I think this ties in well with a broader conversation going on within the netroots and progressive circles about whether it is better to exclusively support candidates who are with us on most every issue and who speak and act in ways that forward the movement, or to support candidates who may not be with all of the time and/or who may speak and act in ways that don't always forward the movement if the election of those candidates would help the Democrats get closer to 60 votes in the United States Senate. This debate pertains also to Nebraska, where it appears that Bob Kerrey, who is hawkish on the war and has shown a willingness in the past to to deviate from the progressive line, is eyeing a return to the United States Senate. To a lesser extent it also applies to Democratic primaries in states like Oregon and New Hampshire, where the establishment pick is not by any means bad (in fact in both cases fairly progressive) but where there is also a strong grassroots candidate in the mix.
We approach this problem from different roles. Singer and Feld have been consultants for candidates, I have been primarily a consultant for causes. So it makes sense that they are aggressive about rejecting criticism of Democrats, whereas I am not.
That said, I have to say that I find this conversation curious and frustrating. No one is putting forward the notion that Mark Warner or Jean Shaheen should lose their race to a Republican, though somehow that always seems to be the straw man that is often used to discredit so-called intolerant progressives. Shaheen and Warner both have progressive tendencies on some issues, and it's not clear there's a real alternative in either case. But you can't just say that Bob Kerrey disagrees with progressives on some issues some of the time and that he'll be a good reliable vote getting to 60 the rest of the time. It's not just that the Senate doesn't work like that, it's also that Social Security and Iraq are core bedrock progressive tenets of society. Before Social Security, a third of the elderly lived in poverty, and the Iraq war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and will end up killing millions more. This is not like disagreeing on gun control.
There's also a real strategic disagreement about what makes a strong party. I don't think there's much leverage in boosting team Democrat at all times, since that strikes me as mindless cheerleading, though from 2002-2006 this was an essential task. At this point, there's a lot more leverage for social change in working to improve the Democratic Party and doing so against the tide of insiders who don't want reform and competition. If this party doesn't change, the calcified culture will lose to Republicans in 2010, or 2012. And it's well-known in branding that you have to stand for something; Bob Kerrey, like Lieberman, will ruin our ability to brand our party as the party of common sense and of the people.
At heart, what really is going on here is that Feld and Singer believe that criticism of these Democrats is harmful to the party, and I believe that criticism of these Democrats is helpful to the party. Both are reasonable views, though starkly different in their moral assumptions. My read is that fighting for better parking spots for Democrats is both fruitless and worthless, but that a democratic process works to create a good and moral society, that more speech is better, and that power ought to be treated with tremendous skepticism.
If Singer or Feld want to defend Bob Kerrey, they can and should go right ahead, but they will be defending a Senator who attacks Democrats and liberals with the same ferocity as Joe Lieberman. If they want to set 60 votes as the only goal, then they must also defend the House majority that passed the warrantless wiretapping bill. And they have to defend the fact that Bush needed, desperately, a Democratic Senator to cosponsor his privatization scheme in 2005, and couldn't find one. Kerrey would have been Bush's person, and Social Security would be gone, and millions on their route to elderly destitution.
Now, I'm not making the case that Kerrey should be opposed by progressives. I haven't made up my mind on that. What I do know is that the downsides of a Kerrey in the Senate are large, and real, and that the 60 vote magic number should not be an excuse not to deal with them. |
