Using venom to win votes

By Geoffrey Nunberg
New York Times News Service
Published: Saturday, Dec. 27, 2003 8:45 p.m. MST
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The anger wars were officially launched last July, when Ed Gillespie gave his first speech as chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Democrats, he said, "serve up raw emotion" in place of solutions, "and that emotion is anger." Gillespie has been echoing that theme ever since. Last month, he described the Democrats as the party of "protests, pessimism and political hate speech."

As alliterative animadversions go, the line may not be in a league with "nattering nabobs of negativism," Vice President Spiro T. Agnew's dismissal of the critics of another Republican administration caught up in a controversial war. But it signals a similar intention to make the Democrats' mood itself an issue in the coming campaign, and to redefine the language of political emotion in the bargain.

Marc Racicot, the chairman of the Bush for President campaign, sent out a fund-raising letter last week warning that the president is under "venomous assault from rage-filled Democrats," even as the campaign was releasing a new ad called "When Angry Democrats Attack."

"Tired of the pessimism and angry protests?" it asks, over clips of Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. John Kerry harshly criticizing the president, along with one of Howard Dean growling "Thank you very much," implying that the governor's dyspepsia extends even to his expressions of gratitude.

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Granted, the Democratic base really is angry, and Dean owes his front-runner status to his success in mobilizing that feeling. The party's activists are still mad about how President Bush came by his job and even madder about what he's done with it since — an anger that has spilled over into an antipathy for the man himself.

Still, it would be hard to argue that the Democrats are any more hostile toward Bush than the Republicans have been toward the Clintons or, for that matter, that Republicans have become any more amiable since they assumed control of the White House and both houses of Congress. The only thing that has changed is that now the left is expressing itself with the same pugnacity as the right, Democrats say. If the tone comes out sounding angry in Democrats and merely aggressive in Republicans, that's because of the discrepancies in power between the two, not because of any temperamental difference between the sides.

But as the Republicans tell the story, the Democrats' animosity is less a question of being mad as hell than of having anger issues. Conservative commentators analyze the Democrats' problems in therapeutic terms that they would once have derided as Marin County psychobabble.

Charles Krauthammer talks about "the unhinging of the Democratic Party," as it passes "from partisanship to pathology," and David Brooks describes Democrats as "caught up in their own victimization." In one of his last columns before his death, Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal located the "subconscious roots" of Democrats' anger in a crisis of self-identity, compounded by "inner doubts about their own moral position" after the Clinton scandals.

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