Decision ’04: Democrats Take a Dive

During the Second Punic War, faced with a tremendous defeat at the hands of Hannibal, the Roman consul Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus elected to combat the Carthaginians by avoiding them, chasing and provoking the army until Hannibal attempted a full-on attack. At this, Fabius would withdraw. Such Fabian tactics, as they are now eponymously called, always have reappeared throughout history only to disappear again because they are unpopular.

And precisely for this reason, could it be few suggest the real reason the Democrats were beaten soundly in 2004’s election is because they intended to lose all along. “Unpaid” knows there is little proof of collusion, but coincidences do matter. The first has to be a curious decision by Al Gore not to run for President again in 2002. Already other candidates had begun to raise money, but Gore gave no reasoning why not 2004. With the war on Iraq still in planning on the US largely terror free in 2002, Gore may have considered Bush impossible to beat. And so did the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment from Terry McAuliffe to Democratic Leadership Council Chairman Al From, to Bill Clinton himself. The idea was to run a solid, predictable campaign in ’04 and regroup once the worm had turned in ’08. This strategy was pioneered by none other than Richard Nixon. Upon losing to Kennedy in 1960 (and considering the limiting effect of the 22^nd Amendment) he chose not to oppose Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 at the height of his popularity but instead four years later with the country on the brink. But Nixon also was reluctant to face a war-time president.

The man who crashed the party in ’02 was Howard Dean. His anti-war stance electrified the Democratic base despite the fact that few elected Democrats would criticize the war beforehand. Yet for all of Dean’s effort, his own party decided to crush him with a vicious campaign of negative ads in violation of election law by a group called Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progress in Iowa and New Hampshire. Funded by individuals very close to John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, and Wesley Clark, the ads refused to acknowledge their campaign ties. Unsurprisingly Dean lost the Iowa caucus to John Kerry. But did Dean decide to throw the fight? If he is successful in his bid to win the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, it seems plausible. Dean would get a job with plenty of face-time and the chance to be aggressive attacking policies he doesn’t like, but without the rigors of the campaign. Instead he would do what he is best at: raising money from previously parsimonious donors. So should the job at the DNC turn out to be Dean’s golden parachute, why did the election proceed to be so closely fought by both sides?

The answer is that it’s an illusion. The Kerry campaign again and again made odd decisions after securing the nomination. Most noticeably it focused nearly all its energy on Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Massive voter registration drives and millions of dollars spent in advertising focused on a swath of states that predictably split as they did in 2000. In fact nationally, the only states that shifted from “red” to “blue” or vice versa were Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. Each was so closely decided in 2000 that such shifts are not even statistically significant. Bush ran hard to attract more voters to be sure, but picking up Iowa and New Mexico were not why he won. The states he won in 2000 gained electoral votes overall, allowing Bush the freedom to lose New Hampshire without picking up any new states. Kerry would have needed to win in the South or Southwest. Kerry and other Democratic Party members refrained, focusing only on Ohio and Florida. While victory in either one would have been enough to propel Kerry to victory, such a strategy allowed the GOP to focus nearly all of its energies there. Losing the element of surprise as a challenger doomed Kerry’s tactical chances before the voting ever began. Republicans wanted to claim this was all a reflection of Kerry’s personal tendency to be a “flipper-flopper”.

Au contraire. The Democrats are now poised to humiliate Bush akin to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The ’08 Republican nominee will have no name recognition because of the vice president’s vow not to run to succeed Bush. Kerry, Edwards, Dean, and even Gore can run with an edge in name recognition over every Republican candidate with the exception of John McCain and Bush’s younger brother John. McCain would be the oldest President ever elected, John “Jeb” Bush has said he will not run in ’08, suggesting that a relative outsider…an “anti-Bush” …would be chosen. The Democrats would likely choose a candidate from a “red state”, where at least among sitting governors or Senate the list of viable candidates is rather short. But also note, none of the previous Democratic candidates would qualify. Edwards lost his seat while the others are from “blue” states, including Hillary Clinton.

Still, expect to see very little public news about the process until 2006. The Democrats, until that time, will play up their defeat while quietly raising money and marshalling resources for the mid-term election. While the situation in both the economy and Iraq is important to the campaign, the Democrats also must choose when and how to oppose both the President and the Republican majority in Congress. That dance begins on November 16^th, with Bush hoping to confirm White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and the next Attorney General of the United States.