In the Political Party Ring, It’s Fearless Frodo vs. Pathetic Piggy

It’s not as tangible an asset as money or good poll numbers. But for a political party, confidence--in its message, its ideas, even its mission--is usually a critical ingredient of success in an election year. Right now, the confidence gap may be the biggest difference between the parties. Just over seven months before the midterm elections, Republicans are swaggering. Democrats look lost.

Republican candidates for the House and Senate already appear to have settled on the central messages they’ll trumpet in this fall’s campaigns: Defend President Bush’s tax cut; endorse his call for big spending increases on defense and homeland security; and, above all, link themselves to Bush’s popularity, particularly the public support for his handling of the terrorist threat.

Republican Lamar Alexander probably previewed things to come when he crammed all of those themes into a single ad last week, just days after announcing his bid for an open Senate seat in Tennessee. Only a few years ago, Alexander, a former Tennessee governor, was running against Bush for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination and belittling Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” as “weasel words.”

But in his first Senate ad, Alexander talked more about Bush than himself: “This is a dangerous time,” Alexander declares. “I want to help the president win the war and strengthen our country.” Alexander couldn’t have bound himself more closely to Bush with handcuffs.

Democrats don’t have nearly as much direction. In theory, they have settled on a two-part election-year strategy: embrace Bush on the war and challenge him on domestic issues. The party is following the first half of that prescription. But when it comes to drawing domestic contrasts with Bush, Democrats are faltering.

It’s difficult to think of a single issue where Senate Democrats have put Bush on the defensive. The Enron investigations haven’t landed more than glancing blows on the administration. Bush might be vulnerable to charges he isn’t doing enough to protect worker pensions after Enron, but it’s uncertain Democrats have the votes to pass the party’s principal retirement security initiative, a plan from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Likewise, Democratic leaders wanted to use the ongoing energy debate to sharpen lines between a Bush plan emphasizing new drilling and their preference for conservation. But that hope faded when the party’s main idea for reducing energy consumption--a big increase in fuel economy standards for cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles--was trampled under a stampede of Democratic defections in a Senate vote this month. Now, the energy bill has become a kind of legislative tar pit that’s denied Democrats the opportunity to create a clear distinction with Bush.

All this, though, was just a warm-up for the budget Senate Democrats released last week. The budget resolution this year is mostly a symbolic document; it’s an opportunity for the parties to express their priorities. And on that front, the plan from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) was oddly appropriate: it was almost incoherent, which may accurately reflect the current state of thinking among congressional Democrats.

Like a doughnut, or a bikini, the Conrad plan is defined mostly by what isn’t there. It lacks a serious effort to balance the federal government’s books without using taxes collected for Social Security--something both parties pledged to do as recently as the 2000 presidential election (remember the lockbox?). All year, Democrats have understandably condemned Bush for proposing a budget that just over the next five years would divert $1.05 trillion in Social Security surpluses to run the rest of government and pay for his tax cut. But Conrad’s plan anticipates the diversion of $990 billion in Social Security money over that period, unless a future Congress acts to stem the red ink.

Conrad offers some ideas with teeth, like dropping all the additional tax cuts Bush proposed this year. But mostly the plan avoids real choices. Conrad makes his numbers add up only by projecting that Congress will repeal all of last year’s $1.3-trillion tax cut when it expires after 2010, an implausible prospect. But the plan makes no effort to scale back the tax cut in the meantime. Instead, it says that, if the government remains in the red next year, Congress should devise a plan to balance the budget by 2008 without using Social Security money. There’s an election-year rallying cry: Let the next Congress find a way to clean up the budget mess by the end of the next presidential term.

The Conrad budget was twisted into incoherence by its refusal to urge that Bush’s tax cut be trimmed now to pay for the war and other domestic priorities (like a Medicare prescription drug plan). That omission partly reflects the Democratic reluctance to challenge Bush on any issue while his job approval rating is so high. But the bigger problem may be practical: Conrad and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) know that they couldn’t win a vote on downsizing the tax cut because too many Democratic senators from the red states Bush carried wouldn’t support them. The same thing happened in the fuel economy vote. It will likely happen again if the leadership decides to move a plan to toughen gun control laws. Even Conrad’s cautious budget might fail on the floor.

In all, the last few months suggest that the red state Democrats are almost paralyzed by fear that they will be attacked from the right or portrayed as obstacles to Bush. That anxiety has stripped Senate Democratic leaders of a reliable majority and radically diminished their ability to use the Senate to sharpen contrasts with the GOP and shape the climate for the midterm election.

Congressional Republicans have clearly decided they have enough confidence in Bush’s agenda to face the midterm election arm-in-arm with the president. Vulnerable Democrats have just as clearly signaled they intend to succeed, or fail, on their own. Republicans seem to be taking their cues from the blood-brother fellowship in “The Lord of the Rings.” For Democrats, the operative text these days looks to be the “Lord of the Flies.”

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.