Dear Howard,
As one the primary voters in Seattle who helped delivery his district to you in the Democratic by an overwhelming margin. I am distressed to witness what appears to be your complete abrogation of any relationship to the progressive agenda ...
Dear Howard,
As one the primary voters in Seattle who helped delivery his district to you in the Democratic by an overwhelming margin. I am distressed to witness what appears to be your complete abrogation of any relationship to the progressive agenda.
Today, in the New York Times, in its possible first-ever non-destructive presentation of you to the general public, published your self-authored epitaph: an editorial writing in which you finally threw aside whatever shreds of integrity you had remaining to tell voters like me that the only way to support a progressive agenda in America is to vote for a candidate antithetical to our goals.
Your candidacy was all about telling the Democratic Party that business as usual was not working for progressive voters. To so many of us, your candidacy represented a hope that, finally, at last, the Democratic Party, in the face of the far-right insanity of George Bush, could be forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of progressive views. We hoped, so many of us, that at last the Democratic Party would quit ignoring progressive voters while rushing to appear as moderate Republicans struggling to feed at the same corporate trough as the Republicans.
Your candidacy was a rebellious, outsider candidacy in a time in which nothing less could suffice. No other Democrat would challenge the amazing manner in which the Democratic Party was not only failing the progressive voter miserably, but producing the tools of its own destruction. These tools I refer to are the repeated capitulations to the Republican agenda and to corporate and Republican interests which hold sway in Washington, DC, and ruin any people's movement which might otherwise take power.
How wrong we were. One of the original Democratic Leadership Committee demagogues, John Kerry, a man who never met an exploitative corporate practice he couldn't be paid to ignore or evangelize, stole your rhetoric and, with the assistance of a corporate-owned mass media, took the primary by storm even as your candidacy was reduced by these same figures to a hysterical replaying of you shouting at a public appearance.
And now you write to tell me that the only way to support my agenda is to get behind these same craven operators that did in your candidacy.
The sell-out is naked and transparent. Sadly, the current Democratic Party offering, Kerry, is so indefensible and unaligned with progressives that your editorial, which is intended to convince me to vote for Kerry, as opposed to Ralph Nader, does not actually even make mention of John Kerry. His candidacy, which is once again swooping into moderate Republican territory, exactly as Al Gore did in 2000, with every passing week shifts farther and farther away from the progressive agenda.
You opposed the Iraq war. You tell me now that I must ignore the only anti-war candidate left in the race, Ralph Nader, and support a figure whom I angrily protested in the streets before, during, and after his vote to authorize the Iraq war. You tell me now that I must ignore Nader, the only figure willing to tell the public why it is that the Iraq war really started, and that we must question the stream of big lies that led to the war's beginning, and instead support an absolute craven operator who has buried all of these issues and seems very eager to be every bit the "wartime president" as our current White House occupant.
You tell me that the answer to the insane Bush budget problems is to vote for a candidate whose proposed budget involves continuing the military spending train wreck, scaling back early childhood education, mass transit, and legions of other progressive programs, all while further cutting the corporate income tax rate. After your candidacy denounced a Bush administration which ran the budget planning exclusively for the purposes of political appearances and payoffs to corporations, you tell me to ignore the only progressive candidate in the race - Ralph Nader - and support a Democratic candidate who has created his entire budget exclusively with the goal of not seeming "liberal" in front of the uninformed.
You tell me that if I love environmentalism, I must ignore Ralph Nader - who has hardcore pro-environment oppositions - and vote for a candidate who opposes the Kyoto protocol for the same reasons Bush opposes it, and who is from a party that has led the charge to capitulate to the automobile industry by refusing to impose better fuel mileage restrictions on their consumer products.
You tell me that if I want the progressive goal of universal health care, first described possibly by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, I must vote for a candidate who refuses to consider any non-corporate model for our health care system. Again, the health care system, you tell me, must exist first and foremost to create profits for insurance companies and second to provide health care services. This position you apparently take is an insult to your previous good work in Vermont, and you know it. That work of yours in Vermont gave some of us hope.
You campaigned on "fair trade, not free trade". And now you tell me that the only way for me to go is to ignore Ralph Nader - the only candidate left in the race who shares your views in this matter - and support a ranking high priest of exploitative so-called "free" trade pacts which exist exclusively to increase corporate profits, at the great expense of global worker's rights, environmental health, and individual well-being.
Howard: your capitulation is complete. You are telling progressives to ignore the only progressive in the race. You are telling us to sell out completely and play the same old game once again. The Democratic party has been losing elections very effectively now for a long time, and it is very true that this is in part because the Democratic party is playing a losing game.
Exploitative corporate power only needs one party. That power seems to have made its choice already.
I can only express sadness that I ever supported you, or that I voted for you. I feel that I have been fooled, and I think that I should have seen it coming. By telling me to ignore Ralph Nader, you are not only attempting to silence the only progressive voice left in the race, you are telling me that everything claim you made (in public) about what you stand for, throughout your entire campaign, was absolute bullshit.
Today, I will be removing myself from the Dean For America mailing list, and I consider our relationship ended. What the Democratic party and your self-authored epitaph today has done is convince me that, more than ever before, and especially, after nearly 4 years of George W. Bush, progressive voters need a choice, because the Democratic Party will fail us no matter what extreme of corporate radicalism is produced by the Republican Party. Two parties is not enough choice for a political spectrum being moved farther and farther to the right by both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Sincerely,