Over at the Big Con, Digby has a great post up on transformative politics. Given our extremely lengthy discussion of vice-presidential picks earlier today, I think one passage from the article, where Digby quotes New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman, needs to be emphasized:
[H]ere's a proposal to inspire a transformational focus by our candidates. On every issue, with every group of activists, politicians who claim to be doing transformational work should be required to prove it. All politicians who seek your support should produce articles, videos, transcripts--anything that demonstrates that they are challenging the conservative assumptions that frame virtually all discussions of public policy among America's elected officials. How do we talk about abortion? As a duel between "prochoice" and "prolife" extremists--or as an issue of basic human freedom for women denied the power to control their own bodies? What do we say about health insurance? That it requires a delicate balance between the free market and socialism--or that it is an essential investment in our most important national resource and a basic right, without which our commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is meaningless.
The key here is to measure a candidate's progressive transformational potential not by his or her voting record on a checklist of policy issues, but to what degree that candidate is willing to challenge conservative frames themselves. I'm not sure if we have such a linguistic wordsmith either in Congress or as a sitting Governor, but I can think of one politician who has consistently pushed the envelope and engaged in actual fights--often successfully--on subjects that no other Democrat would touch. That person is Senator Russ Feingold.
From narrowly winning re-election in 1998 despite rejecting "soft" money from the DCCC and eventually passing campaign finance reform into law, to being the lone vote against the Patriot Act and leading a coalition to block a renewal of the law as is four years later, to becoming the first Senator to propose a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq before such a bill passed the Senate two years later (not to mention for over 60% of the country to come to agree with that position), to offering a censure motion against President Bush, to working with Chris Dodd to block telecom immunity, by personal filibuster if necessary, no other Democrat in the Senate even comes close to Feingold's consistent willingness to pick seemingly unwinnable fights, push the envelope, and eventually turn a minority of one into a majority position nationwide. Simply put, no one else does this. Once and a while Boxer (on election integrity in 2004), Dodd (who seems to be growing in this capacity) or someone else will pick a fight, but truth be told Feingold is a one-person progressive movement and progressive transformation in the U.S. Senate.
Over time, we need to build a bench and a nexus of power around an entire group of transformational progressives in Congress. In the short term, if we want such a figure to become the face of the future Democratic Party once Barack Obama (almost certainly) becomes the Democratic nominee and then (hopefully) the next President, Feingold is arguably the only available option. Chris Dodd, Sherrod Brown, Barbara Boxer... maybe. However, for quite a long time Russ Feingold has been the one and only consistently transformative progressive in the U.S. Senate.
I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Using the criteria presented above, what other Democrats have demonstrated a broader commitment to progressive change through their words and through their fights? Those are the leaders we need to identify and work with, and hopefully one of those leaders will find his or her way into the Democratic ticket this year. We need to go beyond checklists: who has talked the talk, and then walked the walk?
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