On a hot August day in Denver, just a few hours before a vote at
the Pepsi Center made Sen. Barack Obama the Democratic Party’s
nominee for president, liberal activists gathered less than two
miles away at the Central Presbyterian Church for a forum on
economic justice and ending poverty.
A man strummed on an acoustic guitar inside the sanctuary, which
was temporarily decorated with antiwar and pro-impeachment
banners, all helping to make the facility live up to its name:
Progressive Central.
“I think we can be on the edge of an era in this country of bold,
dramatic change equal to the Great Society and the New Deal,”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) declared during the session that
followed, as the scraggly bearded actor and activist Sean Penn
listened from one of the pews toward the back. “We’re going to
need people with the mindset to do big things. Ending poverty is
not a tiny matter—it’s a big thing. Universal health care is a
big thing. Making sure we eliminate hunger in this country is a
big thing. These are big, big, things. They require big
solutions. Not little baby steps, but big, bold, dramatic
change.”
While prominent Democrats took to the airwaves to explain to the
American people why they needed to elect Obama president, members
of the party’s progressive wing were gathering throughout the
Mile High City and discussing how to make sure that once elected,
Obama governs as a liberal.
With the Republican brand name badly damaged and Democrats
expected to make further gains in Congress, progressives see this
as a moment then the country is turning against conservatism,
giving them a rare opportunity to make the case for a radical set
of changes that would uproot the U.S. economic system and place
government at the center of people’s lives.
Over the course of the 20th century, there have been a number of
Democratic presidents, but they have met with varying degrees of
success when it came to actually advancing liberalism. While
Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson greatly
expanded the role of government in the economy, with a permanent
legacy that includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,
Jimmy Carter proved too inept to enact such major changes. Bill
Clinton, despite his political success, ultimately put his
short-term political goals ahead of any liberal agenda, and
eventually universal health care gave way to welfare reform.
As the progressive Democrats of America gathered in the church
for a five-day shadow convention, the popular blog DailyKos and
several other liberal groups hosted progressive speakers in
another venue blocks away from the convention, dubbed the Big
Tent.
In a panel organized by Campaign for America’s Future, Robert
Kuttner, co-founder of the American Prospect, spoke about his new
book: Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power
of a Transformative Presidency.
“It is increasingly clear to me that there are moments in
American history where the crisis is so severe, that only radical
change can achieve moderate ends…” Kuttner told the crowd
assembled within the tent. “This is one of those moments.”
According to Kuttner’s account of history, the three
transformational presidents—Abraham Lincoln, LBJ, and FDR—did not
start out intending to make bold changes, but “became more
radicalized in office” because of the existence of powerful
“social movements.”
In Lincoln’s case, Kuttner argued, he started out wanting to save
the Union but ended slavery under pressure from the
abolitionists; FDR was initially opposed to deficits, public
works, and deposit insurance, but was forced to embrace all three
by the industrial labor movement; LBJ was a Southern moderate who
signed the Civil Rights Act because of Martin Luther King, Jr.
and other activists. The same will be true for Obama.
“Whether we get a progressive president, and whether that
president governs as a progressive, is up to us,” Kuttner said.
Many progressives were reluctant to get behind Obama during the
primary because he was seen as more moderate on some domestic
policy issues than his rivals, Kuttner explained, but the
existence of his massive movement and his potential to transcend
party with moderate-sounding rhetoric made them give him a pass
on the issues.
“But the time for giving him a pass is over,” Kuttner said of
Obama. “If he doesn’t understand that everything that needs to be
done for the economy is more radical than almost anything that
can be debated in polite company, he will neither be elected, nor
will he be a great president.”
Kuttner called for “bolder, gutsier programs,” including a
“Roosevelt scale” re-regulation of financial markets.
William McNary, the president of US Action, who spoke at a panel
later that afternoon, said the next 10 years would be the most
critical period in the history of the progressive movement.
“Everybody’s talking about change,” McNary mused. “Are we gonna
get real progressive change? Are we gonna get small change? Or
are we gonna get chump change?”
Alan Charney, a program director for the same group, echoed the
call, and described “The Next New Deal.”
Charney asserted that the prosperity Americans enjoyed in the
aftermath of the New Deal was based on an economic “paradigm”
that is now in crisis because of globalization, trade, corporate
influence, and what he called new “social cleavages,” such as
immigration.
“What we need is a new, a Next New Deal to rebuild our economy on
a different foundation,” Charney said. Among the changes he
advocated were more investment in college education, health care
for all, “green” jobs, and an end to America’s dependence on
fossil fuels.
“This is a transformational moment. They come along once in a
generation, once in a lifetime,” he beamed. “When the mass
movement is there, that will be the time when the political
leadership will be forced to act.”
Along these lines, a number of issue-focused groups and
coalitions have formed to push specific progressive causes, such
as the Apollo Alliance for alternative energy and Health Care for
America Now!
Obama himself has given mixed signals throughout his career—and
especially during the presidential campaign—as to whether he’s a
principled liberal or a slick politician who would compromise
progressive ideals for short-term political gain.
In 2003, when Obama was still an obscure state legislator making
a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate, he was a proud progressive.
In a lengthy questionnaire filled out that December for the
staunch liberal Independent Voters of Illinois—Independent
Precinct Organization, Obama vowed that as U.S. senator he would
be “a champion for the progressive agenda” and boasted that he
had “demonstrated the backbone and passion to really fight for
progressive causes, even when the political winds are blowing in
the other direction.”
That same year, Obama spoke at an AFL-CIO event and declared
himself a “proponent of a single-payer universal health care
plan,” which is a technical term for a socialized system in which
government is the sole purchaser of health care. But during his
presidential campaign he has stated that he would only support
such a system “if we were starting from scratch.” On the other
hand, Obama has conceded that his health care plan could
incrementally lead to a single-payer system. A common complaint
among progressives about Obama’s handling of the issue is that he
hasn’t spoken about it much since the general election started—a
criticism that is sharpest among Hillary Clinton loyalists.
During the Democratic primaries, Obama railed against the North
America Free Trade Agreement, but in the general election, he
cooled off, and said his prior anti-trade rhetoric was just an
example of how political campaigns could get “overheated.” He
also softened what was a firm 16-month timetable for withdrawing
troops from Iraq and backed away from his pledge to meet
unconditionally with the leaders of hostile regimes within the
first year of his administration (now he tends to talk in vague
terms of “tough direct diplomacy”). He also reversed himself by
supporting Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation that
granted immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated
with the government even after vowing to filibuster any bill that
included such a provision.
Barack Obama is not a progressive by any means,” said Tim
Carpenter, the national director of Progressive Democrats of
America. “We have no illusions. This is a guy who missed a key
vote when it came to no strike on Iran. He missed the
Kyl-Lieberman vote [designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a
terrorist group], he was very slow coming out against the war,
and though he spoke out against it, he voted for every
appropriation.”
Carpenter said that his group, which was founded in 2004, is
mostly focused on organizing at the district-by-district level
and electing progressive members of Congress, but would still
work to get Obama elected.
“I think it’s safe to say we’re where conservatives were in ’64
with Goldwater,” he said. “Conservatives made a rational decision
that they were going to stay within the party and they were not
going to be afraid to lose based on the issues that united them
as conservatives. We’re doing the same things as Democrats.”
Among the successes they already claim is that, for the first
time, the Democratic Party’s platform adopted in Denver calls for
guaranteed health care. Also, House Majority leader Steny Hoyer
paid a visit to Progressive Central during the convention. “The
Democratic leadership is becoming quite aware of what we’re up
to,” Carpenter said.
For all their optimism, it’s worth pointing out that there are
substantial differences between now and the other periods of
transformational change in American political history. Both LBJ
and FDR assumed office during times when the climate was far more
suited for sweeping changes. Progressives can do all the talking
they want about how the economy is in a state of severe crisis,
but empirically, our current economic problems pale in comparison
to what they were when FDR was elected in 1932. That year, the
nation’s economy shrank by more than 13 percent and the
unemployment rate was 23.6%; by contrast, the economy grew 3.3
percent in this year’s second quarter, while as of August the
unemployment rate was 6.1%. LBJ assumed office in the wake of the
tragic assassination of the beloved John F. Kennedy, and the
outpouring of sympathy made it a lot easier for his successor to
push legislation through Congress—and it didn’t hurt that at one
point Democrats had 68 senators.
The biggest mistake progressives are making is to believe that
the diminished prospects for the Republican Party this November
mean that the conservative movement itself has been vanquished.
But regardless of who wins this election, the network of
conservative media, policy organizations, and activist groups
will still be in a much stronger position to resist radical
liberal reforms than their predecessors in the earlier eras of
transformational progressive change.
Philip Klein is a reporter for The American Spectator.
