George Bush's Democrats

Following Vice President Al Gore's concession, President-elect Bush announced: "I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation. The President of the United States is the President of every single American, of every race and every background." It was an appropriate speech delivered from the Democratic-controlled Texas House chambers. Referring to the Texas House as "a home to bipartisan cooperation," Bush added, "Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent."

Texas State Representative Paul Sadler, a Democrat, told the New York Times that Bush "didn't invent bipartisanship in Texas." It "kind of developed over the years because of the nature of the system." Nature of the system? What system? Essentially it is the same "system" around which the rest of the Southern Democratic Party developed.

The Southern Democratic Party was the party of slavery. Conservative Democrats were the Confederates during the Civil War. Democrats either were, or cooperated with, the KKK in resisting Reconstruction. Following Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), conservative Democrats practiced Jim Crow--separate and unequal. And after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), conservative Southern Democrats were the prime resisters of desegregation.

After Brown and the civil rights evolution of the 1960s, and the application of Goldwater's 1964 and Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," Southern white males especially began to leave the national Democratic Party in significant numbers. Republicans began to appeal to them with a series of racial themes and code words: "conservatism" during the civil rights struggles in 1964, "law and order" after the riots of 1967-68, "antibusing" in 1972, "welfare queen" in 1980, "Willie Horton" in 1988 and "compassionate conservatism" in 2000. Democrats also played this game: Carter's "ethnic purity" misstep in 1976 almost got him into serious trouble with the party's base; Bill Clinton used "Sister Souljah," and Al Gore emphasized crime ("blanket America in blue")--Democratic Southerners all. And all, Republicans and Democrats alike, are from the same system. Clinton redefined the Democratic Party away from the "special interests" of blacks--symbolized by Jesse L. Jackson Sr.--by politically manipulating a rapper. Because of Jackson's tireless pursuit of racial justice, and because he's a strong and highly visible Democrat, Republicans are now attempting to define and identify him as the symbol of the Democratic Party.

Taking a page from ultraconservative Ronald Reagan--who often referred favorably to the liberal FDR--Bush quoted the ideological founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson, a Virginian, was also the author of a Kentucky resolution and conservative theory of Southern resistance called "nullification," and his Democratic partner, James Madison, developed the theory of "interposition." Both concepts were forms of Southern resistance--first, resistance to ending slavery, and later to ending Jim Crow segregation. Jefferson also provided the ideological foundation for the concept of "local control"--the stepchild of "states' rights." Bull Connor, Jim Clark, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace were all the products of this "system" and were Democratic advocates of states' rights, local control and an antifederal ideology of less government, lower taxes and a strong military.

It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats that created the "bipartisan system" that State Representative Paul Sadler referred to. It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress with which President-elect Bush intends to work. But the President-elect's problem of governing all of the people cannot be satisfied merely by building bridges to essentially conservative Southern Blue Dog, Yellow Dog, New Dog or DLC Dog Democrats. These conservative dogs already support him. His problem will be in reaching out and building bridges to liberals and progressives who feel like they've been treated like dogs, who represent the dogs who have been left out in the cold and put in the doghouse by a bipartisan coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, this is the bipartisan pack that consistently bites us.

This conservative bipartisan coalition is generally for denying a woman's right to choose, supports charitable choice and violates the Constitution's mandate of church and state separation by attempting to put parochial prayers and the Ten Commandments in public schools. Out of this bipartisan "system" comes the privatization movement--public vouchers for private schools, privatizing all or part of Social Security, privatizing healthcare through medical savings accounts and much more.

It is this conservative bipartisan coalition that allows Ralph Nader to say that we have one corporate party with two different names. If Democrats go down this bipartisan path it will only strengthen Nader and the Greens for 2002 and 2004. The move down that path has already been aided by Democrats: In 1992 a conservative Democrat, Bill Clinton, selected an even more conservative running mate, Al Gore, who in 2000 selected an even more conservative running mate, Joseph Lieberman. By helping to shift the Democratic Party and the country further right, a very conservative George W. Bush could select an ultraconservative Dick Cheney as his running mate--and win.

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