The Self-Identified Progressive Candidate

by: Chris Bowers

Sun Jul 08, 2007 at 16:35:10 PM EDT

(Bumped at 5:00 pm eastern - promoted by Chris Bowers)

When it comes to discussions of the Democratic presidential primary, it is fairly common practice within the blogosphere to debate which candidate is the most "progressive." These debates often include analyses of voting records, staff hires, policy positions, candidate backgrounds, stump speech rhetoric, sponsored legislation, and Iraq war votes / apologies. Depending on who you ask and which criteria you value the most, pretty much all of the Democratic 2008ers (except, I think, for Biden) have, at one time or another, been identified as either "the most progressive" or "true progressive" candidate in the campaign by multiple bloggers. The varying answers individuals arrive at speaks simultaneously to the fairly nebulous meaning of a term as widespread as "progressive," to the difficulty in assigning quantifiable ideological rankings to individuals, and to the always gaseous nature of national political campaigns.

Given this, for a moment let's put aside attempts by progressive activists to define Democratic candidates as progressive or otherwise, and instead take a look at how often the eight Democrats currently running for President define themselves as progressive. Let's call these the "self-identified" progressive rankings. According to a Google search I conducted a few days ago, here are the number of results for the word "progressive" on all of the candidate's campaign websites, along with some notes on the findings for each:

  • JohnEdwards.com: 3,480 times. While Edwards' website sports, by far, the most mentions of the word "progressive" of any candidate, it should be noted that most of those mentions come from the Edwards team opening up the campaign website to far more user generated content than any other campaign. In other words, in most cases the term was used not by the campaign, but by a supporter crating content on the wesbite. Still, the gap between Edwards and other candidates according to this criteria is striking.

  • Kucinich.us: 379 times. For a website that does not have a lot of content, Kucinich certainly uses the term "progressive" a quite a bit. Good for him.

  • HillaryClinton.com: 97 times. Many reading this might be surprised to find out that Hillary Clinton uses the term "progressive" much more often than Barack Obama, at least on their respective websites. And yes, most of the mentions are either directly from Senator Clinton, or from official content released by the campaign. Clinton herself even uses the term "progressive movement" a few times, which is nice to see.

  • BarackObama.com: 17 times. This is surprised me, since I have heard Obama refer to himself as a progressive in multiple speeches, including at Take Back America. However, for one reason or another, the word does not show up on his website very often. Perhaps he has started using the term more often of late, or he tends to use it in forums where he is speaking to certain, targeted audiences, as opposed to a more generalized audience on his website.

  • ChrisDodd.com: 17 times. Half of the 17 mentions come from two articles that repeat a combined nine times, so really the word appears less than ten times on his website.

  • RichardsonForPresident.com: 8 times. Single digits, but most of the uses of the term came in the last month, which is encouraging.
  • Gravel2008.com: 5 times. The word actually only appears once in a short, one-line article that appears in five places on the website. Further, it was used by someone outside of the campaign posting on the site.

  • JoeBiden.com: 4 times. Hey, four is better than none.

Granted, just because someone calls him or herself a progressive does not mean that person actually is a progressive. Also, just because someone does not call him or herself a progressive does not mean that person is not a progressive. (In fact, according to the semiotic theory to which I subscribe, crudely speaking someone could only be defined as a progressive if others were to define that person as such. But that is another, more esoteric matter entirely.) However, it is still quite interesting to see which candidates are using the term (everyone but Gravel), and who is using it the most (Edwards, Kucinich and Clinton). At the very least, not only does this reveal something about the voters each campaign is targeting right now, it is also a positive sign that the term is gaining some currency among even the most high profile Democrats. This is an important development, because it is an untenable situation for those on the left and center-left in America to have one political party self-identify as conservative, as they other to self-identify as either "moderate" or simply "big tent." Progressives need national leaders, and a national coalition, to articulate a progressive viewpoint in this country. In many ways, that starts with having leaders who are at least willing to call themselves progressives. To embarrassingly quote from the Tom Cruise gratuitous underwear / high school pimp film Risky Business: "If you can't say it, you can't do it." (Fun fact: In 11th grade, during my audition for the part of The Joker in my high school's all-Spanish language, musical adaptation of Batman, I did an imitation of Tom Cruise's famous dance in Risky Business. I didn't get the part).

Notably, on the other side, the term "conservative" appears on John McCain's website 551 times (methinks the Senator doth protest too much), on Mitt Romney's 159 times, nine times on the Fred Thompson blog, and only twice on Rudy Giuliani's. The gap between McCain, clearly desperate to brand himself as a conservative, and Giuliani, who doesn't appear to give a rat's ass about calling himself such, is hysterical.
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