Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9412290006
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: G3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THOMAS B. EDSALL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the long term, these forces raise a far more ominous question: Can the Democratic Party survive as a legitimate competitor in a two-party system?
These pressures will severely restrict Democratic strategists seeking to push the party to the center or right. At the same time, such constraints will increase the leverage of those who want the Democratic Party to be a left alliance of minorities, feminists, gays and labor dominated by public-sector employee groups.
More importantly, the power of money, demography and geography, as well as cultural conflict, will interfere with the ability of the Democratic Party to regain credibility with the groups that once stood at its core: the working and middle classes - the essential component of a majority party.
While maintaining an alliance with Americans on the margin, the Democratic Party has alienated middle America, moving far from its New Deal roots as the ally of such groups as European immigrants, Catholic ethnics and organized labor seeking entry to the economic and social mainstream.
Today, the party is increasingly seen by swing voters as seeking to redistribute income from workers to nonworkers. And it is increasingly regarded as a party tolerant of values and programs undermining the two-parent family, while providing unintended but devastating disincentives for codes of personal responsibility as well as the work ethic.
The growing conversion of the South to a Republican bastion represents a loss to the Democratic Party not just of political support and of moderate-to-conservative House and Senate members used to running in biracial constituencies. The loss of the South is a blow to the solar plexus of the Democratic Party as a national party.
Without the South, and facing overt hostility throughout the region, Democratic presidential candidates can only make weakened claims to be fully national figures.
While Democrats are losing credibility as a national party, the GOP is making modest gains in reducing one of its central vulnerabilities: its failure to be a biracial party. The small increases in numbers of Republican black elected officials, including Rep.-elect J.C. Watts, R-Okla., and Boston's new district attorney, Ralph C. Martin II, serve to effectively attack the ``whites-only'' image of the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, pressures pushing the Democratic Party toward the left are likely to be reinforced by changes in the pattern of campaign contributions.
For Democrats, the major moderate-to-conservative sources of cash have been from corporate and trade-association political-action committees. These groups have remained bipartisan in their giving patterns largely because House Democratic leaders used the power of the majority as both a carrot and stick to persuade business PACs that their interests would be served by making Democratic contributions.
Now the power of the majority no longer stands as a club over the business-trade association community. As a result, contributions are likely to fall significantly.
The importance of these financial sources is reflected in the most recent Federal Election Commission reports: From the start of 1993 through June 30, 1994, a total of $30.4 million, or more than half the total amount of PAC money received by Democrats, came from corporate and trade-association committees. These PACs gave far less to Republican candidates, $19.6 million, a balance that is likely to shift radically in 1996.
The effect of this will be ideological, as the loss of business and trade-association PAC support will make Democrats increasingly dependent on labor, especially public-employee unions; private and nonprofit service providers; environmentalists; gays; Hollywood activists; feminist groups; and key immigrant lobbyists.
The 1994 to 1996 shift in financial patterns is likely to be much more abrupt than the steady liberal shift of the House Democratic caucus, which has already been occurring as growing numbers of moderate and conservative Southern Democrats retire or are defeated.
These trends, culminating in the defeat of 1994, will intensify a bitter civil war among Democrats over the ideological direction the party should take to regain competitive strength. Ideological commitments aside, however, there is a growing body of evidence that the 1994 setbacks resulted from angry center-right Democratic voters.
Comparing 1992 to 1994 voting patterns, major losses for the Democrats occurred among white men, especially those with just high-school degrees whose economic futures are highly uncertain. They also took place among white Protestants and among those who see their standard of living declining.
The loss of support from white men - only 37 percent voted for Democratic candidates in '94 - violates a core concept at the heart of the Democratic Party as the party of working people. White men are those experiencing the largest wage declines, the brunt of defense cutbacks and the dramatic attenuation of corporate loyalty.
For such voters, Clinton's message on crime, welfare reform and personal responsibility was overshadowed not only by the ominous moral implications of the Paula Jones and Whitewater controversies, but also by administration policy initiatives: gays in the military, stringent diversity rules in federal appointments and a health-care program viewed by poll respondents as forcing higher costs on the broad middle class in order to cover the uninsured.
In addition, Clinton's failed attempt to win approval in 1993 of a $20 billion economic-stimulus package, and the pervasive charges in 1994 that his crime bill was laden with pork and counterproductive social spending, cost him and his party Election Day support among crucial voting constituencies.
Thomas B. Edsall, a political reporter for The Washington Post, is author of ``Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics.''
The Washington Post
by CNB