From 2002: "Less grass, more roots". From the new CEO of the DLC.

madfloridian

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Mon Apr-27-09 12:34 AM
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From 2002: "Less grass, more roots". From the new CEO of the DLC.

The implications of the title are that we have little substance, and they have the "roots."

There were two articles in the years 2002 and 2003 that shook me out of my complacency about our Democratic Party. They were the ultimate articles of ridicule of the grassroots of our party. I save them to remind me that as much as I love and trust President Obama, he has a long road ahead of him...and many in our own party think tanks might undermine.

Here is the first one, dealing with protestors mostly protesting welfare reform. It was just insulting, and it was meant to keep us in line.

This one is by Bruce Reed, the new leader of the DLC...found at the DLC website.

Less Grass, More Roots" May 2002

Reed states that protests are not what they used to be. Correct me here, but there were powerful wonderful protests during the lead up to the Iraq War vote in October that year. The tone appears sarcastic.

I learned this firsthand recently, when a swarm of protesters stormed the DLC offices demanding to meet with me. At first I thought they were looking for Ralph Reed. Or perhaps they had set out years ago to march on the Clinton White House, but, like Odysseus, had met so many adversities along the way that they arrived late and found a different landscape altogether.

..."In fact, the crowd had come to protest the DLC's support for welfare reform . As I steeled myself for a reprise of the epic 1996 debates over time limits and work requirements, the leader of the group spelled out their demand: "We want a meeting with Senator Bayh and Senator Carper, and you're the guy who can get it for us." Apparently, they knew the outcome of the 2000 presidential election after all.

"Isn't there a phone around here you could use to call the senators?" they kept insisting. So the first protest in 17 years of DLC assaults on liberal orthodoxy ended with a voice mail for Senator Bayh's scheduler.

Contempt for activists was dripping from the article.

Where have all the good protests gone? Aging centrists everywhere would love to blame over-pierced and under-challenged young people -- the first generation in human history to talk like snowboarders and think like Ralph Nader. Today's youth think "this generation has a lot to say" is an advertisement for cell phones -- which, as a matter of fact, it is.

Yet much as I believe that there's nothing wrong with the younger generation that a few years of national service wouldn't fix, they're not the only ones who bear responsibility for the collapse of modern dissent. If all that young Americans can find to get mad about is some vast globalist conspiracy, authority isn't giving them enough to question.

Another slam at protestors:

Perhaps longing for the old days when protests meant something is just another baby boom delusion. Still, it's sad to think that in 40 years, we have gone from "I Have a Dream" to "We Want a Meeting!"

Dear Ralph, it is hard for activists to hear from their senators and congressman if they don't want to be bothered. Think on that a moment. They work for us.

Making fun of those who seek you out because you claim to be the spokespeople for the party....not a good idea.

The other article that lingers in my mind is one that says it is time to get over Vietnam and head on into the new wars we have to fight. It ridicules (yes, ridicules)...activists, Howard Dean, and slams Dennis Kucinich. It is from April 2003, when we were supposed to be the victors in Iraq.

Good Night, Vietnam

He might as well have said Hello, Iraq.

Former Gov. Howard Dean, whose antiwar rhetoric has made him the unlikely darling of liberal activists in Iowa and elsewhere, has been visibly struggling to criticize the war without appearing to undermine the troops. He vowed not to "personally" attack the president on the war, but has instead continued to attack his Democratic rivals who voted to authorize force.

But one antiwar Democrat has refused to change his rhetoric at all, and is supplying a fascinating exhibition of the Left's "Vietnam Syndrome": the tendency to interpret any military conflict through the nostalgic lens of the political struggle against the war in Vietnam. Like rock musicians, antiwar protesters tend to keep going back to the 1960s and early 1970s for role models and inspiration. But few are as fearlessly faithful to the Vietnam War era of protests as presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who made a speech on the first day of the war in Iraq that consciously echoed George McGovern's "Come Home America" acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic Convention.

"Come home, America," said Kucinich to the National Newspaper Association on March 20. "Come home and fix your broken streets and mend your broken dreams.... Come home and establish a living wage.... Come home and provide single payer, guaranteed health care for the forty-one million Americans who suffer illness without relief.... Come home and provide guaranteed social security for generations to come without privatization and without extending the retirement age, which would be devastating for minorities.... Come home and make non-violence an organizing principle within our society through the creation of a Department of Peace, America!"

And a jab at the anti-war protestors whom that group called "fringe activists" often.

Antiwar Democrats are entitled to their opinions. In fact, we share most of their concerns about the Bush Administration diplomacy that has made the drive to disarm Iraq such a lonely endeavor for the United States and the United Kingdom, without letting those concerns obscure the national interest in toppling Saddam. But antiwar Democrats do not have the right to claim, as Dean often does, that opposing the war is a matter of fidelity to Democratic tradition, or that antiwar Democrats represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

Hey, they even blame the "aging baby boomers" for being annoying about a war that was never justified.

Some aging baby boomers may continue to view every military conflict as a reprise of the big war of their youth, and some politicians may opportunistically offer them a sort of battleground reenactment of the protests they fondly remember. But for the rest of us, the Vietnam War is long over, and it's time to reassert Democratic internationalism for a new era.

That brand of "Democratic Internationalism" I could easily do without.

This was our own party talking to us like that. It was degrading and it continued until the last year or so. They did not disappear, they only stopped the insults for a while.

The effects and influence are still there.