"Center-Right Nation" Watch: Mark Penn edition

Mark Penn joins fellow corporate pollster Doug Schoen, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer and Jon Meacham as the latest member of the Punditburo to insist that no matter what happens on election day, America is a center-right nation, and therefore a President Obama must not govern as a progressive. Here's the excerpt from Penn's screed in the Financial Times:


Penn is following Schoen's lead in making the Democratic side of this Establishment argument - using the manufactured storyline of Bill Clinton's supposed actions to claim that if a President Obama governs as a progressive, he will end up like Clinton in 1994. Not only is the storyline wholly fake, it implies that nothing has changed in America since 1994. That is, it implies with a straight face that the Bush years and the backlash to those years did nothing to move the country in a progressive direction.

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And that's what's really going on here - the Establishment is attempting to anchor the definition of the "center" right where it is right now. And as dishonest as the arguments from shills like Penn are, those arguments are going to only get louder after election day. If they are allowed to distort whatever election mandate happens on November 4th, they will kill progressive change before it is ever born.

That's not an Onion headline, that's what's really going on, according to the Wall Street Journal's article today about the coming battle for the soul of the Democratic Party (to admittedly use a cliche) if Obama wins. What's interesting about this piece is not so much that there is a battle (anyone who's been reading this blog knows there has been a very intense one), but that it's so out in the open among top Democratic leaders.
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That said, what that inappropriately anticipatory behavior suggests is 1) that there is going to be a battle over whether an Obama administration (if there is one) is going to be a third Bill Clinton term (with all the corresponding incrementalism) and 2) that this battle is going to have very high stakes.