Sometimes you find that a politician really will speak his mind when asked. Even more rare is one who will speak his mind when not asked. Dennis Kucinich is one of those rare breed of politicians who’s willing to do both. More importantly he’s willing to speak out against other factions of the Democratic Party, not to pander to progressives or the netroots, but because he is a progressive, and he opposes those who would use the Democratic Party as just another empty vessel to fill with corporate cash and neocon dreams:
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, a consistent opponent of the war in Iraq, appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week, telling host George Stephanopoulos, “I think that the support is building in my direction.”
Stephanopoulos suggested instead that the response to Kucinich merely represents the Democratic Party’s “liberal base” and that the “centrists” of the Democratic Leadership Council under Howard Ford believe that Kucinich’s ideas “could hurt the party.”
Stephanopoulos quoted Ford as saying, “‘George W. Bush is handing us Democrats our Hoover moment'” and told Kucinich, “They believe that if the party follows your path, they’re going to blow this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“You have to keep in mind that the center has shifted in our politics,” Kucinich responded, smiling. “I’m really at the center, and all the other candidates are to the right of me. And they’re to the right of the American people.”
“The Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda is indistinguishable from the Republican Neoconservative agenda,” he went on. “They want to continue to stay in Iraq. They reject the idea of a not-for-profit health care system. … These analysts are … trying to keep a politics that really helps support a privileged few at the expense of the many. So I’m the candidate of the people.”
(cont.)
Here’s you’re soundbite people: The Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda is indistinguishable from the Republican Neoconservative agenda. That is the best summation of the DLC and its insidious influence over the last two decades on our politics. They threw away the ideals on which FDR won victories during the last “Hoover moment” in our history, and substituted warmed over Republican policies cloaked in rhetoric which was marginally more compassionate sounding than the that which came out of the mouth of Newt “I divorced my wife while she was fighting cancer” Gingrich. And the worst thing was that Gringrich, Delay, et alia, would have failed to pass the GOP’s legislative agenda of corporate welfare and drowning the federal government without the DLC’s active connivance and assistance.
With Bill Clinton they were able to sell this as the only viable approach to winning elections, despite the losses the Dems continued to suffer everywhere but at the level of Presidential elections. Once Bill’s second term was up, however, they have done nothing but enable the worst policies of the worst President in our history, while shackling Democratic candidates with their mealy mouthed centrist claptrap.
And why? Because they are willing captives of the K Street regime of corporate lobbyists. They sold the American people down the river for corporate handouts. We have an incredible shrinking middle class, more people without health care than many developing nations, much less developed ones, bloated trade and governmental deficits, a ruined Army and Marine Corps, a great vacuum machine sucking away jobs overseas, the lowest tax rates for billionaires and corporations in our history, more people in prison their ever before and little regard for anyone with an income below 6 digits.
This is the legacy of the DLC folks. Dennis Kucinich is right. They should be sent packing to join their neocon friends in the GOP. The sooner the Democrats realize this, the better they and the country will be. If they fail to heed his advice to turn away from “triangulation” and promote real progressive policies in the next election, the Democrats may just go the way of the Dodo bird.