The Democratic Party's Deepest Internal Battle: It's Not One of Gender and Race

[Demeter]

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/016


"In a hypothetical match-up against Clinton, a weekend Zogby poll gave the Arizona senator 45 percent to her 39 percent. Against Obama, McCain led by 44 percent to 39." Juxtapose that with match-ups of but a month ago, when Obama led by a margin of 12.

Then juxtapose that with this remembrance as well: This was to have been the year of the Great Conservative Crack-up. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, foreign policy conservatives -- they were all at each others' throats, a much-anticipated if not inevitable development springing from the historically uneasy construction of the Great Conservative Synthesis of the early 1960s...
What Democrats failed to remember, however, was that their own party, since at least 30 years before the conservative synthesis, has also been an uneasy alliance of competing political sentiments, if not actual ideologies. Their unifying difficulties -- their repeated inclination to scatter philosophically hither and yon -- run much deeper than mere organizational disorderliness.

Beginning in the New Deal era, throughout the Great Society battles and now, to today, the tensions within the Democratic Party have been, in the most sweeping terms, those between its progressive elements and the older-school conservatives. Reaganism appropriated most of the latter in the 1980s, only to have its hold attenuated somewhat in the '90s by the triangulating Bill Clinton, and whose wife now wishes to call them home en masse.

But whose home? The progressive dwelling erected by FDR and furthered remodeled by visionaries such as Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern and Paul Wellstone? Or the conservative Democratic home of Scoop Jacksonism, which tosses a socially progressive bone now and then but adheres to the fundamental electoral attractions of a globally muscular and intrusive America...And let there be no mistake: the latter is precisely what Hillary Clinton represents, and that representation is precisely what lies at the heart of Democrats' modern disunity.

Some political acts (IWR) are so cowardly, so callous, so cynically motivated and lastingly harmful as to shut down any consideration of forgiveness. Hillary's was one of them. Absent it, her admittedly overplayed "35 years of experience" would have blown away Barack Obama. This would have been no contest...Her gender and her opponent's race now keep her afloat, but again, let there be no doubt that at the core of the party's modern-day split is the deeper historical and ideological division between long-term, visionary progressivism and short-term, opportunistic neoconservatism.




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[alarimer]

1. Load of crap

Obama is hardly a progressive and would probably have voted for the IWR too. Everyone else did. He only says he would not have in hindsight because we all know NOW what a bad idea this was.

I hate both of them. I will not be voting in the fall with either of these corporate lackeys in the race. Fuck it. I've had it.

[Mechatanketra]

2. Wow. IWR was a unanimous vote? Who knew?

I seemed to recall the Democratic senator from IL in Congress at the time voted against it.

Or were you just warning everyone that what followed was going to be a load of crap? Because that would make more sense.

The thing is, I'm not really filled with starry-eyed enthusiasm over Obama ... but at least there's a chance he wouldn't be a "yellow brick" Democrat (i.e. lacking either brains, heart, or nerve to oppose GOP criminality).