Left Face?
Patrick Hynes has an
excellent article about the uncivil war for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party today over at Crush Kerry.
In case you missed it, yesterday Crush Kerry pointed to this
incredible article regarding an email from Eli Pariser, the head of MoveOn.org, where Pariser claimed that MoveOn "owns" the Democratic Party.
"In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive," the message continued. "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."
Pariser was probably responding to
this article by Peter Beinart, where Beinart suggests that in order to be competitive, the Democrats need to publicly disassociate themselves from the left-wing fringe of the party as represented by Michael Moore and MoveOn.
Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.
Here's the debate the Democrats are waging right now in a nutshell. Will the party do better by moving slightly to the right, to capture more votes in the center? Or will they do better by moving to the left, to energize their base and prevent the loss of votes to the Greens and/or Ralph Nader?
Howard Dean
seems to think he can do both.
Let me tell you what my plan for this Party is:
We're going to win in Mississippi
...and Alabama
...and Idaho
...and South Carolina.
Sounds like he's going to the right, but:
I'm not one for making predictions -- but if we accept that philosophy this time around, another Democrat will be standing here in four years giving this same speech. we cannot win by being "Republican-lite." We've tried it; it doesn't work.
