Capitol Chronicle

If you were lucky this week, you avoided running into a Democratic presidential candidate. They were so thick on the local ground you couldn't swing a dead armadillo without hitting one or two, and this is only the latest wave. John Edwards, John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Dick Gephardt all breezed through this week, Dennis Kucinich has paid at least one visit to UT, and Howard Dean loves Austin so much he may soon buy a loft in the Warehouse District. The extent of actual public interest in an election still more than a year away is best gauged by an insta-poll that made Clark the front-runner 15 minutes after he announced. People said they didn't exactly know who he was, but thought he looked good in a uniform.

This latest Austin flurry appears to be largely Clark's doing, as he visited the Capitol and held a rally downtown, and the others followed his wake lest local Dems -- and more importantly, local Dem deep pockets -- forget them in the glare of Clark's .350-caliber smile. Arkansan Clark is said to carry the favor of Bill and Hillary, still an entrée in these parts, and more than a dozen Democratic state reps endorsed the Hammer of Kosovo within minutes of hearing his name. This is a guy who wasn't quite certain he was a Democrat until a few weeks ago -- that, too, could suggest something about the cynicism most voters (rather, nonvoters) express about the state of national politics.

However, anybody who gets Bill Safire's knickers in a twist -- the Times columnist was on the "Hillary Clinton surrogate" trail quicker than you can say "Little Rock" -- is worth at least a good look. And we should not forget that the Boy Emperor stopped by the United Nations last week demanding tribute and explaining that, like it or not, he remains the world's designated enforcer. Bush didn't put it quite that baldly, of course, but you didn't need a translator to know which way the wind was blowing. "Events during the past two years have set before us the clearest of divides," Bush declared, "between those who seek order, and those who spread chaos; between those who work for peaceful change, and those who adopt the methods of gangsters; between those who honor the rights of man, and those who deliberately take the lives of men and women and children without mercy or shame."

Here's the capo di tutti capi proclaiming shock that there are "gangsters" in his neighborhood. The assembled underbosses politely demurred, at least for the present -- how long they can hold out against U.S. power, U.S. blackmail, and their own "strategic interests" in the Middle East is another question.

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On the Center, Right

So I'm deeply sympathetic to the "ABBA" crowd -- Anybody But Bush Again. But in the little matter of $87 billion in good money to be thrown after bad, it's undoubtedly too much to expect Congress to exhibit as much backbone as the UN The administration brazenly lied about the Iraqi threat to Congress and the American people, every bit as willfully as it deceived the UN Yet, with few exceptions, our craven representatives couldn't embrace a pro-war resolution quickly enough, and now they are all full of bromides about "not abandoning our responsibilities."

Inevitably among the chief apologists are all the current "centrist" Democratic candidates: Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, and most egregiously of all, Joe Lieberman. As they watch Bush's poll numbers drop, they all talk tough about holding his feet to the fire -- but when the Don comes calling on Capitol Hill, let's see how many of them do more than give stump speeches.

Clark, a decorated member of the military chorus cheering the slaughter from cable television, waffled for several days but now says he would not have voted to authorize the Iraq war. Luckily for him, he won't have to: The officeholders will likely hold their noses and vote for quagmire, and then complain that Bush made them do it. The ignoble exception is Lieberman, who for a decade has been cheerfully calling for Saddam's head, and who also takes credit for the vile incubation of the Department of Homeland Security: While his opponents are questioning whether Clark is a real Democrat, they should be asking the same of Lieberman.

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Who's Left?

The Clark flip-flop on Iraq, opportunistic as it appears to be, was triggered by the same groundswell of popular activism that has fueled the Dean campaign. Whatever his other merits, Dean surged on the strength of his expressed opposition to the war, and he continues to set the bar for his more mainstream opponents. Clark's candidacy is itself a party insiders' response to the Vermont maverick who caught everybody napping, and he's even developed a wistfully romantic following, as the "anti-war general," among celebrity lefties like Michael Moore and Garry Trudeau. Dream on. Gephardt, with his extensive history of pro-labor politics, has more claim than most of the others to Democratic leadership, but he may well be destined to be the party's Bob Dole, a bridesmaid forever.

It remains difficult to imagine that the long-term, authentic progressives in the race -- Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and arguably former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun -- can maintain enough popular traction (let alone money) to do much more than push the dialogue a bit to the left. The Rev. Al Sharpton has considerable entertainment value in discomfiting his Democratic opponents, but otherwise plays to a constituency of one.

As a whole the group remains a quadrennial illustration of the structural limits of U.S. electoral politics, especially at the national level. Whatever happens over the next several months -- let alone in the minuscule caucuses and state primaries that determine the headline victories and the financial "momentum" -- it's important to remind ourselves that for the rest of us, the work always remains on the local ground. Our national politicians are only as good, or as bad, as we demand them to be.