DNC Alert: Dems Boo God and Jerusalem

In response to public outcry (and lacerating GOP criticism), Democrats have amended their party’s official platform, reintroducing previously omitted language that refers to God and recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. After Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland proposed the amendment, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the vote to the floor and was greeted with thunderous boos. The jeers were so clamorous a visibly flummoxed Villaraigosa had to repeat his call for a vote three times and, after it became clear he wasn’t gathering the yeas he wanted, simply declared the amendment passed by fiat.

It’s not at all clear what general inferences can be properly drawn from these symbolically explosive exclusions. Has the Obama administration now officially abandoned Israel as its closest ally? Are Democrats now, as a matter of explicitly stated mission, no longer religiously inclined enough to muster even a perfunctory mention of God? What does it say about their general worldview that abortion warranted four references and “Gay/LGBT” issues managed six? (The national debt was mentioned five times).

The DNC has struggled to forward a coherent narrative to account for the historic lacunae. The White House originally released a statement claiming that President Obama had seen (and presumably approved) the platform by Wednesday. They subsequently amended that statement (yes, amending their position on a new amendment) that Obama had not, in fact, previewed the platform and so was unaware of the omissions. When CNN’s Piers Morgan asked Democrat National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz about the intended meaning of the initial revisions she responded: “I can assure you that no one has deliberately taken God out of our platform.” When he pressed her if it then was the consequence of a “mistake” she demurred, refusing to provide a response.

As extraordinary as the editorial imbroglio is in and of itself, the deeper meaning lives in the subtext that was never stricken from the platform. In an effort to divert attention away from their political albatross, the nation’s palsied economic performance, Obama is attempting to turn a bread and butter election into a referendum on our cultural cleavages, vilifying the GOP as religious extremists waging a “war on women”, and if they can help it, an imprudent war on Iran.

But is steadfastly supporting Israel on the precipice of an existential crisis an instance of foreign policy extremism? Moreover, is the official DNC position on abortion an accurate reflection of the view of the general population? Most Americans wouldn’t agree with Obama’s permissive stance towards third trimester and partial birth abortion. Also, the new wording on abortion in the DNC platform embraces “a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.” The new part is the concluding clause: “regardless of ability to pay”, clearly implying that the Federal government assumes a responsibility to fund abortion through taxpayer dollars. However, since the Hyde Amendment (1976) this has been forbidden (and generally accepted as a matter to to be determined on a state by state basis by both parties). And while American sentiment is split in many complicated ways on the issue of abortion, there is overwhelming agreement that it shouldn’t be subsidized by the federal government.

So in a breathless effort to tar the GOP with the feathers of extremism, the DNC has revealed its own political intemperance, the many ways in which its political and moral compass points away from the inclinations most Americans share. And given how quickly it succumbed to external political pressure, the incident was a lesson in the strategic malleability of their principles, making the platform less a substantive manifesto than the transcript of an ephemeral stump speech. Theirs is an oddly sycophantic variety of extremism too, a marriage of political immoderation and faux populism. They stand unwavering behind some very unpopular views until you ask them not to.

All conventions are now well-manicured public relations events, as minutely produced as a commercial for dishwasher detergent. This can make them politically unspectacular theater, with the messaging polished with excruciatingly granular meticulousness. The mark of obsessive marketing is often a blanket of blandness, amorphous slogans announcing nothing in particular but with howling enthusiasm. The flip side of such painstaking care, though, is that they can be inadvertently revealing, the very best and most illuminating kind of disclosure, that leaks candor against its wishes. In their official platform, one sanctioned by the party elites to communicate the principles that animate and bind them as a party, they ditched our nation’s general religiousness and our particular devotion to Israel. It is equally telling that they recanted these omissions almost immediately as scrutiny of them began to build, and did so against the wishes of party members present at the convention for the vote that decided the issue. The sum result of all this rhetorical wrangling is that it remains clear what Democrats are against (i.e. Republicans) but still persistently obscure what they stand for, as a matter of principled conviction.

Category: Election 2012