The Democratic Party, as everyone says, has never been as unified as it is this week in Boston and will continue to be through the November elections. Such are the wages of Bushism, where implacable hostility to policy experts and dogmatic adherence to a platform of tax cuts über alles has made it clear that kicking the incumbent out of the White House is the necessary precursor to advancing any sort of substantive policy agenda.
But while the spirit of unity certainly has produced some genuine agreement among usually warring factions, much remains unresolved -- particularly on the two issues, Iraq and trade, that have most sharply divided the party in the recent past. What we're seeing this week in Boston is less a truce than a cease-fire, with each faction competing furiously beneath the surface to define the Kerry agenda as its own and preparing for the all-but-inevitable policy battles that will come in the wake of a Kerry victory.
Thus, while members of the Democratic left like Michael Moore, Howard Dean, Jesse Jackson Jr., SEIU President Andy Stern, and Reps. Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich have been plotting to "Take Back America" under the auspices of the liberal traditionalist Campaign for America's Future at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, a lower-profile event across town indicates that they won't get as much help from John Kerry as they'd like.
The scene is the third-floor ballroom of the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, where Bill and Hillary Clinton are staying and where the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a party-affiliated democracy-building outfit chaired by Madeleine Albright, tried to make it clear Wednesday morning that Clintonism lives on in the person of Massachusetts' junior senator. The occasion was a policy briefing for NDI's International Leaders Forum, a group of foreign diplomats in town for the convention, covered mostly by international journalists. On hand was Rand Beers, Kerry's top national security adviser (and his likely National Security Adviser), Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (Kerry's likely Secretary of State), former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Senator Gary Hart, and -- most interestingly -- Laura Tyson, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and currently one of three economists "consulted on nearly every [economic] policy decision" the Kerry campaign makes.
Tyson, a trade skeptic during the early days of the Clinton administration whose views have evolved over the years, came bearing news that will be heartening to the business community and disappointing to labor and others cheered by the Kerry campaign's talk of "Benedict Arnold CEOs" and the on-again, off-again protectionist rumblings from the convention floor: He doesn't mean any of it.
After briefly singing the praises of liberalized trade and capital flows, recommending Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization for those who wanted to know more, and arguing that trade is "necessary, but not sufficient" for global economic development, Tyson acknowledged that her remarks were somewhat at odds with much of what Kerry's said on the campaign trail.
"When people say, 'well, listen to what the Kerry campaign has said about trade in some of the primaries, we are concerned that Senator Kerry will move the US away from trade integration,'" she said, she tells them to "think about the issue of national campaigns in the US" and to "recognize that what might be said in one primary ... is not an indicator of the future."
Tyson further argued that Kerry would be able to liberalize trade more than Bush has, because Kerry would support policies that help compensate the inevitable losers in globalization -- a step that will allegedly drain the swamp of anti-trade sentiment. Lest it be thought that Tyson's commitment to the multilateral process and to continued trade integration leaves plenty of wriggle room to keep the process but add, say, environmental standards into the mix, she explicitly disavowed this option during a later exchange. Adding environmental issues to the WTO's brief might bog it down and impede progress on further integration.
"I want to assure you that a Kerry-Edwards administration will continue in the great American tradition of leading the way on global economic integration," she concluded.
Hearing a prominent advisor to the Kerry campaign essentially disavow the candidate's previous statements on an issue was a bit disconcerting, especially as Beers wasn't shy about speaking up at times when panelists (notably Hart) made statements he didn't feel the campaign was prepared to embrace. The tenor of Tyson's remarks was, however, remarkably consistent with Ryan Lizza's reporting on a lunch held for a small group of journalists featuring unofficial Kerry economics gurus Robert Rubin and Robert Altman and the campaign's official economics czars, Gene Sperling and Jason Furman, where the press was assured that deficit reduction will be the top budgetary priority.
A rightward tack during the general election following on the heels of a shift to the left during the primaries isn't necessarily anything to write home about -- that's how all Democratic presidential campaigns work. The dynamics of the trade issue, however, are somewhat different, because the left view on trade is actually more popular than the centrist alternative in many of this year's key swing states.
Accordingly, the higher-profile public speeches in the Fleet Center have continued to sound skeptical themes, while the free-trade message has been delivered to elite audiences at low-profile events. There are no sure things in politics, and Kerry might change course yet again while in office; as a senator, though, he was (as John Edward tried to point out against him during the primary campaign) a consistent supporter of new trade agreements, so there's every reason to believe that the Democrats' centrist wing has already won the first major policy fight of the Kerry era.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer. His column on politics and the media appears every Tuesday.
