I've been lightly following the discussion on what our core values should be over the past few days, and while I'm happy to see a wealth of great ideas coming up, I have also been asking myself some questions about what it all really means.
One thing in particular has come to my mind:
Accountability - that's a strong value for us. But I wonder, do we have the stomach to bring that accountability to bear on our own party first, as an example of how much we mean business?
Idealistically we'll all say yes - but I'm not sure how many Democrats are willing to jeopordize the political futures of some of our leaders in order to make a principled point of accountability.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for it. I think accountability should be issue#1 and if we end up finding more rats in our house than we expected when we start to clean up, then I'm ok with the ramifications. But it's a hard sell to the masses, especially if it means getting rid of some popular and/or influential leaders and organizations.
What it comes down to is that we've got corruption and transparancy issues in our own house - so we need to entrench those Accountability goals as standard practice before we can even THINK about trotting them out for the masses to consume. If we retain the status quo and start talking about those things as part of our "core values," it only sets us up for ridicule and failure.
How far are liberal and progressive organizations and leaders prepared to go in order to commit themselves to the Accountability issues that affect them?
I hope the answer is that they're willing to turn the establishment on its head and come to the forefront of accountability - but I'm not naive enough to believe that all of them would remain respectable if they decided to open their doors to fully transparant inspection tommorrow.
In the long run, however, I don't see how we could survive without that kind of a house-cleaning, especially if we want to make this a key value.
So how do we go about cleaning our own house in a measured, deliberate manner that has both credibility and honour?
We want to keep the righties from using this effort against us (if we root out some corruption, we want to be able to say "hey, we're serious about getting rid of this," but we don't want to have to defend ourselves against right-wing attacks like, "see, look how corrupt they are"), but we don't want to do this with kid-gloves and gloss over the groups and people that need to go.
Or am I getting ahead of myself by asking these questions?