Bill Clinton's recent American Prospect interview weighs in fairly heavily against the party's conservatives. So why is the media trying to paint it as an attack on Howard Dean?
Ok, everyone needs to run out and buy the latest issue of the Prospect NOW, because it's got some really nice material in it this month. The highlight is, of course, one of the first face to face interviews President Bill Clinton has given to a liberal magazine since the 2000 election. It's a really interesting article in which Clinton says some pretty amazing things about the state of American politics and the Democratic party.
And honestly, I think that after reading that interview it's very hard to identify Bill Clinton with the DLC any more. The former President's positions on virtually every intra-party struggle clearly come down on the left of Al From or Bruce Reed's-- although to be fair, he thinks the whole intra-party schism is stupid.
But the media's reponse to this has been completely inverted. Michael Tomasky, who conducted the interview, dissects the Washington Times spin here of the Clinton interview as an anti-Dean/anti-left rant. But that's just the Washington Times, and people who read the Wash Times (or, more appropriately, have it read to them) aren't likely to really care about the Dems' intraparty struggles except as a source of amusement for their black, rotten hearts. More seriously, the Associated Press's coverage of the interview also suggests an anti-Dean slant:
"I think it is highly counterproductive to spend a great deal of time trying to identify the wings of the party and having each wing criticize each other.''
Democratic front-runner Howard Dean has identified himself as being "from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,'' a claim that has drawn criticism from several of his rivals, including Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who has argued that Dean is too liberal to defeat President Bush.
But as Tomasky himself argues, that's complete bull. Just look at these quotes from his rebuttal article and honestly say that Clinton's still a huge fan of the DLC:
Here's the whole context: I asked Clinton about the schism within the Democratic Party. I said to him that sometimes the arguments between the liberals and the centrists had taken on a tone of not mere disagreement but of mockery. "And this has happened," I said, "more from the centrists toward the liberals than the other way around," at which point he cut me off and said, "Yeah, and I think it's a big mistake."
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Clinton then went on to say that Democrats should "pocket some of the gains" he made by reminding voters that the Democrats had moved to the center on welfare reform and fiscal responsibility. Fair enough. But then he added that that work has already been done, saying, "I don't think we have to do as much conscious adding to the base in the way I did it." And then he said, "My theory was that class warfare wouldn't take us very far" in 1992, but that "now what we should say is that they, not we, have brought class warfare back to America." In other words, he said precisely, and at length, that Democrats can't simply do what he did in 1992, and that on at least one specific question -- the rhetoric of "class warfare" -- they should do the opposite!
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Obviously, this is a knock at intraparty struggle. I can respect that. But it's NOT an example of Bill Clinton dissing Howard Dean. Spread the meme before you see it on MSBNC!