Do Democrats Make a Difference?

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Will Dean Make a Difference? Does Howard Dean at the helm of the Democratic Party matter?
Dave Lindorff
Wednesday, February 16, 2005


Most analysis and pundits, as well as many critics on the left, are saying no. First, as N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out (quoting that "muckraking" left-wing publication, Counterpunch), Dean is no progressive, and second, the party chairman is just a fund-raiser, with no power to set policy or direction.


In fact, however, Dean could make a difference, particularly on the issue of Social Security, and that could make a difference in the party's fortunes in next year's Congressional elections.


It seems clear that the Bush administration has overstepped badly in its attack on Social Security. The effort to scare young people with talk of the system going bankrupt has not worked. Even the tame corporate media have not bought this story for the most part. While they submissively adopt the administration's terminology, calling the president's demolition plan a "reform" effort, many news outlets have pointed out the falsehood of that bogus bankruptcy claim.


Now many Republican in Congress, faced with the prospect of going to the voters next year, are anxiously telling the president to back off, to slow down.


Where Dean comes in is in his instinct to be combative.


The reflexive Democratic response to every issue in recent years has been to seek compromise, to back off.


Social Security is no place for this to happen. As any general knows, with the Republicans in retreat, the Democrats need to go on the attack.


Democrats have their strongest issue in decades in the fight over Social Security and they should be going for the jugular on it.


They have a president who has squandered his credibility, first with his now fully exposed lies about Iraq, and now about his transparent lies regarding Social Security.


Meanwhile, Republicans as a party have been exposed as liars. For years, the GOP has cried foul saying the Democrats unfairly tried to frighten voters by saying that Republicans were out to weaken or destroy Social Security. They always insisted that they had no such intention.


Now that claim stands fully exposed. The Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress clearly are on an ideological crusade aimed at gutting the retirement program and causing its collapse.


Dean needs to make that case, and to bring the party, and its elected officials with him. They need to make the argument that Democrats will not compromise on Social Security, and that they will not allow the president’s plan to peel younger workers off of the program with a promise of "private" investment accounts.


But they need to go further and make the point that only the return of a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress can insure against further, or future attacks on the system.


That's something that Dean should yell about. The louder the better.


10:44 am pst


Monday, February 14, 2005

All the president's friends: A Riefenthal moment in Montgomery County, PA
I had a close encounter with the president last week--at least as close as someone of my political leanings and lacking James Guckert’s press pass can hope to get.


It felt a little like a Leni Riefenthal moment, scripted to the last detail.


The Man was coming to my neighborhood--the Montgomery County Community College gym just a few miles down the road from my house--to take his Social Security wrecking campaign to the people.


I had just covered a press conference by local activists protesting his planned divide-and-conquer strategy of offering private investment funds for the still young and foolish, and decided to swing by the college to see what was happening there.


Along the way, which turned out to be the route the president's motorcade was to take an hour or so later from the Willow Grove Naval Air Station to the college, the security was astonishing. Every police and emergency vehicle in the county seemed to have converged on this stretch of highway. Every driveway and intersection sported a vehicle blocking access. Bridges over the roadway each had what appeared to be a Secret Service SUV parked nearby, lights flashing.


This is clearly a popular fellow, this George W. Bush.


At the campus, I found a parking space near the gym and started walking towards a long line of people stretching back from the door.


At the end of the line were a cop car, one local police officer in uniform, and several very large young men in sports jackets. The cop looked diminutive and inconsequential next to them, and he wasn't doing anything. The young men were clearly in charge.


I approached them and they looked at me--dressed in jeans and bearded--skeptically, I thought.


"Do you have a ticket?" one of the big guys asked, unsmilingly.


"No. Where do I get one?" I replied.


"You can't. It's too late." Now there a smile.


"Where did you get them, before it was too late?" I asked him.


"Senator Santorum," he said, referring to Pennsylvania's junior and extremely right wing senator, Rick Santorum, who is up for re-election next year.


"How would I have known that?" I asked. "I don't recall reading any announcements in the media about how to get tickets for the president's visit."


"I don't know," the young man said. Now the smile was a kind of smirk.


"Pretty strange way for a president of all the people to behave, don't you think?" I asked. "I mean, don't presidents want to have people come to their speaking engagements?"


This time I got no answer.


"So who are you guys?" I asked them. "You don't look like Secret Service."


"We're from the Republican Party," one of them answered.


"The president's having the Republican Party handle security for his visit?" I think I sounded a little incredulous. I was. This was, after all, not a campaign appearance; the campaign ended back in early November. This was the president of the United States making a visit to my neighborhood, wasn't it? So what is the deal here? Saving money on security by having Republican goons do the security, like Hells Angels at a Stones event?


I revealed myself as a member of the press at that point, mentioning In These Times, a publication that had once issued me an identity card. They looked suspicious.


"The White House press officers are arriving with the president," I was told. "You can talk with them then about getting to cover the event."


I didn't have time for that, and was pretty sure I wouldn't have had any luck on such short notice anyhow, especially with no assignment letter in hand, and wearing a "No War in Iraq" T-Shirt under my parka.


The following day, the local media were full of stories about how the president, speaking to a full room of local residents, had warned about Social Security going "bankrupt" and about how those of us now over the age of 55 had "nothing to worry about" regarding our retirement.


There wasn't a word about how the adulating audience in that hall had been hand-selected by the office of one of the Senate's most hard Right members. My guess is that most of the people sent to cover the event didn't even think to ask how the crowd had been assembled.


No doubt the same thing was repeated across the country at the various venues where the president went to "sell" his "reform" program for Social Security.


Little wonder then that he's being allowed to get away with presenting this plan to wreck the system as its opposite--a plan to save it.


He only presents it to people who ideologically oppose Social Security, or who are too ill informed to know what he's up to.


There is something sick going on in this country, when the president has to be so hermetically sealed off from dissent, and when the media are so ready to help to protect him, and the rest of us, from reality.


8:44 am pst