It must have been divine intervention by the Journalism Gods that on my flight to Las Vegas for YearlyKos, a conference billed as a gathering of the future of the Democratic Party, I happened to sit next to Lou, a potent symbol of the party’s past. Small and wiry with a jutting jaw and the tense energy of a prizefighter,… return to article
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Reader Comments (16)Page 1 of 1 pages“I couldn’t help but notice that the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a redoubt of the party insiders, was far more diverse than YearlyKos.”
That’s simply because there’s an elaborate ‘affirmative action’ process for delegate selection to ensure that. It’s not a self-selected group of people.
Posted by jgilliam on Jun 15, 2006 at 2:14 PM While I agree in sentiment, I am on board with the message Markos et al. have been pushing in Crashing the Gate, various talk shows, etc. - that at this juncture, strategy is the number one priority. Part of their strategy, for good or ill, revolves around a core message which resonates with the populace.
As important as the labor issue is, I don’t think it can ever be addressed in the current atmosphere. It would be folly to push something which has been framed by the Republican mob as “moonbatty” simply because it is the right thing to do. Are there no pawns to be sacrificed? Remember the belief that “there’s no difference between Bush and Gore,” thus crazily voting our consciences via Nader? Must we make similar gaffes now?
Perhaps that explains the “pugilistic spirit” - the desire to win. Let them. It will be a better world for idealists too.
Posted by rocco on Jun 16, 2006 at 12:02 AM Whatever, Rocco. As long as liberals keep compromising their beliefs the Republicans will keep winning. THAT’s why Bush is in charge, not because of Nader. What exactly did YOU do anyway to get Gore or Kerry elected?
Posted by angrygreen on Jun 16, 2006 at 2:01 PM What was missing at this convention at which supposed progressives patted on another on the back...was true democratic exchange and discussion.
Since Markos has made it clear that any questions that disturb him are totally taboo on his blog page, - there was NO discussion of 9/11. No one in the celebrated and impressive truth community (as the members of scholarsfor911truth.com) would have been allowed to speak.
We’ve come a long way, baby...away from true freedom of inquiry. And that’s so sad.
Here is a good read that raises a question Kos and his adorers would never allow to be raised. How ugly is that?:
http://tvnewslies.org/blog/?p=396
Posted by skipper7 on Jun 16, 2006 at 7:43 PM angrygreen -
Compromising one’s belief is different from prioritization. I’m not suggesting we suddenly jump on Republican bandwagons, and I don’t think that anyone at YearlyKos, from what I’ve read, has either.
That said, there are key points which resonate more strongly with the majority of voters, and that should be focused upon come election time. Sadly, labor is not one of those priorities. Yet, you would have liberals run on a ‘labor’ ticket simply because we believe it’s the right thing to do? How about another tax? Better yet, let’s call ourselves ‘The party of agnostic humanism”.
This is a battle, and we need good generals just as much as we need cause to fight. I stand by my statement that Crashing the Gate outlines a sound strategy for electability.
You are, of course, free to disagree, and to do so with obvious green anger. I await your alternative strategy, and the logic that it employs.
By the way - what did I do to get Gore or Kerry elected? Well, I voted for Kerry and gave money (Unfortunately, getting elected and actually getting to be president have become two different things in this country). But I’m guessing that’s not what you meant. As for Gore, I didn’t vote. And I was a Palm Beach County resident. I was an angry green then too. Regret is a fine teacher.
Posted by rocco on Jun 16, 2006 at 8:10 PM I could’ve sworn that people of color were missing at YearlyKos.
But then again, I suppose that anyone who knows anything about DailyKos would not expect colored folk to show up (or be invited) anyway.
Well, it definitely appears that Markos et al. have indeed “crashed the gate” since they appear now to be doing what the DNC has raised to a high art: ignoring Blackfolk and Brownfolk.
Posted by signiphile on Jun 20, 2006 at 11:45 AM As a newcomer to posting on the Link, I may have missed some prior disputes. So, please forgive the potential naivete of this comment. As I read the foregoing article, I found myself agreeing with what the author was saying about Lou and people in his community. And as I read the comments, it seemed as if most of the people writing the comments didn’t understand what the author was getting at. Did I miss something? Like a prior argument? Anyway, here’s my comment:
Working people in this country are actually very socialist in their ideas about economic justice, but the structure of their religious and social communities essentially channels them into voting Republican by equating the Republicans with moral virtue and the “holy seal.” They don’t realize that what they truly believe about wages and working and corporations is socialist, but in fact, it is. The problem is the successful definition of “socialism” as something bad.
Secondly, the “political junkies,” especially the ones who can afford to travel to a convention away from home, are quite out-of-touch with the daily realities of life for about 60% of the people in this country—that is, the ones working for minimum wage (and nearly every job now, even if one has a college degree, pays minimum or almost-minimum wage), with no health care coverage for themselves or their children or their elders, frequently with insufficient money to even eat properly for an entire month, the people who live in multi-generational and multi-family households because they can’t afford rent on their own. These people feel totally forgotten by the politicians and the political activists. Life for them is so hard and so depressing, it’s no wonder we have a problem with methamphetamine addiction!
I have long believed that what the Democratic Party must do is emphasize how it will make life better for these people—the single mom struggling on minimum wage, for the disabled vet who can’t find a job that pays enough to pay for his medicines or ongoing care, for the many families whose children are now receiving absolutely sub-standard educations because of the right-wing attack on the public schools.
(Continued on another post. Sorry this is so long. No time to edit.)
Posted by OregonRusalka on Jun 20, 2006 at 12:34 PM As a life-long Democrat, I am just fed up to the gills with the policies and rhetoric of the state and national party organizations. The problem is that for too long the Democrats have been courting the same wealthy donors as the Republicans. Howard Dean showed them how to change that, and they are raising a lot of money in small donations now (not from me, though); HOWEVER, they haven’t responded by changing their message. They are still vacuously quoting the same old (discredited) Republican-lite claptrap that has frozen them ever since Ronald Reagan came on the scene.
Ever since the fifties and sixties, when the right wing in this country was a bunch of John Birch Society fanatics, the right wing has mounted their attack on every possible front. They have groups and individuals ready to go forth and do battle with every government and community entity, from the school board and the United Way to the highest federal agencies.
On the other hand, the opposition of progressives has been scattered and disorganized and a lot of them don’t even show up on the local level—and the local level is where true strength is built. Liberals and progressives in this country have been very snobbish about local politics and local level offices. They have seldom put up a real fight. By default in too many places, the right and its fellow travelers have been able to build organizations at the local level that have propelled them into positions of power. The Republicans could never have gained control of county elections offices without that strength at the local level.
Right now, in my home county, there are two issues into which I plan to put my energy: the election for sheriff and a bond issue for the local school district. Does that seem picayune to you?
Well, the race for sheriff is between a competent and ethical woman and a right-wing man who lied about his background/experience (including purchasing a fraudulent degree from a fake universitiy) and has had numerous altercations both within and outside of the sheriff’s office. Nevertheless, there are people writing in to the newspaper saying that the woman is _______(insert here whatever printable word for b*&#h;you like) while the man is “misunderstood” and being “judged too severely” for “understandable mistakes in his past.” They have constructed a really nasty website attacking the woman and making all kinds of slanderous accusations, while pleading that their man is “not so bad.” Does this sound familiar to you? Is that not the standard tactic of the far right? Tar your opponent, no matter how worthy, so that a vote for the right wing scumbag doesn’t look so bad? It worked for the “swift boaters”, it worked by calling Al Gore a liar, and it has worked a zillion times in less well-known elections.
And the school bond? Well, my grandchildren will probably have to attend public school for their entire education—we’d rather send them to Waldorf, but we’re among the working poor! So we have to make sure that public schools have adequate funding. This bond issue is to provide funding for arts, music and advanced science education, all things which have been cut in the catastrophic wake of property tax limitation measures in Oregon. Kids need these programs. When I was reading the lists of valedictorians and salutatorians graduating this year from our local high schools, over 80% had some kind of musical activity or artistic talent for which they had been recognized—in addition to being science whizzes. All kids, of every economic level, should have the chance to experience those same benefits from art and music.
(To be continued)
Posted by OregonRusalka on Jun 20, 2006 at 12:39 PM The national campaigns? The congressional elections? I spent time and money in both 2000 and 2004 working hard on the presidential campaigns (being a local precinctperson as well). And guess what? Even though both Gore and Kerry carried Oregon, chicanery and fraud in other states ruined any chance of them getting into office. I am convinced that the same thing will happen this year. Republicans will maintain control of Congress because they control the vote counting via electronic voting machines. Just look at the special election in Congress to fill the Republican seat vacated by a fraud conviction—the Republican squeaked through. That’s how they have done it ever since the elections of 1998. The votes are changed so that the Republicans always win by a squeaker—notice that it’s never the other way around.
What does this mean? It means, dear friends, that the problem really isn’t the American electorate overall. If the actual will of the American electorate still did not result in the election of the candidates they actually voted for, the problem lies elsewhere—it lies in the incredibly fraudulent voting machine technologies that states have been forced to adopt by bills passed by a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president. It was win-win-win for them. Money for their financial backers, power on both the state and national level, and neutralization of their opponents, no matter how hard the opponents campaign. Until this is changed (at the local and state level, by local and state activists willing to run for such unromantic and invisiible jobs as controller, secretary of state, county recorder, etc., etc.), there is no point in voting for a national candidate in certain states. There’s certainly no point in giving them any money. Even if the most people vote for them, they won’t “win”.
Oregon, with its mail-in voting system which automatically guarantees that a paper ballot exists for every vote cast, is the only state in the union right now with free, fair and honest elections. We don’t always like how our fellow citizens vote, but we know that our elections are clean.
Until the election systems in every state are as well-run and as documented as the one in Oregon—by the way, a big thank you to Bill Bradbury, the Democratic Secretary of State who devised the vote-by-mail program—we have no hope of changing the national government to actually reflect what people want.
That’s why I’m only working on local campaigns this year.
I can’t understand why, with all the internet coverage of the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, election campaigners and activists are still worried about attracting the votes of the working class—for the most part, they already get them—they just don’t count.
Posted by OregonRusalka on Jun 20, 2006 at 12:39 PM Great article, thanks for your fair and balanced report on the YearlyKos convention.
I see your story has brought out the ghastly Bush/Cheney administration’s fearful trolls. Can almost smell their putrid fear and loathing at the heart of their disinformation mongering.
Smack them back by calling your congress critters and letting them know they’d better vote for net neutrality or
prepare for defeat at the polls this fall. Simple as that.Just do it!
Posted by Newspaper Brat on Jun 20, 2006 at 1:57 PM Scorp wrote:
Even now, socialist old Europe is stagnant, corrupt, and inefficient, and is dying off at a rate greater than when the communists were killing off tens of millions of their own people.When were you last in Europe? I’ve travelled there in the recent past and my entire family would move there in a heartbeat if we had the money.
Europe is culturally vibrant and economically much healthier than the U.S., despite having to deal with millions of economic refugees from BOTH Eastern Europe and Africa.
Sweden? Anybody remember Sweden?—it is the healthiest economy in Europe and has been for years—and, gee whiz!—it’s economy is “mixed”—that is, it combines socialism in certain areas with capitalism in other areas. Every time you shop in H&M;or one of the other Swedish mega-chain stores in the U.S., you are voting for something that got started in Sweden.
I’ve lived in Austria—still rather too fascist for me, but Germany is very nice. Both Belgium and Holland also are very nice, vibrant, economically strong places. Italy and Spain are becoming economic powerhouses, especially Spain. Spain has been very successful in marketing its industrial products to Latin America, whereas the U.S. generally sucks at it. The U.S. is stuck in the old economics of resource exploitation instead of mutual economic development.
All these countries have “socialized medicine,” meaning that when their people need medical care, they get it. Of course it’s paid for with tax dollars, but I’d rather have tax dollars pay for health care that give the obscene profits to the insurance and pharmaceutical industry.
Take a trip to Europe—not a package tour—a real journey. Travel on your own. Talk to people—all kinds of people, not just the ones you think might agree with you. Europe is by far the better place to raise a family and live out one’s life.
And finally, neither Clinton nor Johnson and not even Carter were “leftists”. That is such a joke! If any of them were leftists, I am as green as Kermit the Frog and it ain’t easy! Every time I meet one of you locos and you start talking about how the Washington Post and the New York Times and the LA Times are liberal newspapers and Clinton was a liberal president—I just break out laughing! You guys are so funny! Do you know how ludicrous you sound when you make those kind of comments? We haven’t had a truly liberal president since FDR. Not even Truman was truly liberal—in the correct sense of the word, in the dictionary definition, and in the way Jane Austen and Trollop used it.
Go read some real history written by real scholars—and read it with an open mind, not that closed safe you currently think is your mind. And of course I’m coherent! I’m extremely well-educated. If you were as well- educated as I, you would sound coherent and sensible, too.
Posted by OregonRusalka on Jun 20, 2006 at 7:58 PM Loud, loud applause for Christopher Hayes. How fortunate you sat where you did on your flight.
Lou is right, labor makes capitalism live and breathe. When I worked in the aerospace industry we were contractually encouraged by DoD to bring in unemployed, unskilled people from our area and train and employ them. We did, and in the process created a lot of Lous and those Lous made the engines on the Huey helicopter thrive and in thriving a lot of my buddies in Vietnam made it home. What really stuck with me though was the degree of pure pride that populated the entire plant workforce of Lous. It was so intense you could feel it when you walked the production floor. To me that’s America, and sadly that appears to be fading away. Maybe we need more Lous writing blogs!
Posted by rvrman on Jun 22, 2006 at 7:32 AM Here Here OREGONRUSALKA.
Living in the heart of Texas, it’s truly amazing how many times I run into those types who spout that kind of nonsense.
After a bit of conversation, it’s almost always the same process behind why they believe this way. They actually have absolutely NO experience with the realities they speak of other than the words of their favorite talking FRight Winger.
A telling example was this optomatrist I went to this week. He confessed he was a right winger, I told him I was a liberal.
He immediately came down on Hillary, and said how he feared her becoming president, because she was too liberal.
Instead of debating him, I asked him exactly what positions has Hilary taken that he disagrees with - his answer was he doesn’t know any issues specifically, but she’s a socialist and they are bad. Hmmmm
He said he was tired of the liberal press, and I said what liberal press, can you name some members of the liberal press. Of course the NYTimes was mentioned, and I asked exactly why do you think they’re liberal. The only thing he said was they’re liberal because they focused on bad news too much. Hmmmm.
As a Journalism grad from days prior to the stupification of today’s press, i told him why this was so, and I explained to him the press does not have an obession with bad news rather it is the simple of nature of news that makes this seem so.
News by definition I said is generally things that are “NOT ordinary” every day occurances.
In the world we live basic day to day life is not fraught with danger. Most threats we fear are remote. The liklihood we will experience getting shot at, being robbed, raped or being dealing with some horrible accident is possible but for most people it is a 1x in a life time experience.
So what stands out in our world are the examples where this does happen and a person has that 1x in a lifetime experience. It’s news because it’s not commonplace.
ONLY in a world where getting shot at, raped, robbed Etc. where life was a daily hellish struggle for existance, would “good news” be news. In such a world people would line up to read about someone having a “good day.”
The unusual, the out of the ordinary that’s what people like to read about. I told him, because our daily life is rather routine, and on the whole pleasant. It holds virtually NO interest for the readers.
I told him you should be happy that you think the press is full of bad news, for there is no surer sign that your life is pretty good, because only in a nation where most of us have it pretty good are the bad news stories we read news.
He actually got it.
For those who still don’t get it. Try reading the press from destitute 3rd. world nations. Their press is full of “good news” because it is so out of the norm that anything good happen in those places.
Posted by johnnyincentx on Jun 24, 2006 at 10:43 AM I was wondering what happened at the convention. I only had heard a few rah-rah-the-Internet-wonder-still-needs-human-contact type of reports.
I heard an interview with Jim Lehrer on a public radio station recently. Lehrer said the Internet has meant people will respond more readily, but there is not an increase in discussion; most people only offer their support or opposition to an issue.
I also have noticed that many of the most popular blogs and altnerative media (1) focus attention on the traditional press’s headline stories, and (2) offer space to a wide range of other groups or people. In other words, the sites are being middlemen or distributors. It’s a great way to make money, but doesn’t add anything new to the debate.
There are several more observations I could note. However, I will close with a warning that the emphasis on standardized tests in schools is replacing the education of our future leaders and future political activists. Already I have seen a marked decrease in the number of college graduates, let alone high school graduates, who can present, develop, and conclude an argument.
Posted by SillyLeftist on Jun 26, 2006 at 6:01 AM I agree with this idea. DailyKOS seems to be just another fundraising source for the DNC. They are attempting to capture “progressive” money while wrapping non-progressive candidates in a “progressive” wrapper to make them palatable to the progressive community.
I find it interesting that you comment that fewer then 40 people attended the conference on Labor yet the “blogosphere expert” panel was packed. I do want to say that DailyKOS has allowed for a place for some people to organize and advance the cause of the Democratic Party, which is a good thing. The problem is that DailyKOS is really not advancing the “progressive” cause, but is really pushing a centrist moderate cause. Hence the limited attendance at the labor conference at their own event. While DailyKOS may be a money making business model, in my opionion it is not a model on which to base a winning liberal movement.
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