What Mr. Bush did with that speech Tuesday night was akin to Chuck Yeager strapping the entire Democratic Party into an X-1 and taking the whole lot of them up to 80,000 feet at Mach 2. They were in ideological air they’d never breathed before.
“Let’s roll,” the president announces. First he talks about hunting down thousands of human time bombs. Then he heads to North Korea, Iran and Iraq and rolls them through a 360 around the “axis of evil.” About now, Tom Daschle’s smooth smile is touching the back of his neck. But he won’t stop; now the president is saying “I will not wait on events while dangers gather.” Sweat is running down Joe Biden’s legs. Teddy shifts, thinking his seat in the House is starting to come apart; surely this guy is going to ease off.
Instead, the one-year president invokes History itself, which “has called America and our allies to action,” and says that “it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” Barbara Boxer thinks her head is being pulled through the Capitol dome. A voice inside Hillary’s helmet is saying, “We’re going to survive this; see if you can move your hands and applaud.”
Finally, the speech ends, the party is back on terra firma, and Mr. Gephardt makes a few remarks on what he’s just experienced. He says: “Our values call for protecting Social Security, and not gambling it away on the stock market. Our values call for helping patients and older Americans, not just big HMOs and pharmaceutical companies. Our values . . .”
Listening to this, I had one thought: The Democratic Party is shrinking. Maybe not in numbers; it got half the popular vote in 2000. But ideologically, culturally, in the ways a political organization should keep its politics alive and wired to the turbines of national life, the Democratic party is winding down.
Read it all in: Opinion Journal – it speaks for itself.