WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- It should be a banner year for congressional Democrats with excellent prospects to increase their hold on the Senate and regain the House of Representatives after 8 years in the Capitol Hill wilderness.
Yet instead, they are looking at a ruling party with a poor-to-catastrophic record on policy issues wiping the floor with them in both contests. How can that be?
The answer is an old and simple one. Sly old President George W. Bush and his political Svengali Karl Rove are targeting the Democrats on national security issues, where they have been defenseless for three and a half decades. And once again, the old game plan is working to perfection.
For the Democrats remain a traumatized party. It is not the trauma of plunging into the unwinnable war in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago that still haunts them. It is the 20 years of marginalization that resulted when they reacted to that by freaking out to the extreme left.
The McGovernization of their party in 1972 still haunts the Democrats, just as the annihilation of the Republicans at a national level in 1936 far more than their defeat in 1932 traumatized the GOP for more than 40 years until Ronald Reagan rode to their rescue.
During all that time, Democrats controlled the national agenda, especially on domestic issues. And even though Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon could win and then rewin the White House in successive campaigns, it was only on foreign policy issues. They did not dare to roll back the dominant liberal Democratic consensus on domestic ones.
Over the past 30 years, those positions have been reversed. It is the Democrats who remain traumatized by the 24-year era from 1968 to 1992 when they only held the White House for four of them, and even those four were only under the humiliating and inept Jimmy Carter.
Even Carter and certainly the far more formidable Bill Clinton were able to put their imprint in many profound and successful ways on domestic U.S. affairs. But on foreign policy, they did not dare to stride tall.
Carter in fact carried out many important and ultimately highly successful defense initiatives. His defense secretary, Harold Brown, was regarded by senior serving army officers as vastly preferable and more successful than his GOP predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. Brown developed the Stealth technology that has been the backbone of U.S conventional air superiority ever since. The revival of the U.S. Army as a quality fighting force after its Vietnam trauma began under him.
But even Carter's successful initiatives were only carried to fruition under his successor, Reagan, who won credit for them. Carter carried the can for economic stagflation at home, the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and -- most important of all -- the endless humiliation of the 444 days that 52 U.S. hostages were held captive in Iran. These fiascoes put the mark of "national wimps" and "losers' on the Democrats more effectively than any Texas red hot branding iron.
The canny Clinton avoided getting caught up in such humiliations and his air war against Yugoslavia, from a U.S. point of view, went remarkably well and cost free. Yet even then, he was not able to escape the sneers of "liberal Democrat wimp" and "draft dodger."
Bush, even while he champions a radical preemptive strike doctrine that threatens the very basis of international global peace between the major world powers since World War II, has remained invulnerable to any such criticism. Yet his own heroic war experience was limited to defending the borders of Texas from Oklahoma as a far-from-combat pilot.
It is therefore, not Vietnam, but the long decades of marginalization that followed -- peaking in the 1979-80 Iran hostages humiliation -- that continues to traumatize Democrats today.
If they have any calculation left in their failure to oppose the looming war against Iraq at all, beyond the Pavlovian reflexive fear of being labeled defeatist wimps yet again, it is with only one hope. That is: That history will repeat itself and an easy war victory for the current President Bush will miraculously translate into a popular revulsion against him by the time the next presidential election comes around.
In fact, the opposite is likely to occur. If the war goes badly wrong, and the economy then plunges catastrophically too, Bush will indeed be out on his ear, and a radical Democrat -- most likely Al Gore, or even Hilary Clinton -- might well be swept in to replace him.
But if Iraq does indeed go as easily and as quickly as Bush -- and even many Democrats -- now take for granted, then neither Gore nor Mrs. Clinton look likely to pull a "Bill Clinton" upset on this younger Bush in 2004. For they both lack the political canniness and popular touch of the "Comeback Kid" president. And Bush, 43, has far more domestic political street smarts than his Daddy ol' 41 did.
Finally, all the long-term demographic trends favoring the Democrats mean nothing so long as that majority is too complacent, too comfortable or just too plain apathetic to come out and actually cast their votes. And that is exactly the problem the congressional Democrats look like facing next month.
As Kenneth Baer put it in the October edition of the liberal Washington Monthly, "The single biggest obstacle to the emerging Democratic majority is not so much party as politics -- pulling that majority together to win at the voting booth."
Those old grand masters of politics, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight D Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, understood that wisdom very well. But the current Republican strategy plays to the Democrats' traditional weakness over the past 30 years. It ensures the Democrats can only prevail if they can put together a strong and credible sustained criticism of the Republicans on the defense and national security issues that remain their strongest base. And so far, the Democrats have lacked the nerve to even try.
Until they do better, as former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado somberly noted in an op-ed piece in Thursday's New York Times, marginalized and in the wilderness they will remain.
(Second of two parts)
