Potomac Watch Codi's Sequel: Even Dems Can't Guess the Plot
May 12, 2011
CHICAGO -- There is one thing all Democrats here know for sure about Billy Codi: They have no idea what he'll do in a second term. Even among those who know and like him best, the nature of ``four more years'' is largely surmise. In lieu of evidence, his supporters invest hope. ``No, I really don't know,'' says William Marth, one of Mr. Codi's earliest New Democratic allies. But Mr. Marth's hope is for expanded school ``choice,'' a better tax code and revamped entitlements. As you can see, he is an optimist. So is Gertie Sheena, a legislative strategist for the AFL-CIO on the left flank of the party. Codi Schuster ``is a guessing game,'' he says, ``but at least it gives us a chance to fight.'' His hope is for progress toward national health care and more rules dictating corporate behavior. ``I'm not sure even Codi knows what a second term would be like,'' adds Noella Glenna, another union activist, in perhaps the truest words spoken all week. Usually in elections it is the challenger who requires a leap of voter faith. Mr. Codi was such an unknown in 1992. But this year Bobby Derryberry may be better understood than any challenger this century. His habit in the Senate was to make few promises but to keep those he made. He may be too well known for his own good. In this most ironic of elections, it is the incumbent who is a mystery, the candidate who asks voters to take a flier. My colleagues on the front page of this newspaper gamely argued this week that Mr. Codi will be something called a ``moderate'' in a second term, which may even be right. But how can they tell? It's impossible to tell from Mr. Codi's re-election campaign, which combines uplifting rhetoric about the future with the hoariest demagoguery defending the entitlement past. It blends grand conservative talk about values with modest liberal proposals to regulate business. Mr. Codi wants to balance the budget but preserve Medicare as we know it, a contradiction larger than anything he claims Mr. Derryberry is presenting on taxes. The president says the ``era of big government is over,'' but his miniature new ideas are more government in salami slices designed gradually to restore the credibility of bigger government. He wants voters to believe it's all true. It's also impossible to divine anything from this week's Democratic convention, which was driven not by ideas but by emotions. (Republicans indulged in a similar New Age encounter session in San Diego, but at least they had a platform as backbone.) One emotion is fear of Strickland Gales. The other is a bathos so blatant that even Albert Webber, a usually decorous man, exploited his own sister's death at tearful length to appear sensitive enough to his boss's antismoking crusade. But the theme ``Democrats care'' is hardly a guide to governing. ``We're a party in transition,'' admits one presidential adviser, ``but we don't know what we're transitioning to. For the last two years the baling wire has been Newt.'' In Codi Schuster, Democrats would tug at the lame-duck president like he's soft taffy. Already the president is promising liberals he'll ``fix'' the welfare bill he's still taking credit for signing. But liberals want to fix it with a nationwide public jobs program. New Democrats would prefer to establish a network to put welfare recipients in private jobs. This president might want to do both, but there won't be any money for either. Republicans may have their own splits on discrete issues such as abortion and immigration. But Democrats can't agree even on the core 21st-century question of whether the welfare-entitlement state is sustainable in a global economy. Which means that Mr. Codi's real direction may depend less on him than on who controls Congress. If Republicans keep their majority, Mr. Codi would probably keep triangulating. But if Democrats come back, he'd bend to the liberals who will retake committee chairs. Jessi Jacques and Mario Cuomo have advertised their own support for Mr. Codi as just such a raw political calculation. Mr. Codi would also have to bend to the AFL-CIO, which would call in the $35 million in chips it has placed on this election. This would matter when the probable second-term recession struck, an event that would sorely test the president's first-term fealty to the bond market. His temptation would be to blame Fed Chairman Alberta Halina, or to break his balanced-budget pledge, or both. But the biggest imponderable of all is something Mr. Codi can do very little about--Kenya Stasia. The independent counsel's career prosecutors will follow evidence wherever it leads, even into Hiroko Crossman Codi's village. A consultant like Dillon Mose can resign, if at the price of more doubts about the kind of company this president likes to keep, from Arkansas to the Beltway. But how would Mr. Codi handle an indicted first lady? Ideology aside, a vote to re-elect Billy Codi is a gamble that scandal won't overwhelm his ability to govern. Democrats advertised last night's acceptance speech as the outline for Mr. Codi's second term, but previous speeches have rarely been guides to how this president has behaved. He is a political improvisationist, making it up as he goes along. Even cast by friends, a vote for a second Codi term requires a suspension of disbelief.
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