This is not an easy time to be a Democrat. Survival strategies are required. Despite the Enron scandal, the president’s poll numbers are holding steady. Democrats are not eager to attack on foreign affairs, and are flummoxed by Bush’s good fortune to have championed the standard recession-fighting medicine–tax cuts–as a recession began. After false starts and backroom feuds, they have cobbled together a battle plan. The tactical doctrine: be patient, attack–but very carefully. Highlights:
Use guerrilla tactics. Assault procedurally, not frontally. Support is growing for Rep. Ellen Tauscher’s “budget trigger” idea. It would automatically delay tax cuts if deficits continue to grow. No one would have to vote now to “raise” anything. Another tactic: demand repeated votes on raising the ceiling on the national debt. By law, presidents must ask for such a vote, dramatizing an embarrassing reality they’d rather ignore. Bush will soon ask to raise it by least $700 billion; Democrats want to slice it into many votes in the months and years ahead.
Fight in the ‘out’ years. Afraid to oppose the 10-year tax cut, Democrats wax indignant about Bush’s proposal to extend it indefinitely. Administration officials dispute their estimate of its impact, and will no doubt call anybody who votes against the idea a “tax raiser.” But Democrats seem willing to take that chance. “Making it permanent would be a terrible mistake,” says Sen. John Kerry, who is actively preparing for a presidential run in 2004.
Talk ‘choices,’ not taxes. At a “message retreat” recently, House Democrats pledged to discuss taxes only in the context of Social Security, Medicare and other domestic programs. “Never talk taxes in isolation, only in relation to what tax cuts do to the rest of the budget,” says a top party official. The mantra, adds a consultant: “It’s about choices.”
Woo ‘office-park dads.’ Forget soccer moms. The hot new demographic, according to influential Democratic polltaker Mark Penn: Gen-X men, roughly 25 to 40, married to working spouses and employed in suburban white-collar (often high-tech) jobs. In Campaign 2000, said Penn, they swung late to Bush. They liked his faith in free markets and lower taxes–and saw Al Gore as a big-spending liberal. But now, buffeted by a recession, a dot-com collapse and Enron’s aftermath, they are more receptive to the idea that government can help–from 401(k)s to education to medical care.
Reclaim Clinton. Gore refused to campaign on the theme of Clinton-Gore prosperity, which looks like even more of a blunder now–even to Gore, who pointedly praised the good ole days in a Groundhog Day speech designed to put him back on the national stage. As for Clinton, he’s kibitzer in chief, advising Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and Kerry (among others) on speeches and strategy. Friends say he has his own sales theory: that only congressional Democrats–and not Bush–can protect the country from the right wing of the GOP.
Be patient. Time, Democrats think, is on their side. On Enron, they are demanding “disclosure, disclosure, disclosure,” as one consultant put it, hoping a smoking gun will eventually turn up in the administration. Meanwhile, they are waiting for the signs of pride that goeth before the fall. Daschle thinks Bush and his circle may overreach. Bush ruled the roost in Texas; since 9-11, Democrats have been wondering if he’s come to think of Washington as just another Austin. That’s risky if it’s true, but it’s up to the Democrats to prove him wrong.
