Netroots In The Center
Posted on Sat Aug 11, 2007 at 09:55:32 AM EST
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In the WaPo opinion pages, Kos and SusanG argue we are all Centrists now:
Convinced that this is fundamentally a conservative nation, [Harold] Ford demanded that Democrats unceasingly inch toward the right or risk electoral irrelevance. As then-DLC official Ed Kilgore put it in 2005, "If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win." But we who live outside the D.C. bubble -- in all 50 states, in counties blue and red -- were hearing voices at odds with the Washington consensus. People wanted real choices at the ballot box. And given the disastrous rule of the Bush administration, they wanted a Democratic Party that stood tall and pushed back like a true opposition.. . . In fact, we pushed the party so far left that we positioned it squarely in the American mainstream and last year won a historic, sweeping congressional victory, something the "centrist" groups had been unable to accomplish for decades -- not even in the DLC's glory days of the 1990s.
. . . The DLC had two decades to make its case, to build an audience and community, to elect leaders the American people wanted. It failed. . . . Their time is up. The "center" is where we stand now, promoting an engaged and active politics embraced by significant majorities of Americans.
In fairness, I am posting Ed Kilgore's response to all this:
The quote, which appeared in a Ron Brownstein piece in The National Journal, was this:"We are more of a coalition party than they are. If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win."
The context of the quote was a long conversation with Brownstein about how Democrats needed to deal with the Rovian "polarization" strategy. And all I was trying to say was that counter-polarization was an insufficent response for Democrats, given the enduring ideological tilt of the electorate, for many decades, towards the center-right. I did not say, imply or mean that Democrats needed to "move to the right" or "blur the differences between the two parties." Au contraire. The whole point was that Democrats had to complement a mobilization strategy with a persuasion strategy designed to pull swing voters in our direction over time. "Standing up" to Bush and the GOP, and offering clear choices between the two parties, I thought then and think now, is essential, but the choices we offer have to be attractive to people who aren't reflexively on our side.
As it happens, today, as opposed to 2005, we'd likely win the "gun to the head" test. But that's not just because Democrats are suddenly "standing up to Bush;" it's because his record, and his party's complicity in that record, are abysmal, and the whole world knows it. The tangible consequences of Republican misgovernment are at least as important as the "noise" we make about it. That matters because Bush is going to leave office soon, and like it or not, if Democrats want to build an enduring progressive majority, we'll have to seal the deal with millions of voters who will be vulnerable to Republican arguments that W., like Nixon before him, failed because of personal incompetence and imperial delusions rather than conservative ideology.
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