Heads will roll. The phrase is common, and deservedly so: There's something powerful, indeed inspiring, about the image of Vikings lopping off heads only to use them in lieu of bowling balls in the primitive, pre-modern Viking bowling alleys of our overheated collective imagination, or rather my overheated imagination. That rumbling sound you hear? Why, rolling heads, of course.
By now just about everyone agrees that the midterm elections were an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats, and that heads should roll as a result. Everything that could have plausibly gone wrong for the party did -- and when I say "plausibly," I mean to exclude the possibility that all Democratic candidates could have been, in a massive election eve surprise, transformed into massive animatronic dinosaurs. Great for a laugh, sure, but not quite ready for prime time.
So everyone is pretty much on board with the election-as-Democratic-disaster interpretation -- everyone that is, but Terry McAuliffe. A week ago, McAuliffe predicted a decisive Democratic triumph. When asked two days before the election on Meet the Press if the president's popularity would prove troubling for the loyal opposition, McAuliffe said, "No. George Bush has never had coattails." As it turns out, McAuliffe was (metaphorically, to be sure) wrapped up in Bush's coattails and spanked coast-to-coast.
Yet since Nov. 5, McAuliffe has maintained that election night went reasonably well for the Democrats, famously observing that 51 percent of Americans now have the good fortune of living under Democratic governorships. McAuliffe has also twice wrestled an alligator -- once when the animal's jaws were taped shut -- meaning that he publicly tussled with a more-or-less defenseless animal for laughs. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
(But then again, who among us hasn't, at one time or another, tussled with a wounded or otherwise constrained animal to amuse friends and colleagues? Let's not get sanctimonious here.)
On Sunday, administration officials discussed Iraq, and various senators -- both veterans and newly elected -- focused on the election and the agenda before the next Congress. The real news, however, came in a brief statement by Bob Schieffer of CBS's Face the Nation. (Which nation? This nation.) It went as follows:
Finally today, all last week I was thinking, 'What if someone from another planet came here and all he knew about our elections was what he learned from campaign commercials?' Well, first the alien would conclude that only the dregs of our society run for office, the liars, the thieves, the adulterers, even the occasional murderer, as I learned from one ad. I even saw an ad that accused a candidate of favoring public urination. The alien would also think that voter participation doesn't have much to do with voting but a lot to do with phoning candidates, as in, 'Call so and so and tell him to stop lying, or cheating or selling dope,' or whatever. How many times did we hear that one this year?
Is Schieffer trying to tell us something? There are three possibilities as to Schieffer's hidden message: (1) Bob Schieffer -- who is, to the naked eye, a handsome and even-tempered fellow -- is an alien, and this is his distress call ("Get me off this planet, what with its maddening election-year shenanigans!"); (2) we must establish a government of first-rate thieves, idlers, roustabouts and louts worthy of our intergalactic starfaring comrades; or (3) the tone of televised campaign advertisements leaves much to be desired. Rest assured, my crack investigative team is on the case.
Before tipping his hand, Schieffer, along with co-host Gloria Borger, spoke at length with Senators-elect John Sununu and Mark Pryor, both heirs to distinguished political families. Pryor, the only Democrat to succeed in beating a Republican incumbent (and a scandal-tarnished one at that), identified himself with the tradition of Democratic centrism (which should not be confused with the "democratic centralism" practiced by the Bolsheviks). In the course of doing so, he made an often-overlooked observation:
Well, you know, given that choice, I -- I'm a much more of a center mindset, but one of the great things about the Democratic Party in this country is it's so diverse. I mean, a Massachusetts Democrat is different than an Arkansas Democrat. And really our strength is our diversity. Now what that means when we get to Congress and, of course, the House and the Senate, you have two different caucuses there, and exactly how they'll handle that, you know, we'll -- we'll work all that out as time goes on, but, you know, the most important thing is that we stand by our principles and just continue to, you know, press the Democratic agenda, but more importantly than that, we meet the needs of the people of this state and the people of this country that we're all sent here to represent.
There are those who'd make the Democratic Party more coherent, focused and single-minded in its opposition to the Republicans, but, as William Saletan has pointed out in Slate, there's a fatal flaw with this line of reasoning: It means that Republican conservatives, an impressively disciplined group, will hold the initiative in determining where the differences and distinctions lie. You're for apple pie? Then we're against it!
Bill Clinton's victories were, to a crucial extent, personal victories by a political virtuoso, not victories that built a stronger Democratic Party -- there's no better way of understanding the much-admired master of "triangulation." And so in the interest of building a big tent, the post-Clinton Democrats have become a party far more open to dissent and disagreement on a wide range of issues. This is, despite protestations to the contrary, almost certainly a positive development for the Democrats rather than a negative one, if only for the obvious mathematical reason that it gives the center-left coalition room to grow. Pryor seems to recognize this. The problem, of course, is that even a big-tent party needs a kernel of core principles, and that's arguably what's at stake in the months to come. It remains to be seen if Pryor will have a role to play. Certainly his symbolic importance -- the many ways in which this pro-war, anti-tax, Christian conservative represents the lines of fracture within the Democratic Party -- should not be underestimated.
Sununu is the brainy campus conservative hitting his stride in early middle age. On party politics, he had the following to say:
There's nothing wrong with differentiation. Republicans were focused on making the tax cuts permanent, passing a homeland-security bill, passing a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare, offering a pretty positive vision for where the country needed to go . . . If I was giving advice to any Republican running for office, I'd say, 'Don't be afraid to lead. Don't be afraid to stand up for what you believe on issues, whether it's modernizing Social Security and adding personal retirement accounts, reforming the tax code, passing a homeland-security bill, adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare. Those aren't easy issues to talk about on the stump, but they're important. And if you're willing to provide leadership on those issues, voters will respond. They might not agree with you on every single issue, but they want someone who's going to have -- offer a strong voice whether you're running for the House, whether you're running for the Senate or whether you're running for local office. It really does make a difference.'
Sununu makes no effort to hide his true colors: Like his soon-to-be-colleague Ted Kennedy and like Ronald Reagan, Sununu is an honest ideologue, which is easily the best kind. You can tell that he prefers checkbook politics to the fever swamp of moralistic mud slinging, thus providing a much-needed counterweight to some of his new colleagues.
Like his father, Sununu has often been compared to Al Gore -- he is as famous for being a policy wonk as for having a strangely robotic manner. There's good reason to believe that he's being groomed as the next Phil Gramm, a dedicated economic conservative with attention to detail. We'll surely be hearing from him in the future.
On NBC's Meet the Press, Tom Daschle demonstrated yet again why he deserves to remain leader of the Democrats: Respectful yet feisty, his tone is just right. Consider the following:
RUSSERT: You're getting some advice from practically every quarter. This is from former President Al Gore, an interview he taped for 20/20: 'Democrats should not mistake the magnitude of this loss. There has to be a major regrouping.' Do you agree?
DASCHLE: I don't agree. Keep in mind, Tim, the Republicans had 50 senators in the election in 2000. They have 51 today. They have one more than they had two years ago. Seventy-eight million votes were cast. Forty-four thousand in three states would have made us the majority party. So I don't think that there's any mandate here. There isn't any seismic shift in direction. We still have a 50-50 breakdown in our country's voters and I think we have to respect that. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't get involved with a good discussion, a good analysis of how we can more effectively communicate our message, how we can resonate more effectively on these issues. And we're going to do that, but I think that to somehow recognize this as a mandate for Republicans or some condemnation of the Democratic approach is wrong.
In response to Gore's challenge, Daschle makes the obvious point that we often place too much stock in small shifts in voting behavior. Of course, Daschle has a vested interest in this interpretation: If you believe the Republican narrative -- that the midterm elections were a contest between Bush and an obstructionist Daschle -- the pre-presidential tango appears to have concluded with a knockout punch in Bush's favor. And that makes the current stakes for Daschle about as high as they can get; come the 2004 presidential primaries, few will care that he is an articulate and persuasive leader if he is still perceived as having stumbled in Congress.
In a separate interview, Russert discussed the new Senate with the once-and-future Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Russert began by asking Lott if he'd like to revise the alternative minimum tax so that it hits fewer middle-class households and if he'd like to lower the payroll tax. Lott took the bait, saying that he'd very much like to do both; but then came the sucker punch:
RUSSERT: But, senator, here's the problem. There was a $280 billion surplus. It's now a $160 billion deficit. You said you wanted to change the alternative minimum tax, which would cost another $140 billion. You want to cut, perhaps, the payroll tax, which would be more lost revenues. We're on the verge of a war with Iraq that's going to cost $100 billion. What happened to the Republican Party as the party of balanced budgets when you are running these deficits?
LOTT: Well, you've got to remember, over the past year we have been dealing with the war on terror, the conflict in Afghanistan. We are doing a lot more for homeland security. We've got to make the necessary investments in national security, homeland security and economic security. But you have to use judgment in that, Tim. I didn't say we were going to be able to do all these things in the tax area. I think you should use good judgment. And you may want to do more. You do what you can that would help the most, and you do the rest of it later. I do think that fiscal responsibility, some restraint on these deficits, as we get through this war on terror, hopefully, and do some things to have a continuing growing economy, we can see those deficits begin to come back down. Remember, when we were in the majority in the Congress was when we had, I think, three or four years running, surpluses. We know how to do it now, and we will begin to work back in that direction.
Suffice it to say, Lott seems every bit as likely to stumble as Daschle.
Before I go, I'll leave you with these wise words:
LOTT: An issue of this magnitude, as Churchill would say, is a big one.
Indeed.
Reihan Salam is a writer living in Brooklyn. He regularly analyzes the Sunday political talk shows for TAP Online.
