Why the Democrats Are All Boxed In

We have reached a moment of transcendent weirdness in American politics and perhaps a defining moment in the 2004 presidential campaign. In Washington last week, Newt Gingrich and the AARP--who battled each other over old-age entitlement spending in the 1990s--joined the White House in support of a new $400 billion Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Odder still, the Wall Street Journal's ultraconservative editorial page opposed the bill, as did ultraliberal House leader Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy and most of the Democrats running for President. This, after a decade of Democrats pleading for just such a benefit and lambasting Republicans for blocking it. This, in the same week that Tom Daschle and George Bush joined forces to support the fetid enormity of a $31 billion energy bill, which was quickly dubbed the Hooters and Polluters Bill, since it funded, among many other things, construction of an energy-efficient Hooters restaurant in Shreveport, La. This, in the same week that Massachusetts moved toward legalization of gay marriage.

Confused? Overwhelmed? Appalled? Yes, yes and yes. This was an awful week for the Democrats, who are likely to lose--politically--on all fronts. And it was a shameful week--substantively--for the Bush Administration.

The political equation is obvious. The President will be able to say the Democrats opposed prescription drugs for the elderly whether the Medicare bill passes or not (just as he campaigned in 2002 saying the Democrats blocked Homeland Security because they wanted labor-protection provisions in the bill). The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the energy bill, which Senators of both parties managed to stop, perhaps temporarily, last Friday. The President can still say, "We proposed energy 'reform'; the Dems opposed." Not many Americans will scour the fine print. As for gay marriage, my guess is that Bush will remain above the fray. The issue is too raw--and his Vice President has taken the same position as most Democrats have. But Bush will benefit nonetheless from the anguish and agitation on the religious right, which will use the ruling to invigorate turnout among Christian conservatives.

The week's events illuminate a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans on domestic policy. The Democrats are boxed into complicated and unpopular positions because they tend to stand on principle--although the principles involved are often antiquated, peripheral and, arguably, foolish. The Republicans, by contrast, have abandoned traditional conservatism to gain political advantage (with the elderly, for instance) or to pay off their stable of corporate-welfare recipients. The Medicare bill contains large gifts to pharmaceutical manufacturers; the energy bill is a $23.5 billion bequest to traditional-energy producers, with additional billions worth of free-range pork tossed in. "This is classic machine politics, the sort of thing we used to do," said a prominent Democrat. Hence the Wall Street Journal's opposition to both bills. After all, Bush is running such huge deficits that they might imperil the prospect of endless tax cuts--and even "increase pressure to raise taxes to pay for" these new programs, the editors noted.