Radical Schizophrenia? Making Sense of Democratic Party Constituencies

Outside of psychiatric medicine, the notion of schizophrenia suggests "a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements."

We've seen a lot of irrationality this campaign season on the right of the spectrum, which thankfully has moved largely toward remission. But as the Democratic race becomes increasingly frenetic, we're seeing snowballing incoherence among the competing factions of the Democratic Party base.

First, note Ari Berman's argument that the fundamental dividing line among Democrats is between Hillary Clinton's political machine and the Democratic National Committe under Chairman Howard Dean.

The Democratic establishment apparently dissed Dean, belittling his stronghold among grassroots internet activists as insignificant and immature.

Berman suggests instead that Dean's an unheralded genius, and the real party split is between those who champion old-guard centrist triangluation versus the progressive insurgency seeking to uproot the party from below. According to Berman, Obama's heir to the Dean legacy: There's amicable relations between Dean and Obama, suggesting synergy between Obama and the netroots. Here's a key passage:

The race for the Democratic nomination is a window into how the candidates view the future of the party, which is being shaped in large part by Dean's efforts. Are Clinton and Obama similarly committed to Dean's [winning all] fifty-state strategy? How much faith would each, as the Democratic nominee, put in the party's grassroots? In the Internet era, the party is less about elder statesmen sitting in Washington than millions of people across the country organizing locally around issues and candidates....

Dean and Obama have understood how the party is changing -and have embraced it. Clinton, thus far, has not.

Howard Dean and Bill Clinton were both pragmatic, moderate governors of rural states who shared an affinity for balanced budgets and free trade. But ever since Dean became a presidential candidate, his relationship with the Clintons has been rocky....

Tensions have cooled since then, and both Clintons have voiced their support for Dean's fifty-state strategy. Yet in a larger sense, Hillary's candidacy represents the polar opposite of what Dean built as a candidate and party chair: her campaign is dominated by an inner circle of top strategists, with little room for grassroots input; it hasn't adapted well to new Internet tools like Facebook and MySpace; it tends to raise big contributions from a small group of high rollers rather than from large numbers of small donors; and it is less inclined to expand the base of the party.

Okay, if Berman's sources are credible Obama's essentially got the DNC in the tank, while the Clinton's will run an off-the-shelf establishment campaign with 1990s-era Clintonites (like Harold Ickes, EMILY's List and Clinton allies in organized labor, and party media-and-money men like Terry McAuliffe and Howard Wolfson).

The problem here is that genuine netroots activists - the very people who catapulted Dean to frontrunner status in the 2004 pre-primary season - aren't cooperating with the analysis.

Jerome Armstrong - a comrade-in-arms to Dail Kos' Markos Moulitsas - indicates that he's not in love with either Clinton or Obama, but has nevertheles thrown in his lot with the New York Senator, a position most likely adopted by much of the blog's readership:

It continues to amaze me - the contortions that folks who dearly want Obama to win will rationalize to themselves about his candidacy. Now, I thought the 2003-2006 netroots was all about the 'fighting dems' that invigorated the Democratic Party with a strong sense of partisanship and Howard Dean's "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" candidacy. But then The Nation comes along, and rewrites that entire history to say that really, it was all just a precursor, that really, "Obama is Dean 2.0"....

I don't find myself in love with a candidacy in this nomination fight. I had a number of candidates that I supported, a few I really liked, and they all dropped out. In the choice between Clinton and Obama, I don't see much of a difference in substantive policy, nor in the people running their campaigns, and basically chose Clinton because I think she's got a better shot at winning than the gamble of going with the untested Obama.

So here we have one of the founders of the netroots movement debunking the Dean-Obama nexus.
But wait!

You've got to get a load out of FireDogLake's blogger, who's jumped into this debate to straigthen things out.

Jerome is essentially right that there are really no meaningful policy differences to be divined between our two candidates, and Samantha Powers' comments now about Obama's likelihood of revising his withdrawal plans if elected serve simply to remind us that the tea leaves people are currently reading during the campaign re: policy really mean nothing. If Obama were a true anti-occupation believer, he could have jumped full guns behind Lamont when he had the chance instead of ducking and running through the state and pulling the plug on his participation in a Lamont multi-platform ad buy.

So, we have no progressive candidate. We have no Wellstone, no Feingold, no ideologically based movement person. My question is this: which of these candidates is more likely to reveal an inner Lieberman of some form once in power? I don't have an answer. People can believe what they choose to believe, but both candidates have Liebermanish historical tendencies and both propel narratives reminiscent of Lieberman, the earlier years.

You'll have to wade through the rest of this terribly written post. But understand that "Liebermanish historical tendencies" refer to any deviation from the netroots' fundamentally retreatist agenda, and neither Clinton nor Obama have any credibility on the issue. Indeed, look at the language FDL reserves specially for Hillary Clinton:

It so happens that, once [John] Edwards dropped out, more of the online readership sorted itself to Obama. Now, I can't see any meaningful policy reasons for having done so (and Edwards hasn't endorsed), so to me it seems more like a consolidation of the anti-Clinton movement among tech literate activists than it seems like anything about any ideologically or policy based progressive agenda....

I conclude from this that the hundreds of millions of dollars at least that have poured into branding Hillary Clinton - whose policies in general I hardly care for - as a lesbo cunning corrupt cold calculating bitch, have altogether not been without their effect on many online activists and readers in particular.

So as you can see, the comparison so far here reveals considerable incoherence and schizophrenia in the various directions the Democratic partisans are moving.

But note something else, especially with the crude FireDogLake: The hardliners in the base want absolute purity in a candidate, assumably to get the most ideological doctrinaire leftist installed in the Oval Office in January. They'll thus have in position their own Manchurian Candidate to implement a radical anitwar agenda that even the most hardened activists in INTERNATIONAL Answer would love.

Another problem: Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have exceedingly advocated the hard-left antiwar agenda, which includes a couple of years worth of commitments by both candidates to withdraw virtually unconditionally from Iraq upon taking office. Either all of this left-wing blogging ferment is simple oneupsmanship or there truly is a seriously unhinged strata of radical diehards simply too perplexed by their tremendous opportunity this year to unite around a standard-bearer.

In closing, be sure to read Abe Greenwald at Commentary and his elucidation of both Clinton and Obama's antiwar bona fides. They're both desperately ready for an antiwar surrender, in Afghanistan, Iraq, it doesn't matter - just get the troops out as fast as possible:

We’ve had our formidable challenges in both theaters, [but we know] from Hillary that it’s too late to win in Iraq, and from Obama that we need to withdraw from Iraq immediately and pick up the pace in Afghanistan. We must, you see, stop fighting somewhere.

I'll have more later.

See also my earlier post, "Crash: More on the Coming Democratic Train Wreck."