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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: The Corrections (December 17, 2002) The once-genteel media world has become a place where somebody is always waiting to pounce on your errors. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Cheney's Win Over the GAO Threatens Congressional Oversight (December 17, 2002) The ruling is broader than necessary to protect the president's ability to receive candid and confidential advice. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Media: All Too Human (December 10, 2002) The respectable media are fascinated with famous people who seem headed for trouble but are not there yet. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Big Brother and Another Overblown Privacy Scare (December 10, 2002) John Poindexter has no more power to compile a computer dossier on you than I do. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Needed: The Hispanic Power Outage (December 10, 2002) 'Everybody agrees Latino turnout was down in California, down in Florida, down in Colorado,' a consultant notes. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: The Hispanic Power Outage (December 10, 2002) John Rawls and the Politics of Social Justice Social reformers such as Rawls are in a tradition that emphasizes the best over the possible. By Clive Crook. |
Political Pulse 
Needed: A Tough, Credible AlternativeKerry could benefit in 2004 if the Democratic Party learns the right lesson from Landrieu's triumph by William Schneider .... "When people feel insecure," they'd rather have "somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right." Thus did former President Clinton sum up last month's midterm election. Clinton thinks Democrats made a big mistake by assuming that they could take the national security issue off the table. In Clinton's view, his party, in essence, said, "OK, Mr. President, you can have your way on national security. Now let's talk about the economy." Democrats were "missing in action on national security," Clinton said. They needed a "positive agenda" that included the credible use of force. Otherwise, he warned, Democrats sound like wimps—and they lose. Clinton urged Democrats to stand up to President Bush on the tax cut as well. The former president called it "too little stimulus in the short run, too little responsibility in the long run." Isn't that something Democrats should have been talking about before the election? Sure, but they were afraid to. A lot of them were running in Bush states, and they didn't want to be attacked as "tax lovers." Why didn't Clinton say all this to Democrats a month before the election? It's because nobody asked him. Democrats were afraid to be seen listening to Clinton. The wimp strategy failed. Now what? "We don't have to be more liberal," Clinton declared. "But we do have to be more relevant in a progressive way." Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., was not exactly critical of Bush in her successful runoff campaign. She couldn't afford to be: Bush has a 73 percent approval rating in her state, and Landrieu has supported him on 85 percent of key votes this year, according to Congressional Quarterly. But she did shift gears. In the November 5 election campaign, she emphasized her support for Bush. In the December 7 runoff, she emphasized her independence. Mocking her Republican challenger as a "rubber stamp" for Bush, Landrieu promised to "support the president when he is right for Louisiana" and to oppose him when he is "wrong for the state." She denounced what she called a "secret deal," reported in a Mexican newspaper, between the White House and Mexico to double sugar imports from Mexico and threaten Louisiana's sugar farmers. Her strategy worked. Landrieu energized Democratic voters. Turnout was only slightly lower in the December 7 runoff than in the November 5 election, and Landrieu improved her performance markedly in heavily black New Orleans. Despite efforts by Republicans to tar Landrieu as a liberal—"Mary Landrieu is so liberal, she might be closer to Hillary than I am," a Clinton impersonator said in one radio ad—she didn't win on ideology. She won on independence. There's a lesson for Democrats as 2004 nears: They have to offer a tough, credible alternative to Bush, particularly on national security. That's why 2004 could be Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry's year. Unlike most other candidates of his generation, Kerry served, honorably and heroically, in combat. In fact, he has rare credibility on both sides of the most divisive issue of his generation: Kerry was a decorated combat veteran and an antiwar activist. He has been a leading Democratic spokesman on Vietnam, Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He has challenged Bush on Iraq and even Afghanistan. What about Kerry's vote against the Persian Gulf War in 1991? That won't hurt him with Democrats. Most Democrats voted against the war. And he's been tough on Iraq in the years since. Recall the seven debates between Kerry and Republican Gov. Bill Weld in the 1996 Massachusetts Senate campaign. Kerry showed himself to be deeply knowledgeable and quick-witted. But if Kerry shares Bill Clinton's intelligence, he lacks Clinton's common touch. Kerry's a patrician. He's often described as cool, cerebral, diffident—not as someone who feels your pain. Kerry is, by any definition, a liberal—a Massachusetts liberal who was Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor for two years. That's unlikely to be a problem in the race for the Democratic nomination. And against a Republican named Bush? A man who was awarded the Silver and Bronze Stars as well as three Purple Hearts would not look out of place in a tank. In his December 3 economic policy speech, Kerry blasted Bush's tax cut as "unfair, unaffordable, and unquestionably ineffective." He then went on to defend Clinton's economic record, without mentioning the name Clinton: "Under the leadership of a Democratic president, we had the courage to tackle the budget deficit and get the nation's fiscal house in order." Kerry did mention Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a Republican. In a speech about the economy, Kerry echoed McCain's 2000 campaign themes. And he managed to work in references to his own military record: "It's time we joined together in our country—all of us as citizen soldiers, committed to a cause greater than ourselves—to make certain in deeds, not words, that we have an economy where no American is left behind." No American left behind? Where have we heard that before? From George W. Bush. When a candidate echoes John McCain and George Bush, he sounds strong, even if he's a Democrat.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Schneider is the Cable News Network's senior political analyst. He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly. His column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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