As the Democratic Party marches toward the congressional elections in November with confident visions of taking control of one or both houses of Congress, one fact shades their optimism: They have no dynamic drum major leading their parade.
The Democratic front-runner for the 2008 presidential nomination in the polls, Sen. Hillary Clinton, is golden in New York but elsewhere is often seen as polarizing. With some voters, it?s merely the idea of a woman as president; with others it?s a perception of arrogance and all-knowing about her.
Within her own party, the former first lady is suspect among liberal activists for seeming to emulate her husband, retired President Bill Clinton, in tacking conspicuously to the center of the political spectrum, as he did in winning easy reelection in 1996.
Other prospective aspirants to the nomination all lack, at this stage at least, the political standing or charisma to take their place at the head of the Democratic drive for a congressional takeover this fall.
The situation is not unlike that encountered by the Republican Party 40 years ago, when the Democrats controlled Congress but were falling in voter confidence, in the wake of the Vietnam War and growing public protest about the direction of the country.
A failed Republican presidential nominee named Richard Nixon seeking political resurrection seized the opportunity, jumping in front of a midterm campaign to revive the GOP after the humiliating defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Nixon predicted his party would gain 40 House seats, three in the Senate and six governorships.
Generally considered politically dead after losing a race for governor in California in 1962, Nixon spent the summer and fall of 1966 speaking for 66 Republican House candidates, and 44 of them were elected as well as 15 other Republicans. In all, his party picked up 47 seats in the House, three in the Senate and eight governorships.
As a consequence, Nixon suddenly wasseen as the architect of the swift GOP recovery from the Goldwater debacle. And he was unintentionally assisted by President Lyndon Johnson, who singled Nixon out as “a chronic campaigner” trying to “pick up a precinct or two or a ward or two” by criticizing him on the war. The Republicans fell short of a congressional takeover, but suddenly Nixon was being taken seriously again.
Building on his renewed political stature and his recovering party, Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a platform of ending the war in Vietnam and putting the deeply divided country back on course.
Fast-forwarding to today, a failed Democratic presidential nominee named Al Gore finds himself facing a similar opportunity for political resurrection. Another midterm congressional election approaches in which this time it is an incumbent Republican president and his party in a political tailspin, giving the Democrats a chance to assume control of Congress and enhance its prospects for gaining the White House in 2008.
A significant difference is that Nixon in 1966 was already plotting his political resurrection and eagerly, though in a controlled way, taking the first public steps to a second presidential bid. Gore on the other hand has repeatedly said he will not run again in 2008 and has turned to other endeavors in a more general realm of public service.
Most recently, he has been in the spotlight with his searing documentary film on global warming and other environmental perils, “An Inconvenient Truth,” obviously designed to awaken the American public to a concern that he has long held, and that now motivates his public actions.
However, in a speech four months ago at Constitution Hall, Gore jumped with both feet into the Democratic criticism of President Bush, launching a blistering attack on him for “breaking the law repeatedly and insistently” in what Gore called a “truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.”
Since then, more Democrats have been murmuring about a Gore comeback at a time their party needs a strong and eloquent leader, but with others expressing doubts. Maybe what he needs is for Bush to denounce him as LBJ did to Nixon, putting Gore squarely on the political stage again.
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.
