DLC Blues

For those of you who have not yet heard, Hillary was at the DLC convention on Monday, pushing a tough, centrist image and calling for a truce within the Democratic party in an effort to shore up support for her 2008 presidential bid.

Make no mistake about it: Hillary is the DLC's candidate in '08, and if any other Democrat wants a chance at the nomination, he will have to take the grass/labor/progressive/netroots approach.

Personally while I am ok with Hillary as a senator from NY (although her voting record is nowhere near as progressive as it could be from this state - probably because she has been angling for the presidency) I do not want to see her win the Democratic nomination in '08. A lot of this has to do with the DLC's platform and talking points; searching for an ever-changing center will get you nowhere except abandoning any principles and positions you have, which Hillary personifies in this DLC let's play nice with everyone playbook. My other reasons are that I think the wingnuttery would come out of the woodwork to campaign and vote against her, as well as we have just had 1 Bush, 2 Clinton and 2 Bush administrations. It is time for a change.

However even excluding those last two concerns, I still do not feel that Hillary represents the party. She may be very liberal on several issues, but that has nothing to do with being a partisan Democrat. Standing by Bush as he committed the nation to a false and failed war in Iraq and continuing to support it in his terms is not a Democratic stance. Well, I guess since 51% of the nation voted for Bush that means that she has to woo them. Do you see what I am getting at? Needing to cozy up to big business to get money for the party while selling out your base economically is not a Democratic stance. For those of you who believe that the Democratic party cannot compete without big, powerful business lining their pocketbooks, I would encourage you to visit Paul Hackett's ActBlue page, where you can see that he has raised 172K from approximately 3500 people, The average donation is $50 and most of this occurred over the past week. Not too shabby.

It is no longer 1992 and Bill's triangulation is not going to work for Hillary in 2008, yet the DLC continues to cling to this failed vision because they see it as the only way to win. If the DLC wants to position itself as a middle of the road, hawkish, good for the rich organization then it can form its own middle of the road, centrist party, because it does not represent the mainstream of the Democratic party.

These are just my concerns with the DLC's policies and prescriptions. Still, the main reason that myself and many partisan Democrats hate the DLC (take note that there is a difference between thinking someone has the wrong idea, as per above, which does not entail dislike, and hatred) is because they spend so much time bashing their own party. I have said it before and I will say it again: if you use Republican language to bash a Democrat you are not a Democrat. This is exactly what the DLC does when they try to make themselves look 'tough' on defense and belittle the progressive base of the Democratic party because the DLC always shifts away from the partisan line toward the center at the expense of what they consider to be the 'left.' Kos has a rebuttal to this call for peace, I recommend it as well as the other articles he links to at the bottom, especially Digby's and Steve's.

Let me end by saying that if Hillary gets the nomination the grass/netroots will close ranks behind her and support her. I would hardly expect the same of the DLC, who would probably defect to the Republicans and spend their time bashing a progressive and partisan candidate. Hillary's nomination is not inevitable and I urge everyone to work towards getting a more progressive and partisan candidate the nomination (Clark or Feingold for me at the moment).