Matsui had been the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2004 elections and had to answer tough questions about why Democrats got creamed in those elections, having been pummeled in the presidential race, losing four seats in the Senate, and most especially, losing five House seats in Texas. He made up a story, put as positive a spin as was possible on the ugly details. And he rightly blamed, or credited, Tom DeLay for the outcome in the House, taking comfort in the fact that outside those Texas losses, produced by a controversial Texas redistricting, Democrats actually did not have a bad day at the polls. But, of course, both Texas and Tom DeLay mattered and it was another two years in the minority.
"Obviously, we look to 2006," Matsui said, "We are going to be out there recruiting candidates; we are going to be out there raising money." He was challenged on his optimistic pabulum often, and his response was always the same: The Republicans are doing things that are laying the groundwork for their own downfall. “I think they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction,” he said again and again.
And he was willing to just push on, making his case in that low, soft, super-earnest tone that was unmistakably his. Because he had no bluster, there were two ways to deal with him: dismiss him as a hired optimist, or listen to what he had to say and wonder if he was onto something.
So now the Texas redistricting is under review, DeLay is under indictment, and Republicans, mostly, are in the express line to return money given to them by the now-iconic taker-of-Indian-money lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In watching the tale unfold, I had a wistful urge to know what Matsui would have said about it, now that the collapse seems at hand.
“I told you so,” would cover it, but it would be interesting to hear Matsui's take on what appears to be a pivotal political moment.
The Republican Revolution has pretty much ground to a halt with the plea deals of Abramoff and his partner-in-crime, Michael Scanlon; Scanlon was DeLay's mouthpiece, and Abramoff was one of his ATM machines, the message-and-money guys who do the dirty work to make politics work in Washington. That they have agreed to “tell their story” to federal prosecutors and then to grand juries and then to trial juries means that it is likely that some members of Congress will go to jail.
But more importantly, we are going to get a close-up look at the odious ways in which people behave in order to get and keep political power, and the particularly odious ways in which this crowd behaved. Ordinary Americans are going to be nauseated, and that could mean that in November they will ask the Republicans in charge of Congress to relinquish that responsibility.
If the Democrats take control, the incoming class of freshmen Democrats could well come to be known as the Abramoff babies, paralleling Matsui's class in 1978, and the one before than in 1976, which were known as “Watergate babies” -- Democrats who elected in the wake of that scandal.
That group of eager young Democrats came to Washington to clean it up and change the world, but by the mid-1990s they had been driven back and put on the defensive because of things they believed in: helping poor people; defending the right of a woman to chose; and protecting the environment..
When Matsui died last year, Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne, wrote:
They pushed through reforms to cleanse politics and clean up the environment. In the 1990s they demonstrated that, contrary to attacks on their kind as big-spending liberals, they could be fiscally responsible and able stewards of the economy. That's the achievement in which Matsui shared. In time, a new generation of reformers will come to Washington to roll the stone up the hill again.As the revolutionaries of the mid-1990s go on the defensive and do their time in the dock, the time for that new generation of reformers may have arrived, and it would have been interesting to hear what Bob Matsui would have had to say about it, having sown the seeds of their success.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
