Post Opinion - Columnists

FOR THEIR NEXT PATHETIC PLOY ... By JOHN PODHORETZ

November 22, 2002 -- A SURVEY by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg asked the public which of the two parties does a better job keeping America strong. The Republicans prevailed - by 39 points.

Thirty-nine points.

Maybe that's because the Democrats have made it clear that their fears about the future of the country are focused not on militant Islamists, but on fat, white, mostly Protestant guys who drive SUVs and vote Republican.

That's this week's message from Tom Daschle and the family of Al Gore.

Daschle is (for a little while longer, at least) the second most powerful man in Washington. Al Gore was the vice president of the United States and the recipient of 50 million votes in the 2000 election.

Gore's family and Daschle went on television to claim they were harassed, threatened, disturbed and haunted - no, not by al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but rather by some right-wingers carrying signs and speaking into microphones.

Tipper Gore and her daughters complained to Barbara Walters that protesters outside the vice-president's house during the Florida recount were "organized" by evil Republicans who disturbed her son Albert's study and sleeping time. Kristin Gore said, "We felt sort of like trapped in this, you know, little house with all these people yelling mean things."

I've been in the vice president's house. Maybe by the standards of Versailles it's a little house. By a rational person's standards, it's a mansion. And by the way, those protesters were standing at least a block away from the house, if not farther, separated from the Gores by a fence and about a billion Secret Service agents.

Was it unpleasant for the Gores? Doubtless it was. But why are they still whining about it two years later? Don't they know how pathetic it makes them look?

But the Gore family's whining was nothing compared to Tom Daschle's. On Wednesday, Daschle gave a press conference in which he spun a theory so demented that mainstream media columnist Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post was compelled to ask, "Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws?"

Here's Daschle: "What happens when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren't satisfied just to listen. They want to act because they get emotionally invested. And so, you know, the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically and - on our families . . . Some people . . . [get] energized to go out and hurt somebody."

He said this by way of complaining that politics in the United States has gotten depressingly ugly.

In other words, Daschle thinks it's acceptable to accuse Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners of plotting his death, even as he complains about a supposed decline in the level of public discourse!

You should recall that Daschle's office received one of those milled-anthrax letters that was intended to kill everybody in its vicinity. Daschle was drawing an implicit connection between people who disagree with him and the Democrats and the evildoer(s) responsible for the attempted mass murder of staffers in the Hart Senate Office Building.

In the absence of any actual proof, what Daschle said is not only nuts, but really quite disgusting. And ignorant. As Kurtz rightly notes, Limbaugh is a "mainstream conservative . . . so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their election-night coverage."

What Kurtz means is that Limbaugh's views correlate well with the voting majority inside the Republican Party - he is pro-life, a free trader, a skeptic about environmental fears, opposed to affirmative action and an internationalist on foreign policy. These are opinions with which parts of the mainstream of the Democratic Party do not agree.

Daschle, a politician, is used to being disagreed with. What he's not used to is losing. He and the Democrats lost in part because there is something childish about their obsession with finding scapegoats and bogeymen on which to blame their own failures.

Americans know that what they have seen since 9/11 has been a stunning elevation of American political discourse and a return to seriousness in American politics. But Daschle refused to climb out of the sandbox and become a fully functioning political adult during a time requiring the utmost seriousness from America's politicians.

He paid the price for it. And so will Gore, if he doesn't get out of the sandbox himself.

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2002

Answers

When it comes to national security, some of those Democrats (not to mention a great number of Europeans) remind me of Earnest Hemingway's remark about "little old ladies of both sexes."

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2002

LOL, Peter!

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2002

1O1

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2002

Nutshell, Peter, nutshell! But it's not little old ladies that come to mind. Daschle has always reminded me of those fussy little men who usually live alone and have everything evenly-spaced and at regimental right-angles to other objects. When his cleaning lady moves something (usually a really frou-frou bit of china) a quarter-inch out of alignment, it upsets him for days and he behaves like a little

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2002