There's an unreal sensation to the ongoing pre-Presidential race. On the one hand, Senator Unelectable is up in New Hampshire, talking to the same people that got her husband elected in 1992, and completely ignoring that newish Progressive movement that won in 2006; On the other, it appears that the 2008 convention may very well not be where it should be, which is Denver, not New York City.
This can't be happening, shouldn't be happening, but it is, and it appears that again, we're marching like lemmings into a political abyss, because that's what we do. We're Democrats, the party that managed to lose to Bush, Reagan and, god help us, Nixon.
The future of the Democratic Party isn't in New York; we own that, and sometimes to our discredit. It's in the West and Southwest and in the Great Plains, where we've made unprecedented gains. Holding the 2008 convention here would show, in the most explicit way and one that a hostile media is waiting for, that Democrats are still the party of special-interest groups, machines, of politics as they were, not as they are or should be. There is no new message here. There is an old one: New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Volvo-driving, latte-drinking, elitist leftwing East Coast freak show. New York 2008 wouldn't turn out, likely, as did New York 2004; think Chicago 1968.
In the same vein, it chills me that Hillary Clinton is not even making the effort to talk to the grassroots. Where, does her circle think, did the 2006 victory come from? James Carville? What we're seeing hereabouts is the decentralization and dispersion of political power, the empowering of individual activists and the emergence of a new and muscular Progressive movement, one that talks about the issues relevant to, like, ordinary people. That's where the Democratic Party is going today; there's nothing in the Senator's background that suggests she would be even comfortable with that kind of structure.
If we want the Bush era to be closed off and repudiated, we'll choose another course. If we want McCain or Giuliani or Romney to validate that legacy, and appoint the next four or five Supreme Court justices, and form Iraq policy, climate policy, tax policy and regulatory policy, if we want the old Democratic Party, the one that lost elections all the time, back, we'll continue.
(Cross-posted at The Daily Gotham)