My plan for Denver was to focus on the externals: all the caucuses and gatherings and seminars that attempt to shape the issue agenda and mobilize constituencies. This, I assumed, was where I would find the real Democratic Party, and where the real fights and drama would be found, not at the choreographed love fest of the Pepsi Center.
Each day, I've started with the "daybook" put out by Congressional Quarterly. Each day's schedule runs to just over 200 events -- and that doesn't include the speeches and events of the official convention schedule. Since you can't do everything, or even most things, most people choose one of several tracks through the convention. One can follow the policy track, attending a string of panels on universal health care, job creation, alternative energy, and so forth. And, of course, there's a progressive track and a centrist or Blue Dog track. Or one can follow the blogger/journalist track and hang out in the "Big Tent," for the promised smoothies and massages (I tried to get in, but they couldn't decide whether I was a blogger or a journalist and eventually decided I was neither). And let's not forget the lobbyist track (which is a little subterranean -- though many activities are presumably bankrolled by lobbyists, the transparently lobbyist-sponsored events are few, at least in the daybook).
And so, it seems, the party outside the convention hall is a set of circles of alike people talking to each other. It is the familiar caricature of American politics itself: The liberals seminarize with the liberals, Blue Dogs with like-colored Dogs, the bloggers hang out with the bloggers, the journalists with each other, and the lobbyists feed other lobbyists.
As a result, in two days at least, one is unlikely to find the party's ideological fissures on display. (There is street theater, of course: the supposedly disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters so beloved by the media, and the equally large factions of PETA and Code Pink activists -- but that's all on the margins.) But even while everyone follows his or her own track with like-minded allies, the real differences between them seem modest. Wandering from hotel to conference hall, crossing the circles to the extent possible, the picture is not of a fractured party -- but of an energized, focused set of interests converging. All through Denver, one feels a general optimism that the sense of shared purpose, and the possibility of a broad public mandate for Democratic candidates, will create the kind of affluence of political capital in which there's room and time to resolve most differences.
For many decades, the operative descriptor for the Democratic Party was "Balkanization" -- the party was made up of a series of interest and constituency groups, each of which had an identity and agenda, often irreconcilable, that was more important to it than the party itself. That was the weak and sometimes self-destructive party that was unable to present a coherent agenda.
But while the familiar constituencies and interests are fully represented here, that sense that they are all pulling in different directions, indifferent to the shared purpose of a political party, is wholly gone. There is a sense, as never before, that all these ideas -- health care, alternative energy, sound budget policies, access to college, responsible foreign policy -- are connected. That each victory, particularly in November, will make the next easier. Where there is debate, it is often about tactics and timing -- how hard to push, what to do first, how to avoid squandering an opportunity next year -- than about the basic questions of what to do. Of course, tactical questions can lead to serious, substantive fights, and there are different viewpoints about the primacy of the federal budget deficit, details of universal health policy, or education policy -- but all those divisions seem to recede into the distant future.
Some look at the streets and hotels of Denver and see a different kind of party, one in which a progressive agenda might be used to win elections and then co-opted or suppressed by lobbyists or traditional interests. Spending much of Tuesday afternoon in the hotel that hosted the big donors of the party finance committee, it is easy to feel the money and the continued presence of Washington's well-dressed forces for the staus quo. And yet, as The Washington Post declared this morning, "the worst of the excesses are over," recalling by contrast "former senator John Breaux (D-La.) hosting a corporate-funded bash at the New England Aquarium in Boston complete with women dressed as mermaids" at the last Democratic convention. And the fact that lobbyists who don't share a progressive agenda will spend money on parties does not prove that they will have the power to derail that agenda. They'll spend the money anyway, and what really matters is that there should be both money and energy on the other side -- in support of universal health care and public investment.
Others fear the party's progressive core will be held hostage to the demands of the Blue Dogs, the minority of conservative members of Congress who hold the marginal seats, and will make up many of the new members if there are Democratic gains this fall. The Blue Dogs' concern with fiscal discipline, and their own corporate ties, as Tom Schaller's report from their circle showed yesterday, may become powerful constraints on Obama's agenda. But as Tom reported, they, too, speak a language of investment and some of the rudiments of populism.
For Democrats, a major purpose of this convention has been proving it is unified around its nominee. For the party that lives, breathes, eats, and drinks on the streets of Denver, unity is a little too simplistic a description. Outside of Obama, there are plenty of latent differences, as there always will be. But rather than a sense of factions pulling against each other, there is a sense that this time, the circles are intersecting.
