Before he left for his “undisclosed location,” Steve had alerted TWN readers about the launch of a new bipartisan initiative, the Partnership for A Secure America. This group had its debut this week (see Jonathan Kaplan’s report in The Hill, at ), and Scot Lehigh’s op-ed in today’s Boston Globe.)
Jim Lobe’s write-up in The Asia Times assesses both the strengths and challenges of this new endeavor.
But I think the real test is whether this group will be able to get equal time for its message within both parties. Will the PSA be asked to brief the DNC and RNC? Will a group of moderate Democrats like the DLC embrace it? Will PSA representatives be invited to talk to Grover Norquist’s famous weekly Wednesday meeting (after all, he did have George Soros over recently!)
And in the wake of the negative response from the left wing of the Democratic Party to Senator Clinton’s decision to chair a DLC-led initiative on revamping the Democrats’ policy agenda, how successful will a group of moderate Democrats be in trying to convince other Democrats to reach across the partisan divide? Clinton’s spokesman Howard Wolfson, clarifying his boss’s stance — “Her point was simply to say that the goals and issues that divide us are less consequential than are the ones we share in common, and that unity is needed in the face of our shared challenge” — is nearly identical to Henry Nau’s advice to Republicans that what unites them is greater than what divides.
— Nikolas Gvosdev
