Hillary's fatal flaw

If you thought the 2016 Democratic race would be a coronation, think again. Divisions in the party are emerging. Just like the ones we've seen before.

Almost every contest for the Democratic presidential nomination ends up as a race between a progressive and a populist. Progressive candidates are inspirational. They campaign on liberal social values and win educated, high-minded, upper-middle-class Democrats. Think Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis or Barack Obama.

Populist candidates are tough guys. They champion the interests of the poor and the working class, and win wage earners, disadvantaged minorities and Democrats without college degrees. Think Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale or Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This time, the progressive candidate was expected to be Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). But she isn't running. Nonetheless, the vote is still there, waiting for a candidate. It got one. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) is enjoying a surge of support from progressive Democrats.

The closest thing to an authentic populist in this race is former Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.). He champions working-class interests and, on military issues, is something of a throwback to muscular, Cold War Democrats like John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman and Senator Scoop Jackson. Webb is a decorated military hero who claims to speak for the "forgotten" white working class. If they've been forgotten, it's mostly by Democrats. Once the bedrock of the Democratic Party, many turned into Reagan Republicans. Just 36 percent of non-college whites voted for Obama in 2012.

Ironically, Sanders' message is pure economic populism. "Nobody should earn more than $1 million," he said in 1974. He wrote in 1976, "In the long run, major industries should be publicly owned and controlled by the workers themselves." The people packing his rallies don't look like horny-handed sons of toil. One Democratic pollster put it this way: "The Bernie Sanders voter is still a Volvo-driving, financially comfortable liberal who is pretty much white." Why is Sanders such a draw to white liberals? It's not their populist economic interests. It's their progressive economic values.

In American politics, everybody's a populist. The opposite of a populist is an elitist, and nobody wants to be that. Not Webb, who claims to speak "loudly and consistently on the issue of economic fairness." In his announcement, Webb said, "Let's clean out the manure-filled stables of a political system that has become characterized by greed."

According to the Washington Post, "Webb adds a decidedly more conservative option for Democratic voters," noting, "He has regularly championed the plight of rural and working-class Americans." Is that conservative? It is if you pair a populist economic message with conservative social values. "I have spent my life in and around the American military," Webb said when he entered the race. A Naval Academy graduate, he was a company commander in Vietnam and Reagan's secretary of the navy.

Then what is he doing in the Democratic Party? Answer: Iraq. Webb ran for the Senate in 2006 as a staunch critic of the war in Iraq. He called the 2003 invasion "a strategic blunder of historic proportions." Webb's antiwar views are his lifeline to liberals. And a solid platform from which he can criticize Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the war.

Webb wrote the book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. He was writing about Ulster Protestants who settled the United States more than 200 years ago. We now call them Appalachian whites or country-music fans. They're Webb's people — and they're a constituency whose support for Democrats has collapsed.

In 2010, Webb published an article titled "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege." In it, he wrote that, since the rise of the civil-rights movement, "the supposed monolith of white Anglo-Saxon dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America." He criticized diversity programs for "having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white." Recently, Webb urged caution in the rush to condemn the Confederate battle flag: "We all need to think through these issues with a care that recognizes the need for change but also respects the complicated history of the Civil War."

Webb embodies an obsolete Democratic tradition that combines economic populism and cultural conservatism. How obsolete is it? When Webb won his Senate seat in Virginia, he lost white men by 24 points.

Where does that leave Clinton? In 2008, she easily carried white working-class Democrats in Appalachia. But she still lost. She doesn't want to take that chance again.

Clinton knows that progressives have become the dominant voice in the party. Which is why she declared in New Hampshire last week, "I take a back seat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values."

Clinton is trying to straddle both traditions. She's both a Clinton Democrat and an Obama Democrat. Bill Clinton is a hero to populist Democrats but faces criticism from progressives. Obama is a hero to progressives but has never done well with populists. Hillary Clinton is trying to hold them both.

Previously:
• 06/22/15: A Two-Oxymoron Race
• 06/18/15: Losing Our Religion: Not so fast, Dems
• 06/15/15: Rebellion in the Dems' Ranks
• 06/11/15: Divide and Conquer
• 10/22/14: Dems Are Having Trouble With the Working Class, Just Like the 2010 Midterms

Bill Schneider, a leading U.S. political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and Resident Scholar at Third Way. Along with his work at Third Way, Bill is the Professor of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University and is a contributor to the AL Jazera English network. Bill was CNN's senior political analyst from 1990 to 2009 and was a member of the CNN political team that was awarded an Emmy for its 2006 election coverage and a Peabody for its 2008 coverage. Schneider has been labeled "the Aristotle of American politics'' by The Boston Globe. Campaigns and Elections Magazine called him "the most consistently intelligent analyst on television.''

Comment by clicking here.