This is from last summer
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-great-democratic-crack-up-of-2016.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-great-democratic-crack-up-of-2016.html
Maryland might seem a peculiar venue for a blood feud over the future of the Democratic Party. It is the second-bluest state in the United States, after Massachusetts, according to Gallup; its registered Democrats, more than 30 percent of whom are black, outnumber registered Republicans two to one. Maryland is home to an immense federal work force and is one of the states most economically dependent on the federal government. Its gun-control laws are among the strictest in the nation. In 2012, Maryland, Maine and Washington became the first states to ratify same-sex marriage by popular vote. Barack Obama’s statewide margin of victory was roughly 26 points in 2008 and 2012, the fifth highest in the United States. The last time the G.O.P. won control of the Maryland State Legislature was in 1897. So reliable is its party affiliation that, as a Democratic senator’s chief of staff puts it, “If Maryland ever becomes a jeopardy state, then the whole thing is gone.”
This past March, when Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in United States Senate history, unexpectedly announced that she would not be seeking a sixth term in 2016, national progressive groups quickly threw their weight behind their dream candidate: Donna Edwards. A pugnacious former community organizer, Edwards is a four-term African-American congresswoman from Prince George’s County, one of the most affluent majority-black counties in the United States. But she wasn’t the favorite of establishment Democrats. For them, the obvious choice to replace Mikulski was the seven-term congressman Chris Van Hollen, who is considered a progressive like Edwards, but has a reputation for coolheaded practicality and for working well with Republicans. Of the bills sponsored by Van Hollen in the previous session of Congress, 37 percent included at least one Republican co-sponsor. For Edwards, the corresponding figure was 0 percent. Where she is viewed as a warrior for liberal causes, he is seen as a conciliator, one whose let’s-sit-down-and-talk-this-over geniality led to his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2007 to 2011 and, thereafter, to his designation as the House Democrats’ point man on bipartisan budget discussions. As their lead negotiator, Van Hollen has immersed himself in the sort of legislative sausage-making that typically entails compromise, like his expressed willingness, in 2012, to consider restructuring Social Security as part of an overall deficit-reduction agreement. To progressives, this was nothing less than apostasy.
Though the Senate Democratic primary was a year away, the national groups supporting Edwards knew that Van Hollen would be viewed as the prohibitive front-runner if they didn’t define the stakes of the contest immediately. Three of these groups — the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America and Blue America — sent out a blizzard of fund-raising solicitations, petitions and emails to members and to the media, one of which hailed Edwards as “a true Elizabeth Warren Democrat,” referring to the U.S. senator from Massachusetts whose confrontational stances on economic issues have galvanized the left. Van Hollen received an altogether different reception. Within hours after he made his candidacy official on March 4, three other voices from the liberal wing of the party — MoveOn, Credo Action and Daily Kos, the website run by the activist Markos Moulitsas — openly questioned his progressive bona fides and implied that he was one of a breed of “corporate ‘New Democrats.’ ” Moulitsas’s website declared that Van Hollen’s flexibility on Social Security amounted to “a major red flag,” making him “a candidate that may bargain away retirement security.” Edwards, meanwhile, entered the race pointedly pledging never to tamper with Social Security, “no ifs, ands, buts or willing-to-considers.”
Whichever Democratic candidate wins the primary next spring, he or she will be heavily favored to become the state’s next U.S. senator. Because of this, the Maryland contest is unlikely to hinge on which candidate can appeal to the broadest spectrum of voters on Election Day. Rather, it will be a fight over what a true Democrat should, and should not, be. This identity struggle was born out of devastating losses at the polls last November, but it is rooted in intraparty disagreements that have been decades in the making. And it is by no means limited to Maryland. In Illinois, Florida, California and elsewhere, progressive groups have asserted their energies to promote what they hope will be populist warriors in the Elizabeth Warren mold while weeding out those judged to be ideologically tepid. The recently announced presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, will no doubt increase the party’s gravitational pull leftward. Still, given Van Hollen’s history as a highly effective liberal legislator, the effort to push him aside in favor of Edwards is a striking development for a party that has largely kept its internal skirmishes under wraps. As Neil Sroka, the communications strategist for the liberal group Democracy for America, puts it, “We view primaries like this one as a fight over the future of the Democratic Party.”
For all the much-discussed ailments of the Republican Party — its failure to win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections; the corrosive bickering between its mainstream and its Tea Party stalwarts; and the plummeting number of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans — the inescapable reality is that the Democrats have fallen into a ditch arguably as deep and dismal as the one Republicans have dug for themselves. “It isn’t that the Democratic Party is struggling,” says Jonathan Cowan, the president of the centrist policy center Third Way. “It’s that at the subpresidential level, it’s in a free fall.” The Democrats lost their majority in the Senate last November; to regain it, they will need to pick up five additional seats (or four if there’s a Democratic vice president who can cast the tiebreaking vote), and nonpartisan analysts do not rate their chances as good. The party’s situation in the House is far more dire. Only 188 of the lower chamber’s 435 seats are held by Democrats. Owing in part to the aggressiveness of Republican-controlled State Legislatures that redrew numerous congressional districts following the 2010 census, few believe that the Democratic Party is likely to retake power until after the next census in 2020, and even then, the respected political analyst Charles Cook rates the chances of the Democrats’ winning the House majority by 2022 as a long shot at best.
Things get even worse for the Democrats further down the political totem pole. Only 18 of the country’s 50 governors are Democrats. The party controls both houses in only 11 State Legislatures. Not since the Hoover Administration has the Democratic Party’s overall power been so low. A rousing victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton might boost other Democratic aspirants in 2016; then again, in 2012 Obama won 62 percent of Electoral College votes yet carried 48 percent of Congressional districts and a mere 22 percent of the nation’s 3,114 counties. Through a billion dollars of campaign wizardry, the president did not lift up but only managed to escape a party brand that has come to be viewed in much of America with abiding disfavor.
Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland.
Credit: Matt Eich for The New York Times.
For a giddy moment seven years ago, Democrats dared to believe that Barack Obama’s election would significantly reconfigure partisan alliances. Instead, his presidency has only calcified them. “When Obama swept the 2008 primary and general elections, Democrats’ image suddenly came to be defined by a city-dwelling law-school professor whose life experiences had been far different from those of most working-class whites,” said David Wasserman, a congressional analyst for The Cook Political Report. “It was the culminating moment of a half-century of realignment. Democrats had already ceded Southern whites, but in the last few years they have lost droves of Midwestern, small-town and working-class whites who feel like they have little in common with the party anymore.”
As to how Democrats should be responding to their poor showing below the executive branch, there are two competing schools of thought, each of which began to emerge in the middle of the last decade, when the Republicans controlled all branches of government and Karl Rove, the G.O.P. strategist, was crowing about a party majority that would endure for many decades to come. Moderates believe the only remedy is for Democrats to refashion themselves as pragmatists who care more about achieving results than ideological purity. When I asked Cowan about what he hoped for in a Hillary Clinton presidency, he said: “Senator Clinton has been in politics long enough to realize you’re governing in a divided country. You use the mandate you have to get stuff done.”
Progressives, on the other hand, believe that the Democrats lost their way by obsessing over what President Bill Clinton once termed “the vital center.” That fixation, they say, has rendered the party brand incomprehensible and raised the question as to what exactly Democrats stand for. To them, it is the sharp-tongued populist rhetoric of Warren, whose signature line is that “the game is rigged” against working-class Americans, that represents the party’s only viable future. Moulitsas of Daily Kos says: “The Democrats’ branding problem isn’t that people don’t agree with the Democratic agenda. It’s that voters don’t trust them to actually carry it out. That, in huge part, is why Democratic-base turnout is so low across the board and especially so in midterms. So that’s where the Warrens and Edwardses of the party come in: Democrats who aren’t just saying the right thing and believing the right thing but doing the right thing and forcefully fighting for it.”
The problem is that neither wing can muster an entirely airtight case that theirs is the road map to electoral success. Sroka, of Democracy for America, says that last November’s election “was a good night for progressives,” pointing to the successful re-election campaigns waged by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who each employed anti-Wall Street rhetoric. But in purple states, House Democrats like Alan Grayson of Florida, Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire and Tom Perriello of Virginia all ran on Obama’s progressive achievements in 2010 and lost, as did Shea-Porter again in 2014.
Moderate Democrats cite the Senate victories of Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Joe Donnelly in Indiana in 2012 as models for how Democrats can expand the map in their favor by proffering candidates who are not to the left of their electorate. On the other hand, Mark Warner, the Virginia senator and popular centrist, was nearly defeated in 2014 by failing to motivate the Democratic base. And the moderate Senate Democrats Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana did all they could to distance themselves from Obama’s Affordable Care Act and were still routed. The election results are a jumble of counterindicators, from which anything and nothing can be concluded, allowing each side to blame the other after a loss.
The long-simmering family quarrel has now spilled out into the open in Maryland, where, Sroka says, “going forward the question is: ‘Will the party embrace that sort of populist progressive image? Or is it going to follow the Wall Street wing that’s led the party astray for the past 15 years?’ ” Cowan, unsurprisingly, sees the Maryland contest differently: not as the voiceless versus the elite, but rather as reasonable folks versus extremists. Or as he says, “What is at stake in the Maryland Senate primary is literally nothing less than whether we will Tea Party the Democratic Party.”
Representative Chris Van Hollen.
Credit: Matt Eich for The New York Times
This past March, when Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in United States Senate history, unexpectedly announced that she would not be seeking a sixth term in 2016, national progressive groups quickly threw their weight behind their dream candidate: Donna Edwards. A pugnacious former community organizer, Edwards is a four-term African-American congresswoman from Prince George’s County, one of the most affluent majority-black counties in the United States. But she wasn’t the favorite of establishment Democrats. For them, the obvious choice to replace Mikulski was the seven-term congressman Chris Van Hollen, who is considered a progressive like Edwards, but has a reputation for coolheaded practicality and for working well with Republicans. Of the bills sponsored by Van Hollen in the previous session of Congress, 37 percent included at least one Republican co-sponsor. For Edwards, the corresponding figure was 0 percent. Where she is viewed as a warrior for liberal causes, he is seen as a conciliator, one whose let’s-sit-down-and-talk-this-over geniality led to his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2007 to 2011 and, thereafter, to his designation as the House Democrats’ point man on bipartisan budget discussions. As their lead negotiator, Van Hollen has immersed himself in the sort of legislative sausage-making that typically entails compromise, like his expressed willingness, in 2012, to consider restructuring Social Security as part of an overall deficit-reduction agreement. To progressives, this was nothing less than apostasy.
Though the Senate Democratic primary was a year away, the national groups supporting Edwards knew that Van Hollen would be viewed as the prohibitive front-runner if they didn’t define the stakes of the contest immediately. Three of these groups — the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America and Blue America — sent out a blizzard of fund-raising solicitations, petitions and emails to members and to the media, one of which hailed Edwards as “a true Elizabeth Warren Democrat,” referring to the U.S. senator from Massachusetts whose confrontational stances on economic issues have galvanized the left. Van Hollen received an altogether different reception. Within hours after he made his candidacy official on March 4, three other voices from the liberal wing of the party — MoveOn, Credo Action and Daily Kos, the website run by the activist Markos Moulitsas — openly questioned his progressive bona fides and implied that he was one of a breed of “corporate ‘New Democrats.’ ” Moulitsas’s website declared that Van Hollen’s flexibility on Social Security amounted to “a major red flag,” making him “a candidate that may bargain away retirement security.” Edwards, meanwhile, entered the race pointedly pledging never to tamper with Social Security, “no ifs, ands, buts or willing-to-considers.”
Whichever Democratic candidate wins the primary next spring, he or she will be heavily favored to become the state’s next U.S. senator. Because of this, the Maryland contest is unlikely to hinge on which candidate can appeal to the broadest spectrum of voters on Election Day. Rather, it will be a fight over what a true Democrat should, and should not, be. This identity struggle was born out of devastating losses at the polls last November, but it is rooted in intraparty disagreements that have been decades in the making. And it is by no means limited to Maryland. In Illinois, Florida, California and elsewhere, progressive groups have asserted their energies to promote what they hope will be populist warriors in the Elizabeth Warren mold while weeding out those judged to be ideologically tepid. The recently announced presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, will no doubt increase the party’s gravitational pull leftward. Still, given Van Hollen’s history as a highly effective liberal legislator, the effort to push him aside in favor of Edwards is a striking development for a party that has largely kept its internal skirmishes under wraps. As Neil Sroka, the communications strategist for the liberal group Democracy for America, puts it, “We view primaries like this one as a fight over the future of the Democratic Party.”
For all the much-discussed ailments of the Republican Party — its failure to win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections; the corrosive bickering between its mainstream and its Tea Party stalwarts; and the plummeting number of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans — the inescapable reality is that the Democrats have fallen into a ditch arguably as deep and dismal as the one Republicans have dug for themselves. “It isn’t that the Democratic Party is struggling,” says Jonathan Cowan, the president of the centrist policy center Third Way. “It’s that at the subpresidential level, it’s in a free fall.” The Democrats lost their majority in the Senate last November; to regain it, they will need to pick up five additional seats (or four if there’s a Democratic vice president who can cast the tiebreaking vote), and nonpartisan analysts do not rate their chances as good. The party’s situation in the House is far more dire. Only 188 of the lower chamber’s 435 seats are held by Democrats. Owing in part to the aggressiveness of Republican-controlled State Legislatures that redrew numerous congressional districts following the 2010 census, few believe that the Democratic Party is likely to retake power until after the next census in 2020, and even then, the respected political analyst Charles Cook rates the chances of the Democrats’ winning the House majority by 2022 as a long shot at best.
Things get even worse for the Democrats further down the political totem pole. Only 18 of the country’s 50 governors are Democrats. The party controls both houses in only 11 State Legislatures. Not since the Hoover Administration has the Democratic Party’s overall power been so low. A rousing victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton might boost other Democratic aspirants in 2016; then again, in 2012 Obama won 62 percent of Electoral College votes yet carried 48 percent of Congressional districts and a mere 22 percent of the nation’s 3,114 counties. Through a billion dollars of campaign wizardry, the president did not lift up but only managed to escape a party brand that has come to be viewed in much of America with abiding disfavor.
Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland.
Credit: Matt Eich for The New York Times.
For a giddy moment seven years ago, Democrats dared to believe that Barack Obama’s election would significantly reconfigure partisan alliances. Instead, his presidency has only calcified them. “When Obama swept the 2008 primary and general elections, Democrats’ image suddenly came to be defined by a city-dwelling law-school professor whose life experiences had been far different from those of most working-class whites,” said David Wasserman, a congressional analyst for The Cook Political Report. “It was the culminating moment of a half-century of realignment. Democrats had already ceded Southern whites, but in the last few years they have lost droves of Midwestern, small-town and working-class whites who feel like they have little in common with the party anymore.”
As to how Democrats should be responding to their poor showing below the executive branch, there are two competing schools of thought, each of which began to emerge in the middle of the last decade, when the Republicans controlled all branches of government and Karl Rove, the G.O.P. strategist, was crowing about a party majority that would endure for many decades to come. Moderates believe the only remedy is for Democrats to refashion themselves as pragmatists who care more about achieving results than ideological purity. When I asked Cowan about what he hoped for in a Hillary Clinton presidency, he said: “Senator Clinton has been in politics long enough to realize you’re governing in a divided country. You use the mandate you have to get stuff done.”
Progressives, on the other hand, believe that the Democrats lost their way by obsessing over what President Bill Clinton once termed “the vital center.” That fixation, they say, has rendered the party brand incomprehensible and raised the question as to what exactly Democrats stand for. To them, it is the sharp-tongued populist rhetoric of Warren, whose signature line is that “the game is rigged” against working-class Americans, that represents the party’s only viable future. Moulitsas of Daily Kos says: “The Democrats’ branding problem isn’t that people don’t agree with the Democratic agenda. It’s that voters don’t trust them to actually carry it out. That, in huge part, is why Democratic-base turnout is so low across the board and especially so in midterms. So that’s where the Warrens and Edwardses of the party come in: Democrats who aren’t just saying the right thing and believing the right thing but doing the right thing and forcefully fighting for it.”
The problem is that neither wing can muster an entirely airtight case that theirs is the road map to electoral success. Sroka, of Democracy for America, says that last November’s election “was a good night for progressives,” pointing to the successful re-election campaigns waged by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who each employed anti-Wall Street rhetoric. But in purple states, House Democrats like Alan Grayson of Florida, Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire and Tom Perriello of Virginia all ran on Obama’s progressive achievements in 2010 and lost, as did Shea-Porter again in 2014.
Moderate Democrats cite the Senate victories of Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Joe Donnelly in Indiana in 2012 as models for how Democrats can expand the map in their favor by proffering candidates who are not to the left of their electorate. On the other hand, Mark Warner, the Virginia senator and popular centrist, was nearly defeated in 2014 by failing to motivate the Democratic base. And the moderate Senate Democrats Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana did all they could to distance themselves from Obama’s Affordable Care Act and were still routed. The election results are a jumble of counterindicators, from which anything and nothing can be concluded, allowing each side to blame the other after a loss.
The long-simmering family quarrel has now spilled out into the open in Maryland, where, Sroka says, “going forward the question is: ‘Will the party embrace that sort of populist progressive image? Or is it going to follow the Wall Street wing that’s led the party astray for the past 15 years?’ ” Cowan, unsurprisingly, sees the Maryland contest differently: not as the voiceless versus the elite, but rather as reasonable folks versus extremists. Or as he says, “What is at stake in the Maryland Senate primary is literally nothing less than whether we will Tea Party the Democratic Party.”
Representative Chris Van Hollen.
Credit: Matt Eich for The New York Times
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