The discussion at TPMCafe on the netroots took a strange turn yesterday, when Scott Winship of Democratic Strategist, a rare post-Clintonian self-described New Democrat, did a post that immediately got demonized and dismissed in a way that failed to come to grips with what he was trying to say.Best I could tell, Scott was suggesting that Netroots Progressives had bought into a revisionist take on Clintonism that was, well, inaccurate and strategically misleading. But partly because Scott plunged into a discussion that had earlier been skewed by Max Sawicky’s blunt argument that the Internet Left was ignorant and ideologically empty, he got definitively bashed, not just at TPMCafe, but over at MyDD, by Chris Bowers, for suggesting that Netroots Lefties didn’t know their history.But in skewering Scott for his alleged disrespecting of netroots intelligence and knowledge, Chris and others didn’t come to grips with Scott’s underlying argument about the anti-Clinton worldview of the Netroots Left. And that’s a shame.There’s little question that many if not most Left Netroots folk buy into the some variation on the following take on the Clinton legacy:1) Bill Clinton got elected by accident (a combination of Bush 41’s political stupidity, and Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy), and then spent much of his first term betraying his core progressive constituency by focusing on deficit reduction, supporting free trade, and refusing to fight for single-payer universal health care;2) After his first-term record discouraged the Democratic base and created a Republican landslide, Clinton got re-elected by “triangulating,” caving into Republicans on welfare reform in particular.3) Clinton’s apostasy from progressive principles led to a meltdown of the Democratic Party in Congress and in the states.4) Clinton’s political guidance snuffed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, and his “centrist DLC” acolytes led Democrats into an appeasement strategy that killed the party in 2002 and 2004. Moreover, it became obvious that Clintonism represented not just appeasement of the political Right, but a subservience to corporate interests that Clintonites relied on for campaign contributions.5) The revival of the Left and of the Democratic Party in 2006 involved an implicit repudiation of Clintonism.I won’t go into a refutation of these contentions until someone in the Left Netroots openly admits to them. But as Scott suggests, this isn’t a distinctive Netroots take.Throughout and beyond the Clinton years, there persisted an enduring hostility to Clintonism in the establishment DC Democratic Party. It was evident in congressional (especially in the House) Democratic opposition to many of Clinton’s signature initiatives; it got traction in Al Gore’s rejection of Clintonism and everyone connected with it in his 2000 campaign; and reached fruition in 2002, when Democrats went forward with the anti-Clinton, Bob Shrum-driven message that we were “fighting” for prescription drug benefits at a time when the country was absorbed with national security concerns.Indeed, the primacy of Shrum–the only major Democratic strategist with no involvement in either of Clinton’s’ campaigns–in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 Democratic campaigns, is a good example of how the hated DC Democratic Establishment hasn’t been Clintonian for a good while.So: let’s talk more about Clintonism, the Left, the Democratic establishment, and the netroots.Scott Winship is onto something important here, and dissing his views because he seems to be dissing the intelligence or historical knowledge of netroots folk is no excuse for refusing to talk about it.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.