It’s been evident for a while that the Democrats are having a domestic squabble, and the Lamont / Lieberman camps’ ongoing obsessions with trivialities look very much like a “(s)he leaves the top off the toothpaste” level of grievance. Petty and embarrassing.
However, some recent developments make me think a filing for irreconcilable differences may be on the horizon. From WCBS:
CBS 2 has learned the details of a private dinner for the mayor that was held at an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side last month. There, he spent the evening in serious discussions about the viability of a White House run.
Sources told CBS 2 Bloomberg brought three deputy mayors with him, and proceeded to talk through every angle of a presidential run. By the end, the group had zeroed in on his running as an independent in 2008. And, the sources said, he seemed intrigued.
The dinner was held at the home of Michael Steinhardt, a legendary Wall Street hedge fund manager and a Bloomberg friend. He brought along Al From, head of the Democratic Leadership Council, which played a part in Bill Clinton’s rise to power in 1992.
The presence of Al From is not a minor side-issue… because the DLC represents the “Third Way” — the more centrist coalition of the Democratic Party. From MyDD:
I don’t particularly like the theoretical aim of the DLC — bringing the Democratic Party closer to the center, or at least making it more palatable to corporations — not do I approve of its tactics, particularly Democrat-bashing. But as bad as these two things are, for the DLC to help advance the candidacy of a presidential aspirant outside of the Democratic Party is political treason, grounds enough for excommunication.
And the DLC includes people like the Clintons and Joe Lieberman… which makes me wonder what Peter Daou is up to by organizing meetings like the Bill Clinton / blogger get-together recently. Ed Pilkington writes in the Guardian:
If there’s ever to be a history of left-wing blogging (and it can only be a matter of time before some publisher gets around to it) then this photo will surely have to be its centrefold. It captures the moment on Tuesday when Democrat-leaning bloggers crossed a rubicon: they sat down with the liberal establishment, in the form of Bill Clinton.
[snip]
Will this be seen as the moment when the liberal blog found its feet, after years in which the rightwing appeared to have a stranglehold on the blogosphere? Or will it be looked back on as the point at which liberal bloggers were seduced into the big tent, kissing goodbye to their most important weapon: their opposition?
I think it’s very possibly the latter — although seduction in this context sounds a bit incestual.
My first impression of that blogger meeting was that Peter Daou and Clinton (and perhaps the DLC) were building bridges in advance of a Hillary run in 2008. However, there’s more to Bill Clinton than “Hillary’s strategist”. There was (and still is) fairly widespread support for his politics when one separates them from his personal peccadillos… and those politics are reflected in the DLC.
Given how vociferous the far left has been in its calls for a united front against the Republicans and George Bush, it’s not surprising that some folks may be deciding there’s not much future for more centrist views. They’ve come across as shrilly inflexible, contributing their fair share to the increasing partisanship, disillusionment, and isolation.
All in all, there’s much to think about with these developments, and at the very least, Polimom agrees with Joe Gandelman this morning: the 2008 race is getting more complicated all the time.
I wonder whether anybody in the DLC is talking to the folks at Unity 08?
Update: More signs of a major Dem rift from Forbes (h/t TPMMuckraker):
Does the Democratic Leadership Council–the centrist policy factory whose founders in 1985 included an Arkansas governor who later wound up in the White House–benefit mainly Democrats or the whole country? Some left-wing Democrats might say it does neither.
Now, in a previously unreported action, the Internal Revenue Service has revoked the DLC’s tax exemption on the grounds that it primarily benefited a private group–Democrats, and particularly “New Democrats” running for or holding office–rather than the community at large.
[snip]
At the very least the DLC’s tax woes will make an intriguing footnote in the annals of strange bedfellows. For example, the DLC’s chairman during the years the IRS alleges it wasn’t bipartisan enough was Senator Joseph Lieberman, now running as an independent after Connecticut’s Democratic primary voters rejected him for being too pro-Bush.
Another view about the Bloomberg meeting from James Joyner, and Steve Gilliard writes about the DLC .
And some tangential but truly astonishing feminist fall-out from the Clinton / bloggers meeting can be found here, here, here, and here. I’ve been watching this unfold in incredulous disbelief.