Author photoJohn Hood's Daily Journal
What Erskine Knows

By John Hood

March 29, 2004

RALEIGH — Erskine Bowles, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in 2002 and the likely one again in 2004, is no fool. As President Bill Clinton's chief of staff in the White House, Bowles was one of the few grown-ups picking up the beer cans and broken lamp shades after the adolescents occupying the place. Having proven himself on Wall Street and in the North Carolina business world, Bowles didn't need the Washington power trip the way others around him did.

But in 2002, the level-headed Bowles got bad advice, tried to be something he was not, and got thoroughly thrashed by Republican Elizabeth Dole. It's likely that Bowles had little chance of winning the race anyway, in my judgment, but his 180-degree turn on a variety of issues had him facing left when the rest of the electorate was clearly moving to the center-right.

This time appears to be different. Erskine Bowles knows something that the national Democratic Party, strident and trapped in tantrum-mode, has yet to realize. The 2004 elections will not be won by "energizing" left-wing voters with left-wing red falafel (red meat being, of course, out of the question).

Judging by recent appearances, such as one Monday with Dole and 2004 GOP rival Richard Burr before the North Carolina Bankers Association in Greensboro, Bowles isn't going along with John Kerry's national Democratic message, the one destined to resonate so well with so many millions of voters -- in France and Spain. For one thing, for one big thing, Bowles continues to support the war in Iraq. I think opposition (in addition to being mistaken) would doom his chances for election, a fact also likely to be true in the other Southern and Western states with competitive Senate races this year.

Indeed, Bowles has gone further than the dwindling number of hawkish Democrats left in Washington. He has opposed attempts to force Bush national-security advisor Condoleeza Rice to testify in public before a Congress-created commission on 9/11. "That's a big precedent to break," the former White House bureaucrat told the bankers. On Iraq itself, Bowles said just a few weeks ago at a campaign stop in Sylva that he still believes the resolution authorizing Bush to use force was the right vote, though he criticizes how the Bush administration has handled the situation after the invasion. At another event, he defended intelligence estimates placing biological and chemical weapons in Saddam Hussein's hands in the recent past and warning of the dangers of letting them fall into the hands of terrorists.

On the economy, Bowles properly senses some political vulnerability because of Bush's big-spending proclivities and is trying to link Burr to the mushrooming federal deficit (that's a stretch). Interestingly, Bowles is talking about how excessive regulations are keeping small businesses from creating new jobs (he once ran the U.S. Small Business Administration) and distancing himself from Kerry's laundry list of spending proposals, which has been opening up the latter to legitimate accusations from the Bush camp about potential tax increases.

Bowles calls himself a "centrist" in an obvious attempt to position himself for a tough race with Burr, whose political talents and impressive record in the U.S. House are undeniable. Bowles has the luxury to do this because he likely won't face a primary challenge this year, so he won't need to pander to those liberal Democratic activists with their loud mouths full of crimson chickpeas. And it also happens to be much closer to the truth -- Bowles being a centrist, I mean -- than the reflexively leftist candidate invented for the 2002 effort.

I'm not arguing that Bowles will necessarily pull this off, of course. For example, he's still being unforgivably protectionist on trade issues, and surely knows better. Burr has a free-trade record, for the most part, so Bowles sees a opening in a tough economy to peel off cultural and even fiscally conservative voters by demagoguing the issue. I'll differ with the conventional wisdom and argue that this is not the best political play here. I don't think that North Carolina voters really believe that erecting barriers to the free flow of goods and services is a sound way to promote growth and opportunity. The policy sounds a hundred years old, and is.

I also think that Bowles may still be vulnerable on the tax issue, as Burr presses forward a strong defense of the Bush record on taxes (in a year in which many North Carolinians are going to be getting sizable tax refunds) and dares Bowles to oppose making the tax cuts permanent and enacting some additional reductions.

But I have to return to my initial point: Erskine Bowles knows something that many Democrats across the country are probably going to learn in the coming months. Bush is probably not going to be an unpopular president in November, the Iraq campaign in the war on Islamofascist terror is probably not going to be a political liability for its supporters, and the hyperbolic hysterics we hear out of Washington Dems are probably not going to increase their ranks much, if at all.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.

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