Posted on: Sunday, July 25, 2004

COMMENTARY
Democrats might try L-word for a change

By John Griffin

As a still-aspiring liberal who's more often called a milquetoast moderate, I will be watching this week's National Democratic Convention in Boston with perplexed interest — and wondering how it relates to far-out Hawai'i.

I'm old enough to remember when liberal was a proud term — when President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the nation out of the Great Depression and into the New Deal social revolution of Social Security and other benefits, when President Harry S Truman stepped in with skill and Fair Deal courage, and when President John F. Kennedy gave the nation a new burst of pride and vigor, an assassination-shortened New Frontier.

Alas, a mixture of Democratic mistakes and decay and Republican propaganda skill has moved the nation to the right over the past 30 years. Today, only 20 percent of U.S. voters identify themselves as liberal, and for many others the label evokes negative associations of big government and cultural elitism. President Bill Clinton muted the liberal message to succeed.

So the L-word comes on a sliding scale and is hard to pin down in today's politics, where Republicans have often made it a four-letter word that many Democrats want to avoid.

Not only that, the old definitions have gotten blurred. In courting white-collar professionals, Democrats have often lost touch with their old blue-collar base of farmers, urban workers and the disadvantaged.

Republicans nationally may push privatization, deregulation and deunionization, but they also have been skilled at wooing the heartland workers and the so-called NASCAR dads who are this election's equivalent of the soccer moms.

To make it more complicated, the neo-conservative Republicans who have swayed Bush and his White House agenda have been activist abroad, far from the old GOP isolationism. Old foreign-activist Democrats are now preaching caution.

Looking at the total picture, author-columnist E.J. Dionne has pointed out that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests." The old class-based language of the left is no longer respectable for many Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans have fashioned their own class-based populist language of the right. To hear him, you might think George W. Bush is a populist instead of a right-wing crusader.

So far, this election campaign has been Bush-driven, a referendum on his efforts at home and especially abroad as dramatized by Iraq and growing dislike for American policies in the world. It is the president's to lose or salvage.

Still, to win, Democratic candidate John Kerry needs to emerge from the Boston convention with a stronger, clearer image of himself and his policies — to find a focus.

Republicans and their talk-show surrogates have been busy for months trying to smear him with the liberal label, citing old statements and selective voting records in Congress. Kerry defenders say the Democratic ticket of Kerry and fellow senator John Edwards is moderate by historical standards They cite a series of conservative-leaning votes, plus campaign platform positions that are far from the far-out left.

My own feeling is that Kerry and Edwards lean less to the left than Bush and Vice President Cheney fall way over to the right.

In any event, part of the viewing fun with this week's convention will be looking at how the L-word gets treated. I hope for a vigorous defense, if only from some of the further-out liberals such as Howard Dean, who at least deserves credit for giving the Democrats back their fighting soul and maybe launching today's chance for victory.

If the Mainland still seems up for grabs in November, it's likely Hawai'i will go for Democrats Kerry and Edwards, barring some dramatic turn of events.

Yet I still ask myself where Hawai'i is on the liberal-conservative scale 50 years after the Democrats defeated a half-century of plantation-era Republican domination and launched our state's belated version of Roosevelt's New Deal.

Those were heady early days. But over the years, the Democratic "revolution" seemed to become a victim of its own success. For years, Republicans fumbled and couldn't mount an effective challenge, while Democrats sometimes feuded, confused growing self-interest with the old idealism, and coasted on to victories.

With skill and hard work, Republican Linda Lingle won the governorship two years ago and now seeks to expand the GOP's role in what has long been a Democratic Legislature as the national presidential election echoes in the background.

(One stray thought: Lingle will have to push for Bush's re-election to some degree. But if he proves truly unpopular, will her endorsement hold back the party here now and hang around her own neck in 2006, sort of like Evan Dobelle will forever wear his backing of Mazie Hirono? I doubt it, but it's a question, just as you might ask whether a President Kerry would help the Democrats here.)

My point: While the terms liberal and conservative may have much and shifting importance on the national scene this week and beyond, those terms now mean far less in a more homogenized Hawai'i.

Here, Democrats have often seemed like moderate Republicans, and the party needs revitalization or it will lose more ground. Meanwhile, Republicans need to expand their modest and moderate "revolution" without getting tied to the unpopular Bush regime.

John Griffin, former editor of The Advertiser's editorial pages, is a frequent contributor.

Correction: John Griffin was misidentified in the byline in a previous version of this commentary.