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The Fighting Moderates
By
PAUL KRUGMAN

"The Republicans know the America they want, and they are not afraid to use
any means to get there," Howard Dean said in accepting the chairmanship of
the
Democratic National Committee. "But there is something that this
administration and the Republican Party are very afraid of. It is that we
may actually
begin fighting for what we believe."

Those words tell us what the selection of Mr. Dean means. It doesn't
represent a turn to the left: Mr. Dean is squarely in the center of his
party on issues
like health care and national defense. Instead, Mr. Dean's political
rejuvenation reflects the new ascendancy within the party of fighting
moderates, the
Democrats who believe that they must defend their principles aggressively
against the right-wing radicals who have taken over Congress and the White
House.

It was always absurd to call Mr. Dean a left-winger. Just ask the real
left-wingers. During his presidential campaign, an article in the muckraking
newsletter
CounterPunch denounced him as a "Clintonesque Republicrat," someone who, as
governor, tried "to balance the budget, even though Vermont is a state in
which
a balanced budget is not required."

Even on Iraq, many moderates, including moderate Republicans, quietly shared
Mr. Dean's misgivings - which have been fully vindicated - about the march
to war.

But Mr. Dean, of course, wasn't quiet. He frankly questioned the Bush
administration's motives and honesty at a time when most Democrats believed
that the
prudent thing was to play along with the war party.

We'll never know whether Democrats would have done better over the past four
years if they had taken a stronger stand against the right. But it's clear
that the time for that sort of caution is past.

For one thing, there's no more room for illusions. In 2001 it was possible
for some Democrats to convince themselves that President Bush's tax cuts
were
consistent with an agenda that was only moderately conservative. In 2002 it
was possible for some Democrats to convince themselves that the push for war
with Iraq was really about eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

But in 2005 it takes an act of willful blindness not to see that the Bush
plan for Social Security is intended, in essence, to dismantle the most
important
achievement of the New Deal. The Republicans themselves say so: the push for
privatization is following the playbook laid out in a 1983 Cato Journal
article
titled "A 'Leninist' Strategy," and in a White House memo declaring that
"for the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can
win
- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical
landscape of the country."

By refusing to be bullied into false bipartisanship on Social Security,
Democrats have already scored a significant tactical victory. Just two
months ago,
TV pundits were ridiculing Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, for
denying that Social Security faces a crisis, and for rejecting outright the
idea
of diverting payroll taxes into private accounts. But now the Bush
administration itself has dropped the crisis language, and admitted that
private accounts
would do nothing to improve the system's finances.

By standing firm against Mr. Bush's attempt to stampede the country into
dismantling its most important social insurance program, Democrats like Mr.
Reid,
Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin and Barbara Boxer have, at a minimum, broken the
administration's momentum, and quite possibly doomed its plan. The more time
the news media spend examining the details of privatization, the worse it
looks. And those Democrats have also given their party a demonstration of
what
it means to be an effective opposition.

In fact, by taking on Social Security, Mr. Bush gave the Democrats a chance
to remember what they stand for, and why. Here's my favorite version, from
another
fighting moderate, Eliot Spitzer: "As President Bush embraces the ownership
society and tries to claim that he is the one that is making it possible for
the middle class to succeed and save and invest - well, I say to myself, no,
that's not right; it is the Democratic Party historically that created the
middle class."

For a while, Mr. Dean will be the public face of the Democrats, and the
Republicans will try to portray him as the leftist he isn't. But Deanism
isn't about
turning to the left: it's about making a stand.

Copyright 2005

Posted by Miriam V.