So Chris has been doing a series of posts on the think tank Third Way, a group that offers policy ideas and talking points to centrist Democratic Senators.  I have conflicting information on how influential they really are, but it is instructive to watch the moderates and the centrists in the Democratic Party try to modify their branding.  So I'm going to wade into the intra-party debate.

In Chris's last post, he printed an email from a Third Way rep claiming that Third Way doesn't mean triangulating between the left and the right but is meant to signify the third great progressive era, after the turn of the 20th century and the New Deal.  I found this explanation of the name unsatisfying. Based on the literature of the group, the bio of its President, and the origin of the term itself, it seems very unlikely that what the Third Way rep wrote to Chris is accurate. Here are some facts which give me pause.

• Jonathan Cowan, Third Way's President, founded a group called Americans for Gun Safety that promised to bring a new voice to a debate dominated for too long "by the far left and far right". Triangulating against the left has been a core fundraising strategy for Cowan for years, in fact. For instance... 

• Cowan previously founded a Gen X-focused group in 1992 that called for the privatization of Social Security and was funded in part by third party Presidential candidate Ross Perot.  (There's a whole lot more here, including Cowan in a backwards baseball cap grabbing media attention and an anti-boomer manifesto called Revolution X).

• Third Way transparently and dishonestly used polling data to misrepresent the electorate as whiter, more male, and richer than it really is. Polling the electorate in 2006 and comparing it to 2004 is just misleading, since a Presidential electorate is always wider than a midterm. Moreoever, Third Way's economic 'analysis' on middle class is similarly fraudulent. They misrepresent statistics, change measurement definitions to suit their conclusions, and use standard right-wing spin to hide wealth inequality. If your political statistics and economic work has no analytical rigor and is coming from a political group designed to push certain policies, then if the work is tilted against the middle class, it's hard to see that as anything but right-wing.

• Third Way is a term rooted in the synthesis between the left and the right, and is not a historical description of a third great wave of progressivism. I have never heard of the progressive era referred to as 'the first way', or the New Deal era referred to as the 'second way'. Have you?

• Here's Third Way's prospectus from 2004.

  Progressive centrism is not about splitting the difference between right and left.  Rather, it is a philosophy that favors government regulation to ensure fairness but opposes interference in private lives; it is a "third choice" that replaces the left's defense of big government and the right's frenzy to dismantle government.

  Bashing big government and the left is fairly triangulationistic, and that's the kind of rhetoric that flows through all of Third Way's work right alongside the rhetoric bragging about bringing progressivism into the 21st century.

All of this is to say that I'm glad Third Way is trying to shift their branding away from hating on the left.  But come on.  Don't try to tell us Third Way doesn't mean what everyone knows it means. That's just a naked admission that your brand is dead.