San Francisco Democrats — who have produced some of the most left-wing politicians in America, and some of the most astonishing examples of poor “progressive” governance — want to move the party to the center.
That, at least, is the claim made by some local party activists in the pages of Politico on Monday:
Leaders of the local party argue the famously liberal city has, in recent years, exported one bad political idea after another, leading Democrats astray and ceding power in Washington to Donald Trump and the GOP. They cite “defund the police,” symbolic resolutions about foreign conflicts like the war in Gaza and removing the names of U.S. presidents from school buildings, among other causes they cast as damaging to the party’s brand.
It’s an astonishing pivot for the party in a longtime bastion of progressivism, after moderate Democratic activists made deep inroads in the city last year. Now they are attempting to lead a national conversation around what it takes for Democrats to win — by rejecting what they deride as performative politics and virtue signaling and embracing pragmatism and quality-of-life issues.
Their previously unreported plans, shared first in conversations with POLITICO, call for fully staffing police departments, erasing local regulations that drive up the cost of building new housing and focusing public schools on closing learning gaps for Black and Hispanic students in math and reading. They are also calling for imposing potential age limits on elected officials, a cause of some activists in both the center and left wings of the party.
San Francisco voters have recalled a number of radical elected officials in recent years, and elected reformist Mayor Daniel Lurie last year, but there is a long way to go before San Francisco Democrats become the new standard-bearers of the party’s marginalized centrist wing — especially given the left-wing track record of local politicians like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and lame-duck California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
The Democrats’ last move toward the center, in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, was spearheaded by southern Democrats, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992. His legacy was subsequently set aside by the party, as it rejected Hillary Clinton in favor of far-left Barack Obama in the 2009 Democratic primary. Much of the party today is staffed by Obama acolytes, and its officials keep moving further left.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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