Returning to the city where their party was ripped apart 28 years ago, Democrats began arriving in Chicago Saturday to renominate for president the man who embodies the generation that came of age in 1968, Bill Clinton.
Clinton’s journey reads like a political anthology of Democratic thought. Once a liberal in the mold of George McGovern, Clinton evolved into a New Democrat centrist, overturning the foundations of the New Deal as he seeks to become the first two-term Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt.
On a summer day of brilliant sun with a thunderous air show at the lakefront, the city threw open its polished doors to thousands of political tourists. There were parties for every pundit, a prelude to a convention where media would outnumber delegates by nearly 4 to 1.
Not so long ago, after Republicans swept Democrats from Congress and statehouses in 1994, talk of the Chicago convention would turn to how to properly bury the party. Instead, President Clinton comes to town this week hoping his newly resurgent Democrats wipe away the negative images that began taking shape in 1968 when Vietnam War protesters clashed with police in the city’s streets and parks as the party convened at the International Amphitheatre.
“I believe that we have gone a long way toward burying the ghosts of Chicago,” Clinton said in an interview.
If the Democrats arrive in Chicago in far better shape than they could have expected two years ago, they can give thanks to Republicans.
Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri traces his Democratic party’s hopes for resurrection to a meeting in the Oval Office in June, 1995, with an unlikely source of inspiration: House Speaker Newt Gingrich. An animated Gingrich, confident as ever, was taking on Clinton, Gephardt and others over the federal budget.
“The problem here is you’ve got a gun to our head, and it’s called the veto,” Gephardt recalls Gingrich telling the president. “So I need a gun to your head, and I have one. I can shut the government down, and I can default on the debt. Believe me, we will do both to get the budget the way we want it.”
The Democrats in the room thought Gingrich was posturing and could not know for certain whom voters would blame if the government shut down. But when it did, the answer was clear: Republicans in general and Gingrich in particular.
Both Clinton and the Democrats come to Chicago trying to reconnect with the kind of voter who left them in 1994. The Democrats offer nothing so sweeping as a “Contract with America” but have a set of simple hit-them-where-they live proposals on issues like pensions and education.
The party’s old catechism has been shelved in favor of an appeal that, like the Republicans before them in San Diego, tries to woo the coveted middle class. Democrats must mollify their core constituencies, as Republicans did with social conservatives at their convention, without affording them a prime-time television stage.
The Democrats are carrying a special burden to their convention. Party realists concede that voters have not so much embraced them as they have rejected Republicans. And there are strong signs that Republicans as a party benefited from their error-free convention to the point that they express far more confidence in their ability to control Congress.
“The (Democratic) party itself has no coherent, forward-looking message. The president will try to provide one at the convention, but what really unites Democrats is fear of the Republicans,” said Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
Alan Secrest, a Democratic pollster, adds, “I think the national jetstream is blowing Democratic right now . . . (but) there is no question that voters haven’t fallen back in love with Democrats. They are frightened and repulsed by Republicans.”
The GOP made great efforts to repair its image during the convention, showcasing the more its moderate elements, almost hiding its harsher edges.
In their own way, Democrats will try to do the same, linking the party’s fortunes with the president who broke a 12-year Republican lock on the White House.
Last week, Clinton took full advantage of the powers of the presidency when, in grand ceremony, he signed a series of bills on raising the minimum wage, health-care reform and welfare reform.
In so doing, he helped his own fortunes, and possibly those of congressional Republicans who will campaign on those accomplishments as evidence that things really can get done in Washington.
To the extent that the Democrats are unified, it is in emphasizing a contrast with Republicans, and so they offer themselves as protectors of such cherished programs as Medicare and Social Security.
Yet the party continues to have enormous trouble in the South, where a spate of resignations and party switching has imperiled an already crumbling foundation.
The Democrats began to lose their base in the region in 1968 when Southerners defected to the independent candidacy of George Wallace and to Republican Richard Nixon. Many working-class, white ethnics joined ranks of defectors in 1972 when Nixon won re-election in a landslide over George McGovern and Democrats were painted as the party of amnesty, acid and abortion.
In the elections of 1994, senior voters, typically a reliable Democratic bloc, also tended to vote Republican, as did lower-income workers. The often discussed angry white male deserted the Democratic party with a vengeance.
Republicans were able to crush Democrats in 1994 by making the case that Clinton was not varying from the left-leaning trends that had come to dominate the party. They contrasted the Clinton tax increase with the Clinton promise of a middle-class tax cut. They emphasized his gays-in-the-military proposals and destroyed Clinton’s national health care plan by labeling it a huge, new and intrusive federal bureaucracy.
Then, for the first time as a congressional minority party in more than 40 years, Democrats did something they often find elusive: They stuck together.
“We knew our first task was to stop an extreme agenda from passing, and we needed almost complete unanimity in facing the legislative challenges we did,” said Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader in the Senate.
Democrats decided on modest proposals that have since been turned into a plan labeled “Families First,” which congressional leaders hope receives a broad hearing during the convention.
“Democrats now are speaking to issues not just from the opportunity side but from the accountability side,” Secrest said. “Democrats get in trouble when all they talk about is opportunity and not accountability. Republicans fare best when they talk about accountability. Democrats have to demonstrate they can make government work and that they understand government’s limits.”
Gingrich often describes politics as war without blood, emphasizing control over language as the most potent weapon in a political arsenal. The Republicans battle plan worked flawlessly in 1994. But during the budget process, it was Democrats, particularly Daschle in the Senate, who won the battle for rhetorical high ground, casting Republicans as drive-by shooters out to plug Medicare.
“There are some phrases you don’t hear much from House Republicans these days, like `tough choices’ or `shut it down’ or `I’d rather be right than be re-elected,”‘ Secrest said.
Democrats point to recent victories in state legislative races as a measure of the hope they hold out for the fall. They say that they have raised record amounts of money for congressional races, though they still trail Republicans substantially in fundraising.
Gephardt frames the election as a plaintive request for voters to give Democrats on all levels a second chance.
“Ultimately, one party or the other has got to start addressing people’s everyday problems,” Gephardt said. “If we can’t get that done we are going to wind up with a third party.”
