US elections: Democratic writers ponder the victory

1. Watershed :The Democrats Weren't Ready for This -- by William Greider/The Nation

The Democratic Party was not really ready for this. Democrats have been in the wilderness so long--since Ronald Reagan launched the conservative era twenty-five years ago--that older liberals began to think it was a life sentence. Bill Clinton was the party's rock star; he made people feel good (and occasionally cringe), but he governed in idiosyncratic ways that accommodated the right and favored small gestures over big ideas. The party adopted his risk-averse style. Its substantive meaning and political strength deteriorated further.

Then George W. Bush came along as the ultimate nightmare--even more destructive of government and utterly oblivious to the consequences.

The 2006 election closed out the conservative era with the voters' blast of rejection. Democrats are liberated again to become--what? Something new and presumably better, maybe even a coherent party.

This is the political watershed everyone senses. The conservative order has ended, basically because it didn't work--did not produce general well-being. People saw that conservatives had no serious intention of creating smaller government. They were too busy delivering boodle and redistributing income and wealth from the many to the few. Plus, Republicans got the country into a bad war, as liberals had decades before.

On the morning after, my 6-year-old grandson was watching TV as he got ready for school. He saw one of those national electoral maps in which blue states wiped away red states. "Water takes fire," he said. Water nourishes, fire destroys. How astute is that? It could be the theme for our new politics.

With Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate, we can now return to a reality-based politics that nourishes rather than destroys. The party's preoccupation with "message" should take a back seat to "substance"--addressing the huge backlog of disorders and injuries produced by conservative governance. This changeover will be long and arduous. But at least it can now begin.

Republicans lost, but their ideological assumptions are deeply embedded in government, the economy and the social order. Many Democrats have internalized those assumptions, others are afraid to challenge them. It will take years, under the best circumstances, for Democrats to recover nerve and principle and imagination--if they do.

But this is a promising new landscape. Citizens said they want change. Getting out of Iraq comes first, but economic reform is close behind: the deteriorating middle class, globalization and its damaging impact on jobs and wages, corporate excesses and social abuses, the corruption of politics. Democrats ran on these issues, and voters chose them.

The killer question: Do Democrats stick with comfortable Washington routines or make a new alliance with the people who just elected them? Progressives can play an influential role as ankle-biting enforcers. They then have to get up close and personal with Democrats. Explain that evasive, empty gestures won't cut it anymore. Remind the party that it is vulnerable to similar retribution from voters as long as most Americans don't have a clue about what Democrats stand for.

The first order of business is taking down Bush. The second front is the fight within the Democratic Party over its soul and sense of direction. These are obviously intertwined, but let's start with Bush and how Democrats can contain his ebbing powers. This is not a philosophical discussion. Events are already moving rapidly.

Everyone talks up postelection bipartisanship, and voters are weary of partisan cat fights. But that doesn't mean selling them out to get along with the other party. If Bush wants compromise, let him start by promising not to nominate any more hard-right-wingers to the federal judiciary. Harry Reid, the new Senate majority leader, could respond by promising not to confirm any nominees if Bush doesn't keep his word.

The tables are turned now. Democrats will control the pursestrings of government. Beyond keeping post offices open, they can kill anything Bush proposes. They have the high ground, but they can now also be blamed for what goes wrong. For the first time in a dozen years, Democrats have the power to alter the governing fundamentals.

Ending the war cannot be compromised. Voters want out "now," as soon as possible. They did not endorse a couple more years of US occupation, many more lost lives and wasted billions. If Democratic leaders get that wrong, it becomes their war too, and Americans will not be forgiving. A coherent alternative that deserves bipartisan support may emerge from the Baker-Hamilton group. But, if not, Democrats should be principled critics and draw up their own road map.

Let Iraqis decide their own fate. Telling them to split up into three parts sounds like more colonialist intervention. Iraqis are robbed of true sovereignty as long as occupying Americans are present. Democrats can come up with a plausible timetable for withdrawal, accompanied by rational foreign-policy steps like direct talks with Iran and other Middle Eastern powers to defuse the sectarian violence and to arrange a manageable exit for the US military.

Congress cannot command troops, but it has enormous leverage to coax and prod Pentagon policy through appropriations and other legislation. Cutting off funds in the midst of war is not going to happen--it never has in US history--but the military itself could become a valuable source of strategic ideas, both in hearings and through back-door communications. Bush's promised "victory" in Iraq is not an option.

The Pentagon, in fact, is especially vulnerable to Congressional pressure, because its spending is scandalously out of control. Rumsfeld allowed it, and the services took advantage of his open checkbook. Emergency "war" spending is headed toward $507 billion and covers numerous projects with no relevance to Iraq or Afghanistan. House and Senate committees can force out the facts and expose this outrage now. If they don't, it will haunt them later when they try to reduce federal deficits.

When Democrats take up their commitment to reducing Bush's budget deficits, they face a big problem up front. The economy is heading toward recession. Shrinking federal deficits would only make things worse. Dems need to back off that pledge and consider stimulative spending instead.

They can look for money elsewhere. One promising source lies in the many investigations and hearings Senate and House committees are planning to expose war-profiteering--Halliburton's no-bid contracts, obscene subsidies and tax breaks for Big Oil and Big Pharma, the rank corruption that has essentially looted government programs. Properly managed, these inquiries can produce popular anger and demands for recovering the public capital carried off by private interests.

The straightforward way to achieve this is taxation. For three decades, Washington has been cutting taxes for corporate and financial interests, not to mention the wealthy. Democrats have to find ways to stop intoning this conservative tax-cutting mantra by showing that government has been robbed and ordinary families are the losers. Will voters be upset that Democrats are recovering public money by raising taxes on the plunderers? I think they will cheer.

Representative Charles Rangel, the next chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has said he will not attempt to repeal Bush's outrageous tax cuts for the wealthy--but instead let them expire in 2010. That kills estate-tax repeal and puts other measures in terminal jeopardy. Democrats should go on the offense and develop a tax-shift strategy that increases taxes on corporations and capital in order to finance tax relief for struggling families, middle-class and below. Last-Ditch Bush may veto this, but let's see how many nervous Republicans vote against it.

All this depends, however, on the question of whether Democrats have the stomach for a fight, not only with Bush and the GOP but with the business and financial interests that underwrite both parties. We don't know yet, but a test case may come soon. Corporate leaders, investment bankers and the insurance industry are lobbying to gut the modest regulations enacted after Enron and to disable investor lawsuits against fraud on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms.


2. Why I'm Not Celebrating Yet -- by Margy Waller

Apparently, we’re in for a couple years of change and disappointingly incremental policymaking. Signals are clear—and all over the press.

For example, just two days after the “left turn” election, we heard that “Victorious Democrats vow cooperative approach on taxes and the economy.” Well, bollocks.

My friends and family keep asking if I am excited, celebrating, partying up a storm, and so on. I am not.

Everyone assumes that inclusionist economic policies stand a chance of implementation in the next Congress. Well, maybe—some of those ideas. But is it a new day for equitable economic policy? Not so much…not just yet.

Of course, it’s good news that so many of the president’s worst ideas are now buried deep and going nowhere. Plans to further reduce taxes on the wealthy (by eliminating the estate tax) and kill the universal retirement system (by privatizing Social Security) are dead in the 110th Congress.

But, we aren’t likely to see meaningful progress on economic fairness and inclusion just because both houses have new leadership.

Why not? It’s our own fault. Progressives haven’t given members of Congress a clear signal about what we want in years. Instead, the message from the think tank and advocacy crowd on economic and social policy has been: “Get the best deal you can!” and “Take the crumbs, if that’s all you can get from your seat at the table.”

Even more importantly, we’ve in no way prepared the public to demand or support steps that improve our national economy by increasing economic and social mobility. We’ve barely touched on the need to strengthen the 30 percent of the labor market that is made up of jobs paying less than $10 an hour. We hardly ever focus our advocacy and media work on the damage to our economy stemming from the large and growing percentage of jobs no one could call “decent work.”

And until voters demand equitable economic policy, we should not expect members of Congress to take the lead.

We can expect smallish changes like the very belated minimum wage increase that is on the “to-do” list of our madam speaker-elect. But, will Congress take the next logical step—one adopted by many of the successful state initiative campaigns: Ensuring that wages increase automatically with the cost of living?

Will Congress pursue any of the other new ideas developing at the state and local level to strengthen economic mobility by making bad jobs into better jobs?

Will we see federal policy movement toward the delinking of health care coverage from employment, like steps taken in a few states and one locality (San Francisco, natch)?

How about ensuring that all employees are offered a limited number of paid sick days as one city (yeah, yeah—San Francisco again) did on November 8?

Will Congress take action to clarify that employees are free to organize and negotiate for better jobs?

Sure, it’s not necessarily wrong for incoming leadership to signal a desire to cooperate with the administration and other conservatives. That’s all the voters are truly prepared to accept at this point. It’s our job to start demanding better policy in the future.

We’ve already heard “progressives” advising the new leadership to “resist the impulse to pursue big ambitions.” This might be the right political advice for today, but it is also strong evidence that another kind of institution is required—one that has the freedom to focus on long-term goals and a mission specific to policy outcomes, uncolored by campaign goals.

It’s no good thinking that we can hold our fire now and turn to the bigger stuff in 2008, when many hope that progressives will still be surfing the wave of voter discontent with conservatives. We have to start sharing our most ambitious goals now, if we want them to be adopted by future candidates, members of Congress, and presidential administrations.

The thing about the new Congress is not so much what its members choose to do, as what we share with them about our expectations. If our stated goals are limited, then the outcomes will be small-bore and we shouldn’t be disappointed. It’s not about them; it’s about what we want.

(Margy Waller is the project director of The Mobility Agenda at The Center for Community Change.)


3. Bad-Ass Democrats: Some of the Most Critical Victories on Election Day 2006 Were Delivered by Candidates Who Were Anything but 'Republican-Lite.' -- by Tad Daley

"I'd rather vote for what I want, and not get it," said Eugene Debs, "than vote for what I don't want, and get it." Debs, of course, ran for president several times, never came close to winning, but put forth insistent ideas on labor rights, civil liberties, economic justice, and enduring world peace (he served time in jail for opposing American entry into the First World War) that in time became part of the American mainstream. Nearly a century later, progressive Democrats appear to be promulgating a different model. We're voting for what we want, and getting it!

January will see no less than nine new senators sitting on the Democratic side of the aisle. In three of the most closely watched races, moderate Democrats Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, and James Webb of Virginia won by a razor's edge - probably all with less than 50% of the total. But the three most progressive major U.S. Senate candidates in the country each won going away. On a day of record turnouts nationwide, Sherrod Brown garnered 56% of the vote in Ohio, Amy Klobuchar secured 58% in Minnesota, and Bernie Sanders (actually not a Democrat but a socialist!) pulled a full 65% in Vermont.

None of these three candidates apologized for their unabashedly progressive principles. None of them pandered to people who voted Republican in the last election to convince them to come over to the other side. Instead, all of them fired up the Democratic base, put forth big uncompromising liberal ideas, and inspired thousands of citizens who otherwise might not have cast a ballot to show up on Tuesday at the polls.

And now, as they join Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, and arguably a few other Democratic firebrands, we may see in the U.S. Senate for the first time the emergence of a genuine progressive caucus.

It is a little known fact that 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry actually finished not second, but third in the nationwide popular vote. The totals? 55 million for Kerry. 58 million for Bush. And 70 million eligible citizens who didn't even bother to vote, despite all that was at stake for our nation and our world. Many believe that the key factor behind the Kerry fiasco was that his focus on "swing voters" - probably best epitomized by his prancing about in the woods with an awkwardly held shotgun in hunter camouflage in October 2004 -- failed to motivate enough of the Democratic base to show up on Election Day 2004. (President Bush and architect Karl Rove, in stark contrast, made little effort to persuade Democrats to come over, concentrating instead on generating passion -- and turnout -- among evangelical Christians.) Next time around, Democrats can obsess, again, about how to get 2 or 3 million of that 58 million to change their minds. Or, they can try to elevate the souls of 5 or 7 or 10 million of that 70 million, so that they care enough about the fate of our civilization to actually vote on Election Day 2008. For us.

Perhaps the biggest untold story of Election Day 2006 is not just the ascendancy of Democrats, but the triumph of these intrepid new progressives. The resounding victories by Brown, Klobuchar, and Sanders may mean that the salvation of the Democratic Party - perhaps not only in traditional bastions of liberalism like Minnesota and Vermont but also in critical swing states like Ohio -- is to go after our base. To be not timid Democrats, but bad-ass Democrats. To give the millions of Americans who previously did not show up the kind of vision and boldness and hope that will move them next time to turn out, and perhaps even to devote some of their treasure and toil to our collective struggle. To stand by our beliefs, with a bedrock confidence that no matter how far out of the mainstream they may appear today, eventually those beliefs will prevail. "First, they ignore you," said Mahatma Gandhi. "Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

(Tad Daley , who served as Issues Director of the 2004 presidential campaign of Congressman Dennis Kucinich, is a co-founder of Progressive Democrats of America, probably the fastest-growing political advocacy group in the country.)


4. America’s Election: Daddy’s Swagger vs Mommy’s Care -- by Ruth Rosen

The world will long wonder what took the American people so long to realise that George W Bush, the swaggering, macho, faux rancher from Texas, was an incompetent and dangerous man who threatened the democratic foundations and moral credibility of the United States.

The answer, I believe, can be summed up in one word: fear.

After 11 September 2001, Bush successfully employed a politics of fear which resulted in widespread indifference to his domestic and foreign-policy agenda. Urged to be terrified by terrorism, Americans became blinded by fear. If a policy was part of the "war against terror", most Americans figured it was probably worthwhile. As a result, they ignored the administration's "tax relief" to the wealthy, its lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, its zealous campaign to promote the religious right's vision of a Christian nation, and its determination to privatise anything and everything, including security in Iraq.

As long as they thought they had a strong masculine president who would protect them, Americans seemed willing to give up all kinds of constitutional liberties and rights . As long as they felt comforted by the illusion of safety, Americans also seemed willing to tolerate Bush's arrogant attitude toward the rest of the world.

But such hubris almost always ends in tragedy. Eventually, people began to notice that the emperor wore no clothes. When hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans, Bush's incompetence and lack of compassion could no longer be hidden behind a strutting swagger. As people drowned, he dined. As people died, he ignored their plight. Widespread corruption and sexual scandals among conservative Republicans further undermined the illusion that Bush - the man who believed God wanted him to be president - had anyone righteous on his side.

Finally, the daily news reports of death and devastation in Iraq made Bush's daily mantra of "staying the course" seem more pathetic than protective. "Is this man capable of safeguarding my family?" Americans asked themselves. At the polls, they cast their votes and decisively answered "no".

As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it: "This will be known as the year macho politics failed - mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men. Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability."

And so they turned to the Mommy party. Victories by fifty Democratic women in the House of Representatives helped their party gain control of both houses of Congress and catapulted Nancy Pelosi, a feminist liberal from San Francisco , to assume leadership as the first female speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line to the presidency.

Not everyone turned to the Mommy party, of course. But women gave Democrats an important edge; 55% of them voted for Democrats, but only 43% voted for Republicans. Exit polls reveal that both white men and women split their votes fairly evenly between the two parties. The female vote that really made a difference came from women who were young, poor, and from ethnic and racial minority populations. Democrats also enjoyed even larger margins from both men and women among the young, between 18 and 29 years of age (22%); low-income workers who earn less than $15,000 (37%); African Americans (79%); Latinos (39%) and the highly educated (17%).

The real "family values"

Although she won't become speaker of the House until January 2007, Nancy Pelosi has hit the ground running. During her first 100 hours as speaker, she has promised to introduce legislation that raises the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour, requires all cargo shipped into the US to be screened, cuts student-loan interest rates in half, allows the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients, and broadens the types of stem-cell research allowed with federal funds.

Pelosi has also demonstrated bold leadership by backing John Murtha in the race for majority leader in the House. One year ago, Murtha - a hawkish Democrat from Pennsylvania, and a decorated Vietnam veteran - stunned colleagues when he called for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Defying the president, Murtha argued that many troops were demoralised and poorly equipped and that after more than two years of war, they were impeding Iraq's progress toward stability and self-governance.

On 13 November 2006, Pelosi wrote to all elected representatives, saluting Murtha's outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq and endorsing him as Democratic majority leader. At a time when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton still hasn't opposed the war, Pelosi has staked out a strong anti-war position by promoting Murtha to such a position of leadership.

Liberal women have been celebrating this election for many reasons, including the potential return of the nation's attention to actual "family values". Throughout the election, Pelosi, a self-described "mother of five children and grandmother of five", emphasised the necessity of health care, education, energy independence, and a dignified retirement.

Pelosi's promises have already raised expectations among women's rights advocates. Just days after the election, author Judith Warner argued in a widely-discussed New York Times op-ed that Pelosi should expand her agenda and do even more to support America's working mothers and their families: "The American family", she wrote, "needs quality after-school programs, national standards for childcare, voucher programs and tax subsidies to help pay for that care, universal, voluntary public preschool, paid family leave and incentives for businesses to make part-time and flex-time work financially viable."

Not all these things will necessarily happen, but still (as a friend of mine recently commented) at the very least we now have politicians who will discuss these vital matters.

For those who have feared the end of legal abortion in the United States, the election means that the Democrats won't have to watch helplessly as the Bush administration packs the Supreme Court with rightwing conservatives. As a result, legal abortion seems protected - for now. Even in the conservative state of South Dakota , voters defeated an initiative that would have banned all abortion, except to save the life of a pregnant woman. In California and Oregon, they also beat back initiatives that would have limited women's reproductive choices.

As the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) notes: "the change in House leadership can only bring good things for reproductive health advocates..." In particular, the organisation expects "a marked decline in anti-choice, anti-family planning legislative attacks, including the freestanding anti-choice bills that have been a centerpiece of the social conservative agenda."

The election has raised hopes, but they will almost certainly be dampened by political reality. Still, there is a palpable sense of possibility in the air, a glimpse of a brighter future, a growing confidence that the constitution will not be eviscerated, that a theocracy won't govern this nation, and that Americans just might remember, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, that Americans should pay "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind..."

One day after the election, my stepson - a properly cynical, but sensibly progressive young man with whom I've shared these years of bleakness and gloom - called me and said: "Today, I'm proud to be an American. We still live in a democracy." I couldn't remember the last time I heard anyone I respected utter those sweet and moving words.

(Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who formerly wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her book The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America ( Penguin, 2001) will be republished in 2007 with an updated chronology and epilogue)