On the other hand, this Steve Brozak character who’s apparently running for Congress in New Jersey comes off as a cross between a bad SNL sketch and a marionette. Who knew a person could go so long moving his fist back and forth in exactly the same arc, opening and closing his mouth the same way, and keeping the rest of his body perfectly still? That, and while I know this “wouldn’t hesitate for a moment before deploying the army to destroy the terrorists” business isn’t targetted at me, suffice it to say it manages to come off as disingenuous and troubling at the same time.
Tag Archives: Democrats
Speaking of Ehrenreich, Jay at HipHopMusic.Com is pondering the reaction among the center-left blogging establishment to this column, in which she skewers Nader’s 2004 candidacy and repents for voting for his last one. As Jay says:
Most of the A-List lefty bloggers are not really all that far to the left, at least compared to the wild-eyed hippies I hang out with at WBAI. And I don’t have any problem with that, we need a variety of voices out there.. but it’s disappointing to see how smugly contemptuous some of these guys can be towards folks who are a little further left than themselves. Ehrenreich’s crime, evidently, was to voice her support for Ralph Nader in 2000, which so offended these guys that four years later they still disparage her mental health and (quoting Lenin) diagnose her with an “infantile disorder.” And now that Ehrenreich is joining them in rejecting Nader’s 2004 campaign, they can’t let go of their grudge, and just keep on with the sniping and condescension even when she’s on their side…sometimes you can cling to a grudge so tightly it stops the flow of blood to your brain. And if you want those who supported Nader in the past to feel welcome joining you this time, you should probably stop treating them like you think they are idiots.
That last sentence can’t be repeatedly enough. It’s something many of us have said in many fora, but it seems strangely inscrutable to a crowd all too eager (as they should be) to welcome the conversions on the way to Damascus of those who literally, willfully voted for Bush the last time but seemingly congenitally unable to organize or organize with those who cast a vote in 2000 which they see as equivalent to a Bush vote. Had this crowd – or the larger Democratic establishment – channelled a fraction of its anger against those who cast Nader votes against those who systematically expunged Gore votes, things might be very different right now.
As Jay says, one of the more perverse manifestations of this selective Nader-induced blindness has to be the refusal to understand the irony in the following Ehrenreich paragraph:
So, Ralph, sit down. Pour yourself a Diet Pepsi and rejoice in the fact that — post-Enron and post-Iraq war — millions have absorbed your message. You’re entitled to a little time out now, a few weeks on the beach catching up on back issues of The Congressional Record. Meanwhile, I’ve thrown my mighty weight behind Dennis Kucinich, who, unnoticed by the media, is still soldiering along on the campaign trail. In the event that he fails to get the Democratic nomination, I’ll have to consider my options.
Get it? In other words, I too harbor hopes for progressive national leadership of a kind we’re unlikely to see in a Kerry administration, and I continue pushing challenges to the conventional wisdom of the two-party system. But I also recognize political reality as it is now, and however reluctantly, I’m ready to make the sacrifices necessary to see Bush out of office.
Only when she says it, it’s a hell of a lot more clever. To read her paragraph and claim that it shows she hasn’t learned her lesson and isn’t ready to support Kerry is just absurd. For those who did, and who think that I’ve somehow misinterpreted it in the preceding paragraph, let me just say that I know what she means not only because the article makes it abundantly clear but also because she told me so personally six months ago when she came down to New Haven to participate in our women’s arrest. Quoth Ehrenreich: “I’m throwing whatever weight I have behind Kucinich for now, and when the time comes, I’ll throw it behind Dean or whoever the guy turns out to be.” And by the way, when she mentioned having weight to cast, in person as in writing, she clearly meant to be fecicious.
Just watched Congressman Gregory Meeks’ (D-NY) shameful defense of Kerry’s shameful position on equal marriage rights. Tucker Carlson’s criticism of Kerry for opposing gay marriage may be opportunistic, but it’s accurate. Meeks’ defense of him, on the other hand, was predicated on the dangerously inaccurate idea that Kerry has simply shared a personal religious view with no impact on policy, when the truth of the matter is that Kerry’s on record supporting the idea of an anti-gay constitutional ammendment in Massachusetts. Meeks’ claim that Kerry’s opposition to gay marriage is just an example of the diversity of American democracy which the Democratic is protecting is as hollow as a claim that Dick Cheney’s position against liberating Nelson Mandela is an interesting personal quirk which symbolizes the vibrancy of American democracy.
An outrageous and deeply cynical comment by Kos, who should know better:
In addition to suspect signatures, entire reams of signatures can be invalidated if the person collecting them is a felon. Turns out that out of the 122 paid people who gathered the Nader signatures, at least 19 are confirmed felons. One of them was convicted for forgery. Considering that these same felonious petitioners were also soliciting signatures for an anti-immigrant initiative and an effort to invalidate Arizona’s clean election law, invalidating those petitioners and their signatures may actually serve triple duty, helping defeat Nader’s cynical presidential effort AND two nasty Republican-backed ballot efforts.
Not much new to say about this. Voting for Ralph Nader is, I firmly believe the wrong choice for someone concerned with progressive change in this country to make, and overlooks the tremendous difference between the greater and lesser of the two evils for those most directly affected by government policy be it creating jobs, protecting the right to organize, keeping bigotry out of the constitution, or sustaining the earth. But how should Kerry supporters respond? By organizing voters behind the Democratic candidate, and organizing the candidate behind a progressive agenda which co-opts Nader’s issues rather than demeaning his supporters. Not by drawing from the other side’s playbook by seeking out ways to disenfranchise voters by narrowing their democratic choices. Kos, unfortunately does this and descends one step further by lauding Democrats for taking advantage of this country’s abysmal treatment of former convicts, a group whose make-up (in case Kos has forgotten) is disproportionately minority, disproportionately poor, and shamefully swelled with first-time non-violent drug offenders. Felon disenfranchisement is the closest parallel this country maintains to a poll tax. Progressives should be working to undo it, not to exploit it for electoral gambits.
The Center for Voting and Democracy reports back from the Take Back America Conference, at which it advocated the advantages of instant run-off voting (IRV) and offered participants a chance to take part in a simulated IRV election to determine the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with Edwards winning and McCain and Dean in second and third places respectively. Don’t think they’ll be getting offered tickets to the Democratic Convention though. Which is a shame, because a political party which really put a premium on democracy would put IRV front and center in its platform (more of my thoughts on IRV are in the archive here.
A month ago I wrote here about a “Catholic Voting Scorecard” prepared by Catholic Democrats to remind voters and the media that abortion isn’t the only issue on which the Conference of Bishops has taken a contentious stance, and that it shares more of them in common with the Democrats than the Republicans. Now Nathan Newman shares a survey of Catholic Senators compiled by Senator Durbin:
Unsurprisingly, Democratic Senators do poorly on the pro-life rating, but the news is in the Domestic and Foreign Policy ratings. Using the stated legislative priorities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Durbin has ranked the Senators on Catholic positions from the minimum wage to the right to unionize on the domestic front to the Iraq War Resolution and Global AIDS funding on the international side. And some Catholic Republicans are way off the Church’s legislative priorities. Senator Sununu and Santorum received the lowest domestic ratings (23%) with Bunning and Santorum tied with the lowest ratings in foreign policy (6%). Other Catholic GOPers with notably low ratings were Senator Domenici (27% Domestic, 12% International) and Murkowski (33% Domestic, 7% International). BTW Kerry had the highest domestic rating of any Catholic Senator (95%). Of course, conservatives will say only the abortion issue counts. Now, many Catholic leaders may say it counts more– and Durbin gives it its own rating, but it should raise questions in some quarters– hint to the media– that additional stories on who is a “good Catholic” could be done.
Now the Republicans can only be expected to keep exploiting the mantle of faith as long as it appears a potent strategy. But it’s time for the media to wisen up and broaden its sense of what construes Catholic politics. It’s time for the Church to levy the kind of pressure it has on behalf of what it calls “unborn children” towards fighting the poverty faced by children born in this country every day. And it’s time for the Democrats, religious or not, to stop shrinking from hypocritical attacks from Republicans.
Beth, like me, is excited by this piece in the Times on the resurgence of grassroots organizing this election season. As she writes:
That’s great for democracy.
It’s also great for Democrats.
It’s always nice when the interests of the big-D and small-d (D/d)emocrats converge…
Beth argues, inter alia, that door-to-door campaigning makes it possible to customize the candidate for the voter. To which I would say, yes, with a caveat. Yes in the sense that politics in perhaps its best sense is about communities and about the harnessing of political institutions to effect tangible change in individual lives, and when Democrats fail to articulate a vision which speaks to individuals’ and communities’ circumstances and issues, they lose. As Sam Smith argued in a tremendous essay oft-cited on this site:
We got rid machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed out a culture and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well.
One Tammany politician, George Washington Plunkitt, claimed to know every person in his district…In the world of Plunkitt, politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King or George Will. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.
So the first non-logical but necessary thing we must do to reclaim democratic politics is to bring it back into our communities, into our hearts to bring it back home. True politics, in imitation of baseball, the great American metaphor, is also about going home.
Back in December, I chided the Times for an article in its magazine about the Dean organizing strategy which portrayed the belief of regular people that their political involvement, rather than a technocratic project, could be a natural outgrowth of concerns borne out of their personal lives as some sort of leery veureristic parallel to an Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. I’m glad to see the Times get it better this time around, and am hopeful that the rest of the Democrats are beginning to as well.
My caveat would be that crossing the line from customizing the emphasis to customizing the policy tends not to work out so well either. The one thing I’ll say for TV is that it holds candidates accountable nationally for the messages they put forward locally, and helps to curb excesses of “customization” like Lincoln’s two speeches in favor of and against racial equality while stumping on the same day. One political scientist like to compare the nationalization of political campaigns and soft drinks. Apparently, back when my parents were walking to school in the snow (uphill both ways, no doubt), patrons at individual establishments could manually set the ratios of syrup, sugar, water, and whatever the hell else goes into their cola. Once Coke became a product that was the same everywhere, it was necessary to choose a formula that would appeal to the most folks national wide. The same has happened for campaigns, as it’s no longer feasible to customize the message for each district once much of the campaign happens on national television.
The good news here is that it means candidates are responsible in one part of the country for what they tell another and so my gloss on Beth’s point would be a warning that what Kerry can’t do is spin himself on one side of the issue in California and the other in Oregon.
The bad news about the shift away from the grassroots is something I’ve railed against to no end here, but the corollary to this particular piece of good news is the bad news that Democratic candidates have responded to the nationalization of the campaign by whoring themselves out to an illusory median voter rather than bringing new voters into the process by articulating strong progressive visions for the country from New York to Arizona to Pennsylvania to Florida and beyond.
The New York Post has Kerry announcing a running mate by the end of May and offers its “sources'” top picks:
Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsak and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.)
Memo to John Kerry:
Do not tap Bob Kerrey, who besides creating an awkward “Kerry-Kerrey” ticket just made it into the news flouting democracy, the right to organize, and the values of The New School of which he’s President by refusing to recognize the results of its graduate student election.
Do not tap Evan Bayh, who voted for the Bush tax-cut, one of a select group of awful Bush ideas which you actually voted against, and whose presence on the ticket would critically undercut your message on the issue.
Do not tap Ed Rendell, who gave the god-forsaken Democratic Leadership Council an inspiration to hold their conference back home in Philly this summer to celebrate his not being much of a leftist, about a month before he backed down in the face of resistance from a plan to equalize school funding in the state.
You can do better.
David Corn offers a solid defense of Kerry’s progressive credentials – his investigations of Iran-Contra, BCCI, and Vietnam POW/AWOL rumors, and his votes against DOMA and for Clean Elections. He sets out consciously to tell the good parts of the Kerry narrative, and he articulates them well. Corn may very well be right that
there have been times he has shown courage, devotion to justice and commitment to honesty, open government and principle-over-politics. There are few senators of whom that can be said. A full assessment of the man ought to take these portions of his public service into account.
There remain, unfortunately, other portions to be taken into account as well. Alex Cockburn, also in The Nation, a few weeks back summarized some of the major alarms Kerry should be setting off for progressives. But that said, I’m still closer to David Corn than to Cockburn or to this headline from LWB-Idol Sam Smith on this one.
Nick Confessore put together (scroll down to March 4) one of the more judicious assessments I’ve seen of Kerry’s record and various attempts to paint it:
He is pro-welfare reform, a deficit hawk, a good environmentalist, doesn’t want to privatize Social Security or Medicare, supports labor, is basically a free-trader with some occasional gestures towards less-free trade, supports civil unions but not gay marriage, and is a liberal internationalist on foreign policy. In other words, he’s your basic moderate Democrat — not too liberal, not too conservative. That was always his perverse strength. On a scale of one to ten, few Democratic interest groups would give him a ten, but most would give him a seven.
That, as they say, is the good news and the bad news.
The Times is reporting that Nader will announce on Sunday whether or not he’ll be running for President in November, and that all signs point to the former:
After weeks of postponing his decision, Nader will appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to make the announcement, said Linda Schade, a spokeswoman for Nader’s presidential exploratory committee.
`He’s going to be discussing his role in the presidential election,” Schade said of the man whose run for president in 2000 is blamed by many Democrats for tilting a close election in favor of George W. Bush. `He’s felt there is a role for an independent candidate to play.’
This would be, as I argued before, an unfortunate setback for progressive change in this country. Also problematic is this quote from DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe:
I’m urging everybody to talk to Ralph Nader. I’d love him to take a role with our party, to energize people, to get out there and get the message out.
Now I’m all for Ralph Nader energizing people – but that means energizing people to fight the rightward shift of the Democratic party as well as of the country. And whatever McAuliffe thinks “the message” is, if it bears any resemblance to the message he had the party push in the 2002 elections, then it bears little resemblance to the message Nader is pushing, or to the real concerns of millions of working people who choose not to vote or who vote for the Democrats as the lesser of two evils.
So once again, Nader’s wrong to obscure that Democrats are not yet Republicans, and McAuliffe’s wrong to obscure that Democrats are not yet Greens. Both should perhaps take heed of this quote:
What’s needed is courageous leaders unwilling either to sacrifice the imperative of unseating Bush or to obscure the failure of the modern Democratic party to articulate or pursue a truly progressive vision for America.
Dean’s speech tonight – while more faltering than usual for him – resoundingly articulated the lasting legacy of his campaign: a stronger, more combative, more visionary Democratic party. He also talked a lot in the past tense about the campaign, and quite vaguely in the future tense. “We are not done yet.”
Edwards found the perfect soundbyte to celebrate his surge while spinning Kerry’s narrow win: “Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.” And he does a tremendous job of looking like he doesn’t expect the applause but is happy to go along with it.
Kerry’s right to focus, in his speech now, forward on his vision for the country and to direct his anger at the sitting President. “Some of us know something about aircraft carriers for real.” And here come the three words again… There they are. He’s still a less than inspiring speaker though.
CNN has Edwards narrowly ahead of Kerry, 40 to 37%, in Wisconsin, having gained substantially from support among independents. Dean is hovering in the teens. Edwards just gave a good performance on CNN. As before, he’s emphasizing his record on his trade and his personal background as his major differences with Kerry. He struck a charismatic balance between looking forward to “a two man race” and expressing praise for the voices Dean, Kucinich, and Sharpton have brought to the table, and respect for their right to stay in as far as July.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think the conventional wisdom, expressed on CNN by both Bob Dole and George Mitchell, that the Democrats are stronger with a short primary is off the mark, as I think Dubya’s falling approval ratings over this contested primary have shown. A longer primary is certainly better for the left, as it helps keep the candidates honest and accountable.
Josh Eidelson 