IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, V: ATTACK ON DEFENSE

Column No. 111 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - June 22, 2006

At the end of January last Karl Rove announced that the Republicans would/should be running on two issues in the November, 2006 Congressional elections: national defense/security and "values" (New York Times, January 21, 2006, Metropolitan Desk Late Edition – Sect. A, Page 1, Col. 1).   Rove does love to set the agenda for he knows well that virtually every time, he who sets the agenda wins the election.  We will be dealing with that electoral strategy issue in more than one future column. In this one I begin a two-part focus on the national defense/security issue, further developing the thinking that I presented briefly at the end of my TPJ column of February 9, 2006, entitled “A Comment on Democratic Alchemy; Appearing in The American Prospect.”

The Democratic Leadership Council Democrats, like Senators Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, and Joseph Lieberman present one approach to the conundrum.  It is encapsulated well by the title of one of the most well-known songs from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”  And so, they start from the falsity that in the War on Iraq “we are fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here.”  Now that strategy might be a good one if there were in Iraq large numbers of non-Iraqis (or Iraqis for that matter) dedicated to the use of flanking maneuvers (sorry, I mean “terrorism”) who we could fight and kill or capture in large numbers.  Unfortunately, that is not the case.  On many important issues the DLC seems to have the same level of dependence on facts that the Georgites do.  But, engaging in that alternate reality, the DLC and its minions are falling all over themselves countering with the "we can do the Georgite national security and values agendas even better than the Georgites have, so elect us" line.

First, this approach gives the game away on the facts before play starts.  It is well-known that the vast majority of Iraqi resisters to the US occupation are Iraqis and the best guess about them is that they would not have taken up arms against any successor Iraqi government if the US occupation were not ongoing.  It is also well-known that the overall security situation in Iraq is getting worse, not better.  Third, it is also well-known that among the tens of thousands of new Iraqi enemies of the US the invasion/occupation has produced; before the invasion many of them viewed the US as a country they could count on to help them when push came to shove in getting rid of the hated dictator.  It never occurred to them that the US way of replacing him would create a situation that an increasing number of Iraqis regard as worse, not better.

Second, the DLC approach gives the game away on what the correct electoral strategy is before play starts.  The Georgite policy in Iraq is based on the concept that military force can achieve the goals it has set as those of the invasion: “establishing Democracy.”  “We can do it better” means that the DLC supports using more force, which presumably means more money and more military manpower, both in short supply in the US, that is unless taxes are raised to support the war effort and the draft is resumed.  (Even then, “success,” however it might be defined, would be hardly guaranteed.) But one hears none of the latter.  Just “we have to be muscular,” “we cannot abandon the Iraqis, or the troops” “what will the world think,” and the like.

Third, the DLC strategy ignores the facts that a) the Georgites bold-facedly lied our country into the war, b) a majority of Americans now thinks that the US never should have gone in, and c) that the primary electoral base of the Democratic Party wants the US to leave as soon as possible.

Fourth, the strategy totally disregards Harry Truman’s dictum that if a voter wants to choose a Republican, they will go for the real one rather than some pale imitation every time.

In the face of this, what should Real Democrats do?  Well, first of all, they should be calling for withdrawal from Iraq at the earliest feasible time, just like Cong. Murtha and colleagues are in the House and just like Sen. Feingold and colleagues are in the Senate.  But to my mind even more importantly, they should be going onto the offensive against the Georgites.  They should not accept the position that the Georgites simply made a mistake and it is up to the Democrats to rectify it.  The premise should be that not only has the Iraq invasion weakened the national security of our country, not strengthened it, but that the whole Georgite national security policy and programs are totally flawed, and weaken our country, not strengthen it.

And so.  The indictment of the Georgites on defense/national security could go something like this.

1.       Protecting us from future 9/11s?  The first one happened to have happened on their

watch.   It happens that they received multiple warnings about some threatened dire terror event, from the famous 8/5/01 Presidential Daily Briefing paper to whatever warning was leaked to Judith Miller and The New York Times by a “top-level White House source” in the summer of 2001 (Daily News Attytood, http://www.pnionline.com. 5/18/06).  They didn’t protect us the first time.  Why should we count on them to protect us again?

2.       They may have caught and killed al-Zarqawi but it still not known a) just how much Power he had in the Iraq insurgency (some sources say”very little”), b) whether or not he was really “al Qaeda.”  In any case, the US has not caught Osama, and c) how his death (itself already shrouded in secrecy and charges of cover-up) will affect the facts on the ground, if it will at all.

3.       If the Georgites did not lie the US people and Congress, as well as the UN, into the War, they were totally incompetent in handling the intelligence information about what was the true situation in Iraq in relation both to WMD and relations with al Qaeda (both non-existent).  2500 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later why should the Georgites be trusted to do any better the next time around.

4.       They have depleted and weakened our armed services in fighting a war for which it is ill-equipped and not properly trained.  (There’s that competence issue again.)  In fact, they have taken the world’s mightiest military force and are on their way to rendering it incapable of doling anything except massive bombings (apparently on the Georgite agenda for Iran).

5.     They have created large numbers of new terrorists, not reduced their ranks.

6.    They have turned the world against us.

7.    They have done virtually nothing to strengthen homeland security in the homeland, e.g., the deplorable situation at our nation’s ports.  They use homeland security funds as much for bucking up their electoral prospects in certain states and districts as for proving true homeland security.   And of course, they have created a domestic spying operation that has no proven relationship to homeland security but has a clearly proven relation to the Georgite campaign to destroy Constitutional democracy in the United States.

8.       They have demonstrated clearly that they are totally incompetent when it comes to handling natural disasters, much less future man-made ones that could have even worse aftermaths.

9.       They have depleted the national treasury.

10.   Showing that they just love military solutions to problems that cannot be solved using the military (like hunting down and seriously weakening if not eliminating al Qaeda), they propose to send the National Guard to patrol our nation’s Southern border, a task for which they are neither equipped nor trained.

Next time we will discuss a positive program on developing a true and truly effective program for national defense and security.

IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, IV: THE TEN COMMITMENTS, RE-VISITED

Column No. 110 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - June 15, 2006

I have twice shared with you my proposed “Ten Commitments” for the Democratic Party (once on November 25, 2006, and more recently on February 9 of this year).  I must say that I still like them and I still think that they are a good candidate for that “list of ten” that many Democrats are searching for.  (They are substantive and thus stand in stark contrast to the ten of Gingrich’s infamous 1994 “Contract on America” almost all of which were about process: “we will introduce . . .” not necessarily implement. For the most part they did the former and did not do the latter.)  I am republishing them here in this “Ideas for Democrats” Series because our Party certainly is a long way from closure about what it is going to put at the center of our Campaign for both 2006 and 2008.

As I have noted previously, my primary list for the most part eschews specific legislative proposals.  I do remain convinced that first we need to find that new “overarching philosophy” that has been talked about for so many years.  (I presented my candidate for that position in the first column in this series).  Then, I think that a “top ten” list can be very useful, if it focuses on those principles of governance and governing that so distinguish the Democratic Party of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and the pre-Viet Nam Lyndon Johnson, from the Republican Party.  Democrats have been good with laundry lists of proposed legislative programs for decades.  They don’t win elections.  Principles do. (Viz. the Republicans’ “cut taxes,” “shrink government,” “end regulation,” “fight flanking maneuvers [oops, I mean “terrorism”], none true representations of their positions but presented as if they were nevertheless.)  With apologies to the wonderful Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun for the title of my list (http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/ten_commitments), once again I put forward for your consideration a slightly modified version of my proposed draft “Ten Commitments.”

Henceforth, the Democratic Party will be committed to:

I.  A full, planned withdrawal from all military activity in Iraq, including the construction and maintenance of all military bases, by a date certain.  This withdrawal is to be accompanied by a reactivation of the Israel/Palestine peace process along the lines of the proposed Geneva Accords.  It is further to be accompanied by a return to the multi-lateral foreign policy that worked so well for our country from the time we entered the Second World War until the advent of Georgitism, and a return to abiding by the UN Charter, which forbids “pre-emptive war” of the Georgite type.  (A specific plan for achieving the Iraq withdrawal can be found in my column of Dec. 15, 2005.)

II. A return to totally free and fair elections, and a full-scale assault on the Republican strategy of Grand Theft Elections.  (See: the recent GAO analysis, at http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20051021122225-53143.pdf, the Report of the Carter-Baker election reform commission, http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/a/203832.htm, Mark Crispin Miller’s new book, Fooled Again, and now Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s  major article on Rolling Stone, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen).

III. Making the protection and promotion of Constitutional Democracy, in accordance with the plain language of the Constitution including the Preamble, the center of the Party’s approach to governing.  A return to the Constitutional System of checks and balances and the requirement that the President fully abide by the Constitution is essential.

The Preamble to the Constitution states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

IV. A vision of government that is defined by the Preamble, which understands that big problems require big solutions, that when necessary for the common economic good, government needs to be big, that the Norquist Doctrine of Bathtub Government needs to be flushed down the toilet.  On the other hand, in accord with the prescriptions of the Constitution, when it comes to such matters as belief as to when life begins, freedom of political, moral and ethical expression, and adult personal behavior, government needs to be small.  This is the exact opposite of the Republican, anti-Constitutional view, which wants government to be overwhelmingly big when it comes to said matters of personal belief, rights, liberties, and freedom, and overwhelmingly small when dealing with the economy.

V. In support of this Commitment, a taxation policy designed to share the burden, in accordance with ability to pay, of supporting those actions of government necessary for the full implementation of its responsibilities as set forth in the Preamble.

VI. Also in support of Commitment IV, regulation of the market for goods and services designed to insure that it is both free and fair.

VII. A Pledge of honesty, integrity, openness, and a return to the traditional arms-length relationship between government and the private sector for all elected and politically-appointed government officials.  A specific ethical pledge to which all Democratic candidates for elected office and Democratic nominees for political appointments will be asked to subscribe will be developed.

VIII. The broad and forward projection of the most important Values that define a civil society: pluralism in matters of religion in accordance with the First Amendment; tolerance of difference; the promotion of compassion and sharing the burden, leaving behind the Doctrine of Every Man for Himself and the Devil Take the Hindmost; the full promotion of human rights at home and abroad; the understanding that healthy sex is healthy and unhealthy sex is not and that for adults sex is a private matter; and the end to the promotion of the criminalization of personal belief in matters of morality and of adult sexual identity and behavior.

IX. The development of an Energy Policy that will deal with the potentially disastrous and very real problem of global warming, as well as ensuring that ample energy will be available to support modern human life after the petroleum runs out.

X. The establishment of nomination and hiring standards for political appointees designed to ensure competence in government.  A specific list of standards will be developed.

This is where I think the Democratic Party has to go.  If one tries to pick out “what issues can we win with?” first without examining and establishing principles, that is “why” we should win, one almost assures losing (as has been proven over and over again since the election of 1964).  Neither our country, nor indeed the world, nor indeed in my view the human species as we know it, could afford that.

IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, III: DEALING WITH THE DLC, II

Column No. 109 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - June 8, 2006

Last week I began my column by noting that common to left-wing Democrats, old-style New Deal Democrats, progressive Democrats, many traditional liberal Democrats, among all sorts of Democrats that is, except the so-called “New Democrats” lead by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), is the plaint “Why Don’t the Democrats?”  By that is commonly meant why don’t the Democrats come up with a new, progressive, overarching philosophy, and why don’t they consistently distinguish themselves from the Republicans in general and the Georgites in particular on the principal issues that face our country: the role of government, the preservation of Constitutional Democracy, the War on Iraq, the looming threat to the planet as a whole of the consequences of global warming, and the prevention of future acts of Grand Theft Election.

I pointed out that the principal reason that that does not happen is that there is no “THE Democratic Party.”  The best organized, best funded wing of the Party with the most regular access to the mass media is the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), considered by most observers to represent the right-wing of the Party.  Last week I presented a brief (and surely incomplete) history of the development of the DLC.  I pointed out that in the midst of the Reagan Presidency that was clearly taking the country to the Right, much-needed Democratic Party reform could have gone either to the Left (developing a New Deal-successor overarching public-service philosophy) or to the Right.  The DLC took it to the Right.  In a posture that it still holds to today, they stood for two principal principles: in order to get elected, in our public persona Democrats have to look as much like Republicans as possible, except that we’re nicer, and we have to play “small ball,” not in the sense that those hateful, single-issue, very loud identity groups do, but in the sense that we have to go with issues at the secondary and tertiary levels of importance, preferably ones that won’t offend very many people when we put them forth.  And so, the issue for us non-DLC Democrats of every non-DLC stripe becomes, “just how do we get our Party back?”  How do we deal with the DLC?

First, we have to consider what NOT to do.  In dealing with the DLC we do not want to do in return precisely what the DLC does: spending a lot more time attacking the rest of us in the Democratic Party than they spend attacking the Republicans.  For example, as our colleague Michael Carmichael has said of their new book on foreign policy With All Our Might. “Nowhere does the DLC volume present a serious critique of Bush administration foreign policy failures.”  According to Michael, the authors of the book spend a lot more time attacking fellow Democrats than they do attacking the Georgites. Not that we should never attack, as for instance in getting on Hillary Clinton’s case for sponsoring anti-flag burning legislation or Barack Obama’s case for omitting from his vocabulary to the extent possible two critical words, “Iraq” and “Constitution.” But for the most part for us doing so must be a no-no, and whenever we do it, we must present the positive reasons for making our criticisms.

Second, unlike the DLC which often tends to personalize issues just like the Republicans do, we need to stay way from so doing and stay focused on the issues themselves.  Unlike the DLC, we already recognize that all of the central Georgite polices, from the War on Iraq to the War on the Constitution to the War on The Environment to the War on the Rest of Us on Behalf of the Interests of the Rich, represent the most grave of threats to the future of our country as we have known it since the Civil War.  And so, we need to deal with the DLC by hammering away on our anti-Georgite themes, on these major issues facing the nation, which now resonate with an ever-increasing part of the electorate.  By so doing we will demonstrate their failings much better than openly attacking them will.  Of course, each time we criticize a Georgite policy we need to present a positive alternative to it.  The adoption of an over-arching philosophy, perhaps of the type I proposed in the first column of this series, will make doing so ever so much easier.

Third, we have to consider the fact that the DLC actually seems to like many of the Georgite polices, especially in the economic and military and even foreign policy arenas.  Why? As David Sirota says in his new book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back, (quoting here from the BuzzFlash promo for the book), “If the opposition party becomes part of the corporate consensus, in effect part of a hostile takeover, then you have an entire political system where ordinary people’s interests are not even being represented in the debate, much less in public policy. ... the middle and working class in America are being absolutely crushed everywhere they turn.”  There are two positive ways to deal with this problem.  One is to simply point out, without denigrating the DLC directly, how the corporate interests that they represent fly in the face of the interests of the country as a whole.  Second, we need to identify as many specific pro-DLC corporate interests as we can and show how their professed interests stand in contra-distinction to traditional Democratic Party interests and concerns.

Fourth, we need to begin to approach directly and personally pro-DLC corporate interests and show them how their continuing support for DLC policies, which too often mimic Georgite polices although they are perhaps milder in tone, is not in their own best interests.  An increasing number of traditional Republican voices are coming out against the Georgites, in the corporate sector, in the financial sector, in the military.  We need to find ways of bringing these voices together and help us approach other possibly sympathetic members of their sectors.  One organization that is already doing this is “Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities” (http://www.sensiblepriorities.org).  Their full-page ad in The New York Times of May 21, 2006 calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation cited issues that the DLC generally shies as far away from as it can, issues with which many branches of the Georgite regime can well be confronted: “Financial mismanagement and unaccountability; incompetent forecasting; mammoth waste; plummeting morale; squandered good will; intolerance of dissent.”  Folks, these are the words of worried business people, not traditional left-wing Democrats.  Let’s build upon them organizationally.

Fifth, the DLC seems to often focus on how the Democratic Party can win electorally by using this issue or that or not using that other issue or this.  We need to counter this by focusing first on why the Democratic Party should win, then going on to the “how.”  This again gets back to staying on issue-message, on developing that over-arching philosophy for the Party, on staying on the attack against the Georgites not the DLC per se, and on coupling every attack item with a positive program item for dealing with the issue raised.

Sixth, certain leading DLCers are actually saying “gee, maybe it would be better if we lost the mid-term elections so that we would have a better chance of winning (electorally) in 2008” (Adam Nagourney, “Hey Democrats, Why Win?” The New York Times, May 14, 2006).  By doing so they ignore totally what further substantive harms will come to our country, our Constitutional form of government, and the world as a whole under another two years of total control of the Federal government by the Georgites.  Our position must be we that have to win, we need to win now, in 2006, at least one House of Congress, to at least slow down the Georgite avalanche of reaction.  Then, once we get there, we need to have investigations, surely.  But during the next two years we have to be equally strong in putting forward positive legislative proposals, whether or not they actually make it into law.  If they don’t because we control only one House, that becomes the reason for campaigning to win both in 2008.  If we somehow win both and then elicit a series of Bush vetoes, that becomes the reason for winning the Presidency as well in 2008.

Finally (for this week at least, and I do have additional thoughts on this one, surprise, surprise), we have to recognize that the Democratic leadership in the Congress is not monolithic nor is it stuck in a time-warp.  We need to be patient while we continue to apply positive pressure.  And so, just as we need to deal with the DLC not by continually attacking it but by going forward, we need to deal with the Democratic Congressional leadership not by attacking its negative parts that support, openly or covertly, Georgite polices, but by defending, supporting and encouraging those who are gradually turning against them.  Who would have thunk it six months ago that as Hillary gradually moves to the Right and Nancy Pelosi gradually moves to the Left that the latter would be gradually replacing the former as O’RHannibaugh favorite whipping girl?  Who would have thunk it that one of the most pro-military-might Democratic Congressman, John Murtha, would at the same time have become their favorite whipping boy?  Times change and so do people.  We need to stay positive.

That’s it for this week.  More next.

IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, II: WHY DON’T THE DEMOCRATS?

Column No. 108 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - June 1, 2006

“Why Don’t the Democrats?”  This is a common plaint heard among left-wing Democrats, among old-style New Deal Democrats, among progressive Democrats, among many traditional liberal Democrats, among all sorts of Democrats that is, except the so-called “New Democrats,” lead by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).  It was put together by certain sectors of the Party leadership in the 1980s.  In this column, I attempt to provide some answers to that question.

To begin that task we must first look at the DLC a bit.  It was designed to counter the identity-group Democratic Party politics that had developed in the 1960s that eventually lead to the Presidential nomination of George McGovern in 1972.  That nomination had been opposed by significant sectors of the Democratic Congressional leadership. The stone-faced visage of “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing” (nominally from the State of Washington) looking down upon the assembled throng on nomination night is forever etched in my memory.  Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey too, and a number of other center and center-right Democrats did not lift a finger for McGovern.

They were right about the dead-endedness of identity group politics.  You cannot win on a national scale by having a platform made up of pieces appealing to one identity group after another with nothing tying those pieces together.  This is surely not to say that equality for women, a peace-first/shoot-later multi-lateral foreign policy, civil rights, environment protection and preservation, labor rights, gay rights and protections, establishing an equitable and cost-effective national health care system, and so on and so forth are not among the most important central political objectives of any Democratic Party that it is to live up to its name and its history.

It is to say that the way they were put forth in the McGovern era, with no central bring-them-all-together themes a) didn’t work, and b) made them and the Democratic Party an easy target for the ever-rightward lurching Republicans, as well as for rightward-lurching leadership Democrats.

The first DLC candidate-in-fact although without the label and without the organization was that nice, totally inexperienced, one-term Southern governor, Jimmy Carter.  He was actually an accidental candidate.  The logical one for 1976 was Ted Kennedy, but the Chappaquidick tragedy had done him in.  The other logical candidate was Hubert Humphrey, who with his minuses also brought many plusses, including what it meant to be a New Deal/Great Society Democrat.

However, bladder cancer intervened and we were left with Jimmy.  It is notable that even in the post-Nixon, post-other-Republican scandals, Carter is principally remembered for just two things: presiding over the development of the Camp David Accords that brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and presiding over the development of the worst inflation that the nation had seen in the 20th century.  Hardly elements of the traditional Democratic agenda.   And so, Carter brought us Reagan, not a product per se of the Republican Religious Right (although definitely of the Goldwater right-wing of the Party), but the historical transition figure who brought his Party and the Nation directly to the RRR’s current control of the Federal government.

The DLC grew out of the era of the Carter Presidency.  It developed on the one hand in response the anti-Vietnam War movement both within and without the Party that bore a major responsibility for the nomination of Sen. McGovern.  On the other hand it developed in response to the identity-group politics that the Senator surely did not foster or even like very much, but whose constituents were instrumental in gaining the nomination for him.  And they dominated the then-liberal wing of the Party.  At that point, in the midst of the Reagan Presidency that was clearly taking the country to the Right, Democratic Party reform could have gone either to the Left, developing a New Deal-successor overarching public-service philosophy or to the Right.

The DLC took it to the Right.  In a posture that it still holds to today, they stood for two principal principles: in order to get elected in our public persona we have to look as much like Republicans as possible, except that we’re nicer, and we have to play “small ball,” not in the sense that those hateful single-issues that those very loud identity groups do, but in the sense that we have to go with issues at the secondary and tertiary levels of importance, preferably ones that won’t offend very many people who traditionally oppose us (although they may offend traditional Democrats) when we put them forth.

The DLC in fact had as a basic premise one that stands at the center of Religious Right Republicanism, so famously put by Bill Clinton in one of his most memorable State of the Union addresses: “The era of big government is over.”  And so the DLC took, and takes, the position which is at the center of contemporary far right Republicanism.  The functions of government are to be as limited as possible in doing the people’s business, infra-structure, health care, environment, public services, education, economic regulation, and etc., as “strong” as possible when it comes to oppression and repression and military might.  The government’s role in suppressing freedom of thought and personal action, so dear to the hearts of the Religious Right, the DLC just ignores.

Following in importance the two positions on whether we should actually have a Constitutional Democracy or a government by “Unitary Executive” (read dictatorship) running the country, the biggest difference between the Georgite Republican Party and the traditional Democratic Party in fact is over the role of government.  The Georgite Republicans, as I have written in this space many times, want to, in the immortal words of Grover Norquist referring to all the kinds of governmental functions called for by the Preamble to the Constitution, “shrink government to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bath tub.”  The DLC’s only President, Bill Clinton, functionally agreed with this view, as he said, although he would not use Norquist’s rhetoric. Traditional Democrats beg to differ.  We look to the Constitution and its Preamble*, which sets forth a broad and strong role for the Federal government in running the affairs of the nation as a whole.

And so, we currently face this divide in the country, on Constitutional government to begin with, then on the role of government, then on the Iraq War, then on the drive to divide and conquer with homophobia, misogyny, racism, and etc. The DLC surely does not endorse extreme Georgite positions on all of these matters.  But they consistently try to find a “middle ground,” as on abortion rights, where there clearly is none.  On foreign policy for example, the DLC has just come out with a book entitled With All Our Might.  Our colleague Michael Carmichael has said of it: “Nowhere does the DLC volume present a serious critique of Bush administration foreign policy failures.  Quite the contrary, the authors would have the Democratic Party default to the PNAC (Project for the New American Century, read ‘neo-con’) positions on virtually every point of defense, military and foreign policy.”   Further, according to Michael the authors of the book spend a lot more time attacking fellow Democrats than they do attacking the Georgites.

Once again, on the War, on global warming, on other ravagings of the environment, health care, education, civil rights, civil wrongs, sexuality rights, on the nature of the Republican Party itself, in the context that Bush’s poll ratings are in the toilet, the question is asked “Why Don’t the Democrats?”  The first answer is because there is no THE Democrats.  The Party is obviously split, and I am hardly the first observer to come to that conclusion.  The question then is obviously “what do we do now?”  I will be getting to a consideration of that one in future columns in this series.  But let me conclude this one with the briefest examinations of why this is so.  Why does the DLC do what it does?  Are they stupid, or abstruse, or just plain shortsighted?  In my view none of the above.

First and most important, they actually like many of the Georgite polices, especially in the economic and military and even foreign policy arenas.  Why? As David Sirota says in his new book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back, (quoting here from the BuzzFlash promo for the book), “If the opposition party becomes part of the corporate consensus, in effect part of a hostile takeover, then you have an entire political system where ordinary people’s interests are not even being represented in the debate, much less in public policy. . . . the middle and working class in America are being absolutely crushed everywhere they turn.”

Next the DLC seems to really believe, despite what the polls tell them, that there is some vast electoral middle out there when it comes to Georgite policy and plans for the country.  Third they focus on how they think the Democratic Party can win electorally using this issue or that, not using that other issue or this, rather than first on why the Democratic Party should win, then going on to the “how.”  Certain leading DLCers are actually saying “gee, maybe it would be better if we lost the mid-term elections so that we would have a better chance of winning (electorally) in 2008,” ignoring what further substantive harms will come to country and Constitutional government under another two years of total control of the Federal government by the Republican Religious Right and the Georgites.

As I said above, to be continued.

__________

*    Preamble: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more per­fect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the com­mon defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Consti­tution for the United States of America.

IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, I: THE VISION

Column No. 107 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - May 25, 2006

With this column I return to the subject of politics and the Democratic Party that I have addressed in two previous series, the one on the Kerry Campaign in the summer of 2004, and the one entitled “The Future of the Democratic Party” in the fall of 2005.  As with the classic bridal gown, there will be something(s) old, something(s) new, something(s) borrowed and something(s) blue, which is what we all be (actually much worse) should we be unable to derail the Georgite theocratic fascist juggernaut.  The first absolutely essential step in doing that will be to take over at least one house of Congress this fall, regardless of what Adam Nagourney had to say in the News of the Week in Review in The New York Times of May 14, 2006 (“Hey Democrats, Why Win?” a topic to which I shall return in a future column).

In a front page article in The New York Times on May 9, 2006 (“Optimistic, Democrats Debate the Party's Vision”) Robin Toner said:

“With Democrats increasingly optimistic about this year's midterm elections and the landscape for 2008, intellectuals in the center and on the left are debating how to sharpen the party's identity and present a clear alternative to the conservatism that has dominated political thought for a generation. . . . . But some of these analysts argue that the party needs something more than a pastiche of policy proposals. It needs a broader vision, a narrative, they say, to return to power and govern effectively.”  To which I say, Amen.

I also say that such statements are nothing new.  On the Op-Ed page of The New York Times of November 4, 2004, Andrei Cherny, a former senior staffer for both Sen. Gore and Sen. Kerry, wrote: “The overarching problem Democrats have today is the lack of a clear sense of what the party stands for. . . . Democrats have a collection of policy positions that are sensible and right. . . . What we don’t have and what we sorely need is . . . a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.”

In The New York Times of May 26, 2003, there was a front-page story by my high school classmate Adam Clymer about the state of the Democratic Party.  Adam told us that what all of the Democratic Party leaders and outside observers alike, even the DLC people quoted, agreed upon is that what we need is: a new "clear identity," the ability "to think strategically" (Peter Hart), a "better message," to "stand for something" (Bob Strauss), to be able to "show that we can make progressive government work" (Will Marshall), "to move away from incremental new reforms to big and broad issues" (Bill Carrick).

But when I said “nothing new,” I really meant “nothing new.” In a New York Times article on September 25, 1987, the journalist E.J. Dionne wrote:  “All Democrats have been searching for language to call America away from the individualism of the Reagan years to a new sense of community.”  We Democrats have not found that language yet.  If we had, we have won the Presidency the last time around, despite the Georgite cheating machine.  In an article in The Washington Post of Nov. 9, 2004 (yes, although I have been reading the Times since I was age 7, I do see other papers from time to time), Dionne pointed out that a significant number of people who agreed with the Democrats and disagreed with Bush on individual policy issues voted for him anyway, in part because of the lack of an overall vision on the part of the Democrats and the presence of one (although we would strongly disagree with its content) on the part of the Georgites.  Finally finding that vision will be crucially important for beginning the Democratic comeback in 2006 that will be necessary if our country is to be saved from the worst outcomes of Georgite policies down the road of history.

As some of you know, in 1992, I published a book entitled The New Americanism: How the Democratic Party Can Win the Presidency. In the book, I proposed a “broad, embracing, expansive vision” for the Democratic Party, for its then present and the nation’s future.  I believe that it is still very much what the doctor ordered for the Democratic Party.  In brief, it is a simple concept with a precise mission: to find the new grand vision for the Democratic Party, to find the bed-rock foundation upon which both the traditional agenda and the 21st century agenda of the Democratic Party can be established, to find the language and the civil weapons that our nation needs if the determined Georgite assault on, yes, American Constitutional Democracy as we have known it for 200 years, is to be halted in its tracks.

Ever since the New Deal, the principal political divide between Democrats and Republicans has been over the role of government in our nation and our national policy.  Republicans want it as small as possible in dealing with the economy, as big as possible in controlling and restricting personal rights and liberties. Democrats generally take the opposite view.  Previously both sides have had some shadings on their positions.  Georgite Republicanism has none.  Not only have they adopted the Grover Norquist “sink it to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bathtub” program for any positive functions of government, but they also most obviously want to establish a government of, by, and for the repression and oppression of any citizens of our great nation who oppose their social, their economic, or their foreign polices. I originally envisioned The New Americanism as a sort of elegant marketing program for the traditional Democratic agenda.  Now the struggle is clearly over whether the United States will continue as a Constitutional Democracy or not.  Thus, with all immodesty, I now view my proposal as the first political weapon which should be put onto the field of political battle in order to stop the Georgites once and for all.

The New Americanism finds the proposed “Vision for the Democrats” in the very founding documents of our great nation. The New Americanism projects a grand, integrated, overarching, forward-looking domestic and foreign policy based upon the principles of, yes, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Together they provide the Statement of Purpose for our nation, the Statement of Purpose of our National Government, and the Primary Functions of that Government in achieving in the stated Purpose.

Our National Purpose is made clear by the Declaration: to demonstrate unequivocally that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness . . .”

The primary Purpose of our National Government is also made clear in the Declaration: “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men.”

The Primary functions of our National Government in achieving this purpose are spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Why this is enough to make a strict constructionist out of anyone (other than the Georgites, of course)!  And so I present to you, dear reader, my proposal for, as Andrei Cherny put it, “a [Democratic] worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.”  I do hope that it may prove useful.

ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Column No. 106 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH -  May 18, 2006

In his New York Times column of May 4, 2006, “The Paranoid Style,” David Brooks let loose a strong critique of Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy: Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending U.S. Decline.  He accused Phillips of engaging in “conspiracy theorizing” focused on the Republican Right and Republican Administrations, in both the foreign and domestic policy arenas.  “When the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips” he said. “Conspiracy theory” is a charge that the Republican Right just loves to trot out whenever they are faced with analyses by their critics that a) lay bare various plots and plans they have engaged in about which they have not been, shall we say, fully forthcoming, and b) for which they have little to respond with in dealing with the substance of the critiques.

As Paul Krugman pointed out in his New York Times column of May 8, 2006, “Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly large role in current American political discourse. And they're right. For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree with James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has declared that ‘man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.’“

Krugman went on: “For the last few years, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has been used primarily to belittle critics of the Bush administration — in particular, anyone suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as and excuse to fight an unrelated war in Iraq. . . . The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like ‘loopy conspiracy theories’ are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to ‘confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree.’ Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.”

Brooks falls into this latter category, and like all of the right-wing scriveners who use the term, fails to define it. Krugman cites the Wikipedia which defines “conspiracy theories” as “attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance.” One can also note that from its Latin root the word “conspiracy” means literally (and simply) “with a secret.” In English usage, it refers to a secret plan, developed and implemented by a secret group.  Further, if and when the desired outcome is achieved, the secret plan always includes a basis for claiming that that outcome is not the result of any conspiracy.  Public deniability is an absolutely essential element of such efforts.  In this light, let us consider some foreign policy actions undertaken by Republican administrations since the 1950s.

In 1953 the government of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a coup secretly organized by Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit, working for the CIA.  The coup was claimed to be indigenous at the time. The formerly pro-Nazi Shah was re-installed on his throne and an essentially fascist regime was established.  The secret U.S. involvement couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1954, the French Indo-Chinese War was brought to a peaceful end by the Geneva Agreement, guaranteed by Great Britain and the Soviet Union.  The U.S. was not a party to it.  Under the agreement the nation was temporarily divided into two parts, North and South (Pres. Reagan to the contrary notwithstanding, this was an entirely artificial creation that had no roots anywhere in Indo-Chinese history). A national election was to be held by 1956.  It was widely assumed by all parties that the Vietnamese Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would be elected president. Secretly, the Eisenhower Administration, with the Dulles brothers, Allen at the CIA and John Foster at State, encouraged the temporary government in the South to cause the election plan to be aborted.  (That kind of abortion, the Republican Right likes.) That they were never held, lead directly to the U.S.-Vietnam War.  The U.S. always officially denied that any such interference in Vietnamese domestic affairs ever took place. The U.S. role in all of this could not possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1954, the democratically elected government of Guatemala’s Pres. Jacopo Arbenz was overthrown by a military coup secretly organized by the CIA (another Allen Dulles “triumph”), although it was claimed to be indigenous at the time.  The secret U.S. involvement couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1973, the democratically elected government of President Salvadore Allende of Chile was overthrown in a military coup secretly organized by the U.S., under the leadership of the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Richard Helms, Director of the CIA. At the time, any and all U.S. participation was denied, even though Kissinger had started a secret anti-Allende campaign even before he took office in 1970.  The secret U.S. involvement couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1984, The Reagan Administration secretly began organizing an armed opposition aimed at overthrowing the left-wing government of Nicaragua that had taken power following the overthrow of the widely detested dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle.  Since any such support was prohibited by U.S. law, Reagan’s boy Ollie North secretly arranged to sell arms for Iran (at the time on the State Department’s own “any-contacts-prohibition” list) in order to raise money “off-the-books” to support the so-called “Contras.”   The “Iran-Contra” deal and its spawn couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

The Georgite invasion of Iraq cannot be properly called a conspiracy for it was based upon a not-so-secret plan for Middle East dominance and petroleum-supply security drawn up by Project for the New American Century in the mid-1990s.  However, it was nevertheless not acknowledged as having anything to do with the Iraq invasion, and certainly the highly sophisticated plans that were developed to mis-lead the American people as to the true reasons for the U.S. do indeed constitute a conspiracy, by definition.  But according to Brooks, the fact that Administration knew it was lying couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, now could it?

One must fairly point out that it has not been only Republican administrations that have engaged in secret foreign policy adventures that qualify under the definition above as conspiracies, but couldn’t possibly be either, just the product of “loopy left-wing imaginations.”  There was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, planned under Eisenhower, but approved by John Kennedy.  There was the unannounced assemblage of an invasion fleet along the Southeast coast of the Untied States in the summer of 1962, presumably aimed at Cuba (although one cannot be sure; Grenada, perhaps?), the invasion plan (if there was one) subsequently aborted by the agreement that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In 1962, the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic was overthrown, and he was replaced by a democratically elected President, Juan Bosch, a moderate left-winger.  A military coup unseated Bosch in 1963.  It was in turn over-turned in 1965.  But a second military coup, in that year, was secretly supported by Lyndon Johnson and was successful.  In 1964, Johnson secretly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Brazil, Joao Goulart.  According to Brooks, none of these plans hatched in secret, implemented at first in secret, with subsequent Administration denials of involvement in public, could possibly be defined as conspiracies.

From this review, surely are we forced to come to the same conclusion as David Brooks: “when the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips.” Aren’t we?  No, neither Republican nor Democratic administrations ever participate in foreign policy conspiracies, now do they?  No conspiracies there, not even under the bed.  These conspiracy theories are all just fantasies.  Aren’t they?  Let’s re-look at Mr. Phillips’ book in the light of the history briefly reviewed above, I say.  Go get ‘em, David Brooks.

_____

This column is based in part on a column of mine that appeared on the webmagazine BuzzFlash (http://www.buzzflash.com) on May 8, 2006.