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Making political art of science Monday, Nov 21, 2005 By John Brummett That wasn't such wonderful news a couple of weeks ago for Democrats. All they did in New Jersey was hold serve in a blue state with a multimillionaire gubernatorial candidate against a Republican who went over the top by invoking the Democrat's failed marriage. In Virginia, they kept the governorship in Democratic hands against Republican attacks that tried to ally the Democrat with Hitler. In California, Democrats cut the legs out from under a celebrity Republican governor. None of that connects, except in the shared backdrop of George W.'s travails. Democrats ran on well-financed natural advantages in New Jersey. They ran on religious values in Virginia. Across the land in California, they tapped the teachers' unions and other regular liberal Democratic constituencies to defeat ballot proposals put forth by Arnold Schwarzenegger that, even if flawed, at least were intended to address real public policy problems. In a national context, Democrats remained devoid of any coherent message that might bridge or transcend these desperately targeted and widely divergent local tactics. The Virginia ones wouldn't work in California, and would, in fact, be resented. And vice versa. All politics may be local, but whenever Democrats get into a national context, they repeatedly find themselves having to choose one local over another. That's how John Kerry wound up needing to draw to an inside straight - to carry every state he ran in, including Ohio and Florida. But now Democrats have a plan. They intend to change the subject. They don't want to talk about war or abortion or gays or taxes. It's not that they don't believe they're right on those issues. It's that they believe they've lost a series of elections talking about those issues, always defensively. They can argue each effectively and competitively. But the cumulative effect is to invite the same old "liberal" curse. These new ideas are not coming from Howard Dean, the national Democratic chairman, or Harry Reid, the minority leader of the Senate. They're coming from the House side - from U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide now chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and his minority leader, Nancy Pelosi. Emanuel and Pelosi are talking about science and technology. They're saying America must not let its worldwide dominance in those fields - and its ensuing economic advantages - be put at risk. They want to elevate and fund science and technology at the level of the National Institute of Health. They've started talking about always-on broadband, universal high-speed Internet access and nanotechnology, which, very generally, is the manipulation or manufacture of atomic items at a microscopic scale. They want college available and affordable for all who wish to go. And, by the way, Emanuel says anyone who has a job ought to get health insurance, if only a bare-bones policy through the system that covers federal employees. If they haven't already, Emanuel and Pelosi should sit down with Al From, head of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. The two best political and governmental ideas I've heard lately came from him. One was to take on directly this stubbornly lingering vestige of yesteryear - a lack of accomplishment in science and technology by young American women, who seem to dominate everything else academically. We can't stay ahead of India and China on science and technology if we continue to surrender our otherwise superior gender in those fields. Convince our young women that they can do science, technology and engineering, teach them well, then stand back and turn loose their talents on the world - that's what From is saying. His other idea was to create a National Cure Center with a JFK-like vision and deadline for curing or at least delaying Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. One reason is human compassion. The other is dollars. If we could push back the average onset of Alzheimer's by five years, we'd be well on our way to controlling health care costs. Demanding that women do better in science and helping old folks head off Alzheimer's - it's hard off the top of one's head to say whether those are liberal or conservative notions. That's kind of the point. ------- 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. |
