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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
On a big night for the sitting president, his Democratic challengers gather together to rally the faithful -- and crack Bush jokes.
Apr 10, 2003 | Any event hosted by the Children's Defense Fund inevitably provides a rarefied supra-ultra-über-liberal environment. So when the nine declared Democratic presidential candidates gathered together for the first time at a CDF forum Wednesday night in Washington, it wasn't all that surprising that -- even though much of the rest of the country was discussing the fall of Saddam Hussein's evil regime and jubilation in the streets of Baghdad -- those who mentioned their support of the war would be greeted by the lonesome echo of one attendee's applause.
Or that a candidate -- in this case, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio -- could actually propose free tuition for any American who wants to attend law school and not be interrupted by derisive laughter.
It was the kind of setting where Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., could feel perfectly comfortable earnestly declaring his belief that "children are our future." (He did this without any musical accompaniment.)
The forum was not a debate in any sense -- if anything, candidates praised one another, though some barbs lurked beneath the odd remark. President George W. Bush suffered all of the blows thrown, with universal agreement that he and his proposals -- most notably his tax cut -- were a disaster for children and the nation at large. The sentiment was clearly shared by the host of the evening, Children's Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman, who introduced the event by condemning Bush for offering "budgets that leave no millionaire behind but leave millions of our children behind."
Each candidate was permitted a leniently timed one-minute opening statement, some questions from the panel -- moderator Judy Woodruff of CNN, Michel Martin of ABC News, Juan Williams of Fox News Channel and syndicated columnist Mark Shields -- after which they were given time for a brief closing statement. With little but the war to separate their views, and no real interaction (much less confrontation) among the candidates, the hopefuls felt occasionally obliged to point out the few biographical (or, in one case, biological) areas where they differed from their competitors.
Kucinich was the only one to have grown up poor, at times living in cars. "I remember where I came from, the crossroads of hope and despair," he said. Former ambassador to New Zealand Carol Moseley Braun noted that she was "the only candidate who ... bore a child and raised one." Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is the only physician so, he argued, he brought a special understanding of healthcare needs.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was the only Vietnam veteran and "the first and perhaps the only U.S. senator" to call for the resignation of former Majority Leader Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., after he whistled Dixie. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., attended a 1963 dinner at Yale with then-Marian Wright and legendary campus priest Rev. William Sloane Coffin, where he accepted their challenge to help register black voters in the South. Making his first appearance as a candidate, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., pointed out that of the four candidates from the Senate, he was the only one to vote against giving the president the power to wage war against Iraq.
In one way, the evening was like a science project illustrating the challenge for Democratic presidential hopefuls: appeal to the important, moneyed liberals (like many of those packed into the hall of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel ballroom) while not alienating swing voters and millions of other Americans who look at the world very differently. This was an audience, after all, where the Rev. Al Sharpton -- a man often called "controversial" because that's one of the nicest things you can say about him -- drew exuberant hoots nearly every time he spoke, a place where Gephardt defended his vote for the war by forcefully arguing, "I do not want to have another 9/11," only to be met again by the sound of one person clapping. The trick for the more credible candidates trying to position themselves as close to the center -- like Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman and Gephardt -- is to appeal to the ballroom clappers, particularly the wealthy ones, without losing sight of the more important, larger audience.
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