THE MINUTE the ads of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had begun to draw blood, the Democrats attacked them as a giant, malevolent plot. The same plot, drawn up by a diabolical genius of unsurpassed malice and cunning, that has been causing Democrats trouble for so many years now, always unwarranted, always malicious, and always unfair. In today’s Democratic imagination, there are no political accidents, no spontaneous movements, no genuine issues, and never a genuine weakness in a candidate. There are only diversions, cooked up and cleverly sold to a gullible public, “dirty tricks” supervised by conniving Republican masterminds, and schemes to undermine democracy.
The first instinct of Democrats during the recall election that claimed the political life of California governor Gray Davis last year was to call it the latest phase in a Republican plot to subvert the government–the previous ones being a redistricting effort by Texas Republicans, the recount in Florida after the 2000 election, and the impeachment of Clinton two years before that. But it was the Democrats who pioneered and perfected the art of destroying a foe through sexual harassment claims.
And removing Clinton would only have helped Democrats, as it would have transferred power to Al Gore who would no doubt have been elected easily in 2000, as an incumbent riding a wave of peace and prosperity, minus Clinton’s many embarrassing problems. In the Florida recount, it is certainly true that eyes were gouged and crotches kneed by all sides. But it was not the deviously gifted Republicans who weeks before the election assembled battalions of lawyers in 20 key states, drew up elaborate plans to litigate the election results, flew a planeload of lawyers into Tallahassee in the early morning after the election, and sent Gore’s campaign manager into the state to declare, with Bush ahead, and with no recounts yet started, that the state should be “awarded” to Gore. And the plan to change the congressional districts in Texas to favor Republicans? It would indeed be outrageous, if it were not an effort to undo an equally outrageous redistricting 10 years ago that drew them to favor the Democrats. (The best solution would be to erase congressional districts all over the country and replace them with a grid of square boxes. But I digress.) As for the recall in California, Democrats claim it had nothing to do with the monstrous unpopularity of Governor Davis, and everything to do with a desire to put a Republican in a statehouse then held by the Democrats. But when the recall petition was announced, there was no guarantee that Arnold Schwarzenegger would enter the contest, much less win it.
The problem with all of these charges is that they (1) involve things that are perfectly legal (provisions for impeachment and recall are in the federal and state constitutions), (2) involve tactics earlier used or invented by Democrats, or (3) concern events that might easily have ended up helping Democrats. This is a plot?
Most of the charges against the Republicans fall under the heading “dirty tricks.” A “dirty trick” is any tactic used against Democrats in an election they later lose. Dirty tricks are invariably orchestrated by a dark genius (think Karl Rove or Lee Atwater), who has the power to exert mind control over vast populations. Usually, the trick consists of hanging a lantern on a glaring flaw in a Democrat that anyone not a Democrat could already spot miles away.
In 1988, it was, of course, Willie Horton (aka the Massachusetts prison furlough scandal) that was instrumental in changing a 17-point lead for Michael Dukakis when his convention was over to a 10-point lead for George Bush the elder on Election Day. In this case, Atwater was so fiendishly clever that he had managed 12 years before the election to implant in Dukakis’s brain the idea that letting violent criminals out on unsupervised weekend furloughs was a step in the march of compassionate progress. (As governor, Dukakis had in 1976 vetoed a ban on furloughs for murderers.) Atwater then further exercised his mysterious powers so that when one of these furloughed murderers (Willie Horton) raped and assaulted a young couple in Maryland, he influenced Dukakis to adopt a tone of defiant indifference when the victims tried to complain. Atwater then got inside the brain of CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, who at the first presidential debate asked Dukakis the killer question–What would he do if his own wife should be raped or murdered?–to which Dukakis replied, in effect: Nothing much.
To most people watching, this was the sequence of events that finished Dukakis, but Democrats then and thereafter saw it differently. To them, the big thing that swung the election was one TV ad put out by an independent committee, months after the issue had begun to find traction, which showed that Willie Horton was . . . black. To most Americans, Dukakis had serious problems with crime and punishment issues, not to say common sense; to Democrats, Republicans were bigots who didn’t mind being killed unless they were killed by black criminals. A lily-white killer won’t do.
Between 1988 and the rise of the Swifties, the dirtiest trick of all may have been the entire 2002 midterm election, with Bush’s top operative Karl Rove pulling the strings. First, Rove created the war on terror, to distract attention from the Democrats’ favorite issues. Then he somehow induced Saddam Hussein to act as if he had megadeath weapons, to force a confrontation that had been brewing for years. Then he hoodwinked prominent Democrats into saying they believed Saddam did have those weapons. Then he put a gun to the head of Tom Daschle and forced him to add a clause to the Democrats’ version of the homeland defense bill to placate the Democrats’ friends in the public-employee unions. (It would have made it harder for the president to redeploy personnel in the event of an emergency.) Still under Rove’s influence, Daschle induced several Democratic senators, including Jean Carnahan and Max Cleland, to defend this provision, which a great many voters would find incomprehensible. They lost, and it was all Rove’s fault.
With this under his belt, it was no stretch at all for Rove to go out and find some 246 Vietnam-era veterans, most of whom had served near or with Kerry, and get them to pretend that they had been seething with anger for some 30 years. Of course, anything Kerry himself might have said or done to torque off so many people had nothing to do with it, just as the votes cast by Democrats play no part in the results when they lose elections, and anything Dukakis said or did about that unfortunate incident had nothing to do with his loss.
RATIONAL PEOPLE think differently. As David Broder points out in the Washington Post, the Swift boat controversy is part of a war that will die only with the last boomer, and one that John Kerry should have foreseen. “Kerry may be judged naive to have thought that Vietnam would be a golden credential . . . and not an inevitable source of controversy,” Broder writes. “In a 2002 conversation, Kerry told me he thought it would be doubly advantageous that ‘I fought in Vietnam and I also fought against the Vietnam War,’ apparently not recognizing that some would see far too much political calculation in such a bifurcated record.” In short, the Swifties’ reaction was predictable, and rooted in Kerry’s behavior and choices. Kerry, like Dukakis in 1988 and the 2002 Democrats, made his own problems. But don’t tell that to the Kerry campaign.
As Tod Lindberg notes in the Washington Times, contemporary Democrats are almost unique among modern political groups in the extent to which they tend to trace all of their setbacks to monstrous and sinister plots. But perhaps they may have to, as a way of reframing a set of reversals they would otherwise find it extremely painful to explain.
In some ways, Democrats never recovered their bearings after the 1980 election, and have still not come to terms with what it all meant. At first, they consoled themselves with the thought that Reagan was an anomaly, an ex-movie star gifted with Hollywood stardust, who had, like The Shadow, the mysterious ability to cloud men’s minds. They told themselves that he was a detour, a blip on the screen that would not be repeated. He was an act of God, like an earthquake or a hurricane, that could not be avoided but had to be lived through, and things would go back to normal once he left the scene.
He did leave the scene, but things did not go back to normal, so they ascribed the victory of George Bush the Elder to the Reagan afterglow and Atwater’s black magic, and assumed things would go back to normal after that. Then Bill Clinton did win, and things did go back to normal, with themselves in the White House, and both houses of Congress. But “normal” lasted only two short years before the Republicans stormed into Congress, and Bill Clinton was forced to veer right. And this was the least of their woes.
Republican presidents, like Nixon and Eisenhower, had won landslide elections without disturbing the Democrats’ place as the majority party, and a tied election like that in 2000 could be dismissed as an oddity. What could not be dismissed was the slow, steady march of the Republican party toward parity, as the Democrats lost ground. It was in the Clinton years that the Democrats’ last edge eroded, and finally vanished completely. A single president can win on the basis of circumstance and of personality, but the institutional advance of the party as a philosophy and an institution is something entirely different and deeper, and moves into the realm of ideas.
What this suggests–that Democrats are sometimes rejected for very good reasons; that the party has some serious internal problems; that Republicans have some ideas that are appealing to people–is something many liberals simply can’t swallow. To them, all Republican victories are on their face illegitimate, won by appeals to bias or ignorance. But mainly by sinister plots.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
