Mr Jefferson’s inheritors

Will Rogers once remarked, “I belong to no organised party. I am a Democrat.” Were he alive, he would be dumbstruck by the conformity that has overtaken his party colleagues.

Will Rogers once remarked, “I belong to no organised party. I am a Democrat.” Were he alive, he would be dumbstruck by the conformity that has overtaken his party colleagues. It is hard to imagine a time which cried out more for a vigorous opposition. Yet, when it was needed most, the Democratic Party failed to check a system running amok.

President Bush said last week that with 20,000 additional troops he could stop the Middle East from exploding. Having destroyed a noncombatant nation and triggered the death of thousands, here he was, telling us how he proposed to save Iraq and the world. To be fair, Bush has been no less assiduous in devastating his own country. Last week it was discovered he had ordered postal mail to be intercepted without a warrant. Habeas Corpus is no longer guaranteed, phone conversations may be listened to, library books tracked; the state has put citizens under surveillance without legal sanction. If Iraq’s infrastructure is crumbling, America is hardly shipshape. The tab for the war is $ 350 billion (and counting): money which would have provided for hospitals, put thousands through college, even permitted the inspection of cargo coming into the US, an oft-voiced concern. The budget surplus has become a towering deficit.

Where were you when Kennedy died, was a question often asked. So might the Democrats be asked: where were they when a boy president, who came to power in a doubtful election, broke every norm in the country and world? It was a Democrat-controlled Senate which gave Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq. Heedless of pleas from people like Senator Robert Byrd, a majority of Democrat Senators voted for the war, fearful of losing the mid-term elections by being labelled ‘soft on terror’. But this Faustian deal availed them nothing; their Senate majority was soon history.

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By 2004 it was clear that the whole WMD thing was a crock. Yet not one prominent Democrat receded from his or her vote. Neither John Kerry, nor Hillary Clinton, nor any other big-name Democrat deigned to visit Cindy Sheehan at Camp Casey outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, where she undertook a Gandhian satyagraha to seek an answer from Bush to a simple question: for what noble cause did her son die fighting in Iraq? He, of course, did not meet her.

The Democratic Party never stood up on the two issues of our time. By 2006 the country had itself moved far ahead of the Democrats. Bush’s dropping poll numbers lent them some calcium and many spoke out on Iraq. But they seldom questioned the Original Sin, choosing merely to critique Bush’s conduct of the war. Nevertheless, so hated had Bush’s Republicans become, that the Democrats were returned in the House and got an unexpected control of the Senate. But, going by early indications, caution is still the watchword of the Democratic Party.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a US-based writer