The Washington Post introduced the latest redesign of its Sunday magazine October 7, and the cover story was a (very) long essay by its chief correspondent, Dan Balz. The essay was entitled “Who Will Lead the Democrats?” and its subtitle—“And Is There an Agenda That Can Actually Unite Them? A Definitive Inquiry into the State of the Party”—was a little prolix, as subtitles go, but not a bad summary of the piece.
Like his late Post colleague David S. Broder, Balz tends to reflect the conventional wisdom in political Washington, and there’s nothing wrong with that: The conventional wisdom is always useful to know. He also earns a certain respect among conservatives for his admirable habit of writing about Republicans without resorting to epithets. To be sure, this puts Balz among a very small minority of Post political writers, but it also gives him a measure of credibility his newsroom neighbors lack.
That trait was abundantly evident in the article. One of the things that intrigued me about it was that Balz approached the subject of President Trump in terms that publications like the Washington Post took a very long time to apply to Ronald Reagan. That is to say, he acknowledged the achievement of Trump’s surprising, even historic, election in descriptive, not pejorative, terms.
For Balz, it is self-evident that Trump has recast the Republican party in his image and, in 2016, appealed to voters on a spectrum of issues that Democrats may (or may not) be able to challenge successfully in 2020.
Even more surprising, most of the Democrats he interviewed made the same point: Trump had poached on Democratic territory, had gotten away with it, and might well repeat that performance two years from now.
Of course, the Trump effect may be transitory. But as always, the challenge for Democrats is to reclaim the constituents their party has lost and find the requisite candidate and message. Accordingly, Balz surveyed some familiar faces—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joseph Biden—and consulted a few wild cards: the leftist California senator Kamala Harris, Colorado’s centrist governor John Hickenlooper, even the sui generis governor Jerry Brown of California, who is 80 years old and ran for president three times in the last century.
The other thing that intrigued me was the consensus among Democrats that while the party’s left-liberal wing has prevailed on most issues, and Clinton-era center-leftism is dormant, there was very little confidence, much less consensus, about what that means in practical terms. It is true, as many pointed out, that in 2016 the policy differences between Sanders and Hillary Clinton were comparatively trivial; but at the same time, the party’s left and right wings seem equally persuaded that their particular mixture of issues and (some unknown) candidate might pull it off. Or not.
Which left poor Dan Balz back where he began: The Democrats may, in fact, not wake up before 2020 and in any case have no unifying leader and no clear message.
Here, however, his principal thesis was undermined by one of the vagaries of journalism. Because of the extended lag time between the writing of an article for the Post magazine and its actual publication—about two weeks, according to an editor’s note—there was no mention of the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the morning the magazine arrived for readers was the very day after Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Or put another way: The defining event of the midterm-election season—allegations of sexual misbehavior and excessive drinking and their handling by the FBI and the Senate—began and ended between the time Balz finished writing his essay and the day the Post Sunday magazine landed on my pavement.
Let this be a lesson to oracles: What appears to be self-evident on Wednesday may be obsolete by Thursday morning. I don’t mean to suggest that the cautionary notes struck by Dan Balz are invalid—indeed, it is unlikely that the Kavanaugh melodrama will retain its power until November 2020—but it’s valid to observe that the Democratic party has been shaken and stirred and, since last week, pointed in a new and radical direction.
In the short term, this might well be advantageous. Just as the Republican “base” was reportedly energized by Senate Democrats’ embrace of character assassination as a political weapon, the failure of the campaign had an equally energizing effect on Democrats. Republicans are gratified by Kavanaugh’s survival, but relief might well have a dampening effect on turnout. Democrats, by contrast, are seething with rage and aching to vote.
But to what end? The issues that roiled the Kavanaugh vote—attitudes toward allegations of sexual misconduct, accusations of white privilege, the notion that a patriarchy governs our politics, the need for direct action in the streets—have agitated the left and won the allegiance of establishment Democrats. Yet these are endlessly debatable abstractions, abetted by a startling emotional element unlikely to appeal to a durable majority and bound to subside.
Moreover, they are wholly unmentioned by Balz or any Democratic strategist with whom he conversed. They are, in fact, reminiscent of the previous epoch—the late 1960s/early ’70s—in which the Democratic party was visibly transformed by a violent detachment from its recent past. George McGovern’s 1972 invocation of “the poor, the black, and the young” was a suitable response to the antiwar movement, social unrest, a growing media consensus, and the confident conviction that radical upheaval was irresistible. But that message had limited appeal beyond the barricades. Even as the Vietnam war was being fought, and the voting age was newly lowered to 18, McGovern was famously trounced by Richard Nixon.
The lesson is simple for both parties: Emotion is a vital element in politics, but passions cool, time passes, and life goes on. Angry crowds make for great TV but seldom reflect widespread sentiment. Even the self-assurance of journalists is wishful thinking. The issues that stymied Dan Balz’s Democrats—economics, immigration, jobs, cultural values, America’s role in the world—will matter to voters long after Justice Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook is forgotten.
