Barack Obama, Ideologue-In-Chief? or What Centrists Fail to Understand

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

So-called 'pundits' such as John Freehery, founder and CEO of the Freehery Group, 'a boutique strategic advocacy firm' in Washington DC, and blogger at The Hill's Pundits Blog, understands this to be the most important line from Obama's inaugural address for Republicans, for it is them for whom the ground has shifted. They now face a huge challenge to reposition themselves. The background to this interpretation is what could be called the archetype of the core centrist credo:

We are a centrist country with conservative leanings. And if you don’t appeal to the vast middle, especially that part of Middle America that lives in the suburbs, your party loses seats, influence, access to money, and perspective

The center revolted against the partisanship of the last 20 years. They threw their lot in with Obama because he talked to them, appealed to them, excited them and promised them a post-partisan world where all would work together for a more perfect union.

Who could possibly be against that ideal?

Obviously all those who don't share that 'ideal' to begin with and question the whole concept of 'centrism,' such as Thomas Frank below.

At the other end of the political spectrum, further to the left, Victor Navasky, along with many others, 'prefers to believe' that Obama might be 'a liberal wolf in centrists sheep's clothing.' The formulation 'prefer to believe' betrays a classic case of projection that sill seems all too common among progressives today. It's wishful thinking.

The reverse seems to make more sense: Obama appears to be 'a centrist sheep with a rather thin progressive veneer.' If this is the case, the key challenge for left-liberal progressives is to develop a strategy that allows them to nudge Obama to the left.

The above line from Obama's speech only needs to be slightly modified to more accurately describe what really has happened in the US and the world in the past 30 years and to begin to make sense and become politically useful for left-liberal progressives. For the ground that has shifted is nothing less than 'reality,' primarily in its economic and environmental dimensions, less so in its politics:

What the centrists fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments of centrism that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

Progressives such as Glenn Grennwald, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, George Lakoff, Christopher Hayes, Guy Saperstein, David Sirota, and Rick Perlstein - just to name a few - have argued for a long time that centrism is a sham. Reich explicitly did so back in 2004 in his book Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, in chapter 5, Winning: It Will Take More Than Reason, in the section appropriately named 'The Sham of Centrism,' (pp. 196-201). 'Centrism' is a particularly pernicious form of political ideology, precisely because it passes itself off as 'the reasonable and sensible middle,' or these days as 'pragmatism.' Plus, it is shifting all the time, and the right very successfully has shifted it in its direction. For the same reason, 'leading from the center' doesn't make sense, because picking people up where they are supposedly at, is the opposite of leadership.

According to Politico, Obama wants 80 Senate votes for his recovery plan. Given that there are 58 Democrats in the Senate now, why does he want an additional 22 Republicans? In order to get them, and all the Blue Dog Democrats, he will have to make a number of centrist/conservative concessions. In addition, this will likely delay the adoption of the bill, during a daily deepening crisis where time is of the essence. Why would he do that? Why doesn't he instead 'act like he won'?

Today, Obamaian 'pragmatism' and 'post-partisanships' are just new words for 'centrism,' which is now obsolete, having been surpassed by developments around the world. As Glenn Greenwald recently documented, 'centrism' is anything but new. In fact, this is what most Democrats have been doing, ever since Dukakis in 1988, who said 'this election isn't about ideology. It's about competence.' Greenwald explains:

The central tenets of the Beltway religion -- particularly when a Democrat is in the White House -- have long been "centrism" and "bipartisanship." The only good Democrats are the ones who scorn their "left-wing" base while embracing Republicans. In Beltway lingo, that's what "pragmatism" and good "post-partisanship" mean: a Democrat whose primary goal is to prove he's not one of those leftists.

Whatever else one might want to say about this "centrist" approach, the absolute last thing one can say about it is that there's anything "new" or "remarkable" about it. The notion that Democrats must spurn their left-wing base and move to the "non-ideological" center is the most conventional of conventional Beltway wisdom.

In his excellent column at the Wall Street Journal, 'Obama Should Act Like He Won,' Thomas Frank presents one of the best definitions and critiques of centrism that I have read in a long time. It is scathing and right on target:

There is no branch of American political expression more trite, more smug, more hollow than centrism. [...]

Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants.

And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are "New Democrats," "Radical Centrists," clear-eyed believers in a "Third Way." The red-hot tepids, we might call them -- the jellybeans of steel.

The reason centrism finds an enthusiastic audience in Washington, I think, is because it appeals naturally to the Beltway journalistic mindset, with its professional prohibition against coming down solidly on one side or the other of any question. Splitting the difference is a way of life in this cynical town. To hear politicians insist that it is also the way of the statesman, I suspect, gives journalists a secret thrill.

Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he -- and the vast silent middle for which he stands -- knows beyond question what is to be done

As this should remind us, the real-world function of Beltway centrism has not been to wage high-minded war against "both extremes" but to fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of liberalism. Centrism's institutional triumphs have been won mainly if not entirely within the Democratic Party. Its greatest exponent, President Bill Clinton, persistently used his own movement as a foil in his great game of triangulation.

And centrism's achievements? Well, there's Nafta, which proved Democrats could stand up to labor. There's the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. There's the Iraq war resolution, approved by numerous Democrats in brave defiance of their party's left. Triumphs all.

Essentially, 'centrism' is a political ideology that combines and articulates neoliberalism and 'liberal' interventionism. It is all the more powerful the more it succeeds to delude people with its pretension that it is 'post-ideological.'

It cannot be repeated enough: 'Post-ideological' and 'post-partisan' politics is utter and dangerous nonsense. I am just waiting for the Obamaniacs to push it further and start talking about 'post-politics.' It is a myth, but a very powerful myth, that has served 'centrists' exceedingly well. It is high time to burst this pretentious bubble, especially right now that it is being vigorously reinflated.

Likewise, there is nothing 'radical' about the 'radical middle' or 'radical centrists.' And today more than ever the 'third way' is a deadend street, a slow-motion trainwreck, given the economic and ecological crises facing us. 'Centrism' means sustaining the unsustainable. It tends to reduce democracy to technocracy, a tendency that critical theorists have critiqued for decades, foremost among them Juergen Habermas.

Christopher Hayes, drawing pragmatist philosophy in his recent reflection on what kind of 'pragmatist' Obama might turn out to be, put it really well:

Dewey's pragmatism was reformist, not radical. He sought to ameliorate the excesses of early industrial capitalism, not to topple it. Nonetheless, pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions. It demands a skepticism not just toward the certainties of ideologues and dogmatism but also of elite consensus and the status quo. This is a definition of pragmatism that is in almost every way the opposite of its invocation among those in the establishment. For them, pragmatism means accepting the institutional forces that severely limit innovation and boldness; it means listening to the counsel of the Wise Men; it means not rocking the boat.

These two kinds of pragmatism, what I would be tempted to call the 'fake,' so-called 'common sense' pragmatism of the establishment, and the 'real' philosophical and historical pragmatism, are opposed to each other. Obama has staffed his administration almost exclusively with members of the now discredited ancien regime of neoliberalism and interventionism. His early positions on a whole range of issues, from the 'bailout' to 'entitlement reform,' and from Pakistan to 'clean coal,' also reflect these obsolete approaches. Many of his other policies represent only a return to the historical norm. Some progressives may be forgiven, after these exceptional eight years, for mistaking these changes for genuine progress. Doing less harm is not the same as doing good.

One can make the strongest case for the argument that for the US to adequately address not only its current crises, but also the ones that will be the defining challenges of the 21st century, it needs to radically change many of its major policies in a quasi-revolutionary shift to a sustainable environment, economy and society. Conservatism and 'centrism' have proven to be failures to even begin to address these challenges, only making them worse. Progressivism is the only viable alternative left that at least stands a chance of beginning to respond semi-adequately to systemic challenges such as catastrophic climate change, peak oil, a hyper-militarized foreign policy and an utterly unsustainable world economy, that threaten the very foundations of human civilization. This is how much the ground has shifted.

Even such a corporate outfit as the World Economic Forum, in its latest report, 'Global Risks 2009,' now acknowledges that global risks today are so 'interlinked,' that they necessitate much more coherent and effective global governance, which of course is a form of collective action at the highest level that, if anything, only progressivism can achieve, with its systematic emphasis on the need for more coordination, cooperation and integration.

Thomas Frank concludes his column by quoting from former House Majority Leader 'the hammer' Tom DeLay's 2007 memoirs that Republicans under his leadership learned 'to start every policy initiative from as far to the political right as we could,' thereby moving 'the center farther to the right.'

President-elect Obama can learn something from Mr. DeLay's confession: Centrism is a chump's game. Democrats have massive majorities these days not because they waffle hither and yon but because their historic principles have been vindicated by events. This is their moment. Let the other side do the triangulating.

Something tells me that Obama knows all this already. So why doesn't he act accordingly? The 'chump's game' of 'centrism' should insult both his intellect and his seriousness, assuming that he actually is serious about finding workable solutions to critical problems, and not primarily concerned with keeping if not expanding his majority in the 2010 midterm elections and getting re-elected in 2012.

And here's the rub: The crises we are facing now, and will continue to face in one form or another for the rest of the 21st century, can only be adequately addressed through radically changed policies, which must be consistently applied for decades. But in a political system that is geared towards winning elections every two to four years, this is almost impossible to achieve. But saying that we are already doomed and that it is too late to change guarantees that nothing will be done, and thus this assessment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obama just got elected President in this political system, which will continue to severely constrain his actions, no matter how brilliant and well-intentioned he may be. It is for this reason that progressives must develop a strategy that allows them to change both the structure of the political system and the ideology that supports it.

In short, politics is inescapably ideological, 'centrism is for phonies,' and 'post-partisanship' is bogus. At least for the next four years, Obama will be, not Pragmatist-In-Chief, as he and others would like us to believe, but unavoidably Ideologue-In-Chief. If progressives don't manage to develop and act on a strategy that allows them to at least nudge him to the left, early indications are that he will turn out to be yet another triangulating Centrist-In-Chief, and the results cannot possibly be better than some version of Clintonism 2.0. Given the enormous challenges, they are almost guaranteed to be worse. The stakes could not be higher.

Quo vadis, Obama?

In his column of June 30, 2008, noting how similar the current election feels to those of 1980 and 1992 Paul Krugman reflected on a set of important and related questions regarding Obama's "real" agenda: If elected, would be "a Ronald Reagan of the left," bringing about significant change, or "just another Clinton"? Is he moving to the right, as he has done in recent weeks, because he thinks he has to in order to win big, which would then allow him to bring about major change? Or does his "triangulation and poll-driven politics" actually make it harder for him to win? What is the relationship between how a candidate campaigns and how he governs? And perhaps most importantly, is Obama a "transformational figure behind a centrist facade," like so many progressive activists would like to believe, or actually a centrist behind a transformational facade. How much is substance and how much is style?

To these important questions, Krugman tentatively suggests a few answers. They are also relevant for progressive strategy and the ongoing debate on how best to nudge Obama to the left, difficult as this is likely to be, especially if he doesn't move much by himself.

For now, Krugman concludes, Obama looks more like Clinton, and pretty centrist. The parallels between Clinton and Obama are indeed noteworthy: Projecting the image of transcending traditional divides; not more but smarter government; the economic plan; etc.

Krugman concludes:

In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.

One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country’s direction. And that’s mainly up to Mr. Obama.

Indeed, there has been the concern all along that Obama raises very high expectations in trying to win the election, which he then can't meet once in office, because of the power structure he enters, and because of the very bad shape this country is in. I wish I could share Krugman's optimism that it is "mainly up to Obama" which direction this country takes. I am afraid that even a very progressive Obama could only do so much.

This is precisely where progressive strategy comes in. While for electoral strategists getting Obama elected is the ultimate goal of strategy, in our understanding it is, if not the beginning, at best one component. For immediately, the question becomes: Now what? How to move Obama to the left? This raises the crucial strategic question of how best to articulate what we call movement-electoral strategies to get progressives elected, and then, once in office, how to hold them accountable to a progressive agenda.

Is the 2008 Presidential Election a Great Opportunity for "Progressives"?

In its latest editorial, Get In It to Win It, The Nation suggests that because of its "volatility" the 2008 election offers

perhaps the best opportunity in a generation to nominate a genuinely progressive candidate - a candidate who can win next November.

And that's precisely the crux of the matter: A "genuinely progressive candidate ... who can win." In the US of 2007, isn't this necessarily an oxymoron? Much of this of course depends on how you define "progressive." I have addressed this question in a previous post, Who is Progressive? For a more recent and more extensive discussion, see What does it mean to be "progressive"? at TPMCafe.

Just to underline the main point: Who is a "genuine progressive" and electable at the same time? For example, many believe that people like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader are genuine progressives; yet few think it very likely that they could ever get elected. In fact, some think that their campaigns are counterproductive, because they take precious resources and votes away from better-placed candidates.

Likewise, many progressives don't consider Hillary Clinton to be really progressive, and some doubt whether Obama really is, all the more since his platform is not very well defined yet. (For a series of probing questions concerning Obama, see David Sirota's post from today). Yet for the past thirty-some years, whoever raised the most money was eventually nominated to run. Depending on where you stand, this is either a huge problem for "progressives" or not a problem at all.

Since hardly anyone dares to call him-/herself liberal anymore, almost everybody on the left is a "progressive" now. The problem remains that this includes a whole spectrum of "progressives," ranging from rather conservative centrists to pretty hardcore leftists, with very different and ultimately irreconcilable agendas. Since strategy is primarily goal-driven, and since "progressive" goals diverge so significantly, there necessarily have to be painful trade-offs when it comes to uniting behind a candidate and an agenda. There is no easy way out of these strategic dilemmas.

The Nation editorial further opines:

The point is not to organize for a particular contender but rather to assure that whoever wins is accountable to our stances against the Iraq War and for restoration of civil liberties, a robust response to global warming and universal healthcare.

Yes, but this is one of the key questions: How can progressives effectively keep candidates accountable to a progressive agenda once they are in office? One would think that the fact that they were elected with their support would help. It would help even more if they were "one of them," so to speak. Many had hoped that this would be the case of Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, only to be rather disappointed once he assumed office. Could that happen with Obama on a national scale? How deep does his experience as a community organizer in Chicago reach, of which he claims that it was the best education he has ever received (including Harvard Law School). Or is this an irrelevant question?

Finally, The Nation appears to advocate for what we call a "movement-electoral strategy" in our survey (pdf) of progressive strategy, which includes Democracy for America and Progressive Democrats of America:

The progressive voice on these issues will gain traction only if MoveOn.org, Democracy for America and Progressive Democrats of America, as well as unions, environmental groups and other issue-focused organizations, rapidly expand into a cohesive movement. New technologies make it easier than ever to organize voter lists and to communicate with voters about the candidates and the evolving dynamics of the race. In partnership with innovative state-based organizations, MoveOn.org, unions and other national groups should prepare interventions throughout the process. Such interventions are essential.

Interestingly, Dan Berger also identifies the beginning of a "mass movement" from his experience at the first US Social Forum. Yet if you compare the agenda of the Forum with those of the leading "progressive" candidates, you can measure the distance that separates very different understandings of what it means to be "progressive."

Very appropriately, the motto of the Forum is "Another World is Possible. Another US is necessary." But how do make the necessary possible, when the leading candidate is Hillary Clinton? Though it is hard for some progressive to accept, politics, it seems, stubbornly if not necessarily, remains the art of the possible.

And please don't forget to be "realistic" when it comes to political strategy.

Bill Clinton, Strategist in Chief

In New Role, Senator Clinton's Strategist in Chief was published in the New York Times on May 13, 2007. This article is interesting insofar as it reflects a widespread understanding of "strategy" that we have noticed all along. This is all the more interesting since this article presents Bill Clinton not only as a mere strategist, but as some sort of super strategist. Accordingly, one might be forgiven to expect to learn something about the long-term goals and big picture thinking of this super politician. But there is nothing of this sort. Instead, strategy is reduced to electoral strategy and, as is frequently the case, is being confused with tactics.

The following excerpts are supposed to illustrate this point:

Bill Clinton's connections, and his endless supply of chits, only begin to capture his singular role in his wife's presidential candidacy, advisers and friends of the couple say. He is the master strategist behind the scenes; the consigliere to the head of ''the family,'' as some Clinton aides refer to her operation; and a fund-raising machine who is steadily pulling in $100,000 or more at receptions.

So far, his roles have unfolded in private as he provides ideas to his wife and makes sure she paces herself, and as he acts as something of a field general with donors, instructing them on how to talk up Mrs. Clinton.

The Clintons mostly talk about strategy, not campaign management, advisers say. (my emphasis)

Now, when I read this sentence, I got excited, expecting to hear something about strategy; I was all the more disappointed when I read on to see how the paragraph continued:

He receives polling data from Mr. Penn, who was his pollster in 1996, and the two men speak regularly. He sometimes looks over drafts of Mrs. Clinton's major speeches, and he gives her feedback on her performances.

Advisers say his advice to her can be boiled down to a few broad themes. He urges her to remember that the biggest person gets elected (in other words, the one who rises above political pettiness) and that the most optimistic candidate wins. He has encouraged her to talk about average people who work hard and play by the rules, classic Clintonian language. And she has, using those phrases and other themes in talking, for example, about regular Americans who are ''invisible'' to the Bush administration. (Advisers say Mr. Clinton did not devise the invisible line.)

So apparently this is how the leading paper in the country understands strategy, essentially as polling, framing, and messaging. Interestingly enough, in a profile of Hillary Clinton's top strategist, Mark Penn, the other leading paper in this country, the Washington Post, exhibits a similar understanding of strategy. Clinton's PowerPointer: With Data and Slides, a Pollster Guides Campaign Strategy of April 30, 2007, appeared in the Post's series "The Gurus: The professionals who manage the machinery of American politics."

With the same pollster in charge of "strategy," a very similar network of advisers and a very similar platform, one should not be surprised to get with Hillary what the country got with Bill: Clintonism 2.0, the updated version. Not surprisingly, apparently one of the Clinton campaign's major concerns is whether the country is ready for yet another Clinton or whether there is still too much "Clinton fatigue" around.

One way for progressives further to the left to respond to this state of progressive "strategy" is to quote the great strategist Sun Tzu: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." For indeed, the sad truth is that winning elections is the be all and end all of centrist strategy. Getting Clinton (or Obama, or ...) elected is the ultimate goal. By the way, it is rather sobering to contemplate that if Clinton got elected and re-elected, that would give us 28 years (almost three decades!) of uninterrupted rule by the two most powerful political machines in the country.

For more liberal progressives however, this state of affairs is precisely part of the problem, not part of the solution. For them, getting yet another centrist elected is "tactics without strategy," is "the noise before defeat," because this is not the way to significantly change the country. You win a battle, but you lose the war. Hence the urgent need to develop a strategy that allows us to win the war.

By necessity, this strategy goes far beyond election cycles. That seems to be one of the reasons why hardly anybody is thinking about it. What you find much more is something along those lines: 'Bush is so bad, we absolutely have to get a Democrat elected in 08! Now it is even more urgent than in 2004!! This must be our absolute priority!! Electability is everything!!!' -- And then what?

"Third Way is the Wrong Way"

This article by Guy T. Saperstein, a partner at the Democracy Alliance, which he describes as "a center-left organization that is attempting to build progressive political infrastructure," is a criticism of Third Way's strategy, an organization that calls itself "a strategy center for progressives."

His core argument is that centrism is a counterproductive and self-defeating strategy that undermines progressives' efforts. According to Saperstein, Third Way's political philosophy is best articulated in The Politics of Polarization, a report that was published in October 2005, and that was presented as a "new study of electorate [that] updates seminal work by Galston and Kamarck." It was written by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, with the assistance of Scott Winship. Kamarck and Galston also wrote The Politics of Evasion in 1989, which is said to have had a significant impact on Bill Clinton's campaign. Now similar things are being said about the new study's influence on Hillary Clinton's platform. Galston is a political theorist at the University of Maryland and at the Brookings Institution, and a co-editor (together with Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira) of The Democratic Strategist. Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Scott Winship is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, chief blogger of The Daily Strategist, and recently became Senior Policy Advisor at the Third Way. I only point this out to illustrate how tightly knit the centrist universe seems to be ...

In any case, according to Saperstein, Third Way's strategy

is predicated on one core premise - a premise that I think is not only utterly fallacious, but one which attempts to lead Democrats in the wrong political direction. The core premise of "The Politics of Polarization" is that more people self-identify as "conservatives" (32%) than "liberals" (20%), so polarizing the electorate favors Republicans, not Democrats. Thus, Democrats must trend toward the center and/or conservative positions to attract the "moderates," and avoid supporting clear, but polarizing, "liberal" positions.

Indeed, the writings of Galston and Kamarck emphasize this key premise again and again, and not only as a description of how things are, but also as a prescription of what progressives should do and what direction they should move in. The fact that more voters self-identify as conservatives rather than as liberals should come as no surprise, given the growing success of the conservative infrastructure in shaping the ideological climate according to their interests (which is precisely what the Democracy Alliance tries to counter by building progressive infrastructure). But since the center has thus significantly moved to the right, moving towards the center necessarily comes at the expense of more liberal positions and hence undermines the progressive agenda.

Instead of pandering to an elusive center by abandoning more liberal positions, progressives should do what conservatives have successfully done: Rather than accepting the status quo by essentially strengthening core conservative positions, they should challenge it in order to change the terms of the debate and its underlying assumptions. The way to do this is to unambiguously confront conservative positions by presenting clear progressive alternatives. It means mobilizing the base rather than pandering to moderates, which is precisely what Republicans have done, based on the advice of Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove. According to Saperstein, this is easier in ideological terms and more effective and sustainable in the long term.

Saperstein illustrates his argument with two examples, the Iraq War and public housing policy. On Iraq, Saperstein shows that by accepting "the fundamental assumptions that underlay Bush's war," Third Way "managed to lag behind the Democratic Party on Iraq," thereby adding to the public's confusion about where Democrats stood on Iraq. In short, by being too close to the center, Third Way "has been in the way, not leading the way."

On public housing policy, Saperstein refers to a presentation by Third Way's President, Jon Cowan, to the Democracy Alliance. In it, he emphasized that when he was at the Housing and Urban Development Department, he worked to "blow up public housing," and characterized it as "modernizing" progressive ideas. According to Saperstein, he failed to mention that much of what he blew up

was sitting on valuable urban land and was replaced, not by low-income housing, but by developments of mid and high-priced condominiums, while the poor were moved farther from cities, and that some of the blown up housing had been recently built and was in good condition. More significantly, Cowan failed to acknowledge that the number of replacement units did not match the number of housing units blown up and thousands of low-income tenants were left homeless by this "modernization." The next day, Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of Center for Community Change, an organization that works on behalf of low-income people, called this demolition of public housing, with the insufficient housing replacement, "immoral."

Blowing up public housing and leaving thousands homeless may be Third Way's idea of "modernization," it may even appeal to some Democratic real estate developers, but there is nothing progressive about it.

Saperstein concludes that the question for progressives is not whether but how to influence Democrats:

The question for progressives is not whether we want to influence the Democrats -- of course we do. The question is do we want to invest precious time and resources on inside-the-Beltway cautiousness, bad policy analysis that makes no waves, takes no chances and doesn't differentiate itself from the conservatives, or do we work to build something more real, vital, honest and progressive -- based on better policy -- ideas that change America because they change the terms of debate, not simply pander ineffectively to a mythological, out-dated concept of the "center." If we don't, if we think that type of ideological myopia is counterproductive, we better keep watch on Third Way.

This seems to be a step in the right direction; the question is, does it go far enough. According to Saperstein, the goal of the Democracy Alliance is to build progressive infrastructure in order to change the ideological climate and ultimately public policy in a more progressive direction. Again, as we do find ever so often, strategy in the final analysis is driven by the ultimate objectives it pursues, and varies according to them.

To put it differently, looking at the presidential elections, does it make a difference to "progressives" whether Hillary Clinton is elected, which most of the New Democrats, including Third Way, are said to support, or whether Barack Obama is elected, which some in the Democracy Alliance are said to be tempted to support? Or is perhaps John Edwards the most progressive candidate, at least among the electable ones? No doubt that Dennis Kucinich would be much more progressive, but of course he does not have any chance. Elections are prohibitively expensive, but progressive resources are notoriously and chronically scarce. Politics remains the art of the possible. Does that mean that progressives are necessarily stuck with no good options, only lesser evils? Depends on what you mean by "progressive;" that seems to be the crux of the matter.