[Mb-civic] Leave It to Cleaver

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-perlstein25jul25.story

Leave It to Cleaver

Wedge politics have given the GOP an edge, so the Democrats may want to
slice and dice for their own side
 By Rick Perlstein
 Rick Perlstein is the author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the
Unmaking of the American Consensus."

 July 25, 2004

 CHICAGO ‹ Political observers recently got to watch Republican wedge
politics go down, in textbook fashion. At a fundraiser in New York for Sen.
John Kerry, Whoopi Goldberg said something naughty about President Bush. Ken
Mehlman of the Bush campaign called the formerly obscure event a
"star-studded hate fest" and demanded the Kerry campaign release it on video
‹ implying even naughtier tidbits to come. Fox News, then the rest of the
media, granted Goldberg's attack legitimacy as an "issue." The mighty GOP ax
had fallen again, predictably, right at the point where two key
constituencies of the Democratic coalition are joined.

 One segment of the party is both reliably rich and reliably liberal ‹
"Hollywood." Another ‹ they used to call them "hard hats" ‹ is culturally
conservative but seeks a dependable protector of its economic interests.

Chop!

 One chunk of voters falls to the right side of the hatchet, angry at
Hollywood's insult to their piety. Another falls to the left, ready to
cancel their checks to Kerry if he insults free speech. Pundits pile on,
interpreting the flap as something Democrats foisted upon us.

 "Why is it that the Hollywood folks, who are very bright people, don't get
that this campaign is about middle America, not the left and the right
coasts?" asked Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

 Kerry is forced into a no-win choice. He releases a statement
disassociating himself from the stars ‹ and one wonders how much that will
cost him in donations.

 All that was predictable.

 The next part was predictable too. As the story spent another week in the
news, Democrats howled with outrage. "The Republicans have gotten away with
it again!"

 I'm not howling ‹ at least not at Republicans. Instead, I'd like to howl at
my fellow Democrats convening now in Boston. In the Case of the Star-Studded
Hate Fest, I'd like to congratulate Republicans on a nice play. The only
thing that frustrates me is that Democrats never try the same thing.

 Lately the phrase "wedge issue" has become synonymous with only the kind of
divides that Republicans exploit. But properly understood ‹ historically
understood ‹ the phrase is politically neutral. The meat at the joints of
the Republican coalition is tender too, more tender than it has been in any
time in recent memory. It is past time for Democrats to begin aggressively
exploiting that.

 Republicans are skilled at reaching into the distant past of Democratic
candidates to stage their melodramas. Democrats wouldn't have to go back far
at all. Take something President Bush said in a 1993 Houston Post article:
Heaven is open only to those who accept Jesus Christ.

 An aggressive campaign by Kerry and the Democrats would pressure Bush to
explain whether he still believes that. As it happens, Bush has an answer:
Billy Graham told him not to "play God." But thereby hangs the wedge.

 Put the issue in Bush's face again, forcing him ‹ Chop! ‹ to choose whether
to offend one party segment or another. Republican voters who believe you
have to be Christian to go to heaven, and want their president to believe
the same, fall to the right side of the hatchet. Moderate Republicans, who
like Bush for his tax policies but are embarrassed to be associated with
intolerance, fall to the left.

 Like the affirmative-action-affirming African Americans versus
affirmative-action-reviling white ethnics, or environmentalists versus rural
hunters. Once they were all in one happy Democratic family. Then came the
Republican ax, aimed assiduously at the party's most tender joints.

 The problem is that no force in the Democratic Party seems to be probing
the architecture of the Republicans in this way: figuring out which of its
bulkheads lean most precariously against another, what cracks lay bare its
weakening structural integrity at the foundation.

 There are plenty. Here's one:

 Family-owned manufacturing companies have always been the bedrock of the
Republican coalition ‹ and its most reliable donors. They're wobbly now.
"I'm very conservative," a factory owner in Rockford, Ill., told me. "Always
voted Republican. But I'm extremely concerned with what I hear from this
current administration."

 He's disgusted at how Republicans always side with giant corporations, like
Wal-Mart, that ruthlessly run U.S. plants out of business with their
unsustainable obsession with radical cost-cutting among suppliers,
devastating communities like Rockford.

 Another Rockford manufacturer told me that a Democratic presidential
candidate "who steps forward and says we're going to make manufacturing a
priority in this country" would get a $2,000 donation from him. Some
habitual Republican voters on his shop floor mentioned the same reasons for
switching to the Democrats.

 The retreat of manufacturing in the United States, or fair compensation for
low-skill jobs, should be turned into a political disaster for Republicans.
Force Bush into the no-win choice: Chop! Are you with Wal-Mart or are you
with the U.S. manufacturers that Wal-Mart is putting out of business?

 Another potential wedge: the Republican coalition's self-made
businesspeople who pride themselves on their expertise, frugality,
deep-seated competence ‹ and who would never run their businesses the way,
say, Republicans have run the occupation of Iraq.

 Where are the Democratic National Committee press releases embarrassing
Bush into releasing information on how the self-made and competent have been
shunted aside for government contracts by the cronied-up and incompetent?
And where is the Democratic outreach to the proud business owners left
behind? Chop! 

Turning the owners of factories and small businesses into Democrats ‹ it
sounds a bit absurd. But Karl Rove would understand. Such daring is his
daily bread. "But do you weaken a political party, either by turning what
they see as assets into liabilities and/or by taking issues they consider to
be theirs and raiding them?" Rove asked rhetorically in an interview with
the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann, discussing his stratagems to turn Latinos
and African Americans into Republican straight-ticket voters. A "boyish look
of pure delight spread across Rove's face" as he answered: "Absolutely!"

 But Democrats can be timid beasts. They like to win elections by attracting
just enough "swing voters" to nose the party over the 51% line ‹ not to
loose wrecking balls against the citadels of the enemy, or even to
concentrate much on building a bigger citadel of its own. (Democratic
consultants deeply distrust any strategy aimed at working to create a wider
permanent base of Democratic loyalists because that would require making
commitments that would turn off swing voters.)

 It is a tribute that timidity pays to strength ‹ the strength of
ideologically conservative positions that have seemed in the last decade to
constitute a juggernaut.

 But that strength is only apparent. The very thing that made the Republican
Party so formidable in the past ‹ its ideological aggressiveness ‹ now
threatens its future. Again and again, Republican primaries (the latest
being the one to replace retiring Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller) turn
on litmus tests on this or that extremist conservative position.

 Ripe conditions to wedge off moderates ‹ those, say, who have no problem
with statutes against assault weapons.

 What's more, these days Republicans simultaneously display a ruthless
cronyism and electoral eagerness to please that seems to come from not just
an ambition to stay in power but an obsession with wielding power
absolutely.

 Both the cronyism and the pandering, in turn, offend the significant
portion of Republicans whose loyalty to the party rests on their sense of
its superior idealism.

 Ripe conditions to wedge off conservatives ‹ trade purists, say, disgusted
with the steel tariffs.

 For those who believe the Republican coalition does harm, it's time to make
the Republican coalition impossible. Then the Democrats can win ‹ not just
this presidential election, but a governing majority for the next
generation.


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