What can the Democrats and the left learn from election 2004? Well, we aren't going to learn anything if we can't be critical of ourselves.
From:
CounterPunch
An Interview with Joshua Frank
What the Left Must Learn from 2004
By KEVIN B. ZEESE
Joshua Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. The book is an analysis of the 2004 presidential campaign. Frank's writings appear regularly on the Internet, and he is a contributor to Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils. In this interview, we examine what the antiwar movement can learn from the 2004 presidential election and how the movement should be approaching the 2006 election.
Kevin Zeese: First, tell me about your new book Left Out! What did you learn about the 2004 campaign while writing it?
Joshua Frank: I learned a lot from the 2004 elections, and this book is my attempt to put it all together and make sense of what went down. In Left Out! I shovel through the muck of our current political arrangement, where progressives and those on the Left are continually told that we have real options within the so-called two-party system. Many told us during the 2004 elections that George W. Bush was so darn bad that we had to, just had to, vote for John Kerry. There was no other choice. The polluted climate, as you well know, was "Anybody but Bush." Or better put, "Nobody but Kerry." Hatred of Bush drove the support for Kerry. We had buses to Ohio, we had DVD parties, and all were targeting Bush rather than trumpeting Kerry. That should have been sign number one that the Democrats were on the wrong path. The candidacies of Ralph Nader and even that of the Green Party's David Cobb were seen as far too dangerous to support in the states that could have actually put pressure on Kerry (i.e., swing states) to take on issues we believed in. The strategy, endorsed by so many respected activists and intellectuals on the left, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Medea Benjamin, Norman Solomon, to name just a few - was all about expediting the process of removing Bush from office. Not issues.
Read the Rest HERE!