Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and the prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
–Vachel Lindsay

With the Democratic presidential campaign underway, it seems an appropriate time to examine the idea of what it has meant to be a Democrat over the last century, especially those Democratic presidents and presidential candidates who have helped to shape the modern party.

Perhaps the best place to start is with one of the most misunderstood figures in American history, William Jennings Bryan. Over the next few weeks, this ongoing series will explore Woodrow Wilson, Al Smith, FDR, Harry Truman, and others. The posts will not focus on the usual recitations of what they did, but instead on their beliefs: what did they define as the core values of the Democratic Party? Where possible I also will try to draw parallels with current issues such as Iraq and the role of government. What do these people who helped define what it means to be a Democrat–and for some a progressive–have to contribute to the current debate about where America and Democrats should be headed?

For most of the turn of the last century William Jennings Bryan dominated the Party, serving as its presidential nominee three times–more than anyone else other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is possible he might have even run a fourth time but in 1912 he threw his support to Woodrow Wilson, a move that was crucial in enabling Wilson to win the nomination and go on to capture the presidency. Bryan today seems book-ended by two events–the Cross of Gold Speech the first put him on the national stage and the Scopes Trial which was his exit–that many present-day Americans regard as the defining moments of an eccentric man with harebrained ideas.

Known to his contemporaries as “The Great Commoner,” Americans today might style him “The Great Crackpot.” This is not helped by the contemporary image of him that appears occasionally on cable television in the movie Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer’s dramatization of the Scopes trial. Frederick March’s over-the-top portrayal of Bryan (who in the movie is named Brady)–which was intended to deliberately contrast with Spencer Tracey’s laid-back Clarence Darrow (Drummond in the movie)–cemented an image of The Great Commoner in our cultural consciousness as an out-of-control zealot.

Yet Bryan did not earn three presidential nominations–and perhaps could have even had a fourth–because he was a crackpot. Actually, in many ways he was–and still is–ahead of his times. Long before most politicians recognized the power of the media, Bryan founded a publication he named The Commoner which was mailed to thousands of households throughout the country, households that remained loyal Bryan supporters for most of his life. In the opening issue of The Commoner Bryan wrote:

Webster defines a commoner as “one of the common people.” The name has been selected for this paper because THE COMMONER will endeavor to aid the common people in the protection of their rights, the advancement of their interests and the realization of their aspirations.

It is hard to remember what those times were like in these days when candidates born with silver spoons in their mouths like to pretend they cut brush on weekends at their Texas “ranches,” but back when Bryan wrote that paragraph a majority of people in power were not only skeptical of “the common people” a good many of them were afraid of them, seeing them as ignorant rubes who hadn’t the slightest concept of either politics or economics or as wide-eyed fanatics who would plunge this country into anarchy that would make the excesses of the French Revolution look tame. When a self-styled anarchist assassinated President McKinley it only reinforced their fears. Republicans then as now, also loved to evoke the specter of “class warfare” in a way reminiscent of segregationists warning of the perils of integration. One GOP editorial warned in a passage that sounds like Dick Cheney of:

specious demagogy which has evolved the professional politician, arrayed country against town the farmer and his sons and daughters against the business and professional men and their sons and daughters capital against labor, and built up against neighbors the impregnable barriers of prejudice and hate.

So the Republicans projected their fears and prejudices onto Bryan and he became caricatured as a rube and a zealot. Yet the list of causes and programs Bryan fought for would not make a bad platform for the Democratic Party today. What makes William Jennings Bryan one of the more remarkable figures in American history is that in his times many of his ideas were not only radical but thought by some to be “un-American.”

In The Commoner and as Senator from Nebraska, Bryan opposed our intervention in the Philippines as “imperialism,” advocated for a federal income tax and women’s suffrage before either of them became law, defended trade unions, demanded that candidates reveal the source of their campaign contributions, proposed labor have a cabinet position, championed the idea of insured bank deposits and a precursor to the federal reserve system, and spoke out for the popular election of Senators decades before the Seventeenth Amendment.

Even the Scopes Trial is still misinterpreted and misunderstood. While there is no doubt Bryan’s religious beliefs were a large part of his motivation in offering to prosecute Scopes, the famous “final speech” that he never lived to give, says little about religion. Instead it builds its case mainly on the principle that local school boards should have the power to decide what is taught in their schools, something few Americans today would oppose. Bryan’s much-discussed antipathy toward Darwinism actually grew out of his horror at how what Richard Hofstader would later term Social Darwinists were using “survival of the fittest” to justify oppressing anyone who didn’t live in a mansion.

In the autobiography she completed for her husband after his death, Bryan’s widow noted, he stood for “equal rights for all and special privileges for none.” In essence William Jennings Bryan fought for the importance of the level playing field even as the plutocrats of the 1890s were turning the country into what Mark Twain called “the Great Barbecue.” He took on the causes of the powerless, the poor, what he called the “common people” and fought for them against the money and influence of what were then called “trusts.” These were times when people like John D. Rockefeller proclaimed,

The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.

Indisputably the last great public orator who spoke without the aid of technology, Bryan essentially made his living giving speeches. A few remain on three old wax cylinders preserved by Cylinder and Digitization Project of the University of Santa Barbara. Those cylinders leave little doubt about Bryan’s rhetorical powers, for even on these primitive recordings his voice rings like a bell, clear and pure with every word so carefully and precisely enunciated that it is easy to understand how this man could speak to a thousand people gathered under a Chautauqua tent on a steamy summer afternoon as fans fluttered in the air and even those in the furthest seats could understand him as clearly as if he was standing right next to them.

The cylinders also destroy March’s parody in Inherit the Wind of a bombastic, flowery speaker given to outrageous metaphors to make his points. Instead in two political speeches on the cylinders, Bryan gives careful, reasoned arguments for his positions, citing historical examples and other evidence to bolster his point. Because the recording time of the cylinders was short, only a couple of minutes, Bryan has about the time of the average television interview question to make his points, which he does convincingly, leading you to believe this man regarded as a rhetorical dinosaur might fare quite well in today’s media environment.

This is the Bryan who literally struck fear into those who dared debate him, for they knew that his command of an issue allowed him to weave his voluminous knowledge into a tight argument from which few could escape. The “Cross of Gold” speech is remembered today for its famous conclusion, but in fact most of the speech is devoted to making an economic and social case for what at that time was called “free silver.”

It is hard to believe that this short, stocky man whose face reminds me of Elmer Fudd should have charisma, but Bryan had enough of it that he could give his surplus to Al Gore and John Kerry and still move a crowd like a bolt of lightning. Any public relations student would tell you that such a man who looked like a caricature from Hee-Haw could never be president today, but that is a sad comment on our times and not on Bryan.

He even favored Stetson hats, which some in the press lampooned, because back then Stetson hats had all the romance of seed company baseball caps. But the hat was part of the image Bryant cultivated as the Great Commoner, like Ben Franklin wearing a fur hat in Paris, in a day before handlers molded presdients with make-overs as if they were Paris Hilton.
In “On Democracy,” an early speech for which no recording exists, he outlined what he believed should be the principles of the Democratic Party:

But what are the principles for adherence to which we are so denounced? Look at the word democracy itself, “the rule of the people.” That is the fundamental idea of the party, and a government by the people is the form which we desire. Contrast this with the form proposed by Hamilton, that aristocrat who has been represented, during the last campaign, as the embodiment of sagacity, wisdom, and statesmanship. ..He feared and distrusted the people.

In the same speech Bryan went on to lay out some of the important elements of that principle, elements that remind me of some of the cornerstones outlined in The Strange Death of Liberal America.

We believe in the superiority of civil law to military rule.

We believe in the separation of church and state for the benefit of both. Read, by the light of the faggot and the torch, the history of the bloody years when Church and State joined forces and crushed opposition by the heel of power.

We believe in free schools, fostered and protected…Education is necessary to self-government. The schoolhouse is the dearest friend of a free people…God speed the day when education shall banish bigotry from every mind, when the man of learning will stoop to help the man less fortunate and confess himself superior only is his ability to do greater good.

Another Bryan speech, “The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism” was given before the 1900 Chicago Democratic Convention. Someone ought to mail a copy of it to those who now propose to send more troops into Iraq. We also might recall the war in the Philippines has some uncanny parallels with Iraq. Like Iraq, President McKinley (who is Karl Rove’s hero) believed American troops would be welcomed to the Philippines, but instead their arrival precipitated an insurrection that lasted from 1899-1913. It took 126,000 American troops to put down the rebellion.

Bryan thought the Philippine invasion was a bad idea and pressed for the inclusion of an anti-imperialist plank in the 1900 Democratic platform. In his speech advocating the plank, he said:

Someone has said that a truth once spoken can never be recalled. It goes on and on, and no one can set a limit to its ever widening influence. But if it were possible to obliterate every word written or spoken in defense of the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, a war of conquest would still leave its legacy of perpetual hatred, for it was God Himself who placed in every human heart the love of liberty. He never made a race of people so low in the scale of civilization or intelligence that it would welcome a foreign master. (my emphasis)

Bryan goes on to outline the main reasons for opposing making the Philippines an American colony in a passage that also has contemporary echoes:

I am not willing that this nation shall cast aside the omnipotent weapon of truth to seize again the weapons of physical warfare. I would not exchange the glory of this republic for the glory of all the empires that have risen and fallen since time began.

It is appropriate to recall William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic Party enters into a new era when it has the first chance in a long time to control both Congress and the White House. Bryan is seen today as a perennial loser, someone who might have been president had he only moderated his positions on issues such as free silver and the Philippines. For today’s candidates he is cited as the classic example of someone who should have moved to “the middle” rather than cling to a too-radical progressivism. To see him as someone to emulate or an important influence would probably precipitate a few snickers from many of today’s party officials.

Yet even though Bryan never became president, if one measures success even in simple score-keeping terms then Bryan was a success because almost everything he fought for became part of the American fabric. However, Bryan’s place in history and his importance to today’s Democratic Party lie not in keeping score–something he himself would abhor, for Bryan was not a man who kept score. Instead what mattered was that he remained consistently true to his principles no matter what the consequences.

This might suggest Frederick March was not far off the mark, but the real Bryan was not the bombastic blowhard of Inherit the Wind but a much more complex character. Bryan had his share of faults. He was a racist, his support of prohibition could sometimes seem bizarre, and there is no question about his religious beliefs could be as rigid as any contemporary fundamentalist. The cross-currents of his times blew through him as one of his Nebraska tornadoes. There was no triangulation, no waiting on the focus group data in the way Bryan lived. As Lindsay’s poem suggests, even today people are rarely neutral about Bryan.

Yet despite his faults it could be argued that William Jennings Bryan is the founder of the modern Democratic Party, for it was Bryan who reshaped the party at the turn of the 19th century into a party of the “common people,” with an emphasis on the level playing field. Until the Democrats lost their moral compass during the 1980s, Bryan’s principles served as the backbone of the Party. In his 1900 speech, Bryan said,

Lincoln said that the safety of this nation was not in its fleets, its armies, its forts, but in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere, and he warned his countrymen that they could not destroy this spirit without planting the seeds of despotism at their own doors.

As the Democrats seek to redefine themselves, those are principles we would do well to remember over the next year’s presidential campaign.

NOTE: Any post on Bryan would be remiss in not mentioning the recent biography by Michael Kazin. Click here to check out the book.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord, All Things Democrat,

Tagged with: Bryan • Clarence_Darrow • cross_of_gold_speech • Democratic_Party • Democrats • Dick_Cheney • Elmer_Fudd • Franklin_Delano_Roosevelt • hamilton • inherit_the_wind • Iraq • John_D_Rockefeller • Lincoln • philippines • philippine_invasion • progressivism • Scopes_Trial • separation_of_church_and_state • spencer_tracey • stanley_kramer • the_great_commoner • William_Jennings_Bryan • Wilson_administration • Woodrow_Wilson

It is one of the oldest buildings in Brooklyn, a weighty stone edifice built with the mid-19th century’s mix of optimistic excesses and get-ahead practicality. It echoes a time when construction followed the principle that the total tons of the stone used should produce a rough approximation of the status of what lay within. Like a medieval cathedral or castle this monument to America’s expanding economy was built to last far into a future that seemed boundless.

For over a century it didn’t take a very sophisticated scale to deduce that this particular building stood for prosperity in this borough of a city that legitimately could claim to being the world’s business center. Even as Brooklyn’s fortunes changed with the economy, this building seemed to project a certain Gibraltar-like immunity to conquest, for within it lay no rust belt dinosaur but the guts of one of the most profitable sectors of the American economy, one that seemed to possess a certain immunity to the normal economic ebb and flow because what it produced had always been needed and for much of the last half century had been consumed in such prodigious quantities that it gave Wall Street stock brokers wet dreams.

The original building was constructed in 1849 by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhar, entrepreneurial pioneers on the order of Goodyear, Westinghouse and Ford who like the others hitched their fortunes to a new product, in this case chemicals and drugs. Within 10 years the fledgling company was making more than a dozen chemicals and medicines. A firm that started out producing the equivalent of snake oil by the thousands became an internationally-respected corporation that created elixirs that literally saved lives by ending what formerly had been certain death sentences. During World War II, Pfizer played a major role in helping to win the war by gambling their resources to produce penicillin by deep tank fermentation, a process that enabled them to mass produce the drug and thereby make it widely available to Allied forces. Arguably, without this advance the course of the war might have gone differently. In 1950 Pfizer launched the broad spectrum antibiotic Terramycin which became the next “wonder drug.”

On January 23–a week ago–the unthinkable happened in Brooklyn and in Pfizer facilities across the United Sates as the company announced it would lay off 7,500 workers and turn the stone edifice into a museum. That the announcement�s timing placed it squarely in the middle of the ruckus of Iraq guaranteed it would receive little notice save by those directly affected and the troll-like figures who spend days hunched in front of computer screens manipulating billions as if they were playing video games. Years from now we may realize the Pfizer layoffs and plant closings symbolized something more important than whether Prime Minister Maliki would finally crack down on the Iraqi militias.

Currently, the financial sections of newspapers across the country can scarcely contain their giddiness as they herald that America faces an economic revival in which the average worker is doing about as well as any worker has in the history of the world. The New York Times reports that in 2006 the average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers “was a bigger annual raise than any that workers received from the late 1970s to the mid-90s.”

The GOP likes to take credit for this by claiming this prosperity grew from the Bush tax cuts which spurred investment and expansion. Yet the Pfizer layoffs reveal much of this overly-enthusiastic optimism has the feel of smoke and mirrors, something the average worker intuitively knows as she or he drives to their job each day wondering if what happened at Pfizer will happen to them. In fact all of us should be asking, if what has been the most profitable area of the American economy is not immune to layoffs is anyone safe anymore?

A good deal of the significance of those layoffs lies in Pfizer’s recent history, for the company became exhibit “A” in the growing discontent with excessive executive compensation. What especially drew the ire of even staid publications like Forbes was the compensation paid to recently-fired Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell which included a phenomenal 72% raise in 2004 over his $9.7 million 2003 salary. At Pfizer�s annual meeting last year, union protesters chanted, “Give it back Hank.”

This was among the events that precipitated a large public outcry over executive compensation which resulted in several states passing laws to require companies to disclose executive pay. In January 2006, SEC commissioners voted unanimously to overhaul the way companies report CEO salaries and bonuses. McKinnell”s windfall came even though Pfizer�s stock performance caused The Street.com. to headline a story on the company, “Few Fans for Pfizer,” after its 2004 performance failed to meet expectations and its stock fell near a 52-week low.

McKinnell’s outrageous raise prompted a rare agreement between both the AFL-CIO and Warren Buffet. Buffet has identified the ability of corporations to rein in skyrocketing CEO pay as the “acid test” of corporate reform. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka agreed:

Outrageous CEO pay and pensions hurt working families, whose life savings and retirements are invested in companies like Pfizer. At a time when working Americans are losing their pensions left and right, working people are shocked by the size of these CEOs’ unjustified golden retirements.

The Center for Corporate Policy has pointed out �between 1970 and 2001, median pay among the top 100 executives rose from 35 times that of the average worker to more than 500 times as much.� They might have cited William Jennings Bryan’s remark, “No one can earn a million dollars honestly.”

Yet McKinnell continued at Pfizer until finally in July of last year he was sacked, falling from the height of power with the aid a golden parachute worth $200 million even though Pfizer’s stock dropped 40% during his five-year reign, a reign he opened by proclaiming to Business Week he would raise Pfizer’s earnings by 15% a year. This is the same McKinnell whose business acumen earned him a position as chair of the Business Roundtable that worked with President George W. Bush on issues such as the infamous tax cuts and privatizing Social Security.

What the workers received instead was pink slips, pink slips that were the direct result of McKinnell’s mismanagement. Divided among the 7,900 laid off workers McKinnell’s golden parachute would be worth an additional $25,000 per worker. His pay raise would add another $900 to their “severance packages.”

But McKinnell isn’t the only one at Pfizer making big bucks at the expense of regular workers. A revealing table in Pfizer’s proxy and information packet for its 2006 annual meeting had a revealing table on page 57 that showed the top four officers under McKinnell earning from $1-3 million if stock incentives are included. Their salaries range from $677,000 with a bonus of $596,000 to more than a million with a bonus on $1.4 million. The total in the bonus column for these four alone over the past three years is an astounding $12,204,000!

Now instead imagine those egotistical expenditures invested in something useful, something that would increase the company’s earnings. A new CEO would have somewhere near a quarter of a billion dollars to use to pull Pfizer out of the tail spin that has it laying off workers. Clearly the concept of investing that amount of money in executive salaries has done nothing for Pfizer but lower its stock values.

The idea that corporate executives should receive such ridiculous salaries at the same time they are laying off workers because of bad decisions made by these very same executives helps explain why the playing field in America has become so tilted. It also explains why this country’s business performance is becoming a national crisis. The chief symbol of this is that Toyota is now poised to become the world’s largest auto manufacturer.

Republicans and the business community in particular like to continually talk about “accountability” in the public sector. “Schools need to be accountable for their performance,” say the CEOs and GOP fat cats. “Government aid programs for health care, child care, job training need to be accountable,” they preach in media interviews and political speeches. And then there is the grandfather of them all dating back at least to the McKinley years, “Government needs to be run more like a business.” Well if government had been run by the likes of the folks who ran Pfizer into the ground, God help us all! If one can’t even make money running a drug company how do they propose to take care of more intractable problems like student performance?

The question everyone should be asking is not merely the obvious one of “are these people worth it,” but the more serious one of whether in fact are the high executive salaries paid by American corporations counterproductive? If one accepts the GOP mantra that competition, hard work and a bit of hardship produce results then the idea of high executive salaries runs totally counter to that. Why should I work hard or even care what the results are if I know that no matter what I do I can walk away with $200 million in severance pay, a sum so astounding that those of us who labor this time of year over finding even a few hundred more in deductions on our 1040s simply cannot comprehend it or how one could possibly spend it?

But just for the heck of it let’s try to spend it: new car, not just a Chevy or a Toyota, not even a Lexus, let’s go all out and buy a $175,000 Lamborghini Gallardo; new house, how about one of those estates they advertise in the back pages of the New York Times Magazine for, say ten million; clothes, how about $5,000 a month; and then there are the toys, yachts, expensive home entertainment systems, etc. that might get you up to $30-50 million. There’s more: all those tax deductions for rich folks would lower that total, like the Lamborghini “company car” and the estate needed for “entertaining clients.”

Even more pointedly, do these executives really need all those millions? Does the Lamborghini allow them to make better decisions? Or the estate? Is there a single neuron in any of them or even a byte or bit that solves problems like Pfizer’s poor performance?

As if we don’t need another negative aspect in the Pfizer case, we now come to the outrageous prices Americans are paying for drugs manufactured by the likes of Pfizer. The next time Congress conducts a hearing on the high cost of drugs you might ask your Senator or Representative to grill one of those drug company executives about his or her salary. Meanwhile, every time you go to the pharmacy to fill your prescription, think about Mr. McKinnell’s $200 million golden parachute or the bonuses paid to him and those directly under him and when you hand the cashier your payment think of it as not merely making a payment to your HMO but as a payment to Mr. McKinnell.

I call it High Way robbery because the High (and mighty) rob the rest of us in a Way that is inexcusable. However, instead of occupying a cell somewhere, McKinnell is probably relaxing on his yacht in the Caribbean with a drink in his hand smiling about what he managed to pull off, like a bank robber who has masterminded the heist of the century.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord

Tagged with: AFL-CIO • Brooklyn • business_roundtable • executive_salaries • forbes • Ford • George_W_Bush • goodyear • henry_mckinnell • highway_ribbery • Maliki • penicillin • Pfizer • pfizer_layoffs • pink_slips • SEC • wall_street • Warren_Buffett

The talk for the last two weeks in the mainstream media has focused on the need for the Republicans and Democrats to “work with each other,” to “compromise.” Like much that passes for wisdom on the front pages and nightly newscasts this one could have been spoken by a third grader. Of course, people need to work together and yes, nothing gets done if there isn’t a little compromise. The devil, however, is in the details. For example, maybe I’m not too bright but would someone please tell me what the “compromise” is on an Iraqi troop build-up? Ten thousand instead of twenty? Or what about the minimum wage. The GOP wants to add exceptions for small business people. Adding those exceptions would destroy the idea of a minimum wage.

Last month I happened to catch the end of Talk of the Nation’s discussion of the future of the Democratic Party. Like many in the oped pages and on blogs, the main theme of the discussion seemed to be that the American people hungered for moderates. No one defined exactly how one recognizes one of these moderates, maybe because they couldn’t.

As near as I can tell, as we say here in backwoods country, what the mainstream media labels as a moderate Democrat is someone who should be performing in a circus if not on “Stupid Pet Tricks” or one of those home video reality shows. A moderate, the guest “experts” implied was someone who miraculously “balanced” the agendas of various Democratic Party interest groups. One example given was of newly-elected Pennsylvania Senator Casey, who is pro-life, pro gun control, and against stem cell research but opposes a gay marriage amendment and drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and agrees we a need of change of course in Iraq. So three issues balance three other, completely different issues, making Casey a “moderate.” The venerable New York Times noted this, “But the party made many of its gains in both the House and the Senate by recruiting candidates with conservative views on abortion and gun rights, most notably Bob Casey Jr., the senator-elect in Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, representative-elect from North Carolina.”

The trick to being as moderate seems to be how many plates can you keep spinning before they all come crashing down on your head. Or maybe it’s like the old shell game where you had to guess under which nut shell lay the pea. A skillful slight of hand artist could keep you guessing until you had been fleeced of all your money. Or maybe it’s a high wire act, where you walk across this thin chord with one of those long balance poles that has written across it in bold letters “moderation.” A Pennsylvania newspaper tried to describe this amazing feat,

“The genuine-held fears of the ultra-right and ultra-left that the opposite realm of the spectrum will ruin the nation will not stand a chance of coming to be. Mrs. Pelosi will move to the middle.”

Whatever it is, moderation seems to be the pundits’ definition of where the Democratic Party should go and is going. So now politics has become like one of those scales that used to sit on the bars of gold mining towns, where somewhere someone weighs how much the “ultra-left” weighed and how much the “ultra right” and if they balance we have moderation. Never mind that just as in those gold mining towns, there may be a finger on the scale. It does not matter what issues are being balanced. For example, Senator-elect Casey has said he is against Roe v. Wade so if President Bush appoints a pro life justice to the Supreme Court it is assumed Casey will give him the thumbs up. But if at the same time he gives the thumbs down to Bush’s prescription drug program or No Child Left Behind, he must be a moderate.

There is, of course, another way to define moderate, that is someone who alters their positions on issues so they fit in between two alternatives. But how do you do that with something like a woman’s right to choose? Do you say a woman can choose on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but not on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday?

In The Strange Death of Liberal America I wrote about those Democrats who tried to triangulate a “middle ground” as being like a drunk trying to pass a sobriety test as he wobbles down the middle of the road. My Texas compadre, Jim Hightower has put it a little more colorfully in his book There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

The craziness of all this is that somehow venerable political tactics such as compromise and collaboration have become mixed up with moderation. Yet we all know compromise and collaboration are not the same as balancing Roe v. Wade and prescription drugs.

The current debate going on about how far to take Congressional ethics rules is an example. Here the Democrats, unlike the Republicans who did everything behind closed doors, are having genuinely open and meaningful debate that many of us hope will define the style of the Party as it assumes power. I have not seen or heard the word moderate or left or right used in any of the accounts of this important discussion.

You cannot build a party or a nation by trying to find the middle of the road or you end up like one of Hightower’s armadillos. Here is where values come in. You see, values cannot be moderated. In a previous post I quoted FDR, “When there is no vision, the people perish.” Maureen Dowd, Gore Vidal and others have made much mileage out of the fact that you cannot have a “war” on terrorism, because terrorism is a tactic not an enemy. In much the same vein I would argue that you cannot have a party based on “moderation” because moderation is a tactic not a value.

Tagged with: alaska_national_wildlife_refuge • Bob_Casey • Bush_tax_cuts • conservative_views • Democratic_Party • Democrats • FDR • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • gay_marriage_amendment • Gore_Vidal • heath_shuler • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • Iowa_caucuses • Jim_Hightower • Maureen_Dowd • moderate_Democrat • Nancy_Pelosi • New_York_Times • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • NPR • Pennsylvania_senator • shell_game • stupid_pet_tricks • talk_of_the_nation • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • values • views_on_abortion

They say he could hear voices and because of that some feared him, others thought he had come unhinged, while the rest ignored him, turning away, avoiding looking into his eyes the way people shun looking at someone who talks to himself loudly about things that don�t make any sense.

What made it worse in many eyes was that not only did this man admit hearing those voices but also that he went even further by insisting that others also better listen. AND he warned that if they refused to listen they might lose everything they had.

Yet some found the idea of a man, especially a politician, hearing voices intriguing. Perhaps this curiosity came from knowing that composers, writers, painters, visionaries and prophets hear voices all the time. The Greeks knew this and gave the voices a name�Muses, from which we derive a double-edged word that could signify day-dreaming or profound thoughts.

That the man who heard these voices should become head of the Democratic National Committee says something about our times and the state of the Democratic Party. For the Republicans this choice represented for once and for all their belief that their political rivals had truly lost their minds. But they didn’t get it because they prefer not to hear those voices the same way they prefer not to believe Joseph McCarthy almost destroyed our democracy or that there weren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

That man is Howard Dean and because he heard those voices and had the courage to not only admit it but to insist those voices told the truth, the Democratic Party, which still lies in intensive care, received a much-needed transfusion. Some would argue that transfusion may have saved the party. No one can deny today that it was sorely needed.

One voice especially went beyond the bounds of rationality for many Democrats because it bordered on acknowledging the existence of ghosts or spirits. That voice came from the ether and in it lay thousands, even millions of other voices, all of them frustrated that no one would listen to them anymore. Those voices found the ether or the ether found them because traditional methods of communication had become clogged up–dare I say constipated. Howard Dean insisted those voices had power, saying, “We are the great grassroots campaign of the modern era, built from mouse pads, shoe leather and hope.” To prove his point he raised huge sums of money from the ether. It was as if coins rained down from the sky.

The second voice insisted that out there lay those who felt alone, disenfranchised, powerless and frustrated. Dean revived an old idea to give those voices power. He called them Meet-Ups, although they just as easily could have been called coffees or potlucks. Suddenly people could look across a room and realize they were not alone; that there existed others who felt as they did and cared just as passionately about the same ideas. With each connection the wattage of this movement increased until it burned too brightly to be ignored.

But there was also a third voice, one not so easily acknowledged for those who had forgotten what it sounded like. Unabashedly echoing Paul Wellstone, Howard Dean set out to show not what was, but what could be. Like some crazed, pith-helmeted explorer staggering through the impenetrable jungle that is the modern political campaign, Howard Dean hacked this way and that as he pressed forward with his singular mission to rediscover it.

“It” in Dean�s mind was the Eldorado of the Democratic Party and Liberal America: that fabled place where somehow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal and its belief that government existed to keep the playing field level still lived on. For half a century most Democratic contenders had thought such a quest impossible or even mad. The fabulous world of FDR and the New Deal had receded past memory, its true location so lost and out of reach that its path had been grown over by the twisted vines of equivocation and submerged under the weeds that choked the Era of Bad Feelings.

The map, if it ever existed–for in the minds of most it had seemed to be only a legend or a crude forgery–had not merely become lost, it had become irrelevant. That was the message Bill Clinton and Al Gore had hammered home again and again with their sermons about the New Democrats. That was the point of all those lush weekends in Edenic settings, where the truly enlightened sat in plush chairs drinking herbal tea and listening to one another expound on the Powerpoint charts, tables and statistics affirming the existence of their self-styled renaissance.

In Iowa in 2004, Dean may not have made it to Eldorado, but like some other explorers he may have stumbled across something of great value, something that if people would only recognize it could change the face of the world. Like those explorers who helped to end what my grade school history books called the Dark Ages, Dean showed there was a new world out there wide open with possibility.

The “barbaric yawp– a phrase Walt Whitman used to describe the democratic message of Leaves of Grass– that caused Dean so much trouble in Iowa in fact can now be seen as an expression of all those voices and that possibility much as Whitman called for America to speak in its authentic voice. In Dean’s yawp lies the voices of small town cafes with neon signs missing a letter or two, the voices of inner city neighborhoods where the sounds of kids bouncing basketballs can just barely be heard over the rhythms of the boombox they have sitting on the ground nearby, the voices of factory workers who now punch buttons instead of swinging sledgehammers but do so with the same subtle touch that makes what they do still a craft.

Although no one still recognizes it, Dean was asking a very relevant question: What if the whole Hollywood production that has been titled “America�s Right Turn,” is nothing more than a phantom, a marketing creation, a fad, right up there with Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch dolls? What if the strategy of the Democratic Party was merely like one of those bad Hollywood sequels, Rocky VIII, Crocodile Dundee Does Kansas City, Superman Redux? What if there was an error on the part of all the pundits who have made American politics a cacophonous squawk like a huge flock of crows descending on a particularly foul and rotting corpse?

Dean officially announced his presidential candidacy in June 2003, fully a year ahead of the convention and half a year before the first primaries. In his announcement he threw down a gauntlet to his own party saying, “Most importantly, I have wanted my party to stand up for what we believe in again.” What Howard Dean was trying to tell us was that the rise of the Republican Counterrevolution could be a much more complex and sinister phenomenon that the mere fact that one bright morning in America people had suddenly awakened and decided to become Republicans.

Howard Dean showed that Liberal America still had a pulse, and a pretty strong one at that. All the prescriptions and therapies being advocated by the self-designated care givers such as “slowing down” and “relaxing,” “toning down” the advocacy may in fact be doing the patient more harm than good. Four and one-half years later he is still trying to convey the same message and four years later, the Democratic Party now acknowledges the voices, but hears them only faintly.

As head of the Democratic National Committee, Dean has most notably been associated with the 50-state strategy–a process which in some cases has had him literally building local parties from the ground up. The 50-state strategy has also put him squarely at odds with party leaders like Rahm Emanuel who believe the Party should concentrate its efforts.

If Clintonism and triangulation left the party bereft of a vision, the notion of focusing on key states has slowly eroded its national base. Any systems thinker worthy of the name could see the ultimate result of the Emanuel strategy would be a one-state party.

Yet Dean has still not been able to gain traction on the most contentious issue of all–what do the Democrats stand for? As the Party gets ready to meet early next month it still remains a cobbled together federation of interest groups. What Dean needs to do now is to begin facilitating a dialogue in the Party about what are its core values. The values of Liberal America certainly make an excellent starting point for that discussion.

There is an instructive historical lesson in this. The core value of Liberal America weaves through the fabric of the American experience, holding it together. No single party can lay claim to those values over the entire history of this nation. With that in mind, there exists the very real possibility that it is the Democrats that may become extinct.

Howard Dean and others are determined not to see this happen. Now they need to speak louder and more forcefully in defense of those values.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,

Tagged with: 2004_presidential_election • Abramoff • Al_Gore • Bill_Clinton • bloggers • Clintonism • community_organizing • counterrevolution • Dean • Democratic_National_Committee • Democratic_Party • Democrats • Enron • era_of_bad_feelings • FDR • GOP • grass_roots • Hollywood • Howard_Dean • Iowa • Latino_voters • liberal_america • New_Deal • political_organizing • presidential_campaign • Saddam_Hussein • the_ether • United_States_Supreme_Court • Walt_Whitman • Wellstone • wmds_in_Iraq

Can you guess what ended last week? You won�t find the answer in the New York Times, even though they say they have “all the news that�s fit to print.” You won’t find it in USA Today, or on any of the major networks or even on public radio or television. It is an event that ended with a whimper after it began with such a bang. I don’t even remember a big celebration.

Getting a better idea now? That event was the much-touted Democrats’ 100 hour initiative. It ended last week with all six of the major items being introduced into legislation. Now before I tell you what happened to those items I defy you to name the six. If you get two, you are better informed than the average American, three makes you a news junkie, four makes you a die-hard Democrat, five or better makes you a Washington reporter or a member of Nancy Pelosi’s staff.

As outlined in the San Diego Union Tribune, the six are:

Slap a “conservation fee” on oil and gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; eliminate oil industry tax breaks, and recoup royalties lost of an Interior Department “error.” Passed Thursday.

Lower interest rates on federally subsidized student loans from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent in stages over five years at a cost to taxpayers of $6 billion. Passed Wednesday.

Make the government bargain directly with drug companies with the aim of reducing prices of prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries. Passed Jan. 12.

Expand government-financed embryonic stem cell research. Passed Jan. 11.

Raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over 26 months. Passed Jan. 10.

Bolster terrorism-fighting efforts with more cargo inspections. Passed Jan. 9.

It is hard to be too critical of Pelosi’s 100 Hours. Immediately after the election, the Democratic Party needed something both to energize its base and also to differentiate itself from the Republican Counterrevolution that had dominated the American government for too long. The issues picked needed to be ones that could be agreed on without too much haggling among all the Democrat�s constituent groups. When you see the six, they may seem obvious now, but they were anything but obvious a year ago. So Pelosi deserves some credit in putting together a platform that satisfied most groups.

The programs also will serve to provoke President Bush and the Republicans. Stem cell research is a no-brainer, the kind of wedge issue the Democrats have searched for some time since it splits the religious right from the corporate partners of the Counterrevolutionary Coalition. The same thing might be said for port inspections, which will pit the War on Terror zealots against big business.

But, now, as they say, the heavy lifting starts. The six issues face a battle in the Senate where committees, debates, and GOP opposition will all strive to shape them in their own fashion. Second, and more important, is the thus far unspoken issue�the elephant in the room, the very same elephant that has been in the Democratic caucus room for so long that the place reeks of his smell�how is all this going to be paid for?

That the Democrats in the Senate have thus far been relatively silent about the 100 Hours legislation says volumes. They know they are the ones who are now stuck with getting Pelosi’s six initiatives through the minefield that is today’s Senate, knowing a misstep along the way could blow everything up and also knowing that in the end the final judgment about the 100 hours will not be was the legislation proposed, but did it become law?

For a generation now, Democrats have insisted on adding programs that have caused the GOP to evoke its shopworn phrase “tax and spend,” as it paints the Democratic Party as a party that would expand government give-aways while taking money from the average tax payer. Take a couple of provisions of the 100 Hours legislation. The lowering of student loan rates–which the Democrats even cut back on themselves–will have an impact on budget because those funds must come from somewhere. Ditto for cargo inspections.

Here we find ourselves squarely on the horns of the dilemma that has plagued the Democratic Party for almost half a century. It is also why the 100 Hours may end up backfiring. For almost 50 years, the Democratic Party has advocated adding this program and that program, so that you could call it the laundry list party. Name the issue: health care, the environment, the minimum wage. Each has come with a price tag attached and the GOP has delighted in telling the American tax payer exactly what the cost would be for each household in this country.

On the other side, the GOP Counterrevolution has sought to take us back almost a century when government no longer was responsible for public programs. Programs came from the private sector and were market-driven. Let everybody keep their money and invest it as they see fit and everything will come out OK, preach the Republicans, sounding a bit like Karl Rove’s hero William McKinley.

This Fall’s elections suggested the American people are growing tired of these shopworn alternatives. The reign of the Counterrevolution has seen the average citizen fall further behind, so that the upcoming generation may be the first in quite some time to face a situation in which their expectations and their income will be less than their parents�. They also have clearly had it with laundry lists of untried programs that seem to come with high price tags and little evidence that suggests they will succeed.

Programs and markets have only served to create a hunger for values, the theme that runs through both the Republican victory in 2004 and the Democratic turnaround of 2006. What Pelosi and the Democrats failed to do was to articulate a theme that united the 100 Hours, some nice soundbite that explained why these programs in particular had been chosen. In short, what values do these programs represent that signals a change from the GOP-run Congress?

There is an old rule in advertising: make sure the consumer knows the product. The 100 Hours have about them the feel of some of those “new style” commercials that feature montages coming at you, each lasting a millisecond, so by the end of the commercial you wonder what was being sold. Without a unifying theme, without articulating the common values of the new Democratic majority, the 100 Hours may soon be forgotten. So, too, may be those who originated them.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,

Tagged with: 100_hours • Bush_administration • cargo_inspections • Democratic_Party • Democrats • GOP • Karl_Rove • minimum_wage • oil_profits • Pelosi • prescription_drugs • religious_right • Republican_Party • sound_bite • stem_cell_research • student_loans • taxes • values • William_Mckinley

It has been a strange winter in Iowa this year, so warm that the ground has not frozen yet in the central part of the state and precipitation has usually come as rain and not snow. Until a cold spell this week, it is as if November had blended into March leaving the winter months off the calendar. Then right in the middle of this mild winter a good old-fashioned snow storm roared out of the Northwest dropping nine inches on parts of Iowa and Minnesota as it sent the temperature plunging to six below in the small town where my son goes to college.

This made the trip home from this weekend’s college basketball games interesting as SUV drivers who seem to think four wheel drive means they can stop on a dime even on glare ice tried to bully their way through the mess which only made everyone else’s drives all the more harrowing. The sight of several of these behemoths in the ditch brought a perverse pleasure, especially after one of them that was going way over the normal speed limit spun out in front of us, somehow fish-tailed completely around one side of our car and left my wife and I shaking more than our heads. But the real prize for stupid driving went to semi jockeys determined to meet their deadlines. Instead one almost met his maker as he slid into the median sideways, finally ending up going the wrong way on the other side of the interstate. How he didn’t seriously injure himself and a few others is one of those inexplicable events that has you ready to believe some higher power even takes an active interest in what happens on an isolated section of I-35.

The fickle nature of the weather serves as an apt metaphor for the upcoming Iowa caucuses, which a little more than a year from now could well choose our next president. The weekend drive seems symbolic even down to the SUV bullies since members of the press seem to prefer SUVs and tend to drive them in a most un-Iowa-like fashion as they ride from one press event to the next like the hired guns they are. Whole posses of them can suddenly swoop into a little town with one tiny cafe suddenly demanding food like modern versions of Jesse James and his gang. Or they descend on some poor farmer who is just trying to get his work done to poke cameras and microphones in his face in a modern hold-up that commands that the victim empty his soul to enrich the media conglomerates that just hijacked his local radio station.

As we all remember, in the last presidential contest after Iowa it was all but over. Coming into Iowa, Howard Dean had shaken the party establishment in ways it has needed to be shaken. First, he reminded the party of the importance of grassroots organizing-of actually connecting with real voters through his famous meet-ups and other organizing techniques. Second, he brought the Democratic Party at least into the 20th century by showing how the Internet could be used to mobilize voters and raise funds. Bloggers were a key part of this effort. Finally, as Dean himself said, borrowing from Paul Wellstone, he wanted to represent “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” In saying this he reestablished the importance of the importance of values over Clinton’s triangulation.

Going into the Iowa caucuses Dean was the assumed front runner with John Edwards not too far behind, so it was quite a surprise when John Kerry eked out a narrow victory in which he did not even carry a majority of those who participated in the caucuses. That precipitated Dean’s infamous outcry, which reminded me of Paul Wellstone’s memorial service in the way that opponents seized on it with wild exaggeration and the way the media bit on this like fish who had not been fed for a week. But the Dean candidacy threw a scare into the mainline Democrats who had been ruining the party.

This coming year, Iowans are definitely “up” for the coming caucuses. An activist couple I have known since college said this is the most excited they have been about the caucuses in a long time. Part of their excitement comes from an emerging optimism that not only may the Era of Bad Feelings be ending but also that the Democrats have a very real chance of capturing the White House and once again assuming control of a government that has drifted far from the Liberal American ideal of a level playing field. The progressive base that both Dean and Edwards built also has not faded away over the last four years, but quite the contrary seems emboldened by the chance of bringing the Democratic Party back to the values of Liberal America.

The outside press sees former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as a spoiler in the caucuses and there is no doubt he has a capable organization in place. But most Iowans I talked with see Vilsack’s run as quixotic at best. The word is that he will drop out before the caucuses to avoid an embarrassing performance.

When I asked Iowans who they thought was the front runner, few who were not already working for a candidate felt comfortable making a prediction. Edwards will be strong again because he has made Iowa a priority. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also have strong support. John Kerry seems to have less support than Al Gore, who has made a comeback with his movie about global warming and some of his recent policy speeches.

The most interesting aspect for me about the Iowa predictions is that unlike previous years there does not seem to be a great deal of bad feeling about any candidate. Contrary to the anti-Hillary drumbeats from the mainstream media and a few blogs, Iowans do not seem to harbor an intense dislike for her, although that could change.

Perhaps had I time to talk to more Iowans or visited other parts of the state, I might have formed different impressions, but right now my best guess suggests that Iowans are looking for something different from both parties. For the Democrats it is hard for anyone to predict where the Iraq War will be a year from now, but if this administration which seems to have moved from stubborn and stupid to insane continues to “stay the course” and the funerals increase in those century-old stone churches that form the center of many an Iowa town, a candidate like John Edwards, who boldly staked out his moral objections to the proposed troop increases on Martin Luther King Day, could run away from the Clintons and Obamas who seem bent on issuing statements about the war that read like medieval theological arguments over the splitting of hairs.

However, objections to the Iraq War represent merely part of a larger mood one can feel in the Iowa air as surely as you could feel the wind shift and the mercury drop when that storm blew in. For a generation now people have watched congress after congress and president after president stumble over issues that increasingly have made their lives more and more of a crap shoot. In a state that depends on farming-which has always been a crap shoot-the dissatisfaction bubbles just beneath the surface, for these folks tend to not get riled up too visibly, but when they do they can get very feisty as they did during the Great Depression when radical movements swept across the state in gusts.

The Democrats’ answer for two decades or more has been to serve people like those in Iowa a smorgasbord of programs that resemble a wild game potluck supper I once attended in an Iowa church at the intersection of two gravel roads. You could sample deer, rabbit, pheasant, quail-but for the adventurous you could also munch on possum, ground hog, beaver, muskrat and any other critter you could plink, skin and throw in a stew pot. This potluck approach in which each interest group brings something to the table-don’t forget the jello salad– has usually defined the Party in lieu of any unified message. The Iowans I spoke to this weekend could no more define a Democrat than they could four years ago when the Kerry Plan for America was thicker than the phone books in most Iowa towns.

What has changed is that the coming caucuses won’t be defined by a hatred of George Bush as they were in 2004 and in the voting booths this past Fall. A year from now any Republican who passes herself or himself off as wanting to continue the Bush legacy will be lucky to get out of town in one piece. Even the right wing that has been active in the GOP feels their “issues” have been ignored or shunted to the side by the war.

So Iowans showing up at Democratic Party caucuses will first want to know whose record has been strongest in opposing Bush absurdities such as No Child Left Behind, suspending civil liberties and cutting off funds for stem cell research. But that will not be enough. Iowans, like other Americans, hunger for the vision thing like starved souls. They’ve had enough of bad-tasting potluck menus. They don’t want any more Kerry-Edwards phone books or high-falutin’ rhetoric from former members of Skull and Bones (Bush and Kerry both held that “honor”).

Their schools are in trouble, their health care coverage is one step from the poor house, and their own incomes have remained as flat as certain stretches of Iowa farmland. Although these folks who have their feet on the ground can’t quite articulate it, they know the playing field has been tilting underneath them. They can see the tilt just by looking backwards to a time when their parents could make it on the farm and by looking ahead to the day when they, too, may have to get out like their neighbors and leave behind another skeletal house standing with vacant-eyed windows and bonelike two-by-fours to which a few boards still cling to remind passers-by that here once was life.

A few old timers remember the real Democratic Party, the one that bailed them out of the Great Depression while the GOP stood by and invoked the same voodoo market talk they do today. The generation that followed remembers the movements for equal rights when the Democratic Party again said that the playing field should be the same for all. But another generation has passed for whom these memories seem merely the musing of old folks, perhaps distorted by age’s nostalgia for the “good old days” and maybe not even true, for those less than 50 have not seen or heard many Democrats speak about equity.

Some of the younger folks turned to Nader and the Greens who at least could blame it all on the corporations, but more of them turned away from voting at all, becoming success stories for this Era of Bad Feelings when a Republican Counterrevolution sought to drive Americans away from politics and government service or into the barroom-like haunts of the Limbaughs and the O’Reillys whose rants fed the frustration and anger.

But those rants have worn as thin in Iowa as they have elsewhere. Now people anxiously wait for the candidate who can articulate a vision of a 21st century America with a level playing field. People want the problems solved and are tired of letting health insurers, oil tycoons, and corporate plutocrats with inflated salaries and deflated morals get their way. The people want their government back and they want the American Dream to cease being a nightmare. Like the shifting weather it is still too early to tell whether anyone will plant those seeds in fertile Iowa soil.
Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,

Tagged with: Abramoff • Al_Gore • Barack_Obama • bloggers • Bush • Bush_administration • college_basketball • community_organizing • counterrevolution • Dean • Democratic_Party • Democrats • era_of_bad_feelings • George_W_Bush • GOP • grass_roots • Great_Depression • Hillary_Clinton • Howard_Dean • Iowa • John_Edwards • John_Kerry • Latino_voters • level_playing_field • liberal_america • mainstream_media • New_Deal • next_presidential_election • Paul_Wellstone • Saddam_Hussein • tax_cuts • United_States_Supreme_Court

Today, Martin Luther King Day, takes us back to a muggy afternoon, one of those Washington summer days that in earlier generations chased Presidents and Congressmen alike out of the city and off to somewhere cool. Fans flutter constantly, so that in the immense crowd they resemble insects flirting among heads that roll with the cadences of the speaker, whose words drift out like a wind, now in gentle breezes and then in gusts, building up to something all can sense is truly special. They are packed so closely together, that it seems as if they are holding one another up, that there is no ground beneath their feet, causing them to resemble a watery extension of the reflecting pool nearby.

A famous photograph of the moment shows Dr. King, his eyes locked on somewhere only he could see with such clarity, while around him stand faces rapt with attention. One is the face of a white, uniformed park policeman, his Smokey Bear hat sitting with military precision atop his head. He dominates the frame to one side, appearing taller than anyone else, but he also dominates it in a different way, for in his eyes one can see a look that sums up all that speech has come to mean: truth, hope, wonder. It is a look I remember seeing on someone who was totally lost in the religious rapture that comes with the presence of something transcendental.

We are almost forty years removed from that moment and yet it still holds the same power on us as it does on the face of that young policeman. What Dr. King evoked on that day was the dream of Liberal America–the dream that the single most important value of what has been called t