Democrats Saw New Ideas, Voters Just More of Same

Now what?

After failing for the fifth time in the past six presidential elections, few Democrats are ready for another hard look in the mirror. Most are too busy assessing blame for their dispiriting defeat in a race that almost all believe could have been won. Continued control of Congress is small comfort for an entire lost generation of Democratic activists denied the chance to wield executive power.

The party faithful have been reduced to the loser’s bitter consolation: speculating on what might have been. What if Michael S. Dukakis had not responded to George Bush’s attacks by imitating a punching bag? What if Peggy Noonan, Bush’s eloquent wordsmith, had come down with writer’s block? What if Paula Parkinson had pictures?

These replays miss the real point of 1988. It’s true Bush ran a good campaign, and Dukakis didn’t. It’s also true that the underlying economic conditions favored the vice president. But the most striking aspect of this campaign was its routine quality--the way it inexorably settled into the contours of GOP dominance set over the past 20 years. “If you look at each of these elections individually we have an excuse for losing each and every one,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “But a pattern has been established.”

Like every Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson--with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1976--Dukakis was routed in the South and the Rocky Mountain states. Like his predecessors, Dukakis couldn’t escape the perception of weakness abroad and permissiveness at home. And like every Democrat in the past 20 years, Dukakis attracted only a minority (41%) of the white vote. Southern whites now vote Republican in presidential elections almost as automatically as their parents voted Democratic. The Democrats continue to struggle with blue-collar workers, Catholics and men--once proud cornerstones of their imposing base vote.

Entering this election year, many Democrats believed they had turned the corner. When Walter F. Mondale was buried by President Reagan in 1984, there was agreement in the Democratic Party that his brand of discredited interest-group liberalism was interred with him. In the resulting ideological vacuum, liberal think tanks, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and neo-liberal reformers all tried to sketch out a new vision for the party.

The process hardly produced a revolution. But as the nominee, Dukakis represented the triumph of one identifiable new approach: the pragmatic, managerial politics popular among younger Democrats, particularly in state government. Though Dukakis conformed to the McGovernite consensus on foreign policy that has ruled the party since the Vietnam War, he built his domestic policies on new pillars: distance from party constituency groups, cooperation with business, encouraging private solutions to social problems by leveraging limited public funds.

New approach, same result. For all his programmatic wrinkles, Dukakis struck the electorate as more of the same. To Dukakis, and perhaps a few Harvard political scientists, the differences between the governor and traditional liberalism were self-evident. But for most people, a Massachusetts Democrat who supported gun control, opposed the death penalty and questioned a list of weapons systems, was, by definition, a liberal.

Dukakis contributed substantially to this problem by allowing Bush to define liberalism. Dukakis never gave an overarching speech explaining how his methods sought to advance historic liberal goals in new, more fiscally prudent, ways. Without such a framework, his piecemeal ideas on housing, health care and college education--though creative, and likely to be models for Democrats in the next Congress--didn’t produce a coherent alternative to Bush’s devastating portrait.

Beyond Dukakis’ mistakes, though, the campaign revealed inherent weaknesses in the technocratic liberalism he represents. Offering only competence and partnerships--political equivalents of near beer--Dukakis remained an indistinct figure, an accountant who somehow found himself steering a tank. That left him vulnerable to Bush’s attacks. “This is not the failure of liberalism; it’s the failure of neo-liberalism,” said Mellman. “It is the failure of the approach that says there can be a value-free, passionless politics.”

Until the final weeks of the campaign, Dukakis’ attachment to the politics of partnership--a politics without enemies--led him to refuse the only major weapon the Democratic Party has left in national elections: its enduring image as the voice of ordinary Americans against powerful forces. Dukakis resisted a populist message because his politics are inimical to it. As governor, Dukakis most often functioned not as an advocate for labor against management or consumers against business, but as a broker. The candidate who last month declared, “I’m on your side” said in an interview last year, “I don’t side with people.” That’s fine for a mediator; for a politician, as Dukakis belatedly discovered, it’s emasculating.

And so the search for answers begins again. In the wake of this latest disappointment, the Democrats are likely to splinter into three or four schools of thought. Each will produce its own national spokesmen, and eventually, its own presidential candidates.

One group is likely to argue that the non-adversarial message can appeal to swing voters turned off by traditional liberalism--as long as the messenger doesn’t share Dukakis’ unique vulnerabilities on cultural issues. Brainy, moderate and reassuringly square, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey seems the logical spokesman for that point of view.

Other Democrats will say they need a leader who can re-energize liberalism by focusing it through a populist lens. Dukakis only moved voters once he adopted the class-based “I’m on your side” theme. That argument’s power was underlined by Tuesday’s results in California, where voters rejected several lavishly funded initiatives from insurance companies, embracing only the anti-industry initiative pushed by Ralph Nader.

At the head of the populist-liberal line are New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Jesse Jackson. But the chances of selling a Northern liberal, even a populist, in the South at any point in the near future seem dubious. Giving up on the South would mean that the party could not regain the White House until it pulled an “inside straight”--a sweep of the Northeast, industrial Midwest and Pacific Coast.

With his final push in states such as Pennsylvania, California, Michigan and Illinois, Dukakis came within sight of that goal, which suggests to some that the “inside straight” may be the Democrats’ future. But Dukakis’ narrow losses in state after industrial state--all of which he needed to win--reveals the impracticality of that strategy. It leaves too little margin for error. The margin will shrink further after the 1990 reapportionment, when the South will gain electoral votes.

That analysis is already leading many weary Democrats back to familiar turf: arguing that the party cannot compete nationally without a Southerner heading their ticket. The first choice of Southern politicians, a conservative such as Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, would have enormous difficulty being nominated. But the prospects may be brighter for younger, culturally moderate Southerners, who preach the economic populism that attracts Northern blue-collar voters.

Events will undoubtedly scramble all these considerations. It is not yet clear how much stomach Democrats have for another round of the self-analysis that availed them so little in 1988. But Dukakis taught the Democrats one lesson: Denying your political heritage is suicide. For better or worse, the Democrats are etched in the public’s mind as the party of liberalism. They can’t hide their ideology behind a fig leaf of competence. They probably can’t nominate someone conservative enough to move the party significantly rightward. If they are going to regain the White House--and not just wait for an economic collapse to evict the GOP--they will have to find a way to make the “L-word” work for them.