Countering The Netroots
The New York Sun has an article about the upcoming meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in Denver. One of the topics of the meeting appears to be the subject of the netroots and how to counter the excesses. David Sirota comes out swinging:
A former Congressional staffer sharply critical of the group, David Sirota, said the speeches to the group will carry some political cost. "Among a certain segment of voters, it's absolutely, positively negative. It's radioactive," Mr. Sirota said. "Candidates should at least consider the radioactivity."
The tension dates back to the last presidential race when council officials threw cold water on the populist, Webdriven campaign of Howard Dean. Dr. Dean, who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, derided the council as the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party." A sharp-tongued aide for a Dean rival told the New Republic that the Vermont governor's Internet-savvy backers resembled the grotesque denizens of the "bar scene from ‘Star Wars.'"
The conflict between the two camps is so intense that when Mrs. Clinton appeared before the council last year and called for a halt to the internecine fighting, bloggers unleashed attacks on her that are still reverberating. A newspaper report in May that Mrs.Clinton hoped to create a unified Democratic agenda under the council's aegis received two reactions from a leading liberal blogger, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com, "LOL," shorthand for "laugh out loud," and "DOA," meaning "dead on arrival."
I long held the opinion that extremes, either left or right, are essentially unelectable unless they can reach the center voters. The DLC is of pretty much the same opinion.
"If we're going to be a majority, we have to get bigger. We have to compete in places like Colorado and the Southwest where it's been an uphill battle in the past," said Mr. Reed, a former domestic policy adviser to Mr. Clinton. "We need to be winning over independents and disgruntled Republicans, not just talking amongst ourselves."
The council was founded in 1985 by Democrats determined to confront a party establishment controlled by union leaders and liberal lobbies.
"They were throwing bombs because the Democratic Party was being run by unalloyed liberals who were completely in the thrall of old-line interest groups," a White House aide under Mr. Clinton, Matthew Bennett, said. In the 1992 campaign, the formula was adopted by an Arkansas governor, Mr. Clinton, who saw the DLC as a way to set himself apart from other contenders for the presidential nomination.
Which really actually highlights something. A number of bloggers (Roger Simon for example) have called the left reactionary. They are trying to drag the Democratic party back to a failed doctrine that kept them reliably losing elections for decades. In that sense, they are reactionary, but they think they are leading the party in a new direction.
