home

Netroots In The Center

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 b