In 1989, after the Democrats suffered their third successive loss of the White House (to the elder George Bush, following eight years of President Reagan), Elaine Kamarck of Harvard’s Kennedy School and William Galston of the Brookings Institution wrote a pamphlet called “The Politics of Evasion,” warning Democrats to move to the center if they wished to hold power again. In 2005, after Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lost, following then-Vice President Al Gore’s narrow loss in 2000, they made much the same argument. Now, in 2011, a few months after the Democrats’ cosmic drubbing in the 2010 midterms, they are making the same case all over, to the same crowd that ignored them the first times that they made it.
They are nothing if not persistent, as well as unfazed by rejection. Sisyphus, doomed to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, surely had nothing on them.
They are also, according to history, right. Three years after they first made their argument, then-Gov. Bill Clinton, D-Ark., listened, ran as a “new kind of Democrat,” and won.
Then, he governed as the old kind of Democrat, pushed a huge plan for state-controlled health care, lost both houses of Congress, went back to the center, reformed welfare, balanced the budget, and became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected president twice.
In 2000, Gore ran as a neopopulist and lost an election he could have won easily. In 2008, Barack Obama ran and won as a Rorschach test, but governed again as a really old liberal: mindful of what happened when the Clintons failed to pass health care, he rammed his bill through, and got slammed even harder than they were.
It was deja vu all over again, as it had been since the late 1960s. Score five a row for the team.
The question now is if anyone outside of the team will be listening, or if anyone outside of the team is still left. A year ago, Peter Beinart described them as being the scribes of the “don’t scare the bear” part of the party, those who believed that the conservative instincts of the American people took the form of a large scary animal, around whom the left had to be careful and advance its objectives with stealth.
Steer clear, and the beast will not maul you; poke him, and he’ll bite off your head.
Came 2006, though, and the natives were restless: Iraq was in chaos, the GOP scandal-ridden, and they started to think that the bear was now sleeping. Came 2008, and the fiscal implosion, and they started to think he was dead, or had never existed.
But Iraq turned around, the stock market stopped falling, the GOP miscreants were gone, or in prison. When they tossed a bomb in his cave, he was there.
The bear is alive, which is more than you can say for the center-most wing of the party, which was decimated by the 2010 midterms and beaten down in the health care debate.
In 1989, the Democratic Leadership Council was a rising new power; this year it expired, and those Beinart mentioned as the pair’s cohort are either going or gone.
DLC founder Al From is retired; Jane Harman is joining a think tank; Evan Bayh left, broken by health care; Joe Lieberman will retire next year, loathed by the party that dumped him five years ago, six years after he ran on his party’s national ticket and two years before he backed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Centrist Democrats are clearly an imperiled species. Who will help roll the stone up the hill?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
