Leave It to Cleaver

Political observers recently got to watch Republican wedge politics go down, in textbook fashion. At a fundraiser in New York for Sen. John Kerry, Whoopi Goldberg said something naughty about President Bush. Ken Mehlman of the Bush campaign called the formerly obscure event a “star-studded hate fest” and demanded the Kerry campaign release it on video -- implying even naughtier tidbits to come. Fox News, then the rest of the media, granted Goldberg’s attack legitimacy as an “issue.” The mighty GOP ax had fallen again, predictably, right at the point where two key constituencies of the Democratic coalition are joined.

One segment of the party is both reliably rich and reliably liberal -- “Hollywood.” Another -- they used to call them “hard hats” -- is culturally conservative but seeks a dependable protector of its economic interests.

Chop!

One chunk of voters falls to the right side of the hatchet, angry at Hollywood’s insult to their piety. Another falls to the left, ready to cancel their checks to Kerry if he insults free speech. Pundits pile on, interpreting the flap as something Democrats foisted upon us.

“Why is it that the Hollywood folks, who are very bright people, don’t get that this campaign is about middle America, not the left and the right coasts?” asked Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

Kerry is forced into a no-win choice. He releases a statement disassociating himself from the stars -- and one wonders how much that will cost him in donations.

All that was predictable.

The next part was predictable too. As the story spent another week in the news, Democrats howled with outrage. “The Republicans have gotten away with it again!”

I’m not howling -- at least not at Republicans. Instead, I’d like to howl at my fellow Democrats convening now in Boston. In the Case of the Star-Studded Hate Fest, I’d like to congratulate Republicans on a nice play. The only thing that frustrates me is that Democrats never try the same thing.

Lately the phrase “wedge issue” has become synonymous with only the kind of divides that Republicans exploit. But properly understood -- historically understood -- the phrase is politically neutral. The meat at the joints of the Republican coalition is tender too, more tender than it has been in any time in recent memory. It is past time for Democrats to begin aggressively exploiting that.

Republicans are skilled at reaching into the distant past of Democratic candidates to stage their melodramas. Democrats wouldn’t have to go back far at all. Take something President Bush said in a 1993 Houston Post article: Heaven is open only to those who accept Jesus Christ.

An aggressive campaign by Kerry and the Democrats would pressure Bush to explain whether he still believes that. As it happens, Bush has an answer: Billy Graham told him not to “play God.” But thereby hangs the wedge.

Put the issue in Bush’s face again, forcing him -- Chop! -- to choose whether to offend one party segment or another. Republican voters who believe you have to be Christian to go to heaven, and want their president to believe the same, fall to the right side of the hatchet. Moderate Republicans, who like Bush for his tax policies but are embarrassed to be associated with intolerance, fall to the left.

Like the affirmative-action-affirming African Americans versus affirmative-action-reviling white ethnics, or environmentalists versus rural hunters. Once they were all in one happy Democratic family. Then came the Republican ax, aimed assiduously at the party’s most tender joints.

The problem is that no force in the Democratic Party seems to be probing the architecture of the Republicans in this way: figuring out which of its bulkheads lean most precariously against another, what cracks lay bare its weakening structural integrity at the foundation.

There are plenty. Here’s one:

Family-owned manufacturing companies have always been the bedrock of the Republican coalition -- and its most reliable donors. They’re wobbly now. “I’m very conservative,” a factory owner in Rockford, Ill., told me. “Always voted Republican. But I’m extremely concerned with what I hear from this current administration.”

He’s disgusted at how Republicans always side with giant corporations, like Wal-Mart, that ruthlessly run U.S. plants out of business with their unsustainable obsession with radical cost-cutting among suppliers, devastating communities like Rockford.

Another Rockford manufacturer told me that a Democratic presidential candidate “who steps forward and says we’re going to make manufacturing a priority in this country” would get a $2,000 donation from him. Some habitual Republican voters on his shop floor mentioned the same reasons for switching to the Democrats.

The retreat of manufacturing in the United States, or fair compensation for low-skill jobs, should be turned into a political disaster for Republicans. Force Bush into the no-win choice: Chop! Are you with Wal-Mart or are you with the U.S. manufacturers that Wal-Mart is putting out of business?

Another potential wedge: the Republican coalition’s self-made businesspeople who pride themselves on their expertise, frugality, deep-seated competence -- and who would never run their businesses the way, say, Republicans have run the occupation of Iraq.

Where are the Democratic National Committee press releases embarrassing Bush into releasing information on how the self-made and competent have been shunted aside for government contracts by the cronied-up and incompetent? And where is the Democratic outreach to the proud business owners left behind? Chop!

Turning the owners of factories and small businesses into Democrats -- it sounds a bit absurd. But Karl Rove would understand. Such daring is his daily bread. “But do you weaken a political party, either by turning what they see as assets into liabilities and/or by taking issues they consider to be theirs and raiding them?” Rove asked rhetorically in an interview with the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann, discussing his stratagems to turn Latinos and African Americans into Republican straight-ticket voters. A “boyish look of pure delight spread across Rove’s face” as he answered: “Absolutely!”

But Democrats can be timid beasts. They like to win elections by attracting just enough “swing voters” to nose the party over the 51% line -- not to loose wrecking balls against the citadels of the enemy, or even to concentrate much on building a bigger citadel of its own. (Democratic consultants deeply distrust any strategy aimed at working to create a wider permanent base of Democratic loyalists because that would require making commitments that would turn off swing voters.)

It is a tribute that timidity pays to strength -- the strength of ideologically conservative positions that have seemed in the last decade to constitute a juggernaut.

But that strength is only apparent. The very thing that made the Republican Party so formidable in the past -- its ideological aggressiveness -- now threatens its future. Again and again, Republican primaries (the latest being the one to replace retiring Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller) turn on litmus tests on this or that extremist conservative position.

Ripe conditions to wedge off moderates -- those, say, who have no problem with statutes against assault weapons.

What’s more, these days Republicans simultaneously display a ruthless cronyism and electoral eagerness to please that seems to come from not just an ambition to stay in power but an obsession with wielding power absolutely.

Both the cronyism and the pandering, in turn, offend the significant portion of Republicans whose loyalty to the party rests on their sense of its superior idealism.

Ripe conditions to wedge off conservatives -- trade purists, say, disgusted with the steel tariffs.

For those who believe the Republican coalition does harm, it’s time to make the Republican coalition impossible. Then the Democrats can win -- not just this presidential election, but a governing majority for the next generation.