Dana Milbank hung out yesterday at the annual meeting of the Campaign for America’s Future — accurately described as “a celebration of all things liberal” — and found something odd for Dems: the complete absence of bickering, in-fighting, and finger-pointing.
The Democrats have lost the past six congressional elections and two straight presidential races. So why is Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Chicago liberal, so happy?
At the annual meeting of the Campaign for America’s Future, a celebration of all things liberal, Schakowsky took the stage yesterday to the sound of “We are Family” and then sang a line and danced.
“It’s so bad here in Washington that it’s actually good for us,” she said to laughter from a thousand liberal activists in the Washington Hilton ballroom. “It’s starting to feel like 1994 when the Republicans took over the House and the Senate, and now the tables are turning with a vengeance.”
Dems still have a long way to go before they start getting their hopes up about the next couple of election cycles, but Milbank’s right when he notes that the disparate factions within the party are, for the most part, on their best behavior. For now, the Dems are united — and it’s all thanks to Bush.
In recent years, this [Campaign for America’s Future] gathering has been a chance for what Howard Dean calls the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” to assert itself. But this time, centrists and liberals have called a temporary truce because of their shared battle against President Bush.
Keep in mind, Campaign for America’s Future was created with the express purpose of dragging the Democratic Party away from the DLC and towards building a more progressive base. And yet, unlike some of its earlier gatherings, this week’s conference was far less concerned with Al From and almost completely focused on Bush.
“Both of us have our guns trained on the other party,” observed Roger Hickey, who runs the Campaign for America’s Future with [Robert] Borosage, in between interviews with liberal radio hosts. The group, formed after the 1996 election in hopes of moving the Democrats to the left, is even hearing from an evangelical minister, Jim Wallis, along with the usual suspects such as Dean, Bill Moyers, John Sweeney and Arianna Huffington.
Across town at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), headquarters for the party’s moderates, senior fellow Marshall Wittmann endorsed the cease-fire. “We’re now all anti-Bushies,” he said, likening the mood to that of the Republicans in 1993, when Wittmann worked for the Christian Coalition. “He has finally proven he’s a uniter, not a divider.”
This shouldn’t be overstated too much. It doesn’t take too much effort to stop by some blogs and see some pretty heated arguments between the various factions within the party. Read any combination of Kos, The New Republic, Sirota, Wittmann, MoveOn.org, and Ed Kilgore and you’ll see that there are plenty of Dems who have serious policy disagreements with other Dems.
But all of them seem to agree that Bush’s presidency is not just a disaster, it’s such a catastrophe that Dems have to work together to oppose, no matter how much we disagree. We’ll hash out the future of the party and the direction we want to take the country later — just as soon as we’re back in office.
…Borosage, in his opening speech, directed no barbs at the DLC, discussing only the “scoundrels” in the other party. “They can hatch a lie, festoon it with footnotes at the Heritage Foundation, have it written authoritatively at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal [and] echo it through Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Fox News,” he said.
The opening session proceeded with barely a hint of the intraparty fratricide of recent years — and it ended early. This self-restraint seemed to surprise the organizers, who filled the time by screening a preview of an anti-Wal-Mart documentary.
“We’ve been so terse and well disciplined,” Borosage marveled.
Disciplined. Now there’s a word that’s rarely used around Dems. And to think, we owe it all to Bush.