As we begin our lessons in Elementary Politics let's examine the relative positions of the two major parties as we enter the even-numbered year - known to Big Time Political Operatives as the "On Year.
Here is the Prime Directive of politics: Secure Your Base.
President is sitting at a job approval in the mid-eighties. THE MID-EIGHTIES. Juan Peron didn't have performance ratings like this when Eva was the only person polled.
Even if no one is undecided, that means the Democratic base (vis-�-vis the President) is something around 15 percent. Gary Bauer has a wider base.
Directive Number Two in politics is: Draw a clear distinction between you and your opponent.
The standard approach to accomplish Directive Number Two is to remind your base (a) How bad off they are, (b) How much worse they are going to be, (c) It's all your opponent's fault.
Directive Number Three in politics is: People vote their expectations.
A recent Zogby poll, shows the difficulty our friends across the aisle are facing. According to that poll: 71 percent of African Americans and 68 percent of Hispanics expect "their personal lives" WILL BE BETTER in 2002 than they were in 2001. [Emphasis mine]
It is not unreasonable to suspect that nearly all of the 15 percent who do not approve of the President is contained within that group of African Americans and Hispanics who do not think their lot will be better next year. The remainder being the Ladies lunching on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post.
If over two-thirds of the traditional Democratic base thinks they are headed in the right direction, then accomplishing Directive Number Two becomes something of a challenge.
Ok, class. Let's look at this from the view of a Democratic strategist:
On the negative side of the ledger we have the following:
The nation is almost unanimously behind the President's handling of his job. Notwithstanding Democratic fantasies to the contrary, there is nothing in the public domain which indicates a significant difference in his job approval between foreign and domestic policy.
The senior - perhaps the only - face of the Democratic party is Tom Daschle. Outside of Big Time Political
Operatives, political junkies, and a bare majority of voters in South Dakota, almost no one knows who Tom Daschle is.
The White House has done a pretty good job of showing the President's willingness to compromise to get the best possible bill.
The Education Bill in which George W. Bush worked with Ted Kennedy is an excellent example. If the Democrats want to attack President Bush on the content of this particular bill they are faced with the somewhat off-putting task of attacking Senator Kennedy along with him.
On the positive side of the ledger we have:
The Democrats control access to the floor in the Senate.
That's it.
As the base of support for a political party shrinks, it is dragged inexorably toward its most extreme edges. The people who attend the meetings, who write the letters, who give the money, who vote in the primaries are the truest of the true believers.
The attack rhetoric will sharpen to the point of ugliness - listen to Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe comparing the religious right to the Taliban. And the policy demands will shift sharply to (in this case) the left - note that Daschle had to reject a perfectly reasonable stimulus package to appease his left.
This will tend to cause the "soft" Democrats - people who nominally describe themselves as Democrats but tend to split their tickets - at best to stay home in November, and at worst to run into the open arms of the Republican Party.
So class, as the bell rings, remember: Notwithstanding what you read in the op-ed pages and see on the news shows, it is the Democratic Party which has a very, very steep hill to climb and very few resources available to help climb it.
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