What an idiot. JAMES TRAUB wrote a March 12 piece for the NYT Magazine, entitled Party Like It's 1994. (Relevant quote in gray).
In this DLC-friendly/Hillary-friendly article, he claims Gore ran a bad campaign. He then appeared on Franken today and was publicly locked into saying things to support the piece. On air, he said (a la Clintonian Third Way criticism) that Gore's populist shift in 2000 actually lost him votes.
But first he revealed that he doesn't know the basics of presidential politics. He claimed that Gore, as a sitting VP of a successful two-term president, had an electoral advantage. This is simply false and the converse is true. Two-term VPs are rarely elected in modern times. The only exception dating back to 1836 is George H.W. Bush in 1988. Traub incredibly offerred as evidence the result of the 1988 election. When Franken asked him when was the same result previously, he admitted he had no idea and began to adopt a defensive inflection, IMO, indicating his embarassment at being over his head. No expert he.
The 1988 cycle can be explained as an exception caused by the self-admittedly poor campaign of Dukakis versus the sleazy but effective campaign of Lee Atwater and Dubya.
The empirical demonstration of Traub's falsity is in the poll numbers. If I am right, the polls would heavily favor Dubya in 2000 and Dukakis in 1988 (i.e. cutting against sitting VP). Bush in 2000 led by abount 20 points in March, 1999. Dukakis also had a big lead. Without the fact in hand, I believe it was at least 15 points.
It should be self-evident that good campaigns gain points and bad campaigns do the reverse. By an objective standard, Gore ran at least a good campaign. I can only think of one possible campaign as effective since at least the Humphrey campaign of 1968, which almost got to even starting way back, or the 1948 Truman victory.
Mr. Traub, before you sound so certain about a subject, you should be adequately informed. The larger truth is that the Third Way will not get the nomination nor would it win the presidency. The time is ripe for progressive populism.
Party Like It's 1994It's a persuasive argument. But there's one question that Marshall and like-minded folk cannot convincingly answer: How do you harness the passion of your followers with a chastened politics that rebukes many of their convictions? How can you be "authentic" and "genuine" outside the confines of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party? You can't, unless you're as brilliant as Bill Clinton. Indeed, you can see the dilemma play itself out in Clinton's two chief political offspring. In 2000, Al Gore unmoored himself from Clinton's "Third Way" politics to run a more satisfying race as a populist scourge of Big Oil and Big Health Care and so on — and drastically underperformed expectations. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, an exquisitely sensitive instrument in such matters, has staked out centrist positions on such toxic issues as Iraq, abortion and even flag-burning in anticipation of the 2008 election. And party regulars have already begun despairing of her firmness of purpose. It's the Gordian knot the Democrats can't cut.
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