The primary elections, coming up Tuesday, are when the electoral process begins to edge toward the political center. This week’s turnout probably will be small – it usually is – but at least a broader spectrum of Republicans and Democrats will have a chance to express their preferences.
The 2006 primaries don’t have the high-profile battles between centrists and edgier candidates that Colorado saw in 2004. So the turnout may be less than the 30 percent of registered Republicans and Democrats who voted two years ago. But it will still be more centrist than the state nominating assemblies.
True believers in both parties disdain the center, but centrist candidates win in Colorado. That was obvious in 2004.
The state assemblies, where the most ardent partisans hold sway, gave top-line ballot positions to the more conservative and more liberal candidates. Republican delegates favored Bob Schaffer over Pete Coors. The Democrats stunned Ken Salazar by awarding more convention votes to Mike Miles.
But in the primary elections, the centrist candidates trounced the fringier ones. Coors defeated Schaffer by 61 percent to 39 percent, and it was a rout for Salazar, who had 73 percent of the primary vote to just 27 percent for Miles.
The broader the electoral base, the better the chances for a non-threatening moderate.
This frustrates some people. Left-wing Democrats have reason to be especially rankled. They see the Republican right wing succeeding at the polls – up to a point, anyway – and they’re frustrated that their extremism doesn’t succeed the way extremism on the right succeeds.
The Democratic Leadership Council frustrates them, too. The left-wingers argue that the party can’t win again until it embraces its more radical roots, but it’s the DLC brand of centrist, compromising politics that accounts for most of the few victories the Democrats have had in the past decade.
Before the DLC had its “national conversation” in Denver last month, the Democrats’ left was belittling the squishy centrists. Leftist bloggers like to pick on the middle, accusing the centrists of caving in to “big-money interests.”
Usually it’s the Republican right that preaches against the perils of moderation. It has turned “moderate” into an insult. But the Democrats’ left flank aspires toward immoderation as well.
The left likes to say the DLC is living in the past, still celebrating the 1992 victory of Bill Clinton, a DLC poster boy. “They are definitely a relic of a bygone era,” the author of a website called Dailykos.com said of the DLC.
Perhaps. But the only Democrats who win in this part of the country are those relics who exude that creaky old Clinton centrism.
The Democrats’ left might like to clone Teddy Kennedy, or Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold. But even they don’t go as reliably far to the left as the “netroots” would like. The blogging left’s presidential candidate in 2004 was screamin’ Howard Dean, now chairman of the whole Democratic Party and thus comparatively subdued.
These are the people, ever looking for ways to separate themselves from the conventional past, who in 2004 were urged to go to “meetups” instead of old-hat “meetings,” although apparently many of them were too busy communing with their computers to interact with actual people. This may explain why Dean, who raised eye-popping sums of money on the Internet, didn’t have much success in turning out actual supporters for the various steps of the 2004 presidential nominating process.
The Michael Moore school of in-your-face partisanship is not a good model for Democrats, not if they want to win. Ken Salazar is a better role model – or Andrew Romanoff, Joan Fitz-Gerald, Mark Udall or Peter Groff. These are not take-no-prisoners, give-no-quarter ideologues. They believe that government has a legitimate role to play in the health of a community, and it can’t play that role if it’s preoccupied with schoolyard brawls.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
