[Mb-civic] The Democrats' Da Vinci Code

Thu Dec 9 22:02:53 PST 2004

The Democrats' Da Vinci Code

By David J. Sirota, The American Prospect
 Posted on December 9, 2004, Printed on December 9, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20702/

As the Democratic Party goes through its quadrennial self-flagellation
process, the same tired old consultants and insiders are once again
complaining that Democratic elected officials have no national agenda and no
message.

Yet encrypted within the 2004 election map is a clear national economic
platform to build a lasting majority. You don't need Fibonacci's sequence, a
decoder ring, or 3-D glasses to see it. You just need to start asking the
right questions.

Where, for instance, does a Democrat get off using a progressive message to
become governor of Montana? How does an economic populist Democrat keep
winning a congressional seat in what is arguably America's most Republican
district? Why do culturally conservative rural Wisconsin voters keep sending
a Vietnam-era anti-war Democrat back to Congress? What does a self-described
socialist do to win support from conservative working-class voters in
northern New England?

The answers to these and other questions are the Democrats' very own Da
Vinci Code  a road map to political divinity. It is the path Karl Rove
fears. He knows his GOP is vulnerable to Democrats who finally follow
leaders who have translated a populist economic agenda into powerful
cultural and values messages. It also threatens groups like the Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC), which has pushed the Democratic Party to give up
on its working-class roots and embrace big business' agenda. These New
Democrats, backed by huge corporate contributions, say that the party must
reduce corporate regulation and embrace a free-trade policy that is wiping
out local economies throughout the heartland. They have the nerve to call
this agenda "centrist" even though poll after poll shows it is far out of
the mainstream. Yet these centrists get slaughtered at the ballot box, and
their counterparts  the progressive economic populists  are racking up
wins and relegating the DLC argument to the scrap heap.

The code's seven lessons are clear, and have been for some time. The
question is, will party insiders see the obvious and finally follow their
real leaders? Or will they continue mimicking Republican corporatism,
thereby hastening their own demise?

Fight the Class War

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, crying "class warfare" is
the last refuge of wealthy elitists. Yet, inexplicably, this red herring
emasculates Democrats in Washington. Every time pro-middle-class legislation
is offered, Republicans berate it as class warfare. Worse, they get help
from corporate factions within the Democratic Party itself.

But as countless examples show, progressives are making inroads into
culturally conservative areas by talking about economic class. This is not
the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the
need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them
red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary
Americans.

In Vermont, Rep. Bernie Sanders, the House's only independent and a
self-described socialist, racks up big wins in the "Northeast Kingdom," the
rock-ribbed Republican region along the New Hampshire border. Far from the
Birkenstock-wearing, liberal caricature of Vermont, the Kingdom is one of
the most culturally conservative hotbeds in New England, the place that
helped fuel the "Take Back Vermont" movement against gay civil unions.

Yet the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights Sanders' economic stances help him bridge
the cultural divide. In the 1990s, he was one of the most energetic
opponents of the trade deals with China and Mexico that destroyed the local
economy. In the Bush era, he highlighted the inequity of the White House's
soak-the-rich tax-cut plan by proposing to instead provide $300 tax-rebate
checks to every man, woman, and child regardless of income (a version of
Sanders' rebate eventually became law). For his efforts, Sanders has been
rewarded in GOP strongholds like Newport Town. While voters there backed
George W. Bush and Republican Gov. Jim Douglas in 2004, they also gave
Sanders 68 percent of the vote.

Sanders' strength among rural conservatives is not just a cult of
personality; it is economic populism's broader triumph over divisive social
issues. In culturally conservative Derby, for instance, a first-time
third-party candidate used a populist message to defeat a longtime
Republican state representative who had become an icon of Vermont's anti-gay
movement.

The same message is working in conservative swaths of Oregon, where
Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio keeps getting re-elected in a Bush district.
For DeFazio, the focus is unfair trade deals and taxpayer giveaways to the
wealthy. When Republicans promote plans to "save" Social Security, DeFazio
counters not by agreeing with privatization but with his plan to force the
wealthy to start paying more into the system.

The message is also used by Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor, who
represents a district that gave 65 percent of its vote to Bush in 2000 and
was previously represented in the House by Trent Lott. Taylor bucks his
district's GOP tilt by mixing opposition to free trade with what the Almanac
of American Politics calls "peppery populism" and a demeanor that is "feisty
to the point of being belligerent." "Unlike the policy hawks who never leave
Washington ... I know the owners of factories, the foreman, and the workers,
and they'll all tell you it's because of NAFTA that their factories closed,"
Taylor told newspapers in late 2003, criticizing the trade deal signed by
President Bill Clinton.

This message contrasts with that of the DLC centrists, who promote, for
instance, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh's free-trade, Republican-lite positions as
a model for winning in red states. What they don't say is that Bayh comes
from one of Indiana's most beloved political families and wins largely by
virtue of his last name, not his ideology. Where a corporate message like
Bayh's has been put to a real challenge, it has been a disaster. In
Louisiana, for instance, the state's tradition of electing Democratic
populists like Huey and Russell Long gave way to centrist politicians like
Sen. John Breaux, a man best known in Washington for throwing Mardi Gras
parties with business lobbyists. When a Breaux clone ran to replace the
retiring senator, he was crushed by a moral crusading Republican.

In North Carolina, instead of following John Edwards' class-based formula,
Democrats anointed investment banker Erskine Bowles as the nominee to
replace Edwards in 2004. At the time, party insiders brushed off concerns
that, as a Clinton White House chief of staff, Bowles was an architect of
the free-trade policy that helped eliminate North Carolina's manufacturing
jobs. But Bowles' opponent, Rep. Richard Burr, made the Democrat pay for his
free-trade sellout. "You negotiated the China trade agreement for President
Clinton, which is the largest exporter of jobs not just in North Carolina
but in this country," Burr said at one debate, robbing Bowles of an economic
issue that might have offset North Carolinians' inherent cultural suspicions
of a Democrat. On election night, Bowles went down in flames.

Champion Small Business Over Big Business

The small-business lobby in Washington is a de facto wing of the Republican
Party. But Democrats are finding that, at the grass-roots level,
small-business people are far less uniformly conservative, especially as the
GOP increasingly helps huge corporations eat up local economies. While
entrepreneurs don't like high taxes and regulations, they also don't like
government encouraging multinationals to monopolize the market and destroy
Main Street.

As a small-business man himself, Montana's 2004 Democratic gubernatorial
nominee, Brian Schweitzer, figured out how to use these frustrations in one
of America's reddest states. He lamented how out-of-state corporations were
using loopholes to avoid paying taxes, thus driving up the tax burden on
small in-state companies. He discussed taxing big-box companies like
Wal-Mart that have undercut local business. In the process, he became the
state's first Democratic governor in 16 years.

In the Midwest and New England, progressives are focused on small
manufacturers. These traditional GOP constituencies, which sell components
to large multinationals, have been decimated by a trade policy that
encourages their customers to head overseas in search of repressive,
anti-union regimes that drive down labor costs. "When the economy turned
soft [in 2001], we anticipated the business would come back," one owner of a
factory-machine business told BusinessWeek. "But it didn't. We saw our
customer base either close, or migrate to China."

Free-trade critics like Democratic Reps. Mike Michaud, Ted Strickland and
Tim Holden, who perpetually win Republican-leaning districts, are rewarded
for their stands with support from these kinds of businesspeople, who had
previously been part of the GOP's base. The U.S. Business and Industry
Council, which represents America's domestic family-owned manufacturers, now
lists these and other progressives at the top of its congressional
scorecard.

Unfortunately, these kinds of trailblazers are not yet being rewarded by
their own party in Washington. According to reports, the House Democratic
leadership is considering promoting some of the most ardent free traders to
the Ways and Means Committee, the panel that oversees trade policy.
Apparently Democrats have not yet lost enough seats in the heartland to
honestly address their Achilles heels.

Protect Tom Joad

Northern Wisconsin and the plains of North Dakota are not naturally friendly
territories for progressives. Both areas are culturally conservative, yet
their voters keep sending progressive Democrats like Rep. David Obey and
Sen. Byron Dorgan, respectively, back to Congress.

No issue is closer to these two leaders' hearts  or more important to their
electoral prospects  than the family farm. In Wisconsin, corporate dairy
processors have tried to depress prices for farmers' dairy products. In
North Dakota, agribusiness has squeezed the average farmer with lower prices
for commodities. But unlike other lawmakers who simply pocket agribusiness
cash and look the other way, Obey and Dorgan have been voices of dissent.
They have pushed legislation to freeze agribusiness mergers, a proposal
originally developed by populist Sen.Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. As Dorgan
once wrote, "When Cargill, the nation's number one grain exporter, can buy
the grain operations of Continental, which is number two, the cops aren't
exactly walking tall on the antitrust beat."

Dorgan and Obey also opposed the Republican-backed "Freedom to Farm Act,"
which President Clinton signed into law. Instead of pretending the subsidies
in the bill were good for the little guy, Obey told the truth and called it
the "freedom-to-lose-your-shirt" bill. He noted that the new subsidies would
primarily go to large corporations, encourage overproduction that depresses
prices, and reward big farms over small ones.

Other Democrats are catching on. In South Dakota, Rep. Stephanie Herseth
used her family-farm roots to woo Republican voters. As most of Herseth's
House Democratic colleagues buckled to corporate pressure and helped pass a
free-trade deal with Australia in 2004, the first-term congresswoman
attacked her GOP opponent for supporting the pact, arguing that its
provisions would undercut American ranchers. She won re-election in the same
state where Republicans defeated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

Similarly, in conservative western Colorado, John Salazar won a House seat
by touting his agricultural background. His campaign slogan was "Send a
Farmer to Congress," and voters obliged.

And the opportunities for progressives are growing. Instead of neutralizing
Democrats' advances on agricultural issues, the GOP is digging in, already
planning to repeal country-of-origin labeling laws that help small farms
differentiate their products from larger corporate producers. House Majority
Whip Roy Blunt, who has pocketed more than $360,000 from agribusiness, wants
to kill the measure, claiming, "I can't find any real opposition to doing
exactly what we want to do here." Clearly the GOP hasn't talked to any
family farmers lately.

 Turn the Hunters and the Exurbs Green

For years, conventional wisdom has said that culturally conservative hunters
and exurbanites will always vote Republican. But the GOP's willingness to
side with private landowners and developers is now putting the party at odds
with these constituencies. And that could create a whole new class of
Democratic-voting conservationists.

In Montana, Schweitzer criticized his opponents for trying to restrict the
state's Stream Access Law, which protects anglers' rights to fish waterways
that cross through private land. He also promised to prevent the state from
selling off public land. It was one of the ways he outperformed previous
Democrats in rural areas and won his race.

In Colorado, when the Bush administration tried to allow development in
wildlife areas, John Salazar pounced. He noted that many of the Bush
administration's plans went "against what nearly every local elected
official on both sides of the aisle has asked for." Salazar's opponent, who
was a former lobbyist and industry-friendly state environmental official,
was unable to effectively respond.

Meanwhile, successful Colorado Senate candidate Ken Salazar trumpeted his
record of creating land-conservation programs, and his surrogates
communicated that message to the state's culturally conservative hunters.
"Ken's background in resolving water, access and big game habitat, and
natural resources issues best qualifies him to be Colorado's next senator,"
wrote the group Sportsmen for Salazar in an open letter to outdoorsmen. The
Democrat had transformed his environmental advocacy from a potential
"liberal" albatross into an asset in conservative areas.

Become a Teddy Roosevelt Clone

"Tough on crime" has always been a reliable Republican mantra. Now, though,
progressives are claiming that law-and-order mantle for themselves. Led by
state attorneys general, Democrats are realizing the political benefits of
fighting white-collar crime, big-business rip-offs, and corporate
misbehavior.

In Republican Arizona, former Attorney General Janet Napolitano became known
as a tough prosecutor of corporate crime. She charged Qwest with fraud and
negotiated a $217 million settlement with scandal-plagued accounting firm
Arthur Andersen on behalf of investors. The record helped her become the
state's first Democratic governor in more than a decade.

In New York, Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who had never held elective office,
eked out a victory against a Republican incumbent in 1998 to become the
state's Attorney General. He then did something that seemed like political
suicide: He took on Wall Street. Specifically, Spitzer used state law to
charge investment firms with bilking stockholders. Though opponents labeled
him anti-business, he countered that he was pro-business because he was
protecting the integrity of the market. Four years later, he won re-election
in a landslide, improving his performance in many parts of the conservative
upstate.

On Capitol Hill, some senior Democrats have been slower to take up this
fight. For instance, as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs
Committee in 2002, centrist leader Joe Lieberman refused to seriously
investigate the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals. Not surprisingly, both
companies had been bathing Lieberman and his New Democrats in cash for
years. The Connecticut senator's refusal to aggressively investigate the
matter became an embarrassing public admission that he and his kind had been
castrated by their corporate financiers. So rank-and-file lawmakers are
filling the void. North Dakota's Dorgan, for instance, brushed past
Lieberman by leading high-profile hearings on Enron's misbehavior. As TV
cameras rolled, Dorgan dressed down executives who had deceived
shareholders.

Sanders, meanwhile, won the hearts of Vermont's Republican-leaning IBM
employees by fighting to prevent the company from illegally reducing their
pensions. And Mississippi's Taylor continues stumping about corporate
traitors. He pushed legislation to prevent taxpayer subsidies from going to
companies that ship jobs overseas.

This Teddy Roosevelt-inspired posture is potent for two reasons. First, the
GOP's reliance on corporate money means it cannot muddle the issues by
pretending to meet progressives halfway. Second, the GOP is increasingly
using corporate lobbyists and executives as its candidates for public
office. Last year alone, Republicans ran corporate lobbyists and executives
for top offices in Indiana, South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, and Florida.
These kinds of candidates will never be able to fight off progressive
opponents who make corporate crime and excess a major campaign issue.

Clean Up Government

In the early 1990s, Newt Gingrich attacked Democrats as corrupt, wasteful,
and incompetent, eventually leading the Republicans to reclaim Congress.
Now, though, progressives are using the tactic for themselves.

In Montana, voters grew tired of state policy being manipulated by corporate
lobbyists while the economy was sputtering. In Gingrichian fashion,
Schweitzer criticized his GOP opponent for becoming a corporate lobbyist
after a stint in the Legislature. He also asked why his opponent had spent
$40,000 of taxpayer money to redecorate the secretary of state's office
during a state budget crisis.

Schweitzer was following Arizona's Napolitano, who was making headlines by
cutting out almost $1 billion of government waste at a time the state budget
was in the red. Her crusade was reminiscent of how deficits have been used
by South Carolina Rep. John Spratt to symbolize government mismanagement and
win his Republican-leaning district. It also echoed Colorado Democrats, who
used deficits to win the state Legislature for the first time in 40 years.
"The Republicans' obsession with narrow cultural issues while the state's
looming fiscal crisis was ignored drove a deep wedge between fiscally
conservative live-and-let-live Republicans and the neo-conservative
extremists with an agenda," wrote one Denver Post columnist.

In the conservative suburbs of Chicago, Gingrich's corruption theme arose as
Republican Rep. Phil Crane took fire for accepting junkets from companies
that do business with Congress. Democrat Melissa Bean, a first-time
candidate, used the issue to defeat him. The same thing happened in
conservative New Hampshire, where Democratic businessman John Lynch hammered
Republican Gov. Craig Benson over cronyism allegations. Lynch painted Benson
as "a governor with ethical problems overseeing an administration wrought
with scandal," according to The (Manchester) Union Leader. Lynch won the
race, making Benson the first New Hampshire governor in almost eight decades
to be kicked out of office after just two years.

Use the Values Prism

In 2004, pundits seem to agree that the national election was decided by
"moral values." And though many believe the term is a euphemism for
religious, anti-abortion, and anti-gay sentiments, it is likely a more
general phrase describing whether a candidate is perceived to be "one of
us."

It is this sense of cultural solidarity that often trumps other issues. For
example, many battleground-state voters may have agreed with John Kerry's
economic policies. But the caricature of Kerry as a multimillionaire playboy
windsurfing on Nantucket Sound was a more visceral image of elitism. By
contrast, successful red-region progressives are using economic populism to
define their cultural solidarity with voters. True, many of these Democrats
are pro-gun, and some are anti-abortion. But to credit their success
exclusively to social conservatism is to ignore how populism culturally
connects these leaders to their constituents.

In Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, Sanders' free-trade criticism not only
speaks to conservatives' pocketbook concerns but also to a deeper admiration
of a congressman willing to take stands corporate politicians refuse to
take.

In Montana, Schweitzer's plans to protect hunting access not only attract
votes from outdoorsmen but also project a broader willingness to fight for
Joe Six-Pack and the state's way of life. As focus groups showed, this
stance garnered strong support from Montana's women, who saw it as a values
issue.

Wisconsin's Obey may be a high-ranking national Democrat, but he keeps
winning his GOP-leaning district by translating legislative fights into
values language at home. Debates over Title I funding, for instance, become
a venue for Obey to question whether America should provide huge tax cuts to
the wealthy while its schools decay. Battles about whether to change
antitrust rules become an Obey rant about out-of-state media conglomerates
pumping obscene radio shows into his culturally conservative market.

In North Dakota, Enron may have had almost no direct effect on locals. But
Dorgan made the company's antics a values commentary on the problem of
unethical corporations. "This is disgusting to me," he said to the cameras
during an Enron hearing. "[This is] corporate behavior without a moral
base."

Mississippi's Taylor flamboyantly challenges free-trade supporters to visit
his district to see the effects of their positions. "Some of [those who
voted for free trade] knew better, and those are the ones I'm really mad
at," he said. "[They] looked out for the big multinational corporations at
the expense of average Mississippians and average citizens, even from their
own states."

*****

In these seven ways, successful red-region Democrats have tacked back to a
class-based populism that puts them firmly on the side of the little guy.
And because voters implicitly know that big guys with lots of cash dominate
the political system, that populism projects a deeper sense of values and a
McCain-like authenticity.

In the aftermath of the recent election, the stale cadre of campaign
consultants who helped run the party into the ground now say the solution is
for Democrats to simply invoke God more often and radically change their
positions on social issues. But the point is not to impulsively lunge
rightward in some cheap, unprincipled gesture to red America that would reek
of political strategizing.

The point is to follow red-region Democrats who have diminished the
electoral impact of traditional social issues by redefining the values
debate on economic and class terms. Granted, the progressive populists
profiled above do not uniformly hew to the standard liberal line on social
issues: some are pro-life, some pro-choice; some pro-gun ownership, some
pro-gun control; some pro-gay marriage, some anti-gay marriage; some
vociferous about religion, some subdued. But they have shown that there is
another path that moves past wedge issues if the party is willing to
fundamentally challenge the excesses of corporate America and big money.

Critics may say populism will not appeal to middle-class voters because that
portion of the electorate is economically comfortable. But polls show that
outsourcing, skyrocketing health costs, and other alarming indicators mean
that even those who are getting by do not feel financially stable or secure.

Historical revisionists will claim that the centrist Clinton's ascension in
the 1990s directly refutes the electoral potency of class-based populism.
But Clinton's 1992 campaign was not the free-trade, Republican-lite
corporate shilling that many propose as a Democratic panacea. It was, by
contrast, populist on all fronts. "I expect the jetsetters and
featherbedders of corporate America to know that if you sell your companies
and your workers and your country down the river, you'll be called on the
carpet," candidate Clinton promised in 1991. On trade, it was the same. "I
wouldn't have done what [George Bush Senior] did and give all those trade
preferences to China ... ," he said. "I'd be for [NAFTA] but only  only 
if [Mexico] lifted their wage rates and their labor standards and they
cleaned up their environment so we could both go up together instead of
being dragged down."

Clinton, of course, proceeded to break these pledges, reducing corporate
regulation, coddling big business, and leading the fight for NAFTA and free
trade with China. Worse, well after these policies were wreaking havoc on
working-class America, high-profile Democrats kept pretending nothing was
wrong. "[Congress'] NAFTA vote had about a two-week half-life," said
Clinton's chief trade negotiator, Mickey Kantor, years after NAFTA was
sucking U.S. jobs south of the border. "Even today trade has very little
political impact in the country."

Populist red-region Democrats might beg to differ with Kantor, who is now a
high-priced corporate lawyer. They know firsthand that the embrace of a
big-business agenda arguably did as much long-term damage to the Democratic
Party's moral platform as any of Clinton's sex scandals or the battles over
social issues. Because, really, how moral is the "party of the working
class" when the president it still worships led the fight for trade
agreements that hurt that same working class? Where are the principles of a
party that has high-profile leaders so tied to big business that they are
unwilling to seriously investigate white-collar criminals? And what are the
core values of a party that keeps venerating its corporate apologists while
marginalizing its voices of reform?

This is why populism is ultimately the way back for Democrats. Because, as
red-region progressives show, having the guts to stand up for middle America
 even when it draws the ire of corporate America  is as powerful a
statement about morality and authenticity as any of the GOP's demagoguery on
"guns, God, and gays."

All the Democratic Party has to do is look at the election map: The proof is
right there in red and blue.