Hillary, the DLC, and the Netroots

Martin Longman

19 years ago

Matt Bai has an interesting piece in the New York Times Magazine. He discusses Hillary’s strategy for capturing the White House. But he also delves into our domain, and attempts to explain what we think, and how we feel about Hillary. I’m going to excerpt a large piece and discuss it below the fold.

What Dean’s candidacy brought into the open, however, was another kind of growing and powerful tension in Democratic politics that had little to do with ideology. Activists often describe this divide as being between “insiders” and “outsiders,” but the best description I’ve heard came from Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic operative who runs the advocacy group N.D.N. (formerly New Democrat Network), which sprang from Clintonian centrism of the early 1990’s. As Rosenberg explained it, the party is currently riven between its “governing class” and its “activist class.” The former includes the establishment types who populate Washington – politicians, interest groups, consultants and policy makers. The second comprises “Net roots” Democrats on the local level; that is, grass-roots Democrats, many of whom were inspired by Dean and who connect to politics primarily online, through blogs or Web-based activist groups like MoveOn.org. The argument between the camps isn’t about policy so much as about tactics, and a lot of Democrats in Washington don’t even seem to know it’s happening.

The activist class believes, essentially, that Democrats in Washington have damaged the party by trying to negotiate and compromise with Republicans – in short, by trying to govern. The “Net roots” believe that an effective minority party should disengage from the governing process and eschew new proposals or big ideas. Instead, the party should dedicate itself to winning local elections and killing each new Republican proposal that comes down the track. To the activist class, trying to cut deals with Republicans is tantamount to appeasement. In fact, Rosenberg, an emerging champion of the activist class, told me, pointing to my notebook: “You have to use the word ‘appease.’ You have to use it. Because this is like Neville Chamberlain.”

This is an ominous development for Hillary Clinton, because the activists’ attack on the party hierarchy is a direct and long-simmering reaction to the Clintonism of the 90’s and the “third way” instinct of the D.L.C.

The first thing I want to say is that I have deliberately ignored Obamarama over at the orange place. But Hillary should take notice of Barack’s experience and rough treatment.

The second thing I want to say is that Matt Bai is treading on thin ice by trying to characterize what the ‘activist class’ or the ‘net roots’ feels about anything. Simply put, we don’t all agree on a whole lot.

It’s not true that we all think we should eschew all new proposals or big ideas. And as long as the Republicans are looting the treasury, it’s simply not true that we expect the Dems to allow all the money to be siphoned to Republican districts. And that is what would happen if the Dems refused to participate and compromise on any new bills.

Setting aside the war for the moment, the activist class has been most upset by three things this year.

1) The failure to stand up and fight against the promotions of Condi Rice, Abu Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, and other incompetent members of the Bush administration. Also, the cave in on judges.

2) The failure to fight against CAFTA and the bankruptcy bill.

3) The decision to soft pedal the party’s fundamental dedication to civil, reproductive, and gay rights, and to recruit candidates that are on the wrong side of these issues.

Each one of these issues has come as an assault on progressive sensibilities. And while we successfully crushed the Charles Schwabinization of Social Security, that too was an assault. Every time a Dem casts a vote in favor of elevating a Condi Rice or John Roberts it feels like capitulation and appeasement.

It’s hard to see how these votes have much to do with ‘trying to govern’. To see the difference between appeasement and ‘trying to govern’, look at some of Hillary’s other efforts to reach across the aisle:

Clinton has forged very public partnerships with the likes of Bill Frist (on automating health-care records), Rick Santorum (on restricting graphic media for children), James Talent (on tracking gulf war syndrome) and Lindsey Graham, who, as a congressman, played an active role in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial (on expanding health-care services for the National Guard). Clinton garnered the most headlines, not surprisingly, for taking part recently in two joint appearances with Newt Gingrich to discuss the health-care crisis, in which the two former nemeses – Gingrich’s mother once called Clinton a bitch on national TV – appeared warm toward each other. Meanwhile, Clinton and John McCain have become the Senate’s version of Bill and Ted, jetting off together for a week at a time to such exotic destinations as Iraq and the Yukon (where they were joined by two other G.O.P. senators, Graham and Susan Collins).

I don’t see anything wrong with this type of bipartisanship. The GOP is in control, and Hillary needs to work with Republicans to serve her constituents. But she doesn’t have to sell-out her constituents by “voting for the Iraq war resolution, (breaking) with some of the more liberal Democrats who tried to hold up $87 billion for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and (being) one of only six Democrats to oppose a measure that would have effectively killed the president’s missile-defense plan.”

It seems that the party’s ‘governing class’ looked at the 2004 election and decided the country had suddenly become too homophobic, too hostile to reproductive rights, and too militaristic for Democrats to win national elections.

The activists looked at the election and drew dramatically different conclusions. First, we saw a lot of voter suppression, some fraud, and not enough transparency in the vote counting. We wanted voting reform, but other than a few members of the house and Barbara Boxer, we didn’t see any appetite for that fight.

Second, we saw that Kerry refused to disavow his vote for the Iraq resolution. Kerry’s failure to significantly differentiate his position on the war from Bush’s led many voters to conclude their wasn’t any difference between the parties over our foreign policy.

Third, we did notice very high turnout among religious conservatives, and acknowledged that a lot of it was driven off anti-gay ballot initiatives and anti-abortion rhetoric. But we didn’t conclude that we should abandon women’s and gay’s rights in response. We concluded that we failed to mobilize people that care about women’s and gay rights because we didn’t vocally stand up for them.

In short, the ‘governing class’ responded to 2004 by deciding to distance themselves from single-issue interest groups and contentious social debates. The ‘activist class’ responded by deciding we need to fight, and to be seen fighting. We need to draw bright lines between the parties, not blur the differences.

And if there is a poster-boy for the strategy of blurring differences, it is the Democratic Leadership Council. If the netroots agrees on one thing, it is that the DLC carries a lot of responsiblity for the loss of the last two elections.

The DLC is out of touch with liberals and wants to hide us in the attic like a crazy aunt. They are more socially conservative, more business friendly, more hostile to the social safety net, more pro-military, and more indifferent to the poor than the Democratic Party as a whole.

Hillary recently discovered how much hostility the activists have for the DLC:

That Clinton doesn’t fully understand the depth of this resentment seemed painfully apparent in July, when, at the D.L.C.’s annual gathering in Columbus, she accepted the assignment of fashioning a new agenda for the group and publicly called for a truce between factions on the left and center. Her aides thought she was actually delivering a mild rebuke to the D.L.C. for criticizing Dean and the bloggers; what they didn’t understand was that her presence at the D.L.C. event itself was enough to infuriate the “Net roots,” and the suggestion that the two sides should work together made it only worse. The response from the blogosphere was swift and bilious. “It’s truly disappointing” that this is the garbage “Hillary has signed on to,” Moulitsas wrote on Dailykos.com, provoking the blog’s devotees to write hundreds of passionate and often profane diatribes in agreement. In a strikingly blunt appraisal, John Podesta told The Washington Post that Clinton had “walked into a cross-fire maybe she should have realized was out there.” (“I didn’t get any carnations for that one,” Podesta told me later, laughing.)

The incident called into question her cynical grand strategy:

the thinking among her closest advisers holds that unlike other prospective candidates with conservative leanings, like Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana or Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, Clinton doesn’t have to worry about winning over more liberal base voters; she’s an icon of the left, and short of climbing into a tank and invading a country all by herself, she couldn’t do much to change that. By this theory, Clinton gets to have it both ways: her consistent centrist record will convince general-election voters that she is not the archetype they thought she was, and Democratic-primary voters will forgive her more conservative positions because, in their minds, she is saying such things only to make herself “electable.” It’s a strategy so elegant that even Karl Rove would have to smile in appreciation.

The strategy might be elegant, but she is going to run into a buzzsaw if she doesn’t wake up and take us seriously soon.

If Hillary were elected President it would be a landmark for American society and well worth celebrating in some senses. A return to Clintonian policies would be a welcome improvement. But she has two problems. First, the netroots will not be taken for granted, nor will they be tricked by her cynical ploy to ‘make herself electable’ because, number two, we see no evidence that her strategy gets people elected.

Hillary is the clear front-runner for the nomination, but if she doesn’t change her strategy she is going to splinter the party and become the mortal enemy of the netroots.

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