While some Democrats realize that the party has to change course, former Clinton pollster and adviser Mark Penn has some especially dumb advice in an op-ed entitled Back to the Center, Democrats. It is hard to determine exactly what he means considering that his candidate lost in 2008 (and again in 2016 without his help) for going to far to the center, if not actually the right. Besides losing in 2016, the Democrats also lost in 2010 and 2014 due to running as a Republican-lite party. For many Democrats, moving back to the center might make them more liberal than they are today.
The general strategy of Democrats has been to move to the right, but slightly less so than the Republicans, and then say everyone has to vote for them or else the right wing crazies in the Republican Party will take over. Since 2008 that strategy has been a failure. Perhaps such triangulation and moving to the right helped Bill Clinton, but I suspect he won more because of his personal charisma than his conservative policies.
While Penn believes that the Democrats have moved too far left on most issues, he does believe that the Democrats have the upper hand with Obamacare. While Obamacare was a huge improvement over what we had before, it did not go far enough, and a growing number of Democrats are realizing that Bernie Sanders was right in proposing a single payer plan–which Hillary Clinton campaigned against.
The Democratic Party remains divided over its direction. As I discussed yesterday, some establishment Democrats are seeing the need to look toward new leaders such as Bernie Sanders, while others want to cling to the past.
Maybe Mark Penn has done us a favor in writing this once again as even many more establishment Democrats realize that when Mark Penn recommends something, the wisest course is to do the opposite. Former Obama speech writer Jon Favreau tweeted, “Zero Democrats who matter care about what Mark Penn says or does, unless he decides to work for your opponent. Then, lucky you.”
Alex Pareene, politics editor at Fusion, responded with a post entitled, Mark Penn’s Bad Column Also Makes No Goddamn Sense. Sarah Jones wrote Don’t Listen to Mark Penn at The New Republic. Martin Longman wrote Mark Penn Has Some Really Bad Advice at Washington Monthly. Philip Bump debunked Penn’s article in writing Breaking: The Democratic Party is different now than it was in 1995.