Give Chuck some Love

Chuck Pennacchio for US Senate has a diary up on dKos. Go and give our pro-woman candidate for PA some love if you’ve still got a sign on over there.

Candidates have come and gone in Pennsylvania’s 2006 Senate race, but I keep my eyes on the prizes.  And so, too, must you stay focused with me–with us.

I will never be intimidated for ours is a citizen campaign in the truest sense of the word.  The Party establishment can’t touch me–they can’t touch us.  

In fact, after trying to ignore our successful outreach campaign in Southeast Pennsylvania (November-December 2005), and after wanting to laugh at our statewide organizing feats (January-May), establishment figures and unwitting surrogates now try to attack us, and the values we stand for.

Also, don’t forget to support him at his website, Chuck2006.

US Senator says “Rove is Traitor”


Who knows if it will stick, but at least some  questions are being asked. Is Karl Rove Consigliare for a criminal gang, as Pat Oliphant portrays in this cartoon? Or is Karl Rove a traitor? On Morning Sedition today, Poppy reports from Patridiot Watch that NJ Senator Frank Lautenberg thinks he may very well be:

July 12, 2005
Frank Lautenberg Accuses Karl Rove of Treason

On Air America’s Morning Sedition, Mark Maron and Mark Riley were interviewing NJ Senator Frank Lautenberg regarding his call for Karl Rove to lose his security clearance as a result of the Plame leak.

Maron said, “Karl Rove is guilty of treason, isn’t he?”

Lautenberg responded, “Yes, I think so.”

When Senators are accusing White House Deputy Chiefs of Staff of treason, things have reached a new level.

offered for your enjoyment or critique from Liberal Street Fighter
The press, finally, seems to smell some blood leaking from the festering walking pile of corruption that is the Bush Administration. Dare we hope that some of this may stick? Will we finally get to see Ambassador Wilson’s dream to come true?

It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

Perhaps. Treason is a serious charge, but if things keep going they are, perhaps the charge might stick. Perhaps not legally, but maybe POLITICALLY. The White House and the Republican Party are in full Nixon mode, attacking the character of their enemies and double-talking and denying statements that they made in the past.

Keith Olbermann points out the implications of the allegations against Rove, that Karl Rove is Soft on terror. As the President’s most trusted advisor, that means that the President is soft on terror. Take away his protector cred, and there really isn’t much left other than appeals to homophobia and racism.

Karl Rove is a liability in the war on terror.

Rove — Newsweek’s new article quotes the very emails — told a Time reporter that Ambassador Joe Wilson’s trip to investigate of the Niger uranium claim was at the behest of Wilson’s CIA wife.

To paraphrase Mr. Rove, liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers; conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared to ruin the career of one of the country’s spies tracking terrorist efforts to gain weapons of mass destruction — for political gain.

Politics first, counter-terrorism second — it’s as simple as that.

Olbermann goes on to describe what it’s like to live in fear after a terrorist attack; he describes the fear of the unattended bag:

Because it’s starting again. I was in the checkout line in a supermarket last night when one of New York’s countless little old ladies barked out something at the cashier: “Miss? Who does this bag belong to?” Uncomprehending, the checkout woman blinked at her. The older woman pointed at a gym bag that had been left near the store’s entrance, on a ledge below the delicatessen cabinet. Gefilta fish is an unlikely terrorist target to say the least, but the woman was absolutely right. “We’re supposed to report unattended bags. There could be a bomb in there.”

Silly, right? As silly as it would’ve been before last Thursday in London if somebody on the Underground had said to a fellow passenger, “There’s a bag of something here that doesn’t seem to belong to anybody.”

The current Administration, which has maintained its grip on power by stoking those fears, while doing little to actually protect us, may be demonstrably run by people who’ve actively made the problem worse:

We’re back in those times, thanks to the London attacks. Needless to say, the 2001 bag at Yankee Stadium was no more threatening than the 2005 bag at the Associated Supermarket. But if we’re going to have to live our lives looking for them, I damn well don’t want political morons in positions where they can deliberately screw up counter-terrorism measures. I know we already have to live with the idea that they’ll do it accidentally.

Any time I’ve criticized the current administration here or on the air, I’ve gotten the same idiotic emails from the same idiotic people who’ve never been touched by terrorism. They brand me a liberal who doesn’t understand that terrorists want the next unattended bag to be filled with WMD. Their position is incredible on its face; in the light of the confirmation of the Karl Rove revelation it would assume the quality of farce, were it not so deadly serious.

And the bottom line is this: in the metaphoric department of the war on terror, Karl Rove not only leaves bags unattended – he does it intentionally.

I don’t know if any of this will stick. They are slippery creatures, these Republicans, and they may ooze right off of this hook. In the meantime, I’m going to crack a beer and enjoy the show.

UPDATED Sharper title thanks to suggestion from Al Rodgers on the reposted thread at dailyKos

Inconvenient Voice (and mind) of the Voter

“The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.” — Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 1810. ME 12:417

This basic foundation of our system of government, that a well-informed electorate is necessary for liberty to be preserved, has been more of an ideal than anything practical. Physical, professional, educational and financial barriers have generally precluded large segments of the citizenry from having access to vital information about their government and the ways in which decisions are reached. Public libraries opened up opportunities to greater numbers of people, yet still barriers persist. The Internet has the great potential to put most of the world’s libraries at ANYONE’S fingertips, yet still cost of access and the costs of computers bar many, a problem that has been slowly eroding as mobile devices and cheap wireless access spreads across the globe. Unfortunately, low-cost access to the internet lags here in the United States compared to some countries. Activists have been pushing in many places to make cheap access available to all by setting up Municipal WiFi networks, with some success.

That will all come to an end if Pete Session’s bill H.R. 2726 passes, a bill ironically titled the Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005.

From Liberal Street Fighter
You can read details of the issues on numerous activists’ websites and now Steven Levy has highlighted the bill in his column The Technologist in the July 18th issue of Newsweek:

Pulling the Plug on Local Internet
Guess who wants to stop you from getting universal, citywide wireless cheaper than you get it now?
Pete Sessions, a Texas member of the House, believes in states’ rights. But he also thinks that there are situations so extreme that Congress must slap down state and local government initiatives. One such case: localities that offer citizens free or low-cost Internet service. Idealists may view extending high-speed Internet as a boon to education, an economic shot in the arm and a vital component in effective emergency services. Sessions (who once worked for telecom giant SBC) sees it as local-government meddling in the marketplace—”trying to pick winners and losers,” he says—and thus justifies federal meddling to stop elected officials from giving their constituents a stake in the 21st century.

Funny how the rhetoric of freedom spills so easily from the lips of winger politicians UNTIL the interests of their business cronies come under assault, then they can’t restrict people’s rights fast enough.

The stakes are high, as the folks at NYC Wireless describe it:

No less than the future of all communications is at stake. In a few years, television, telephone, radio and the Web will be accessed through a high-speed internet connection. Low-cost alternatives to telephone (DSL) and cable monopolies are emerging across the country, as cities, towns, nonprofits and community groups build low-cost “Community Internet” and municipal broadband systems.

Companies like SBC, Verizon and Comcast have been introducing laws state by state that would prohibit municipal broadband, undercut local control and prevent competition. But we’ve been fighting back — and winning.

An alliance of public interest groups, local officials, high-tech innovators and organized citizens have defeated anti-municipal broadband measures in nine of the 13 states where they’ve been introduced this year.

What the industry couldn’t pass in the states, they’re trying to push through in Washington. Sessions’ bill — the “Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act” (an Orwellian title if there ever was one) — would prevent state and local governments from providing “any telecommunications service, information service or cable service” anywhere a corporation offers a similar service.

Congressman Sessions worked for telephone giant SBC for 16 years, and his wife currently serves as a director of Cingular Wireless, an SBC subsidiary. SBC and its employees have been Sessions’ second-biggest career patron, pouring more than $75,000 into his campaign coffers..

freepress.net has a petition they are circulating to kill Session’s bill. So far the bill has no co-sponsers, and anybody who does should be targeted quickly to pressure them to withdraw their support.

Technology has created a great opportunity to allow broad numbers of citizens to communicate with each other, and to access broad amounts of information, about the actions of our government, large corporations and the elected officials bought and paid for BY those corporations. It’s essential that this new flowering of communication be allowed to grow. As Levy describes it in his column:

Using “mesh” networks that run on the Wi-Fi wireless standard, cities can deliver the Internet affordably to everyone within their boundaries. “We can cover a city for a fraction of the cost of the traditional providers,” says Ron Sege of Tropos, a company that installs shoe-box-size devices that beam the Net from street lamps. This enables cities like Philadelphia to launch nonprofit efforts to make whole neighborhoods into hotspots: public spaces get free access, and citizens who use the service at home or around town are billed less than $20 a month. “We all have to compete in a knowledge economy,” explains Dianah Neff, the city’s chief information officer, who says the current providers focus excessively on the affluent.

H.R. 2726 must NOT be allowed to pass.

Sirota today

Has a fine post up today:

Why America Needs Less Mindless Conformity

Think about it for a second. If you are in Washington, D.C.’s Republican/Democratic Establishment circles, it is considered nothing short of disgusting or fringe to think we should, for instance, set an exit strategy in Iraq, or renegotiate the corporate-written “free” trade deals that are wreaking so much havoc on our middle class. If you are in business, you are considered weird for keeping in mind anything other than the bottom line, no matter what laws and ethics you have to break. If you are in media, you are considered a freak if you suggest reporting on serious issues instead of Michael Jackson, if you suggest putting on air anyone other than the same tired, old, out-of-touch Beltway pundits who regurgitate the same idiotic talking points. But as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford tells us, conformity is exactly what the powers that be want – and is exactly what we shouldn’t give them.

I would add to that list that there are certain bloggers only too willing to tell us what we should all recognize as facts, what connections we should all make in this time of chaos. More with the Morford he links to below.
crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter
As Morford puts it:

Why Do You Work So Hard?
Is it maybe time to quit your safe job and follow your path and infuriate the establishment?

There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.

Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven.

This is the American Puritan work ethos, still alive and screaming and sucking the world dry. Work is the answer. Work is also the question. Work is the one thing really worth doing and if you’re not working you’re either a slacker or a leech, unless you’re a victim of BushCo’s budget-reamed America and you’ve been laid off, and therefore it’s OK because that means you’re out there every day pounding the pavement looking for work and honing your resume and if you’re not, well, what the hell is wrong with you?

It infects everything. It has disabled the Democratic Party as a party that is actually able to work for a world where people can pursue their happiness, where families and people and art and beauty and the environment matter. Even on blogs, this conventional wisdom seeks to silence inconvenient points-of-view, to bury people who’re making different connections between things than the accepted “reality based” connections.

Morford continues:

Our culture allows almost no room for creative breaks. There is little tolerance for seeking out a different kind of “work” that doesn’t somehow involve cubicles and widening butts and sour middle managers monitoring your e-mail and checking your Web site logs to see if you’ve wasted a precious 37 seconds of company time browsing blowfish.com or reading up on the gay marriage apocalypse.

We are at once infuriated by and enamored with the idea that some people can just up and quit their jobs or take a leave of absence or take out a loan to go back to school, how they can give up certain “mandatory” lifestyle accoutrements in order to dive back into some seemingly random creative/emotional/spiritual endeavor that has nothing to do with paying taxes or the buying of products or the boosting of the GNP. It just seems so … un-American. But it is so, so needed.

It is vital that the cultural left fight harder for a country where people CAN drop out to “follow their bliss”. Or to create something or just succor the needs of someone who needs help, without it always having to feed into the puritanism.

We are designed, weaned, trained from Day 1 to be productive members of society. And we are heavily guilted into believing that must involve some sort of droning repetitive pod-like dress-coded work for a larger corporate cause, a consumerist mechanism, a nice happy conglomerate.

But the truth is, God, the divine true spirit loves nothing more than to see you unhinge and take risk and invite regular, messy, dangerous upheaval. This is exactly the energy that thwarts the demons of stagnation and conservative rot and violent sanctimonious bloody Mel Gibson-y religion, one that would have all our work be aimed at continuously patching up our incessant potholes of ugly congenital guilt, as opposed to contributing to the ongoing orgiastic evolution of spirit.

Don’t let “them”, whoever they are, shout you down or shut you up or tell you you’re being silly. Believe something to be true? Then TEST it by writing or saying it, then engage with people who disagree with you. Be willing to reach out and touch an intellectual or spiritual hot stove. Be willing to be burned. LEARN from getting burned.

As Sirota writes:

In the movie “The Usual Suspects,” Kevin Spacey says “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Likewise, the greatest trick the insulated Establishment and Corporate America ever pulled was convicing ordinary Americans they can’t change things, they can’t make a difference, and they must become just another cog in a directionless corporate system that ignores anything other than the quest for profit and the desire to make more “things” (whatever they may be). It just isn’t true – and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we will be on our way to really addressing the fundamental challenges facing this country.

Our current political straits, and the ineffectual nature of the Democratic Party, is the continued blind acceptance of what “everybody knows”.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died — Leonard Cohen

Don’t give in to what everybody knows. Keep questioning. Keep making mistakes. Keep learning.

"Reality Based"

Reality in our century is not something to be faced. — Graham Greene

There has been much talk about “reality” in political discourse in the blogosphere as of late. It was sparked, I think, by the piece by Ron Suskind in the NY Times Magazine last October …

crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Many on the left, and the centrists in the Democratic Party, chortled at that observation. Of course we are, we’re PROUD of it. However, it raises a question … how do we decide what “reality-based” means? This is not a metaphysical question, but a very practical one. What do we mean by reality, and how do we decide what is “real” within the political sphere?

“Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn’t the dream destroy reality?” — George Moore

Is political reality fixed, or created? If it is created, does it become so by fiat, from “leaders”, or does it arise through foment and debate? Are “fringe” ideas counterproductive, or vital, to the development of political power? There are some who would argue that “fringe” ideas, “conspiracy theories”, diminish the chances for political success. History would argue otherwise.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. — Philip K. Dick

The Republican regime we face now was based on fringe ideas. They succeeded because a group of people on the far right refused to be silenced, and built a broad-based infrastructure to feed their agenda. The aide Suskind quoted was speaking a political reality — the current regime EXISTS because a united group of people on the right willed it into existence. Isn’t our purpose, as liberals, to assert that we need to create political consensus through debate and measurement and process? Are we so lacking in our faith in a government, a political system based in those ideas, that we think we need to echo a movement that is so much the opposite of that which we hold dear; reason and debate?

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality. — Salvador Dali

Is that a political “success” that we on the left want to replicate? As believers in the Enlightenment, in the idea that human reason can help us to create a better world for ourselves, do we want to reenact the way the right gained power? The greatest successes of the left came from a vibrant and healthy debate. People told Martin Luther King and Malcolm X they were too radical. The Suffragists were told that they were never going to win the right to vote for women if they kept making wild statements and claims. THAT is the history of how progressive change has been accomplished in this country. Why, then, are so many on the center-right calling for lockstep thinking and a silencing of “fringe” ideas? Have we become so intellectually lazy, so bereft in our faith in the power of reason and discourse, that we feel that political debate must be limited?

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I Roam

Sometimes, as you go through your day, maybe bouncing from link to link on the ‘net, you’ll stumble across something unexpected. A picture or profile or book review — something that reminds you of something you used to do, or like. Something like Wander Woman in the Village Voice, a book review of A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

I was struck by this paragraph in the review:

The word lost derives from the old Norse term for “disbanding an army,” and Solnit fears that “many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.” In Wanderlust she delved into the shrinkage of public space, and here she pursues the idea that children’s lack of opportunity to roam freely—”Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely)”—will strip away our culture’s sense of adventure and imagination. Wildlife has returned to many American neighborhoods because, “[a]s far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape.”

I think that’s exactly right, and I know because I watched it happen.

crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter
We moved around a few times until I was in fourth grade, when we settled in a small town with some man-made lakes northwest of Chicago. It was a patchwork of winding streets w/ small little ranch houses, established older neighborhoods, a few planned developments and some old farms and what I thought was untamed woods. They seemed untamed to me, and as a seventies “latch key kid”, I was free to explore as a wished. Sometimes on foot, sometimes on a Schwinn Stingray, either alone or with a friend or two, I’d find a trail, a path, an unused rail bed or gurgling little stream and follow it.

I’d purposely try to get lost.

Now, there probably wasn’t much real danger of actually getting lost, but I remember walking through the fairly thick woods of northern Illinois, picking fresh mullberries, gooseberries, raspberries and blueberries off bushes as I walked. Sometimes I’d get turned around, and end up coming out far away from my usual stomping grounds. Or I’d come through a thicket of thorny bushes only to discover an old, cracked foundation, remnants of an old home nowhere near present roads. Occasionally, amongst a treefall deep in the woods, there would be an old dead campfire, some scattered beer cans, maybe a discarded Playboy, the leavings of older kids doing whatever older kids did.

Last I was back, all of those woods are gone now. It’s all subdivisions, and the abandoned rail beds are carefully laid out bike paths. I don’t know if it was better. I’m not sure that it was good that we were left so much to fend for ourselves, but that sense of unbounded possibility does seem diminished.

I used to walk or bike or hike all over the place, as well as traveling through the books I read. Sometimes I carried them with me and read them in a quiet place in the woods. Now I roam on the internet. I’m not much for walking around anymore, much to the detriment of my long-term health, no doubt.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in some time, until I stumbled across this review in Village Voice. How something I used to enjoy had been lost through the course of time.

Although the title pronounces this a field guide, it’s closer to a walkabout. Solnit’s essays sweep through myriad varieties of loss, from objects to memories to love, with plenty of slippage between the categories. She believes that losing things is intrinsic to human life, a never ending process of abandonment and discovery. “Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names,” Solnit proposes. “This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery.” Solnit’s writing switches gracefully between these two modes of perception—between melancholy regret at what’s been discarded ( Hollow City documented the displacement of bohemian San Francisco in the dotcom era) and fragile optimism ( Hope in the Dark rallies around the power of grassroots activism).

I’ve always enjoyed learning new things, and I used to enjoy meeting new people, seeing new places. I look forward less and less, and won’t let myself look back. It’s important to remember to do both. It’s in the clues gleaned from both past and future that we find connections.

"I Am Become Death …

… the Destroyer of Worlds.”

It’s oft repeated, that recitation by J. Robert Oppenheimer of a misquotation from the Bhagavad Gita. At the end of the second World War, he may very well have been describing the United States Government, not just the development of one weapon. It certainly seems that way, here in the blastwave from a bloody last half of the 20th Century, of wars raged for nebulous reasons in Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, Latin American and the Middle East.

One couldn’t help but wonder, watching a deeply corrupt and bloodthirsty President give yet another self serving speech about how Iraq is part of the “War on Terror”, a war that serves only to keep Death continuously fed; what will it take for us to stop ourselves, for us to stop our leaders? Will that only happen with blood in our streets, are we only able to make a change when we’ve fallen into an abyss?

crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter
Why do we do this, over and over again? It’s not new, of course, and not unique to the United States, but the sheer amount of damage we deliver can be truly stunning. Can such a willingness to feed so many, so thoughtlessly, into the maw of Death be anything other than some weird love for it, a strange Xtian embrace of helping others “cross over”?

Anwaar Hussain was reminded of the same verse when he wrote a report on Fallujah in November of last year:

Fallujah has been laid waste. It has been bombed, re-bombed, its citizens gunned down, its structures devastated by powerful weapons. It is a hell on earth of crushed bodies, shattered buildings and the reek of death. In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, 70-ton Abrams Tanks and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunship that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers crisscrossing the entire town firing at will at whatever moved outside the buildings. For those inside, the US troops were equipped with thermal sights capable of detecting body heat. Any such detection was eagerly assumed to indicate the presence of “insurgents” inviting a deadly salvo.

No body has an accurate idea of how many Iraqis—combatants and noncombatants—have been killed by the thousands of tons of explosives and bullets let loose upon the city. Mortuary teams collecting the dead rotting in the city streets are fighting the wandering dogs that are busy devouring their former masters. The hundreds buried beneath the rubble and debris will be dug out later. A US marine spokesman, Colonel Mike Regner, estimated 1,000 and 2,000 Iraqis dead. The world is awaiting the toll from more reliable sources with a wincing anticipation.

One battle, over half a year ago. So many sacrificed. So many of our own soldiers, ordered to carry out this destruction, based on a pack of lies given by an administration wholly owned by dreamers of empire, war profiteers and end-times fanatics. Soldiers delivered themselves unto the death they deal out, on orders from above. Marching into that black light.  

Bush stands up there, talking about freedom and democracy as he continues to order death and tyranny. Can you see the glint in his eye, that loving gaze when he loses his place and his mind fills only with thoughts of his power and mission and the glorious sacrifices he offers up to Death on the altar stolen from Mammon?

They say when one marries one’s beloved, you become a single heart. You become each other.

Can you see the love?

note: Image of Thanos w/ Death by Jim Starlin “borrowed” from Starlin’s Explorations of Mortality, part of an interesting series of pieces on the portrayal of death in comics.

Reclaiming Our Base

Emily’s List released an important report this past week, Women at the Center of Political Change (opens as a .pdf):

“There is a clear message from the women we spoke to: never stand between a woman and her desire to protect and care for her family,” said EMILY’s List President Ellen R. Malcolm.  “Republicans will continue to lose women if they fail to respect that women see themselves—not government or politicians—as the arbiter of family values.  From the intrusion of government into private family decisions, the risk created by efforts to privatize Social Security, and the ‘my way or the highway’ foreign policy of the Bush administration — the Republican’s own agenda has worked to turn women away from that party.”

Women may be showing signs of “turning away” from the Republicans, but will the Democrats give them a party to turn toward, or will we continue to follow the demands of the center/right, DLC, “third way” Democrats and merely continue to turn our party into a nicer shadow of the Republican Party?
That question isn’t limited to women voters, but also to other traditional constituencies, as Garance Franke-Ruta reports in the American Prospect:

Minority Report

The frustration of some black and Latino operatives raises the question: How much longer can Democrats count on historic loyalties?

In May of 2004, Paul Rivera had an idea. His proposal, based on his experience working in three previous presidential contests: Put staff in every market where Hispanic and African American voters were important and spend $1 million to test different base-vote mobilization strategies so that by July, the best one could be implemented and carried out as part of the overall field operation. Rivera, a Puerto-Rican Democratic operative from the Bronx who was the highest-ranking Latino in John Kerry’s campaign, took the plan up the ladder.

But Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager, let the proposal die on the vine. Her intentions may have been understandable — she wanted to run a streamlined, centralized field operation, say insiders, not a bunch of different projects — but the net result of the strategy she oversaw was an election-day shocker for the Kerry campaign. Not only did Kerry win a smaller fraction of the Hispanic vote than any Democratic presidential candidate in recent history; he lost a couple of points with black voters, too. And, unlike Bill Clinton in 1996, Kerry lost white women voters, who have by and large remained loyal to the Democratic Party even as their husbands, boyfriends, and brothers grew into a core Republican constituency over the past 40 years.

“One of the biggest problems with the Democratic Party is we don’t know how to speak to the people we claim to represent,” Rivera told me in late May over a plate of mini-burgers and parmesan onion curls at hip downtown D.C. eatery Matchbox. “If we say blacks are for Democrats, Hispanics are for Democrats, women are for Democrats — the data don’t show that any more.”

This is a growing problem, but not beyond repair — yet. However, if we continue to parrot Republican talking points then we fail to offer a true alternative. The “third way” is a way leading to continued political disaster. Minority voters were shown how little value they held with the party in the aftermath of the last two Presidential elections. Now, we are demonstrating, by championing candidates who are hostile to women’s control of their own bodies, candidates like Casey & Langevin, that we are willing to abandon women too.

Some would ask how we can ignore the impact of “moral values” on the last election. As Emily’s List reports:

While Republicans have benefited from perceptions that Democrats are the party of big government, their positioning on issues of intrusion is eroding that edge. Twenty percent of women are uncomfortable with abortion rights and believe that abortion should be legal only in extreme cases or not at all, but are also uncomfortable with government intrusion into moral decisions. These voters, who chose Bush over Kerry by eight percentage points, have fallen precipitously in their Republican allegiance. Now 38% plan to vote Democratic for Congress and only 30% plan to vote Republican, a 20-point shift toward the Democrats.

We can protect abortion as a medical procedure without “celebrating” it, as the Republicans, and sadly too many Democrats, distort a very principled stand. It is time to take principled stands. Fuzzy consensus is not a position. For some time, DC was mired in a sort of policy ennui, until the Reagan campaign showed that political power could be gained by claiming to fight for a vision of the future. THAT is the secret of their success, and in response the Democratic Party has offered only muttered lists of policy positions and spineless echoes of Republican distortions.

It is time for the Democratic Party to tap into the very thing that makes us a truer reflection of 21st Century America — diversity. There is an enormous pool of talent and passion for us to tap, and to empower. Sadly, we fail to do so over and over again, as described by Franke-Ruta:

Those structural problems led to a kind of strategic blindness to the importance of minority-voter contact and outreach. Kerry spent less on paid media in Hispanic markets than Gore did in 2000, despite spending more than twice as much overall. Indeed, Kerry spent less on targeted Hispanic media — $3 million — than he did on political strategist and consultant Bob Shrum.

In the Democratic Party, ensuring minority turnout has always been seen as something best solved through the traditional transactional political relationships that have characterized the Democratic Party’s approach to minorities for decades. Transactional politics means, essentially, that we’ll give you X in return for Y — the “you” often being a high-ranking figure in a given community who can be counted on to deliver votes. It’s a top-down model, and it’s the one the Kerry campaign emphasized, turning to prominent minority leaders to help it out, just as Democratic presidential campaigns have done for decades.

But even in the African American community, where the model was developed, times have changed. During the general election, the campaign had the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pay $86,000 to race-baiter Al Sharpton, who at most can move 140,000 voters in midnight-blue New York City, as well as substantial sums to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, an aging civil-rights leader whose currency among younger black voters is open to question (and whose organization, Rainbow/PUSH, was recently fined by the Federal Election Commission for campaign-finance rule violations during the 2000 election). What that campaign got in exchange for this was an electorate that was just as white as in 2000, even as the country became more diverse.

The transactional model’s opposite is a ground-up operation that involves more direct outreach and financial support for local get-out-the-vote efforts and ethnic media, and a recognition that in immigrant communities, there may not be a leadership or organizational infrastructure capable of moving and turning out voters, no matter how well they are cultivated. The Republican Party, truth be told, recognizes this more than the Democrats do, which has led some younger Democrats to feel that the party is either out of touch or taking minority votes for granted. “There are Democratic decision-makers who ask, ‘How little can I spend on these voters to get them to shut up?’” Rivera says.

In May, Rivera, along with Navarro and three other high-ranking former Kerry campaign and DNC Hispanic political operatives, sent the Democratic leadership and potential ’08 candidates a biting 13-page memo. “Instead of developing strategies and political capacity in communities of color to increase the number of voters and votes, the Democratic Party is steeped in token commercial relationships and unaccountable voter-contact methods,” they wrote. “If the Democratic Party does not improve its performance with Latinos, it is doomed.” The memo, which grew out of a series of meetings of more than 30 elected and appointed Hispanic Democratic leaders, as well as political operatives, in November and March, has been understood within the party as the shot across the bow. Nonetheless, there are still those who ask, says Rivera, “How little can I spend on communities of color?”

If we continue to listen to corporatist beltway insiders who have offered bi-partisan cover for policies that damage our country, the Democratic Party will continue to founder and lose. The Party, in fear of the Republicans hanging distortions of policies from the seventies around the neck of the Democrats, continues to fail to offer a true alternative. Merely being “nicer” Republicans is not a recipe for party health. As Emily’s List concludes their report:

The Future for Democrats

Overall, this survey contains three central lessons for Democrats. First, Democrats have an enormous opportunity in 2006 to expand their base, particularly among women, but they can do more to solidify these advantages. Women’s mood for change, combined with their focus on domestic issues—leading with Social Security—has resulted in defections of up to 20 points in some cases, in their support of Bush from just six months ago.

Second, any debate between the primacy of values and economics is irrelevant in reaching women who care about both and combine the importance of both in considering their families’ futures. Democrats need an agenda that addresses poignant economic insecurities among women, but that does so with due respect for the centrality of families and care giving in their values system.

Finally, in recognizing the centrality of families and care giving, Democrats can take advantage of Republicans’ overreaching on issues of intrusion. While Democrats do not have the advantage on values that they do on a prospective economic agenda, Republicans have promoted defections by appearing to endorse government intrusions into family privacy.

Democrats must be the party of change and hope. They also need a clear agenda that makes families more secure and must develop language that respects families and care giving to take full advantage of the opportunity that they have been granted. While women voters have lost confidence in President Bush and the Republicans, Democrats have not

yet closed the deal with women voters.

“Democrats must be the party of change and hope” Yes, and to that I would offer Democrats must be the party of INCLUSION. The Republicans are making the argument that they are the more inclusive party, and it’s very easy for us to chuckle at that, but at least they are out there listening and courting voters:

“Tower introduced me to Ronald Reagan,” during the Senate race, recalls Sosa. “He was governor at the time. I explained to him what I was trying to do. He said, ‘That’s going to be real easy.’ I said, ‘Why do you say that?’ He said that ‘Hispanics are Republicans; they just don’t know it.’” Reagan then explained that Hispanic families were taught to value family, faith in God, hard work, and personal responsibility, and to believe that America is the greatest country of all. Those, Reagan told Sosa, are Latino values and Republican values. “I was just astonished that in 30 seconds, he gave me the strategy, and I have followed it ever since,” Sosa says.

Democrats often attribute the GOP’s gains among Latinos to such factors as homophobia and anti-abortion sentiment. But in fact, such explosive personal issues are rarely discussed or even mentioned in GOP media for Hispanics (whether outside groups do so is another question). Those subjects, explains Bendixen, are so taboo in traditional Hispanic cultures that when he conducted focus groups to gauge Latino opinions on gay marriage (among other issues), more than 70 percent of one group said afterward that this was the first time they had ever discussed homosexuality with another person in their lives.

Thus, in 2004, Bush ads aimed at Latino voters showed pictures of college students graduating, prosperous-looking families with four kids laughing, and well-to-do-looking Hispanics at the office, while a very sentimental, specially composed Spanish song played in the background. Ads proclaimed that America is our country and Bush is our president. The message: Nos conocemos. We know each other. All told, Bush spent about $5.5 million on uplifting, aspiration-based emotional appeals in Spanish-language media in 2004 — a small cost, due to the inexpensive nature of the media markets in Hispanic battleground states — with a tremendous bang for the buck. The GOP increased its Hispanic margin by 10 percent in the states where 79 percent of Hispanic voters reside and where Democrats declined to target them, and overwhelmed ethnic media markets in battleground states. In New Mexico, which Gore won in 2000 and where Bush won in 2004 by less than 6,000 votes, Hispanics provided his margin of victory; Democratic targeting in the last few weeks before the election simply came too late.

In other words, the Republicans offer visions of hope, while the Democrats offer … what? To fight for people’s votes? To cross the aisle and protect the “right” of usurers to bankrupt American families? To continue to promote free trade over fair trade? To abandon American citizens, especially women, the dying and the sick to intrusions into their personal medical decisions? Too many “Democrats” support these Republican policies, PUSH these policies. Yes, they are Republican policies, but the Republicans do a masterful PR job of putting a happy face on those policies, while at the same time pointing out that Democrats believe them too. No wonder we continue to lose as a political party — we offer NOTHING if we continue to follow the prescriptions of the party leaders who continue to betray large swaths of our voters.

It is important that we support the progressive reformers in the Democratic Party, and the efforts of Howard Dean to tap into the enormous well of talent and passion in our natural constituencies.

In response to the dissatisfaction of minority communities, the DNC, under Chairman Howard Dean, is revamping the Clinton-era minority political desk system and plans to make voter targeting, including of minorities, a much more central aspect of the committee’s ongoing get-out-the-vote and field operations. Dean has won praise for his hiring practices, appointing the first black director of polling in party history, Cornell Belcher of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategy; a female political director, Pam Womack; and a mixed-race communications director, Karen Finney, who had previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards. Finney speaks of a “paradigm shift” and vows that from here on out, “We will not take a single vote or a single voter for granted. That is a mistake we will not make again.

It’s going to take action, not just promises, to rebuild a coalition to the future. Continuing to echo the distortions of the right will only drive members of our coalition out of politics, or into the arms of our opposition. Expanding the big tent so far to the right that it leaves women & their doctors, the poor and American workers out in the rain will serve only to continue our string of losses.

The Democrats have to remake themselvs as a party of hope and diversity, in opposition to the Repulican Party of intrusion and irresponsibilty.

(note: kudos to Ramsey’s diary on Wednesday at dailyKos for the excellent summary of the Emily’s List report that brought it to my attention.)

This Isn’t Really About "Billy Jack"

When I was very young, probably around ten or twelve, I first saw Billy Jack, a couple of years after it had first come out.

Jean : You just can’t keep making your own laws. There’s got to be one set of laws fair for everyone, including you.

Billy Jack : That’s fine. When that set of laws is applied to everyone, then I’ll turn the other cheek too.

Jean : There’s got to be a better way to change those people.

Billy Jack : CHANGE those people? You worked with King, didn’t you?

Jean : Yes!

Billy Jack : Where is he?

Jean : Dead.

Billy Jack : And where’s Bob and Jack Kennedy?

Jean : Dead.

Billy Jack : Not “dead”, their brains blown out! Because YOUR people wouldn’t even put the same controls on their guns as they do on their dogs, their bicycles, their cats, and their automobiles.

What can this social history tell us about how to procede today? On the flip …

crossposted at Liberal Street Fight
Little did I know, as a very young person, that Tom Laughlin’s little independent film was part of a massive shift in politics within popular culture. The counter-culture and it’s politics were brought directly to the public, circumventing the mainstream outlets. Music, books and film. “Billy Jack”, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song”, Jefferson Airplane, Marvin Gaye and so many others.

However, though this isn’t about Billy Jack, I’m going to talk about why that film, and Tom Laughlin announcing that Billy Jack Is Ready to Fight the Good Fight Again, gives me hope.

In the comment thread in the crossposting of Either/Or at dailykos this past weekend, wytcld commented:

The 60s was a watershed for both the cultural and political “counter.” Neither quite fulfilled its promise (yet … both broadcast seeds for the future), but of the two flanks, the political was arguably weaker than the cultural. That’s why the modern right is fighting a cultural war on a political battlefield – they’re relatively stronger in politics and we’re relatively stronger in culture.

We need better political armaments, and we’re developing them here. But we also might consider shifting more of the war to the battlefield where we were more successful and potent last time around: culture. Just as they’re talking about culture but fighting on a political battlefield, might we talk about politics but fight on a cultural battlefield?

We are at that point now. In the last year or so, numerous documentaries (“F911”, “Unprecented” et al), and overtly political songs (“Mosh”, “Imagine” covered by A Perfect Circle, the latest System of a Down), have been popping up. New ways of talking about politics, about liberal ideas and returning America to a more rational and humane political culture, have begun to slowly change the public debate. The question going forward is one posed by wytcld. Will enough political leaders have the courage to utilize and reinforce these new ways of looking at the world?

So far, the signs are not good. The Democratic Party ran away from Michael Moore’s “Farenheit 911” during last year’s campaign, after flirting with utilizing its points when the movie came out. Numerous films and books enumerated the various ways that the Bush Administration lied to the country about the war, about how they have much too cozy a relationship with the House of Saud. Songs cried for change. The politicians capitalized on NONE of it.

We’re back in ’71 in so many ways. The military is making the same kind of mistakes and telling the same kind of lies. A corrupt Republican Administration is mired in dirty dealings and pursuing an unjust war and condoning war crimes, and viciously attacking whistleblowers and patriots who try to expose their crimes.

What is the “opposition” party doing about it? With a few noble exceptions, not much. As Tom Laughlin put it in the New York Times:

Now the man who created and personified Billy Jack, Tom Laughlin – the writer, director, producer and actor – is determined to take on the establishment again, and his concerns are not so terribly different. Mr. Laughlin (and therefore Billy Jack) is angry about the war in Iraq and about the influence of big business in politics. And he still has a thing for the nuclear power industry.

“I’m going to say a lot of egregious things,” Mr. Laughlin, 73, announced at the start of an interview at his home here in the rolling horse country east of Los Angeles. His face is creased with deep lines, his hair a bleached gray, but he is still entirely recognizable as the handsome Billy Jack.

“We despise both political parties, really loathe them,” he said. (“We” might be Mr. Laughlin and his alter ego, or it might include his wife, Delores Taylor, who played Billy Jack’s pacifist partner, Jean; but one doesn’t interrupt the man lightly.)

“We the people have no representative of any kind,” he continued. “It’s now the multinationals. They’ve taken over. It’s no different than the 70’s, but it’s gotten worse. And if you use words like ‘impeachment’ or ‘fascist’ you’re a nut on a soapbox.”

That anger is the legacy of the failure of the Democratic Party to take up the fight at the side of liberal culture back when it had the chance. My hope is that this time, with a newly energized left, using tools like the internet, desktop publishing and music studios and film editing booths that fit on an easily carried laptop. Camera phones can document police abuses against protestors and send them out immediately, wirelessly. Armies of dedicated netizens practice distributed citizen journalism to expose official lies. These are tools that the left didn’t have three decades ago.

I’m glad to see that a passion for change and social justice doesn’t fade with time. I hope Tom Laughlin will raise the funds he needs to make Billy Jack’s Crusade, but I’m sure that people we haven’t heard from yet are going to change the way we look at things, that new works of film, art, music and writing will shake up the debate, reawaken our moribund political culture.

The Reagan Revolution tapped in on popular culture at the time to cement their power, a power that has only grown since. It is incumbent on those of us who are politically active to encourage and back up a newly progressive Democratic Party that can use that energy to enact change. We have a chance to do it right this time. Let’s not blow it.

Either/Or

The “center-right” of the party has, over the last several years, presented the Democratic Party and voters on the left with a stark either/or choice: either the party move in “their” direction on economic issues and national security issues, or the party will continue to lose.

David Sirota highlighted one of the methods used by these “centrists” in his blog this past week:

I like Josh Marshall a lot, but some of the people he has posting on his new website really seem to be comfortable vomiting up the most hackneyed conventional wisdom without spending more than 5 seconds actually trying to offer something new or honest. Take this person named Rick Heller. He calls himself a “centrist” (I put it in quotes because the term has become a misnomer). Today, he says – without any evidence whatsoever – that “Liberals are those who are a little softer on national security and perhaps not as budget conscious as we’d like.” This is the same kind of garbage that self-serving self-promoters like Peter Beinart spew, while claiming to speak for Democrats. And that’s what it is – garbage.

I join Mr. Sirota in calling bullshit.
crossposted at Liberal Street Fight

Sirota does a fine job of answering Mr. Heller’s assertions, but that attack shows up frequently in print, in chat show interviews and in comment threads on blogs. The other attack commonly leveled by “centrists” is used by Mr. Heller in the comments: “your economic populism isn’t going to work if you are so demeaning to people who are more culturally conservative than you.”.

What exactly are writers and activists on the left doing when we try to assert our values, when we put forth assertions that the road to relevance for the Democratic Party is to actually FIGHT for our ideals, for the ideals that spring forth from the enlightenment roots of the very founding of our country? As I put it in an earlier piece:

Idealists set the horizon. Idealists point out the top of the mountain, giving a political movement, a political party a goal to aim for. Without them, all you’re left with is a bunch of maps without destinations.

To attack those of us advocating for a broad leftism as a winning formula for the party, many will reference iconic, and often unrepresentative, activists from the past. Advocating for feminism and women’s health? Why, you’re just like Andrea Dworkin and you must carry the S.C.U.M. Manifesto around in your bookbag! Peace activist? Oh, you must be a pacifist that has forgotten that we were attacked! Fighting for minority opportunity and full suffrage? You’re obviously so mired in “identity politics” that you’ve forgotten that we’re ALL Americans. An advocate of Universal Healthcare … you must be a socialist! Since we have so much in common with these charicatures, therefore we must hold the more “conservative” American culture in utter contempt! Time for us to shut up now, since we are plainly outside the mainstream. No notice is paid that many voters, writers and activist groups on the left work more closely together than they’ve EVER worked in the past. The powerful efforts put forth in support of John Kerry’s half-hearted campaign last year are forgotten, and the left is blamed for the loss, utilizing these distortions of the 21st Century left.

It’s becoming clear that the strategy outlined by Thomas Frank has actually been a two-pronged attack. While the right has used cultural issues, primarily through preachers in evangelical churches, to persuade working class and middle class voters to vote against their best interests, they’ve also funneled money through think tanks and corporate allies into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party itself. They’ve persuaded many in the party and supporters outside the main party machinery, through oganizations like the DLC and it’s spinoff the NDN, that the best hope for success is to move away from populism and from the various groups on the left who are too “single issue” driven or “shrill” or “outside the mainstream”.

The American Prospect outlined this effort back in the spring after Gore’s loss to GWB:

Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, “We’re trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way,” he adds, “they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win.”

Of course, these positions make it hard for Democrats to win because so many of them DON’T believe them, and thanks to their reliance on corporate cash, the majority of them holding office now have NOTHING in common with the constituents feeling increasing pain from Republican policies, policies they helped usher into law. Who helped organize this movement?

While the DLC will not formally disclose its sources of contributions and dues, the full array of its corporate supporters is contained in the program from its annual fall dinner last October, a gala salute to Lieberman that was held at the National Building Museum in Washington. Five tiers of donors are evident: the Board of Advisers, the Policy Roundtable, the Executive Council, the Board of Trustees, and an ad hoc group called the Event Committee–and companies are placed in each tier depending on the size of their check. For $5,000, 180 companies, lobbying firms, and individuals found themselves on the DLC’s board of advisers, including British Petroleum, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Dell, Eli Lilly, Federal Express, Glaxo Wellcome, Intel, Motorola, U.S. Tobacco, Union Carbide, and Xerox, along with trade associations ranging from the American Association of Health Plans to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For $10,000, another 85 corporations signed on as the DLC’s policy roundtable, including AOL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Citigroup, Dow, GE, IBM, Oracle, UBS PacifiCare, PaineWebber, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Upjohn, and TRW.

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC’s executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC’s executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively–meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms–though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included. Some donate enormous amounts of money, such as Bernard Schwartz, the chairman and CEO of Loral Space and Communications, who single-handedly finances the entire publication of Blueprint, the DLC’s retooled monthly that replaced The New Democrat. “I sought them out, after talking to Michael Steinhardt,” says Schwartz. “I like them because the DLC gives resonance to positions on issues that perhaps candidates cannot commit to.”

This article dates from 2001, but we are suffering under the influence of this strategy’s success now. Utilizing this strategy has become a trap, since the Republicans have gone on to cement corporate support through the very-effective K Street Project. It seems from our current prospective that the DLC (and NDN) have served as a Trojan Horse, letting the right hollow out our party from within. Whether or not they are still operating as such, or if they’ve realized their error and trying to correct it, is a moot point. They’ve mortally wounded the party as an effective opposition. It is plain that we must move away from their counsel. We must reconnnect with our roots, our grassroots and core issues. Gore realized this too late in 2000, but he did try. From the American Prospect:

During the last months of the 2000 presidential election, however, it must have seemed to the DLC that Gore and Lieberman, ur–New Democrats both, had crossed back to the other shore. Abandoning the DLC’s message almost entirely, they scrambled to look like plain, old-fashioned Democrats in an awkward, faux-populist “people versus the powerful” campaign that sought to energize the party’s working-class and lower-middle-class base. The DLC’s elation at the selection of its chairman as the running mate for one of its founders turned to dismay during the Democratic convention last August, as Gore lurched left.

“I listened to Gore’s speech at the convention with incredulity,” says William Galston, a longtime DLCer who served as domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and who is currently a special consultant for Blueprint. Galston was the Gore campaign’s representative to the Democratic platform committee, working alongside From and Elaine Kamarck, another veteran DLC strategist, who chaired the committee. Galston had heard rumors on the eve of Gore’s speech that it would represent a shift but hadn’t been otherwise warned. “From the convention on, I had essentially no input into the campaign,” he says.

Also left with sharply reduced influence was From, who recalls with resignation his inability to bring the Gore-Lieberman ticket home to its New Democrat roots. “Once Joe [Lieberman] got on the ticket, I worked mostly through him,” says From, ticking off the names of campaign staffers through whom he tried to reach Gore. “I talked to [Bob] Shrum, [Stanley] Greenberg, [Carter] Eskew, and Tad Devine,” he says. “I did a memo to Gore. I actually gave him a game plan to try to contain the populism in a way that would do the least damage.”

After his populist turn, Gore surged in the polls in August and early September, and many analysts credited his fiery attacks on pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and health insurers, Big Oil, and George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. “When I came on in July, Gore was already beginning to move in a populist direction,” says Stan Greenberg, Gore’s pollster for the last few months of the campaign. Brought in to replace Mark Penn, the chief pollster for both Clinton and the DLC, Greenberg helped move Gore to the left, targeting the candidate’s message to recapture white working-class voters in the $30,000-to-$50,000 income range. On the ground, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and other components of the Old Democrats’ traditional voter base–organized labor, African Americans, Hispanics, abortion rights activists–conducted intensive voter education and the get-out-the-vote drives, and these groups now take credit for delivering Gore’s popular vote victory.

Two lost elections in a row, elections in which the party base rallied after being initially snubbed, yet still we hear that the “center” is where we should move. One must ask, is the party being deliberately sabotaged, or are these “centrist” movers-and-shakers well meaning but wrong? It’s hard to know, but the damage is obvious.

Thankfully, though the efforts of Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, John Conyers and others, progressive and liberal ideas are being forced back onto the table. Despite the withering attacks from Vichy Dems like Sen. Biden and Rep. Hoyer, the grassroots have offered powerful support to these more principled, more Democratic leaders, and slowly away from the corporate toadying of right-wing rhetoric. Interests groups on the left have continued to fight and coordinate fundraising, voter outreach and on getting the left’s perspective on issues out.

We on the left have some ways to go, but we can aim this party back to climbing the mountain toward a more inclusive United States of America. We’re going to win this battle, and take our party back, because there are more of us, because we have history and science on our side, and because we MUST. The war within the Democratic Party will be very nasty over the next two or three election cycles, but we will prevail.

crossposted also at dailyKos