I do agree that a Gore/Obama Administration would have a chance to make things better as a Nation. I don't think Gore (even if he runs) is a lock though; the traditional media is his friend right now only because he isn't running. As soon as he announced the "earth tones/Love Story" crap would start again, and some sort of Swiftboat lies would be ginned up and rammed into the media narrative. So it would still be a battle.

That said, I think it would be very very unwise to underestimate what a Democratic President would face in the way of brutal attacks from the Radical Right in the 2009-2012 time period. I get the very strong impression that the Radicals plan is to (1) lose in 2008 (2) attack attack attack from 2009-2012 (3) run a white-horse-and-sword Strong Republican(tm) in 2012.

And I specifically need to hear from the leading Democratic candidates how they plan to handle the dolchstosslegend attack that is already being tested against Congress and that is going to be turned full-force on the Democrats as soon as they start trying to clean up Iraq.

sPh

I'd love that ticket, too, and could hope for much from it, but can I raise a straw man alert here? "Remember mau-mauing? The Weathermen? Rioting? Various kinds of sex police? Heterophobia?" Well, for most Americans, the answer is just plain no. I'm 52 and don't get a perfect score. Besides, I remember rioting as a anguished outburst from the streets of Detroit, not a disdain of America from the inner circles of liberal elites. 

Can we get over this cardboard image of the left? How can we ever hope for an "alignment" without it? Indeed, how can we ever get to Obama's dream of less divisions along lines of identity politics if we don't recognize the real diversity that is America and the tensions it continues to breed. And those tensions are most often maintained by the politics of racism and exclusion, not by those crying at the gates to be heard.

It harms Obama or Gore to associate them with chauvinism and centrism. Who has spoken out more than Gore in the last years? They're smart enough to know they're not embodying nostalgia for a nonexistent past in which America resembled the ethnic uniform of a small European nation, and they'd sure by smart enough not to talk about that at the very moment when Europe is starting to face precisely the divisions that we've had all along.

Get over it: neither Gore nor Obama leads the right wing of the Democratic party. If Sleeper wants to sound like Rove, calling the Democrats the party at war with Christmas and marriage, he might wish to find other candidates. 

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Your observations about Gore are well taken. If he were running he would be my first choice right now. A Gore-Obama ticket would be very attractive.

I'm unclear, though, about the political realignment you're calling for, and I think my problem lies somewhere in the last sentence, that speaks of a "realignment that unites grounded liberals and honorable conservatives...to fight for a reasonable, republican politics against those on the right (but soon perhaps again on the left) who feel driven to subvert it?"

"Grounded liberals" and "honorable conservatives" probably will, and probably should, always represent political philosophies that are different enough to produce opposing political parties, though they may often agree well enough with one another to produce legislation and sometimes, but rarely, even to vote for the same leaders.

If Gore were to enter the race, I do not believe he should do anything to resurrect 2000. The press will do that for him, and not in a way that will be helpful. He is experienced, thoughtful and tough, and seems now to be comfortable inside his skin. A Gore campaign would best be served by starting now and looking forward, not backward.

"Hillary...I'd rather see her on the Supreme Court."

Excellent idea-- utilize her strengths and neutralize her weaknesses.

I do not understand Democrats' fascination with Gore. We have four or more great candidates. Gore ran and lost. Actually, he won and then gave away the presidency to his opponent, who turned out to be the worst President in recent American history. That's the guy you would have rather than Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson or Biden? I don't get it.

Sometimes you want a $100 bottle of wine for no reason other than because you can't have it. That's the case here. We have five great candidates. Stop looking elsewhere.

Just at the wrong moment, Obama seems to be taking the fight out of us. He wants us to hug the people who will stab us in the back.

We're moving into a position of strength. It's time to burn their fields and salt their lands.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

There's been alot of usage of the term politics of fear, the concept has been misused in fact to silence and censor public debate, whether we're talking about the Iraq war, or more pertinenty on the immgration reform issue.

It's also been used to herd the thought of those who like to pat themselves on the back for their so called progressivism. It doesn't encourage them to actually think about issues, flattery is intended to deceive.

The current immigration reform legislation is a blind, a smoke screen to push through fast tracking of George Bush's North American Union, something that will allow corporate owners to run our country, dictate trade and labor and environmental plus so much other policy in our country. Too many democratic leaders in the senate support this, and others haven't even read the legislation entirely.

Why isn't this being dicussed here? Are you lulled into some kind of believe that this serves something other than corporate interests, or do you despise the American poor as some proper object of scorn? Do you believe that you won't be affected?

=== Sphealy, BTW, has a bit of a two-dimensional outlook on politics, thinking that a small group of determined people can just ruin the whole thing. ===

We all have our own views of our understanding and that of others, and you are certainly entitled to your view of my outlook. You will of course not be surprised that I do not agree with you on this.

The Radical Right in particular, and the Republican Party in general (after 2004 at least) clearly does have a bent towards authoritarianism, punishing father figures, and decision making by small elite groups. Bringing up the Democratic Party in this context doesn't have much meaning because the Democrats are more of an alliance than a classical political party, and 80% of them have no bent to authoritarianism.

sPh

From a purely electoral point of view, I would much prefer Gore/Richardson.

To the best of my knowledge the Electoral College has not been replaced with a popular vote since the 2000 election.

And either a lot of Democrats came out of the woodwork in 2006 and/or a lot of moderate Republicans voted Democratic to send a message to their own party. I don't think we can assume either of these things will happen in 2008 (particularly given the events of this week).

sPh

he Guardian has a great piece by Al Gore today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2086737,00.html

A drive for global domination has put us in greater danger

Moral authority, which is our greatest source of strength, has been recklessly put at risk by this wilful president

Al Gore
Thursday May 24, 2007
The Guardian

The appears in the “Comment is free” section; the link is toward the bottom of the page.

A very likely scenario except I don’t think either the Republicans or Neocons ever "planned” to lose an election

An unlikely scenario as the GOP and neocons have not only shown that they do not plan to lose but that they will steal elections to win which is why Bush was appointed in 2000 and stole the electoral college votes in OH to win in 2004. The GOP has systematically stacked the system and election fraud is at the foundation of the US Atty scandal. The truth is that America is going to be shocked when the GOP wins the 2008 elections for exactly this reason.

 Americans have done nothing to preserve the sanctity of the vote nor prosecute those who have stolen Presidential elections and now are placed in key positions as the Federal prosecutors across the nation to ensure the stealing of the 2008 elections. The states have already been identified, yet nothing is being done. MN, MO, FL, NV, ARK, IL etc all will provide the GOP win via stolen votes and prosecuting 'election fraud' in those states by Rove's minions.

I would never dream of giving your comment a "0" rating, destor, but I couldn't disagree with you more. I think it's a complex problem, and it requires a complex solution. But I'm convinced that the solution requires stealing the hearts of the many American citizens with entrenched Republican sensibilities. Continuing the divisiveness of contemporary American politics, even if it gives us a short-term victory, almost ensures a long-term defeat. And more importantly, it doesn't provide us with the most important spoils of war: altering the battlefield of language and ideas on a permanent basis. Putting a Democrat in the White House for the next 16 years would be nice, but it's small potatoes. What I'd like to see is a future, 16 years from now, where the staunchest of Republicans hold the beliefs and ideals of our moderate democrats today. I think that, to get to that point, we need to assimilate republicans, not destroy them.

There's little evidence, since Republicans got spanked in the last election, that the Radical Right will continue to act as the thugs they were when they had all the cards. In fact, we see plenty of evidence that the Radical Right, and rank-and-file Republicans in general, are backing away from their in-your-face strategy that clearly brought ruin upon the GOP.

While not disputing your characterization of Democrats as more of a loose confederation, the appeal to moderates of both parties to come to the fore is at the heart of Obama's message. Rather than appeal to those on the Left who simply want to punish people (in fact, acting very much like their characterizations of Republicans), we've seen that such a path is no governing at all--simply because the marginalization and dehumanizing is done by the Left onto the Right doesn't make it a workable model for governing (or leadership, for that matter).

Yeah -- "overemphasis of diversity". Whenever and wherever straight, white men aren't sufficiently deferred to.

starting with the refreshing proposition that people aren't evil because they are of another party.

Well, some of them are pretty close to evil. Lying us into a war borders damn close to that line, wouldn't you say?

How many people in SC last week cheered hard at every mention of the word torture -- oh, I'm sorry, "interrogation techniques" -- in that debate?

They may not be evil. Hell, I bet lots of them went to church the next day. But let's not pretend we have anything in common with people who cheer on torture.

We have political parties for a reason. Different people have different ideas. Bipartisanship is a load of crap. It should be a last resort, taken after you've done what you can to fight for your ideas.

Bipartisanship is for conference committees, not the whole damn campaign.  

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

"Five great candidates"? I only count two, and that's if I add together all the fractions and round up.

Your equivalence of the Right's “dehumanization of some Other… on nearly every policy” with things like "rioting", "the Weathermen" and "heterophobia" is a good example of comparing one group's standard-bearers to another group's radical fringe and saying "See... both sides are wrong". It's like comparing Rush Limbaugh, a man with a huge audience and influence, to Ward Churchill, a virtual unknown if not for one extreme comment about 9/11 victims.

The "Right" in America has again and again embraced leaders, such as the late Rev. Falwell, who promote the dehumanization of Others. The American Left is not without it's dangerous cranks who will to power, but c'mon, there's a reason you pointed to "mau-mauing" instead of the Left's prominent equivalent to Bill O'Reilly or Pat Robertson.

In my humble opinion, we should ride the horses in the race and not spend too much time hoping for that horse in the greener pasture to come over. I personally think Obama with Jim Webb serves to fill many of the same holes in our candidate.

Obama/Gore would be more likely, if nothing else because Gore doesn't seem to be into the presidency, and being VP would give him a freer hand to pursue his interests.

Kinda like how Bill Clinton said that there are some things in which he can have a greater positive influence than when he was President. If Hillary is elected, that'd put him in an interesting position, as well...

I forget. What exactly did Obama do to help Lamont?

I was talking about Dodd who unlike a lot of Democrats campaigned for Lamont after the primary. I thought Dodd was brave for that.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

How about Gore's wisdom and Edwards' wisdom?

I know you were talking about Dodd. What he did was commendable. I was just looking at the Dodd/Obama comment above through the Lamont lens.

Honestly, the only way a lot of things are going to change is if we have some sort of Depression-esque society-wide assraping, which we're most certainly on track for. The only reason why the New Deal happened was because we were absolutely laid out, as a country.

Otherwise, people are making too much money off the jacked up healthcare industry to really think about changing it.

That's the way its going to be folks, Obama or no Obama.

Exactly. So given that, I'll take Obama.

Evil people are not necessarily stupid or lacking in perception, and the Radical Right has shown that it can make a short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.

Such as? Please elaborate.

What about those of us who don't neccessarily like Obama?

Sorry, but there's plenty out there like me who think his idealism is shallow, and he lacks the expertise and experience that someone like Richardson does.

Besides, I'm a firm believer that it isn't Obama's idealism per se, rather the public's idealism reflected onto Obama.

Call me crazy, but I really have trouble seeing where Obama is an idealist. That's not to say I don't have respect for him and his seemingly earnest commitment to foster a more forthright and dignified level of debate. But really, the only ideal he's demonstrated is a commitment to is the Socratic method.

On policy, he's incredibly unambitious. It's so frustrating to have to make this case because he's been allowed to get away with not actually having any realy policy proposals, though he's been actively campaigning for almost half a year. Nonetheless, what we know doesn't come anything close to idealism.

He's wants universal healthcare but doesn't want to alienate the insurance lobby, so he pussyfoots around the issue by proposing better administration of services. Hardly visionary. I seem to remember George Bush making the very same proposal.

As far as economic policy goes, he's incredibly hesitant to challenge business interests. He voted for the purely pro-business class action reform bill. He vetoed an amendment that would have placed a pathetic cap of 30% on credit card interest rates. His economic advisors are about as middle of the road as it gets. His social security expert recently advocated a mix of benefit cuts, tax increases and MANDATORY PERSONAL ACCOUNTS. Wow! It's a new day in America. Can't you just feel the tide turning?

His environmental program consists of giving the auto industry a huge tax break to provide their employees healthcare as a means of incentivizing them to make the kind of cars they should have been making all along to compete. So, if we pay the Auto makers to pay for our insurance, then they'll make competitive, environmentally friendly cars? Whoopee.

I'm sorry. Obama's got a an admirable rhetorical style, but on the issues, he's just a run-of-the-mill centrist. Not at all what the country needs right now.

Gore / Edwards. That's a wisdom and progress ticket.

--Andrew Hiller

Agreed. Out-bully'ing a bully only creates a new bully.

If Obama casts a Yea vote on the Iraq supplemental when it comes before the Senate, I think he can just about kiss his chances of becoming president goodbye. The anti-war left are going to hammer him into Hell if he caves. And the anti-war left are the kind of activist voters who get involved in primary elections.

John Edwards stands to gain quite a bit of support following the vote--unless Barack and Hillary are careful to remember why voters gave control of Congress to the Democrats in the last election.

Maybe you're looking at the wrong set of candidates.

The anti-war left are going to hammer him into Hell if he caves. And the anti-war left are the kind of activist voters who get involved in primary elections.,....John Edwards stands to gain quite a bit of support following the vote

Well the anti-war left would be fickle and stupid if they transfer support to Edwards who voted FOR the war because Obama votes to fund the troops. That is irrational and asinine.

You're right, Red Planet (Jeesh! Great name! I hope the commenters just above you are noticing!) to note that "honorable conservatives" and "grounded liberals" will disagree about too many things to stay for long in a coalition against the politics of fear.

But every so often, those who love the republic even more than their other convictions -- who realize, that is, that in a country as diverse as ours, we sometimes have to work overtime to identify and defend certain common standards and ties, without which we fly apart -- decide to join together and come up the middle against extremists who'd destroy the only things that make the contest possible at all.

For example, in 2004, the American Conservative magazine -- paleo-cons if ever there were -- actually endorsed John Kerry in an unbelievably eloquent editorial by their managing editor Scott McConnell. I'll try to link it later, but the gist of it was, "Four more years of Bush and conservatism will be discredited and in the doghouse for decades to come; he's destroying the Constitution," etc.

The European left has a long, disastrous history (pre-WW II) of disdaining and even attacking liberal republicans, because it was convinced that Constitutional protections were really just bourgeois mystifications of oppressive social relations. They aren't, though. They're real -- or they're not -- depending on whether people who may never otherwise agree join forces to insist on them.

This, by the way, was the point of my long and depressing essay of April 20 on part of the back-story to Chuck Schumer's face-off with Alberto Gonzales: A republic needs not just a skeleton of laws, but the cartilage that holds the skeleton together. It also needs things even softer but no less vital to the organism's survival. The truth is that more than a few conservatives care deeply about such things -- sometimes even more so than the left when it's busy thinking of itself as the world spirit on horseback rather than a representative of ordinary, vulnerable people who don't have much margin for error while trying to organize.

What do honorable conservatives believe in that grounded liberals do, too? Try an old book, Clinton Rossiter's Seedtime of the Republic, especially the concluding sections. Or try Gore's book. As you might expect, he's defending the same Lockean, entrepreneurial capitalism which conservatives champion under the name of "free markets," but he's challenging them to admit that vast corporate engines, bought at sold anomically at the click of a broker's mouse, have none of the entrepreneur's civic virtues, none of the ordinary citizen's regard for a republic in which we sometimes transcend our own private interests to care for the whole. Adam Smith believed in the latter; George Bush does not; and more than a few conservatives know the difference and can see that the corporate behemoths are undermining the rules and the sentiments that keep a republic free.

Obama is right to say we should stop demonizing these people; what he doesn't say, as some commenters have noted, is how, exactly, we should reach out to them. Gore is more experienced at that, as evident in his book. Some people reading this will consider him a sell-out; so, at times, have I. But we live in very extraordinary times. There is no margin for self-righteousness anymore.

Perm Dude @11:28, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I suspect you're either pretty young or weren't very political before the Bush era, if you really think the Democratic Party of the past 6 years is equivalent to the movement conservatives of the past few decades. What sPh and others are pointing out is that the radical force that's been at work in our politics, culminating in the last several years, is materially different from garden-variety partisanship.

Over time, a determined faction on the right has very effectively, if brutally and dishonestly, altered our political environment. Most people, including most Democrats, couldn't see what was happening for years; and even after it was evident, most still thought we could operate as we "good government" types always have, just working harder to reach across the aisle and forge consensus. But movement conservatives don't want consensus, they want to blow up the system (Grover Norquist: "bipartisanship is date rape.") Their rhetoric was carefully designed not just to defeat but to discredit their opponents (google Newt's GOPAC memo of vocabulary words; hell, just remember the Swift Boat campaign). They've perverted the public and media discourse to the point that citing facts at odds with their goals equals bias. And things have gotten so bad that when a president publicly acknowledges knowingly and repeatedly violating the Constitution and the law (FISA) and says he'll continue to do so, when the majority party plans to jigger the system to remove longstanding rights of the minority in considering lifetime appointments (the "nuclear option"), and when the Congress essentially repeals the Magna Carta (habeas corpus), the widespread reaction is as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. And the Democrats spent six impotent years in the face of it all. This isn't partisan politics; this is a crisis.

I emphatically agree that we're desperately in need of a politics, and a government, informed by empathy; but we haven't got a prayer of achieving that unless the particular poison that's infected our system is leeched out. Look at how authoritarianism has taken root in other countries; google Mark Tushnet's paper on "Constitutional Hardball"; and understand that we're facing a substantive threat to our very form of government. Josh Marshall has written a few TPM posts about his political evolution in this environment; what people like me are looking for is a sign that Obama and the other Democrats see what's at stake as clearly as Josh, and are willing to fight to restore our system to health. We need to pull the political spectrum not just back from the right, but back from the brink.

A related side note: I adored this piece of Jim Sleeper's, except for his equation of truly fringe leftie phenomena with indisputably mainstream forces in conservatism. We all know the views of both are crazy and dangerous; but only those on the right are (or ever were) taken seriously and have real power. That false equivalence, in fact, is a perfect illustration of the mess we're in.

To put it gently, that is an "untruth".

Why was Dodd in a commercial for Lamont in the general?

Would you rather have the man who admits a mistake and strives vehemently to correct it, or a man who sees a mistake going on in front of him, knows it's a mistake, and acquiesces to the mistake?

Sorry, I don't think it's asinine to go with the fighter.

 or a man who sees a mistake going on in front of him, knows it's a mistake, and acquiesces to the mistake?

This above statement is precisely the behavior of Edwards and Hilliary. They both knew that the intelligence was flawed and voted to give Bush a blank check anyway. They acquiesed for political expediency. So for the anti-war left to shift support to either of them would indeed be asinine.

=== I refuse to second-guess endorsing a viable, progressive ticket just because progressive policies might somehow give an edge to the opposition sometime down the road. ===

I would be interested to see you point to where I said that, since I did not.

I did say that the years 2009-2012 are going to be very ugly for a Democratic President with brutal attacks coming from a Radical Right that is in no mood to take part in a touchy-feely politics of healing, and I want to see some signs that the potential candidates (be they progressive or traditional Dems) are tough enough to handle that.

sPh

Did MLK seek compromises with racists down south? Or was he single-minded in the pursuit of equality To compare acquiescence with non-violence is intellectually dishonest.

Yes. MLK did seek compromises with the racists in the South in his single minded pursuit for justice under the law, not equality. Point of fact, the only thing MLK initially sought at the beginning of the Montgomery Boycott was to end forcing blacks to stand so whites could sit and to stop forcing blacks to leave the front of the black section so whites could fill it when the white section was full. i.e. not desegregation

 I'm not talking about physically hitting people or burning things down, I'm talking about not giving in on matters of principal and not seeking compromise simply to avoid confrontations.

MLK initial demands were not for desegregation of the buses so as to avoid confrontation. He only asked that they uphold the existing laws and stop arresting folks for not giving up their seats in the black section, which were their'segregated' rights under the law. It was only the intransgience of the racist White Citizens Council of Montgomery that brought about the federal suit with the much higher  goal of abolishing segregation laws completely. Rosa Parks was not even a plantiff in that suit as her actions did not violate the segregation laws.   It is not intellectually dishonest to compare acquiescence with non-violence. To suggest such is to miss the point of non-violence in it's entirety.

To compare MLK's struggle with a methodology of keeping everybody a bit happy by allowing some injustices, and not fighting back in the face of an enemy labeling you everything from traitors to soft is an insult to Dr. Kings's legacy and the causes for which he fought.

To the contrary, it is your woeful historical recollection of how MLK fought for justice under the law  that is a misunderstanding of how MLK used the non-violence tactic along with compromise in the civil rights struggle  to end segregation that is the insult to his legacy. King consistently worked to build consensus and that did mean making everyone happy by working tirelessly for to persude and convince the majority  of whites that anything less was immoral and a failure on their part to be humane to their fellow man and live up to their own American ideals written in the Constitution.

Which is analogous to what we face in the Congress today..the failure of the President to live up to our system of governance and rule of law under this democracy. It is a failure of leadership that continues to allow Senators and Congressman not to uphold the Constitution as they were sworn to do. Where they place allegiance to their party above national interests. They are not beholden to the executive branch nor the Commander in Chief but the American citizenry and it is us who must demand that the House and Senate fulfill the will of the people and not GWBush.

We need someone to step up and lead the Congress out of this morass. That takes compromise and building of alliances to get the sixteen votes necessary in the Senate and a veto proof majority in the house.

What will not work is pigheaded pissing contests.

Jim Sleeper On Equating the Sins of the Left with those of The Right

I do accept the criticism that my essay sounded as if it equates the violent and sometimes hateful spasms of the radical left with thuggery from the right. Perhaps 20th Century world history haunts me here, but it shouldn't be applied to American contexts.

I'm thinking of Orwell, who arrived in Catalonia in 1936 to fight fascism and discovered that Stalinists were killing Trotskyites, social democrats, and liberals, and that no one in Britain's left press wanted to hear about it, much less report it. Years later, in the spring of 1944, Orwell couldn't even find a publisher for Animal Farm on the left, because the novel was rightly seen as a send-up of the vicious side of Stalin, who was of course Britain's desperately needed ally at the time, what with Hitler stil