Dem's non-compete clause

By Daniel Henninger

"What we will not tolerate is the Republican efforts to privatize Medicare." That was the voice of Sen. Ted Kennedy, announcing a no-compete clause for all of Medicare amid the recent debate. It is the voice of the modern Democratic Party which, when you stand back and take a long look, appears not to want to compete at much of anything these days, other than winning the presidency. But even here the people running for the Democratic presidential nomination seem mostly intent on signing up the whole country to a non-compete clause.

Medicare, the public schools, trade, affirmative action, the environment, even the federal judiciary - persons of competitive or entrepreneurial instincts need not apply. How did this happen, especially now? For most people in the United States, the idea of not competing is alien to their being. Sports stadiums in America fill up every night of the week with people high on the thrill of competition. Parents stand on the sidelines all weekend as their children learn to compete on the playing fields of Peoria.

Even Al Gore, the father of the information superhighway, purported some relationship with the more dynamic instincts of the American economy, claiming friends and funders around Silicon Valley, until the Valley vaporized on oversold dreams. But at least they had a forward-moving dream. What do Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean dream of at night? Smoldering steel mills and dairy farmers. Honorable work, surely, but not the future for the kids racing up and down those soccer fields.

Historically, the Democratic party has somehow managed to mix the water of the administrative state with the oil of private-sector energy. Europe's social democrats did too, until the ever-rising sea of public needs drowned the continent's competitive people.

For decades, the Democrats kept their party's ideological seesaw balanced at one end with socialists and the other with Wall Street admirers of government's promise, such as Felix Rohatyn, Robert Rubin and Cyrus Vance. Of late, however, the party has increasingly sounded as if it's become psychologically alienated from the private sector.

The Medicare fight was revealing. The federal prescription drug benefit for the elderly has for years been the great white whale of the party's Ahabs. But then the Republicans put the blood of competition in the water, proposing that private insurers' plans be allowed to "compete" with Medicare. Compete? Eeeek! The Democrats tried to blow up the bill, including the drug benefit, to avoid exposing Medicare to the softest breeze of "competition." Even the traditional Democratic motif of competition with regulatory restraints was unacceptable. When the private-sector clause passed, Sen. Hillary Clinton said, "The needs of people are trumped in this town time and time again by interests who have money." Any given issue can toss up dire rhetoric like that, but the Democrats' impulse to fence off their - and our - world from competitive forces has become reflexive.

The public schools are now shrines to the new non-compete doctrine. Neither the schools, their teachers, their unions nor custodians may ever be exposed to competitors, even those who have virtually no money, such as the nation's financially strapped Catholic schools. The party and teachers unions have spent millions ("interests who have money"?) to thwart even pilot alternatives. The Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., broke ranks to support a choice plan for the District's collapsed, non compos mentis school system, and has been vilified for it by the no-compete crowd. (Mayor Anthony Williams' support for a voucher system along with that of many black D.C. parents suggest there are Democratic outliers who do want the chance to compete.) The simple explanation here is that elections are expensive, and Democratic candidates will do what they must to sustain contribution flows from unions representing 19th-century industries, health-care workers or teachers who live in an alternative, non-competitive universe. Again, any of these in isolation could be viewed as business as usual. But over time these combined pressures have become like silt, filling in the Democrats' normal harbors to reality and closing them off from the real economy or a negotiable politics.

Thus, the anti-globalization rioters of the 1990s in Seattle and elsewhere, seeking an eternal non-compete clause, got President Clinton to ratchet down his strong support for free trade; now all the party's presidential candidates have made trade negotiations contingent on environmental and labor restrictions.

And what might that mean? In Seattle at the time of the riots, Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees told a rally: "We refuse to be marketized. We have to name the system that tolerates sweatshops and child labor. And that system is corporate capitalism." This isn't some kid with a wet handkerchief over his nose but one of the party's top 10 potentates.

In the Senate, year-long Democratic filibusters blocking votes on the President's judicial nominees - Hispanic, female, black, no matter - are of a piece with the flight from competition, here the marketplace of ideas. Whatever else, the minds of Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen must be suppressed.

The one thing these Democrats compete hard at is politics itself, and in an era when television has turned politics into a kind of sport, this may be enough to keep some of the public awake. But I think the party is living on thin ice and could wake up one election morning to discover it has sunk to the bottom of the lake. You can't expect voters to agree forever that a 38-year-old health program can never change, that schools can never change or that a black, female federal judge cannot possibly exist in America.

One of the most enduring images in sports, that most competitive of arenas, is the eighth round of the 1980 Leonard-Duran match, in which Roberto Duran raises his glove and says, "No mas," no more, and refuses to compete. Howard Dean's got a feisty little personality, but as a party, the Democrats are about one electoral round away from becoming the party of no mas.

Daniel Henninger is the deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.