Posted on 03/27/2004 1:31:44 PM PST by RWR8189
"DEMOCRATS ROCK! Can you feel it?" hollers Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow. It is sometime after 7:00P.M. on March 25, and Stabenow is onstage at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, D.C., addressing countless tables of Democratic donors and politicians, who are half-listening to her as they drink wine, sip iced tea, and eat catered barbecue. There are over 1,500 people in all. Stabenow takes a deep breath. "Isn't this just wonderful to see everyone coming together?"
Certainly it's impressive. From the print media's perch on the museum's balcony, some 50 feet above and at least 100 feet away from the stage, it is hard to make out the details of Stabenow's face. But the bird's-eye view has its advantages. Sitting high above the crowd, one can identify the type of wine Hillary Clinton is drinking (red), count the number of Sikhs in attendance (one), and watch what Bill Clinton does while Al Gore is speaking (read over the remarks he himself is about to deliver).
Once the old Pension Office, the National Building Museum is a massive, cavernous space that resembles nothing so much as a cross between Notre Dame cathedral and a Boeing air hangar. It is over 100 years old. Its football-field-length interior and immense Corinthian columns (some of the tallest in the world) are awe-inspiring. More important, the museum is vast enough to hold all the egos gathered here tonight.
Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and organizer of the event, is here. Also, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry is here. Al Gore is here. The man Gore endorsed for the presidency in December, Howard Dean, is here. As is Al Sharpton, who must have assumed (incorrectly) that the event was black tie, because he is dressed like the waiters. Sharpton and Dean's fellow failed Democratic candidates--John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Gen. Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, and Bob Graham--are here too. As is Tom Daschle. And Nancy Pelosi. And Joe Biden. And Ted Kennedy. And Jimmy Carter.
They are all here to celebrate "Democrats United 2004," the centerpiece of McAuliffe's "Democratic Unity Day," a series of events meant to showcase the party's determination to defeat George W. Bush in November. The day began early Thursday afternoon, when McAuliffe and Daschle led reporters around the party's newly refurbished headquarters on Capitol Hill. And it will end sometime Friday morning, when "Something New Part II," the after-party, concludes, and the last young Democrat stumbles out of Dream nightclub in Northeast D.C., having consumed one "Donketini" too many.
Yet how unified are the Democrats? It's a question worth asking. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, after all, was purposely not invited to tonight's event, as he has refused to end his presidential campaign until at least the Democratic convention in July. And Zell Miller, Georgia's conservative Democratic senator, is also conspicuously absent, having announced on Wednesday his leadership of "Democrats for Bush." A potential problem for Democrats is that, however different the two may be ideologically, both Kucinich and Miller have constituencies.
On the other hand, those constituencies appear to be shrinking. It's no exaggeration to say that the Democratic party now assembled behind John Kerry is more unified than it has been in almost 20 years. Polling evidence confirms this. In mid-March, a CBS/New York Times poll gauged support for each party's presidential candidate among registered Republicans and Democrats. It showed that when you ask Democrats whether they will definitely vote for John Kerry this fall, 80 percent say yes.
Such early support hasn't always been the case. In late March 1992, CBS and the Times asked registered Democrats whether they would definitely vote for Bill Clinton, the likely nominee, that November. Only 66 percent said yes. And when Time magazine and the Yankelovich polling firm asked a similar question in the spring of 1988, 76 percent of registered Democrats said they would definitely vote for Michael Dukakis.
"I think the Democrats are united," says Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser. "They're 100 percent committed to driving their car off the cliff." Morris's concern is that Democrats are unified not so much by a strong leader or a powerful message as by a visceral hatred of George W. Bush. And Bush hatred, Morris argues, won't appeal to swing voters in a presidential election. "It's almost a crankiness rather than an actual position," he says. If Morris is right, Kerry's problem won't be dissension from within his own party. It will be his inability to capture the undecided.
What is most interesting about the idea of Democratic "unity" isn't that it exists. It is how quickly the idea has traveled from opinion leaders to rank and file Democrats. Consider the week of March 6. On that day, Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt said this is "the most unified Democratic party since 1964." The following day, David Yepsen, the Des Moines Register's veteran political reporter, announced that John Kerry's ascendancy during the primaries had "resulted in a unified Democratic party." And three days later, when the Los Angeles Times interviewed Barb Marsh for a "man on the street" interview, Marsh said, "Democrats are closer and more unified than we've been in a long time."
Spotlighting party unity was one purpose of the "Democrats United" dinner. But there were several others. First, the dinner helped glorify Terry McAuliffe's stewardship of the Democratic party. Since the Clintons installed him as party chair in 2001, McAuliffe has come under criticism from people inside and outside the DNC. The Democrats' electoral record on his watch hasn't helped. (McAuliffe had the dubious honor of chairing the party through the disastrous 2002 midterm elections, as well as the 2003 California recall vote.) There has been talk from the Kerry campaign of limiting McAuliffe's role in the coming months to fundraising, and naming someone else "general chairman" to act as Kerry's surrogate.
But there wasn't any such talk at the unity dinner. Instead, there was a lot of praise for McAuliffe's accomplishments. These include the new, "high tech" headquarters, a small-donor base of 2 million people, and a voter file with 160 million names. What's more, McAuliffe told the crowd, the DNC is, for the first time in its history, free of debt. McAuliffe has taken the party from $18 million in the red to $25 million in the black. And the unity dinner alone will rake in more than $11 million in one night--the largest Democratic fundraiser in history.
Second, the evening signaled Howard Dean's gradual transition from renegade presidential candidate to Democratic party insider. Last fall, Dean labeled Washington politicians, Democrats included, "cockroaches." Now he finds himself cast as Kafka's Gregor Samsa, transformed into a cockroach overnight. The party is courting him and his supporters, afraid they will abandon Kerry in November. So, on Thursday morning, Dean endorsed Kerry at an event at George Washington University. The event was hyped for a reason. Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress and the coauthor, with John Judis, of The Emerging Democratic Majority, says that possibly the most significant division within the party is between Dean supporters and the establishment: "There's this sense in the party that you want Dean to help mobilize those people he energized in the primaries and keep them in the party and, of course, outflank Ralph Nader."
The third function of the unity dinner was to relaunch John Kerry's presidential campaign. Kerry had spent the previous week in Ketchum, Idaho, snowboarding and reading Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Oprah's current book club selection. Politically, it had not been a good week. Kerry was lampooned for having claimed that more foreign leaders supported his presidential campaign than George Bush's. Yet the only foreign leaders who had gone on record with their support were North Koreans and the anti-Semitic former prime minister of Malaysia. Members of Kerry's staff were dispatched to distance their candidate from these endorsements. Kerry's other misstep was to point out that he "actually did vote for the $87 billion" appropriation for reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq last fall "before I voted against it." While true (Kerry voted for a resolution he cosponsored with Joe Biden that would have paid for the appropriation by rolling back a portion of the Bush tax cuts), the utterance only helped the Bush campaign's effort to label Kerry a political opportunist. The candidate needed a break.
He's come back tanned and relaxed. On Thursday night, Kerry sits still most of the time, watching the various speeches attentively. When his turn comes, he is gracious to his former opponents and vociferous in his criticism of Bush, who has, he says, spoiled the American economy and made Americans less safe than they were in the 1990s. It's a tough speech, meant to fill what has been seen as a hole in the Kerry campaign. As Dee Dee Myers, President Clinton's former press secretary, told me, Kerry's camp has proven he can play good defense. But, she said, "They also need good offense."
ANOTHER THING Kerry's campaign needs, judging from the reaction at the unity dinner, is Bill Clinton. When the former president is introduced, the scene turns into a rock concert. Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" blares from the speakers. Democratic doyennes get on their feet and clap their hands. Screams and catcalls sound from the rafters. Clinton speaks the longest, of course. He's interrupted by applause countless times. The crux of his address is that Republicans are masters of manipulation: In order to win elections, he says, "they have to get people to stop thinking. And they're real good at that." When they are not applauding Clinton, the crowd sits in rapt attention, mesmerized. So do members of the press. It's not hard to see that the people assembled in the National Building Museum would give anything to have the man run for president. Again.
It's not hard to see this because of what happens after the speeches have concluded. A gaggle of donors surrounds John Kerry. Yet, watching from the balcony, one notices that the Massachusetts senator is not the most popular man in the room. For a larger, expanding crowd is spiraling outwards from Clinton. He is being mobbed, almost clawed at, by people asking for photographs and signatures and hugs. It's an astonishing sight, and brings home a simple truth. John Kerry may be the Democratic nominee. But it is still Bill Clinton's party.
Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
This I don't believe. 160 million slighly less than two-thirds of the entire nation, unless McAwful is counting all the dead people or foreigners.
Actually it is just Bill Clinton's list of women he wants to try.
What a bunch of poseurs....catered Q and NO beer??!!....HAH!
FMCDH
still Bill Clinton's partyWhich means Hitlery's the VP candidate if she wants to be.
Better keep that senate seat warm 49% Stabmenow, since Candice Miller or Mike Rogers is going to ROCK YOU in 06, despite how 'pro-gun' you say you are after voting for the .30-30.
Either one of those two could win and win BIG.
Does anyone else see the glaring irony in this paragraph?
The whole article conveys thoughts of "the good old days"!
A sad lament to the liberal minded schmucks who can't accept (in their own words)progressive thinking!
Did you hear Clinton's speech where he said Kerry's vote against the $87 billion for the troops was a "protest" vote?I didn't watch the RAT love-in. Did Clinton really say that?
Didn't Kerry, during the debates, say that his vote was not a protest vote? I seem to remember him saying that. I could be wrong though.
Already spent eight years running second fiddle in and around the previously white house with an intellectually and morally bankrupt un-and-anti-American creature even more comprehensively more bloody stupid -- hard as it is to believe that two of those exist -- than herself.Ok, let's do the math. If Kerry wins in November and Hitlery is not on the ticket, what's next for her? She can't run for president in 2008 because even if Kerry ends up losing the presidential race in 2008 he'll certainly get the RAT nomination. That means she has to wait until 2012 and go for the nomination then, possibly against Kerry's VP, if Kerry does a full 2 terms.
Can't happen, you say? No way Kerry can win once, let alone twice, you say?
Fine. But you're not the one facing Hitlery's choice. And neither am I. Only the bwitch herself has to look in the mirror and say: Can I last until 2012... or beyond... and still be a viable Presidential Candidate?
And if she does the math (assuming she's got a clean mirror) the answer has to be a resounding no.
On the other hand, if she gets on the Kerry ticket she can only gain. Kerry can lose the election and she won't get blamed. Kerry can win the election and not do a Vince Foster and Hitlery is still in the game. Or, Kerry can win and somehow Foster-out on us. Leaving Hitlery on the throne.
Any way you do the math, there's only one answer: Kerry-Clinton '04
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