Going back to what I wrote about Friday night, there's this item from Glenn Greenwald calling for a purging of corporate centrists from the Democratic Party. Naturally Glenn includes the Obama administration in his rundown of villains.
While Greenwald calls for "systematic primary challenges," which sounds pragmatic and strategic, I continue to worry that the constant Well The Dems Suck Ass, Too drumbeat will have the unintended consequence of spreading disillusionment among the progressive activist base of the party -- disillusionment that could result in several negative outcomes.
Cesca is right. Greenwald is wrong. And patronizing.
What rational person would ever think that it's a bad thing to force incumbent members of Congress to have to justify their actions to voters, compete within their own party over conflicting ideas, and maximize the instruments available to citizens to keep their representatives accountable? Supporting primary challenges against incumbents who enable policies that you think are bad and harmful is about the purest expression of democracy there can be.
This rhetorical is more a legal than a political statement. I consider myself, for the most part, rational. Yet, I can think of a whole host of reasons why there aren't primary challenges against many, many sitting members of Congress and the US Senate. Cost. The incumbency effect. The party withdrawing support for a challenger.
Politics isn't a wholly rational enterprise. Politicians do not take kindly to folks who try to bump them out of office because of a policy disagreement. When those disagreements are clothed in the often self-righteous mantle of principle, it becomes even more dangerous. There are fewer people more repellent to me than a person who believes that there is no counter-argument others can make against their righteous possession of the truth. Greenwald has crossed that line quite a bit recently, and with his equation of the Bush and Obama Administrations because of the latter is continuing policies Greenwald (and I, I shall admit) find distasteful, we are entering territory that I had thought we left behind after the 2000 elections. While hardly a progressive - and I defy any one to read what I or other true lefties have written that argue otherwise - Obama is far preferable to the Bush Administration. Indeed, it is a handful of Senators who currently are holding up health care reform, and they can be by-passed quite easily. We are much further along on any number of issues than we would have been had John McCain won. While it is certainly true we do not have a perfect group of Democratic politicians in office, our situation is far preferable to any we have been in since Jan 20, 2001. I defy any one - any one - to show me otherwise.
Rather than get in a huff because no one wants to play the game according to your rules, it might behoove some folks to accept the game as it is and win under its rules. We've done pretty well so far. Whining because others aren't bowing before another's superior logic or grasp of the facts, or because another plays the game better is childish.
I would add two things. I have nothing against primary challenges. I am only saying the kind of thing Greenwald is calling for here is not only practically impossible, it would be self-defeating. Also, some of the so-called Blue Dogs got support from lefty-blogger activists. There is no reason in the world why the same thing can't happen again.
