Pacific Views

They Can Win

...MICHAEL: I saw an interesting thing happen today. A rebel was being arrested by the military police, and rather than be taken alive, he exploded a grenade he had hidden in his jacket. He killed himself, and took a captain of the command with him. ...

JOHNNY OLA: Those rebels, you know, they're lunatics.

MICHAEL: Maybe so -- but it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight -- the rebels aren't.

ROTH: What does that tell you?

MICHAEL: They can win. ...

-- From the Godfather Part II, slightly edited from transcript.

So, I went to my first Howard Dean meetup on Wednesday. I've had reservations about Dean, partly summed up in this Common Dreams article that wonders if he isn't a hawk in dove's clothing. But by the end, I couldn't get the above scene from Godfather II out of my head.

Some of the people there had the same reservations I did, and said openly that they agree more with Kucinich, which is basically my take. But the thing is, at base, they showed up without anyone from campaign headquarters asking them to go. They're planning their own public awareness campaigns, and talking about how to get the state Democratic party leadership to side with them.

They feel motivated to lead the way on their own, to take the first steps that need to be taken if people want our government back. And people that energized and empowered, they can win.

Politics has moved so far to the right in this country, for whatever reasons (whole other topic), that liberal politics needs a victory. A big one. If we want to be able to argue for a more liberal point of view than that represented by the bulk of our current elected representatives, then we need to get to a position where we're no longer playing defense.

Bloggers like Max Sawicky have put forward very good arguments as to why it pays to back the most liberal candidate they can at this early stage, in order to move the debate. There are just a few problems with this, as I see it: 1) Right now, the debate is 'liberals are traitors vs. no we're not', 2) it takes a lot of time to build an organization that's propelled mostly by elbow grease and word of mouth, and 3) the opposition is loaded.

This July article talks about the oncoming fundraising juggernaut that any Democratic candidate faces:

...The president's swing through America's biggest battleground state capped a two-week, cross-country fundraising tour that helped raise about $30-million toward his re-election campaign.

Based on early projections, that could well top the quarterly fundraising of all nine Democratic presidential candidates combined, through Monday. That was the deadline for filing new quarterly campaign reports, though totals have not been released. ...

Thirty million dollars in two weeks. We can't beat this with money, not in a time when even the Democratic party's standby corporate donors have started hedging their bets in our one-party state. It can only be beat by a popular uprising of the democratic kind. By a unified and determined opposition that will advertise, organize, agitate, and educate like the whole world depends on it.

We, by which I mean anyone who doesn't want Bush in office for another four years, have to make a choice pretty quickly. We're facing the political and media machine built up during thirty years of concerted effort and planning. A movement that's been building cohesion as the liberal opposition has fractured and fragmented.

What's needed is someone who will fight back, and who can get enough people motivated to help that we can even overcome a financial disadvantage that might be in the hundreds of millions. Howard Dean has already shown in his public statements that he can fight back without sounding unacceptably shrill. And that meetup indicated, to me anyway, that he can rally people around his campaign.

But those motivated people are going to need to come from the party's activist base first. At some point the fact that other candidates think mostly in terms of group endorsements rather than grassroots organizing needs to be seen for the tragic strategic flaw that it is. Just as an unwillingness to compromise needs to be seen for the tragic popular flaw that it is.

Maybe we can hold off worrying about creating the perfect society until we've got one that isn't in constant and imminent peril from within?

Posted by natasha at August 17, 2003 01:15 AM | TrackBack