Web Letters | The Nation

Web Letter

I agree that we people to the left of the Democratic Party should join the Obama campaign. We need to do the hard work of electoral organizing alongside the thousands of volunteers who have created the Obama movement. I think that we should, along with jumping into the work of the electoral campaign, argue that the Obama volunteers could become the base of a mass ongoing movement that lives on after Obama wins, a movement that would be in place to give the Obama Administration direct, on-going, immediate information from the base up and hear what Obama thinks from the Government down. We can try to create such grassroots advisory committees in every district. Even if we cannot make these ideas realities everywhere or even anywhere, raising the ideas is a good thing. And in some places we may be able to do it. Every town, or ward or even neighborhood that succeeds in creating a post-election advisory committee would be a great lesson, a great guide for others to build more participatory democracy.

Web Letter

Goodness, I have to wonder whether some of our critics have read more than the first sentence of this piece.

We're well aware of the upside and downside of Obama and his campaign, which we charactered as occupying the political center of what is becoming a left-center coalition. If you think there's another way to win the presidency in 2008 without involving and representing the political center, but with only a coalition of the left or even just progressives, and cede the center to McCain, make your case. I'd love to see it.

It's fine by me to vote Green if you like and just want to register a minority opposition this round. Just don't go to the polls alone. Bring every antiwar voter under forty that you can, and lecture them all day long on illusions if you like. Most of them will still figure out what to do, even if some here can't.

In the meantime, if you want to strengthen the left pole in this coalition, get your politics beyond cafe chatter, and lend a hand.

Web Letter

Reading this article induced a deja-vu experience. Once again, Progressive leaders, either asleep at the switch or exhibiting the same lack of courage we have been excoriating our newly elected Dem. congress for, are stepping out with too little, too late.

You had a candidate with a proven track record who supported, championed and actually campaigned on all those Progressive positions you now must "urge" your chosen candidate to adopt. His name is Dennis Kucinich. You sat on your hands and failed to support or campaign for him when it might well have mattered. Did you not know he was there? Or rather did you timidly bow to the "conventional wisdom" fostered by the MSM and perpetuated by too many of your progressive peers that he was "unelectable" and bite your tongues fearing to appear "foolish"? Or did you in fact share that assessment?

Either way you are once again, as in '96, '00, and '04, in the awkward position of supporting a candidate who, according to your own admissions, is hardly qualified to, and shows little or no desire to, carry a Progressive banner into the executive mansion. Granted, he has introduced a couple of new and refreshing elements into the mix; his banner is a different color, his coat of arms more artfully drawn, and his motto more eloquently stated than your previously chosen champions. But you don't have to listen very hard or for very long to know that neither he nor Clinton will, nor do they intend to, bring us any closer to where we need to be.

In my humble estimation you guys have it ass-backward. It seems to me to make more sense to start with someone that you know, or at least have every reason to believe, will move heaven and earth for the causes you believe in and then fight like hell to get him/her elected than to elect someone you may have to fight like hell to get to move in the right (left) direction. But what do I know? After all, I voted for a "loser" in the last three elections (Nader).

Wait, come to think of it, didn't you too (Gore, Kerry)? At least my loser shared my principles. Did yours?

This time you may get your wish. But, as they say, be careful what you ask for.....

Web Letter

There must've been some strange glitch that transferred liberal-bashing posts from the Free Republic and Neo-Con talking points gleened from the New Republic into the Nation's letters somehow.

How surreal to read ongoing MSM spin about Obama's church--or attacks on his terrible "liberalism".

It must be DLC operatives and Hillary's fat cats leading the charge, sensing their days of comfy entitlement are drawing to a close.

Web Letter

A happy surprise awaited me when I read the angry letters in response to this absurd article! There really are some Nation readers paying a lot of attention! I have come so, so close to forsaking the Nation community (after many years) because of the non-thinking, blind swooning I keep seeing for Obama. I thought intellectuals and progressives were thinking people, not sheep! Defending and supporting the lacklustre junior senator with a weak bipartisan record, with precious little demonstrated fighting for "our causes" and a decidedly un-fathomable twenty-plus-year presence in that un-progressive church... I don't get it! Where is the scrutiny? Where is the thinking? I am old enough to remember when progressives/liberals were more likely to be on the side of working-class people in this country. What happened? No luxury candidates for me, please!

Web Letter

It is irritating to me that some of our favorite icons on the left who had an early attitude of mistrust are only now coming out for Obama--after his nomination looks certain and everyone else did the work. Edwards was an initial choice of some, despite the fact that he was in support of the Iraq authorization and two early versions of the credit card bill. The left was wowed by his fair-weather attempt at populism, and I always wondered why. When a statesman of the Martin Luther King caliber finally comes along, the very people who should have immediately got on board held out as if requiring stricter proof of his mettle. Same with Howard Dean in 2004. We wouldn't be talking about Obama today if it weren't for Dean's fifty-state strategy. Yet support of Dean was not universal amongst progs. I just don't get this sort of left-elitism. What is the bar? Maybe I should ask, Where is the bar?

Web Letter

Having true-blue dems who have supported, both financially and by volunteering, older people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and myself, 34, be allowed to be demonized and called racist by their own party members because of the "youth" vote who are new to politics, and will just as surely fall away after the November election, I think you people are disgraceful.

Hear this: any so-called "Dem" who allows and supports American voters not having their votes count because of "rules" that were beyond voter control, are not "Dems" at all. That title belongs solely to the tried and true, true-blue Dems.

Anyone dismissing Wright's comments, and Obama's inability to understand why they were wrong, when he fully dismissed Don Imus, is contradictory, naïve and just plain arrogant.

Web Letter

This article achieved only two things: (1) it made me momentarily rethink my support for Obama; and (2) it demonstrated the authors' ignorance on almost every single issue under the sun. A truly remarkable feat.

The entire article is a parody of self-contradiction. For example, first the authors say that "diplomacy and trade" should replace military force in the Middle East; then mere sentences later they call for a "war...for energy independence from Middle Eastern police states"; and still later they rail against "trade agreements [with] nations that seek only to control their own national resources and economic destinies." I'm not sure they quite understand what this whole "trade" thing actually is.

After admitting that both Obama and Clinton refuse to rule out leaving some troops in Iraq for counterinsurgency operations, the authors assert--with no evidence--that Clinton's promises to withdraw from Iraq are all lies. The idiocy is astounding.

The authors, who have apparently been asleep since 1994, trot out a veritable Greatest Hits of cringe-inducing phrases: "multinational corporations"; "Yankee military intervention"; "military-industrial complex"; "vast rainbow of social movements"; and "globaliz[ing] corporate and financial power."

I sincerely hope that the authors leave the Democratic party, and that publications like The Nation stop giving them a platform. Publishing articles that have too many demonstrably false assertions to even count, like this one, makes you no different from The Weekly Standard when it publishes articles claiming that Saddam had WMDs. This is disappointing.

Web Letter

This is an excellent statement. The most important part is recognizing that what’s at stake is not simply a choice between two individuals but between two styles of politics, one which is squarely establishment, top-down, and run by corporate lobbyists, the other which is participatory and dependent on local grassroots organizations. I believe there is zero possibility for advancing any significant part of the progressive agenda without sustained grassroots mobilization in 2009 and beyond, no matter who is president. Obama, I believe, understands this and is actively looking to partner with citizen groups. Hillary promises to do much for citizens; Obama promises to work with citizens. This is a fundamental, not superficial, difference, and offers the first hint of real promise in our national politics in a very long time. The statement by Hayden, Fletcher, Glover, and Ehrenreich simply recognizes reality: the Obama campaign is the first significant, large-scale popular, progressive and (not least) cross-racial movement of the twenty-first century. Like the authors, I wasn’t on board at the start of this campaign, but I am now.

Web Letter

I think you're misreading the Obama movement. Despite the fact that a good part of the base of the movement is antiwar, at least in regard to Iraq, the message of the campaign is decidedly centrist, working "across the aisle." In fact, Obama has often criticized Clinton as being too partisan, which, in the sorry state of our current politics, really translates into "too liberal." Among the "faults" of the Clintons, "too liberal" isn't one that would be high on the list outside of the deep Republican side.

Barack did make a speech against the war, but his position now is really indistinguishable from Clinton's. Yes, he says out within a year, but the qualifiers are the same as Clinton's. On NAFTA as well, his position is identical to Clintons. His position on healthcare is actually less progressive than Clintons.

Yes, he gave what was generally an excellent speech on race in America, but it was a political speech that he was forced into, as was the nuanced nature of the speech itself. It is a disgracce that a speech like this was even necessary in this day and age, but really, let's face it, when really examined, it was not quite as earth-shattering as it's received credit for. African-Americans harbor anger at both very real and validly perceived if not quite real indignities? News flash? On substance I think this falls far below the MoveOn anti-Iraq war speeches Gore made.

Barack has played the same politics as anyone and has been calling up the negative sterotype of Clinton (disingenuous) as a person and a woman (whiner). And he did use right-wing logic and a subliminal reference photo in his anti-Clinton healthcare brochure.

(I think that your statements on Clinton's being a cheerleader for NAFTA are also false. Yes, as part of Bill's Administration she may have supported NAFTA, but she was part of the Administration. That she did speak out against aspects of NAFTA behind the scenes seems pretty well supported. Her nuanced position on NAFTA now is the same position she has publicly stated at any point after Bill's tenure.)

I don't see any new politics here. Most of those running the Obama campaign are ex-Clintonistas anyway, though somehow now knighted and saintly.

If anything I could more understand progressives egging on the fight between Barack and Hillary in the hope that the Democratic party would implode as a result and the entire two-party system would be buried in the debris. I'm not quite ready to endorse this vision myself, but it does seem to be a more realistic hope of transcending what you're purporting to transcend.