Barack, if you want progressive support, stop acting like WE'RE as much to blame as the Right is.

[Ken Burch]

In your book you attacked us repeatedly, and your basic attitude seemed to be that we had no right to ask or expect anything from you.

What did we do to deserve your contempt?

And what right do you have to ask us for support when you continue to give us this contempt?

You need to face facts.

the "center" no longer exists.

Progressive ideas have majority support.

And the way to win is to mobilize the progressive majority, not to demand that progressives shut up and remember our place.

You've made your campaign much harder by treating us this way.

[draft_mario_cuomo]

1. Post of the day. Here is Obama on liberalism in his book

==Reagan’s message “spoke to the failure of liberal government,” government at every level had become “too cavalier about spending taxpayer money.... A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities.... Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster,”==

[Superman Returns]

3. cherry picking at it's finest

you're taking one sentence from an entire passage and using it out of context. He's not agreeing with that sentiment, he's trying to get in the mind of the American people to explain why Reagan won two elections by substantial margins. Whether you like Reagan's politics or not, you can't deny that he had a narrative that won over Americans, even many middle class Democrats.

[draft_mario_cuomo]

6. Where did he dispute Reagan's contention of "liberal government's failure"?

He criticized--and praised--Reagan (wanting to be everything to everyone as usual) in that section but I do not recall him saying he was merely stating that other people believed those things that I quoted. This is a guy who gushed over Clinton's DLC Third Way in his book, which was premised on the assumptions in that quote.

[Superman Returns]

8. maybe...

if you post the whole passage we can find out.

[draft_mario_cuomo]

9. So you haven't read that part of the book but claim it is cherry picking? nt

[NYCGirl]

24. Here's where he got that quote:

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/Obama-Audacity-Hope14feb07.htm

From David Walsh of the World Socialist Website

[Ken Burch]

25. It was still Obama's quote, accurate and verbatim.

The source is irrelevant.

[NYCGirl]

26. And cherrypicked and contextless to make the WSWS happy. NT

[Ken Burch]

27. There was no context that could possibly make that quote anything but leftbashing

And it's time for the party to admit we don't DESERVE to be bashed anymore.
We don't need to be dissed for the ticket to win.

We're ordinary mainstream Americans who are guilty of nothing but fighting
for the causes we believe in. A party who isn't comfortable with people like that
having a say in what it does is not an honorable party. We saw in the Nineties what happens
when progressives are silenced and excluded: A Democratic president who treated most of the Democratic Party as
an enemy to be crushed. There is no good reason ever to repeat this approach again.

[NYCGirl]

29. It is certainly not leftbashing. It is a snapshot of a time in history, and it

is stating a fact. Reagan's campaign was fucking brilliant. I abhored him and everything he stood for, but I have to admire his marketers — they were masters.

[Ken Burch]

32. Reagan's campaign was brilliant...I don't disagree with you at all on that.

But it was brilliant as a campaign based on illusion, on pleasant visuals. Only OUR party's leaders' still harbor the delusion that Reagan permanently moved the country to the right on issues and that we had to surrender to win. They totally disregarded the workable alternative strategy of the Rainbow Coalition and mass voter registration campaigns.

We are still digging out from the results of that timidity and cowardice.

We can build unity by speaking confidently about our own values, by pointing out the good progressive policies did in the past and the good new and innovative they can do in the future, and be calling people to "the better angels of our own nature" as a former Republican president who would be wrestled to the ground by Homeland Security if he dared show up at a GOP convention nowadays put it.

The American people want the country to have a sense of fairness and justice. We can appeal to that. We can appeal to the hope a better life and the natural regard for our fellow human beings that Americans still hold in the depths of their hearts.

None of this requires us to act like our most solid and committed supporters are ideological lepers.

[janx]

40. A source is ALWAYS relevant. n/t

[LittleClarkie]

2. Wasn't Lieberman his mentor?

That's one thing that stops me from going with him

[draft_mario_cuomo]

4. Yes, and Holy Joe claimed Obama picked him

You can see the legacy of Holy Joe's influence on Obama in the whole "let's work with the right-wing" bs.

==Hence Vietor's sensitivity to the allusion in my column to Obama's "mentor" being Senator Joe Lieberman. As a freshman senator, Vietor insisted, Obama had been assigned Lieberman as mentor. Read the Hartford Courant and you'll find Lieberman boasting that Obama picked him.

Either way, it's obvious that Obama could have brokered a different mentor if he'd so desired, the same way he could have declined to go and tout for Lieberman at that Democratic Party dinner in Connecticut at the end of March. But he clearly didn't, because he wanted to send out a reassuring signal, in the same way he's doing with his PAC, the Hopefund, which is raising money for fourteen of his senate colleagues. According to BlackCommentator, ten of them are DLC--half the DLC presence in the Senate.

There has been a more substantive signal, keenly savored by the corporate world, where Obama voted for one of its most cherished pieces of legislation, sought for years, namely "tort reform." ==

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060508/cockburn

[NYCGirl]

13. And we all know how honest Joe Lieberman is. Dick Durbin is Obama's actual mentor.

[draft_mario_cuomo]

16. Obama thinks Holy Joe is honest. So you are saying Holy Joe lied about something BO has not denied?

Durbin was a friend from his home state who took him under his wing. That does not somehow negate the fact that Holy Joe was also Obama's mentor, and apparently the guy Obama chose. He did not choose Durbin, Feingold, Kennedy, Harkin, etc. Guess who his first year in the Senate was modeled after btw? One Hillary Clinton...

[Tellurian]

30. Sen. Luger(R) is Obama's foremost mentor..he groomed Obama and got him into politics first hand..

Sen.Durbin is fellow senator from Illinois..

[Ken Burch]

37. Here's the source of the confusion:

Durbin was Obama's political mentor back home in Illinois.

Lieberman(back when he was one of us, sort of)was Obama's Senate mentor. This had a lot to do, I suspect, with Obama cooperating in the Senate leadership's sabotage of the official Democratic nominee in Connecticut's Senate race, Ned Lamont, a situation where, for the first time in U.S. history, the leaders of a party in the U.S. Senate effectively worked for an independent candidate who opposed their party's principles against their party's own nominee. Harry Reid still owes the people of Connecticut, the Democratic Party grassroots and the American people an apology for this.

[Superman Returns]

5. in that case

I guess you should be skeptical of Gore who picked him as his VP.

[LittleClarkie]

7. I might be if Gore hadn't been reborn out of the ashes of his defeat

He's hardly the same man.

[Ethelk2044]

19. I did not realize that there were two Gores. He is just one man.

[draft_mario_cuomo]

10. The Lieberman of 2000 was hardly the Lieberman of 2005 nt

[silverojo]

11. I've always been skeptical of Gore, for that reason

Let him stick to fighting against global warming. It's a far better cause than being one of Lie-berman's butt barnacles.

[sandnsea]

23. Are you serious

He proves he's trying to work with everybody in DC and you're going to hold that, of all things, against him?? You can't get people to change their minds if you don't talk to them.

He takes a different approach. He starts with people who are furthest right, and then he starts winding his way back to the left, bringing the right with him. No, it hasn't worked with Lieberman specifically, but he is still out there doing that. It's why you won't find different messages from one place to the other. He says the same thing to everybody, and has a good Democratic vision at the root of it.

[paulk]

12. LOL

With all the conditions "progressives" place on their "support", with every little progressive special interest group of single issue voters stomping their feet and whining about sitting this one out or voting third party, I'm surprised that any candidate gives them the time of day at all.

And why should they? Because of some imaginary "progressive majority" that's going to rise up out of the streets and sweep said candidate to victory? As they say - "show me the money". Show some evidence of the "facts" you claim.

Politicians are, after all, realists - they really are interested in "facts", not opinions based on wishful thinking...

[Ken Burch]

18. The "money" in this case is the polls(and you can go the the website of all major pollsters

and find them) that clearly show the conservative message is dropping in support and progressive ideas have majority backing.

We can win by appealing to people on the merits of our ideas. That wouldn't alienate anyone, it would gain us votes from the millions of people who don't vote for our ticket because it always looks like it doesn't stand for anything.

We don't have to limit ourselves to manipulating the existing presidential electorate. We can mobilize new voters with a confident, positive progressive message and can win over existing voters by finally acting like we believe in our own values.

Your conservative Beltway approach is what blew what shoulda been easy victories for us in 2000, 2002 and 2004. Those elections proved that triangulation and shame-based campaigning will never work again.

BTW, as to those "conditions" we progressives supposedly place on our support? We placed none on our support of Clinton in '92 and '96. Even you would have to admit we got burned by that. Eight wasted years when an ELECTED Democratic president kept acting like he had to apologize for getting elected and BEING a Democrat. You would agree, I hope, that we must never settle for eight years of dead loss like that ever again.

It was NEVER fair for the party insiders to blame liberals and progressives for the failures of the 70's and 80's. Any Democrat would have lost in a landslide to Nixon in '72, once he made the China trip(even Scoop Jackson and you all know it). Carter lost in 1980 because he put the Republican goal of a balanced budget and the rich man's priority of low inflation before full employment before traditional Democratic values, and also because of the bad feelings he caused by his unjustifiably vicious primary campaign against Ted Kennedy(remember those people who just HAPPENED to show up on Teddy's motorcade route in Chicago shouting "murderer, murderer" right before the Illinois primary?)

Mondale lost because he deliberately chose to give up his sense of humor and stop displaying any passion for his principles during the '84 campaign. And Dukakis lost because he refused to respond to Bush's smears, in a campaign where we progressives were BEGGING him to fight back.

We never had to reduce ourselves to Conservatism to win in '92(and once Clinton sold out on healthcare and left gays in our armed forces to be hounded out of the service, he essentially governed exactly as Bush Sr. would have).

The DLC lies have to stop.

[paulk]

34. an interpretation

based on whe way you wish things were. It's not a black and white battle between "conservatism" and "progressivism".

I can't take your premise seriously.

[Ken Burch]

35. Why should I take your response "seriously"?

You didn't make a case for any particular position. All you did is attack mine. That's not good enough.
You aren't treating this discussion with any respect.

[paulk]

39. well, when an individual (you) makes a post that uses "we"

in talking about a diverse group of people.... as if you were their spokesman -

it's hard to treat the discussion that follows with much respect.

[wyldwolf]

14. Obama called Wellstone a "gadfly." And Obama and the Hamilton Project???

[KittyWampus]

20. You realise Gadfly is NOT a pejorative, don't you?

[wyldwolf]

15. The Audacity of Hope reads like a DLC manifesto - but with more flowery language

[truebrit71]

17. That's sort of how I saw it too...

...much too mainstream, centrist, "we need to bring the country together" type bullshit...

Fuck that for a bowl of cherries....I want payback....

[KittyWampus]

22. you "want payback"? Just the perfect reason for politicans of ANY persuasion to ignore you.

[Ken Burch]

28. Not payback...a victory that's WORTH something.

The Nineties proved that nothing good happens when progressives are out in the cold in a Democratic administration. Eight years where only the rich gained from "Democratic" policies.

Nothing from that decade should ever be repeated.

[Tellurian]

31. Oops... he we go again with conditions..

15 sec of rationality, then zip, back to the same ole.

what is "progressive" about that?

[Ken Burch]

33. What "Conditions" did I put in that post at all?

I didn't ask for anything specifically.

All I did was point out the obvious: that there is nothing in the Nineties we should repeat in the next Democratic administration. You don't honestly think we should ever again use DLC ideas, do you?

Is there any good reason to EVER have another Democratic ticket that's as far to the right as Clinton-Gore?

Any reason to ever have another Democratic ticket that BRAGS about not being progressive and how much it loves executing people?

Any reason for a Democratic adminstration to ever do something as vicious as Clinton did when he signed the Rush Limbaugh Wet Dream Welfare Persecution Act, a signing that didn't even gain us a single vote anywhere?

[Ken Burch]

38. What about all the conditions you DLC'ers put on giving YOUR support to the party

Like your candidate always being the nominee, or YOUR platform always being adopted without debate, or the rich always coming out ahead of the workers and the poor when the DLC president is in office?

[Ethelk2044]

21. Sorry Hillary has DLC written all over her. Obama explains about his life in that book

That has nothing to do with the DLC.

[Capn Sunshine]

36. Is this really necessary? Can't you talk about your own candidate?

This disinfo thread is pathetic. Really.