America steps to the populist left, and the American Dream gets a chance to live again

1. The Fading Dream – by BOB HERBERT/NY Times

“America moved me all over again — it was an amazing place, the idea of it astounding.”—Arthur Miller

Rumsfeld is exiting stage left and the curtain is coming down on George W. Bush’s Theater of the Absurd. A rival company is setting up shop and expectations are high.

O.K., Democrats. Now what? Inquiring minds want to know if the new troupe will make us laugh, cheer, or cry.

First, let’s stipulate that there are limits to what the party can achieve in the next two years, even with control of both houses of Congress. But the two most important tasks facing the Democrats are doable. The first is to ensure that Congress fulfills its constitutional obligation to impose a check on the excesses of the executive.

The second task is to respond to the anxiety that has seeped through much of the electorate about the state of the nation. Americans are worried about the war, the political and economic situation here at home, the way the U.S. is perceived by the rest of the world, and the direction in which the country is heading.

The Democrats didn’t win the off-year elections, the Republicans lost them. And I’m convinced that the Republicans lost because while they were in charge (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”) millions of Americans began to lose confidence in those things that had moved them about America — its awesome power to do good, its ethical underpinnings, and most important, that incredible array of qualities that fell under the magical, mystical heading, the American dream.

A real-life metaphor for what has happened to America occurred last week on the west side of Manhattan. After inviting hundreds of well-wishers to watch, officials had planned to tow the aircraft carrier Intrepid from its dock to a facility on the other side of the Hudson River, where it would undergo a major overhaul. But when the time for its departure arrived, the Intrepid, which has served for years as a popular Sea, Air and Space Museum, could not be budged. It was stuck in the mud beneath the river.

The Intrepid was commissioned in 1943, when the U.S. still knew how to win wars. Its active history encompassed that extraordinary post-World War II period when bold leadership and a sense of common purpose transformed the U.S. and made it the envy of the world. That leadership and sense of common purpose has since been largely lost.

The elite now send other people’s children off to fight and die in wars that are unwinnable. On the home front, a two-tiered economy has been put in place in which a small percentage of the population does extremely well while a majority of working Americans are in an all-but-permanent state of anxiety about job security, pensions, the economic impact of globalization, the cost of health care, college tuition, and so on.

For perhaps the first time in history, there is a large swath of Americans who are worried that over the long haul their children will not fare as well as they have.

For resurgent Democrats there is no better touchstone right now than Franklin Roosevelt. He understood the corrosive effects of prolonged economic insecurity and the essential need for cooperation in the effort to build a successful society. His goal was “to make a country in which no one is left out.”

Roosevelt had both the vision and the political skills, including an indestructible sense of optimism, to galvanize the nation in some of its darkest hours. Those qualities have been in short supply among the terminally timid Democrats of recent years.

Last week, the voters gave the Democrats another opportunity to lead, not just on the war in Iraq, but on such questions as how best to deal with globalization, how to make real progress toward energy independence, and how to ensure that the economic benefits of a wealthy nation are more equitably shared.

What voters really want to know is whether the American dream will still be there for the next generation.

In Congress over the next two years, and in the presidential campaign of 2008, the Democrats will have to respond to that question with a coherent vision of the nation’s future and a cadre of leaders who, like Roosevelt, can convey that vision convincingly and optimistically.

There’s a reason why the Democratic figure generating the most excitement at the moment, Barack Obama, titled his latest book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”


2. True Blue Populists – by PAUL KRUGMAN

Senator George Allen of Virginia is understandably shocked and despondent. Just a year ago, a National Review cover story declared that his “down-home persona” made him “quite possibly the next president of the United States.” Instead, his political career seems over.

And it wasn’t just macaca, or even the war, that brought him down. Mr. Allen, a reliable defender of the interests of the economic elite, found himself facing an opponent who made a point of talking about the problem of rising inequality. And the tobacco-chewing, football-throwing, tax-cutting, Social Security-privatizing senator was only one of many faux populists defeated by real populists last Tuesday.

Ever since movement conservatives took over, the Republican Party has pushed for policies that benefit a small minority of wealthy Americans at the expense of the great majority of voters. To hide this reality, conservatives have relied on wagging the dog and wedge issues, but they’ve also relied on a brilliant marketing campaign that portrays Democrats as elitists and Republicans as representatives of the average American.

This sleight of hand depends on shifting the focus from policy to personal style: John Kerry speaks French and windsurfs, so pay no attention to his plan to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and use the proceeds to make health care affordable.

This year, however, the American people wised up.

True to form, some reporters still seem to be falling for the conservative spin. “If it walks, talks like a conservative, can it be a Dem?” asked the headline on a CNN.com story featuring a photo of Senator-elect Jon Tester of Montana. In other words, if a Democrat doesn’t fit the right-wing caricature of a liberal, he must be a conservative.

But as Robin Toner and Kate Zernike of The New York Times pointed out yesterday, what actually characterizes the new wave of Democrats is a “strong streak of economic populism.”

Look at Mr. Tester’s actual policy positions: yes to an increase in the minimum wage; no to Social Security privatization; we need to “stand up to big drug companies” and have Medicare negotiate for lower prices; we should “stand up to big insurance companies and support a health care plan that makes health care affordable for all Montanans.”

So what, aside from his flattop haircut, makes Mr. Tester a conservative? O.K., he supports gun rights. But on economic issues he’s clearly left of center, not just compared with the current Senate, but compared with current Democratic senators. The same can be said of many other victorious Democrats, including Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Sheldon Whitehouse in Rhode Island, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. All of these candidates ran on unabashedly populist platforms, and won.

What about Joe Lieberman? Like shipwreck survivors clinging to flotsam, some have seized on his reelection as proof of Americans’ continuing conservatism. But Mr. Lieberman won only through denial and deception, for example, by rewriting the history of his once-fervent support for the Iraq war and Donald Rumsfeld. He got two-thirds of the Republican vote, but managed to confuse enough Democrats about his positions to get over the top.

Last week’s populist wave, among other things, vindicates the populist direction that Al Gore took in the closing months of the 2000 campaign. But will this wave be reflected in the actual direction of the Democratic Party?

Not necessarily. Quite a few sitting Democrats have shown themselves nearly as willing as Republicans to bow to corporate interests. Consider the vote on last year’s draconian bankruptcy bill. Mr. Lieberman voted for cloture, cutting off debate and ensuring the bill’s passage; then he voted against the bill, a meaningless gesture that let him have it both ways. Thirteen other Democratic senators also voted for cloture, including Joe Biden, who has just announced his candidacy for president.

The first big test of the new Democratic populism will come over reform of the 2003 prescription drug law. Democrats have pledged to repeal the clause in that law preventing Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. But the fine print of how they do that is crucial: Medicare reform could be a mere symbolic gesture, or it could be a real reform that eliminates the huge implicit subsidies the program currently gives drug and insurance companies.

Are the newly invigorated Democrats ready to offer a real change in this country’s direction? We’ll know in a few months.


3. A Big Step in Nation's March to Left -- by Paul Waldman/Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

The last time a midterm election brought this kind of change to the Washington power structure, reporters and pundits explained that it was more than the product of clever election strategy, a couple of scandals or a failed policy. Instead, we were told in 1994 that the results at the ballot box signaled something deeper and more fundamental: a shift in Americans' beliefs.

"The country has unmistakably moved to the right," wrote The New York Times the day after Republicans took both houses of Congress. "The huge Republican gains also marked a clear shift to the right in the country," said The Washington Post. Similar notes were sounded after Republican wins in 2002 and 2004.

Yet, for some reason, we have yet to hear the opinion-makers tell us that Tuesday's election means that the country has "moved to the left."

But if 1994 was a move to the right, then 2006 would certainly qualify as a move to the left. After all, Republicans have owned all three branches of government for most of the last six years. They lowered taxes on the wealthy, increased spending on defense, cut or ignored regulation in areas such as environmental protection and worker safety, and pursued a bellicose foreign policy - the very program conservatives have been advocating for decades. The problem was that Americans weren't happy with the results.

Yet if recent experience is a guide, we shouldn't be too surprised that pundits haven't spotted a shift to the left in the rejection Republicans suffered Tuesday. This has been the pattern in recent years: When Democrats win, we're told it was a matter of circumstance or an unusually skillful candidate. When Republicans win, we're told it was because Americans are becoming more conservative.

Why? Because many members of the media have internalized the attacks conservatives have made on them for decades and come to adopt the complimentary conservative picture of what America is all about.

Journalists have accepted the idea that they are an urban elite disconnected from the "real America." They live in places such as Washington and New York, where liberal ideas dominate. The rest of the country, therefore, must be filled with conservatives. So when Democrats win, it can only be an accident of history - but when Republicans win, it must be a pure expression of popular will.

But the fact is that nearly all the movement in American public opinion in recent decades has been in one direction: to the left. This evolution is precisely why conservatives have grown so angry about the "culture wars" - because they're losing.

In 1977, the General Social Survey found 66 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement, "It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family." By 2004, that figure had fallen to 36 percent.

To take another example, a 1987 Pew poll found that only 48 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, "It's all right for blacks and whites to date each other." By 2003, the number agreeing had risen to 77 percent, and it will no doubt keep rising in our ever-more-diverse society.

Conservatives might protest that opposition to interracial dating isn't a "conservative" position - but that's only because all sides have now accepted what was once the liberal position. In other words, we've moved to the left. Our ideas about race, gender roles, child rearing and a host of other matters have grown increasingly progressive over time. And that isn't even mentioning issues such as health care, the minimum wage or Social Security, where the liberal position has long been the more popular one.

Yet, through smart politicking, Republicans managed to hold on to power. By keeping their base energized and organized, they ensured that they wouldn't be beaten on turnout alone. Combined with ruthless redistricting to increase the number of safe Republican seats, and relentless exploitation of 9/11 - not to mention some key Democratic missteps - it was enough to get more than 50 percent on Election Day.

But it could only work for so long, particularly when their positions on issues don't command majority support. In fact, looking at public opinion over the last few decades, issues seem to come in two types: those on which the public is steadily moving to the left, and those, such as abortion and gun control, on which opinions barely budge no matter what happens in the political arena. Although Americans may be more conservative than our friends in Western Europe, it is virtually impossible to find a fundamental issue on which the public is moving steadily to the right.

When Republicans took over both houses in Congress in 1994, commentators told President Bill Clinton that his policies had been repudiated. The country had moved to the right, they said, so if Mr. Clinton wanted to salvage his presidency, he should do the same. In many ways, he followed their advice.

In the wake of resounding Democratic wins, will we hear the same voices advising President Bush to move to the left? Knowing what we do about Mr. Bush, the idea that he would listen to such a suggestion seems fanciful. But unless they want to see more defeats in the coming years, his fellow Republicans might want to think about it.

(Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group, and the author of " Being Right Is Not Enough ." His e-mail is pwaldman@mediamatters.org)