Remember when we couldn't wait for the Clintons to get out of the White House so we'd never have to hear about these people again?
How could we have been that dumb?
In The Splintering of the Democratic Party, I pointed out how Howard Dean’s accession to the party chair created a problem by pushing the Democrats too far to the left. Soros was underwriting him, Move On and the entire party.
But for a Democrat to win, he (or she) would have to peel off a significant chunk of Republicans and independents, and occupying the Sensible Center is the only way to do it. Otherwise, it’s McGovern time all over again. Hillary has spent her first term setting herself up as a pragmatist and centrist, no doubt receiving a lot of coaching from her husband who was a master of triangulation.
With Dean pushing the party to the Hard Left, it becomes necessary to replace him, preferably with Harold Ickes, but that would open up a fight that would split the party. Hillary doesn’t need to be the heavy in an internal war to purge the Hard Left. They, after all, are the base. What Hillary needs is to control the purse strings. If she has that, then it doesn’t matter who chairs the party.
The coup is her seduction of Soros. If he’s underwriting Hillary’s effort, that means he has abandoned Move On and Dean, its avatar. It means that Hillary’s shadow party will harvest the unions for money while Dean will harvest the Hard Left. But Ickes will have the power while Dean becomes merely a figurehead.
In politics, always follow the money.