Campaign 2010: Deja Vu All Over Again

Comparisons
are odious, the old saying goes, and certainly Democrats are dealing
with some smelly, stinky realities as they stare down the next eight
months until Election Day 2010 and pundits galore compare the party's
prospects to debacles of the past.

For a long time parallels were being made with 1994 and the midterm
elections during Bill Clinton's first term. Those gave us a Republican
House and Senate, the glory that was Newt Gingrich and a Contract with
America that after a dozen years turned out to have a hell of a balloon
payment attached.

But this week, the mainstream media meme has shifted, advancing to the
elections of 2006, when Democrats took back control of Congress,
campaigning against a GOP "culture of corruption." Now the village
drums are signaling that it's the Democrats who have been poisoned by
too much power and made vulnerable. Exhibit A is Charlie Rangel, dean
of the New York congressional delegation, forced to step down this week
as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.

As Reid Wilson wrote Wednesday on the National Journal's
Hotline on Call blog, "Dems have seen this movie before -- only last
time, it happened to the other guys. Now, a beleaguered Dem majority
has to hope their party can withstand a building wave that favors the
GOP, and that effort isn't made any easier by countless, and mounting,
self-inflicted errors.

"Four years ago, it was GOPers who found themselves on the receiving
end of jolt after jolt of bad news. This time around, Dem strategists
are beginning to accept the inevitability of big losses, and a sort of
morbid gallows humor has settled over Congressional and political
aides."

Jeff Zeleny echoed that theme in Friday's New York Times:
"The troubles of Gov. David A. Paterson of New York, followed by those
of two of the state's congressmen, Charles B. Rangel and Eric J. Massa,
have added to the ranks of episodes involving prominent Democrats like
Eliot Spitzer, Rod R. Blagojevich and John Edwards. Taken together, the
cases have opened the party to the same lines of criticism that
Democrats... used effectively against Republicans in winning control of
the House and Senate four years ago.

"The mix of power and the temptations of corruption can be a compelling
political narrative at any time. But with voters appearing to be in an
angry mood and many already inclined to view all things Washington with
mistrust, the risks for Democrats could be that much greater this year."

Wilson and Zeleny make a compelling case for a 2006 remake with a role
reversal. But in the end, I fear that another important -- and sadly,
fitting -- comparison may be the 2002 midterms, the first big elections
after 9/11.

I use the word "fear" deliberately, for 2002 was the election year the
Republicans first used the public's fear of terrorism and attendant
homeland insecurities as a campaign issue. It was on August 26, 2002,
that Vice President Dick Cheney announced, "Simply stated, there is no
doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," and
during the weeks leading up to the elections that President Bush
insisted on the congressional vote authorizing the use of force against
Iraq. You'll remember, too, that Condoleezza Rice stirred fantasies of
smoking guns turning into mushroom clouds.

It was also the year Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss upended
Democratic Senator Max Cleland's bid for reelection, impugning his
patriotism and running a television ad with pictures of Osama bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein that mischaracterized Cleland's votes against
amendments to the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.

This year, Democrats may have been sufficiently snakebitten on the
economy and health care -- and now, corruption -- without conservatives
having to do much of anything else. But fear is their ace in the hole
and they already are playing it with gusto.

As in 2002, the current election cycle has featured a steady stream of
attack and insinuation from Republicans that Democrats in Congress and
this time, the Obama administration, have been soft on terrorism,
despite a pretty solid record so far snagging terrorist suspects both
here and abroad. Dick Cheney was on the offensive during a February 14
interview on ABC's This Week
and the following day his daughter Liz told Fox News, "There's simply
no way that you can say that the president is using every tool at his
disposal to fight and win this war."

Liz Cheney is one of the founders of Keep America Safe, a right-wing group whose other board members are The Weekly Standard's
Bill Kristol and Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot whose plane
struck the Pentagon on 9/11. Its stated purpose is "to provide
information for concerned Americans about critical national security
issues."

This week, the organization put out a television spot demanding that
the Justice Department reveal the names of "The Al Qaeda Seven,"
attorneys working for the Justice Department who previously, as the ad
states "represented or advocated for terrorist detainees." Ominously,
it asks, "Whose values do they share?"

Well, mine for one, and those of a lot of academics, legal scholars and
judges whose opinions I respect. In the words of former Bush Solicitor
General Ted Olson, from an article he co-wrote in 2007, "The ethos of
the bar is built on the idea that lawyers will represent both the
popular and the unpopular, so that everyone has access to justice.
Despite the horrible September 11, 2001, attacks, this is proudly held
as a basic tenet of our profession." Olson's wife perished in the
Pentagon crash.

Of the slurs against the Justice Department by Keep America Safe and
others, Ken Gude, a human rights expert with the liberal Center for
American Progress told The American Prospect magazine, "This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did. Not kind of like McCarthyism; this is exactly McCarthyism."

Fear also is a strategy outlined in that confidential Republican
National Committee document, inadvertently left behind at a Florida
resort and leaked by a Democrat to Politico.com.
The motivations of small donors to the party are listed as "fear,"
"Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration," and
"Reactionary."

The PowerPoint presentation asks, "What can you sell when you do not
have the White House, the House or the Senate...?" and replies, "Save
the country from trending toward Socialism!"

As the GOP trends further and further right, they can and will attack
on any and all fronts, but in the end, it may be that the only thing
they have is fear.