Category Archives: liberalism and progressivism

IOKIYAR for Churches

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Remember last year, when the Republican Party used conservative churches to campaign for Bush?

The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives. …

… The instruction sheet circulated by the Bush-Cheney campaign to religious volunteers lists 22 “duties” to be performed by specific dates. By July 31, for example, volunteers are to “send your Church Directory to your State Bush-Cheney ’04 Headquarters or give [it] to a BC04 Field Rep” and “Talk to your Pastor about holding a Citizenship Sunday and Voter Registration Drive.”

By Aug. 15, they are to “talk to your Church’s seniors or 20-30 something group about Bush/Cheney ’04” and “recruit 5 more people in your church to volunteer for the Bush Cheney campaign.”

By Sept. 17, they are to host at least two campaign-related potluck dinners with church members, and in October they are to “finish calling all Pro-Bush members of your church,” “finish distributing Voter Guides in your church” and place notices on church bulletin boards or in Sunday programs “about all Christian citizens needing to vote.” [Alan Cooperman, The Washington Post, July 1, 2003]

Here’s another one:

The Republican National Committee is employing the services of a Texas-based activist who believes the United States is a “Christian nation” and the separation of church and state is “a myth.”

David Barton, the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders, was hired by the RNC as a political consultant and has been traveling the country for a year–speaking at about 300 RNC-sponsored lunches for local evangelical pastors. During the lunches, he presents a slide show of American monuments, discusses his view of America’s Christian heritage — and tells pastors that they are allowed to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. [Deborah Caldwell, Beliefnet, 2004]

Well, folks, that was then, and this is now: Patricia Ward Biederman and Jason Felch of the Los Angeles Times write that the feds have a different standard for liberal churches.

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California’s largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church’s former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.

In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991’s Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that “good people of profound faith” could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support.

But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, “Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster.”

Apparently the IRS has doctrinal issues with All Saints:

On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that “a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … ” The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.

The IRS offered All Saints a dispensation if it agreed to repent:

After the initial inquiry, the church provided the IRS with a copy of all literature given out before the election and copies of its policies, Bacon said.

But the IRS recently informed the church that it was not satisfied by those materials, and would proceed with a formal examination. Soon after that, church officials decided to inform the congregation about the dispute.

In an October letter to the IRS, Marcus Owens, the church’s tax attorney and a former head of the IRS tax-exempt section, said, “It seems ludicrous to suggest that a pastor cannot preach about the value of promoting peace simply because the nation happens to be at war during an election season.”

Owens said that an IRS audit team had recently offered the church a settlement during a face-to-face meeting.

“They said if there was a confession of wrongdoing, they would not proceed to the exam stage. They would be willing not to revoke tax-exempt status if the church admitted intervening in an election.”

The church declined the offer

What’s next? Thumb screws? Iron maidens?

Update: See Steve Clemons, “Religion, Wars, and the IRS: Pro-War Sermons Get Tax Privilege; Anti-War Sermons Not”

Update update: See Dave Johnson, “IRS Cracking Down On War Opponents” and John Aravosis, “Bush administration threatens liberal church for being anti-war.”

Reality Bites

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Could an epidemic of second thoughts be spreading on the Right?

If so, it’s spreading slowly. Righties are still righties, and many’s the winger who will insist he still feels fine even as flesh is consumed and internal organs are shutting down. But reality can be catching, and nobody avoids it forever.

In Salon, Joe Conason reports that some righties are grudgingly acknowleding that, maybe, um, we need some government regulation after all.

On the day that avian flu reaches these shores, even the most conservative Americans may begin to understand why effective government and global cooperation are as important as “free markets” and national sovereignty. With millions of lives at stake, they may well wish that we had spent more to bolster public health agencies at all levels — including the United Nations — instead of entertaining the simple-minded demagogy of the right for the past two decades.

Indeed, the pandemic threat is already exposing the limits of “free market” rhetoric among Washington’s right-wing think tanks, which have remarkably little to say about the subject that now preoccupies officials and experts around the world. …

…After many years of undermining global and national efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic, organs of Republican propaganda like Heritage suddenly consider public health to be a pressing concern of the federal government, right next to national defense on the list of priorities. Conservatives tend to change their attitudes quickly when their own lives and families might be endangered.

Conason reminds us that another repository of conservative “thinking,” the Cato Institute, in the pre-Katrina past called for the abolishment of FEMA — “presumably because everyone should depend on free-market solutions in case of an earthquake or hurricane” — and wanted the U.S. to stop paying dues to the U.N., thereby defunding the World Health Organization.

“The withdrawal of American participation and support from world organizations has always been a matter of principle for the Republican right,” Conason says, “although conservative ideology has yet to explain how we can close our borders to bird-borne disease.”

Details, details.

“The Cato attitude toward bird flu is much like the libertarian solution to global warming: If the ‘free market’ can’t solve the problem, let’s pretend it isn’t happening,” Conason writes. But the free market is not cooking up the stockpiles of vaccines and Tamiflu we’re likely going to need.

(Republican problem-solving amounts to denying there’s a problem until it bites their butts. Poverty, jobs, environment, health care, you name it — every time, Republicans will insist there is no problem until the crisis actually gets in their faces and threatens to hurt them in the next election. Then, of course, they will blame the problem on Democrats. On the other hand, Republicans are prone to manufacturing crises where none exist in order to enact some policy they know won’t sit well with the public.

Democrats on the whole will recognize problems shaping up down the road, although their solutions may or may not work as promised. However, I have to think back quite a while to remember a time when Democrats were in a position to enact much of anything that wasn’t compromised to death by Republicans before it became law. But if a Democratic remedy misfires, Republicans exploit the failure to expound their anti-government theories, never mind that the problem would not have evaporated had government not responded to it. )

Reality is settling over the GOP like a bad hangover. At the Washington Post, Shailagh Murray writes that some in the GOP regret they overindulged in pork when they wrote the highway bill.

The highway bill seemed like such a good idea when it sailed through Congress this summer. But now Republicans who assembled the record spending package are suffering buyer’s remorse.

The $286 billion legislation was stuffed with 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers’ districts, including what critics denounce as a $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” that would replace a 7-minute ferry ride in a sparsely populated area of Alaska. Usually members of Congress cannot wait to rush home and brag about such bounty — a staggering number of parking lots, bus depots, bike paths and new interchanges for just about every congressional district in the country that added $24 billion to the overall cost of maintaining the nation’s highways and bridges in the coming years.

But with spiraling war and hurricane recovery costs, the pork-laden bill has become a political albatross for Republicans, who have been promising since President Bush took office to get rid of wasteful spending.

So why couldn’t they see this coming? Did the war thing just slip their minds? Did a ouija board tell them not to worry about natural disasters? Of course, part of the problem is that there used to be presidents who took the governing thing seriously and who would have refused to sign the bill. Murray continues,

President Ronald Reagan once vetoed a highway bill because it contained 152 pet projects. Despite the pork inflation, Bush had no complaints about the current package when he signed it on Aug. 10. “This bill upgrades our transportation infrastructure,” he declared. “And it accomplishes goals in a fiscally responsible way.”

Junior wouldn’t recognize fiscal responsibility if it bit his butt.

That was before Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, leaving tens of thousands homeless and requiring billions of dollars in unanticipated rebuilding costs. Trying to live within a tight budget, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are in the process of pushing through politically difficult cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, farm subsidies and student loans.

Making sure the poor and disadvantaged make all the sacrifices–that’s the Republican way. And since entrenched poverty so excacerbated the damage of Katrina, it’s so sensible to make the problems of poverty even more intractable. The Guardian observes,

If the budget cuts passed by the US senate on Thursday are anything to go by, the whole thing will end in tears. Republicans – disgracefully – targeted most of the cuts on the elderly and the poor through restructuring (ie cutting) some Medicare and Medicaid programmes. Worst of all, part of the cuts originally aimed (creditably) at cutting America’s ludicrously high agriculture subsidies was amended so the brunt would be taken by chopping $844m from food stamps for the poor rather than from farm subsidies. Meanwhile, Republicans are hoping to pass yet more tax cuts for the wealthy. An administration that can tackle a serious budget problem in this way deserves all that may be coming to it.

The Republicans may hope to pass yet more tax cuts for the wealthy, but there are signs the soak-the-poor crowd may be losing their edge there, too. Robert Kuttner writes in the Boston Globe,

AFTER HIS reelection, President Bush set two top domestic priorities — privatization of Social Security, and ”reform” of the tax system. Privatization ran into a wall of opposition once the public grasped that the price would be a big cut in guaranteed retirement checks.

On Tuesday, Bush’s blue-ribbon commission on tax reform issued its recommendations, and they are hitting with a similar, resounding thud. The political right wanted a flat tax, a consumption tax, or a national sales or value-added tax in place of the progressive income tax. Not only did the commission fail to support any of these, but it took on one sacred cow — capping the mortgage interest deduction that would raise taxes on the upper middle class. … it was far from what the drown-the-government crowd wanted, and one more sign that Bush is losing control of the agenda.

Damn those economists. They actually check their math.

And here’s the biggest jaw-dropper of the day: Jim VandeHei writes in WaPo that

President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.

Bush? Ethics? The Apocalypse is at hand, I tell you …

Arraignment Day

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[Update: Scooter pleads not guilty. No trial date has been set. Apparently some of the evidence submitted by Libby is classified, and the judge and others will have to get security clearances to see it. Interesting.]

Scooter’s arraignment is scheduled for 10:30 am today. I will post whatever happens. He will probably plead not guilty, of course, but given that the Bushies really don’t want a trial, it’s possible someone got to him and persuaded him to fall on his sword for the Team. We’ll see.

Meanwhile–I just found this quote at Fallen Monk:

If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people – their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties – someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad; if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.” – John F. Kennedy

Nice.

Rosa Parks

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There’s little to say about Rosa Parks’s courage and the significance of her life that hasn’t already been said. Jeanne d’Arc is particularly eloquent.

Across the Blogosphere, left and right, bloggers are paying tribute to Mrs. Parks, who died last night at the age of 92.

Although mostly heartfelt, the praise from some rightie bloggers underscores what to me is the most amazing attribute of rightiness, which is the inability to apply lessons of history to the present. Although the faces and causes change, the American Right still reflexively smacks down anyone who dares to take a stand for the dignity of the individual or to speak a truth the Right doesn’t want to hear. Like Rosa Parks.

The liberal struggle for equality and individual rights versus the conservative struggle to keep power and privilege in the hands of a select few is the most persistent theme in American political history. Although slavery was the mother of all inqualities, abolition didn’t stop the struggle. New movements gain attention–labor, women’s suffrage, civil rights, women’s rights, native American rights, gay rights. Time and again, a segment of American citizenry rises up and declares it will sit in the front of the bus with The Man. And then we go through the same old dance–the Right lashes back, smears the instigators, swears that if X happens it will be the end of civilization as we know it, attempts to use law to hold back the liberal tide, fails, and then gradually loses popular support as people figure out the change wasn’t so bad after all. And two or three generations later, the Right declares it was for X all along.

And they cannot learn. Earlier this year I had a conservation with a rightie about “activist judges.” I mentioned Brown v. Board of Education, and the rightie lashed back in irritation — how come you lefties always bring up Brown? We bring it up because it exemplifies the same old learning curve we keep having to repeat. In fact, I believe the Right’s bugaboo about “activist judges” originated with the Brown decision. Later would come other decisions, such as Engel v. Vitale and Roe v. Wade, always followed by the same rhetoric. X is a threat to the American way of life. X takes rights (i.e., privileges) away from people. X is a usurpation by the federal government of states’ rights. And X will lead to moral depravity (e.g., miscegenation after Brown, godlessness after Engel, rampant promiscuity and a “culture of death” after Roe).

Same old, same old. When the privileged few are prevented from using state and local government as agents of oppression–whether oppression of racial minorities, religious minorities, women, or any other not-privileged group–they throw collective temper tantrums and whine that government is taking away their rights. And anyone who stands up for equal treatment under the law had better have a thick skin, because the Right will attack.

And the learning comes slow. After 40 years, there are still pockets of resistance to the Montgomery bus boycott. I found some on the blogosphere today. This blogger calls Parks a “pawn” of the NAACP, for example. (Fact is, Parks was a long-time NAACP worker who knew very well what she was doing when she sat on that bus; she was nobody’s “pawn.”) Although I was a toddler when the Brown decision was handed down, the resulting fight over school desegregation was still white-hot when I was high school. An all-white high school, btw. And the standoffs on school prayer and abortion seem not to have budged much after all these years.

This blogger writes, “The civil rights leaders of today pale in comparison to Parks and her compatriots.” That’s what they always say. In the 1950s, Parks and Martin Luther King were vilified soundly by the Right. As were Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in their day.

Tweak the racial epithets, and the invective hurled at Rosa Parks in 1955 becomes the same invective hurled at Cindy Sheehan today.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ends and Odds

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Rumors are flying that Dick the Dick could resign. I think maybe we’re all getting a little overheated.

Also–via Kevin Drum, I see that Paul Waldman stumbled onto a truth I wrote about awhile back. A couple of truths, in fact. Waldman writes,

Yet Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) raise a caution. Americans, they argue, are pretty conservative; no matter what is going on this week or this month, conservatives far outnumber liberals, so Democrats always start at a disadvantage. Democrats who want their party to stand up for a strong progressive agenda, they claim, are barking up the wrong tree. Democrats must stick to the center, or lose.

Even those with impeccably liberal pedigrees are making this argument, such as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. “According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate,” Dionne wrote. … Michael Barone of the National Journal looked at the same numbers and pronounced us to have “a conservative electorate.” Evan Bayh, a probable candidate for president, cited the same figures to argue for a more centrist Democratic Party. “Do the math,” he said. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic pronounced the liberal/conservative/moderate split “the most important thing you need to know about contemporary politics.”


As I wrote earlier,

But the problem with this explanation is that the word liberal has been so demonized by the Right that even liberals don’t know what it means any more. I’d be willing to bet that a whopping large amount of people who call themselves “moderate” are liberals who don’t know it, or who would be liberals if someone could make a case for liberal government without some rightie goon dancing about shrieking “Tax and spend! Tax and spend!” …

….Frankly, I think genuine liberalism has been absent from public discourse and policy for so long that I think today’s voters might find it quite refreshing. Considering the younger ones have never been exposed to liberalism before, maybe we should call it something else and tell ’em it’s a new new thing. I bet they’d take to it like ducks to a pond.

Fact is, a lot of people who don’t call themselves liberals hold liberal ideas, whether they understand that those ideas are “liberal” or not. People don’t know what the word liberal means any more. The righties have done such a through job of demonizing the word that people are afraid of it. It’s like the hoards of people who say they believe in equal rights for women, “but I’m not a feminist.”

I smack such people whenever I meet one, btw, so if this applies to you, keep your distance.

Waldman writes that the “median voter” sure looks like a liberal.

At this moment in history, that voter is pro-choice, wants to increase the minimum wage, favors strong environmental protections, likes gun control, thinks corporations have too much power and that the rich get away with not paying their fair share in taxes, believes the Iraq War was a mistake, wants a foreign policy centered on diplomacy and strong alliances, and favors civil unions for gays and lesbians. Yet despite all this, those voters identify themselves as “moderate.”

And we know why this is true, don’t we? Waldman writes,

The answer lies in a decades-long campaign to make the word an epithet — from Ronald Reagan taunting Michael Dukakis as “liberal, liberal, liberal” to a host of Senate candidates who faced television ads calling them “embarrassingly liberal” or “shockingly liberal.” Through endless repetition, conservatives succeeded in associating “liberal” with a series of traits that stand apart from specific issues: weakness, vacillation, moral uncertainty, and lack of patriotism, to name a few.

For example,

Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

That’s exactly what I wrote here. I did a title search and found (as of May 2005):

Books by conservatives with the words liberal or liberalism in the title (not including the Michael Savage titles already named above):

* Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
* Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
* Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
* Mona Charen, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
* Mona Charen, Do Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)
* Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
* Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism
* John Podhoretz, How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane
* David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity
* Michael S. Rose, Goodbye Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church
* Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Modern Liberalism and American Decline

If I expanded this search to include “The Left” I could list a great many more titles along the same lines, and most of them sold a respectable number of copies.

Now here’s my list of books by liberals with conservatives or conservatism in the title:

* Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

And that was the only title I found, unless you include:

* Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America

Mr. Lind is a recent convert from neoconservatism, and I don’t know for sure that he’s calling himself a liberal. So that title may not count.

As I wrote in an even earlier post, it’s easy to find broad-brush condemnations of liberalism coming from conservatism. But it’s remarkably difficult to find broad-brush condemnations of conservatism coming from liberals.

Sure, there was plenty of snarking about conservatism. But when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.

Kevin suggests we fight back by “focusing on extremist conservative ideology, something we don’t do often enough.” We on the Blogosphere focus on it, but are we demonizing it the way the righties demonized liberalism? I’m not sure we’ve got it in us to do that. Although I’m willing to give it a shot.

But we’ve got to remember that conservatives are all about defending the Powers That Be–the corporations, the military-industrial complex, and various entrenched institutions dedicated to keeping the powerful in power and the playing field as uneven as possible. All they have to do to defeat us is make people afraid of us. Demonizing forces for change and real reform,* ensures that the status quo will win by default.

(*What righties call “reform” amounts to dismantling what’s left of the New Deal and reversing all civil rights case law since the McKinley Administration–“reforming” backward instead of forward, in other words. We might call that “unreform.”)

But liberalism has to do more than make people afraid of conservatives. We have to give people a vision of empowerment and hope, that government can be better, and can do better, to make America a better place for all of us.

And before we can do that we must neutralize what Steve M. calls the “Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism.”

Given that the Right pretty much controls mass media, that’s not going to be easy. But I believe we have to try. And maybe if enough people become disillusioned by the Right, they’ll be ready to listen to what we have to say.

A Progressive Agenda, Cont.

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Picking up from last night–today E.J. Dionne explains why it is vital for the Democratic Party to have a clearly articulated agenda:

It has long been said that Americans have short attention spans, but this is ridiculous: Our bold, urgent, far-reaching, post-Katrina war on poverty lasted maybe a month.

Credit for our ability to reach rapid closure on the poverty issue goes first to a group of congressional conservatives who seized the post-Katrina initiative before advocates of poverty reduction could get their plans off the ground.

And you know how they did this. While the progressives were busily studying the details and working out a sensible plan for actually reducing poverty, the Right got in front of cameras with pre-digested talking points and their same old Coolidge-era agenda repackaged for Bush-era consumers. And now that they’ve seized the initiative, any chance the progressives might have had to do some good is pretty much dead.

Dionne continues,

If it didn’t matter, I’d be inclined to salute the agenda-setting genius of the right wing. But since we need a national conversation on poverty, it’s worth considering that conservatives were successful in pushing it back in part because of weaknesses on the liberal side.

Right out of the box, conservatives started blaming the persistent poverty unearthed by Katrina on the failure of “liberal programs.” If there was a liberal retort, it didn’t get much coverage in the supposedly liberal media.

It’s conservatives, after all, who spent almost a decade touting the genius of the 1996 welfare reform and claiming that because so many people had been driven off the welfare rolls, poverty was no longer a problem.

From day one, Democrats should have been in front of cameras, speaking in one voice, stating the grand themes of the progressive agenda discussed in the last post. Rebuild America first! Make work pay (no suspension of Davis-Bacon)! Keep the promise of opportunity for all Americans, not just Dick Cheney’s corporate cronies! Real security for America!

This is not to say that all of these themes shouldn’t be backed up by detailed, workable policy plans. Of course they should, which would distinguish them from the empty talking points of the Right. We want to be serious about governing, not just bamboozling the public into voting for us. I’m saying this is what needs to be done if progressives are ever going to have a say in the national agenda. While the Left debates details, the Right gets out in front and starts marching–inevitably in the wrong direction. But when people want a leader, they’ll get behind someone who appears to be going somewhere. Even if it’s off a cliff.

A Progressive Agenda

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United and on the offensive, [Democrats] should drive home a simple triumvirate of charges: corruption, incompetence, and unresponsiveness to the concerns of the great American middle.

Of course, this will ultimately mean some degree of agreement on a positive alternative—on a shared vision of what America is and what American government should be doing to make America better. — Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, The Washington Monthly

Today I (once again!) ran into a rightie blogger who said “Democrats have no ideas.” This is an article of faith on the Right, which has been dragging around the same few zombie ideas since Goldwater. The fact is that Demcrats, progressives anyway, have multitudes of ideas. No one ever hears about them because no one, including the gutless wonders calling themselves “Democrats” who inhabit Washington, listens to us.

There’s an article by Robert Borosage in the current issue of The Nation, called “A *Real* Contract With America” that presents the following items as a clear platform for change [numbers added]:

[1] Crack Down on Corruption: In contrast to conservative cronyism, shut the revolving door between corporate lobbies and high office. Prohibit legislators, their senior aides and executive branch political appointees from lobbying for two years after leaving office. Require detailed public reporting of all contacts between lobbyists and legislators. Pledge to apply this to all, regardless of party. Take the big money out of politics by pushing for clean elections legislation.

[2] Make America Safe: Commit to an independent investigation of the Department of Homeland Security’s failures in response to Katrina. Detail action on the urgent needs that this Administration has ignored: Improve port security, bolster first responders and public health capacity, and require adequate defense planning by high-risk chemical plants. End the pork-barrel squandering of security funds.

[3] Unleash New Energy for America: In contrast to the Big Oil policies of the Administration that leave us more dependent on foreign supplies, pledge to launch a concerted drive for energy independence like the one called for by the Apollo Alliance. Create new jobs by investing in efficiency and alternative energy sources, helping America capture the growing green industries of the future.

[4] Rebuild America First: Rescind Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations, which create more jobs in China than here, and use that money to put people to work building the infrastructure vital to a high-wage economy. Start with challenging the Administration’s trickle-down plans for the Gulf Coast, which will victimize once more those who suffered the most.

[5] Make Work Pay: In contrast to the Bush economy, in which profits and CEO salaries soar while workers’ wages stagnate and jobs grow insecure, put government on the side of workers. Raise the minimum wage. Empower workers to join unions by allowing card-check enrollment. Pay the prevailing wage in government contracts. Stop subsidizing the export of jobs abroad.

[6] Make Healthcare Affordable for All: Pledge to fix America’s broken healthcare system, with the goal of moving to universal, affordable healthcare by 2015. Start by reversing the Republican sellout to the pharmaceutical industry by empowering Medicare to bargain down costs and by allowing people to purchase drugs from safe outlets abroad.

[7] Protect Retirement Security: In contrast to Bush’s plan to dismantle Social Security, pledge to strengthen it and to require companies to treat the shop floor like the top floor when it comes to pensions and healthcare.

[8] Keep the Promise of Opportunity: Instead of Republican plans to cut eligibility for college grants and to limit loans, offer a contract to American students: If they graduate from high school, they will be able to afford the college or higher technical training they have earned. Pay for this by preserving the tax on the wealthiest multimillion-dollar estates in America.

[9] Refocus on Real Security for America: In contrast with Bush’s pledge to stay in Iraq indefinitely, sapping our military and breeding terrorists, put forth a firm timeline for removing the troops from Iraq. Use the money saved to invest in security at home. Lead an aggressive international alliance to track down stateless terrorists, to get loose nukes under control and to fight nuclear proliferation.

There is nothing in the list above that I and myriad other leftie bloggers haven’t been saying all along. Further, I believe there is nothing on that list that the average, middle-class, middle-of-the-road citizen would find objectionable. In fact, most of these items would be welcomed by the “average middle middle” citizen. I’d make item six a little bolder–national health care!–but otherwise it seems a good agenda to me.

The other day I read that Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders are putting together a Democratic policy platform for next year’s campaigns.

An early draft of the agenda outlines the specific initiatives House Democrats will pledge to enact if given control of the House. Leaders have been working on the document for months, and have already started encouraging Members to unify around it and stick to its themes.

Among the proposals are: “real security” for America through stronger investments in U.S. armed forces and benchmarks for determining when to bring troops home from Iraq; affordable health insurance for all Americans; energy independence in 10 years; an economic package that includes an increase in the minimum wage and budget restrictions to end deficit spending; and universal college education through scholarships and grants as well as funding for the No Child Left Behind act.

Democrats will also promise to return ethical standards to Washington through bipartisan ethics oversight and tighter lobbying restrictions, increase assistance to Katrina disaster victims through Medicaid and housing vouchers, save Social Security from privatization and tighten pension laws.

I think they should just run with the Borosage list. I’m afraid the Washington Dems will come up with mealy-mouthed promises that will end up sounding the like same old same old. I think they should be careful that grand themes (Rebuild America first!) don’t get buried by the policy-wonk stuff (housing vouchers!). But now’s the time to start talking about those grand themes.