Things I'd like to see, Part 2: Kucinich as U.S. Senator

You may or may not remember him, or even heard of the man, but former Ohio senator Howard Metzenbaum passed away last week at the age of ninety. CNN.com reports of his eighteen-year tenure as the United States senator from Ohio:

During 18 years on Capitol Hill, from 1977 to 1995, Metzenbaum came to be known as "Senator No" and "Headline Howard" for his abilities to block legislation and get publicity for himself.

He was a cantankerous firebrand who didn't need a microphone to hold a full auditorium spellbound while dropping rhetorical bombs on big oil companies, the insurance industry, savings and loans, and the National Rifle Association, to name just a few favorite targets.

Unabashedly liberal, the former labor lawyer and union lobbyist considered himself a champion of workers and was a driving force behind the law requiring 60-day notice of plant closings.

When other liberals shied away from that label, Metzenbaum embraced it, winning re-election in 1988 from Ohio voters who chose Republicans for governor and president, and by wider margins than either George Voinovich or George H.W. Bush.

And the New York Times reports:

Mr. Metzenbaum's success in passing social legislation on issues like workers rights and adoption policy, in blocking pork-barrel excess and tax loopholes, and in inventing new ways to use the filibuster - long the tool of Southern segregationists - were unquestioned.

Finally, the Cleveland Plain Dealer writes:

He once filibustered for two weeks against a bill to lift price controls on natural gas. When debate was cut off, Metzenbaum, who was to prove himself a master of Senate rules, invented a new stalling tactic. He introduced hundreds of amendments and called for a time-consuming roll call vote on each one.

Metzenbaum built a reputation as a Horatio at the bridge. He was credited with saving taxpayers millions of dollars by standing in the way of "Christmas tree bills," adorned with costly favors for a given state or corporation. Metzenbaum was often at the forefront of Democratic opposition to Reagan administration cabinet and Supreme Court nominees.

This is precisely the sort of leadership we so desperately need in the U.S. Senate. Since Metzenbaum and former senator John Glenn retired, we've been saddled with corrupt Republicans who are beholden not to their constituents, but corporations and the rigid GOP system of discipline that keeps any member from breaking ranks without incurring harsh consequences. To be sure, in 2006 we were able to oust Mike DeWine from office in favor of Democrat Sherrod Brown. But even Brown has not exactly been a leader in the Senate.

So why not make a concerted effort to convince Dennis Kucinich, currently representing Ohio's 10th Congressional District, to run against incumbent George Voinovich in 2010? Can you imagine the brand of leadership he would bring? I can, and the more I think about it, the more I like the idea.

There is, to be sure, great risk for Kucinich in making such a run; this year he faced a surprisingly stiff primary battle, mostly from moneyed opponents who think he shouldn't be running for any higher political office. And considering how vicious an opponent Voinovich -- who ran a nasty campaign for mayor against him in 1979 -- is, the battle would most certainly be a tough one. But I think it's worth consideration.

My Primary Vote

I just returned from voting in Ohio's primary. I cast my ballot for Dennis Kucinich, as my choice for both the presidency and the 10th Congressional District's representative. And thus my conscience is clean.

I know, I know. "You just wasted your vote," many of you shall say. To that I give you this simple response: Horse shit. The only votes wasted, dear readers, are those not cast and those cast for a candidate who doesn't represent you. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying to you, or doesn't know what he's talking about.

These are not things I write lightly. I know quite well that what I've just typed shall piss off a number of people. The truth, however, was never designed to make people happy.

Primaries are precisely the time when we as voters are supposed to stand up and vote our beliefs. Why in God's name would anyone vote for someone who doesn't represent him? "Pragmatism"? That's a bullshit excuse, one designed to justify keeping the status quo intact. And for far too long, far too many Democrats have succumbed to that argument. We voted "pragmatically" in 2004, cast our ballots for a candidate who wasn't worth the toilet bowl he shat into, and what did it get us? Nothing, except four more years of crap raining down upon our country. Four more years of craven capitulation -- two of them under a Democratic Congress -- to a boy tyrant who in a sane world would have been removed from office and convicted of treason during the first year of his reign.

Neither Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama have earned so much as a single Democratic vote. But for the desperation of Americans to elect anyone other than a Republican, the adulation and scorn of the corporate media, and the humongous egos of the two prima donnas themselves, they are the candidates we have been saddled with in this primary season.

There is an admonition against allowing the "perfect" to be the enemy of the "good". But really, how many people do you know who ask for or expect perfect? I and everyone I know is fully aware that nothing and no one is perfect. All we want are good policy and good representatives. Yet each and every election cycle, we're forced to accept the mediocre and the downright bad.

It doesn't, and shouldn't, have to be that way. However you intend to vote in the general election, is this or is it not the time to vote your beliefs -- to cast your ballot for the presidential candidate who represents you? Not Big Business, not the DLC, but you. Mr. and Ms. Average American. To hand your ballot to someone who doesn't represent you is to surrender it to the status quo, to send a message that, no matter how much you may complain about the way things are, you're perfectly content to leave it as is.

That isn't democracy, ladies and gentlemen. It's a monarchical system, one in which the will of the public is subjected to the greed and ambition of a political minority whose interests are to keep you beaten down and in service to the economic elite. And I don't know about you ladies and gentlemen, but I refuse to give in to that bullshit. Politicians are supposed to work for us, to be our voices in the halls of power. We are not supposed to subject our interests and political beliefs to those we employ.

Maybe your state's primary or caucus has already been held. Maybe it's today, or has yet to be held. For those of you who fall into the latter categories,ask yourselves if it isn't worth it to challenge this fucked up system by voting for the candidate who represents you, just to see what would happen.

The most important thing about being a Democrat: vetting our candidate.

Matt Gonzalez over at BeyondChron.org wrote a brilliant exposé on Barack Obama that must be shared. The hardest part of trying to get Democrats elected to power is vetting them, especially during election years in which people are so desperate for someone who can deliver on a promise of change that they fail to look past the campaign rhetoric to see the truth. I've explained on other blog sites that Barack Obama is a DLCer in progressive's clothing. Mr. Gonzalez hammers the point home.

It has been claimed by uncritical supporters that Obama's record in the U.S. Senate is progressive, but this is far from the truth (a fact easily verified by going to GovTrack.us and doing some homework). It is undeniable that the senator from Illinois has consistently voted to fund the Iraq war, with the sole exception being that he was shamed by Christopher Dodd of Connecticut into voting against last Summer's appropriations bill. Matt Gonzalez writes:

Since taking office in January 2005 he has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward, totaling over $300 billion. He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration's various false justifications for going to war in Iraq. Why would he vote to make one of the architects of "Operation Iraqi Liberation" the head of US foreign policy? Curiously, he lacked the courage of 13 of his colleagues who voted against her confirmation.

The senator from Illinois has been less than enthusiastic in advocating for a full withdrawal from Iraq. Obama has also, as Gonzalez points out, voted to re-authorize the USA PATRIOT Act -- one of the more heinous attacks on civil liberties in this decade -- in stark contrast to his prior work as a civil rights attorney. Somewhere along the way, Obama was either corrupted on the issue of civil liberties, or else he has been fooling people on where he actually stands from the beginning. Either way, his record on the occupation of Iraq and on civil liberties are not consistent with his rhetoric on the campaign trail.

On class action lawsuits, Gonzalez writes:

In 2005, Obama joined Republicans in passing a law dubiously called the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) that would shut down state courts as a venue to hear many class action lawsuits. Long a desired objective of large corporations and President George Bush, Obama in effect voted to deny redress in many of the courts where these kinds of cases have the best chance of surviving corporate legal challenges. Instead, it forces them into the backlogged Republican-judge dominated federal courts.

And on credit interest rates:

Obama has a way of ducking hard votes or explaining away his bad votes by trying to blame poorly-written statutes. Case in point: an amendment he voted on as part of a recent bankruptcy bill before the US Senate would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Inexplicably, Obama voted against it, although it would have been the beginning of setting these predatory lending rates under federal control. Even Senator Hillary Clinton supported it.

Are you seeing anything to suggest that Obama is a progressive, yet? I'm not. I've written about this before, but it's worth repeating: health care "reform". Given Obama's record of gutting actual health care reform in the Illinois state senate, one can't help but nod in agreement when Matt Gonzalez explains:

Obama opposed single-payer bill HR676, sponsored by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers in 2006, although at least 75 members of Congress supported it. Single-payer works by trying to diminish the administrative costs that comprise somewhere around one-third of every health care dollar spent, by eliminating the duplicative nature of these services. The expected $300 billion in annual savings such a system would produce would go directly to cover the uninsured and expand coverage to those who already have insurance, according to Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Obama's own plan has been widely criticized for leaving health care industry administrative costs in place and for allowing millions of people to remain uninsured. "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore ridiculed it saying, "Obama wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan-the same companies who have created the mess in the first place."

And as Gonzalez points out, Obama went to bat for Joe LIEberman for re-election in 2006 against challenger Ned Lamont (whom blog web sites such as Daily Kos supported) and referred to the turncoat as his mentor. Yeah, real "progressive" of Obama to try to prop up a party traitor who has consistently enabled the Bush-Cheney regime at every opportunity, and who endorses Republican John McCain for president.

I realize Obama supporters don't like to read the truth about their candidate, and who can blame them? After eight years of destructive Republican policies, the desperation for some actual change -- even if it is only an illusion -- is certainly understandable. But it is because desperation can lead to making serious mistakes in an election year critical to America's future that it is important for Democrats to know exactly who it is we're prepared to hand the nomination to. Barack Obama simply is not a progressive, he's just another DINO who has somehow managed to fool a lot of people.

Hope is not lost, however. We can and should focus our efforts to get true Progressives elected to Congress, so that a (we hope) Democratic president may be pushed in the correct direction on issues such as getting out of Iraq and passing true health care reform. It's still early in the year, and we still have a chance to be the change we want to see in this country. It's not enough to simply get Democrats elected to power; the failures of the last year have proven that. We must work to get the right Democrats -- Progressive ones -- seats in the Legislature and in state offices across the country.

Only then can we expect to succeed in pushing Barack Obama, should he win the nomination and become president, to achieve actual change.

In the interests of full disclosure, BeyondChron.org reports that Gonzalez has been chosen as Ralph Nader's running mate. Which means the Nader-haters shall dismiss anything and everything he has to say, no matter that it's true. But I thought it only fair, in the interest of telling the whole truth, to let you know about this.

Help Dennis get his ad on the air!

From: Congressman Dennis Kucinich! UNOFFICIAL
Date: Feb 16, 2008 5:39 PM

Because of the abysmal approval ratings of Congress itself, there is a real groundswell of "throw the bums out" voting, as evidenced by the 24-point victory in the primary challenge this week by progressive Donna Edwards. But we need to very careful not to let the exceptionally good be swept out with the bad.

That is why we need everyone to see this new Dennis Kucinich ad, to protect his seat from a hostile primary challenge in his own district.

Thank You Dennis Video: http://www.usalone.com/thank_you_dennis.php

For weeks big money has been running terribly false attack ads against Dennis trying to smear him out of Congress. And Dennis needs your help to fight back by running the ad on the page above in his own district. So if you can make any kind of donation, please use the easy form on the same page above to do so.

And to thank you for your valiant support, Dennis wants you to have as his gift to you a copy of his special Kucinich commemorative edition pocket constitution, with your donation of $100 or more. And if you are one of the few who have not be blindsided by Cheney's gut-the-economy agenda, Dennis Kucinich will personally autograph your copy with your donation of $1,000 or more.

Please note that even if you had already donated the full legal limit to his brave presidential run, which had a real impact in shifting the debate, you can donate another $2,300 for his congressional seat defense.

But even if you can't make a donation right now, there is still something incredibly important you can do to help, and that is to send links to the video to anyone you can. So ask all your friends to
visit the page below too.

Thank You Dennis Video: http://www.usalone.com/thank_you_den...

So please do what you can to spread the word that this is a must win, must-keep situation. It is only because of the courage of Dennis Kucinich in standing strong to protect and defend the Constitution that we are where we are now, with more and more members of Congress clamoring for meaningful impeachment hearings, and the House still holding the line against that craven telecom immunity thing.

Let us not be complacent. Let us not take anything for granted just because Dennis is so amazing on every issue. We have to make sure that we empower Dennis to remind his constituents what a magnificent job he has been doing for them and for us all. And nothing would push impeachment forward more than the most clearcut victory for Dennis in his primary.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

Fight Joe Cimperman's DISHONEST attack ad!

The ad Cimperman is running isn't just based on a fundamentally stupid argument (that an elected official shouldn't waste his time running for another office) that may now be used against him next year when he himself is up for re-election; it is fundamentally dishonest.

Kind of dumb, isn't it? Even if you don't like Dennis Kucinich, it's still a dumb ad. Because, really, Cimperman is being a part-time official to run a campaign against an incumbent.

I've spent a only a few minutes doing some research. And as it turns out, contrary to Cimperman's lie regarding attendance records Dennis has not missed nearly as many votes in Congress as some of the other candidates for president (king). Ron Paul missed 684 of 7034 votes (9%) since Jan 7, 1997.1 Compare that to Dennis, who missed 346 of 7034 votes (5%) since Jan 7, 1997.2 Sitting U.S. senator John McCain has missed 584 votes (16%) out of 3,710 since January 22, 1997.3 This is a matter of public record, and easily verified. This information did not take long to find. Just a candidate's name, the key words 'missed votes', and that's it. This information is ridiculously easy to locate. Cimperman must have known that what he was saying in the ad isn't true, meaning he lied when claiming Dennis has missed more votes than any other member of Congress. Either that, or Cimperman is too stupid or lazy to get his facts straight. Either way, we cannot trust Joe Cimperman to be honest with voters.

Help Dennis Kucinich win re-election. Go to Kucinich.us and donate your time and money to his campaign. Because now is NOT the time to silence Progressives voices in Congress.

Why the GOP shall win unless Democrats get their acts together.

Tomorrow I'll address something having to do with the new database cataloging the lies that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Today I'm going to write about a couple of things that the candidates for president and for Congress really ought to heed, lest they blow it all again. First, the Rude Pundit writes of the stench of Karl Rove hanging in the political air.

Really, Clinton and Obama are playing into Rove's hand. Much of the blame here rests with the Clintons, who, truly, are campaigning as a single, buy-one-get-one-free unit, for when Bill says that he consulted Hillary on every decision he made when president, the implicit promise is that Hillary will consult him and, c'mon, don't we want Bill back in the White House? They are fighting a campaign that is better suited to 2000 or 2004. Someone needs to kick Bill Clinton in the nuts and say, "Down, boy." He's playing the short game, which used to be the way you win elections.

That's not all:

At this point, the Democrats could nominate a sock monkey or a slice of provolone and it would beat John McCain or Mitt Romney. As long as that sock monkey wore a "Bring the troops home" t-shirt. But the Clintons are waging the slash and burn war of tiny marginal advantages here and there that'll let them conquer 51% of the territory and declare victory, very much like the way Rove operates, very much like how Clinton adviser Mark Penn sees marketing. (Rove, by the way, must be chafing at the bit to go after consultant Howard Wolfson and other Glover Park Group members.)

This concern is a very valid one, and it may very well become a realized nightmare. It has been written at Daily Kos that should Clinton win the nomination, Howard Dean's days as DNC Chair are numbered; that we'll go back to the McAuliffe era of losing elections because God forbid the DLC ever allow the Democratic Party to stick with strategies and tactics that actually help the party as a whole win. His Rudeness closes with:

The way to real victory that leads to real potential changes in the nation is not to play Rove's game. He is the master. Win or lose the battle, who cares, the true master knows, the real essence is what happens during the arc of the war. Don't believe it? Ask yourself how much that thrillingly new Democratic Congress actually got done that wouldn't have been done under a Republican one.

Which leads me to the second point. Jerrold Nadler -- who is on the House Judiciary Committee -- is one of Nancy Pelosi's chief allies in keeping impeachment from happening.

Conyers and some subgroup plan to take their proposal for non-impeachment imperial abuse hearings to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to request her blessing. She is, of course, most likely to share Nadler's position. She may have given Nadler his position, or perhaps it originated with Hillary Clinton, but it sounds most likely that Nadler has simply been speaking for himself: he honestly opposes impeachment hearings, even for emperors.

Let's lay it on the table here, again, because it really needs to be hammered home.

Wednesday's meeting was handicapped, of course, because no-one says aloud what the reasons are for opposing impeachment. That Cheney and Bush have committed impeachable offenses is universally understood. But the arguments against impeaching them (other priorities, bipartisanship, we don't have the votes, etc.) usually sound like lame cover for whatever the real reason is. I suspect the real reason is built into Nadler's plan of wasting a year in order to pass bills next year. He assumes that in 2009 there will be either a better Congress or a better president (he backs Hillary Clinton), or both.

Sadly, history says otherwise. For 230 years, the party that brings impeachment wins, and the party that fails to do so when it's called for loses. Conyers was there when the Democrats moved to impeach Nixon and then won big. He was there when they refused to impeach Reagan and then lost. And most of the current committee was there when the Republicans impeached Clinton against the will of the public for a non-impeachable offense and still won both houses of Congress and the White House.

When the Democrats held back from impeachment during Iran Contra, they lost the next elections. When the Democrats led the effort to investigate and impeach Nixon, they won big in the next election, even though Ford was running as an incumbent. When the Republicans tried to impeach Truman, they got what they wanted out of the Supreme Court and then won the next elections. Articles of impeachment have been filed against 10 presidents, usually by Republicans, and usually with electoral success following. When the Republicans impeached Clinton, impeachment was actually unpopular with the public. Even so, the Republicans lost far fewer seats than is the norm for a majority party at that point in its tenure. Two years later, they lost seats in the Senate, which had acquitted, but maintained their strength in the House, with representatives who had led the impeachment charge winning big.

Parties that seek to impeach are not punished at the next election. In fact, they frequently improve their position -- as evidenced by the Democrats in 1974, Republicans in 1952, and all the way back to the Whigs of last century. In every election back to 1842 where House members of an opposition party to a sitting president have -- as a whole or a significant caucus within the party -- proposed impeachment of the president, that opposition party retained or improved its position in the House at the following election. There is no instance of voters responding to a significant impeachment effort by sweeping its advocates out of office. In fact, history points in a different direction, suggesting that voters frequently reward parties for taking the Constitution and the rule of law seriously.

The Democrats have no legislative agenda to distract from. Voters do not care that they don't have enough votes to impeach; they simply want Democrats to try. And impeachment, historically, benefits the political party that brings it up -- while punishing the political party that opposes it. So why are Congressional Democrats so afraid to even try?

I keep coming back to one or both of two probabilities. Congressional Democrats opposed to impeachment approve -- for whatever reasons -- of the imperial executive. They're simply cowards. Whether it's one, the other, or both, the fact remains that voters have a nasty tendency to punish those politicians who deny them justice. 2008 shall be no different, unless we can convince Congress to get its collective act together and initiate impeachment proceedings and the presidential candidates to stop playing by Karl Rove's rules.

One last thing: I just found this posted at MySpace. Consider it a gift for all my fellow Kucinich supporters.

Busting the Myth of Ron Paul, Part Three

The way he talks about going back to the Constitution, you'd think Ron Paul actually believes in it. And yet, when the time came for him to actually stand up for that venerable document, he was and continues to be strangely absent. Consider the case of HR 1955, which amounts to a thought crime bill. It was a sickening display of cowardice on the part of Democrats, voting for yet another of the shrub's unconstitutional police state measures. In ordinary times, no Congress in its right collective mind would be allowed to get away with such a thing. But we do not live in ordinary times. But where was Ron Paul, supposedly the champion of the Constitution, in the HR 1955 vote?

No Vote TX-14 Paul, Ronald [R]

Nay OH-10 Kucinich, Dennis [D]

For that matter, where has Ron Paul been on voting for any legislation that actually protects Americans and the Constitution? Here are a couple more interesting comparisons between Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

Ronald Paul missed 666 of 7012 votes (9%) since Jan 7, 1997.

Dennis Kucinich missed 345 of 7012 votes (5%) since Jan 7, 1997.

Ron Paul voted against a bill, HR 2517, which according to the summary:

Amends the Missing Children's Assistance Act to reauthorize through FY2013, and revise requirements for uses of, the annual grant to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by the Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency Prevention.

Why did he do that? And why did he vote against HR 3791, which would do the following:

Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act of 2007 or the SAFE Act of 2007 - Amends the federal criminal code to expand the reporting requirements of electronic communication and remote computing service providers (service providers) with respect to violations of child sexual exploitation and pornography laws. Requires such service providers, in reporting violations of such laws to the CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (Center) to provide: (1) information on the Internet identity of a suspected sex offender, including the electronic mail address, website address, uniform resource locator, or other identifying information; (2) the time child pornography was uploaded or discovered; (3) geographic location information for the offender; and (4) images of such child pornography. Requires the Center to forward each report which it receives from a service provider to a designated law enforcement agency.

Requires service providers to preserve images of child pornography for evidentiary purposes.

Authorizes the Center to provide images of child pornography reported to its CyberTipline to service providers to enable such providers to stop further transmissions of of pornographic images.

Grants service providers and the Center immunity from civil claims or criminal charges for complying the requirements of this Act, except for certain intentional or reckless misconduct.

Where was Representative Paul on HR 4136? And for someone who claims to stand up for the Constitution, where was he on HR 3773? Look at his voting record for last year, and you'll learn he didn't cast a vote. And where was Ron Paul on the impeachment of Dick Cheney, when Dennis Kucinich introduced the Articles of Impeachment in November last year?

Ron Paul joined his fellow Republicans in voting to table the resolution. Then, when the GOPers in the House decided to suddenly keep the bill alive in order to embarrass Democrats into voting against impeachment, he up and joined his fellow Republicans again. Finally, when the GOPers decided they'd had enough fun and allowed Nancy Pelosi to send the articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney to the Judiciary Committee to die, Paul voted aye.

When it comes to protecting Americans, and when it comes to protecting the Constitution, Ron Paul's record is at best spotty and at worst, indicative of someone who thinks it's a game. A game!

Pay heed to Reed, he knows what he's writing about.

I found this excellent column at The Progressive online, and if Adolph L. Reed, Jr.'s feelings are an accurate reflection of what most voters have in their hearts and minds (and I believe they are), then we had better think about who we're prepared to throw away our votes for come January.

The Democratic candidates who are anointed "serious" are like a car with a faulty front-end alignment: Their default setting pulls to the right. They are unshakably locked into a strategy that impels them to give priority to placating those who aren't inclined to vote for them and then palliate those who are with bromides and doublespeak. When we complain, they smugly say, "Well, you have no choice but to vote for me because the other guy's worse." The party has essentially been nominating the same ticket with the same approach since Dukakis.

Read on, dear reader, read on...

A friend of mine characterizes this as the "we'll come back for you" politics, the claim that they can't champion anything you want because they have to conciliate your enemies right now to get elected, but that, once they win, they'll be able to attend to the progressive agenda they have to reject now in order to win. This worked out so well with the Clinton Presidency, didn't it? Remember his argument that he had to sign the hideous 1996 welfare reform bill to be able to come back and "fix" it later? Or NAFTA? Or two repressive and racist crime bills that flooded the prisons? Or the privatizing of Sallie Mae, which set the stage for the student debt crisis? Or ending the federal government's commitment to direct provision of housing for the poor?

This time, the nominal frontrunners have Rube Goldberg health care proposals that protect the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the chief sources of the health care crisis. They discuss the murderous adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan mainly in bloodless, managerial terms—as a "broken policy" or some other such technician's euphemism. Not only do their references to the tragic loss of American lives seem pro forma and constructed by focus-group engineers; they also reinscribe the presumption that only American lives count. This is part of what undergirds the broader framework of a foreign policy hinged on cavalier use of military assault and invasion in the first place—what used to be clearly recognized as imperialism. Edwards, who seems somewhat better than the others on Iraq, apparently needs to make up for it—lest what seem like expressions of decency be grounds for accusations of weakness—by being even more bellicose than they regarding Iran. However, all of them have indicated a lusty willingness to attack Iran, Syria, or any other country that can be demonized either for not dancing to our government's tune or even just because it's convenient to do so as a prop for some other purpose.

Yes, Reed brings out the criticisms against Bill Clinton. It's a legitimate question we all need to ask ourselves, as we seem prepared to hand the Democratic nomination to the conservative wife of a conservative former president whose only claim to the political party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman appears to be based on little more than a voter registration card. But that's not Reed's main point. Far from it.

At the end of the primary campaign, one of the "serious candidates" is going to get the nomination and form a ticket with another version of his or her triangulating self. (I still wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be Clinton-Obama, in an all-Oprah ticket, an exercise in massive short-term self-delusion and empty identity politics that will guarantee the White House to whichever combo the GOP puts up.) Maybe by Election Day I'll be moved or guilted or frightened into voting for that ticket, whatever it is. But I'm just as likely to sit this one out.

And here it is in a nutshell: hand the nomination to Billary W. Clinton, and the Democratic Party (and the rest of the country) is probably going to have to endure eight more years of Republican domination. There's a reason the GOP candidates vying for their party's nomination feel comfortable taking on Hillary Clinton, to the point where they join in the propaganda of "inevitability" with which the Clinton campaign seems to have brought itself to the brink of pseudo-victory. It's that the Republican ticket will waste absolutely no moment, and no opportunity, to wage the most heinous and vicious attack job unlike anything America has seen before in a presidential race. If you think otherwise, you're kidding yourself.

Consider the reason the Repugs are hot to see Clinton take the nomination, and the obvious answer to the question of what they'd do if another Democrat -- say, John Edwards or even Dennis Kucinich -- wins the nomination of his party. Have you guessed it, yet? If you said, "I don't know," then welcome to the RNC's worst nightmare. Because if an actual, populist Democrat disinclined to take shit from the Republicans' ticket and inclined talk to the American electorate about the issues that truly matter were to be elected, the GOP can kiss it hopes of retaining its hold on the White House goodbye. And the Republican National Committee knows this as much as, if not better than, anyone else. But Reed isn't finished making his argument, not by a long shot.

I know that some outraged readers are going to write in, fulminating about how nihilistically ultraleftist I am to criticize the Democrats in this way and how irresponsible The Progressive is to publish the criticism—especially now, when the stakes are so great and it's so crucially important for the future of the country, the world, the galaxy, the cosmos, that some Democrat—anyone, no matter how worthless—wins the Presidency. (That they make the same cataclysmic claim about every election never seems to dull their self-righteous fervor.) They'll explain that we have to understand that we can't get everything we want all at once, that the Democrats can't go any further than they go, and that a half-hearted promise of part of a stale loaf of bread in some unspecified future is better than no bread at all—especially for those who don't really need the bread at the moment.

Well, in part, they're right. The Democrats are what they are. We should all know that by now, after two decades of their failing to stand up to the rightwing juggernaut, of presenting themselves as more responsible and steady managers of the country's slide to the right. By the time the national elections come around, there really are no options other than to vote for their predictably worthless nominee, make an existential statement (or engage in wish-fulfillment, if you think it's more than that) by voting for a third party candidate, or just not bother. This bleak reality reflects the left's failure to build any durable extra-electoral force between elections that can bring pressure to bear on the Democratic contenders and debate.

Elected officials are only as good or as bad as the forces they feel they must respond to. It's a mistake to expect any more of them than to be vectors of the political pressures they feel working on them. This is a lesson that progressives have forgotten or failed to learn.

As an illustration, consider the recent contretemps between John Conyers and the pro-impeachment, anti-war activists who attacked him as a sellout for failing to push impeachment over Nancy Pelosi's and the House Democratic leadership's opposition. His critics accused him of betraying the spirit of Martin Luther King. But that charge only exposes their unrealistic expectations. Conyers isn't a movement leader. He's a Democratic official who wants to get reelected. He's enmeshed in the same web of personal ties, partisan loyalties and obligations, and diverse interest-group commitments as other pols. It was the impeachment activists' naive error, and I suspect one resting on a partly racial, wrongheaded shorthand, to have expected him to lead an insurgency. If the pro-impeachment forces had been able to organize a popular movement with militant local to national expressions on a wide scale, Conyers would have had the leverage necessary to press the movement's case to Pelosi and Democratic leadership, or at least he and the others would have felt real pressure to act more boldly on this issue. Instead, an understandable sense of urgency led them to take a politically self-indulgent, doomed shortcut. The result is much wasted effort, unnecessary enmity, and another demoralizing defeat.

Unfortunately, like the Democrats, our side fails to learn from experience. Despite a mountain range of evidence to the contrary, we—the labor, anti-war, women's, environmental, and racial justice movements—all continue to craft political strategy based on the assumption that the problem is that the Democrats simply don't understand what we want and how important those things are to us. They know; they just have different priorities.

That's why the endless cycle of unofficial hearings and tribunals and rallies and demonstrations and Internet petitions never has any effect on anything. They're all directed to bearing witness before an officialdom that doesn't care and feels no compulsion to take our demands into account. To that extent, this form of activism has become little more than a combination of theater—a pageantry of protest—and therapy for the activists.

Then at the apex of every election cycle, after having marched around in the same pointless circle, chanting the same slogans in the interim, we look feverishly to one of the Democrats or some Quixote to do our organizing work for us, magically, all at once.

We need to think about politics in a different way, one that doesn't assume that the task is to lobby the Democrats or give them good ideas, and correct their misconceptions.

It's a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out of it. Electoral politics is an arena for consolidating majorities that have been created on the plane of social movement organizing. It's not an alternative or a shortcut to building those movements, and building them takes time and concerted effort. Not only can that process not be compressed to fit the election cycle; it also doesn't happen through mass actions. It happens through cultivating one-on-one relationships with people who have standing and influence in their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and organizations. It happens through struggling with people over time for things they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program. This is how the populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World War II. It is how we've won all our victories. And it is also how the right came to power.

The anti-war movement isn't coherent or popularly grounded enough to exert the pressure necessary to improve the electoral options; only the labor movement has the capacity to do so, but it doesn't have the will. None of the other progressive tendencies has the capacity to do anything more than lobby or exhort. Effective lobbying requires being able to deliver or withhold crucial resources, and none but labor has that capacity. Exhortation works only with people who share your larger goals and objectives; other than that it's useless except as catharsis.

We also need to think more carefully about what our demonstrations and protest marches can and can't do. Here we could take a lesson from Martin Luther King. His 1962 Albany, Georgia, campaign failed because the local authorities figured out that the success of King's mass marches depended on meeting brutal resistance from local officials. When they didn't forcibly stop the marches, the movement fizzled.

Our approach to mass mobilization is like the Albany campaign. Our actions don't raise public consciousness because they're treated dismissively, if at all, in the mainstream media. They don't even connect with the residents of the cities where we hold them because we agree to strict march routes and rally sites that make certain we don't engage with anyone other than ourselves. And we agree not to disrupt routine daily life more than a homecoming parade would in exchange for having a designated place to gather and talk to ourselves. Even the civil disobedience is carefully choreographed and designed to be minimally disruptive.

Whether or not we admit it, these are features of a politics that is focused mainly inward, on shoring up the spirits of the participants in the actions themselves. They don't send a message that those in power can't simply ignore, and they don't inform, excite, or win over anyone who's not already on board with the movement's agenda. It's telling in this sense that our movement culture has evolved elaborately clever techniques for keeping participants entertained through the stale, all-too-predictable cavalcade of speeches and chants and puppets on stilts.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that people don't need to engage in rallies and protests. It is self-defeating, however, to collapse the difference between the activities that make us feel good and the work that is necessary to build the movement. There are no shortcuts or magic bullets. And, if we don't confront that fact and act accordingly, we'll be back in this same position, but most likely with options a little worse than these, in 2012, and again and again.

Okay, yeah, I know. That's one hell of a long read. Be glad I didn't just copy and paste the entire column. But pay attention to what I'm telling you, and ask yourselves this question: are we, as Americans, better served by electing the same center-right or far right politicians to power in an endless cycle of self-deluding sham elections designed to keep things as they are? Or are we better served by nominating and electing a Democrat whose commitment to true change and Progressive reform is as solid as his commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law? Are we better served by electing another conservative Democrat, who will continue the country's backward slide into an age of empire and ruin? Or can we put aside our partisan differences and agree that what this country needs is a new FDR, a new New Deal?

If you think we need a new direction, nay, if you damned well know we need a new direction -- an end to war; single-payer, not for profit health care; well funded education; strengthened labor, environmental and food safety regulations and laws; a re-invigorated foreign policy in which the United States of America lead by example instead of imperial edict; if you know in your heart, mind and gut that these and other Progressive changes are long overdue, then think seriously about which Democrat can and will bring all this.

He's the candidate who, as mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, fought the banks and private energy company to save the city's municipal power company. Yes, he took a big hit to his political career and for a long time he was out of politics. But he didn't hesitate to put the good of the people who elected him above the selfish interests of the city's financial bosses. He's the only presidential candidate who has tried to introduce true health care reform, HR 676, to the table in a serious attempt to provide universal health care. He is the only Democratic candidate for president who voted against the war in Iraq, against the Orwellian USA PATRIOT Act, and against continued funding for the Iraq war. And he is the ONLY presidential candidate who has mounted any effort to hold George W. Bush and Dick Cheney accountable for their multitude of crimes.

That candidate, dear readers, is Dennis Kucinich. Yeah, yeah, spare me the lame attacks and insults. And especially, spare me the tired old, "he can't win" nonsense. I know he's got a snowball's chance in hell of winning the nomination. But that's not why we all need to vote for him. We need to vote for him so that the Democratic nominee knows that without the Progressive bloc, without the support of people who truly want reform, there is no hope under Heaven (or above Hell) of winning the presidency. We must not hand the nomination to Billary W. Clinton, or Barack "I can't make up my mind whether to channel Hillary or Dubya this week" Obama. John Edwards has a real chance to take the nomination, and at this point I think he's the best chance we've got right now to turn things around, if only enough Democrats quit holding their noses to vote for candidates who run opposed to everything we stand for both as Democrats and -- more importantly -- as Americans.

But we need to decide, right NOW, if we're really serious about winning the White House and keeping Congress. If we are, it means voting for Kucinich instead of Clinton or Obama, so that Edwards will be able to win the nomination. Reed's column offers a dire warning, one we all must heed, if we do not do this: allow Clinton or some other center-right candidate to win the nomination, and a lot of voters are likely to stay home and not vote at all. Considering how much GOP vote fraud relies on low voter turnouts, it's a warning we cannot afford to dismiss or ignore.

An Interesting Evaluation of Dennis Kucinich

John Nichols wrote about Kucinich's Challenge over at The Progressive's web site. What has puzzled me for some time is why Dennis's populist talk and straight-shooting hasn't translated into actual support. I mean, yeah, the corporate media marginalizes any candidate who dares speak truth to power. And yes, the money system goes out of its way to exclude those without large sums of it. But is there something more to this? Let's take a look at what Nichols writes about the Democratic debate in Chicago this Summer.

"I want to see America take a new direction in trade . . . and that means it’s time to get out of NAFTA and the WTO," shouted the Congressman above the thunderous applause that greeted his promise of "trade that’s based on workers’ rights: the right to organize, the right to collective bargaining, the right to strike."

So powerful was Kucinich’s presentation that even the moderator, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, shifted his line of questioning from the usual soft media inquiries about "reforming trade policies" toward a blunt demand that the candidates say whether they would "scrap NAFTA or fix it?" After Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the others struggled to answer the question without offending either the labor crowd or their corporate donors, Kucinich won the moment by declaring, "No one else on this stage could give a direct answer because they don’t intend to scrap NAFTA. We’re going to be stuck with it. And I’m your candidate if you want to get out of NAFTA. Let’s hear it. Do you want out of NAFTA? Do you want out of the WTO?"

The steel, auto, machine, and construction workers were on their feet, cheering wildly. Again and again, on industrial policy, on health care, on each issue that arose, Kucinich owned the argument. And when the Congressman turned to the signature issue of his insurgent Presidential bid, ending the war in Iraq, he distinguished himself from the cautious contenders to his right by speaking the truth that has been on the mind of everyone who has watched the sorry degeneration of this nation’s system of checks and balances. Instead of promising to end the war as President, Kucinich declared, "We shouldn’t have to wait for a Democratic President to do it. The Democratic Congress needs to act now."

It was a virtuoso performance. Mark Lash, a steelworker from Crown Point, Indiana, summed it all up when he said that of the seven candidates who were trying so hard to woo the workers, it was Kucinich who gave "the answers everyone wants to hear." In one of those old Jimmy Stewart movies or maybe in a new John Cusack movie, something big would happen. Unions would have started going against expectations to endorse the underdog. The media would have started taking him seriously. A long-overdue political awakening would have begun—for the Democratic Party and for the nation.

I watched that debate, and I can tell you right now that with a truly fair moderator who gave all the candidates as close to equal time as possible, Dennis was able to make a significant impact. Before and since that debate, it has been business as usual, ignoring and marginalizing Dennis. Nichols agrees.

Within weeks of that August AFL-CIO forum, unions began to make their endorsements.

The Machinists went for Clinton, arguably the steadiest proponent in the field of the job-killing "free trade" schemes that have decimated the union’s membership.

The Carpenters and the Steelworkers broke for Edwards, a newly minted populist who sounds good but still struggles to get the specifics right.

The Firefighters backed Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, an old-school liberal with a weaker record than Kucinich and no better prospects.

And what was the Congressman from Cleveland left with when the applause died down?

Nothing.

No endorsements from labor.

No backing from prominent Democrats.

No poll numbers of consequence nationally or in the essential early primary and caucus states.

There is something that is surely heartbreaking about the hand that is regularly dealt to Kucinich and his idealistic second bid for the Presidency. But the Congressman has chosen to play at the table of contemporary American politics, where not only the rules but the very premises of the process are stacked against him.

And, he goes on to write...

It is not merely the dominance of the monied elites and the party bosses, nor even the emphasis on image and style, that undermines a candidate who is actually referred to by supposedly serious reporters as "too short to be President." It is the desperation of Democratic voters denied, voters who, after so many stolen elections and failed campaigns, have convinced themselves that the only thing that matters in 2008 is winning—and that the only way to win is by nominating not the candidate who is right on the issues but the candidate who seems, a la John Kerry in 2004, to have the right strategy or at least the right stature.

That, too, is what's happening. Just as in 2004, voters appear so desperate to get a Democrat in office that they don't seem to realize or care that the Democrat they throw their support behind may not actually be the winner they're looking for. But Nichols then takes on a more sour note, writing:

The 2004 race yielded Kucinich no primary or caucus wins and just 1 percent of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Yet, the Congressman is running once more, mounting essentially the same campaign that he did four years ago. Kucinich is again bouncing around the country, creating the facade of a national campaign but never sticking around long enough to convert the enthusiasm of the crowds he draws into votes. And, as in the later stages of the 2004 race, when he stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he could not win a fight that everyone knew was finished, he refuses to entertain the notion that he might not be swearing an oath of office on January 20, 2009.

There is much to be said for the power of positive thinking, but in Presidential politics the practice can be futile—especially when more prominent and monied candidates are stealing your themes: economic populist (Edwards), anti-war (New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson), and time-for-a-transformation (Obama). In Kucinich’s case, his optimism borders on off-putting and out of touch. Indeed, if he continues on his current course, he runs the risk of falling short of the 643,067 (3.9 percent of the total) votes he scraped together by the end of his never-say-die 2004 run.

This would probably be a legitimate evaluation, if Kucinich were actually running to win. But he isn't. Dennis is running to make sure that the eventual nominee -- and let's pray to God it isn't Billary Dubya Clinton -- does run for president in the general election next year on the very platforms the other candidates are now "stealing".

Kucinich may be more necessary to the process of choosing a 2008 Democratic President than even he may understand. The front-loaded race for the nomination will be a blur for most Democrats, who will likely be told who the party’s candidate is going to be long before they actually have a chance to weigh in. At that point, the trailing candidates will be told by the money men who define American politics that it is time to start suspending campaigns.

Hell, the money men are already doing that; look at how they've eliminated Mike Gravel from the race. But lest you think Nichols has turned on Dennis, and chosen to attack him, he does offer some advice that might actually work for the Cleveland, Ohio Democrat should he heed it:

More than two dozen states will select delegates after February 5. Many of them—Wisconsin, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Oregon—have Democratic voter bases that are ardently anti-war. If Kucinich were to commit now to mount a campaign that made no pretense of personal electability but rather promised to force the party to debate its direction—not just on the war but on the whole question of what a post-Bush America might look like—he could yet turn himself into the most effective protest candidate this country has seen in years.

What might the Congressman propose to the voters of later primary and caucus states, where the choice could well come down to Kucinich versus Clinton? By telling voters "this is your chance to vote for a peace plank," Kucinich could—and should—promise to use whatever bloc of delegates he is given to fight for a clearly anti-war platform, to provoke floor fights over foreign policy and the domestic agenda, and to have his name placed in nomination in order to take his message to prime time.

In a one-on-one race, where the Kucinich campaign is about an idea rather than a man, he could turn the tables on the elites. By ditching talk about actually being nominated—which only strains his own credibility—and instead making himself the tribune of the peace and justice movement that is alive and powerful at the grassroots of the Democratic party, Dennis Kucinich could win hundreds of delegates to the 2008 convention. He could renew and redefine the debate in the later primaries and at the convention. He could force the eventual Democratic nominee to listen to the party’s neglected base—which polling suggests is now very close in its thinking to the self-identified independent voters who decide close contests in November—rather than to the Wall Street donors and Washington think tanks that invariably muddle the message once the pundits declare the nomination fight to have been settled. And, maybe, just maybe, Dennis Kucinich could make the Democratic nominee more appealing than a broken political process is supposed to allow.

I think that's very good advice, and worth taking if there is to be any hope of mounting a real challenge to the conservative wing of the Democratic Party that has already all but chosen the nominee of the party in general for us.

P.S.

Looks like this story isn't going away, according to The Nation. John Edwards came right out and stated what a lot of people are thinking, saying Billary is channeling the shrub with her planted questions. The Des Moine Register reports. Not to be outdone, according to CNN.com, the Clinton campaign then turned around and accused Edwards of acting like the dictator by way of attacking Democrats and being divisive.

So let's recap: Hillary Clinton gets caught fielding planted softball questions, a practice used quite often by George W. Bush. When this is pointed out, she accuses her critics of acting like George W. Bush. The defense is obvious; she's trying to deflect criticism by accusing her opponents of doing what she did -- acting like the shrub.