Salon.com's news editor, Steve Kornacki, lamented yesterday that "Obama won't face a credible primary challenge", going on about how the closest thing to a liberal challenge he has comes from Republican candidate Buddy Roemer. While it is true that many liberals aren't seeing any "viable" candidates materialize on the left, Kornacki isn't telling us why that is: the failure of supposedly liberal pundits to report on candidates who are actually running.
And therein lies the catch-22 bloggers like Kornacki can't seem to escape from. They complain about Obama, but they refuse to use the public voice they've been given to alter the political landscape. Pundits influence public opinion simply by reporting on someone or something. And they pass up opportunity after opportunity to do so when they fail to do their journalistic duty.
Because there is a Democrat trying to get himself on the ballot to challenge Obama from the left in next year's primaries: Aldous Tyler is seeking the nomination to run for president as a liberal Democrat. His platform hits all the right notes, including opposition to war, taxation of the wealthy, a sustainable energy policy, cleaning up the environment, and restoring and protecting the safety net, among other positions. Tyler also favors heavily regulating Wall Street and corporations.
So why aren't supposedly liberal bloggers and pundits giving Aldous Tyler any coverage? Kornacki writes that "[t]he depths of liberal despair over his presidency are often overstated", meaning that bitch as they might about Obama, far too many who claim to be liberal aren't dissatisfied with his policies enough to want to be rid of him - and having so thoroughly bought into the Big Lie that Republicans are just so much worse than any Democrat no matter what the evidence disproving that notion, they fear that any challenge might weaken Obama to the point that the GOP nominee might manage to cheat his way to victory next year.
But it's Obama's fault that he is even in such a precarious political position in the first place. Having made big promises only to cold-bloodedly refuse to even try to deliver on so much as one of them, and after literally adding insult to injury by dissing his party's official base, it's no wonder that his campaign is looking a lot more like Al Gore's and John Kerry's lackluster, doomed efforts than, say, Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election drive. So coming out of a primary challenged beaten up and vulnerable isn't exactly a legitimate excuse not to cover challengers, especially ones from the left of the political divide.
Isn't it time to break the self-imposed media blackout on left-wing challenges to Obama? If Democrats are truly fed up with him, and are seeking alternatives, it only makes sense for those blessed with public voices, such as Steve Kornacki, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, or Ed Schultz to use their gifts to report on people like Aldous Tyler. The media might lament the lack of candidates, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. They only need to be reported on objectively, so voters can render their own decisions.
Note: I originally posted a version of this at FireDogLake.com, only to see it flagged as spam and my account deactivated. I guess certain persons don't like having their lack of any moral foundation challenged. Oh well.
In my previous two entries, I discussed why it is important for people who call themselves left-wingers to have a solid moral foundation. To sum up, one cannot call one's self a progressive or a liberal and support the extreme right-wing policies of those in government. To support Obama's continuation and expansion of Bush-Cheney fascist policies, whether directly or by refusing to challenge him electorally, or by simply remaining silent in the face of ongoing crimes and usurpation of Constitutionally delegated powers, is immoral.
But what is morality, and how should the American left apply it to politics?
(I'm totally on board with this!! - promoted by Diane G)
Crossposted from Docudharma and Writing in the Raw.
I received a letter from Dennis Kucinich this week. Dennis reported that the recent census resulted in the need for Ohio to eliminate 2 Congressional districts. Guess which ones?
Dennis states:
The New York Times, Newsweek, and Fox News have all recently headlined stories that I may lose my Congressional seat, not through an election, but through redistricting!
Because of this attack on his district, Kucinich has sent out this letter to ask for the suggestions of "We the People" about what he/we should do about this. I wrote a letter to him suggesting that we form a new, progressive party of the well known politicians who have either been driven out of office or who are feeling incredibly frustrated with the impossibility of accomplishing anything meaningful.
This new third party might be called the "People's Progressive Party."
2010 is nearly over, and the fight for the presidency in 2012 is beginning to take shape. Corporate Democrat Barry Obama has not merely disappointed the public, nor has he merely failed to accomplish progressive goals. He has, in fact, deliberately and stubbornly refused to even try to accomplish progressive goals, opting instead to continue and expand on the fascist, totalitarian policies of his predecessor and ideological brothers, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
I do not make that last charge lightly, or at all inaccurately. Paul Street and Glenn Greenwald, as well as Jane Hamsher and the good members of the FDL family, among others, have documented the multitude of offenses which the right-wing Obama regime has undertaken against the public in the name of continuing the horrors of the Bush-Cheney years.
(I'm gonna have to make this guy a goddamned admin before he gets how much we love him, I think :) - promoted by Diane G)
The Founding Fathers gave us democracy. We have the moral responsibility to restore what was given to us, to take back what has been taken away by corrupt politicians of both major parties. There is no longer any doubt that the two-party system has been used to Establish, Maintain, and Expand corporate Tyranny. It has been used to divide and conquer, to prevent We the People from uniting in defense of our rights as citizens.
The false paradigm of We the Left against We the Right must be rejected. Americans must embrace a new ideology of Citizen Empowerment, they must speak a new language of Political, Social, and Economic Activism, they most forge a new movement, a local, state, and nationwide alliance encompassing the values and goals they share in common. They must cast aside the dead language of We the Left and We the Right, for among the victims of corporate Tyranny, there is no We the Left nor We the Right anymore, there is only We the Powerless.
In Part 3 Cohen talked about the struggle for power and direction within the Democratic Party from the days of the Viet Nam War to the present, and wound up with "Frankly... I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he's up for re-election... Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you'll never get anywhere."
Here in the conclusion of the interview Cohen expands on those ideas and fills in some of the outlines to draw a rough set of guidelines or roadmap of how to get from where things stand now with the Democrats as out and out corporatists to a world of the kind of progressive populism they have been well known for at various points in history, and how it is going to take a no more Mr. Nice Guy approach from progressives and a lot of very hardnosed and fearless aggressiveness, of the kind that I think Muhammad Ali meant when he noted so many years ago "He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."
Lately there has been a spate of diaries at such web sites as FireDogLake and "Open" Left wherein lay members - typically under attack from site moderators, who act as Democratic Party hacks and gatekeepers - have sought ways to bring back the Progressive Party, or join the Greens, or build up some other institution, that will allow progressives to act together as a cohesive political unit. (I posted an entry there myself, only to end up being attacked by site moderators, threatened with banishment, and ultimately banned when I refused to back down against their incessant bullying.)
Fellow FDLer TalkingStick points out the wisdom of studying the teabaggers for ideas about how we progressives can rebuild our own movement.
Mason calls for progressives to join him in building a Progressive Party from the ground up, apparently not aware that it already exists in states such as Vermont and Washington, and as Green Party affiliates inMissouri and Wisconsin. He is joined in this effort by MadHemingway, who posted the 1912 platform the Progressive Party ran on.
FDL members are not alone in Left Blogsylvania in expressing their utter disgust with the Democrats; at "Open" Left, such lay members as Arthur Lukas gripe about where progressives are and asks where we should go from here. Even at the Daily Obama, whereupon I also post, a poll I put up asking if it is time for progressives to break away from the Democratic received a fifty percent yes-vote.
Such discontent is often met by moderators and site owners with derision, insults, threats, and banishments of the "offending" members. Nevertheless, it has grown more difficult for the access-bloggers to bully progressives into submission, a lesson FDL's Jason Rosenbaum refused to learned after the beat-down his contemptuous post before the Massachusetts special election received. In short, no one on the left is buying into the Big Lie that Democrats are any different from Republicans in terms of substantive policies, nor are we responding to threats and insults anymore for "failing" to be bullied into supporting Democrats no matter what.
This discontent and refusal to be bullied has created an opening for progressives seeking to organize the left back into a cohesive and more importantly, effective movement in opposition to the far right. There are angry voices aplenty, people outraged by the betrayals of the man they though they were electing president in '08 and the endless capitulations to the GOP made by Democrats. Here we have an advantage.
The only thing lacking in the new political environment is effective leadership among progressives. We will not find it among the self-appointed "leaders" of the 'netroots, the access-bloggers like Chris Bowers, Markos Moulitsas, and the aforementioned Rosenbaum whose only real goal is to gain access for themselves - and only themselves - to the inner circles of "serious" political power and corporate media recognition. It is therefore up to us to take on leadership roles and organize the left.
If we can take charge, we the progressive base, then we can finally begin the work of taking back America from the fascist elements that have usurped it for their own ends to the detriment of everybody else. The Full Court Press is one tool for doing that, and it's a very good start.
Journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media on the struggle within the Democratic Party, starting from the Viet Nam War:
There's no doubt that there's an awakening. What concerns me is that the liberal base, the Democratic Party base, has never been more educated, in my view, and that's because of the independent media. The democratic base is against an imperial foreign policy. The democratic base is for real medicare for all, or at least the strongest public option that would really hurt private insurance. There's an understanding of history, and again it's largely because the independent media is giving us the news in real time, every day when we click on the computer and we watch Real News, we watch Democracy Now.
What hasn't translated is while we have this boom in independent media on the Internet, we don't have a boom of independent politics.
What I believe are needed are new groups, that will be on the Internet, mobilizing the millions to make the kinds of demands of the Democrats that the right wing base, which has clearly transformed the country, the right wing base in the Republican Party not only took over a major party, they haven't let up on that party until their agenda is put in place, whereas on our side we don't have that.
What needs to happen, this is what a few groups are doing, Progressive Democrats of America is one, the idea is we need to take over that major political party.
When people talk about change, and then they deliver only for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street, you vote them out. You primary them. You know this is what the right wing has done for decades. It's what they're doing now.
What we get from MoveOn historically and other groups is apologies for democratic office holders who have faked left with their rhetoric and then governed for big business. And what we need is to primary these people.
Frankly... I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he's up for re-election.
Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you'll never get anywhere.
At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.
How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales, became more public. This sh__ has GOT to end.
MSNBC's Ed Schultz talking at the AM950 Blue State Bash on Saturday night to a crowd of progressive talk radio fans in Minnesota lets go with both barrels at Robert Gibbs, at Barack Obama, at the "people who have infiltrated the Democratic progressive movement", and at the whole delusional idea of bipartisanship.
"I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him," Schultz said. "And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb the same way Senator Leahy got it on the Senate floor. I told Robert Gibbs, I said, 'I'm sorry you're swearing at me, but I'm just trying to help you out."
"I'm telling you, you're losing your base," he continued. "Do you understand that you're losing your base? And that the American people don't want public option, the American people want single-payer!?'"
When Obama needed the votes of progressives to get elected, his message was Change We Can Believe In. But now that he no longer needs us, now that he has power, he has a very different message for progressives . . .
That blunt message is echoing from one end of the Beltway to the other, from the White House to Capitol Hill, it's echoing from K Street to Wall Street and across the corporate media airwaves. Corporate power must not be challenged. Don't even think about it. Byron Dorgan got the message. Chris Dodd got the message. Robert Wexler got the message. We all got the message.
2 AM and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don't have to tell you what her latest mistake was, I don't have to tell you when she made that mistake, I don't have to tell you because she wasn't the only one who made that mistake. 100 million other Americans made the same mistake on November 4, 2008, they believed the lies, they voted for liars and frauds and career criminals up and down the ballot.
So here we are.
"Pragmatic" progressives tell us we can't jump the track, the corporate media tells us we're just cars on a cable, the "Christians" tell us life's like an hourglass, glued to the table, so go to church unless you want to be damned to Hell for eternity like the Muslims and the Jews and the heathens in Africa and Asia. Well we've seen this movie before, we know who the killers are, we know who the victims are, we know who the warmongers are, we know who the hypocrites are, we know how it ends, we know how it always ends, but no one can find the rewind button, no one can ever find the rewind button.
Because that's what it's going to take, the netroots joining together to actively campaign against the Dems, in order for the left to be taken seriously. This will require playing genuine political hardball going into next year's midterms, and building up going into 2012.
Before I proceed, let me just point out that I am a progressive first and a Democrat second. This is because as an activist, I recognize that movements must control political parties, and when the reverse is true, bad things happen. See this column for elaboration. Therefore, I recognize that it is time for the left to start waging all-out war.
The following is based largely on the entry, "For a Full Court Press". It proposes action going into the 2012 elections, but it seems to me that we can and should begin building the foundations next year (which is only days away) for the midterms. The point is this: if progressives don't start getting genuinely tough with the Democrats, and start making the party accountable to us, then it's going to continue behaving like a party of Republican-wannabes that simply use and abuse us while implementing Republican policies - which we all know are utterly disastrous for the country. Here is what I propose.
1.) Draft an 8 or 10 point list of progressive policy principles that encompass a broader array of more specific issues (for example, on the economy: tight regulation, public investment in infrastructure through direct job creation, and steep, direct taxation of the wealthy).
2.) Get as many Democrats as possible to sign - in physical writing - a commitment to support and implement these policy principles. If they refuse, deny them all fund-raising and votes in next year's primaries.
3.) Seek out vetted candidates to run in primaries against incumbents who refuse to sign the pledge. Also, we must have independent progressive candidates ready to run in the general elections as a backup plan.
4.) Instead of giving money to Democrats, use it to target them in newspaper, television, and Internet ads on their many failures to follow through on voter expectations. Use grassroots on-the-ground campaigning to encourage voters to go with primary opponents from the left or with independent candidates from the left - but get them out to vote. Incumbents benefit from low voter turnout, and we want higher turnout. Having left-wing candidates on the ballot against right-wingers will offer voters a true choice, and perhaps get them to the polls.
5.) Offer full support to any Democrats who do sign on to the pledge. If they sign and then renege, be prepared to follow through on #3 and #4.
I hate to say all this, because I've been a registered and loyal Democrat since I was old enough to vote, but we will probably have to punish the party at the polls next year. The leadership won't take us seriously unless they know for a fact that we will no longer cave in and support them unless they do as they're told by us. And if they decide they'd rather be Republican-wannabes out of power in perpetuity, then so be it. The left doesn't need the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party needs the left. It's time we prove that to them.
I want to conclude this entry by pointing out that I fully support Jeff Roby's Full Court Press idea, and that we should begin building the foundation now. Obviously we are not going to accomplish much in 2010; it shall take years to build the progressive movement back up, and we'll be facing stiff opposition every step of the way from right-wingers seeking to thwart a growing left-wing movement. But the sooner we begin building, the sooner we can start putting the Full Court Press plan into action.
Diane Gee's Wild, Wild Left is a Multi-authored collaboration of the Best and the Brightest moving the World to a Sane & Equitable Future for the World!
Join in!
