The death of the moderate Democrat: and the birth of the 'netroots' party.

THE scene is one of those Washington cocktail parties so hated by left-wing "netroots" activists--a gathering where politicians and pundits and inside-the-Beltway types meet to gossip, conspire, make deals, and generally sink farther into their morass of inside-the-Beltway corruption. One prominent member of Congress says to a prominent political analyst: "You know, if you think about it, Nancy Pelosi is pretty close to the center of the House Democratic caucus." It seems hard to believe, given that Pelosi, the Minority Leader, is a true-blue San Francisco liberal with a near-perfect 95 rating from the left-wing Americans for Democratic Action. But the analyst starts thinking, starts envisioning the House Democratic lineup, beginning on the left with the Black Caucus, and then the Hispanic Caucus, and then the white lefties, and then Pelosi. In that cast of characters, the congresswoman from San Francisco seems almost, well, centrist. "That doesn't mean she's a moderate," the analyst says, recalling the conversation at the party. "But the Democratic caucus has gone so far to the left that, hell, she's in the middle."

There's been much talk in Washington recently about the fate of "moderate Democrats." These days, Nancy Pelosi is a moderate Democrat--if that is defined as standing near the center of the party's ideological spectrum. But the truly moderate Democrat--the type of centrist that has been so maligned by the left-wing blogosphere--is pretty much a thing of the past. Just look at a few numbers.

Americans for Democratic Action rates House members on a scale from 0 to 100 based on how they have voted on issues important to various liberal constituencies. In 1985, when there were 253 Democrats in the House, 20 were ADA "All-Stars"--that is, they had perfect scores of 100. In 2005, when there were 202 Democrats in the House, there were 65 All-Stars. An astonishing 143--about 71 percent of the Democratic caucus--had scores of 90 or above.

By way of comparison, in 1985, when there were 182 Republicans in the House, nine had perfect 100 conservative scores as measured by the American Conservative Union. In 2005, when there were 232 Republicans in the House, 38 of them had perfect ACU scores. A total of 126--about 55 percent of the Republican caucus--had conservative scores of 90 or above.

The numbers are similar in today's Senate, where 22 of 45 Democrats have received the ADA's most liberal rating. Forty Democratic senators--about 90 percent of the Democratic caucus--have ADA ratings of 90 or above. By contrast, out of the Senate's 55 Republicans, only twelve have received the ACU's highest mark. A total of 34 Republicans--about 62 percent of the Republican caucus--have ACU ratings of 90 or above.

The numbers are by no means scientific, and there are some differences in the ADA and ACU ratings systems. But as rough guides to party positioning, the ratings--especially each side's ratings of its own team--measure how well lawmakers satisfy the expectations of interest groups on the left and right. These numbers suggest that, while neither the House nor the Senate is a hotbed of centrism, Democrats in recent years have moved farther to the left than Republicans have to the right.

Today, after years of drifting leftward, Democrats face a dilemma. They are the target of an angry, energized netroots movement that considers the mainstream Democratic party too centrist, too accommodating to Republicans, and insufficiently "progressive" for today's politics. The farther Democrats move to the left, the farther their most passionate constituents prod them along.

THE DEATH OF TRIANGULATION 

None of this happened overnight. The Internet organizing group MoveOn.org, a prime mover in the new netroots politics, was founded in 1998 to attack lawmakers who supported the Clinton impeachment. The biggest lefty blog, DailyKos, was founded in 2002. These websites have been agitating for years, but up until now they were associated mostly with failure. In 2000, when MoveOn promised to punish the House impeachment managers at the polls, it failed to oust even a single one. When DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas threw his support behind several "progressive" candidates in House races around the country, nearly all of them lost. For a long time, "netroots candidate" was a synonym for "loser."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

No longer. In August, the netroots scored their biggest success so far, playing a key role in Ned Lamont's defeat of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (2005 ADA rating: 80) in the Connecticut Democratic primary. While the netroots still haven't defeated a Republican, Lamont's victory has been enough to embolden the angry Left to threaten reprisals against Democrats who don't advocate an immediate pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq. "Friends," wrote the left-wing agitprop filmmaker Michael Moore in an open letter to Democrats, "Let the resounding defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman send a cold shiver down the spine of every Democrat who supported the invasion of Iraq and who continues to support, in any way, this senseless, immoral, unwinnable war." To any lawmaker who does not support "an immediate end to this war," Moore wrote, "allow me to inform you that your days in elective office are now numbered.... If you don't believe us, give Joe a call."

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Lamont's primary victory, amplified by threats like Moore's, struck Democrats around the country like a bolt of lightning. "It's going to drive the Democratic presidential primaries to the left on national security and the Iraq War," says Marshall Wittmann of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, "and it's going to make it difficult for anyone to stand by their decision to vote to authorize the war." The rise of netroots anger, Wittmann adds, will "send the message that centrist hawks are unwelcome in the Democratic party," which could affect the party for years to come.

Of course, for the netroots leaders, that's exactly the point. Read left-wing blogs for very long and you'll find that many of the most prominent bloggers are at least as contemptuous of centrist Democrats as of Republicans. In their view, the last 20 years of the Democratic party--the years in which, according to those ADA ratings, Democratic lawmakers moved steadily leftward--have been a disaster because Democrats did not move far enough to the left. "The entire 'move to the center' response of third-way politics from 1985-2005 was a complete failure," writes Chris Bowers, who runs the influential blog MyDD and the political action committee BlogPAC. "If we are going to improve the progressive response to the conservative movement, we cannot simply replicate our past failures."

Although less well-known than Moulitsas and DailyKos, Bowers is a key figure in the netroots movement. A 32-year-old graduate student working on a Ph.D. in English at Temple University in Philadelphia, Bowers's main qualification for his new role as political strategist appears to be a stint at the American Federation of Teachers and his status, as of last November, as a committeeman in Philadelphia's 27th Ward. But he is full of confidence, and he scoffs at those who warn that the netroots are too far out on the fringe to win. "We won't fail because we are too 'left wing,'" Bowers writes. "For starters, I'm not really sure how leftwing many of the leaders of the movement actually are. I am pretty far left, but I speak for myself alone when it comes to that."

Not entirely. Another leader of the netroots, MoveOn's Eli Pariser--who rose to prominence when he started a petition urging the United States not to strike back after the September 11 terrorist attacks--recently declared the death of the Clinton-era strategy of "triangulation." "Seizing the political middle ground no longer makes sense in an era when any attempt at bipartisanship is understood as a sign of Democratic weakness and exploited accordingly," Pariser wrote in the Washington Post after Lamont's victory in Connecticut. "With triangulation's passing, a new era of bolder, principle-driven politics can begin."

Of course, Bill Clinton was the only president in his party to be elected and reelected since Franklin D. Roosevelt. But that seems like ancient history--pre-history, actually--in the blogosphere. "The Left interprets Clintonism as a major mistake," says Wittmann. "We lost Congress in '94, we lost, we lost, we lost. Many of these bloggers were not even old enough in the Clinton era [to have] experienced Democrats' being in the wilderness."

So triangulation--moderation--is dead. But now many Democrats must practice a new kind of triangulation, trying to find a middle ground not between Democrats and Republicans but between the netroots faction and more mainstream Democratic voters. So far, no one has figured out a way to do it.

THE PAPER TIGERS OF THE BLOGOSPHERE?

There's no doubt that Democrats perceive the netroots as the biggest, baddest player in party politics. But why, exactly? Perhaps the most overlooked factor in all the Lieberman-Lamont coverage is the fact that the netroots' contribution to Lamont, while significant, was relatively small. According to PoliticalMoneyLine, the Lamont campaign raised $4,116,131 through July 19 (the most recent date for which figures are available). But $2,501,500 of that came from one contributor: Ned Lamont. Most of the rest, $1,607,371, came in contributions from individuals.

How much of that came from the netroots? First, Lamont raised about $270,000 from donors through MoveOn.org. Then, according to ActBlue.com, the clearinghouse for most blog fundraising, Lamont raised $298,068 from individuals contributing through blogs. (Of that amount, Chris Bowers's MyDD was the biggest single source of money, helping to raise $104,543.) The total was about $568,000.

So Lamont raised $4.1 million, $2.5 million of which came from himself and $568,000 of which came from bloggers or net-roots activists. Now, that $568,000 was significant--about a third of what Lamont received from individuals--but it paled in comparison with what Lamont gave himself. And remember that the Lieberman-Lamont race was the focus of nationwide netroots enthusiasm for months--long before the press began covering the blogs' involvement. According to ActBlue.com, Lamont received more from the blogs than any other candidate in any other race in the country. And still, it would not have amounted to much had the race not involved a candidate wealthy enough to finance his own campaign.

So why are Democrats virtually cowering in fear--and willing to abandon an approach that gave them more success at the presidential level than they had had in decades--in the face of the netroots' attack? There's no entirely convincing explanation, but the short answer seems to be that the netroots can make trouble. If you are a Democratic candidate, and all the anger of the angry Left is directed at you, you will hear about it, day after day after day. Blogs, which have their message relayed by a political press corps that pays attention to blogs, can create buzz. In Connecticut, some out-of-state bloggers who came to support Lamont transformed the race into something of an anti-Lieberman traveling circus. A Republican candidate facing such opposition could deride it as left-wing kookery. But a Democratic candidate, worried that such a comment might cut into his support, can't say the same thing.

So what now? No matter what happens in mid-term elections this November, the netroots seem to be in the driver's seat for the foreseeable future. If Democrats fail to win the House or the Senate, the angry Left will blame accommodationist Democrats and vow to defeat them all the next time around. If Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, the netroots will be triumphant and take their victory as a sign that they should eliminate all remaining accommodationists in 2008. In neither case will the party take a hard look in the mirror, as truly centrist Democrats have urged.

"While the Republicans may be forced to reform themselves after the '06 elections, the Democrats will be emboldened and not inclined to change, so the weaknesses that were evident in the '04 campaign will never be addressed," says Marshall Wittmann. "The paradox of '06 is that the Republicans could be forced to get their act together while the Democratic Left will be completely reinforced by the results."

And what would Democratic politics be like then? A few months ago, at the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, Chris Bowers sat in on a panel discussion about the "virtual communities" created by left-wing websites. Might such "communities," a member of the audience asked, serve as models for political organizations in the real world? In other words, could a real organization function like a group of angry bloggers on the Internet, who often shout down anyone who raises doubts about the blogs' take-no-prisoners approach to politics? Bowers seemed a little taken aback at the thought. "I would say no," he said. "That would be a very dark and disturbing place ... where someone jumps into a room and says something that makes everyone mad, and then a mob starts chasing them ... I can't imagine a community structured like the blogosphere. That would be really scary."

Just ask the Democrats.