A New Generation of Progressive Leadership

Democrats and particularly bloggers like to take the piss out of Barack Obama and John Edwards and the rest of our slate of Democratic Presidential candidates a lot; I've joined them. But it's undeniable that we're seeing a completely different dynamic in 2007 that we saw in 2003 leading up to the primaries. Then, centrist pro-gun fiscally conservative Howard Dean was seen as a wild-eyed liberal just to the left of Karl Marx. The range of topics was extremely narrow, and the solutions expressed even narrower. Today, we see a broad progressive agenda espoused by everyone - even Hillary Clinton - and practically everyone in this race has pitched their message in a more progressive way than even Dean. (OK, not Biden, but he represents the past)

The candidates' liberal chorus about the war in Iraq, gay rights, healthcare and labor issues was a testament to the Democratic left wing's growing strength since the Republican rout in the 2006 midterm election.

The White House hopefuls called for broad healthcare reform. All embraced allowing gays to serve in the military, a step to the left of President Clinton's policy of "don't ask, don't tell."

The rival candidates also paid homage to their party's deep antiwar sentiment by competing for the mantle of being the most strongly opposed to the war in Iraq [...]

At a time when many Republicans are dissatisfied with their presidential candidates, the mood at the twin forums illustrated the energy and high hopes coursing through liberal ranks.

"There's enthusiasm and optimism that someone in this room will be elected president," said Wayne Holland Jr., head of the Utah Democratic Party who attended the conference of liberal activists organized by the Campaign for America's Future. "There's a confidence I've never seen."

We begged, pleaded, and cajoled Democrats to emphasize a true politics of contrast in 2004 and 2006. We urged them to be bold and not passive or cautious. Now we're just starting to see the fruits of that, at least on the campaign trail (in Congress is another story, though I think they're beginning to get the message as well). People in this country are starving for change and leadership; that's why they're so disgusted with Congress right now, because it appears unwilling or unable to challenge George Bush.

But candidates on the stump ARE offering a leadership agenda. Barack Obama offered one of the boldest good government proposals in recent memory today, and he framed it in terms of a regrettable American past that we are slipping into again.

As factories multiplied and profits grew, the winnings of the new economy became more and more concentrated in the hands of a few robber barons, railroad tycoons and oil magnates.

It was known as the Gilded Age, and it was made possible by a government that played along. From the politicians in Washington to the big city machines, a vast system of payoffs and patronage, scandal and corruption kept power in the hands of the few while the workers who streamed into the new factories found it harder and harder to earn a decent wage or work in a safe environment or get a day off once in awhile.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Preventing and even discouraging partipation in the political system are important tools of the entrenched interests in society. If people can't or won't change the system, the system becomes a tool for preserving injustice instead of eradicating it [...]

From Jack Abramoff to Tom Delay, from briberies to indictments, the scandals that have plagued Washington over the last few years have been too numerous to recall.

But their most troubling aspect goes far beyond the headlines that focus on the culprits and their crimes. It's an entire culture in Washington – some of it legal, some of it not – that allows this to happen. Because what's most outrageous is not the morally offensive conduct on behalf of these lobbyists and legislators, but the morally offensive laws and decisions that get made as a result.

The specific policies are numerous, but they include banning political appointees from working on anything related to their prior employer, ending no-bid contracting abuse, banning gifts to executive branch employees, enforcing the Hatch Act which bans government officials from engaging in partisan activities, ELMINATING SIGNING STATEMENTS, allowing for public comment on all bills before signage, conducting regulatory business and federal earmarking in public, and more. Obama is a candidate with a message of changing our politics, and all of these proposals, many of which he advocated before coming to Washington, all get at a drastic change from the tarnished legacy of the Bush era and a restoration of the principles of good government and respect for the Constitution. Even Ralph Nader's old group gave it a thumbs-up. You can see the speech he gave here.

We have another Presidential candidate, John Edwards, who is the first since Lyndon Johnson, really, to talk about the shame of poverty in America and advocate for those voiceless poor who have no access to the levers of power. Because he happens to be wealthy and wants to be President so he can do something about this issue, he takes a lot of heat from a clueless media, like this story today in the New York Times, alleging that Edwards' anti-poverty nonprofit was somehow used for nefarious purposes. Never mind the fact that The Times never bothered to talk to any poor people that were helped by Edwards' nonprofit. If you just look at what the Paper of Record thinks is dastardly - going abroad to talk with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and criss-crossing the country helping build unions and talking about poverty - it doesn't seem all that untoward. In fact, it seems pretty impressive:

Indeed, this all seems like an extremely successful venture. Edwards raised some money to fight poverty. He used a certain amount of that money to finance his own pre-presidential campaigning, which was entirely focused on poverty reduction. During that campaigning, he spent an enormous amount of time...talking about poverty, and restoring its place in the national political discussion. Given that the sum of money we're talking about is $1.3 million, how has this not been an extraordinarily effective anti-poverty center? Granted, among its methods were to enable a national politician to continually raise the issue's profile through his personal advocacy, but isn't that what folks donating to a John Edwards poverty center were expecting? And hasn't Edwards -- who still brings up poverty in his speeches, just released a book on the subject, and whose efforts spurred Matt Bai to write a New York Times Magazine cover story on the reemergence of the issue in the national political discourse -- proven very, very effective? If you care about poverty, this seems like $1.3 million well spent.

It's clear to me from these examples that we have a new generation of progressive leadership, one that is understanding that in a dangerous world, in the aftermath of a disastrous Presidency, we cannot be timid, we cannot be cowed, we must be strong and principled and tell the nation exactly how we can change this country and make an impact on people's lives. I'll leave the last word to E.J. Dionne, who wrote this admirable piece today:

cliches die hard, so you hear such 20-year-old questions as: "Are Democrats moving too far to the left?" or "Will Democrats abandon the center?"

This approach is about abstractions, not concrete political problems, and it misses the dynamic in American public life, which is the move away from the right and a discrediting of the conservative era. The political "center" of today is not where the "center" was even five years ago.

That's why every leading Democratic candidate for president chose to appear at this week's "Take Back America" conference organized by the Campaign for America's Future, the leading group on the party's progressive end [...]

None of this means that the country would replace the fiercely ideological politics of the right with strident leftism. On the contrary, the reaction against conservatism is being fed by two streams -- a move left by one part of the electorate, and a frustration with ideological politics altogether by another part.

It's why New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, flirting with an independent run for the presidency while denying he's doing so, hit a responsive chord when he declared this week that "good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology."

But the "good ideas" that voters are demanding mostly have to do with problems that have been framed by the left, not the right: the need to disengage from Iraq, to create health security, to ease economic inequalities. It's time to update our sense of where the political center lies and to adjust our view of "the left" accordingly.

The local Air America station has a new tagline: "Progressive, the new mainstream." I'm beginning to think that they're right.