Matt Welch worries about the implications of Santorum’s second-place finish because of what Santorum represents, but it was his discussion of recent Democratic nominating contests that caught my attention (via Andrew). Welch writes:

Kerry’s almost dutiful drubbing, meanwhile, activated two restive strains within the Democratic Party — the anti-war anger that had clustered around third-place finisher Howard Dean, and the firmly anti-Clintonian economic populism of runner-up John Edwards. The left’s national center of gravity, so long anchored in Democratic Leadership Council-style notions of free trade, fiscal sobriety, and even rhetorical tackling of entitlement spending, lurched significantly back to its pre-Reagan fondness for government taking a robust lead role in just about everything.

The 2008 Democratic National Convention proved to be the public funeral for a “third-way” Democratic politics that had produced Bill Clinton, Al Gore (the 1.0 version), Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry. Even Hillary Clinton during the convention bashed the economic policies that her husband had championed, even while basking in the credit of the results they achieved. The 2004 losers helped dictate and predict what the 2008 winner would do once in office [bold mine-DL].

That doesn’t seem right. Progressives in the Democratic coalition became more assertive and influential during the second Bush term, and it was the unpopularity and failures of the Bush administration that energized progressive activists while also radicalizing Democrats that had been inclined towards more “centrist” views in the past. Neoliberalism became tarnished because of the association of some neoliberals with “centrist” foreign policy hawkishness on Iraq, but on many domestic issues the party still accepts neoliberalism to a remarkable degree. Bush administration failures, particularly those related to the Iraq war, fueled the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, and success in 2006 strengthened the position of progressives within the party and paved the way for Obama’s successful mobilization of the “McGovern coalition” that had been unable to propel an insurgent presidential campaign to victory in the previous thirty years. I would add that it wasn’t Dean’s showing in 2004 that “dictated and predicted” Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. It was the disastrous course of the war between 2004 and 2008, Obama’s earlier opposition to the war, and his commitment during the campaign to end the war in Iraq that determined this.

It is an exaggeration to say that the “third way” was buried in 2008. Let’s remember that the eventual 2008 Democratic nominee ran a fairly cautious campaign that put him to the right of both Clinton and Edwards, and it is difficult to see how Obama has actually governed as a left-populist. He pandered to anti-NAFTA sentiment as a candidate, but in office he has been a less-than-enthusiastic but reliable supporter of free trade agreements. Indeed, on virtually every issue Obama has arguably been less liberal than Bill Clinton as these things are conventionally defined, and even on health care the legislation that Obama signed was far less ambitious than anything Bill Clinton proposed, and for that reason it remains unsatisfying to many progressives. It must be mystifying to those progressives how anyone on the other side of the spectrum can see Obama as a left-wing ideologue, just as it was baffling to many of us on the right how Bush could be perceived as a big right-winger. The more insufferably “centrist” an administration is, the more its partisan opponents feel compelled to portray it as radical.