Planning Now for a Democratic House
I talked this afternoon with a Dem strategist who’s been telling House members they should be planning now – in the ikely possibility they’ll win the 15 seats they need in November – for how to use their coming majority to showcase the Bush administration in all its lurid awfulness.
Imagine an endless parade of witnesses offering shocking details of Abu Graib, Guantanamo, torture camps, Cheney’s secret energy task force, payoffs to Halliburton, rigged electronic voting booths, Katrina, Valerie Plame, CIA failures, Defense Department usurpations, Iraq’s descent into civil war, and other coverups, deceptions, data manipulations, silencings, suppressions of science, crass incompetencies, outright corruption. Out of all of these hearings, he said, would comes a bill of particulars so damning that every 2008 Democratic candidate running for everthing from Indianapolis city council to U.S. president will be swept into office on a rip tide of public outrage.
After all, he said, didn’t House Republicans during the Clinton years wreak all the damage they could even when there wasn’t much of anything to complain about? Recall Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who while chairman of the House Government Affairs Committee issued truck loads of White House subpoenas along with a suplphurus guiser of unsupported uaccusations. Why shouldn’t Henry Waxman, who will fill the same shoes, give as good as the Clinton White House got? Imagine how John Dingell, who will run the House energy and commerce committee, could expose the intimacies between the Bushies and Big Oil; what John Conyers, Jr, in command of the house judiciary committee, could reveal about Bush’s trouncing of Americans’ civil liberties; or the job Barney Frank, at financial services, could do on the Administration’s nefarious links to Wall Street. Hell, why not try to impeach Bush?
I told him he was dead wrong. If they get the House back, Dems shouldn’t do anything of the sort.
First, they won’t be credible. The investigations and hearings would be seen by the public as partisan wranging. They might even cause the public to question what it already knows, allowing Republicans to argue it was all conjured up by partisan zealots from the start.
Second, they won’t get any new information anyway. Their subpoena power would have no effect on this White House. They’d end up fighting in federal courts for the whole two years. Besides, there’s enough dirt out there already to sink any administration. Although cowed at the start of the administration, the mainstream media have done a fairly good job since.
Moreover, Bush is the wrong target. His popularity could hardly be lower than it is already, which means 2008 Republican candidates in all but the reddest of red states will distance themselves from this White House. John McCain, should he be the Republican nominee, won’t be tarnished by Bush at all because in the public’s mind McCain is a maverick and independent. He’ll remain above the partisan mud-throwing while the House Dems would be mired in it.
Finally, House Dems have spent the last six years whining and complaining. That was understandable. There was ample reason, and they didn’t have the power to do otherwise. But if they spend another two years whining and complaining, when they do have some power, they’ll confirm the Republican message that Dems are pessimistic Eeyores, obsessed with what’s wrong with America and clueless about what to do or how to fix it.
I told him House Dems should use the two years instead to lay the groundwork for a new Democratic agenda. Bring in expert witnesses. Put new ideas on table. Frame the central issues boldly. Don’t get caught up in arid policy-wonkdom.
For example, instead of framing basic economic question as whether to roll back Bush’s tax cuts, make it how to recreate good jobs at good wages and rebuild the middle class. Consider ideas for doing this through trade policy, industrial policy, antitrust, publicly-financed research and development, and stronger trade unions.
Instead of framing central foreign-policy question as whether we should have invaded Iraq, make it how to partition Iraq into Shiite, Suni, and Kurdish zones while America gets out. Focus the national security debate on how to control loose nukes and fissile material, and secure American ports. Open direct negotiations with North Korea and Iran.
On energy and the environment, they should offer ideas for developing new non-fossil based energy industries in America, and how to ratify a realistic Kyoto accord.
Help the public understand how these are all related. Show why, for example, we’ll never have a sane foreign policy unless we reduce our dependence on oil, how the creation of new alternative-energy industries can help create good jobs in America, why good jobs are essential to a reviving the middle class and saving the environment.
Most important, be positive. Avoid the blame game. Bush’s shameful record is plain enough. Start the new record. Help America dream again.