Barack Obama com Evan Bayh, senador pelo Indiana e um dos membros dessa facção moderada do Partido Democrata que pode vir a ter muito peso até 2013
... poderão ser eles a ter a palavra decisiva para marcar a agenda do Congresso, durante os anos Obama:
«One critical topic was largely lost amid the media’s grading of Barack Obama’s presidency at its 100-day mark, and the decibel-splitting debate about the GOP’s future: As Sen. Arlen Specter’s party shift shows, for the first time since the mid-1990s, moderate Democrats are a rising, increasingly decisive factor in American politics.
From their efforts to enact bipartisan health care reform to shaping energy and environmental legislation, Democratic moderates form a crucial bloc of votes that will define much of Obama’s legislative agenda. Elected from the South, the Midwest and the interior West, they come from Republican strongholds and claim to speak for moderates and independents — or swing voters.
Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Warner of Virginia, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana have emerged as a formidable legislative force, following in the steps of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council on economic issues. One of their greatest concerns is averting a new era of exploding budget deficits.
They recall that Clinton enacted a landmark budget in 1993. It raised taxes on corporations and the wealthy, put limits on new social spending and ultimately helped cut the budget deficit and produce a budget surplus in 1998. Clinton’s presidency “marked a profound change” in the Democratic Party’s direction, argued Kenneth Baer, the author of “Reinventing Democrats,” a history of the DLC. Before Clinton’s ascendance, Democrats “had been seen as profligate ‘tax-and-spenders’”; with Clinton in power, however, Democrats “had a president who championed ... fiscal restraint.”
Clinton helped Democrats shed their image as pro-Big-Government liberals, and his legacy of fiscal responsibility reverberates among Democratic moderates in Congress in 2009. In March, Democratic centrists in the Senate formed a moderate coalition to push for bipartisan deficit reduction, among other center-left policies.
But DLC founders Al From, former Louisiana Rep. Gillis Long, and former Sens. Chuck Robb of Virginia and Sam Nunn of Georgia also “sought to reorient the party toward the white middle class,” as Clinton biographer David Maraniss put it. Their program offered tax cuts for middle-income families, hailed small business as America’s economic driver and held traditional interest groups — organized labor, for one — at arm’s length.
In a 60-40 Democratic Senate, the influence of the DLC’s heirs is going to be profound. Specter, the newest Democratic moderate, opposes the union-backed Employee Free Choice Act, while Ben Nelson has expressed disapproval of Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan. They are reluctant to buck the wishes of business and raise taxes on the middle class.
These centrists also tend to be more hawkish than most of their liberal congressional counterparts. Like Al Gore’s and Clinton’s support for the 1991 Gulf War, Democratic centrists, more recently, backed George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq war and praised Obama’s decision to send thousands of troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. While eyeing Obama’s overtures to Iran and Cuba with some trepidation, the presence of Robert Gates (a Republican), hawkish Hillary Clinton and four-star Gen. James Jones in the Cabinet is reassuring. Obama, they know, isn’t another Democratic dove in the mold of Eugene McCarthy.
The newly won power of these liberal centrists won’t necessarily trigger a fresh round of Democratic infighting. The DLC has been eclipsed by the Center for American Progress. Bill Clinton is the secretary of state’s spouse. Al Gore is a hero to environmentalists and anti-war activists. It is, in short, a different era.
Democrats are more cohesive politically than they were in the mid- to late-’80s, when Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson battled for the party’s mind. (The DLC, Jackson once quipped, stood for “Democrats for the Leisure Class,” who “comb their hair to the left like Kennedy and move their policies to the right like Reagan.”)
Obama is too young to have fought in these wars; besides, as his first 100 days as president show, he is ideologically nimble and tough to pigeonhole politically. While his sweeping first budget has evoked in some memories of LBJ’s Great Society, his speech to Congress in February highlighted his commitment to deficit reduction. He has talked, Clinton-like, about trimming wasteful government spending, endorsed tax cuts for the middle class, vowed to withdraw deliberately from the war in Iraq and hailed such values as responsibility, family and national service.
Obama has one foot planted in the moderate camp and another squarely centered in the liberal camp. While the moderates in the Senate are only one of the Democratic Party’s constituent pieces, they are a rising force in Washington and in the country, especially now that Specter has brought Democrats to the brink of a filibuster-proof majority for the first time in decades.»
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