Tag Archives: Democrats

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Turns out that, as I posted my thoughts, (scroll down) in the early hours of this morning, on why Nader would be wrong to run and why the Democrats would be wrong to respond to a Nader run by Sister-Souljah-ing the left, my classmate Dan Munz had, a mere forty minutes earlier, posted his (brilliantly titled) thoughts on why Nader would be wrong to run, and why the Democrats would be right to respond by Sister-Souljah-ing (his reference) the left. It’s a small shtetl after all, eh?

Dan and I disagree, like many registered Democrats who fall into this debate, on both a tactical level and an ideological one, and given that we apparently both lost sleep last night setting forth our visions for the party, I won’t rehash that debate except to say again that I believe the Clinton years and the Gingrich revolution are only the most recent demonstrations of the danger in seizing the center and the power of offering a choice rather than an echo. It’s not surprising, of course, that Dan and I are each largely convinced that a party more in line with our respective ideology would also be more effective at building a governing majority (that, of course, is part of the weakness of the “electability” discourse).

Dan is right, of course, that to argue that there’s no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is a weak straw-man argument, and one that hurt Nader’s case. I would add on the one hand that it’s an argument that’s particularly easy to make from a position of relative privilege, in which the comparatively progressive reforms that Clinton accomplish – the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Earned Income Tax Credit, more progressive NLRB nominees, and others – make relatively little impact on one’s life. I would add on the one hand, however, that relatively few of those who condemn the two-party consensus in America would argue that there is, in fact, no difference between the parties (some of course do for rhetorical effect).

Dan goes on, however, to make an equally unfounded claim: that there’s no difference between the Greens and the Democrats. While Dan’s right that Nader’s agenda is “certainly more in alignment with Democratic than Republican values,” that isn’t saying much. It’s hard for me to imagine many of the sixteen issues Nader lists as the core of his campaign as the centerpieces of a Kerry Presidential run. “Full public financing of public elections with the necessary, broad changes for a more fair and representative election process, replacing present charades?” “Universal health insurance — single payer embracing prevention, quality and cost controls”? “A redirected federal budget for the crucial priorities of our country and away from the massive waste, fraud and redundancy of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” as well as the massive costs of corporate welfare”? Dan may not share these as priorities – or even as goals – but I think it’s disingenuous to argue that Nader doesn’t stand for anything the leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t.

Dan argues that “when I see an organization I don’t like, I try to join and persuade it to change. I don’t bail and get all distructive.” I’d argue that social change depends on having folks on the inside and the outside of institutions – be they the Democratic party or, say, the State Department. The system needs to be both kicked and dragged (I’ve tried to act this out with my arms and legs a few times, and I’m told it’s been amusing, if perhaps not enlightening). Dan argues that

These days, a lot of the major battles have been settled, and largely in Democrats’ favor. Both parties now admit we need civil rights, we need social security and other entitlement programs, we need better health care, we can’t be completely isolationist, &c.

To which I’d respond, along the lines I alluded to in my earlier post, that today neither party is proposing the kind of ambitious, radicial, structural change – in areas from public school funding to healthcare to the crippling effects of the drug war – demanded before we could really talk with a straight face about “starting gate equality” for Americans of color, and those who do find themselves labelled “race-baiting demagogues” and are candidates for the Sister Souljah treatment; that neither party is articulating reforms like raising the income ceiling on the payroll tax to make social security a more secure entitlement and a less regressive tax; that neither party is offering the kind of healthcare reform that has saved costs, saved lives, and saved millions from healthcare insecurity in most industrialized nations; and neither party has offered an comprehensive alternative to the use of unilateral military and economic power as American leadership in the global community. As Dan said, “One man’s homogeneity is another man’s consensus…”

Dan and I agree that Nader would be wrong to mount a 2004 Independent Campaign. And we agree that the way for the Democrats to respond to a Nader challenge would be to illustrate the real differences between them and the Republicans. The difference, maybe, is that I think to so compellingly would require more than just a shift in rhetoric.

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That liberal media, at it again:

Representative Dennis Kucinich has every right to keep campaigning despite his minuscule vote tallies, but he should not be allowed to take up time in future candidate debates. Neither should the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is running to continue running, not to win

Kucinich and Sharpton were, of course, perhaps the two most interesting candidates in those debates. And their presence raises the burning issues muffled by the consensus of the Democratic establishment. Lieberman’s presence, for that matter, should force the four NYT-approved candidates to argue for a vision of the Democratic party as meaningfully to the left of the Republicans – practice that could only help them.

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I thought Howard Dean’s Meet the Press interview this morning was in large part quite good. He was forthright in assessing what went wrong in Iowa and New Hampshire –

We spent a lot of money in Iowa and New Hampshire trying to win. We’re were trying to do essentially what John Kerry is now doing. We were planning on trying to get a huge momentum out of Iowa and it didn’t work…We really wanted to try to capitalize on the momentum that we had. And when things started going south after the campaign got really rough in Iowa, because when you’re the front-runner of course, everybody’s whacking you every day, we got in a fight with Dick Gephardt and we both ended up third and fourth instead of first and second…It was my fault. We knew what we were doing, we took a gamble, and it didn’t pay off.

– and how the campaign lost stream:

There are a lot of analyses of what went wrong in our campaign…The best one, though, was an article in The New York Times which said that the campaign was so much about message that I forgot that it has to be about me, too, that people have to like you if they want to make you president of the United States. And I think there’s some truth to that.

I think Dean’s right that there’s some truth in that – people want a trustee as well as a delegate in Washington. I also think, though, that voters want someone who’ll fight for them, and that just as few organizing conversations are successful if you’re not convinced the organizer is willing to argue with you and change your mind, few candidates win voters’ faith for the general election if they aren’t seen fighting to win the primary.

He also used that moment as a chance to defend the increasing visibility of his wife:

That’s why I asked Judy to come out on the campaign trail, who incidentally had such a good time the other day, yesterday, which was our anniversary, she had volunteered to come again, much to my astonishment. But that’s why I asked Judy to come out, at Senator Harkin’s wife’s suggestion, so that people would get to know me…She’s not a prop. I always said when we first ran, I promised I would never–I mean, I didn’t promise, but I knew I would never use her as a prop, but I do think that people have to know something about Judy to know something about me. It’s the person I married; it’s my life partner…They have to get to know Judy, and I actually think, which is a funny thing to say after two years on the road, that people don’t feel like they know me that well and I’ve got to figure out a way to let them do that more.

I think in large part my feeling on this comes down to agency – is she there because she wants to be? And that, of course, is impossible to assess.

Looks like this will be Dean’s stance on Roy Neel’s corporate background:

First of all–Roy Neel hasn’t been a Washington lobbyist for four years, first of all. Secondly, he was Al Gore’s chief of staff; he was Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and he’s a great organizer and he’s a good guy…[Neel] has not been in the lobbying business for four years. He’s been a college professor. And I think he’s been good for the campaign and he’ll continue to be good for the campaign…He did exactly what he was supposed to do and didn’t break any–not only didn’t break any laws, he didn’t break any ethics guidelines…What I want is a–and what we have–we have not changed what we’re doing in this campaign a bit. We’re getting enormous support still from the grassroots. It does help to have somebody who knows something about how to run campaigns organizing your campaign. It had been my hope that Joe would stay on, because he’s such a brilliant strategist and he built the campaign, and I think that would have been a tremendous team to have Roy running the inside stuff in the campaign, making sure that the trains ran on time, and having Joe’s brilliant strategy from the outside…

Not terribly convincing, but that’s because he’s defending a move that’s quite difficult to come up with a coherent and credible defense for. Someone should definitely tell the Governor to forswear the expression “making sure that the trains run on time” unless he really wants to make us think about the major benefit of fascism. He does make a good case against the current frontrunner:

…that is a very different thing than taking $650,000 of special-interest money after you claim that you don’t and you’re railing against special interests, as Senator Kerry has and as George Bush–what George Bush has done is much, much worse than what Senator Kerry did. The only thing that bothered me about John Kerry is that his whole campaign, which borrowed from me, was “Well, we’re going to get the special interests out of Washington.” Come to find out, he’s taken more special-interest money in the last 15 years than any other senator…We have 11 percent of our contributions of $2,000 checks; 89 percent is less than that, and that’s not true of any other candidate running for the presidency.

Dean also defended his critique of the DLC:

As you know, Tim, I don’t take it lightly when people go after me and eventually I’m going to respond. Look, eventually we’re going to need the Democratic Leadership Council in order to beat George Bush. We’re going to need every single Democrat that we can possibly get. But, you know, I don’t lie down in front of people who want to run me over with a steamroller.

And he slammed Bush on pre-war intelligence:

The president was not truthful with the American people about why we went into Iraq. Now, we don’t know why he wasn’t truthful. We don’t know if he was given bad information which he passed along to the country or if he and the administration at the highest levels decided to manipulate the intelligence reports. We don’t know. But we do know that most of the things the president said about why we were going into Iraq were not true…It is true that Saddam Hussein committed genocide. That was under President Bush the first’s watch…

And he tried to distinguish himself from other candidates as an economic realist:

There was no middle-class tax cut in this country. There was a huge middle-class tax increase because of the fiscal policies of George Bush. So for John Kerry to get upset that I want to get rid of all the Bush tax cuts is ridiculous…You know what I’m going to say? I’m going to say, “Mr. President, most people in this country would gladly pay the same taxes they paid under Bill Clinton if they could only have the same economy they had under Bill Clinton.”

Me, I’d rather have a tax structure, entitlement system, and economy like we had under FDR – or even, say, Nixon.

Dean also argued that voters would accept higher prices at Wal-Mart from fair trade policy:

Well, you know what they get in return? American jobs stop going overseas, illegal immigration is reduced to a trickle because people are going to make money in their own countries instead of having to come here to feed their families. And you get much better world security because you develop middle classes in developing countries. I think that’s a pretty good tradeoff.

And he slammed the jobless recovery:

No jobs. Where are the jobs? The 1,000 jobs created in December? This president is the first president since Herbert Hoover who has a net loss of jobs. You know, you can talk about all the numbers you want on the front page of the newspaper, but until your neighbor has a job, and you’re not worried about losing your health insurance, the economy has not turned up.

He also reminded progressives like myself why we should be anxious about him:

You can have health insurance for every American, which costs exactly the same amount as we’re putting into Iraq every year now. But you cannot have family leave and all this other list of things.

Dean called the leadership of the NRA “nuts” but argued that being endorsed by the NRA for Governor will help him more than it’ll hurt him:

Now, look, I’m not going to get the NRA endorsement [for President] because I do support the assault weapons ban and I do support background checks and extending it to instant background checks to gun shows laws, but nobody is going to be able to push me around and say that I’m for registration or all that stuff which they’re going to do for all the other Democrats because I was endorsed eight times by the National Rifle Association when I was governor of Vermont. That stuff matters. That’s an electability issue.

What I wish he – or any of the Democratic candidates – would say is that guns should be regulated because they’re dangerous, but the way to stop urban crime is through massive investment in jobs, education, and income support. But then again, I’m no fiscal conservative.

Dean handled the “scream” pretty much just right:

I was having a great time. Are you kidding? Look at the expression on my face. I’ve never had so much fun…You know, I never lost my temper once in 12 years at any staff member when I was in the Legislature, although I did blow up at a few legislators from time to time. This is ridiculous.

And he promised to stay in the race as long he’s viable:

I’m not going to do anything that’s going to harm the Democratic Party if we get blown out again and again and again. You know, if somebody else gets more delegates and they clinch it, of course, I’m not going to go all the way to the convention just to prove a point. But I’m going to be in this race as long as I think I can win.

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Nathan Newman, who supported the Faustian Prescription Drug Deal, is right to argue that the increase in projected costs presents the Democrats an opportunity to call for the corporate sweetheart deals built into the legislation to be reversed – to make this an object lesson in which party it is that’s breaking the bank, and where the cash is going. Here’s hoping the Democrats indeed take the chance to take a stand. They still would have been better off taking a stand against the damn thing when it was time to vote in the first place.

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My predictions for tomorrow:

Kerry comes in first, simply because Dean hasn’t had enough time to catch up after recovering from whatever combination of his combative stance in Iowa/ his overly-apologetic response to his combative stance in Iowa/ his insufficiently apologetic response to his combative stance in Iowa/ media harping on an imagined combative stance in Iowa/ some combination of the above one may choose to blame for the beating he took in the polls in the past week. Dean comes in second and he and Kerry both pitch themselves as comeback kids; Kerry as usual finds the media more credulous than Dean. Dean comes in closer to Kerry than to the Edwards, who comes in third behind him, lacking the committed and organized constituencies Kerry and Dean have mobilized. Clark does not much, if any, better than he’s been expected to the past few days, and likely even worse – in any case drastically worse than he was expected to a few weeks ago before Kerry stole his part as the anointed “Anti-Dean” and his campaign fumbled and failed to advance a coherent vision or take advantage of what could have been a real head start to build a machine in New Hampshire. If Clark does particularly badly, he strikes me as more likely than any of the other candidates to drop out shortly after, thus ending further embarassment and leaving his Presidential run as a whimsical coda on what many see as an accomplished career as a military public servant. Lieberman does worse than Clark, claims that he exceeded expectations, and argues that Kerry and Dean are both soft on defense and that only he represents a real choice between extremists. Kucinich does much better than Sharpton.

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Nathan Newman offers a good reason to like Kerry. Mickey Kaus offers several reasons not to. As I see it, Kerry’s greatest offense of the past months has been telling Eric Alterman in early December

Eric, if you truly believe that if I had been President, we would be at war in Iraq right now, then you shouldn’t vote for me

and then using the capture of Saddam Hussein to argue Howard Dean was weak for opposing the war.

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The Democrats’ choice to have a response to Bush tonight by Bill Richardson simulcast in Spanish is a good one on both counts: The Democrats can use Spanish without hypocrisy because unlike the GOP, they haven’t been fighting to keep the fastest-growing language in the US out of schools and voting booths (certain elements, of course, can be depended on to deride this, like any move for inclusion or any policy benefiting people of color, as patronizing/ race-baiting/pandering); and Richardson is a successful and respected Southern Latino Governor who recently came into the spotlight negotiating with North Korea – and an excellent candidate for Vice President.

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A couple thoughts on the Iowa caucuses, a topic on which much ink (real and virtual) has and no doubt and will be spilled:

As someone who, despite significant reservations, believes Dean would be the best of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, I was disappointed to see him come in third. As someone who believes with great conviction in the organizing model that Dean has employed, I was disappointed to see that it was not enough to win him the Caucus. That does little to take away from the tremendous progress the Dean campaign has made and the ways it which it’s destabilized some of the unfortunate Clintonian paradigms of building power in the Democratic party. I’d also argue that losing Iowa does less than many think to hurt Dean’s chances of seizing the endorsement. One of the ways the press has hurt Dean over the past months, besides applying a level of cynicism and scrutiny to him denied in coverage of, say, the sitting President, is by raising the bar for his importance impossibly high. It’ll be interesting to see whether Dean is as effective as Clinton at seizing on and drawing momentum from underdog status. Some have argued that losing Iowa is better for Dean because it leaves several “anti-Dean” candidates in the running going into New Hampshire and stymies efforts to coalesce behind one Dean alternative – I guess we’ll see how that plays out as well.

It’ll be interesting to see what Kerry makes of the new attention and the new media narrative offered to him. Specifically, I wonder to what he and his staff attribute his late surge. The role he takes over the next weeks may hint at who it is they he thinks is propelling his rebirth as a candidate.

Looks like the zenith of Dick Gephardt’s political career has passed. The interesting story here may be his failure to marshall stronger support from the labor movement – instead of garnering the endorsement by the AFL-CIO as a body some expected, he saw the two largest unions in the body go to Dean. I think the Cold War AFL-CIO (there’s a reason they used to call it the AFL-CIA) model suggested to some by his support for the war in Iraq, and the tension it created, speaks to shifts in the American labor movement.

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This issue of In These Times includes compelling pieces by Andy Stern and Gerald McEntee, Presidents of the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the two largest unions in the AFL-CIO. SEIU and AFSCME, the leading private and public sector unions respectively in the US, surprised many pundits who view them as rivals when they together endorsed Howard Dean a few months back. Stern argues rightly that the Democratic party cannot survive without the labor movement:

At our best, unions are one of the few institutions with progressive values that have millions of members, multimillion dollar budgets and the ability to do grassroots organizing on a large enough scale to counter the power of today’s corporations.

The 2000 presidential election clearly showed the difference unions can make.

* Bush won in nonunion households by 8 points, but lost in union households by 37 points.
* He won nonunion white men by 41 points, but lost union white men by 24 points.
* He won nonunion gun owners by 39 points, but lost union gun owners by 21 points.
* He did 16 points better among nonunion people of color than among union people of color.

So if more workers in Florida, Missouri, Ohio and other states that went narrowly for Bush had been union members, the past three years in this country would have been very different.

He offers three priorities for organized labor: legal defense of the right to organize as a human right, alliance across movements and communities in fighting for just causes, and prioritizing organizing. The latter two are arguably what accounted for the historic success of the CIO before and during the New Deal period, and are central to the New Unity Partnership Stern is spearheading with the Presidents of HERE, UNITE, the Laborers, and the Carpenters. The decline in the first, from the Taft-Hartley Act (which only Dennis Kucinich among the Democratic candidates has promised to repeal) to Reagan’s crackdown on the Air Traffic Controllers, is at the centerpiece of the counter-revolution against the labor movement over the past decades. And Bush, as McEntee argues, has pushed that counter-revolution further:

Indeed, at no other time during my 44 years in labor have I seen members of my union-the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)-nor the House of Labor, more dedicated to getting one person out of office.

And we all know why. Three million jobs lost in three years-the most since the Great Depression: 66 million Americans with inadequate healthcare coverage or no healthcare coverage at all; a median household income that has fallen for three straight years; 3 million Americans who slipped into poverty in 2001; ergonomic rules scrapped; overtime regulations attacked. The list goes on and on…the Bush administration invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act-an action that hadn’t been taken in 25 years and never in a lockout. President Bush’s shameful use of Taft-Hartley sent a message to other employers: When the going gets rough at the bargaining table, the federal government can always step in-to help the boss.

But McEntee’s central argument, which Stern alludes to as well, is that getting a Democratic President into office is not and never has been enough to protect the rights of working people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed a National Labor Relations Act to bring labor into his coalition and into the Democratic establishment becuase it was clear that otherwise the labor movement could have torn his Presidency apart. Real economic change in this country won’t be accomplished by a Clintonite who sees organized labor as a special interest equivalent to big business to be kept at bay with moderate reforms and kept out of corrupting the political process. As McEntee argues:

It is clear that we must defeat George W. Bush. But we must also grow our unions. And whomever the Democratic Party selects as its nominee-AFSCME hopes it is Howard Dean-we must insist that he support a comprehensive social justice agenda, job creation, quality and affordable healthcare for all, the preservation of Medicare and Social Security, civil rights and much more.

And the House of Labor must insist that the next president support an aggressive agenda for worker rights, including real penalties for violators of labor laws, creating a law that will make employers recognize their workers’ desire to form a union, establishing first contract arbitration and giving the National Labor Relations Board the power to enforce laws that
protect workers.

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Dick Gephardt responded to Bush’s immigration plan today with a call for “comprehensive immigration reform that is fair to undocumented immigrants” rather than half-way measures. Here’s hoping other Democrats – including the others running for President – respond in kind.

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Bill Bradley today became the latest high-profile Democrat to endorse Howard Dean. The prospect of Bradley and Gore, who fought a bitter primary struggle four years ago, coming together to endorse a candidate in this one is a peculiar and interesting one. I think, as I suggested before, that it shows less about Bradley than it does about Gore – who was castigated in 2000 for failing to run the kind of aggressive populist campaign Bradley and now Dean is associated with.

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One of the more interesting moments I caught in the Iowa Debate was the Kucinich-Dean exchange on single-payer universal healthcare. Dean, to his credit, was up front in stating that voters whose primary issue was single-payer should vote for Kucinich, and then touted the virtues of his plan which, Kucinich rightly argued, would maintain the strangehold of the insurance industry on the practice and policy of healthcare. What perhaps was most surprising about Dean’s defense of his plan, however, was its central argument that it was simply the best the Democrats could get away with – that his plan “was written to pass Congress.” Dean cited the failures of the Carter and Clinton healthcare plans to buttress his claim.

I think Michael Tomasky, in Left for Dead, offers a more convincing reading of the Clinton healthcare failure:

…the A.M.A. and the insurance lobbies fought the Clinton proposal with the same intensity they’d have have brought to a fight against single-payer. A political calculation to trim the sails is useful and defensible if, without sacrificing too much in the way of principle, it gets you more votes. The Clinton calculation did not do that. And in this instance, given the number of co-sponsors single-payeralready had in the House of Representatives and the appeal of the plan’s salient features, it may actually have been the case that a single-payer system could have been sold to the public. The seller, though, had to be willing to confront one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies – something the Clintons weren’t up to; but this, too, is something people clearly say they want their leaders to do more of.

Among the people calling on their leaders to do more of that? Howard Dean. Kucinich was right to ask him who, if not the President of the United States, would be in a position to stand up to the insurance industry. Dean, unfortunately for those of us drawn by the strength of his organizing and the clarity of his alternative vision, was left looking not for the first time like what he’s referred to rightly as “the Republican wing of the Democratic party.”