A Small Victory for Progressives

[Kevin Spidel]

A Small Victory for Progressives
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted July 23, 2004.


It has always bothered me when presidential candidates and their struggling campaigns tell over-idealistic supporters they will carry a message to their party's national political convention.

Why? Because after working on one of those message-carrying campaigns in '92, and as a reporter for 20 years, I've come to realize that in national politics winning is everything. Sending messages and declaring symbolic victories only feels good until you realize that you're being ignored by people who have the power to make real change happen.

For two decades, efforts to take messages to the Democratic Party Platform Committee largely have been all show and no substance – until now. This month, for the first time in a generation, the Dennis Kucinich campaign and a coalition of like-minded activists, the "Progressive Democratic Caucus," lobbied the party's platform committee and won a concession on troop reduction in Iraq.

"Within the DNC (Democratic National Committee), we went from being a pariah and marginal to being in," said Tim Carpenter, Kucinich's deputy campaign manager and a lead negotiator at the recent platform committee meeting in Miami.

The 2004 Democratic Party platform now has this language:

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

[Moderator]

1. Good article. Thanks for posting but please remember DU copyright rules.

Excerpted material from copyrighted articles are limited to four paragraphs.

Thanks
Moderator

[Fovea]

2. Don't you realize what you achieved?

Yes, one half of one part of the plank.

Far better than what the DLC wanted, I warrant.
Now, does that mean we give up?
Cheney No!

Progressives will have to carry on the fight, but the first battle has been won, to affect the platform in a way more significant than any since '92. This isn't just an issue, this is a plank that entirely opposes the real goal of Dubya in Iraq-- the continuous enmeshment of the American military with the 'sovereign' government of Iraq, which is simply a place holder for resource monopolists.

[struggle4progress]

3. link

http://www.alternet.org/election04/19291/