So there's some sort of fight going on about whether Third Way is incrementalist or not. Or whether you're allowed to describe them as incrementalist. Or something. I guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word "incremental" is. For instance: I ran a search through their policy shop's health care offerings and all I found was "Bridging Health Coverage Between Jobs," which proposes a temporary insurance benefit as workers transition between different employment situations. I think there's a fair chance that that actually doesn't rise to the level of an incremental solution because it's not an incremental step towards any solution in particular, so maybe they're not incrementalists. To understand this debate, though, you need to go back to November 11th, 2004, when Third Way was announced. This was a week after John Kerry lost the presidential election, and the young organization was sold as a DLC for the next-generation. "As Democrats continue to stagger from last week's election losses, a group of veteran political and policy operatives has started an advocacy group aimed at using moderate Senate Democrats as the front line in a campaign to give the party a more centrist profile," wrote The Washington Post. In other words, Third Way was formed under the theory that the Democratss problem in 2004 was that they were too far to the left, and as such, had lost middle class voters. The organization focused on upper middle class voters and followed the Mark Penn strategy of machine gun bursts of small, bite-sized policies meant to attract professional whites and rural voters. This meant, in practice, making the party more conservative, because these voters, which Third Way defined as central, were more conservative. They also tried to make an issue of internet porn. But the politics of the moment passed Third Way by. This year, Barack Obama was, on domestic policy, the most moderate of the major Democrats, which put him substantially to the left of every major Democrat running for president in 2004. His health care plan was more universal than Gephardt's, his Iraq plan was more aggressively focused on withdrawal than Dean's, and he was a black liberal from an urban center. Clinton and Edwards ran on similar platforms. None of them bore any obvious resemblance to the office park bait Third Way advocated. Indeed, the health plans all looked more like EPI's offering than Third Way's. So Third Way carved out a niche with a focus on messaging and complicated survey data. And in that, they were useful. But there's no debate over their ideological orientation. They were built as the vessel for a particular argument about the path to a Democratic resurgence, and their side of that debate lost. The moment did not favor small policies or a rightward shift. Quite the opposite. Which put Third Way in something of a bind. Obscuring the leftward trend in the electorate led to odd episodes like their attempts to prove that the 2006 election proved affluent whites the swing demographic and proved the need for a renewed Democratic centrism. But the key voters were not the rich, as Tom Schaller pointed out. They were, well, everybody. Third Way was an organization began atop the numbers-based insight that Democrats lost the middle class and that was now working to juke the stats in order to seem relevant. And then came 2008, where Democrats improved their vote share across the board even with a more populist agenda, and then came the financial crisis, and the utility of Third Way's affluent incrementalism grew yet murkier. The problem for Third Way is that it's not clear what their role is now that Democrats have won atop something like the opposite of their advice and very different from their predicted majority coalition, which may explain why they're acting so defensive. Indeed, this fight over some offhandedly dismissive comment on a blog is actually the first thing I've heard out of Third Way in quite some time. And it's not exactly an example of affirmative agenda-setting or policy thinking. Related: See this extremely smart post from Mark Schmitt the Third Way's "New" and Old" rules..
