My party has lost its soul: Bill
Clinton, Barack Obama and the victory of Wall Street Democrats
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A former Clinton aide on how Democrats lost
their way chasing Wall Street cash, and new populism the party
needs |
By Bill Curry |
Salon |
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Ralph Nader, Elizabeth Warren,
Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Cory Booker (Credit: AP/Evan
Vucci/Lauren Victoria Burke/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Stephan
Savoia/Reuters/Eduardo Munoz) |
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1.
In 2006 the Atlantic magazine asked a panel of “eminent
historians” to name the 100 most influential people in American
history. Included alongside George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Mark
Twain and Elvis Presley was Ralph Nader, one of only three
living Americans to make the list. It was airy company for
Nader, but if you think about it, an easy call.
Though a private citizen, Nader shepherded more bills through
Congress than all but a handful of American presidents. If that
sounds like an outsize claim, try refuting it. His signature
wins included landmark laws on auto, food, consumer product and
workplace safety; clean air and water; freedom of information,
and consumer, citizen, worker and shareholder rights. In a
century only Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon
Johnson passed more major legislation.
Nader’s also the only American ever to start a major social or
political movement all by himself. The labor, civil rights and
women’s movements all had multiple mothers and fathers, as did
each generation’s peace and antiwar movements. Not so the
consumer movement, which started out as just one guy banging
away at a typewriter. Soon he was a national icon, seen leaning
into Senate microphones on TV or staring down the establishment
from the covers of news magazines.
What lifted Nader to such heights was the 1965 publication of
“Unsafe at Any Speed,” an exposé of the auto industry’s
sociopathic indifference to the health and safety of its
customers. In little more than a year Congress put seat belts in
every new car and created the forerunners of the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Washington’s rapid response affirmed Nader’s belief that people
provided with critical facts will demand change and that sooner
than one might expect politicians, however listless or corrupt,
will give it to them. This faith in the power of ideas and of
public opinion — in the educability of people and thus in the
viability of democracy — distinguishes Nader from much of what
remains of the American left.
For nearly 30 years Nader largely abstained from electoral
politics while turning out a steady stream of testimony and
books. But his influence waned. By the late ’70s the linked
forces of corporate and cultural reaction we memorialize as the
Reagan Revolution were gathering force. In 1978 Nader lost a
pivotal battle to establish a federal consumer protection agency
as key Democrats, including Jimmy Carter, whom Nader had
informally blessed in 1976, fled the field.
In Reagan’s epic 1980 sweep the GOP picked up 12 Senate seats,
the biggest gain of the last 60 years for either party. Nader
had done his best business with Democrats, especially the
liberal lions of the Senate; men like Warren Magnuson, Gaylord
Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern, all swept out to sea in
the Reagan riptide. In the House, a freshman Democrat from
California, Tony Coelho, took over party fundraising. It’s
arguable that Coehlo’s impact on his party was as great as
Reagan’s on his. It is inarguable that Coehlo set Democrats on
an identity-altering path toward ever closer ties to big
business and, especially, Wall Street.
In 1985 moderate Democrats including Bill Clinton and Al Gore
founded the Democratic Leadership Council, which proposed
innovative policies while forging ever closer ties to business.
Clinton would be the first Democratic presidential nominee since
FDR and probably ever to raise more money than his Republican
opponent. (Even Barry Goldwater outraised Lyndon Johnson.) In
2008 Obama took the torch passed to Clinton and became the first
Democratic nominee to outraise a GOP opponent on Wall Street.
His 2-to-1 spending advantage over John McCain broke a record
Richard Nixon set in his drubbing of George McGovern.
Throughout the 1980s Nader watched as erstwhile Democratic
allies vanished or fell into the welcoming arms of big business.
By the mid-’90s the whole country was in a swoon over the new
baby-faced titans of technology and global capital. If leading
Democrats thought technology threatened anyone’s privacy or
employment or that globalization threatened anyone’s wages, they
kept it to themselves. In his contempt for oligarchs of any
vintage and rejection of the economic and political
democratization myths of the new technology Nader seemed an
anachronism.
His critics would later say Nader was desperate for attention.
For certain he was desperate to reengage the nation in a debate
over the concentration of wealth and power; desperate enough by
1992 to run for president. His first race was a sort of novelty
campaign — he ran in New Hampshire’s Democratic and Republican
primaries “as a stand in for none of the above.” But the
experience proved habit-forming and he got more serious as he
went along. In 1996 and 2000 he ran as the nominee of the Green
Party and in 2004 and 2008 as an independent.
The campaigns defined him for a new generation, but he never
stopped writing. His latest book, “Unstoppable,” argues for the
existence and utility of an “emerging left-right alliance to
dismantle the corporate state.” The book is vintage Nader and
ranks with his best. The questions it poses should greatly
interest progressives. The question is, will any read it.
It’s a question because on top of all the hurdles facing even
celebrity authors today, Nader is estranged from much of his
natural readership. It goes back, of course, to his third race
for president, the one that gave us George W. Bush, John
Roberts, Sam Alito, the Iraq War and a colossal debt. Democrats
blame Nader for all of it. Some say he not only cost Al Gore the
2000 election but did it on purpose. Nader denies both charges.
Both are more debatable than either he or his critics allow.
In 1996 I served as counselor to President Clinton and met often
with Nader to discuss that campaign. Early on he told me he
wouldn’t be a spoiler. Judging by his message and schedule and
the deployment of his meager resources, he was true to his word.
In 2000 his allocation of resources was little changed: He spent
20 days in deep blue California, two in Florida; hardly a
spoiler’s itinerary. But he was in Florida at the end and his
equation throughout of Gore with Bush — “Tweedledum and
Tweedledee” — outraged Democrats.
The Democrats’ dismissal of Nader in 2000 was of a piece with
our personality-driven politics: a curmudgeon on steroids; older
now and grumpier; driven by ego and personal grievance. But
Nader always hit hard; you don’t get to be the world’s most
famous shopper by making allowances or pulling punches. The
difference was that in 2000 Democrats as well as Republicans
bore the brunt of his attacks. What had changed? It says a lot
about the Democratic Party then and now that nobody bothered to
ask the question, the answer to which is, a whole lot.
Between 1996 and 2000 the Wall Street Democrats who by then
ruled the party’s upper roosts scored their first big
legislative wins. Until then their impact was most visible in
the quietude of Congress, which had not enacted any major social
or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the
early ’70s. It was the longest such stretch since the 19th
century, but no one seemed to notice.
In the late ’70s, deregulation fever swept the nation. Carter
deregulated trucks and airlines; Reagan broke up Ma Bell, ending
real oversight of phone companies. But those forays paled next
to the assaults of the late ’90s. The Telecommunications Act of
1996 had solid Democratic backing as did the Financial Services
Modernization Act of 1999. The communications bill authorized a
massive giveaway of public airwaves to big business and ended
the ban on cross ownership of media. The resultant concentration
of ownership hastened the rise of hate radio and demise of local
news and public affairs programming across America. As for the
“modernization” of financial services, suffice to say its effect
proved even more devastating. Clinton signed and still defends
both bills with seeming enthusiasm.
The Telecommunications Act subverted anti-trust principles
traceable to Wilson. The financial services bill gutted
Glass-Steagall, FDR’s historic banking reform. You’d think such
reversals would spark intra-party debate but Democrats made
barely a peep. Nader was a vocal critic of both bills.
Democrats, he said, were betraying their heritage and, not
incidentally, undoing his life’s work. No one wanted to hear it.
When Democrats noticed him again in 2000 the only question they
thought to ask was, what’s got into Ralph? Such is politics in
the land of the lotus eaters.
The furor over Nader arose partly because issues of economic and
political power had, like Nader himself, grown invisible to
Democrats. As Democrats continued on the path that led from
Coehlo to Clinton to Obama, issues attendant to race, culture
and gender came to define them. Had they nominated a pro-lifer
in 2000 and Gloria Steinem run as an independent it’s easy to
imagine many who berated Nader supporting her. Postmortems would
have cited the party’s abandonment of principle as a reason for
its defeat. But Democrats hooked on corporate cash and
consultants with long lists of corporate clients were less
attuned to Nader’s issues.
Democrats today defend the triage liberalism of social service
spending but limit their populism to hollow phrase mongering
(fighting for working families, Main Street not Wall Street).
The rank and file seem oblivious to the party’s long Wall Street
tryst. Obama’s economic appointees are the most conservative of
any Democratic president since Grover Cleveland but few
Democrats seem to notice, or if they notice, to care.
2.
There’s much talk lately of a “populist” revival but few can say
what a populist is. Like “liberal”and “conservative,” it’s a
word best used with conscious imprecision. As apt to indicate a
sensibility as a theory, it’s often just an epithet, the
conjured image being one of class envy and fist-shaking anger.
But populism can be civil; Huey Long was a populist, but so was
Will Rogers. It has conservative as well as liberal elements.
Populists espouse traditional values. They loathe bureaucracy,
public or private. They seldom raise taxes and never on the poor
or middle class.
The best template of populism remains the career of William
Jennings Bryan. Like Jefferson and Jackson, Bryan railed against
big banks. He thought it in the nature of big businesses to
oppress small businesses and to corrupt government. He despised
the gross income inequality of his day. His proposed graduated
income tax left the lower and middle classes alone.
Bryan took the national stage decrying banks in his Cross of
Gold speech and left it denying evolution at the Scopes trial.
He didn’t become a Bible-thumper in old age, he’d always been
one. And he never altered his view of banks. He reminds us that
populism can be economic or cultural — the first tends to
reform, the second to repression — and that both species may
abide in the same person. For a century the parties divided
populism between them; Democrats ran the Cross of Gold speech at
Republicans. Republicans ran the Scopes trial at them. Then
Democrats decided to let Republicans have both cultural and
economic populism. It was some gift.
Populism encompasses not just Bryan’s late 19th century
agrarians but their close relations, the early 20th century
urban progressives and countless descendants of each. Jefferson
and Jackson are called fathers of both populism and the
Democratic Party. Jackson and Bryan are the only Democrats other
than FDR to be nominated three times for president. All
populists share common traits: love of small business; high
standards of public ethics; concern for individuals, families
and communities; suspicion of elites and of all economic trusts,
combinations and cartels.
Some recent populist talk is owing to the election of two
liberals, Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio. (Liberals taking
Massachusetts or Manhattan didn’t used to be news.) It’s unclear
how well they and other Democratic liberals can tap populist
sentiment. In any case, Democrats are late to the populist
dance. Mass protests of corrupt oligarchies have roiled global
politics for a decade. In America the Tea Party has been crying
crony capitalism since the Bush bailout and Obama stimulus.
Income inequality’s so bad Mitt Romney wants to raise the
minimum wage.
Even the Democrats’ tardy me-too-ism seems insincere, less a
churning of policy than a freshening of message. In 2009, when
he had the votes in Congress, Obama chose not to raise the
minimum wage. Not till late 2013 did Democrats press the issue.
Why then? As the New York Times reported, “they found an issue
they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally
in 2014.” If there’s a true populist revolt on the left it is as
yet invisible to the naked eye.
Meanwhile the populist revolt on the right persists. In 2010 the
Tea Party declared open season on GOP incumbents. It has since
bagged quite a few. But Republicans don’t just fight over
offices, they fight over ideas. It’s hard to track all the
players in their endless policy scrum: Heritage, American
Enterprise, Focus on the Family, Club for Growth, etc. Rand Paul
pilfers Democratic issues like a fox stealing chickens while
dynasty star Jeb Bush grapples with such timeless questions as
whether there can be such a thing as a conservative social
program.
Democrats aren’t even having a debate. Their one think tank, the
Center for American Progress, serves their establishment. (Its
founder, John Podesta, once Clinton’s chief of staff, is now
counselor to Obama.) The last real primary challenge to a
Democratic senator was in 2006 when Ned Lamont took on
Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman. They say the GOP picks presidents
based on seniority. Two years out, Republicans seem headed for a
bloody knife fight while Hillary Clinton may be headed for the
most decorous, seniority-based succession in either party’s
history. (If she loses this time it will be to herself.)
If Democrats had caught populist fever they’d be reappraising
their own orthodoxy and offing a few of their own incumbents.
Owing only partly to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling,
they instead spend their days as Republicans do, in an endless
search for new ways to help the rich pump money into politics.
As public alienation deepens, polls show Democrats generally
content with their party’s leaders. Of such stuff revolutions
are not made.
3.
Which brings us back to Nader’s book. It opens with a story of
left and right banding together in 1982 to stop construction of
Tennessee’s Clinch River Breeder Reactor. Authorized in 1972, by
1977 this “public private partnership” had spent $1.3 billion of
public money ($4.5 billion in current dollars) on
preconstruction costs. That’s when Jimmy Carter pulled its plug.
Or thought he did.
In 1981 the Reagan administration revived it. It looked good to
go until Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers convened an ad hoc coalition
of liberals opposed to nuclear waste and conservatives opposed
to wasting money. Its sublimely eclectic membership included the
International Association of Machinists, the National Taxpayers
Union and the Audubon Society. What happened next was Reagan and
his allies in Congress got rolled. By 1983 the project was dead,
this time for good.
Nader cites other issues, most culled from his own experience,
on which left and right collaborated. He predicts convergence on
topics ranging from civil liberties to defense, corporate
welfare and open government. He assays 25 ideas he deems ripe
for alliances and the strategies for forming them. He says all
appeal to a growing populist movement. It’s this movement he
calls unstoppable.
Nader’s belief in convergence isn’t the same as Obama’s naïve
pursuit of the holy grail of bipartisanship. He doesn’t say
Democrats and Republicans can talk away their differences, only
that some of them can work on issues on which they haven’t any.
He concedes that doing even that much is hard for Republicans,
for whom it often proves fatal to work with Democrats even on
Republican ideas.
To many, Nader’s vision will seem naïve, as will the book’s very
title. Surely a lesson of our time is that all progress is
stoppable. Not long ago optimism was in vogue. Obama’s slogan
then was “Yes we can.” Today it could be “It turns out we
can’t.” His basic brief: “With an economy so broken, government
so broke, politics so corrupt and Republicans so crazy, no one
could do better, so quit whining: from now on, this is as good
as it gets.” Better the Obama of 2008, or the Nader of today who
insists “pessimism has no place in a democracy.”
Some of the ideas in “Unstoppable” may seem small bore:
defending whistle-blowers, auditing defense budgets, loosening
restrictions on standing to sue. Some need elaboration —
encouraging community-based businesses, reforming government
procurement — while others seem too long a reach: tying the
minimum wage to inflation, getting Congress to do its
constitutional duty on declaring war. But all relate to systemic
reforms Democrats no longer espouse.
Democrats envy Republicans their knack for framing issues in
foundational values: thrift, hard work, family, patriotism.
Nader espouses values that form the very substratum of American
culture. He often cites lessons learned as a child, listening to
his dad talk politics in the family restaurant or tagging along
with his mom to town meetings. He doesn’t tell these tales as
politicians do, for mere nostalgic connection, but to make the
case for community and small business, to defend families from
the commoditization of privacy and the commercialization of
childhood and, above all, to spark a revival of the grass roots,
New England-style democracy of his youth. One may call such
values liberal or conservative, or simply say they are rooted in
American populism.
Republicans can talk values even while defending a corrupt
status quo because, recent Tea Party convulsions aside,
defending the status quo is their job. The Democrats’ job is to
challenge the status quo; when they don’t do it, nothing they
say sounds sincere. Nader’s words resonate because they’re
rooted in a populist tradition and connected to a populist
vision. Democratic rhetoric rings hollow because it’s no longer
rooted in any tradition or connected to any vision.
4.
What agrarian populists did best was battle cartels and advocate
for a kind of homegrown communitarian capitalism. They busted
price fixing railroads and granaries, fought for rural free
delivery and established cooperative banks that still provide a
third of all credit to rural America. Most amazing, they did it
all via Congress amid the venality of the first Gilded Age.
Powerful trusts were turning farmers into wage slaves and the
world’s greatest democracy into just another corrupt oligarchy
when Populists and Progressives rose as if from nowhere to stop
them.
Parallels to our own time could hardly be clearer. Like invasive
species destroying the biodiversity of a pond, today’s global
trusts swallow up everything smaller than themselves. The rules
of global trade make organizing for higher wages next to
impossible in developed and undeveloped countries alike. Fights
for net neutrality and public Wi-Fi are exactly like the fight
for rural free delivery. Small businesses are as starved for
credit as small farmers ever were. PACs are our Tammany Hall.
What’s missing is a powerful, independent reform movement.
Republicans make their livings off the misappropriation of
populism. Democrats by their silence assist them. Rand Paul is
more forceful than any Democrat on privacy and the impulse to
empire. The Tea Party rails loudest against big banks and
corporate corruption. Even on cultural issues Democrats don’t
really lead: Your average college student did more than your
average Democratic congressman to advance gay marriage.
It’s hard for Democrats to see that their problems arise from
their own mistakes. Obama called the 2008 recession “the worst
since the Great Depression.” It wasn’t; by most measures — jobs,
wages, exports — it was the worst since 1982. The valid
comparison to the 1930s is that now as then all our vital
institutions are broken. Our healthcare, banking, energy and
transit systems are badly broken. Our defense policy is
obsolete. Politics is a cesspool. Oddly, the one system working
relatively well, public education, is the object of our only
sustained reform effort.
Mistaking the nature of the crisis, Obama mistook massive fraud
for faulty computer modeling and a middle-class meltdown for a
mere turn of the business cycle. Had he grasped his situation
he’d have known the most he could do by priming the pump would
be to reinflate the bubble. Contrast him to FDR, who saw the
systemic nature of his crisis. To banks Roosevelt offered only
reform; financial help went to customers whose bad mortgages he
bought up and whose savings he insured. By buying into Bush’s
bailout, Obama co-signed the biggest check ever cut by a
government, made out to the culprits, not the victims. As for
his stimulus, it didn’t cure the disease and hefty portions of
it smelled like pork.
Populist rage against the bailout and stimulus saved the
Republican Party. In 2006 it had lost Congress, in 2008 the
White House. Younger voters recoiled from its racial and
religious politics. Middle-class decline had even devout
Christians focused on family finances. That’s when Democrats
handed over title to economic populism. Absent the bailout and
stimulus it’s hard to imagine the Tea Party being born,
Republicans retaking Congress or the government being so utterly
paralyzed.
Liberals have spent the intervening years debating macroeconomic
theory but macroeconomics can’t fathom this crisis. This isn’t
just a slow recovery from a financial sector collapse, or damage
done by debt overhang or Obama’s weak tea Keynesianism. We’re in
crisis because of all our broken systems; because we still let
big banks prey on homeowners, students, consumers and retailers;
because our infrastructure is decrepit; because our tax code
breeds inefficiency and inequality; because foreign
interventions bled us dry. We’re in peril because our democracy
is dying. Reviving it will take more than deficit spending and
easy money. It will take reform, and before that, a whole new
political debate.
5.
Reading “Unstoppable” reminds one of Nader’s standing among the
’60s reformers who formed populism’s last great wave. The book
is drenched in populist themes: distrust of big business and big
government, faith in democracy and contempt for its corrupters,
defense of all things small — towns, businesses, people —
against the inevitable predations of all things big. Among its
lessons for would be populists:
Populism isn’t about spending. Of Nader’s 25 proposals none
costs any money. Eight actually save money. By cleaning up
Reagan’s fiscal mess Bill Clinton made Democrats the party of
fiscal responsibility. With the bailout and stimulus Obama
handed the issue back to Republicans. Populists know we have a
choice: change the rules or write the check. And they know which
choice generally works best. If instead of a bailout and
stimulus Obama raised the minimum wage, secured a public option,
rescued homeowners and cut defense there’d be no budget crisis
today and he’d be a folk hero instead of a punching bag.
Populists challenge big business. Apart from global warming, our
most pressing problem is the mal-distribution of power,
opportunity and income. In their denial, Democrats think they
can compete with Republicans for Wall Street cash and still
“fight for working families,” but on many issues — wages, credit
costs, tax burdens — there really are two sides. Soon even the
party’s base will ask which side it is on.
Populists stand up for small business. We think of small
business as Republican. Not necessarily. In a 2012 poll of
small-business owners, a majority picked Obama over Romney, a
choice their Washington lobbyists were at pains to explain way.
No constituency gets more lip service and less actual service
than small business, which is why it’s always up for grabs.
Nader’s small town, small business populism speaks to it like
nothing else can. Small business has never been, or felt, more
threatened. A party that earns its trust can govern a long time.
Populists care about ethics. So do voters. In two recent rounds
of exit polls voters named corruption their top concern over
jobs and the economy, this in the teeth of a “jobless recovery.”
In 2008 Obama closed stump speeches with vows to “curb
lobbyists’ power” and “change Washington’s culture.” Voters
thought he meant to make it more honest. It turns out he only
meant to make it more polite, and even in that he failed. His
longest list of unkept promises is the one titled “ethics and
open government.” Few among party elites have any sense of the
price he has paid.
Populism changes with the issues and times. Ethics means even
more to us than it did to the early populists. Technology has
made privacy a populist issue. The bankruptcy of our foreign and
defense policies elevates those issues. Populism is relevant to
global warming. Its frugality fosters conservation. Its
decentralization supports everything from local farms to
distributed generation. Its anti-corporate ethos is a key to any
credible effort to curb the influence of the fossil fuel
industry.
It pains us to watch Democrats bungle populist issues. We see
Rand Paul corner the market on privacy and the scrutiny of
defense budgets and wonder why no Democrat rises to expose his
specious rantings. We yearn for a new politics but worry that
our democracy, like that Antarctic ice shelf, has reached its
tipping point. For things to improve Democrats must come up with
better ideas and learn how to present them. So why don’t they?
One reason is that today’s Democrats think politics is all about
marketing. While Republicans built think tanks Democrats built
relationships with celebrity pollsters. When things go awry one
pops up on TV to tell us how they “lost control of the
narrative.” Asked to name a flaw, Obama invariably cites his
failure to “tell our story.” Judging by his recent book, Tim
Geithner thinks failing to tell his story was the only mistake
he ever made. People don’t hate the bailout because Tim Geithner
gives bad speeches. They hate it because their mortgages are
still underwater.
Democrats must learn that policy precedes message; figure out
what you believe, then how to tell people about it. A good idea
advertises itself.
Democrats must also learn to argue history. They chortle when
Michele Bachmann credits the founders with ending slavery or
Sarah Palin forgets who Paul Revere rode to warn. Yet they let
the right turn our founding myths into pulp propaganda with nary
a reply from any but academics. In “Unstoppable” Nader enlists
Jefferson, Adam Smith, Friederich Hayek and a raft of others to
buttress his case and reclaim valuable ground.
Democrats think the power of money is greater than the power of
ideas. Nader thinks that with the right ideas you can win even
if outspent 100-to-1. Every year Democrats further dilute their
ideas to get the money they think they need to sell them. The
weaker the ideas, the more ads they need, the more money it
takes, the weaker the ideas. As you can tell from their ads,
they’ve been at this a long time.
They don’t believe in ideas because they don’t believe in
people. Obama wasted years dickering with Republicans who wished
him only ill. He should have talked to the people and let them
talk to the Republicans.
6.
One reason we know voters will embrace populism is that they
already have. It’s what they thought they were getting with
Obama. In 2008 Obama said he’d bail out homeowners, not just
banks. He vowed to fight for a public option, raise the minimum
wage and clean up Washington. He called whistle-blowers heroes
and said he’d bar lobbyists from his staff. He was critical of
drones and wary of the use of force to advance American
interests. He spoke eloquently of the threats posed to
individual privacy by a runaway national security state.
He turned out to be something else altogether. To blame
Republicans ignores a glaring truth: Obama’s record is worst
where they had little or no role to play. It wasn’t Republicans
who prosecuted all those whistle-blowers and hired all those
lobbyists; who authorized drone strikes or kept the NSA chugging
along; who reneged on the public option, the minimum wage and
aid to homeowners. It wasn’t even Republicans who turned a blind
eye to Wall Street corruption and excessive executive
compensation. It was Obama.
A populist revolt among Democrats is unlikely absent their
reappraisal of Obama, which itself seems unlikely. Not since
Robert Kennedy have Democrats been so personally invested in a
public figure. Liberals fell hardest so it’s especially hard for
them to admit he’s just not that into them. If they could walk
away they might resume their relationship with Nader. Of course
that won’t be easy.
Populism isn’t just liberalism on steroids; it too demands
compromise. After any defeat, a party’s base consoles itself
with the notion that if its candidates were pure they’d have
won. It’s never true; most voters differ with both parties.
Still, liberals dream of retaking Congress as the Tea Party
dreams of retaking the White House: by being pure. Democratic
elites are always up for compromise, but on the wrong issues.
Rather than back GOP culture wars, as some do, or foreign wars,
as many do, or big business, as nearly all do, they should back
libertarians on privacy, small business on credit and
middle-class families on taxes.
If Democrats can’t break up with Obama or make up with Nader,
they should do what they do best: take a poll. They would find
that beneath all our conflicts lies a hidden consensus. It
prizes higher ethics, lower taxes and better governance;
community and privacy; family values and the First Amendment;
economic as well as cultural diversity. Its potential coalition
includes unions, small business, nonprofits, the professions,
the economically embattled and all the marginalized and
excluded. Such a coalition could reshape our politics, even our
nation.
Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton
and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut.
He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of
populism. |
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