Time for Terry McBucks To Go

I hope this column is irrelevant by the time you read it.

That is, I hope Terry McAuliffe is gone from his post as chair of the Democratic National Committee.

After the Democrats dropped the Senate and fell several seats further into the minority in the House in the Nov. 5 election, a recriminations-rama commenced immediately. That was good. There's nothing wrong with finger-pointing when the goal is to render an institution more effective. Who lost the Senate? It is appropriate -- even necessary -- to review the performance of those who steered the Democrats into the rocks. Already one of the three chief Democratic strategists has fled the helm. On November 7, House minority leader Dick Gephardt announced he was resigning his leadership post. (To run for President apparently. What's the slogan: "He can't lead a party, but he can lead a country"?) That leaves Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and McAuliffe in the crosshairs.

As of yet, there's no whiff of a move against Daschle among Senate Democrats. (Gephardt would have been challenged had he attempted to linger on.) But McAuliffe's ears ought to be on fire. Disgruntled, dismayed, disgusted and discombobulated Democrats have been demanding his departure. The more ungracefully, the better. McAuliffe signals he's staying put. But, then, this is the guy who two weeks before the election declared -- with no qualification -- Florida Governor Jeb Bush was toast (even as public and private polls showed Bush pulling away). Final results: Republican Bush, 56 percent; Democrat Bill McBride, 43 percent.

McAuliffe's sin was not that he missed a call -- or ten. But that he -- along with comrades Gephardt and Daschle -- produced no coherent, overarching message for his party. He raised plenty of money, but no ideas. All three seemed to believe that the sluggish economy would drive voters to the polls and that these voters would somehow divine that electing Dems would lead to better days. Initial indications are that even Democratic die-hards were not jazzed by this lazy approach. Regular readers of this column might recall that I had noted before the election that Democrats were pursuing theme-less politics. Others observed that, too. But it was somewhat surprising to see the lickety-split formation of a post-election consensus -- among Democrats -- that the Democrats had squandered a historic opportunity by failing to present a clear alternative to George W. Bush and his Stepford Republicans. Liberal and conservative Democrats both cried, in the words of a Democratic Leadership Council statement, we "need a new, clear message...unmistakably distinct from that of the Republican Party or the President."

Of course, Democrats -- the party of ideological chaos -- disagreed over the thrust of said new message. Left-leaning Democrats proposed defining the party as the opponents of Bush's millionaire-friendly tax cuts and his dash to war in Iraq. The DLCers urged development of a "positive, centrist" vision. What might that entail? Here's how these corporate-backed Democrats put it: "there is an urgent need for Democrats...[to create] a message and agenda based on broad values and policy goals rather than government programs, that is aimed at building new majorities rather than tending to old coalitions and that promotes reform, growth, international and domestic leadership, and opportunity, responsibility and community." Did they miss any platitudes?

But both sides did concur on a key point: McAuliffe had crashed. And his post-election performance did not endear him to Democrats. He downplayed the significance of Democratic defeats, while boasting about the amounts of money he had bagged for the party. And he griped that "a lot of [Republican] money came in from special interests." Which is akin to Britney Spears complaining about the explicit gyrations of Christina Aguilera, for McAuliffe has collected literally hundreds of millions of dollars from his own special interests for the Democrats. "I'm not sure what we did wrong," he said. His best explanation: "We faced a very popular president who campaigned more than any other president." Then consider this a warm-up to 2004. And if McAuliffe could not devise a strategy for countering Bush in a time of economic anxiousness in an off-year election -- which traditionally favors the party out of the White House -- does he deserve another swing?