In a post titled "The baseless, and failed, 'move to the center' cliche" Glenn Greenwald argues that centrist Democratic presidential campaigns are "just an unexamined relic from past times, the immovable, uncritical assumption of Beltway strategists and pundits who can't accept that it isn't 1972 anymore -- or even 2002." Basically, his argument is that the reason Democratic candidates have lost in recent presidential elections is that they have run centrist campaigns: "What makes Democrats look weak is their patent fear of standing by their own views." Greenwald has consistently been one of the best sources of analysis on issues like wiretapping, torture, and civil liberties - but on this one, he's 100% wrong.
Greenwald does have a point that Kerry was hurt by the perception that he was a "flip-flopper," although Greenwald somehow fails to mention that his biggest "flip-flops" all involved moving to the left - not to the center or to the right - on the Iraq War issue. The GOP relentlessly attacked Kerry for voting to authorize the war, and then coming out against it later. In the course of one month in late 2003, Kerry went from supporting, to voting against, an $87 billion supplemental funding bill. When asked about the change in position, Kerry gave Rove the ultimate quote for attack ads: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Greenwald does not discuss any of the other major reasons Kerry lost, like the perception that he was a wealthy Bostonian who was out of touch with middle- and working-class Americans, the common stereotype that Massachusetts Democrats are far-left extremists (I grew up in NC, and GOP ads would often attack local Dems by linking them to Ted Kennedy or Tip O'Neill), or the Swiftboat campaign's efforts to brand him as unpatriotic. Note that none of these three major perception problems involved Kerry being typecast as a centrist - instead, they were used to successfully paint him as elitist and ultra-liberal.
Speaking of the Swiftboat campaign, it is important to remember that, while the initial wave of claims about his service were almost completely baseless, they were followed with a second wave of attacks highlighting his Vietnam protest days, especially his act of throwing away his medals. I am sure that some percentage of voters believed both waves of attacks, but I imagine the second wave of fact-based (if loathsome) attacks got traction with a much larger percentage of voters. To the contrary of Greenwald's thesis, being seen as too liberal is close to a death knell for Democratic presidential candidates - and that's the biggest reason Kerry lost.
In contrast with the Kerry example, Greenwald provides an example of a Democrat who won by refusing to move to the center. Of course, it isn't a presidential candidate, because there is no such example in recent American history. Greenwald's example is Chris Murphy, "who ran on a platform of, among other things, ending the Iraq War, opposing Bush policies on eavesdropping and torture, and rejecting what he called the 'false choice between war and civil liberties.'" Murphy also had the advantages of running during the 2006 Democratic congressional landslide (the one that triggered Rumsfeld's resignation the day after the election), and running for office in Connecticut, one of the bluest blue states, in a district which borders New York and Massachusetts, two of the other bluest blue states.
The most glaring omission from Greenwald's piece on the "baseless" idea that Democratic presidential candidates should run as centrists? He doesn't discuss a single one of the Democrats who have been elected president. Presumably, that's because all of the Democratic presidents in the last half-century have been centrists. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton all ran on some issues one would describe as liberal, but on the whole, they are generally described as centrists or moderates.
Greenwald also makes the mistake of misinterpreting poll numbers showing that 8 out of 10 Americans think the country is "moving in the wrong direction" to mean that 8 out of 10 Americans are liberal and/or want to vote for a liberal presidential candidate. I agree that these numbers are very encouraging, but many of those poll respondents are conservatives who want to vote for a different type of conservative from Bush, or who specifically blame Bush himself for the problems, but still intend to vote for the Republican candidate. My point is that low favorability ratings for an outgoing president should not be viewed as a rationale for running on a hard-line ideological platform - especially when one of the biggest complaints about that outgoing president was his bitter partisanship.
Greenwald isn't the only major liberal blogger who seems to have convinced himself that America has suddenly been transformed into some kind of 70/30 liberal Democratic majority. I was shocked by Roy Sekoff's appearance on the Dan Abrams show last night (Sekoff is a founder of The Huffington Post). Sekoff repeatedly mocked the idea of appealing to swing voters (calling them "these ambigious swing voters," as if they don't exist), and insisted that Kerry's and Gore's losses were due to running as centrists. Are Greenwald and Sekoff serious? Do they really think that Obama could compete in places like Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico running as a traditional liberal? Do they really think swing voters are not an essential part of a winning coalition?
(crossposted on my blog outragedmoderates.org; also, I don't mean to come across as bashing Kerry, who I voted for, and thought would make a pretty good President)