Generally, the people of the streets gravitated to the Democratic Party -- over which, by virtue of age and earning power, they continue to exercise inordinate influence. A "willingness to make tough decisions" -- back to Joe Lieberman -- isn’t a large part of the party’s repertoire.
Stop snickering, Richard Perle.
A virtue of old-plugdom is the ability to remember not just when John Kerry was aligned with Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark but when Perle, now a key Bush counselor on foreign policy, was aligned with the Democrats: specifically with Sen. Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson, the anti-communist hawk on whose staff he served. Neither Jackson nor Perle had the least use for the commies: never wanted other than to put them out of business.
It turned out that Republicans got along with these two Democrats better than their fellow Democrats did. Democrats rebuffed Jackson’s presidential candidacy. Perle, looking for foreign-policy hard-liners to serve, found Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. A different kind of Democratic Party could have hung onto him, but -- well, that’s another story.
Sen. Kerry and Gov. Dean will likely work hard at convincing us they can make the tough post-Sept. 11 decisions. They have some convincing to do. The latest Washington Post-ABC poll has the present commander in chief showing his heels to the whole Democratic field, starting with Lieberman, Kerry and Dick Gephardt, the ex-House minority leader. In politics, things can turn around quickly. And some things don’t turn at all, even after 30 years.