| Today's Post article on the new tough-on-big-business Public Service Commission under Gov. Martin O'Malley is a good read; despite the failure of the PSC to substantially mitigate the huge rate hike for Baltimore Gas & Electric customers, they've been aggressive in holding utility companies to account and in trying to lower overall energy bills for consumers through energy efficiency. Gov. O'Malley has gone so far as to call on the PSC to investigate the relationship between BGE and its parent company, Constellation Energy, and "determine whether customers should receive rebates and whether Constellation should be broken up." All of which is fine -- it's good policy, not to mention good politics. Few people, after all, are going to come to Verizon or BGE's defense. What's peculiar about these populist impulses from O'Malley (think also of the living wage bill) is that, when on the national stage, he seems to go out of his way to shun any association with the progressive base of the Democratic Party. He has aligned himself with arguably the least progressive of the major presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, and co-authored a now-infamous op-ed with the Democratic Leadership Council's Harold Ford Jr., in which they sang the usual DLC anthem of bashing partisanship and praising centrism. |
I probably don't have to explain to readers of this blog what's wrong with the DLC's approach to centrism, but I do want to focus on this odd discrepency between O'Malley's rhetoric to the national public and his actions on the local level. Now, O'Malley isn't a true-blue progressive like, say, Eliot Spitzer or Deval Patrick -- his crime control efforts in Baltimore, for example, betrayed a hostile attitude toward civil liberties -- but I think it's fair to say that he has supported quite a few progressive policies as Governor, including the living wage bill, support for education, and various environmental measures. So what explains the mushy centrism found in the WaPo op-ed and elsewhere? It might have something to do what Chris Bowers talks about today: In its efforts to appeal to the broader public, the DLC seems to emphasize winning elections at the expense of crafting policies that will benefit the country. Not that winning elections isn't important, but implicit in O'Malley and Ford's appeal to not ignore the "vital center" is the idea that the political center is won not by persuading moderates to your side, but by changing one's policies to suit the imagined beliefs of moderates. It's an attitude that has served Democrats poorly, the recent FISA bill being only the most recent example. Of course, some Democrats may genuinely hold moderate beliefs on certain issues; but in O'Malley's case, it's clear that he's more progressive than he lets on in the Washington Post opinion section. That might be a good thing for O'Malley's political prospects, but not for the larger progressive cause. |
