We Don't Want More Liberal Representatives, We Want Stronger Ones

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10862

We Don't Want More Liberal Representatives, We Want Stronger Ones
by Cenk Uygur | Nov 6 2007


There is this misconception in the press and in Washington that the netroots and other progressive activists want their representatives to be more liberal. The myth is that we want to drag the party all the way to the left and take them away from the center. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We don't need elected officials to be any more liberal or progressive; we just need them to be stronger. Is Senator Schumer's problem that he isn't liberal enough? I don't think so. His problem is that he caves in to the Bush administration on anything that might vaguely be in the "national security" realm because he's scared and miserably weak.

I know that the Mukasey confirmation is a little different because Schumer had parochial interests in mind as well. Well, how heroic! So, he's not only afraid of Bush on national security but also interested in putting his local political machine over his voters' interest. Very heart-warming.

But as we all know, it's not just the Mukasey appointment. It's not just Schumer. It's warrantless wiretapping, it's torture, it's Iraq, it's Iran, it's signing statements, it's the US attorneys firings, it's the Patriot Act, it's presidential secrecy, it's the Geneva Conventions, etc., etc. The list of Democratic cave-ins is so long that it's painful to think about. You could open up a buckle store with all these Democratic buckles.

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The problem isn't that the country is too conservative (or too liberal, depending on the election you look at), the problem is Washington takes so long to adjust. The press and the politicians are still reacting as if we're in 2003 and Bush still has any sway on national security matters. The guy is at 24%. He doesn't have any sway over anything.

Even more importantly, the press is assuming the center of the country is between these Democrats and these Republicans when that isn't anywhere near true. These Republicans are grossly unpopular and these Democrats couldn't stand up to them if you put a wall behind them.

We're all so tired of the buckles. What we're even more tired of is the press telling us that we just want the Democrats to be more liberal because we are left-wing extremists. We're standing right in the middle of the country politically. The difference between us and the Democratic politicians isn't that they are standing to the right of us; it's that they aren't standing at all.