Why I love Digby -- Endorse This

I hate meta-bloggy discussions with a passion and rarely indulge in them, but because I turned off my comments to cool the rhetoric a little, others in the blogosphere are commenting and I figure I'd better say something more about it.

I've been doing this for five years and I've taken enough controversial stances to have received my share of commenter ire. I even have a couple of internet stalkers. But I've never had to deal with the kind of abuse to which many others have been subjected, so I'm not complaining. My regular commenters are the greatest. It just got a little bit too heated and I don't have the inclination to referee flame war, which is what i would take.

A lot of criticism has come my way recently because I won't "endorse" anyone and this has led to people making assumptions about my position. But the truth really is that I am not invested in any of the candidates. They are nearly identical in terms of policy, all have political gifts and bring something to the table and I find none of the various electability arguments particularly persuasive. Indeed, I believe that the fact they are so similar in all the important ways is one of the reasons everyone is at each other's throats on this --- since there's no daylight on policy everyone is having to argue their case based on their own emotional connection to the candidate or what the candidate symbolizes, which often devolves into ugly invective. It really does become personal under those circumstances. You can see the result of this in the candidates' own debate last night. They weren't really fighting over anything important because they don't actually disagree about anything important. But they had to fight. It's an election. Somebody's got to win.

Unlike many of you, all things being equal in the policy and electability department, I don't actually believe that Edwards' "fighting working man spirit" or Obama's "post-partisan vision" or Clinton's "hard knuckled experience" are going to be the determining factor in the success of progressive politics. I think change is going to come from the ground up not the top down, from a progressive movement that has positioned itself to leverage ANY candidate.

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But the real lesson is far more compelling. Both Kennedy and Johnson were pushed to do far more than they ever imagined by the movement that Dr. King helped to galvanize. While Dr. King let it be known that he supported the Kennedy and King over their Republican opponents, he drove that movement from the outside, never seeking political office, understanding that it was his role to be a "drum major" for justice, to mobilize citizens of conscience to push the limits of the political debate. He was arrested, gassed, beaten, and eventually assassinated by the defenders of segregation. But he was also investigated, wire-tapped, and slandered by administrations led by liberal Democratic presidents. Liberal politicians and press condemned him for pushing too hard and asking too much. He was abandoned by many of his allies when he came out against the Vietnam War. He was reviled when he moved from civil rights to economic rights, and began organizing a poor people's campaign, calling on the government to guarantee the right to a job for everyone able to work. He was assassinated as he stood with sanitation workers striking for the right to organize and a living wage.

The lesson of the King years isn't a choice between rhetoric and reality, or between experience and change. The lesson of the King years is the vital necessity of an independent progressive movement to demand change against the resistance of both entrenched interests and cautious reformers.

King understood that electing good liberal leaders - whether the young and fresh like Kennedy or the experienced and wily like Johnson -- was necessary but not sufficient. "Freedom," he taught, is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." King called each of us to vote but also to act. "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."

Obama is right that there is power in the word, that hope has a true force in the world. Hillary is right that Johnson's experience and forcefulness were vital to passing the civil rights laws. But King's example and lesson is that neither of these is sufficient. It takes a movement to force even a sympathetic president to act.

I know, it's great fun to think about Rahm and Teddy telling Bill to STFU. But everybody ought to take a deep breath and remind themselves that this is also exactly the kind of thing Democrats do to their sitting presidents, whether named Clinton or, I dare say, Obama. They run to the press with the news that they scolded them so they can make sure everyone knows they are the ones running things.(I know everybody's forgotten how that used to be because the Republicans don't constantly air dirty laundry in public for their own aggrandizement. They usually work these things out among themselves for the good of the party.)

If the Democrats win the presidency, expect many more of these little dramas. The inflated egos of powerful Democratic Senators and Congressmen require that they consistently step forward to knee-cap their president whenever possible lest anyone get the idea that he (or she) is actually in charge. They're just practicing with Bubba, kind of a reminiscence of the good old days.

Oh, and don't worry about congressional prerogatives. They'll rediscover them with a vengeance when there's a Democratic president. They'll investigate his or her every move, calling for special prosecutors and generally behaving like asses, at the smallest provocation by the press if it gives them a chance to pontificate grandly on Tim Russert about their own superiority. They don't have the guts to do it when the Republicans are institutionalizing torture or lying the nation into an illegal invasion of another country, because well, Republicans are mean. But they'll find plenty of things about which to get righteously indignant with the executive when its a Democrat. They'll be in hypervenitlating, bipartisan bliss with their Republican cohorts, elbowing each other to be first to the microphone denouncing the latest shocking presidential failure to dot "i"s and cross "t"s.