AFTER A BIZARRE PERIOD OF QUIESCENCE

The Democratic Leadership Council is back. Has anyone noticed their post-election resurgence? First there was the p.r. coup in organizing a crammed National Press Club meeting on the theme, “Why Gore Lost.” This was useful for a couple of obvious reasons. The first is that some Democrats still can’t get it into their heads that Gore did actually lose. The issue here is not over-votes in some Florida county no-one had ever heard of before last November. It is that Gore blew what should have been a landslide by a suicidal embrace of populist claptrap devised by Stanley Greenberg and Bob Shrum. I’m surprised the DLC isn’t more enraged at Gore. Didn’t he owe a great deal of his ascendancy to DLC credibility as a centrist alternative to paleo-liberalism? At least Clinton, for the most part, didn’t betray the party on policy grounds. The latest encouraging fusillade to prove that the center isn’t dead is the emergence of Evan Bayh as the new DLC head. His tax policy position is the only Democratic posture that can survive the Gore juggernaut. In his first speech as DLC chair, Bayh said, “I embrace the president’s call for a tax cut that will benefit every American because I believe in freedom.” Freedom, huh? When was the last time you heard a Democrat support that idea with conviction? Then he added a fiscally conservative note: “Many of us do not want to go back to the days of deficits. We don’t want to go back to the days of increasing the national debt upon the back of our children.” This is exactly the posture the Democrats need to take in countering Bush’s so-far-brilliant p.r. offensive in defense of tax cuts. My only worry is that there is no-one out there in the media to defend Bayh.