Crossposted at My Left Wing
Jim McDermott in May 2005:
[I]f there's anything that's lost, that we've lost in the last . . . while, it's . . . the sense of the common good. . . . I think the biggest thing that's missing in the Democratic Party is that we have lost the idea of the common good. That's what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was going with social security . . . and herein comes the President who says "we have to get rid off that, we want to put you on in the ownership society." What he means is that we want to put you out on your own and that's splitting again the idea of the common good. . . .
Armando: I have to tell you my first reaction ... you talk about the theme of the common good, it is very powerful, I think you really hit on something there congressman.
Mike Tomasky today:
The Democrats need to become the party of the common good. They need a simple organizing principle that is distinct from Republicans and that isn't a reaction to the Republicans. They need to remember what made liberalism so successful from 1933 to 1966, that reciprocal arrangement of trust between state and nation. And they need to take the best parts of the rights tradition of liberalism and the best parts of the more recent responsibilities tradition and fuse them into a new philosophy that is both civic-republican and liberal -- that goes back to the kind of rhetoric Johnson used in 1964 and 1965, that attempts to enlist citizens in large projects to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits.
Jim McDermott is a great man.