I've been waiting to establish some ground between us for some time ... I respectfully disagree with the two of you.
And the diary.
And the front page rebuttal.
HERE is the problem.
Single issue politics is fine. However, only the ACLU, the HRC, and some of the environmental groups are doing it the correct way. Does the Christian Coalition care whether Specter talks about God? Sure, the NRA gives high ratings to Dean, but they've almost always endorsed his GOP opponent. Why? Loyalty to one branch of one party? Not exactly. They are party blind.
A) Talk is cheap. Votes are everything. ALL votes, including votes for legislative leaders and votes in general elections. Chafee talks a good game, and he even votes the right way on individual pieces of legislation ... but he votes for anti-choice party leaders, votes for anti-choice justices, votes in the general for anti-choice candidates. Oh, yeah ... Chafee says "maybe I won't vote for Bush this time." When has he ever stated publically "I didn't vote for Bush." To be blunt, NARAL is acting like the leaders at the Yale Women's Center who dated guys who flirted nicely but whose real idea of humor was to sit around with other guys and make sexist jokes. Flirting doesn't count. If the guy is a Republican and he hangs around with jerks, he has to denounce them when it counts ... at the ballot box. I'm sure that GOP candidates COULD even lie, but I don't think the Party would tolerate Chafee declaring "I never voted for this clown," and deciding to cast votes for Nancy Pelosi over Denny Hastert. Just like the NRA counts Dean's legislative votes for leaders against him when he was governor and running against GOP candidates. Just like Arlen Specter gets his entire series of votes counted up by the Christian Coalition, and not how many times he said "God" this year. They aren't fooled, because they don't think it's the same God. But we can see Chafee for what he is ... not invested in the cause. I'll do you one further on this point. I think that if there are two candidates for Congress, a fully pro-choice woman who defected to the Republican label two years ago and who never voted for any anti-choice bill, leader, or judge since and who is being threatened with expulsion by the national GOP, and a long-time local politico male who has ALWAYS voted for the pro-choice candidate, legislation, etc. ... NARAL should pick the Republican. Why? She's more invested in the outcome of the legislation. Oh boy, am I in trouble now. Now I'll really walk the plank. It's two years earlier. Same two candidates, but the woman has just become a Republican to avoid a primary. NARAL should endorse the Democratic candidate. Why? Because we have NO guarantee that she's going to vote against Hastert, Bush's judges, DeLay, even if she says she will. No guarantee at all. Reward votes, not promises. Talk is cheap. You can be party blind and reward votes (ALL votes) and appear to be pretty party loyal these days. Right now, under these standards ... NARAL would maybe be endorsing only a few GOP legislators, and always because the alternatives were much worse. AND I posit that votes BY leaders can mitigate the reputation of the party ... Anyone who claims that Bill Frist and Harry Reid are the same kind of anti-choice is smoking crack.
And that brings us to ...
B) One issue orgs need to do nuance. Unless by one issue, you mean that you care about one vote to be held at one time. Harry Reid is not as pro-choice as Olympia Snowe. True, in a manner of speaking. Arlen Specter is not as pro-gun as Harry Reid. Also true. But the NRA realizes that they have Harry Reid against Bill Frist, not Arlen Specter. And Arlen Specter doesn't vote for Harry Reid, he votes for Bill Frist. And Bill Frist will go FURTHER than Harry Reid for their cause. We on the left, as individuals, realize that the world has black and white and shades of grey. Our orgs sometimes have problems seeing grey. The leaders of the right talk in black and white, but they act on the grey. If you're party blind, and you act on the grey (while still obeying point A), you still end up endorsing one national party in the modern atmosphere 99.999% of the time. If individual candidates are seen as all or nothing (and you ignore point A), you end up making boneheaded endorsements because you convince yourself that one bad vote is equivalent to 100 bad votes.
C) Local is where it's at. The CC did local well before national. And they did endorse a higher % of Dems in the local elections, if they moved to the CC positions. Parties are not moved at the national level. They move left or right nationally after they are hijacked locally in a majority of places. DFA and Dean know this, and hopefully, we'll continue this plan in the next few years (and it may take until 2020 to be fully realized). They move left or right once the other party is moved to the same direction in a critical mass of locations. Our orgs often DON'T DO LOCAL. Then they shouldn't be getting our money. If you sit up in the nosebleed seats, you can shout a lot, but you can't make the players do anything. If you sit down at the field level, sometimes your yelling has an effect. Unless your idea of nosebleed is the skybox, but most of us aren't George Soros or Al Gore.
D) Get on the damn TV, and appear mainly where you'll get a fair hearing. Does one right wing org send its reps to the Daily Show? No. Get on the Air America and explain your positions in detail. Get on TDS with a book or a controversy and explain your positions. Get on Countdown. Get on Kos and write diaries. If I see one more person from NOW on Fox News, I will scream. And as much as I disagree with some of their positions, PETA makes the same mistake. When has PETA ever aimed to appear on a program that is somewhere leftish? If you send your leaders to places where they are used as rodeo clowns, prepare to have the org look like a joke. This is shoring up the base. Fox News is not there so you can make my mother-in-law pro-choice. You aren't going to make my mother-in-law pro-choice.
E) There are no one-issue orgs on the right. The NRA talks about immigration now. The Christian Coalition has single-handedly invented Supply Side Jesus, even though it took Al Franken to specifically point out the inherent hypocrisy. We got on the left through different causes, but we're all in the same boat now. Does this mean that the Christian Coalition always endorses the GOP guy in a national race? No, but unless he's been extremely egregious, they just don't spend any money on that race at all. They'll focus on local races there and hope they create a national challenger for down the road. In the meantime, they will make as if they give the guy credit for his stand on taxes or his stand on defense.
Now, the left tries not to be hypocritical. But we don't have to be, since collective effort does not really clash with individual rights. I, who thinks that PETA are a bunch of meddling ignorami, would not recoil in horror if NARAL started espousing points against animal research in an effort to make the argument in favor of stem cell research in a run-around to counter the right-wing's attempt to back door anti-choice philosophy and legislation in the stem cell debate. Got that? I'd be even happier if they counter-balanced that stance with a more public alliance with the AMA; so, NARAL would establish itself as anti-cruelty but pro-medicine. It would say that it is defending doctors and their patients. It would help to drag many Ob/Gyns back to the left. I'd like to see Mothers against Gun Violence ally themselves publically more often with the AMA, for similar reasons. Drag the doctors to the left by reminding them about what's important. Individually, progressive physicians cannot do this to their colleagues.
What does this mean? It means that NARAL will start to give candidates credit for defending doctors against HMOs and maybe even start to have positions on health care choice IN GENERAL. It means that Mothers against Gun Violence will start to campaign for improved funding to emergency services. No, it doesn't mean that we have to lure the AMA with tort reform. Did the Christian Coalition lure Jews to its candidates by renouncing Jesus? Not as such. They decided to emphasize the myth of Greater Israel, in an effort to get hyper-militant Jews. We won't get super-right wing physicians with the examples I listed ... we will get some on the fence. We will embarrass those physicians with NRA bumper stickers ... and yes, we'll alienate some animal researchers ... but if left wing orgs find ways of adopting overlapping PARTS (not ALL) of PETA's platform, they'll only isolate a few researchers or farmers that are negligent in their practices ... and in today's atmosphere, is any biologist going to vote for the national GOP while it denounces evolutionary theories? Is any agribusiness going to support anyone OTHER than the corpocroc GOP? And it should be done as the right does it. The Christian Coalition espouses tax reform, and the Club for Growth espouses social conservatism. If NARAL joins PETA in promoting human stem cell experiments over similar animal work or promoting rights for animals and human subjects (not equal rights, but equally enforced rights) in medical centers, then PETA should start espousing pro-choice views about human health care. After all, humans are animals.
HRC and NARAL should be united, not divided. They are there to support Human Rights. Individual gay men deciding that abortion is "icky" does not change this fact. Ken Mehlman is gay, so does this mean that Democrats should denounce the HRC? I support the right to bear non-concealed rifles and pistols, so does this mean that Mothers Against Gun Violence can't join forces with daily Kos? Does it even mean they can't join forces with me? Of course not, because I don't support the right to carry bazookas, assault rifles, nuclear weapons, or anthrax vials. It says "arms," not "any arms you feel like carrying" or "as many arms as you can bear at one time." Nuance. Nuance. Nuance.
If you don't pay attention to party, but you start making alliances on the left, you'll help the Democrats move left. Some local GOP politicos will get support, and maybe the GOP will move left. But, in today's atmosphere, where Lincoln Chafee is a pawn and not a leader, you're not going to be endorsing him. He'll be too much in conflict with your ever-more-complex formula for what makes a good candidate. And yeah, it's almost as if we'd be forming our own shadow party and secretly endorsing our way to making over the Democrats in our image. Don't you think that's EXACTLY what Dean has in mind? But he's not going to do that without us continuing to make over the progressive orgs to help him. Don't you see? That's exactly how the Dominionists have won. They are corpocrocs AND Dominionists. There is no difference now.
The new left will be seemingly contradictory (pro-patient, pro-doctor, pro-animal, pro-choice, pro-government, pro-civil liberty, anti-corporate, pro-business, anti-militia, limited pro-gun, pro-soldier, anti-military contractor, pro-balanced budget, pro-social safety net), but it won't actually be. It will espouse the principles we share, and downplay the points where we disagree by not really talking about them.
It won't give any of us ALL of what we want. Just the important stuff. The modern right is "Keep everyone isolated and in control, even if they're harmless in their behavior." So, we're "Do as you will, so long as you harm none." And that's from a Jew. If I can base my political philosophy on an idea that is FAR off from my religious beliefs ... then NARAL can do nuance.
That's about all for now.
PS. If Pat Robertson reads this, and can identify which religion that DOES come from, kudos to him. And a big middle finger too.