I haven’t been a fan of the DLC in a long time, but their response to the recall was something I’d have been proud to write.
The money graf, in my view:
Democrats also need to tend to their own garden and take very seriously the decision of California voters — who still decisively tilt Democratic in party identification and overall policy views — to support what began as a nutty right-wing crusade and ended as a popular movement. They need to regain their centrist, problem-solving reputation, and must absolutely reverse the recent perception that they don’t give a damn about anybody who doesn’t belong to a reliable Democratic constituency group.
Good for them.
Of course, for half of forever, that “centrist, problem-solving reputation” had a couple of undiscussed components:
— the tendency to keep redefining the “center”, always moving it to the left, and pretend that that moving target was the actual position and preference of mainstream America;
— the tendency to instantiate “solutions” that either left the problem unaffected or exacerbated it, and to justify those “solutions” later either by redefining the problem a posteriori or by claiming that “things would be even worse if we hadn’t done this.”
These are major sins against clarity and honesty. All the great Democrats from Jefferson through Jackson to Cleveland would go superluminal at the mere thought of them. If the Democratic Party wants to reform itself and regain the respect of Americans generally, it should repent of them and renounce them forever. After that it can get to work on purging itself of interest group politics, but one thing at a time.
What will really change politics in this country would be if the Libertarians ever start paying attention to the center.
I gave up on them over the .08 blood alcohol issue. The fact that it attacked the wrong end of the drunk driving issue was totally irrelevent; all that mattered was that it was being imposed thru the highway money extortion. The large L position would apparently been identical had the pressure been for a law calling for severe penalties for those who drive hog-whimpering drunk.
Any party which rarely pulls 5% of the vote when 68% of voters surveyed agree with vague libertarian principals (“government should be smaller and do less to control our lives”) is doing something wrong.
Good luck. The Democrats have snobbishly despised the voters and truckled to selfish, narrow-minded, special interest groups for the past 30 years that I have observed them. For all that time they have also been jellyfish on national defense; too many of their activists and politicians sympathizing with America’s enemies (Ron Dellums, anybody?) Reversing those problems is going to take a change like you have never seen before in American politics. It might be easier to found a new party, as the anti-slavery Whigs did in the 1850s. Remember that one? It was called the Republican Party.
As for the Democrats’ vaunted problem solving skills, it was noticing that the policies the liberals advocated didn’t work that first sent me over to the conservative side of things. I’ve seen that conservative policies work a lot better. Bill Buckley put it well, in a phrse I did not believe at the time but have since realized is true. In an interview he once said “Conservatism is the politics of reality.”
You want the Dems to win in ’04? I’ll tell you how to win. Nominate somebody to right of Genghis Khan on national defense and somebody to the right of John Ashcroft on social issues, but who spouts the usual Democratic swill on economic issues (few people understand econoomic issues so that it is easy to sell bad policies, such as the Dems like, to the voters). Zell Miller, the last survivor of the Scoop Jackson wing, might fit that mold. He probably doesn’t want to run, at his age. I can’t think of anybody else among prominent Dems who could fit that description.