I am 35 years old....
Old enough to remember Nixon resigning live on TV, Vietnam Vets coming home and wearing their jackets in silent protest for years till they grew threadbare, the photos of JFK and Hubert Humphrey on the farmhouse kitchen wall of my grandmother...
old enough to remember watching a smiling Jimmy Carter win the nomination in 1976, the photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm on the walls of my Black friends in the urban neighborhood I grew up in....and the chilling feeling in that neighborhood with the 1980 election of election of Ronald Reagan...
old enough to have protested Reagan and Bush, sometimes, it seemed to no avail, to have been arrested over apartheid, to have sweated for Jesse Jackson, to have witnessed the human rights travesty that was U.S. policy in Central America...yet....
I am also young enough to know that I have an entire adult political lifetime ahead of me...and young enough to know that the world that our generation builds, the battles we win and lose, will be the legacy we give to our children....children already alive among us...
maybe it's the New Year...or the sorry state of our political affairs...but I feel like stepping back and taking the long view for a moment...and then, saying, here on dKos, some things I think we need to bear in mind...
We might not win this one....
We need to reinvent our party....
It's about more than this election...
What we do now is important...all of it...
Yeah....we might not win this one....even if we do everything right...with our best candidate.
This is a tough thought. But I think we need to deal with it. First of all, because that's what almost all of the debate here on dKos centers on....how to win the Presidential Election in 2004.
The stakes have never been higher...from international policy, to the Supreme Court...to the future of progessive taxation, the legacy of the New Deal, the Great Society and the fiscal health of our nation.
When you get down to it, history will say that having 9 candidates on New Year's Day 2004 was a major mistake. It hurts everyone...and benefits no one except our opponents. At this point, we can say that it hasn't helped the debate, or the Democratic case against Bush for months now....
and it's looking like it might get worse. Not just from the point of view that we could end up with the nominee only being known as the result of voting at the convention, and the fact that it's tearing down rather than building up the Democratic Party and it's candidates.....but also because this mess is distracting us from our major job in the wake of 2000 and 2002...
We must reinvent our Party.
I mentioned that I'm 35. Well, I've spent a lifetime thinking that the Democratic Party was old fashioned and hide bound....but it was built by my elders...I didn't have a say in it.
The time for that to change is long past. And yet it hasn't happened. You look at the face of our campaigns...of our candidates...of our leadership...and the sad fact is that forty years after the birth of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement....
the face of the leadership of the Democratic Party is largely made up of white, priveleged men of the previous generation. I'm sick of it. It doesn't reflect us, our values...and it doesn't excite the voters that I talk to and canvass. I do GOTV in West Oakland...and believe you me....Gray Davis did not pass the smell test.
So, yes, we need to win this election and we might not. And we need to reinvent our party, and that hasn't happened.
But that isn't all....as I mentioned above...this election is about more than 2004....we need to have a plan for taking back the House and the Senate (which won't happen this go round.)....and I don't see one. We need to have a ten year plan that will grow the kind of candidates and leaders and policies that reflect who we are as a nation and where we are at....and I don't see one.
In the wake of 2000...we need to heal the rift with the Green Party...we need to acknowlege that some of our most loyal and hardest working Democrats are torn between the Green and Democrat planks...(witness the mayoral race in San Francisco.)...and yet, as was the case in San Francisco...we, as a Party don't know what the hell to do here either.
What I am getting at here....is that for the last month it's been non-stop sniping between the Presidential Candidates....with nary a move to address the real crises our Party is facing in the long and short term....
this situation can't be good.
It gets reflected in the debate about candidates...and it gets distorted in the debate about candidates....
I have to admit...that my previous focus has been ABB and winning the Presidency in 2004...as a Democrat with Midwestern roots and an understanding of the deep conservatism of the center of the country....I had been pulling for Gephardt and Edwards and, recently, looking at Clark...
I am now rethinking everything.
I still have doubts about Howard Dean...but I will take a second look at Howard, and all the candidates, in the light of the priorities I've raised above.
There is something sick in our Party. We won't solve it in six months...but goddammit, I'd rather work on that...
than obsess about who's attacking whom...
Because it's not just about attacking Bush and winning...it's about building something that works for all of us...
it's about Recasting the Democratic party so we can all be proud of it and participate....
and proud when it comes time to hand it to our children.
I know this rhetoric would seem to lead to Howard Dean...but I am honestly not sure of that. And I remain unsure of our chances in 2004 with Howard Dean on the top of the ticket. That being said, I am willing to see this campaign as being about more than winning the Presidency in 2004....
Because it is.
peaceout & happy new year