Free at last

While W. enjoys his new home, the Democrats will be sorting out their message, lobbying for voting reform, and waiting for the economy to tank

by Robert David Sullivan

As a Democrat, I couldn't be happier about the outcome of the 2000 election. My dream scenario involved Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature leaving their fingerprints all over George W.'s inaugural invite, but it will just as much fun to blame Katherine Harris and Antonin Scalia for the existence of another Bush administration. It was also a pleasant surprise to do without the gloating that usually follows a Republican victory, especially when a member of the Bush family is involved. Instead, we got a month of temper tantrums from conservatives. I especially liked their argument that stupid people -- as in people who don't understand butterfly ballots or forget to check their punch cards for hanging chad -- don't deserve to have their votes counted. They had a point, but it was sweetly ironic to hear this coming from supporters of a presidential candidate who liked to stir up resentment against intellectuals, and from people who call Bill Clinton immoral because he knows how to exploit loopholes in the law.

As Americans, we must all accept George W. Bush as president, just as we accepted the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case. Some Democrats say that it's all worked out for the best anyway: after eight years of good news, the economy can only go down and the crime rate can only go up, leaving Bush to take the blame. But I don't think any of us need to hope for such things. Even if Bush is a successful president and the country suffers no major calamities during the next four years, the Republicans are going to have a tough time holding the White House in 2004.

Think of the Bush administration as a safety valve, which will release much of the anger toward Bill Clinton that's been building for the past eight years. Americans don't like either party to govern for too long, so Bush's legal victory will at least reassure the public that the Democrats haven't become entrenched in power. In the last century, when one party captured the White House, it usually won a second term, but it became weaker with each succeeding election (for example, Bush's father lost six percentage points from Reagan's 1984 landslide). So I doubt that a President Gore would have been re-elected in 2004, especially without winning a majority of the vote in the first place. As for Bush, he faces a couple of disadvantages in running for a second term. There's the fact that he lost the popular vote, of course, and he may well have lost the state that gave him an Electoral College victory. Just as important, his association with Dick Cheney, James Baker, Colin Powell, and other Republican retreads makes it appear that he's really attempting to restore the GOP regime of 1980-'92, which included his father's administration (see "The Little Referee," page 14). The younger Bush may be inexperienced, but the idea that he's a fresh face who needs a full eight years to find his way around Washington is laughable.

I HAD three major fears about a Bush presidency, and two of them were eased by the fallout from the election. First, I worried that he would sign huge tax cuts that would bring us back to the federal deficits of the Reagan-Bush era, thus giving Republicans a cover story for cutting government programs that are too popular to touch otherwise. But with the Senate deadlocked at 50-50, and the balance of power resting with Republican senators from Northern states carried by Gore, I think that caution will prevail and any proposed tax cuts will be scrutinized for their long-term effects on the budget.

Second, I worried about Bush's possible appointments to the Supreme Court. On that score, the court's five-to-four decision essentially handing Bush the presidency is a lucky break. It means that the Senate will not give him the benefit of the doubt if he tries to appoint another ideologue such as Scalia or Clarence Thomas. In the past, senators were reluctant to vote against a Supreme Court nominee unless they could point to some kind of scandal or personal failing (such as a lack of "judicial temperament"). Now Democrats, and perhaps some moderate Republicans, can point to Bush v. Gore as a reason to block any appointee who would tilt the Court even further to the right.

My third concern was the environment, given that Bush's record on this issue in Texas is poor, and that both he and Cheney are financially obligated to the oil industry. Here, again, I'm hoping that moderate Republicans in Congress will minimize the damage, but in this case Southern Democrats could side with Bush.

With respect to the religious right, I don't think that Bush has the votes in Congress, or the personal inclination, to deliver much more than a ban on partial-birth abortions. When it comes to civil-liberties issues, including some of the more draconian aspects of the drug war, Bush is no profile in courage, but the Clinton administration wasn't so hot either, and there was no reason to believe that Gore would be an improvement.

In his belated victory speech, Bush listed five specific policy goals, and they hardly represent a major shift to the right. His call for "broad, fair, and fiscally responsible tax relief," as noted above, will not necessarily translate into sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy, thanks to the Democratic gains in Congress. "A military equal to every challenge, and superior to every adversary"? Go to it, George. We can cut back any boondoggle projects later, if need be. As for working "to make all our public schools excellent," I have no objection. This is the one issue on which Bush has always sounded sincere, and it's not such a bad thing if it's tackled by a president who doesn't depend on support from teachers' unions. "Save Social Security" and "strengthen Medicare"? Great. These two entitlement programs disproportionately benefit the middle class rather than the poor, so no Republican president is going to destroy them. If anything, Bush has more credibility than Gore did when it comes to reform, since it's always tough for the Democrats to resist demagoguery in pursuit of the senior vote. ("Medi-scare," as Bush called it.) And Gore's attempts to outbid Bush in expanding Medicare coverage for prescription drugs weren't the finest moments of his campaign.

There's no good political reason to fight Bush on these goals. If there's no progress on any of these issues, voters are going to blame Congress as much as they blame the president, and neither side will win. If Bush is successful on any of them, the results will be fairly subtle. They're more about averting problems than about changing people's daily lives -- unlike, say, the federal highway program, or even Clinton's welfare reform -- so they're not going to give Bush a free ride to re-election. If the government stops mailing Social Security checks for a few months, and then Bush helps to fix the program, people may express their thanks on Election Day. Otherwise, any breakthrough on Social Security is going to be forgotten as quickly as the Gulf War was during the first Bush administration.

EVEN IF voters aren't inclined to give Bush another term in 2004, the Democrats will need their own set of issues to win the next election. At the top of the list, and conspicuously absent from Bush's introductory speech, is health care for all (and not just seniors). The Republicans evidently feel that the failure of Hillary Clinton's health-care plan has settled this issue once and for all, a view encouraged by their allies in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. But it's still a disgrace that the United States is the only major industrial nation without universal health care, and the Democrats are morally obliged to work toward a solution.

Almost as important, a range of environmental issues are beginning to seep into the public consciousness, including global warming, urban sprawl, and efficiency in transportation. These were tailor-made for Gore, but the public wasn't yet familiar with them, and they were never really introduced into the campaign. Wait for a big enough hole in the ozone layer, and for more people's daily commutes to approach two hours, and they could become major factors in a presidential election.

There are also several social issues where long-term trends favor the Democrats, but they still can't agree among themselves on how to handle them. How do we reduce gun violence without infringing on the right to self-defense? What is the best way to ensure racial diversity in employment and higher education without resorting to divisive quota systems? How do we protect the rights of gay men and lesbians without falling back on hate-speech codes and other forms of political correctness? Is it possible to curb the excesses of the drug war without risking a return of the late-'80s crack epidemic? Progressives overwhelmingly voted for Gore because they felt his heart was in the right place on most of these issues, but they didn't really know what he would do about them. Now that Democrats are out of power, they'll have the opportunity to sort some of these questions out and come back with a clearer message in 2004.

Then there is the biggest issue of all, which wasn't on anybody's radar screen before November 7: uniform voting procedures. Unlike campaign-finance reform, which has always seemed arcane, this is something that everyone can understand. Most people agree that it's common sense for everyone to vote for president in the same way, and for all the ballots to be counted in the same way. The federal government can't force all states and counties to use the same presidential ballot, but Congress can appropriate funds so that every county has access to the latest and most accurate voting equipment. The prime beneficiary would be poorer, more urban communities, and that would help the Democrats. If Bush or the Republicans in Congress block such a proposal, they'll simply be handing the opposition a killer issue to use against them in the next election.

The Electoral College is another no-win issue for Bush. He'll probably defend the system because it put him in office, but the public is likely to prefer electing presidents by popular vote. In the past, neither party has shown much interest in scrapping the College, and as late as two months ago, the conventional wisdom was that the status quo favored Democratic candidates, who quietly followed a strategy of winning large industrial states by paper-thin margins and thus canceling out wider Republican margins in the South and West. As it turned out, Gore won large states such as California (54-41), New York (60-35), and Illinois (55-43) by surprisingly comfortable margins, thanks to his party's increasing strength in major cities. Instead, it was Bush who worked the Electoral College to his advantage by narrowly winning small states such as Nevada (50-46) and New Hampshire (48-47). (A Gore win in either state would have made Florida irrelevant.) The patterns in this year's election suggest that the Democrats could widen their margin in the popular vote next time by pumping up turnout in Los Angeles, Chicago, etc., but such efforts could mean nothing if the Electoral College is still in place.

The obstacles to abolishing the Electoral College are imposing, if not insurmountable, given that it requires a constitutional amendment. Certainly, legislators in smaller states may feel that they have more clout under the current rules. (Though it's hard to see how Rhode Island comes out ahead. Its 120,000-vote margin for Gore, more than a third of his national margin, would have carried a lot of weight if the popular vote decided the presidency. But being small and being allied with the wrong party means that the Ocean State will be a double loser under Bush.) Even so, the issue will be highly useful to the Democrats. At the very least, it will be harder for the GOP to argue for controversial amendments involving school prayer, flag-burning, English as an official language, and limits on Congress's ability to raise taxes while they're blocking a proposal to count all votes for president.

Almost all the various proposals for election reform would have the effect of increasing voter participation, which generally favors the Democrats. So why haven't they called for reform before now? One reason is that few Democratic members of Congress have a vested interest in boosting turnout. All incumbents won their seats under the current system, and new voters represent a threat to their security. Democrats in districts that are drawn to favor their party (which means about 90 percent of the Democratic Caucus) may not be worried about Republican opponents, but they don't want to make things easier for third-party candidates or primary-election challengers. So progressive activists are going to have to lobby Democrats in Congress as hard as they lobby moderate Republicans in order to pass election reform. One factor that may help is the Democratic Party's inability to take back the House of Representatives after six years of Republican rule. Even veteran Democrats in the House may change their minds about a system that makes it nearly impossible to knock off incumbents, now that it's repeatedly kept the GOP in power by only a few seats.

On paper, Election 2000 was a clean sweep. The Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress (counting Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote in the Senate). But they don't seem exactly jubilant. And even without dipping into the eggnog, I just don't feel as bad as I thought I would.

Robert David Sullivan is a contributing writer for the Phoenix. He can be reached at robt555@aol.com.