WASHINGTON, 4 January 2005 — The truce appears to be expiring among Democrats in Washington. In the immediate aftermath of John F. Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in November, Democrats notably avoided the post-election squabbling that has consumed the party after almost all recent presidential races — even those it won. But as the New Year arrives, a series of high-profile articles in leading liberal journals are reopening old divisions.
On one front, a liberal operative at a top think tank has accused the Democratic Leadership Council, the principal organization of party centrists, of pushing the party toward a pro-corporate agenda that, it says, “sells out America’s working class — the demographic that used to be the party’s base.’’
In equally combative terms, a leading young centrist commentator published a manifesto in the New Republic magazine accusing the Democratic left of slighting the struggle against Islamic terrorism and undermining the party’s image on security — an argument instantly embraced and promoted by the Democratic Leadership Council. In the near term, the Democratic desire to unify in opposition to almost all of Bush’s agenda probably will take the edge off these disagreements.
But these twin firefights — which have inspired volleys of responses, web postings and e-mails — reflect enduring divisions over strategy, message and policy that could influence the race for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee next month and are certain to loom over the contest for the next party presidential nomination in 2008. “There is a big fight about the direction of the Democratic Party still going on, and these are big documents in that fight,’’ says Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future.
For Democrats struggling to recover after an election that saw Bush re-elected and Republicans gain greater control of the House and Senate, these two disputes highlight the most basic choices facing the party on domestic and foreign issues.
These disputes follow an election in which the party largely avoided factional discord. Although former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s bid for the nomination divided liberals and centrists early in 2004, the burning desire to oust Bush united groups such as MoveOn.org and the Democratic Leadership Council behind Kerry during the general election.
“We were all working for the same causes,’’ said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank affiliated with the council.
Democrats have moved back to the barricades, at least in their intellectual circles. The lines of battle evident in these disputes also could resurface in the race for the DNC chairmanship, which will pit liberals Dean and party operative Harold Ickes against centrists such as former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer and Simon Rosenberg, president of the centrist New Democrat Network.
The domestic squabble extends a long-standing dispute about how heavily Democrats should rely on anti-corporate and anti-free-trade economic populism in their message.
During the 1990s, many liberals felt President Clinton abandoned effective class-conscious themes by supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement and a balanced federal budget; conversely, in 2000, centrists charged that Al Gore fissured Clinton’s winning coalition by reverting to a populist message that they believe drove away affluent social moderates.
Liberal essayist Thomas Frank gave that old controversy new fuel this year with his best-selling book “What’s The Matter With Kansas?’’
In that book — and a pair of articles immediately after the election — Frank insisted that undiluted populism built on opposition to free trade and denunciations of corporate power offered Democrats their best hope of regaining ground among culturally conservative voters drawn to Republican positions on social issues such as gun control and gay marriage.
Over the past month, David Sirota, an aggressive young party operative, echoed that message in a pair of pugilistic articles in The American Prospect and The Nation. Economic populism, Sirota wrote, represented “the Democrats’ very own Da Vinci Code — a road map to political divinity.’’
Sirota previously was best known for deluging reporters with e-mails criticizing Republicans. He sent those first as a spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee and then as director of strategic communications for the Center for American Progress, a new Democratic think tank, where he serves as a fellow.
But his two articles were perhaps most striking for the intensity of their attacks on centrist Democrats. Like Frank, but with even more ferocity, Sirota condemned the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded to promote centrist policies after Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984.
Sirota denounced the council as “corporate sponsored’’ and committed to ideas on trade, taxes and business regulation, that help their “wealthy cronies’’ and abandon the Democrats’ historic working-class base while “pulling the party further and further out of the mainstream.’’
More explicitly than most liberal critics, Sirota also criticized Clinton, whose “New Democrat’’ agenda was heavily influenced by the council’s thinking. Clinton’s “embrace of a big-business agenda arguably did as much long-term damage to the Democratic Party’s moral platform as any of (his) ... sex scandals or the battles over social issues,’’ Sirota wrote.
