Here's how bad things are for the Democrats. During the
last town meeting of liberals that still convenes on
network television - Hollywood's Oscar ceremony - no one,
not even the tag team of Barbra Streisand and Robert
Redford, had so much as a mildly critical word to say about
George W. Bush. But Nathan Lane scored one of the night's
few laughs when he saluted movie animators for "creating
the illusion of life - something that was never achieved
with Al Gore."

Such is the torpor of the Democrats these days that Mr.
Gore's shaving of his beard is what passes for a
galvanizing party event worthy of national polls (62
percent were pro-shave) and desperate '04 prognostication
on CNN. Even the Democrats' rare legislative victory, the
passage of the campaign finance bill, was robbed of its
glory when the party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, almost
simultaneously announced a record soft-money donation of $7
million from the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" mogul, not
to mention a spring Apollo Theater fund-raiser at which
Bill Clinton will be paired with Michael Jackson, fresh
from his photo op at Liza Minnelli's wedding.

If the Democrats stand for anything in a time of rapidly
expanding war, it's not clear what it is. Hours before the
Passover massacre in Netanya, President Bush could assert
that the latest diplomatic foray by Gen. Anthony Zinni was
"making very good progress" with little worry that any
Democratic leader would challenge him. The incoherence and
indolence of the Bush "policy" in the Middle East, which
kept General Zinni out of the region for three months of
violent meltdown and ultimately rendered Dick Cheney a
supplicant to Yasir Arafat, has been more forcefully
dissected by conservatives like George Will than anyone in
the administration's opposition. At home, the Democrats
can't even offer a serious alternative to the Bush budget
for the simple reason that they helped give away the store
by abetting the administration's mammoth tax cut last
summer and made no legislative push for even partial
rollbacks after the fiscal world changed on Sept. 11.

The explanations for this fecklessness start, of course,
with the president's poll numbers. Democrats are so
intimidated by them that a recent open memo co-written by
James Carville found hope that Mr. Bush was "falling back
to earth" in a survey showing that his approval rating had
tumbled from 82 percent in December to a March low of . . .
75. Compounding the Democrats' fear of a popular president
is the Republicans' calculated rollout of a strategy
branding anyone who questions the administration as "giving
aid and comfort to our enemies" (the phrase actually used
by Tom Davis of Virginia, the head of the G.O.P.'s House
campaign committee).

This strategy was codified by Karl Rove in a January speech
to the Republican National Committee inviting his party to
politicize the war in an election year because Americans
"trust the Republicans to do a better job" of "protecting
America." But the impugning of the opposition's patriotism
began only two months after Sept. 11, when the Family
Research Council ran ads in South Dakota likening Tom
Daschle to Saddam Hussein because the Senate majority
leader had opposed oil drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. In late February, when Mr. Daschle raised
a few mild, common-sense cavils about the next stage of the
war, Trent Lott fired back, "How dare Senator Daschle
criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on
terrorism?" Since then, President Bush's image and voice
have graced negative TV and radio ads in which firefighters
and flags are used as props and incumbent Senate Democrats
are demonized as partisans who will "put their interests
ahead of national interests."

Such tactics are sufficiently ugly that two Republican
senators who, unlike Mr. Lott, didn't take deferments
during Vietnam, John McCain and Chuck Hagel, were moved to
defend Mr. Daschle's right to question war policy after the
minority leader's attack. So was another Vietnam vet, Colin
Powell. But except for a speech given in New Hampshire by
John Kerry, a presidential candidate inoculated against
charges of treason by his own Vietnam heroism, no Democrat
has articulated a muscular alternative wartime political
vision to the president's. As Nicholas Lemann reports this
week in his compelling New Yorker account of the White
House run-up to a planned removal of Saddam, the
administration is now using Sept. 11 "as the occasion to
launch a new, aggressive American foreign policy that would
represent a broad change in direction rather than a
specific war on terrorism." Where is the debate?

It's an index of the general sheepishness of Democratic
leaders that such sporadic tough talk as there is usually
emanates by default from either the clownish Mr. McAuliffe
or the cranky Senate octogenarians Robert Byrd and Ernest
Hollings. It's a measure of how compromised leading
Democrats are by their own ties to Enron, Global Crossing
and the accounting industry that the heavy lifting in
pursuing Mr. Cheney's secret energy task force and the
dubious Enron dealings of the secretary of the Army, Thomas
White, has often fallen to the House's Henry Waxman, who
doesn't have the power to call his own hearings.

As for Mr. Gore, America's "president in exile," in the
hopeful formulation of the best-selling populist Michael
Moore, his most pointed remarks are served up to rich
paying customers at fund-raisers. Our country has seen more
spirited political back-and-forth over the merger of
Hewlett-Packard and Compaq and the factual verisimilitude
of "A Beautiful Mind" than it has over a $48 billion
defense-budget increase (itself larger than the entire
defense budget of any other nation) or our uncertain policy
for stabilizing Afghanistan so that the victory by Mr. Bush
and our armed forces over the Taliban isn't usurped once
more by Al-Qaeda-breeding chaos.

 
Trent Lott did nail his adversaries correctly on one score.
"When you don't have anything substantive to talk about,"
he said, "you start talking about process or how you need
more information." This fits the Democrats' one bold but
almost substance-free stand of late - the threat to
subpoena Tom Ridge if he won't formally testify before
Congress about what he's up to as director of homeland
security. Would Mr. Ridge really have much to say even if
he did testify? His biggest function seems to be to supply
gags to late-night comics with his color-coded alert
system. The man who has by far the most clout over domestic
security (and much else) is John Ashcroft, who continues
trying to grab authority from other agencies (from the
Treasury Department to the Federal Trade Commission), not
to mention extra-constitutional power, with even less
resistance from Democrats than they mustered against his
appointment in the first place.

Last week, in a typical stroke of grandstanding designed to
deflect us from his stalled anthrax investigation and other
hapless efforts to find terrorists within our borders, the
attorney general announced that he would haul in thousands
more men for questioning. He hopes we'll forget that his
previous dragnet produced no Sept. 11-related arrests and,
according to officials consulted by USA Today, "little
usable intelligence about terrorism."

Mr. Ashcroft couldn't even find half of the nearly 5,000
subjects he intended to interview in that previous roundup,
but not until there was universal outrage this month over
the I.N.S.'s posthumous granting of visas to two of the
Sept. 11 hijackers did he decide "to move up [the]
timetable" for the agency's reform (as a Justice Department
official delicately put it). This week Mr. Ashcroft made
yet another move that puts his own political posturing
ahead of the war on terrorism by seeking the death penalty
for Zacarias Moussaoui. Few legal experts believe that the
courts will uphold a death sentence for an indirect
participant in the attacks (Mr. Moussaoui was already in
jail on Sept. 11), but by overreaching anyway Mr. Ashcroft
has given the French government grounds to withhold
evidence needed to prosecute the case.

It isn't treason for a party out of power in wartime to
talk about these matters. If anything, it's the Democrats'
patriotic responsibility not just to hold up their end of
the national dialogue over the war's means and ends, but to
say where they want to take the country in peace. Yet now
that they've capitulated on issues ranging from
fuel-economy standards to gun control, the sum of a
Democratic social vision these days often seems to have
dwindled down to a prescription drug program for Medicare
patients. For the party itself, however, nothing short of a
spine transplant may do.