[Marxism] Democratic Party realities

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, October 2, 2005
The East in the West
By MATT BAI

No Democratic politician in America is connected to as many of the party's
old and emerging power centers as Hillary Clinton. Her web of influence,
spun quietly and deliberately over time, is remarkable. She was
instrumental in helping John Podesta, her husband's former chief of staff,
set up the Center for American Progress, which is now the party's largest
and most dynamic policy center. The pollster Mark Penn and the ad-maker
Mandy Grunwald, both of whom worked for Bill Clinton and are among
Hillary's closest advisers, have longstanding ties to the centrist,
pro-business Democratic Leadership Council, while two other Clinton
confidants, the operatives Ann Lewis and Harold Ickes, remain close to
women's groups and Big Labor, respectively. The trusted aides Howard
Wolfson and Patti Solis Doyle have been associated with the Glover Park
Group, one of the most influential consulting firms among Democratic
interest groups. Mark Buell, a San Francisco philanthropist who, along with
his wife, Susie Tompkins Buell, is a close friend of Clinton's, sits on the
board of the Democracy Alliance, a new network of wealthy progressive
donors, and one of Hillary Clinton's former top aides, Kelly Craighead, is
on its senior staff. (Other potential presidential candidates have
supporters in the alliance as well.) You can hardly pry up a floorboard in
the basement of Democratic politics without finding some sign of the
Clinton operation churning underneath.

The chief benefit of this network is that it spans the ideological divide
in the party, from far left to far center. The problem is that labels like
"left" and "center" seem to have lost much of their meaning in the party,
and the divisions in Democratic politics no longer seem to run along
traditional lines. Gone are the days when Hubert Humphrey waged war against
Strom Thurmond on civil rights, when George McGovern's protesters clashed
with Scoop Jackson's hard-liners. In the era after Bill Clinton, the vast
majority of Democrats, whether they once considered themselves liberals or
centrists, mouth allegiance to the same set of often tepid principles on
issues like trade, terrorism and gun control - positions that they will
often cite as evidence of hard-won unity but which in truth represent the
absence of the real intellectual discussion that once defined (and
sometimes doomed) the party. As a result, aside from a few subtle disputes
- whether troops should be withdrawn from Iraq now, for instance, or next
year - the philosophical differences between liberals and centrists have
never been more obscure. Nothing better illustrated the passing of the
party's long ideological debate better than the explosive presidential
campaign of Howard Dean (now the party's chairman), whose record as a
pro-gun, pro-Democratic Leadership Council governor did nothing to prevent
him from seamlessly assuming the role of chief spokesman for those liberal
voters who had always embodied the so-called Democratic left.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/magazine/02hillary.html

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