Wall Street Journal Touts Progressive Democrats

I recieved this from someone else, in text format, and so I do not have a link to it. But I will try to find one and post it here.
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The Wall Street Journal

August 26, 2008

Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table


By Gerald F. Seib

Denver: Walk into almost any hotel here this week and you can find an odd sight: Liberal Democrats starting their day by lobbying moderate and conservative Democrats.

The lobbyists are members of the Progressive Democrats of America, an activist group working to keep the party true to liberal priorities, and they have been assigned to every hotel housing Democratic convention delegates.

"At breakfast, where they go to get their talking points [from the national party], we will be there," says Tim Carpenter, a veteran of Democratic campaigns and national director of the PDA.

The fact that Mr. Carpenter and his cohorts feel compelled to buttonhole other Democrats to push a liberal agenda is a sign of a quiet tension lurking within the Democratic Party. That tension is a potential complication for Sen. Barack Obama now, and it is certain to be one for him and his party if he is elected president.

Progressives -- the term of art for the party's liberal wing -- contend, with some justification, that they have provided much of the fuel that could propel the party to win control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in 16 years. They have contributed and raised large amounts of money, fired up their troops on the Internet, and generally are thrilled at the prospect of a Democratic sweep.

Yet they aren't sure the party they think they are leading to victory is really following them. Sen. Obama has been essentially nonideological in his campaign, has made much of his desire to reach across the ideological spectrum to Republicans, and spent several weeks this summer moving away from the left and toward the center on issues ranging from warrantless wiretaps to abortion to gun control.

More than that, liberals realize that if the party expands its control of the House and Senate, it may do so by electing moderate and conservative Democrats who vanquish sitting Republicans. Thus, while Democratic control in Congress could expand, liberal influence may not.

So the progressive wing of the party has gathered in Denver uncertain whether to celebrate or fight for its due.

"The party doesn't get it," says Mr. Carpenter, who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, former California Gov. Jerry Brown and former President Bill Clinton. "That's why organizations like the PDA have to organize and energize.”

The big question, of course, is: Exactly what do progressives want? For many, the short answer is: Quick and unconditional withdrawal from Iraq, no parallel buildup in Afghanistan, a reduction in the military budget, a broad rollback of the Bush tax cuts, an increase in corporate taxes and a shift of those funds to social spending, a huge government drive for alternative energy sources, and a much bigger government role in providing health care.

Sen. Obama doesn't exactly oppose any of those impulses, but he hasn't fully bought into all of them, either. He'd roll back some but not all Bush tax cuts, for instance, and is a long way from backing the kind of government-funded universal health-insurance system many progressives want.

Rob Kall, a radio host and editor of liberal Web site OpEdNews, says flatly, "Liberals and progressives don't see him as liberal. Universally among liberals and leftists, they seem him as a centrist."

That may be fine with the Obama campaign, which likely calculates that victory hinges more on the candidate's ability to win over independents and former supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton than the party's liberal base, which figures to go along for the ride. Still, Mr. Kall says some members of his Web site are drifting toward third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney or questioning how hard they want to work this fall.

The most likely campaign effect, though, is continued pressure on Sen. Obama through the fall to move left on key issues.

David Sirota, a liberal analyst and author with the Campaign for America's Future, which bills itself as "the strategy center for the progressive movement," expresses particular concern about whether Sen. Obama will attack corporate interests on behalf of the working class. "If we are serious about developing the tactics and strategies to bring about real change after the election, we have to first know if Barack Obama is even with us," he wrote a few days ago on the Campaign for America's Future Web site.

Mr. Sirota expressed particular qualms about the candidate's choice of economic advisers who support free-trade agreements and hail from the investment-banking world.

Perhaps the most immediate impact of the liberal quest to be heard came in the drafting of the Democratic Party platform to be adopted by the convention this week. The experience of Donna Smith is illustrative.

Ms. Smith, a health-policy activist with the National Nurses Association and self-described "middle-aged grandma from Chicago," is pushing for a so-called single-payer national health-insurance system, in which the government essentially would expand the Medicare program to cover all Americans. She and some fellow activists hoped to appear at a platform hearing in Cleveland several weeks ago to make their pitch, but they didn't get on the agenda.

Their goal wasn't to get the party to sign on to national health insurance, which they realized was a bridge too far, but rather to get the platform language call explicitly for "guaranteed health care" for all Americans, without specifics about how that would be achieved.

So Ms. Smith and colleagues from other progressive groups organized a kind of guerrilla campaign for the official platform-writing session that followed, in Chicago. They recruited a sympathetic platform delegate to carry their amendment, pulled liberal Rep. John Conyers of Michigan into action, and they ultimately got their language added to the platform.

Ms. Smith was pleased, but she recognizes that as only one step toward national health care. "We don't think it's anywhere near where it should be in terms of what the platform should say or what our party should stand for," she says.

Michael Yaki, the Democratic Party's national platform director, says the debate over health-care language "was a semantic issue. The progressive forces "pointed out that it was important. ... If that wasn't made as clear as it should have been, then they pointed out something good."

The Obama team has, in fact, been skillful at smoothing the edges of such policy disagreements. Its language on abortion says flatly that the party "unequivocally" supports a woman's right to an abortion -- yet it also nods to the party's conservatives by saying it supports policies to reduce the incidence of abortion.

On gay rights, the platform states in strong terms that the party will fight discrimination because of sexual orientation or "gender identity" -- yet the words "gay" and "lesbian" appear nowhere in the draft.

The balancing act will get tougher if there is an Obama victory this fall and ambiguities have to give way to policies. That, in fact, is a classic problem for a growing party: How to expand the tent to take in newcomers without offending the stalwarts who always have been inside. It was a constant problem for Ronald Reagan, who led Republicans into a majority in 1980 but often was accused by fellow conservatives of compromising too much.

Smart progressives know that's how things work, but they also think they've earned a special place inside the tent.

Here's the direct link:

http://blogs.wsj.com/politicalperceptions/2008/08/26/partys-left-pushes-for-a-seat-at-the-table/

Yet they aren't sure the party they think they are leading to victory is really following them. Sen. Obama has been essentially nonideological in his campaign, has made much of his desire to reach across the ideological spectrum to Republicans, and spent several weeks this summer moving away from the left and toward the center on issues ranging from warrantless wiretaps to abortion to gun control.

And imho, that is what he will have to do if he wants to win the White House.

Ugh.

I don't want Obama for President.

I don't want John McCain for President either.

I kind of like the idea of Sarah Palin for VP, but not enough to get me to vote for McCain.