TAPPED, among others, has been following posts on the Democratic Leadership Council and in particular a memo on “The Real Soul of the Democratic Party.” The memo, which personifies the problems with certain brands of centrism, offers a polemic against Howard Dean and the McGovern-Mondale wing of the party. In response, many commentators have taken the authors to task for lumping Dean - a moderate in many ways - with the uber-liberals. True enough, but there’s something equally disturbing about the memo - namely, its faux populism:
Not only is the activist wing out of line with Democratic tradition, but it is badly out of touch with the Democratic rank-and-file…. Democratic delegates were nearly five times more likely than Democratic rank-and-file to have incomes over $75,000, three times more likely to have a college degree, and over four times more likely to have done postgraduate work. No wonder that when the New Yorker recently asked Karl Rove to describe the Democratic base, he said, “somebody with a doctorate.”
Heaven forbid the party’s delegates have completed postgraduate work! We’ve come to expect this anti-elistist posturing and ad-hominem argumentation from Republicans, do we really need it from Democrats as well? Will that really win us an election? “Most Democrats aren’t elitists who think they know better than everyone else,” they write, “they are everyone else.” Well, just because they support the death penalty doesn’t make the DLC everyone else either.
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