Democrats have to advance young leaders and go back to working-class roots

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What Democrats Need: Something Old and Something New
To rebuild its winning coalition, a Rust Belt writer argues, the opposition party has to advance younger leaders and go back to its working-class roots
SEAN POSEY
BillMoyers.com

Clinton’s loss exposed what two terms of President Barack Obama partially obscured: the party’s irrelevance across wide swaths of the country. Republicans control 67 out of 98 partisan state legislative chambers and hold 33 governor’s offices. By contrast Democrats have a “political trifecta” in only six states, all on the coasts.

“We’ve disconnected ourselves from those working-class people,” Rep. Tim Ryan told MSNBC. “They left us in droves all throughout the industrial Midwest and the country, and now here we are — a coastal party.”

That would be the post-New Deal Democratic Party, heralded by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council’s rise to prominence during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The so-called New Democrats’ “third way” politics combined aspects of liberalism and conservatism with an emphasis on, as the DLC put it in its 2001 “New Democratic Credo,” “technological innovation, competitive enterprise and education rather than top- down redistribution or laissez faire.”

The next Democratic president after Clinton followed a similar path. Despite being the candidate of “change” in 2008, Obama adopted much of the Clintonian political outlook. He filled top administration positions with Wall Street-friendly financial advisers such as Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers. While voters lost their homes, bankers kept their bonuses. Clintonian third-way politics prevailed again. Again, Democrats lost the initiative (and the House) to the Tea Party.

Too many Democrats are looking for villains — from James Comey to Jill Stein — to blame for the party’s disastrous loss. This has to stop. Efforts to pass a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College represent a similar dead end. The longer it takes for the party to wrestle with its shift away from working people and toward Wall Street, Silicon Valley and special interests, the less likely it is that it will ever happen. If no common agreement can be reached over the causes of the party’s decline at the state level or its loss of the White House, moving forward could prove impossible.

Yep.