Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Financially, the DNC has not suffered terribly under this new regime -- it raised $309 million this year, compared with the Republicans' $385 million. As Arianna Huffington has pointed out, however, the DNC raised its money from a much wider pool this year. In 2000, its donor base was 400,000, while in 2004, 2.7 million people gave to the party.
You would think that such a shift would, out of necessity, have caused the DNC to pay more attention to its grass-roots supporters -- they're the ones now paying the bills. But that hasn't happened. "I've met Terry McAuliffe just once," Boyd says, referring to the DNC's chairman. "It was as he was out scrounging for money, as he always is. And when I met him I got this deep sense of sadness. Here he was, doing the same thing he was doing four years ago. Only now, instead of getting a check for $250,000, it was for $20,000. And that's just damn depressing." Democrats, Boyd adds, "haven't reinvented themselves as a party. They're still thinking of themselves as the folks that raise money and then put on a show every four years. And that's a dead end."
Since the election, though, MoveOn's approach is the one being called the dead end. A couple of weeks ago, in an influential analysis of what went wrong for Democrats, New Republic editor Peter Beinart took particular aim at MoveOn. Beinart believes that Democrats have been losing elections since 9/11 because they have not taken much interest in defeating what he calls "totalitarian Islam." MoveOn, he says, does not put "the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of [its] hopes for a better world," and fosters a "grass roots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage."
"It's a really nasty piece," Boyd says of Beinart's assessment. "The idea that we should identify an entire culture as a totalitarian movement for Democrats to oppose, I think that's wrong and I think it's dangerous. And the idea that we must begin the purges so that Democrats can lead the way in this holy war -- it scares me." Boyd rejects Beinart's belief that MoveOn and its members don't really care about fighting terrorism. That's just the unfortunate reputation the group has acquired, Boyd says, because it has spent the past three years fighting what it considers bad anti-terrorism policies. "The dynamic is simple -- we've been in the opposition and on defense. So when the president says that the way to fight terrorism is to fight a war in Iraq, the opposition says, 'Wait a second, are you insane?' That's perceived as not caring about terrorism. We know that people here, the staff and the members, care deeply about it. But we do believe in the wisdom of crowds; we do believe that the policy elites get it wrong pretty damn consistently."
The policy elites -- of which Boyd includes editors of the New Republic, who supported the war in Iraq -- have a view of anti-terrorism policy "that doesn't connect with the truth in that part of the world and on the ground," Boyd says. There is something to this argument. Beinart, in his essay, congratulates Republicans for the "historical re-education" that 9/11 prompted in the party, a retooling that replaced "the isolationism of the Gingrich Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might." Beinart lambastes Democrats for their failure to similarly reeducate themselves -- but he ignores the truth "on the ground," which is, according to just about every empirical measure of progress in the war on terrorism, that Republican "reeducation" has not reduced the threats to this nation in any demonstrable way, and it may very well have increased it.
MoveOn is fighting against what it considers a dumbed-down terrorism policy. There may be many reasons to criticize the methods MoveOn has used in this fight (Beinart cites the group's opposition to the war in Afghanistan and its naive claim at the time that "a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation from the Taliban"), but it's hard to see how these missteps prove that it's MoveOn's fault that, in Beinart's assessment, Democrats have become a "soft" party that doesn't care about national security. Isn't fighting bad -- historically bad -- national security policy the very definition of caring about it?
Even as he disagrees with Beinart's thesis, however, Boyd does believe that now that they have developed a vibrant opposition, " Democrats need to get on offense, and that includes the development of a security policy that is strong and hard." As part of his call for a range of strategic initiatives liberals should aspire to, Boyd says that the left needs to spend time and money and intellectual energy on a comprehensive, long-term national security policy, "one that deals with the hard things that the administration doesn't ever touch," like "some of their friends the Saudis." There are also specific policy goals Democrats should fight for in the short term, Boyd says, citing as a quick example the need to bolster security at seaports (which, along with many other homeland security objectives, has been seriously ignored by the Bush administration).
MoveOn, Boyd promises, not only will call for these initiatives but will challenge both Republicans and Democrats who disagree with its goals. "We were very disappointed during the campaign in being part of one big happy family," Boyd says of MoveOn's status among Democrats who didn't necessarily share its views. "After an election that's not the case. It's more complex. And we will be advocates for the rank and file."
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