Great, but where's the movement?
It's a fascinating horse race, this primary, but like a lot of people I find myself looking for something deeper, some signs of a movement emerging to counter the amazing discipline and power of the Right.
And this, I sometimes think, is the essential dilemma. Immediate electability? Or long-term inspiration and leadership? It's hard to deny that Dean more than any other candidate has created the components necessary for a viable movement. So are we tossing away a movement wrapped in an unelectable candidate, a Barry Goldwater of the left, for a chance to win an election? Is that what the Kerry over Dean vote is all about?
Robert Reich doesn't think so. He's been
a-poking around in recent history, looking for clues , looking for signs of a movement, which didn't emerge around Clinton. Dig this:
"In the months leading up to the 1996 election, Mr. Clinton famously triangulated — finding positions equidistant between Democrats and Republicans — and ran for re-election on tiny issues like V-chips in television sets and school uniforms. The strategy worked, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Had Mr. Clinton told Americans the truth — that when the economic boom went bust we'd still have to face the challenges of a country concentrating more wealth and power in fewer hands — he could have built a long-term mandate for change. By the late 90's the nation finally had the wherewithal to expand prosperity by investing in people, especially their education and health. But because Mr. Clinton was re-elected without any mandate, the nation was confused about what needed to be accomplished and easily distracted by conservative fulminations against a president who lied about sex."
His premise is that populism works, and will work, if we stick with it, and stay out of Clinton's "dead center." He believes Kerry can forge enduring messages in the heat of this election battle. And around that will coalesce a movement.
Sounds a bit hopeful to me. Those who came after Goldwater on the right were handed the blessing of the Southern Strategy. And around this a movement did coalesce. Certainly discipline, tenacity, and enormous resources played a role, but without the Southern Strategy and the election victories it delivered, Ronald Reagan would have done his great communicating from a lovely home in California.
Do the Democrats have anything of similar power that they might wield? A similar gift they might employ? Or of greater power, considering they must overcome this most daunting of Republican machines? Reich and others believe they do, in the form of the growing disparity between the haves and have-nots. It makes sense. It's logical. It's emotional. It's simple. But already I can hear the big guns on the Right, blasting away at "Class Warfare," and I wonder how long the message will hold.
