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The very mention of George W. Bush's name sends progressives into paroxysms of rage. But political veterans warn that anger has to be channeled into a winning campaign.
Jun 11, 2003 | Grassroots Democratic activists believe America is in desperate trouble. At the recent Take Back America conference in Washington, which brought together the core of the party's liberal wing and the politicians who wanted to win its support, there was a conviction that George Bush is more than simply a bad president, an heir to Reagan or Nixon. He is the worst president ever, a leader so destructive to all that progressives value that the damage from his reign may be irrevocable. For liberals, Bush is a national emergency.
Yet to the country at large, Bush appears to remain an affable fellow and resolute leader. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll taken last week shows that 67 percent of Americans believe the administration has not deliberately misled the public about Iraq's weapons, despite much reporting to the contrary. A recent Fox News poll indicates that most respondents said Bush's tax cuts won't help their families, but, astonishingly, the same poll shows that 47 percent think the cuts are a good idea, compared to 44 percent who think they're not. In the latest Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll, the president's approval ratings were 61 percent.
"A friend of mine said he feels like Bob Dole in 1996, saying, Where's the outrage?" says Paul Begala, the Clinton strategist turned Crossfire host. Managing that outrage gap is going to be crucial for Democratic political aspirants who need to motivate their furious foot soldiers while winning over a blithe public.
There's a consensus among progressive Democrats that they lost the 2002 midterm elections because they were too soft on Bush. The overwhelming message of the Take Back America conference, organized by the Washington-based Campaign for America's Future, was that liberals should be aggressively unapologetic about their values and their anger, just as conservatives are. Meanwhile, John Podesta, Clinton's former White House chief of staff, will soon launch the American Majority Institute, a Democratic think tank with a $10 million annual budget designed to play offense against the right. The Hill, a Washington congressional newspaper, quoted former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart saying, "Certainly right now the conservative right does a much better job of feeding the media beast facts and arguments that make their case. This will be part of the push-back effort."
The question is whether Democrats can make their anger work for them and communicate it outside their own confabs. After all, rage is a tricky thing in politics. It fuels the shock troops of the right wing, but it also can blow up in their faces (see Bob Barr and Newt Gingrich). For Democrats, it could galvanize an untapped resentment of Bush -- or leave them marginalized by a media eager to parrot Republican attacks.
Hard-core Democrats are hungry to hear leaders speak to their disgust and fury with this president, and at Take Back America, speakers that obliged were rewarded with standing ovations. Bill Moyers, PBS journalist and former Lyndon B. Johnson press secretary, began a spellbinding keynote speech by quoting the Populist Platform of 1892, "We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin." He spoke of the White House's "homicidal dream," and of its policies as "the most radical assault on the notion of one nation indivisible in over 100 years.
"In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether 'we, the people' is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality -- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others," Moyers continued. "Let me make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy."
The speech held the crowd rapt and then brought them to their feet in delirious applause. Two days later, Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, echoed Moyers in plainer language: "I've been doing this for 44 years," he said. "This is the worst condition I have ever seen our country in."
