(WARNING: I am an Edwards supporter but also am an Old Timey Democrat with some new fangled ideas.)
It’s time to call it a day. Time to pack it up and time to call in the divorce lawyers. It’s always been a troubled marriage and it looks like there are now irreconcilable differences due to way too much sleeping around. There used to be a bit more balance in the marriage and a much bigger allowance given to the people. Now we the people seem to be locked away in the attic like some dotty aunt or uncle. Nope, it’s time to break free.
I'm really sick of this term "moderate". Moderate is just a word for conservatives who are socially liberal and think the Republican Party is too whacky. They should take back that party and leave the party of FDR to those with the "Fighting Faith" that Galbraith talked about. Then we can just be friends and agree to disagree without all the baggage of trying to sleep in the same bed.
We should make it simple. The Fighting Faith people get the Main Street House and the Eisenhower Republicans aka moderates aka Blue Dogs aka Western Democrats get the Wall Street House. Then all our cards will be on the table for all to see and we can try and forge rules where the working people have an equal place at the table finally. With the clear delineation between the Party of Labor and the Party of Wealth we can try for that symbiosis deal. You know that mutual benefit between two very different critters like the way bees and flowers work together. It’s what Adam Smith and Tom Paine and others talked about in the age of Enlightenment. It was the experiment of freedom.
Right now we are just run by corporate and corporate lite and the middle class is getting "Screwed" as Thom Hartmann would say because of this "Hostile Takeover" as David Sirota would say. Time to split. Maybe also have the kid form his own party too.
Religious extremists and neo cons can have one party, let’s call it the "Big Daddy Party". Fiscal conservative social liberals can have another party - kinda Libertarian- kinda the Kumbayah Party. Then old timey liberals who believe in protecting the "vital center" of our nation i.e. the middle class and expanding opportunities and rights for those who don't have them, they can have the Main Street Party or quite simply, the Liberal Labor Party.
I know that a lot of liberal pundits see it as a matter of process and if we could only reason with Harry Reid and Rahm Emmanuel things will work out. Bill Scher has a terrific piece about why the compromises don’t work and how they have given the Republicans more power, but it doesn’ address the underlying deep seated problem that Harry and Rahm are simply in the wrong party.
Here’s Bill Scher’s "No More Compromise" piece
http://www.tompaine.com/...
which starts by saying that Harry Reid had a game plan for this year
Democrats "intend to reach out to President Bush and our Republican colleagues in Congress." The Democrats’ last guiding principle would be "results," because "it's time Democrats and Republicans worked together to achieve results."
Four months into the new Congress, how’s that game plan working out?
I literally barfed when I heard such drivel last year and wrote a piece with a less delicate title called "Compromise Sucks" http://montanamaven.com/...
Thanks in large part to my Senator Baucus, the tone was set early. Scher says,
The accommodationist tone was set early on by the Senate. After the House passed in January an extremely overdue raise in the minimum wage, Senate conservatives and the White House immediately whined that the bill needed business tax breaks to "offset" the extra $2.10 an hour.
Instead of standing up to such nonsense, daring the conservative minority to sustain an extended filibuster and face the 80 percent of electorate who supports raising the minimum wage, Democratic leaders immediately flinched. They sought to put together a tax package that would pacify those senators completely out of step with the voters.
No political price was exacted for opposing popular legislation. And with that, power shifted. The Republican minority was putting pressure of the Democratic majority, not vice versa.
He then points out compromise after compromise making the Democratic Party left on life support. And in the last week, the Party died.
Skepticism over flawed trade agreements has been rising in recent years, and several new congresspeople won on a platform of trade reform. Nevertheless, Democratic leaders cut an informal deal with the White House, seemingly extracting some minor concessions on labor and environmental standards, but lacking strong enforcement provisions, and maintaining the misnamed "free trade" structure that has failed to protect workers and lift up economies.
The coup de grace is the Iraq compromise, which is not a compromise at all but a full capitulation to the White House which wants the occupation to continue against the will of both the American and Iraqi peoples.
And then we get the craziness of sticking the minimum wage onto the Iraq bill. These folks need to go back to Poli Sci 101.
The lone upside is that the minimum wage compromise (including $5 billion in unnecessary business tax breaks) was slipped into the Iraq capitulation.
Some may view that as creative legislating. But if it takes funding a massive war supported by only 34 percent of Americans to pass a long overdue pay raise supported by a whopping 80 percent of Americans, that doesn’t bode well for future legislation.
Compromise? Work with these guys? Why? I keep asking that question?
Why do we have to work with indicted and un-indicted criminals? Do they have something on us? Will they put polonium in our food or anthrax in our mail? Even if it’s not that diabolical, why compromise? Why not consensus? Why not coming up with a new idea out of opposing views not just some mushy middle? Compromise may be good for small things, but to compromise your passion and your core beliefs seems unnecessary and often just staves off the inevitable like, say, a civil war.
For 26 years the conservatives have not compromised their vision of unraveling FDR’s "New Deal". And for 26 years the Democratic Party leaders drifted into Rubinomics embracing the multi-national corporation’s mantra of "free" trade and left their labor constituency behind. And in so doing they left their soul behind. Many of our so-called leaders roam the halls of Washington trying to find their cores, their passions, their principles. The emptiness is profound. So to substitute for this emptiness they put in its place the concept of a game and winning. They want to win something. Yeh, that’ll do it. But why do they want to win? And what do they want to win? Without that the whole deal turns into Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride without the operator at the controls. That’s what we are seeing this week.
There is something beyond rotten in this state of Denmark, but can we wait for a Fortinbras to clean up this mess? It could be too late. The damage to the Democratic Party may be permanent. After this vote on the war we will have handed the victory back to the Republicans. They will take credit in September for bringing our troops home while the Democrats will look like the wimps that they are. They are wimps because they didn’t kick the corporatists out a long time ago. They are worse than wimps because we now see clearly that they don’t really want to let those conservatives go. They are co-dependents in the hapless marriage.
Maybe the next President can turn this around. But it will take a leader that says the day of the false moderates is past. It’s time for those folks to take back their own party⎯The Republican Party and leave ours alone. If not, we need to kick them out. Then we have to elect real democrats in Congress and a real small "d" democrat as President. People who actually want to take this country in a new and bold direction with a little help from lessons learned over the past.
My choice of John Edwards has been clear for a long time and it makes the bitterness of the last week a bit easier to swallow. I’m glad that more people like Keith Olbermann are agreeing because John Edwards has to fight everyday to get the corporate news to pay attention since it’s a message that they don’t want to hear. It’s a message of a different kind of America than we’ve had in the last 26 years. It’s a repudiation of the Gospel of Wealth and a turn back to the idea that we are in this together; for better or worse; in sickness and in health.
As we head into Memorial Day we should all try to take a few moments to remember the promise of America for the least of these my brothers and sisters, our troops, as To the First pointed out in his diary today. Which side are you on, my friends, which side are you on? Time to begin a whole new life with a bunch of different partners.