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The Three StoogesNancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, March 8, 2006, at 3:30 PM ET
Illustration by Charlie Powell. Click image to expand.

According to the latest CBS News poll, George W. Bush's approval rating hit a personal worst of 34 percent in February, making him the most unpopular president since Nixon during Watergate. Thanks to the Abramoff scandal, confidence in the Republican-run Congress is only two points higher. Such numbers naturally provoke Democratic fantasies about doing in 2006 what Republicans did in 1994, taking both houses in a historic sweep. Conditions seem ripe in many ways. But Democrats do not have a charismatic schemer like Newt Gingrich to lead the way. Instead, they have Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean.

Pelosi is a conventionally liberal congresswoman from San Francisco who serves as House minority leader. The quite conservative Reid, who comes from a small town in Nevada, is the Senate minority leader. Dean, the former Vermont governor who seemed headed for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 until he yodeled in Iowa, is the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Since assuming their positions, the three of them have shown themselves to be somewhere between useless and disastrous as party leaders. Individually, they lack substance and policy smarts (Pelosi); coherence and force (Reid); and steadiness and mainstream appeal (Dean). Collectively, they convey an image of liberal elitism, disarray, and crabbiness.

Pelosi and Reid do deserve credit for getting the Democratic troops in line. Both are former party whips, and since their promotions they've continued to wield the scourge effectively. In Bush's first term, when the too-nice Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt ruled the roost, Democratic defectors let the president pass his tax cuts. In the second term, by contrast, the congressional minority has maintained discipline, winning a few morale-boosting victories and forcing some uncomfortably close votes. Bush was not able to peel off centrist Democrats to negotiate with him on Social Security, which meant a well-deserved defeat for his half-baked privatization plan. But whip work, which emphasizes horse-trading and instilling fear in the rank and file, is poor training for policy-making and message-building. Those are the facilities the institutional Democratic Party sorely lacks at the moment.

Nancy Pelosi epitomizes this problem. To understand her politics, think Huffington Post without the flashes of wit. Here is a typical Bush-bashing, cliché-ridden quote of hers: "The emperor has no clothes. When are people going to face the reality? Pull this curtain back!" Pelosi dismisses people who disagree as hoodwinked or stupid. She's not exactly Hillary Clinton herself, though. A five-minute interview is usually sufficient to exhaust her knowledge on any subject. And she can flop around like a fish. When Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., proposed a pullout, or "redeployment," of U.S. troops from Iraq in November, Pelosi's first reaction was to isolate him. "Mr. Murtha speaks for himself," she said. But after taking a drubbing from left-wing bloggers and her anti-war constituents, she announced that she supported Murtha after all. This shored up her image as Washington's answer to Barbra Streisand, and set up Dick Cheney to paint the Democrats as defeatist and unsupportive of our troops in Iraq.

Reid's flaws are mostly a mirror image of Pelosi's. A Mormon convert who grew up in a working-class family in a small town, he doesn't dabble in Hollywood politics. Reid voted for the Iraq war resolution, and is anti-gun-control, anti-gay marriage, and—most shocking for a Democratic figurehead—anti-abortion. But as a leader, he's colorless and erratic. Most of the time, he's a study in gray, except when he livens it up with a spasm of random aggression. Reid has called Alan Greenspan a "hack," Bush a loser and a liar, and, in one off-the-mark, vaguely racist-sounding rant, charged that Clarence Thomas' opinions were poorly written. (You can criticize Thomas' opinions for lots of things, but Slate's legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, tells me they are quite well written.) After calling for more Supreme Court justices as brilliant as Antonin Scalia, he recommended that Bush nominate his undistinguished flunky Harriet Miers. Moreover, Reid's own pork-barreling and lobbyist-courting suggest that making him majority leader would merely replace the Republican hackocracy in Congress with a Democratic hackocracy. Reid has declined to repudiate contributions from Abramoff-linked Indian tribes, and his own family includes so many lobbyists that after some nasty press coverage, he had to ban them from his office.

Howard Dean is smarter than either Pelosi or Reid and clearly stands for something. Unfortunately, what he stands for in the minds of most people is incandescent rage and upscale socialism. Dean has an unfortunate knack for making himself the issue, even when, as lately, he's trying to maintain a low profile. His injudicious comment about the GOP being the party of white Christians was followed by his statement that "the idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong." Such gaffes lead to endless debate about how Howard Dean is screwing up, rather than about how Bush is screwing up. Building on the work of a DNC pollster, Dean a few months ago took to referring to his party's base as "merlot Democrats." With him and Pelosi in charge, this threatens to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But more important than what the three stooges do wrong is what they can't seem to do at all, namely articulate a positive agenda for reform and change. Voters have grown disenchanted with Bush's mishandling of the war in Iraq and the country's finances, and with the evangelical tilt of many of his policies. But there remains a baseline mistrust of Democrats on security, the economy, and values issues. For a sweep big enough to recover both houses of Congress, the party will almost certainly need an affirmative message as well as a negative one. Democrats need to demonstrate they won't just cut and run from Iraq, that they see security as more than a civil liberties issue, and that their alternative to tax cuts isn't just more spending on flawed social programs and unchallenged growth in entitlements.

Thus far, Pelosi, Reid, and Dean have been literally unable to develop such a national message for the party's congressional candidates. Not just a good message—any message. Their "legislative manifesto," originally promised for November, has been delayed more often than a flight on Jet Blue. When it eventually arrives, expect something benign and insipid. In 1994, Gingrich had the Contract With America. In 2006, Democrats will have another glass of merlot.

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Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.
Illustration by Charlie Powell.
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What in heavens name is Weisberg talking about? Dean's … "gaffe" is not a gaffe. It's an accurate assessment. You cannot point to any other politician who has been more accurate in his assessments of what was going to happen in Iraq.

Moreover, Dean recognizes something DC reporters do not--that mid term elections are local elections, not national elections. He's spent his energy revamping state party structures and finding candidates for almost every race…

And just by the way, why is the story about democrats right now. The republicans are imploding. The small government guys at Cato are dissing the president. George Will left the reservation. Bill freakin' Buckley off the reservation as well, and Bill Kristol is close. There's an outright revolt on the ports issue.

Moreover, Frist is a spineless, rubberstamping tool who has pretty much lost control of his caucus. When something needs to be done, Cheney comes down and takes care of business because Frist has lost his authority. Hastert's a puppet who's lost his puppetmaster. The real story in Washington right now is the humiliation of the Congress and the destruction of the separation of powers.

And the story of Slate's day is that Nancy and Harry don't get along?

--BeowulfSchaeffer

(To reply, click here.)

What Dems should do:

1. Exploit the South Dakota abortion ban. If done right, this will guarantee a Democratic president in 2008. This gambit is sure to backfire, and has even alienated many pro-lifers who see it as too confrontational, too soon.

2. Dubai ports deal. Should be a no-brainer, but the Republicans in Congress are beating the Dems to it, by attaching legislation to block the deal to a package that Dubya won't want to veto. I'm afraid the Dems may have already lost out on this, but here's a way to salvage this. Come up with some legislation that offers more security on our ports. Maybe forbidding ANY foreign country from directly running our ports, or at least forcing them to agree to heavy scrutiny. Expand the powers of the Port Authority while pointing out the door Bush left open.

3. A simple healthcare fix. Sell Medicare policies to anyone who doesn't qualify to receive one for free. Set it up on a sliding scale based on what the person earns. Think of the money Medicare could earn on this, particularly from the self-employed and those with pre-existing conditions that insurance companies won't insure no matter how much they make.

4. Go back to Clinton economics - it's the economy, stupid. Rolling back the tax cuts again is a no-brainer. Just be sure to remind people who got those tax cuts to begin with. It sure wasn't you and me. Also, be sure to explain that the war, Katrina, etc. has to be paid for, that we've amassed tons of debt thanks to Bush, and that under his leadership government has grown in size while becoming less effective.

5. Keep some of the old, bleeding heart liberal talk at bay. People probably won't be interested in shoring up relations with Europe (even if we need to, it won't be a priority). Any talk of civil rights needs to focus on not incarcerating innocent AMERICANS. Shut up about Gitmo and Abu Ghriab, yes they're bad but no one in America is going to care about Arabs right now. Do not criticize religion, in fact just don't mention it. If someone brings it up, just say that in America everyone is free to worship as they choose. This is probably a weaker area for Dems than national security, and polls show there's way more religious people than non-religious in America. Remember who voted for Bush in 2004, and DON'T ANTAGONIZE THEM!!!

6. If you can do this last one, you'll have it made. Start planning the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. You know we're going to have to start that anyway, because we've run out of money and we aren't getting enough recruits. Don't say anything about admitting our mistakes, just follow Murtha's suggestion that we've accomplished our mission and it's time to start bringing our troops home. However, DON'T pull troops out of Afghanistan yet, we still haven't caught OBL yet. Pledge to catch this guy, AND remind people that Bush has failed to do so. That should do the trick.

--Ripley

(To reply, click here.)

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