Philadelphia
WRITING IN THESE PAGES just after the 2004 presidential election, I advised my fellow Democrats to start winning and stop whining by wooing America’s purple (red-blue) majority. How? By running faith-friendly, pro-life, pro-family, pro-poor candidates. In talks before my fellow political scientists, I predicted that, if Pennsylvania Democrats proved willing to nominate him, and if their liberal national party leadership did not subvert him, then Pennsylvania’s state treasurer, Bob Casey Jr., would walk over two-term Republican senator Rick Santorum.
It happened in double-digits last Tuesday. Casey bested fellow pro-life ethnic Catholic Santorum 59 percent to 41 percent. The Democrat won every region of the state except the area known as the Central/Northern Tier. In addition to winning by landslides among urban residents, African Americans, union members, young people, unmarried women, and other typically Democratic voters, he also won self-described moderates (65 percent), white Catholics (58 percent), and weekly churchgoers (52 percent). The purple Democrat practically tied “Red Rick” among voters who ranked either “values issues” or “terrorism” as “extremely important,” and even made headway among white evangelicals (29 percent).
Santorum’s sometimes caustic conservative rhetoric loomed far larger in voters’ minds than did his record of thoughtfully articulating and tirelessly promoting compassionate, cost- effective social policies and faith-based programs. Late in the campaign, the senator began to sound desperate and slightly disingenuous. Then came his remarkably gracious and public-spirited concession speech, provoking several Democrats with whom I watched it to remark that they might well have voted for “that guy.” (Stay tuned: Santorum is not yet 50.)
As the Democratic party’s national leaders now seem to understand, you can’t effectively court a purple-voter majority with faux-purple candidates, or wait to show your purple colors till the election is all but over. Real purple Democrats won even in many states and districts where both the president and Republican incumbents were not as wildly unpopular as they were in Philadelphia and its suburbs. The only Republican House incumbent who survived in true-blue Philly’s inner-ring districts, Jim Gerlach, ran ads credibly tagging his challenger, Lois Murphy, as “Liberal Lois,” and showing her vamping with Nancy Pelosi, now the national Democrats’ House speaker-in-waiting.
Through 2008, President Bush can govern the purple republic without cashier ing his deepest convictions about winning the war against terrorism, reforming entitlement programs, and helping people in need through faith-based and community initiatives. The new Congress that convenes in January will have more conservative members, and fewer liberal and far left members, in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle. Attentive purple voters will be listening and watching. If the Democrats’ leaders in Congress slip into ultra-liberal attack mode, then they will be rebuked, and the whole party will suffer. But even if congressional Democrats start biting at it, the president should not pull back the bipartisan hand that he ceremoniously and sincerely extended after the election, first to Pelosi, and then to Senate majority leader-in-waiting Harry Reid. If, come what may, the president remains ever the bigger, bipartisan man, then he and the GOP will regain public acclaim, and his legacy will be better too.
President Bush has an opportunity now to govern from the center and center-right, just as he promised he would back in 1999 and 2000, and again after 9/11. To seize it, the president’s closest advisers must tune out the partisan, inside-the-beltway blather posing as political analysis, and resist being pulled into back biting over “Who lost Congress?” Above all, the president himself must lead and not let the unmistakable public rebuke of Election 2006 justify lame-ducking it back to Texas.
It won’t be easy. Some conservative commentators and ex-Bush insiders who once coronated Karl Rove as a political genius now say Rove was overrated or worse. With perfect hindsight, they intone that Republicans could and should have won more razor-close races.
Nonsense. Elections are often razor-close. In 1994, when Republicans won 54 House seats, if a grand total of just 19,500 votes had switched from Republican to Democrat across 13 districts, then Democrats would have retained control. Love or loathe him, Rove is a master campaign strategist and tactician. But it would have taken magical powers for Republicans to duck this defeat.
As political scientists generally agree, even “nationalized” midterm House elections turn on multiple factors. The short list includes past district vote patterns; past presidential vote patterns; incumbency advantages; candidate quality; changes in real disposable income; presidential approval ratings; and, in off-year contests, the so-called midterm penalty for the president’s party. Many months ago, forecasting models variously incorporating these and other variables called the House for the Democrats, with several estimating their net gain at 20 seats or more. That was before the president’s approval ratings took new nosedives in many states.
Iraq was the main, but hardly the sole, reason for the president’s drag on Republican prospects. As Joe Klein correctly reports in his latest book, Politics Lost, from his first days in the campaign business Rove bet that “voters had three basic questions about a candidate: Is he a strong leader? Can I trust him? Does he care about people like me?” Rove bet right in 2000, 2002, 2004, and in 2006. But, on all three counts–leadership, trust, compassion–public confidence in Bush’s post-Katrina presidency has been dismal. In 2002 and again in 2004, Rove succeeded by “painting the opposition as weak, untrustworthy, and effete.”
This time, however, “cut and run” and the rest rang hollow (or worse), even to many registered Republicans. Besides, painting pro-life, ex-military, and law-and-order candidates as “Pelosi Democrats” could stir only the right-wing radio audiences who already believed it. Negative ads apparently worked in Tennessee against Harold Ford Jr., but the final vote margin (50,000) was smaller than analysts had predicted. (Memo to GOP: Read his moving concession and weep. I predict that this purple Democrat, who had challenged Pelosi for the House minority leader’s chair, will be back–and won’t be beat again.)
As Klein also points out, Bush’s compassionate conservatism was sincere, and Rove did his job by framing it as an answer to that one of the three questions that “was always toughest for a Republican,” namely, “Does he care about people like me?” But once Bush was elected, translating his special “charge to keep” into new faith-based policies and programs with a bipartisan prayer in Congress proved largely impossible. At one extreme, some House Republicans wanted the White House to push for laws that would permit proselytizing with public funds and radically expand religious hiring rights. At the opposite extreme, some House Democrats wanted to repeal the Clinton-era laws that had begun, at least in principle, to prohibit grant-making federal agencies from discriminating against otherwise qualified community-serving religious nonprofit organizations.
Now, however, President Bush can reach back and wrap his original faith-based and community plan around the reelected Senate Democrats, ranging from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Joe Lieberman, who have long supported it, while also inviting in Casey and other natural allies on this issue among the body’s new members.
Earlier this fall, Casey gave a speech at Catholic University, “Restoring America’s Moral Compass: Leadership and the Common Good,” that (but for a few rhetorical rough edges) could almost have been written by Bush’s brilliant ex-speechwriter Michael Gerson. All those now responsible for the post-2006 White House “compassion agenda,” as well as the president himself, should read it. A typical passage holds that if “we are going to be pro-life, we cannot say we are against abortion of unborn children and then let our children suffer in degraded inner-city schools and broken homes.”
Whatever common ground the president finds with the new Democratic majority in Congress on domestic, social, or economic issues, it still won’t matter much unless he leaves town in two years having resolved the dilemma in Iraq–resolved it, that is, without having undercut American determination to meet the profound and prolonged global and homeland security challenges posed by international terrorism networks and the nations that support them.
This year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) made “a new direction” its mantra, and the president’s badly bungled Iraq policy its main target. Politically, it worked, but conspicuously absent from the official DCCC to-do list was even so much as an outline regarding Iraq. On Election Night, some DCCC officials made formulaic statements about the war. As always, it’s a bad sign when alliterated principles (re-deploy, re-this, re-that) are offered instead of policies.
Even after the president announced Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s departure, there had yet to be a meaningful Democratic alternative articulated, apart from calls to withdraw the troops on timetables tethered loosely, if at all, to conditions on the ground and promises to consider practicing whatever the Baker-Hamilton commission preaches. The commission report, due in December, could prove wise and worthy–or not. Bipartisanship is a blessing, but genuine joint legislative-executive debates and policy deliberations are needed, not mutual abdications or government-by-commission.
Bipartisanship on Iraq need not be a pipe dream. A year ago, Delaware’s Democratic senator Joseph Biden gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Turning the Corner on Iraq.” Biden declared that the “hard truth is that our large military presence in Iraq is both necessary . . . and increasingly counterproductive.” Still, he continued, “Iraqis of all sects want to live in a stable country. . . . And the American people want us to succeed. They want it badly. If the administration listens, if it levels, and if it leads, it can still redeem their faith.”
Amen, but only if the Democratic majority in Congress now levels, listens, and honestly helps the president to lead, both at home and abroad, starting with Iraq, will it deserve the public’s new-found faith. If not, that faith will soon be fleeting, and many Democrats, purple or not, will lose in 2008, and deservedly so.
Contributing editor John J. DiIulio Jr. is co-author, with James Q. Wilson, of American Government: Institutions and Policies, now in its tenth edition. In 2001, he was the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
