A Party on a Fast Track to Failure

Just as Britain’s Labor Party had succeeded in throwing off the shackles of that country’s once-omnipotent unions, congressional Democrats have consented to be bound, trussed and gagged by America’s fading labor movement.

No pressure or persuasion or blandishment on President Clinton’s part to persuade Democratic holdouts to support him on trade could equal in persuasiveness the due-bills being presented on the Hill by organized labor. It was a struggle whose outcome could have been predicted by confronting the simple political reality that House Democrats owe far more to the union locals than they do to president of their own party.

Much of the Democrats’ mulish resistance to granting Clinton “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade agreements arose out of the events of 1994, when a large number of their fellows from Southern and border states lost their seats to Republicans. The survivors mostly were from safe districts in which Democrats hold commanding leads in registered voters; some of these districts have large numbers of minority voters who are tenaciously loyal to the party. In such places, Republicans shrink from even running a candidate. In others, where the balance of partisan power is more equal, the winning margins for Democratic candidates are supplied by union members.

But it is not simply dues-paying union members dutifully trooping to the polls at the behest of their shop stewards to cast their ballots for Democrats. It is the phone banks, the issue ads on television paid for by the unions and the street workers who get out the vote on election day that are the gift of the unions to Democratic congressional candidates.

And when their party’s most loyal and generous supporters stipulate that a Democrat’s willingness to support a union position on a bill will be seen as a token of gratitude, there is very little that even a Democratic president can offer by way of compensation. A ride in Air Force One, an inscribed photograph of the first family or even a promise not to veto an appropriation for a local defense contractor does not approximate a few weeks of helpful campaign commercials paid for by a union treasury. These Democrats waltz with those who brought them to the ball, and when the president offered his own dance card, he was firmly rebuffed.

Few congressional Democrats can forget the president’s “triangulation” strategy in 1996 that advanced him as the alternative both to extremists in the Republican Party and ultra-liberal within the ranks of his own party. And indelibly stamped on their minds is the sad fate of Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky of Pennsylvania, who sacrificed herself on the altar of party loyalty when she cast the deciding vote for Cllnton’s deficit reduction bill in 1993 and found herself out of a job a year later. Nor do they fail to recall walking the plank for his BTU tax that year, only to be abandoned to the sharks as Clinton backed down in the face of opposition in the Senate.

Nevertheless, House Democrats should have resisted the temptation to let Clinton stew in his own juice and should have been less suggestible in the face of labor’s scare tactics and those of labor’s opportunistic partners in the environmental movement.

What was at stake in the fast-track bill was not just a procedural grace note that would allow the president a clear shot at trade negotiations, but the future course of the Democratic Party.

The winners in Monday’s decision to remove the bill from consideration are the same forces that led the Democrats to defeat in presidential elections throughout most of the last two decades, quite content, at the same time, to enjoy the fruits of their own majority in Congress and to accept that their party would never be more than the sum of its part.

Never has the chasm between the congressional and presidential wings of the Democratic Party been deeper. What makes this split all the more ironic is that in defending free trade, one of his party’s most venerable doctrines, Clinton has been humbled by one of its most consistent supporters, organized labor.

Like the Republicans who doomed themselves to a two-decades banishment from the White House with their support of the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, the congressional Democrats of 1997 have marched resolutely into the past behind the banners of their staunchest allies.