McJoan broke the story yesterday, but as a quick recap:

Daily Kos's mcjoan informs us that The Third Way, a group of Congressional centrists, is proposing a "hybrid" health care "reform" plan that guts the public plan option. That news was followed by a letter to President Obama from nine GOP Senators (all GOP Finance Committee members except Snowe) warning the President against the inclusion of a public plan alternative to private plans.

Third Way's version isn't new; ...[it] pretends to allow a public plan as an alternative to private health insurance, but then deliberately hobbles the public option to ensure that it can't effectively compete with private plans.

There's no room for this kind of thing anymore. Third Way has no natural constituency - instead they play contrarians to mainstream progressive policy.

But it's arguable whether this is even worth making a fuss about - Third Way already limps along. Certainly there's rhetorical value in fighting bad, centrist policy. But part of me worries the beltway media will rise to their defense.

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Matt Bai writes:

Some Democrats, though, and especially those who are apt to call themselves “progressives,” offer a more complicated and less charitable explanation. In their view, Clinton failed to seize his moment and create a more enduring, more progressive legacy . . . because his centrist, “third way” political strategy, his strategy of “triangulating” to find some middle point in every argument, sapped the party of its core principles. . . .

David Brooks wrote a glowing piece on Barack Obama. The piece was an obvious swipe at Paul Krugman's evaluation of Obama. Some, like Matt Yglesias saw Krugman as engaging in payback, demonstrating that they have not been reading Krugman at all on this issue). Here is part of what Brooks wrote:

[Obama] has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. . . . But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. . . . This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

A post-politics "Third Way" has been Obama's message. His message is the most like the 1992 message of Bill Clinton. The question is is that the right one for this political climate? Are Democrats, are progressives, is the country, where they were in 1992? On Hardball yesterday, John Edwards said:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Harry Truman [and Hillary Clinton] said they were going to bring healthcare to the people, what was wrong with them? JOHN EDWARDS: First of all, they were living in a different environment . . . If you look at what is happening to healthcare today as opposed to when Senator Clinton was addressing it, the health care system has gotten much worse. . . . I think we are in a place where the American People are ripe for change. We just need a leader who will stand up.

So the question is do we want and need the Clinton Third Way political approach of the 90s?

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Matt Bennett of Third Way sent me an email following our discussion with the following response to our blogging on the subject of their name and influence.  I'm gratified that Third Way would reach out and have this discussion, and hopefully we'll have more of these back-and-forth's. To briefly recap, Third Way is an insidery think tank that encourages Senate Democrats to push moderate policies with messaging, polling, and communications support.

Matt Stoller has reopened the examination of our name, finding our response to Chris Bowers' post"unsatisfying." We felt he raised some good questions, so we are grateful for the chance to take another crack at it.

We did not invent the term "Third Way" - we borrowed it, quite consciously - from Bill Clinton, whose philosophy of governance we share. We did so to avoid calling our organization something anodyne and anonymous. (Does Washington really need another Institute for the Study of Policy?)

But Clinton didn't invent the term either, and its meaning has evolved dramatically as it has moved through time and between countries:

• In Italy, Benito Mussolini (whose philosophy of governance we do NOT share), used it to mean his brand of fascism.
  
• In Britain, Tony Blair used the term to describe his own government, but it also describes a minor party that advocates Swiss-style direct democracy. And it's a magazine "for people who haven't lost faith in God or lost touch with the world."
  
• In Canada, it referred to a 2006 health care plan.
  
• In the Middle East, a small Palestinian party.
  
• In the Netherlands and parts of Africa, it's used by a group working on human rights in Ghana.
  
• In the US, we couldn't use the URL www.thirdway.com because it's owned by the Mennonites. (It apparently describes the Mennonite-Anabaptist theology.)

All of this is a bit confusing. But as Chris and Matt's posts show, the biggest difficulty we face with our name sprang from the addled brain of Dick Morris, who urged Clinton to "be more Republican than the Republicans." This led to the infamous "triangulation," which has, hopefully, ended up in history's dustbin.

We were left with a challenge. It cannot be denied that the salience of the term "third way" was damaged by Dick Morris. But as history and geography have proven, the term has had many meanings, and we believed it is still very relevant. So four years after Clinton's departure, we chose the name and undertook the task of continuing the evolution of the term.

That effort continued with our response to Chris. We call ourselves "Third Way" because our mission is to help bring progressive politics into the modern era: to move beyond the first way (Gilded Age reform and the beginnings of a post-colonial international system) and the 2nd way (the New Deal/Great Society safety net and America as a world leader), and toward a 3rd way (molding government to conform to the massive economic, security and cultural shifts facing us today). That is, we believe, what Clinton meant by his "bridge to the 21st century" - helping progressive ideas evolve to remain fresh and relevant.

But if we left any confusion with that explanation, let us be clear: we also chose the name because it sends a signal about where we are philosophically, and that is somewhere in that governing and political space known as moderation.

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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.

After my post Wednesday morning asking questions about Third Way, I actually received an email response from the group. I have placed the complete response in the extended entry. The most relevant part of the response dealt with what the term "third way" actually means, and what other two "ways" to which they are relatively "third." Prepare for a long post in the extended entry.

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