Iowa Dispatch: Why It's Wrong to 'Sit This One Out'

I am traveling through Iowa this week, trying to catch as many campaign events as I can. And, while bracing myself to step out into single digit temperatures this morning, I had occasion to read Adolph Reed's much discussed essay, "Sitting this one out." I admire Reed greatly - his democratic socialism is similar to my own. He's extremely smart, an incisive writer and draws on a great depth of historical understanding to press his points. And, his analysis of the campaign dynamics of the past twenty years seems spot on:

The Democratic candidates who are anointed "serious" are like a car with a faulty front-end alignment: Their default setting pulls to the right. They are unshakably locked into a strategy that impels them to give priority to placating those who aren't inclined to vote for them and then palliate those who are with bromides and doublespeak. When we complain, they smugly say, "Well, you have no choice but to vote for me because the other guy's worse." The party has essentially been nominating the same ticket with the same approach since Dukakis.

What I am wrestling with here is whether his conclusions follow from his analysis. Because, while he is undoubtedly right about the drift of the party and the shift in the center of political gravity in the United States, it remains true that a Republican presidency (combined with a Republican and increasingly conservative courts) has been disastrous. To take one example, Reed dismisses the old Liberal standby - the Court. He writes:

And I'm prepared to blow off every liberal who starts whining and hectoring, in that self-important and breathless way they do, about our obligation to protect "choice" or to make sure we can get another Stephen Breyer or Sandra Day O'Connor onto the Supreme Court.

I have often, in the past, shared Reed's frustration with this line, especially to the extent that the court argument tended to reduce to a single issue -- abortion -- that while certainly extremely significant, often obscured other issues critical to progressives - poverty, corporate power and the like that moderate Democrats seemed ineffectual at dealing with.

But, what we've learned from the catastrophic appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito is that abortion is far from the only thing at stake in a dangerously right-wing court. Affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws, the public's right to regulate business - all of these things have suffered significant setbacks as a consequence of 5-4 rulings on the Roberts court -- rulings which, there is little doubt, would have broken differently had a Democrat appointed the last two Supreme court justices.

Reed argues that Democrats are what they are - that the real work of Progressives must focus on movement building between elections, not anointing inevitably disappointing candidates during them. Having arrived in Iowa yesterday to follow the candidates around for the week, I am both more skeptical of his arguments and more wary of precisely the things Reed says we should be wary of.

On the one hand, the differences in content between the Democrats and Republicans is striking and far-reaching. Since yesterday, I have seen Obama, Clinton and Edwards events. Each spoke at length about the health care crisis in America and vowed to greatly ameliorate if not eliminate that crisis. Each expressed concern (for Edwards it was a call to arms) about the growing gap between rich and poor, the badly skewed tilt of our tax code and the increasing squeeze on the middle class. Clinton and Edwards hit hard on legislation giving hedge fund managers lower tax rates than, as Clinton put it, "their secretaries." All candidates talked about ending the war in Iraq and all decry the irresponsible and unilateral foreign policy of the current administration.