Matt Bai

An entertaining look at some of the faces and factors remaking the Democratic Party, but also frustrating. Bai has a thesis here, that I'm not convinced is entirely fair, and he does hammer away at it - that the "new progressive movement" has no ideas of how to govern, and is instead obsessed with mere tactics that they think will win elections, as if just electing more Democrats will solve all the nation's problems.

Admittedly, you'd be hard pressed to look at the 2006 midterm elections and see evidence of any grand ideas the Democrats ran on, and Bai is not impressed with the efforts of the people he spent time around while researching this book to come up with such ideas. But such activity is out there, such as at the Center for American Progress which Bai himself mentions a couple of times but essentially glides over (maybe he should have spent more time in their offices and less hanging out with the rich venture capitalists and Hollywood types), and at the Truman National Security Project, which focuses on how Democrats should deal with the national security challenges currently facing our nation.

Bai also matches the stereotype of the traditional media political journalist (he's a NY Times writer) who looks down his traditional nose at the emergence of the new media forms (such as blogs). He writes that the blogs, in fact, are the dark side of the new progressive movement - as if there would be anything close to the current, vital progressive movement currently taking shape and beginning to remake the party without the blogs and new media. And why are they the dark side? Because they're fiercely partisan, mainly. How media types can lecture the Democratic Party and its constituent parts for not being bipartisan enough in 2008, after 2 terms of the most ruthlessly partisan GOP government I can ever think of, during much of which time the national Democratic party frequently bent itself over to acquiesce in a "bipartisan" way, I don't know.

So Bai fails to convincingly prove his thesis and suffers from traditional media biases, but his emphasis on focusing on developing new ideas and programs for the 21st century is at least on the right track. And his profiling of the people he did choose to spend most of his time around - especially the wealthy donors who created the Democracy Alliance in an effort to build up the progressive infrastructure - is an interesting read.… (mais)