The winner of the Democrats' first debate was . . . George W. Bush. If you missed the televised South Carolina debate last Saturday night and only read about it in the papers, you might conclude that the whole thing was a demolition derby. In fact, only a small part of the debate was candidates criticizing each other. But that part grabbed the headlines, and a little attack goes a long way in damaging the whole field. George Stephanopoulos, as moderator, sounded like a cross between Jerry Springer and a Survivor show MC, egging on contestants to attack each other. It didn't take long for some to take the bait.
Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) tried to set a good example by refusing to play Stephanopoulos' game. Stephanopoulos asked if Dean still felt that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) was trying to have it both ways on the Iraq war. Dean replied: "That's not up to me to judge that. That's up to the voters."
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), at first, also managed to stake out his own position without trashing the rest of the field. "No Democrat will be elected president in 2004 who is not strong on defense," he said, implicitly distancing himself from doves Dean and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) but not making a direct attack.
But soon Stephanopoulos had his slugfest. Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) grossly misrepresented Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.)'s health plan, claiming it would take "almost a trillion dollars out of the pockets of working families making $30,000 to 40,000 a year, giving it to the biggest corporations."
Baloney. Gephardt proposes to repeal most of Bush's tax cut (the part that went to richer people) and use the proceeds for a corporate tax credit to be used to buy employees health insurance. I'm not sure this is the best strategy, especially since many corporations already provide health insurance. But it's certainly not a trillion-dollar transfer from working people to corporations. Shame on Edwards.
If Edwards was guilty of the worst caricature of a fellow Democrat, Lieberman played the dangerous game of reinforcing the Republican stereotype of Democrats generally. On Gephardt's health proposal, Lieberman said, "We're not going to solve these problems with the kind of big spending Democratic ideas of the past."
Let's see, what would those big, bad, outmoded spending ideas be? They are Social Security, Medicare, and federal aid to education -- programs that have endeared Democrats to two generations of voters. Why run against your party's own heritage? Why make the Republicans' job easier?
(Another recent Lieberman ersatz-Republican howler: "You can't create jobs by being antibusiness." Is it pro-jobs to tie the hands of the SEC, as Lieberman worked to do, so that Enron-style scandals can occur?)
The Democrats are still basically a liberal party. Lieberman won't win Democratic primaries by running as the most Republican-sounding Democrat in the race, but he will damage his party. There are principled differences among the Democratic field. They have antiwar candidates and prowar ones, candidates who would repeal Bush's tax cuts to balance the budget and ones who want to restore some social investment, candidates who claim to be business-friendly and others who are populist and anticorporate.
Yet all of them have more in common with each other than with George W. Bush. If Bush is reelected, he will complete the job of packing the federal courts, privatizing social insurance, and making public investment a fiscal impossibility. It matters less which Democrat emerges as survivor than that the nominee not be damaged goods.
The primary process is a democratic way of airing issues and of taking the eventual choice of party nominee out of smoke-filled rooms. But if the next 12 months produce mainly infighting, the party's standard-bearer will limp into the general election bruised, battered and ineffective. The Democrats ought to remember that they are auditioning for the job of party nominee, not for the post of savaging the rest of their own field. They need a pact to ignore the goading and keep their fire trained on Bush.
Ronald Reagan, running for California governor in 1966, proposed an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. Democrats could use a little of this old time religion.
It fell to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is not exactly famous as a unifier, to warn good-naturedly: "Republicans are watching. Let's not start fighting. . . . We should not have the bottom line tonight be that George Bush won because we were taking cheap shots at each other." Amen, Reverend.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the Prospect.
This column originally appeared in yesterday's Boston Globe.
