Mondo Mondale; The Lawyered Look

Having Walter Mondale back in politics, at least for the past few days, has been a treat. From the moment he replaced the late Paul Wellstone as Minnesota's Democratic Senate nominee, we've been in the midst of a great historical refresher course. The man is a walking (if barely) museum of the mindset of the Democratic congressional monolith that ruled, with only the occasional interruption, from 1932 until 1994. Not that today's senators and congressmen aren't slippery, but Mondale practices a period slipperiness that I'd thought was long gone by.

The linchpin of Mondale's rhetoric, as it was for many of his contemporaries, is the Re-Ask. We've discussed the Re-Ask in this column many a time. With the Re-Ask, you can always follow up even the most challenging questions with a yes-or-no answer, and thereby give the appearance of bracing candor. All you have to do is change the question you were asked. So when a journalist shoves a microphone in your face and says, "Senator, you were captured on video stealing money from a nun at gunpoint, and then spending it on child porn. Does that disqualify you from higher office?" you can reply:

"Do mistakes sometimes get made in politics? Yes. Have I done some things in my life that I regret? Sure. But does that mean that I'm going to let a Republican Senate steal your Social Security money? Not on your life, buster!"

The essence of the Re-Ask is to turn a pragmatic question into a principle question. Mondale showed himself a master of the technique when he was grilled on Iraq. This was an important moment, because a lot of Republicans had had high hopes that the Iraq issue would help their candidate, Norm Coleman, steam past Mondale. Some of these Republicans thought that Mondale would support the President on Iraq, alienating Wellstone's core of peacenik supporters; others thought Mondale would oppose the President, giving him Wellstone's (dicey) position minus Wellstone's charisma. But they were both wrong. Mondale stated his position quite plainly at a press conference: "It is not enough to threaten our enemies with our weapons," he said. "We must also attract our friends with our values." How helpful! But Mondale didn't stop there. As the Fargo Forum noted, "He called for force against Iraq only if needed." This is, in essence, a Double Re-Ask. To paraphrase: "If it becomes absolutely necessary to drop bombs on people, do I favor dropping bombs on people? I don't mind telling you I do. If it's totally unnecessary and counterproductive to drop bombs on people, do I favor dropping bombs on people? Under those circumstances I would be very much opposed."

The Lawyered Look

The astute analyst Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate was talking about declining voter turnout last week, as he has for the last several hundred weeks. He was looking for explanations of why, while Republican registration has risen slightly since 1962 (from 20.9 percent to 22.7), Democratic registration has plummeted (from 44.3 percent to 30.1). He listed a whole bunch of reasons, from the post-Civil Rights evolution of the South to failures of grassroots organization. But one that gripped me was the Democratic Party's "inability to maintain a consistent voice as the party of the average person."

That's right. Democrats have become the party of the average lawyer. Last week in Minnesota, Democrats sought to reclaim all of Paul Wellstone's votes for Walter Mondale, but were rebuffed in court. As Bill Sammon of The Washington Times put it, "[W]e need to take a look at the bigger picture, which is, we're seeing a trend here. This is the third time in less than two years that Democrats have gone to a state supreme court to set aside or get around a state election law that was inconvenient to their designs on a particular office."

They failed in Florida in 2000, but only because their case was so dishonest and weak. In general, the Democrats' (correct) calculation is that they can out-lawyer the Republicans any day. For every three races that wind up in the courts, they figure they'll win two. With a number of contests this cycle looking very close, the party has sent 10,000 lawyers into the field to monitor polling places and create a lot of ruckus and ambiguity. Terry McAuliffe has begun to create the predicate for suing to overturn Republican victories in a half-dozen states, speaking of a "disturbing number of incidents in which Republican operatives are working to chill voter turnout."

McAuliffe's implication is that Republicans are trying to dampen black turnout through obstruction and intimidation. This line got a lot of attention in Florida 2000 when Democrats alleged that "roadblocks" had been set up in Jacksonville to keep blacks away from the polls. (The one routine roadwork site they most often alluded to had been there for weeks by the time Election Day rolled around.) But this charade has actually gone on for decades, and always takes the same form. Democrats milk the inner-city turnout machines until they moo, Republicans complain that dead people are voting and that people are voting twice, and Democrats claim that Republicans are violating the letter and spirit of the Voting Rights Act.

In this regard, Missouri, South Dakota and Arizona bear watching, but the constituency that really takes the cake this cycle is Illinois. Rod Blagojevich, the Democrats' candidate for governor, recently mailed a flier around black neighborhoods in Chicago reading, in part: "WARNING? It is ILLEGAL for anyone to refuse you the right to vote." The implication is that devious Republicans manning the polling places in Chicago were going to find ways to keep blacks from casting their votes. But the last anybody looked, the mayor of Chicago was named Richard Daley, scion of a Democratic family whose reputation for the efficient control of voting procedures stands rather high, to put it mildly. When was the last time a Republican had a job even sweeping the floors at a Chicago polling station? 1896?

Howells of Derisive Laughter

One of the accusations most often leveled at political columnists is that they're good at trashing people, but have no positive vision of what government should be. It's all well and good to nitpick, the complaint goes, but which programs do you favor? What politicians do you like?

I'll tell you a politician I like a lot: British culture minister Kim Howells. (He also happens to be my favorite ex-Communist, but that's another article.) Last week the four works shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize (for modern art) were put on display at the Tate Britain in London. Among the finalists were Fiona Banner's Arsewoman in Wonderland, a pornographic "wordscape" of Alice in Wonderland written on a billboard; some film shot from a camera hanging off a construction crane; and a parody of the front page of the London Times. Did Howells get into any Rudy Giuliani-style rigmarole about whether or not the art reflected the "values" of the British people? No he did not. He went down to the exhibit himself and pinned a note to the wall reading: "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit."