No, liberals are not driving the Democratic Party. Unfortunately.
by digby
Here’s Ronald Brownstein with an egregious example of false equivalence:
One lesson of the grueling standoff, as I noted recently, is that when Congress devolves into perpetual conflict, each party’s more militant voices gain influence at the expense of its deal-makers.
That dynamic is evident in a Democratic Party that has coalesced around a hard-line, no-negotiations strategy meant to lastingly delegitimize threats of government shutdown or default as a lever for exacting policy concessions. “We have to break the cycle of this, and it has to happen now,” insists one senior White House aide.
But the shift of power from the center to the fringe has been most vivid in a Republican Party that precipitated this clash. Although Boehner’s hapless performance surely has ironfisted predecessors like Joe Cannon and Sam Rayburn spinning, it’s not as if Senate Republican leaders, despite their own abundant doubts, have more successfully controlled the most belligerent voices in their own ranks.
So, the liberals in the Democratic Party are forcing the White House and the leadership not to negotiate? Who knew we had such influence? (Oh, and if we do, we’re also forcing them to hold out for higher spending in the budget, raising the cap on social security, revisit the public option as well as banning the keystone pipeline, throwing TPP into the trashbin and drastically scaling back the NSA and the drone war. We’re just that powerful.)
In fairness, Brownstein does spend most of his article examining the Tea Party tail that’s wagging the GOP dog, but that observation above is simply daft. The Democratic Party may be militant about not allowing any more debt ceiling debacles, but that’s hardly coming from the “fringe.” In fact, the left wing of the Democratic party is almost entirely irrelevant except to the extent it is expected to supply votes — and it almost certainly will. In fact, if the Republicans play their cards right they will probably be able to get a bunch of liberals to do their dirty work for them if it comes down to that. Burden of being “grown-ups” and all that.
It’s pretty to think that there’s a left and right populist movement afoot that’s destabilizing both party establishments but there’s just no evidence of it. There’s no liberal equivalent of the Tea Party.
I think I should have added National Journal to my Credo petition …
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