Last week, in the middle of a Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) training trip for state and local elected officials that took me from Alabama to Colorado to Vermont, I was forwarded an e-mail from David Sirota, who works for the Center for American Progress.
Sirota's cover note said: "As the [Democratic National Committee (DNC)] meets this weekend to vet candidates for chairman, I wanted to pass on this piece slated for the cover of the upcoming edition of The American Prospect. It delves into how, under the blathering of pundits and operatives, various 'red state' and 'red region' Democrats are already showing the party how to win in conservative areas. The key is to fundamentally reject the corporate/DLC argument -- and follow those who continue to win with a progressive populist message.” [emphasis in the original]
"Here we go again," I thought, and then read the piece ("The Democrats' Da Vinci Code"), which combined some interesting observations on Brian Schweitzer's winning gubernatorial campaign in Montana alongside some dubious generalizations about what Sirota perceived as successful examples of "progressive populism." The article, of course, also featured several gratuitous shots at the "corporate-backed" DLC and at the "big-business agenda" of Bill Clinton -- the only Democratic presidential candidate to have carried more than one western or southern state since 1980.
I was a little surprised to find this piece scheduled for the cover of the Prospect, which just a few months ago had published a joint article by one of its co-editors, Robert Kuttner, and the head of our think tank, Will Marshall, enumerating a common economic message and policy agenda for Democrats while explicitly burying all the old hatchets.
Fortunately, the Prospect's own Matthew Yglesias effectively exposed Mr. Sirota's serial distortions of what the DLC is all about in the context of an even more recent piece Sirota published in The Nation. I will therefore simply refer readers to Yglesias and devote this response to the substance of the "Da Vinci Code" argument, as best I can understand it.
The styling of "The Da Vinci Code" article is revealing. Sirota argues that red-state success for Democrats is actually pretty simple, if they will simply abandon any policy positions or messages that interfere with 100-percent economic populism, as he more or less defines it.
There are two fundamental problems with this argument, which has been raised many times among Democrats over the last three decades. The first is the assumption that an economic message can serve as an electoral "silver bullet" in this particular age in the particular "red" areas the article is talking about. For one thing, there's this little matter of national security, which every reputable analysis of contemporary politics notes as a very significant, and perhaps the most significant, Democratic weakness in red states.
Some of the politicians Sirota cites as role models certainly seem to understand that. According to his own account (which he provided at a DLC event in Colorado two weeks ago), Ken Salazar, the one Democrat who won a seriously contested red-state Senate race this year, talked incessantly about national security in his campaign. John Spratt of South Carolina is much better known in his district for his tough-minded defense views than for any votes he's cast against trade agreements.
And even state-level Democrats understand the importance of security as a "trust" and "values" issue. Janet Napolitano has made homeland security (backed up by her crime-fighting credentials as Arizona attorney general) a signature feature of her governorship.
Conversely, we witnessed a compelling test of the "economics trumps security" hypothesis in 2002, when the default-drive message of the national Democratic Party in the first post-September 11 election was limited to Medicare prescription drugs and Social Security, on the theory that national security was a "Republican issue" that Democrats should largely ignore or concede. That didn't work out very well.
And while all Democrats should agree that it's a good idea to frame economic policy positions in values terms, it's no substitute for coming to grips with cultural "values issues" themselves. Salazar certainly did, going out of his way to distance himself from absolutist positions on abortion (while remaining fundamentally pro-choice). And Sirota's account of the Schweitzer campaign, interestingly enough, doesn't mention the candidate's embrace of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, or his vocal opposition to any form of gun control. (For the record, I'm not endorsing Schweitzer's approach to these issues, but simply noting he didn't think "economic populism" so riveted the Montana electorate that he could take a pass on cultural issues).
I stress this point not just to criticize Sirota's argument but because the belief in the political salience of narrow, poll-tested, "can't-miss," let's-change-the-subject messages, at the expense of a broad message that addresses the actual concerns of actual voters, is one of the Democratic Party's worst addictions. It's time to break that losing habit.
But whether or not you believe that the wallet, if you thump it enough, ultimately trumps the heart, the economic message Sirota promotes is sometimes vague and often questionable. It's not enough to call yourself a "populist." That word has a historical meaning that is increasingly irrelevant, because no one is talking about public ownership of grain elevators or free coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1.
But there are many varieties of "populism." There's anti-corporate populism, to be sure. But there's also anti-government and anti-cultural-elite populism of the variety so successfully used by today's Republicans. Just intoning the word, or even modifying it with the adjective "economic," does not provide a crystal-clear political guide for Democrats.
I think we would all agree that any definition of populism should focus on opposing the use of government by the wealthy and powerful to gain special privileges. And in the age of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, we are all populists in this sense, or at least those of us (like the DLC) who have relentlessly opposed the GOP campaign to eliminate progressive taxation, provide special access for lobbyists who supply campaign contributions and toe the party line, and give favored business constituencies a pass on compliance with environmental or workforce safety standards.
Indeed, we believe that Democrats should systematically oppose taxpayer-financed corporate subsidies, whether they are in the federal budget and tax code or are extorted from state and local governments as the price for business investment. Democrats should also emulate Eliot Spitzer in arguing that an effective free-enterprise system requires strict accountability of corporations and their executives to shareholders, employees, and consumers for their behavior, and should emulate Joe Lieberman in arguing that entertainment-industry corporations should not be exempt from accountability, either.
But populism need not involve blind and undifferentiated business-bashing, or the belief that a negative message of "class warfare" -- untempered by a positive message of how all Americans can get ahead on a level playing field -- is all Democrats need to stand for. The Clinton administration championed economic policies that truly "lifted all boats," simultaneously spurring business development, the first mass upper middle class in human history, the first large-scale gains in real middle-class incomes in 30 years, and historic gains in employment and homeownership for the working poor and minority Americans. And when Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996 on this record and agenda, he made red-state inroads that today seem astonishing. What's wrong with this picture?
Well, according to Sirota, the Clinton record was blighted by Clinton's support for a "corporatist" pro-trade agenda, and much of his thesis seems to be based on the idea that Democrats cannot win in red states without decisively opposing any sort of trade expansion, a subject he returns to repeatedly. Indeed, his animus toward the DLC, reflecting a less clearly stated but unmistakable animus toward Clinton, appears based on the assumption that the only possible rationale for being pro-trade is slavish devotion to corporate interests.
Let's remember something here: Support for trade expansion is the oldest continuous policy tradition of the Democratic Party, reaching back at least to the administration of Martin Van Buren. The original populist Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, was more of a free trader than Bill Clinton or anybody in the DLC. Every single Democratic president of the 20th century has been pro-trade. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman insisted on unilateral trade concessions near the end of and after World War II to prop up European economies threatened by communist expansion.
Does that mean that Democrats have to be pro-trade? Of course not. But it does mean the burden of proof among Democrats rests upon those who would demand an abandonment of that tradition -- and with it, the abandonment of the historic mistrust of protectionism as the use of government to pick and choose industries that will be conferred with insulation from competition. And it also means that those of us who maintain this tradition should not be subjected to ad hominem attacks on our integrity.
There's plenty to talk and argue about on trade policy. Nobody's a pure free trader, and I hope no Democrat really believes that the United States should refuse to trade with anybody. We're all opposed to “unfair trade deals,” and we all understand that the kind of economic growth we need to resume the growth of the 1990s -- and, for that matter, to defend our values and interests around the world -- depends on continued U.S. global economic leadership. We can agree to disagree about the specifics, but as Marshall and Kuttner wrote in their joint Prospect piece, the broader mission of Democrats is to do everything possible to equip Americans -- through everything from lifelong learning to health insurance to strengthened collective bargaining rights -- to obtain economic opportunity and security in the face of global competition that will not go away no matter how many or how few trade agreements are signed.
If this sounds challenging and complicated, so be it. There is, in truth, no "Da Vinci Code" that will quickly explain how Democrats can project a sensible and winning economic message, much less an overall appeal to red-state voters who mistrust us on so many fronts. There is no corporate villain so compelling that demonizing it will relieve us of the responsibility to explain what we would do to provide economic growth, security, and higher living standards. And there is no intraparty fight or purge that can instantly cleanse Democrats of the accumulated political sins that have burdened us in great swatches of the country.
There ain't no easy road, and there ain't no easy code. So let's get on with the hard work ahead and avoid the simplistic prescriptions and irresponsible name-calling that do nothing but store up political treasure for the opposition.
Ed Kilgore is policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council and writes the blog New Donkey.
