Opinion
The presidential election says a lot about the unequal state of America's two parties
IT IS hard not to become fixated on personalities in the final stages of a presidential campaign. Is George Bush too pig-headed to be trusted with another four years? Is John Kerry too much of a flip-flopper? Did Mr Bush's peevish expression in the first debate display his real nature? Or is his folksy charm still preferable to Mr Kerry's Brahmin condescension? But presidential elections are not just tests of the character of the individual candidates. They are also tests of the character of the parties they lead. And this year the two parties present a study in contrasts.
The most obvious concerns momentum. Momentum in the presidential race may shift from day to day, but momentum in the battle to become America's dominant party seems to be largely in the Republicans' direction. Forty years ago, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one. Today they outnumber them by just a few percentage points. Forty years ago the Democrats had a lock on Congress. This November the Republicans have a good chance of retaining control of both the House and the Senate. Forty years ago the Democrats set the political agenda. Today the Republicans are a much more fertile source of ideas on everything from foreign policy to school reform.
A second contrast lies in organisation. The Republican Party seems to be organised like a blue-chip corporation: directed from the top and tightly disciplined. The Democratic Party is much more of an ?adhocracy?: a collection of groupuscules that have come together for the single purpose of winning this election.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the ground war. It is generally agreed that the big prize this year will go to whichever party does the better job of getting its supporters to the polls. To this end, the Republicans have reinvented the traditional political party for the age of suburban sprawl. The party boasts an elaborate hierarchy of activists?state chairmen, county chairmen, precinct captains, local volunteers?who all have a pre-assigned role in a plan laid down in the Bush-Cheney headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. By contrast, the Democrats?ironically, given their opposition to outsourcing?have handed over most of the grunt work of registering and mobilising voters to independent groups such as MoveOn.org and America Coming Together.
This difference is partly a function of campaign-finance law: the Democrats have been much busier exploiting loopholes in the McCain-Feingold legislation to form nominally independent organisations, known as 527s (after part of the tax code). But it has much deeper roots: the Republicans are now much more interested than the Democrats in building up their party.
Mr Bush is one of the most enthusiastic party-builders to have occupied the White House. Several earlier presidents deliberately snubbed their parties: Richard Nixon pursued a strategy of ?lonely victory? in 1972, while Bill Clinton adopted a policy of ?triangulation?, adopting whatever Republican ideas seemed likely to win votes. George Bush senior didn't so much snub his party as ignore it. But his son threw all the prestige of his post-September 11th presidency behind campaigning for congressional Republicans in 2002. He has worked closely with other party-builders on Capitol Hill, particularly Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay in the House and Bill Frist in the Senate.
Meanwhile, the Democrats' party organisation is fraying. For decades the labour unions have provided both shoe leather and organisational glue for the Democrats. But the proportion of the workforce belonging to unions has shrunk from 30% in 1950 to 13% today. Trial lawyers have replaced trade unionists as the party's main paymasters, but they are too few in number (and too busy) to hold the party together in the same way. Women and black groups are also too focused on their own interests. The party was losing ground to single-issue pressure groups even before the 527s came along.
The lesson from Tony Blair
These differences in momentum and organisation make a bigger point: the Republicans have more to gain from a victory in November. Because the election is largely a referendum on Mr Bush, he can claim, if he wins, a clear mandate for his policies?particularly cutting taxes at home and smiting terrorists abroad. If Mr Kerry wins, the only mandate he will have will be for not being George Bush. In 1993, Mr Clinton had a difficult enough time holding his party together despite laying out a compelling vision of a new Democratic Party. The singularly unvisionary Mr Kerry will have to deal not just with the same struggles (for instance, between health-care reformers and deficit hawks) but also with a new civil war between the party's rabid Michael Moore faction and its more sensible Tony Blair wing.
The second reason why the Republicans have more to gain from a victory in November is that they think they can use a second Bush term to turn themselves into America's de facto ruling party. Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, may be exaggerating when he says that ?the Democratic Party is toast? if Mr Bush wins. But the Republicans have put emasculating the Democrats at the very heart of their second-term agenda. They plan to reduce its footsoldiers by contracting out hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, to reduce its income through tort reform (which may slim down the lawyers' wallets) and right-to-work laws (which will allow workers to opt out of union dues). And they plan to boost the number of people who own shares?and hence a stake in the success of the capitalist system?by beginning to privatise Social Security.
The Republican aim is to do to the Democrats what Mr Blair has so successfully done to the Tories in Britain: marginalise them so completely that they degenerate into a parody of a political party. No wonder the Democrats are fighting so hard this year. And no wonder they hate the party-builder in the White House with such a furious passion.
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