Laboring Democrats

Nah–not really.

It’s true there are disgruntled centrists at the Democratic Leadership Council, alarmed at the dudburger campaign being run by their favorite, Joe Lieberman. And it’s true that on each of two important subjects, there’s another first-tier candidate in the race who doesn’t share Lieberman’s instincts: Howard Dean on foreign policy and Dick Gephardt on trade. But in fact the party’s emotional center of gravity is much closer to Dean and Gephardt than it is to Lieberman and the DLC (whose misfortune it is to agree with that bastard Bush from time to time). And judging from Tuesday’s forum, Lieberman seems disinclined to make much stink about it at the moment–at least not when he’s in mixed intra-party company. “We’re not going to win by being opposed to all tax cuts,” the senator offered in his affable, half-apologetic closing statement. “We’re not going to earn the trust of the American people by being weak or ambivalent on defense. Let’s pull together and fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic party and the future of America.”

Unless they signal a serious fight over serious and specific policies–which simply didn’t happen in Chicago–words like these aren’t a sign of “tension.” They’re the political equivalent of a bedtime prayer.

Moving to the candidates themselves, in the order they first spoke. Not one of them got a positive media review that I’ve seen. But the first speaker’s notices were decidedly negative.

(1) John Kerry had “a second difficult night at a televised Democratic forum,” Adam Nagourney’s New York Times dispatch concluded. Kerry’s throat was hoarse, you see–“a distraction from what his aides had hoped would be a commanding performance.” Such nitpicking! The greater “distraction” was the senator’s wonkishness. He claimed that he’d vote against the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” pact “if it were before me today” on grounds that “it doesn’t have environmental or labor standards protections in it.” (It doesn’t have anything in it; ministerial negotiations over the plan’s details aren’t scheduled to conclude until the end of 2005.) And if we’re going to find fault, how’s this for nerdy, Dukakisoid self-promotion: “I have offered a [health care] plan that I am proud to say to you has been judged by National Journal’s independent group of experts . . . to be the most feasible and the best plan,” and so forth.

The plan in question, however, is a perfectly respectable one, and Kerry discussed it comprehensibly–and audibly, despite his croak. He’s run first or second in virtually every nationwide Democratic poll. Moreover, and more impressively, Kerry’s managed to keep himself in a dead heat with Dean in New Hampshire despite Dean’s phenomenal publicity momentum in recent weeks. Did the AFL-CIO event do anything to damage Kerry’s standing? No. Bottom line: He’s an experienced, well-known, mainstream, “electable” Democrat. No one should write him off.

(2) North Carolina’s Sen. John Edwards you can write off, probably. The early book on him was “poised” and “personally magnetic” but “green” and “lightweight.” Then he made a strenuous and largely successful effort to ballast himself with detailed policy proposals. None of which he brought with him to the big show in Chicago. Last week he regressed a fair bit, playing Opie on “Mayberry, R.F.D.”: “Well, first Bob, let me say I come from a family of textile workers.” And, last Bob, let the senator point out that “my grandmother was a sharecropper.” Edwards, despite his “rising star” aura, has yet to break out of the low single-digits in any significant poll–even in neighboring South Carolina. I note that Edwards, even while boasting that the labor movement is “personal for me,” carefully neglected to provide a direct answer when questioned about his position on right-to-work laws like the one in North Carolina. His senatorship comes up for renewal next year. My hunch is that he privately expects to appear exclusively on his home state’s ballot.

(3) Are we allowed to say that Carol Moseley Braun is a charming and well-spoken lady? She wasn’t a very good senator, and she wouldn’t be a very good president, and pretty much everybody knows that, and there’s no point even pretending that her campaign will ever be more than tomorrow’s trivia question. But it’s not like she’s the worst candidate in the race.

(4) Dick Gephardt’s not the worst of them, either, though his campaign calls to mind that man in Norman Mailer’s joke who complains to God about the many injuries and disappointments he’s been made to suffer: “You’re not treating me fairly, God. Why not?” To which God replies, after suitably dramatic thunder and lightning: “Because you bug me.” Gephardt is smart, accomplished, knowledgeable, and responsible. He is a better representative of–and owed more by–his party’s labor-movement backbone than any other politician. And yet his is a “languishing candidacy,” as the Los Angeles Times brutally but not inaccurately puts it: slow to raise money; faltering in the polls (the Des Moines Register has Gephardt trailing Dean among union households); treated with a subtle but persistent and damaging drip-drip of condescension by the press.

Maybe it’s Gephardt’s slightly cloying, eager-beaver personality: The guy who always tries just a little too hard. “My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver,” he reminded his union-label audience in Chicago. And “my mom was a secretary.” And “neither of them got through high school.” And–enough already–“my mom died about eight weeks ago.”

Or maybe it’s Gephardt’s tendency to move his lips faster than his neurons are firing. The Gephardt campaign plainly wanted a single soundbite remembered from the event: “This administration has declared war on the middle class in this country.” This soundbite had, by the end of the evening, been spoonerized by the candidate into a rather startling, fabulously over-the-top piece of news about President Bush: “He has declared war on the American people.”

(5) As I say, though, Gephardt is not the worst of them. That would be Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who runs behind Carol Moseley Braun in most of the polls, and for good reason. Graham provided the only real squirm-in-your-seat moment. And it came the very first time he was asked to open his mouth. “Sen. Graham, you have a solid globalization record,” moderator Bob Edwards of National Public Radio noted. “How do you reconcile your recent promises on trade policy with your voting record on the issue?” Graham said . . . nothing, and stood blank-faced, for several agonizing seconds while nervous titters spread through the auditorium. Had it not occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, the AFL-CIO would want to hear a word or two about duties and tariffs and whatnot?

Graham’s platform is tissue thin. He is inarticulate, and prone to winging it, and politically maladroit. Last week, when asked how he would help state governments dig themselves out of budgetary crisis, he told America’s “working families” that local authorities should be allowed to impose sales taxes on their Internet purchases. I thought he was joking at first. But no, along with everything else, Graham is a singularly humorless man.

(6) Joe Lieberman is a famously nice guy, and a valuable public servant, and he comes to the race with a considerable name-recognition advantage over most of his competitors. But don’t bet on him to last much past the beginning of next February–if that long. It may be that no avowedly “centrist” candidate could win the Democratic nomination in the present climate, so intensely polarized with hostility to the incumbent president are the party’s grassroots voters. It may be, in fact, that mobilizing this anti-Bush sentiment is the only practical strategy by which the Democrats can hope to retake the White House.

But even if that’s wrong–even if it’s possible for a Democratic candidate to win his party’s left-turn-only primary marathon while simultaneously positioning himself for a run-to-the-middle general-election campaign in 2004–Lieberman shows no sign of having figured out the tricks involved. For whatever reason, he is a poor triangulator. Halfway through last week’s debate he sheepishly reiterated his qualified support for purely experimental school-voucher projects. And got booed for it.

(7) Al Sharpton went over big in Chicago. He got off the best one-liner: He showed up 15 minutes late, explaining that he’d had a “non-union cab driver.” Sharpton got the evening’s only standing ovation, too–when he railed against the Bush Justice Department for unspecified investigations into union corruption. And so far as I can tell, Rev. Al’s rousing reception in Chicago was par for the course. He has a genial, entirely un-politician-like stage presence, and Democratic audiences generally enjoy his company–in the moment, that is. When they answer pollsters’ telephone calls, however, it’s a different story. Sharpton barely rates a blip. My guess is that a lot of people vaguely sense they’re supposed to disapprove of the man, but can’t put their finger on why.

Here’s why. Sharpton is a funny, genial, ingenuous man with a record of lurid demagoguery in the not-so-distant past. Also, he’s an ignoramus–a totally unqualified candidate. What will President Sharpton do about rising health care costs, he is asked? “We need to have a constitutional amendment that is being proposed now under House Resolution 29 to make the quality health care of all citizens a constitutional right,” he replies. This would be a stupid idea under any circumstances, but there’s a more basic problem: House Resolution 29 is a bill to convert a temporary federal judgeship in Nebraska to permanent status. What will President Sharpton do to help workers who claim to have been harassed or fired for union-organizing activities, he is further asked? “If I were president, we’d have a federal law” banning such retribution, he promises, apparently unaware that just such a law has been on the books for decades.

(8) The last time I paid any extended attention to Dennis Kucinich–at a convention of New Hampshire public school teachers back in March–I remember feeling sorry for him. He was awful: His prepared speech was impenetrably allusive, he read the whole thing without hardly once looking up from the text, and he lost the room almost instantly.

Something’s happened to him since then. He’s become weirdly compelling. Kucinich spent most of his time doggedly attempting to goad his fellow panelists into a more-progressive-than-thou contest. Kucinich would “cancel” the NAFTA and WTO trade agreements on his first day in the Oval Office, he says. He would replace a “failed” private-sector health care system with a British-model, government-managed national scheme funded by a “7.7 percent tax paid by employers.” And will “Dick” or “Howard” or any of the rest of them make such pledges, Kucinich wondered aloud–repeatedly and sarcastically? Well, will they, huh, huh? “Let’s go home knowing that.” This time, Kucinich did not lose the room. You got the sense, instead, that everyone was watching, intently, to see whether “Dick” or “Howard” would blow a gasket and strangle the man. Dennis Kucinich, it turns out, is going to be fun to watch.

He’s still a kook, though, and his campaign is a self-indulgent fantasy, and he’s not doing his party the slightest bit of good.

(9) Come to think of it, there was one other reason why I felt sorry for Kucinich at that March New Hampshire teachers’ convention: He was made to take the podium minutes after Howard Dean had relinquished it. And Dean had been quite terrific, really: fluid, intelligent, engaging about otherwise boring policy questions, and magically able to convince a deeply partisan “special interest” audience that he was unalterably on their side–even while, in the same breath, he was explicitly refusing to promise them much of anything at all. That “crusading, antiwar liberal” business was largely atmospherics, I decided. Dean could win the nomination. Dean could also–DLC worrywarts and overconfident RNC apparatchiks to the contrary notwithstanding–win the White House.

I haven’t changed my mind, exactly. But I am struck, reading the recent transcripts and watching last week’s debate, by the extent to which Howard Dean has changed his mien: He is running as if he’s convinced the race is already his to lose–subdued and cautious on the issues, openly hard-eyed and practical about the political nuts and bolts. “The real question here tonight,” he told the union folks in Chicago, “is which one of us can beat George Bush.” I can, was his answer, which was hardly a surprise. I’ve raised a ton of money, was his basic explanation, and I wasn’t surprised he found it a convincing one, either.

But I’m surprised he’d say so out loud. Keeping this calculating aspect of his talent and personality hidden was one of the biggest reasons he’d become a plausible front-runner in the first place.

David Tell is opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.