Who Will Save the Democratic Party From Itself?

After its disastrous experience in the 2014 midterm elections, some think that the Democratic Party needs to refocus itself and return to some of its historic roots as a champion of the working and middle classes.  One such person is former Virginia Senator James Webb who has announced an exploratory effort on a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.  There are positive aspects to Webb's vision, but the question is whether he or anyone else can cause the party to recalibrate itself and/or force Hillary Clinton to do so.  The Democrats need a stirring theme and agenda and just saying that they are not crazy and/or a bunch of hate merchants like the Republicans - true as that may be - isn't enough to recapture the battered middle class.  We need to reignite social mobility for the younger voters and give parents an ability to once again believe their children have a better future.  Here are highlights from a New York Times editorial:

Not everyone agrees that Hillary Clinton’s selection as the Democratic nominee is unstoppable. The first to challenge her is Jim Webb, a one-term former senator from Virginia.

Here is the case for the Democratic Party renegade.  When Webb, who served as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Nov. 19, he sought to capitalize on Democratic discontent. Taking a swipe at both Wall Street and Clinton’s potential bid for the nomination, Webb declared:

Our Constitution established a government not to protect the dominance of an aristocratic elite, but under the principle that there should be no permanent aristocracy, that every single American should have equal protection under the law, and a fair opportunity to achieve at the very highest levels.

Webb suggested that he could bring working class whites back into the Democratic fold and restore the biracial Democratic coalition:

We have drifted to the fringes of allowing the very inequalities that our Constitution was supposed to prevent. Walk into some of our inner cities if you dare, and see the stagnation, poverty, crime and lack of opportunity that still affects so many African-Americans. Or travel to the Appalachian Mountains, where my own ancestors settled and whose cultural values I still share, and view the poorest counties in America – who happen to be more than 90 percent white, and who live in the reality that “if you’re poor and white you’re out of sight.”

Webb’s exploration of a presidential bid is based on the premise that he can tap into a crucial but alienated segment of the electorate.

This bloc includes voters convinced that Wall Street owns both parties, voters tired of politicians submitting to partisan orthodoxy and voters seeking to replace “identity group” politics with a restored middle- and working-class agenda.

Webb is one answer to the weaknesses of today’s center-left, the so-called “upstairs-downstairs” coalition described by Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University. Kotkin argues in his recently published book, “The New Class Conflict,” that the Democratic Party has been taken over by what he calls “gentry liberals,” an elite that has undermined the historic purpose of the Democratic Party.  Kotkin contends that

The great raison d'être for left-wing politics – advocating for the middle- and working classes – has been refocused to attend more closely to the policy imperatives and interests of small, highly affluent classes, as well as the powerful public sector.

I asked Kotkin what he thought of the themes Webb intends to raise, and he wrote back “I think he’s onto something.”

Al Hunt, a Bloomberg columnist, warned that Webb “could be Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare,” noting that Webb

seems an improbable candidate. He has taken illiberal positions, was President Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary, has few relationships within the Democratic Party, and has no serious fund-raising network. What he does possess is a long-held and forceful opposition to U.S. interventions in Iraq and Libya, and potentially Syria, as well as solid anti-Wall Street credentials. In Democratic primaries, these may be Clinton’s greatest impediments to rallying a hard-core activist base.

To gauge Webb’s prospects, I looked at the exit poll data for the 2006 Virginia Senate race, when he unseated George Allen, the favored Republican. I then compared Webb’s performance among key constituencies to the performance of all House Democrats running nationwide in the same year.

The results of this comparison do not support the portrayal of Webb as a candidate equipped to win over key white constituencies.

What are the prospects of winning the presidential nomination for a candidate who challenges current Democratic Party strategic orthodoxy? This strategy calls for identity group, rather than class-based, mobilization, on the assumption that turning out single women, the young, and racial and ethnic minorities is more effective than an uphill struggle to revive support in the recalcitrant white middle and working class.

As much as such a shift to a class-based strategy might result in economic policies more beneficial to less affluent Democratic constituencies, and therefore to more votes in the long haul, so far there has been insufficient intraparty pressure to force a change in strategic orientation.

It is not lost on Democratic strategists that President Obama won twice deploying a group-based rather than a class-based strategy. Even if the next Democratic nominee does not inspire the high minority turnout levels of 2008 and 2012, the 2016 electorate will be less Republican than it was in 2012. Every four years, the heavily Republican white share of voters drops by a little over 2 percent, and the disproportionately Democratic minority share grows by the same amount.

Insofar as the Republican Party tempers its retrograde stance on social-sexual and moral-racial issues, Democratic campaigns stressing alleged threats from conservatives — the threat to freedom and privacy posed by the Christian right; the threat to Hispanic family unity posed by anti-immigrant activists; the threat to programs serving the poor posed by deficit hawks — will run out of gas.

Democrats, according to Pew, retained an advantage on less tangible qualities such as empathy, honesty and a willingness to compromise.  As attractive as those characteristics are, they are not top priorities for voters. . . . . voters’ top priorities consistently include bread-and-butter issues, jobs and the economy.

The Democrats’ lack of credibility on economic issues will hobble, if not extinguish, the party’s prospects. Unless the Democrats develop a coherent, comprehensive strategy for the have-nots, it won’t matter whether the party’s nominee is Clinton, Webb or anyone else.