The Progressive Platform we are building will be a sort of blueprint that we believe all progressives, especially candidates, should follow. It will be our beliefs as progressives, where we stand on various issues, and in many cases, what we believe needs to be done on those issues.
In the first post, the idea of creating a Progressive Platform was introduced. I had posted links to various political platforms, so everyone could get an idea of what we are trying to accomplish. Then you were asked to vote on what planks we should include in our platform.
This week we will briefly discuss planks for our platform.
The 2010 elections can be described in many ways, but one way to view them is as a repudiation of the congressional factions with which the Obama Administration has negotiated with (and/or capitulated to) over the last two years.
Blue Dogs and "moderate/centrist" GOPpers were overwhelmingly defeated in primaries and in the general election.
The progressive wing of the Democratic party did not suffer such defeat. It is time that the President join the winning wing of his chosen political party.
At a minimum President Obama owes the progressives a nod of thanks and respect for their demonstrated ability to stave off the recent Republican Wave.
In the past few months, there have been a lot of discussions in the media and on the blogs about what a progressive is. Many, especially in the media, are of the opinion that a progressive is the same thing as a liberal. But is that really the case? Chris Matthews considers himself a liberal. The DLC folks consider themselves liberal. Most Democrats consider themselves liberal. But are those folks progressive?
Is a progressive the exact same thing as a liberal? If not, what is a progressive? And better yet, what does a progressive, in this day and age, stand for?
These last questions are ones that we will be answering over the course of the next several months while we draft our Progressive Platform.
We now know the outcome, more or less, of the Washington State US Senate race-and it looks like it's going to be Patty Murray, D-(Actual No-Kidding Progressive), over Dino Rossi, R-(Guy Who Will Be Running Again For Something As Soon As He Can).
Murray managed to win in a State that is far more "purple" than you might think, in a vote-by-mail election that guarantees at least a few days of uncertainty.
You have to do some unusual math to figure out how these elections will go, and we're going to walk through how this race got called by NBC just a couple hours ago.
Do you ever look at newspaper articles about worker and student strikes in countries like France or Greece or Argentina-you know, the kind of activity that shuts down the whole country-and think to yourself, "Holy shit, that's what I'm talkin' about! Those people know how to protest!?"
Well, I sure do.
Not to glorify any particular tactic for it's own sake, but geez, the spirit of collective action and common purpose that's displayed in those moments-let alone the negotiating power it awards to grassroots movements, unions, and progressive political parties-is something that sometimes, um, feels a little lacking here in the good old U.S. of A.
So what are you waiting for. Go ahead. Try that here. See how many people you can turn out. See where it gets you.
Likely. not. very. far.
We have a situation here. We're stuck in a Catch 22. As a society, we presently seem to be inoculated against the means necessary for our own collective advancement. (If you're at the top of the plutocratic order, now's the time to congratulate yourself on a brilliant system.) And I'm not talking about any one particular style of collective action or protest - we're not France or Greece or Argentina, and I don't particularly want us to be. I'm fully ready to embrace an all-American style, and I would settle for whatever kind of collective action (within ethical and strategic limits) powerful enough to challenge entrenched power and privilege. Is that such a tall order?
What do I mean, we're "inoculated?"
I'm glad you asked. Have you ever heard someone say something like, "I'm not an activist or anything," or they look at you like you're from Crazy-ville (or they simply don't engage) when you start talking about the protest you went to?
Think about the word protest for a minute. Seriously. Stop. And think about it. Notice. What comes to mind with the word? Now try it with the word activist.
It's long past time for the left to publicly acknowledge that tying its meager fortunes to the Democrats is a lost cause. You cannot fight a beast from within its belly. You can only be digested and shat out.
You may not like the suggestion I'm about to make.
But I'll make it anyway: Vote third party, a LEFT-wing third party. MAKE the Democrats' self-inflicted losses in November be because they were too right-wing and the public, having been lied to for too long, chose to leave for a party that represents its interests over those of Big Business.
You must do this not only to send the right message, but because it is the ONLY way any Democrat will be made to realize just why he or she lost and what the party needs to do to win and keep power. That's not going to happen by sitting out elections, which is what the powerful want us to do anyway and only allows the far right to keep shaping the narrative that Democrats lose because they're perceived as being too liberal.
It has become increasingly (anecdotally) evident to me that "progressive" has supplanted "liberal" as the preferred ideological term of self identication among the US left. For quite some time it appeared as if the terms were purely interchangable, but my read on the trends now is that liberal is declining. For example, just last night I recently Anderson Cooper's program introduce Media Matters as the "progressive media watch dog group" and a WSJ article also applied the term to Netroots Nation. Both indicate the greater acceptance of the term such that established media use it without irony. In the hunt of some kind of empirical data, I tried a variety of comparative searches, and settled on the Daily Kos internal search engine, because it allows for accurate date ranges on searches, allowing me to examine the trend:
The X-axis represents the number of years back from July 2010 (when I ran the searches), so 1 = the last 12 months, 2 = the 12 months before that (Jul 2008-Jul 2009), 3 is the 2007-2008 period and so on to 6, which represents (counts fingers...) 2004-2005. The engine allows one to go back one more year, but I am omitting it because I'm not that confident about the 2003-2004 data for when the site was really just taking off. What's evident here is that at least among Daily Kos contributors, progressive passed liberal in popularity some time around early 2006. Last year, use of liberal actually declined in absolute terms.
An obvious (fair) objection is that Daily Kos is not the totality of the left. The sociological advantage of the site is the ongoing wide participation of a fairly broad audience of contemporary US left activists. I have put another chart inside which shows comparisons for some other sites I thought to search against, to provide some validation on the sample represented in Daily Kos (which I think it does since the Kos figures do not appear to be an outlier). One problem with general searches (say Google or Bing) is the difficulty of sorting out the number of non-political uses of terms like "progressive" and "conservative." Existing explicitly for politics, it's a safer bet that most uses of those terms on Daily Kos will be in their ideological context.
(Waiting on Democratic strategists to figure out what to do is simply a passive way of committing suicide. Nuts to that. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The following is the culmination of something I've been working on for several weeks. I've put a great deal of my time into this so whatever you do please make sure you watch the video.
When I was at Netroots Nation on Thursday, I pointed out why a majority in the House of members with D's next to their names isn't as valuable as a majority populated by Better Democrats:
We currently hold a 37-vote-margin in the House. Yet 34 Democrats voted against the health care reform and 19 voted against financial reform. It doesn't take a genius to see that it barely matters what happens in November when that many Democrats are voting with - and voting like - Republicans.
That's why you were there for Donna Edwards when she took on Al Wynn. That's why you were there for Bill Halter when he took on Blanche Lincoln. And that's why you should be with me as I take on Stephen Lynch.
As a reminder, my opponent in the Democratic primary, incumbent Stephen Lynch, voted for the Iraq War and its continued funding, for the Patriot Act and its reauthorization, and against health care reform, and has voted to restrict a woman's right to choose.
The differences between my values and Stephen Lynch's values couldn't be clearer. Ilyse Hogue, Director of Political Advocacy and Communications for MoveOn.org, highlighted as much when she sat down with Amy Goodman for an episode of Democracy Now! taped on location at Netroots Nation:
Amy Goodman (52:33): Ilyse Hogue, what about other primaries that are taking place?
Ilyse Hogue (52:37): Well, I think Bill Halter was the precursor. What we saw was him embodying a very strong feeling that our members have, and we think is sweeping across the country, which is he was taking on Wall Street. But Blanche Lincoln was also showing a friendliness towards the HMO's during the health care fight. And, what we're seeing is the base - our members - saying, 'Enough with Democrats who think that they're more accountable to corporate powers in this country than they are to us.
So we're seeing that same thing play out with Stephen Lynch and Mac D'Alessandro in Massachusetts-09. That primary is September 14th. What's interesting about that is that that is largely believed to be a safe Democratic seat, so the primary is actually the election. And Stephen Lynch, who is the incumbent, voted against the health care bill even though, at the end of the day, most of the Democratic base thought it would provide some relief. He did not do it as a champion for the public option. He was not there for the public option fight.
Mac D'Alessandro has come in and he's said, 'You know what? If we really want this democracy to be owned by the people and work for the people, we've got to do things. We've got to overturn Citizens United. We've got to actually get public financing. We've got to get lobbyists out of D.C.' And, I think that most Americans are looking for action on specific legislation like financial regulations, but they're also looking for people who are going to challenge the system because the system is not working for most Americans.
The kind of grassroots campaign that I'm running is built upon reaching out to voters directly, on the phones and at the doors. With the help of enthusiastic supporters across the 9th district, we have built a grassroots army that has generated strong momentum.
Just today, it was announced that we finished in second place in Democracy for America's Grassroots All-Stars contest, a competition that began with ninety candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives from across the country. I was the top finishing candidate among those still in a primary campaign, and I was the only candidate among the top five finalists not from the state of California.
I am running against an entrenched incumbent who has a million dollar warchest lined with contributions from big corporations and special interests. But, if there's one thing I've heard over and over again from voters as I've gone door to door across the district, it's that the voters want someone who stands up to big corporations, not someone who is funded by them.
That's why I need your support and the support of the netroots. Like Ilyse Hogue said, this is a blue district, so we have an opportunity to focus on electing the best Democrat we can. I urge you to support my campaign so that Massachusetts' 9th can be represented by a Better Democrat.
We all know the statistics. Over 4,400 American service men and women killed. Over $730 Billion spent. Longer than American involvement in World War II, longer than the Civil War, longer than the American Revolution, catching up to Vietnam.
We all know what a terrible cost the War in Iraq has levied on us. This is a war that my opponent in the Democratic primary, incumbent Stephen Lynch, not only voted for, but also voted to fund at least eleven times.
Still, as frequently as we've heard the dizzying and disheartening statistics, we sometimes lose sight of the direct impact this war has had on our communities. While we spend some $13 billion per month on the Iraq War, many of our cities and towns face crippling budget shortfalls as we climb out of this ongoing recession.
To make it clear to the families of Massachusetts' 9th Congressional district, I have offered a breakdown of the costs, using an interactive map. If you visit the map on my website, you can see what the per capita financial cost to each city and town has been - as well as what that money would have bought in teachers, police, and firefighters over these past seven years.
Iraq certainly isn't the only issue where my opponent and I disagree, or where he has cast a profoundly bad vote. Stephen Lynch voted for the Patriot Act and its reauthorization, while I believe that it represents an infringement on the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans. Lynch voted for the Stupak Amendment to the health care reform bill, while I am staunchly pro-choice and see the Stupak Amendment as the most profound attack on a woman's right to choose since the Hyde Amendment of the 1980's. Stephen Lynch also voted against the health care reform bill, while I support it because it provides tens of millions of Americans with access to health care, allows children to remain on parents' health care plans until the age of twenty-six, and ends some of the worst abuses of health insurance companies, like "pre-existing conditions" restrictions on children.
There is a clear pattern that, while Stephen Lynch may vote with us Democrats more often than not, the votes where Lynch diverges from us Democrats are among the votes that most shape the path on which our country will head. If you no longer want to face the cost of a bad vote - if you want to elect a Better Democrat - I urge you to get involved and support my campaign.
Netroots Wisconsin 2010 is the Wisconsin regional conference of Netroots Nation. Wisconsin will host the first Netroots Nation regional conference in the Dairy State, and the second in the nation. Netroots Wisconsin will take place in Madison, Wisconsin on Sept. 25, 2010. Unite the Cheddarsphere! at http://netrootswisconsin.org
The big news this past week out of MA-09 is that progressive challenger Mac D'Alessandro will make the Democratic primary ballot against anti-choice, anti-health care reform ConservaDem incumbent Stephen Lynch. He submitted 5,000 signatures to city and town clerks offices by the May 4 deadline. As long as at least 2,000 are certified valid (should be no problem with 5,000 submitted), Mac submits the 2,000+ certified valid signatures to the Secretary of State by June 1 and he'll give voters a choice against ConservaDem Lynch.
Mac took to YouTube to thank his grassroots supporters for their help making the signature drive a big success:
Progressive Democrats across the country have reason to be active in this race. There were 34 House Democrats who ultimately opposed health care reform; and Lynch's vote was among the most perplexing:
Then there are the real head scratchers. Reps. Michael Arcuri (D-NY) and Stephen Lynch (D-MA) famously abandoned the reform push late in the game, after having voted for the House bill. Lynch, in particular, went on a very public crusade of opposition to the bill from the left, and cast his vote despite pleas from President Obama and AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka that he vote with the party.
Of the 34 anti-health care reform Dems, some are running for other office (Senate or Gov), some are retiring, but most are running for re-election. Best I can tell though, few if any have serious primary challengers. MA-09 will provide progressive Democrats nationally with an opportunity to send a message to a ConservaDem who abandoned one of the Democratic Party's central pillars - expanding access to health care and moving toward truly making quality health care a right instead of a privilege.
That appears to be why Mac's campaign has found itself on MoveOn.org's radar screen as a viable primary challenger worthy of progressive support:
In the wake of Rep. Stephen Lynch's vote against health care reform, many progressives have expressed frustration with him-and now he's facing a serious primary challenge.
Mac D'Alessandro is the New England Political Director for the progressive Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and he's pledging to "be on the side of consumers and workers, and not on the side of health insurance companies and big banks."
So get in the game! Now that Mac has demonstrated grassroots strength through the impressively successful signature drive, he has to raise money - and ConservaDem Stephen Lynch starts off with a $1.3 million campaign war chest. So, please, please, please head over to Mac's ActBlue page and contribute as generously as you can!
Mac D'Alessandro of Milton, Massachusetts, has spent his career fighting on behalf of working families. For the past nine years, Mac has worked for the Service Employees International Union, most recently as New England Political Director. Prior to working for the SEIU, Mac worked for Greater Boston Legal Services, directing legislative efforts to help families combat poverty. Mac earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Human Ecology and Environmental Policy from Rutgers University and his Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School. Mac, 40, is married to Jennie Mulqueen, an early childhood arts educator, and is the proud father of five-year-old Sophie and three-year-old Atticus.
That was the title of one of the more powerful panels held at this year's Pennsylvania Progressive Summit, in Harrisburg, PA. Sam Bennett, Women's Campaign Forum President/CEO and former congressional candidate, led the panel discussion which previewed several of the state's female candidates and elected officials. Largely discussing the various ways to get more women into public office, the candidates shared their personal stories on why they chose to run for office, how to personally fund your campaign, and discussed the reasons why more women in office is "essential to the health of our nation".
In the first two videos, Sam Bennett and other panelists outline the major points on why we need more women in public office. In the third video, Lois K. Herr illustrates how to support other women in running for office. The final video offers advice on ways to support your own campaign, especially if its your first.
Also from the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit (paprogressivesummit.com), I'd like to bring you a few videos form a panel simply entitled 'Marriage Equality'. On this panel, the speakers discussed the benefits, issues, and consequences or allowing homosexual couples marriage rights equal to those of heterosexual ones. The panelists and approached the topic from a variety of angles. Some spoke about the legal issues equality, both in the PA state legislature and in the constitution, others talked about the religious aspects, especially from the Christian and Jewish traditions, and others talked about the moral and human rights aspect of the debate.
The clips below go into many of the arguments against marriage equality and gay marriage and why most of them struggle for validity. The first video, PA state senator Daylin Leach, who sponsored a bill in the PA state legislature in support on marriage equality, goes into many of the arguments against gay marriage that he has heard while debating the bill. As he says, no one has debated him twice, because no one has presented him an argument with any validity. The second video looks at many of the religious issues brought up by the marriage equality debate. Many think that religion has no part of the legal debate over gay marriage and often when religion is invoked, it is done so incorrectly. Finally, the last clip discusses why marriage equality supporters should want legalized gay marriage and not civil unions. Civil unions seem like an acceptable compromise, but really they are impractical and still discriminatory.
SEIU's New England regional political director Mac D'Alessandro has taken the primary plunge against incumbent Stephen Lynch. (Lynch, for you Progressive Punch score followers, gets a lousy 2 rating, coming from Massachusetts, and has a lifetime progressive score on "Crucial Votes" of 81.87, which drops to 71.95 when focusing on 2009-2010.)
Greetings, Blue Mass Group! My name is Mac D'Alessandro. I'm the New England Political Director for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and, as of this week, I am a candidate for United States Congress from Massachusetts' 9th district. I am a progressive Democrat, and I'm running for Congress because I believe that the working families in our communities deserve a Congressman who will fight for them and who will actually be a leader on key issues that matter to them - from reforming our health care system (and building on the recently-passed reforms) to holding Wall Street accountable to investing in job creation for our communities to protecting our civil rights and ensuring equal protection under the law.
I have spent my career fighting for working families. I've been with the SEIU for nine years. Prior to that, I worked for Greater Boston Legal Services, directing legislative efforts to help families combat poverty. I live in Milton with my wife Jennie, our children Sophie and Atticus, and our cat Nile. Like most families throughout the district and across Massachusetts, my wife and I sit at our kitchen table on a regular basis, going over our bills and the family budget, paying for today while trying to save for tomorrow. We see too often that the well-being of Fortune 500 companies are put in front of the good fortune of working families like ours. That is why I'm running. The 9th district deserves more than just another representative; the district deserves someone who will champion our Democratic ideals in the U.S. House of Representatives as we fight to balance the playing field for working families like ours.
There were 34 House Democrats who opposed health care reform. Lynch was the only one from Massachusetts. And, of those from the 34 who are running for re-election, I still don't see a lot of primary challenges. Supporting Mac D'Alessandro's campaign can send a message nationally to Democrats wavering on other issues (like Wall Street reform). Mac very much represents what it means to be a "Better Democrat." Please spread the word, join the Facebook group, and contribute any amount you can.
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