Kerry wins the election in November.

Now - when will it ever be OK for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, such as myself and other progressives and liberals, be permitted to push for progressive issues and begin to move the party and country BACK TO THE CENTER from the edge of the right wing abyss where is is now?

Will we be told it is "not the right time" or "too early", or "wait just a bit", or "you are undermining the Kerry Presidency" by pressing for progressive issues?

Will there ever be a time for us to do this?

When Clinton was in office, we were marginalized then and told "to wait" - we even couldn't consider spending more money on social issues when the country was in the best fiscal shape since the 1960's.

And now look at the mess the repukes and their apologists have gotten us into.

For the "good of the party/country" we are willing to vote for Kerry, even if he's not our "ideal" choice. "For the Good of the Party/Country".

What do you consider "progressive" issues?

There really are no legitimate members of DU who are not progressive/liberal.

I don't see that the party has moved past the center to the right? Why do you feel so?

Interesting that you feel the party needs to move back to the center.

Many further left here feel it already is in the center and needs to move left.

Notice I didn't say "back to the left" because I feel the party has always been controlled by moderates

is compromise. We need to figure out what our priorities are, what is negotiable, what is deal-able and what is a "bedrock" issue we can't deal away. With this in mind we then can start a dialog with the other sides and hopefully find ground where none of us get everything but we can move forward.

There is no way we will ever be able to make everybody happy so if we see legislation that both sides aren't happy with we are probably on the right track.

and lobby your representatives. Do the footwork, do the fundraisng and build a consenus. Spin in a postive manner and make it appeal to the masses. Start as soon as possible. Most people will not go along with an issue until it affects them. Make the issue as broad as possible while maintaing the integrity of the core issue, that way when it starts to get whitled away you end up with what was most important.

are controlled by Republicans.

If Kerry wins, I hope that he will campaign as hard for Dem candidates as Bush did for Repub candidates.

We will need at least one branch of Congress to be Dem if we are going to just stand still as far as social security, medicare, and other Dem programs. Right now the Repubs have endangered the programs we already have.

Also we will need more Dems in the Senate in order to get Supreme Court justices who are centrists.

about progressive issues. He's a DLC plant who will follow the corp agenda and continue the Fuc*astion of this country and it's people.

Kerry just appointed two TOUGH progressives to rtepresent his interests at the DNC, Dick Durbin and Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

BTW...Kerry was a significant weight for the left throughout the nineties pulling AGAINST the rightward forces like Howard Dean trying to pull the party further to the center.

The DLC hierarchy did not support Kerry until they were forced to by circumstances of the primary.

To pretend that he is some agent of the DLC is absurd. They loathed Kerry and his maintaining an overall liberal voting record even though a member of their group. They loathe having to support him now.

where they always kept seven future generations in mind in how they lived their lives. That, I'm afraid is what we will have to do. We won't have what we want for a long time. All we can do is move the country along incrementally in hopes that future generations will have it better than us.

The Republican party has been highly successful under Bush in one thing particularly. They want to spend so much money that the country will not pay for lefty type government programs. They have accomplished that. I hate to say it, but the days when the left got money for it's programs are over for a long time to come. The Democratic party is no longer the party of the New Deal, and we won't be again any time soon. The Republicans have succeeded in transforming us, albeit inadvertently, into the "Responsibility Party".

The bottom line is that we simply will not have the money as a country to be the old traditional Democratic party. Our job at this point in history is to fix the mess that the Republicans have made. We are so far in debt, with the war business making matters ever worse day by day, that our economy is quite literally in danger. If we don't fix what the Bushes and Reagan have done to us (the national debt) it will take us a lot longer to get to the place where we can have traditional Democratic programs again.

I don't know whether President Clinton recognized this fact or not. It may have been only that the country was still moving inexorably to the right, and he realized the futility of fighting that battle by proffering liberal policies. In any case, he did the right thing, he did the best he could do, and that was to try to get the country headed back in the direction of fiscal responsibility. That is all that the country would have tolerated at the time.

While President Clinton may have had a choice between lefty type programs and fiscal responsibility (I say he didn't), it is clear that Kerry won't have that choice. Kerry will have to fix Bush's war mess. He'll be lucky if he can get that accomplished. It will be a long time before we see any money going to our issues. We simply won't have the money. All we can do is live for the future.

Fighting for progressive issues and supporting Kerry are not mutually exclusive. In Illinois, for instance, we plan on sending Barack Obama to the U.S. Senate next year.

One merely needs to keep in mind that if Bush gets four more years, we're *all* screwed until his judicial appointments die, no matter how hard we fight.