Shall we not gloat?
Since I left right before the election, I didn’t get a chance to say much about the results. Needless to say, I’m pleased — though anyone who thinks the Democrats will get the message is going to be disappointed. They will not abandon their pro-abortion stand or any other distinctive position; the election of Rep. Pelosi as house minority leader is a harbinger of the left-wing tack they’re going to take. Look, abortion is one of the reasons the Democratic Party exists today — and just because it hurts them nationally and in certain states doesn’t mean they’re going to abandon it or go soft.
Political parties subsist on votes, money, and energy. The hard-line pro-abortion politics of the Democrats brings votes in the northeast and in major cities. It attracts money from upper-middle-class citizens, especially women, and they contribute tons of energy as well. Guns are an analogous issue for the Republicans. Even if gun control is temporarily a popular issue, as it is after a gun-related mass murder, it makes no sense for the Republicans to abandon their strong support for the second amendment. They’d lose the energy of committed activists, as well as people who support gun rights but don’t belong to the NRA or make political contributions. They would jeopardize their ascendance in the Midwest, South, and West. That’s why the Republicans might support a weak gun-control measure like the Brady Bill, so they can appear “moderate” to weakly committed voters, but they wouldn’t support a gun-registration bill or a ban on handguns.
That being said, it would make a lot of sense if the Democrats ran someone who was truly moderate on the Dems’ signature issues. Let’s say the candidate supported a ban on partial-birth abortion and sex-selection abortions, plus he favored parental consent for minors, but was “pro-choice” under other circumstances. He might strongly affirm the second amendment, but say that cheap handguns have no place in our society; he’d favor expanding IRA accounts but would leave Social Security alone; he would favor raising taxes on the “most fortunate Americans” but not “working Americans”; etc.
The candidate I’m describing would stand a strong chance of winning in the general election. A charismatic, truly moderate Democrat would give Republicans a lot of trouble in 2004, but it won’t happen because of the primary process. In order to get the nomination in the first place, a candidate has to convince his own party that he represents them. The people who vote in primaries are the ones who would walk through fire to support their party, and the Democratic faithful are probably going to remain enraged until those primaries happen in 14 months. They can’t believe that they’ve been trounced by the barely articulate boob in the White House, and they’re going to want an old-fashioned tax-and-spend big-government social liberal as their candidate, or the closest thing they can find. They aren’t hungry enough for victory to swallow their principles, as they were for Bill Clinton in 1992 and ’96. Given all that, they have to run a pro-abortion liberal next time around. Count on it.
I read that President Bush said that although Republicans were victorious last week, “This is no time to gloat.” I agree that gloating is low-class and probably sinful, so that means it’s never a good time to gloat. I promise I won’t do it. However, after seeing the humiliation on the faces of Tom Daschle and Terry McAuliffe, I have to ask: if now isn’t a good time to gloat, then what is?