The First Shots Fired
Tomorrow morning, Meet the Press’s featured guests will be Rep. Harold Ford, the new chairman of the DLC, and Markos Moulitsas, the man behind the Daily Kos. Since its early days, the Netroots have looked scornfully at the DLC, thinking of it as selling out too often on progressive ideas. Based on this WSJ article by Kimberley Strassel, I’d say that the first shots have been fired:
“They’ll find their way back to the middle. And if they don’t, they won’t win.” So says a blunt Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, of his party’s current crop of presidential candidates. The question is just how many would-be Democratic presidents recognize the wisdom of his words.
Based on who showed up to the YearlyKos convention vs. the DLC convention, the hands down winner is the Kos kids. To be sure, the Netroots are spoiling for a fight too:
The far left has found something to unify it: hatred of George W. Bush. Technology has given it the means to organize; what the right found in talk radio, liberals have found in the “netroots” Internet, from MoveOn.org to Daily Kos. Its activism has of late overshadowed groups like the DLC, which still believe in such creaky notions as ideas. Even Mr. Ford, who took over the DLC chairmanship in January, is willing to admit his outfit has been eclipsed: “The DLC and other moderate groups have struggled a bit to find not only our voice, but a way to be heard.”
Making it harder is that this newly energized left is directing inordinate firepower on the DLC itself, in a crazed, purist drive to purge any group that would exert a moderating influence on the Democratic Party. New Republic scribe Noam Scheiber let loose a few weeks back in a New York Times hit piece, calling the DLC “radioactive” and “quaint,” gloating that its “fading influence was good news for the entire party,” and arguing that it should just get lost. Markos Moulitsas, chief flogger-blogger on the Daily Kos, this week slammed the DLC as a group that wants to “blur distinctions with the GOP,” and reveling that Democrats had won in 2006 because liberals like himself had “forced” Americans to pick sides.
While it’s true that Kos and MoveOn.org had forced a bit of a choice, it isn’t as ideologically pure as they’d like people to believe. After all, they got behind a number of the southern ‘moderates’ who they’re now attacking for not being progressive enough. Still, the tensions between the two groups aren’t imaginary. Kos currently has posted a reprint of an article first run in the National Journal. Here are the most important graphs of the reprinted article:
“We are actually starting to build the kind of noise machine, to reward or beat up on people, that the Right has had for a long time,” says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, 33, the pugnacious founder of the popular blog Daily Kos. “We are training these politicians that they don’t have to be afraid of taking courageous stands — and that they will be rewarded or punished based on their behavior.”. . . The Democratic Internet base cradling that trigger does not speak with one voice. But the emerging generation of online Democratic activists, many of them young and shaped by the bruising partisan conflicts of the past decade, seems united most by the belief that the quickest way for Democrats to regain power is to confront Bush more forcefully and to draw brighter lines of division between the Democratic Party and the GOP.…In strikingly similar language, Internet-generation Democratic activists from Moulitsas to Eli Pariser, the 24-year-old executive director of MoveOn’s giant PAC, describe Clinton’s effort to reorient the party toward capturing centrist voters as “obsolete” in a highly partisan era that demands, above all, united opposition against the GOP. Moulitsas and Pariser, like most other voices in the Internet activist base, want a Democratic Party focused more on increasing turnout among its partisans than on persuading moderate swing voters. Both, in other words, want a party that emulates Bush’s political strategy more than Clinton’s.
Then let’s see the DLC’s approach:
[S]everal other centrist party strategists worry that the hyperpartisan turn-out-the-base strategy that many online activists demand won’t work for Democrats, because polls consistently show that more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal.
“We are more of a coalition party than they are,” says Ed Kilgore, the policy director for the DLC. “If we put a gun to everybody’s head in the country and make them pick sides, we’re not likely to win.”
Here’s what Moulitsas says about that comparison:
Two things happened in 2006: we forced people to pick sides (by giving them a choice, imagine that!), and they overwhelmingly sides with us, the Democrats. But not just Democratic voters, which we grew (especially among young voters), but also independents.
We’re proud Democrats, confident and secure in the belief that we’re on the right side of history and Americans will side with us if we can only get our message out.
The DLC thinks this is a conservative country and we can only win if we blur distinctions with the GOP.
And there it is, in a nutshell.
It’s this tension that threatens to tear the Democratic Party into thousands of itsy bitsy little pieces. Check this graph out from Ms. Strassel’s article:
The real target audience for these pronouncements is the Democratic presidential field, and the threat is clear: Touch the DLC, and you will be (to use a favorite, medieval Kos word) “punished.” At least a few activists danced a victory lap, too, a few weeks back when every last Democratic candidate spurned the DLC’s annual convention in Nashville, instead turning up at Mr. Moulitsas’s YearlyKos event in Chicago.
This is why Hillary has adopted so many different positions on Iraq. She knows that if she doesn’t genuflect at the DailyKos altar, she’ll lose those extremists’ votes in November, 2008. She also knows that to apologize for voting for the war would sound the death knell on her candidacy. The logic is simple. If she won’t stand up to the extremists in her party on the most important issue of our generation, then she isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief.
Frankly, I think we’re seeing signs of a serious split in the Democratic Party. Look at my post about the article in The Nation. That doesn’t sound like a contented political party. There’s other bits of information that tell the tale of discord. This post certainly has the sound of discontent to it:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN) voted for the bill which would provide the Bush Administration carte blanche to wiretap to their fascist little heart’s content. US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will oversee the wiretapping. Thankfully, Klobuchar and the rest of the capitulators among the Democrats only approved this for 1 Friedman Unit.
What I find so particularly infuriating and depressing is she doesn’t get it that we sent her to Washington to hold the Bush Administration accountable. She even campaigned on it. The following is her excuse:
The bill approved by the House and Senate this week provides a temporary six month extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While I supported the extension as a temporary measure, I remain concerned about whether there are adequate safeguards in the bill, and will work with my colleagues to address these concerns in the next six months while we enact a permanent extension of FISA.
(MN Campaign Report)First caving in to the Bush Administration on the Iraq War Supplemental and now this. Why won’t she represent the majority of Minnesotans and oppose the worst Administration in the history of the United States. She’s blown her two most important votes so far.
Like I’ve said elsewhere, Democrats pandered to the Nutroots last year for the steady stream of campaign contributions. I don’t know that they agreed with them as often as the Nutroots would like to think. Democrats sold the Nutroots a bill of goods, then thought they could ignore them without consequence.
The bad news for Pelosi Inc. is that MoveOn and Kos are thinking about running primary challengers against freshmen legislators that voted for the warrantless wiretap bill. Likewise, they’ll likely run challengers against freshmen that voted for the Iraq supplemental.
This food fight has the potential to last awhile. Neither side is likely to back down because the stakes for their organizations are too high. Both sides are intense, too, which means this could get nasty. Which side wins is anyone’s guess at this point.
The only thing that’s certain is that Republicans will sit back and enjoy the show. At least until it’s time to get fired up about our candidates.
Technorati Tags: Harold Ford, DLC, Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos, Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org, Hillary, Nancy Pelosi, Amy Klobuchar, FISA, Iraq Supplemental, Election 2008
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog