Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, just released by John Wiley & Sons. The views expressed here are his own.
The 2008 presidential campaign will begin in earnest less than two months from now, on the morning after the November midterm elections, and there are already three things we can predict with a fair degree of certainty about the coming Democratic primaries.
First, we may be finally seeing the death of the idea that on national security Democrats only need to go along with whatever hare-brained war Republicans can come up with. If nothing else, the Iraq war has made that much clear.
Yet despite the relative Democratic unanimity, Iraq will still be the single most important issue in the presidential primaries. There will almost certainly still be a large American presence there; despite all the blather about the administration’s super-agile “adapting to win” strategy, President Bush sees any fundamental change in his Iraq policy as a validation of his critics. As he made plain in late August, “We’re not leaving, so long as I’m the president.”
Among the Democratic candidates, there are essentially three positions on Iraq. The first is, “I was against it from the beginning,” something only Russell Feingold can claim. The second is, “I supported it at first, but I have recanted, and now realize it was a mistake.” This is the position held by John Edwards, John Kerry, and to varying degrees, most of the potential candidates who were not in Congress at the time and so did not cast an actual vote on the war. The third position, dripping with nuance, is, “Let’s not talk about whether it was a mistake; let’s talk about how the administration has blundered it.” This position is held by Joe Biden, Mark Warner, and most of all, Hillary Clinton.
Although there is almost unanimous opposition to the war among Democratic primary voters, they will be satisfied with candidates who hold positions No. 1 and No. 2. The real question—particularly for Clinton—is whether they can live with a candidate who takes position No. 3.
At this point, it’s hard to know, although much depends on the choices the candidates themselves make. If, for instance, the two top contenders turn out to be Clinton and Edwards, Edwards could choose to confront Clinton on her reluctance to make a clean break with the war. On the other hand, if Warner emerges as Clinton’s main competitor, his own wishy-washiness on the issue makes it highly unlikely he’d seek to make Clinton suffer for not making the same kind of public mea culpa on the war that Edwards did.
Also, there’s always the possibility that Al Gore could enter the race. Like Feingold, Gore is pure on the war: He was right from the beginning, and so has nothing he needs to defend. (And his entry, particularly if he waited until, say, a week before the Iowa caucus, would probably blow every candidate not named Clinton over the side of the primary boat.)
The second prediction is that the primaries are likely to feature another extended discussion about electability. The question is whether Democrats will be wiser about it than they were in 2004, when they decided that by virtue of his record of Vietnam service and square jaw, John Kerry was the most electable of the candidates running.
Of course, the bulk of any such discussion will revolve around Clinton. We’ll put off analyzing her electability to a later column, but the debate that occurs as we head toward the first contest in Iowa may serve to give every other candidate a pass on the question. Some people will say Hillary can win the general election and others will disagree, but if that’s all anyone is talking about, the unspoken assumption will be that every other contending Democrat can—or at least has a better shot than she does.
The last prediction we can make with confidence is that the most dynamic force in Democratic politics—the progressive blogosphere—will be both more and less influential than it was in 2004. More, because of its higher profile, larger audience, and exponentially greater complexity; and less, because that complexity means the blogs will never unite behind a single candidate the way they did during the last race.
In all likelihood, many of the most influential bloggers will remain neutral, though some will support one candidate or another. But there will be no repeat of the Howard Dean candidacy of 2004, for three reasons. First, Dean was the only 2004 candidate who truly appreciated the political potential of the Internet and established a web presence designed to enable Internet organizing and court bloggers. He quickly became the bloggers’ candidate, and even those who supported other candidates gave props to him for his Internet-fueled campaign.
But this time around, all the candidates will make substantial efforts to court bloggers and signal their respect for the blogosphere. Indeed, they already have: Mark Warner hired Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, Hillary Clinton hired Peter Daou of The Daou Report, and other potential candidates’ web sites feature blogs and podcasts, in an obvious attempt to signal that they “get” the blogs. Although some of these sites are underwhelming—it’s hard to imagine anyone spending hours a day at Tom Vilsack’s site, for instance—others, like the PACs of John Edwards, Mark Warner, and Wesley Clark, already look like sophisticated campaign sites. Never again will a presidential campaign believe it’s enough to have the finance director’s nephew manage their internet presence with a cheap site and little outreach to bloggers.
The second reason no one candidate can do what Dean did is that the left blogosphere is far larger and more complex than it was in 2003 and 2004. Despite the importance of the elite bloggers, even if they wanted to they couldn’t dictate to the rest of the blogosphere which candidate to support, if for no other reason than that there are so many blogs. Many of the blogs with the highest audiences didn’t even exist four years ago.
Finally, we should recall that Dean became the blogs’ favorite candidate for one important reason that had nothing to do with the Internet. When he stood up at a convention of California Democrats in March 2003 and said, “What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq? ... I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party!” it was a political earthquake. At the time, the other contending candidates all supported the war and were trying to show how close they were to Bush on foreign policy. The moment the words came out of Dean’s mouth, the party’s hard-core knew they had found their man.
That will certainly not be the case this time around: All Democrats have gotten the message that partisans want their leaders to be, well, partisan. If Democrats are successful in taking back one or both houses of Congress this year, the explanation will be not just the failure of the Bush administration’s policies, but that the congressional leadership that made it happen—Pelosi, Emmanuel, Reid and Schumer—know how to play hardball, staying unified in opposition and attacking Republicans without mercy.
There has been a fundamental shift in the thinking of elected Democrats since the 2004 elections—those in Congress, those in the states and those eyeing the White House. The rank-and-file have been shouting at the top of their lungs that what they want is unapologetic opposition to the Republicans, and they’re finally getting it. This isn’t just red meat for the true believers, it also happens to be effective politics, something ordinary Democrats understood but their Washington leaders didn’t. Well, they do now, and they stand a good chance of winning Congress because of it. Whatever else happens between now and January 2008, no Democrat touting the value of accommodation with the GOP stands a chance to become the party’s standard-bearer.
