HOUSTON—President George W. Bush’s Republicans have now spread their support so wide and the Democrats are so disjointed it’s hard to see how the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson can make a comeback in the near term.
Former New York mayor and longtime Democrat Ed Koch zeroed in on his party’s problem when he assessed: “We have to start persuading voters to think of us as a centrist party rather than a radical party.”
Certainly, just as M.J. Coldwell, J.S. Woodsworth or T.C. Douglas wouldn’t recognize the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in its new flaky guise of the New Democrats, neither would FDR, JFK or LBJ recognize the flaky Democratic party of the 21st century.
The Republicans used to be seen as the party of the rich and the anglo-saxon elite.
Not anymore.
It’s made huge inroads into the Latino population, which has edged out Black Americans to become the largest minority group in the U.S. Black Americans such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have surely shown it is ability, regardless of race, that gets you to the top in the Republican administration.
Indeed, Bush has more minorities in top posts in his government than any other president before him.
The fallout from the 9/11 terrorist attacks is another reason for the Democrats’ decline.
Only brainwashed Democrats, and there are fewer and fewer of those, still believe their party would be more adept at defending their country than the Republicans.
Recall, contender John Kerry’s excuse that he voted for liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein before he voted against doing so. Typical of wishy-washy Democrats today. So few principles.
Or, as comedian Groucho Marx would have summed up Kerry: “These are my principles, but if you don’t like them I can change them.”
In their growing bitterness, the Democrats can’t see, or won’t admit they are wrong.
They throw out ridiculous charges that the Republicans have been “captured” by the Christian right, or that they live in fear of a midnight knock on the door from a team of Bush’s stormtroopers because they subscribe to a lib-left magazine such as The Nation.
Bush has turned America into a police state, they say, have you seen what it’s like an an airport these days?
Soldiers and police are armed to the teeth. Perhaps, but there has been no repeat of the 9/11 attacks despite Osama bin Laden’s constant threat that more attacks on U.S. soil are coming.
As for being hijacked by the Christian right, why do decent individuals with high morals and ethics feel so uncomfortable with the Democratic party?
That’s surely the question the radicals in the party should be asking.
Foundering around, the Democrats try to create mass hysteria, only to drive rational, thinking voters away. Then they slur any Republican they find who has the slightest blemish, and ignore their own warts.
No one is supposed to mention senior Democratic senator Robert Byrd was once a big mover in the Ku Klux Klan, that Congressman Al Sharpton uses racial comments against white Americans, or Jesse Jackson uses anti-Semitic epithets. Any criticism is impolite.
Bill Clinton seduces a young intern in the Oval Office of the White House, commits perjury, is impeached and forced to give up his lawyer’s licence (rather than facing the humiliation of being disbarred). Yet why are we trying to destroy the character of a genuinely good man?
Readers ask me to expand on contentions in recent columns that the Democrats are lucky to have lost only seven of the past 10 elections. I’ve already pointed out that if right-wing gadfly Ross Perot hadn’t taken 18.9% of the vote in 1992, George W. Bush Sr. with 37.4% would never have lost to Clinton with 43%. Without Perot, the Democrats would have lost eight of the past 10 presidential elections.
Furthermore, Clinton was re-elected by a razor-thin vote in 1996 when he took 49.2% of the vote to Republican Robert Dole’s 40.7% with Perot still taking 8.4%. The combined conservative vote was just 1% behind the Democratic vote. Had Perot not entered the race a second time, and depending how the electoral college tally had gone, the Republicans might well have won nine of the past 10 presidential elections.
If Democrats can’t figure out that they themselves have been hijacked—by, as Koch says, radicals—and their messages scare moderate voters, they’re headed for a more thrashings at polling stations in 2008.
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