Robert Reich has
this long piece in today's
NY Times that points out the multiple fallacies of DLC "centrist" politics and Clinton's lack of a lasting legacy for the Democratic Party.
Reich voices many of the concerns I have voiced on this board in the past. It's a great read...
(more)
He opens with this:
The dismal fifth-place showing by Senator Joseph Lieberman in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday serves as both reminder and motivator to the other Democratic presidential candidates on what it will take to win in November. For so long now, everyone has assumed that recapturing the presidency depends on who triumphs in the battle between liberals and moderates within the party. Such thinking, though, is inherently flawed. The real fight is between those who want only to win back the White House and those who also want to build a new political movement -- one that rivals the conservative movement that has given Republicans their dominant position in American politics.
Senator Lieberman's defeat on Tuesday could be a good indicator of which side is ahead. To their detriment, Mr. Lieberman and the perennially dour Democratic Leadership Council have been deeply wary of any hint of a progressive movement, preferring instead an uninspired centrist message that echoes Republican themes.
He goes on to dipute the DLC's primary contention that Republican gains have come from white, suburban households:
Self-styled Democratic centrists, like those who inhabit the Democratic Leadership Council, attribute the party's difficulties to a failure to respond to an electorate grown more conservative, upscale and suburban. This is nonsense. The biggest losses for Democrats since 1980 have not been among suburban voters but among America's giant middle and working classes -- especially white workers without four-year college degrees, once part of the old Democratic base. Not incidentally, these are the same people who have lost the most economic ground over the last quarter-century.
And he calls out Clinton by detailing why Bill was always all about Bill, rather than doing anything lasting for the Party:
Democrats who avoid movement politics point to Bill Clinton's success in repositioning the party in the center during the 1990's. Mr. Clinton was (and is) a remarkably gifted politician who accomplished something no Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had done -- getting re-elected. But his effect on the party was to blur rather than to clarify what Democrats stand for. As a result, Mr. Clinton neither started nor sustained anything that might be called a political movement.
This handicapped his administration from the start. In 1994, when battling for his health care proposal, Mr. Clinton had no broad-based political movement behind him. Even though polls showed support among a majority of Americans, it wasn't enough to overcome the conservative effort on the other side. By contrast, George W. Bush got his tax cuts through Congress, even though Americans were ambivalent about them. President Bush had a political movement behind him that supplied the muscle he needed.
In the months leading up to the 1996 election, Mr. Clinton famously triangulated -- finding positions equidistant between Democrats and Republicans -- and ran for re-election on tiny issues like V-chips in television sets and school uniforms. The strategy worked, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Had Mr. Clinton told Americans the truth -- that when the economic boom went bust we'd still have to face the challenges of a country concentrating more wealth and power in fewer hands -- he could have built a long-term mandate for change. By the late 90's the nation finally had the wherewithal to expand prosperity by investing in people, especially their education and health. But because Mr. Clinton was re-elected without any mandate, the nation was confused about what needed to be accomplished and easily distracted by conservative fulminations against a president who lied about sex.
I posted a similar rant a few weeks ago that stimulated a helluva' good discussion on here.
I think Reich's analysis is dead on. And, though he notes that he has been working for Kerry, I think Reich also provides an argument for Dean's candidacy.
Reading Dean's comments from Michigan today reinforce my belief that he is the candidate who can bring change to the Party at the time it desperately needs new ideas...