Posted on 2-4-2002

The Evil Of Two Lessers
By Frank Rich

Such is the torpor of the Democrats these days that Mr. Gore's shaving of
his beard is what passes for a galvanizing party event worthy of national
polls (62 percent were pro-shave) and desperate '04 prognostication on CNN.
Even the Democrats' rare legislative victory, the passage of the campaign
finance bill, was robbed of its glory when the party chairman, Terry
McAuliffe, almost simultaneously announced a record soft-money donation of
$7 million from the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" mogul, not to mention a
spring Apollo Theater fund-raiser at which Bill Clinton will be paired with
Michael Jackson, fresh from his photo op at Liza Minnelli's wedding.

If the Democrats stand for anything in a time of rapidly expanding war,
it's not clear what it is. Hours before the Passover massacre in Netanya,
President Bush could assert that the latest diplomatic foray by Gen.
Anthony Zinni was "making very good progress" with little worry that any
Democratic leader would challenge him. The incoherence and indolence of the
Bush "policy" in the Middle East, which kept General Zinni out of the
region for three months of violent meltdown and ultimately rendered Dick
Cheney a supplicant to Yasir Arafat, has been more forcefully dissected by
conservatives like George Will than anyone in the administration's
opposition. At home, the Democrats can't even offer a serious alternative
to the Bush budget for the simple reason that they helped give away the
store by abetting the administration's mammoth tax cut last summer and made
no legislative push for even partial rollbacks after the fiscal world
changed on Sept. 11.

The explanations for this fecklessness start, of course, with the
president's poll numbers. Democrats are so intimidated by them that a
recent open memo co-written by James Carville found hope that Mr. Bush was
"falling back to earth" in a survey showing that his approval rating had
tumbled from 82 percent in December to a March low of . . . 75. Compounding
the Democrats' fear of a popular president is the Republicans' calculated
rollout of a strategy branding anyone who questions the administration as
"giving aid and comfort to our enemies" (the phrase actually used by Tom
Davis of Virginia, the head of the G.O.P.'s House campaign committee).

This strategy was codified by Karl Rove in a January speech to the
Republican National Committee inviting his party to politicize the war in
an election year because Americans "trust the Republicans to do a better
job" of "protecting America." But the impugning of the opposition's
patriotism began only two months after Sept. 11, when the Family Research
Council ran ads in South Dakota likening Tom Daschle to Saddam Hussein
because the Senate majority leader had opposed oil drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. In late February, when Mr. Daschle raised a few
mild, common-sense cavils about the next stage of the war, Trent Lott fired
back, "How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are
fighting our war on terrorism?" Since then, President Bush's image and
voice have graced negative TV and radio ads in which firefighters and flags
are used as props and incumbent Senate Democrats are demonized as partisans
who will "put their interests ahead of national interests."

Such tactics are sufficiently ugly that two Republican senators who, unlike
Mr. Lott, didn't take deferments during Vietnam, John McCain and Chuck
Hagel, were moved to defend Mr. Daschle's right to question war policy
after the minority leader's attack. So was another Vietnam vet, Colin
Powell. But except for a speech given in New Hampshire by John Kerry, a
presidential candidate inoculated against charges of treason by his own
Vietnam heroism, no Democrat has articulated a muscular alternative wartime
political vision to the president's. As Nicholas Lemann reports this week
in his compelling New Yorker account of the White House run-up to a planned
removal of Saddam, the administration is now using Sept. 11 "as the
occasion to launch a new, aggressive American foreign policy that would
represent a broad change in direction rather than a specific war on
terrorism." Where is the debate?

It's an index of the general sheepishness of Democratic leaders that such
sporadic tough talk as there is usually emanates by default from either the
clownish Mr. McAuliffe or the cranky Senate octogenarians Robert Byrd and
Ernest Hollings. It's a measure of how compromised leading Democrats are by
their own ties to Enron , Global Crossing and the accounting industry that
the heavy lifting in pursuing Mr. Cheney's secret energy task force and the
dubious Enron dealings of the secretary of the Army, Thomas White, has
often fallen to the House's Henry Waxman, who doesn't have the power to
call his own hearings.

As for Mr. Gore, America's "president in exile," in the hopeful formulation
of the best-selling populist Michael Moore, his most pointed remarks are
served up to rich paying customers at fund-raisers. Our country has seen
more spirited political back-and-forth over the merger of Hewlett-Packard
and Compaq and the factual verisimilitude of "A Beautiful Mind" than it has
over a $48 billion defense-budget increase (itself larger than the entire
defense budget of any other nation) or our uncertain policy for stabilizing
Afghanistan so that the victory by Mr. Bush and our armed forces over the
Taliban isn't usurped once more by Al-Qaeda-breeding chaos.

Trent Lott did nail his adversaries correctly on one score. "When you don't
have anything substantive to talk about," he said, "you start talking about
process or how you need more information." This fits the Democrats' one
bold but almost substance-free stand of late — the threat to subpoena Tom
Ridge if he won't formally testify before Congress about what he's up to as
director of homeland security. Would Mr. Ridge really have much to say even
if he did testify? His biggest function seems to be to supply gags to
late-night comics with his color-coded alert system. The man who has by far
the most clout over domestic security (and much else) is John Ashcroft, who
continues trying to grab authority from other agencies (from the Treasury
Department to the Federal Trade Commission), not to mention
extra-constitutional power, with even less resistance from Democrats than
they mustered against his appointment in the first place.

Last week, in a typical stroke of grandstanding designed to deflect us from
his stalled anthrax investigation and other hapless efforts to find
terrorists within our borders, the attorney general announced that he would
haul in thousands more men for questioning. He hopes we'll forget that his
previous dragnet produced no Sept. 11-related arrests and, according to
officials consulted by USA Today, "little usable intelligence about
terrorism."

Mr. Ashcroft couldn't even find half of the nearly 5,000 subjects he
intended to interview in that previous roundup, but not until there was
universal outrage this month over the I.N.S.'s posthumous granting of visas
to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers did he decide "to move up [the] timetable"
for the agency's reform (as a Justice Department official delicately put
it). This week Mr. Ashcroft made yet another move that puts his own
political posturing ahead of the war on terrorism by seeking the death
penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui. Few legal experts believe that the courts
will uphold a death sentence for an indirect participant in the attacks
(Mr. Moussaoui was already in jail on Sept. 11), but by overreaching anyway
Mr. Ashcroft has given the French government grounds to withhold evidence
needed to prosecute the case.

It isn't treason for a party out of power in wartime to talk about these
matters. If anything, it's the Democrats' patriotic responsibility not just
to hold up their end of the national dialogue over the war's means and
ends, but to say where they want to take the country in peace. Yet now that
they've capitulated on issues ranging from fuel-economy standards to gun
control, the sum of a Democratic social vision these days often seems to
have dwindled down to a prescription drug program for Medicare patients.
For the party itself, however, nothing short of a spine transplant may do