Last June before Howard Dean made the decision not to say anything to put the party or president in jeopardy for the election, he had some powerful words to say.
From the Washington Post:
Dean at progressive conference: Time for Democrats to 'behave like Democrats'As Arkansas Democrats go to the polls Tuesday to determine the fate of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a moderate Democrat under siege from liberals, former Vermont governor Howard Dean said the progressive movement is finished with supporting Democrats who demoralize the party's left wing.
Dean, in a fiery speech Tuesday at the America's Future Now conference, gave voice to frustrations on the left that President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress have not used their big majorities to pursue a more progressive agenda. "We are done with putting people in office who then forget who got them there," said Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman.
"You did your job," Dean added. "You elected Barack Obama. You elected a Democratic Congress. You elected a Democratic Senate. And now it's time for them to behave like Democrats if they want to get reelected. They have forgotten where they came from -- and they haven't been here that long."
Dean echoed other progressive leaders who opened the conference Monday, expressing dismay, even anger, at the White House and Congress, saying they have been too timid and compromising on issues such as health care, the economy, climate change and banking reform.
Dean never said too much later as the election neared. I think he was basically correct then in June.
At Huffington Post this week, R. J. Eskow of the Campaign for America's future, had a powerful post.
A President's Choice: Resist Wall Street's 'Shock Doctrine' or Keep Listening to the Usual SuspectsLast night's real winner wasn't a party or an ideology. The real winner was Wall Street. Once again the wealthy and powerful have applied the Shock Doctrine to US politics, using a financial crisis to increase their power. The Democratic Party tried to accommodate the Wall Street crowd for two years and failed. Now Democrats must decide whether to adopt a new, bold and coherent strategy, or keep listening to the same advice that got them here.
.."They may need to decide quickly. The party's usual suspects are already out in force, making excuses for themselves and peddling the same shopworn "centrist" wares. The president used the words "responsible," "responsibly," or "responsibility" thirteen times in today's press conference. It's admirable when someone takes responsibility for their actions. That's an act that will hopefully include taking stock of what went wrong and trying something different.
Dean once referred to the
false centrism that was hurting our party.
Without the involvement and commitment of people at the ground level, you don't really have a party. You have no pool from which to draw future congresspeople, senators, and presidents. And you have no genuine excitement.
..."He says "the truth is when you trade your values for the hope of winning, you end up losing and having no values--so you keep losing.
We have to reconnect to the base.
..."In recent years the Democrats, in our pursuit of big dollars, have neglected the people we're there to serve. We let our connection to our base atrophy and have forgotten, as they say in politics, who brought us to the dance. In service to a falsely named "centrism," we've sidestepped every major request from labor unions, especially on including worker protections in our free-trade agreements.
The quotes are from You Have the Power, 2004.
Eskow refers to it as a "pseudo centrism."
The Failure of Pseudo-Centrism
We're still suffering from the massive failure of a radical, free-market-run-wild ideology that devastated the economy. The public understood that, so they gave the Democrats an enormous mandate to change economic direction. Yet just twenty months later conservatives scored a huge triumph, leaving Democrats with a choice: Continue to blur the distinction between themselves and their opponents, or lay out a clear agenda for job creation and economic growth.
Of course, that's been the choice all along. But the president and many other senior Democrats chose to take the advice of the "centrist" experts within their party by adopting unpopular Republican positions and getting nothing in return. After last night's rout, what are these experts advising? You guessed it: more of the same so-called "Centrism." That's an odd word to use for policies that most Americans oppose, like cutting Social Security or allowing bankers to enrich themselves by endangering the economy, but theirs is an Alice-in-Wonderland world.
I know that seniors are scared to death of having Social Security and Medicare cut. And the problem is that we were not able to come out and say that Democrats were not going to cut them. I mean, look at the deficit commission led by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles...handpicked by our president.
What were seniors supposed to think?
Eskow makes the point that real centrists would defend Social Security and fight back against Wall Street. He then points out that the GOP will happy if we keep pushing right wing ideas.
If Democrats want to keep passing bills that include unpopular right-wing ideas, Republicans and their Wall Street patrons will be happy to let them do it and suffer the consequences. They've done it before, most notably when they let Dems take the fall for their unconditional bailout of the big banks. We saw the results yesterday. And yet, incredibly, the usual suspects are still pushing the same failed approach.
Robert Reich in an
interview with Der Spiegel the day before the election said that people say they are in the middle when pollsters ask, but that the middle is mostly fiction.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: When you served in the White House, President Bill Clinton began on the left but drifted to the middle after the Democrats lost significant ground in the mid-term elections. Do you see that happening again?
Reich: I was there with Bill Clinton when he tried to socalled "triangulate" and please the voters in the middle. But the middle is a fiction. The middle is simply where most voters who respond to surveys say they are.
Heubeck and Weyrich did not spare words when they spoke of
this new type of right wing movement. Our movement must be highly provocative. The thing we have most to fear is that we will be ignored.
Cultural conservatives must understand the predicament we are in. We must be willing to take measures that perhaps we would be unwilling to take under different, more ideal circumstances. We will have standards--we will never try to justify dishonesty, destruction of the personal reputation of our opponents, cheating, assault, etc., in the service of victory for our movement. However, we will not consider ourselves above appearing "unseemly" or surrendering some our personal dignity. We must be willing to shake people out of their complacency--which means being obnoxious if the situation requires it--because given the fact that the dominant leftist culture is safely ensconced, complacency only serves the interests of our opponents.
Heubeck went further:
We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest.
..."We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs. For example, we could have every member of the movement put a bumper sticker on his car that says something to the effect of "Public Education is Rotten; Homeschool Your Kids." This will change nobody's mind immediately; no one will choose to stop sending his children to public schools immediately after seeing such a bumper sticker; but it will raise awareness and consciousness that there is a problem.
Karl Rove's tactics of attack, no surrender follow those lines. They are afraid of no one, fearful of nothing.
But there is one thing they do well....they clarify where they stand and never waver. They are not going to compromise, they are not going to be bipartisan.
And we keep acting like they will.
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