The new weapon

Where the party is at

The Democrats were in focus all week. Commentators in the American media picked out the number of times the word ‘‘strength’’ or a variation of it figured in John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on Thursday in Boston.

Throughout the week, they trawled his biography for big and small revelations. They deconstructed reminiscences of his schoolmates and friends. They wondered whether Kerry was too dull. They wondered whether he was too rash after Newsweek dug out the factoid that Kerry began to show a ‘‘daredevil side’’ at Yale, so much so that roommate Bundy refused to get in a plane with Kerry. They commented on his glorious war record and on his choice of wife all over again after she said ‘‘shove it’’ to a reporter.

But for most, it was his ‘‘not-ness’’, as The Economist put it, that remained Kerry’s defining feature, even now, after the reams of newsprint and the flushed speeches, live on television. He is not George Bush. He is not Howard Dean. Nor Clinton. Beyond that, ‘‘Mr Kerry has been hiding in plain sight since 1969 when he returned from Vietnam to lead Vietnam Veterans against the War’’, The Economist said.

But what happens, after the hating—The New York Times addressed its question to the Democratic Party. The NYT pieced together a fascinating tale of a party that is receding in the traditional sense of the term. Because it is increasingly playing second fiddle to a new breed of ‘‘political venture capitalists’’.

The story so far: The Democrats are actually a receding presence on the political landscape, even if they manage to win the White House in November; the party has lost its sense of direction. The Conservative movement on the other hand has established a strong long-term foundation; its message-machine works far more efficiently.

So, those who have stakes in ‘‘progressive politics’’ are arguing that the ‘‘era of the all-powerful party’’ is over and that ‘‘political innovation, like technological innovation, would come from private-sector pioneers who were willing to take risks’’. So, wealthy Democrats are going into huddles in Washington and in New York, in Boston and in Los Angeles. What makes these meetings remarkable, said the NYT, is that while everyone attending them wants John Kerry to win in November, everyone is focused well beyond the next election. ‘‘The plan is to gather investors from each city…and create a kind of venture-capital pipeline that would funnel money to a new political movement, working independently of the existing Democratic party’’.

So where does that leave the party? Where does that leave ‘‘progressive politics’’? The real question, said the NYT, is this: Does the party have a message, an idea, in the era after big government? After all, it is the vacuum at the the core of the party that the torrent of private money is rushing in to fill, creating an ‘‘entirely new kind of independent force in American politics’’. The power is shifting away from the party.

Interestingly, worries of a similar nature are plaguing large sections of the media across the Atlantic as well. In Britain, in The Guardian this week, Jonathan Freedland asked: ‘‘Labour will get its ‘historic’ third term, but what’s the point of winning if there’s no big idea?’’ Senior Labour figures, he said, picture this: that Labour will beat a dilapidated Tory party next year on a less than 50 per cent turnout, ‘‘only to sputter on with no driving sense of mission…they would be in office, but not in power’’.

By the riverside

In Egypt’s Al Ahram weekly, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gently reminisced about a long walk along the Nile, in the year 1988, with Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize winning novelist. They spoke of the river and about Rabindranath Tagore and about ‘‘the pains that are so numerous’’.

‘‘I read Tagore every morning, like a prayer’’ confided Mahfouz, because Tagore is the ‘‘soul of the world’’. The novelist was hopeful, recalls Singh, about the then recent peace overtures and the Camp David spirit. And ‘‘that good might eventually triumph and that the best part of human creativity was yet to be’’ .

Singh carried back with him Mahfouz’s simple message for writers in India. ‘‘Indian writers,’’ he said, ‘‘should carry the spirit of India to the world.’’