Word: democratization
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...Washington last week, it seemed like 1993 all over again. Hillary Clinton was talking to a bunch of New Democrats about health care. There were, however, a few modifications. Senator Clinton was no longer talking about a sweeping plan to force employers to provide insurance for their workers. Indeed, she favors John Kerry's approach of providing less intrusive tax credits to the uninsured. And the New Democrats she was talking to weren't the usual suspects either: not the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which provided the intellectual muscle for Bill Clinton's presidency but a younger, newer group...
Enter the New Democrat Network, which began life in 1996 as a political action committee--that is, a group able to raise money and donate it to candidates. It was led by a From and Joe Lieberman protege named Simon Rosenberg who, at age 40, is a generation younger than From and markedly less combative. Until this year, the NDN was regarded, accurately, as a DLC clone. But a serious rift has opened between the two groups. "There's a debate in the New Democratic world about where we are going," Rosenberg told me diplomatically. "And if it's true...
...didn't support Dean's candidacy or agree with him on many issues," Rosenberg says, "but I appreciated how he did what he did. I also thought it was time for New Democrats to declare victory in the intellectual wars and make peace with the party infrastructure." In fact, Rosenberg's group continues to give financial support to New Democratic candidates in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, where the traditional Democratic message doesn't work very well. But he has also reached out to the more adventurous liberals in the mainstream party--groups like MoveOn.org and bloggers like Daily...
...opinion, that means under the care of a man and a woman. Germany and Norway have registered partnership laws that give some recognition to same-sex couples, but activists in both countries say they don't expect them to be expanded anytime soon. Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrat-Green government got a law on partnerships through in 2001, but a bill that would have treated same-sex partners the same as married couples on taxes, pensions and adoption stalled in the conservative-dominated Bundesrat. Even domestic partnerships remain off the agenda in Italy, where the Catholic Church...
John Kerry has been a very good democrat these past few weeks, roaming the country, talking up the bran-muffin issues that Democrats really, really care about: education and health care. He's even been a wee bit adventurous. He challenged the teachers' unions with a clever deal--more pay in return for less job protection (it is nearly impossible to fire a lousy teacher these days). Last week he reintroduced his thoughtful health-insurance proposal, which might even be politically plausible--if still not entirely affordable--if the Bush tax cut for people earning more than...