American Prospect: Get Mussed For Russ?

[Autonomy]

The last time Democrats ran an anti-war candidate, they got destroyed. Feingold '08 could be different.

It is not difficult to read Russ Feingold’s intentions. With his call for a countdown to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, he has made clear that he plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. And when he told David Gregory on Meet the Press that, “Yes, I am going to work real hard to try to get a progressive Democrat in 2008,” it is not a mystery whom he has in mind. For one thing, there are not many elected Democrats who want to be called “progressive,” now an acknowledged euphemism for “liberal” (an that has now achieved iconic status, even among some Democrats).

But the fact that Feingold is the first Democrat to call for a withdrawal timetable says less about the future than about the muddled past of the Democratic Party and illustrates why a “progressive” Feingold Democrat would have trouble wining the nomination.

More: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10169

[rodeodance]

1. " represents a break from the cautious Clintonian model" yup

.....Feingold voted against the war in October 2002. In August 2005, he says the troops should come home because the war was a mistake. His position is as clear as the president’s position. But Feingold’s position also represents a break from the cautious Clintonian model that has been the controlling paradigm for Democrats for more than a decade. Clintonianism needs Clinton’s magic to work. Absent that, Democrats, including Senator Hillary Clinton, will need to be clearer about what they believe and about what they want to do.

Kerry’s emergence as a candidate in the spring of 2004 was the result of his perceived electability, which was based on his service in Vietnam. It remains true that Democrats still must answer the are-you-strong-enough question when it comes to presidential elections. So clearly, some Democrats with an eye on 2008 will want to position themselves as hawks on military matters. Feingold sees a danger there, however.

“Democrats are making the same mistake they made in 2002, to let the administration intimidate them into not opposing the war when so many of us knew it wasn’t a good idea,” he said on Meet the Press.

[Ken Burch]

2. Let's hope Russ runs. We can't win if we run another bland centrist like

Kerry. The path of "nuance" always leads to defeat.

[Ken Burch]

3. And Goddamnit, it wasn't Eugene McCarthy who destroyed the party!

It was the heavy-handed tactics the party bosses used to stop McCarthy and force the delegates to vote for a pro-war platform in Chicago that did that.

The party bosses used those tactics even though the polls proved that a pro-war ticket running on a pro-war platform would guarantee a Democratic defeat in the fall. Most ironically of all, Hubert Humphrey himself, who had privately broken with the war shortly after RFK's assassaination, knew this as well, but was unable to act on this knowledge because his candidacy was entirely at LBJ's mercy.

Why Humphrey forgot this and ran as an all-out hawk again in 1972, when he had nothing to gain from doing that again, is a grear cosmic mystery.

[bemildred]

5. Humphrey was a good party hack and did as he was told.

The national party bosses have shown very clearly since
then that they will destroy the party before they will
allow it to be truely democratic.

[stray cat]

4. Russ is calling for a plan and a sound policy......

What could possibly be wrong with having a goal to shoot for and a working plan?

[Ken Burch]

6. The worst possibility is a repeat of 1972

in which Humphrey and Scoop Jackson, knowing that they were probably going to lose the nomination and caring more about punishing "those goddamned longhaired potsmokers" than helping the party win the election, started slandering George McGovern on foreign policy issues. In the fall, their ads were quoted almost verbatim by the Nixon/Agnew campaign.

I wouldn't put it past Hillary and Biden, once they are vanquished, to lower themselves to the same destructive trick, since neither one has any convictions or any loyalty to anything but their own egos.

We know they'll do everything in their power to sink the ticket if Feingold is nominated, and we have to find a way to drive them out of the race as early and as thoroughly as possible.

[bemildred]

7. Yes. And what they did to Jimmy C. was a crime too. nt