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Bloggers and Billionaires, MoveOn and Howard Dean: The Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted August 21, 2007.


Matt Bai's new book, The Argument, pits Washington insiders against the progressive rebellion for control of the Democratic Party, but he's spent too much time inside the Beltway to get the story right.
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As anyone who follows politics knows, there's been a revolt against the "old" Democratic Party represented by Clinton insiders and an array of powerful political consultants, pollsters, and gate keepers.

Frustrated by Clintonian triangulation, two losses to George Bush in elections that were widely perceived to be stolen or given away too easily, and enraged by the party leadership's support of the invasion of Iraq, outsiders have risen up in an attempt to displace the insiders and their losing ways and bring more progressive values and vision to the political process.

It is a widespread uprising, which, according to Matt Bai's new book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, is "led by baby boom liberals, wealthy investors and defiant bloggers whose faith in party and country had been severely shaken by 12 years of Republican rule."

Battle for the Democratic soul

Make no mistake: this is a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. It's primarily a fight between the grassroots and the elites. It's a struggle that has been fought many times in political history, but it's never been fought at a time when the insurgents could tap into the kind of power represented by the Internet, probably the single-most significant shift in political organizing and communication capacity in decades.

Who will eventually prevail in this donnybrook is unclear, and of course there will be compromises and détentes reached along the way. But many feel that if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic party nominee, those who have exercised power for the Dems over the past two decades will keep their hands on the reins, while if it ends up being Obama or Edwards or someone else, it may usher in a new era of Democratic politics.

Arrayed on the establishment side are a host of recognizable names including Terry McAuliffe, former head of the DNC; James Carville, longtime Clinton advisor, author and talking head, who is married to chief Dick Cheney protector Mary Matalin; Harold Ickes, another former Clinton official who raised many millions of dollars for media on behalf on the Democrats leading up to the Kerry nomination in 2004; and Bob Shrum, media consultant-cum-campaign manager who led the failed Kerry campaign in 2004. It was Shrum's fifth consecutive defeat in the presidential sweepstakes.

In Mathew Yglesias's Washington Monthly article: "Shrum and Dumber: Memoirs of the Man Who Thrice Saved Us From a Democratic Presidency," the writer explains that "Democratic consultants are in the enviable position of both earning a percentage of their client's ad buys and deciding how much money their clients spend on ads. This is an obviously absurd arrangement; it can hardly be expected to do anything but hurt the effectiveness of Democratic campaigns …" It is circumstances like these that have the grassroots rebellion savaging the corruption and parasitic nature of the Beltway insiders who have their grips on the election process. As über-blogger Markos Moulitsas likes to say: "I went into politics to eliminate the middleman."

And lest we forget, perhaps the most formidable factor in the "old" political establishment is none other than Bill Clinton, to many still the most popular politician in America and by all accounts a savvy strategist who appears engaged in his wife's ongoing campaign at many levels, including stumping for her on the campaign trail.

On the legislative side, establishment leaders include Rahm Emmanuel, former Clinton aide, and current House member who headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's successful 2006 effort to win back a majority for the Dems for the first time since 1994, and Chuck Schumer, Emmanuel's counterpart, who led the Dem effort in the Senate and who has received particular notoriety of late for breaking with his party and promising to work very hard to maintain the 15 percent income tax rate for hedge fund billionaires, while the rest of us frequently pay a tax rate twice as high.

For the grassroots insurgents, the key players include the hugely successful citizens group MoveOn.org and the influential blogosphere made up of thousands of activated and informed citizens. Both have excited, large constituencies, aggressively campaigned against the war in Iraq, mobilized grassroots activism and money and supported a wide array of Democratic candidates, working both within and outside the party infrastructure. MoveOn raised $27 million in 2006 for the Democratic takeover and has more than 3 million internet members. According to leading progressive blogger Chris Bowers, the progressive blogosphere attracts between 2 million and 4 million readers each week. This August the second YearlyKos convention was held in Chicago, attended by the top six presidential candidates, 1,400 progressive activists and the national political press.

The grassroots insurgency has already scored major blows against the Dem Party establishment. They supported Howard Dean's campaign for chairman of the DNC in 2005 and truly panicked the Beltway insiders who mounted a failed attempt to stop him. Soon after, Dean embarked on his 50-state strategy, which had given party insiders conniption fits. In his campaign, Dean insisted that the Democratic Party was never going to get its mojo back unless it stopped being a triaging, pollster-driven operation, collecting money from big donors and parachuting in outsiders to focus only on key "swing" states, while starving the rest of the party's political infrastructure nationwide.

More recently, the Democracy Alliance (DA), a relatively new grouping of wealthy donors, came together to finance a political infrastructure, including think tanks, media watch dogs and groups developing progressive candidates. Investing upwards of $80 million already, their effort is designed to help Democrats regain power and govern with the vision and ideas necessary to counter the powerful Republican noise machine that had been assembled and funded by a cadre of rich right-wingers over the past 30 years.

The DA coalesced into a formal group as a result of the now-famous PowerPoint presentation created by Democratic Party activist Rob Stein, which cataloged in comprehensive detail how conservatives, clearly in the minority in terms of values and political positions, were able to take over the country.

Enter Matt Bai

Into the fray enters Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine political writer, with the first attempt at a comprehensive history of the current Democratic insurgency, along with a major critique. Bai has a big problem with all this progressive insurgency activity. The theory of Bai's book is that the new "progressive movement," which clearly has wrested significant pieces of power away from traditional Democrat party domains, lacks a unifying vision -- or an "argument" as he suggests in the book's title. The New Dealers had one, Goldwater Republicans had one, but what is the "argument" of the progressives? Put another way, the insurgents don't have any new ideas -- they are all tactics, and for Bai, it is the ideas that matter.

Whether you agree with Bai's critique or not likely depends on your vantage point. Beltway insiders and the largely elite think tanks that are seeking a "third way" probably agree wholeheartedly. If you are a blogger, a grassroots activist or otherwise outside of the D.C. insiders' clique, you're likely to take major umbrage with what Bai has to say.

At its most fundamental level, Bai's "no new ideas" argument seems flawed. He has organized his book around a false dichotomy; nobody is against smart ideas, but what good are ideas without political power and without the fundamental vision that has been the foundation of progressive values for decades?

There has always been an ongoing preoccupation with "new ideas" by the mainstream arbiters of political status, kind of a magic-bullet approach to politics. That's what drives the insider establishment.

But the basic tenets of progressivism -- fairness and equality; human dignity and the ability to earn a living and support a family, no matter if it is gay or straight, married or not; corporate responsibility and an end to the rampant political corruption and corporate cronyism that so dominates the Republican party; affordable healthcare for all; green economic development; cutting back a bloated military budget and investing in infrastructure and education, and real security without fear-mongering -- none of these ideas are new. And if a candidate ran on them aggressively, and had the necessary resources, he or she would be on the road to getting elected.

And Bai never fully digests the essential point of the new internet-facilitated democratic revolution. He doesn't appear to grasp the significance of the transformation that is occurring in politics today -- from the hierarchical political machines of yesterday to a grassroots, bottom-up, person-to-person model that involves millions of new people who are fed up with the so-called wisdom from the top. It is a specific rejection of the manipulation and the triaging by the consultants, the lack of engagement with local people seen in the Kerry campaign and its centralized Boston operation in 2004. Bai doesn't get that this aim to democratize the political process is itself a vital and worthy idea.

While Bai pays lip service to the energy and success of the grass roots and the netroots, he fundamentally doesn't trust it. It is not him. He can't accept that the grandest idea of the new politics is to spread the power and resources and get people involved.

The new democratic revolution is not about smart guys inside the Beltway -- like many of the guys who were Bai's sources and mentors for the book, consummate insiders like Steve Rosenthal, Harold Ickes and Simon Rosenberg. "New ideas" do not win elections -- elections are won with good candidates and strong organization at the local level, and a message that looks to the future, with a vision of fundamental values that has the potential to change people's lives.

Money is like manure

The firebrand Texas populist Jim Hightower is fond of saying "money is like manure, you have to spread it around." It turns out this is a popular phrase most notably uttered by Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly: "Money is like manure -- it isn't worth a thing unless you spread it around, encouraging things to grow … ya know what I mean." And oil billionaire J. Paul Getty had a slightly different version of this expression: "Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells."

But the spreading of resources is not what happens when the Beltway stays in control, when power emanates only from the center. It didn't happen in the Kerry campaign, nor did it happen in the gargantuan effort by Democratic elites to pave the way for a Democratic victory in 2004, when the big three -- former Clinton aide Harold Ickes, who created the Media Fund; heiress Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily's List; and Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO -- joined forces to create Americans Coming Together (ACT) for the big push to beat up on Bush (527s like ACT can't directly support their preferred candidates; they use their resources for "public education" that makes the case against their opponents.)

In these 527 operations, funded to the tune of $200 million in 2004, the power control model exercised by the big three failed to motivate voters as was necessary to overcome the superior organizing effort by the Republicans. The Media Fund efforts contributed tens of millions to the big media corporations by taking out a vast number of ads, and other efforts transferred millions of dollars to the Sulzbergers via endless New York Times ad buys. In the case of ACT, thousands of outsiders -- often college kids parachuted into unfamiliar neighborhoods with their handheld PDAs -- failed to connect with ordinary Americans.

The end result was that after spending that $200 million, they had virtually nothing left in place to show for it. Little infrastructure was built, and there was no real public accounting of what that money was spent on. And many expect that if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination, she will implement the same type of command-and-control operation with insiders like Ickes and others -- the same people who have been busy trying to build the same voter database that failed the Dems in 2004.

As I wrote in 2004 right after the Kerry election loss in Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics (Chelsea Green, 2005), "… 2004 should be a wake up call for progressives. Among the major lessons: that the gap between the Democratic establishment and its grass roots must be bridged; that the party must listen less to its consultants, pollsters and insiders in D.C. and more to its activists and rank and file base; and that it must nominate a candidate who can articulate a broad vision that American's can identify with. …"

All that is still true. And if Howard Dean is emulated more and attacked less, there would be more resources shifted out of the hands of the command-and-control freaks and into the more risk-taking, ears-to-the-ground hands of local activists, particularly in black and Latino neighborhoods, but also among party activists and bloggers.

New ideas are nice. But if Democrats want to succeed and throw off the conservative yoke, they are far better off moving as much of the operations as possible to the local level and making democracy breathe again. Only when there is a dynamic back-and-forth relationship among national and regional media, candidates' messages and a revived grassroots will the Democratic Party truly assert itself.

The Bai bias

Every book, every article, every review, including this one, comes with a built-in vantage point and bias. Establishment writers like Bai have a way of signaling where their bread is buttered and just how far outside of the conventional wisdom they're willing to go with their analysis. Bai's vantage point is fundamentally from within the D.C. Beltway. And while he made a stop in Las Vegas for the first YearlyKos convention in 2006 and car trips up and down the coast of California with progressive blogosphere kingpins Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, as they promoted their book Crashing the Gate, he never quite gets the passionate contempt for politics as usual that motivates the insurgent bloggers.

You can divine Bai's perspective from the intellectual company he keeps. Among Bai's tutors are Simon Rosenberg, Harold Ickes, Steve Rosenthal and Mike McCurry, former Clinton press secretary, along with a number of the key characters in the book.

The very first hint of Bai's perspective and a signal that bloggers might be in for a hard time is the presence of Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein as the author of a defining and most prominent dusk jacket blurb supporting Bai's book. Progressive bloggers already know how Klein feels about them:

"... [T]he smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed .... [T]he left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful -- and politically successful -- tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered."
Bai thanked Simon Rosenberg for his contribution to his understanding of the progressive movement and in the book's preface he describes Simon Rosenberg as "one of the early visionaries of the progressive movement." I laughed when I read this. Just when did Bai think the "progressive movement" began? Rosenberg's relatively young career included stints at the Democratic Leadership Council and in the Clinton administration -- neither of which are exactly symbols of progressive thinking.

Thinking that I had perhaps missed something, I asked several people in the know: "Is Simon Rosenberg a progressive, and what did he do to deserve the title?" I got knowing smiles in return and a couple of quizzical looks. Everyone who knows Simon thinks that he's very smart and a very good self-promoter, and that he tries to stay ahead of new developments. But no one thought he was a progressive. And the people I talked to liked Rosenberg. His New Democratic Network is no doubt doing good work in terms of helping to modernize the party technologically -- particularly in the efforts of Pete Leyden in San Francisco. But when I think of a visionary, I think of labor leaders, civil rights icons, successful organizers and human rights advocates. Not Simon Rosenberg.

So if Bai thinks Rosenberg is a progressive visionary, what does he call people like: Cornell West, Roger Wilkins, Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Van Jones, Anthony Thigpen, Bob Borosage, Tom Hayden, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Antonio Gonzalez, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and many more ?

It is interesting how the word "progressive" has been co-opted to such a point where a supposed savvy author like Bai thinks that Simon Rosenberg was an early progressive visionary. Maybe he's playing a joke on Rosenberg? I guess progressives should be happy that the tent has grown so broadly that even Hillary Clinton is calling herself a progressive instead of a liberal. But just what does it mean?

The book's narratives

The book is organized around a series of narratives that trace the key players and organizations in the Democratic insurgency. The stories, which switch back and forth from chapter to chapter, are often insightful and a fun read.

Bai spent time on the road with superbloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas as they toured their book, Crashing the Gate, up and down the California coast. Bai depicts Armstrong, who is regarded by some to be a "blogfather" of the bottom-up approach of the progressive blogosphere, as a very strange guy. In one hysterical scene at the home of progressive Hollywood mogul Norman Lear, Bai portrays Armstrong as a buffoon, as he clumsily pimps for the short-lived presidential candidacy of Mark Warner. But in other parts of the book, Bai portrays Armstrong as thoughtful and almost clairvoyant in his insight. Moulitsas, on the other hand, does not fare well.

Bai describes Moulitsas thusly: "His limbs moved in yogalike motion, elbows folding into hands, feet wrapping themselves around ankles. He had an effeminate way of talking, or maybe it was just Latin American, tilting his head every so often and thrusting his wrists to the sides." Hmmmm.

The MoveOn narratives focuses on a couple of small house parties where the clumsiness of engaging MoveOn's local membership is evident, and also on Eli Pariser. Pariser, the wunderkind who helped build MoveOn into a powerhouse, probably gets the most favorable treatment in the book (along with Andy Stern, the powerful and controversial head of the Service Employees International Union who is featured in a highly respectful narrative in the book; Stern represents Bai's prototype for the "progressive" who is willing to think outside the box.)

While Pariser is universally respected for his tech-savvy, organizing skills and maturity beyond his years, Bai inexplicably ignores Wes Boyd, dissing him for being rich (he and his wife, Joan Blades, sold the company that created the flying toaster screen savers) despite the fact that Boyd founded MoveOn, lives modestly, and has been the organization's brainiest thinker and strategist from the beginning.

Boyd, the blogger Moulitsas, the framing guru George Lakoff, who gets short shrift in the book, and Guy Saperstein, a prominent member of the Democracy Alliance, all get put down by Bai for various reasons. Interestingly, all live literally within a couple of miles of each other, around Berkeley, Calif., far away from the Washington Beltway. (Disclosure: This author splits time between NYC and this same general neighborhood and knows each of these people.) Maybe Bai just doesn't like California. The very strong Beltway orientation of the book and the general hostility to the West Coasters just gets to be too much for coincidence, or maybe many of the progressive outsiders end up on the West Coast?

50-state strategy

Perhaps the book's best chapter is "The Argument," a nuanced and enjoyable recounting of Dean's ascension to head the DNC, and his ongoing struggle with the party establishment, and particularly with the electoral heavy hitters, Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer. The major bone of contention is the 50-state strategy with which Dean, in some key ways, continued the movement his presidential campaign began.

It is here where Bai is at his most colorful, grasping how important Dean's continued "symbolic importance, in defeat was." Bai notes that Democratic Party insiders considered Dean a "polarizing liberal with the political equivalent of Tourette Syndrome." Bai adds: "Party lobbyists and consultants asked each other the same question over and over: What in creation was going on in Dean's addled brain? Just what was that little fucker trying to prove?" I laughed at the description of Dean's famous scream speech after Iowa -- which Bai calls strangely "captivating" -- delivered "through clamped teeth like a man trying his damndest to give an upbeat toast at his ex-wife's wedding."

In what might be the nut graph of the entire book, Bai describes how Dean had tapped into a current of resentment that went to the heart of the modern Democratic Party, the same current that ran through MoveOn and the Democracy Alliance and the blogs. Dean would never actually say so, but he was running against Clintonism and everything that it stood for. This of course was what was motivating the blogs and grassroots Democrats all over the country. They were tired of the targeting syndrome, of the ideological triangulation and wanted some big changes.

The Democracy Alliance

In terms of the book's winners and losers, many of the villains appear in Bai's discussion of the Democracy Alliance (DA). It's the most gossipy part of the book, leading more than one person to suggest that Bai's work is more like a Vanity Fair article than serious political history. However, that didn't stop a number of DA members from devouring a review copy of the book during the recent "Take Back America Conference" in D.C. to see just how their history was being told. Most were not too happy.

Many juicy, previously unknown tidbits emerge from the secretive first two years of the DA, suggesting that Bai had good sources and pieced a lot together. Even Rob McKay, who was a donor/partner from the beginning and who later became chair of the Alliance, said that he learned things he never knew about the early days of the Alliance by reading the book.

The DA's founding was directly connected to the PowerPoint created by Rob Stein, a veteran Democratic politico, who, after the 2000 election gave the Republicans control of Congress and the presidency, realized that we had "a one-party state." Stein researched the patterns of the wealthy right-wing funders, becoming a pied piper among donors and elite Democrats and slowly building a constituency that eventually coalesced in the formation of the DA at its first gathering at The Boulders, an exclusive resort in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The DA was formed in part to emulate the right-wing's success in centralizing a small cadre of large ideologically aligned donors and effectively distributing their largesse year after year to a collection of increasingly effective think tanks and other groups. This conservative infrastructure provided the research, developed the leaders, and pushed out the propaganda and coordinated messages that ushered in the current conservative period -- first the Reagan era in the '80s, and then the much harsher Bush II period of the past six years.

Very briefly, the DA is a 2.5-year-old organization of approximately 100 wealthy donors, including a small group of billionaires, particularly the "big three," the most famous of whom is George Soros, and which also includes Peter Lewis, founder of Progressive Insurance, and the San Francisco Sandlers, Marion and Herb, who sold their World Savings Bank, one of the United States' largest savings and loans, to Wachovia Bank for $24.2 billion in 2006.

To be a part of the group, one must give $250K to groups tabbed by the DA, but well over half of the members give much more than the minimum, so the average donation per member totals more than half a million a year. In the first period, the big three billionaires provided more than 40 percent of the total resources that the DA distributed, but that number has dropped to around 25 percent, according to chairman Rob McKay.

Bai is harsh in his criticism of the DA, though ultimately sympathetic to its original crusading figure Rob Stein, who Bai sees as a zenlike figure whose tenacity resulted in the fulfillment of his vision.

Bai is unrelenting in his criticism of the first chair of the DA, wealthy venture capitalist Stephen Gluckstern, who took over as part of an attempted organizational coup against Stein by bigtime fund-raiser Erica Payne, an ally to several donors she brought into the DA.

While the miscalculated coup ultimately failed for Payne, who had to leave the organization, it still maneuvered Gluckstern into the chair. According to Bai, Gluckstern eventually drove the organization into a ditch. With the emasculated Stein on the sidelines (only to reappear later in a different role), the unsavvy Gluckstern hired longtime McKinsey consultant Judy Wade to run the organization.

Wade, according to Bai, whose assessment was confirmed by a number of DA members, was a disastrous choice. Wade set out to "McKinsey-ize the DA, and, as Bai caustically notes, "McKinsey consultants traffic in numbingly esoteric and abstract techniques, the effectiveness of which is debatable." Bai dryly adds that "McKinsey had exalted one of it most prized clients as a prime example of its talent-driven philosophy: Enron, which later became synonymous with fraud and corporate malfeasance." Basically, according to Bai, Wade's controlling habits and caustic personality were oil and water among a group of wealthy donors unaccustomed to being bossed around. Soon a full-blown rebellion was under way.

The next stage

As a consequence of the fallout, a new team -- the powerful duo of Rob McKay, the San Francisco-based Taco Bell heir, and Anna Berger, the powerhouse deputy to Andy Stern at the SEIU, took over the board leadership. McKay, a longtime California philanthropist who supports grassroots groups and political reform, and Berger, with the money, political muscle and acumen of the SEIU, promised a new kind of leadership. Drummond Pike, the head of the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, became treasurer, and the center of gravity moved away from the Beltway and more towards the Left Coast, at least in attitude.

When I spoke with McKay about the Bai book, he laughed and said that Bai's history stopped too soon, just as he was taking over. And arguably things have changed quite dramatically at the DA. McKay, who has a collaborative style, sees the organization as much more of a network and not the "center of the universe" that Wade and Gluckstern tried to create. McKay didn't contradict Bai's negative critique of the earlier period, but insisted on looking forward, saying it was "pretty ridiculous to imagine that an organization with the complexity of the DA would be able to iron out all its wrinkles in two years."

McKay, in tune with Democrat insurgents, insisted that the DA would work best if it were somewhat decentralized. He applauded Dean's efforts with his 50-state strategy, and likened the DA to the "starfish model," a concept from the new book the Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

McKay explained: "The spider model is the command-control version where one big smack and it's dead. But when you cut off part of the starfish, it quickly grows back in a new way. Think about Napster and all of its progeny like Kazaa, Grokster and eDonkey, ever more decentralized versions, where eventually you didn't know who the leader is, versus the rigid recording industry, which has been unable to cease the flow of red ink."

The authors of Starfish and the Spider explain that the linckia, or long armed starfish, "can replicate itself from a single piece of an arm … because in reality a star fish is a neural network, basically a network of cells." One of the key principles of starfish decentralization is that "an open system doesn't have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system. Information and knowledge naturally filter to the edges, closer to where the action is." The authors cite Alcoholics Anonymous and Craigslist as variations of the starfish model, where catalysts can instigate a process that, if left well enough alone, can then multiply ideas and become ever more effective.

The DA is now broadening its reach, inviting unaffiliated donors and foundations into discussions about voter education and mobilization. In fact, key players in the DA will play major roles in a new 527 effort for the 2008 election which will harvest somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. But McKay says they will not use the all-star model of Ickes, Malcolm and Rosenthal, hoping instead to emulate the "starfish."

While it will be a challenge for the DA and whatever the new 527 will be called -- maybe the "starfish fund "-- to truly decentralize in the relatively short time before the 2008 elections, the fact that the DA's leadership is willing to look at new models and not do the same old thing is encouraging.

In the end, Bill Clinton frames Matt Bai's book

In probably the book's most riveting scene, former President Bill Clinton shows up as a surprise guest at the Austin DA confab. After Clinton's usual smooth presentation, Guy Saperstein, one of America's most successful trial lawyers and a DA expert in foreign affairs and healthcare, rose to ask a question. Saperstein mentioned that John Edwards had already apologized about voting to authorize the Iraq war. "Why shouldn't every Democrat who voted for the war -- including presumably Hillary Clinton -- do the same thing? How were Democrats supposed to have any credibility if they wouldn't admit when they had been so calamitously wrong."

Clinton quickly went ballistic: "He leaned forward belligerently and pointed a finger at Saperstein. 'You're wrong,' he said. 'Everything you just said is totally wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.'" He went on to explain away Hillary's vote on the war and tell Saperstein he wasn't productive. "Only in this party do we eat our own. You can go on misrepresenting and bashing our own people, but I am sick and tired of it."

Clinton later apologized and realized he had made an error, but it was too late for many of the people in Austin. On the surface, the exchange had been about the war, but it symbolized much more: "It had been about Clintonism itself and the centrist governing ethos that had led the party to this place in its history." To the progressives, Clinton's desire to remake the Democratic Party "had stripped the party of its moral authority."

Bai documents Clinton's attempts to patch up what almost all attendees perceived to be a defensive reaction from the former president. Some sensed deeply that the exchange represented the chasm between the more issue-oriented and anti-war progressives -- probably a majority of the DA -- and the "pragmatic" insiders who prefer to steamroll dissent.

Later, Bai travels uptown to Harlem to visit Big Bill, who ironically is meeting with a group of progressive bloggers brought together by Peter Daou, a prominent blogger hired by Hillary Clinton to serve as liaison to the internet crowd and develop the online arm of her campaign. Apparently, Bill reads blogs and his curiosity led to the meeting.

Near the end of his book, Bai gives the misunderstood and underappreciated former president Clinton the chance to frame his book: In Bai's view of Clinton, "The new world required something different, not the perpetuation of sprawling Democratic government nor the Republican version of a docile bureaucracy, but a third way -- a way that would retool the welfare state without dismantling it."

Bai then sets Clinton up with the soft-ball pitch that will make his book. He tells Clinton that "he hears a lot of skepticism in D.C. and online about the power of ideas in politics. Most of the new progressives seemed to think that winning elections is more about machinery and political dexterity." Clinton responds forcefully: "They're not right about that. I still think that ideas matter. We still have to be the party of ideas, because otherwise there is no reason to buy us. "

The lines are drawn

So there you have it. In Bai's view, bloggers, 50 state advocates, wealthy donors, Moveon members -- "all those new progressives" -- are missing the essential ingredient for success -- they don't care about new ideas. The "new progressives" are shallow and tactical for believing in the grass roots, for wanting to move resources to the local level, for wanting to push the manipulating Beltway class out of the way -- for getting rid of those middlemen in politics.

As much of what passes for politics these days, we have yet another case of the "pot calling the kettle black." In terms of tactics, it is in fact the other way around. The insiders blame the outsiders for what they truly are themselves. One main reason for the uprising from the new progressives is that the consultants, the fund-raisers, the gate keepers, the power brokers, and those officials who straddle the fence, are the ultimate tacticians. They appear to care little about values, vision, passion and, yes, ideas. They are more about controlling the resources and the message, buying the media, getting rich, forwarding their careers, becoming TV stars, and getting rehired or retiring wealthy. And they keep losing to the conservatives as the country slides into a black hole.

They are the talking heads and the party insiders who want to write off whole parts of the country, whole slices of demography, and want to squash the anger and passion of a new class of political activists who don't seem to be rolling over and playing dead, no matter what Matt Bai writes.

So the lines are drawn. In The Argument we have the Bai worldview. Centrist politicians are good, especially as they seek to find a way to work across the aisle, believe in "ideas" and embrace a post ideological bipartisanship. This third way perspective is characterized sympathetically in the book in descriptions of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Mark Warner, as well as groups who don't get the funding Bai thinks they deserve from the DA.

Bai's hostility toward the bloggers is clear and steady. In the chapter interestingly called "Into the Abyss," Markos is portrayed as a self-centered ranter, the women from Fire Dog Lake are venomous and Mark Warner comes away from his critical interactions with bloggers "profoundly disturbed and wondering if all this hatred might ultimately consume his party. "

Matt Bai has written a slice of history in progress. It is a fun read and will no doubt spark all sorts of debates and disagreements. And like all perspectives, it must be weighed and measured by those who influenced it, and what you, the reader, believe to be the most important element of politics and change. Have fun.

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See more stories tagged with: blogosphere, moveon, progressive, democratic party, bloggers, third way, matt bai, democracy alliance, the argument

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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Corporate insiders always pollute democratic opposition
Posted by: Perfectclue on Aug 21, 2007 4:17 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Don Hazen's article exposes the source of the corruption when discussing ideological deformation, distortions. It is clear that corporate and class interests have a generic death grip on democracy and always is the source of its betrayal and wholesale corruption.

What is missing in this article, is a historical and ideological framework that puts all these observed empirical facts, explanations, into perspective that reveals that these problems are not new strategic problems, but longtime historical failures that need further explanations, if we are to move humanity forward from its 5000 years of class history, since patriarchy, the first class society emerged.

Deformed, corrupt ideologies, class ideologies, are always the product of deformed, subordinated middle classes, who are themselves part of the deformed link to capitalist oligrachy, that makes up this deformed social mechanism, class mechanism, that keeps reproducing the class ideology, class elites, who always narrow the paramaters of social development, its own middle layers, and also reproduces the class hierarchies, which filter out real democracy, that comes from a fully social, devloped middle class, neither crippled, subordinated by class masters, and divided by exploited lower working classes. The partial and subordinated middle class is itself the ouctome of class society and the hall marks of all class societies, that goes beyond the 300 years of Capitalism, and explains the generic class mechanism, of 5,000 years of patriarchical class rule.

This framework explains the historical development of capitalist ideology, namely (class) Liberalism, that break down into their false Stalinist options, between tweedle dee and tweedle dum class failures. It also gives a renewed historical perspective and explanation, of the general failure of all Western democratic revolutions, including our own Ameriican version which was part of the European Enlightenment against feudal class society, with its regressive clerical, servile middle layers that too make up this class mechanism. The initial success of the Age of Reason, was based on the social principle of this fully developed middle class, without class masters, that linked with the nation state would have reproduced, once instiutionalized, a universal mechanism for social wealth, and real democracy.

However, both the Enlightenment and Socialists democratic movements, did not take into account this generic class mechanism, which operates on an international level, the sum forces and arrayed class forces, both tradtional and new forms of class rule, that were to corrupt all national democratic movements, by both Napoleon and Stalin.
Once the social liberals, revolutionary liberals were displaced by the merchant classes, industrial classes, betrayed with its property rights over universal social rights, the link to the nation state became transformed into class nationalism, and class Empire, just as it had done in Ancient Greece, where grafting democracy onto class rule, produced the same corrupting class forms on civil society: oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorship, class repulics, and Empire were all already identified as corrupting forms.

Bottom line, unless we dismantle this corrupt class mechanism, on both a national level and interantioanl level, history will stand still with regard to our social development. Once Napoleon, and STalin appeased the class forces, either within the nation state, or external to all global class relations, all hope of establishing a social middle class, and real democracy, morphed into these two dictators, and Empires. We must dismantle this class mechanism, its class hierarchies, and set up parties without class ideologies, if we are to see real fundamental change.

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Sorry, this comment has been removed from the system.
» temper temper Posted by: apophenia_monkey
» RE:Nice try: asshole Posted by: taryn
Chances are
Posted by: shangrilalad on Aug 21, 2007 5:08 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
.
When you consider how easily terrorized Americans have been by the Cheney/bush crime family, you’ve got to wonder how we’ll react when Russia or China start tossing around nuclear threats like Cheney/bush have been doing. Talk and threats are cheap, but not when you have nukes and appear crazy enough to use them.

Most of the world, including me, are convinced that the dynamic-duo are crazy enough to drop the BIG ONE first, and on anyone. C/b have already committed so many crimes, they can’t stop now for fear of International Judgment later. If a World Court began an investigation of Cheney/bush crimes tomorrow, there would be millions of victims eager to testify against them. No doubt Karl Rove has already told nitwit and King Cheney to cover their ass.

Based on what you’ve seen, how do you think they might decide to cover their ass? Go for broke, or face up to their crimes?

The thing that really grates is creeping sense of guilt that chokes America right now. Our leaders in both parties share the blame for C/b crimes, and they know it. But rather than trying to climb out of the hole, they keep digging deeper. Wars of aggression spawn many other crimes to cover up the original crime. We the people also share the blame for C/b crimes, and we know it. The question is, will we continue committing crimes to cover up the original crime?

Chances are, we the people might someday find ourselves hated and condemned by the world. Somebody’s got to take the fall, and I nominate Cheney/bush. When fascism fell apart for Mussolini, the Italians hung him upside down from a lamppost, which gained them points in International opinion. Nobody hated the Italians after the war, they made a mistake, but fixed it and everybody forgave them. We’ve got to show the world we’re trying to fix our mistakes, or they won’t be so forgiving.

Cheney/bush have to be Impeached for many reasons, but stopping them from committing more war crimes is number one. The whole world is watching, and we better get it right to save our country.

.

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What ideas?
Posted by: Urstrly on Aug 21, 2007 5:25 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
As someone who hopes against all the evidence to the contrary that the Democratic Party will not blow it in 2008, I am confounded that the so-called Centrists still believe they have any new ideas. What, I wonder, might they be?

Seems to me that they shoot down every new notion that raises its head: MoveOn's use of the internet to raise money and issues, Dean's 50-state strategy, Gore's insistence that our careless affluence is destroying the planet, Obama's suggestion that we need to talk more with other nations and a little pressure on Pakistan might be useful in the fight against terrorism, not to mention anyone's suggestion that our blanket, unquestioning support of Israel is not helpful to the cause of peace. Their idea of an idea is really a gimmick that supplants genuine critical thinking, e.g. It's the economy, stupid. Now emulating starfish, that's a new idea.

Still, I find it depressing that two groups of super-wealthy individuals will duke it out to determine the party's fate. The consequences of a Clinton victory seem pretty clear: marriage to the corporate status quo with minor adjustments in policy. What's less clear is what happens if she loses, either the nomination or the election.

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» RE: What ideas? Posted by: Debs
2008 is too LATE--- Bush / Cheney must be IMPEACHED-NOW
Posted by: wmGreybeard on Aug 21, 2007 6:25 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
...
Priority

1. IMPEACHMENT

2. ABOLISH the Electoral College. [The Electoral College made sense in the days of horseback communications; not so today with instant communications.] Today it only creates red and blue states and the battleground states which get almost all the votes that really make a difference.
The 50 state campaign could then, be a real strategy .

3. Real public campaign finance reform, with spending limits for all candidates.
No PACs or other sources of unaccountable sources of support.
No self financed billionaires.
Third parties and Independents could have a bit more than no chance at all.

4. Transparent government. Only military secrets are legitimate.

wmGreybeard

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» RE: 2008 is too LATE--- Posted by: Andie927
money talks, suckers walk
Posted by: Col. Jackleg on Aug 21, 2007 6:28 AM   
Current rating: 3    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I continue to rail on this thesis and I am perplexed that so many just don't get it. This nation has never been populist in spirit and never will be because there ain't no money in it. How many economic catastrophes must we create, how much infrastructure carnage must there be, and how many utterly stupid murder sprees known as "wars must be labored before the hoi polloi pass the hat and collect enough money to get back and hopefully get even. Dream on suckers while you watch MoveOn, Dean, Kucinich et al. get pummeled by the filthy lucre that is the serum that drives the American pulse. Think I'm out of touch? Look at the "hope" for redemption in 2008 and convince me that the masses will turn out and vote enthusiastically for any of them. We will be left with the residue of another hapless executive branch and feckless Congress overseen by a corrupt and distant federal judiciary. Money talks, suckers walk and this is suckerdom without equal.

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» But... Posted by: american
» RE: money talks, suckers walk Posted by: Jeff Hoffman
» RE: money talks, suckers walk Posted by: Ian MacLeod
» RE: money talks, suckers walk Posted by: Jeff Hoffman
» RE: money talks, suckers walk Posted by: Ian MacLeod
Grassroots...with lots of Miracle-Gro®
Posted by: Chickensh*tEagle on Aug 21, 2007 6:37 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
-- For the grassroots insurgents, the key players include the hugely successful citizens group MoveOn.org....

The MoveOn model is, Nita sends out a mass email and we all call our Congress critters. To me, that smacks more of power brokering than "bottom-up" grassroots crusading.

-- On the legislative side, establishment leaders include Rahm Emmanuel, former Clinton aide, and current House member who headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's successful 2006 effort to win back a majority for the Dems for the first time since 1994....

Here in New Hampshire, our Dems won in spite of, not because of Pharaoh Rahmses. Both our new reps beat out Emanuel's picks in the primaries. But it's clear they're still under his thumb at least partly.

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Where's the Grass?
Posted by: oekosjoe on Aug 21, 2007 6:38 AM   
Current rating: 3    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Hazen's review of Scott Bai's book is an excellent example of the nexus between 2000, 2004, and 2006; between differing intelligentia; between conflicting strategies of 50 states, strategic elites, or marginality; between big and small ideas. What's lacking - and painfully lacking - is a vision of how very local progressivism works with, against, or around very local concerns and politics. What's lacking is an Alinsky-like synthesis, since, at its root, politics is getting votes, wholesale, retail, door by door, or overthenet.

Before anyone tries to frame that synthesis, let's clarify at the start that everything-is-everything. When my Congressman, directly from a meeting with Rahm Emmanuel, suggests that a gay Native American may have a special problem in a campaign in New Mexico, that could be seen as targeting, as DLC-lite, or as Beltway timidity. When he's challenged - "Navajos think gay guys have two souls" - he re-frames (with respect to Lakoff) the problem: "We'll support him when he beats a straight in a primary."

When a gang of high school dropouts organize a response to yuppies taking over their neighborhood, they work with one of Schrum's predecessors among the K-Street Gang.

When that gang gets the city to sponsor a mural rather than a comprehensive housing policy assuring permanent economic diversity, it's just a first step.

The alliances necessary to frame real policy that has sustaining power take time, at all levels, and local is no different from international. That, at least, ought to be one great lesson from the success of AlterNet itself, and should have somehow slid into Hazen's critique.

But to get back to Alinsky: Neither the new nor Beltway progressives seem yet to get it: progressivism is whatever there is when the bunch in the room decide to get power. That's why it was so messy with the Southern Watson progressives and machine Tammany progressives of the '20's. That's why its still so messy. Absurdly, the right wing has real the progressive organizational style, of churches, sitting rooms, and columns, both online, in print, and of the fifth sort. What the left needs to do is listen, and then to empower rather than dictate. And that dictation can be just as brutal from the Deanies as from the DLC.

In practice, it means helping angry kids edit their "Kill the Yuppie" into starting companies to exploit those very yuppies; helping them hold a school system accountable for really stinking college, pre-college, and career options framed by "you're a problem kid" rather than "your problem is ours to solve." It's almost never an easy apothegm wrapping up an ugly enigma: the enigma itself needs a solution, not a label.

And whether that label is applied by MoveOn or Beltway, by the fascist right or the reactionary church, online or in your face, is all a matter of listening. That's where the ideas begin. If it's not their idea, it's nobody's.

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It's just a game to them
Posted by: Democritus on Aug 21, 2007 6:50 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The marriage of James Carville and Mary Matalin is a microcosm of the marriage between big-money Republicans and big-money Democrats. Just as Carville and Matalin live in a symbiotic relationship--each feeding off the other--so, too, the Democratic and Republican national parties are joined at the hip in a similar competitive enterprise.

The prize in the latter competition is who gets to wield power until the next election, which is similar to who gets to buy the dinner in the Carville-Matalin competition. That's about as deep as it gets with our two parties. It's all about getting power, and in coming up with clever "new ideas" to frame issues, raise a lot of money, and trick the electorate one more time.

Is it any wonder that progressives are fed up with this system? That's what the 2006 congressional elections were all about. It didn't make any difference whether the new faces were conservative in their views, like Jim Webb and Heath Shuler, or whether they were liberals like Independent Bernie Sanders and Democrat Sherrod Brown. What stood out in the Democratic takeover of the House and the Senate was the vote against the status quo. It was a vote against the games that the politicians on both sides play. The fact that the status quo still seems to prevail in Washington--not only in the presidential debates, but also in the paranoic White House and the paralytic Congress--shows that the establishment politicians still don't get it. Maybe 2008 will be a watershed event for the games players. Maybe then an aroused electorate will show its disgust for politics as usual to rise up and throw the bums out.

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» RE: It's just a game to them Posted by: Lincoln fan
» RE: It's just a game to them Posted by: oregoncharles
Democratic party as bad as the Republicans
Posted by: zooeyhall on Aug 21, 2007 8:01 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I don't think the Democrats offer any more hope for Progressivism in this country than the Republicans.

I think the Democratic politicians are as much in bed with the corporations and lobbyists as the Republicans. They are just as corrupt and prostituting for the oligarchy as the Republicans.

American needs a third party now more than ever. I think that there would be real opportunity for a new party that concentrated on the concerns of the middle class: health care, job opportunity, loss of jobs overseas, declining real income, illegal immigration, loss of America's credibility in the world, environmental issues.

A new party that had a solid platform addressing the above issues would blow-away the two "traditional" parties.

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Clintonism, must end.
Posted by: Stellaa on Aug 21, 2007 8:23 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Excellent article. I have noticed this aversion to the Berkeley/California crowd. Sort of curious how they constantly dismiss any of the "ideas" that come from here, and yet I don't see any ideas from there.

Enough of the dynasties. Enough of the centrist do nothingness glibness. The insider Democrats are on the take with the Subprime lenders as evidenced by Schumer et. al. I still blame the Clintons for no national healthcare and for so many cowardly retreats when they had the power. Pray tell why do we regard them as saviours. ?

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How Hillary Will Lose
Posted by: edmenken on Aug 21, 2007 8:30 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Hazen's piece is right on!! I just submitted "An Open Letter To The Democratic Party", which appeared yesterday at OpEd News. com, and described why I, and I'm sure millions of other progressives, will no longer support the party, but anxiously await the emergence of a new Progressive Democratic Party that we can be a part of.

I amazes me that those "insiders" who are all gung ho about Hillary don't see -- or don't care to see -- what's coming if she's the nominee. Any high school junior interested in politics can tell you that the "swift-boaters" will be promoting the notion, "Do you really want to see the White House become a playpen again for Bill Clinton's sex addiction?" Or, "We know what happened when 'Slick Willie' occupied the White House before; do we want to see that again?"

None of the other democratic hopefuls would dare propose those ideas, but the right-wing is salivating, waiting for the opportunity. And Karl Rove won't have to work very hard to defeat her with those kinds of TV ads, bumber stickers, and talking heads spewing that garbage all over the airwaves. Who do the democratic insiders think they're kidding? Do they really believe that they can overcome that contagious poison?

Now is the time for that new Progressive Democratic Party to be born, and I'm convinced that it can and will happen if MoveOn and the other genuinely progressive organizations jump out and announce the creation of the new party. We can't wait any longer, and this country can't afford another republican in the White House.

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» Why start from scratch? Posted by: antiapathy
» I love Dennis Kucinich Posted by: antiapathy
» RE: How Hillary Will Lose Posted by: oregoncharles
DLC: inside the beltway power?
Posted by: frank69 on Aug 21, 2007 8:33 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The DLC, DCCC, DCC, and the inside-the-beltway consultants are a bunch of LOSERS. I have no use for any of them.
Who was the last progressive president? LBJ's domestic programs were more progressive than even FDR's! Harry Truman was a very worthy successor to FDR.
I have heard about how Rahm Emanuel did "such a great job." That's absolute BS! He personally cost the Democratic party to lose the Illinois 6th district open seat to the R's! And many representative candidates won primaries over Rahm's choices. Most of them went on to win in November!
Those inside-the-beltway-boys keep praising each other and patting each other on the back!
Out here in the "boondocks" of the California central valley, I think those insight-the-beltway types are full of shit.

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What is Rove's next job?
Posted by: covalentbonded on Aug 21, 2007 8:58 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Electing Hillary Clinton!

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Ms. FB Murphy
Posted by: stippolito on Aug 21, 2007 10:03 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I couldn't agree more! I am so sick of the "establishment" elites who, with all of their hubris, think they possess the
knowledge of winning. I've been a Dem for years and have become ashamed of the party under these fools(including the Clintons,McAuliffe,Carville, Rahm, Schumer et al) who are nothing but Bush lite. WHY have they ignored reestablishing
habeas corpus immediately when they assumed the majority
in Congress Jan 2007? They capitulated just 3 weeks ago in granting the idiots more power under the homeland security
bill. Pelosi is another one...she takes over as Speaker and she takes impeachment off the table...stupid! Could have been a tactic but no. she takes orders from the "elite" of the party.
I also RESENT this group shoving Hillary as the candidate for
president 15 months before an election. They were instrumental in destroying Howard Dean in 2004 in favor of
their 'elite" pick John Kerry and consequently defeat at the polls.
Enough said? Many of us could go on and on pointing out the collusion between both parties but why? Both parties are instruments of corporate America so why not just rename the country United States of Corporate America.
And they think we are stupid???

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» yeppers Posted by: Iconoclast421
Blah blah blah
Posted by: tngreen on Aug 21, 2007 10:08 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I am so so over "progressive" Democrats who are bloated with righteous anger over the centrist policies of their party but who, when presented with an honest-to-god progressive candidate such as Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader, can only reply "But he'll never get elected!" and then descend into some utterly incomprehensible debate over which one of the bought-and-sold frontrunners will best represent the progressive agenda. Is this not a study in insanity? You can't be against the war and in favor of a strong labor movement, universal health care and access to higher education--and then vote for Clinton, Obama, or Edwards. Well, I suppose you can, if that's what the voices in your heard insist you do. In the meantime, I'll keep "throwing away" my vote on actual progressive candidates. At least I can sleep at night.

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» RE: Blah blah blah Posted by: Spot
» RE: "throwing away" my vote Posted by: oregoncharles
» RE: Blah blah blah Posted by: leighsure
It's still early, folks
Posted by: willymack on Aug 21, 2007 10:08 AM   
Current rating: 1    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Does anyone out there think the losers who comprise the rethug presidential "candidates" have a ghost of a chance in a fair election? It's almost certain that, if the 2008 "election" isn't already rigged in favor of the rethugs, then a "dark horse" hero will burst onto the scene, sometime next year, to save the day. He/she is probably already being intensively coached and filled with plausible lies to blather endlessly until the electorate is subdued to the point of being comatose, while the Democrats are being outrageously libeled and slandered-all under the direction of, guess who? None other than Karl Rove, that pasty-faced arch villain who'se already done so much damage to our nation with his nasty deceits and back stabbing. Our biggest problem is that way too many of us actually BELIEVE these lying bastards, even now, when their destructive activities have been laid bare. As for the Democrats; I think it's still quite possible for another candidate to enter the fray-either late this year or early next year, if only to pull the rug out from underneath the Clintons, or to level the playing field. Don't get me wrong; I don't think it'd be a catastrophe if Hillary was elected. Even a schlup like me would make a better president than the chucklehead there now.

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» look a bit deeper at the rethugs Posted by: Iconoclast421
I'm an Adlai Stevenson Democrat.
Posted by: Sojourner on Aug 21, 2007 10:36 AM   
Current rating: 1    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Stevenson was great with ideas. The "egghead" epithet was invented for him. Remember? I suppose not. That was a long, long time ago.

I just happened to catch some of the Iowa Demo debate and was surprised to find issues being talked about. (Yeah, along with if you pray...duh.) Again we have a situation when any one of the Demo candidates would be better, by far, than any Rethug. But again they will be defeated if we cannot get our act together.

Yes, we need a stroke of genius, because the facts are still as they were when Mondale said "Reagan has just said he will not raise your taxes. I tell you that I will." If Americans had bit the bullet back then, imagine the likelihood of the US still being the world leader rather than the world policeman. Mondale was trashed because voters love being told it won't cost anything. That has not changed and probably never will.

Progressives like to be realistic. That's one reason we are such a minority. Yes we need a labor party. But we have just gone through, dating from the 1968 Chicago Demo convention, a transformation of the Demo party, learning to function without the racist solid South. It has been hell, but it might have been much worse. Imagine if the Shrub had his rubber stamp GOP majority still today!

In 1963, I was laughed down in my community (Sioux City, Iowa) for proposing a public mental health center. Reagan had come through in 1960 on his General Electric political tour and convinced everyone that there was a commie under every bed. Socialized medicine? Just as bad.

Today, single-payer health care is being discussed at the level of national politics. Unheard of back in my day. And don't forget who brought the issue to our attention most recently--yes, the old sinner himself and his lobbyist lackey of a wife :). With the pressures on corporations, especially in manufacturing that competes internationally, the time is finally ripe for health system changes. It's an idea whose time has come.

Bai's dividing the party is a self-fulfilling prophecy for a split. (However, his pigeonholes sure do make it easy to explain a complicated issue. We can choose red or black, as at the casino--and lose everything that has been won so far at such high cost.) If Demos can hang together, then the chance for a new party will eventually emerge, because the Rethugs, who now have the solid South racists, are about to become a laughing stock. Sorry Abe, but they traded you for tax cuts long ago. Progressives learn from our mistakes. Let's not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory one more time.

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Am I a "progressive"?
Posted by: sausage on Aug 21, 2007 10:50 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I've always viewed myself as a democratic-socialist with civil libertarian tendancies. In other words, government stops at the frontdoor, except commonly agreed upon cases of physical abuse which often lead to murder.

On the other hand, I feel government's proper role is primarily the ordering of the economy, acting as the honest broker in disputes between citizens and corporations and taking up the burden of providing goods and services to the citizenry where private enterprise fails.

And private enterprise has woefully failed to provide adequate healthcare, education, basic public transportation, communication tranmission and energy. In fact, in my estimation, private enterprise, the military-industrial complex, does a miserable job of defending the nation, we should go to a national arsenal system.

About the only things private enterprise does well is sell shoes, automobiles, houses, and that not very well, groceries and run restaurant chains.

So, am I a progressive?

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» Point taken. Posted by: Sojourner
» RE: Point taken. Posted by: anothername
Democracy, Freedom, and Thought
Posted by: american on Aug 21, 2007 11:09 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Democracy is the active principle of this republic and end is freedom.

(The logic of democracy as a lever to engender freedom: People do not enslave themselves: people enslave others. People will not vote against their own self-interests, whether the question is slavery or the right to know the truth about something that affects them.)

This country came in to being as a result of active, participatory, rebellion against tyranny and the charting document of this nation, the Constitution, is designed to thwart tyranny and engender freedom.

The fact that the focus of discussion is on these financially "elite" groups duking it out for the policy rights that will pertain to all Americans and not on what most people think we ought to do is in itself most patently illustrative of the lack of democracy that is occuring in the country right now.

An unturned stone: This country was also endowed from the beginning with an assemblage of cultural mores and traditions that defined American society.

Democracy was the trellis and American culture was the vine. It was not envisioned that democracy would destroy these highly important socio-cultural attributes important at the time of the nation's founding and still utterly relevant today: enlightenment thinking, core Christian ideals, honesty, diligence, trust in one's own judgment, independence, reason, community, and individual responsibility and accountability. These existed in a cultural milieu handed down from the colonists, and prior, chiefly England, but the rest of Europe as well. Very few wanted to see American society's chief cultural attributes debased or destroyed.* -And democracy has not weakened or infected these things in any, for lack of a better word, heretical, way. It has been the cooption of Democracy that has attempted to destroy democracy itself -of course- and at the same time the correlative good/higher principles of American culture necessary to drive it: it has been necessary to kill both at once, because the greater characteristics of the American culture and thinking that brought about the constitution are a necessary correlative to its survival.

Authentic American cultural traditionalists would not advocate debt shopping to propagate the economy; they would not advocate relinquishing American independence to a foreign policy that defends Israel without "...complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest..."; they would not allow the press to devolve into a oligarchy of a few media companies controlled by just a few men.

It is my emphatic belief that the groups currently steering the levers of power do not support the good, grainy aspects of American cultural tradition, let alone the higher order ideal of Democracy.

*Of course, slavery and other abhorrences to and of the human mind and body existed in this milieu, however they were made to occur via false beliefs, distortions and misrepresentations of philosophies of the European tradition, including Christianity. The proponents of these varieties of thinking were going against the grain of proper, correct, or true, philosophical thinking, but they were not against legacy American culture and tradition.

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As the above comment says:
Posted by: thoughtcriminal on Aug 21, 2007 12:07 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
"Authentic American cultural traditionalists would not advocate debt shopping to propagate the economy; they would not advocate relinquishing American independence to a foreign policy that defends Israel without "...complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest..."; they would not allow the press to devolve into a oligarchy of a few media companies controlled by just a few men."

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. The people who fought off the British Crown Corporations in order to establish a republic, faults and all, would have said the exact same thing. Didn't they also warn us of 'entangling foreign alliances (Saudi Arabia and Israel being the most blatant)? Didn't they make freedom of the press a fundamental right?

The only place freedom of the press exists anymore is on the internet, and the media corps are desperately trying to convert this into their own private empire as well.

Why did Clinton win? Because he sucked up to the corporate media, and then he helped to increase their power via the 1996 Telecom Act. If you take even the most cursory look at the interlocking corporate media, from TimeWarner to Disney to NPR to FOX, you have to acknowledge that it is one big conspiratorial propaganda outfit. What little there is that is accurate and honest is buried in piles of BS engineered by government officials and public relations corporations.

We even have journalists abandoning the corporate media to start their own PR firms - why not? It's the same job, and they'll make a lot more money. Check out this recent job listing on craigslist, for example:

"Monument Worldwide is a dynamic and growing UK firm consisting entirely of former senior journalists. We're looking for someone to lead our US West Coast office. You'll be a no nonsense, common sense hard worker, with fantastic people skills and great creative journalism based instincts that will help place our clients stories and issues with the biggest national media outlets. You must be comfortable working in a team and by yourself, and must be able to make decisions without direction. This is a fantastic challenge and brilliant opportunity for the right candidate."

Yup. If you want to know why our political process is corrupt and dishonest, you need look no further than that. If Clinton hadn't been a corporate cash slut, he would never have won any elections, period. Was it worth it? Was he really all that different from Bush Sr., his new golf buddy? Bush Jr., however, is worse than either - a real fascist pig. That's what sucking up to the corporate media gets you in the end.

Let's consider NPR as one example - back in 1999, CNN and NPR were caught red-handed with eight interns from the US Army 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group. Chumps like Alexander Cockburn insinuated that they were there to 'spy on the media' or some such nonsense.

Not at all - they were there to learn the tricks of the trade from the real masters of propaganda - CNN and NPR.

Thus, building real independent media is probably the most important political step anyone can take... and it is being done, slowly but surely.

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» RE: As the above comment says: Posted by: Sojourner
» RE: As the above comment says: Posted by: mercianomad
Grassroots
Posted by: Lincoln fan on Aug 21, 2007 1:04 PM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Progressives seem to say that they are fed up with the "top down" politics of today and want a grassroots movement to take control of the Democratic party and force them to serve "The People".

However, when push comes to shove, I don't believe that most progressives really believe in democracy. They believe in "Government of the people, and for the people. The part "by the people" feels a bit uncomfortable.

We can't have a democracy until the average person realizes that he. isn't smarter, more compassionate, nor more ethical than the average person. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Bob Reichenbach,
Director, The Lincoln Initiative.

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» RE: Grassroots--agreed Posted by: Ripcord
» RE: Grassroots--agreed Posted by: Lincoln fan
A stereotype I was unaware of
Posted by: defrag on Aug 21, 2007 2:34 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Matt Bai thinks straight Latin American men act "effeminate"? News to me!

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How about an exhumantion
Posted by: veive on Aug 21, 2007 2:36 PM   
Current rating: 3    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What we've got to do is bring back FDR. Maybe a seance will save us. What we have now is corporatism heavy or corporatism lite. What we need is FDR's kind of Democratic Party.

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» RE: How about an exhumantion Posted by: camusrebel
I WON'T be a Repub, but I don't wanna be a democrat....
Posted by: ibemee on Aug 21, 2007 6:04 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
...and I always wondered why the symbol is a jackass....

what a mess we're in..... :-(

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Soul
Posted by: opeluboy on Aug 21, 2007 6:42 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What soul?

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Lets get real!
Posted by: camusrebel on Aug 21, 2007 7:15 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
This article is way lame. Yak-yak-yak. I almost fell asleep. There is NO DIFFERENCE between the Hilbamawards corporate Frankenstein, Howie Dean, the DA, DNC, DLC, CFR, CIA, MIC, GOP. This excruciatingly boring claptrap is not fooling us anymore.
The great unwashed masses are no longer bamboozled by shiny trinkets and fancy words. Dennis Kucinich is the only real progressive, liberal, democrat or decent human being mentioned. He is a man. A simple truth telling man that the vast majority of Americans agree with about the war, war in general, health care(ABOLISH the blood sucking insurance industry) NAFTA(get the F out NOW), impeachment.

We don't need you gate keepers anymore. We are onto the Republocrat scam. What you long winded gas bag spineless cowards do not yet see is that even among conservatives and independents, Dennis takes stands that most people agree with.

A peaceful revolution is under way. The 4 major networks will be Nationalized, both parties will be outlawed and the CIA will be abolished, all that money going to promote PEACE world wide.

Howard Dean was created by his Skull n Bones brothers last election for the sole purpose of giving the stenographers in the "media" a distraction from the only real peace candidate, President Dennis Kucinich. And you clowns bought it, hook line and sinker. Markos progressive?? Give me a freakin break already. Progressive is demanding 9/11 truth.

Progressive is picketing your Reps office until he signs House Res. 333 to impeach cheney.

Sponsored by ..................................you guessed it, the only courageous voice in Washington, DK. Dont wait for Katie Kuric to tell you 18 brave reps have already signed on. Take the red pill! Break out of the Matrix. Look in the mirror and ponder how u will explain to your great grandchild their world, either 1) World peace, all humanity working together to cleanse and protect our Mother Earth, sports, music, science, and love in abundance. Greed hunger torture gone
or 2)Full blown fascist police state.
All the sleep inducing blather making excues for and differences bwetween soulless sold out "Democrats" is easily seen for the attempt to confuse it is.

Get in the streets! Demand your Rep sign HR 333 TODAY!! Everything else is surrender.

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Fascinating article
Posted by: jgrossnas on Aug 22, 2007 9:19 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
This is one of the best pieces I've read on Alternet in a while. Thank you for this very thoughtful article.

As for the crux of the matter, this is a healthy debate that the Dems need to have, even if they do appear ready to trounce the GOP again. What's that line about gaining the world but losing your soul...?

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Commission on Presidential Debates
Posted by: Moe Snodgrass on Aug 22, 2007 10:27 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The Repubs and Dems officially got into bed together to create the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private institution operated in collusion by prominent Democratic and Republican party operatives, to dictate total control over debate format, moderators, and who is invited to participate.

Imagine the result in 2000 if Ralph Nader would have been granted the freedom to debate the ruling parties unencumbered? It would have been revolutionary to those citizens whose only source of info is broadcast news and the TV commercials of the candidates.

Please realize that the CPD exists only to serve the complicity of the two major political parties and will be displaced or forced to change only in the face of powerful, organized opposition. The Repubs and Dems are too solidly entrenched in -- and empowered by -- a corrupt system to change anything and must be relegated to the dust bin of history along with the CPD. New voices must be widely disseminated and heeded until they too become corrupt and we relegate them, too. Please write your newspaper editor or blogger to initiate momentum NOW to end the rule of the CPD before the 2008 elections.

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jmp3954
Posted by: jmp3954 on Aug 23, 2007 12:34 AM   
Current rating: 1    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
If the "progressives" win completely, it will likely be a repeat of 1972, when the Republicans won 49 states. I'd give Kucinich Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, and maybe New York. California and Illinois could be close, but I think he'd manage to lose them.

There is no viable national constituency for a genuinely leftist presidential candidate in the United States. A few things have changed, but this axiom of American politics is as true today as it was in 1972. FDR and LBJ are as good as it gets.

So all you whining leftists out there should just shut your fucking traps and get behind Hillary or Obama or whoever becomes the Democratic nominee. Or would you rather have Giuliani as president?

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» RE: jmp3954 Posted by: mercianomad
» RE: jmp3954 john cp Posted by: johnp
» RE: jmp3954 Posted by: raywigton
» RE: raywigton Posted by: leighsure
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