It's time for Democrats to learn moderation in the course of public discourse

Date published: 8/14/2005

A S THE SMOKE was settling from the Los Angels riots in 1992, a clearly shaken Rodney King asked a question to an equally traumatized country:

Can't we all get along?

It was a good question, despite the mocking tone in which people tend to use it today. The derision one hears associated with King's plaintive query implies a certain sense of surrender in the omnipresent battle for national cohesion--as well as silent acquiescence to the decline in cultural civility.

In essence, to mock the phrase "Can't we all get along?" is to mock the very idea of, well, us getting along. The question is: Who is right--King, or the scoffers who can't imagine respecting people with different perspectives?

I've been thinking a lot about Rodney King's question as the level of vitriol directed toward Republicans by Democratic leaders has surged in recent months.

Can't we all get along?

It goes beyond differing political prescriptions. This is a democracy; we're supposed to have differences. But when we see a party whose leading senator publicly uses words like "idiot" and "loser" to describe the president of the United States, that's not politics--that's an obsession.

When we have the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate comparing our troops to Nazis, Stalinists, and the Khmer Rouge, that's not merely unfair--it's pathological.

When the chairman of the Democratic Party says he hates Republicans and "everything they stand for," that's not just the worst way to win new supporters--it's narcissistic and self-destructive.

Can't we all get along?

Even some liberal stalwarts (including Joe Biden, hardly a shrinking violet) have begun to admit that the level of vituperation needs to be toned down--at least in the public arena. Antagonism might rouse the hard-core party faithful, but it isn't sustainable as a political foundation.

The polls bear this out. While the president's poll numbers have waned, largely based on news from Iraq, there has been no corresponding rise in support for Democrats. The reason, admit Democratic heavies James Carville and Stan Greenberg in a party memorandum, is that Democrats have brought little to the table. "Democrats have not yet defined themselves or what changes they would bring," the two note.

Date published: 8/14/2005