Just before the 9/11 Celebrations – I do not use that word flippantly; that is how it sometimes seemed here – a leading Democrat said something extraordinary. It was in an interview with CBS News, yet CBS did not see fit to broadcast so much as a fleeting reference to what he had said in its main evening bulletin that day. Senator Jay Rockefeller, the 69-year-old vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said that the United States would be much safer today if Saddam Hussein was still in power.
Perhaps, amid all the mawkishness and self-congratulation of George W Bush and his administration, the US media came to the collective conclusion that Rockefeller’s remarks were unpatriotic during “wartime” and therefore had to be played down. Wallowing in what they are still happy to portray as Bush’s finest hour seemed more important. Yet I know Rockefeller well enough to know he is no hothead lefty: he is the great-grandson of the legendary oil magnate and a plodding moderate who has represented the sleepy old state of West Virginia for 21 years.
Rockefeller’s high-level committee has just spent two and a half years sifting through every piece of intelligence Bush and his chums used to justify the war in Iraq. With disastrous tim-ing – immediately before the fifth anniversary of 11 September – the committee published a pains taking report on how the administration had been methodically spoon-fed false information from the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmad Chalabi; there was also an even more disturbing report detailing the “intelligence” used to substantiate the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Rockefeller said, furthermore, that he knew a great deal more than he could say. “The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion, and 69 per cent of the people at that time, it worked; they said ‘we want to go to war’, including me,” he spat out with uncharacteristic anger (and Bush-style syntax). The US is now “much less safe” as a result, Rockefeller went on; he had now satisfied himself that Saddam was never a danger to America, would have remained iso ated, and if the US hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, “we wouldn’t have depleted our resources, preventing us from pro secuting a war on terror, which is what this is all about”. The Bush administration “deliberately led the American people to war”, leaving him “profoundly shaken that this could happen in America, profoundly shaken”. He was almost shaking with rage.
To the rest of the world, none of this would be a surprise. But, coming from an establishment po itician such as Rockefeller, the words were astounding. Days later, Jack Murtha, a 74-year-old Democrat congressman of 32 years’ standing and decorated Vietnam war hero, introduced a motion calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation.
With America weeks away from the midterm elections and just over two years away from the presidential elections, does this presage a turning point for the Democrats? For the past ten years, beginning with Bill Clinton’s scandal- ridden second presidential term, the party has found itself boxed in as the habitual party of opposition; 9/11 then enabled Bush to embark on his audacious campaign to portray himself as a strong war leader.
Having been hoodwinked, almost to a man and woman, into voting for the Iraq invasion, the Democrats have not known what to do or say since. What would a President Gore or Kerry have done in the light of the atrocities? Bomb Afghanistan? Iraq? Nothing? No Democrat has had the courage to come forward and say; even Rockefeller has failed to come up with a coherent explanation of how and why a Democratic administration would have handled things differently.
I said, more than a year ago in these pages, that I believed Hillary Clinton would be the next Democrat presidential candidate, and I still believe that to be likely. But when I spoke to her at a party at her house in DC the other day, she seemed more tired and drawn than I have seen her before – much more so than she comes over on TV. She is concerned, too, I’m told, about dragging her daughter Chelsea, now 26, through it all again.
Truman long gone
More to the point, a Fox poll this month (yes, I know it’s Fox, but their pollsters are independent) has Hillary slipping 11 points among Democrats – down from 43 per cent but still a whopping 32, way ahead of Al Gore on 15 and (yawn) John Kerry on 13.
Yet Hillary is as boxed in as any of them: she is still choosing to take a defiantly pro-war line, but trying to tweak it by lamely insisting that the Bush administration is conducting the war wrongly. She has thus polarised herself not just across the country, but among even Democrats themselves, as representative of the pragmatic, Clintonian, Third Way wing of the party which will forsake ideology for power.
The more idealistic wing that clings to the kind of idealism so famously articulated by Harry Truman in his 1949 radio address (“the Democratic Party does not dodge issues or seek to gloss them over . . . we state them boldly . . . we propose concrete and practical action to solve them”) is isolated, led by Howard Dean, the party chairman whom the media persist in portraying as a wild madman.
Thus the problem facing Democrats, however much Bush et al may be in disarray, is that – as Paul Waldman, author of Being Right Is Not Enough: what progressives must learn from conservative success, rightly says – the Republicans have understood that in America these days “politics is about identity . . . symbolism and narrative”: about personalities rather than policies.
In the current midterm campaigning, for example, they are delighting in pointing out that if the Democrats regain the House, John Conyers (77 and black, though that is never stated, of course) would become chairman of the House judiciary committee and Alcee Hastings (70, at least formerly corrupt, and also black – ditto) would be chairman of the House intelligence committee. (That would probably be welcomed by certain people in the British government: they were enraged when Peter King, Republican chairman of the House homeland security committee, blabbed to the media following a top- secret briefing just before the arrests in London last month of people accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic planes.)
The Republicans instinctively know that, according to one study, the American voter spends seven seconds on average deciding whom to vote for; alas, Gore’s assiduous work on the environment cuts little ice. So far none of the potential candidates, including Hillary, has declared an intention to contest the 2008 elections; this is the political convention here. It is also sound reasoning, because once a candidate has made a formal announcement, legal constraints are imposed on his or her ability to raise funds.
The convention has also given them all, including Hillary, a chance to delay coming up with any manifesto. Policy ideas from Democrats have therefore been put on hold. So far, there has merely been the predictable lemming-like rush towards the centre right, the supposed political “middle ground” of America, which, conventional wisdom dictates, a Democratic candidate must win over; the crucial bloc that strategists on both sides are going for now consists of “security moms”, who have supposedly taken the place of soccer moms.
Wonky wimps
There is, as a result, a vacuum among the Democrats on domestic issues, which echoes their non-positioning on Iraq. Traditionally, Democratic voters want a higher minimum wage and freely available abortion, are pro-environment and concerned about healthcare, and want fair taxation policies. But the likes of Waldman have initiated a debate within the party on whether spelling out such policies in detail, and producing turgid policy papers, turn off voters who much prefer the adman’s image of a he-man (Bush) to a wonky wimp (Kerry).
The result has been a conspicuous silence from potential 2008 Dem ocrat candidates on policy ideas. Waldman, in fact, argues that the key questions in American politics no longer concern policy but centre around three questions: Who do you identify with? Who can you trust? Who is strong and who is weak? It all boils right down, in other words, to image.
Alternatives to the possibly damaged images of Hillary or Gore, then? Mark Warner, maybe, the photogenic 51-year-old former governor of Virginia and a “moderate” who none the less approved 11 executions while in office? Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, formerly US ambassador to the United Nations and, at 68, an old Washington pro with a helpful Latino background? Kerry’s running mate and former fellow senator John Edwards, 53, candidate of choice among Third Way pragmatists who don’t like Hillary? Otherwise, the Democratic cupboard is surprisingly bare.
This is the outlook for what a colleague described to me this week as “the American left” – a contradiction in terms in 2006, if ever there was one. The climate is such that I was not in the least surprised when a close friend, a senior official in Clinton’s 1992 campaign and then a member of his first administration, told me how he feared “the extreme left” in the Democratic Party will destroy its chances in 2008. Who, I asked, did he mean? “People like George McGovern,” he replied. Yes, George McGovern – the former B-24 Liberator bomber-pilot hero, whose great sin was to have opposed the Vietnam war in 1972. Democrats, you see, have bought in to the Republican agenda hook, line and sinker.
Indeed, it is depressing that one of Gordon Brown’s closest chums on this side of the Atlantic – and Brown is even more of an Americaphile than Blair, revelling in his Washington power trips and Cape Cod holidays – is Bob Shrum, a veteran strategist who has helped pilot the Democrats to no fewer than eight presi dential defeats. Shrum will probably be at the side of Hillary or one of the others in 2008, as he has managed to cultivate an image of himself as indispensable.
Yet defeat for the Democrats in the midterms this November would secretly be welcome to whoever is the candidate in 2008: the Republicans found after their congressional landslide in 1994 that Bill Clinton could wield his presidential veto and thus sabotage their image, as Bush would surely strive mightily to do with a Democratic Congress.
Ideally, the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate would like to be free to coast to victory on two simple themes: that the country has endured eight years of a Republican president and 14 years of a Republican Congress that, between them, have botched everything and left the world in a terrible mess, and it is high time for change.
It’s hard to see how such a campaign could go wrong, but I wouldn’t put it past the Democrats. Particularly if more of them don’t have the courage, like Rockefeller, to step out of that box so obligingly provided by the American right.
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