Mitt Divides Democrats to Conquer Them

At first blush, Mitt Romney’s new line may look a little weak. He laments the differences in governance between Barack Obama and his most recent Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton.

ROMNEY: New Democrats had abandoned those [old school liberal] policies, but President Obama resurrected them, with the predictable results. President Clinton, remember he said the era of big government is over. President Obama brought it back with a vengeance. Old school liberals saw a problem and thought a government program was the answer. ObamaCare is the fulfillment of their dreams. Old school liberals envision government guiding and providing every need of every citizen. Government will be at the center, the most important player of our lives. It’s called the ‘Life of Julia,’ and it’s a cartoon.

From there, Romney fisks the Julia cartoon that the Obama campaign rolled out last Thursday, to disbelief and derision from us here on the right.

The HillBuzz wing of the Democratic Party has never liked Barack Obama. He played the race card against them four years ago, his win cost them Hillary Clinton’s presidency and so forth, but they despise him for his policies as much as anything else. As much as the media enjoys playing up splits among Republicans, the Democrats have been engaged in a core philosophical battle for the past three decades. The old school liberals are as Romney describes them, tax and spend liberals who see government as the solution to every problem. The New Democrats want to move the party more to the center, and tend to favor policies that are friendlier to the free market. They tend to be Jacksonian on national defense, unlike the old school “blame America first” liberals of the past and, in Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the present. The Clintons are New Democrats, and won two terms as such while leaving behind memories of a strong economy that they believe vindicated their side of the Democrats’ intramural fight. But Obama’s 2008 win moved the Democrats far to the left of where Bill Clinton left the party at the end of his two terms. Clinton and his New Democrats had worked for years to get the leftist stain off the face of their party as much as at was possible. Obama undid all that and has spent his entire term moving ever more toward the McGovernite policies that have made it so difficult for Democrats to take and hold the presidency. On policy, Obama has left the New Democrats behind.

With the old school liberal vs. New Democrat line, Romney is re-opening that fight and reminding moderate Democrats that they opposed Obama four years ago in the primary and could vote against him in the fall. Romney is vindicating the New Democrats and helping them justify electing him, on the basis that Obama has been bad both for the country and for the Democratic Party. The 2010 mid-term shellacking lurks just offstage, whispering to these Democrats that Obama’s old school liberalism lost Democrats the House and governorships and state legislatures.

It’s a shrewd argument, tailored to Democratic voters Mitt Romney can capture in November, and he should stick with it. Romney may be thinking that something like a 1984 landslide is possible, when Walter Mondale ran against President Ronald Reagan as an openly liberal Democrat, and lost 49 states.