I haven't written about politics in a long time, which some of you might think is a good thing. Furthermore, I doubt I'm going to start again any time soon. My politics haven't necessarily changed, I'm still the big liberal I always was. In fact, that's part of the problem. It's been a long time since I felt like the Democratic Party showed much interest in upholding any of its traditional progressive values, and I'm not sure I see things getting better any time soon. Lewis Black described the Republicans as the party of Bad Ideas, and the Democrats as the party of No Ideas.
And while I agreed that the 2000 election was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court rather than the will of the people, it was also clear to me and a lot of progressives that if not for the failings of the Democratic Party and Al Gore to capitalize on the peace and prosperity of the Clinton Administration, the election would have not only gone the other way, but wouldn't have even been all that close.
As for 2004? Another weak candidate who couldn't beat the worst president since the discovery of electricity, it seemed. It didn't make much sense, given how poorly George W. Bush had performed and how badly the war was going, but whatever. No one ever failed in business or politics by banking on the ridiculousness of the American public.
Well, turns out, the problem with the American voting public might not have been our decision to re-elect an apocalyptically bad president after all.
The problem might just have been our trust in the system and the assumption that our votes actually mattered.
Is this how the fall of Rome began? And when it happened, did the Romans actually give a damn?
11 comments:
I find that article really chilling. But why did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decide to publish it in Rolling Stone? It's way too serious a subject to be discussed in a forum that will be dismissed as entertainment for potheads. -victoria
Victoria, I suspect the reason it went to RS is that RFKjr is perceived as one of those potheads by a great deal of the mainstream. The man had a radio show on Air America for heaven's sake, that makes him very nearly a communist in many eyes.
That said, I hope it's publication in a mainstream magazine, even one that's typically not all that political, will help get the word out.
Oh, and Rob, you might want to look into Russ Feingold. He seems like a real comer when it comes to actually paying attention to the liberal side of the story.
Here's the Salon rebuttal. If nothing else, a lot of the Salon comments are interesting in that they examine both articles.
Oo, very cool, thanks Omar!
Rolling Stone isn't what it used to be, but only people who weren't prepared to hear the message anyway would call it "entertainment for potheads." Potheads haven't cared about Rolling Stone for decades, and Rolling Stone has always been as much about politics as it is about entertainment.
Robert Kennedy writes for rolling stone alllllllll the time. I think he recently did a whole huge feature on mercury in vaccinations.
i may be labeled conservative by most, but still love me some RS. I'm actually a paying subscriber ... which my husband cannot understand.
now, off to drool over the cover shot of RHCP and read more about AFI who seem to be going more goth than glam.
Democrats have no ideas, huh? What about public financing of elections? Single payer health care? Abortion rights, worker protection, civil rights, environmental protection...At one point, I think maybe liberals had started to take these things for granted, so I can kind of understand people who made this complaint in the late nineties. But not anymore.
I have to think anyone who claims they don't hear ideas coming from the Democrats should check their ear canals for foreign objects (perhaps some confetti got lodged in there at a Nader rally back in 2000?). Or maybe the obstruction is at the level of the brain.
And how many of these things are being supported by leading Democrats, Jen? How much distance have any of these issues travelled in the Congress or Senate? How much opposition to the war have we seen from the Democrats? And more importantly, how much opposition to the war did we see BEFORE public opinion turned against it?
As for the environment, I think it's interesting that the only voice we hear about global warming and the environment that has any real impact is from Al Gore.
Jen, you're so indicative of the Democratic Party of today. All righteous indignation because progressives dare to question your dedication to ideals that realistically you have been giving little more than lip service to for years. "If you're Liberal, you have no choice but to be a Democrat!" Your Nader remark is very very revealing, and sad. How exactly did Nader hurt you in 2004? Who are you going to blame for Kerry's lackluster performance, or his "Republican Lite" approach to the war?
And how many Democratic candidates will we see in 2008 that oppose the war? How many of them opposed it from the beginning? And how many, aside from Russ Feingold, have supported public financing of elections? Is that even part of the party platform?
Jen, I'm so glad you wrote, and I mean that. When the Dems get back on message, I'll be back, and that includes Al Gore, who is looking more like a quality presidential candidate than he ever did in 2000. But if you give us Senator Clinton and her opportunistic support of the war, or if you give us John Kerry or any other candidate who feels they somehow "deserve" to be president, you can expect the same sad song, third verse.
(I should point out that I really like Jen. I sounded sort of snotty there.)
Rob, I anticipated that you would argue that leading Democrats do not actually advocate these things, which is why I included the links in my post. As the links demonstrate in part, the issues I cited all have widespread support in the Democratic Party, and many Democratic legislators have made progress in getting many of these things enacted at the state level (there's a pretty obvious reason for their lack of progress in implementing them at a federal level). Massachusetts has legalized gay marriage, thanks to Democrats. Democrats in Ohio and California are trying to implement a single-payer health system. The list is obviously too exhaustive to present here, but if you want to know what Democrats are doing for the environment, or the minimum wage or abortion rights, do a google search, don't assume that the answer is "nothing" just because you're not seeing it on the front page of the New York Times.
I don't think that every liberal has to be a Democrat. But I do think it's sad that Nader was so successful in promoting the "Democrats don't have any ideas" meme, which was picked up on not just by progressives, but also by centrists and conservatives. When something like that gets repeated enough times, people believe it even if the evidence does not support it.
I think it's a ridiculous litmus test to only support candidates who opposed the war from the beginning. The rationale for war was constructed using evidence that was later determined to be false. I think it's actually rather commendable to reverse your thinking on an issue when you discover that your original conclusions were based on bad information. It's what the American public did, and it's what many politicians did, as well.
I don't think every candidate running under the Democratic Party banner is a good candidate. But I think it's a mistake to hold up someone like Hillary Clinton as the embodiment of the Democrats. I also think it's very odd that you single out Al Gore as being somehow outside the mainstream of Democratic politics. Al Gore is no maverick--he's about as mainstream and party-line a Democrat as you can get. He literally grew up in the Democratic party!
This is getting out-of-control long, but I truly believe that if the House and Senate go Democratic this year, there will be positive changes that will directly impact me personally (single payer health care would change my life a lot). And it bums me out to see people with whom I have a lot in common ideologically dismissing the Democratic party as not having ideas.
A theater I belong to had a fundraiser out here in California this past weekend for a guy named Stephen Heller. He was the whistleblower in the Diebold scandal, where Diabold was using uncertified software in the CA voting machines. And, frighteningly, he has the paperwork to prove it.
But he has been charged with three felonies (felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property) and is being prosecuted.
The world just seems upside-down.
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