A fight for Control and Ownership of the DNC

Seen in The Weekley Standard

The Fight is on!

Not that I care much except for those like Zell in the Democratic party...


THE LAST WORD

Where is the Democratic party headed? It's an important question, and one which will impact on every American, be they Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative.

The debate surrounding this question was tipped off last week by Peter Beinart, who suggested that Democrats must do now what they did at the start of the Cold War: decide that the totalitarian threat facing America is the most important issue on the horizon and that the party will endure no dissent from factions which do not want to confront this threat vigorously. During the Cold War the totalitarian threat came from communism; today it comes from Islamist radicalism.

Beinart's call to arms has been met with much resistance in Democratic circles. In his own magazine, the New Republic, staffers such as John Judis, Jonathan Chait, and Noam Scheiber have rushed to oppose him. In the far reaches of liberal webdom, Democratic sites have mostly taken up arms against Beinart, too.

Why? A couple reasons. First, many Democrats believe that there's nothing wrong with the party that a good candidate can't fix. In a sense they're right. A good candidate papers over ideological confusion by sheer force of leadership. But a party cannot sit twiddling its thumbs waiting for a figure who may not arrive for many years--if ever. A party which abdicates the ideological battlefield in this manner runs the risk of fading into obsolescence.

Other Democrats insist that Beinart is wrong because the global war on terrorism isn't the defining issue of our day. They say that domestic matters--healthcare, taxes, the deficit--are the dominant subjects. These partisans may be right, but they have little evidence on their side, and much evidence against.

Still other Democrats believe that the global war on terrorism isn't very real--that it's a reaction to George W. Bush and American imperialism, that the problem isn't Islamist terrorism, but rather the United States itself. These people are the folks Beinart wants to purge from the party.

And still other Democrats are insisting that this last group of people--the Michael Moores and MoveOn.org types whom Beinart wants gone--don't really exist in any significant numbers. They argue that Beinart has merely set up a straw man, that the left-fringe of the party is toothless and miniature.

Well. The latest development in this intra-party struggle came yesterday with the story about a MoveOn.org email to the Democratic National Committee.

MoveOn's head, Eli Pariser, called the Democratic leadership "professional election losers" and proclaimed, "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."

The first proxy fight between Pariser's MoveOn, the Democratic establishment, and Beinart's new Democratic hawks will come in the contest for head of the Democratic National Committee. This is an election to which we should all be paying close attention. It is nearly as important for the future of our country as the November 2 election was.

Best,
Jonathan V. Last



Eli Pariser, "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."

Oh Really! and you are?

Maya