In recent days, as the Jack Abramoff story has detonated in slow motion across official Washington, Dems have been debating ways of converting the muck of the GOP scandal into political gold. The short-term strategy appears to be twofold: Argue in unison that the GOP is the party of corruption, while aggressively countering GOP efforts to cast the scandal as bipartisan by hammering away at Abramoff's exclusively Republican donations and spotlighting the GOP-built K Street Project machine.
A few polls suggest this early strategy is yielding short-term results. But it nonetheless begs a big question: Can Dems really expect this argument to translate into the lasting gains they're hoping for? Or should they be trying to formulate a strategy that goes beyond merely tarring the GOP as the corrupt party and looks for ways of weaving the mushrooming scandal into larger arguments about the Republican Party's most conspicuous domestic failings?
In the belief that this may soon become (or at least should become) a big debate among Dems, The Prospect called some Democratic strategists and thinkers to sample a bit of opinion. Some Dems, including ones charged with taking back Congress, say they think Dems should begin making the case more aggressively that GOP corruption is part and parcel of a larger alliance between the Republican Party and major corporations in certain sectors, particularly in energy and health care -- an alliance, the argument continues, which shafts ordinary working- and middle-class Americans.
“It's important to make a larger argument about whose interests are really being served in Washington,” Rahm Emanuel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told The Prospect. “Everybody gets excited about corruption, and they should. But it's not like people have high expectations of Washington to begin with. What we need to make sure we explain to voters is, `This isn't just Washington corruption. There's a cost to this corruption, and you're paying the bill. This comes at a cost to you -- in the form of an $800 billion prescription drug bill, and an energy bill where your taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the energy industry.'”
Others noted that the central strategic conundrum Dems face is that they are dealing with two unknowns. One is that while polls show the scandals are sinking in with the American people, it's unclear as yet whether voters perceive themselves as being directly impacted by them. It's also unclear at this early juncture whether the disdain Americans feel for Congress right now will translate into dislike of their own representatives.
"People hate Congress but love their individual Congressmen -- a much higher percentage of people believe Congress is corrupt than believe their individual members are," says Karl Agne, a senior adviser at Democracy Corps, the organization founded by James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Bob Schrum. "The critical way to get people to see this on an individual level is to argue, 'This representative, because of his support for his party's leadership, no longer represents you."
Agne believes that the way to get people to see the party leadership as having directly failed them is to discuss corruption in the context of the GOP's failure on issues critical to them. "Dems have got to make this a change election, and two of the issues where the public is desperately looking for new ideas is on energy and health care," he says. "Pointing to the lobbying scandals becomes more potent if it's put in a larger context of Republican fealty to special interests in energy and health care, which makes it impossible for the GOP to bring about real reform on their most pressing problems."
Among some involved with crafting strategy for the party's efforts to win back Congress, part of the early discussion is born of a sense that while the GOP's ethics scandals are beginning to bear fruit, Dems need to do better. As one top Democratic strategist familiar with DCCC strategic deliberations told me privately: “Right now, the American people kind of hate them more than they hate us. It's a slight edge, not a huge one. We gotta keep generating more heat.”
If a debate does indeed unfold on how to convert the scandals into a broad indictment of the GOP that can bring about big Democratic gains, it seems likely that some voices in the party will want to weave the corruption arguments into a larger argument about class in America. Such an argument might go beyond tying today's corruption to the GOP's favoritism towards health care and energy interests, and describe the scandals more broadly as being part of a larger corrupt alliance between the GOP and wealthy individuals and big corporations across the board.
Indeed, after a decade of Dem worshipping at the altar of Clintonian incrementalism, it's tempting to think that the time is ripe for Dems to make a bigger case, to tell a bigger story, to weave the scandals into an overarching class-based argument. Consider the current political atmosphere. It's dominated by, among other things, exploding deficits caused by tax cuts for the rich, growing economic insecurity as pension plans are put on the block by even healthy corporations, and even the Sago mining disaster, which has spotlighted Bush's failure to police the mining industry even as Appalachian mine workers endure hardscrabble and dangerous lives. It's tempting to imagine that such developments – taken together with the GOP's failings on health care and energy, and its willingness to hand over to corporate lobbyists the keys to Congressional committee rooms -- might accumulate and reach a kind of tipping point, making both working- and middle-class Americans more receptive to the argument that Republicans have broadly failed them as a class in ways that consistently benefit the wealthy.
Of course, as other analysts note, many Dems still are in thrall to the post - 1994 belief that a “small-issue,” Clintonian approach to talking about the country's problems is the only way the party can succeed. That might make it less likely that such a broad class-based argument (much less big policy solutions based on it) will be embraced by many Dems.
"If Democrats pointed to the scandals as a consequence of the GOP's efforts to align itself with big business, the corruption argument might connect up with ordinary people more,” says Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But as Dems have developed constituencies among professionals, a fair number of them high-income, they're less and less comfortable with anti-business broadsides. Plus, Clinton's policy successes are still seen as embodying the kind of economic responsibility and moderation that enable Dems to win. So they might be better off tying Republican corruption and incompetence to their alliance with specific sectors – energy and health -- where individuals feel burned, rather than to a larger anti-business argument.”
For his part, if Emanuel has his way, the one thing Dems will certainly keep arguing is that the GOP is the party of a corrupt status quo. “We'll keep focusing on Republicans as the reason progress is not being made on health care and other issues,” Emanuel says. “Democrats are the agents of change, and the Republicans are the party of the status quo and business as usual. That is the paradigm.”
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor for New York Magazine, writes bi-weekly for The American Prospect Online. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.
