Last month, I attended launch parties for two new periodicals created as part of the continuing campaign to close the “infrastructure gap” that persists between the well-funded and highly organized Republican right and the relatively underfunded and generally disorganized Democratic left.
Former Clinton policy adviser Bill Galston, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and public intellectual nonpareil Ruy Teixeira announced their new, online magazine, “The Democratic Strategist,” the mission of which is to provide a forum for thinkers to promote new strategies and tactics that will improve the Democrats’ electoral competitiveness. The next day, Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny — both 30-something former Al Gore speechwriters — hosted a panel featuring fellow periodical pioneers Bill Kristol, Francis Fukuyama and Mike Tomasky to celebrate the inaugural issue of their new quarterly, “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.”
Whereas the “Strategist” wants to encourage new ground-level approaches, Democracy hopes to fly at 30,000 feet on the wings of big policy ideas, foreign and domestic.
Both periodicals add to the explosion of center-left institutions formed, almost in panic, after Gore’s 2000 presidential loss. That progressive infrastructure-building already includes a major think tank (Center for American Progress); a media watchdog (Media Matters for America); media outlets (Air America Radio and the increasingly powerful liberal blogosphere); and a variety of organizations that seek to recruit, train and elect liberals and progressives to local offices (Progressive Majority, Progressive States Network). There’s even a new organization-Democratic GAIN-aimed at training, placing and providing insurance for young, peripatetic field organizers.
Despite this flurry of start-ups, many unresolved questions about the re-infrastructuring of the center-left — and, by extension, the Democratic Party — remain.
First, is the money going to the right places? Some Democrats privately worry that the wrong organizations are being funded, to the starvation of other projects that are either more capable, more needy, or both. At the launch event for the “Strategist,” Donna Brazile, Gore’s 2000 campaign manager, rightly lamented that much of the monies go to salon-style, top-of-the-pyramid organizations, leaving fewer resources for state-level, grassroots organizations.
Next, are the donated sums really large enough? One Democrat very involved with big-donor giving recently told me the real problem is that conservatives have a variety of organizations able to fund themselves, year after year, from the interest generated by their $50 million (or larger) base endowments. Progressives have no such organizations, and so their leaders must spend an inordinate amount of time running around the country to finance their operations perennially.
Finally, how much of the donated millions — and the recipients of this philanthropy — are overlapping? More specifically, one hears this oft-whispered subquestion: How much of all these new monies and projects are Clinton-inspired endeavors?
Notably, CAP and MMFA are both headed by Clinton allies: former White House chief of staff John Podesta and media critic David Brock, respectively. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Clinton allies like Harold Ickes are building target lists for Hillary Clinton’s inevitable campaign. Whether Clinton wins or loses the primary or general election in 2008, should any infrastructure she is building for her own presidential run be shared with Democrats more broadly?
The great partisan failure of Bill Clinton’s presidency is that these political capital ventures did not commence when Democrats had the leverage and fundraisingpower that comes with controlling the White House. Hillary is doing a far better job of rebuilding the center-left without the Oval Office than her husband did with it.
But if the Democrats lose in 2008, many will begin asking publicly (rather than privately) if this re-infrastructuring movement is still too nascent to matter yet, or whether the efforts are being managed properly in the first place.
Thomas F. Schaller is an associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
