‘Doomocrats’ Must Learn Bond Between Americans and President

The great American portrait painter James McNeill Whistler once reflected wistfully on his expulsion from the United States Military Academy for failing a course in chemistry. “If silicon were a gas,” he said, “today I’d be a major general.”

Democrats could easily sympathize with Whistler’s hypothetical musing. If only they had good candidates, salable policies and a majority coalition of the voters, they would now be preparing to stage a presidential inauguration.

The first problem is the quality of Democratic presidential candidates. They have been intelligent and humane men but have suffered from a kind of world-weariness and a disposition to distance themselves emotionally from the electoral process. Not since Hubert Humphrey has there been a Democratic standard-bearer whom a citizen might be tempted to approach with a hard-luck story and come away from the encounter with something more comforting than a colloquium on social-welfare policy.

There has been a curious but pervasive pessimism in people like George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis--a kind of tragic political vision of America that could not be hidden under a flimsy rhetoric of hope that all managed to express. It often appeared that they sensed some terrible tragedy in the offing but could never persuade Americans precisely which iceberg was in the shipping lanes. President Reagan was not far offthe mark when he characterized them as “Doomocrats.”

Americans love a happy ending. They often confuse life with art. That is one reason for the phenomenal affection they had for Ronald Reagan. He understood how important it was to reinforce the illusions that people have about themselves. He prized encouragement over analysis and pep rallies over sermons. Reagan would tell you that you resembled Cary Grant; Democrats would advise you to have your teeth straightened and promise dutifully to seek federal funds to pay for the procedure.

The policies of Democratic presidential candidates, moreover, are never more than the sum of their parts. Tossed together as payoffs to the various constituencies, they are psychotic salads of contradictory flavors and textures. For a party so relentlessly intellectual, there is really very little that has emerged from the Democrats in terms of soaring and overarching themes.

Their most abiding problem has been their perceived weakness on defense and foreign policy. It has dogged the steps of Democratic presidential candidates since the time of the Vietnam War and caused a rift within the party and precipitated the defections of people like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

It is really not a question of favoring one weapon system over another. The eyes of most Americans glaze over when asked whether they favor the maintenance of a strategic triad or would opt for a response based on submarine-launched missiles. So enduring is the suspicion of the voters that the Democrats would farm out their defense policy to the United World Federalists that the rare gesture of hairy-chested combativeness is greeted with disbelief.In the eyes of many Americans, fitting Dukakis with a tank driver’s helmet was like putting socks on a rooster.

Liberalism, by itself, was never really the issue in the campaign. Toughness was. A large measure of the lack of Democratic credibility on both defense and crime was a product of Dukakis’ often appearing to be running for the post of auditor general. The aged snow-blower in the Dukakis garage was not a symbol of reassurance. It signaled that Dukakis might go shopping for the sinews of war at a factory-outlet store.

Most alarming of all, perhaps, is the eminently responsible and intellectually respectable--but politically suicidal--embrace of multilateralism in foreign policy. It is the belief that our solitary will in the world no longer matters very much, and that little can be accomplished by this country without making fundamental concessions to influential countries whose values are not necessarily compatible with our own.

Finally, and most exasperatingly, is the problem of the Democrats’ zero-sum constituencies. To the degree that Democrats claim the solid support of their most consistently loyal supporters, the black voters, they risk losing those groups that would give them an electoral majority--white Southerners and Reagan Democrats. Dukakis could never resolve this agonizing dilemma.

That he failed to throw a bridge over this chasm does not mean that the Democrats have to go for all time risking the loss of traditional white groups or the alienation of their base of black support. Establishing that bridgehead will come about less from policy innovation than from the emergence of a Democrat who understands the unique emotional bond between Americans and their President and who will intuitively embrace the most attractive policies and reach effortlessly across constituency lines to establish a winning coalition.