Every year in Washington, D.C., the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) convenes the largest conference of activists positioned anywhere to the left of wherever the center has drifted off to. Labor and community groups and civil rights groups play a big role, most of them strictly loyal to the Democratic Party. The focus is on domestic issues, and the approach is an inside strategy of nudging and honoring those in power. You can sense my cynicism, and yet this year I was very pleasantly surprised.
Who was not moved by the sight of hundreds of thousands of people of all colors gathered in Chicago's Grant Park to cheer Barack Obama's election as the 44th president of the United States?
Obama needed to win by a big enough margin that the Republicans couldn't steal the election again, and he did it with a campaign that harnessed the populist power of the Internet and an indefatigable army of young volunteers. Now the corporate pundits are trying to limit the damage Obama can do if he follows through on his promises.
Before the election John McCain and his right-wing allies were saying that Obama was a "socialist" with plans to soak the rich and "redistribute wealth." But after the election, the right's revisionists denied that Obama's impressive victory gave him any sort of mandate to enact socialist reforms or redistribute wealth. They claimed that the US remains a center-right nation.
As progressive writer David Sirota notes, the "center-right nation" phrase is being parroted with the propagandistic discipline of Cuba's Ministry of Information.
