Campaigning yesterday, John Kerry noted that the Bush Administration is touting it’s economic record and calling him pessimistic for criticizing it. “There’s no greater pessimism,” he retorted, “than to say that America can’t do any better than this.” He’s right, and the most recent disappointing job numbers underscore the point.
Tag Archives: John Kerry
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has officially removed his name from consideration for Vice-President. This seems to be a largely symbolic move at this point, since Richardson’s name, which was being thrown around a great deal six months ago, had gone more or less unmentioned for a while based (according to Washington types and some friends in New Mexico politics) in large part on a reputation for maritial infidelity. Richardson’s fall from the short list strikes me as an unfortunate development; while some of his politics (particularly fiscally) were somewhat more conservative than I’d like, he’s a tremendously popular Latino executive from the South with a reputation for a strident populist progressivism and a savvy and pragmatic political instinct. So given that John Lewis didn’t seem to be on the table this time around, I would likely have taken him over Gephardt or Edwards.
The latest chatter seems to be that a Vice-Presidential announcement (read: leak, followed by later announcement) will come in the middle of this coming week. If, as many have suggested, it comes down to Gephardt or Edwards, my vote’s for Edwards. While both men campaigned to the left of Kerry on trade and arguably on jobs, Edwards was immeasurably more effective in articulating and demanding a vision for working America. While both men, like Kerry, voted for Bush’s War, Gephardt as Minority Leader is personally responsible for orchestrating the party’s shameful surrender on the issue. It was perhaps the defining moment of Gephardt’s sad tenure of compromise to the Republican party as a Democratic leader; at risk of sounding trite, Gephardt gives off the impression of a fading star, Edwards a rising one.
In this race, as in the Presidential primary, everyone seems convinced that Gephardt is labor’s candidate except for those actually involved in the labor movement, perhaps in part because (near) everyone outside of the labor movement visualizes it as the Teamsters. But absent a real progressive, Edwards is my pick, is SEIU’s pick, and hopefully will be Kerry’s as well.
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.
(Cross-posted over at Undernews:
The past three days were my first here in Tampa working on a non-partisan voter registration campaign targeting underrepresented voting groups in the area. No one was asked about how they planned to vote. But several people – at the supermarket, at the Wal-Mart, at the gas station – made comments to me about it, including:
“I’m not voting for Bush because he doesn’t care about poor people like me. Maybe if I owned this store, I might vote for him.”
“Of course I’m voting – we need to knock Bush out of that chair while we can.”
“I’m voting for John Kerry because he wants to make my health insurance cheaper.”
“No, I’m not voting. I don’t like Bush or Kerry – neither of them cares about people like me.”
“I’m definitely not voting for Bush. But who’s the other one that’s running?”
Most of the folks I’ve talked to have a very clear idea of what they think of George Bush – generally a very, very negative one. Many fewer have a clear idea of who John Kerry is and what he’s about – and it’s not because he hasn’t run enough TV commercials. For some hurt by what these years under Bush have wrought, here and nationally, haziness about Kerry won’t make much difference in whether they show up in November. For others, it will make all the difference.
Dennis Hastert made news yesterday questioning whether John McCain was a Republican. Republican and Democratic commentators alike would do well to remember, before the former get too indignant and the latter do too much gloating, how conservative John McCain actually is. He’s vehemently anti-union, anti-choice, and pro-war. What McCain is is a traditional conservative who, to his credit, is more ideological than partisan, which sets him apart from any number of Senators on both sides of the aisle. McCain’s increasingly apparent disgust with the Bush Administration is an indication of Bush’s lack of fidelity to the American conservative tradition in favor of an even more dangerous radicalism, not a demonstration of McCain’s liberalism. He’s not our Zell Miller – Zell has simply become an opportunistic conservative who gets more airtime as a Democrat. He is also, emphatically, not the man to fill out John Kerry’s Presidential Ticket.
Picture this scenario:
Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry takes a break from his whirlwind campaign tour to fly back to Washington DC to cast the crucial sixtieth vote to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans left jobless in the Bush economy. He emerges from the Senate Chambers to a triumphant rally with unemployed workers in which he blasts the White House’s callous indifference to the plight of ordinary Americans and pledges to keep fighting to send him looking for a new line of work.
Of coure, that’s not what happened today. Instead, John Kerry spent the day campaigning in Kentucky, a state which, by his party’s count, has lost over 36,000 manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. And, with 59 votes, the ammendment failed.
Kerry’s spokespeople are claiming that the Republicans staged the timing and the closeness of the vote to embarrass him, and I’m sure their right that the Republicans were out to trap John Kerry. But it’s a trap that he walked directly into. More importantly, it’s a vital opportunity to use the power of his office by addressing, in however insufficient a manner, the needs of his constituents, and his hundreds of millions of potential constituents-to-be.
The people of Kentucky didn’t need John Kerry in their state today to talk the talk and shake hands and take photos and raise money telling George Bush to bring it on. They needed him in DC doing his job by defending those who’ve lost theirs.
As November approaches, John Kerry makes it that much more difficult for himself to get working-class voters to take the time out of their day to cast a vote for him every time he has better things to do with his time than cast a vote for them.
(Cross-posted, for the first time, over at the Undernews Blog.)
In the latest round of the struggle for political license over Catholicism, Democrats, including my Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, have prepared a “Catholic Voting Scorecard” designed to demonstrate that when one integrates candidates’ stances on issues, from DOMA to child tax credit refunds, on which the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken stances, Democrats are better Catholics. Personally, I’d rather see John Kerry et al articulating the kind of Catholics they are and the policies that dictates (“My personal faith and political conviction demand that we mean what we say when we promise that no child is left behind”) than touting their fidelity to the policy proscriptions of the Conference of Bishops (“I’m 74% faithful!”). But this scorecard seems worth it, if nothing else, only for having elicited this tragically ironic condemnation:
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said both the bishops and the Democrats are confusing means with motives. “Many of the issues they’re talking about really have nothing to do with actual Catholic teaching or religion,” he said. “It is interpretation of economic policy.”
As I’ve alluded to before, the modern permutation of religion in political discourse into apologetics for social conservatism and the hollowing out of the economic justice which is central to all faiths is a deeply cynical and tragic abuse of the tradition. Where Jesus preached that the meek shall inherit the earth, Congressman King insists that whether the poor will have a share of the wealth of this nation is a matter of interpretation. This reminds me of nothing so much as last summer’s declaration by the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations that “the budget is not a Jewish issue.”
Kerry promises to screw his base:
He noted that Reagan Democrats were a critical faction in the 1980’s but that Democrats like President Jimmy Carter had trouble attracting Republican votes.
“Fear not,” Mr. Kerry said. “I am not somebody who wants to go back and make the mistakes of the Democratic Party of 20, 25 years ago. Nor am I somebody who believes that Washington has all the answers.”
Some would take from history that Reagan offered a coherent alternative vision, while Carter failed to. But Kerry apparently has learned from history that Democrats are just secretly looking for Republicans to vote for.
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.
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.
Every time I try to really like John Kerry, he goes and does something like this:
“President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn’t be upset if I could earn the right to be the second,” he told the American Urban Radio Network.
Given that the “first Black President” rewarded Black supporters by gutting AFDC and presiding over the expansion of the drug war and the prison industrial complex, and called Sister Souljah a rabid racist and Charles Murray a thought-provoking academic, one can only imagine what the second one would come up with.
Perhaps the most interest feature of the Times’ write-up of today’s debate is the short shrift given to half the candidates, who in the earlier draft were mentioned only as “other candidates” until the last paragraph which noted that Kucinich “has no chance” and that Sharpton “complained” about being ignored. The longer version up now is slightly, although not significantly better on this count. Kucinich and Sharpton at least made it into the photo – given that Sharpton was sitting right between Kerry and Edwards, it would have been hard to find any other way to take it.
Josh Eidelson 