The narrow victory of Republican candidate Brian Bilbray over his Democratic opponent, Francine Busby, this week in the special election in the 50th Congressional District of California indicates the Democrats are close but not quite ready to take back control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Despite Bilbray’s victory, the national public opinion climate still looks pretty bleak for Republicans. Only one out of every three Americans approve of George W. Bush’s performance as president. Two out of every three Americans believe that the United States is on the wrong track. The approval rating for the GOP-controlled Congress is even lower than the president’s rating, as only a quarter of the public give thumbs up to the folks on Capitol Hill. What does this mean for Republicans up and down the ballot this year? Big Trouble.
But the results from California last week suggest that Democrats still have to learn some lessons before they can take back control of one or both houses of Congress in November.
The first lesson is that the Democratic “culture of corruption” argument may not be as powerful as they thought it might be. If there was any place that the culture of corruption argument should have worked, it would have been in the 50th Congressional District in the San Diego, Calif., area.
The reason for having a special congressional election in the first place is that the former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham was already enjoying the hospitality of a federal correctional institution after pleading guilty to taking bribes from a defense contractor. To add insult to injury, the newly elected congressman, Bilbray, has worked as a lobbyist since he left Congress the first time.
Perhaps the recent controversy surrounding Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., and the discovery of his frozen assets have taken the edge off this issue for Democrats but the “culture of corruption” pitch just didn’t work here.
The next lesson is that the immigration issue appears to be a very potent campaign issue. San Diego is on the front line of the immigration battle, and Bilbray and a third party immigration candidate combined for a clear majority of the vote. Bilbray took a very hard anti-amnesty line and even went so far as to criticize President Bush’s immigration proposals. Busby got into trouble in the last days of the campaign when she told a Hispanic group that people didn’t need papers to vote.
Anti-immigrant feeling is always strong in the United States when Americans are having a hard time paying their bills. The cost of energy and health is going through the roof, and hard pressed middle class Americans see immigrants as an added drain on their pocketbooks. If the Democrats hope to counter the immigration issue, they will need a strong populist economic program that addresses the economic insecurity of the public more productively than the Republic policy of bashing helpless immigrants.
The last lesson that Democrats need to learn in order to win is that it is very difficult to nationalize congressional elections. The late and great Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, once said that “all politics is local.” And that appeared to be the case in San Diego last week as voters made the judgment that the local Republican was OK, even though the Republican national leader, the president, was a lost cause.
Democrats must find a way to nationalize the mid-term elections because the national winds are strongly blowing against the president. And there’s nothing like an international issue to nationalize an election. A clear majority of Americans now believe that it was a mistake to go to war against Iraq. It appears in some surveys that more than half of the American public also think that the president lied to them about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Troop withdrawals before Election Day will help the GOP, but as long as troop casualties mount and expenditures increase, Americans are ready to go through the roof in November.
The Democrats came close in California 50, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. The Democrats can take advantage of the hostility towards the president and win in November if they learn the lessons of June.
Brad Bannon is a Democratic political consultant.
