Ducks Both Lame and Dead

It's time to give up on the cliche that Washington is just a sleepy "company town," with the Post as its "hometown paper." Last week, the old hometown was subject to the most horrifying kind of hometown drama: In the course of about 24 hours, six people were shot dead by a sniper in Montgomery County, just across the District line, and in DC itself. The killings were random, the sniper highly motivated and highly skilled. (He fired from long range?most at 100 yards?and killed each of his victims with a single bullet.) With the corpses still cooling in the morgue, with all the schools in DC and surrounding counties under lockdown and with a psychopath still at large, the Post reported the incident as a chatty Trend piece. Its headline: "5 Shooting Victims Reflect Montgomery's Growing Diversity."

The same day, I read an interview in The Washington Times with Cynthia McKinney, the five-term Georgia congresswoman who has been a lame duck since getting clobbered in the Democratic primary last summer. McKinney is an opponent of the war on terror who has spoken in support of Palestinian terrorists. McKinney's loudmouth father, who is her closest political and personal adviser, blamed her election loss on the machinations of World Jewry. And they were doubtless right, in the sense that a person who sought to win an American campaign by focusing it solely on his support for apartheid in South Africa might be justified in blaming his failures on the world's blacks.

But McKinney continues to scavenge for scapegoats and the search has led her far afield. "I am not talking about the Republicans who crossed over to vote for my opponent," she told John McCaslin of the Times, "but the heavy involvement of Indians in the primary." This was something new and puzzling. What did the Indians do? Presumably send smoke signals to the effect of White Man! Israel War Noise Makem Heap Big Trouble! No Votem McKinney! And didn't Georgia expel all its Indians a century and a half ago? McKinney continued: "Earlier this year, I was one of 42 members of Congress who wrote to President Bush to urge the release of Sikh and other political prisoners in India? To my colleagues of both parties who have also been involved in the effort to expose India's brutal record, I say watch out: they are coming after you, too."

Oh, those Indians! If anything, this is even weirder, since it brings to the surface the ricocheting racial affinities and antipathies that, for McKinney, constitute the whole of politics. You follow? She backs the Sikhs who are at odds with the Indians who fight the Pakistanis who sympathize with the Palestinians who attack the Israelis who are supported by the American Jews who did her in. It's a simple matter of my-enemy's-friend's-enemy's-friend's-enemy's-enemy-is-my-friend. Or, as the Post would put it, "Delusional Pol Reflects DeKalb County's Growing Diversity."

The Treason Tour

The chain reaction that Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott and David Bonior created through their Treason Tour of Iraq has badly harmed their party's prospects for the White House in two years. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt wound up taking the fall for his colleagues last week. When he signed on to the President's Iraq resolution, which (as the Democrats accurately complain) gives Bush freer hand to wage war than any of his predecessors have had, he damaged his chances of getting the nomination in 2004. Moderate Democrats lost hope that they could rally the House to back a compromise bill of the sort Joe Biden and Richard Lugar had drawn up in the Senate. Hardline Democrats threw up their hands. Rep. Maurice Hinchey complained of Gephardt: "His attitude is, 'Everybody's on their own.'" True?but that's Gephardt's diagnosis, not his wish.

McDermott and Bonior's escapade also made it implausible that Dems would be able to change the subject to the economy before the November elections. This inability has liberal Democrats?even normally rational ones, like the columnist Matt Miller and the pollster Ruy Teixeira?gnawing their lapels in frustration. Their attitude toward Bush can be summed up as: Will you just sit still for a second so I can flog you, for chrissakes! Now, it's not as certain as people think that Iraq wins for Republicans. There is not a single Democratic senator who lost his seat by voting against President Bush on the Gulf War resolution in 1991?and Bill Clinton was elected a year and a half later despite never having bothered to take a firm position on the matter. Nor is it clear that the economy hurts Republicans. As Republican pollster Bob Teeter noted last week, "a bad economy seems to be defined as unemployment. And when you look at the polling data, very few people say they are at risk."

But Democrats think that's the dynamic. For them, the issues of 401(k)s and corporate corruption and the Dow are like so many articles of beachwear that they've brought on a trip where it rains all the time.

Sore Loserman Redux

Let's not dwell on how soaked-through Al Gore has become in his retirement. It was evident at his come- back speech at the Brookings Institution last week that, if there is one thing soggier than Al Gore, it is an out-of-practice Al Gore. To see him speak for the first time since the campaign was like revisiting your high school during your freshman year in college. How puny everyone looks! How petty all the talk sounds! There is suddenly a vast stature gap between Gore and Bush, and it is not in Gore's favor.

A more surprising collapse is that of Gore's runningmate, Joe Lieberman, who now seems doomed to join the rolls of dud veep candidates who have flopped going after the presidential nomination. The two veep losers who actually made it?Mondale in 1984 and Dole in 1996?have run the most uninspiring races since World War II.

Lieberman aspired to build his 2004 candidacy on the homeland security bill he has been sponsoring. Unfortunately for him, the President won't let him have it in the cumbersome form he desires. Bush wants instead a flexible department that is free of the usual civil-service protections. Meanwhile, Lieberman's union base won't let him set up a homeland security department that can hire and fire at will. Since the President is unlikely to vote for Lieberman next election, the Senator had very little trouble deciding which of his two obstructers should carry the blame. "We are being stopped from achieving an agreement on a matter that we agree 95 percent on," Lieberman said, "for reasons that have something to do with the election."

But if you think about it for a moment, that doesn't fly. It's Lieberman whose position on the bill has "something to do with the election." If we were talking about a lumber mill or a car plant in 1920, then cutting job security or wages would put money in Joe Plutocrat's pocket at the expense of workers. But the same class interests are not at work when we're talking about government jobs. If some career bureaucrat in Washington gets more freedom to hire and fire, it remains a big deal to Lieberman's constituents in AFSCME and other unions. But who among Bush's constituents benefits? Nobody. There are no plutocratic beneficiaries of the Bush approach, no class of people who will pocket lots of money from his anti-union policies and then pour some of it into his campaign coffers. That's why, as organized labor has shifted en masse from the private sector to the public, a lot of romance has left the union movement. The labor movement is no longer a matter of the working class against the capitalists. It is a matter of a politician's pampered clients against taxpayers. Unions still vote Democratic, but they no longer drag any principled voters along with them.