(no subject)

[yesthattom]

Middle-of-the-Road Kill
Bad Direction From the DLC

Liberals -- if you want victory in 2004 and beyond, you must forsake your principles, move to the middle, and pray that voters mistake you for Republicans.
That’s the conventional wisdom in Washington today. Its foremost proponent may be Al From, founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
DLC "New Democrats" are GOP Lite: cozy with corporate elites, comfortable with free-market fundamentalism, hostile toward unions, keener for tax cuts and defense spending than for public investment or securing the social safety net.
Donning conservative drag has worked for the DLC -- the Fortune 500 fund it generously, as they do the real GOP -- so it’s no surprise From urges liberals to follow him. He thinks the secret to electoral success is luring independents and moderate conservatives away from George Bush.
But he’s wrong.
The key to success in 2004 will be turning out each and every liberal voter, even those who may have sat idle for years. That requires inspiring partisan activists, the grassroots volunteers whose enthusiasm is reserved for the most progressive policies and the candidates who promote them.
From’s poll-tested principles can’t do that. They generate about as much excitement as a Joe Lieberman speech.
"The DLC says it’s centrist, but centrism is wherever the polls say most Americans are," former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote in 2001. "Centrism is unprincipled. Centrism doesn’t lead. It follows."
Or to paraphrase Texas populist Jim Hightower, the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead donkeys.
George Bush is beatable. Liberals and progressives gathering this week in Washington for the "Take Back America" conference know that. The question is: Will the Democratic Party favor the DLC, which has plenty of money, but is otherwise bankrupt? Or will it adopt the vision, passion and values needed to get out the vote?
TomPaine.com -- Middle-of-the-Road Kill
Featuring "Cracking the Conservatives: Bush's Vulnerabilities and the Seeds of Progressive Revival" by Bob Borosage (www.OurFuture.org).

Comments

[mangosteen]

You know the answer why the DLC is doing what it's doing as well as anyone else does. Grass-roots movements require real work and energy, and you really don't get the leverage of that many voters at any given time, for a given unit of shoe-leather.

The DLC is looking at it in terms of economies of scale. They don't actually have to go out and press the flesh if the just broadcast a vaguely GOP-like message. The fact that this won't actually garner any votes for them is irrelevant.

[misteropinion.livejournal.com]

It's as though they want to be the mini-van of politics---neither a van nor a station wagon, without the capacity of the former or the efficiency of the latter.

It will all be better once the Empire comes.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

The problem is really that both parties have drifted off-message and there are unrepresented potential voters available both to the left and to the right for a group like the DLC.

The GOP no longer represents the small-government, states' rights affirming, fiscally conservative values many historical Republicans want to support. I see the struggle among friends and family -- people who have always been Republican, who _do_ believe in business-friendly policy but do _not_ believe in federally mandated morality, in looting the environment, and in the foreign policy stance that the neo-con radicals and fundamentalist Christians running the country -- who _aren't_ interested in supporting a liberal agenda but don't want anymore of _this_. I don't know if these people would vote for a "Democrat" that agreed with them, or if they need to take back their own party, or if they're satisfied to just quietly stop voting. I can understand wanting to bank on them.

In any case, I do hope the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is successful in taking charge of the party this time around.

[emmett-the-sane.livejournal.com]

What's astonishing to me is that I consider myself a moderate, and I have always felt the Democratic party was a little to the right of moderate. Trying to "balance" it further just means they'll be further to the right of center.