Table of Contents
Praise for The Argument
Sharply written, exhaustively reported.
Nick Gillespie, The New York Times Book Review
[Matt Bais] unsparing, incisive, and altogether engaging book is a must-read for anyone unaware of the seismic shift thats afoot among the Democrats.... A layered, colorful portrait of a party in transition... an energetic and timely narrative. Jose Antonio Vargas, The Washington Post
"Whether writing in the first person or the more traditional reportorial third person, [Bai] is a superb stylist and a skilled selector of telling, sometimes humorous, anecdotes. Steve Weinberg, The Boston Globe
Bais storytelling abilities are so deft and the tale he tells is so important that you dont have to be a political junkie to enjoy this book.
The Connecticut Post
Bai is an excellent writer and reporter with a deft touch for revealing character and a reliable gift for crafting memorable phrases.... This book underscores his emergence as an important new voice in the political dialogue.
Ronald Brownstein, The American Prospect
Matt Bai combines the jaded eye of a gossip column with the arc of a Greek tragedy in this incisive tale of Democratic soul-searching.... Bai has deep access to Democratic chieftains and a knack for the polemical vignette.... Bai succeeds as a sly observer of the lefts parlor talk, conferencespeak, and off-the-cuff confessions. Mother Jones
Matt Bais The Argument is the most significant book to date on the upcoming 2008 elections.... Bai has a novelists eye for the details of the two-way flow between politics and personality, and his extraordinary book is an expos of sorts, revealing the emotional underpinnings of the new wave of liberal activism thats reshaping the Democratic Party.... The new left-wing activists are a subject so rich in fraught personalities as to be a treasure trove for a novelist. Until that novel comes along, though, the uncanny characters that Bai has brought to life will do very nicely. Fred Siegel, City Journal
Matt Bai has written a slice of history in progress. It is a fun read and will no doubt spark all sorts of debates and disagreements. Don Hazen, AlterNet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matt Bai writes on national politics for The New York Times Magazine, where his work has twice been featured in The Best American Political Writing. Previously, he was a reporter for The Boston Globe and a national correspondent for Newsweek. He has also been a fellow at Harvards Kennedy School of Government. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
For more information, please visit www.mattbai.com.
This book is for all those voters
who have generously shared with me
lifes rarest commodities:
their time and their wisdom.
May you have the government you deserve.
Too often in the recent past, we have succumbed to the temptation of believing that more money, more slogans, more evasion of confrontation, more sophisticated media advisors, more access to television, more courtship of lobbyists and interest groups would satisfy the emptiness in our souls. It was never to be. There is no political salvation down that path. All the money in the world, the cleverest media manipulators, the pollsters and focus-group experts cannot provide one thing: the soul of a party.
GARY HART, The Courage of Our Convictions
Preface
When I think back on it now, I suppose this book began as so many of the most important things in life do, reallywhile rumbling in a van through the soybean fields of eastern Iowa. It was April 2003, and I was on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, traveling with Howard Dean, who was just then becoming a serious contender for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. I found Dean interesting, but what interested me more were his crowds. I had seen my share of standard political rallies, but I was completely unprepared for the depth of partisan passion and fury that swelled within the gymnasiums and community centers on our route. Im Howard Dean, and I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party! the candidate would thunder, hitting his signature line, and long-suffering liberals found themselves literally moved to tears.
In Washington, Deans campaign was written off as the latest of the partys quadrennial childrens crusades, an antiwar juggernaut fueled by the same college kids whose parents had screamed for Gene McCarthy. But when you saw it up close, you knew it was more than that; not only were those kids at the Dean rallies, along with their hippie parents, but so were housewives and middle-aged labor guys and a lot of people who didnt even call themselves Democrats. Having endured eight years of Clintonian centrism, an election they believed was stolen, and then, finally, their partys own capitulation on the war in Iraq, Iowa liberals had had enoughnot just of George W. Bush and conservative Washington, but of what they saw as their own partys ineffectual pragmatism. Dean, the former Vermont governor with the hard, gravelly voice, had tapped into a well of resentment that Democrats back in Washington, and those of us who covered them, simply didnt understand.
Something was happening under the surface of Democratic politics, and it had nothing to do with the usual politicians or consultants. What I had glimpsed in Iowa was the emergence of the first political movement of the Internet age.
And so, in the months and years after I first traveled with Dean, I set out across the country to find the places where this nascent movement was coalescing and to trace its arc. My initial investigation led me to a cadre of elite financiers, led by George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire, who had begun to meet in secret, pulled together by a mysterious and closely guarded set of PowerPoint slides. This weird discovery was followed by others that led me on a meandering odyssey to every part of the continental United States (and Alaska) from the Hollywood mansion of the television producer Norman Lear to a hotel overlooking the Vegas strip with sparkling chocolate fountains. I walked the streets of Columbus with door knockers and drove the California coast with celebrity bloggers. I sat with former president Bill Clinton, who, forced to defend his legacy against this liberal insurrection, had lost his cool in front of a clandestine gathering of millionaires in Texas. And I met lesser-known politicians like Mark Warner and Ned Lamont, whose early forays into this new movement foreshadowed challenges that now confront the partys 2008 presidential candidates.
Returning to Washington after these trips, I would encounter colleagues and party leaders who remained, as ever, fixated on the deal making in Congress, on who was up and who was down in the midterm elections, and on the early jostling for the 2008 campaign. Id hear about how elected Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the partys leaders in the House and Senate, were supposedly determining the direction of the party. And I began to suspect that all of us who followed Democratic politics had been missing the story. The real reinvention of the party was happening not in Washington, but in New York and San Francisco and Denver and, yes, even in Alaska. More than at any time since the 1960s, the party and its leading politicians were being forced to respond and adapt to a popular movement beyond their controla widespread uprising led by baby boom liberals, wealthy investors, and defiant bloggers whose faith in party and country had been severely shaken by twelve years of Republican rule.
