All three Democratic presidential losses in the Eighties were caused by centrism.

[Ken Burch]

Last edited Fri May 30, 2014, 11:20 PM - Edit history (6)

1980: Jimmy Carter ran for re-election on an essentially moderate Republican record...he had increased the defense budget, he'd put the Republican/corporate priority of "low inflation" before the progressive Democratic priority of full employment, and he had caused the Iranian hostage crisis by giving the Shah sanctuary in this country after supporting that tyrant against the Iranian people to the bitter end. John Anderson, at one point in the summer of 1980, was leading Carter AND Reagan in the popular vote by running to the left of both of them(his support collapsed after he put Ed Koch's chief strategist David Garth in charge of his campaign and Garth made Anderson positioned Anderson as another bland centrist). Reagan won by using the "misery index" caused by Carter's refusal to work to lower unemployment in the presidential debates AND by trading arms for hostages. The liberal wing of the party had nothing to do with that result, and it would have been just as bad if Teddy Kennedy hadn't run in the primaries, since Carter had appeal to the Democratic base anyway by then.

1984: Mondale, after implying that he'd work to re-industrialize the Upper Midwest, gave in to the Wall Street wing of his advisors and made the right-wing goal of "deficit reduction" his major theme of the fall campaign...a prioirity that guaranteed that he wouldn't restore any of the massive cuts in the social wage made by Reagan, OR re-industrialize the "Rust Belt", or work for Taft-Hartley repeal or any other significant progressive issues. In his acceptance speech at the San Francisco convention, Mondale made it clear that he would run to Carter's right(giving his embarassing "we heard you" pledge to Dems who thought Carter was TOO LIBERAL). Mondale also refused to break with Reagan's essentially fascist Central America policies(he promised a Cuba-style economic blockade of Sandinista Nicaragua, which was the same thing as taking the side of the Contras in the war)and refused to passionately speak out for the nuclear freeze. Mondale dissed and demobilized the base and gained none of the finicky centrists anywhere in doing so. He also refused to listen to Jesse Jackson's advice about making a major effort to increase black, Latino, Native American and working-class white voter registration. Again, liberalism was repudiated by the Democratic Party in 1984, and the blame for that loss lies solely in the lap of the anti-progressive wing of the party(this was still an era in which many old-time Southern congressional committee chairs refused to endorse the Democratic presidential ticket...an choice that, according to party rules, should have cost them their chairmanships).

1988: Michael Dukakis was a centrist technocrat who made homophobia a major part of his campaign(he had become presidential timber by fighting to stop gay people in Massachusetts from adopting children and gays on his campaign staff remained closeted for fear that he'd make them leave the campaign if he discovered their sexual orientation). Dukakis pledged a 6% annual increase in the war budget(at a time when the Cold War was already, for all practical purposes, over and done with) and again, essentially backed Reagan's Central America policies despite the fact that those policies had no popular support. He said nothing about the continuing Contra war, and never mentioned poverty or the suffering of working-class people in his campaign. And, like Mondale before him, Dukakis refused to back Jesse Jackson's call for a major effort to register Rainbow voters. In the fall, Dukakis refused ever to respond to any of the Republican smears on his record or his character or to allow other Democrats to do so...a strategy that made all uncommitted voters think Dukakis was admitting that the smears were true. The one time Dukakis said he was a "liberal&quot he actually wasn't)he cut Bush the First's lead in half in a single day...then he refused ever to say it again. There were massive numbers of people ready to stand up and fight for the idea that liberal/progressive ideas were actually a GOOD thing, but Dukakis wouldn't let THAT kind of a campaign happen.

Three centrist campaigns. Three huge losses. Thus, the Nineties move by the Democratic Party to silence, punish and demonize labor, the poor and progressive activists was built totally on lies. Yet some people still accept the lie-based premise that the party has to treat those groups as the political equivalent of lepers, has to appease big corporate donors rather than fire up and mobilize the base or the millions of new activist types who are looking for a party that speaks to their convictions, and has to treat words like "liberal" and "progressive" as the political equivalents of child pornography. Why?

[cali]

1. If you had stated that centrism is a major contributing factor, I would have agreed.

[yeoman6987]

13. I really think the most boring candidate loses each time

The candidate (doesn't matter which party) wins the election every time.

[Ken Burch]

17. That is also a good point.

All three of our Eighties nominees were not only boring in their years, but went out of their way to be so on purpose(Mondale was actually a passionate, engaging speaker in the Senate and as Carter's veep, but it looked like he decided to be as suicidally depressing as possible in 1984...as if he was AFRAID to fire people up. Fat lot of good that approach ever did).

[AleksS]

39. Agreed to a certain extent

It does seem like the "cooler" or more exciting candidate has a major advantage. But the naive and wonderous, wide-eyed and hopeful part of me dreams that having good policy positions could overcome that.

We're living in an "entertain me" America. The candidate that entertains will win. So many folks don't care what message the entertainer is peddling, as long as it's exciting, and fun, and distracts us from the doldrums of where the rest of our lives are stagnating.

[salib]

96. Some counter examples:

Lyndon Johnson vs that crazy Arizonan
Ike
Even Nixon vs McGovern

[nomorenomore08]

118. But note those examples were all further in the past than Ken's. n/t

[salib]

125. Well, if it is only valid for a particular time frame

Then, it could be that the time frame has already passed.

I could go back further, certainly the 20's were filled with "centrists" winning.

I agree, we need much more liberal, even socialist, and definitely atheist (far a real change), candidates to win. I just am not convinced that this is a compelling argument.

[nomorenomore08]

131. But it certainly is a valid argument that none of the candidates mentioned in the OP were all that

progressive - particularly the open homophobia of Dukakis at the time. What social progress we've made since then has been largely no thanks to cautious centrism - though Obama's "turnaround" on marriage equality, transparent as it may have been, has certainly had an effect on public attitudes.

[Ken Burch]

132. Harding and Coolidge were "centrists"? n/t.

[Jackpine Radical]

32. Yes, it's hard to ignore the contributions made by dirty Republican tactics.

The Reagan hostage deal and Willie Horton come to mind in the '80 and '88 election campaigns, for example. I dunno--nothing much would have saved Mondale in '84. That was the year that Gary Hart, who might otherwise have had a fair chance, took himself out of the running with "monkey business."

[Ken Burch]

35. Those did play a role.

being "too liberal" didn't, however.

There was position to the right of Mondale and Dukakis that that the party could have taken without simply voting to disband. The voters didn't want us to be just barely distinguishable like we were in the Nineties, and what elected Clinton in '92 were personal charisma and healthcare, not the silencing of the Democratic left.

[billhicks76]

54. Gary Hart Worried Them

Last edited Sun May 18, 2014, 08:07 PM - Edit history (1)

As did Jerry Brown in '88. I believe Paul Wellstone and JFK Jr did also. Russ Feingold would've but he made the smart move after he fell to bow out. Warren and Grayson are the only two worthwhile candidates I see now.

[7962]

85. I think its insulting to Warren to equate her with Grayson

I know a lot of people here love him, but I think he's an arrogant, rude person. Warren has been the opposite of that.

[billhicks76]

129. Insulting?

I wouldn't go that far. They are just different. And Senators are always more prudent and coy. I have big news for you though. Being mild mannered, polite and playing footsie with power has got us nothing. We could've had a non-violent revolution after 8 years of Bush but Obama successfully neutered the movement and made sure nothing big happened by letting Bush off the hook

[JDPriestly]

151. Warren is a delightful person. She has an infectious enthusiasm and good,

middle-class manners and values. She is hard-working and really cares about the economic issues that are bringing down our middle-class and our country.

I agree that we need a bold candidate who speaks to the issues that Piketty and Warren have raised and pushes back against the ridiculous Ayn Rand philosophy that is so popular among conservatives.

[7962]

161. I agree. Thats why I wouldnt put Grayson in her class. nt

[fasttense]

94. Centrism is what causes these candidates to appear boring and dull.

That's why Obama gave speeches (and still does to some extent) that are filled with liberal ideals and inspirational liberal desires and then ends up pretty much doing what a middle of the road RepubliCON would do. Liberal ideals are awe inspiring. Middle of the road ideals are dull, boring and uninspiring. Real conservative ideals tend to be pretty boring too because they mostly want things to stay the same. But liberal and progressive rhetoric can be beautiful.

All that soaring rhetoric about hope and change and then when Obama got into office we got middle of the road RepubliCONism. Because real centrists would say things like, "We can do it very, very slowly and if anyone disagrees we will immediately back off and change it to suit every little nit and pick." Centrism has to include things like, "We will work tirelessly to get conservative approved agenda as well as a few things on our agenda passed." "We will fire people if any RepubliCON objects to them before all the facts are in, even if their efforts insured I was elected. We will pass only half of what we want at any given time because we have to include half of what the other guy wants even if what he wants is the opposite of what we want."

Centrism is dull, boring and uninspiring.

But I don't think Carter spoke like a centrist. His words were filled with liberal passion and ideals. I think what prevented Carter from getting reelected had nothing to do with how good of a president he was, or how centrist he was. It had more to do with the traitor Ronnie Raygun making deals with terrorist and ensuring the hostages were NOT released until he was sworn in. In fact the minute he was sworn in the terrorist released the hostages as agreed upon. So it was the Iranian terrorist who really got Ronnie Raygun in as president. He didn't even need the Supreme Court to force it down the people's throats and make it look legal.

[Maedhros]

184. About that "hope and change" rhetoric...

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/the_hope_diet_would_the_tea_party_fall_for_this/

It is a peculiar coincidence that the last two Democratic presidents, men unusually anxious to compromise and capitulate, have also chosen to market themselves as homegrown philosophers. More curious still, both have presented their hard-won insights in the great American tradition of positive thinking. Like so many aphorists-on-the-make before them, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama entered the marketplace of ideas selling tidy homilies on the very same concept: Hope.

“Hope” ... sets an extremely low standard for judging Democratic politicians. Hope is, by their definition, something they bring with them, or a place they come from, or a poster they are (literally!) the illustration for; ensuring that this fanciful substance flows our way doesn’t require them actually to, you know, enact anything we’re hoping for. On the contrary, they can do things (like Clinton’s deregulations or Obama’s spying program) that actually harm their constituents, and then tell us, as Barack Obama tweeted after the 2012 election, “The definition of hope is you still believe, even when it’s hard.”

This is the opposite of accountability. It means, just keep waiting, and just keep voting. If you think good thoughts long enough, maybe someday you’ll get that million bucks, or that single-payer healthcare system.

And that’s probably why this stuff springs so goddamned eternal. After 30 years of these pseudo Democrats—Democrats who fundraise like Republicans, Democrats who govern like Republicans, Democrats who basically become Republicans (for example, Zell Miller, the creator of the “HOPE Scholarship”)—it’s easy enough to understand why elected officials love the concept. “Hope” means, forget about how you got taken last time. Think positively. Maybe this next Democrat is the one who will finally act the way you think Democrats ought to act. And when he doesn’t, “hope” means you need to stick with him anyway, because . . . well, because he’s the one who carries hope in his back pocket and all.

At any rate, “hope” is a virtue they mainly recommend for you, the Democratic voter; with their funders and bundlers, the relationship is a little more contractual. For them our Democratic leaders undertake to perform certain actions; it is only for the rank and file that they recommend a diet of wishes. If we complain about this state of affairs, they will no doubt tell us that results in this material world aren’t everything. There’s something philosophical and ennobling about hoping for things. “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him,” says Job of the Almighty.

When confronting our earthly leaders, however, the situation ought to be a little different. We shouldn’t have to hope. We should expect politicians to deliver.

[fasttense]

202. Good point.

Hope is a hope for change, for improvement. No one ever hopes for things to get worse and rarely hope for things never to change. Hope is the rhetoric of a liberal philosophy.

Too bad it is so frequently nothing more than rhetoric.

[Maedhros]

207. At this point, it's just branding. "Vote for HOPE (tm)" [n/t]

[L0oniX]

2. ***

[upaloopa]

3. Ever hear the term Reagan Democrats?

Many working class Democrats voted for Reagan out of the idea that domestic social programs were not working and cost too much money. They were looking for a way out of double digit inflation. Right or wrong that is why Dems lost. I was there.

[JI7]

8. it was because they view and continue to view social program as being handouts to minorities

[FrodosPet]

135. Which is really dumb on the Reagan Dems part!

If everybody who can't or does not want to work received a welfare check of $400 a week to spend ($1600 a month), working people could end up with secure jobs and higher pay from strong consumer markets.

Getting incompetent and disruptive people OUT of the workforce and harmlessly parked in front of a TV screen is probably the best thing that could happen to this country.

[Ken Burch]

11. Those voters could have been won back on labor law reform.

We were never going to get far enough to the right to get them back on social spending. Even Clinton didn't get the Reagan Democrats back.

The way to get those voters back was to help labor fight back against Reagan's anti-union crusade. But Mondale refused to do that.

And there were progressive alternatives to the social programs that weren't working...such as federal jobs programs, putting the poor to work rebuilding their own neighborhoods. Carter, Mondale and Dukakis refused to even try that approach. Promising to punish people just for being on welfare never gained us any votes, because voters realized that there weren't jobs for the long-term unemployed.

[JI7]

12. they would have been won back if the Dems supported a Law preventing BLacks from equal rights

[Ken Burch]

15. No, that wouldn't have been enough for those who were specifically race-obsessed.

Fighting, progressive "people's crusades" in the Eighties would have elected us. Centrism never could have.
And a "southern moderate&quot i.e., an anti-progressive stick-in-the-mud)would have lost 49 states to Reagan too...since no one could have made the case that electing such a person would have meant anything.

[JI7]

16. 40 percent of Democrats voted against Obama in West Virginia Primary

and i'm talking about 2012, not 2008 when he had an actual opponent.

[Ken Burch]

21. And a candidate that could appeal to those people couldn't possibly be progressive in office

No good would be done by someone who pandered to that mindset. You can't "out-n____r" your opponents on the stump and then govern for the good of all after getting elected.

[Lasher]

116. I was one of those Democrats who voted against Obama in the 2012 West Virginia Primary

Here on DU I said I would vote for a ham sandwich instead of Obama in the 2012 primary and that's just what I did. I would have voted again for Candidate Obama of 2008, but the body snatchers somehow replaced him in the 2012 Primary with Reaganomics Obama. That is why I cast my protest vote in the 2012 Primary.

[Ken Burch]

119. who did those 40% vote FOR, btw? n/t.

[Lasher]

121. I voted for some prisoner in Texas, if memory serves.

I think he was the only other presidential candidate in the WV primary.

ETA:

Prison Inmate Wins More than 40% of Democratic Vote Over President Obama in WV Primary

President Obama has never been particularly popular in West Virginia, and even though he’s an incumbent president running essentially unopposed, Tuesday’s Democratic primary in the Appalachian state didn’t change that dynamic.

More than 40 percent of Democrats voting chose to cast their ballot for Keith Russell Judd, an inmate at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Beaumont, Texas, where he’s doing time for extortion and threats made at the University of New Mexico in 1999.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/prison-inmate-wins-more-than-40-of-democratic-vote-over-president-obama-in-wv-primary/

[Hippo_Tron]

287. Most of those people haven't been Democrats for years, but never bothered to re-register

[Ken Burch]

34. Please tell me you're being "ironic" there.

You can't really be saying we should have called for the return of Jim Crow.

[Scuba]

75. We didn't need to get those voters back, what wich half the electorate sitting on their hands.

[Art_from_Ark]

166. Mondale never had a chance

But he really blew it when he proclaimed "I'm gonna raise your taxes!"

[Jenoch]

190. I heard VP Mondale do an interview on local radio a couple of years ago.

He was asked about the 1984 presidential campaign. He laughed and admitted he knew back then that he had no chance of winning or even coming close to beating Reagan. He was pleased to win his home state however.

[Ken Burch]

210. Why did he even run, then?

He should have renounced the nom and let them draft Cuomo in his place,

[Jenoch]

212. My guess is the DNC thought Mondale provided the best chance at winning.

I don't think Cuomo could have won against Reagan either.

[Ken Burch]

215. There were so many other votes the party could have won that year.

They could have connected with the anti-nuclear and Central America solidarity movemewnts, and with poor people and workers who were mobilizing everywhere to fight Reagan's agenda. There were massive numbers of people in those movements who didn't vote because dismal campaigns like 1980 had convinced them that electoral politics were useless to them, that political parties were deaf to their concerns and their principles, that money(even then)mattered more than people in the electoral game. Many responded to the Jackson(and, to a degree, the Hart)campaigns. None responded to the Mondale campaign.

Instead, the party put DEFICIT REDUCTION...something Wall Street cared about(which is why then-Mondale advisor Robert Rubin pushed so hard for it)but a goal that could never have led to any improvements in anything for any potential Democratic voters, and a goal that meant having the party abandon any restoration of the cuts in the social wage or any effort to reindustrialize the Rust Belt...above and beyond anything else(that's why Mondale's tax position was such a disaster...not because he proposed raising taxes-voters actually respected the honesty of that proposal-but because it wasn't tied to funding any progressive, grassroots alternative to Reaganism.

And even the potential mobilization of feminist voters behind the Mondale/Ferraro ticket was blunted by Gerry Ferraro's pre-nomination effort, as chair of the Platform Committee, to remove the endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment from the platform(a change that wouldn't have brought ANY significant blocs of "swing voters" over to the party, given that virtually no groups of people who backed the party on any other issues opposed the ERA by then...ERA opposition was always in a clear minority and always a view held solely by people with extreme right-wing views on ALL issues).

All the party gave up on the millions new voters it COULD have brought in because the party establishment was obsessed, instead, with the hopeless goal of appeasing wealthy donors and "fiscally conservative" voters they already knew were totally, mindlessly, unquestioning committed to Reagan and would have voted for him against ANY Dem, even Fritz Hollings, Reuben Askew or John Glenn(or even Sam Nunn). We weren't going to get those voters in 1984 no matter what, or 1988 no matter what. And we didn't actually get them in 1992 or 1996(Clinton was elected with 43% and nudged that up only a few trivial points in 1996....never even trying to get the House back in 1996 when a Dem retake-after the government shutdown-should have been a "gimme&quot .

The lesson, as Barack Obama learned(and HRC wouldn't have if we'd nominated her, since her fall campaign would have been on Bill's exact 1990's program)was that our only hope was bringing in new voters by persuading those voters that, while the party had ignored them in the past, it wouldn't do so again(and yes, Rahm made sure he forgot that message as soon as the votes were in, but the GOP hasn't ever forgotten it-which is why they're doing all they can to stop new voters from casting their votes now).

Our only chances lie with the powerless, the forgotten, the dispossessed....we can't get the comfortable, those who fear change, and those who fear and hate all who are different than they are. We didn't do that in the Eighties and lost. We did that, at least partially, in 2008 and 2012 and won. Not rocket science.

[Jenoch]

218. Yeah, I don't buy any of that.

It's like Republicans believing they could win in 2012.

[Ken Burch]

220. False equivalence.

There are almost no untapped blocs of potential Republican votes nowadays. There have always been huge untapped blocs of potential Democratic votes to our left.

In years like 1984 and 1988, years where defensive politics was already known to be futile, years when votes based in the existing pool of voters were going to be impossible for us to get, when nothing we could have said and no one we could have nominated could EVER have connected with the "Reagan Democrats" or satisfied the tight-budget demands of potential Wall Street donors(the ones we never got checks from in those years), what possible harm could have come of running a true, grassroots people's campaign, of truly reaching out to those who felt abandoned, of putting in the funds actually needed for massive voter registration? We weren't going to go below Mondale's 41% no matter what...why not go big and fire people up? Why not run a campaign of passion?

it's like we were the worst college basketball team imaginable in the era before the 30-second clock, going into a four-corner stall when we were ten points behind with ten minutes to go.

[mississippi62]

55. Gays for Reagan

I was a newly-wed living in Dallas when Reagan was nominated in 1984 election. He was hugely popular for the reasons cited by upaloopa. Early 80's were depressing - I can remember waiting in gas lines, watching inflation suck away spending power (forget about savings), and wondering if I would ever be able to afford a home. Mortgage rates soared to nearly 20%.

The Republican national convention during the summer of 1984 was a time of euphoria. Reagan offered the promise of stability and a return to "Happy Days" (no coincidence that TV series was so popular at the time). Among the special interest groups at the RNC convention was "Gays for Reagan". They were at the convention not because GOP had an official platform on LG issues but because, like everyone else, they hoped for better economic outcome under Republican administration.

[RKP5637]

58. Yep, that's the way I remember it tool. Also, Reagan was a polished speaker, he knew how to speak

to and to motivate the masses. He was likable, probably due to his Hollywood days. I recall many democrats saying you could really disagree with him and argue, but it was hard to walk away not liking him. And, as you say, many people wanted significant change, "they hoped for better economic outcome under Republican administration."

[MannyGoldstein]

4. +1

[JI7]

5. dukakis lost points after he said he would oppose the death penalty even if his wife was raped and

killed.

this is just ignorant of history.

[Ken Burch]

7. Dukakis was already way behind by then.

And there was no excuse for Bernie Shaw of CNN to ask such a despicable question.

[IkeRepublican]

122. Agreed

Atwater put Dukakis in the toilet long before Bernard Shaw and Dukakis essentially helped him do it with the passive approach.

Kitty burning the flag, Dukakis having a psycho evaluation, the prison furloughs and a few others. Then the coffin was nailed shut with Willie Horton. Dukakis could have nailed Bush's ass to the wall by going nuclear with the prison furloughs was signed into effect by Reagan. But, he didn't.

As Terry McAulliffe stated in Boogie Man, "If you get hit with false accusations and say, 'Oh, I'm not saying anything and keep it positive', you're gonna get destroyed."

[markpkessinger]

187. He also didn't help himself much by driving that tank in a parade . . .

. . . He made himself look ridiculous with that stunt.

[Ken Burch]

216. the 'pugs said that stunt made Dukakis look like "a heavily-armed attack rodent" n/t.

[JI7]

6. so clinton was more liberal than carter, mondale and dukakis

[Ken Burch]

9. In practice, he wasn't actually much further right.

And he was to their left on health care...probably the major domestic issue in that campaign.

[Warpy]

28. They'd have voted for Satan over Pappy Bush

He'd crashed the economy, raised taxes, and scared the militarists to death with his defense cuts, base closures, and wind down of the Cold War once the USSR had collapsed.

[markpkessinger]

189. The worst of Clinton's pandering to the right . .

.. occurred in the wake of the impeachment attempt, when he was desperate to salvage a legacy -- ANY legacy -- for his presidency. That's why I always get nervous when presidents start thinking too much about their 'legacy.'

[MohRokTah]

10. Were you even there?

If you were, your memory is sorely lacking.

Far more complicated than this post intimates.

[Ken Burch]

14. I was there. I'm 53. Saw it all go down.

Mondale lost running as a fiscal conservative(promising to reduce the deficit meant promising to do nothing to economically revitalize the Upper Midwest and the Northeast). He lost by refusing to stand with labor against Reagan's assault(there was no proposal to repeal Taft-Hartley or even to do anything to make it easier to get a union recognized at the workplace...Obama, by contrast, won millions of votes by promising to bring in "card check".)

The DLC/Third Way argument is built on lies...and it gave us a "Democratic" president in the Nineties that agreed with the Republicans on all but a handful of trivial side issues. Then it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2000(and Kerry's partial embrace of it cost us victory in 2004, when a progressive "get out of Iraq" campaign would've kicked Dubya's ass).

[MohRokTah]

23. If that's the way you remember it, there's no talking to you.

1980 Carter lost due to a damaging attack from his left in the primaries. The Liberal Lion did him in.

'84 and '88 were both lost due to our candidates being too liberal.

Seriously, going against this historical fact is as bad as the wingnuts claiming Romney wasn't conservative enough and that's why he lost to Obama.

[Ken Burch]

29. There were no candidates to Mondale or Dukakis' right who'd have done better in '84 or '88.

Carter was hopelessly behind Reagan before Teddy got in...and with millions begging Teddy to run, he couldn't have been true to himself and the people if he'd stayed out. Teddy would never have been able to call himself a progressive again.

And Teddy bore no blame for Carter's inexusable decision to abandon his support of human rights and back the Shah against the Iranian people to the bitter end. If Carter had done what he should and cut the Shah loose in the first place, there'd have been no embassy hostages. If he'd put full employment before the rich man's goal of low inflation, Reagan would have had no "misery index" to destroy him with in the televised debate.

Nobody outside of South Carolina knew about Fritz Hollings(and he had no compelling policies).

John Glenn couldn't win a primary. He didn't even have polls showing him doing well in Ohio.

And Reuben Askew was yesterday's man by '84. Nobody cared about him anymore.

In '88, Al Gore had no strong appeal anywhere and was just as much of a passionless stick as he was in 2000.
No national polls showed him doing well against Bush the First.

Besides which...even if we had elected those guys, what good would it have done? They didn't disagree with Reagan on anything. What's the point of electing a Dem to preserve a Republican status quo? They wouldn't have done anything different than the Right in secret, wouldn't have made any good Supreme Court nominees(they'd have picked a bunch of Tom Clark types and that's it)

[MohRokTah]

31. Suffice it to say, we are in complete disagreement on this. eom

[rhett o rick]

111. Yes it seems you want to blame the liberals and on a liberal message board no less.

And right in time for the upcoming elections. It's been 30 years of the Blue Dog - Republican coalition that is bringing this country to its knees.

[Rex]

176. Pretzel logic is often strange.

Hating those on your side more than you hate the opposition makes for a strange conversation.

[dflprincess]

52. Kennedy did not cause Carter's loss

The majority of us who supported EMK in the primaries and caucuses did get behind Carter after the convention.

Carter loss because Reagan & Poppy Bush committed treason by cutting deals to keep the hostage crises in Iran going and because they were selling greed to the public while Carter made the mistake of thinking Americans were adult enough to hear that we needed to make some sacrifices to become energy independent.

[Overseas]

107. K&R. Well said.

[Doctor_J]

109. And John Anderson

possibly.

[Art_from_Ark]

167. Carter lost because of severe inflation and Iran,

Reagan's image as a kicker of foreign butts who would turn things around, and John Anderson's stealth campaign that siphoned off liberal votes from Carter. Kennedy's challenge in the primary had little to do with it.

Mondale lost because he was running against a popular president while he (Mondale) was saddled with the image of the Number 2 man in a failed presidency. His promise to raise taxes sealed his doom.

Dukakis lost because he really wasn't presidential material. The Willie Horton ads and his wife's personal problems didn't help, either.

[Ken Burch]

230. Actually, Carter mainly lost because he did nothing to reduce unemployment.

He put lowering inflation(which is mainly a right-wing concern) ahead of keeping working-class voters in their jobs-AND because he agreed with the corporate agenda of deliberately lowering middle-class living standards to create higher corporate profits.

And Iran was an issue because he listened to the right-wing types who said we had to keep the Shah in power no matter what.

Both of those positions were among the most right-wing choices he ever made as president.

You can't win re-election as a Democratic president by openly taking the side of the rich in the class struggle. And you couldn't possibly get re-elected as a Dem president only five years after the end of the Vietnam War by running as an all-out hawk.

They mobilized their base....we told ours to go to Hell.

Defeat for our ticket was the only possible result. Carter was losing to Reagan in virtually every poll taken after January of 1980.

[Armstead]

86. You seem to only be able to make your points by claiming others are ignorant

If you disagree with the premise of a poster and want to civilly dispute their facts, that's fine.

But you tend to claim that anyone who has a different view is an ignorant, uninformed moron.

Not a very constructive tactic, if your goal is to actual engage in issues in a constructive debate.

[MohRokTah]

183. And you make unfounded accusations.

To have been there and to be aware of what was going on one would have to be in one's forties.

Not everybody on DU is over forty years old.

[Armstead]

195. speaking of unfounded accusations, you assume the OP wasn't there

and if he wasn't, I sure as hell was, being in my early 60s, and I think there is much truth in his analysis.

As I said in my previous post, you are more than welcome to offer dissenting opinions. But you'd do a lot better if you don't start out by insulting the person posting.

[MohRokTah]

200. And again, you make an unfounded accusation.

I ASKED if he was there.

[Armstead]

205. Oh whatever, your personalized approach is boring

My response was based on your tendency to insult the intelligence and knowledge of posters you disagree with.

There is a big difference between civilly disagreeing with someone's opinion or interpretation of the facts, and your habit of framing that by calling the posters who disagree with you as ignorant, uninformed and generally stupid.

If you ever feel like debating based on an actual subject at hand, without the "nyah, nyah" nonsense, am happy to engage.

[MohRokTah]

206. As is yours. We are done with any attempts to ever discuss anything.

[LordGlenconner]

171. Couldn't agree more

Mondale was a terrible candidate. Dukakis was a terrible candidate. Their "centrism" was just one component of what made them bad candidates. Personality was the other 99 percent.

Carter was at times inept (the Iran hostage crisis and ensuing rescue attempt) and a victim of bad luck (energy crisis). His 1980 campaign was a shit show organizationally which did not help and he also had to fend a nasty challenge from Teddy during the primaries which weakened him tremendously. People were pissed off and he was who they directed their anger at, wrong as that is.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

18. No. Simply Not True

Jimmy Carter lost because of a combination of his inability to end the Iranian hostage crisis; the horrid economy/skyrocketing interest rates; and a widely held perception that his administration was inept.

Walter Mondale lost because he's a fairly uninspiring speaker who was running against a masterful campaigner, and the fact that the economy had dramatically improved in four years.

Mike Dukakis lost because he ran one of the most inept campaigns in the history of modern American policics and allowed himself to be crucified by Lee Atwater. Willie Horton, the photo in the tank, and his dumb comment about Indiana farmers growing Belgian endive are three top reasons why he lost.

George HW Bush had a 90+ approval rating after Gulf War 1. He lost because of a crumbling economy, and the fact that Bill Clinton is an abler speaker and campaigner.

[Ken Burch]

26. While they are true, none of your points refuted my thesis

Carter had a bad economy to work with, but he made it worse by using Republican "low-inflation" economic policies and by beginning the deregulation cycle that has helped cause a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle-class to the rich.

Mondale was a dreary speaker in 1984(he'd been better before that, but seemed to intentionally "tamp it down" that year for some reason, as if he that "gravitas" meant being as monotonous as possible)but he could have won if he'd listened to progressives and run a "reindustrialize the Rust Belt/U.S. out of Central America/reverse the cuts and create better programs" campaign. Instead, he ran on deficit reduction, a policy that no Democrat can ever be elected president on.

Dukakis did ran a horrible campaign, as I said-but it was a horrible CENTRIST campaign. He was the candidate(as was Mondale and as would be Kerry)of the passion-fearing, principle-hating party insiders. If Dukakis had listened to what Jesse was telling him, and had fought back against the smears, he could have won. He lost because he did what he was told was "safe" and "mainstream".

While all that you are saying is true, it still doesn't support the DLC argument that progressives, labor, the Rainbow and the poor needed to be left out in the cold in order for the party to win.

Bill Clinton was a great speaker...and he COULD have won running an exclusive, progressive grassroots campaign. He never had to run against the Democratic base to get elected, and he did almost nothing worthwhile in his eight years in office after winning on a "death to the base" campaign. The Reagan Dems all still voted for Bush and Perot in '92, and Dole and Perot in '96.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

91. The thesis was that all three Democratic candidiates lost because they went centrist.

My rebuttal is that all three lost because they were out-campaigned or the country was fed-up.

Notwithstanding Donna Rice, if the party had wanted someone further left, they'd have supported Gary Hart in '84. They'd have supported Jesse Jackson in '88.

Presidential campaigns are a two step process of winning your party's primary (and your party - no matter what it is -- is generally somewhere away from the political center), and then turning around and re-tooling your campaign to win the center. Congressional and Senate races are different, as independent voters in non-presidential cycle years are far less likely to show u, and (as Bill Clinton stated) all politics is local.

[Major Hogwash]

33. Good points, plus the media played a big part in painting all of them as weak.

Once the "weak" label was hung on them, none of them could shake it.

[Ken Burch]

49. The way to have beaten the "weak" tag would have been to be gutsy on the issues.

In 1988, we should have drafted Jim Hightower or somebody like that.

A progressive can convey toughness by sticking to her or his guns on principles when the chips are down.

[joshcryer]

77. Pretty much.

[pa28]

19. I remember the Dukakis campaign well.

He was defined as a squishy liberal but in reality he was a squishy centrist. What voters actually despise is a weak presidential candidate and that's exactly what he was.

To this day and even on this site I've heard the argument that we can't nominate a real liberal because he would lose like Dukakis. How do they know he was a liberal? I guess because George Bush and Lee Atwater told them so.

[bettyellen]

37. I think you nailed it here, he came off as very weak. Americans didn't even 't bother to check

under his hood, they weren't interested.

[RDANGELO]

20. We couldn't win in the eighties because there were just too many jittery whites.

Dukakis would have been killed by the Willie Horton add no matter what kind of campaign he ran. The only way we could have won in the eighties was by abandoning African Americans.

[Ken Burch]

22. Abandoning African Americans would have made our party morally worthless.

But we could have won in that decade by appealing to the better angels of our country's nature. People like to believe that the country can get better and that we can be better people than we are. We should have appealed to that.

[JI7]

24. these "better angels" found Reagan's Welfare Queen appealing

[RDANGELO]

25. I think to some degree that's what they tried to do.

I remember Mondale in the debate with Reagan saying that he thought that Americans cared about one another.

[TransitJohn]

27. We're no longer really the base.

Haven't been for a long time.

[Ken Burch]

30. Nobody to our right is.

Nobody who's content with corporate domination of life is "the base".

Nobody who hates what OWS stood for is.

Nobody who wants the labor movement wiped out is.

Nobody who wants a big war budget it.

People like that are right wing on ALL issues, and wouldn't ever vote Dem.

[treestar]

36. The real progressive who ran lost very, very big

McGovern. So I'm not so sure. I don't think the electorate is really all that ready for any progress unless there is something like the Depression. And then, they thought it was the war that solved it. Setting us up for some militarism.

[Ken Burch]

38. ANY Dem would have lost big time in the gamed election of '72.

McGovern mainly lost big because of

A)The Eagleton situation(made worse by other Dem senators not only refusing to be on the ticket, but going public with the refusal...humiliating McGovern when he had done nothing to any of them to deserve the public slight).

B)Nixon's China trip...a pointless excursion that somehow made the voters forget we were still in an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

C)The "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion" line that Robert Novak quoted an unnamed midwestern Catholic Dem senator as using on McGovern...years later, Novak revealed that it was Thomas Eagleton himself who had said that...which suggests that Eagleton may have leaked his own mental health records just to submarine McGovern and force him to be an asshole by kicking Eagleton off of the ticket.

D)The vicious ads Hubert Humphrey(who already knew he was out of contention by then)ran in the California primary attacking McGovern on defense...ads the Nixon campaign quoted verbatim in the fall race. Humphrey stabbed McGovern in the back on that issue and had no justification for doing so, since McGovern had worked harder than anybody else in the fall of 1968 to get peace Dems to support the Humphrey/Muskie ticket and had been Humphrey's loyal legislative ally on many, many issues.

Humphrey or Muskie or Scoop Jackson or Reuben Askew would have done badly that year too. Nixon's "dirty tricks team" was going to make sure of it. The platform we ran on would have been irrelevant...an anti-choice "law and order" "we can win in Vietnam" candidate would have gone down in flames just as badly as McGovern did.

[Rex]

177. And yet Al Gore won in 2000, funny how some like to forget all about him.

Funny that.

[Ken Burch]

211. I was talking about 1972, not 2000 n/t.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

289. Being old enough to remember 1972 (my first vote was for McGovern)

I noticed that even though McGovern was a real straight arrow himself and a veteran of World War II, the media portrayed him as "the hippie freak candidate" and always portrayed his supporters as being about 22 years old and dressed weird.

That was poison in 1972, because most older people were in "future shock." If you didn't live through the 1960s, you have no idea how fast things changed. In 1964, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the first big campus-based protest movement, was waged by men in coats and ties and women in dresses. In 1968, the anti-war protests were fought by people in jeans, long hair, and Indian shirts. In 1968, female students at my college had a curfew and needed permission to spend the night away from campus, even to go home. In 1972, my Lutheran college had its first coed dorm. This was also the era of race riots in America's major cities.

Barriers were being broken in movies and TV. Popular music was changing. It was an exciting time to be young, but it was probably a scary time to be older. The youth culture of the 1960s and early 1970s was the biggest break with the previous generation since the Roaring Twenties, and many older voters thought that it was time to "whip the country into shape."

The voters in 1972 didn't so much reject McGovern as reject what they thought he stood for.

[greatauntoftriplets]

43. +1.

Yet I was very hopeful as I cast my first-ever presidential vote for McGovern. The Nixon juggernaut (despite Watergate) just could not be overcome.

[Ken Burch]

50. NO Dem could have done well against Nixon's dirty tricks.

Muskie's early withdrawal proves that. So does the "Scoop Jackson had an out-of-wedlock child" smear.

And they probably had shit ready to smear about Reuben Askew as well, if he'd had any chance of getting the nom.

1972 was never the fault of the liberal wing of the party.

[Armstead]

88. This isn't the 60's or the 70's

There was a lot of social,economic/political fallout from the turmoil of the 60's and 70's that made it difficult for liberals/progressives to be heard back then.

A lot of it boiled down simply to the resentment that social conservatives had against "them long-haired, draft card burning dirty hippies," and "them lazy shiftless welfare queens (i.e. minorities)." And the fact tat the economy had gotten bogged down.

The GOP tapped into that resentment, and also came up with great marketing of CONservatism as the remedy for the economy, which caused many average people to support the party that is directly opposed to their economic interest.

Them days are gone. The residue is still obviously there and remains powerful. But in a larger sense, the Democrats ought to quit worrying about being identified with dirty communistic hippies, and actually start standing for TRUE PROGRESSIVE/LIBERAL POPULISM instead of continuing to try to be GOP lite.

[nakocal]

40. Carter lost also because Reagan and Bush committed treason

The biggest reason for Carter's loss was the hostages held in Iran. And Reagan/Bush had meetings with the Iranians to have the hostages held until after the election.

[Ken Burch]

47. That's true. Reagan DID commit treason...as Nixon did in 1968,

when his campaign intervened in the Paris Peace Talks to make sure the Vietnam War didn't end before Election Day.
Humphrey could have blown Nixon out of the water if he'd gone public on that one(and probably saved three or four U.S. Senate seats for us in the bargain)but was too gutless to do so.

[Rhiannon12866]

61. +1!

[greatlaurel]

163. That is a succinct and clear analysis of what happened.

Thank you for stating what happened so clearly.

[Nye Bevan]

41. Yep, and Bill Clinton swept to victory in 1996 with an unapologetic socialist platform

(except for NAFTA, "end welfare as we know it", DOMA, etc.)

[Ken Burch]

46. DOMA wasn't in the platform, neither was NAFTA

(in both of those cases, Clinton simply caved-in to the right...as he did on "don't ask, don't tell".)

There was no indication that signing the welfare bill gained him any votes...people who hate "welfare mothers" don't have any non-Republican views and we can't ever get those sorts of voters.

And the vast majority of the country was always anti-NAFTA, so you can't seriously argue that Clinton's trade policy gained us votes.

What was in the platform was universal healthcare. THAT was what voters really cared about...not punishing "welfare mothers".

With his personal charisma, Clinton could have won on ANY platform in 1992. The voters weren't demanding that the party recant from liberalism.

[Nye Bevan]

51. I said 1996, and in that campaign he bragged about signing DOMA

to win votes from Christian groups.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/15/us/ad-touts-clinton-s-opposing-gay-marriage.html

[Ken Burch]

53. Yeah, he bragged about it, but it didn't gain him votes.

As to NAFTA, Clinton and the Right had the exact same position...the voters weren't offered a choice on that one(just as they weren't offered a choice, until almost the end of the campaign, on staying in Vietnam or not in the fall 1968 campaign-the overwhelming majority who voted for peace in the Dem presidential primaries was disregarded in the UnDemocratic National Convention at Chicago).

You can't assume that voters liked everything somebody says just because they voted for him after she or he said it. If HRC is our nominee, for example, most Dems and I'd say most voters won't be supporting her foreign policy hawkishness.

The nation didn't cheer Clinton's decision to throw gays under the bus. Nor did they move to his standard because he signed the welfare "reform" bill(only Republicans wanted that damn thing passed).

Those "Christian" groups all endorsed and voted for Dole.

The ONLY votes Clinton got in '92 OR '96 were from people who didn't hate gays, progressives, unions, and the Rainbow.

All the "Reagan Dems" voted GOP that year anyway.

And you know it.

[wyldwolf]

194. but he still won.

[Ken Burch]

214. So what? It wasn't going to cost him votes either.

There was no reason to pander on the death penalty issue...it has next to nothing to do with presidential politics, and it's not as if a president gets any real chance to bloc executions...in any case, almost all executions happen in state prisons, not on the federal level. And the violent crime rate was declining even in non Death Belt states long befire before Clinton was elected (it was dropping in Dukakis' Massachusetts, for God's sakes).

Clinton's implicit message on that issue was hideous...he was using code words to say "don't worry...I want to kill n_____s as much as you do, White America&quot support for the death penalty is almost exclusively a paranoid white suburbanite thing).

[wyldwolf]

222. so being a centrist in the 80s makes you lose, being one in the 90s makes you win.

[Ken Burch]

224. Having no personal appeal, not responding to smears, and campaigning badly

made you lose in the Eighties. Being charismatic and having a rapid response team to fight smears made you win in the Nineties.

With the rapid response team(Clinton's best innovation, and the only one the party should replicate in current and future campaigns)Teddy the K could have won in '92.

Clinton's appeal was largely personal, and he could easily have won WITHOUT sidelining the left.

Also, the GOP candidates in 1992 and 1996 were MUCH much weaker than Reagan.

The Great Renunciation had nothing to do with those results....here, OR in the UK.

[wyldwolf]

231. but you said it was being a centrist. Make up your mind.

[Ken Burch]

238. It's both...it's not either/or.

Centrism made it worse, much worse, by demobilizing labor, activists, and the Rainbow. None of those groups had much reason to think our party cared about them in 1980, 1984, or 1988. By 1992, most just wanted to see somebody get elected who settled for calling himself a Dem(and much of the DLC's people had all-but-endorsed Reagan and Bush-The-First in the previous three campaigns just to force the party to think it had to move sharply to the right when it didn't)that any Dem nominee would have done better by default that year.

The Great Renunciation and The Great Silencing never had to happen.

[wyldwolf]

239. So for the benefit of the two people still reading this thread...

Carter, Mondale and Dukakis lost because of centrist policies... AND because they were boring (even though your OP blames their centrist policies exclusively.)

Clinton won despite his centrist policies because he was exciting!!

Which means if Carter, Mondale and Dukakis had been exciting, they would have won with their centrist policies.

So what means more... policy or appeal? It's all become so confusing as you've tied yourself in knots spouting non-facts.

[Ken Burch]

241. An oversimplification, but for those particular campaigns, somewhat accurate.

Policy and appeal both have their place...in the 1980's, we had centrist policy and candidates who either lacked personal appeal or(in Mondale's case)tamp down what had been appealing...the natural humor and the passion for fighting for the little guy...to appease some strategists notion of "looking mainstream". Mondale most likely would have lost anyway, but it would have totally changed the dynamic for 1988 if he'd run the kind of campaign that could have swept the Rust Belt, carried Oregon and Washington, and been competitive in California, rather than consigning himself to a 49-state blowout by running a "mainstream" campaign. Dukakis clearly would have won if he'd simply fought back against the Atwater smears(or we might have had a better candidate in 1988, like Jim Hightower).

We lost in the Eighties because of bad strategy and candidates who chose to ignore what makes Democratic candidates traditionally appealing, and also because we were more concerned with winning over voters we knew we couldn't get rather than bringing new voters to the polls. All of the above were grounded in centrism.

And the big thing Clinton brought to the polls in 1992, OTHER than personal appeal, was his commitment to a populist position on healthcare...on that issue, he was to the Left of both Mondale and Dukakis, neither of whom had a proposal on that issue, and(to a lesser degree)he was to the Left of Dukakis on LGBTQ(I know that wasn't the acronym that year, but bear with me)issues(he was going to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military). So Clinton's positioning was actually a mixture of right and left tilts...it wasn't as simple as a straight rightward swing.

[wyldwolf]

242. So your OP is wrong according to you

It really doesn't matter what your policies are as long as you're an exciting candidate.

[Ken Burch]

246. No, and you have no need to be obsessed with proving me "wrong".

My OP is about helping the party to do better by examining what made it do badly in the past, and by removing the blame for past failures from groups and ideas that never deserved it-groups and ideas we need to embrace and connect with if we want to keep winning. How is any of that a bad thing?

[wyldwolf]

247. you're proving yourself wrong the further you go down this "appeal vs. policy" path

[Ken Burch]

249. No I'm not.

It isn't "either/or".

And at this point you're starting to sound childish.

[wyldwolf]

250. You're moving the goal posts to fit your theory

[Ken Burch]

255. No...I'm including other factors that played contributing roles.

I never said that nothing BUT the centrist policies played a role...just that they played the major role.

[wyldwolf]

259. after your first factors were shown to be bogus. Goal post moving.

[Ken Burch]

260. No, my first factors were not shown to be bogus at all

Those three defeats were centrist campaigns driven by centrist tactics. This remains an unassailable point.

Carter doomed himself with centrist to center-right economic and foreign points. Mondale's tax increase pledge killed his chances because he made it clear that the new taxes would not be used to restore social spending cuts and the enforcement arms of regulatory agencies, but solely on the Wall Street-first goal of deficit reduction. Dukakis ran as a homophobe who favored a bigger annual increase in the war budget than Reagan, Bush or the Pentagon really wanted.

And none of them did a damn thing to help Jesse Jackson's efforts to get new voters registered.

Again, I don't have to reject the idea that any non-ideological factors played a role to defend the argument that rigid centrism was the predominant cause. It isn't "either/or".

[wyldwolf]

265. they were repeatedly, and you had no supportive documented facts

[Ken Burch]

268. No, they were not. No one offered any evidence discrediting my argument at all.

Saying "you're wrong" or "you weren't there&quot actually, I was) isn't an argument.

And my OP was full of facts(the platform positions and the tactics used).

Polling doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, polling doesn't always tell us much of anything.

Polls are just statistical guesses much of the time, and are frequently manipulated to tell the story those who commissioned them want told.

[wyldwolf]

269. I didn't say you weren't there.

I've said repeatedly you have no evidence. No supportive documentation. You've drawn conclusions based on your opinions and presented them as facts.

[Cryptoad]

44. WE were busy purging bigots from the Party in the 80's

They all found safe harbor in the GOP ,,,,,,,I was there.

[Ken Burch]

48. It's not like we should have continued tolerating the bigots.

Last edited Sat May 17, 2014, 11:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Those bigots didn't agree with us on anything by then anyway. And no one we could possibly have nominated would have appeased them.

There were also people(including Gerry Freaking Ferraro)who blamed the party's troubles on our platform's endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment-Ferraro tried to remove the endorsement when she chaired the platform committee that year-even though there were no national Democratic figures who could possibly have run for president who opposed it by then(I don't think any Senate Dems opposed ERA by then at all).

People who wanted the women, gays and the Rainbow kept "in their place" in the Eighties weren't GOING to vote for us ever again by that point. Few of them had since maybe 1960.

[Lasher]

158. After signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, LBJ said Democrats had lost the South for a generation.

And yet he signed it. This was the finest hour for the Democratic party.

It is very good of you to have engaged all comers in informed and fair debate throughout your issue-based thread. It is a perfect representation of what I come to DU for. I can only recommend it once, so I will throw this in:

[obxhead]

45. The Democratic Presidential wins in the 90's an 00's were won by

men who advertised liberalism and brought centrism worst than what was advertised by those losers in the 80's.

Liberal politicians can win on a national level, they just refuse to BE liberal when elected.

[Armstead]

89. Bingo

Clinton won by saying things like "I'll fought for you until the last dog dies."

Unfortunately the last dog died the day after he got elected, and he sold us out to Monopoly Capitalism after that.

[Zen Democrat]

56. Reagan won because the corporate media waltzed him into office. And kept him there.

I don't agree with your assessments of these campaigns. It wasn't the people following Reagan on their own, it was blatantly a media sell-job and I was shocked by it at the time. Jimmy Carter is a great man and he was POTUS ahead of his time. That's how he'll be remembered. Reagan's reputation is receding and the Bush family is in the toilet. Mondale was a liberal. Dukakis was a liberal. Bill Clinton was the proud centrist leader of the DLC.

[Ken Burch]

57. It was a media sell-job, but nobody's "liberalism" had anything to do with it.

By DLC logic, Carter should have been able to beat Reagan solidly(and yes, I admire Carter myself, particularly for his post-presidential work)simply because he had made it clear that he wasn't liberal. It wasn't fair to expect the progressive wing of the party to sit by and do nothing while Carter's presidency left theme totally out in the cold and drove the party's popularity down by continuing Republican economic and military policies.

The whole rationale for the DLC's takeover of the party and their insistence that the party abandon almost everything it stood for was and is based on dishonesty. The voters didn't reject "liberalism", they rejected milquetoast candidates who didn't stand up and fight for the best of what we stand for as a party and a country. It was only the corporate elite that actually wanted the Democrats to reduce themselves to Clinton's Eisenhower Republicanism-with-shades policies.

[Overseas]

110. The same corporate media kept 1-inch headlines counting days the hostages remained in captivity,

thus making the treasonous negotiating to delay their release even more effective.

Giving those bamboozled by the Morning in America talk another reason to vote against the gloomy guy who wanted the US to reduce our oil consumption and reconsider our reckless materialism.

[Ken Burch]

263. That was only made possible because Carter had caused the embassy takeover

by backing the Shah to the bitter end and then giving that corrupt, murderous scumbag sanctuary after the Iranian people united to overthrow him.

There was no more reason to protect the Shah than there would have been to let Mussolini move to Bensonhurst.

[Overseas]

270. And some of those moves were what gave some Dems reasons to defect to the rosy rhetoric

of the Reagan campaign. Little did they realize how much worse things could get.

[Ken Burch]

272. True....the problem was, our party wasn't giving those voters any reason to think

that we were on their side...that we would fight to save their jobs, keep their hometowns from turning into economic dead zones, or do much of anything prevent them from losing ground in their standard of living. Our leaders put Wall Street first. And we've been thirty years recovering from that mistake.

[emsimon33]

59. This is a MUST READ!!!!!

[Ken Burch]

60. Thanks for the support. Have a nice weekend. n/t.

[whistler162]

68. You wrote nothing so i can agree with that.

If you mean the poor analysis of history by the OP... NAH just let it sink.

[pnwmom]

62. And the most liberal in decades, George McGovern, lost 49 states. n/t

[Ken Burch]

63. The Nixon dirty tricks squad would have made sure ANY Dem went down in flames that year.

They destroyed the supposedly invincible Ed Muskie very early on, and they'd have done the same to Hubert Humphrey or Scoop Jackson. McGovern's stands on the issues(which weren't actually that different than Muskie's)had nothing to do with that.

No polls taken the entire year showed any non-progressive Dems running strongly against Nixon.

[McCamy Taylor]

128. CREEP hand selected McGovern because he would be the easiest to beat.

It was a set up. McGovern was a "values" candidate--and all you have to do to take out a "values" candidate is tarnish him. They knew that. "Abortion, Acid and Amnesty". Ring any bells? If it doesn't, you need to go back to the books. They made poor old war hero McGovern out to be the bastard son of Chairman Mao.

Dems, hug the center. Own the center. Make the Tea Baggers walk that far right wing road which they have built. Don't give up an inch of the center. That is the sure road to victory in 2016.

[Ken Burch]

130. Hugging the center means not being different than the right once you're in office.

The way to get "swing voters" is to look like a leader...not to treat labor, the poor and activists like pariahs.

And I'm very well aware of the "acid, amnesty and abortion" slur. Do you know who actually said it?

Thomas Freaking Eagleton.

But what were we supposed to do that year?

We couldn't run as an anti-choice party anymore...that would have made it impossible for us to get any women to back us at all(anti-abortion zealots were all right-wing crazies by then). And how could we have been different than the 'pugs if we'd said we'd go on prosecuting draft resisters?

McGovern was the candidate of young America. We'd have done even worse in '72 if we'd gone with a "fuck the Sixties-we'll stay in Vietnam forever" candidate. We'd havehad no chance in a race like that, because the outcome wouldn't have mattered (especially if Scoop Jackson, who was to Nixon's right on some issues, had been imposed as the nominee). "Bomb Hanoi/Taiwan is 'Free China/Build The SST" was not going to be a winning slogan for Dems.

Ed Muskie, btw, was well to the left of most of today's Dems, He wasn't centrist at all, and McGovern people would gladly have backed him if he hadn't been smeared out of the race.

[PATRICK]

64. Back to when the "modern" trend started...

FDR had made a grand coalition he wanted even more cemented on progressive planks before he died... probably because he could well see the alternative- the Southern retaking of the party and the unresolved power of the plutocrats also willing drag back the country.

THEY put Truman in, a placeholder who could give way to the balancing arms of the lustful GOP if they couldn't find a substitute in all the swollen ranks of FDR era pols. But Truman went hardcore progressive and FDR even if not as far as FDR actually might have wished(and FDR, God knows, was not a wild eyed progressive either). But by talking that talk- and with undisuted passion, he swung the centrist mechanics of defeat away from the PLANNED result. The GOP cooperated by doing a Dukakis of their own, Dewey- who would be burned(and not just in effigy) in a modern GOP primary. So as a contrast that supports the post's point of view, the GOP also lost when it went weak centrist.

The main thing is what kind of politics refuses to appeal to the public for a 'try not to lose" approach and sneak by? That leaves the other guy to lazily do the same AND take the gutsy approach as a mere default bonus- even if devoid of substance.

All the GOP has is passion- for power, our money, for making misery. Would that the centrist leadership be as incompetent as when it put Truman in against the wishes of FDR. But then incompetence is the real rule of thumb for both parties lately and senseless misery is measured out by monsters and moderates alike. The grass roots support structures beneath them have a boiling life of their own which has nothing to do with the corporately blessed who are permitted to the top of the ballot. Thus apathy and powerless cynicism has a more recognized place in the calculations of the current balance.

And there is no actual leadership at all except in the courts of money distracted themselves from the natural world and mankind. And in a country of hundreds of millions damned little competition to make politics relate to real people and real life.

[Progressive dog]

65. A non-centrist Democrat (or Republican) has never won the presidency.

The center is where the voters are.

[Douglas Carpenter]

66. Anyone who thinks Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush were centrist is living in cloud cuckoo land

As Ken documented in this report Carter, Mondale and Dukakis all ran centrist campaigns and lost miserably. The last great Democratic landslide was in 1964 with LBJ running as running as an unabashed progressive.

The reality is what is called centrist today would have been called right-wing extremist only a few decades ago. Just how far to the right must we drive the country? Do we continue down this path of national self-destruction or do we take the stands necessary to save our country?

[Progressive dog]

69. The reality is that only centrists (or candidates able to

sell themselves as centrists) can win the Presidency. That is where the votes are.
Barry Goldwater was a RW extremist, that is why LBJ beat him in a landslide.

[Cryptoad]

70. Who ever is perceived as the mostist centralist

always win the Presidency,,,,always have,,, always will..... may not like it ,,, but that is the way the game is played!

[Ken Burch]

105. Reagan wasn't perceived as "more centrist" than Carter or Mondale.

Bush the First was never perceived as "more centrist" than Dukakis.

[Cryptoad]

117. He sure was in enough states for him to win......

Carter was thought of as a flaming Liberal Communist when he ran against Reagan.

[Scuba]

76. Wrong. The votes are on the left, but staying home as they have no candidate representing them.

[Progressive dog]

169. If they stay home they don't count,

and anyway, polls tell a different story.

[Scuba]

170. If we give them no reasons to go vote, we don't count.

[Progressive dog]

172. No, I vote, I count

which is the way the system is supposed to work. I even get to vote on many of my party's candidates.

[Ken Burch]

227. You can't expect people to vote in years where no candidate cares about their issues

BEFORE they get to have candidates who do. Nobody owes anybody a lesser-evil vote, ever. And things haven't gone well for this party when we nominated candidates who didn't care about expanding the electorate.

We ONLY won in 1960, for example, because the Kennedys were brilliant about getting people who hadn't voted to start voting. JFK took ten million more votes than Stevenson had pulled in 1956, yet still just scraped through with a plurality of 100,000.

If JFK had taken your view, he'd have lost by 3 million or more, in all liklihood, since there were no significant swings of support from 1956 IKE voters to our column in 1960.

(And we lost in 1968 by 200,000 votes or so because the party, under Johnson's iron-fisted domination, decided to do all it could to drive potential new voters away by crushing their dreams in Chicago. We lost even though Nixon got 4 million votes LESS than he'd pulled in 1960. That's what happens when you decide that new voters don't matter).

[Progressive dog]

233. That's how to win elections, refuse to

vote for people who mostly agree with you and let the guy you mostly disagree with win. JFK won the Democratic party endorsement. Almost all votes are lesser evil or greater good votes. No one agrees with you 100%.

[Ken Burch]

237. We don't have to nominate people who are further away from us

Than Republican candidates are from actual Republican voters. The country isn't that far to our right(if it is to our right at all).

It's time to get out of this "we're a permanent minority/we can only win by blurring the differences" approach.

Obama's campaign got that...his presidency didn't. That's why he had a big fight on his hands running for re-election against a candidate we SHOULD have been able to beat by ten million votes or more.

[Progressive dog]

252. Obama was nominted and in 2008

Hillary Clinton was the runner up. If you believe they are Republicans, you are really outnumbered in the Democratic party. Apparently Obama (I think his approval among Democrats is above 80% and the last I knew those minority Democrats outnumber Republicans) is not thought of as a Republican by the vast majority of Democrats.

[Ken Burch]

256. I didn't say I believe Obama was a Republican.

Or that Democrats are completely indistinguishable from Republicans.

[Progressive dog]

257. " Jimmy Carter ran for re-election on an essentially moderate Republican record.."

That is an interesting way to begin your OP when you don't believe that Centrist is the same as Republican.

[Ken Burch]

261. And I was talking there about Carter, not Obama.

I doubt you'd find much of any active Democrats out there who think Carter's economic and foreign policy choices, especially after 1978, were either Democratic in any sense or pragmatically effective on any level.

It was Republican to defend the Shah to the bitter end(it's just what Kissinger would have done) and it was Republican to put fighting inflation before fighting unemployment.

[Progressive dog]

266. Okay so Carter was a Republican because he supported the Shah

just like Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford before him. Since the Shah was originally placed in power by the Allies during WWII, we could even blame FDR and Truman for supporting him.
I don't remember Carter sending in American troops to keep the Shah in power, but if you do, you could send me a link.

[Ken Burch]

267. He didn't send in troops, but he did give his verbal and diplomatic support to him til the end.

He never called for Pahlevi to do the right thing and resign, and he never condemned the shah for any of the repressive tactics the bastard used to stay in power. Those tactics were why the Iranian people hated Pahlevi, and they were why our embassy was seized(that, and we wouldn't even promise not to try to put the old thug back into power).

[Progressive dog]

295. Pahlevi was in power long before Carter

and no American President acted to remove him.

[Ken Burch]

298. I know that. But the Iranian people were trying to remove him and Carter wanted him to stay on.

Except for the 5,000 people on the royal payroll, everyone in Iran hated all of us for that.

[JI7]

192. so Kucinich was not on the Left ? did Elizabeth warren get much higher voters than Obama, or is she

not left enough ?

was feingold not left enough ?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

290. I worked on the Kucinich campaign in Minnesota

We had to BEG for press coverage, despite the fact that he drew increasingly larger crowds on each of his four visits.

But we had a really strong guerrilla campaign here in Minnesota--leaflets and tables at public events, freeway bloggin, involvement of ethnic communities, supporters from leftist groups and the state legislature--, where he got 17% of the caucus vote.

It was only the guerrilla campaigns, not the perceived liberalism of any particular locale, that won DK more than a few votes.

In such leftist bastions as Madison Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon, he got 3%. In states with guerrilla campaigns--Maine, New Mexico, Utah (Utah!), Hawaii, Washington, he got more than his usual 3%.

I'll tell you how the mainstream press covered DK. Mostly they didn't, except to ridicule him. At the presidential debates, they gave him the least speaking time of anyone.

Could he have won? Maybe not, but I would have found that easier to accept his failure if he had gotten the same kind of press coverage as the other candidates, including Gephardt and Lieberman.

Case in point: On the day that DK spoke to 1600 supporters in a Minneapolis high school auditorium (having spoken to 800 on his previous trip), we notified all the TV stations. They all sent. When I checked the nighttime newscasts, I found that exactly ONE station had a 30-second blip about the rally. The other stations all led and went on in tedious detail about a rural county sheriff who was having an affair with a deputy's wife. The local paper did not mention the rally, but they did mention that Edwards spoke to 25 supporters (big money types) that same day.

To add insult to injury, at the Democratic National Convention that year, they had DK speak just before the TV coverage started.

This country used to assassinate people who had the potential to rock the boat. Now they just ignore and ridicule them.

The right-wingers already call Elizabeth Warren "Fauxcahontas." I think she's smart to sit out this presidential race and gain more experience and name recognition.

[Armstead]

90. I would replace "centrist" with moderate

There's a big difference between the phony term of "centrist" which really is code for "supporting the entrenched power of corporations and the wealthy" and "moderate" which -- in terms of liberal/progressive politics -- simply means taking a more gradual approach to the goal of true economic justice are the basis of the left.

The difference is profound when you add up the direction they take the country.

People support someone whose persona and the way their deliver their message is reassuring rather than scary or seems to be too drastc change too quickly. BUT that does not mean they want to surrender the economy to a handful of Corporate Monopolies and Wealthy Oligarchs.

[Progressive dog]

173. Centrist simply means to be in the

middle of the political spectrum. The claim of the OP that Carter, Dukakis, and Mondale lost because they were centrists is garbage.

[Armstead]

174. Technically yes -- in modern reality no

There is a difference in the way "centrist" is used today in democratic politics.

A moderate (whether conservative or liberal) simply means someone who agrees and is moving in the same direction as the people who are considered further left (or right). There is a basic consistency or principles and goals. The only difference is a matter of interpretation of the most appropriate degree and speed of achieving those goals.

A centrist, on the otehr hand, today has become code for someone who actively pushes for pro-corporate policies that may be contradictory to the goals of liberals and progressives. Clinton's deregulation of the financial industry, for example, was 180 degrees removed from the liberal idea that such institutions should be subject to regulation.

[Progressive dog]

175. The Merriam Webster still has missed

the supposed change in the meaning of centrist. It has always referred to political views since it's first known use nearly 150 years ago.

[Armstead]

179. Okay if you want to play word games....

Conservative Pro-Corporate Democrats.

That is what many people are referring to as a synonym for the modern use of the word "centrist."

[Progressive dog]

180. Word games are when what the OP believes to be centrist

is described in the OP, and you redefine it to defend the OP. No matter which way you choose to define it, the OP doesn't make a case.

This is an easy find from "The Nation" blogs

Obama's A Centrist, Clinton's A Neo-Con, But All Are Nixonians

Posted by Donald Earl Collins on January 7, 2013 at 10:49am

The fact is, Obama is a centrist president, beholden to the military-industrial complex, prison-industrial complex, Wall Street and corporate interests, just like Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 before him. That Obama is Black and intellectual in his approach matters little in terms of actual policies or in the path that he and his administration have taken toward incremental policies and half-baked compromises.

[link:nationbuilders.thenation.com/profiles/blogs/obama-s-a-centrist-clinton-s-a-neo-con-but-all-are-nixonians|]

[Armstead]

181. Now you have me totaly confused,,,

Why are you posting that blog item? It just seems to bolster my point.

In the OP, he made a detailed and fairly accurate summary of what he was referring to, and I agree wit his basic premise.

I might differ from him somewhat, in that I believe that the campaigns of Carter, Mondale and Dukakis may have been doomed from the start because of economic conditions and perceptions, the momentum of conservative ideas and the personal flaws of them as candidates.

But I agree that they would probably have done better if they had run (and been sincere about) supporting basic liberal goals and values instead of centrist technocratic mush....At the very least, it would have helped liberalism to remain a basic guiding principle of the Democratic Party as a true alternative to the CONservative line of crap peddled by the GOP.

[Progressive dog]

182. The point is easy, the OP claims Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis lost

because they were centrist. You defend the OP. The guy I quoted says every President from Nixon through Bush was Centrist.

[Armstead]

185. The OP ws making a more nuaned argument rather than your one phrase summary

The point of the OP was that in all the cases mentioned, the candidates ran on corporate friendly mush and did not offer a compelling alternative to corporate conservatism.

And I would agree that all of those presidents were centrist. But Clinton and Obama were perceived as liberal and populist when they were candidates. Obama benefited not because he won over conservatives, but because he was able to win over moderates and who were liberal or leaned liberal. Clinton was also perceived as a liberal populist. They both won reelection because they did okay in office, and attracted the support of scared liberals who wanted anything but the GOP.

They also benefited from a combination of other circumstances -- including circumstances with the last names of Bush. And circumstances that also included dorks with the last names of McCain, Romney and Dole.

(Reagan and Nixon were centrists compared to today's batshit crazy conservatives.)

[Progressive dog]

191. Actually the OP was reaching an admittedly wrong conclusion.

So I'll give him credit for nuance, if you like. The fact is that his argument led him to an easily dis-proven conclusion, with a true or false answer, and he got it wrong.

[Armstead]

196. obviously you are welcome to disagree with his premise

just as I was initially disagreeing with yours.

If you had initially said moderate, I might have almost agreed with you. But the term centrist (as currently used) generally means something different than liberal or progressive, at least in issues if money and power.

In my opinion, being a moderate liberal -- and governing that way -- is a very electable alternative to GOP CONservatism, if the candidate has the required talents as a campaigner.

Centrism as defined by corporate conservatism, not so much. Conservatives already have a political party.

[Progressive dog]

197. When use changes, dictionaries change

and centrist still means in the center. The whole point of a dictionary is to define how words are used. Dictionary.com missed your definition, too.

[Armstead]

198. you're back to word games

i'm pretty sure you pay close enough attention to DU and other political circles to know exactly what I am referring to in this context, and the way that centrist is often used in discussions on this basic topic, regardless of the dictionary.

[Progressive dog]

199. Word games would be when someone will not acknowledge

that he cannot have personal word definitions. If you use a word incorrectly, then you should stop and choose a word with the correct meaning.

[Armstead]

203. It is not personal word definition...It is commonly used.

Sometimes I use the word "cool" when I am not referring to the temperature.

And before you say "but cool is in the dictionary as accepted definition" I will reply that I don't care, because a lot of words get used in ways that diverge from what is written in the dictionary.

It's no different than the way the term "radical left" gets tossed around to refer to policies that many would describe as moderate. Or the way many other terms are used that are subject to different interpretations of meaning or degree.

You know damn well what I originally meant and you are knitpicking.

[Progressive dog]

208. Word definitions are in the dictionary

New definitions are added every year but your personal definition is not there. We have used dictionaries for a long time so that we all could work from the same definition. Centrist doesn't get a different meaning because you want one.

[Armstead]

209. Whatever

[Ken Burch]

226. It's not an "admittedly wrong conclusion". I didn't admit anything of the kind.

Don't put words in my mouth, especially when you know they wouldn't say them.

And no, centrism does NOT describe either LBJ or FDR's landslide years...they were both running on programs well to the left of the programs they each supported only four years earlier(there is no way the LBJ of 1960 would have pushed for anything remotely like a War on Poverty OR the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there is no way that FDR would have denounced economic royalists in 1932. Yes, FDR did have a balance budget pledge in his 1936 campaign, but it had nothing to do with anyone's support for him, and the losses the party suffered in the 1938 congressional elections were largely caused by the recession brought on by FDR's post-election budget cuts. If he'd just kept on spending, we'd have swept the board again in '38).

[Progressive dog]

229. Words are normally intended to communicate

with others who speak the same language. Dictionaries are used as the arbiter of word meanings. The meanings are derived from actual usage.
FDR didn't get support from the socialist or communist parties in 1933. He was running against the guy who invented the depression. LBJ was running against the RW nut who wanted to use nukes in Vietnam. They lost, because they were farther from the center than their opponent. In FDR's case, he won, even though much of the left did not vote for him.

[Ken Burch]

234. LBJ won by realizing the country had moved left in 1964

and by moving with it(it's not centrism to move WITH the people...it's just democracy). Johnson then destroyed his popularity and our chances in 1966 and 1968 by spending late 1965 doing what nobody wanted him to do...beginning to cut the Great Society programs and escalating in Vietnam. He then made sure we lost in 1968 by refusing to let the party break with him in Chicago.

If LBJ had run the same campaign in 1964 he ran in 1960(it was 1960 where Johnson truly ran as a centrist if not an outright conservative)he might have lost to Goldwater, because the black freedom movement(what white folks call the Civil Rights movement)might not have seen any reason to care about who won, since a "centrist" campaign in 1964 would still have meant taking a "don't go there" position on ending Jim Crow. Millions would have stayed away from the polls in indifference, knowing that the major parties didn't care about them.

And no, FDR didn't get support from parties to his left in 1932(at that point, the Socialist and Communist parties didn't support EACH OTHER...thanks to Stalin's then-line that non-Communist Left parties were "social fascists&quot but, in 1936, after spending the previous four years moving further and further left on his actual policies, and GAINING SEATS from the GOP in the 1934 midterms on an increasingly leftward program)something like 75% of those who'd voted for Norman Thomas on the Socialist ticket in 1932 voted for FDR...Thomas' vote fell from over 800,000 to a little over 100,000). FDR had built Democratic strength by moving left.

The balanced-budget pledge in his '36 platform was vestigial. The voter never actually expected he'd make a priority of it starting in 1937 and the 1938 results proved that they hadn't wanted him to.

In both 1936, the president followed the people and prospered politically by doing so. They were responsive. And the country they governed changed between their previous campaigns and the ones we are discussing. None of that is centrism at all...what that is is successful activism and persuasion changing people's minds. I don't understand why you are so invested in denying that such a thing can happen.

BTW, why do you call yourself "Progressive Dog" on this board and then devote yourself(at least here)to denying that progressives EVER succeed in moving the country to the Left? I truly don't get that about you.

[Progressive dog]

253. Right for once, the country moved left,

which also moves the center to the left.
Vestigial, of course Roosevelt's pledge was vestigial, that could be why he didn't actually try to balance the budget, it couldn't be why he tried and sunk the economy again. Of course, the double dip recession wasn't why the results in '38 were bad for Democrats. LOL
To answer your BTW I have never denied that the country has moved and continues to move in a generally progressive and liberal direction. I object to the supposed Democrats who spend their time explaining why the Democratic president is no different than a Republican. A Democratic President with 81% approval amongst Democrats.

[Ken Burch]

102. Tell that to FDR in 1936, or LBJ in 1964, or Obama in 2008

None of THOSE campaigns were "centrist".

[Lasher]

159. All Obama had to do in 2008 was beat Hillary in the pirmary.

After the catastrophe of the worst President in living memory, no Republican was going to win in the general election that year. Candidate Obama did come across as a liberal to win the primary, but then he started moving to the right as soon as he'd clinched the nomination. He didn't have to do that to win in the general election though.

[Progressive dog]

168. They were all centrists and they ran on a centrist platform.

The peak of the curve is in the center, running where there are fewer votes is not a winning strategy.

[Ken Burch]

219. FDR was NO centrist in 1936

LBJ was no centrist in 1964. It was never centrist to give speeches denouncing "the malefactors of great wealth" and promising to rein them in(as FDR did in 1936) and it was never centrist to call for War on Poverty OR to a pledge to pass a Voting Rights Act to end things like the Poll Tax in the South(LBJ also ran on a "we seek no wider war"position on Vietnam, which meant he had NO mandate to escalate in 1965).

The notion that those were centrist campaigns is a DLC myth.

And the way to win voters who describe themselves as "centrist" is not to distance yourself from progressive ideas, but to make the case that those ideas aren't just "feel good" things but real, practical, achievable solutions to day-to-day problems-to go beyond Mario Cuomo's "we campaign in poetry and govern in prose" axiom to demonstrate that the poetry IS the plan.

[Progressive dog]

223. Yes, they were centrist, by the dictionary definition,

rather than the new speak definition. FDR ran on balancing the budget in 1936 and he arrested no malefactors of great wealth. economy.
Any Democrat could have beat Goldwater in 1964. This was the Goldwater who wanted to use nukes to defoliate the demilitarized zone, but he supported integration of schools and voting rights.

[Rex]

178. Al Gore won in 2000.

Sadly nobody seems to remember.

[whistler162]

67. No they weren't!

Carter bad timing and bad choices when the stuff hit the fan

Mondale and Dukakis where both week candidates.

[muriel_volestrangler]

71. Has there been a successful Democratic candidate since FDR whom you would not call centrist?

For that matter, what would you call FDR?

[wyldwolf]

84. we can debate FDR all day, but the fact remains progressive of the day hated him, too.

I think had he been living during that time, the OP would have called FDR a 1% centrist.

[Ken Burch]

103. Not the FDR who denounced "economic royalists" and "malefactors of great wealth"

he was no centrist then.

[wyldwolf]

134. You're defending THIS guy?

The FDR who interned Japanese-American citizens? The one who cut deals with white segregationists, promising not to pursue civil rights policies if they backed his New Deal. The once who was afraid if he helped pass anti-lynching laws he'd lose re-election.

The one who's New Deal pretty much ignored African Americans (The social security act didn't cover domestic or agriculture workers - the bulk of which were filled by African Americans.)

The one who forcefully deported several hundred thousand Mexican Americans, both immigrants and citizens, living in the Southwest.

[Ken Burch]

139. You can defend the progressive parts of FDR without defending those things.

It isn't all or nothing.

The point is that FDR was well to the left, overall, of any previous Democratic or Republican candidate. He was not elected because most voters expected him to be just barely different than Hoover, and he was massively to the left of Alf Landon in '36, the year of his biggest win.

[wyldwolf]

141. Just as you can with all the Democrats you regularly trash on DU

[Ken Burch]

148. I don't trash anyone. I just speak out on the issues.

And we know more about people link Bill and HRC and other figures than wedid about what, say, FDR was doing at the time he was doing it(the deportation of those Mexicans wasn't common knowledge at the time, for example, and there wasn't much to do about the devil's bargain with the segregationists). Had I lived in FDR's time, I'd have done all I could to oppose the bad things he did(incuding his tragic decision to cutHenry Wallace loose in 1944) whilestill campaigning for his re-election.

But as time passes, the standards need to be raised. There was no excuse for a Democratic candidate, in the last decade of the twentieth century, to run AGAINST social spending, to denounce the poor as morally inferior, or to force through a right-wing trade deal that two-thirds of the people opposed in every poll of the decade.

There was no excuse for a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, in the first decade of THIS century, to be a proud supporter of the Iraq War, to be willing to openly consider a military strike on Iran that would achieve nothing and kill thousands of innocent people, or to continue to back trade deals that exist solely for the good of the .001%.

(and yes, a lot can be said about the person who beat that candidate for the nomination, and if you've read my posts I've said a
fair amount).

None of this is trashing on a personal level-It's about the issues of theday and the future of this party and the country. I don't think HRC is evil...just wrong on a lot of things. More than anything, I'm convinced that her militarism and her pro-corporate stand on economics will make it impossible for her to be a progressive, inclusive president. And I believe nominating HRC means we'd never pick anyone in the future who wasn't her exact clone on the issues. Is it wrong to NOT want this party to be a political and intellectual dead zone? Is it wrong to want discussion and principles to still go on here?

To me, going back to the Nineties means the death of all hope.

[wyldwolf]

154. You trashed three presidential nominees with your bogus OP

[Ken Burch]

217. I didn't trash them. In fact I voted for ALL of them(did you?)

I wanted them all to win. For what it's worth, even with their limitations, I still think things would have slightly better if they had.

What I critiqued was the campaigns run on their behalf...all of which were essentially anti-liberal and anti-voter mobiliization, and all of which led to progressives, labor, and the poor(especially the black poor-it was in those years that poverty was equated solely with blackness in the white public mind, even though the majority of poor people had always been, was at that time and is to this day white)being blamed for electoral failings they bore no responsibility for at all, and then being demonized, silenced and put into what essentially became an abusive relationship with the DLC-led Democratic Party in the 1990's...a decade in which those groups were treated virtually no differently, when they weren't being treated worse, by a supposedly "Democratic" president than they would have been if Bush the First had won a second term(or Reagan a third and fourth, as he likely would have if the term limits amendment had been repealed)

Workers, the poor, and those who struggle for peace and social justice NEVER deserved the vilification that the DLC gave them...they weren't to blame for the failures of the Eighties at all. And there were no polls taken IN the Eighties(you'd have posted them if there had been)that showed that the party would have done better against Reagan OR Bush if we'd nominated a reactionary like Sam Nunn or Fritz Hollings had been nominated.

And if they HAD won...it wouldn't have mattered, because nothing distinguishable from Reaganism would ever have happened under a Nunn, Hollings, Glenn, or Askew administration. What's the point of electing a Democrat that you can't TELL is a Democrat based on what he actually does in office?

[wyldwolf]

221. Of course you trashed them - unless you now believe being a centrist is a good thing

[Ken Burch]

225. I believe running a good campaign is a good thing.

If Mondale had actually run a "Revive the Rust Belt/Peace and Justice/Leave Central America alone and fight Apartheid" campaign(the kind Robert "deficit reduction is ALL that matters" Rubin wouldn't let him run)he'd have, at the least, swept the Northeast and the Upper Midwest(Ohio would have been a "gimme" putt), carried Washington and Oregon, and maybe even been competitive in California. It might not have elected him, but it would have started the party off with close to 200 electoral votes we could count on for 1988.

And if Dukakis has given his "yes, I AM a Liberal" speech over and over again, while fighting back hard against the smears, rather than always ignoring the smears and never giving that speech more than once, he'd have kicked Bush's ass in 1988.

I'd have rather seen them win than lose. But we both know the kind of campaigns they ran were doomed to beat them from the start, and that liberalism had nothing to do with either campaign. And it is clear that the progressive wing of the party NEVER deserved to be punished for the failures of those campaigns, since progressives were pointing out the fatal flaws at the time and were always disregarded.

I liked both Mondale and Dukakis as people. I wished them well then and do so now. But the interpretation of their defeats that was used to keep progressives totally out in the cold in this party all through the Nineties is not only wrong, it's based on lies. And I can't let those lies go unanswered, so I provided the evidence that refutes them.

[wyldwolf]

232. so do I. Clinton ran a good campaign twice - on centrist policies.

You're having issues sticking to your original premise.

[Ken Burch]

235. He ran a good campaign and won on personal appeal.

His repudiation of liberalism had nothing to do with it, and Clinton didn't get votes from people who hated liberalism and the Sixties in either campaign.

Clinton would have pulled the same vote, and likely higher, running on a Jim Hightower-type program.

[wyldwolf]

236. if Carter, Mondale and Dukakis had had that animal magnetism, they would have won?

Despite their policies?

[Ken Burch]

240. Actually, yes.

This isn't a massively right-wing country. People will vote for progressive candidates when they combine both personal appeal and an ability to communicate their programs as practical solutions.

To get centrist voters, you don't HAVE to say "don't worry, I hate workers and the poor and protesters as much as you do". You get them by saying "yes, this will be change...and here's why we NEED change, and here's why it will work and be good for you".

Those who identify as "centrists" are actually driven mainly by pragmatism...they don't hate dreams, they just want to know how you can make the dreams into reality and how making them reality makes things better rather than worse.

Centrists aren't left-hating zealots...they just want to see the plan.

And voters don't like it when we send the message "If elected, I'll be as ugly-spirited as I think you are".

On poverty, for example, most centrist voters(as opposed to right-wing types)aren't lying awake nights cursing the poor for being "immoral and irresponsible". They know poverty is a problem and a blight on this nation, but they don't think what we've done in the past has helped(and, while it has helped some, it hasn't helped as much as it should have...a point people like Tom Hayden and others on the New Left were making as the War on Poverty programs were being implemented back in 1965).

You get them to commit to a new battle against poverty by linking it not to punishing poor people for acting in ways that anyone who lived without hope probably would act, but by creating real possibilities of breaking the cycle of poverty...not by saying "we're taking your benefits away, slut...go work at McDonald's"-an approach we all now know to be pointless since many people who work at fast-food franchises earn so little they are still eligible for social benefits)but by giving people in depressed areas practical training in rebuilding their hometowns and neighborhoods and then creating actual programs to let them do that...this would also be reparations for red-lining, since it was red-lining that caused urban poverty, and reparation to Appalachia for just deciding that the whole area should be left to die, and reparations to Native America for stealing the continent from them-maybe you wouldn't use those words, but that would be the concept.) And you seize derelict buildings wealthy landlords have deliberately kept derelict under "eminent domain" so that the people who live in those neighborhoods can go on living with them...so the areas can be revitalized without the current residents being forced to leave the only homes they've known.

The point is to use the language of practicality on all of this...not to stoop to what party strategists think is the LCD. It's a language male voters(and yes, white male voters)respond to.

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

[wyldwolf]

243. so you admit your OP is wrong. According to you...

... candidates win or lose on appeal, not policy.

[Ken Burch]

244. No, I don't

I simply acknowledged that appeal also plays a role.

And, in the Eighties, there were no possible nominees to the right of those we had who were demonstrating any particular national appeal.

It isn't "either/or".

[wyldwolf]

245. OH - the 80s were just different. LOL

[mvd]

144. True

Remember a lot of the progress in America didn't come all at once. The times limited that but FDR took big steps. You can also say Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson had their faults, but Lincoln, Roosevelt and Johnson were big steps forward.

It's the business influence in our party that have perpetuated the myth that progressives can't win, and in many cases have actually made it harder for them to break through.

[xchrom]

72. du rec.

[nyabingi]

73. I think the problem with the Democratic Party

of the 80's and 90's was it's persistent belief that they could "win back" whites who had fled the party for the Republicans. People, even today, don't want to acknowledge the factor of race in our politics in America and how it is THE major factor in deciding political affiliations today (and has always been). Yes, there were weak candidates during these decades, but the one major thing they had in common is that they all sought to regain the voters who chose Reagan during the eighties and that was never going to work, no matter how far to the right they shifted. Why?

Appeals to racism have always worked for the conservative party in the US, to such an extent that it was the major factor in the two major parties shifting their political ideologies. If every Black person abandoned the Democratic Party this year and became Republicans, I can guarantee you all the white conservatives would become Democrats again the day after. Democratic pandering to conservative white voters has done nothing but cause Democratic presidents to sign bad Republican ideas into law (NAFTA, "workfare", the Affordable Care Act) and keep this country much more right-wing than I think the majority of the population is.

Weak candidates and bad campaigns aside, most Republicans are going to stay Republicans as long as the majority of Black people vote Democratic and Democrats would serve themselves well by acknowledging this and structuring their future appeals to constituents they can actually count on...

[treestar]

80. Demographics indicate we don't need those whites back

And younger whites are much less likely to respond to appeals to racism.

[nyabingi]

114. That's especially true now and I think

with Obama's candidacy, a lot of the Democratic "establishment" (particularly those who were were trying to push the Democrats further right like the DLC) has started to understand that reality.

[maindawg]

74. I remember when

This country made a hard right, a nose dive into selfish exceptionalism. The decision of 1979 capped a decade of soul searching by America. We had fought so many wars, so many issues had come to the fore that we had grown up as a nation. We had loved and lost, we had watched so many die for what we did not know. We had all been educated by a very good public school system or some Catholic school and we all were very familiar with the mass media. We were not innocent.
Reagon gave us a choice, abandon the slow painful process that we have been shamed into by so much violence and theft, or simply embrace the consumer culture and cease caring about such trivial things as slave labor, pollution, the middle class, and paying our bills.

Reagon introduced a new alternative. Charge it. He spent our childrens money like a drunken sailor so that we could forget our responsibilities and party like crazy while the corporations laid the groundwork to become our masters. The Billionaire was invented through the process of extraction and our debt ballooned to 10 trillion dollars while no one was watching.
We still dont know where that money went. But if you dont see the crime of the millenium at work on the 80's then you cant see.

Bill Clinton won, thanks to crazy Ross Pero , both times. But I feel that Bob Dole , as stiff and conservative as he is, was a basically good man, who would have done a decent job. Bill did a decent job , he stopped the rabid theft of our treasury. He did not start a war, the economy was very good.

[Scuba]

78. Acting like a Republican is not going to peel off votes of the mythical moderate Republican ....

... the votes that can carry our party to victory are on the left, and largely staying home when they have no candidate representing their interests.

We will never win though centrism. If we want to win, we need to represent the people, and it's the policies of the left, and far left, that do that.

[wyldwolf]

79. silly argument regurgitated over and over and over and over and...

... but still doesn't make it true. There's a huge temptation in posts like yours to re-write history from a 'progressive' viewpoint - which is why we seldom, if ever, see any corroborative evidence to support the theory beyond your own words.

[Ken Burch]

104. I offered corraborative evidence.

I reminded voters of the actual positions those candidates took in the Eighties, none of which were "liberal".

And I pointed out that no polls in the era showed candidates to Mondale or Dukakis' right running any more strongly. Those polls should have existed if the "we should have gone with a more right-wing candidate" argument actually held water.

[bettyellen]

115. agree they were too RW and it made them look bad, but I think the country was having a conservative

period culturally and wanted the real thing. There was so much in the news, movies and tv shows suddenly making fun of both the hippies and the free loving integrated liberal 70's period. There seems to be a whole rejection of that period, and ignorance of how important the 60's were socially. It all got painted as a joke. Like that stupid show with Michael J Fox. Kids were more conservative than their hippie parents, and materialism was suddenly cool. People had forgotten how bad the Vietnam war was.

I think we would have had a chance with more magnetic, passionate candidates certainly. The candidates you mentioned just failed to capture the interest of most people. Few were inspired by them, and the media helped make sure of that too. It sucks to say, but whoever we run, they'd better be damned media savvy and quick on their feet, because the media does like to nip at their heels and attack over non issues.

[wyldwolf]

133. that's how you remember it

Where are links from archival news sources in support? Where are archival polls that state the lost because of those positions?

I won't hold my breath.

[Ken Burch]

137. What I said was that those were their positions

Last edited Sun May 18, 2014, 10:43 PM - Edit history (1)

polling wasn't done on the question of whether Mondale's and Dukakis' centrist stands cost them the election.

What I can point to is voter turnout...which cratered in both elections. That turnout cratered because those candidates created no enthusiasm...at a time when massive anti-Reagan activism was in progress from coast-to-coast and workers were mobilizing against Reagan's assaults on unions and workers' rights. If the Democrats had engaged that activism with a strong fighting people's platform, rather than committing to deficit reduction(a commitment that meant no Reagan economic or social spending decisions would ever be reduced)and had backed peace rather than the status quo on nuclear and Central America policy, a much larger electorate could have been brought to the polls, and a larger electorate always increases Democratic chances.

Instead, the party focused on appeasing Wall Street and white suburbanites...groups Mondae and Dukakis never came close to carrying and groups even Clinton didn't carry in the Nineties.

[wyldwolf]

140. In other words, after everything you've wrote, you have ZERO supportive evidence of your positions.

But lest's talk about this voter turnout which you claim cratered.

1976: 53.6%
1980: 52.6%
1984: 53.1%
1988: 50.1%
1992: 55.1%
(source: Source: elections.gmu.edu)

I don't see any cratering there.

[Ken Burch]

146. 53% is cratering. That means half the voters didn't vote.

in 1960, turnout had been 60%.

A passionately anti-Reaganism candidate could have brought us close to that, since most non-voters don't vote bbecause they think the two big parties are too close to each other on the issues.

By contrast, no one who even ran in 1984 or 1988 ever had any chance of taking votes that wqent to Reagan in 1980. even Clinton didn't get those voters- wuth 43%, he only took the votes ANY Dem would automatically have taken. Former Reagan voters went with Bush or Perot in '92 and Dole or Perot in '96. If there had been any polls showing Fritz Hollings or John Glenn would've done better against Reagan the party would have chosen them. Glenn and the southern conserrvatives had a fair shot both times but they just couldn't make the sale. They weren't at an unfair disadvantage. Neither was Gore in '88.











g

[wyldwolf]

147. But we're not discussing 1960. We're discussing the 1980s, where turnout was consistent

... and actually consistent since 1972 - between 1972 and 1982, voter turnout averaged around 53%. There was no "cratering" in the time period you're arguing.

[Ken Burch]

149. flatlining is essentially the same thing.

There were nonvoters who could have been brought to the polls inhuge numbers if only we'd had a program that spoke to them rather than not speaking at all. There was no way deficit reduction could beat Reagan.

[wyldwolf]

153. It's completely different. You can't change word definitions for your needs.

[mythology]

248. Sadly true

Too many people want to see what they want to see and draw the "evidence" from their conclusion rather than actually doing something to test their theory.

[meti57b]

81. 1980, ..... the only presidential election I didn't go to the polls.

I had to work overtime that day, and by the time I got home ....... the polls were still open in California, but California had already gone red.

[NorthCarolina]

82. "Why?" Because the moneyed interests can't lose when both party candidates are beholden

to their agenda. Run Left, Govern Right is the SOP for their candidates on the Democratic side of the equation.

[7962]

83. Funny. Thats the same thing the right says about their recent losses. Not "conservative enough".

They preach it constantly.

[Ken Burch]

124. That doesn't discredit the argument.

It's silly in their case because the grumpy old white dude demographic is shrinking, but the Rainbow/young activist/working-class
and economic victim blocs are growing and we can win my mobilizing them. That's what Jesse pointed our thirty years ago, but too many in our party still refuse to see the truth in it.

The Right realizes this, and that's why they're pushing vote suppression laws through in as many states as possible.

[brooklynite]

87. Republicans make the same argument...

Bush in 1992, Dole in 1996, McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 lost because they weren't real conservatives.

[Adrahil]

155. Yup, they do. Some of our people has the dome flavor of delusion. NT

[riqster]

92. Never mind the media collusion, Repubs dealing with Iran to fuck Carter, and such...

Nope, the losses were due to centrism , yupyupyup.

Simplistic twaddle.

[Walk away]

93. An ideology and $13 will get you across the GWB.

Otherwise, pander to your extreme base during the primaries and then snap back to the center ASAP and stay there for the next 4 to 8 years if you raise enough $$$ to get elected.

[mother earth]

95. Centrism is tantamount to doing absolutely nothing, status quo, laziness at best, why bother

having an election if everything that's wrong is never going to change? Don't rock the boat while the boat is sinking, it's just a slow route to certain demise.

K & R

These are Orwellian times indeed. Bravo, Ken Burch, our country is in dire need of dramatic change, direction in that vein will make us or break us. It's time to do what is best for this nation and put an end to the illusion we've been stifled by.

[Maedhros]

186. Right now, the Republicans are radical reactionaries trying to hasten our transition to Empire.

There are many Liberal/Progressive Americans trying to prevent that transition.

The Centrists simply allow the Conservative Agenda to proceed at its historic pace.

[colsohlibgal]

97. We Followed The Republicans Rightward

And now...while there are some progressives in Congress the party apparatus of the democrats, like the republicans, is beholden to big money, Wall Street, etc. The thing that chafes me most is democrats in the House or Senate who try to talk a good game but sell us out constantly, those of us who pay attention know who they are.

The system is as close to broken as it can be - other than taking care of the gilded class.

[CrispyQ]

98. They feared the media more than they believed the polls.

Reagan cowed them by poking fun at the word liberal. The media got behind him. The dems capitulated & backed away from the word liberal & hopped on the corporate money train. It's been downhill since. They should have stood up to the media & said, "Fuckin A we're liberal & here's why," & then stated all the things liberal stand for. But they didn't. And here we are with a dem party that is more like the old time repub party & a repub party that is on the fringe.

The only reason the dems can give me to vote for Hillary Clinton is the republican candidate.

What the fuck.

[gtar100]

99. I sure hope we're on the road to recovery and beginning to see the good sense of liberal/progressive

politics and policies because the abject failure of conservative policies is now self evident to all but the obstinate who have wrapped their identity in being conservative. We can now juxtapose 1935 to 1975 with 1980 to 2010 and see clearly that progressive policies actually make things better and conservative policies make a few people rich and a whole lot of people poor. Conservatives know it which is why they work so tirelessly to rig the rules and wholeheartedly embrace propaganda as a tool. They cannot stand on the reality of their beliefs and goals because they are repugnant to common sense and decency.

[supercats]

100. I Agree With The Premise

If you're going to be more like a republican, the country feels that person is inauthentic so they vote for the real republican, (Coke not Diet Coke). I think the democrats are ruled by fear and are afraid to stand up and say what they really believe in, and have the conviction to be proud of it, to own what they say and who they are, because if they did there would be REAL choice in america. I think Elizabeth Warren is a shining example of one who stands tall with passion and conviction for what she believes in and thats why she resonates with so many people. This I believe is the way to literally take back our country from the corporations and that carnival act known as the tea baggers.

[Drunken Irishman]

101. The only election the Democrats lost because of centrism was 1980 and that was due to a primary.

Jimmy Carter was well to the right of the National Democratic Party. He clashed with many high-ranking liberals - specifically Teddy Kennedy - and pretty much had a presidency that pushed conservative-leaning deregulation and spending cuts. He was only truly progressive on two major issues: the environment and foreign policy. Domestically, though, for the most part, he ran a right-of-center presidency that had a golden opportunity to pass healthcare reform (Carter had even larger majorities than Obama) and failed to do so because he wanted to tie reform to the deficit and ease it into policy so that the deficit wouldn't balloon. Kennedy didn't like the idea and, well, the rest is history.

Every other presidential election in the 80s, which turns out to be two, were lost because the candidates *failed* to actively work the center.

Your description of Dukakis is NOT what most Americans saw. They saw a Massachusetts liberal who was against the death penalty, for higher taxes, unabashedly pro-choice and a bit out of step with most of America. The fact he had to put Bentsen on the ticket shows this - they had to balance out his liberalism with a southern conservative.

You seem to be under the impression that if a person isn't to the left of, say Leon Trotsky, they're centrist. That's laughably bull.

Democrats didn't lose in the 80s because they were too conservative. They lost in the 80s because, a decade earlier, Americans turned on the ideology. America in the 80s was the antithesis of everything liberalism - it was pro-intervention, subtly racist with a lot of resentment and embracing the ideology of greed. It was not a left-of-center nation and most Americans looked at the Democratic Party as too extreme to ever put into the White House.

In 1984, liberals made up just 16% of the voting electorate. In 2012? 25%.

In 1984, 26% of Democrats voted for Reagan. In 2012, only 7% of Democrats voted for Romney.

That's all you need to know about the 80s. White Democrats were abandoning the party because of their policies and it wasn't because they perceived 'em as too conservative. The only change now is that the demographics of the groups who stuck with Democrats (blacks, Hispanics) have grown considerably since then.

[wyldwolf]

136. Facts

How refreshing.

[Ken Burch]

142. My OP was full of facts.

And Carter was always going to lose once the hostage thing happened. It's impossible to be popular once something like that goes down. Plus, the hostage taking was caused directly by one of the most conservative choices Carter made on foreign policy-his incomprehensible decision to support the Shah to the bitter end and then to offer the tyrant sanctuary from the justied rage of the Iranian people. if he'd cut the Shah loose as son as it was clear that the old torturer was opposed by the entire population of Iran, the embassy takeover likely would never have happened. There'd have been no reason for them to be angry enough with us to do such a thing.

[wyldwolf]

143. "And Carter was always going to lose once the hostage thing happened."

But you just said it was because of centrism.

Ken, you have your own facts, born from your skewed perspective and not from actual events. Yet, they are your facts.

Waiting for you to respond to post #101. Should be quite the example of revisionism.

[Ken Burch]

150. I just demonstrated how Carter's conservative policy on Iran caused the embassy takeover

A failed "centrist"policy once again, combined with thefailed center-right "low inflation matters more more than fighting unemployment or poverty" strategy. And the appointment of Paul Volcker, who said that "the standard of living for te American people has to go down" as chair of the Fed.

All centrist "pro-business Democrat" policies and choices,

[wyldwolf]

152. But you didn't prove that policy caused his defeat

If you did, show me the post will all supportive polling data.

[Lasher]

160. What, you don't think the Iran hostage crisis caused Carter's defeat in 1980?

You do know that Republicans were afraid of an October surprise, right? Why were they so afraid that they committed treason to prevent release of the hostages until Reagan was sworn in? The hostage crisis was not the only factor in Carter's defeat but it's highly probable that he would have won if he could have ended the crisis in October.

The race was closer than most people remember. Polling was close just a week before election day.



The point here is, the October surprise would have been more than enough to secure Carter's re-election.

[wyldwolf]

164. that isn't what the OP is arguing

Read it again -

1. he had increased the defense budget,
2. he'd put the Republican/corporate priority of "low inflation" before the progressive Democratic priority of full employment
3. and he had caused the Iranian hostage crisis

Perhaps if he'd said #3 only, he MIGHT have a point - but that wasn't a centrist policy. It was an American policy - one any president before would have taken. Truman, JFK and LBJ both had a supportive relationship with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Increasing the defense budget was always popular with the American people (well, until recently). And I swear, this is the FIRST time I've ever heard anyone claim lowering inflation wasn't a popular thing in the 70s (although I'm not surprised someone would deny that for convenience.)

What we DO know for sure was the amount of Democrats who abandoned the party in the late 60s and early 70s because of the counter culture movement and Nixon's Southern Strategy. But I guess it was really some phantom centrist policies drove them out?

The problem with the OP is flies in the face of 'conventional wisdom' and the historical record. Too bad he doesn't have any supportive sources.

[Ken Burch]

271. Lowering inflation meant deliberately increasing unemployment

And that meant making life worse for working people, the very people any Democratic president needs to do all he can to help in order to get re-elected.

If Carter had fought inflation with price controls, that would have been one thing....but he fought it with cuts in social services AND deregulation...and with Paul Volcker's "tight money" policies, policies that did nothing but put people out of work and lower the wages of those who weren't put out of work.

Democrats don't win by putting Wall Street before the lives of the kinds of people Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp write about.

And it doesn't matter if backing the Shah may have had support here(actually, the position was widely unpopular among the nation as a whole and among the Democratic base in particular), the problem there was that backing that tyrant to the bitter end, when we KNEW everyone in Iran hated him and wanted him out, made everyone in Iran hate this country and all that it stood for...and that hatred was what caused the embassy takeover. We should have left the Shah to the Iranian people as we left Mussolini to the Italian people...there was no difference between the two.

And we're not talking here about the Southern Strategy era or the backlash against the counter-culture(trends no possible Democratic nominee of the 1968-1972 era could have counteracted, btw-even Scoop Jackson). We're talking the late Seventies and Eighties...we were past the Sixties backlash by then and in to a whole different era.

Increasing the war budget wasn't all that popular in the Eighties(most polls after 1982 or so showed support for the Nuclear Freeze and a U.S.-out-of-Central America policy...Reagan's invention of the Nicaraguan Contras never had widespread U.S. popular support(most people wanted us to leave Nicaragua alone, the polls of the day said). And there was always widespread support for single-payer healthcare.

My OP does challenge the conventional wisdom...but so what? the conventional wisdom doesn't have the political equivalent of papal infallibility and has often been challenged and proven wrong. Almost no one now, for example, would accept the conventional wisdom among white Americans of the 19th Century as to how African Americans, Native Americans, women, gays, and political and religious minorities should be treated...and thank goddess for that. Conventional wisdom is simply, in many cases, the facile assumptions of the ruling elite.

The historical record doesn't prove me wrong either, much as you'd like it to. In the late Seventies, polls very often showed Ted Kennedy running better than Carter against Reagan. After January of 1980, even before Teddy entered the race, those same polls generally showed Reagan beating Carter solidly. And once the hostage rescue mission(a center-right attempt to look "macho" that never had any real chance of succeeding and which would likely have got most of the hostages killed if the helicopters hadn't crashed on takeoff in the desert, btw)Carter was likely going to lose even if Teddy hadn't entered the race at all, just as LBJ would have lost in '68 if he'd been renominated by acclimation after the Tet Offensive and after what would have been(deservedly)much, much larger protests in the streets of Chicago, protests large enough that Johnson's nomination would clearly have been illegitimate.

[wyldwolf]

274. which is beside the point. Lowering inflation was a popular move. It wasn't a 'centrist policy.'

And Carter didn't lose because he targeted inflation. There is no supportive evidence of that.

[Ken Burch]

275. He lost because unemployment went up. Unemployment goes up when you put low inflation first.

And lowering inflation is never a popular policy if it's done through austerity.

Higher unemployment gave Reagan his "misery index".

And Carter's low-inflation policies were never popular. If they had been, he'd have been beating Reagan AND Kennedy in the polls(which he usually wasn't).

[wyldwolf]

276. But that isn't a centrist policy

[Ken Burch]

279. putting low inflation before full employment isn't centrist?

Ok, it's right of center then. That doesn't weaken my argument. It means I was actually being generous in calling it centrist.
It was an economic royalist policy that was only popular on Wall Street and among Milton Friedman afficionados. And itcoud still be called "centrist" in the sense that it reflected the "conventional wisdom" of the Beltway/corporate elite, the ones who were already plotting to destroy the middle class and totally dehumanize both the working poor and those poor people the system had already decided would be discarded and left to die.

It was never popular among people who worked for a living and lived paycheck-to-paycheck...the sort of people(the economic majority in this country)the Democratic Party is supposed to put first, along with those struggling to survive and escape poverty.

[wyldwolf]

286. No. There is no proof of that...

Other than your imagination.

[Ken Burch]

291. The massive grassroots demand that Teddy, with all his flaws, should challenge Carter for the nom

is proof. The polls prioritizing a fight against unemployment over the rich man's fixation with inflation and the deficit is proof. The polls that showed Kennedy beating Reagan while Carter trailed him(for a long period of time)are proof.

You don't get reelected when you deepen a recession, and cut social services, increase the war budget, restart draft registration(at a time when there was no situation, including Afghanistan, where a large U.S. troop commitment could have achieved anything) and put the comfort of a despicable overthrown despot ahead of the security of U.S. embassy personnel, all within a year-and-a-half of Election Day...at least not when you're trying to get re-elected as a Democrat. It wasn't even remotely possible to get majority support for an incumbent Dem who did all of that.

And polls don't always convey reality. They're subjective, can be manipulated to produce a desiredresult, and often take too long to conduct to catch quick shifts in public opinion. Polls are just guesses disguised with statistics in many, many cases.

[wyldwolf]

292. Really? Show me evidence of that.

[Ken Burch]

293. In past threads, I showed you polls and you simply dismissed them.

You would therefore dismiss any polls I presented and any news links I presented.

If you lived through that era(I was in my late teens in the run-up to the 1980 campaign)you know there was massive support for Teddy against Carter in the party. Polls were published all the time, up until Teddy's entrance in the race, showing him running tied with or ahead of Carter and ahead of Reagan. And even after the anti-Teddy backlash the Carter people engineereed, using vile stunts like having people lined up along Teddy's motorcade route into Chicago screaming "murderer! murderer!&quot alluding to the Chappaquiddick accident) Teddy still took over 1000 delegates for the nomination and gained in support as the primaries went along. THAT was proof. The strong support John Anderson was getting as the only progressive, antidraft candidate in the race after Teddy's withdrawal was proof-Anderson's support only collapsed from 21% to 8% AFTER he listened to racist and right-wing New York mayor Ed Koch's media guy David Garth and switched from being the only remainng liberal to being a centrist who argued that Carter, in addition to Reagan, was also an extremist.

I was there. I saw it all.

[wyldwolf]

294. So NOW your line is you HAVE shown polls. LOL

Where? Links?

[Ken Burch]

296. I said in past threads, not this one.

And why should I bother posting them here, since you would just dismiss any poll I posted?

There's nothing special about polls in any case. They have no more authority than anything else.

[wyldwolf]

297. Show us those threads. Or else that's just one more thing you've made up.

[Ken Burch]

299. That goes back to earlier versions of DU. And who's this "us"? you only speak for yourself.

You're just getting abusive. Move on already. You have no reason to belabor this.

And it's against forum rules to accuse someone of lying.

[wyldwolf]

300. excuses excuses. No threads. No polls. Just your imagination.

[Ken Burch]

301. No, the reality that occurred.

Why are you obsessed with polls? They don't really tell you much.

[wyldwolf]

302. ... in your imagination

[Ken Burch]

303. How old were you at the time?

I'm thinking you just learned about this later, from the version of "history" presented at DLC/Blue Dog/Third Way meetings.
I was there and I lived through it. I know what the economy was like, what the candidates said, what the voters(especially the voters we actually had a chance of getting felt, and what would have turned large blocs of nonvoters into voters if our ticket had committed to it.

The only votes Democrats get are people who are left out in the cold by austerity, by "pro-business" economics and by deregulation/privatization. We don't ever get, and we can't ever get, the votes of people who look down on labor and the poor or who see themselves as "winners" in times like the Reagan era. We don't get CEO's or bankers, we don't get people who own Applebee's or WalMart franchises, people who want unions weakened or broken, or people who still resent affirmative action or "welfare mothers".

We get people who are getting screwed, people who have no hope under the status quo and people who dream that things can be different...the people "third way" Dems don't care about. Our focus should be on winning the trust of the people in those groups who, since 1980 in particular, have either given up on voting or never saw starting to vote as worthwhile. That's where our future lies...NOT in promising the smug, the privileged and the fearful-of-change that we'll protect them against the peasantry and the outcasts.

[wyldwolf]

304. irrelevant. What your OP says runs counter to every political science and historical reference

I mean, when Sarah Palin rewrote history with her Paul Revere gaffe, I didn't have to be alive during the 1700s to know she was full of shit - much like your OP.

[Ken Burch]

305. My OP doesn't run counter to every political science and historical reference.

Read Zinn on the era, for just one example. Read Chomsky.

[wyldwolf]

306. well, everyone except yours

Zinn? Chomsky? Quote the relevant passages sourced with documentation.

[Ken Burch]

307. I don't need to. Read history for yourself for once...and not just the approved corporate version.

And you've dismissed links and polls I've posted in the past on other issues, so you'd just dismiss any I post here.

You are not the judge and jury of the truth. And this just makes it looks like you've got a personal vendetta against me.

[wyldwolf]

308. History? What you've giving is more like 'alternate history' - an exercise in what ifs.

[Ken Burch]

254. It's not about polling data.

Unemployment rose because he decided that all that mattered was fighting inflation. That's what gave Reagan his "misery index".

The hostage situation happened because Carter stood with the Shah against the Iranian people up to the bitter end. That's why the mullahs steered the revolution their way and that's why the embassy was seized.

[wyldwolf]

258. yeah, it's about that warm truthiness you feel in your gut.

[Ken Burch]

262. It's about cause and effect

Defending the Shah to the end made the embassy takeover inevitable. Putting low inflation before full employment drove up joblessness and created the "misery" index.

If Carter had cut the Shah loose to start with and put full employment first, Reagan would have had nothing to go after him on.
Low inflation is a rich people issue...high unemployment is a majority issue.

[wyldwolf]

264. based on nothing but your imagination - certainly no documented evidence.

[Ken Burch]

281. Democratic voters put full employment as the first economic priority

Only Republican and upper class voters put low inflation achieved by austerity first. By putting low inflation through austerity before full employment achieved by economic and social expansion, Carter only rewarded voters and donors who were never going to support him for re-election. He made workers and the poor feel like they didn't matter to his administration. He lost by abandoning the base.

[wyldwolf]

285. No they didn't

I've seen no polling that said that. You just make that up.

[BootinUp]

204. As another post indicated

you brought a little reality to the thread there.

[Overseas]

106. K&R. Well said. I remember it happening.

[Hamlette]

108. then how to you explain the losses of McCarthy and McGovern? n/t

[Ken Burch]

120. Eugene McCarthy was screwed over by the nominating process.

Last edited Fri May 30, 2014, 11:23 PM - Edit history (1)

McCarthy actually won more total votes than any other candidate in the '68 primaries(McCarthy and RFK took something like 75% of the total vote between them, according to the Wikipedia entry on the Dem nomination process for that year)but most delegates were chosen by undemocratic methods or were under the personal control of LBJ). In at least one state, the 1968 conventiion delegation had been chosen in 1966. Polling in the summer of 1968 consistently showed McCarthy, after RFK's murder, running a much stronger race against Nixon than Humphrey did, often beating Nixon while Humphrey ran several points behind. And Teddy Kennedy kept dropping hints that he might accept a draft for the nomination, which made it impossible for McCarthy to unite what anti-Johnson delegates there were.

McCarthy didn't fail as a candidate, the process was rigged against him.

I've discussed what doomed McGovern's chances in other posts in this thread. Suffice it to say that no Dem had a fair shot against Nixon in '72.

[bvar22]

112. Want to light up the Democratic Party,

...and ensure a HUGE turnout at the polls?

THIS would do it:

#!

That message would resonate with the vast majority of Americans today
who are finally waking up to the fact that they have been getting SCREWED by the RICH
ever since Reagan.

Hillary can't hit that button.
In fact, very few members of what passes for the "Democratic Party" today
can hit that button.
Their Track Record would expose them as Liars & Hypocrites if they tries to run on Populist Platform.

Candidate Obama was a Blank Slate candidate,
so he could pretend to care about LABOR, Main Street, and the Working Class.
Too Bad he was only pretending.
I actually had some "hope" back in 2008.


[font color=firebrick size=3][center]"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone[/font][/center]
[center][/font]
[font size=1]photo by bvar22
Shortly before Sen Wellstone was killed[/center][/font]

A paraphrase of Wellstone's quote:
"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we say we stand for,
at some point, everyone will recognize that we don't really stand for them.


You will know them by their WORKS.

[47of74]

113. Someone once said that

People between a Democrat who voted Republican and an actual Republican they'd vote for the actual Republican every time.

[Ken Burch]

123. It was Truman who said that, IIRC. n/t.

[butterfly77]

126. Correct..

[McCamy Taylor]

127. "Centrism"? Is that the new word for Hostages for Votes?

And Willie Horton? Donna Rice? All the dirty tricks? They call those "centrist" now?

Oh, wait. You're talking about "Morning in America", the 1984 campaign that Nancy Reagan came up with the get Ronnie re-elected. Yes, you are correct. That was very "centrist." Very upbeat. It got him re-elected.

Sorry, but this OP reminds me too much of Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan and their schemes for 1972. I am sure that Pat told everyone who would listen---including Hunter S Thompson who was writing for The Stone and who was pimping McGovern---that the Democrats' only hope was to resist the temptation to move to the center. I am convinced that was what he said.

[greatlaurel]

162. You are spot on.

Thanks for your insights. Hostages for votes, cannot understand how people did not see what was going on. It was infuriating.

[wyldwolf]

165. thank you.

[UTUSN]

138. Not true. nt

[mvd]

145. Big K&R

Dukakis though was when I first became interested in politics. Back then I didn't think much of how progressive our candidates were - just that I wanted the Democrats to win and how bad Bush/Reagan were - and that continued with Clinton. Have gotten more progressive with age.

[greatlaurel]

156. This is total unadulterated nonsense.

These attacks are just like the old Dirty Tricks campaigns from the Nixon/Reagan eras. The Rethugs have gotten a little more subtle and they are starting their anti-Clinton campaign very early. They know the only way the Democratic Party can loose in 20216 is to divide us into squabbling factions, divide and conquer is always effective if the targeted group does not recognize what is being done to them. That is why we are seeing all this anti-Hillary garbage. It is so sad to see so many good people falling for this.

The "Not Liberal Enough" campaign is what cost Carter the election in 1980, because so many in the Democratic Party stayed home, saying they are all the same, and/or fell for the propaganda and voted GOP. The corporate media was so happy to comply with the GOP to trash Carter about the hostage crisis rather than work with Carter to tone down the rhetoric, they worked hand in glove, to elect the vile Reagan.

There are many of us who remember that time and your post is pure rethug propaganda. We see what you are doing.

[rhett o rick]

188. I think you know that this country, at least the lower classes, will not survive 8 more years

of conservative rule. H. Clinton has made it clear that she stands with Wall Street. I think she is more conservative than Pres Obama and he has already backtracked on doing anything to stop the widening wealth gap. Increasing foodstamps and unemployment are needed but without raising taxes on the wealthy, the burden will be carried by the already over stretched middle class. The task is huge but we must try to stop the oligarchy from killing the middle and working classes. I've seen nothing from Clinton to indicate she is on our side. We can not endure 8 more years of the Wall Street status quo.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

213. Apparantly, former independent and one-time GOP supporter Elizabeth Warren thinks Hillary should run

“You know, all of the women – Democratic women, I should say, of the Senate – urged Hillary Clinton to run, and I hope she does,” Warren responded when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if Clinton was her candidate in 2016.

“Hillary is terrific,” she said when asked again if she would endorse her in the event Clinton makes a run for the Democratic nomination.

Stephanopoulos also asked Warren about her past as a registered Republican in the 1990s and why she left the party.

“I was originally an independent. I was with the GOP for a while because I really thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets and I feel like the GOP party just left that,” Warren said.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/04/elizabeth-warren-hopes-hillary-clinton-makes-2016-run-but-declines-to-endorse-her/

[raouldukelives]

157. K&R

[woo me with science]

193. K&R

[Laelth]

201. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth

[TheBlackAdder]

228. Not how politics works. Candidates are Party Centric for Primaries, Nation Centric for Generals. nt

[BeyondGeography]

251. So if Mondale would have driven through poor neighborhoods

Handing out copies of Sandanista by The Clash he would have won what? An extra state somewhere? That would have narrowed the gap to 48-2.

Sorry, but America is a dark place in many ways; anyone who has observed our politics for any length of time should realize it. Emphasizing pro-labor policies as a way to defeat Reagan when so many white working class people cheered his stance on PATCO? Those guys were making $70K a year...fuck 'em. That's the way it was reported and that's the way a lot of white people who you would describe as pro-labor responded. The proof was in their votes.

We know that, starting with Nixon, the GOP has made an art form of getting people to think emotionally first and vote against their own interests. As suggested upthread by the poster who says the most boring candidate always loses, maybe that's just the way we are. At the very least, Americans (those who vote) are not ideological to the point where they make, en masse, definitive judgments on presidential candidates based on where they stand on the political spectrum. And, if they do, it has more often been "too liberal" than "too moderate," which only proves how inattentive they can be.

[phleshdef]

273. I think you are trying to hard to make an argument based on a "correlation/causality" premise.

Each one of those candidates lost for their own unique reasons. Some fair (being a really weak candidate like Mondale), some not so fair (Carter was plain shit on by everyone) or some kinda in between (Dukakis had his good points and his failings and George Bush was practically an incumbent via being the VP for the still fairly popular Reagan).

[lostincalifornia]

277. Was George McGovern a centrist or Michael Dukakis? Gee, I can pick any decade to fit a premise

Last edited Sat May 31, 2014, 12:08 AM - Edit history (1)

Wait, Bill Clinton was a centrist what happened there

Nothing ever stays constant

[Ken Burch]

278. McGovern wasn't a centrist but a campaign run against the Nixon dirty tricks team

and with the party regulars treating our presidential candidate as if he'd had no right to win the nomination was not a fair test of support for the ideas that campaign stood for.

Dukakis was a centrist technocrat and a homophobe. He was to the right of Reagan on defense(supporting a 6% annual increase in the war budget at a time when the conflict with the USSR was over.

Clinton was personally charismatic and the beneficiary of an unexpected collapse in #41's support. He'd have won on any platform. His centrism had little to do with his narrow victory. His support of universal healthcare had a LOT to do with it, but he
never really tried to get a healthcare bill (as opposed to NAFTA and Glass-Stegall repeal, where he went to the mat to give corporate power huge victories over the interests of the Democratic base and the millions of other working-class Americans).

[lostincalifornia]

283. That was my point, McGovern was a liberal and lost big time regardless of nixon's dirty tricks

The country did not want a liberal at that time in spite of the viet nam war. Your generalization that the Democrats have lost because they were centrists is not valid.

Incidently, for that time Dukakis was a liberal. Unfortunately, 90% of the country was homophobic at that time so you cannot use that as a criteria.

There is always a reason why someone wins or loses,

Obama was and is a centrist for sure, and he won, but guess what it isn't just the president, it is congress too. A senator or representative in the south is not going to win on a liberal platform, just as a conservative is going to have problems winning in New York, Mass, or California

Howard Dean recognize this which was the basis for his 50 state strategy

[Hippo_Tron]

282. What does it matter what McGovern was? 1972 was an un-winnable election

When we post-mortem these decades old presidential elections and focus on the candidates, we miss the more salient point that most of these elections are determined by things that have nothing to do with the candidates.

[lostincalifornia]

284. My point was at that time a liberal was not going to win, and yes I am proud to say I voted for

McGovern and would again.

Your point is valid, but the implication of the OP is we lose elections because of centrist candidates, and it is not that simple

[Hippo_Tron]

280. Two of those three losses were caused by factors entirely beyond anyone's control

The standard for the Post World War II era is to give a President (or at least his party if there's a succession) two terms in the White House. Jimmy Carter is an example of how that rule gets broken if you have enough bad shit happen to you. It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a centrist, if you have an energy crisis, an economic crisis, and a hostage crisis all happen at once, people are going to be dissatisfied and vote for somebody else.

1984 was, likewise, un-winnable for any Democrat, voters had no reason to get rid of Reagan.

1988 is a good topic for discussion, because that was an example of an election that was lost entirely because of an incompetent campaign.

But let me throw in another topic for conversation here. I think that by 1992, voters were ready to toss the Republicans out of power and vote in just about any Democrat, and thus I think we could've done a HELL of a lot better than Bill Clinton. What I'm not sure about is whether said President could've gotten the sweeping reforms we would've liked through congress. Even when congress was Democratic from 1993-1995, you still had a substantial amount of power being held by white southerners, who aren't exactly known for a long history of progressivism.

[Jakes Progress]

288. So will number four.