The Democrats Like Losing
WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.
“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”
Sounds like a parody, but alas:
I have this image of Nancy Pelosi and Ron Emanuel, sitting hunched over at DCCC headquarters election day. They have the numbers tallied up as election night runs over to the Pacific Time Zone — Alaska and Hawaii are assured, and all of California’s results come in. Piling up the numbers, they find Republicans — 217, Democrats – 217.
They stare at the results of Washington State Congressional Race #5, where Cathy McMorris is the Republican incumbant against Democratic candidate Peter Goldmark. They fret when Goldmark takes they lead, their hopes spring eternal when McMorris pulls ahead. At the end of the day, when the margin is, say, 34 votes that requires a recount procedure, the DCCC frets about to figure out how to create a PAC organization that would obscure the ties to the Democratic Party, to fund McMorris’s recount fund.
Sigh.
As these things go, the answer is “I guess”, but it’s really not how you proceed in a political game. Perhaps the best outcome is to get a majority of one (which I guess means Goldmark will just have to win after all) in the House, than have Henry Cuellar switch to a Republican, thus ending up in the minority by one with the Democrat that was, at this time famously in the liberal part of the political blogosphere sitting on the Republican aisle during Bush’s State of the Union speech, a newly minted Republican. In the Senate, the ideal would be to win FIVE SEATS… you win every piece of elected government in 2008.
Sigh again.
Float us back to the last time the Democratic Party supposedly would have been better off losing than winning: 1976. By way of explanation, Tim Vanaugh has a review of the book Decade of Nightmares : The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America in the latest issue of Reason magazine. By way of explaining the book’s furor:
We know now that inflation was on the verge of being whipped, that double digit interest rates were a relic of practically medieval economic thinking, that urban decay was a passing phase in the renewal of American cities, and that the Soviet Union was one Yakov Smirnoff routine away from the old folks’ home of history. But at the time, such problems seemed chronic, and they were joined by countless smaller terrors to create a sense of chronic dread. A nation of latchkey kids was either being driven mad by angel dust or getting abducted by brainwashing cults. Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic were mutilating cattle in the country-side, while in urban areas the 60s problem of “white flight” had escalated into a vision of American cities in violent, unmanageable, apocalyptic decline. Iranian maniacs weren’t just keeping 52 US citizens in captivity, they were, in the hysterical phrase that made the career of the supposedly unflappable newsman Ted Koppel, “Holding America Hostage”.
[…] It was this mood of compounding horror, as much as the standard explanations of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis that made stout Reagan more attractive than pusillanimous Carter. Again, Jenkins brings back a nuance lost to history; the brimstone, apocalyptic strain that underlined Reagan’s famous sunniness.
Frankly, every era has its fire and brimstone shunned just below the surface. That era we call the 1950s, remembered fondly by cultural conservatives and thought of as an age of peace and security and Economic Prosperity, was an age when Everybody was out to get you, subversives were everywhere, Subversives were EVERYONE with any slight difference than your Wonderbread white self, and the Ruskies were going to bomb your house and your neighborhood (so maybe we better bomb them before they get around to the “We Will Bury You”). As for the 1990s, I like to say that there was this sort of giddy half-self aware of its falsity nature of its apocalyptic nature — nobody really believed in the Y2K bug, and we all smirked at the X-Files and Art Bell, entertaining the notion but not buying it.
Popular history largely ignores the important policy linkages between Jimmy Carter , the deregulating architect of the anti-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, and Ronald Reagan, the bumbler behind the “Reagan Recession” and the disasterous mission in Lebanon; but in retrospect there are important ways in which Reagan’s revolution preceded his presidency. […] Much of the working class not only drifted from the Democratic Party but turned passionately against it — a development liberals lament and conservatives applaud, neither considering the degree to which these voters remained unchanged in underlying habits and attitudes.
Keep in mind the continuity, and…
One contrafactual Jenkins doesn’t consider is that had Wategate not irradiated the Republicans, it’s likely the GOP would have remained in the White House through the end of the 1970s and paid the price for the decay of the period.
Since Nixon was incapable of not being a corrupt vindictive paranoid bastard and was incapable of not involving orchestrating the Watergate burglary, a better historical “what if” is, if Ford had squeaked by Carter instead of Carter squeaking by Ford, the GOP would have paid for the price of the disasters that fell upon us all during that period, and the organization, whatever that is, of the Democratic Party would have been in better shape in the 1980s.
For what that is worth. But only maybe.
Now, the problem with this “Losing By Winning” strategy is that it’s coinciding with the attack on the Howard Dean “50-state strategy”, the suggestion that the Democratic Party run in and out of areas where the Democratic Party has become dormant and decayed, and try to build it up into something. The now famous quote from Paul Begala is “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” It’s the Professional Baseball analogy passing by an impressive trade for an all-star in favour of trading to beef up your Farm System.
As it were, you would think it would be embarrassing for the Democratic Party if they picked up — say — a mere half dozen seats in a year where the Congress has an approval rating in the twenties. You would think they would realize how these things look.
The problem here is that there appears to be a mentality within the Democratic Party to do neither, and amble forward awkwardly, consolidating nothing but their modest levels of power within the system. Theoretically these politicians believe in stuff and believe that the nation would be better served with specific political tenants in place. Say, for example, you would think they would believe that Goldmark would better serves the fifth Congressional district of Washington State than McMorris — as an example of that absurd situation I postulated back a ways on where their mentality would take us.