Tough Times for the Dems

Three pieces in the last two days ponder the current state of the parties, especially the Democrats.

First, Tucker Carlson gives some free advice to the Democrats in yesterday's New York Times Magazine. The preppy pundit tells the Democrats to develop a foreign and domestic policy and to stop being so humorless. The first two are, shall we say, tall orders. It won't be as easy as the Republicans finding tax-cuts and anti-communism from Goldwater's defeat until Reagan's victory, as Carlson suggests, because the Republicans were always better anti-communists than the Democrats and the Republicans had Johnson's and Carter's brutal domestic failures to help them find tax cuts. As far as loosening up goes, it is difficult to imagine the party that opposes cigarette smoking with such zeal becoming Kennedy-ratpack cool again.

In today's Wall Street Journal are two pieces wondering about the future of the Democrats. The first by Peggy Noonan discusses abortion as the glue that holds the otherwise disparate Democratic party together and as the destructive force that may ultimately claim the party as its final victim. Noonan seems to sense a changing tide in how we think about abortion, a tide that bodes ominously for the Dems.

Finally, Robert Bartley sees the dawning of a new Bush Establishment. Bush, a traitor to his Yale, Skull and Bones, and Harvard roots in the way that FDR was to his, has founded a new establishment as FDR did. The new estblishment is moral as much as political, and it speaks in accents foreign to Prescott and Poppy.

Clearly times are tough for the Dems. Republicans should keep their foot on the pedal, however. A couple of more bad quarters of GDP growth and W. will look more, not less, like Poppy. Moral accents aside, "one-termer" means the same thing in Greenwich as in Waco.