Our times demand visionary leadership. The moderate progressivism of Clinton and Obama isn't up to the task

“I am a New Democrat,” Barack Obama told the New Democrat Coalition back in March 2009. Whether he wins a second term or is defeated, the first black president of the United States may be not only the second but also the last of the New Democrats in the White House.

Between the 1980s and the present, the so-called New Democrats have existed in two distinct forms. In the early 1980s, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed, chiefly by white Southern and Western Democratic politicians, with the goal of winning back “Reagan Democrats” — white working-class members of the dying Roosevelt coalition, who combined support for universal social programs like Social Security and Medicare with hawkish military attitudes and socially conservative values on attitudes like abortion, censorship and gay rights. Early in its history, the DLC proposed a program of educational and other benefits for young Americans in return for national military or civilian service, along the lines of the G.I. Bill.

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As presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both reflected the priorities of the second New Democrat coalition, uniting donors from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley with a “new majority” coalition of racial minorities, immigrants, liberal women and young voters. Because Democratic voters are disproportionately poor, this has produced a Democratic Party that, in economic terms, is an hourglass coalition of the top and the bottom. Economic populism frightens the party’s billionaire donors, while social populism, which has often been associated with white working-class xenophobia, racism and religiosity, frightens blacks, Latinos, immigrants and white social liberals. The result is what Mike Konczal and others have called “pity-charity” liberalism — a kind of liberalism that appeals to the sympathy of the rich for the poor, rather than appealing, as the New Deal did, to solidarity among the middling majority. It was a version of progressivism ill-suited to the Great Recession, which demanded the visionary leadership of a Franklin Roosevelt, not the managerial competence of a Nelson Rockefeller.

Quietly and without much notice, the Air Force has reversed its policy of publishing statistics on drone strikes in Afghanistan as the debate about drone warfare hits a fever pitch in Washington. In addition, it has erased previously published drone strike statistics from its website.

Since October, the Air Force had been providing monthly updates on drone strikes -- or in its words "weapons releases from remotely piloted aircraft (RPA)." But today, Air Force Times reporters Brian Everstine and Aaron Mehta discovered something was amiss: The statistics published for February "contained empty space where the box of RPA statistics had previously been." In other words: The drone strike data was gone. But that's not all. The Air Force had also scrubbed drone strike data from earlier monthly reports.

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The Pentagon told Air Force Times it had nothing to do with the change, while Air Force Central Command didn't respond to a request for comment. But Everstine and Mehta point out that the timing of the changes are a tad suspicious given recent actions by a certain Kentucky senator.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

"A widow, who used to do housework and laundry but who was finally left without any work, fed herself and her fourteen-year-old son on garbage. Before she picked up the meat, she would always take off her glasses so that she would not be able to see the maggots; but it sometimes made the boy so sick to look at this offal and smell it that he could not bring himself to eat."

- Edmund Wilson, Hull House (1932)