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Early LaborThe Democrats debate in Iowa.

By William SaletanPosted Monday, May 19, 2003, at 5:25 PM ET

This weekend, seven of the nine Democratic presidential candidates appeared together at a "town-hall meeting" in Iowa, hosted by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The candidates were too busy flirting with the union delegates to engage in the mutual sniping we saw in South Carolina two weeks ago. But they did try out a few new tricks. Here's a review of each contestant, in reverse alphabetical order.

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Al Sharpton. Credit him for opening the most interesting line of attack. "There's a misnomer," he said. "We're saying that Bush is cutting taxes. He's shifting taxes. Because when you have to pay more money for mass transit, when you have to pay more money for sales tax, that's a tax on working-class people. … Taxes have gone up all over this country." Other candidates picked up this refrain and extended it to Medicaid. It's a tricky argument, since Bush's fingerprints aren't on state and local tax hikes. But if voters start to make the connection, Bush could lose his image as a tax cutter.

Carol Moseley Braun. Her platform isn't catching on, so she's advertising her gender. Here's how she began her closing statement: "When reporters and other people ask me, 'What makes you different than the other candidates?' I have traditionally just responded with an answer about the economy or taxes or security or diplomacy or civil liberties—an answer about a program. But the fact of the matter is that the thing that makes me different is really the most obvious: I am a woman, and we do things differently. Women focus in on the harmony and security of the whole community."

Whoa. The idea that women are fundamentally different from men, especially in their preoccupation with harmony, is a major reason why many people are reluctant to vote for a woman. Is this a message female candidates want to send after 9/11?

Dennis Kucinich. Talk about the zeal of a convert. Three years ago, Kucinich's voting record earned a zero rating from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Now he's demanding a pro-choice litmus test: "It's going to be important for the next president of the United States to tell the American people that he or she will cause any appointee to have to answer on the question of Roe v. Wade, that there must be a litmus test on this question, and that no one should be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States unless they are ready to keep Roe v. Wade in place and protect a woman's right to choose."

Really? Which of the 20 pro-life votes Kucinich cast in 1999 and 2000 does he now repudiate? And why should we believe him?

Bob Graham. He wins the Bob Dole Award for referring to oneself in the third person. ("Bob Graham is the most electable candidate.") But the headline is Graham's escalating accusations of deceit in the war on terror. He charged that Bush "has engaged in a cover-up of important information that will tell the American people what happened before 9/11, what's happened since 9/11, and who has yet to be held accountable for 3,000 deaths." The good news: Graham is no longer boring. The bad news: He's starting to sound slightly unhinged.

Dick Gephardt. He takes the prize for Most Shameless Bribe. To the AFSCME audience: "If you want to give a billion and a half dollars from the federal government to state and local government here in Iowa in the next three years, then I am your candidate."

John Edwards. He has picked up one of Bill Clinton's lines ("I will wake up every morning going to work for working people") and is trying to turn political issues into legal issues. He often boasts of working with John McCain on the patients' bill of rights. On Saturday, he twice proposed a "workers' and shareholders' bill of rights." Why does he make everything into a bill of rights? Because then you need a lawyer to defend it.

Edwards also hammered Bush's pals for having "inherited, not earned" their wealth. He accused them of "hoarding" rather than "sharing" opportunity. The emphasis on inheritance is crucial, because while both Bush and Edwards are rich (in fact, Edwards is probably richer), Bush was born wealthy, and Edwards wasn't. You can see the outlines of a fascinating class-warfare debate taking shape, with Bush ripping parasitic lawyers and Edwards claiming to have "earned" his wealth by "sharing" it with needy clients.

Howard Dean. He held his tongue better here than in South Carolina, but he couldn't resist answering Graham's claim to be from the electable wing of the party. "I'm very proud to be a member of the Democratic wing" of the party, Dean replied. You can tell he's itching for a fight. "You have the power to take this party back," he told the crowd.

There's something profoundly true in Sharpton's critique of Bush's tax cuts. But there's something equally incongruous between that critique, which virtually all the Democrats embraced at this forum, and Dean's longstanding complaint about Bush's "unfunded mandates," which the candidates likewise echoed. If Bush can't give the states mandates without money, why should the Democrats give the states money without mandates? Isn't that what Gephardt, Edwards (who dangled a $50 billion offer), and their colleagues are proposing? If Delaware wants to raise teacher pay, why should Nebraskans foot the bill?

I'm all for aligning funding with mandates. But the deal has to go both ways.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

None of the Democrats, or all of them collectively, seem to be able to find an issue that appeals to the public. I guess it's been too long since we had a decisive victory in a war. It's almost unbelievable that the public would buy the idea that the Iraq war (1) should be fought at all, (2) was justified in terms of a threat to the United States, (3) would improve our standing in the world, (4) wouldn't cost much and (5) was much of an accomplishment. But there it is. The president is making a pretty big deal of a war that did not achieve it's stated objective and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve its secondary objectives. Better yet, he's spinning so the American people actually think it's a good thing to sink our economy further into debt for the benefit of nation building….We're scared of anybody smarter than average, since we view smart people as intellectual sissies. In the past few years, several politicians have had electoral success bragging about how little they knew about government and how little practical experience they had. What's going on there? Are that many of us resentful about being turned down for jobs in favor of someone who was educated and experienced? It will not surprise me at all if the Democrats fail to find an issue. If Americans can shrug off Arthur Anderson, Enron and the California energy manipulation, they can maintain determined indifference to anything. If they buy the idea that large tax breaks for people who earn large incomes will "trickle down" to create jobs for them, it's too late. Add to this the fact that the Democrats will be outspent by at least 3 to 1, and more likely 4 to 1, and you can see an absolute massacre on the horizon. If Bush doesn't get 60% of the vote and a 60 vote majority in the Senate, he's not trying very hard.

--Arlington

(To reply, click here)

Sure the Democrats were throwing money at local and state government workers but only to fund the mandates which generations of Administrations have placed on local and state governments. There is something qualitatively different between unfunded mandates and the alleged Democratic funded non-mandates. First of all there are no funded non-mandates: the Feds have asked state and local governments for years to carry out Federally-ordained tasks. Second, it is Republicans who praise Federalism (yeah remember the Federalist Society where all those conservative legal eagles come from) and decentralized government and yet they are the ones who have piled on unfunded obligations on the states. Think of the recent Education Bill.... let alone the decrees that come forth from the Savonarola at Justice. There is only party right now that represents a hypocrisy so bold it simply catches one's breath.

--child_of-_empire

(To reply, click here)

…The Democrats claim is that the war on terror has been a failure, and it is all President Bush's fault. Well let's take a look at their claim. First and foremost, the Democrats have no fix for the terrorist crisis, and never will….As the party in power, the Democrats had their opportunity under the Clinton Administration. That administration ignored the deaths of hundreds of American around the globe, who died at the hands of terrorist. They took no action to address these issues from a position of force, and ignored two opportunities to have bin Laden handed to them. What they did do was to reduce defense and intelligence spending to build a surplus on the backs of the wage earners, while stoking those who threatened America. During the Clinton years Saddam Hussein was allowed to thumb his nose at the world, develop weapons of mast destruction, kill thousands of his own people, throw out weapons inspectors, and ignore every UN resolution attached to his defeat over 10 years ago…As for North Korea, Clinton again had his hands in that failure. Korea became a nuclear power under the Clinton Administration. Pakistan and India also became nuclear powers, and developed the means to deliver those weapons, under Clinton's auspices….Blaming the Bush Administration for the recent bombings in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Israel is further proof of how vulgar the Democratic lies can be, and how low they will stoop to grab at power…the Democrats have been positioning themselves for two years in hopes of another 9/11-type attack. Thank God, and our president's attention to this crisis that it hasn't happened. This makes no difference to the Democrats. They use the bombings in other parts of the world as the basis for their argument that the war on terror is failing. Is it that Democrats care more about themselves and their positioning for the 2004 elections than they care about the security of the nation and that of our allies? Their action and words show they do.

--Terpfan

(To reply, click here)

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