The quadrennial NH presidential primary presents a perhaps once-in-a-generation, last-chance opportunity to redirect our nation’s political center back towards the progressive populism and sanity that is in its heart and best interest, but has been distracted by the 30-yr right-wing campaign of ‘divide and conquer’.
CW holds that the NH primary on the Democratic side will be uneventful, but if 3-6 outspoken, celebrated populist progressives can be persuaded to emerge, preferably including viable contenders, the results could be explosive. The NH presidential primary is an outsized PR megaphone that receives global and rapt attention for a whole year at a critical and formative time.
Imagine the impact of the announcements of one candidacy after another other several weeks apart in the Spring following the foundation of a few months of multiple concurrent progressive issue campaigns. Imagine high-profile, cultural and celebrity campaign events. Imagine the first-round of candidate debates – they could be made very difficult for President Obama to get away with ducking them.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
- Force President Obama to embrace at least a measure of real populist progressive policies, proving his commitment to welcoming his progressive base as genuine policy partners. (Most desirable, but not likely given the tone-deaf bubble his administration operates in.)
- Force an LBJ moment, with the President stepping aside to be replaced with a field of true populist progressive champions.
- Constrain Sarah Palin’s appeal from expanding beyond her core supporters
- Raise national awareness of the truth and majority popularity of an honest, just, people-first government building into a politically potent national movement of real hope and change
- A secondary but by no means small benefit of raising public embrace of populist issues and solutions over the next year is the foundation it will foster for the nomination and election to Congress in 2012 of real progressive fighters (as opposed to the many "PINO's" (Progressives In Name Only). If our primary tangible achievement by 2012 is the election of a profoundly more genuinely progressive Congress, this effort will have been worth it. Central to this objective is the fact that following the 2010 elections, many ‘mainstream’ Democrats will be more inclined to support these new candidates when there's no incumbent Democrat running.
- As "New Democrats", especially in the small but outsized politics and media of NH, we can counter-message effectively against right-wing propaganda by the multiple parallel messaging of a grassroots, people-first campaign. We can focus on individual stories of how current policy impacts real people which the bottom 98% of us can identify with. This can be fast-tracked to become an effective template for moving the national debate towards populism with the high-impact megaphone of the NH presidential primary. There's no reason we can't produce coordinated memorable appeals based on truth and personal experience that will resonate more effectively than right-wing appeals based upon slogans and divisiveness.
Here’s the names of articulate leaders who might accept being drafted to run with strong progressive support behind them and with the fate of our nation for a generation hanging in the balance:
REV JESSE JACKSON, DAN ELLSBERG, RALPH NADER, HOWARD DEAN, RUSS FEINGOLD, CYNTHIA MCKINNEY, DENNIS KUCINICH, GLENN GREENWALD, JESSE VENTURA, ALAN GRAYSON.
Our universally-appealing message should be that America’s political system is broken and deeply corrupted. Bold leadership inspired by a popular uprising is required to correct this.
Instead of the mealy-mouthed ambiguity that most candidates run on, imagine the impact if they for once talked to voters like adults in promoting policies and tactics such as:
- Reform HCR by swapping robust universal Medicare buy-in for mandates
- Call Republicans’ bluff on tort reform
- 100% employment via transition of all offensive military operations to building "the homeland".
- Implement robust small-business access to capital & financing
- Settle the Israeli-Palestinian issue fairly
- Straighten out economic imbalances with China from a position of strength
- Restore civil liberties
- Roll back and curtail the security state
- Institute full federal government transparency of the actions of elected officials & appointees
- Implement universal rule-of-law
- End the bogus ‘war on terror’ – clean up genuine and ongoing malcontents via law enforcement
- Public pillory of both key elected officials and financial industry individuals responsible for Wall Street greed and abuse; re-enactment of Glass-Steagall (or equivalent), no-loophole Volker rule, et.al. reforms
- Full transparency required from both elected officials & lobbyists on all transactions between them
- Support & encouragement for the development & implementation of renewable energy and green technology infrastructure.
- Constitutional amendment severely curtailing the role of money in elections
- Rigorous policing and enforcement of election integrity
- Restore public trust in government spending practices via elimination of pork projects, effective public debate on non-essential spending proposals, and a commitment to minimum spending to produce minimum taxation.
The heroic case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks is most instructive. It shows that the empire is not impregnable and that freedom-loving patriots have a chance yet to succeed in fighting for and restoring at least some measure of sanity to our nation and the world.
While the authoritarian right-wing has little trouble marching together in effective lock-step, getting the left to all push together in the same direction has so far often been like herding cats. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Not this time. Not with so much at stake.