Instead of being an organization that advances a progressive agenda, MoveOn.Org has devolved into an arm of the Obama campaign. It wouldn't matter if MoveOn was backing Hilary Clinton or John Edwards, the effect would be the same: to reduce its members' influence on policy.
Candidates take seriously organizations whose support they have to court. What leverage is left to MoveOn in getting Obama to move to progressive positions on reducing military spending, on providing truly universal health care or on committing his administration to the fight for economic justice? None. Obama can now redirect his efforts to pleasing the DLC and the corporatists around Clinton. They're his natural constituency anyway, and they'll be the ones to reap the political benefits in the end.
"We are here to make clear," Barack Obama said in Virginia, "that this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It's not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white." As Gary Gordon reminds us, this sounds like a trope from one of comedian James Tripp's mock campaign speeches. It also brings to mind the scene in The Candidate when Robert Redford, sitting in the backseat of a car while running late to a TV appearance, does a "crack-up" monologue: "We cannot feed our feedless...."
The last thing we need is another run of The Candidate; we have had more than enough bloviation for one season from aspirants of both parties. If MoveOn was truly an issues organization rather than a tool of the Democratic Party, instead of advancing the interests of one centrist candidate over another, it would be trying to produce a revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, maybe with John Edwards in the title role.
2008: Like hope, but different ("McCain" video on YouTube)
John.he.is
Here's an attempt to create an Obama-style video on behalf of John McCain:
And here, for your delectation, is another spoof of Will.i.am's Obama canonization, "Yes We Can," this one taking The.Prez to task for his statement that human beings and fish can co-exist peacefully:
Here's an attempt to create an Obama-style video on behalf of John McCain:
And here, for your delectation, is another spoof of Will.i.am's Obama canonization, "Yes We Can," this one taking The.Prez to task for his statement that human beings and fish can co-exist peacefully:
quote unquote: Lincoln on political virtue
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." -- Abraham Lincoln
The L.A. Times: No news would be good news
Friends at the Times (where I wrote about the magazine business in the long ago) keep me posted on what's going on there, but I rarely get exercised enough to write about it. The Times contributes so little to the political, cultural or social life of the county -- admit it, if it disappeared tomorrow, you wouldn't miss anything but the grocery store inserts, that it's hard to care very much about internal machinations that, although they may make the workplace more or less tolerable, are guaranteed to have zero impact on you or me.
However, the other Times, the real Times thinks it's news [Los Angeles Times Names New Top Editor by Richard Pérez-Peña (The New York Times, 2008-02-15)] that our fishwrap's publisher, David Hiller, decided to give the top editorial job to Russ Stanton weeks before Jim O'Shea was forced out for resisting another in the series of staff cuts that have decimated the paper.
Some of Stanton’s colleagues were disgruntled enough by the prospect, according to Pérez-Peña, to "have taken the extraordinary step of going to Mr. Hiller to ask him not to choose Mr. Stanton....[T]he concerns raised about Mr. Stanton were not about his ability, but about whether he had the stature and breadth of experience to run one of the nation’s most important newspapers."
I hear that the real story is that, in the wake of the Times' recent staffing problems, Stanton, who as the company's "Innovations Editor" (egad!) has been tasked with improving the paper's famously mediocre website, will be nothing more than a flunky for the publisher, who is regarded with contempt by most of the news staff. Stanton responded to that charge by asserting that the "circumstances under which Jim left...really hindered whoever was going to get this job, almost setting them up to be the publisher’s lackey.” Trying to find something nice to say, Pérez-Peña describes the new chief as a "little quirky; he keeps an extensive collection of Los Angeles Dodgers bobble-head dolls in his office."
You're far more likely to find the news you want in papers and websites out of New York, Sacramento and the Bay Area than from 1st and Spring, and from digital news outlets like The Huffington Post and Truthdig. If there's any good news it's that morale at the Times can hardly get worse. But further staff cuts aren't likely to improve either situation. Eli Broad and Ron Burkle ought to be relieved their bid to buy the Times was thwarted; if things continue along the same track, in a year or two they should be able to pick it up for a song.
However, the other Times, the real Times thinks it's news [Los Angeles Times Names New Top Editor by Richard Pérez-Peña (The New York Times, 2008-02-15)] that our fishwrap's publisher, David Hiller, decided to give the top editorial job to Russ Stanton weeks before Jim O'Shea was forced out for resisting another in the series of staff cuts that have decimated the paper.
Some of Stanton’s colleagues were disgruntled enough by the prospect, according to Pérez-Peña, to "have taken the extraordinary step of going to Mr. Hiller to ask him not to choose Mr. Stanton....[T]he concerns raised about Mr. Stanton were not about his ability, but about whether he had the stature and breadth of experience to run one of the nation’s most important newspapers."
I hear that the real story is that, in the wake of the Times' recent staffing problems, Stanton, who as the company's "Innovations Editor" (egad!) has been tasked with improving the paper's famously mediocre website, will be nothing more than a flunky for the publisher, who is regarded with contempt by most of the news staff. Stanton responded to that charge by asserting that the "circumstances under which Jim left...really hindered whoever was going to get this job, almost setting them up to be the publisher’s lackey.” Trying to find something nice to say, Pérez-Peña describes the new chief as a "little quirky; he keeps an extensive collection of Los Angeles Dodgers bobble-head dolls in his office."
...like Mr. O’Shea before him, [Stanton] faces an uphill fight to persuade the newsroom that he is not a puppet of Mr. Hiller.Typically, the local Times buried the story in the business section, but did manage to include the information that
...
A new regime, led by the real estate developer Sam Zell, took control of The Tribune Company in December, and gave more autonomy to each newspaper publisher and television station general manager in a company that had been very top-down. But the new leadership has also made it clear to each property that it must improve its bottom line if Tribune is to meet the heavy debt obligations from the takeover.
Tribune Company bought The Times’ parent company, Times Mirror, in 2000 and installed a widely respected editor, John S. Carroll. At about that time, the paper had a news staff of about 1,200 people.
But after being forced to shrink the newsroom, Mr. Carroll quit rather than carry out another round of reductions. A new publisher, Jeff Johnson, was sent out from the company headquarters in Chicago, and a new editor, Dean P. Baquet, took Mr. Carroll’s place. They made deep cuts in the newsroom but were fired in 2006 for refusing to cut still more.
Once again, the company sent Tribune veterans from Chicago to ride herd on The Times: Mr. Hiller and Mr. O’Shea.
Latimes.com, the paper's online edition, has been adding readers at about a 20% annualized clip recently, Stanton said. The print version of The Times, the nation's fourth-largest daily, however, has seen daily circulation fall to about 780,000 from a peak of more than 1.1 million in the early 1990s, though it has shown a slight improvement recently. The print newspaper generates more than 90% of The Times' revenue, but Hiller noted that the share from online publishing has been growing rapidly.That may explain how Stanton won the post even though he "doesn't have the same range of experience as many of his predecessors, who before moving into the editor's chair had won Pulitzer Prizes and other accolades for their own reporting or coverage they supervised." High-visibility assignments covering wars or Washington or seasoning by running other journals -- not auxiliary websites -- "traditionally have been steppingstones to the top job at The Times and other large newspapers."
You're far more likely to find the news you want in papers and websites out of New York, Sacramento and the Bay Area than from 1st and Spring, and from digital news outlets like The Huffington Post and Truthdig. If there's any good news it's that morale at the Times can hardly get worse. But further staff cuts aren't likely to improve either situation. Eli Broad and Ron Burkle ought to be relieved their bid to buy the Times was thwarted; if things continue along the same track, in a year or two they should be able to pick it up for a song.
The Senate Caves In Again to Bush on FISA
But the House shows a little moxie
The FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), an "updating" of the 30-year-old law that authorized a secret court to oversee intelligence operations by federal agencies, sailed through the "Democratically-controlled" Senate on Feb 12.
Intended to "modernize and streamline" provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, "and for other purposes" (italics added), the act includes a section authorizing warrantless wiretaps of foreign-to-foreign communications and retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that helped the administration to spy on Americans. The bill also states that the government will not need a warrant for foreign-to-American communications, with no privacy protections on the American end, and will allow the government to install monitoring stations in telephone and internet facilities inside the U.S., also without judicial review.
In effect, the statute provides retroactive immunity to government officials as completely as to the telecoms.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Democrat's narrow majority was diminished by the defections of a few conservatives like Lieberman and Salazar, but you'd be wrong. The vote wasn't even close.
Sixty-eight senators voted for the bill; only 29 said nay. To put it another way, 19 Democrats -- 40% of the Democratic delegation -- joined Lieberman and the Republicans in voting to gut the Constitution.
Three senators couldn't be bothered to vote at all. One was Lindsey Graham. No loss there. But the others were the two liberal champions who seek to be the leader of their party: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
It's no wonder that millions of American feel disenfranchised by the current system. In the absence of party discipline, there is no downside to lying about who you are or what you'll do once you're in office. Voters pull the lever for a Democrat and wind up with a senator or a representative allied with the GOP and supporting a corrupt, incompetent and fascistic president. Why wouldn't they vote for Ralph Nader the next time, or just stay home? It shouldn't be a shock that more people vote for American Idol than for president; at least you can count on the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, Carrie Underwood and Taylor Hicks to deliver as promised.
The problem with Washington is not that it is narrowly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Nor is Federalism the problem. The problem is that the government -- all branches -- is firmly and utterly in the hands of conservatives. Nothing is changed by dispatching someone to the District for no more compelling reason than that s/he labels self a Democrat. We have to start choosing people who actually will take on the military-industrial complex, engage in the fight against poverty, expand democratic government, protect the environment, and rebuild the country's tattered infrastructure, regardless of party. We have to stop letting conservatives use the Democratic Party to camouflage their dominance of policy. There are no liberals in the Republican congressional delegation; why should conservatives be allowed to hide out among the Democrats? Party labels are just another way of keeping us from figuring out what's really going on.
Instead of sucking up to right wingers in order to cop the choice corner suites in the Senate office buildings, the Democrats should toss traitors like Joe Lieberman out on their Dumbo-sized ears. What has been gained by taking "control" of the Senate, beyond winning for the Democrats a share of the responsibility for the failures of George W. Bush and of the conservative majority that truly controls the legislative agenda? We would have a far more responsive, effective and democratic government if our elected officials were organized along ideological instead of partisan political lines.
With the White House already lost to the center-right, liberals, progressives, peace advocates, environmentalists, labor activists and such can more effectively deploy their time, talent and legal tender to reorienting the Congress than worrying over who's going to be president. Not that there aren't reasons to choose among them, but McCain, Clinton and Obama are more alike than they are different: none of them is going to tackle the radical adjustment in priorities needed if this is to become a just and democratic country. There should be no rush to choose one over another without getting concrete policy commitments in return.
In the matter at hand, for example, here is the list of nominal Democrats who voted with the Republicans to give the president the added power he craves: Baucus (MT), Bayh (IN), Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Conrad (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lincoln (AR), McCaskill (MO), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Rockefeller (WV) -- the bill's sponsor, Salazar (CO), Pryor (AR), Webb (VA) and Whitehouse (D-RI). I'm not saying protecting your rights as citizens should be the only thing on your mind when you vote, but at least it ought to be a consideration.
Besides, many of these names -- Baucus, Casey, Conrad, Johnson, Kohl, Landrieu, the Nelson boys, Lincoln, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar -- come up over and over again as stalwart defenders of corporate interests and opponents of economic reform. Put a hand on your wallet and look around for a progressive alternative the next time they come conning for support in your precinct.
The list should give us pause in other ways. It turns out that a candidate's opposition to the war du jour may be an insufficient reason to endorse him if his objection to the conflict is that it has been mismanaged, the position of many corporatist Democrats, Jim Webb apparently among them. By the same token, it is hard to see what was gained by replacing the last liberal Republican, Lincoln Chafee, with the conservative Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (another possible warning flag to keep in mind this particular election season: the Rhode Island Democrat's campaign slogan was "Change the Senate").
In 2006, the Democratic Senate and House election committees systematically supported conservatives against candidates who ran on such issues as peace and economic justice. With many more progressives in primary races this time than last, activists need to be on the alert for a reappearance of similar tactics in upcoming contests.
The news isn't all bad.
Although the president was at his fearmongering worst last week, in a rare demonstration of backbone, the leadership in the House, balking at shielding phone carriers from privacy lawsuits and at warrantless and unwarranted surveillance of American citizens by their government -- took a two-week Presidents' Day vacation without reauthorizing last summer's temporary domestic wiretapping law.
"By blocking this piece of legislation, our country is more in danger of an attack," Bush said of the House's presumption. "By not giving the professionals the tools they need, it's going to be a lot harder to do the job we need to be able to defend America."
The temporary provisions are set to expire at midnight tonight, but Democrats argued that the basic law will remain in effect and that the president wittingly manufactured the confrontation by threatening to veto a short-term extension that was intended to permit the Senate and House time to deliberate responsibly on revising FISA permanently. "He knows that the underlying 'intelligence' law and the power given to him in the Protect America Act give him sufficient authority to do all of the surveillance and collecting that he needs to do in order to protect the American people," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The New York Times on Thursday.
In response to Bush's accusation that Democrats are imperiling the nation's security, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer accused the president of "fear mongering."
"After refusing to extend current law, the president repeated today his untenable and irresponsible claim that our national security will be jeopardized unless the House immediately rubber-stamps a Senate bill," Hoyer said. "In fact, a wide range of national security experts has made clear that the president and the intelligence community have all the tools they need to protect our nation."
"This is not about protecting Americans," added Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus, on Friday. "The president just wants to protect American telephone companies."
If the bill is so vital, some Democrats wondered, why not sign the measure without the telecoms' "Get Out of Jail Free" card and let the phone companies off the hook with separate legislation?
Whether the rare display of gumption by House leaders is evidence that the Democrats are ready at last to take on the worst excesses of the president remains to be seen. But so low are our expectations by now that it was gratifying to see them display even the faintest profile of courage, notwithstanding that to do it they had to get out of town.
Countdown Special Comment on FISA: President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist by Keith Olberman (CrooksAndLiars.com, 2008-02-14)
Putting the president above the law (International Herald Tribune, 2008-02-10)
Bush Says Congress Putting US in Danger (AP/NYTimes, 2008-02-15)
Update: House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance
The House approved a new FISA bill that denies retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms and which refuses to grant most of the new powers for the President to spy on Americans without warrants. It passed comfortably, by a 213-197 margin. (Salon.com, 2008-03-14)
The FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), an "updating" of the 30-year-old law that authorized a secret court to oversee intelligence operations by federal agencies, sailed through the "Democratically-controlled" Senate on Feb 12.
Intended to "modernize and streamline" provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, "and for other purposes" (italics added), the act includes a section authorizing warrantless wiretaps of foreign-to-foreign communications and retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that helped the administration to spy on Americans. The bill also states that the government will not need a warrant for foreign-to-American communications, with no privacy protections on the American end, and will allow the government to install monitoring stations in telephone and internet facilities inside the U.S., also without judicial review.
In effect, the statute provides retroactive immunity to government officials as completely as to the telecoms.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Democrat's narrow majority was diminished by the defections of a few conservatives like Lieberman and Salazar, but you'd be wrong. The vote wasn't even close.
Sixty-eight senators voted for the bill; only 29 said nay. To put it another way, 19 Democrats -- 40% of the Democratic delegation -- joined Lieberman and the Republicans in voting to gut the Constitution.
Three senators couldn't be bothered to vote at all. One was Lindsey Graham. No loss there. But the others were the two liberal champions who seek to be the leader of their party: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
It's no wonder that millions of American feel disenfranchised by the current system. In the absence of party discipline, there is no downside to lying about who you are or what you'll do once you're in office. Voters pull the lever for a Democrat and wind up with a senator or a representative allied with the GOP and supporting a corrupt, incompetent and fascistic president. Why wouldn't they vote for Ralph Nader the next time, or just stay home? It shouldn't be a shock that more people vote for American Idol than for president; at least you can count on the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, Carrie Underwood and Taylor Hicks to deliver as promised.
The problem with Washington is not that it is narrowly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Nor is Federalism the problem. The problem is that the government -- all branches -- is firmly and utterly in the hands of conservatives. Nothing is changed by dispatching someone to the District for no more compelling reason than that s/he labels self a Democrat. We have to start choosing people who actually will take on the military-industrial complex, engage in the fight against poverty, expand democratic government, protect the environment, and rebuild the country's tattered infrastructure, regardless of party. We have to stop letting conservatives use the Democratic Party to camouflage their dominance of policy. There are no liberals in the Republican congressional delegation; why should conservatives be allowed to hide out among the Democrats? Party labels are just another way of keeping us from figuring out what's really going on.
Instead of sucking up to right wingers in order to cop the choice corner suites in the Senate office buildings, the Democrats should toss traitors like Joe Lieberman out on their Dumbo-sized ears. What has been gained by taking "control" of the Senate, beyond winning for the Democrats a share of the responsibility for the failures of George W. Bush and of the conservative majority that truly controls the legislative agenda? We would have a far more responsive, effective and democratic government if our elected officials were organized along ideological instead of partisan political lines.
With the White House already lost to the center-right, liberals, progressives, peace advocates, environmentalists, labor activists and such can more effectively deploy their time, talent and legal tender to reorienting the Congress than worrying over who's going to be president. Not that there aren't reasons to choose among them, but McCain, Clinton and Obama are more alike than they are different: none of them is going to tackle the radical adjustment in priorities needed if this is to become a just and democratic country. There should be no rush to choose one over another without getting concrete policy commitments in return.
In the matter at hand, for example, here is the list of nominal Democrats who voted with the Republicans to give the president the added power he craves: Baucus (MT), Bayh (IN), Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Conrad (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lincoln (AR), McCaskill (MO), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Rockefeller (WV) -- the bill's sponsor, Salazar (CO), Pryor (AR), Webb (VA) and Whitehouse (D-RI). I'm not saying protecting your rights as citizens should be the only thing on your mind when you vote, but at least it ought to be a consideration.
Besides, many of these names -- Baucus, Casey, Conrad, Johnson, Kohl, Landrieu, the Nelson boys, Lincoln, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar -- come up over and over again as stalwart defenders of corporate interests and opponents of economic reform. Put a hand on your wallet and look around for a progressive alternative the next time they come conning for support in your precinct.
The list should give us pause in other ways. It turns out that a candidate's opposition to the war du jour may be an insufficient reason to endorse him if his objection to the conflict is that it has been mismanaged, the position of many corporatist Democrats, Jim Webb apparently among them. By the same token, it is hard to see what was gained by replacing the last liberal Republican, Lincoln Chafee, with the conservative Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (another possible warning flag to keep in mind this particular election season: the Rhode Island Democrat's campaign slogan was "Change the Senate").
In 2006, the Democratic Senate and House election committees systematically supported conservatives against candidates who ran on such issues as peace and economic justice. With many more progressives in primary races this time than last, activists need to be on the alert for a reappearance of similar tactics in upcoming contests.
The news isn't all bad.
Although the president was at his fearmongering worst last week, in a rare demonstration of backbone, the leadership in the House, balking at shielding phone carriers from privacy lawsuits and at warrantless and unwarranted surveillance of American citizens by their government -- took a two-week Presidents' Day vacation without reauthorizing last summer's temporary domestic wiretapping law.
"By blocking this piece of legislation, our country is more in danger of an attack," Bush said of the House's presumption. "By not giving the professionals the tools they need, it's going to be a lot harder to do the job we need to be able to defend America."
The temporary provisions are set to expire at midnight tonight, but Democrats argued that the basic law will remain in effect and that the president wittingly manufactured the confrontation by threatening to veto a short-term extension that was intended to permit the Senate and House time to deliberate responsibly on revising FISA permanently. "He knows that the underlying 'intelligence' law and the power given to him in the Protect America Act give him sufficient authority to do all of the surveillance and collecting that he needs to do in order to protect the American people," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The New York Times on Thursday.
In response to Bush's accusation that Democrats are imperiling the nation's security, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer accused the president of "fear mongering."
"After refusing to extend current law, the president repeated today his untenable and irresponsible claim that our national security will be jeopardized unless the House immediately rubber-stamps a Senate bill," Hoyer said. "In fact, a wide range of national security experts has made clear that the president and the intelligence community have all the tools they need to protect our nation."
"This is not about protecting Americans," added Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus, on Friday. "The president just wants to protect American telephone companies."
If the bill is so vital, some Democrats wondered, why not sign the measure without the telecoms' "Get Out of Jail Free" card and let the phone companies off the hook with separate legislation?
Whether the rare display of gumption by House leaders is evidence that the Democrats are ready at last to take on the worst excesses of the president remains to be seen. But so low are our expectations by now that it was gratifying to see them display even the faintest profile of courage, notwithstanding that to do it they had to get out of town.
Countdown Special Comment on FISA: President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist by Keith Olberman (CrooksAndLiars.com, 2008-02-14)
Putting the president above the law (International Herald Tribune, 2008-02-10)
Bush Says Congress Putting US in Danger (AP/NYTimes, 2008-02-15)
Update: House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance
The House approved a new FISA bill that denies retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms and which refuses to grant most of the new powers for the President to spy on Americans without warrants. It passed comfortably, by a 213-197 margin. (Salon.com, 2008-03-14)
2008: Déjà vu all over again?
Unless there is a big change in the Obama campaign's approach to the issues that matter to me, I suspect that come November I will be voting for a third party or independent candidate. It is possible, I suppose, that, under the tutelage of Ted Kennedy, Obama can find his way to the left, but I doubt it. And so, once again, an independent candidacy is required.
Should it be a close election, and the Democrats lose to John McCain because the margin of victory has been ceded to an independent, perhaps, faint hope, I know, but perhaps the next time they will chose a progressive as their nominee instead of letting the media decide which dependable proponents of empire and economic oppression we can be allowed to consider.
Whom to vote for instead will depend mostly on who's on the ballot. There is a genuine possibility that the California Peace & Freedom Party will endorse Brian Moore, the nominee of the Socialist Party USA, making him much more of a national candidate. Should that happen, I plan to vote for him. In another scenario, Ralph Nader may be on the ballot in California as both a Green Party and a Peace and Freedom candidate, and a vote for him would also be acceptable.
In the meantime, I think the pressure should stay on the Democrats on the issues of empire and economic justice, including genuine health care reform. The American military budget now -- grotesquely, absurdly -- exceeds that of all the other nations of the world, combined. Neither Obama nor Clinton has indicated any objection to this state of affairs; on the contrary, each is a proponent of an aggressive, militarized foreign policy.
And so Brian Moore is submitted for your consideration. He certainly deserves at least a look.
Should it be a close election, and the Democrats lose to John McCain because the margin of victory has been ceded to an independent, perhaps, faint hope, I know, but perhaps the next time they will chose a progressive as their nominee instead of letting the media decide which dependable proponents of empire and economic oppression we can be allowed to consider.
Whom to vote for instead will depend mostly on who's on the ballot. There is a genuine possibility that the California Peace & Freedom Party will endorse Brian Moore, the nominee of the Socialist Party USA, making him much more of a national candidate. Should that happen, I plan to vote for him. In another scenario, Ralph Nader may be on the ballot in California as both a Green Party and a Peace and Freedom candidate, and a vote for him would also be acceptable.
In the meantime, I think the pressure should stay on the Democrats on the issues of empire and economic justice, including genuine health care reform. The American military budget now -- grotesquely, absurdly -- exceeds that of all the other nations of the world, combined. Neither Obama nor Clinton has indicated any objection to this state of affairs; on the contrary, each is a proponent of an aggressive, militarized foreign policy.
And so Brian Moore is submitted for your consideration. He certainly deserves at least a look.
2008: Electing a progressive Congress
John Edwards may have suspended his campaign, but he has not given up the fight.
In a letter to supporters on behalf of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Edwards promises that contributions to a fund targeted on the districts of the 29 Republican representatives -- a "stunning number," as the former senator puts it -- who have decided to abandon the sinking ship of conservatism by retiring from Congress this year. "I believe," Edwards writes,
In a letter to supporters on behalf of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Edwards promises that contributions to a fund targeted on the districts of the 29 Republican representatives -- a "stunning number," as the former senator puts it -- who have decided to abandon the sinking ship of conservatism by retiring from Congress this year. "I believe," Edwards writes,
the 2008 elections can truly transform American politics -- but only if we have the courage to act. We have to think big again, taking on fundamental issues like poverty and challenging injustice at every turn. And we have to seize every opportunity to move beyond politics as usual.2008 is providing a unique opportunity to remake the federal legislature. About the conservative Republicans scurrying for the exits, Edwards writes
They've stood in our way and now they're standing down. And we've got an incredible chance to replace them with strong Democratic leaders who will help end the war, achieve universal health care, challenge poverty, and reduce global warming.The DCCC is targeting Republicans, of course, but more importantly this election could change the ideological balance in Congress. No less than the Republicans, many Democrats have been corrupted by the business lobby. In the thrall of K Street, they vote for measures like estate tax repeal, changes in the bankruptcy laws, or special tax breaks for the superrich that harm the people they're pretending to represent. But primary victories, like reformer Donna Edwards' clobbering of trogloDem Al Wynn in Maryland, show that there is a price to be paid by congressmembers who put corporate interests ahead of the needs of the country or of their constituents.
Donate $30 or more to the 2008 Open to Change Campaign and your gift will be matched.
You and I know that we've got to put the White House in Democratic hands this year, [Edwards continues]. But, we've also got to strengthen our hold on Congress -- breaking the ability that special interests still have to throw obstacles in the path of progress. Your activism has helped put Democrats in a strong position. And in order to seize this historic opportunity, I'm asking you to step forward and stand together with our strong Democratic candidates so we can celebrate Democratic victories.
That's what the 2008 Open to Change Campaign is all about. The skilled, savvy and committed political organizers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have developed a detailed plan. With our help, they can turn open seats into big changes.
Donate $30 or more to the 2008 Open to Change Campaign and your gift will be matched.
I've seen it firsthand. I know how eager the American people are to take our government back and lead our country in a new direction. As a DCCC supporter, [you'll be] in the forefront of this movement for change. [Y]ou can help recruit, train, support and sustain strong Democratic candidates -- people who can win the seats that running for the hills Republicans have left open to change.
These kinds of open seat opportunities don't happen every day. Let's make the most of it.
Sincerely, John Edwards
First they ignore Giuliani. Then they dump Romney.
The arrogance of Republican voters, thinking they have the right to choose whomever they want to be their nominee. Why can't they just get with the program, like the Democrats?
What now?
At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama - or, the real nightmare, both - will be the Democratic Party's nominee. So the question we need to be asking is what we can do to insure that five years from now the Bush tax cuts are gone; our priorities have shifted from military spending to education, housing, jobs, water, alternative energy, transportation, the environment, and so on; we have universal single-payer national health; and we are truly out of Iraq -- no "counter-terrorism" units, no "advisers," no Taj Mahal-sized embassy, no Green Zone, no Halliburton-style contractors and no private security forces. Any ideas?
Why I'm (still) voting for John Edwards on Super Tuesday
Millions of Democrats continued to support John Edwards long after the media had conspired to make impossible his nomination by the Democratic Party. For many progressives, he was the embodiment of the desire for a new start after the corrupt, incompetent, authoritarian regime of George W. Bush.
Months ago, his campaign stopped being about electing John Edwards and became a crusade to force the Democratic party to live up to its history -- embodied in the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, and its ideals -- the vehicle used by generations of liberals and progressives to advance the causes of economic justice, civil rights, peace and the environment.
Whatever happens on Super Tuesday, progressive Democrats should continue to vote for John Edwards until the convention. It was Edwards, with his growing maturity in foreign policy and his focus on economic justice as the cornerstone of his effort, who thrust progressive policy proposals into the campaign. As Paul Krugman wrote in The Times,
But, with Edwards out, if the struggle for economic justice and the pursuit a more rational set of national priorities are to remain a part of this campaign until election day, Edwards delegates need to be at the convention in the largest numbers possible.
The empty call for "change" has become the buzz word of this election year. It's gotten so in the last couple months that you can't announce you're running for dogcatcher without issuing a press release assuring voters that you are a "change agent." The usefulness of "change" to a politician is obvious: it encourages each voter to see the candidate as a blank screen on which to project his particular hopes and dreams. But the endless mantra of change has left many citizens hungry for details.
With Edwards' run over, who among the major candidates can be relied on most to deliver the profound transformational changes we need? The next president will inherit a failed military policy; a looming disaster for the economy; the aftermath of decades of growing structural deformities in the economic system; a crisis in health care; a crumbling infrastructure...the list is longer than a bill coming out of the military appropriations committee.
The next president is going to be required to exhibit bold vision and provide tough leadership if s/he is to succeed in building the political and cultural consensus that will bring about the reform and rebirth of the American system. We are still learning who that person might be.
No hurry to choose
It isn't time yet for progressives to decide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The rush of some liberals to endorse Obama in the hours leading up to Tuesday's vote has much more to do with stopping Clinton (and, honestly, I wish Ted Kennedy better luck with his Anybody-but-Clinton offensive than he had with his Anybody-but-Carter effort a quarter century ago) than it does with his goals or likelihood of success.
For now, progressives should withhold their support from both candidates until they make convincing specific proposals about what their administrations will do about health care, international trade, economic justice and job creation, infrastructure, runaway military spending, and the host of other problems that have been festering since the Reagan years.
Take the troubled economy. Hillary Clinton recently proposed (long after Edwards) a broad economic stimulus package that includes a $30 billion “emergency housing crisis fund” to help states rescue low-income families who are unable to meet their mortgage payments and a $25 billion budget item (ten times current federal assistance) to aid low-income families in paying heating bills this winter. She would also spend $10 billion to extend unemployment insurance.
Inevitably, Obama responded a few days later with his own plan, but as was true with other initiatives by Edwards and Clinton -- notably health care -- Obama's proposal mirrored theirs but was more conservative. The senator from Illinois, for example, doesn't include the alternative energy components that are in both the Edwards and Clinton plans, and he emphasizes across-the-board tax cuts, similar to those contained in the agreement between the House leadership and the Bush administration, instead of direct aid to the hardest hit Americans that Clinton and Edwards favored.
This is not to say that either Clinton nor Obama wouldn't be infinitely superior as chief executive to John McCain, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. But, so far, both Democratic candidates appear to be cautious, middle-of-the-road politicians at a moment in our history when more is demanded, and there is no rush to decide Tuesday or anytime before the convention which of the two is better-suited or more likely to rise to the challenges the country will face in the next four years.
Edwards supporters were attracted by a campaign based on ideas, on specifics, and on progressive ideals. Why should we hurry to embrace a candidate who gets specific only reluctantly and who promises to rise above "partisanship," as though the ideas of the right and left are practically and morally equivalent and that what is missing is someone to moderate between them? If we've learned anything over the last several administrations, it is that bipartisanship is a code word for conservative rule. At the very least, it should be enough to give progressives pause before hastening to vote for him that in this campaign Obama has attacked Clinton and Edwards repeatedly from the right.
There are plenty of reasons that one might decide to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, but a commitment to progressive politics is not one of them; there will be plenty of time between now and Denver for those who supported John Edwards to make up their minds which candidate offers the best hope for real change.
The media or the voters?
If you were an Edwards supporter, it is probably because you believed he best embodied your hopes for the future, but once again the media has decided whom you are permitted to consider for the nomination. Now that Democrats have accepted the proposition that only Obama or Clinton is worthy of the party standard, Democratic primary voters are told we must hurry up and choose between them, and our only basis for deciding is a guess about who will be strongest in November. The last couple of Democratic guesses haven't been so hot.
Many Democrats are strongly anti-Clinton. Edwards quit now so that he and Obama wouldn't split the anti-Clinton vote on Super Tuesday, and thus hand her the nomination by default. But with Obama surging in the polls in the weekend before the vote, there is no longer a danger that Clinton will sew up the nomination any time soon. There is no longer a reason, if ever there was one, for progressives to be pushed into deciding between them.
If you feel strongly that the war should be ended as soon as possible, say within Edwards' proposed ten months, why be in a hurry to decide between candidates who expressly support continued counter-insurgency efforts and the presence in the Middle East of "advisers," counter-terrorism units, and Halliburton-style private contractors? Getting the combat troops out in 12 months, as Clinton says she will, or in 16-to-18 months, as Obama plans to do, is a distinction without a difference if four years from now we are still dumping people and money into the Green Zone.
As Dennis Kucinich repeatedly pointed out during this campaign, a permanent war economy, that directs more than half of federal discretionary funds to the military, leaves no room for needed social programs. Progressives should reserve their support for whichever candidate is most willing to offer concrete programs for revising -- for changing -- our priorities.
The last thing the Democrats should want to face is the nightmare of an election night in which the pundits are happily puzzling over how Ron Paul and Ralph Nader have racked up enough votes to make John McCain the president.
Not Edwards but Edwards-ism
Every four years, the left of the party is cornered into supporting a moderate who either loses, because he fails to distinguish himself from his GOP rival, or wins and turns out to be no change agent, after all.
Some former Edwards supporters now resist the idea of marking the spot next to his name. Many invested enormous quantities of time, money and emotional capital because of his promise that he would fight 'til the end. To them, he now appears to be just another hack politician whose words cannot be trusted. But a vote on the Edwards line on the ballot is no longer an endorsement of Edwards himself. It is a vote for the issues that led us to support him.
Should the Democrats arrive in Denver with neither Clinton nor Obama in control -- a virtual certainty, the progressives in attendance will be in position to negotiate a stronger platform and specific commitments on the war and on domestic spending. As Clinton said in Nevada, “This is ultimately about delegates and how many delegates every one of us have.” Edwards may have been willing to squander his influence on Obama's behalf this week without getting anything in return (that we know of), but there is no reason for Edwards' supporters to do the same thing.
In a close race, an uncommitted 15 percent or so of the delegates could have the power to decide the nomination (for example, by voting yay or nay on seating the Michigan and Florida delegations). Don't forget that, because a fifth of the seats at the convention are occupied by so-called superdelegates (members of Congress, governors and other party officials), in order to arrive at the convention with an insurmountable lead, a candidate must win about 62% of the delegates in the caucuses and primaries, clearly an impossible chore for Clinton even if Obama's recent surge ebbs as completely as it did in New Hampshire (despite Clinton's "victory" in New Hampshire, for example, at the end of the day she and Obama each walked away from the Granite State with 9 delegates - and Edwards got 4).
Based on the polls at the time he pulled out, Edwards might have had as many as 300 convention delegates. While there is no way anything like those numbers can be achieved now (made even more difficult by primary rules designed to discount insurgent campaigns), it remains important to remind the party that the issues we cared about a week ago are still the issues we want addressed by this campaign. When the serious delegate wrangling begins in Denver, a block of independent progressives of any measurable size will be able to negotiate significant concessions.
Until South Carolina, an argument could be made that supporting Obama was a way to stop the Clinton juggernaut. But it has been stopped. Now the job is to prevent the Democrats from repeating the mistake of running a cautious, neo-Republican campaign that will end, as it did for John Kerry, in victory by the bona fide Republicans.
The personal charisma of the Democratic nominee will not be enough to assure election, and if not-being-George-Bush wasn't enough to elect John Kerry last time, it alone certainly won't be sufficient to propel Clinton or Obama in to the Oval Office now that Bush is history. Since the heyday of Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, Republicans have become expert at demonizing their opponents, as the Swiftboaters did so effectively to Kerry. Clinton has been subjected to this treatment many times over and you can be sure the Republican hit teams are in maneuvers somewhere, but should Obama stop Clinton, don't be surprised at how quickly the conservative talking heads, now beaming on him as the embodiment of Anyone-but-Clinton, will discover that he is the Spawn of Satan.
Even now, despite the nearly universal animus toward the incumbent president, the polls show McCain as tied with or narrowly beating Obama or Clinton. When they address policy, however, the same polls give the edge to the Democrats by significant margins. If the Democrats win, the irony is that it will because they embraced the ideas advanced by John Edwards; it follows that Edwards supporters need to be in Denver to keep the focus on those ideas.
Unanswered Questions
Five years ago, during his aborted run for the Democratic nomination, Howard Dean asked a series of questions that still need to be answered:
The press liked to ask why John Edwards was so mad. The more interesting question is why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama aren't madder.
If they are outraged that the United States spends more on its military than all of the rest of the world combined, they haven't said so. Are they revolted that preemptive war and the torture of prisoners are official policies of the United States? What are they going to do about repeated and extended service deployments; Walter Reed, military suicides and PTSD; and medical care, jobs and education for veterans? Are they ready to return the Constitution to its central place in our political life, by respecting the Congress and the Supreme Court as coequal branches, by appointing judges who will uphold the law, by renouncing signing statements as a way of getting around the people's representatives, by respecting the separation of church and state, by reining in the intelligence agencies?
Are they outraged that any American must die because he doesn't have access to food or housing or health care? Are they offended that the professional bureaucracy and the balanced budget bequeathed by the administration of Bill Clinton have been replaced by cronyism and incompetence and the biggest budget deficit in history? Do they intend to restore the progressive tax system? Will they renegotiate trade agreements to protect jobs, worker safety and the environment? Are they going to take on big oil, big pharma, and the agri giants, fight for affordable universal health care, back the development of alternative energies, rebuild an infrastructure that has been in decline since Reagan?
Enquiring primary voters want to know.
John Edwards has abandoned his campaign of ideas. That makes it more important than ever to vote for him.
Update: links about similar thoughts by JRE supporters who are voting for him today or in upcoming primaries:
Benny's World
Acebass at the Daily Kos
BruceMcF's Midnight Oil at the Daily Kos
Montana Maven
NcDem Amy at JRE's blog
Ted Daley at Alternet
Sarah Lane at Lefty Lane
Surburan Guerilla
Vyan at the DU
Ellinorianne at the Daily Kos
Months ago, his campaign stopped being about electing John Edwards and became a crusade to force the Democratic party to live up to its history -- embodied in the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, and its ideals -- the vehicle used by generations of liberals and progressives to advance the causes of economic justice, civil rights, peace and the environment.
Whatever happens on Super Tuesday, progressive Democrats should continue to vote for John Edwards until the convention. It was Edwards, with his growing maturity in foreign policy and his focus on economic justice as the cornerstone of his effort, who thrust progressive policy proposals into the campaign. As Paul Krugman wrote in The Times,
Mr. Edwards, far more than is usual in modern politics, ran a campaign based on ideas. And even as his personal quest for the White House faltered, his ideas triumphed: both candidates left standing are, to a large extent, running on the platform Mr. Edwards built.The issues remain
But, with Edwards out, if the struggle for economic justice and the pursuit a more rational set of national priorities are to remain a part of this campaign until election day, Edwards delegates need to be at the convention in the largest numbers possible.
The empty call for "change" has become the buzz word of this election year. It's gotten so in the last couple months that you can't announce you're running for dogcatcher without issuing a press release assuring voters that you are a "change agent." The usefulness of "change" to a politician is obvious: it encourages each voter to see the candidate as a blank screen on which to project his particular hopes and dreams. But the endless mantra of change has left many citizens hungry for details.
With Edwards' run over, who among the major candidates can be relied on most to deliver the profound transformational changes we need? The next president will inherit a failed military policy; a looming disaster for the economy; the aftermath of decades of growing structural deformities in the economic system; a crisis in health care; a crumbling infrastructure...the list is longer than a bill coming out of the military appropriations committee.
The next president is going to be required to exhibit bold vision and provide tough leadership if s/he is to succeed in building the political and cultural consensus that will bring about the reform and rebirth of the American system. We are still learning who that person might be.
No hurry to choose
It isn't time yet for progressives to decide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The rush of some liberals to endorse Obama in the hours leading up to Tuesday's vote has much more to do with stopping Clinton (and, honestly, I wish Ted Kennedy better luck with his Anybody-but-Clinton offensive than he had with his Anybody-but-Carter effort a quarter century ago) than it does with his goals or likelihood of success.
For now, progressives should withhold their support from both candidates until they make convincing specific proposals about what their administrations will do about health care, international trade, economic justice and job creation, infrastructure, runaway military spending, and the host of other problems that have been festering since the Reagan years.
Take the troubled economy. Hillary Clinton recently proposed (long after Edwards) a broad economic stimulus package that includes a $30 billion “emergency housing crisis fund” to help states rescue low-income families who are unable to meet their mortgage payments and a $25 billion budget item (ten times current federal assistance) to aid low-income families in paying heating bills this winter. She would also spend $10 billion to extend unemployment insurance.
Inevitably, Obama responded a few days later with his own plan, but as was true with other initiatives by Edwards and Clinton -- notably health care -- Obama's proposal mirrored theirs but was more conservative. The senator from Illinois, for example, doesn't include the alternative energy components that are in both the Edwards and Clinton plans, and he emphasizes across-the-board tax cuts, similar to those contained in the agreement between the House leadership and the Bush administration, instead of direct aid to the hardest hit Americans that Clinton and Edwards favored.
This is not to say that either Clinton nor Obama wouldn't be infinitely superior as chief executive to John McCain, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. But, so far, both Democratic candidates appear to be cautious, middle-of-the-road politicians at a moment in our history when more is demanded, and there is no rush to decide Tuesday or anytime before the convention which of the two is better-suited or more likely to rise to the challenges the country will face in the next four years.
Edwards supporters were attracted by a campaign based on ideas, on specifics, and on progressive ideals. Why should we hurry to embrace a candidate who gets specific only reluctantly and who promises to rise above "partisanship," as though the ideas of the right and left are practically and morally equivalent and that what is missing is someone to moderate between them? If we've learned anything over the last several administrations, it is that bipartisanship is a code word for conservative rule. At the very least, it should be enough to give progressives pause before hastening to vote for him that in this campaign Obama has attacked Clinton and Edwards repeatedly from the right.
There are plenty of reasons that one might decide to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, but a commitment to progressive politics is not one of them; there will be plenty of time between now and Denver for those who supported John Edwards to make up their minds which candidate offers the best hope for real change.
The media or the voters?
If you were an Edwards supporter, it is probably because you believed he best embodied your hopes for the future, but once again the media has decided whom you are permitted to consider for the nomination. Now that Democrats have accepted the proposition that only Obama or Clinton is worthy of the party standard, Democratic primary voters are told we must hurry up and choose between them, and our only basis for deciding is a guess about who will be strongest in November. The last couple of Democratic guesses haven't been so hot.
Many Democrats are strongly anti-Clinton. Edwards quit now so that he and Obama wouldn't split the anti-Clinton vote on Super Tuesday, and thus hand her the nomination by default. But with Obama surging in the polls in the weekend before the vote, there is no longer a danger that Clinton will sew up the nomination any time soon. There is no longer a reason, if ever there was one, for progressives to be pushed into deciding between them.
If you feel strongly that the war should be ended as soon as possible, say within Edwards' proposed ten months, why be in a hurry to decide between candidates who expressly support continued counter-insurgency efforts and the presence in the Middle East of "advisers," counter-terrorism units, and Halliburton-style private contractors? Getting the combat troops out in 12 months, as Clinton says she will, or in 16-to-18 months, as Obama plans to do, is a distinction without a difference if four years from now we are still dumping people and money into the Green Zone.
As Dennis Kucinich repeatedly pointed out during this campaign, a permanent war economy, that directs more than half of federal discretionary funds to the military, leaves no room for needed social programs. Progressives should reserve their support for whichever candidate is most willing to offer concrete programs for revising -- for changing -- our priorities.
The last thing the Democrats should want to face is the nightmare of an election night in which the pundits are happily puzzling over how Ron Paul and Ralph Nader have racked up enough votes to make John McCain the president.
Not Edwards but Edwards-ism
Every four years, the left of the party is cornered into supporting a moderate who either loses, because he fails to distinguish himself from his GOP rival, or wins and turns out to be no change agent, after all.
Some former Edwards supporters now resist the idea of marking the spot next to his name. Many invested enormous quantities of time, money and emotional capital because of his promise that he would fight 'til the end. To them, he now appears to be just another hack politician whose words cannot be trusted. But a vote on the Edwards line on the ballot is no longer an endorsement of Edwards himself. It is a vote for the issues that led us to support him.
Should the Democrats arrive in Denver with neither Clinton nor Obama in control -- a virtual certainty, the progressives in attendance will be in position to negotiate a stronger platform and specific commitments on the war and on domestic spending. As Clinton said in Nevada, “This is ultimately about delegates and how many delegates every one of us have.” Edwards may have been willing to squander his influence on Obama's behalf this week without getting anything in return (that we know of), but there is no reason for Edwards' supporters to do the same thing.
In a close race, an uncommitted 15 percent or so of the delegates could have the power to decide the nomination (for example, by voting yay or nay on seating the Michigan and Florida delegations). Don't forget that, because a fifth of the seats at the convention are occupied by so-called superdelegates (members of Congress, governors and other party officials), in order to arrive at the convention with an insurmountable lead, a candidate must win about 62% of the delegates in the caucuses and primaries, clearly an impossible chore for Clinton even if Obama's recent surge ebbs as completely as it did in New Hampshire (despite Clinton's "victory" in New Hampshire, for example, at the end of the day she and Obama each walked away from the Granite State with 9 delegates - and Edwards got 4).
Based on the polls at the time he pulled out, Edwards might have had as many as 300 convention delegates. While there is no way anything like those numbers can be achieved now (made even more difficult by primary rules designed to discount insurgent campaigns), it remains important to remind the party that the issues we cared about a week ago are still the issues we want addressed by this campaign. When the serious delegate wrangling begins in Denver, a block of independent progressives of any measurable size will be able to negotiate significant concessions.
Until South Carolina, an argument could be made that supporting Obama was a way to stop the Clinton juggernaut. But it has been stopped. Now the job is to prevent the Democrats from repeating the mistake of running a cautious, neo-Republican campaign that will end, as it did for John Kerry, in victory by the bona fide Republicans.
The personal charisma of the Democratic nominee will not be enough to assure election, and if not-being-George-Bush wasn't enough to elect John Kerry last time, it alone certainly won't be sufficient to propel Clinton or Obama in to the Oval Office now that Bush is history. Since the heyday of Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, Republicans have become expert at demonizing their opponents, as the Swiftboaters did so effectively to Kerry. Clinton has been subjected to this treatment many times over and you can be sure the Republican hit teams are in maneuvers somewhere, but should Obama stop Clinton, don't be surprised at how quickly the conservative talking heads, now beaming on him as the embodiment of Anyone-but-Clinton, will discover that he is the Spawn of Satan.
Even now, despite the nearly universal animus toward the incumbent president, the polls show McCain as tied with or narrowly beating Obama or Clinton. When they address policy, however, the same polls give the edge to the Democrats by significant margins. If the Democrats win, the irony is that it will because they embraced the ideas advanced by John Edwards; it follows that Edwards supporters need to be in Denver to keep the focus on those ideas.
Unanswered Questions
Five years ago, during his aborted run for the Democratic nomination, Howard Dean asked a series of questions that still need to be answered:
What I want to know[, Dean said in part], is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the President’s unilateral intervention in Iraq...And Dean was speaking before we knew how complete the failure in Iraq would be, before we understood that we are enduring the most inept, mercenary, and tyrannical government in our history, before Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, before waterboarding, before illegal spying on Americans, before the suspension of habeas corpus, before the obscenely large deficit.
What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting tax cuts, which have bankrupted this country and given us the largest deficit in the history of the United States...
What I want to know is why the Democrats in Congress aren’t standing up for us, joining every other industrialized country on the face of the Earth in providing health insurance for every man, woman and child in America....
The press liked to ask why John Edwards was so mad. The more interesting question is why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama aren't madder.
If they are outraged that the United States spends more on its military than all of the rest of the world combined, they haven't said so. Are they revolted that preemptive war and the torture of prisoners are official policies of the United States? What are they going to do about repeated and extended service deployments; Walter Reed, military suicides and PTSD; and medical care, jobs and education for veterans? Are they ready to return the Constitution to its central place in our political life, by respecting the Congress and the Supreme Court as coequal branches, by appointing judges who will uphold the law, by renouncing signing statements as a way of getting around the people's representatives, by respecting the separation of church and state, by reining in the intelligence agencies?
Are they outraged that any American must die because he doesn't have access to food or housing or health care? Are they offended that the professional bureaucracy and the balanced budget bequeathed by the administration of Bill Clinton have been replaced by cronyism and incompetence and the biggest budget deficit in history? Do they intend to restore the progressive tax system? Will they renegotiate trade agreements to protect jobs, worker safety and the environment? Are they going to take on big oil, big pharma, and the agri giants, fight for affordable universal health care, back the development of alternative energies, rebuild an infrastructure that has been in decline since Reagan?
Enquiring primary voters want to know.
John Edwards has abandoned his campaign of ideas. That makes it more important than ever to vote for him.
Update: links about similar thoughts by JRE supporters who are voting for him today or in upcoming primaries:
Benny's World
Acebass at the Daily Kos
BruceMcF's Midnight Oil at the Daily Kos
Montana Maven
NcDem Amy at JRE's blog
Ted Daley at Alternet
Sarah Lane at Lefty Lane
Surburan Guerilla
Vyan at the DU
Ellinorianne at the Daily Kos
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