WaPo | A super PAC formed to reelect Barack Obama in 2012 is driving
activists to congressional town halls. Veterans of Bill Clinton’s
administration are joining marches and plotting bigger ones for the
spring. Democratic senators who had befriended Jeff Sessions in the
Senate voted — 47 to 1 — against his nomination for attorney general.
Three
weeks into President Trump’s term, the Democratic Party and progressive
establishment have almost entirely adopted the demands of a restive,
active and aggressive base. They are hopeful that the new activism more
closely resembles the tea party movement, which embraced electoral
politics, than the Occupy Wall Street movement, which did not.
The
pace of the activists, and the runaway-train approach of Trump’s
administration, have given them little time to puzzle it out.
“He
has a strategy to do so many things that he overwhelms the opposition,”
Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said of Trump, “[but] he’s creating
the largest opposition movement I’ve seen in my lifetime in the United
States.”
After previous defeats, the modern Democratic Party
typically plunged into a discussion between a moderate wing and a
liberal wing. George McGovern’s 1972 loss led to an internal party
battle against the New Left. After Walter Mondale’s 1984 defeat, a group
of moderate strategists formed the Democratic Leadership Council. After
the 2004 defeat of John F. Kerry, a new generation of like-minded
strategists launched Third Way, with a focus on lost moderate voters.
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