Where’s the Political Heat? Democrats Lose Their Fire

During a recent California fund-raising trip for his presidential campaign, Michael S. Dukakis, the earnest governor of Massachusetts, offered a glimpse of the tepid rallying cry that may become the future of the Democratic Party.

At a Los Angeles forum of local Democratic activists, Dukakis was asked if he thought so many Americans despaired from voting because they believed state legislatures and Congress were in the grips of special interests. Since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats have known how to answer that question: Hearty agreement followed by a promise to confront the big “interests” squeezing the little guy, the party’s core constituency. But Dukakis never answered. He simply rejected the premise that special interests have too much power.

Dukakis’s striking response said a lot about his politics--the dispassionate politics toward which the bulk of the Democratic field is drifting. This campaign is witnessing the full emergence of post-confrontational Democrats--pragmatic candidates who tend to be less polarizing, less critical of business interests and inclined toward solving difficult problems with compromises that avoid creating clear winners and losers.

What is occurring, particularly on economic issues, is the Hands-Across-Americanization of Democratic politics. Most of the Democratic candidates are building their appeals on the premise that everyone shares the same goals and need only be encouraged to hold hands and work together to solve the nation’s problems.

Conflict is a basic fuel of political life, as prevalent as air, and politics is the way we resolve much of it. As the party with the largest natural base, Democrats have rarely feared conflict. Since the New Deal, most Democrats have identified economic enemies--primarily big business--to generate conflict that energizes supporters and cements their identity as the party of working people. It is Republicans, with their historically smaller base, who have tried to avoid elections polarized along economic lines.

The Democratic contenders still take hard-nosed, polarizing positions designed to sharpen the distinctions between the parties on national security and social issues--disputes in which their opposition is primarily ideological conservatives, such as the religious right. Thus the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork should produce verbal pyrotechnics.

But on international trade, competitiveness and other issues that pit powerful domestic economic interests--rather than ideological activists--the picture is different. If the traditional identity of the Democratic Party has been as the advocate of the working class against the affluent, the increasingly typical pose is as the broker equipoised between the two.

This approach turns the traditional Democratic presidential strategy on its head. “The Democrats may be taking the wrong message out of the notion (made apparent in the 1984 campaign) that the middle-class was feeling squeezed and neglected,” said Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. “What they have done in response to that is to deny conflict . . . to deny that there are different groups in society with different interests.”

The problem with this strategy is Democratic contenders face danger: In trying to appeal to everyone, they may succeed in not exciting anyone very much. “That’s the dilemma of the neo-liberalism that Dukakis and the rest of this bunch are part of,” said Prof. Steven Kelman at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “As part of this modern, very educated, let’s-all-sit-down-and-talk style, it’s hard to get people to die for you.”

Deliberative to a fault, Dukakis epitomizes this new posture. Fabled for riding public transportation, Dukakis is populist in personal style, but his politics are almost devoid of it. Faced with controversial state issues--legislation regulating plant closings or a measure to require companies to disclose hazardous chemicals used in manufacturing processes--Dukakis’s response is to form a commission with the concerned parties, legislative leaders, a few professors and state officials, and put them in a room to fashion a compromise. “I don’t side with people,” he said in a recent interview, enunciating a creed that makes him sound more like a professional mediator than a politician.

Among Democratic contenders, only Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois and Jesse Jackson clearly reject that concept. Both unabashedly sound the historic notes of class-based Democratic populism. So far, Simon’s populism is mostly empathetic: During the recent debate he promised to put pictures of steelworkers on the wall in the White House. Though Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware has also hit some of these themes--criticizing the self-absorbed search for affluence that Ronald Reagan seemed to celebrate, occasionally criticizing business management--but Jackson consistently offers traditional Democratic populism with a bite.

The candidates’ response to the trade deficit best captures these trends. The prevailing Democratic analysis of America’s inability to compete invariably assigns equal blame to labor and business--and sides with neither. On trade, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) has used the most populist rhetoric, but he has directed his invective almost completely toward an easy target: foreigners. Muted in his message is the question of assigning American responsibility for the problem. Gephardt establishes the basic populist division of “them” and “us” but in very broad strokes: Our trading partners are the enemy, and all U.S. interests are lumped into an undifferentiated “us.”

That division may miss the most potent political fault line. By framing the trade issue so broadly, the Democrats are missing a significant opportunity, pollster Greenberg believes--to craft a populist appeal around the theme of equal sacrifice. In recent surveys and focus group sessions on trade, he has found a “growing perception that American corporate leadership is indifferent to its workers and indifferent to the national interest,” he said. “There is a specific belief that America’s corporate leadership is not doing its part. A perception of unfairness in carrying the burden is out there. That’s the kind of issue you can mobilize a majority with, but none of the Democrats are doing that except for Jesse Jackson.”

During the candidate debate in Houston, only Jackson suggested that American business must bear some blame for the trade deficit, through the shifting of manufacturing operations abroad in search of cheaper labor. No one else on the platform even acknowledged Jackson’s argument.

The Democrats’ apparent reluctance to embrace such a rough-edged, polarizing message springs from both immediate circumstance and long-term changes in the party. After Walter F. Mondale’s dismal experience, the Democrats are faced with the delicate task of identifying themselves with working people without seeming too indebted to organized labor; their avoidance of economic populism may reflect the difficulty of reaching that balance. Democrats have also shied away from criticism of business because they fear that any anti-corporate message would cost them economic credibility.

And the Democratic hopefuls may be unduly influenced by the 1984 campaign, when Reagan ran as the candidate of all the people. That worked fine for an incumbent President running in a booming economy, but as a challenger in 1980, Reagan couldn’t have been more different. He ran as a polarizing populist who used clearly defined (if broadly drawn) enemies--welfare queens, meddlesome bureaucrats, soft-headed peaceniks--to peel away the working-class base of the Democratic Party.

Aside from Jackson, and perhaps Simon and Biden, none of the Democratic contenders are moving on the same aggressive path. The dominant note in this field of Democratic challengers has less of an edge than Reagan’s successful insurgency. The language is more restrained, the policies more complex and balanced, the whole mix in tune with the kind of younger, highly educated voters who don’t remember the partisan fissures of the Depression. Not coincidentally, most of the Democratic candidates are part of that group themselves.

Vic Fingerhut, Simon’s pollster and an advocate of the tougher populist appeal, said “This nomination is a fight for which direction the Democratic Party is going.” Maybe in the short run. But with only a few exceptions, the vast majority of the party’s rising stars fit the post-confrontational mold. In coming years--absent an economic upheaval--the submergence of confrontational Democratic economics may not itself cause any conflict.