Op-Ed
One War Too Many
Email: 
Share: 
If You Can Keep It
October 18, 2006 - 9:22pmYou hear it all the time. In addition to the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the greater war on terror, our country is fighting another war a little closer to home: the — cue the Ed Wood horror movie music, the flashing lights, the kitchen-made sound effects — CUUULTURE WAAAR!
Right?
Right, according to your friendly neighborhood party pollster. “We have,” Republican pollster-in-question Bill McInturff told us after the 2000 presidential election, “two massive colliding forces. One is rural, Christian, religiously conservative. [The other] is socially tolerant, pro-choice, secular, living in New England and the Pacific coast.”
It sure does sound like a war, doesn’t it? Not one we’re fighting with the terrorists, or with the Ba’athists — but with each other.
Right?
With all due respect to Mr. McInturff, wrong. But, wrong or not, his idea has proven to be one heck of a dragon to slay.
Marty McFly, my good man — the keys to the DeLorean, if you don’t mind.
In 1994, America’s Grand Old Party charged into both houses of Congress on the back of a November tidal wave, taking control of the Senate for the first time since 1986 and the House for the first time since 1954. How did they do it? They promised to bring reform along with them. The Democrats that preceded them, they said, had developed a very unfortunate sense of entitlement. Issues had taken a back seat to keeping a lock on power. “I,” Frank Luntz, another Republican pollster, recently mused in Time, “was involved in the 1994 elections, and I will never forget the arrogance of the Democrats back then, and how they refused to accept the electoral reality facing them.”
Today, the GOP finds itself in an interesting position — exactly where the Democrats were twelve years ago.
Back then, Republicans had the Contract with America, a 10-point plan that they proposed would fix the country and get Congress back on its feet. The success of the document as an electioneering tool was a sure thing. Why? Because Newt Gingrich and the GOP would only allow something to go in the contract if it had broad-based support from the American public and, at the very least, a sixty percent favorability rating. They reached out. And it was Frank Luntz’s job to check those numbers.
“I’m a pollster,” he told reporter Major Garrett in 1995. “I don’t worry about policy. I know what the people want, and I think it’s time the Republican Party starts giving people what they want and stops acting arrogant and saying, ‘This is what you need. We know what’s good for you.’ ”
Looking back, does he think Republicans delivered on their promises? Not quite. “They came to change Washington,” Luntz says today. “Washington won.”
With images of Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, Bob Ney, Curt Weldon, and the rest of the Brady Bunch-gone-bad still dancing in the minds of those Americans with working television sets, it’s hard not to agree with him. If current trends persist, November of 2006 promises to be for Democrats what November of 1994 was for Republicans — a true congressional revolution.
Your humble columnist, however, is not popping the cork on his (non-alcoholic) champagne just yet.
After their rise to power on a distinctly populist agenda, Republicans in later years would abandon the idealism inherent to the Contract with America in exchange for a tried and true political strategy: playing to the base. A vote against the Republican Party, they warned as time went by, would not merely be a vote against the Republican Party. Such a vote, rather, would give control of America over to, in a description only humorist Dave Barry could conjure, “godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.”
Where politicians had once courted the center, leaving the fringes to stay on the fringes, Republicans now wooed the rightest of the right wing, hoping to bring out enough enthusiastic partisans to make up for any disheartened moderates knocked senseless from the sudden jolt sideways. Rather than follow suit, the Democratic Party split into factions still visible today. As organizations like the Democratic Leadership Council urge moderation and a move to the center on one side, blogs like the Daily Kos continue to spring up on the other, their loudest voices calling on Democrats to be as rigidly partisan as their Republican adversaries.
And that, says Stanford Professor Morris P. Fiorina, author of Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, is where the problem begins. As the parties, their devotees, and the candidates they nominate move further and further apart, that leaves Americans — the majority of whom fall somewhere in-between the two — forced to choose between a pair of undesirables.
“Americans,” Fiorina writes, “are closely divided, but we are not deeply divided…. We divide evenly in elections or sit them out entirely because we instinctively seek the center while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes.”
This year, Democratic promises of reform will not be enough. Americans have heard them too many times. Real change in Washington will have to consist of change from the inside out, starting at the party level. Tom DeLay was the king of toe-the-line-or-else politics; Tom DeLay is gone. The last thing America needs is a Tom DeLay who governs from the left.
Our politicians and our political parties must resist calls from self-identified culture warriors to take a stand in a war that the vast majority of Americans have no desire to fight. They must unlearn the politics of holding themselves accountable only to the whim of an unrepresentative partisan base and start using their offices to work for the people rather than towards furthering a minority ideology.
Anything else, and this election, for Democrats, may end up more a reprieve than a revolution.
Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu. If You Can Keep It appears Thursdays.
10/19 opinion piece
Mark! GREAT article! And isn't it interesting that you and I were talking about the great divide less than 24 hours prior to your appearing in print. Nice job. Not only do I like your point of view - I like your writing style. Thanks for sharing this link. I'll be sure to look for your article next Thursday!
See you soon,
Kris