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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Deans, Greens and liberals say the party needs to scream the anti-Bush truth at the American people. New-Democratic centrists say Americans just aren't that left-leaning. The schism is wide, and it's going to get wider.
Jul 12, 2003 | Joe Trippi is managing Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and when you ask him about the Democratic Leadership Council, a group representing the establishment wing of the party, his voice quickly starts to rise. "Every time the DLC attacks us we get stronger," he says, almost shouting into the phone. "We get more people who sign up with us, more people who contribute, more people who join the campaign. We intend to build the greatest grass-roots campaign of the modern era, and hundreds of thousands of people are joining us. That would bother me a lot if I was in the DLC."
The DLC, to be sure, does not seem terribly bothered. The group has openly attacked Dean's followers, circulating a memo in May, reprised in an L.A. Times Op-Ed on July 3. "The fact is," the Op-Ed sneered, "'the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,' as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean likes to call it, is an aberration, a modern-day version of the old McGovern wing of the party, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home."
Goaded by a notice on Dean's Web site, his followers responded by deluging the DLC with thousands of denunciations. "I hate what you folks are doing almost as much as what Bush does," said one. "I haven't contributed to the Democratic party this year and I won't. I have however, sent around $700 to Howard Dean ... which is way beyond any previous political contribution I've ever made." Warned another: "We all know that YOU, the DLC, represent the party's 'elite.' And now it is the rank-and-file that's giving you this wake-up call. Do not think you can ram your hand-picked candidate down the throats of the American people!"
It's been that kind of year in the Democratic Party, which clearly is still struggling to regroup from the 2000 presidential election and the setbacks in the 2002 congressional elections. But the progressive-moderate schism exposed by Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign, far from being healed, is already showing signs of being an active liability for 2004. Earlier this week, Matt Drudge's Internet news mill reported that Dean had threatened to replace DLC ally Terry McAuliffe as the party chairman if he wins the presidential nomination.
Trippi vehemently denies the story. Yet it's clear that the Dean camp and the DLC are fighting an increasingly acrimonious civil war. Even as the Democratic Party seeks to unite against George W. Bush, many of its grass-roots activists are in mutiny. The rift is less about issues than an argument about the way politics works in America and the role of passion and anger in stirring the electorate, and its resolution will determine the Democratic strategy in 2004 and the direction of the party thereafter.
Tired of running toward a center that has moved sharply right since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, many in the party's left wing want a candidate who can mobilize the party's base and inspire non-voters to join. The DLC rejects this approach -- and sometimes seems to mock it. Noting that liberals are a small minority in America, its Web site says: "No matter how excited, energized, stoked and psyched you are, you only get to vote once."
Whether the DLC's analysis is true or not, its tone has fueled the ascent of the former Vermont governor. Dean's brawl with the DLC has tapped into a deep well of resentment within the party. At the recent Take Back America conference in Washington -- a historic gathering of progressive activists from across the country -- the DLC was an object of derision second only to the president and his cronies. Liberal Democratic Web sites like Buzzflash.com and CommonDreams.org attack the group almost daily, blaming it for their party's reticence in the face of Bush's radicalism.
Founded in 1985, the DLC is the nerve center of the New Democrat wing of the party, which seeks to distance itself from big-government liberalism, emphasizing free-market solutions to social problems. "Since its inception," the Web site says, "the DLC has championed policies from spurring private sector economic growth, fiscal discipline and community policing to work based welfare reform, expanded international trade, and national service." Its chairs have included Bill Clinton and presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, and DLC president Bruce Reed is advising candidate John Edwards.
Many grass-roots Democrats are convinced that the DLC's middle-of-the-road strategy led the party to defeat in the 2002 midterms. "Over the last 22 years that we've been following this poll-and-move-right-plan, we've lost the governorships, lost the Senate, lost the House, and lost the presidency," says Trippi. "We used to control 40 of the state Legislatures. Now Republicans control 40 of the state Legislatures."
The fight between the two sides isn't so much ideological as tactical. Howard Dean, after all, isn't really a leftist, or even a traditional liberal. He's the most fiscally conservative of the nine candidates running for the Democratic nomination and supports gun rights and the death penalty. Certainly, his antiwar stance has won him a great deal of liberal support, but his pugnacious style has been almost equally as important.
"On one hand he's appealing to angry liberal voters," says John Zobgy, president of the polling firm Zogby International. "He's antiwar, populist on the economy and so on, but at the same time, he's also the straight-talking McCain guy, and to a lesser degree the straight-talking Ross Perot, saying: 'There's no spin here -- you might not like what I have to say, but always be assured I'm going to call it like I see it.'"
The DLC's message, meanwhile, is more than just Republican lite, despite the claims of its detractors. It supported the Iraq war, but opposes Bush's broader unilateralism and policy of preemption. It champions universal healthcare and excoriates Bush's economic policies. Yet it's extremely wary of demonizing Bush. "It is important to understand that a majority of the American people do not and will not share the sort of reflexive belief that the president and his administration are stupid or evil," says Ed Kilgore, policy director of the DLC. "I happen to think centrist Democrats and 'liberals' do share the same basic values and a lot of the same basic policy goals. Where we tend to disagree is on means."
That translates into a disagreement about which voters to court. Grass-roots members of the party are tired of compromising their values in the hope of winning the swing voters that the DLC covets, and hope to recruit non-voters instead. The DLC dismisses this strategy as naive fantasy.
"Every two years at election time, the party goes through an agony of self-reflection and recently self-reproach," says Robert Reich, a prominent progressive who served as Clinton's secretary of labor. "They ask: Should we move right and get more of the so-called suburban swing voter or should we have the courage of our progressive convictions and generate more enthusiasm among the base? What's left out of the debate is an acknowledgment that half of adult Americans who are qualified to vote no longer do so. The only way to get them into the voting booths is to give them something to vote for, a real choice, real ideals and a strong and bold vision of where the country is and where it should be going."
Kilgore is withering in response. "I think Secretary Reich frankly doesn't know what he's talking about on that subject," he says. "This is an ancient myth of the left and the right, that non-voters are more extreme than voters."
