Ready to Rumble (Page 2)

If Pelosi is paralyzed by the assault from conservatives both in the White House and in her own party's Democratic Leadership Council and Blue Dog wings (chief among the latter group is an uninspired challenger for minority leader, Harold Ford Jr.), she will cheat Democrats of the edgy enthusiasm that is her greatest asset. Turnout figures show that Democrats are suffering from a passion deficit. While overall turnout in 2002 was up from the 1998 midterms, Democratic turnout was down. Why? "The Republicans started a class war when they pushed through a tax cut for billionaires in 2001, but the Democrats didn't fight back," says Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, an ally of Pelosi's. "Gephardt and Daschle kept talking about how they were concerned about the tax cut. 'Concerned' doesn't get people to the polls."

In the sort of midterm election (with a new Republican President) in which Democrats had gained ground in every contest since 1902, the party lost seats in both the House and Senate. And the collapse in Democratic fortunes extended to the states, with the party failing to claim the majority of governorships and losing the majority of state legislative seats for the first time since 1952. Going into a presidential campaign against a Republican who shows signs of coming into his own as a campaigner, whose political operation has grown more sophisticated and gutsier, and whose ability to raise money has improved with the collapse of Congressional opposition, Democrats must contend with the reality that in states like Ohio, Texas, Georgia and Florida, their party is expiring. "There is no Democratic Party in Florida," Palm Beach County Democratic chair Monte Friedkin bluntly declared after an election that saw his party lose every major race on the ballot.

State by state, the Democrats have not been so weak going into a presidential contest in a half-century. White House political czar Karl Rove talks of 2004 as a "realigning election" that could give conservative Republicans control of the nation for a generation to come. Already, Rove is plotting the political offensive of 2004, a bold push to take seven Democratic Senate seats and secure a veto-proof Republican "supermajority." New House majority leader Tom DeLay is scanning the list of House contests narrowly won by Democrats in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maine, Georgia and Kansas, looking for opportunities to marginalize not just Democrats but GOP moderates whose influence dwindles as the partisan divide widens.

It will be up to Congressional Democrats to counter the scheming Rove and DeLay. Yet structural differences between the Senate and House mean that strategies for the next two years will differ between the chambers. If Senate Democrats hold Louisianian Mary Landrieu's seat in a December 7 runoff, they will--with the help of Vermont Independent Jim Jeffords--control 49 of 100 seats. The last genuine Republican moderate, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee, who voted against the Iraq resolution, remains a party-switch prospect. Additionally, sometime moderates like Maine's Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, and mavericks like Arizona's John McCain, offer Democrats potential partners on particular issues. Democrats retain influence on some committees such as Foreign Relations, where incoming chair Richard Lugar has worked closely with outgoing chair Joseph Biden. Lugar's internationalist bent has put him at odds with the Bush Administration, and Democrats see him as, if not an ally, at least a sympathetic ear for efforts to contain Bush's unilateralist tendencies. Democrats have few illusions about progressive legislation passing the next Senate, but the more conservative elements of the Bush agenda--particularly regarding the environment--may be tempered. "The Senate is not as influenced by the White House as the House," says Senator Russell Feingold. "That leaves room to maneuver."

There will be fights, however. The Bush Administration plans to resubmit federal appeals court nominations of Mississippi Federal Judge Charles Pickering and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, both of whom were rejected by a Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. The White House plans to play rough on judicial nominations, especially ones to a Supreme Court with a 5-to-4 prochoice majority. The question is whether Democrats will fight back if two seats on the High Court open up, as anticipated. Prochoice senators can filibuster against an antichoice nominee, but forty-one senators must vote to sustain a filibuster to force the White House to withdraw a nomination.

The dynamic in the House is different. DeLay's ironclad control of the GOP majority, as well as the wavering loyalties of several Southern Democrats, makes prospects for beating Republican initiatives slim. There are no guarantees that the Bush Administration or its Congressional allies will provide many opportunities to debate foreign policy, and they are unlikely to hand Democrats easy targets like Social Security privatization. But the Administration will seek to make last year's ten-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut permanent and ask for additional tax breaks for the wealthy, and it is here, says Kucinich, that battle lines must be drawn. "We've got to put down the polls and start talking about how the American people have a higher destiny than war and tax cuts for the rich," he says. Adds Ohio's Brown, "No matter what we do, Republicans will claim that opposition to Bush is 'liberal.' But people will see beyond that spin if we offer a real alternative." Besides opposing tax cuts for the rich, Brown says, Democrats need "a positive plan: fully fund prescription drug benefits, raise the minimum wage, develop a school reconstruction plan that creates jobs. Maybe we do some tax cuts of our own, but on the exact opposite end of the rate structure from the ones Republicans propose."

Over the next two years, Brown argues, the Democratic caucus has to deliver one message above all others: "Us versus them, Democrats on the side of working people versus Republicans on the side of economic royalists." He adds, "This election left us with very little to defend. But if Nancy and the rest of us don't go on the offensive we will have even less two years from now."

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