My new career puts me in DC quite often, where I flit in and out of the Democratic Party "establishment" -- partisan media, pundits, official and allied party organizations, academics, elected officials, candidates, and consultants like me.
Exept that I don't really fit in DC. I'm a fish out of water. I steadfastly maintain my "outsider" status even as I work with the biggest insiders of them all. As such, I have a front-row seat to the show that few share. And I can quite honestly say -- DC Democrats are some of the whiniest, most afraid people in the country.
This media clip is illustrative:
By the end of last year, dispirited Democrats in the Senate "were ready to drink hemlock," as a top aide put it. Republicans had given President Bush a major boost by passing his Medicare-reform and prescription-drug bill. Minority leader Tom Daschle was under fire for caving in to the hardball parliamentary tactics used by the Republicans to steamroller Democratic objections.
Ready to drink hemlock? Only in DC. Bush's approval ratings were already tanking. December's job report gave the economy a paltry 1,000 new jobs, numerous investigations were already swirling around the administration, the situation in Iraq was going from bad to worse, and people were getting fired up on behalf of several of the presidential candidatets.
But in DC, it was all doom and gloom. That defeatist attitude permeated every level of the aforementioned party establishment. A few brave voices offered contrarian, and more positive outlooks, but the vast majority were ready to jump off a cliff.
Which is why, despite much pressure to do so, I would never leave my adopted hometown of Berkeley for DC. Those people can't see the forest for the trees. It's groupthink central -- they go to the same cocktail parties, consume the same media, and otherwise lose complete touch with the rest of the country. It goes like this: Person A to Person B: Bush is a popular wartime leader, we can't win. Person B to Person C: Bush is a popular wartime leader, we can't win. Person C to Person A: Bush is a popular wartime leader, we can't win. Person A responds: That's what I've been saying!
But something happened -- the "establishment" got an awakening from the people.
But Bush's slipping poll numbers, combined with large turnouts of angry Democratic voters in the presidential primaries, seem to have emboldened and united the Senate Democrats. In a private meeting with Senators on Jan. 20, Daschle warned it was time to "put the past behind us. If we don't hang together, we'll hang separately." He has hired Phil Schiliro, an aggressive and seasoned House Democratic operative, to craft a more combative legislative strategy. Instead of going along with bipartisan compromises, the plan is to introduce more "message" legislation to rally the Democrats' base and force Republicans into unpopular votes. Senator Ted Kennedy plans to introduce a bill next week to raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour, and he plans to attach it to the next measure the Republicans want to push through the Senate. Democrats last week pounced on N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, who said the outsourcing of U.S. jobs was "a good thing" in the long run; bills were quickly introduced to repudiate him and require firms to give employees three months' notice before they are laid off because of jobs being moved abroad.
Daschle will also be more aggressive in using parliamentary maneuvers to block House-Senate conferences if they exclude Democrats from key decisions, as happened on the Medicare legislation. At the same time, Daschle plans to impose more party discipline. Democrats who supported the Republican Medicare bill, for example, will not be given seats on the Senate Finance Committee, which writes health-care legislation, when the next vacancies occur.
Welcome back, Daschle. We were all wondering what happened to you guys. But it's not just the Senate. All across the party establishment there is a renewed energy and sense of purpose and the realization that we can, in fact, win.
And the key to all of this is us. While the party leaders in DC were lamenting their sad lot in life, Democrats started turning out in droves to cast ballots in the Democratic primary. Even after Kerry ran away with it, they still came out in record numbers. And those "fired up Democrats" were also talking to their friends and neighbors and coworkers, so Bush's poll numbers dropped some more.
It wasn't the party leadership that led -- it was us. It was the blogosphere. It was people who wouldn't know how to turn on a computer. It was me. It was you. We took control of this party, and they never saw it coming.
And sure, like any seismic shift in the status quo, there are those who resist. But they'll be roadkill. The DNC, DSCC and DCCC all have blogs now. So do allied party organizations like the New Democrat Network.
So while some may crow about Dean's demise, and the demise of the blogs and the Internet, their victory was phyrric. If the Dean supporters were being marginalized, if the Netroots strategy was discredited, I would be unemployed. But my firm has never been in greater demand.
We demanded a voice in the process, and we got it.
We won. The Democratic Party's grassroots won. The question now is what we do with our newfound influence.
Update: Kerry is, I believe, the last of the old guard. He and his partisans have gleefully mocked and ignored the Netroots. But that's okay, because the rest of the party is shifting. Just take a look at the Blogads on the left -- candidates know we exist and they're reaching out. Incumbents are generally indifferent to this New Politics. They didn't need it to get it elected, so why should they care about it now?
But new candidates and the organizations tasked with getting them elected are all paying attention. So I probably jumped the gun by saying "we won". We haven't won yet. But the strategy, the notion that regular people must have a say -- that's a done deal. The holdouts exist, but they will fade away as the new generation of Democratic Party politicians embrace the Netroots.
And those Democrats pooh-poohing the Netroots will be as endangered as "moderate Republicans".