Can the Democrats Get Their Act Together? Don’t Bet on It : Politics: The nation’s economic state hasn’t been this bad since the Depression. But the Democrats seem unable to use this against the GOP.

If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the Democratic Party’s ineptness and inactivity in the face of the worst U.S. financial crisis since the 1930s also belongs in Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not.” By failing their economic traditions and constituencies, even as they fumbled war policy in the Gulf, the Democrats have turned in the most bumbling six months of any major party since the Republicans kamikazed with Barry M. Goldwater in 1964--maybe since the decrepit Whigs breathed their last in the early 1850s.

Now, however, party strategists promise a new era is about to begin with their fight to force the White House to extend worker unemployment benefits. But their recent performance demands skepticism. Such fecklessness as the Democrats displayed this year cripples the U.S. political system and warps national priorities.

Without a domestic policy challenge from Capitol Hill, President George Bush has become a compulsive diplomaniac, hunting up crises from Cyprus to the Ukraine, while Illinois has more people on public assistance than during the Great Depression and budget-wracked suburban Suffolk County, N.Y., agonizes over cutting police salaries by 10%.

For want of a meaningful opposition party, the Republican White House can downplay economic problems, while airlines slide toward monopoly or bankruptcy and shaky Southern California real estate straddles the commercial equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Without monitoring by powerful congressional committee chairmen, White House Budget Director Richard G. Darman can walk away unscathed--as he did in mid-July--after admitting that Administration tax-collection estimates for the next five years had been overestimated by $114 billion dollars.

Against this backdrop, the Democrats’ late July decision to come out fighting over the issue of extending unemployment benefits must be taken with a pound of salt. Sure, “little guy” economics is the party’s traditional vehicle of success, and the polls suggest Bush is vulnerable on domestic economics. Obviously, it makes sense for the Democrats, positioning themselves for ‘92, to pursue a five-pronged strategy of attacking the GOP on unemployment, the recession, Darman-style deficit reduction, unfair taxes geared to the rich and the need for a national health-insurance program. Surveys show this is where the GOP weakness is.

Except for one little problem: Are Republicans vulnerable when Democrats--feckless, special-interest-coddling Democrats--are the only available opposition? If they are still the party of Andrew Jackson, Harry S. Truman and the average American, then where have they been for the last year or two as the country slid into recession? Throughout the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Reagan years, Democrats invariably recaptured voters with economic issues during GOP slumps because they attacked Republican policies, hammer and tong. “It isn’t fair, it’s Republican,” said one 1982 TV ad. Last year, save for October’s budget debate, such criticisms were few. What has made this particularly astonishing is that, by a dozen yardsticks, this downturn is the most severe since the 1930s.

The savings-and-loan mess, for example, has been part of the biggest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the Depression. Commercial real estate is in its worst downturn since the 1930s. This may also be true of commercial banks. There were more corporate-bond defaults and downgrades in 1990 than any year since the 1930s. If the figures for 1991 show a million Americans filing for bankruptcy, as predicted, that will be another all-time record.

As for the public sector, state and local finance is going through its worst year since the 1930s. Municipal defaults and bankruptcies could reach new highs. Twelve million Americans, the largest number since the Depression, are now getting public assistance. One national newsweekly has called 1991 the greatest financial-crisis year for colleges and universities since the Depression, and the American Library Assn. just reported that’s also true for the nation’s libraries.

Forget tradition. Forget loyal constituencies. Good, old, red-blooded political opportunism should have Democrats on Capitol Hill lining up six deep to make speeches about these emerging crises. But since late last year, Democratic leaders have been heard from so little that former Democratic National Chairman John C. White recently mused that “Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy must be spinning in their graves at the silence of the Democratic Party.” And Democratic pollster Celinda Lake explained that, with Democrats voicing neither criticisms of the GOP nor economic alternatives, the Republicans of mid-1991 led the Democrats as the better party to keep the country prosperous--this coming out of a Republican recession!

She has a point. In the face of fiscal deterioration, for Democrats to be anything less than politically aroused marked them as: a) too dumb to know what’s going on; b) second-echelon collaborators in a bipartisan economic con job, or c) a & b. None is exactly a recommendation.

Which brings us to both the explanation of 1990-91 Democratic failure and the critical question for 1992: What’s the real likelihood that Democrats can transcend this pathos, pick up their once-proud Jackson-Truman banner and come out fighting as of yore?

It’s not something to bet your bottom dollar on. But neither is it to be dismissed with a horselaugh. Remember that, last October, autumn’s bipartisan Washington budget talks became a Republican debacle when Bush insisted on cutting capital-gains taxes in a way that would mostly benefit the rich while opposing the Democrats’ popular (84% approved) proposal for a surtax on millionaires.

While the Democrats were smart enough to press this, Bush’s approval plummeted from September levels in the 70s to a late October low of 48%. Perceptions of the GOP as the party of the rich soared. All five Republican members of the House running for the Senate against Democratic incumbents lost and, after the dust had settled, Market Opinion Research, announced the percentage of voters identifying themselves as Republicans had plummeted.

The bad news for the Democrats, of course, is that they threw away these issues during the winter. Instead, they switched focus to opposing U.S. Persian Gulf involvement; dropped the millionaire’s surtax as a priority to pursue the dubiously labeled civil-rights agenda that Republicans later nailed as a quota bill, and continued to give bipartisan support to the 1990 budget deficit-reduction deal--even though it strangled their ability to offer a rival domestic agenda. All three fumbles are part and parcel of their current embarrassment in the polls.

The good news for the Democrats is, while they botched their economic critique in the first half of 1991, some opportunity still remains with 16 months to go until the 1992 presidential election. Populist themes that hurt the Republicans so badly last year are still standing tall in state and national polls. Huge majorities of Americans favor both a federal income surtax on millionaires and the Democrats’ legislation to hike taxes on wealthy families and lower them on the middle class. Even 80% of Republicans favor the millionaire’s surtax--so if Democrats get bloodthirsty, it could play havoc with the GOP coalition.

Besides, even the Democrats may now finally understand that “little guy” economics is their party’s most important tradition--and probably also its best opportunity for national renewal. Not only were last fall’s opinion and election statistics impressive, but Democratic Party leaders and potential candidates alike were apparently impressed by the results of a party poll circulated in late June. It showed a preponderance of voters believing that, under Ronald Reagan and Bush, “the rich have gotten richer while the middle class got stuck paying the bill.” Surprisingly, when a hypothetical presidential candidate voicing this message was matched against Bush, he won.

Hypotheticals are just that: hypothetical. Based on the Democrats’ incredibly weak performance on economic issues since December, there’s little reason to assume they can get their act together. On the other hand, though, last October they did get it together.