I just found this and was surprised that the DLC blamed Howard Dean's strategy of mobilising the base as the reason why Gray Davis lost California. As Kerry, Edwards and Lieberman are members of the DLC it would be interesting to know if you all agree or disagree with this analysis.
Arnold's Third Way
By Joel Kotkin
Arnold Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California should not be dismissed as yet another outbreak of insanity from the much-dissed "left coast." Instead, the political trends, as well as the geographic and social forces at play in the Golden State, reflect much that is relevant to the future of politics in the other 49 states.
Perhaps the most pressing lesson -- particularly for Democrats -- is that this election was won in the center, and lost badly by those who deserted it. It is not only the center in the sense of politics, but also in matters of class (middle), education (some), and age (middle). Arnold's voters are folks who are no longer among the struggling poor but have not yet entered the ethereal kingdom of the rich. He did best with those who are in the work force, not retired or in college. These are people with high school diplomas and some college, but they're not the "overeducated" or "undereducated" groups that are increasingly the core of the Democratic Party.
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It is among these voters of the center that the Democrats lost big. This is where the essential Third Way nature of modern post-industrial politics has shown its resilience. Third Way voters are also, for the most part, suburbanites. Just look at the geography of the election. The biggest margins against Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante occurred in areas of the state where middle-class, middle-aged homeowners, including a large number of Latinos, African-Americans, and Asians, have moved in recent years.
A notable example is the so-called Inland Empire, the sprawling suburban counties of Riverside and San Bernadino that lie just east of Los Angeles. With 3 million people, the Inland Empire -- though suburban in style -- is the fastest-growing urban area in America, and a political prototype for what's happening near large cities across the country. It is relevant not only because it is big and getting bigger, but because it reflects the values and dynamics of the peripheral suburbs of major metropolitan areas where the elections of 2004 and beyond may well be decided. There the vote to recall Davis was as high as 70 percent; the vote for Arnold was more than 60 percent.
What was Davis' mistake? Early in his first term, he governed as a moderate but, later on, pretty much capitulated to the left-wing-dominated legislature on critical issues such as the budget, advocacy for gay rights, and illegal aliens' drivers' licenses. Becoming a willing prisoner of the legislative party was Davis' cardinal error, one that Democrats should watch out for nationally, particularly in light of the success, so far, of the Howard Dean campaign. When faced with a recall, Davis' advisers abandoned the center and instead took a "mobilize-the-base" strategy. In Dean's borrowed phrase, they became "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." In California that meant energizing the poverty warlords, the ethnic pols, the labor union apparatchiks, the trial lawyers, and the activists -- environmentalist, feminist, and gay.
The base-mobilizing strategy didn't work for two reasons. First, even when mobilized, the base is not big enough to win hotly contested elections, even in multicultural California. Second, most California voters did not want illegal aliens to get driver's licenses and were turned off by the legislators' concern for the rights of transvestites and by their absolute subservience to public employee unions. Democratic candidates for national office should take note.
Democrats now face the imminent danger, says former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, of being marginalized on the political fringes by a smart and determined new governor who could isolate them. They need to adjust to a new reality. An influential member of the new governor's transition team, Hertzberg is among a small coterie of leading Democrats -- including Attorney General Bill Lockyer and State Senator Don Perata of Oakland -- who have taken the loss to heart and called for a re-evaluation of the party's leftward drift.
Whether others in the legislative party, safe in their gerrymandered districts, get the message is less clear. The takeover of the post-Clinton Democratic Party in California by public employees, fringe advocacy groups, trial lawyers, and Indian casino operators is now pretty much complete. Unless New Democrats are willing to get in the trenches to fight for the soul of the party, we could be see the resurgence of either a new Republican Party, or a new agglomeration of centrist forces that could take control of California's always inventive political culture.
On the other hand, Arnold's biggest challenge may come from his own right wing, which does not want to see a centrist Republican succeed. If he is forced to compromise even slightly on taxes, they could go to war with him, even at the risk of terminating their own party's chance for a California comeback.
Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is writing a history of cities for Modern Library.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=252197&kaid=127&subid=173
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