The Democrats' new red meat

Even before Howard Dean began his stump speech, before he thrashed President Bush for giving tax cuts to "Ken Lay and the boys at Enron" (a jab he repeated three times), Dave Pitz, a retired teacher sitting in the audience in Newton, Iowa, had the message down cold. "Bush has become the CEO of corporate America," Pitz told me matter-of-factly. A central question of the 2004 campaign is whether enough voters agree with Pitz that >Bush is a fiscally reckless president devoted not to them but to wealthy special interests. If the issue is framed that way and the frame sticks, a responsible populist message could work, though it would be the first time in modern political history that it did so. The Democratic candidates >differ little on domestic issues. Theirs is essentially a contest to see which one has the best variation on that theme.

In 2000, Al Gore ran under the slogan "The people versus the powerful." But the Democrats held power, so the argument didn't resonate. This time the corporatist GOP runs Washington and the M.B.A. president seems to make every decision -- from the environment to prescription drugs to immigration -- according to the specifications of industry. The Teddy Roosevelt idea, accepted by both parties for a century, was that government should provide a check on big-business interests. Now, says John Edwards, the White House is "married" to those interests. The "creed of greed," says John Kerry, lets the lobbyists actually write the bills. Dick Gephardt says Bush is such a sellout he "makes me nostalgic for Ronald Reagan." Forget mad cow. Democrats have found a new kind of red meat that their audiences devour.

The reason this goes down so well is that -- like some of the old conservative red-meat charges against liberalism -- it's largely true. Bush's allegiance to entrenched interests (which are, not coincidentally, his biggest political contributors) is the only thread connecting everything in his domestic policy. The failure to stand up for the wider public interest against assaults on the environment is what Gore meant last week when he accused Bush of being a "moral coward."

There's a scene in Ron Suskind's new book, "The Price of Loyalty," that illuminates the point in another context. In a 2002 White House meeting, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is arguing strongly against a second round of tax cuts for the wealthy. At first, the president seems to agree. "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?" he asks. Karl Rove reminds Bush that he must "stick to principle," and he does. The "principle" to which they have devoted their presidency is that the "top" -- not the middle class or the uninsured or the grandchildren who will shoulder the cost -- go to the front of the line every time.

The Democratic candidates sense an opening here. A new Wall Street Journal-NBC poll shows that for the first time voters think Democrats are roughly as fiscally responsible as Republicans. This might not be saying much, but it means that a potent GOP weapon since the New Deal -- that Democrats can't be trusted with money -- may have to be sheathed this year. Democrats are still vulnerable on the tax-hike charge -- especially Dean and Gephardt, whose plans for total repeal of the Bush tax cut leave them favouring tax hikes for the middle class. But there's new hope inside the party that the deficit -- which has Bush's fingerprints all over it -- can move from dull abstraction with no political bounce to something more concrete and relevant. The winner for best anti-Bush TV ad in the MoveOn.org contest, judged by a celebrity panel, was an imaginative spot showing beleaguered children working to pay off Bush's debt.

This campaign theme, properly executed, paints Bush not just as a CEO president, but as an irresponsible leader with what Dean calls a "borrow-and-spend, credit-card presidency." The challenge is to meld this idea with a harder-edged challenge to the culture of Washington. "We ought to cut these lobbyists off at the knees," Edwards says in his stump speech. This is not the kind of thing that Bill Clinton or Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale or Jimmy Carter or John F. Kennedy ever said, in part because they were living in eras of Democratic dominance of the machinery of government.

And in part because it rarely works. On one level, populism is doomed: half the population own stocks and the market is back up. Unemployment isn't rampant. Those without a college degree who suffer most don't vote and getting them to the polls has proved futile for Democrats in recent elections. Organised labour is shrinking fast. Everyone wants to be rich.

But the squeeze on the middle class is real and job creation is still nearly zero. Even those who are fully employed know that the balance of power has shifted in this country, and not in the direction of the people. Polls showing that well under 50 percent believe President Bush "cares about people like you" are causing concern in the White House. That's why Bush has begun the year with a "compassion offensive." And it's why Democrats increasingly recognise that their fate lies not just in Iraq, but in a basic sense of fairness and economic justice at home.

(c) 2004, Newsweek Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.