Taking Back America

As America's jobless rate hit a nine-year high and after-the-fact analyses of the Republican tax plan revealed that the Bush Administration and its allies in Congress had denied child tax credits to low-income families, the conservative Democratic Leadership Council was furiously dispatching memos warning Democrats not to get too aggressive about confronting the Administration. But at the June 4-6 Campaign for America's Future conference in Washington, where the people who form the party's heart and soul gathered to forge a Take Back America strategy for the 2004 presidential election, the DLC's insistence that Democrats stick to the electorally disastrous Republican-lite mode of 2002 found no takers. Instead, those assembled made it clear they prefer the tactics urged on them by journalist Bill Moyers, who called for getting over any fears of being "labeled class warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."

"Those folks at the DLC are wrong," declared Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean to the cheers of more than 1,000 labor, civil rights, civil liberties and peace activists from across the country. "The way to get elected...is not to be like the Republicans but to stand up and fight." Dean got no disagreement from the other Democratic contenders who--with the exception of no-shows Joe Lieberman, a DLC acolyte, and Senator Bob Graham--stumbled over one another in a rush to take up the mantle of progressive populism.

While Senator John Edwards continued to dust off themes from Bill Clinton's 1992 Putting People First campaign, and Senator John Kerry struggled to get the right inflection on one-liners such as how the Administration is "opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing firehouses in New York," Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich was the candidate who most successfully channeled the spirit of William Jennings Bryan. Kucinich, who drew nine standing ovations, gave a speech that promised to withdraw the United States from the economically devastating North American Free Trade Agreement. He also said he'd shift dollars from a bloated Pentagon budget to healthcare and education, and he dismissed proposals to privatize Social Security with, "That money belongs to Main Street, not Wall Street."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.