Posted on 08/14/2003 1:31:01 PM PDT by schaketo
NEW YORK--Leftist or centrist? That's the big question facing Democrats in the run-up to next year's primaries. "The way to beat George Bush is not to be like him," declares former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose feisty antiwar rhetoric has caught fire among liberals and made him the current frontrunner for the nomination. Seizing the centrist standard of the Clintonites, Senator Joe Lieberman warns that a liberal standard-bearer like Dean "could lead the Democratic Party into the political wilderness for a long time to come. It could be, really, a ticket to nowhere."
Who's right?
"[Democrats'] major goal is to beat George W. Bush," says Dick Bennett of the American Research Group, whose latest poll shows a third of Democrats undecided in evaluating the nine declared hopefuls. Among the other two-thirds, Dean leads, followed by liberal Sen. John Kerry, Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt.
Turning left means disaster, argues the centrist Democratic Leadership Council: they say Dean, who opposes the Iraq war, would be 2004's George McGovern. When DLC poster boy Bill Clinton co-opted GOP platform planks like welfare reform and deficit reduction in 1992, he defeated the first President Bush. "The Democratic Party has an important choice to make: Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?" asks DLC chairman Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. "The [Bush] administration is being run by the far right. The Democratic Party is being taken over by the far left."
History suggests that that may be a good thing.
Try to imagine an ideological 50-yard line, a perfect middle-of-the-road position that represents the median of American political thinking at any given time. George W. Bush falls as far to the right of that line as any president in memory. Bill Clinton sat a little to the left of that line; FDR was about as far to the left as Bush is to the right. In modern history, challengers have been most likely to beat incumbent presidents or vice presidents when they seemed to reside the same distance from that 50-yard line as their opponent. If you're trying to unseat a moderate, swing voters are key. Your best bet is to run as one yourself. But moderates don't beat extremists--extremists do, by motivating their base.
Call it Rall's Rule of Ideological Counterbalance.
In 1992, Bill Clinton faced an incumbent president who had run as a "kinder and gentler" Republican, a spacey New Age dude who urged Americans to become "a thousand points of light." A values, fiscal and foreign policy moderate, George Bush I raised taxes. He refused his Gulf War (news - web sites) generals' entreaties to ignore the U.N. and push on to Baghdad. Though the recession hurt him, Bush hadn't scared or angered independent voters enough to make them turn to a left-wing Democrat. Clinton ran as a moderate--even his health-care plan, his platform's sole concession to liberalism, fell far short of socialized medicine--and won over an electorate eager for a change, but not a drastic one.
The DLC formula also applies to 1976, when a moderate Southern Democrat beat incumbent president Gerry Ford, a moderate Republican. Revisionist GOP pundits like to cast Jimmy Carter as a charter member of the "lunatic left" (they love their alliteration) but his budget launched the Reagan defense build-up of the '80s. Carter enacted the current draft registration system. And, to punish the Soviets for invading Afghanistan, he boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Carter, like Clinton, ran and governed as a centrist Proto-New Democrat.
When going up against right-wing Republican incumbents, however, Democrats do better with left-wing challengers. John F. Kennedy, an unabashed "Eastern establishment" liberal, won against an incumbent vice president--Richard Nixon--famous as a right-wing McCarthyite. The unabashedly liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned against the militantly pro-business Herbert Hoover with the mondo-leftie New Deal. In both cases, voters felt that the political pendulum had swung too far right over the previous eight years; only a liberal Democrat president could correct that imbalance.
Reagan's 1980 defeat of Carter (right-winger beats moderate) is the only modern presidential election that doesn't validate the ideological-balance rule. In 1996, however, challenger Bob Dole failed to distance himself from Newt Gingrich's extremist "Republican Revolution" of 1994, came off as a right-winger, and lost to moderate Democrat Clinton. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis was far more left than the moderate Bush I of '88; Mondale's milquetoast moderation failed to attract sufficient angry liberal voters to counter Ronald Reagan (news - web sites)'s energized supporters in 1984.
Rall's Rule cuts both ways. Right-wing conservative Barry Goldwater might have given FDR a run for his money in 1936 but his hardcore "extremism is no vice" rhetoric spooked voters weighing him against Lyndon Johnson--who was, by 1964 standards, a centrist Southern Democrat. Four years later, Richard Nixon had learned from Goldwater's landslide defeat. During his '60s wilderness years, he recast himself as a moderate Republican, implied that he would end the Vietnam War, and defeated Vice President Humphrey, a moderate Democrat who implied that he wouldn't.
What about DLC bogeyman George McGovern? Before his 1972 reelection campaign, Richard Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. He negotiated the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. He went to China, leading to the first U.S. diplomatic recognition of Communist China. He imposed anti-inflationary wage and price controls that enraged corporate America. Nixon's first term was one of moderate Republicanism. McGovern ran as a hard-left Democrat. Rall's Rule successfully explains the outcome.
As Democrats decide which approach to take against George W. Bush, a right-wing extremist whose agenda makes Barry Goldwater look tame by comparison, they should carefully consider recent history. A moderate nominee like Lieberman might have been a safe bet against Bush's father, but he's extremely unlikely to beat his radical son.
George W. Bush falls as far to the right of that line as any president in memory.
Guess he forgot about Reagan. Guess he also forgot about bureaucracy growth, prescription drugs under Medicare, Kennedy-style education reform, and the sponsorship of "diversity" at U of Michigan.
Bill Clinton sat a little to the left of that line;
Guess he forgot about nationalizing 1/7th of the US economy in the health care debacle and gays in the military. Guess he forgot about the largest tax hike in American history. Clinton was a leftist who only lied to make himself more tolerable by the gullible.
Of course, we all knew that. :)
The Democrats have never elected a radical candidate. McCarthy never got the nomination and McGovern got clobbered. The ones Rall cited all took pains to present themselves as centrists, as, for that matter, did Clinton his second election. For Rall to claim that a candidate ran as a radical because one of his opponents called him that is not only silly, it's to assume that those opponents were correct in doing so.
The author of this is a blithering idiot. Do you know who was the McCarthy Committee Council? Hmmmm DO YOU? It was his first job! His dad and Brother got him the prestigious job.. He got it becuase his Dadd and brother had both given political and economic support to Senator Joe McCArthy!
Give Up?
Robert Kennedy... is WHO. Yes Bobby Kennedy was an employee of the McCarthy committte... Yes that conmmittee the Joe McCarthy committee. And Joe Kennedy .. the dad... the former ambassidor to England... Joe Kennedy donated lots of money to Joe McCarthy and so did his son JACK.. You know that JACK!!! ...JFK Jack!! .... that Jack. President Kennedy Jack.
Joe Kenndey, JFK, and Bobby Kennedy were all Joe McCarthy fans. They hated Stalin and did not trust FDR, Truman or Atcheson to protect us. They knew there were a ton of commusnists in our goverment and they wanted them gone. Nixon, JFK,and McCarthy worked together on it during the late 1940s
To say that JFK was leftist is to say that Ronald Reagan was a lefist. Remember the Reagan Economic plan of 1980???? It was taken word for word from the JFK's plan of 1960. Reagan even said he took the ideas from JFK.
The author of this article is an idiot or a liar or both.
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