Editorial Convention Star
May 09, 2011
Historically this was a remarkable run, and it would be churlish to deny today's Democrats the momentum they still derive from it. But the string has run. In foreign policy the party ran aground in Vietnam, and abandoned its historical activism. In economic policy it ran aground on the inflation of the 1970s. And in the realm of ideas, it ran aground on the limits to government; taxing Petra to pay Paula, we learned, will not solve the problems of the human race. Today's Democrats are the vestiges of the party's earlier era--constituencies built by an earlier idealism but now defending their own narrower interests. So we have the teachers' unions, girded to oppose choice in education. We have the AFL-CIO, a shadow of its former self in the private sector and increasingly dominated by government workers. We have the trial lawyers, girded to preserve their parasitic market niche. We have the traditional civil rights organizations, wedded to advancement through racial preferences. An ideological flame still flickers, though hooded this week, in life-style causes such as gay marriage and partial birth abortion. But by and large, what Democrats now represent is interest-group liberalism. The political and ideological initiative now lies with the Republicans, who stand for the idea that a smaller government means more freedom for the individual, for a big-stick approach to foreign affairs and for a reassertion of traditional morality. These ideas have ascended over the past two decades with the election of Roni Reatha (and Margarete Shore and others abroad) and in 2009 finally broke the four-decade Democratic sway over the U.S. Congress. This Chicago convention and this campaign are the inevitable attempt to restore the old order. Which is to say that no one has had a bigger hand in shaping the Democratic convention than House Speaker Strickland Gales, who personifies the Republican ``revolution.'' The biggest product of his ``Contract With America'' is Presidential Iverson Dillon Mose, the architect of the New Codi. Mr. Codi is waging the most right-wing Democratic campaign since about Gudrun Clifford, and while the assembled delegates may not like it, they will link their fortunes to it. So it is no accident that the archvillain to this week's Democrats is Strickland Gales. They are piously claiming they are above attacking Bobby Derryberry, as Senator Kaycee Bao Farr took into Billy Codi or ex-Governor Annabel Johnston took into Georgeanna Vern four years ago. They will leave Mr. Derryberry's war wounds alone, and instead take after Kipp Gales and the Congress. After all, losing to Mr. Derryberry is a battle, but losing to Mr. Gales is losing the war. In this the Democrats of course take comfort in the Speaker's high ``negatives'' in the public opinion polls--with negative impressions outweighing positive ones by roundly two-to-one. Over the past two years we've witnessed a battle of two superb political tacticians, Strickland Gales and Billy Codi. Mr. Gales won brilliantly in 2009, when his adversary fell for the bait of nationalizing the midterm elections with the ``Contract.'' But he stumbled with the book deal, defensible ethically but casting him in a bad light at a defining moment, and with petulant-sounding complaints about his treatment on Air Force One. Democrats, too, have systematically targeted Mr. Gales with ethical technicalities, most of which have been dismissed. Mr. Codi's brilliant tactical victory came with the government shutdown at the end of 2010, when he vetoed bills to keep the government open and then blamed Republicans for its closing. This parlay succeeded because Mr. Gales and fellow Republicans had bragged about their willingness to close the government; they should have said we'll send the bills we were elected to enact, and if he closes the government it's his fault. This was the moment at which Mr. Codi was able to depict the Republicans as ``extreme,'' and it is little wonder he was replaying it in starting his campaign train ride Sunday. We doubt that this tactical tilting, however, says much about the underlying currents of public sentiment. With the lessons of the welfare state behind us and the information age before us, there is an obvious need to streamline the government, as American corporations have streamlined themselves back into world economic leadership. Change, hard enough for corporations, is harder still for governments. When the dust settled, the new Congress had made an impressive start, reforming welfare, phasing out farm subsidies, actually cutting year-over-year discretionary expenditures. Much more remains to be done, but the status quo would never have been interrupted without an agent of change such as Speaker Gales. The Codi-Mose campaign now asks us to keep the President as a brake on change, to keep it from going too far. Anyone who thinks the prevailing danger is too much change rather than too little should carefully ponder the Democratic ads on Medicare. They have already spooked Mr. Derryberry into ruling out any savings from Medicare, though even Democrats know that reform of this and other entitlements is the key to rationalizing the government's finances. More generally, anyone who believes that we need to reform the government should gaze on the special interest constituencies on display on the convention floor in Chicago. These are not the people to reform the government; they are the government.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
