After getting home from work last night, I watched the closing 1/3 - 1/2 of the DNC's unity dinner (meaning most of Clinton's speech, all of Kerry's and roughly 20 minutes or so of handshaking.) What struck me more than anything were the repeated allusions to John McCain. Not only did Clinton mention him by name during his speech, but the video that introduced Kerry spent close to 30 seconds on a visual of Kerry and McCain walking alongside each other, closing with an image of Kerry slapping the Arizona Senator on the back. As a progressive, it didn't do a whole lot for me, but as a political pragmatist, I thought it was exceptionally shrewd - even if the rumors of McCain serving in positions ranging from Kerry's VP to Secretary of Defense or Veteran Affairs are wholly unfounded, the allusions to the Senator tacitly reinforce the idea that McCain, and by proxy, the moderate Republicans whom he's the defacto leader of, will be given a voice in a Kerry administration.
The lead article in today's edition of
Salon (you'll have to sit through an ad on Mercury Poisoning to read it) sheds some more light on the possibility of a Democrat/Centrist Republican alliance, explaining how groups like the Club for Growth (ie, the fuckheads who ran the "Dean should take his latte drinking, volvo driving, sushi-eating, body-piercing, blah blah blahers back to Vermont where they belong" commercial) have targetted high profile Republican moderates like Arlen Specter, and how many moderates are actually clandestinely planning on supporting Kerry in November:
That's because some Republicans say that a Bush loss may be their last chance to take their party back. "If Bush were defeated by Kerry, it would certainly call into question the Republican leadership, people like Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert," says Fasciani. "That axis of the party may lose its weight and its power. The Powell and Giuliani wing of the party would certainly gain some prominence and may, during the next four years of a Kerry administration, perhaps even gain control of the party and increase the tent." Such hopes have even led some Republicans to found a grass-roots group called Republicans for Kerry.
All of this begs the question of whether the Dean wing of the party, with its focus on taking back control of the party from our moderates were in the wrong all along. Would the moderate Republicans who are prepared to support Kerry have been equally willing to support Dean? It's almost certain that organizations like the DLC will argue that they wouldn't have been, and if exit polls come November end up indicating a Kerry win due to the defections of moderate Republicans, they'll have some powerful evidence on their side.
For anyone who's a Dean Democrat, how do we counter such an argument? Democratic victory in November is far and away our most important goal, but keeping the party in check and ensuring that it doesn't reject its newly transplanted spine is certainly number two. Can we still accomplish that if the party wins due to the support of moderate Republicans, or would such a victory prove ultimately phyrric for us, driving the Democratic Party even further toward the DLC and its "third way" vision?