And if bloody, nasty, scarring internecine battles are your thing, make sure you keep your eye on Hillary’s move to the center:
The Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of influential party moderates, named Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton today to direct a new initiative to define a party agenda for the 2006 and 2008 elections.
The appointment solidified the identification of Clinton, once considered a champion of the party’s left, with the centrist movement that helped propel her husband to the White House in 1992. It also continued her effort, which has accelerated in recent months, to present herself as a moderate on issues such as national security, immigration and abortion.
In her new role, the New York Democrat immediately called for a truce between the DLC and liberal elements of the party, which have engaged in a ferocious war of words over the Democrats’ direction since President Bush won reelection in November.
“Now, I know the DLC has taken some shots from some within our party and that it has returned fire too,” she told a gathering of the group here. “Well, I think it’s high time for a cease-fire, time for all Democrats to work together based on the fundamental values we all share.”
“We Democrats have not yet succeeded in isolating and defeating the far right, in part because we have allowed ourselves to be split between left, right and center,” she said. Noting that the DLC had often been in the forefront of those intraparty battles, she said all Democrats should agree to a truce and unite around shared values, “values violated every day in Washington by the ideologues of the Republican right.”
Bill Clinton used his chairmanship of the DLC in the early 1990s to engage in some of those intraparty fights, urging a break from traditional liberalism and emphasizing “New Democrat” themes that foreshadowed his 1992 campaign. But in taking on a central role with the DLC, the New York senator suggested she would use her position less to create intellectual friction in the party than to serve as a voice around whom all Democrats can rally. “It is vital that we bring everyone’s positive Democratic progressive ideas to the table,” she said.
And as if to prove the futility of tranquility within the Democratic party, the disparate factions open fire on each other:
This is an event that accentuates the positive. Leave it to others to talk about internal divisions within the party or nasty polarizing polemics. While someone from the daily kosy (misspelling intended) confines of Beserkely might utter ominous McCarthyite warnings about the “enemy within”, here in Columbus constructive committed crusaders for progressivism are discussing ways to win back the hearts of the heartland. This is a time for Democrats to be ecumenical rather than suggesting a pious inquisition.
I like the Bull Moose, but I would suggest that any attempts at a truce will fail when your opening line is “Hey lunatics- Can’t we all just get along?” For their part, the ‘Beserkely’ residents respond:
Marshall Whitman can slam me all he wants. I can take it. But notice how he slams everyone in Berkeley? No good vital-center-seeking Democrats there! They’re all “berzerk”, ha ha! I bet he called up his old friends at the Christian Coalition and his current friends at PNAC to share that gem.
Cease fire, DLC style! Pleas take note, Ed Kilgore.
Marshall also hilariously calls the 300 elected officials at their conference as “grassroots”. Um, my dictionary defines “grassroots” as:
Ordinary people regarded as the main body of an organization’s membership.
Elected officials are not “grassroots”. The people licking envelopes and getting out the vote and manning phone banks and attending rallies and helping build the party from the ground up — those are the grassroots. And they weren’t at the DLC’s little shingding. But it’s cute that they’re trying to claim the mantle. If they had real grassroots supporters they wouldn’t have to try so hard. Democracy for Texas had over 1,000 people at their event down in Austin. But then again, the grassroots likes DFA.
But hey, that’s all fun and games, despite Marshall’s and Ed’s weird obsession over the words written on this site. (The “enemies within” line obviously struck a nerve.)
When you guys are running around lopping off each other’s heads in the public square, a nerve or two is bound to be struck. At any rate, Ken Mehlman is loving this…
*** Update ***
More bloodletting:
Nobody said it better than London Mayor Ken (“Red Ken”) Livingstone, a leading leftist. Though openly critical of Tony Blair for his support of the war in Iraq, Livingstone was eloquent and unequivocal about the terrorists. Pointing out that London had been chosen for the 2012 Olympic Games partly because 300 languages are spoken in his city, Livingstone said the jihadists’ “cowardly attack” was aimed not “against the mighty or the powerful, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners. Black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindus and Jews, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, class, religion whatever.”
If only we could hear such moral clarity from our own party’s left! Instead, we heard from Daily Kos, the ur-liberal ur-blogger, whose blog included a cheer for, among others, outcast Labourite George Galloway, who blamed the attacks on Blair’s Iraq policy — and was roundly denounced by virtually all British politicians. “See, Democrats? That’s how it’s done,” lectured the blogger ignorantly. Likewise, Matt Yglesias, an articulate liberal voice at The American Prospect, who belittled Marshall Wittmann’s call for moral clarity as a phrase never used “unironically” anymore. No wonder Democrats are perceived to have a values problem.
Heh.