Tag: president

Dem bums

There have been thousands of words written in recent days about the Democrats’ failure to show any backbone and stand up to one of history’s least popular presidents on an issue that is vital to the health and survival of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The New York Times, for instance, called the party’s Senate leaders “feckless” today in an editorial; Glenn Greenwald offers this dissection; and Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque offers this and this.

But none have been able to top Arthur Silber, who makes the point — a valid one I think — that the Democrats and Republicans share a basic goal, shared also by corporate America: Control.

(T)he Democrats may differ from the Republicans on matters of detail, or emphasis, or style. But with regard to the fundamental political principles involved, everything that has happened over the last six years — just as is the case with everything that has happened over the last one hundred years — is what the Democrats want, too.

It may seem a bit extreme, but an honest evaluation of Democratic presidencies — and wars, as offered by Silber — doesn’t exactly show the party to be a shining light of populism or progressive principles. State liberalism in the form of the Democratic Party has really been little more than the flip side of the old business conservatism — a system designed to keep the corporate engine humming.

They could have made a stand here, stopped the president in his tracks and forced the national GOP to stand as the paragon of repressive government the party has become.

But instead the Democrats stood down. A cowardly move, perhaps, but as Floyd says in his post, the Demcorats “cop to cowardice to cover up complicity.” (This criticism exempts Rush Holt, Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold and the others who were willing to fight, but whose swords were taken from them.)

Am I sounding a tad angry? Is my natural lefty populism showing through? What do you expect when a party that has been elected to reverse six years of domestic neglect, foreign misadventure and religious pandering manages to cave on the most important of issues and refuses to truly engage the public on several others (universal health care, anyone?).

The game, of course, is rigged. We are not likely to see a viable progressive third-party presence running at the national level. The system affords just two choices — bad and dangerous. Democrats may be bad, but the current crop of Republican candidates are downright dangerous.

I may not be ready for a return of Clinton corporatism, but I can’t see how a Rudy Giuliani presidency would be good for America or for the world — and he may be the best of this ugly lot of Republican wannabes.

So I and too many others will vote for a candidate come November 2008 that we don’t like because we dislike the other major candidate more. And then we’ll complain about our lack of choices for four years and do it again.

Is this any way to run a democracy?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Stand up to the president or get out of the way

I’m still not sure that Cindy Sheehan is making the right move in threatening to challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi next year, but she is right about the weakness of the Democrats.

They need some backbone — especially when it comes to defending the basic principles of our constitution.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in a farely pointed editorial today, calls the Democrats “gutless chumps” who “are worried about being cast as weak on terrorism” and “willing to cave before they fully understand how thoroughly they were hoodwinked by President Bush on other surveillance matters.”

Congress has only a scant notion of how contemptuously the White House has treated a 1978 law that requires special judicial review of surveillance in intelligence cases. And what are the Democrats poised to do? Give the executive branch anything it wants.

“Gutless chumps” might be an understatement.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The false promise of experience

I’ve been waiting for someone to make this argument as effectively as Ari Berman does here:

I’d like to suggest that “experience” — a buzzword every election cycle — is also overrated.

At every turn Hillary Clinton invokes her years as First Lady and New York Senator as a not-so-subtle contrast to Barack Obama’s supposed inexperience. In his piece criticizing Obama this morning, my colleague David Corn writes that Clinton and John Edwards are “steeped in the nuances, language, and minefields of foreign policy.”

That tenure prompted both Clinton and Edwards to support the war in Iraq, along with virtually the entire Democratic foreign policy elite. They had years of PhDs, postings abroad and negotiations with dictators (the kind bemoaned by Clinton and embraced by Obama in last night’s YouTube debate) under their belt. And they came down on the wrong side of the biggest foreign policy question of their generation.

So it’s a little disturbing to see Clinton surrogates like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright giving reporters a tutorial today on how to negotiate with hostile regimes. In a follow-up interview with a newspaper in Iowa, Hillary piled on by calling Obama’s comments “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Let’s step back a second. The Obama camp could argue that it was “irresponsible and frankly naive” for Senator Clinton to hand President Bush a blank-check to go to war and then claim that she was only giving the Administration the authorization to win over the United Nations and keep weapons inspectors in Iraq until they finished the job. It was painfully obvious, except maybe to Senators and their advisors in Washington, that Bush would use Congressional approval as a mandate to invade.

Those senators he’s talking about were the ones with experience.

I have not signed on to any bandwagon and I remain in flux about who I’d like in the White House when the disastrous Bush years finally come to a close.

But having spent the last 17 years talking with politicians and candidates at the local and state level, I know that experience is really only a small part of the equation.

First, experience tends to favor incumbents. Incumbents, by virtue of being in office, are more experienced.

In the case of the current crop of Democrats, for instance, experience should favor Joe Biden and Bill Richardson (maybe Chris Dodd). Anyone ready to get behind their gray eminences?

Second, experience is meaningless if there is no vision. Successful candidates — and presidents, etc. — have vision. Ronald Reagan had vision (I disagreed with it, but he had it) and John Kennedy had vision. Neither had the kind of experience one might think is required to sit in teh White House.

Jimmy Carter also lacked experience. But that’s not what I think killed his presidency. It was his lack of any real sense of where the country had to go, a lack of focus that could organize his policies and capture the imagination of the country.

Having someone with experience might be nice, but it’s not necessarily the best option.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.