The Democrat purge of the moderates

Kimberly Strassel:

"They'll find their way back to the middle. And if they don't, they won't win." So says a blunt Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, of his party's current crop of presidential candidates. The question is just how many would-be Democratic presidents recognize the wisdom of his words.

Mr. Ford is in a feisty mood throughout our chat, as well he might be given the shelling his group has recently endured at the keyboards of the far left. Skip back 15 years, and the DLC stood as the proud architect of Bill Clinton's "New Democrat" campaign victory. Liberals derided the outfit's goals of nosing the party back toward the political center, but Mr. Clinton understood the perils of running as Jimmy Carter. He took the DLC's advice, talked up "opportunity, responsibility, community" and won.

Today, the DLC is again battling for the souls of those Democrats who would occupy the White House, urging them toward a centrist agenda that will seek to convince the broad middle that Democrats can be trusted on national security, values and fiscal responsibility. Mr. Ford's colleague, DLC founder Al From, thinks the stakes are giant, and that the public's unease over the war, health care and the economy has created the "first time in modern political history" that his party has the opportunity to "build an enduring majority in the progressive center."

That is, if his party doesn't blow it. And Mr. From's problem is that a whole lot of folks still think him a heretic, and this time they're louder, ruder and more coordinated. The far left has found something to unify it--hatred of George W. Bush. Technology has given it the means to organize; what the right found in talk radio, liberals have found in the "netroots" Internet, from MoveOn.org to Daily Kos. Its activism has of late overshadowed groups like the DLC, which still believe in such creaky notions as ideas. Even Mr. Ford, who took over the DLC chairmanship in January, is willing to admit his outfit has been eclipsed: "The DLC and other moderate groups have struggled a bit to find not only our voice, but a way to be heard."

Making it harder is that this newly energized left is directing inordinate firepower on the DLC itself, in a crazed, purist drive to purge any group that would exert a moderating influence on the Democratic Party. New Republic scribe Noam Scheiber let loose a few weeks back in a New York Times hit piece, calling the DLC "radioactive" and "quaint," gloating that its "fading influence was good news for the entire party," and arguing that it should just get lost. Markos Moulitsas, chief flogger-blogger on the Daily Kos, this week slammed the DLC as a group that wants to "blur distinctions with the GOP," and reveling that Democrats had won in 2006 because liberals like himself had "forced" Americans to pick sides.

The real target audience for these pronouncements is the Democratic presidential field, and the threat is clear: Touch the DLC, and you will be (to use a favorite, medieval Kos word) "punished." At least a few activists danced a victory lap, too, a few weeks back when every last Democratic candidate spurned the DLC's annual convention in Nashville, instead turning up at Mr. Moulitsas's YearlyKos event in Chicago.

Messrs. Ford and From, in their usual optimistic way, insist that backslapping is premature. It's primary season, they note, and that means the candidates are catering to the left. None of the front-runners bothered to show up to the DLC event in 2003, either, though nominee John Kerry was pitching to the group come the summer of 2004. "In the primaries you play on one end of the field, but you have to play on the whole field in the general," says Mr. From.

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The Kos kids are about ideological purity and they do not allow the tack to the middle that made Bill Clinton a viable candidate. They want to prove that you can win with liberalism even though only 20 percent of the voters identify themselves as liberal. When the war was going badly, this seemed to work. With the war turning around and looking winnable it will probably mean disaster for the Democrats in 2008.