Which branch of the Democrat party is more to blame for its failures?

[Beet]

Use this thread to discuss how either the liberal or centrist wing has hurt/helped the Democrats. Last year I was an Edwards supporter, but I will make the case that the centrists have hurt the Dems:

I have to disagree with you about Clinton's centrism being appeasement.  The miserable failure of the Democrats in more recent years honestly comes from having abandoned the Clinton approach and taking a more hard-left approach.

1) How exactly was Gore "hard-left"? I don't think he was "hard-left" at all, if he distanced himself from Clinton in the campaign it was only because he was foolishly afraid that some of the Lewinsky fatigue would rub off on him. That's also why he picked Lieberman. In retrospect it's so dumb but that's how it was. We had a big surplus then and Gore proposed an $800 billion tax cut. Bush proposed a $1.3 trillion tax cut. So the size of their tax cuts differed, but I don't exactly see that as being a 'hard-left' position. Certainly Gore did not in any way resemble Howard Dean nor did he have anywhere near the record of John Kerry. Plus, the economy was the best that it had been in 35 years. Many baby boomers no doubt were surprised that things could ever have gotten so good again. Nixon may have narrowly lost as VP in 1960, but the economy was in recession in 1960. Recession!

strike 1 for the DLC.

2) The Democrats kept up the centrist charade in 2002. The Senate leadership made a calculated decision to support Bush's war resolution. And once again, they suffered a historic loss, this time because no party had lost seats in both chambers of Congress in an off-year election since 1934. Later it turned out a lot of the WMD intelligence was crap, and maybe we should have questioned it more vigorously.

strike 2 for the DLC.

3) That was the stage for 2003, and Howard Dean's grassroots campaign, the first truly grassroots Democratic campaign since probably when Jimmy Carter took the nomination in 1976. Even then the 'hard left' did not win. Since Dean peaked too early the nomination instead went to a 'compromise' candidate who was the guy the DLC originally wanted from the very beginning.

Kerry had a liberal voting record to be sure, not the most liberal in the Senate once you account for missed votes but pretty liberal. On the other hand he voted in favor of the war, and continued to stand by that, leading to a pretty awkward campaign whose only message was "I'll manage it better." Not exactly the most overwhelming reason to replace an incumbent president in a time of war, especially the president who guided us through 9/11. That visionless 'message' lost.

Strike 2.5 for the DLC.

Strike 0.5 for the 'hard left', due to Kerry's voting record.

4) Add to that the fact that Gephardt and the congressional Dems had embraced the Clintonian "New Democrat" model after 1994 but they continually failed to re-take congress, that is 3 strikes for the DLC.

The 'hard left' has only one election where it plausibly hurt the Democrats (2004), and even that is unclear due to Kerry's support of the Iraq war. Now how is it that the "hard left" is responsible for the Democrats' current condition, and not the visionless DLC?

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There is the empirical evidence. Now let's turn to the theoretical evidence.

1) The best centrist argument is that you have to be moderate to win. It's a utilitarian naked appeal to power with no pretense at conviction. People can see through this and do.
 
Example: Kerry as a flip-flopper. The main idea here is that Kerry really has no principles and that he'll say contradictory things to win in politics. This is believable because he had a solidly liberal voting record yet he tried to run as a moderate. Similiar things are said or thought about other Democratic 'centrists' including Clinton.

2) A centrist puts very little at stake. In the 2000 election it was perceived that you had two centrists running, a lot of people complained there was no difference between the two parties. That's hardly the way to excite the base, and therefore a poor strategy for increasing turnout. It also makes you vulnerable to defection by "principle" voters (i.e. Nader voters). Bottom line is, people have got to care enough not only to turn out, but to work and contribute for your campaign. It's hard to do that when you don't sharply define yourself on issues.

3) People respond to elite signals, and when strong signals are coming only from one side, people will gravitate towards that side.

i.e., if Peter says "Red is better than blue!" and Paul says "Blue is better than red!" people won't know what to think. But if Peter says "Red is better than blue!" and Paul says "Well, I'm not really sure, but I think that maybe, in some cases, blue may have its advantages..." then people will tend to believe red is better.

Over the long term, if liberals dither and equivocate while conservatives come out strongly, the public will become increasingly conservative.

Note: I also think there are strong arguments for the centrist view, but I'm wondering how centrist supporters will respond to the issues raised above.

[Beet]

Hmmm, wow. . I did have the fortitude to read it all, but I'm not sure I can respond to it all.

I'll just say one brief thing, that no doubt a lot of the perception that Democrats are "weak" on national security is

1- A myth created by by the right. One of their biggest issues which they repeat all the time is how Clinton "gutted" the military. They never mention how military spending kept falling throughout all of George Bush Sr.'s term, and that the end of the Cold War combined with an even worse budget situation thatn we have today more than anything else contributed to the closing of a lot of bases. Another charge they keep repeating is how Clinton did "nothing" against terrorists. This is both untrue and reflects an unfair projection of post-9/11 mentality onto pre-9/11 situations. Clinton responded to every single terrorist attack that happened on his watch and gave far more money and attention to terrorism than any previous president. The Egyptian mastermind of the 1993 WTC attack which Clinton supposedly "ignored" was arrested within two years. You never hear Reagan getting chewed out for pulling out of Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombings.

2- An almost unavoidable aspect to opposition of the war in Iraq. "Opposing the war yet supporting the troops" is one of those difficult nuanced positions you're talking about.

[Beet]

Ok, it's been more than a month. It's taken some time to digest these posts, to avoid some kind of a knee jerk response. Now comments on this topic...

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In this paragraph you have two theses, both of which are a bit hard for me to follow. You claim that the "hard left" rallied to the defense of Clinton during the Lewinsky affair. This was around the time I was first beginning to follow politics, but I don't seem to remember any groups rallying to his defense, except in the sense that in regard to the impeachment affair, public opinion polls at the time showed large majorities of both independents and Democrats, and large majorities of the public overall, opposing impeachment. Large majorities also approved of Clinton's job performance, and his approval on this matter kept rising. On this account, and the results of the 1998 elections, the Republican impeachment process unsurprisingly stalled in the Senate. However, further than this, I don't remember any revival of what is now called the "hard" left in the late 1990s. You mention moveon.org, but many people had no inkling of the existence of this site until it was catapaulted to prominence in the wake of its fundraising efforts for Howard Dean's insurgent campaign.

On the point of Gore defending Clinton, again I do not remember the account you give here. Gore was portrayed in the media as being one of the more critical Democrats because he had publicly rebuked Clinton; while on the other hand he did not call for Clinton's removal from office (though ironically it would almost have guaranteed him victory in 2000). His self-distancing from Clinton and his choice of Lieberman, indeed all of this was directed solely to separate himself from the taint of the Lewinsky affair. From a reasonable perspective, since the nature of Clinton's impropriety was of a very personal nature, this should have been more than enough to neutralize any negative fallout. Where I argue was that the fallout was indirect, in that Gore did not gain some of the benefits that he might have accrued from campaigning more explicitly as Clinton's successor.

With regard to John Ford's comments, as Kramer mentioned, his (limited) populism was a rather late development in his campaign and arguably helped him close the gap with Bush. Spring and summer polling was showing Gore being absolutely crushed in a complete blowout. I distinctly remember an early poll that year showing Bush up by some 25 points. Gore never took the lead in polls for longer than a few days and his election night performance in 2000 was a surprise.

Now, I may be wrong on this, but IIRC his health care and pension programs, did not include anything like "Hillarycare" but did include a prescription drug plan something like the one passed by the GOP house in 2003, and did include a "lockbox" to protect funding for social security. If this is "hard left", given where things stand now, then you will have none other than George Bush and Tom Delay as the nation's most prominent leftists.

I believe that one of the (admittedly numerous) deciding factors in 2000 was not the position-taking of the candidates at all but the intangible air of "excitement". While both candidates gravitated towards the center, I believe some voters, who had no strong convictions either way, voted for Bush simply because his ideas--school vouchers, social security privatization, bigger tax cut-- sounded more exciting. In essence, Gore was the conservative candidate. Most probably thought he was competent and centrist, but he was just too boring, and we were riding so high as a country back in 2000 that people felt secure enough to look favorably on Bush's bolder, more "exciting" plans. In a way, this is also how someone in 2000 could, maybe, have suspected what kind of president Bush would end up being. There was a revolutionary whiff beneath the centrist facade of the Bush campaign. Excitability is also the main reason why so many voted for Nader-- Nader made you feel much better about being a leftist than Gore the Bore.

Therein lies one of the dangers of centrism. Centrism is dull, and the dullness can rub off.

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This is hard to say. To some extent, the Democrats offered nothing in 2002. They offered no reason to vote for them because they were doing little except supporting Bush. This election was more devastating than merely the numbers suggest because it shattered some kind of unproven, invisible assumption that might have been defensible before the election, but was indefensible afterwards--the notion of the 50/50 nation. The media saw the results of the 2000 election as an accident (as one might reasonably conclude) and played it off as such by creating the 50/50 meme (which has suffered a rather quiet death). In doing so they did a disservice to Democrats.

The nation was about as 50/50 in 2000 as it was in 1960. That is, not 50/50 at all. For the first time since 1930, the GOP had won control of all three branches of the government. Jim Jeffords' defection was a sign of how close that control was, but does not invalidate the achievement, because it was not an electoral result. Neither does the fact that more people went to the polls in Florida intending to vote for Gore, because again, under regular voting methods, Bush had a majority of some 2,000 votes, and in a regular case, hanging chads would not even have been an issue. The same goes for civil rights violations in Florida, which did occur, but which fairly or not were signs of the GOP's institutional strength.

For someone atuned to the intangible dynamics of American politics in the year 2000, the Democratic party was clearly in trouble. Nonetheless, it was possible to maintain an illusion of accidentality until 2002. After 2002, the DLC's failure became crystal clear, and since their overwhelming justificaton for their dominant position within the party was electability [and after 1994, specifically presidential electability], you might say they lost their "power base". In such a vacuum, the revival of the left was no surprise. This is a case of the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

[Beet]

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In the long term or short? How many people might a Dean presidential campaign have brought into the fold of the Democratic party or into political activism in general that were turned cold by the Kerry campaign? Sure Dean might have lost, but what long term benefit is there to having been able to say "we ran a candidate we could be for" as opposed to just being against Bush? And how many progressives who because of the closeness of 2004 do not change their ways, who might have realized more completely how they are a minority in the face of a clearer rebuke? In the end these things might matter more than the difference between 250 and 150 electoral votes.

But after the Sept. 11th attacks, national security reasserted itself as an issue.  Without a "Sister Souljah" moment

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and the Democrats need to recognize that holding onto certain constituencies is costing them more votes than it is gaining them.

I guess I have written enough, Beet.  I hope you have the fortitude to read it all.

Again, I'm reading two main points, one on national security, the other on blacks. On the former, you've said that Democrats have had a problem here since Vietnam. You may be correct.

Part of the problem is that the things that build national security credibility the best come from being in power at a time when national security is salient. The GOP probably picked some up through Bush after 9/11. Clinton on the other hand was president at a time when it wasn't such a big issue, so in a sense he had no chance to prove himself. Clinton responded adequately to the challenges that he was faced with. He did not respond to the 1998 African embassy bombings as if the World trade center and the Pentagon had been destroyed by hijacked airliners, but he did respond with measures strong and firm enough to be comparable to the acts which inspired them in the context of that particular time.

But there is a deeper problem with Democrats' credibility and national security, I must admit. Some liberals unfortunately, because they have become so accustomed to thinking of the U.S. as a conservative power, are always wishing to constrain it. This is an extremely negative and self-defeating way of thinking, especially if one is attempting to win the right to govern, and liberals in general would be disabused of it if they could learn to think of the U.S. again as a liberal power, which it originally was, and which was how Kennedy saw it. The same goes for the relationship between liberalism and patriotism/American nationalism in general. Today there is no space for the followers of Patrick Henry...

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... "people that are deeply unpopular with many Americans."  In extrapolating the New York example to national politics (where blacks obviously do not demand black candidates) in the context of switching constituencies what you've argued here could be read as "many Americans are racist, so the Democrats should abandon blacks like the GOP did and try to pander to racist whites instead, because evidently they are more numerous". Distastefulness does make it necessarily untrue. But this is one way to interpret your argument here and it should be noted.

The deeper problem here is the whole notion of identity politics. We should consider why these civil rights leaders have so much power and why the black vote (and the southern white vote) is homogenized in the first place. This is one of those things that never entirely goes away. However, in order to attack identity politics, one must first point it out, and in pointing it out, one gets accused of creating it. This forms a Catch-22.

The role of identity in politics has declined through history as the racial divide, while still large, has nevertheless shrunk considerably, mainly due to the efforts of liberals. Yet these days it is liberals who get accused, paradoxically, of creating it. The reasons are understandable... in order to ensure a society where race is neutralized as much as possible, one must first point out and try to address it. But in order to do that, one must speak within the context of "identity". Speaking within the context of identity gets people thinking about their identity, and this tends to perpetuate "identity politics". What a paradox!

Yet the work in this area must continue. As long as race remains such a salient fact of life, blacks will continue to vote homogenously. As long as that is true then there will always be your Jesse Jackson or your Al Sharpton. Diversification of the black vote--and of the southern white vote-- will be one critical measure in this century of success in moving beyond identity politics. And that is not done by ignoring the issue of race and racism.

[Beet]

This is all mostly reasonable. My point with moveon is that it was mostly an unknown site until 2003, I can't imagine that it had much of an impact on anything up until then.

Gore said "one of the greatest presidents", not exactly the same as "the greatest" which is a significant difference. But it's true that Gore failed to distance himself enough from Clinton.