Democrats Finesse a New Way to Lose Votes

Too much attention can be paid to how the Iran- contra affair, even after Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, has left the Reagan Administration dead in the Potomac. What’s neglected is that all is not well for the Democrats either.

Three months ago, by contrast, Democratic prospects for 1988 were brightening. They had recaptured the Senate in November and public opinion had begun to move their way on budget and regulatory issues. Then, in May, the Donna Rice affair drove front-runner Gary Hart from the race, leaving the party with seven relatively unknown contenders and the prospect of a divisive, drawn-out 1988 nomination contest. And in recent weeks the Democrats have managed to:

--Orchestrate a snide, bickering, nationally televised congressional adversary proceeding with a decorated U.S. Marine war hero who personifies boy-next-door patriotism.

--Plan a follow-up set of hearings designed to refuse U.S. Supreme Court confirmation of a distinguished former Yale law professor and ex-U.S. solicitor general because his conservative views aren’t acceptable to feminists, pro-abortion lobbies, the NAACP and organized homosexuals.

It’s almost as if they wanted a two-part scenario for spotlighting party image weakness and institutional disabilities. For a while, Democrats seemed to be giving up their old 1960s and ‘70s jeans and anti-military maneuvers in favor of trying to rebuild Harry S. Truman- and John F. Kennedy-style appeal to Middle America. But the way their congressional cadres have approached North and the Iran- contra hearings and seem to be approaching President Reagan’s Supreme Court nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Robert H. Bork, one can question how much they’ve really changed their spots: Appearing to bait patriotic military officers and seeming to pander to the National Organization for Women is still a dandy, do-it-yourself kit for losing electoral votes from South Carolina to South Dakota.

Recent party history is a problem, too. Since the mid-1970s, the liberal core of the Democratic Party has not been empowered to govern in Washington, only to harass, investigate, leak to the press or otherwise behave like a political guerrilla force. Centrist Democratic administrations were also afflicted--Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967-68, and even Jimmy Carter (witness the opposition 1980 nomination bid of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass). Yet it’s been truest of the way liberal Democrats, particularly in Congress, have confronted the Republican Administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan--with a rarely abated mix of hamstringing procedural amendments, foreign-policy prohibitions and nomination denials or holdups. And all too often these efforts have been on behalf of the same foreign policy and cultural causes arguably rejected by the public in four of the last five presidential elections.

Which brings us to Iran- contra hearings and Congress’s misreading of the North situation. Democrats were entitled to think that they had--and indeed still do have--senior Administration officials on the ropes for poor judgment, abuse of power and possibly unconstitutional behavior in selling weapons to Iran and then using the proceeds to fund the contras.

Yet despite these White House vulnerabilities, the Democrats failed to recognize they, too, risked parading a persisting weakness before the TV cameras. For years, polls have shown voters handily preferring Republicans on the broad issue of keeping America strong. Indeed, if the Reagan Administration went too far with secret diplomacy, to many Americans part of the cause lay in the way congressional liberals managed to deny the executive branch powers routine in most other Western nations. Capitol Hill carping sometimes even seemed negative towards patriotism.

Alas for the Democrats, congressional confrontation with North seems to have refocused these weaknesses. The hectoring of a beribboned war hero by two snide committee counsels offended many viewers, to whom North came across like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”--devastating Congress’ cynics and smoothies with an aw-shucks patriotism and truthfulness. It goes without saying that today’s “Olliemania” won’t last, and these events won’t dominate 1988 campaigning any more than firing the enormously popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 set the tone in 1952. Yet the North imbroglio crystallizes some of the same negative Democratic foreign-policy images.

There’s a real irony in this. Since 1986, it’s been clear that basic tides in national politics and public opinion have been edging the Democrats’ way. To start, Americans are beginning to embrace affirmative government and spending more money on national problems again. Polls on everything from air travel to the cost of telephone service show growing public concern that economic deregulation has gone too far. Specific discontents are well-documented in Reagan trade, farm and energy policy and recent polls even show the public tiring of Reagan’s obstinacy in refusing to adopt serious approaches to budget deficit reduction. Democrats are actually pulling ahead on that issue, too. It should all be grist for the Democratic mill--if party leaders can only resist the siren song of born-again anti-militarism and cultural fringe-catering.

And in this latter regard, Democrats are running a greater risk than Republicans in politicizing Bork’s autumn confirmation hearings. Bork, of course, is the federal appeals judge recently nominated for the Supreme Court. His credentials are impeccable; it is his views that liberal groups like National Abortion Rights Action League, NOW, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Education Assn. find unacceptable. Because Bork opposes such practices as racial and sexual quotas, busing, abortion and expansion of sociological jurisprudence, senior Senate Judiciary Committee member Kennedy has conjured up “Robert Bork’s America . . . as a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit in segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.” And Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. has promised lengthy, in-depth hearings and all but committed himself to opposing Bork under the banners of the very groups that Walter F. Mondale canvassed with such concern and ideological fidelity before losing 49 states to Reagan in 1984.

Of course, the Reagan Administration may also suffer some embarrassment. Bork’s position on abortion, in particular, is probably to the right of 70% of the U.S. electorate. But in a larger sense, the Democrats may have committed themselves to several weeks of suggesting--again for national TV audiences--that they’re still playing the same old special-interest politics that voters have distrusted for two decades.

So 1987’s two top congressional hearings have just a hint of hara-kiri in them, proclamations of high constitutional dedication notwithstanding. One senses this is really where the Democratic Party’s heart is. Away from the sober realities of governance for some two decades, too many Democrats seem all too comfortable in a role of harassing conservative Administrations to further viewpoints and interest-group commitments the average American does not want to see at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Many Americans share some of the doubts being raised about the Reagan Administration, but to win the White House in 1988, Democrats may have to offer a broader idea and experience than the pseudo-outrage of partisan congressional investigations.