House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who would become speaker if the Democrats take over the House of Representatives in the November elections, is not counting on the falling polling numbers of President Bush and the Republican Party to make it happen.
While she acknowledges that Bush?s fading popularity creates a huge Democratic opportunity in “a very big election … at which everything is at stake,” Pelosi says it won?t happen unless her party convinces voters a Democratic takeover will bring change beneficial to them.
For more than a year, critics have been peppering Democratic leaders with warnings that unless they come up with an appealing positive agenda of their own, they will risk defeat again this fall from another round of GOP flag-waving and challenges to their patriotism in wartime.
With awareness of that peril in mind, Pelosi says an agenda is in the making that will be rolled out next month recognizing neglected middle-class needs in energy, education and health care, and refined in September for a unified Democratic push in the following two months.
At the same time, Pelosi says, she and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid will not neglect reminding voters of the Bush record on the war in Iraq and the Republican administration?s response to the Hurricane Katrina calamity, and particularly what she calls “the Republican rubber-stamp” Congress that has largely denied the Democrats a voice.
Today?s congressional Democrats are often compared to the House Republicans of 1994 who gained control with Newt Gingrich?s Contract With America. Pelosi says House Democrats instead will make certain commitments for action in the first days and weeks of a Democratic majority.
They will include, she says, passage of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission on domestic security, an increase in the federal minimum wage, repeal and reform of the Republicans? embattled prescription drugs plan and pay-as-you-go in place of deficit spending. “We?re deadly serious about achieving these things when we win,” she says.
At the same time, Pelosi says, a Democratic takeover of the House will give her party the power of subpoena now denied by “theRepublican rubber-stamped Congress.” If attained, she says, there will be early investigations into such matters as the conduct of the Iraq war and the link between big oil interests and administration energy policy contributing to high retail gas prices.
Although Pelosi labels the war “a grotesque mistake,” she says “I don?t think it helps” for the Democrats to raise an issue of impeachment against Bush for it. The answer suggests the Democrats don?t want to let the November elections become simply a referendum on a war about which there still remain differing Democratic positions.
In all this, Pelosi cites Bush?s decision last year to aggressively advocate investing some Social Security taxes in the stock market as a political blunder that enabled the Democrats to rally their senior constituents and others. “If we lost that fight the Democratic Party [would have been] in the dustbin of history,” she says.
Instead, she says, that fight on which Bush spent an enormous amount of time and political capital was critical in starting his slide in popularity, along with what she and other Democrats are labeling “a culture of corruption” in the GOP-controlled Congress.
To gain control of the House, the Democrats must take 15 seats in the fall. To that end, Pelosi says, 50 congressional districts now in Republican hands are being targeted in an expensive grass-roots organizational campaign, mostly in the Northeast and the Rocky Mountain states.
A key part of the effort, she says, is to achieve party unity on a limited agenda, which the Democrats too often have failed to do. Many are “perfectionists” who want their own agendas, she says, whereas “the Republicans don?t act that way. They?re with the program.”
For once, the Democrats have enough money to be competitive in this critical fight for control of Congress. The key question for them is whether they can remain unified on what they offer the voters this fall, and whether that package is seen as preferable to what they?re getting now from Bush and the GOP on Capitol Hill.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
