At the WaPo’s politics blog, Chris Cillizza profiles Matt Bennett of center-left think tank Third Way. (The interview also clears up the mystery of what happened to the jumpsuit Michael Dukakis was wearing in that tank in 1988. Access to this kind of souvenir is an underrated perk of a campaign aide’s job.)
Bennett’s assertions aside, Third Way may find itself at the heart of that debate [over a Dem presidential nominee] in 2008. Many within the party are painting the 2008 nomination as struggle between those who want the party to tack further to the ideological left (best represented by the liberal blogosphere) and those, like Third Way and the DLC, who believe only by appealing to the center can Democrats regain the White House.
MyDD’s Matt Stoller reacts to this, understandably enough, by going on the offensive. After disagreeing at length with the tactics of Americans for Gun Safety, a group Bennett helped found, he says this:
Bennett doesn’t care that he’s screwed up everything he’s ever touched. Read the interview; Bennett sees himself as being in the center of the 2008 Presidential debate on the Democratic side even though he’s pursuing the same strategies he’s always pursued, and has done nothing but lose.
Stoller’s post also points out, via Cillizza, that Bennett was part of Bill Clinton’s advance team in 1992. Such failures we should all have. It’s true that Bennett worked for Wesley Clark’s 2004 campaign, and Clark didn’t win. On the other hand, neither did Howard Dean. In fact, it’s really not in the interest of the left-netroots to introduce support for winning candidates as a measure of competence. In the meantime, the question of whether the Democrats’ recent electoral fortunes are due to triangulating corporate sell-outs or unhinged lefty extremists looks set to remain unresolved for a while.
