What the Clintons are up to
Another reason why the Left should not be celebrating the Democrats victory in the mid-term elections can be found in the current issue of Newsweek magazine. Here we see Bill Clinton making clear that progressivism is one thing that will not be part of the Democratic Party agenda. According to the Newsweek article,
The beauty of the Democratic Party midterm victory, Clinton muses, is that voters said no to ideology. They wanted to move past fearmongering and demonizing toward true debate. "America rejected shorthand," he says. "People are thinking again." But they are not thinking of a set of liberal policy prescriptions. He argues that the election was about more than Iraq and corruption; it turned on the unmet needs of middle-class voters for whom the country "isn't working anymore." And yet no one is exactly sure how to make it work again. "The people didn't give Democrats a mandate," the former president cautions. "They gave us a chance."Nothing could be plainer. As Newsweek points out so clearly, while Republicans push a right wing agenda, Democrats push a centrist agenda. Notice what is missing from that equation? You guessed it--no left wing agenda to be found anywhere.
But a chance to do what?...All that is clear so far is that "the chance" will inevitably take centrist form. Just as every Republican candidate has for decades been required to describe himself as a conservative, every Democratic candidate in 2008 will don the Clintonesque cloak of moderation. It's a vindication of Clinton's "Third Way" presidency...
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