Happy warriors with minds of their own - Yes!
Backseat Strategists
Do the Democratic Party's harshest internal critics finally have a plan for building a political majority?
By Mark Schmitt
What's most provocative in this year's crop of books about renewing the Democratic Party is what's missing. The old sectarian fights about ideology, between the Democratic Leadership Council and labor-left factions, seem to have disappeared. None of the four books reviewed here makes the argument that the Democratic Party is in a substantive way out of line ideologically. None argues that the party needs to move as a bloc to the left, right, or center. The prevailing tone, particularly in James Carville and Paul Begala's Take It Back, is more along the lines of, “Pick something and stand for it!”
Even for the most outspokenly liberal author represented here, David Sirota, it is the passion, clarity, and narrative coherence of a liberal message that makes it appealing, more than its content. One suspects that if a moderately conservative message didn't sound so damn wishy-washy, it would be unobjectionable.
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But if Democrats can win anywhere, do they do it as Democrats, or as individuals who separate themselves from the damaged brand of the national Democratic Party? And if the latter, how does that build a party? All four of these books urge Democrats to speak for themselves with more passion, more outrage, to fight back when challenged, and not to accept the conservative frame on issues. But that can mean many things. If personal authenticity is the primary value, then one has to acknowledge that Sen. Joe Lieberman speaks for himself every bit as much as Schweitzer does. While none of these authors has a good thing to say about Lieberman, most speak favorably of former senator Bob Kerrey, who supports both the Iraq war and Social Security privatization, not out of trepidatious calculation, but as a happy warrior with a mind of his own. There is a theory of a political party implicit here, but in only one of these books—Crashing the Gate by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga—does it really become clear.
