The Election That Nobody Won: American Politics & the Crisis of Strategy (page 1 of 2)
By Carl Davidson
Cy.Rev Managing Editor

The stalemated 2000 U.S. presidential election has cast a public spotlight on all the strategic and tactical weaknesses of all the political forces concerned.

It was truly an election that nobody won. To be sure, George W. Bush is now the legal president; but because of his strategic failures and the strategic failures of all the other prime players, the Bush presidency will lack legitimacy for the period ahead.

Strategy is one of the most crucial matters in politics. Success or failure here is a measure of one’s ability, first, to take an accurate measure of the overall circumstances and, second, to make an accurate and fruitful determination of adversaries and allies in each successive set of circumstances. As Alvin Toffler recently put it, any political player who doesn’t have a strategy is really a pawn in someone else’s strategy.

So how did our political players in this election measure up on their strategies? Here’s a quick review of the main points:

The Gore Campaign. The neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council was the inner core of Vice President Al Gore’s campaign. Its strategy has been, for several years, to distance itself and the Clinton-Gore team from the party’s traditional progressives, with the aim of uniting the country's political center and winning over elements of the right.

By trying to marginalize the left Democrats, however, the DLC ignored the crucial role of what can be called the critical force in building broad coalitions. Critical forces are insurgent constituencies that not only raise their own issues, but also pose broader questions against a main adversary that can help mobilize the more passive and static constituencies aligned with them. The Democrat’s left progressives, especially among African Americans, have played this militant minority role in winning earlier mass campaigns.

This race was different. This conscious push to the center, explained the Aug. 15 Christian Science Monitor, seen in Gore's choice of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, has distracted (if not alienated) many activist Democrats. Senator Lieberman is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a pro-business group (of which Clinton also is a leading figure) that has nudged the party rightward in recent years.

One example of this trend on the party's left wing: The congressional Progressive Caucus, a 53-member group of Democrats, got slapped down at the recent drafting of the party's platform.3:23 AM Among the group’s defeated proposals were those that would have limited the president's ability to negotiate trade agreements, raised pay and benefits for low?wage workers, and expanded government?funded healthcare.

They talk about a big tent, grumbled Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D) of Ohio, a member of the Progressive Caucus. But this tent just got a bit smaller.

After spending years criticizing and dismissing the traditional progressive constituencies, Blacks, labor, feminists, greens, the DLC at the last moment expected these same activists to turn on a dime and mobilize the full strength of all those who supposedly had nowhere else to go. Some progressives responded to the call, but many others either stayed home or campaigned for Nader. One indicator: the overall voter turnout this year was about 50 percent, compared to 55 percent in 1992 when Clinton ran against Bush the elder.

“I don’t like that the DLC gets it all”, said Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect, summing up the new relation of forces in the Democratic Party, “and Gore ends up being the left wing of the ticket.”

The DLC’s policy of “distancing” its candidate from African-Americans continued even into the month-long battle over the Florida recounts and the court decisions that finally decided the election. While one exposure after another revealed GOP efforts to undercount, miscount and otherwise disenfranchise voters in Black precincts, the Gore campaign downplayed these issues and stuck to narrower technical challenges to the vote counting process. At the unprecedented protest by the Black Congressional Caucus at the time of the Congressional approval of the Electoral College vote, not one Democratic Senator could be found to join their ranks.

The Bush campaign. The GOP’s strategy was an attempt to unite the right and far right, win over the center, and defeat the progressives. The critical force for Bush was the militant insurgency around the right-wing Christian Coalition. Its only clear-cut success, however, was isolating and defeating Pat Buchanan and his wing of the Reform Party on the far right.

Bush did make some inroads in winning over the center. What was new was his campaign’s “new diversity” and “compassionate conservatism” repackaging. It made some notable gains among moderate Hispanics and Asians, while expanding the GOP’s “Reagan Democrat” blue-collar white males. In fact, Bush carried a clear majority of white males with less than a college education. (One third of all union members also voted for Bush, a point that should be pondered by AFL-CIO officials blaming Nader for their failures.)

But Bush’s strategy stumbled badly over his overall assessment of the center forces and the “Gender Gap.” The American center, in its majority, simply does not want to jail women for having abortions or to abandon the children in its public schools. In California, for instance, women voted for Gore over Bush by an eighteen percent margin. Sociologist Francis Fukiyama explained it in the November 15 Wall Street Journal:

“Buchanan’s attacks on global trade and his opposition to U.S. military adventures abroad have led some influential voices on the left to wonder whether this is a bargain they could join. Some in the Naderite orbit, for instance, now argue privately that Buchanan will not center his campaign on social issues in the 2000 election, and that a platform based on his corporation?bashing might be worthy of support.”

“With Nader by his side, (Teamster President James P.) Hoffa said that ‘only Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan have stood with the American workers on trade.’ He added, however, that on the broad range of labor issues, union representation, health and safety laws and a host of other issues, Nader is on the side on the union movement, while Buchanan is not.... ‘Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan must be included in the electoral process,’ Hoffa said. “Furthermore, the (Presidential Debate Commission) should hold a debate dedicated specifically to address[ing] workers' issues and the issue of globalization.”