"A Dozen Guys"

Jonah Goldberg writes:

My old boss, the late Ben Wattenberg, was a conservative Democrat who worked for decades to keep his party from drifting leftward. In the end, he failed. But he fought a valiant fight. He helped found the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was a kind of precursor to the Democratic Leadership Council, the “New Democrat” organization that helped Bill Clinton burnish his image as a more conservative, “different kind of Democrat.”

I remember asking Ben on more than one occasion why the Democratic Party would allow this or that thing to happen. He’d always respond pretty much the same way. “What Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is a dozen people with fax machines.”

Ben’s point was that the image of the Democratic Party as some formidable organization with legions of political henchmen and bosses capable of imposing their will on the rank-and-file was a leftover from a bygone era.

I think about my conversations with Ben a lot these days. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, who isn’t even a member of the Democratic Party, is the runaway favorite of the party’s liberal base. Donald Trump, an ideologically unmoored billionaire who has changed his party registration five times since 1987 and donated substantial sums to Democrats, has been the Republican front-runner since this summer.