Who Knew That an Elephant's Butt Could Be So Beautiful?

The cover of the current (Oct. 16) issue of Time shows the rear end of an elephant walking away, suggesting that the Foley scandal may finally "spell the end of the Republican revolution." While I can hardly contain myself for hope that this isn't just a lovely dream, I have to say also that I'm beginning to find the eulogies in Time and elsewhere for the supposedly once-great conservative movement somewhat tiresome. In Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, and now Mark Foley, what we have seen in my opinion is no betrayal of conservative ideals, but the fullest flowering of what the movement beginning with Reagan himself was really all about in the first place. Too bad the jackass waiting in the wings promises to be such an uninspiring replacement.

Unlike Karen Tumulty in Time, I would not cite "fiscal responsibility, national security and moral values" as the defining principles of the conservative movement in any sense other than as propaganda. I would not call it either "responsible" or "moral," for example, to consistently favor economic policy which translates directly into a widening gap between rich and poor both within the United States and globally. Throughout the boom years of the 1980s and '90s, as Republicans in particular sought to cut funding for education, health care, and other social programs, the expanding wealth of their friends in big business was matched by skyrocketing homelessness on the streets of American cities, hunger and instability abroad. As for "national security," it seems worth considering that this same trend toward increasing global inequality since the earliest years of the "Reagan Revolution" may in fact be among the root causes of the state of global conflict we're experiencing now, in addition to a Middle East policy followed by both Republican and Democratic US administrations but advocated with particular fervor by religious conservatives who are overwhelmingly Republican. If it is true, as conservative columnist George F. Will observed in The Washington Post Oct. 6, that the Foley affair is "a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries," it isn't simply because the Democrats are hateful and mean-spirited, as many Republican leaders would have us believe. It's because the Republicans deserve it.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have shown themselves to be a far-from-distinguished alternative. Throughout the present administration they have offered little in the way of meaningful opposition, choosing instead to harass the administration around such made-for-TV issues as the proposed port deal with the United Arab Emirates earlier this year—a great opportunity to make a lot of noise about nothing. Worse yet is the party's conservative tilt in the attempt to win over disaffected Republicans, currently led by Hillary Clinton, a rather sad previous version of which we saw in John Kerry lumbering about the hills of the Midwest with the local NRA and pretending not to understand French. Just as they did around the port deal, Democrats have joined with xenophobe Republicans in scapegoating immigrants and calling for a militarized border with Mexico. Through their failure to challenge the policy status quo on the Middle East, the Democrats are in my view as responsible as the Republicans for anti-American rage in the Arab world today. The Democrats might not have made the monstrous error of invading Iraq, but otherwise it seems unlikely that they would be handling the broader range of Middle East issues in any fundamentally different way—certainly not if Hillary Clinton or John Kerry were in the White House. From her gushing support of the Palestinians as First Lady, Clinton has switched as senator and prospective presidental candidate to an opportunistic position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is well to the right of the Bush administration, such as by blatantly snubbing the Palestinians on her most recent visit to the Middle East and supporting the Israeli separation wall that even Bush has declined to endorse (all of which suggests to me that she is far less concerned about the welfare of either Israelis or Palestinians than she is about Hillary Clinton getting elected). During the years of her husband's administration, inequality grew in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom just as it had under Reagan and Bush I. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, as salaries rose for the Clintons' high-tech friends in Silicon Valley, so did the numbers of homeless on the streets of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and Berkeley, a problem greatly ignored both by the Democratic administration in Washington and by state and local Democratic administrations here in California.

While I would most heartily welcome a sweeping defeat for the Republicans in the coming midterm election as well as in 2008, therefore, I would also like to see the Democrats persuaded to work a little harder at proving themselves an alternative that progressives can take seriously. One very useful example of such persuasion, I think, is the punishment dealt conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman by progressives in Connecticut. Another might be the threat of a progressive voter migration to third parties such as the Greens, or "selective" voting rather than voting strictly along lines of party loyalty. For example, while I plan in the November 2006 election to vote for my Democratic US Representative, Barbara Lee, on the basis of her solidly progressive voting record in Congress, I will be voting against conservative Democrat Dianne Feinstein for the Senate in favor of her Green Party challenger, Todd Chretien. I don’t expect Chretien to actually beat Feinstein, but I do think that a large number of angry progressive votes against her would be a good thing for Feinstein to see.

The Democratic leadership needs, I think, some firm encouragement to spend a little less time pandering to conservatives and a little more time listening to the concerns of progressives whose votes they also need. We already have one conservative party in America; we don’t need two. In particular, they should be pressed to explain precisely what change we can expect to see from them in terms of actually narrowing the gap between rich and poor both nationally and globally, and in terms of a more just American policy on the Middle East and around the world.

Given such persuasion, perhaps we can avoid simply exchanging an elephant’s butt for a jackass.

http://www.mceades.com