The progressive wing of the Democratic Party held its annual “Take Back America” conference here recently, but it was no rally for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
The sponsoring Campaign for America?s Future didn?t endorse either one, in keeping with the group?s policy. But it was a bit surprising that neither of the surviving Democratic presidential candidates spoke. Roger Hickey, a co-director of the organization, said both had been invited but had other commitments.
Clinton at the time was speaking only a few miles away at George Washington University, making what she billed as a major foreign policy address. Obama was campaigning in Pennsylvania, which doesn?t hold the next primary for almost a month, on April 22.
Hickey and co-director Robert Borosage said the two Democrats had plenty of backers at the conference, with Obama probably having the edge, but no groundswell for either of them was readily evident. Indeed, both said, many progressives were strong for former Sen. John Edwards before he bowed out of the race.
Borosage noted, however, that both Obama and Clinton have embraced much of the Edwards agenda, including universal health care, energy independence and a greater focus on jobs retraining and free trade, giving populist and labor Democrats reasons for supporting one or both candidates.
In a conference paper titled “Progressives Rising,” Borosage called 2008 the time for “a sea-change election.” He said it would mark “the end of the conservative era that has dominated our politics over the past three decades and the beginning of a new era of progressive reform.”
He did not, however, envision either Obama or Clinton nurturing and ushering in that progressive era. “A large challenge facing progressives,” Borosage wrote, “is that neither Obama nor Clinton considers himself or herself a movement progressive in the same sense that [Ronald] Reagan was a devoted movement conservative.”
Even if one of them is elected in November, he wrote, “neither may be as bold as Reagan was in claiming an ideological mandate and defining a fundamentally new course.” Their principal foreign-policy and economic advisers, he said, “come from rather cautious mainstream circles” like the Center for American Progress, “anchored by former advisers from the Bill Clinton administration.” Reagan, by contrast, he said, adopted a reform agenda “put together by the Heritage Foundation,” a chief ideological think tank on the right.
At the same time, however, Borosage argued that the progressive movement has helped apply pressure to both Clinton and Obama to move toward it in their commitments to end the war in Iraq “quickly and responsibly,” enact universal health care and the taxes to pay for it, a range of other domestic reforms and to institute “a change of course in our global trade policy.”
Looking beyond the 2008 election, Borosage noted that Reagan failed the conservative movement in pursuit of its social agenda in the 1980s, declining to spend much of his political capital on it, and requiring the movement “to organize independently to hold the administration and Republicans in the Congress accountable.”
The same, he said, would likely be the progressives? own fate after the election of either Obama or Clinton. “Advisers will argue for caution,” he said. “Corporate interests will pour resources into trying to shape and limit the change.” Progressives, he said, will likewise have to organize independently to hold the new Democratic administration accountable to its campaign commitments.
As for the current campaign, Hickey and Borosage expressed some concern that the infighting between Obama and Clinton could jeopardize the chances of either being elected. Hickey said there already was some resentment among progressives about Clinton taking on a spoiler role as she probes for vulnerability to erode Obama?s support and delegate lead.
On the positive side, both conference leaders said the long campaign could have the positive effect of giving voters more time to become comfortable with the idea of voting for a black or a female for president. With both candidates relatively close on the policy issues, Borosage said, the Democratic fight is becoming more a contest over matters of character. But progressives are policy folks, which may be why they sound relatively unexcited over the Democratic choices now facing them.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years. His latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, “Very Strange Bedfellows,” has just been published by Public Affairs Press. You can respond to this column at [email protected].
