In the current bilious atmosphere, it’s no longer enough merely to be a challenger. It’s better to be from the political equivalent of another planet. “You need guys from Zagreb,” says Republican consultant Jim Innocenzi. He was lucky enough to have one: Mississippi construction contractor Kirk Fordice. A wealthy novice, Fordice whipped an establishment Republican in the primary and then, last week, upset Democratic Gov, Ray Mabus. Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford, who beat Republican Richard Thornburgh, was so lightly regarded he was considered a “throwaway” candidate by other Democrats in Pennsylvania. “He was a clean slate, so they could shape him any way they wanted,” groused one top GOP adviser to the Thornburgh campaign. “Our guy was too famous for his own good.” The status quo scored one victory: a tough version of congressional term limits was voted down in Washington state. But virtually every other straw in the wind blew the opposite way: against insiders, against the capital, against standpattism and for various brands of middle-class populist resentment.
The populism-promotion business is largely in the hands of Washington consultants–an irony lost on Beltway insiders. Wofford ran on economic themes carefully targeted by his handlers at Pennsylvania’s swing voters, who worry about health-care costs, the loss of jobs overseas and falling incomes. He was schooled in the sound bites of populist anger by some of the capital’s most successful Democratic consultants, who turned a discursive former professor into a tweedy attack dog. Fordice was under the tutelage of two veterans of the Republican National Committee, the same Washington consultants who launched their careers with the famous 1980 ads that ridiculed former House speaker Tip O’Neill as an “out of gas” old pol.
Like a water cannon, middle-class populism can be aimed up or down–and even in both directions at the same time. Fordice ran against welfare and affirmative action–that is, against government programs for minorities and the poor. But he also ran against Harvard (Mabus’s alma mater), that infamous hive of privilege. Wofford used a call for middle-class tax cuts and national health insurance to depict Yalie Thornburgh as an out-of-touch, rich Republican. But the same pitch also played subtly on middle-class resentment of the free services available for poorer Americans. “If criminals have the right to a lawyer,” Wofford’s health-care ads said, then “working Americans should have the right to a doctor.”
Democrats were almost giddy at the prospect of adopting Wofford’s approach next year. President Bush, while in Rome, vowed to devote more attention to reviving the economy, while Democrats handed out T shirts ridiculing him for trotting the globe while ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY RECESSION. Democratic congressional leaders rushed forth with a new “middle class” taxcut proposal, similar to Wofford’s, which would be paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy. Democratic presidential hopefuls sharpened their anti-Washington, anti-incumbency themes. Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey vowed to downsize the cabinet, an idea once championed by “outsider” presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Wofford’s team–campaign manager James Carville, media consultants David Doak and Robert Shrum and polltaker Michael Donilon–suddenly was the hottest in Democratic politics. No fewer than four candidates were bidding for the services of Carville, the “Ragin’ Cajun” who made mincemeat of Thornburgh.
But Carville’s next destination was his home state of Louisiana, where he aimed to help Democrat Edwin Edwards slow the ominous candidacy of former Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke. It was an irony of the consultant culture redoubled: the new master of Democratic populism trying to stop a candidate who was succeeding by playing resentment politics to their logical, if ugly, limits. Consultant Strother, also a Louisianian, warned that Duke’s message went beyond racism to embrace many of the same concerns-welfare, affirmative action, taxes, lost jobs–that other candidates have milked for years.
Duke, in his own way, is a warning about the dangers of selling resentment. The problem, says GOP consultant Innocenzi, is that “when you look for guys from Zagreb you can also get a guy from Munich” of the 1920s. Some self-proclaimed “outsider” candidates are worried about the dynamics. “When there is a moral vacuum in public life,” says Democratic presidential candidate Jerry Brown, “you’re going to attract good outsiders and bad outsiders.” Right now, with anger rampant, and stoked by Washington insiders, we may have little chance to have one without the other.
