The NYT’s David Brooks insists today that, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, it is the center, not the left, that is in ascension in the Democratic Party. Political observers can “learn almost nothing” from the netroots, Brooks argues, because the real power is with centrists and the Democratic establishment (though they are not mutually exclusive).
In the first place, the netroots candidates are losing. In the various polls on the Daily Kos Web site, John Edwards, Barack Obama and even Al Gore crush Hillary Clinton, who limps in with 2 percent to 10 percent of the vote.
Brooks should have checked Daily Kos before wrapping up his column. According to the most recent dKos straw poll, published yesterday, the top three candidates are Edwards, Obama, and Clinton. The netroots’ candidates are losing? Actually, the netroots’ candidates are the Democrats’ top tier.
Brooks then explains his belief that Clinton is excelling by moving away from the base and towards the center.
…Clinton has established this lead by repudiating the netroots theory of politics. As the journalist Matt Bai makes clear in his superb book, “The Argument,” the netroots emerged in part in rebellion against Clintonian politics. They wanted bold colors and slashing attacks. They didn’t want their politicians catering to what Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos calls “the mythical middle.”
But Clinton has relied on Mark Penn, the epitome of the sort of consultant the netroots reject, and Penn’s approach has been entirely vindicated by the results so far.
I’m afraid Brooks has this largely backwards.
I wonder if Brooks has actually heard Clinton’s stump speech, or caught any of her appearances on the Sunday morning shows a few days ago, or taken a look at her voting record this year. Clinton isn’t stiff-arming the netroots; she’s delivering on most of what the movement wants to hear.
Indeed, Clinton’s performance in the Daily Kos straw polls has gone up steadily all year — she cracked double digits for the first time this month — in part because she supports cutting off funding for Bush’s Iraq policy, she’s responded to fundraising controversies by calling for public financing of campaigns, she rejected the GOP’s cynical anti-MoveOn.org resolution, and she just unveiled a fairly progressive universal healthcare plan that has drawn praise from leading Democratic healthcare bloggers.
This is a vindication of a Mark Penn move-away-from-the-base strategy? I don’t think so — it’s more like the opposite of the Penn approach.
The root of Brooks’ confusion is that he’s missing the forest for the trees. He sees Dems unveiling popular, mainstream policy proposals and says, “A ha! Democrats are giving up on the fringe and moving to the center.” But therein lies the point — progressive Democratic ideas are already mainstream. Most of the country agrees with the netroots on most of the major issues of the day.
Matthew Yglesias explained:
“The left” has only been empowered to a pretty minor degree, but the “centrist” wing of the party is . . . way further left on the merits than where it was in the late 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. That, in turn, is largely a reflection of a renewed vibrancy on the left that’s both pressured elected officials and expanded the boundaries of conversation. When the centrist strand in Democratic thinking came to represent school uniforms, promises to balance the budget each and every year of the Gore administration, and backing the invasion of Iraq that was one thing. If, instead, we’re going to get universal health care, action to halt global warming, and diplomatic engagement with rival powers in the Middle East, that’s a very different thing.
If Brooks wants to call that latter thing a defeat for the netroots because dKos diarists sometimes find themselves disappointed, well, then I think that’s a kind of defeat people can live with.
Quite right.