This past Saturday, I joined in a protest at a former president's house, took part in a four-hour progressive politics forum in an enormous theater packed with an enthusiastic crowd, and spoke at a fundraiser for GI resistance in a giant gay cathedral, all in the heart of the hinterlands: Dallas, Texas. All of which is not to say that the United States is a purple country and we should all just get along, but is to say that there is to be found across this nation a crowd much larger and saner and yet even angrier than the deluded corporate pawns and racists shown daily on your television.
Sheehan, who has never held political office, recently said that she was leaving the Democratic Party because it "caved" in to the president. Last week, she announced her caravan to Washington, D.C., which she calls the "people's accountability movement."
Counterpunch, among other places, has the full text of Cindy Sheehan's letter on why she is leaving the Democratic Party. The letter does not make it entirely clear that she ever was providing active support to the Democratic Party in the first place, especially when she write in the letter that "I knew having a Democratic Congress would make no difference in grassroots action." Still, I'll take her at her word, and go along with the claim that she was an active, supportive member of the Democratic Party, but has decided to leave it after the Democratic-controlled Congress capitulated by providing more, virtually blank-check, funding of the Iraq war. I am generally not a very skeptical person when it comes to other people, and I have no problem taking them at their word when it comes to claims like this.
Although I have not suffered a personal loss such as hers, I can also at least empathize with the anger and frustration that Sheehan feels at the passage of the funding bill. I was angry and frustrated when it happened, too. Still, my reaction was a little different than hers. Instead of moving about one hundred miles to a nearby congressional district and running a third party challenge against Steny Hoyer, or whoever, I decided to take out my frustrations by picking a fight with Third Way. At the time, I felt groups like Third Way were indirectly responsible for the failure of the 110th Congress to end the war. I know at this point that they are probably opposed to the war, and support redeployment, but I felt that the longstanding practice within certain segments of the Democratic coalition, such as Third Way, to distance themselves from the left had resulted in a situation where even a Congress with a Democratic majority would sometimes still pass right-wing legislation. So, I wrote a post, picked my fight, felt a little bit better for a few minutes, and began thinking about ways that the upcoming September funding fight could be waged more effectively.
(This lengthy post continues in the extended entry).
[Cindy] Sheehan has upped the ante once again, telling the Associated Press that if Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) doesn't move to impeach President Bush by July 23, then she will run to replace Pelosi in 2008.
Sheehan's latest move raises a question which in some ways seems fundamental to the premise of this blog: Namely, how forcefully should progressives challenge liberals and centrist Democrats when they take a go-slow approach to critical issues?
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