WHY THE DEMOCRATS ARE GETTING ROLLED

Perhaps the best sign of how Bush is cleaning the opposition’s clock is the incoherence of the left-liberal intelligentsia. They have no clue what to say now. For the longest time, they portrayed Bush as simply a moron. Then he won the election, the post-election, the p.r. war of the transition and now the first two weeks in office. How smart can a moron be? Then they decided to describe him as a tool of the far right, symbolized by the Ashcroft nomination. D’oh! Wrong again. He spent his first week proposing a centrist education program that even his critics deem a step toward federalization of education standards. He spent the next week, touring faith ministries for the disadvantaged, touting his new, and broadly popular, plan to support private religious agencies with federal money. Next week comes his tax cut proposal, derided in the campaign as a give-away to the rich (despite the fact that its cuts for the poor are proportionally equal to its cuts for the successful). Greenspan is now in favor if it; the public is in favor of it; the Dems are in favor of it. Meanwhile the big news for Democrats is the continuing Clinton sleaze, the McAuliffe take-over of the DNC, and Jesse Jackson’s use of tax exempt funds to bankroll his mistress. Way to go, guys! So what to do? The left hasn’t been this befuddled since Clinton screwed them five years ago. So they revert to form. Frank Rich ridicules the Washington press corps for falling for W and says his punctuality is reminiscent of Mussolini! Tony Lewis changes the subject. The rest wring their hands over Ashcroft, despite the fact that the most anti-abortion American politician is now required to enforce Roe vs. Wade, a huge liberal victory, which they insist on seeing as a defeat. The real problem is that they have yet to take W seriously. Their own snobbery is preventing them from a real strategy to engage and defeat him. Sounds like Reagan all over again.