(cross-posted on Open Left)
I kind of like the sound of that one. We may have bungled a primary challenge to Ellen Tauscher, but we accomplished a lot of our goals. She is now generally acting and talking a lot better, especially on the war. The big bonus is that the media is tracking how we interact with her, which increases the pressure on her. Check out this blog post on the new LAT presidential blog Top of The Ticket. It titled “Controversial California congresswoman backs Clinton:
But they also share something else in common: each voted in favor of the war in Iraq they now oppose. And, partly because of that vote, each has been the target of attacks from anti-war activists and left-leaning bloggers. Tauscher also has drawn the ire of progressives because she is a member of the “Blue Dogs” in the House — a group of moderate Democrats — and a leader of the New Democrat Coalition.
They are targets because they were wrong in the past and now we are putting pressure on them to get it right moving forward. Their language has changed dramatically due to the intense scrutiny.
During today’s call, Clinton described the latter group as “a very large group of House members committed to pro-growth economic policies that will really help us return to shared prosperity.” Liberal bloggers describe it less kindly, tending toward characterizations such as “sell-out” and “Republican Lite.”
Yeah, that is about right. Interestingly, that no longer includes Clinton, who has been moving fairly dramatically to a populist economic platform for her presidential run. She is no longer the ardent free trader, in the tradition of her husband. I actually do take issue with that phrasing, since it insinuates that those Democrats who do not agree with the Blue Dogs are anti-growth. It is not that progressives are against growth, we just don’t want it all to come to corporations and the richest Americans. Like Clinton says, that is “trickle-down economics without the trickle.”
Early this year, Tauscher was under particularly intense fire from progressive voices, as spelled out in a Washington Post story. Since then, she’s heightened her profile as an opponent of the Iraq war; Tauscher is a chief sponsor, for instance, of a push to rescind the resolution that authorized the U.S. military action. Still …
… Tauscher joining the Clinton camp can be expected to generate negative comment on the left.
My first thought when I read a piece about her endorsement was to mock the fact that Clinton didn’t know how to pronounce Tauscher’s name, not to try and bash Clinton for the association.
I don’t think that anyone is particularly surprised that Clinton is sewing up the endorsements of moderate Democratic women. I would actually be more shocked if they didn’t go to her. What I am more interested in is how the media is reporting it.
Don Frederick seems to understand that Tauscher is controversial, but doesn’t quite identify the biggest reason for the blogger ire that was directed at Tauscher. She was bashing her fellow Democrats, making it more difficult to get our policy goals accomplished. That was the biggest spark to the blow-up, though there were other factors like her extremely poor relationship with the grassroots groups in her district. The Iraq vote is important yes, but it was not what sparked the controversy earlier this year. After all, that vote happened years ago. She is still a figure that will raise liberal bloggers’ eyebrows, if only because we are closely tracking what she is saying and how she is voting.
