The Nation: When's the Idea Primary?

[marmar]

comment | posted March 1, 2007 (March 19, 2007 issue)
When's the Idea Primary?

Robert L. Borosage

Will Hillary apologize for her vote on Iraq? Will Obama disavow David Geffen's gibe at Bill's character? Should Edwards have hired and/or fired the blasphemous bloggers Swift-boated by the wing nuts of the right? Who can match Hillary's muscle and machine? Will Obama sweep the Facebook primary? The 2008 presidential election isn't for another twenty months, but coverage has already descended to tabloid sensation and horse-race handicapping.

To quote John Edwards, it doesn't have to be this way. The 2008 election has the potential to mark a dramatic turn. For the first time in decades, there is no incumbent or logical successor. Americans have clearly turned their backs on the follies and failures of the Bush Administration and the right-wing extremes it represents. People are worried, mad and looking for a new way forward. With Democrats on the rise, the A team is on the field and the leading candidates--Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards--stir passion and mobilize energy.

The election comes when the challenges the country faces are increasingly stark. Iraq is lost, and we are racking up trade deficits and foreign debts that can't be sustained. Our broken healthcare system is bankrupting families and the government alike, while lack of investment in everything from schools to sewers makes America less competitive and less habitable. Corporations are shredding the social contract as inequality grows. Al Gore won an Oscar for telling the inconvenient truth that catastrophic climate change is a danger, real and present. The list goes on.

Surely it is a time for vision, for bold ideas. Yet in the early days of this campaign, caution is the order of the day.

Hillary, the odds-on favorite for the nomination, is a candidate smart enough to carve out a very different course not only from Bush but from the rear-guard politics that characterized her husband's years. Yet she has chosen to present herself as a restoration, saying, "We've lost something these last six years," and pledging to "regain it." She trumpets not her new ideas but her experience and grit: "Bill and I have beaten them before, and we will again." Indeed, she seems almost averse to leading; she offers a conversation, not an agenda. Her position on the war lags behind the passions of her party's activists and the needs of the country. She has only belatedly begun to step up to her signature issue of healthcare. Meanwhile, her campaign spoils for a fight. It stands ready to carpet-bomb any Democrat with the temerity to mention the misadventures of the Clinton years, as illustrated by the assault on Obama after Geffen's comments surfaced. Yet by emptying Hillary's campaign of captivating ideas, that same team makes character and history her calling cards and, inevitably, matters for debate. .....(more)

The complete article is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070319/borosage

[BL611]

1. Maybe its sometime after

March 1, 2007. Isn't it a little early to be bitching about candidates not having detailed platforms yet?

[PATRICK]

2. "It doesn't have to be this way"

But those who control it and the putative "frontrunner" are- once more as always- trying to trivialize the uneasy populist revolution always stirring in the eharts of the electorate. To skirt the real and obvious issues, concerns and desires of the same common sense, suffering and frustrated populace.

Hillary is sustaining this and the uncomfrotable judgment is becoming quite clear that this is the root and character of her leadership role which will carry over into the WH despite any calims to pragmatism in winning the primaries. There are several catches in such pragmatism, one being that one does not really change that much in "adapting". One merely reveals select sides in order to game. The most deadly however is that the compromise is the first- unnecessary- capitulation to the dark side, the undemocratic side, the "I trust the establishment and the establishment supports me" side.

Hillary swings the attention of the public thorugh its disserving MSM intermediaries down a dismal preliminary path. She carries and may ruin Obama in the process. Edwards may once more get lost in this sidelong attention shuffle away from the real people.

So with a long time to go we are not in a good position to lead the party and nation in the necessary direction(much less the best). Not the worst either, but that should not make us complacent or accepting
of yet another badly run show.

Trust the people and lead by conviction. But how to REACH the people when of course the cream of the power establishment and communications monopolies stick their fat nonsense in the way with the full cooperation of the leading actors?