A history of Democratic Primaries since I've been awake. And why I'm worried.

[Bucky]

1980
- Carter, the incumbent, was challenged by two strong opponents. Carter was amazingly weak, having run an undisciplined White House and having been humiliated by the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis, and had approval ratings that stayed in the low 30s. But there were other problems. Another gas crisis, altho not as bad as the '73 crisis, made people antsy. It also triggered a lethl combo of inflation and a stagnant growth rate--"stagflation" they called it.
- Jimmy Carter was an agile campaigner, but his strength was in the moderate and Southern factions of the Democrats, although the Republicans had long since started digging into the Democrat's
- Factional lines were fluid, and personalities dominated more than interest group, but opposition generally broke down as:
- Teddy Kennedy represented the union movement and old line Cold War liberals. He was a flawed campaigner, at various times not being able to give strong off-the-cuff responses to highly predictable media questions like "Why do you want to be president?" and "What really happened at Chappaquiddick?"
- Jerry Brown was a precursor of both Third Way politics and earth-conscious environmental causes. He started late and didn't have a strong base in the early contests.

These were three giants. Brown hovered around 10% in the first contests in February and then dropped to <4% in March. He dropped out in April. Kennedy and Carter battled for the rest of the spring and into the summer. Kennedy eked out a couple of big states, but Carter won many contests by substantial margins, until he was inevitable. Then, once it looked hopeless for Kennedy, he started winning big states like California and New Jersey.


1984

There were four strong contenders and a number of viable also-rans this time.
- Walter Mondale was the establishment candidate, but no one presumed to tell other ambitious senators not to try and challenge him. We were a democracy after all. He had almost unanimous union support--at least from union leaders. He had a strong liberal record and represented both the Kennedy and the Humphrey wings of the party
- Gary Hart was the break out "dark horse" of the campaign, running on a "New Ideas" platform and attracting socially liberal young professionals
- Jesse Jackson put together a strong coalition of the "forgotten man" - urban minorities, family farmers, progressive & single issue activists, and large numbers of university students and intellectuals and civil rights advocates -- the people the party establishment liked to ignore
- John Glenn ran a vigorous candidacy, also drawing from the Kennedy tradition, but was a little too stodgy on the stump to break through to the later primaries & caucuses. He dropped out in March.

These were four giants, but other notables like Ernest Hollings and Alan Cranston ran serious candidacies. (Most heartbreaking was the tepid return of George McGovern, who failed to catch on as he had 16 years earlier in 1972's insurgency campaign)

Generally speaking, Mondale won the eastern states and Hart won the western states and Jackson pulled off three upsets (DC, Louisiana, & Mississippi)




1988
In 1984 Kennedy had shocked everyone by not running. In 1988, it was Mario Cuomo who surprisingly did not run.

A deep bench of mostly new contenders showed the strength of the democratic Democratic party that year. There really wasn't a single "establishment" candidate that year. A few years out of office does that to a party (viz, Republicans in 1980, 2000, & '16, and Democrats in 1992, 2004 & '08). So we had...
- Mike Dukakis combining elements of the Kennedy, Hart, and Cuomo appeals, but also running as supercompetant manager type (it was the 1980s, after all)
- Jesse Jackson repeating, but to less effect, his 1984 Rainbow Coalition. He instead become a regional candidate, but couldn't break out of the South.
- Al Gore combining both the Hart "new ideas" approach and the as-yet-unnamed Third Way that meant appealed to moderates, especially southern moderates, although the country seemed significantly less regional compared to half a generation earlier.
- Dick Gephardt was, if anyone, the union/Humphrey wing candidate. But he was also strong on farm issues and stood for a strong foreign policy in the JFK/Scoop Jackson tradition
- Paul Simon also drew union support as well as professional/Hart-wing & academic support. Bruce Babbitt ran for a while as a conservationist and a westerner (this is when California was considered a potentially flippable Republican state)



Gary Hart blew up in a sex scandal that year. Cuomo began cultivating his Hamlet-on-the-Hudson rep. Joe Biden and Pat Shroeder jumped in and then jumped out when the crowds didn't gather for them.

Again, campaign coalitions were pretty fluid. The people running for the nomination were running on their resumes and their ideas, not their interest bases. All the major candidates were the sorts of leaders the full party could support. Unlike 1980 or today, the party didn't have the sense of being divided into factions, just spread among different candidacies. We lost cause "liberal" had become a dirty word somehow. This was the apex of Nixon's Southern Strategy era.


1992

Bill Clinton happened and Democrats finally got a candidate with some real Elvis in him. He combined Dukakis's & Hart's "governing ideas that work for all the people" appeal with Jerry Brown's liberal-moderate positioning. He swept almost everyone else aside by mid-March. His main rival was...

- Jerry Brown, who now was running a more outsidery/New Age/pro-environment campaign and earned the support of much of the old Rainbow Coalition. Brown kept losing but kept at it until the convention. This is probably the real beginning of the current cultural divide in the party... the candidacy that isn't about resume but about policy approach--the "include us too" coalition of the forgotten families.

A few others also tried to get the nomination, but they were running as job applicants, not interest-base candidates. Still, there was competition and a real question as to "Who would catch on with the people". The small-d democracy mattered still.
- Tom Harkin who won his home state of Iowa and sub-30% victories in the midwest on Super Tuesday before dropping out
- Bob Kerrey who won South Dakota big and couldn't break 15% support anywhere else before dropping out
- Paul Tsongas who had unfair comparisons to the lackluster Dukakis, won New Hampshire and did just as good as Clinton on Super Tuesday (winning Maryland and several western states while Clinton bagged Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming and Brown won Colorado in a three-way photo-finish). He was plagued by health rumors tho (he died of cancer before Clinton's 2nd inauguration) and lost every contest (by 2-to-1 margins) except his home state in the two weeks after Super Tuesday.

Again, these were all men of parts, and the contest was decided by the people, although big campaign donations were starting to matter to all but the insurgency candidate.



2000

Succeeding a successful president was bound to fall to the young handsome intelligent vice president. But even then, the Democrats had a real contest with real arguments between two potential leaders.
- Al Gore ran the first Democratic campaign in the Fox News era. He was clearly the establishment Democratic candidate and the moderate in the race. He had boodles of money. Despite the dot-com bubble popping there was plenty of Wall Street money for the Democrats to wallow in. Democrats, it was finally demonstrated, simply ran the economy and the government better than the Republicans (a comparative list of Reagan-Bush-Bush scandals towers over the paltry and mostly naughty Clinton scandal list, while Obama's scandals consist pretty much of one fucked up website). A few potential challengers (Kerry, Kerrey, Gephardt, Howard Dean) "tested the waters", meaning they found out no one would back them against Gore's megabucks. In the end only one candidate challenged him:
- Bill Bradley attempted to capture the liberal banner, but the party wasn't up to monkeying with a successful formula. He didn't really play effectively to the "hey include us too" wing of the party, the forgotten underclass. He was a millionaire and had no feel for the expanding yet shrinking working class. He lost every primary and was out by mid-March.
- There was no one else. We were a party with a short bench.

By this time, the Willie Hortening of the Democrats was more or less de rigueur now. This was the post-Lewinsky election. So the Al and Tipper showed the strength of their marriage by making out on the podium. This wasn't about governance, but about values. He talked like Mister Rodgers during the debates, as if out-dumbing George Bush was a viable strategy.

Democrats' real strength was now being able to trump Republicans on the economy (tho the party of Reagan never gave up the talking point). So they grabbed the culture war theme from the 80s and 90s, which was only meant to keep the South from drifting to moderation, and placed it center stage. They also gussied up Dubya in the veil of "compassionate conservative" and pretended he would be a bipartisan leader--a deeply empty promise it turned out.

so Florida happened

Despite winning, by a hair, we lost the White House.

But oh, our loins ached for Bubba, just as the generation from 1968 to 1988 ached for Bobby's return. Damn that Constitution. We needed that Clinton mojo back. And there was that new senator from New York with her secret weapon. Fox News spent the next three years sneering that we were all puppets for Hillary. And so, of course, CNN and all the newspapers echoed the voice of America's dysfunctional drunk uncle.



2004

Not surprisingly, Sen Clinton didn't run in the next election. I mean, after all, it'd be insane for a 1st term senator, never re-elected, to run for the White House.

So we got another deep bench year. This was DU's first Democratic primary season. Those of us who were here 12 years ago remember the vitriol. It was harsh, but at least it was a race split multiple ways.
- John Kerry represented the old Kennedy wing, the high church liberals, and a strong slice of the union vote--altho to our shame as a nation, the union vote in 21st Century was not as weighty as it'd been in the middle of the 20th.
- John Edwards gave a populist twist to the moderate wing, striking a perfectly inclusive note for the forgotten citizen, but seemed to lack gravitas (and boy howdy! as we found out four years later!)
- Dennis Kucinich recreated the Rainbow Coalition and gave for the leftier activists a true voice
- Wesley Clark went for the intellectual crowd, and was accused of being a Hillary surrogate, but also brought a lot of veterans and suburban professionals into the Democratic tent
- Joe-mentum (!)
- Al Sharpton did his thing, but mostly just diverted the black vote as a bargaining tool for the convention
- and then there was people-powered Howard Dean, who galvanized many activists and more importantly created the internet wing of the Democratic Party.

Every four years every candidate running for president and every surrogate for each party repeats the implausible mantra that "this year's election is uniquely historical... indeed, it may be the most important election of our lifetimes." For short I'll call it the MIEOOL. They have always been wrong, probably even for 2016, except when they said it in 2004. Bush's run for "re"-election was the MIEOOL of your lifetime. Unless you're under 12 [font size="1"](in which case Kanye's run for reelection in 2024 is your MIEOYL)[/font].

Both Dean fully realizing how to use social media and the internet in pulling together a voting block and the American public's failure to repudiate George Bush's reckless warmongering had lasting implications for democracy and for America's global behavior for the rest of this half century. Thirty years from now we will still be cleaning up Bush's mess in the middle east.

When America needs an orgasm, it turns to the Republicans. When it needs a janitor, it turns to us. Each election pretty much comes down to "Do you want to get the house in order or do you want to want to throw a missile at your middle aged insecurities?" And that leads us to the year....


2008

Once again there was a deep bench. But despite the quality candidates coming forth, there was really only two. One ran on Wall Street money, one ran on Chicago money. But the cast was impressive. One was the Clinton establishment and one inherited the liberal opposition to Clinton, despite being discernibly a moderate of the Third Way stripe. He hadn't been bamboozled by the Bushco drumbeat for war in Iraq, but then he hadn't been a senator yet. It was one candidate with connections and another with a sort of professorial version of Bubba's Elvis factor. He shifted his cadences when he went south and it won him important primaries. She turned up the fire and when she did she won, despite her husband's Hermann Munster like inability to help. I won't go all Freud on the Big Dog, but he was not playing his A-game that year.

There was also...
- John Edwards finished a close 2nd or 3rd for January, then dropping out after losing South Carolina.
- Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel splitting the activist and anti-establishment vote, but Kucinich dropping out after South Carolina
- old schoolers Chris Dodd and Joe Biden running shoestring campaigns like it was 1972 again, and thoroughly rejected by the party money-bags
- Bill Richardson who in another time might have made history, but stumbled under rumors of hubris (as if they didn't all suffer from ego inflation!)

But really it was just the two. It was epic. It was civil war. It was razor close again and again. And then we made history. Which leads us to...



2016

And this year, I contend, is different. It's more than just "2000 Jr" with the incumbent successful-despite-shockingly-disciplined-obstruction. In 2000, a mainstream liberal senator was able to mount a serious opposition against a competent-yet-Fox-villified establishment candidate. Gore then was favored, but his opponent was given more or less equal coverage. The terms of the debate was "who could build on the establishment Democrat's worthy record of progress?" In 2000, a few senators tested the waters.

In 2016, no one from the DC establishment tested the waters. There was a presumptive nominee and there was no one, as in no one, who made any noise. I mean, it's still America and so a few gadflies went out there, Dodd/Biden-like to test the waters, to see if they could catch fire as the anti-Hillary as Obama had done 8 years before. Two were jokes and Martin O'Malley lacked charisma. And money--boy, did he lack money. Senator-Secretary Clinton, for all her service and gravitas and experience and connections to the financial world and good works with the Clinton Foundation, was still a flawed candidate with national negatives that hovered around 55%.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, it was the story of the donkey who didn't bark. Where have all our giants gone? The country's forgotten citizen, the screwed over working class, is far far more numerous now than it was in 1984 when we still had strong unions and college students expected to live better off than their parents. Both the incumbent and his designated successor represent a genuine compassion for the working class who, despite the compassion, continue to get squeezed down by a relentless globalized economy. No one with a solid Democratic pedigree stood up, like FDR would've, like Hubert Humphrey would've, like Ted Kennedy would've, like Bobby died doing, to speak powerfully for the disincluded American.

Had we become the compassionate conservatives? The Party of Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, Carson, and Murdoch is quantifiably neither compassionate nor conservative. They are contemptuous reactionaries, perverting the American dream in ways that would mortify Reagan if he were alive (or Poppy Bush if he weren't a whore for energy, pharmaceutical, finance, and construction interests), and polluting the minds of actual conservatives with tribalized resentments that threaten the unity of the nation.

Nope, this year should be a walk for us. The Republicans, long culturally denoted by their ability to conform and line up behind their leader every four years, are fractured like rats on the Titanic ripping out each other's throats over who gets to eat Leonardo's fingers before drowning. Okay I botched that metaphor. They had a few giants of their own ilk this time around and--significantly--rejected every last damn one of them so they could choose between a deranged theocrat, an empty suit, and gold-plated Mussolini.

They're falling apart. And yet they consistently beat our front runner in head to head polling, except for the fascist (but even then we haven't seen his inevitable tactical turn to reforming populist; and ideologically he's the best positioned to pick up independent and moderate votes that currently elude him for his monkeyshines--trust me, those'll go away by the end of May). They conduct their debates with the dignity of a middle school food fight. And yet they still outpoll Clinton.

With so weak a frontrunner, why was there no mainstream challenger this year? Where was our bench?

Of course, instead we saw the rise of a non-Democrat as the voice of the "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party." Bernie Sanders is a national treasure, but it's not insignificant that he hasn't ever run as a nominal Democrat to Congress. He's been great, speaking for the voiceless, caring for the forgotten. But he's so far out of the mainstream that he hasn't been able to coalesce a working majority against the centrist candidate--a singularly unpopular centrist at that. There's no reason on earth that big money couldn't gather behind a more effective spokesperson--one who hasn't been smeared by a quarter century of lies, vitriol, rumor mongering, conspiracy theories, baseless character attacks, and plain old misogyny. But it hasn't. Either someone up there in the penthouses wants us to lose this year, or there is a corrupt class of one-percenters who are truly out of touch with the mecha-bot they think they're driving.

And don't get me wrong. I do respect Hillary Clinton as an administrator, as commander, as a champion for women's rights, as a foe of global climate change, as a diplomat negotiating treaties. I'd trust her as president as much as any other mainstream Democrat. Part of me wants to see Fox heads explode when she's inaugurated. Sadly, I'm not very confident she can hurtle over that bar, however. And I adore Bernie Sanders's fire and advocacy as a politician, though I do worry about his trade policy and the economic impact of his approach to healthcare (I'm supporting him financially, but mostly because he's tons more electable and probably can't get his more extreme proposals through anyhoo). And they're both wonderful people and they're invited to my barbecue. But from a historical perspective, I gotta ask... is that all we've got?

So, again, I wonder what's going on. How was every ambitious, charismatic senator and governor spooked out of challenging Secretary Clinton? How was the anti-Clinton vote defaulted to a guy who has the political luxury of giving zero fucks (as the kids say) when her cloud-high negatives have been a known entity for so long a time? How was all of the money on Wall Street funneled into only one candidate's warchest?

In a phrase, what on God's green Earth happened to our Democratic Party?

[merrily]

1. The DLC and a desire to share in the lobbyist money the Republicans were getting happened to our

party. In 1980, a memo went out from the DNC to Democrats in Washington telling them to see if they could not also get some of the lobbyist money that the Republicans were getting. From that point, K street grew exponentially.

In 1985, the DLC incorporated with the initial goal of making Bill Clinton President. When Bill Clinton won two elections in a row, which a Democrat had not done in a while, the myth grew that centrists were more electible and most of the officeholders in DC who were not already centrists or blue dogs became centrists and supported centrists and only centrists.

Sorry. I only skimmed your OP, so I don't know what all your points about the individual elections were.

[Bucky]

2. I appreciate your responding

Yeah, I should've mentioned the DLC -- they're a big deal. I'm not necessarily opposed to all their ideas, but I think they've drifted to too cozy a position with the financial speculation "industry"--an industry based on making wealthy by not working, hence the quotation marks--and it's had a definite corrupting influence on the party. The progressive wing definitely need to work on honing our messaging. The DLC, for all its faults, did lead the way on this front.

[merrily]

3. I think the DLC deliberately obscured messaging. Al From hinted at that in his book.

I am not sure what messaging you think they were good at. Kerry was a founding member of the Senate New Democrat Caucus. I had no clue what he was saying most of the time during the debates. Hillary's message "evolves" continually, so I'll be dipped if I know what she really stands for. Obama was good, but I think a lot of that was his own skill and Axelrod's/the team's. (I live in Massachusetts. Axelrod and other members of the Obama team worked on Deval Patrick's campaign in 2002, so we in this state had a preview of some of the things Obama used in his campaign. However, he certainly had his own amazing skills.)

[merrily]

4. P.S. I could not disagree with you more about Hillary and Bernie.

For example, he is the champion of global warming, correctly naming it as our number one national security risk. (There was good reason that Al Gore got a Nobel Peace prize for his work on the environment. Hillary, on the other hand, was pro-Keystone (though she claims she had no position, her state department sure did), pro fracking, pro Monsanto, etc.

For another example, Sanders has zero fucks to give? Are you joking?

[RiverLover]

7. I read the "zero fucks" as meaning he wasn't in the Democratic Party officially and those who were,

were too afraid to run against her. Or were advised not to. Bernie didn't give a fuck, and the DNC didn't realize how many of us out here would enthusiastically support him.

I'd like to know what's going on as well. Who is really pulling the strings here & why. Its pretty bizarre.

[merrily]

8. Who is pulling the strings? Powerful people in the party. Is someone pulling *their* strings, in

turn, beyond rich people in general? Maybe, maybe not. Some things are just beyond my ken, above my pay grade, hideable under TOS, etc. Besides, if we could even deal with level one, I'd be thrilled.

In any case, I do disagree with the OP on his characterizations of Hillary and Bernie.


OT--always great to "see" you.

[RiverLover]

9. Ditto, merrily!!

[CdnExtraNational]

13. It's not too hard to see who is pulling the strings.

Just ignore the social issues and follow the money.

It's a small group that started in 1946.

[Duppers]

12. Zactly!

Like

[Warren DeMontague]

14. "Zero fucks to give" is an expression. He's not beholden to anyone and he obviously was not

Susceptible to the undoubtedly considerable pressure certain party-string puliers laid down early on to keep serious challengers OUT of this race.

It is not an insult.

[Bucky]

18. Yes, RiverLover read me right on "zero fucks"

I mean he's indifferent to the needs of the DNC, not those of the people he swore to uphold the Constitution for.

No one doubts Bernie's compassion. I merely meant he was unbuyable.

[Ken Burch]

5. The only thing I'd disagree with you about on that history was on Jesse Jackson's 1988 showing.

As your own graphic shows,

Jesse actually did much BETTER in 1988 than 1984, tripling his delegate count and winning several additional states. And he did wom solidly in Michigan and Alaska, both of which were outside the South last time I checked. Jesse would probably have carried Illinonis as well, had Paul Simon not stayed in the race there(I've always suspected that Simon stayed in through Illinois, even though he was already out of contention by that point, just to give the regular Dems a credible "Anyone but Jesse" candidate to vote for).

[PatrickforO]

6. Interesting take.

I agree that Sanders is 'tons more electable.'

Honestly, the reason I support him is that he is where I am on the issues. I've been very disappointed through the years I've been politically aware, because the issues I care about for myself and my family, our 'kitchen table' issues, are increasingly considered 'pie in the sky.' Oh you can't have single payer healthcare even though we have a Medicare structure already in place that people understand and like. Oh, you can't have a strong Social Security because we can't afford it (BIG right wing lie there). Oh, 'free trade' is GOOD for America! It will GROW jobs! Oh, your kids are gonna have to literally give a pound of flesh to get through college (did you know that the USA is 'short' about 120,000 bachelor's degree level graduates a year because the cost of college has gotten so prohibitive? Seriously, if you analyze the Census data and compare it with job growth projections from BLS, you see this. So, at a time when businesses are CRYING OUT for more highly skilled workers, we've privatized and profitized college until it's out of reach). Oh, we don't need all those regulations! And why help anyone else anyway? You worked HARD for what you have. We don't need to use our tax money to help the poor. It isn't fair (but NO one ever asked how much the 'forever war' was going to cost)

It makes me sick to think that helping people has become an extreme political position, and even sicker to think that we'd rather use OUR tax money for war than for things that actually benefit us. It makes me sick to think there is a Third Way faction in this party that thinks the solution to all of our problems is to privatize everything in sight, deregulate business everywhere and at all levels and gut social programs. Because it's not.

I think you miss a significant thing in your analysis, too, and that is how angry our citizens are about how they've been fucked year after year by the establishment. This is an anti-establishment election. It is probably the LAST anti-establishment election because the TPP ISDS provisions allow corporations to ultimately take power away from nation states - it is the death knell, the oligarchs' final move to take power. The next stop after Bernie's political revolution, should that fail, is pitchforks. People are pissed.

[pat_k]

10. kick'n'Rec (nt)

[bklyncowgirl]

11. An interesting take. Where are all our giants indeed.

The truth is our "giants" these days are either elderly, retired or discouraged.

Jerry Brown, our most accomplished big state governor still qualifies as a giant and would have made a great candidate but chose not to run due to age and health issues--fair enough the guy's pushing eighty. Joe Biden the same. Al Gore is pretty much retired from politics and is not interested--can't say I blame him. John Kerry seems happy in his current job--he really was born to be Secretary of State. Elizabeth Warren opted out. As for our other big state governors Andrew Cuomo is competent but about as loveable as the Zika virus and is pretty much mired in the cesspool that is New York politics.

There's some young talent in the party but those who have right combination of charisma, accomplishment and ambition seem to be distinctly lacking.

[Warren DeMontague]

15. Good piece, Bucky.

Ive been saying for a while we need to broaden our bench- generationally, geographically. We should be looking to some gen xers and millennials out west instead of the neverending parade of beltway boomers who know all the best places to eat in midtown manhattan but are barely cognizant of the fact that 4 states out west have legalized marijuana.

New century. We need to stop pretending it is the last one.

[Gwhittey]

16. It is hard to find

"giants" with in congress when they are lowest polled one in history. That is why Sanders was one probably only 2 in congress of DNC that could try it because both have been pain in asses to rest of the DNC for last 8 years and Bernie for more. Why do you think Bernie is getting such huge numbers in debate polls. He basically said FU to whole DNC Establishment last night instead of being politically nice. Shocked me that he won the debate but He appealed to people last night who actually had real world issues that are linked to bad decisions of Hillary and not being told what there issues where by M$M. It is hard for the M$M to change the narrative of people who are so obviously getting fucked by the system as the people in Flint.

Hillary sitting there defending Corporate Welfare was such a mistake of hers to bring it up that even Anderson Cooper had to raise bullshit flag and he (if you see how he treats GOP) has gotten marching orders to push GOP talking points.

[TBF]

17. I was enthralled with Teddy Kennedy (1980)

he is the reason I became interested in politics and remain interested to this day. I was 14 that year. Growing up with parents who worked in factories and figuring out how to get my act together to do well enough to get out of that very poor rural area. I felt that despite his wealth someone like Teddy cared about people like me. We see that with Bernie. He may be 74 and extremist, but his warmth comes through and that is why he has people following him into arenas despite the Clinton machine. And that I think is what we are missing. Obama brought enough charisma that we were willing to overlook this quite conservative nature and relative inexperience. We don't have charismatic folks leading the party anymore because their voices have been silenced by not only the third way, but a country that is more comfortable with slick infomercials than authenticity. Look at who they've picked on the right - a businessman who has arguably only been successful with his reality TV shows (the businesses themselves have gone bankrupt). I don't solely blame the people though. I think they are being manipulated with a media that is bought and paid for by the very wealthy owners of this country. When I read posts on Facebook responding to random articles I'm in awe at how successfully folks have been manipulated to do the work of the owners for them.

[Bucky]

19. I wanna add something that's been bothering me about the phrase Democratic Wing.

Really, that's kind of an obnoxious name to assume. Gore, Kerry, Obama, the Clintons, Biden... they're all real Democrats. They really do want government to work for every citizen. They've presided over our party at a time when the working class is getting stiffed, but they've struggled against the worst of the trends all along the way. But they've been Democratic, each in their own way expanding the frontiers of inclusion and standing against the reactionary forces of bigotry. You might disapprove of their tactics and compromises toward achieving their goals, but there's just no serious room for doubting their intentions. If they have still represented the centrist wing of the party, it's still been not conservative, but inclusive and therefor progressive. I think an essential part of being a winning party is being a tolerant, inclusive party. And that means not telling people they aren't really Democrats without a much higher criterion than "I don't think you're tough enough on the banks.".