This won't work: Some Democrats Look to Push Party Away From Center

From The New York Times:

If positions on foreign policy and specifically the Iraq war marked the dividing line in the Democrats’ last fierce internal debate, issues related to banks, entitlements and the rights of consumers broadly could shape the party’s next search for an identity.

Liberals, pointing to a bankrupt Detroit and new reports of diminished class mobility, believe the plight of lower-income and young Americans is so severe that the party must shift away from the center-left consensus that has shaped its fiscal politics since Bill Clinton’s 1992 election and push more aggressively to reduce income disparity.

 

“The sooner we get back to a good, progressive, populist message, the better off we’re going to be as Democrats,” said Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.

 

The growing intraparty economic debate comes even as there is increasing cohesion on the cultural issues that once divided Democrats. Many in the party see progress on matters like gay rights, gun control and immigration, topics that Mr. Obama has spent time on this year but mentioned only glancingly in his address Wednesday at Knox College, in Galesburg, Ill.

The votes and stances on these issues among Democrats in Congress are now far more uniform than they were as late as the 1990s. And it is unthinkable that — whether their 2016 standard-bearer is Hillary Rodham Clinton or somebody else — every major contender in the next Democratic primary season will not be down-the-line progressive on cultural issues.

But there is a growing frustration among progressives who are now saying the party must move toward a more populist position on the issue that many on the left see as the great unfinished business of the Obama years: economic fairness.

 

Center-versus-left tensions have come into view in just the last few days amid speculation that Lawrence H. Summers, the center-left former Harvard president and senior economic official in the Clinton and Obama White House, is a serious candidate to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.

And while the issue has largely been dormant since Mr. Obama’s budget proposal earlier this year, he signaled in his Wednesday speech that he would again try to push through changes to Social Security and Medicare, programs the left considers sacrosanct.

 

But past arguments by Mr. Clinton and other moderate Democrats that positioning the Democratic Party in the political center was the only way to win elections could be harder to make at a moment when the economy is still wheezing, powerful strains of populism have emerged in both parties, and the Republicans are fighting their own civil wars and face serious demographic challenges.