During the last quarter century, many journalists have portrayed the Democratic Party as an uneasy mix of pragmatic moderates, unrealistic liberals and stubborn leftists. With attention now turning to the party’s next presidential nomination, such media themes will soon be surging again.
Midway through the sixth year of the Clinton presidency, Al Gore is the party’s heir apparent. Most of the Washington press corps seems to like the vice president, who blends mild social liberalism with fierce loyalty to corporate power. Generally speaking, he’s their kind of guy.
Sen. Paul Wellstone is not their kind of guy. While running for a second term in 1996, he voted against the cruel welfare “reform” bill that President Clinton pushed into law. Commentators quickly wrote Wellstone’s political obituary. Back home in Minnesota, his Republican foe denounced “Senator Welfare.” But Wellstone — with extensive grass-roots support — defied the gods of mass media and won re-election to the Senate.
Today, Paul Wellstone is saying that he wants to run for president in 2000. And you can almost hear the mainstream pundits sharpening their knives.
A classic sequence of media spin is probable if Wellstone goes ahead with a presidential campaign: First, he can’t win. Then, if he makes headway in early primaries and caucuses, he shouldn’t win. And if a lot of voters keep rejecting that assessment, then the hue and cry will be that his nomination would wreck the Democratic Party.
Several weeks ago, writing about a possible Wellstone race, syndicated columnists Ben and Daniel Wattenberg scoffed that the senator’s distinguishing political characteristics include the fact that he is “antiquely” in favor of federal jobs programs.
But thoroughly modern pundits may not denigrate the value of “message candidates” — at least during the he-can’t-win phase. “Their circuit rides bring fresh ideas, new voters and new activists into the system,” the neo-conservative Wattenbergs exult. “In fact, such candidacies may have replaced third parties as the safety valve of American politics. More voters feel represented, fewer feel alienated.”
That sort of backhanded praise for a long-shot presidential campaign is meant as a fleeting pat on the head. But it may actually point to a drawback of progressive efforts to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
The purpose of fighting for genuine political change and an end to corporate dominance, after all, is not to make more voters “feel” represented. In the high places where key decisions are made, with so many profound consequences, we should be represented.
In the continued absence of real representation, it might not be an improvement if “fewer feel alienated.” In a country where huge gaps are widening between the rich and the rest of us — in terms of money and power — we need major transformations of economic structures, not safety valves.
But when presidential campaigns heat up, we hear plenty of specious media talk about “special interests.”
In mediaspeak, the special interests usually include unionized workers, African Americans, low-income people and seniors. Yet Wall Street and large corporations are presumed to represent the national interest.
In this media context, any politician who fights the power of the two-party system can expect to be depicted as an interloper.
Ten years ago, in the sweltering summer heat of Atlanta, I spoke with people who had come to the Democratic National Convention from all over the country as delegates for Jesse Jackson. Earlier in 1988, during the primaries, Jackson had won 7 million Democratic votes, about 30 percent of all ballots cast. But media coverage often went to great lengths to portray Jackson as a party-crasher, intruding where he didn’t belong.
At the ’88 convention, where Michael Dukakis prevailed, Jackson urged that the platform call for freezing taxes on the middle class and poor while only hiking taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Journalists routinely described it simply as a plan for higher taxes. When the Jackson plank went down to defeat, many pundits hailed a victory over “special interests.”
Now, as Paul Wellstone hits the national campaign trail — speaking about the imperative need to provide all Americans with “a good education, good health care and a good job” — he may not appeal to elites. But a lot of other people will be listening.
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Ooops Department: Last month, in a column about “Dollars Per Vote” (the amount of money a candidate spends for each vote received), I wrote that in the 1996 general election, “the man who finished fourth in the presidential balloting, Ralph Nader, opted to cap his campaign expenditures at $5,000 and ended up with 581,000 votes.” But I made the mistake of citing only a preliminary tally of ballots cast for him. The official, final results show that Nader actually received 685,128 votes nationwide. So, Nader spent about seven-tenths of a penny per vote. Compare that to the “DPV” totals of the men who ran ahead of him in the ’96 presidential race: Bill Clinton, $1.36; Bob Dole, $1.63; Ross Perot, $3.67.
