by Matthew Detroit [Subscribe] [Edit Diary]
about the Hackett near-miss. Dems will be left in the lurch in 06 if they try to predicate victories on anything other than a solid critique of Republican and ruling class politics.
And Kos is DEAD WRONG about keeping "ideology" out of the electoral equation when one in four kids goes to bed hungry; when 20 million plus manufacturing jobs have been lost on Bush's watch; when the children of the poor are dying in Iraq to get jobs and college educations; and when a 20-year-long assault on American workers and the postwar consensus is pushing all of us toward Third World status.
The air of jubilation here around the Hackett near-miss reflects a desperation for victory rather than the makings of a sound electoral policy for the Dems--another victory for K Street over Main Street.
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Limbaugh is--it goes without saying--a smarmy, self-congratulatory fascist. But his analysis on this issue (posted on his site yesterday) hits the mark, and progressive Democrats need to heed it:
RUSH: [Y]ou'll recall, ladies and gentlemen, that I made a big deal out of this man, Hackett, and his ad, his fraudulent ad in which he tried to portray himself as a Bush buddy and a hawk on the Iraq war. His ad never mentions that he's a lib, never mentions that he's a Democrat. . . never mentions that he referred to the president as the most dangerous man in the world, and never references his support for tax increases --
and so yesterday if you'll recall the Democrats were all abuzz about this, bzz bzz bzz, all excited. They couldn't wait, because they knew this guy -- they just knew he was going to win, and they were calling this a bellwether election."
"This is a huge Republican district, Ohio's #2 is, and so they said, "If this guy wins, it means it's over for Bush. It means the country is fed up with all these Bush policies," and of course that was just flat-out wrong because this guy wasn't running as a Democrat; he was not running as a Howard Dean. . . He would have said in his ads that Bush is the "most dangerous man" in America. . . You couldn't tell from watching his ad. . . You couldn't tell from people watching this ad whether he was a Republican or Democrat."
Spare me any claims, please, that this characterization of Hackett's electoral approach is one-sided. Yes, Hackett spoke to his more progressive followers in a more progressive voice; Limbaugh's characterization, which speaks to the more public face of the Hackett campaign, is nonetheless accurate.
The question must therefore be asked: is this the way to educate voters and change America, or simply to tap into voter discontent in order to steal elections and change nothing? I'd say it looks much more like the latter. And it's a mug's game.
Democratic Party policies MUST be predicated on a structural critique of the issues that educates voters, because they must be about MAKING change or remain hollow: about the long-range attempt to undo worker protections in this country; about the racism that underlies notions of American exceptionalism and the dreams of empire--utterly disastrous--in a world of shrinking US might; about the unsustainability of neoliberal capitalism. (These are ideological questions, thank you!) Remaining mesmerized by electoral politics, whether Congressional or Presidential, will never gain the Dems real power.
It goes without saying that the Democratic party will not be able to find soldiers to run for every open post in 2006.
Kozmonauts need to learn the real lessons of Dean's ascension; those lessons are only superficially about financing elections or about the internet. They are much more palpably about what democracy itself means: about giving the people a sense of their own political power. . . The steps that follow from that are, as usual, being shied away from--here and across the Democratic Party.
WE WILL NOT CHANGE AMERICA WITH TROJAN HORSE CANDIDATES.