What the Democrats Missed at the Populist Revolution By Thomas Frank [View All]

[joelogan]

It is almost a ritual in Washington: The Democrats are handed some stunning defeat—losing Congress, losing the presidency, losing Congress some more—and the powerful Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) holds court, comes to a verdict, and announces that the Democrats in question have lost because they foolishly clung to the party’s old, liberal, thirties identity. They remained friendly with organized labor. They didn’t understand the inevitability of free trade or the magic of the New Economy or the rise of the “wired worker.” They failed to reach out to the “center.” Make that the “vital center,” a favorite DLC term that I’ll bet Arthur Schlesinger Jr. regrets having coined.

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The DLC seemed to get their way with the Kerry campaign. They got a moderate Democrat who had supported the DLC’s beloved NAFTA; who seemed to be tough on defense issues; who steered clear of “villainizing” corporate America even when such treatment was richly deserved; who dutifully muted the populist voice of his running mate; and who did so much reaching out to the center that he had little vitality left for his base. The CEO was in love. “Much to the chagrin of Republican strategists,” From claimed in a starstruck essay in August, “Kerry and Edwards are New Democrat stalwarts.”
the Kerry campaign’s corpse.

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The reason for this is simple: GOP leaders know that Democrats have left this huge part of the electorate with nowhere else to go. The challenge for Democrats is to provide them that place. They need to counter the sham populist themes of Republican culture warfare with real populism—and, yes, with “villainization” of this country’s real elite. In 2004, the Democratic ticket enjoyed every advantage the DLC could have hoped for. Its economic proposals were tailored to please investors and entrepreneurs. It waxed moderate-to-right on trade policy. The Democrats even kept pace with the GOP in fund-raising and ad buys.
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But the Kerry team pulled even with the Republicans on the wrong racetrack. In a political system like ours, there are only two natural ideological positions to choose from: money and numbers. When one party has for a century been known as the organ of business, the other cannot simply decide one day to yell “me too” and hope to succeed. Its only realistic choice is to work to counter the influence of money with the power of the ballot, the power of the people. This means advocating elementary measures of economic fairness, so that voters in deindustrialized swing states can recognize a meaningful difference between the two parties. This means reclaiming the Democrats’ powerful historical identity as the champion of the common American. And this means, most of all, relinquishing the cynical opportunism of the DLC, which has now led to the worst debacle of Al From’s advice-giving lifetime.

from:
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/politics/national/2004race/10354/index.html


Time for the Democratic party to move left, economically? What does that mean?