Democratic Fault Line WSJ.com
Last month The New Republic published what turned out to be a prescient piece by Ryan Lizza, which concluded by essentially predicting yesterday's Gore-Dean espousal:
The two men have a strained history, but lately Gore is sounding more and more like Dean. His three most important speeches since leaving office have been harsh attacks on President Bush's Iraq policy and his abuse of the Patriot Act. The two most recent were delivered before MoveOn.org, the Internet network for grassroots liberals, which is overwhelmingly pro-Dean. Some suspect that, just as Dean went outside the Beltway and built his own high-tech grassroots army to bypass the sclerotic D.C. establishment, so is Gore. It's not a bad way for him to exercise influence in the party, if he wants to make a potential endorsement more powerful or if he still harbors hopes of running for president in 2008. "The rest of the Democratic infrastructure is controlled by the Clintons," says one top Democrat.
Perhaps Gore would not endorse the former Vermont governor (though Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, says "they talk relatively regularly"). Regardless, he'll have to choose sides, because the Democrats are splitting into two parties: the party of Clinton, and the party of Dean.
Lizza's insight is that the Dean campaign represents a backlash not only against President Bush but also against President Clinton. "Three years after Bill Clinton left office, he and Hillary still control what remains of a Democratic establishment," Lizza writes: Their man, Terry McAuliffe, continues to run the Democratic National Committee, despite his failure to deliver the presidency in 2000 or congressional gains in 2002. "The best and brightest of the Clinton administration" are now ensconced in new liberal think tanks and in the campaigns of Joe Lieberman, John Edwards and Wesley Clark--but not Howard Dean.
"Dean, by contrast, has come to represent the party's anti-establishment forces," writes Lizza. He "built a grassroots army first--in part by bashing D.C. Democrats and their disastrous 2002 election strategy. . . . This evident schism is not just about Dean's opposition to the war--or even his prospects in the general election. It's a turf war to decide who will control the future of the party."
More evidence that battle lines are being drawn comes from this Associated Press dispatch about Sen. Hillary Clinton:
"I remember back in December of 1991 when my husband was I don't think above 4 percent in the polls," said Clinton, speaking after a housing conference in Manhattan. "Through the months of the primaries and the caucuses, there was a hard-fought battle and it finally ended in June of 1992 when Bill clinched the nomination. He was running third behind President Bush and Ross Perot. So I want to see how the process plays out." . . .
When asked if she was stung by Gore's criticism of Democrats who backed the Iraq war, Clinton, who voted for the war resolution, answered a chilly "no."
Wesley Clark, meanwhile, "told reporters in New Hampshire he'd consider tapping [Mrs. Clinton] for running mate."
One curious aspect of this schism is that it appears to have very little ideological content, except perhaps on the issue of the Iraq's liberation (which Deanies uniformly decry, while there's a range of opinion among Clintonites). Both sides are represented among unions, and even among centrist "New Democrats."
Why did Gore decide to throw in with Dean, instead of with the man whose administration he served for eight years? It's personal, Lizza suggests: "Immediately after the Florida recount was decided in 2000, Gore's senior aides were purged from the DNC and Clinton's were installed. Some ex-Gore staffers are still bitter about the coup, and several express admiration for what Dean is doing."
With Democrats embroiled in internecine warfare, the Republicans' prospects would seem to be very good indeed. Yet it's not clear that either the Clintonites or the Deanies have a winning strategy for their party. Clintonism worked wonderfully for Clinton, getting him elected twice--but the party's losses in 1994, 2000 and 2002 suggest that Clintonism doesn't work without Clinton at the top of the ticket. The Dean approach has the advantage, for now, of not having failed--but at a time when national security is the most important issue facing the country, a stridently antiwar candidate does not look like a good bet for November.
The Dean movement may come to an ignominious end, if he is the nominee, Bush beats him in a landslide, and the Dems end up taking big losses in Congress too. In that case, the party may come to see Clintonism as its only hope--and the question for 2008 will be whether Hillary is enough of a Clinton to duplicate her husband's success.
opinionjournal.com |
