Democrats going nowhere fast
You would think after all that has been written about the Democratic Party’s seeming lack of unity, after all the election losses, after a virtual exodus by longtime segments of its rank-and-file members, that its leadership would stop the internal sniping and message-bungling, get it together, and at least try to have it act like a unified national party.
As I wrote earlier this month, polls show that Democrats are closing the approval gap not because of a bump on their part, but a backslide in the president’s job-approval polls into the low 40s (apparently a result of rising casualties in Iraq and skyrocketing gasoline prices). Hardly something for them to crow about, and a trend that underscores the party’s festering stagnation.
Overall, Democrats continue to be beset by disagreement over what to do in Iraq; criticism from liberals who say its leaders are giving Bush a virtual free ride on his Supreme Court nominee, Judge John Roberts; and complaints from party pollsters that they have no coherent message to take into the 2006 elections.
In recent polling data, Veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found growing fissures throughout the Democrats’ base — particularly among Hispanics on social issues — which could cut into their overall vote in 2006 and 2008.
Reviewing what led to the erosion in the Democrats’ Hispanic vote last year, when Bush won 40 percent of this pivotal minority vote, Greenberg’s findings on key social issues have shocked party strategists.
Hispanics who voted Republican, he said, were “slightly more pro-life and slightly more favorable to pro-life groups. A pro-life Democrat runs better than a pro-choice one, and almost half of Hispanic voters (48 percent) say they would be more likely to support a pro-life Republican.”
I’m sure that that data, when it was first reported, came as a surprise to party leaders. The pro-choice movement has been one of the Democrats’ strongest voter-turnout constituencies, but even now there’s a rift tearing open among that party’s subset.
Democratic strategists say that one of the pro-choice movement’s leading advocacy groups, NARAL Pro-Choice America, is bitter over the way party leaders turned on NARAL’s incendiary TV ad accusing Judge Roberts of “supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.”
This time, though, Republicans found themselves outgunned by Democrats, who vehemently condemned the ad.
“We have to define the reckless left of our party and differentiate ourselves,” Clinton White House adviser Lanny Davis told The Washington Post, calling the ad “smear and innuendo.”
Democrats believe they can be competitive again in next year’s House and Senate races, and they have been congratulating themselves on how well they did in a recent congressional election that they narrowly lost on Aug. 2. That’s where Paul Hackett, a Iraq War veteran and bitter critic of the war, won 48 percent of the vote in a special House race for an open seat in Ohio’s heavily Republican 2nd District.
There’s no doubt that Hackett was a stronger-than-expected candidate, but Republican Jean Schmidt ran a very weak campaign that didn’t have a message, and she refused to attack her opponent.
Bush may be having his troubles right now, but he has an agenda that is getting passed in Congress, he has a set of core beliefs most of America (I cite the presidential elections) relates to, and his party’s base is united behind him.
That can’t be said for the Democrats who do not have an agenda for change, whose base is splintered or shrinking and whose last election was a House race that they lost, against a Republican who didn’t have much to say.
(Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist.)