I’m posting this article as a call to arms to the NH as well as broader progressive community. Suggested candidates, policies and tactics are just that; it is intended more to stimulate debate and action than as a finished blueprint.
The quadrennial NH presidential primary presents a perhaps once-in-a-generation, last-chance opportunity to redirect our nation’s political center back towards the progressive populism and sanity that is in its heart and best interest, but has been distracted by the 30-yr right-wing campaign of ‘divide and conquer’.
CW holds that the NH primary on the Democratic side will be uneventful, but if 3-6 outspoken, celebrated populist progressives can be persuaded to emerge, preferably including viable contenders, the results could be explosive. The NH presidential primary is an outsized PR megaphone that receives global and rapt attention for a whole year at a critical and formative time.
Imagine the impact of the announcements of one candidacy after another other several weeks apart in the Spring contiguous with the launch of an energetic progressive community radio, tv and print campaign. Imagine high-profile political activists, spokespeople, and celebrities participating in wide-ranging events, e.g., interviews, debates, panels, rallies, concerts, etc. Imagine the first-round of candidate debates – with President Obama’s participation, generating continuing news and excitement.
SUGGESTED PROJECT OBJECTIVES
- Grow a politically muscular populist progressive movement that can demand respect, attention, and real influence in national policy-making and implementation.
- Move President Obama to embrace at least a measure of real populist progressive policies, and welcome his progressive base as genuine policy partners.
- Re-energize Democrats with a strong progressive message and strengthen the President’s competitiveness in opposition to Republicans via the vigorous debate of a high-profile primary.
- Constrain Sarah Palin’s appeal from expanding beyond her core supporters.
- Raise national awareness of the truth and majority popularity of an honest, just, people-first government that could grow into a politically potent national movement of real hope and change.
- A secondary but by no means small benefit of raising public embrace of populist issues and solutions over the next year is the foundation it will foster for the nomination and election to Congress in 2012 of real progressive fighters (as opposed to the many "PINO's" (Progressives In Name Only). If our primary tangible achievement by 2012 is the election of a profoundly more genuinely progressive Congress, this effort will have been worth it. Central to this strategy is that following the 2010 elections, many ‘mainstream’ Democrats may be more inclined to support such candidates when there's no incumbent Democrat running.
- Building the infrastructure of alternative news and messaging via a network of progressive community radio stations, and progressive content on community tv and in NH newspapers, will provide a lasting foundation for progressive causes beyond the election cycle.
As "New Democrats", especially in the small but outsized politics and media of NH, we can counter-message effectively against right-wing propaganda by the multiple parallel messaging of a grassroots, people-first campaign. We can focus on individual stories of how current policy impacts real people which the bottom 98% of us can identify with. This can be fast-tracked to become an effective template for moving the national debate towards populism with the high-impact megaphone of the NH presidential primary. There's no reason we can't produce coordinated memorable appeals based on truth and personal experience that will resonate more effectively than right-wing appeals based upon slogans and divisiveness.
Here’s a few among potentially many articulate populist opinion-leaders who might accept being drafted to run with strong progressive support behind them and with the fate of our nation for a generation hanging in the balance:
KEITH OLBERMANN, REV JESSE JACKSON SR, DAN ELLSBERG, RALPH NADER, HOWARD DEAN,RUSS FEINGOLD, CYNTHIA MCKINNEY, DENNIS KUCINICH, GLENN GREENWALD, JESSE VENTURA, ALAN GRAYSON.
Our universally-appealing message should be that America’s political system is broken and deeply corrupted. Bold leadership inspired by a popular uprising is required to correct this.
Imagine the impact if they for once talked to voters like adults in promoting policies and tactics such as:
- Reform HCR by swapping a robust universal income-tiered Medicare buy-in for the present mandate to buy insurance companies’ defective and often deadly products
- Call Republicans’ bluff on tort reform
- 100% employment via transition of all offensive military operations to building the economic strength, prosperity and infrastructure of America here at home.
- Implement robust small-business access to capital & financing
- Settle the Israeli-Palestinian issue fairly
- Straighten out economic imbalances with China from a position of strength
- Restore and vigorously protect and defend civil liberties
- Roll back and curtail the security state
- Institute full federal government transparency of the actions of elected officials & appointees
- Implement universal rule-of-law
- End the bogus ‘war on terror’ – clean up genuine and ongoing malcontents via law enforcement
- Public pillory of both key elected officials and financial industry individuals responsible for Wall Street greed and abuse; re-enactment of Glass-Steagall (or equivalent), no-loophole Volker rule, et.al. reforms
- Full transparency required from both elected officials and lobbyists on all transactions between them
- Top priority support and encouragement for the development and implementation of renewable energy and green technology infrastructure.
- Constitutional amendment severely curtailing the role of money in elections
- Rigorous policing and enforcement of election integrity
- Restore public trust in government spending practices via elimination of pork projects, effective public debate on non-essential spending proposals, and a commitment to minimum spending to produce minimum taxation.
- Cut income tax rates for individuals and business by 50%, and classify all income the same whether personal, business, investment or inherited. Allow 100% deduction for capital investment in the year expended.
- Open-door immigration policy, but with privileges and entitlements limited to those with legal status. Strict enforcement of employer compliance.
The heroic case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks is most instructive. It shows that the empire is not impregnable and that freedom-loving patriots have a chance yet to succeed in fighting for and restoring at least some measure of sanity to our world.
While the authoritarian right-wing has little trouble marching together in effective lock-step, getting the left to all push together in the same direction has so far often been like herding cats. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Not this time. Not with so much at stake.