You have to be really old to see Henry Waxman, from the freshman class of 1974, as a challenger to the Old Vanguard, but that is how the Wall Street Journal frames the battle over the chair of the House Energy & Commerce committee.
That fissure neatly separates the Waxman Democrats from the old vanguard that Mr. Dingell represents. He was first elected in 1955 and has always tried to protect his hometown Detroit auto makers from the eco-mandates that ultimately helped to land them in their present predicament. Mr. Dingell’s rough-hewn candor about the realities of “doing something” about climate change also helped to make him a green pariah. He knows that carbon regulation and taxes will fall most heavily on domestic manufacturing and Midwest states that rely on coal-fired power. His sympathies lie with the people who work near (or in) factories and drive Fords or Chevys.
Mr. Waxman, speaking for the upscale precincts of Beverly Hills, wants to phase out coal and cars that use gasoline. The coastal elites who now dominate Democratic politics will happily trade the blue collar for the green collar.
Like George Miller, Barney Frank and the other liberals produced by Vietnam and Watergate, Mr. Waxman belongs to a cohort whose power has been checked — one way or the other — by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton’s New Democrat tendencies, the Republican sweep of 1994 and George W. Bush. Now with a new Democratic President and a crisis to use as a lever for a sweeping expansion of government, they aren’t about to let an old warhorse with scruples about the costs of regulation interfere with their moment to govern.
There’s no doubt that John Dingell is a relic from the past. That he was first elected to Congress in 1955 and is serving his 27th term there is amazing. No other sitting member of Congress has served as long as Dingell. But that fact undermines the story line that Waxman is upsetting the Old Guard (an Old Guard of one?). The Journal’s framing would ring much truer if it had a byline from 1980. The Class of 1974 was the first modern post-Vietnam, post-Watergate liberal Democratic class. It did represent a clean break with the party of the past that was dominated by southern segregationists and northern hard-hat unionists. But that’s the battle the Baby Boomers have been fighting for the last thirty-four years, and the Waxman-Dingell battle yesterday had nothing to do with it.
On the other hand, the Journal is certainly correct when they say that the Class of 1974 never got to dominate Congress…until now. The Democratic Party has been running away from and apologizing for the Class of ’74 ever since the 1980 and 1984 elections. But modern liberals are finally ascendant. All it took was the epic failure of Reagan/Bushism and the ineffectual opposition of DLC Democratic leadership.
There’s a reason that liberals were excited by the election results and the WSJ is apoplectic. But, don’t worry, elites still rule our world.
