(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.
There was a fascinating contrast in two articles in the New York Times yesterday. The first was a news article, which I discussed in a post yesterday, which referenced the fact that Wall Street chieftains are privately relieved that the new financial reform bill, while it nicks them here and there and does add to/ toughen up some key regulations, doesn't fundamentally shift the way Wall Street does business. The second was a Paul Krugman editorial discussing the anger that many corporate leaders have toward Obama, and the huge amount of money they are shoveling to Republican candidates and conservative causes as a result.
It's an intriguing contradiction: on health care, on financial reform, on energy policy, on so many other issues, the administration and congressional Democrats are passing or pushing legislative changes that don't offer a fundamental transformation of the way big business operates in America. What they are offering instead is relatively mild reforms. Yet corporate bigwigs and their Republican allies are acting like we're moving toward socialist Armageddon.
No one thing explains this odd dynamic. Some of it is tactical: cynical corporate PR/legislative strategists figuring that if they scream bloody murder, they can move the debate more in their direction, and keep future legislative fights from going too far in the progressive direction. On the Democratic side, both tactically and psychologically, many Democrats want to claim that they are doing big bold things even when the actual legislation is a little less far reaching than the rhetoric suggests.
The biggest factor, though, is that big corporate interests are used to getting so much of what they want that when anything doesn't go exactly their way, they are stunned and outraged. From the 1930s to the 1960s, big corporations were still quite powerful, but they were not dominant: labor was stronger then than it is today, Democrats stood up to them more, regulators tended to be more aggressive. But for the last 40 years, conservative, pro-corporate Presidents have been in charge most of the time, and even when Democrats controlled Congress, there were enough boll weevil/blue dog/DC type of pro-corporate Democrats in Congress that they were able to form an alliance with Republicans to keep anything bad from happening to the big corporate interests. The Democratic Presidents we have had in this era- Carter, Clinton, and now Obama- have been pretty conservative in their economic policy. As the pigs at the trough never were forced to share the food they were eating, they grew even bigger and more powerful, making their ability to control politicians, push around regulators, and wreak havoc on the economy grow worse and worse.
Is this finally beginning to change? It depends on your perspective. Some of my progressive friends think that Obama and congressional Dems are almost as bad as the Republicans in terms of coddling Corporate America. Some of my optimistic friends in progressive politics like Bob Creamer think we are breaking through in a major way, setting the stage for bigger triumphs in the near future. And of course those corporate lobbyists who are screaming socialism at the top of their lungs and giving a lot more to Republican candidates can't believe they are only getting their way 80% of the time instead of 100%.
I am not as optimistic as Bob, nor as pessimistic as, for example, some of the folks at Firedoglake. As I have written before, I think we are breaking through a little, making some modest steps forward, but have a long way to go. What I do think is far more important than the debate between optimists and pessimists, though, is that some real thought go into what happens next. If Democrats shy away from picking fights with corporate special interests because of their growling, I fear the worse politically: in this volatile anti-establishment atmosphere, caution is what loses. We have to lean into the punch, and then punch back hard ourselves, to have a chance in the 2010 elections. The great thing about the corporate howling is that an a populist, anti-corporate special interest narrative is the best hope by far for the Democrats, and the Republicans are playing into our hands by opposing financial reform, defending the Citizens United decision, and embracing the corporate screamers. Retreat means defeat right now, both in electoral politics and in the question of whether this change moment becomes bigger or dissipates into the mist.
Right now, the conventional wisdom is that Democrats will lose a significant number of Congressional seats this November and that the Republicans might even take control of the Senate or House. This disheartening meme has been promoted as vigorously as other right-wing memes by the corporate media. This meme has been bolstered by the self-destructive actions of ConservaDems and President Obama -- actions that have just barely helped Americans in this difficult time and has discouraged progressives. The meme has also been reinforced by the frustration and burnout of progressive Democrats. The wide acceptance of this meme has resulted in discouraged progressives and emboldened Republicans, especially the Tea Party crowd. It has also helped the Republicans in Congress stay united in obstructing every progressive effort Democrats try to undertake -- why be flexible when obstructionism works so well?
But what if progressives worked as hard this year to defeat Republicans and elect progressive Democrats as we did in 2008? If we worked this hard again, then it is possible that Democrats could actually gain seats in the House and Senate and that the number of progressives in Congress would increase. If such a scenario came to pass, Republican intransigence would probably break down and Tea Party energy would likely wane. Progressives would be greatly emboldened.
With solid Democratic majorities in both House and Senate and Republicans in disarray, progressive Democrats could take the lead and push for measures that would actually solve our real problems and actually help most Americans. This would then usher in the long period of progressive dominance that seemed possible a year ago and constitute another wave of progressive reform comparable to historical progressive periods - the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the 60s (as described in Mike Lux's book). In short, we might be able to win big and win big for a long time.
Expectations Drive Reality
But one of our biggest obstacles to winning this year is the expectation that this will not happen, that progressives will, instead, sit at home cynically dispirited while Tea Partiers are out in force. This is what the corporate media tells us should happen and will happen.
Instead of listening to this propaganda, believing it, and acting accordingly, we should do the opposite: ignore the propaganda, tell the truth that there is potential for winning big this November, use that truth to rally flagging progressives to action, and then do the hard work to make it happen. This won't be easy -- progressives are tired from working hard in 2006 and 2008, and many are hurting for money in this time of severe recession. All of us are disheartened by President Obama dismantling the grassroots organizing infrastructure that enabled him to win election, his appointment of corporate hacks to positions of power, his continual hippie punching, his promotion of nuclear energy, off-shore oil drilling, charter schools, and other right-wing/corporate policies, and his feeble efforts (at best) promoting progressive policy.
We are the Leaders We've Been Waiting For
But we are not dependent on President Obama for leadership, we can take leadership ourselves. For the next 6 months, we can lobby hard for progressive policies that will actually help most Americans. If we can get Democrats to push for these policies, even if the policies are not enacted, the attempt should help Democrats win election. Also, just as before, we can identify progressive candidates for the November election (like Jennifer Brunner (OH-Sen) whom I'm volunteering for), we can raise money for them and steer volunteer efforts towards their campaigns, and our blogs can promote them. Together, we can do what we did in 2006 and 2008, and therefore we should be able to bring about the same results: more and better Democrats elected to office with a strong mandate to enact progressive policies that will actually help Americans and make the world a better place.
If we can rally progressives to work for big change this year, then we might actually be able to bring it about. Expectations drive reality, so let's set positive expectations (instead of listening to the negative ones promoted by our opponents) and then do our best to make them reality.
Through all the health care debacle Republicans really had no solutions whatsoever. Why should they?? As the party of the greediest and least patriotic of course they themselves had health coverage, or were even drawing that dreaded evil and demonic "government controlled" health care known as Medicare or Medicaid. Who cares if you cancer victims or Type 1 Diabetics or any other sick person went bankrupt or not?? Why it made much more sense for them to be forced to go to the Emergency Room and bankrupt our country than to cost a few insurance company profits did it not??
The co-directors of the Campaign for America's Future have four great lessons for progressives to learn from the frustrations of 2009. Here are the lessons summarized in the form of bullet points:
Change is brutal, and will always be resisted by powerful entrenched forces.
No matter how popular a reform idea is, like the public option, it still faces the buzzsaw of the United States Senate.
Progressives cannot wash their hands of the political process. We have to organize more, independent of the political parties.
This is still the best opportunity in 30 years for progressive reform.
I agree with all these lessons. Watch the following video for more on each of them:
I would add a fifth major lesson: stop expecting, or even hoping, for the center-left coalition to agree with itself. The longstanding internal argument within the center-left coalition over whether the change on the table goes far enough or not is an essential part of the process to any progressive change happening at all. Without that disagreement, progressive governance of any sort would be impossible:
Without people on the left arguing that the coalition isn't going far enough in terms of candidate selection or legislative policy, then there would be no way to push candidates or legislative policy to the left. In order to continually make progressive ideas mainstream, you have to push the Overton window. In order to make legislative policy under a Democratic administration more left-wing, you need people demanding that it become more left-wing. If there is no left-wing criticism, of the actions of the center-left coalition, which in this country means the Democratic Party, then the conveyer belt of promoting left-wing ideas into the mainstream-much less into actual legislation, stops dead.
At the same time, if there is no one in the center-left coalition willing to accept more incremental progressive change, then progressive change is never going to happen at all. The federal government is simply never going to be as, much less more, left-wing than the country as a whole (much less the actual left-wing). Even in a representative democracy, the power and resources of status-quo and regressive institutions will always provide them with government disproportionate control of government at all levels. This power and resource imbalance will always render governance relatively regressive compared to the country as a whole.
What this means for progressive governance is that we need people willing to accept, or even favor, partial, slow, incremental change. Even extremely partial, extremely slow, and extremely incremental change. Without that, no change will ever happen at all.
All of this makes ongoing, prominent, the center-left disagreement absolutely necessary to making progressive change happen within government.
Center-left unity would actually end any prospect for change, both in the short-term and the long-term, rather than increase it. This is a basic principle for progressive governance that more people should learn, no matter which side of the center-left divide they fall on at any given time. It is interesting that former President Bill Clinton has long been one of the biggest proponents of understanding the need for center-left disagreement, and perhaps explains quite a bit about his political career.
We at Open Left are taking the New Year's weekend off. Golden Oldies will run in their place. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on January 4th--Chris Bowers
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Oct 06, 2007. Original HERE.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
An Adam Bink Golden Oldie
From Thu Sep 03, 2009. Original HERE.
Cross-posted at The Bilerico Project
The news out late yesterday was that the National Equality March was endorsed by "over 140 leaders from all walks of life in the LGBT community."
What was interesting to me about this was (a) the timing of the announcement (b) the number of people who decided to get on board after leaning against the march publicly, or in some cases, expressed outright opposition. There have been concerns expressed by many that it was/is shaping up to be a disaster, and other concerns such as those I expressed earlier this week over resources being spread thin.
If you'll follow me across the flip, I have some background on the March, and a general strategy question for you all.
There are a few interesting questions I have in my head to keep in mind for future votes.
1. Vote-counting. As I documented in my piece on Wednesday, Sen. Duane, the lead sponsor and vote-counter, said repeatedly for months that he had the votes and we'll be fine. His comments after the vote indicated that he had been betrayed and lied to- something I believe myself.
My question is how you can say for months that you have the votes and then lose so badly, even taking into account that many Republicans jumped ship once they knew the bill would fail, which was definitely part of the equation here. Keeping in mind we went into this knowing we would need Republican votes for passage, my question is what else happened here, and why Duane said he had the votes for months then they evaporated.
(b) Duane was straight-up lied to by lots of Senators
(c) Republicans made commitments to Duane to vote yes, but between the state Conservative party threatening primary challenges for Republicans who voted yes, and the NY-23 teabagger story, they were scared to death and never told him they were switching to no
(d) Skelos, the minority leader, said publicly he would let his caucus vote their conscience. This turned out to be untrue, he twisted arms, and that is something Duane did not know about or take into account
(e) Sen. Alesi, who was one of the most gettable Republicans, was #3 in the vote order and once he voted no, he became the domino that caused all the other Republicans to vote no (something he denies)
(f) The Republicans, and maybe some Democrats, DID tell Duane they were switching to no, but he didn't want the bill pulled even though he knew it would fail
(g) Duane never got firm commitments from everyone he needed, and was operating on an assumption that even if he could only get verbal commitments from some Democrats and a Republican or two, the rest of the votes he needed would fall in line anyway and we'd be set
Perhaps there's more possibilities. In truth, it's probably some of many different pieces. If it's (a), I wonder what the nature of those conversations were and why Senators think it's okay to go back on their word, on this issue, to an openly gay Senator. If it's (g), that is something to think about at a tactical level.
I have more questions than answers on this, but the more I think about this the more I realize something is not right with either the vote-counter, the model under which he was operating, or the people making the commitments to him.
2. Whether you should have a vote at all. Empire State Pride Agenda had been insisting on a vote for months with the rationale of the importance of knowing where Senators stood. There were a lot of Senators who refused to state a position. The one good thing about this is that now we know who to support and who to defeat.
On the other hand, by many accounts and my own opinion, this bill did significant damage to the chances of New Jersey passing its own law, partly because of lawmaker nervousness and partly because they share media markets (a full Senate vote there will be held on Dec. 10th). It also made headlines around the country and perhaps changed more than a few minds or hardened more than a few opinions on this. I was personally okay with losing a vote by one or two, but not getting it resoundingly defeated. Not only does that motivate the right-wing, keep their funding streams healthy and initiate another irritating series of "let's abandon marriage altogether" arguments in the LGBT community of late. It affected the public perception, too. That is a very serious risk of doing these votes when you do not have nearly the number of votes you should.
I have mixed feelings on this myself, but I am interested in your opinions on whether you would have pushed the bill through even if you weren't sure you had the votes.
I've been doing some more thinking on the outcome of the NY Senate marriage vote, and there are some important emerging themes I want to respond to. In a later piece, I will have some organizing questions I'd like your thoughts on re what to do better.
1. The "This is all the Democrats' fault" meme. I have heard this in a dozen places privately, and yesterday, Democratic Sen. Tom Duane, the openly gay lead sponsor, said this at the NYC rally to protest the vote:
"I'm angry at the betrayal of people who are supposed to be standing up for our civil rights," Duane proclaimed as the crowd cheered. "The Democrats failed us in the Senate."
I think there are two important things to differentiate here. One is the mathematics. Yes, more Democrats voting for the bill would have "given Republicans cover" to get onboard. There is near-universal agreement on this and I don't dispute it.
But the second, and thing I want to zero in on, is the political culpability, which is what I have a problem with. There cannot be straight "This is all the Democrats' fault" rhetoric coming out of this. Non-stop "Democrats suck" risks hatred for both parties, particularly for less political people who are don't get the process part of this, and that is not helpful to anyone. And we only got this far because of New York Democrats. Spitzer campaigned on a pledge to submit a marriage bill in 2006. Paterson has been one of the most public and loud voices in the state pushing for it in special session for months. He was the one who issued the executive order granting recognition to out-of-state couples. Shelly Silver, the Dem Assembly Speaker, brought it up for a vote and it passed with mostly Democratic votes in the Democratic Assembly. It would have never come up for a vote in a Republican Senate- in fact, when Republicans controlled the Senate and Bruno was Majority Leader, he refused to bring it up even after the Assembly passed it. Now that 75% of the Senate Dem Caucus voted for the bill, and 0% of the Republican Caucus did, it's suddenly time for "Democrats suck! They're all to blame!" rhetoric?
I understand the optics around how Democrats give cover to Republicans. But we would have never had a vote under Republican leadership in the first place. And there has been too much "it's all their fault!" talk and not enough about how 0 Republicans went for this bill. There are vulnerable gasbags on both sides of the aisle, and you have to tell that story for the sake of the people listening.
2. How "This is all the Democrats' fault" leads to misuse of resources. This kind of blame game makes people think the grand solution to this problem is to just channel every resource into primarying the 8 Democrats and our problems will go away. This single-minded focus is not wise.
There is a target-rich environment here. The 30 Republicans do not all come from R+26 districts. Our side has to target vulnerable Republicans and find candidates to beat them who will be with us on marriage even when 8 of their caucus colleagues are not. At the congressional level, we beat lots of Republicans in 2006 and 2008, and many of the Democrats in their place vote our way on tough votes, even when in marginal districts, and even when 30 Blue Dogs vote against. You have to go district by district, not party by party.
3. How "Democrats from New York City" should be treated. There is a lot of special anger reserved at the 6 Dems from NYC districts who voted no, because the assumption is that because they're from NYC, known as an LGBT mecca, they are monolithically pro-LGBT. I don't think that's right at all. I spoke to one NYC State Senator who voted no on the phone before the vote, who told me straight up, "Adam, I gotta tell you, African-American churches elected me to this seat, and I gotta worry about them." That pretty much tells you what is foremost on most politicians' mind.
Here in DC, Yvette Alexander and Marion Barry voted no on the marriage bill. I would never call them "Democrats from DC" and blindly expect them to be as progressive as they come. They come from Wards 7 and 8, which are 97% and 93% black, much more heavily religious, have the lowest incomes of any wards, the lowest percentage of people with college degrees of any wards. They do not exactly represent Dupont Circle or Chelsea or anything close to it, so I don't know why anyone would expect them- or NYC Dems from similar districts- to be automatically pro-marriage equality. Maybe it's those kinds of assumptions that led our leaders to think we had the votes when we didn't.
I don't excuse the NYC Dems' votes, and some of them should have voted yes, but my point is we need to think of Senators as Senators from a district, not from a giant city.
Let's side step the issue of populism
since the groups that dislike it aren't going to change by knowing more about it, and since, by your own admissiion, they have an interest in maintaining their hatred of it. I just would like the country to be governed in everyone's best interests and not just the interest of business. Do the tea baggers offer this. Nope. They are dogmatic free market fundamentalists in most cases so I am not interested in them.
I know third parties cannot do anything more than spoil, but the spoiler affect can be used strategically against bad democrats. If the 10 percent nader affect were utilized against the worst corporatists,in 5 years, the corporatists will be exercised from the democratic party. Let's start something like a "strategic liberalism party" and use the spoiler affect to purge the democrats of corporatist candidates. The problem with the greens is that they ran even against good dems like Paul Wellstone! A "strategic liberalism party" or a "real democratic party" wouldn't make that mistake.
The news out late yesterday was that the National Equality March was endorsed by "over 140 leaders from all walks of life in the LGBT community."
What was interesting to me about this was (a) the timing of the announcement (b) the number of people who decided to get on board after leaning against the march publicly, or in some cases, expressed outright opposition. There have been concerns expressed by many that it was/is shaping up to be a disaster, and other concerns such as those I expressed earlier this week over resources being spread thin.
If you'll follow me across the flip, I have some background on the March, and a general strategy question for you all.
Yesterday I wrote about headlines that we hope to see 5, 10 and 20 years in the future. Today let's talk about how to do more than hope. How do we get there?
The headline I offered was May 2020, Annual Citizen Dividend Raised to $20,000. The opening paragraph of such a story would be something like,
"The annual citizen dividend has been increased to $20,000. This is the dividend paid to all citizens as their share of the fees collected from businesses that put pollutants into the atmosphere up to their allowed cap, for oil and other extracted resources, and other recovery of externalized costs. A similar amount is added to the National Income Trust to increase future payouts. In similar news, because of increasing productivity the maximum workweek has been reduced to 15 hours and the minimum wage has reached $50 per hour."
Nice dream, no? But how could we ever get there? What would need to happen before we could see a headline like this in 2020. What policies would have to be enacted? And, equally important, what would the public need to understand and accept before those policies could be enacted? What opposition would be encountered during the effort to get those policies enacted, and how could we counter that opposition? What are some ideas for strategies to follow to make this happen? AND, just as important, what needs to happen before those things can happen?
This post is only a brainstorming session to get us used to looking at the steps that move us toward a long-term goal - just a thought experiment. And of course there are plenty of people here who are much further along in strategic thinking than this 101 discussion. So what follows is only a rudimentary sketch of what might be done if we were doing this for real, hoping to lead to a discussion in the comments. Please add ideas for steps and strategies in the comments.
The elements of the idea break down to:
1) Annual dividend paid by fees collected from businesses for use of resources including polluting.
2) A National Income Trust that grows and pays this dividend into the future.
3) Productivity gains reduce the workweek and raise the minimum wage.
So thinking about the years leading up to 2020, what policies need to be in place, what things would people need to understand, and what about opposition, in sequence leading up to 2020?
Well, Alaska already has something very much like this, paid by companies that extract the state's oil and other resources. And they pay into a trust so that when the oil is gone the trust continues.
So a step toward a similar national plan might be a campaign to educate the public about the success of Alaska's Permanent Fund. And a step toward that might be to get people thinking about who owns and should benefit from the oil under the ground. A step toward that might be getting information to the public about oil company profits and the taxes they pay compared to individuals and other companies. Just for example.
I recently got married to a wonderful woman. But in spite of her long list of great attributes, she has a fatal flaw: she is non-partisan.
She works as a live-in nanny, so we have had a good mix of "together time" and "apart time". But over the past month or so, she and I have spent every evening together. And that is great... except that she wants all of my time. And not only does she want me to focus less time on progressive politics and more time on her, she has also recently complained about the money that I donate to MoveOn, Democracy For America, and other groups.
During the end of the 2008 campaign, I thought it was cute when she jokingly said "You love Obama more than you love me". Now I am starting to think that she really feels that I should have to choose between her and political activism. She is a recent immigrant, and she does not know (or care) much about American politics.
She does agree that the starving should be fed and the homeless should be sheltered. And after I got her to watch "Sicko!", she agreed that America should have universal health care. But her natural inclination is to think that politics is something that happens to other people, and that she and I should focus on our individual lives.
As my wife and I begin to operate more as a couple and less as a pair of individuals, it is possible that she will become the second progressive activist in our household. Or perhaps I will end up shifting more of my time and money to personal concerns and away from political activism. Does anyone here have any suggestions for how I can get her to share my enthusiasm for progressive politics?
A previous post of mine (Splitting equals losing...) now has over 100 replies.
The good news is that I found topics that people feel passionately about (how to advance progressive ideology, and how [or even whether] to recapture the Democratic party from the hands of corporate interests). The bad news is that some of the responses to my post involved a fight between the Pro-Naders and the Anti-Naders. This fight is like a red-hot coal (lots of heat, and not much light).
The point of my post was not to point fingers at the past, it was to point the way towards victory in the future.
On the topic of Nader, both sides seem to agree upon two facts. One is that there were a dozen factors that helped Bush steal the election (purging Black voters, confusing butterfly ballots, Katherine Harris, a bizarrely biased 5-4 "no precedent" Supreme Court decision... and of course Gore's own lackluster campaign). The second fact is that, if we could change history, holding all else constant and ONLY removing Nader from the race, the result would have been: President Al Gore. (And while Gore is only progressive on the environment, I think we can all agree that Gore would have been better than Bush.)
One commentor actually accused other commentors of "not caring" about all those that died during the Iraq war. I will not accuse FeralCat, Dr. Anonymous and others of "not caring". If they did not care, they would not spend their time posting here.
What I do want to do is help us all agree upon effective strategy for the future. And to achieve that, I have a few suggestions.
One is that we should all try to spread the "fusion voting" model to every state. We have that model in New York, and when I vote, I look for candidates that are on both the Working Families ballot, and the Democratic ballot (and I then pull the lever for WF).
A second thing that I would suggest is that splitting is great (when the split is among the Right). In 2008, I signed petitions in favor of including Ron Paul and Bob Barr in the debates. When the Right fights itself, the Left wins. Most of our time and money should be spend in making the Left stronger, but whenever we can help the Right defeat itself, we should do so.
A third good idea that I have heard here is that support for progressive third parties should focus on congress first, before attempting to influence the presidential election. That idea has a lot of merit.
A fourth idea is that progressives should support third party candidates in non-competitive states only. In 2000, I had not yet moved from Texas to NY. I knew that Bush would win Texas, and I liked some of what I heard Nader saying. (In the end, I chose to vote for Gore, to give him a larger mandate.) But maybe in 2012, if the race is between Obama/Biden and Huckabee/Palin, Kucinich will run as an independent or as a Green. If that happens, then progressives can make a deal: for every Kucinich supporter in a competitive state (like Virginia) that votes for Obama, an Obama supporter in a safe state (like NY) will vote for Kucinich. That way, Kucinich gets the same number of net votes, but he does not flip a competitive state to the Republicans.
Finally, I want to address another kind of splitting. Among all of us here at Open Left, who care passionately about progressive causes, let's feel free to disagree, but let's avoid name-calling and personal attacks. If we agree upon policy goals (universal health care, green energy, a living wage, less war abroad, and so on), then when we quibble over tactics, let us not forget that the REAL enemy is guys like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist. A dissenting fellow progressive is, at worst, a misguided friend.
I posted a diary a while back ("Obama is bad"-compared to whom?), and I keep seeing articles that make me want to re-post it.
I do agree that Obama has been disappointing. He is a moderate rather than a Progressive. But I keep seeing the suggestion that progressives should form or support a 3rd party.
"A new party for progressives"? Are you kidding me? Have you forgotten how Nader helped Bush steal the 2000 election from Gore?
I DO agree with Darcy Burner that what America needs is "more and better Democrats". But splitting the Democrates into two pieces is NOT the answer. Splitting equals losing. I would love it if the Republicans would officially split into the Libertarian Social Darwinist party and the Theocratic Christian Taliban party. If they did that, they would lose even more influence.
What we need is a fourfold strategy: First, elect as many real Progressives as possible, in the House, the Senate, and elsewhere. This includes seating Al Franken.
Second, build a strong Progressive movement within the Democratic party. Be willing to primary the DINO's (for example, help Joe Sestak beat Arlen Specter). If we Progressives make it clear to the Democratic leadership that we want them to act like real Democrats, they will be less swayed by the dollars of lobbyists.
Third, we need to remove the Republicans from power. I will do all I can to expand Democratic control of the Senate in 2010, even if it means helping the most Conservative Blue Dog defeat the most liberal Republican. The party of Bush does not deserve to control anything larger than a tiny Alaskan town like Wasilla.
Fourth, we need to change the national dialogue. For years now, "liberal media bias" has been one of the favorite Orwellian labels of the Right. It is true that blatant racism and sexism are unpopular, as they deserve to be. But Big Media is Big Business, and Fox is not the only corporation to regurgitate right-wing talking points about the economy. We need to support progressive media, such as MoveOn, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Air America, and so on.
Once the Democratic Party has more than twice as much membership, and twice as much money, as the Republican Party... once the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is much stronger than the Lieberman/Specter wing, which is much stronger than the entire Republican Party... then and only then can we seriously consider splitting the Progressive Party away from the Democratic Party. If the Democrats win every election for the next decade or two, then I will think about supporting a progressive third party. Until then, do NOT forget what Nader did to Gore in 2000.
