The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The year was 1940, and the political master Franklin D. Roosevelt was speaking at a Jackson Day dinner about the glories of his beloved Democratic Party. "But the future lies with those wise political leaders," admonished F.D.R., "who realize that the great public is interested more in government than in politics."

That warning echoed in the aftermath of last week's election as triumphant Democrats let their hopes rise for a resurgence in national leadership. As if Roosevelt's ghost had sponsored him, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a biographer of F.D.R., showed up in Washington to extol his new book, The Cycles of American History, and offer his own resonant warnings that the "worship of party" could swallow up the purposes. "One wishes that the ^ intellectual energy expended in recent years on procedural reform had been devoted instead to the substance of our problems," wrote Schlesinger. "Nor are substantive problems going to be solved by large committees with two representatives from every state. Ideas are produced by individuals working in solitude . . . numerical majorities are no substitute for leadership."

There it was again: the call, not for endless fiddling with the process and imagery, but for men and women who can harness the Democrats and unite them as an instrument of positive vision. In short, the Democrats, with their majorities in Congress and the statehouses, must put up or shut up if they intend to capture the future. Hammering at the failures of Ronald Reagan will not be enough.

The first responses of the victors left something to be desired. Missouri's Richard Gephardt, a self-promoted presidential possibility, when asked about increasing taxes to deal with the huge deficits, avoided an answer. Hopeful Gary Hart, writing in the New York Times, put forth a vague pastiche for "renewal" and "healing" that hinted at a retreat toward trade protectionism and vast new Government spending programs. He offered no clues on where the money might come from in a nation whose wealth is dangerously overspent now. Robert Byrd's genial and rambling pledges for a new beginning did nothing so much as remind people of the Senate Democratic leader's other, unhappy years in the job.

Somebody with wit, courage and a love of adventure needs to take over the Democratic Party. A handful of daring and like-minded competitors -- Symington, Johnson, Humphrey, Kennedy -- did that back in 1960, and then J.F.K. grabbed it all and took the world along. Reagan did it with the Republicans while the technicians with their polls and committees sputtered and protested his right-wing doctrine. But at least he had a doctrine.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson worried: "America is now sauntering through her resources and through the mazes of her politics with easy nonchalance; but presently there will come a time when she will be surprised to find herself grown old -- a country crowded, strained, perplexed -- when she will be obliged . . . to pull herself together, adopt a new regimen of life, husband her resources, concentrate her strength, steady her methods, sober her views, restrict her vagaries, trust her best, not her average, members."

A Democrat or two might rise from the heap if they took that text and applied it to a Social Security and Medicare system that expands recklessly, a farm program that sinks under surplus, a military strategy that unrealistically embraces all the world, and a welfare system that is demonstrably dissolving families.

Any Democrat who aspires to capture the highest political prize of this country must start with a purpose beyond the politics he must practice.