TNR: Going Long...strengthening party resolve...not going so left.

[madfloridian]

This article gives different idea of what Dean and the other progressive groups are really about. Most of us are NOT that much on the "left", and I think the misconceptions are spreading. This moving left thing is confusing, and it is really not true of Dean or Kucinich or the other affiliated groups. I like the way Cohn words parts of this article. He says they want the party's resolve to be stronger, not so much to take it left. I agree.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040809&s=cohn080904

He is speaking of the side convention called Take Back America where Dean and others spoke. I can't find all of them now. Huge crowd, overflowing.

SNIP..."But now, for the first time, Dean is publicly addressing an audience made up almost exclusively of liberal voters, the type who flocked to his campaign back when he first took the Democratic primary electorate by storm. They're gathered (where else?) in Cambridge, as part of the Take Back America conference being sponsored by the liberal group Campaign for America's Future. And they have filled the ballroom at the Royal Sonesta Hotel well past its 700-person capacity, prompting the fire marshals to shut down the entrance and forcing several hundred more would-be attendees to wait outside.

Dean does not disappoint. He serves up a few of the old, controversial standbys, like attacking the Republicans for campaigning on "God, gays, and guns"; he also manages to trot out a new one when he urges supporters to run for local office, even if it's just the local library board, to wrest control of politics from those who "like book-burning rather than book-reading." But the real point of his speech is to motivate his supporters to remain engaged even after the November elections so they can continue strengthening the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." "You all get a month off," Dean tells the crowd. "Then it's back to work."

SNIP..."Liberals have put aside their ambivalence toward the party and decided to work for their causes from within. In fact, they're borrowing a strategy from one of their arch-ideological enemies: the Christian Right, which succeeded in changing the direction of the GOP by inserting its members into the party structure. During his speech at Take Back America, Dean explicitly invokes Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, as he talks about the work of Democracy for America, the political action committee he created out of the remnants of Dean for America, and the need to run candidates in elections across the country, no matter how seemingly insignificant the office or how politically hostile the territory. "The way Republicans succeeded is that somebody ran for the school board, somebody ran for the city council, all the way up--and we didn't do that," Dean says. "We cannot be a national party until we take our campaign to Utah, Mississippi, and Texas." Already, Democracy for America has endorsed about 60 candidates for elected office around the country, from Eddgra Fallin, running for a place on the Huntsville, Alabama, school board, to William O'Neill, running for a seat on the Ohio state Supreme Court....."

SNIP..."To some extent, Stern, Dean, and other liberal leaders actually seem less concerned with stretching the Democratic Party to the left than they are with simply strengthening its resolve. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the liberal movement itself follows these cues--whether, in the absence of a figure like George W. Bush to unite them, they lose patience with the Democrats and revert to their prior ambivalence. But one can hope. Liberals will always be pulling the Democratic Party to the left, but, as we saw in the 2000 election, both the liberals and the party itself are better off when those fights stay within the family...."END SNIP

Talking to the overflow at Take Back America conference.