Chasing the Republicans, Empty-Handed

When one politician takes the stage to accuse another of the sin of “playing politics,” you can guess the nature of the trouble. The accuser has run out of better excuses. And the accused is surely making gains. It’s like the guy blaming his hangover on the success of the bartender.

Which brings us to the Democrats’ radio address to the nation last weekend.

Three months into this election year, and the loyal opposition has gone round on a bender. That’s sometimes the last recourse when things get unbearable, which may, in fact, explain matters here.

Middle-school civics: The president of the United States is playing politics to one degree or another with every breath he draws, with every trip and deed. That’s why we call him a politician. Blah blah.

But when does the fact warrant an accusation?

Well, you don’t do it when the president is traveling through the Americas and you’re feeling petulant because he is a Republican and might be crowd-pleasing with voters who just happen to be in your hip pocket where they belong, or so you think.

But so muddled are the Democrats and so stubborn their insistence on group loyalty that Antonio Villaraigosa could not resist a sloppy punch when the party handed him the microphone Saturday: “The president’s trip this weekend to Latin America is part of an orchestrated strategy to curry favor with Latino voters.”

(A) Perhaps, and (B) just what’s wrong with that?

Wouldn’t it be a better question to ask: Is it a good idea for the president of the United States to travel south? To shake hands with the heads of states in our own hemisphere? To hash out the neighborly things we share such as economic investment, immigration and the criminal fallout of the drug trade, as well as reestablishing the Peace Corps in Peru?

Or you can ask it this way: You mean George W. Bush should ignore Mexico, Central and South America? As Villaraigosa, the onetime state legislative leader and defeated candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, put it: “The Republican pursuit of Hispanic voters is a calculated political strategy. For us, it’s an extension of our values.”

I’m not Latino, except to the extent that we all are shaped by the cultures around us. But I do know the feeling of being left out by our government. I’d be happier to see the president toss off old ideology and curry more favor, cross more boundaries, speak more languages, play more consensus politics across the whole field of our national disagreements.

Imagine, for instance, how much better we would feel to read that the administration had courted environmentalists in drafting the president’s energy proposals.

I should emphasize that Villaraigosa’s speech, posted on the party Web site at www.Democrats.org, makes no criticism, substantive or otherwise, of what Bush said to whom or where, merely that he went. Sounds to me like the ethnic-politics card in a low denomination, a sure sign of the opposition’s rapid delamination.

The Democrats’ righteousness of the winter of 2000 seems rather quaint at the moment, doesn’t it?

In recent months they have let slip from their grasp the high ground on Social Security surpluses and budget deficits. They fell on their faces on the only forward-looking environmental initiative of late, automobile mileage standards. They have failed to rouse themselves behind health care, even as the problems grow more alarming.

They let themselves get skillfully blindsided by a president who put union steelworkers ahead of global trade doctrine.

Their pockets got picked cleanly when it comes to calling us together for community service and volunteerism.

Now it looks as if they’re going to be left on the sidelines while the administration finally tears into tax cheats.

If the Democrats have found the unified voice to counter the free-market-at-any-cost maniacs after Enron, we haven’t heard it on this side of the country.

Am I off base or doesn’t it seem that the most interesting challenge to the Republican status quo is being posed these days by a Republican senator from Arizona? I guess the Democrats are laying low, scared maybe that somebody will accuse them of playing politics.

By the way: In Sunday’s column about what’s in the name of Arthur Andersen, I got one wrong. It’s Edgar Allan Poe, not Allen.