In Washington DC and the White House, the game of musical chairs is still going strong: But it is more than a game. Since the election on Nov. 2, eight of the 15 members of Bush’s first-term Cabinet have resigned. This is already a higher rate of turnover than occurred at this transition stage under the last two presidents who won a second term, Reagan and Clinton, and more departures are predicted. Yet the number of outgoing Cabinet members is less significant than the kind of individuals who have been chosen to replace them.
The latest new recruit is Bernard Kerik, who takes over from Tom Ridge in the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik is the son of a prostitute who may have been murdered, a high-school dropout who learned his craft as a policeman on the beat in New York. He joins people like Carlos Gutierrez, the new commerce secretary, a native of Havana who began his career at Kelloggs, selling cereal out of a van; and Margaret Spellings, the new education secretary, and the first woman in that post for almost a quarter of a century; and Alberto Gonzales, the new justice secretary, who is the son of a migrant farm worker; and of course Condoleezza Rice, the first black female US secretary of state. A multimillionaire and a son of privilege, George Bush is successfully engineering — or so it seems — a rainbow administration.
At one level, this is to his and America’s credit. It is also a vivid demonstration of why the right here is currently so much more successful than its British equivalent. To be sure, because this is a presidential and not a parliamentary system, Bush is not confined in his choice of Cabinet ministers to elected officials. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a British right-wing Cabinet being flooded by quite so many females, immigrants and non-whites. The Tories are not yet that adroit.
Because, make no mistake, Bush’s Cabinet appointments represent the politics of calculation quite as much as — if not more than — meritocracy and multiculturalism. Since so many of Bush’s new appointees are women or from minority groups, it will be much harder for Senate Democrats to withhold from them the necessary approval. Moreover, appointing individuals who were not born to the purple (as Bush himself was), but who instead owe their prominence to him, is an obvious way of buttressing Cabinet loyalty.
But the calculation involved in these new Cabinet appointments goes deeper than this. By so strenuously encompassing diversity within his administration, Bush is further reinforcing what proved the Republicans’ most potent message during the election: That he and they stand for America, that indeed they are America, while the Democrats are a party of sectional interests and half-baked elitists.
Of course, this claim is substantially unfair. The Republicans invoke a united America, but they also draw on vital sectional interests of their own: Evangelical Christians, the gun lobby, the oil industry, and much of Wall Street. In other ways, too, their opportunity-for-all politics are not quite what they seem. If one looks below the top positions in Bush’s administration to the mass of senior executive positions, the number of female and minority appointees is far less impressive than it was under Bill Clinton. Nonetheless, in one respect, the Republicans’ critique is correct. The Democrats have allowed themselves to appear overidentified with particular groups in American society, and so made it easier for their opponents to posture as the party of the nation.
In part this has happened because of a failure of ideas. In recent decades, those on the American left have tended to be preoccupied with desegregation and difference. They have seemed obsessed with race and gender issues, and neglectful of those powerful forces that in practice often override these divisions: Religion, nationalism, individual and family ambition, etc. Thus Democrats have conventionally appealed to America’s Hispanic voters in terms of their difference, by focusing on issues such as civil rights and immigration. By contrast, the Republicans have doubled their share of the Hispanic vote over the past three elections by appealing to it much more in terms of mainstream issues such as education and home ownership.
One way for the Democrats to redress these failings, some of the party’s pundits are now arguing, is by a judicious change of language. Instead of championing same-sex marriage, for instance (and so explicitly linking itself with a particular group — gays and lesbians), it has been suggested that the party should refer instead to “the right to marry”, thereby converting what appears a sectional cause into a matter of common humanity. Others have signaled the need to construct a new Democratic populism, and rightly so.
Something will have to be done to prevent the Republicans doing at the next election what they did so successfully this year: Representing their (millionaire, Yale-educated stay-at-home) candidate as a flag-waving man of the people, someone you could have a beer with, and the Democrats’ (millionaire, Yale-educated war-veteran) candidate as an effete, marginal elitist who looked French.
But all these things are surface strategies. Far more important is substance and policy. If you search Google for “Democrats and Women”, more than 3 million items flash up. “Democrats and Race” produces a similar figure. Try looking for “Democrats and Poverty”, however, and you get a paltry 700,000 hits. This has been one of the problems of the overemphasis here on race and gender. It has got in the way of proper attention to America’s profound economic inequities, even though the latter are grievous and feed so obviously into its racial and gender inequities.
This is now the Democrats’ biggest challenge. In a vast, hugely powerful country that is historically antipathetic to high taxation, central interference and anything savoring of socialism, they have to find a way of reconnecting with those blue-collar workers with insecure jobs, minimal health insurance, and limited prospects who nonetheless voted last time in their millions for Bush. They have to take on American poverty and win. They have to challenge the Republicans’ claim that theirs is the party of the American dream as well as the American nation. They have to insist that well-publicized opportunities for a few in Bush’s Cabinet is not the same as opportunities for the many.
