Calling a Truce: Ending the War within the Democratic Party
Tomasky, Michael
LAST FALL'S disastrous elections should have taught the Democratic Party many lessons. The list opens with the minor and tactical (it should not parade before the public a national chairman who...
...Still, not enough...
...In sum, the Democrats need to define themselves as a broad center-left party that accommodates both tendencies and accepts ideas from both...
...and politically, it removed a huge bludgeon from the Republicans' hands...
...It should learn from that episode and adapt itself accordingly...
...it proceeds on up to the profound and historical (is the Democratic Party as presently constituted even capable of coming up with innovative ideas...
...Similarly, however, a rush toward the center on all issues would be folly as well...
...The party should be liberal on some matters, aggressively and without apology...
...and there was the bland-as-milk Gore of other moments, afraid to pronounce himself against the teaching of "creation science" and unwilling during one of the debates, when a black audience member asked a question that invited him to express just one ounce of skepticism about the death penalty, even to aver that it had been unfairly administered in Texas...
...Now there was a crisis, a gripping, emotional crisis, and now there was a clear goal: hold on to power...
...That is liberalism's great unfinished task, and the party should just be for it (as I write, Al Gore, still mulling a run in 2004, has evidently come out in favor of a Canadianstyle, single-player health plan...
...But it's easy to forget that he covered his bases in the traditional liberal camps, too...
...At the same time, I would argue that the party needs to develop a realistic and imaginative foreign policy, one that pays a greater intellectual debt to Dean Acheson and George Kennan than to Gene McCarthy...
...It seems fair to say in retrospect that the liberal wing's apocalyptic opposition to that bill was excessive...
...And the DLC had influence: Many of the party's young, rising stars were members—Gore, Chuck Robb, Richard Gephardt, that governor down in Arkansas whom many people recognized to be a real corner...
...Supporters could contribute as little as $50, writes Kenneth S. Baer in Reinventing Democrats, his 2000 book about the DLC, but "it primarily pursued givers who could donate at least $1,000," which made the group "an elite organization in every regard...
...Because it was about the only thing the two sides agreed on: The bill was Zell Miller's, the moderate-to-conservative Georgia Democrat, and it was a concept liberals could support reflexively...
...Arguments between the two wings of the party during those years were sometimes intense, and they should not, in retrospect, be minimized...
...After Gore lost—well, he won, but after he was de-named to the presidency—a spirited debate ensued in Democratic circles about whether he had lost because he was too centrist or too populist...
...Yes, easier said than done, much easier...
...The debacle of the 2002 election should tell Democrats that it's time for a fifth: the end...
...He worked for Congressman Gillis Long, a cousin of Huey, in the 1970s as he came to believe that the New Deal coalition was fraying and that the Democrats were too suffocated by the demands of their interest groups...
...The debate has defined the party for nearly two decades, having gone through what I would identify as four basic iterations...
...And the truth is that in large part it would be old-time religion: A foreign-policy position based on skepticism about the use of American power abroad that was appropriate and morally correct in the 1960s has limited justification in today's world, where we face a threat in Islamic fundamentalism and the terror it incites that is an altogether different creature from Ho Chi Minh...
...he had Jesse Jackson on his left and Gary Hart on his right (Hart was quite liberal, but since he had no union backing and talked suspiciously of "new ideas," and since Jackson already held down the port side, Hart positioned himself somewhere to starboard...
...Democrats have to stand firmly for tolerance and secularism...
...to say that more fervently populist rhetoric, closer affiliation with labor, forcefully stated opposition to war, and unapologetic support for a range of social programs would offer the voters a clear choice and roll back the right-wing agenda of the Bush administration...
...It rose from the carcass of Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign...
...Why were the Democrats mocked as "the party of prescription drugs" by some commentators after the election...
...now, even many old-line liberals agreed, we were sick to death of losing, and we just had to do whatever it took to win...
...And the Washington press corps—just then in transition from the old bourbon-and-a-smoke cohort that had grown up listening to John L. Lewis's speeches on national radio to the Evian-and-Stairmaster generation whose image of labor had more to do with Lane Kirkland and Jimmy Hoffa—was hungry for its message of rejection of paleoliberalism...
...Depressingly, but appropriately, given the privileged position pollsters had come to occupy in a party that now lacked leaders with the confidence to follow their own vision, the positions were laid out by the most famous pollsters who supported each: Stan Greenberg DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 27 DEMOCRATIC PARTY produced a poll demonstrating that Gore had been too moderate, and Mark Penn released one showing that populism was the cause of defeat...
...They must support abortion DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 25 DEMOCRATIC PARTY and gay rights, and they must oppose privatization, partial or otherwise, of Social Security...
...But since he lost forty-nine states to Ronald Reagan (and barely won his home state of Minnesota), it was reasonable to believe that some rethinking of assumptions was called for...
...still, traditional liberalism emerged from that election discredited...
...Nothing grated on me more in the days after the election, or struck me as more fatuous and dangerously wrongheaded, than hearing the sentence "This proves that the party has to move to the ," the blank being filled by "left" or "center...
...28 n DISSENT / Winter 2003...
...He wrote editorials for a paper in the Mississippi Delta in 1964 calling for the desegregation of the schools...
...suffice it to say that Clinton— at different times, in different ways—managed both to placate the two wings of the party and to infuriate them...
...He had co-written the press release himself, with help from a newly elected senator from Tennessee named Al Gore...
...whatever misgivings we have about Clinton, people said to one another, we can't let them destroy this presidency this way...
...The Republicans would have a field day with such a Democratic program...
...He backed Edmund Muskie in 1972, and was unnerved by McGovernism...
...Meanwhile, because of the strong economy of the 1990s, more poor people left poverty than at any time since the 1960s...
...But the chief lesson is this: the first thing the party needs to do is to make peace within itself...
...From was born into a Jewish family from South Bend, Indiana, whose Democratic loyalty was secure before Harry Truman recognized Israel, and utterly unshakable afterward...
...Thus was born, in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council...
...everywhere, or nowhere, was Tom Daschle, mediating but making no leadership decisions...
...Bill Clinton owed his emergence on the national scene to the DLC, and the platform planks that got the most attention were the centrist ones...
...And so, on February 28, 1985, he and a group of like-minded legislators announced the formation of the DLC...
...Mondale's ascent to the nomination that year was a fait accompli...
...But at least the party controlled the White House, and on balance, activists from both wings of the party could announce themselves less than inspired, perhaps, but satisfied enough with how things were going, especially with regard to the roaring economy, in January 1998...
...It was the brainchild of Al From...
...for every William Winpisinger of the machinists' union scolding Clinton at every turn, there were labor leaders aplenty who made their peace with him, to say nothing of women's groups, gay and lesbian organizations, and other liberal stalwarts...
...It also made the DLC pro-business and, by definition, anti-labor, at its emotional core...
...BUT IT ENDED, and came iteration three, the Battle Phase...
...Many Americans, many liberals and progressives, still support such a posture, and passionately...
...There are still many questions on which the Democratic and Republican parties have fundamentally different outlooks and represent distinct and irreconcilable interpretations of the world...
...Michael Dukakis was not a DLCer, but his most famous line from the 1988 campaignDEMOCRATIC PARTY that "this election is about competence, not ideology"—reflected the group's impact on the way he positioned himself...
...We do not usually associate "that Lewinsky woman" with either policy debates or sober historical shifts, but in the current context, I think, we need an exception, and for this reason: The Lewinsky scandal—that is, the dipsomaniac tumult in the media and the frantic madness of the right—united the two wings of the Democratic Party...
...Well, such a program would offer the voters a clear choice, all right, but the truth is that it's a choice a majority of voters would probably reject...
...Centrists hated Hillary's health-care plan but were pacified by the new incremental policies he embraced as he ran for reelection against Bob Dole in 1996...
...For the spring 2003 semester, he will be a visiting fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard...
...It made me see in a way I hadn't before not only how low the right wing would go in order to bag its quarry, but the full palette of its cultural and philosophical assumptions and beliefs (if they thought Bill Clinton, a Southern Baptist, was this evil, what did they think of me, or my gay friends, or my atheist friends, or my gay-atheist friends...
...The poll from the time that I remember most vividly showed that Americans backed welfare reform by 52 to 7 percent, with the rest being undecided or having no opinion...
...This was, essentially, the Gore campaign...
...In any event, it passed, and though it had some negative effects, it has had more positive ones...
...Not close...
...That happened—and the fight over tax policy happened, and all the other arguments within the party happened—because of this festering and antiquated debate about whether the Democrats should be a liberal party or a centrist party...
...TLIEN CAME the second iteration: The Monica phase...
...I say the opposite: the thirteen months of impeachment were deathly serious, a period when the politics of small differences that had animated the Democratic Party's internal debates were of necessity cast aside to defend a popularly elected president against a cadre-driven coup d'etat...
...It should support universal health care...
...Sure, it would have been nice on one level if a majority of Democrats in the Senate had voted against it...
...Either argument is a prescription for ensured minority status for years to come—that is to say, a prescription for helping to ensure that the Republican Party controls electoral politics for the foreseeable future...
...Liberals admired his defense of affirmative action but scorned welfare reform...
...following the maxim—with which anyone who's been involved in progressive politics should be familiar enough—that smaller differences make for stronger animosities, the left and center wings of the Democratic Party have often considered each other as a greater enemy than either has regarded the Republicans...
...there was Dick Gephardt, arguing for a Democratic tax cut almost the equal of Bush's...
...MICHAEL TOMASKY is the political columnist for New York magazine and author of Left for Dead and Hillary's Turn...
...They need to be willing to assert that an effective market requires regulation—that a business world in which regulatory mechanisms that have been in place for, in some cases, half a century are eliminated is a world that quickly turns Hobbesian, hurting workers, investors, and pensioners alike...
...They need to be both (Jesse Jackson used to like to say, "It takes two wings to fly...
...I don't have the space here to delve into a lengthy consideration of the Clinton tenure, whose chief twists and turns are well known...
...He worked in the War on Poverty...
...Another poll showed that even a plurality of adults on welfare supported the bill...
...I know for my own part, as a liberal, I was halfhearted about Clintonism until the Lewinsky scandal...
...Imaginative: that is the key word...
...This history, too, is well known...
...More ideological quarrels will mostly ensure a lot more November nights like the last one...
...The list opens with the minor and tactical (it should not parade before the public a national chairman who delivers himself of ill-advised and oafish outbursts before the election and then appears at the National Press Club the day after the wipeout to announce that the party had "a good night...
...Here was Ted Kennedy, calling for a delay or repeal of the Bush tax cut...
...But they are not half the electorate...
...If the Democrats chuck these and kindred principles, they might as well have a closeout sale and be done with it...
...They must mount an argument against endless tax cutting and for a role for the federal government: Taxpayers may be able to take their tax rebates and buy their children new winter coats, and while new winter coats are certainly not to be gainsaid, there are certain things taxpayers can't do with their rebates that only the federal government can do—clean rivers, protect air quality, provide unemployment insurance...
...Partisan Democrats, like partisan Republicans, are political people, and political people think in ideological terms first...
...THESE POLLS introduced the fourth and most recent phase, of Recrimination and Confusion...
...But it's clear now that more ideological argument is not what the Democrats need...
...Activists in the party's established interest groups began, however grudgingly, to see the DLC's point...
...They need imagination...
...Mondale did indeed represent rather well what the Democratic Party stood for at 26 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 the time...
...there was the populist Gore of the Democratic convention, inveighing against "the powerful" in behalf of "the people...
...Several things have to happen to prevent this, but it's clear that the first of these is that the leaders of the two wings of the party, the liberal and the moderate, have to take the hatchet now lodged firmly in all their backs and bury it...
...And the bewilderment over what to do about Iraq...
...I would love to be able to write that the party should migrate to the left...
...Also not close to majority status is the percentage of Americans who opposed welfare reform in 1996...
...The party had no foreign policy of its own to speak of, so they had nothing to offer as a serious alternative...
...Afraid to take either point of view too strongly, party leaders end up taking neither, and thereby end up standing for nothing in particular...
...But how could they, realistically...
...The Democrats will never succeed as either a liberal party or a moderate party...
...The conventional wisdom today, after the attacks of September 11, is that the nineties as a whole were one big play period, a decade of irresponsibility, and that the Lewinsky interval was particularly frivolous...
...The DLC was, almost from the moment of its inception, two things that many Democratic organizations were not in 1985: influential and rich...
...THE FIRST AND longest phase of the argument was the Healthy Tension phase...
...The media would dismiss it as oldtime religion...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
