The Party Bosses Bungle Super Tuesday : Results Shatter Illusions About Type of Candidate Democrats Like

How symbolic it was that, on the way into television studios in Washington for a post-election interview on Tuesday night, Charles Robb, former Virginia governor and the founding father of Super Tuesday, ran smack into a plate-glass door. The incident was emblematic of the smashing of some illusions about who it is that votes for Democratic presidential candidates.

The air is now full of bogus rationalizations on the part of some of the Southern Democrats and Washington insiders who staged the event. In their desire to amplify the voice of the South and to come up with a kind of peckerwood Paraclete, they succeeded only in shooting Dixie’s wad. They accomplished it in a single day, and they deprived the South of any further voice in the selection of the Democratic nominee.

It is important to understand the confused state of mind of the inventors of Super Tuesday. They fancy that out there somewhere in the country there are vast numbers of white male voters straining to find a Democratic presidential candidate to support if only that person had the fortitude to say boo to the special-interest groups that haunt the party. The most likely habitat for this hypothetical voter, they maintain, is in the South, which used to turn out huge Democratic majorities. Why, according to the analysis of the architect of Super Tuesday, have these expectant males voted so consistently Republican since 1968? Because Democratic nominees have been a dreary succession of pallid, liberal milksops stampeded into taking absurd and extreme positions by the hectoring of unionists, feminists, peaceniks, blacks and old folks.

If Robb and former Democratic Chairman Robert Strauss could climb down from their high dudgeon long enough to examine the characteristics of Democratic voters, they would find the party’s staunch supporters to be: unionists, feminists, peaceniks, blacks and old folks. Not surprisingly, these people support liberal candidates in primaries.

Super Tuesday was a field day for Democratic liberals. No amount of political cosmetology can remake Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson and Albert Gore as centrists. What is even more to the point of what it takes to win in Democratic primaries, had the Tory Democrats’ favorite candidate, Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, chosen to run, he, too, would have turned into a liberal or expired in the wintry cornfields of Iowa.

What enabled these conservative Democrats to beguile and bamboozle people into thinking that Super Tuesday would not only be decisive but also yield a moderate Democratic winner was the amulet of electability--who shows the best promise of winning in November. Hypothetically, a very conservative Democrat might beat a Republican in the general election, but how such a person survives Democratic primaries in which liberal voters predominate remains unanswered by the political wizards of the party’s right wing.

In rationalizing their failure on Tuesday night, the impresarios of the Southern primaries plumbed the depths of insincerity and unctuousness about Super Tuesday’s most conspicuous winner, Jesse Jackson. You heard a lot of claptrap from Establishment Democrats about how Jackson had become a national candidate and a force to reckon with in the party. They hate his guts. They regard Dukakis as unacceptably liberal and, hence, unelectable. Gephardt is viewed as an apostate. They would probably settle for Gore, but more for stylistic reasons than matters of substance.

George Bush, however, has transcended ideology. Wrapped tightly in the inherited mantle of President Reagan, Bush’s subliminal slogan is “Four more years.” Despite his fatuous bonhomie and the utter banality of his political idiom, Vice President Bush is going to win the nomination because, as Richard Nixon demonstrated, being the frog prince at least positions you to be kissed. Bush’s claim to be the most fervent votary of the President was simply better than Dole’s. Both Dole and Bush are deeply flawed candidates, but Bush’s skillful emulation of the political characteristics of the beloved Reagan is more convincing than that of the Kansas senator. Dole is a hard man to like but an easy one to respect; Bush is easy to like but hard to respect. In that sense it is Bush who more nearly approximates Reagan in the voters’ mind.

Having bungled Super Tuesday, the disgruntled Democratic right now presents us with its fallback position in the form of a brokered convention in which its weighty and influential presence would be felt in the form of a large bloc of “super delegates”--elected officials and party leaders who are officially unpledged. Unpledged does not mean uncommitted. Such a group also is unlikely to go for the most conservative of the hopefuls.

If it comes to a brokered convention, these conservatives, with their ignorance of the Democratic electorate, are likely to end up with an even bigger surprise than they had on Super Tuesday--the nomination of Jesse Jackson.