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Bush vs. Bush, and Bush loses Monday, Oct 31, 2005 By John Brummett A Gallup Poll released midweek showed that President Bush would lose right now to a Democrat, and do so rather badly. A Democrat would get 55 percent, according to this survey of more than 1,000 Americans last week. What a waste of phone banks. That Bush would lose to a generic Democrat is meaningless. That's because there is no generic Democrat. There only are Democrats with baggage - existing or awaiting, real or imagined. You have Hillary Clinton, hated or resented or feared by approximately half the electorate. You have John Kerry, destroyed by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and his passive response to them. You have John Edwards, youthfully overeager and only marginally credible championing poor people. Evan Bayh, U.S. senator from Indiana, is about as generic as you can get, if generic can be taken to encompass anonymity and blandness. But he wouldn't be generic by the time the Republican hit squads got through with him. Elections are not about one person, up or down. They're choices, usually between the lesser of bad ones. They're choices based on definitions sometimes imposed by the other side. Bush could have been beaten in November, but not by Kerry. He could have been beaten in 2000 more clearly than he was beaten by Al Gore. Bush's dad might have been vulnerable in 1988 to a Democrat other than Michael Dukakis. Just after the Democratic convention, when Dukakis was still mostly generic, the elder Bush trailed by 17 points. This Gallup survey of last weekend essentially pitted George W. Bush against George W. Bush, and he lost. Democrats lack more than a generic candidate. They lack a message. Here's a quick quiz: Can you name something Democrats stand for? Opposition to the war in Iraq, you say? Hillary voted for it. Kerry voted for it, and against it. Opposition to the president's Social Security privatization? OK, fine. But that's dead anyway. And, by the way, the question was what Democrats stand "for," and you've responded only with what they're against. Perhaps our little quiz was harder than you thought. Democratic insiders will tell you that their most effective political combatant currently is over at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Rahm Emanuel, a leading Clinton White House official now serving in the U.S. House from Chicago, is a go-getter chairman. So, I checked into what Emanuel was saying in terms of a Democratic message. Not much, it turned out. If you go to the DCCC's Web site and click on "news," you'll find articles about the indictment of Tom DeLay. And here's the DCCC's current position statement for 2006: "In 1994, the Republicans took over the Congress on a pledge to 'restore the trust between the people and their elected representatives,' and to end a government that they said had gotten 'too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money.' Instead of delivering on those promises, this Republican Congress has delivered a record of failures on the issues that matter most to American families. The time for change is now." Change to what? It might be helpful for the Democrats to remember something else about 1994. It was that the Republicans offered a "Contract with America," outlining more than opposition to Democrats, but an agenda. Sitting in the House to decry and vote against bills the Republican majority crams down their throats won't cut it for Democrats. For now, Democrats privately admit that their best hopes for 2006 are to make gains in the House and Senate, but not take back either chamber. And they'll admit that their best hopes tend to be with "conservative" Democrats running for open seats or against weak Republicans. That's more a matter of imitation and expediency than a message. As for the presidency in 2008, Bush won't be on the ballot to beat himself. Democrats will need a candidate who can perform as well as that powerful generic one. ------- John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
