Letters

The Democratic Party I read with great interest and greater confusion David Greenberg's article on the problems of the Democratic Party's primary process ("Primary Obligations," Summer 2008). Underlying the piece was a supposition that the overriding problem with the process was that it didn't represent those he calls "regular Democrats." These groups and individuals (many of whom were once denounced as the same sort of special-interest groups that he now considers "movement" Democrats) are set against a mythical notion of left activists who are cynically using the party for the short term. As a lifelong Democrat, it seems to me that the activist writers I read are deeply concerned that members of the party establishment are the ones who have lost their way and are using the party simply as a vehicle for the perpetuation of their own interests, connections , and self-contained world. Perhaps this position is wrong, but it should be addressed rather than simply sneered at. What makes Greenberg's piece more disturbing is that it is a paean to the Clintons and the Clinton years. This is particularly striking in the light of the following piece by Timothy Canova ("Legacy of the Clinton Bubble," Summer 2008), which offers hard evidence for precisely why "movement Democrats" might be suspicious of both Bill Clinton and the establishment he left behind in Washington . Clinton's economic policies did enormous damage to the country's economy and especially to the nation's wageworkers . Greenberg ignores all this while declaring that Clinton's "third way liberalism" led to the "revitalization of the party." By what measure? At the end of his second term, the Democrats held fewer seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, held fewer governorships, and controlled the legislatures of fewer states than they did at the beginning of his first term. This is revitalizing a party? I would hate to see what weakening one looks like. MICHAEL MERANZE Santa Monica, California David Greenberg Replies Meranze can stand firm in loathing the dreaded Democratic "establishment," but he should address the main point of my piece—the potential danger of a takeover of the party by affluent activists who view it more with hostility than pride (and some of whom, like their conservative doppelgangers, profess more loyalty to a doctrinaire "movement" than to a political institution that does real things for real people). The last time the party let a movement supersede the interests of such regulars as bluecollar workers, senior citizens, Catholics, and others, they got George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. However distasteful we may deem the prospect of liberals making "connections" in Washington (Meranze's word; I'd call it "politics"), the aesthetics of a Terry McAuliffe is a small price to pay to avoid our past mistakes. Seizing on one fragment in my piece, Meranze purports to expose it as a "paean" to Bill Clinton. Had I wished to write a defense of the most successful liberal president since Lyndon Johnson (if not Franklin Roosevelt), I wouldn't have devoted thousands of words to caucuses and open primaries. But since Meranze asks: inevitably, Clinton disappointed us all, in different ways. So did FDR in his time. But by what measure could anyone conclude that Clinton did "enormous damage to the country's economy"? Is Meranze referring to the decline in unemployment ? The historic reductions in poverty? The rise in real wages, even for the worst-off? The record budget surpluses ? The return to a more progressive tax code? The longest economic expansion ever? I agree that Clinton tragically failed to beef up the party's grassroots infrastructure , but he did something equally important: he shed the most wrongheaded elements of the party's reigning ideology , so that anachronistic stands on issues like crime, economics , and foreign policy no longer crippled it. Indeed, every recent Democratic presidential candidate—including Barack Obama—has recognized the wisdom of Clinton's new liberal synthesis and has espoused Clintonian positions on most key issues. Why? Because despite the disappointments, compromises, and setbacks, it by and large worked. To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers. But because we have a long lead...