Setting Up Easy Targets for Karl Rove

By Joe Klein

George W. Bush's unprecedented nosedive continued last week, as it has almost every week since Hurricane Katrina. The war in Iraq grinds on, unresolved and bloody. The Republican congressional scandals continue to grow; the latest to be investigated, for defense-contracting irregularities, is Representative Jerry Lewis of California, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The Congress did pass another round of tax breaks for wealthy investors last week, but it remained deadlocked or just plain dead on immigration, a new federal budget and most other real problems. New polls showed Bush hovering at about 30% approval, which puts him in the same pathetic league as Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. A powerful majority of Americans---about 70%--believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Logic would dictate that a profitable election season looms for the Democratic Party. There is a strong, substantive case of incompetence and ideological extremism to be made against the Bush Administration. The Democrats also seem more or less united on a reasonable agenda of domestic-policy alternatives--with fiscal responsibility leading the list--even if they remain boggled on foreign policy. Of course, the Administration doesn't inspire much confidence overseas either.

And yet one senses a fluttery uncertainty on the Democratic side--induced, I suspect, by the prospect of another nefarious Karl Rove campaign. This is a legitimate fear. Rove has shown a positive genius for organizing campaigns around poisonous trivia. He will question the patriotism of Democrats (and, once again, be aided by those on the noisome left who believe that the U.S. is a malignant, imperialistic force in the world). He will deploy an ugly, stone-throwing distortion of Christian "values," especially against those Democrats who choose not to discriminate against homosexuals. And if things get really desperate, he will play the race card, as Republicans have ever since they sided against the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The inevitability of race as a subliminal issue in the campaign became obvious as I watched House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the personification of fluttery uncertainty, trying to defend Representative John Conyers on Meet the Press a few weeks ago. Conyers will be chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Democrats win control of the House in November, and he has already threatened impeachment hearings against President Bush. This is one of the few scenarios that might rouse the demoralized Republican base from its torpor. It is also likely to alienate independents, who are sick of the hyperpartisanship in Washington and will be less likely to vote for Democrats if the party is emphasizing witch hunts instead of substantive policies. But the ugly truth is that Conyers is a twofer: in addition to being foolishly incendiary, he is an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped by Republicans. He is one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s, a group "more likely to cry 'racism' and 'victimization' than the new generation of black politicians," a member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me.

The Republicans will not be so crude as to mention Conyers' race; they will simply paint him as an extremist and show his face in negative ads. Nor is Conyers likely to be the only target. We'll probably be seeing a lot of two other potential African-American committee chairmen: Charles Rangel of New York and Alcee Hastings of Florida.

Rangel would be one of the most powerful Democrats in the new Congress, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He is regarded as more mainstream than Conyers, well versed in tax and entitlement policies, but he has had an unfortunate tendency to shoot off his mouth in the past. He has questioned interracial adoption, and has compared colleagues who opposed tax breaks for minority broadcasters to Hitler. After Hurricane Katrina, Rangel compared Bush to Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who attacked peaceful civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses in the 1960s.

In a way, Hastings, who would become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is the most problematic of all. He is a former federal judge who was indicted in 1981 for influence peddling, acquitted on all counts, then impeached and removed from his judgeship by the Congress. In 1992 he ran for Congress himself and, improbably, won. It is an open secret that Pelosi has chosen Hastings to replace the respected and experienced Jane Harman as the ranking Democrat on the committee. This was a questionable decision even before it became apparent that the Democrats might win the Congress; now it's a devastating negative ad waiting to happen: "Why do the Democrats want to put an impeached judge in charge of your national security?"

Conyers and Rangel are embarrassments, but there is nothing the Democrats can do about them--and they are certainly no more objectionable than any number of right-wing extremists who fester in Congress. But it's not too late for Hastings to remove himself from the line of fire and make clear his support for Harman as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.