If it were not for the internet, and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism that it has enabled, Hillary Clinton would already be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, and Barack Obama or another reform-minded candidate would be trailing badly. (On the Republican side, it's harder to make such a clear-cut statement, mainly because the field has been so open on that side. But again, I think the internet and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism it has enabled has helped keep the Republican field from solidifying, and certainly it has helped two of the four remaining candidates, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul, extend their reach. For the purposes of this argument, though, I am going to focus on the Ds, a side that I know better anyway, and maybe one of our Republican contributors will wrestle with this on their side.)
From the 1980s forward, the presidential nominating process -- what political scientists call "the winnowing process" -- has been dominated by two things: the money chase and the big media's power to frame the primary narrative around the race. On the Democratic side, we've seen the same pattern play out every time there has been an open field (i.e., no sitting president running for re-election). One candidate is the favorite of the party's establishment and its major sources of funding, and one tries to create a reform coalition to dislodge the establishment favorite. That, in broad strokes, is the story of Mondale vs Hart in 1984, Dukakis vs Jackson in 1988, Clinton vs Brown in 1992, and Gore vs Bradley in 2000.
In 2004, something started to shift, and we saw a semi-outsider candidate powered mainly by small donations, Howard Dean, nearly steal the prize, but then the voters -- and the establishment and the money -- quickly solidified around John Kerry. The frontloading of the primaries--which has been engineered by a succession of party insiders who have wanted to insure a quick consolidation around a frontrunner (ideally from the establishment) has always given the edge to that better-financed establishment candidate. And certainly once Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire, that was the end of any reform challenge to the frontrunner.
To be clear, I don't think the Democratic pattern can be distilled simply down to Big Money + Party Establishment vs Smaller Money + Outsider Reformer. As Ron Brownstein pointed out in a great column last year, there's a demographic element to this pattern too. In each case cited above, the victorious "insider" candidate has also managed to appeal to the more working-class Democratic base while the "reformer" has tapped more well-educated liberal types. Beer-drinkers vs wine-drinkers. Labor vs eggheads. Ethnic Catholics vs Jews and blacks. Brownstein warned that Obama, with his two best-selling introspective books and Harvard pedigree, might simply be repeating the same Hart-Jackson-Brown-Bradley role, while Clinton, with her base among working women, union members and urban minorities, was more likely to maintain the upper hand. And that may still be the story of 2008.
Now, Clinton vs Obama does have echoes of Gore vs Bradley or Mondale vs Hart. In each case, you have a former VP (or former First Lady, which Hillary is playing as if she was VP) against a reformist Senator. In each case, the reformist campaigned for change and new ideas over experience. But with Obama, two things are different.
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