Memo to the Candidates: If not You, then Who? If not Now, then When?
U.S. Senators and Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden have all been making the trek to New Hampshire to appeal to the state’s voters to choose them in the first-in-the-nation primary to be held in January. They’re all talking about Iraq as a military failure in their efforts to play to decidedly antiwar crowds:
Biden: “The war in Iraq has been a failure,” with U.S. troops now acting as “apartheid cops.” There is no military solution to the “sectarian cycle of vengeance and revenge” (December, 2006 at Southern New Hampshire University).
Dodd: “I’m the one that believes that…there’s no military solution at all to Iraq. We need to move away from this idea that there’s a military solution… And so, I believe that we oughta start re-deploying this evening” (April 2007, MoveOn.org virtual town meeting).
Obama: “…I make a solemn pledge to you, as president we will be out of Iraq” (April 2007, addressing a New Hampshire voter in Nashua).
Clinton: “That’s what we’re trying to do in the Congress, working together to put the pressure on [President Bush] to set some deadlines on him. But if he doesn’t end [the war in Iraq], as president I will” (April 2007, interview with the New York Times’ Des Moines Bureau).
Sorry, Senators, but our troops and the Iraqi people can’t wait for the possibility of one of you to become President. By then thousands more Iraqis and Americans will be dead, and for what? Everyone with any senses knows the policy is a failure, so why should more people have to die?
End the war now - use your power as senators. It’s never too soon to take real leadership.
United State Senators, unlike members of the House of Representatives, can wield enormous power over the agenda and business of the Senate. A single determined Senator can bring business to a halt until his or her issue is addressed. The good news is there are four of you, not just one.
You can filibuster war funding bills. You can declare your refusal to vote for another dime of the taxpayers’ money for the war. You can respond to President Bush’s promised veto of the pending supplemental war appropriations bill with not a weaker bill, but a stronger one to fully fund the safe and orderly withdrawal of all US troops, bases and contractors within six months, as the Out of Iraq Caucus leadership in the House of Representatives advocates.
You can do this together so nobody grabs the credit and nobody feels slighted. It can be the first act of the “I Want To Be President” caucus in the Senate. You’ll all be history’s heroes for ending an unjust war. Isn’t the promise of saving thousands of lives more important than calculating how to position yourselves on the war to best increase your odds of winning the Democratic nomination?
Skeptics will doubtless dub this leadership plan unrealistic, noting the Democrats do not now have the votes to end the war and bring the troops home this year, let alone fund an interim UN or regional peacekeeping mission in Iraq, reparations and reconstruction for the Iraqi people, and to do right by our homecoming troops, all of which must be addressed and paid for.
However, Democratic leaders have not tried to make a case for such a dramatic change in policy. We submit that if you laid out such a comprehensive plan, it would have massive support from the American and Iraqi people.
And the alternative - giving Bush nearly $100 billion in “supplemental” war funding to continue his disastrous policies in Iraq, with another $140 billion requested for the fiscal year that begins October 1 (all of this on top of well over $400 billion to date) and crossing our fingers and somehow hoping it will make things better in Iraq - is that more realistic?
The only thing missing is actual leadership, which voters are hungry for, and which all of you fine candidates claim to possess. So why wait until one of you (maybe, and it’s more likely for some than others) is president? Show some bold leadership now. End the war now. Bring our troops home - now.
Anne Miller is the Director of New Hampshire Peace Action. Kevin Martin is the Executive Director of (national) Peace Action.
The cynical opportunism of these self-promoting politicians should eliminate their chances. Only Kucinich continues to demonstrate the courage and honesty of a true leader.
A year or so ago, Hillary was regularly calling for more troops yet this has yet to be exposed or re-exposed. The anti-war left should very loudly proclaim they will not vote for this hypocrite and opportunist. I greatly fear she can still buy the nomination and have increasingly less confidence that Obama is any kind of real alternative to her.
I’m getting nostalgic for mediocrity. The evolution that needs to happen in America is away from the mindset of militarism and dominance and the whole vocabulary of that. Victory, courage, leadership, loyalty, steadfastness, sacrifice, pride, good guys, bad guys, are battlefield words that creep into ordinary political parlance as virtues that are really just our ingrained American arrogance in new clothing.
I don’t want a warrior candidate, all jacked up to “wrest power” from somebody, any more than I want to be a warrior society. I’d rather we’d stay home and clean up the back yard.
The Iraq “war,” like any other arson fire, will burn itself out despite the administration’s efforts to prolong it and the failure of liberals to end it. We don’t have the crendentials for leadership, globally or domestically. We are a country that needs to sit down and shut up for awhile. We need a call to inaction. A swelling of grassroots apathy.
2008 might be a good year to turn our attentions to a third party candidate - some naive vegetarian who will promote composting and bicycle travel as national priorities. They will lose of course, just as our emperor will lose control in the Middle East. Who cares?
The truth is that barring major changes, a national election is not possible in the US at this time. We can go through the motions but the last two were blatantly stolen and there is no reason to believe that the next won’t be as well. If we want to have a real election, we need to start making a lot of noise insisting on paper ballots. Without electoral reform and checks, it’s a moot point.
Dennis Kucinich has had an workable exit strategy posted on his website since October of 2003. But the media practically never talks about it and others say there is no good exit strategy available. For those who are serious about getting out of Iraq AND avoiding a war with Iran, there is only one candidate worth supporting and that is Kucinich.
The other candidates who say they oppose the war but continue to vote to keep funding it so it doesn’t end and are now taking a belligerent stance against Iran are displaying schizophrenic behavior and are actually dangerous to the future of this world. Does anyone really think Bush will end this war if we keep giving him money to continue it plus extra money to finance and Iran attack?
Jaded Prole - Without electoral reform and checks, it’s a moot point.
The crux of the matter indeed.
Would that the other Democratic hopefuls would not just talk but ACT, as Dennis Kucinich has and does.
Would that they envisioned workable ways in which the world could be a better place, like Kucinich’s proposed cabinet level Department of Peace, which would (using 2 percent of Defense’s budget) educate everyone from bullying school children to abusive spouses to generals and diplomats in the ways of nonviolence and peace. Peace would be the organizing principal around which policy would be created. Talk about transforming our violent society!!
The authors took an idea I posted last week and expanded upon it. Of course it is an idea that we all have and dream about - real leaders dedicated to the health and viability of a democratic America. But these people (the candidates)?
Yes we need immediate leadership and if you want the job now would be a good time to show us that you deserve it. But not these people. To them it is all just a game, and they are just players that have beem groomed for the game, and the game of course must be played by the rules, otherwise rowdy players might get in and muck up the whole gravy train.
Sneak up behind Hillary and yell BOO! and she would pee her pants. You can see almost weekly the virus consuming her from the inside out, until she has become an empty hollow shell of blathering nothingness.
Instead of tiptoeing around the Bush Nazis these candidates should be jumping as high as they can and landing their heels with all their weight on the toes of the totalipublicans. They could be pushed over if we had any leaders with guts.
BOO!
I’d at one more suggestion for a Senator with the guts to try to stand up and stop this.
Simply fillibuster and stop the entire business of the US Senate. The pitch would be that the war in Iraq is such a national disaster, and is daily causing the deaths and maiming of both Americans and Iraqis, that it is wrong and immoral to continue business as usual while this is going on.
From that statement, filibuster everything. Refuse to let the business of the Senate go forward
Right now, there’s not a hope that I’d vote for any of these fools. The ones who were in the Senate in 2002-03 fully supported the war. The ones who are in the Senate have all voted to fund the war during every vote that has come up. And they are all supporting the extension of the funding behind the smoke screen of the “goal” of a withdrawal at some point so far in the future as to be just a vague promise. And they have all supported the idea of an attack on Iran.
So for me, any of these fools needs to stand up now and start fighting to end this war now. Otherwise, I’m not voting for them. Period. I’d rather cast my vote for a 3rd party candidate who better represents my views.
PS … Supporting Kucinich is going to have to be a grass-roots effort. The media will never support him. Heck, most the media is owned by Republicans or defense contractors.
One way for the American people to clearly say they want this war to end now would be to support Kucinich and to do so much more strongly than the media will lead you to suspect he can be supported. Everyone will have to ignore 10,000 stories saying he can’t win, and 20,000 more stories making fun of his appearence.
The only warning is this, Kucinich is playing in a rigged game inside the Democratic Party. The Democrats get to set their own primary calendar, and they are clearly stacking it up such that a grass-roots campaign opposed by both the media and the party big-shots is severely disadvantaged. And also, while the Democrats could set whatever campaign finance rules they want for their internal nomination campaign, they’ve clearly set rules that allow lots of big money to come in and tilt the nomination race. They could run Clean Election rules if they wanted, but they don’t want to. And the Democratic convention has tons of “super delegates” that aren’t picked by voters. So Kucinich would need closer to 60-65% of the voters delegates to win.
So, while I like Kucinich, its very doubtful that he can win in such a rigged contest. And as long as the contests are so rigged, its an open question as to efforts are better put there or into building NOW an independent anti-war campaign for the general election. But the key would be to start to organize such a campaign NOW, and not to make the same mistake that’s made every year not to start such a campaign until next summer.
Im all for that new reality show where they plan to pick a presidential candidate.
Dennis Kucinich is the ONLY answer to what ails this fallen country. Intellectualize, hypothesize, or criticize but that is the bottom line. Anyone, ANYONE with an open mind and a true lust for a fair and truly democratic America should throw the names Obama, Clinton, Edwards, et all right in the toilet and stay focused on The Courageous Congressman from Ohio. His record speaks volumes. His record is about “We The People” and not politics as usual based on money and ego. He’s the real deal–end of story.
If you over-study and over think, you will lose the simplest of realities: D.K. is NOT an ordinary pandering, over-inflated politician. www.kucinich.us
the problem here, as we all know, is that we are talking about a game in which the stated rrules are for the spectators and the actual rules are for insiders - so we watch a show,meanwhile the real world is left unattended - and we watch a show -= wee choose sides, some like the bad guys - some always do - like peter brady,i once thought jesse james was pretty cool - but in any case, whether we like the good guys or we like the bad guys, we are waiting for a hero to show up and what is needed, what is promised by democracy,is that we are the hero. consider these words from abraham lincoln, which many in this forum likely already know - well imagine that lincoln meant them seriously and not as a soundbyte
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
the time is now
“Sorry, Senators, but our troops and the Iraqi people can’t wait for the possibility of one of you to become President. By then thousands more Iraqis and Americans will be dead, and for what? Everyone with any senses knows the policy is a failure, so why should more people have to die?”
Because AIPAC said so.
As long as Kucinich is tied to the democratic party in any form, he is tainted by the same brush. If he is truly for reform he should sever all ties to the democrats.
Kucinich keeps progressives in the corporate conservative Democrat Party fold. The best he could do for progressives is to defect to the Green Party. Gore is considering running as GP candidate.
Haven’t we wasted too much energy on the DLC Democrat Party? Aren’t we tired of being taken for granted? They give us Murdoch’s Hillary and question mark Obama. But progressives have no say in this though we have the numbers and the power diluted by this money-power conservative Democrat minority.
Why not unite under the Green Party and tell Rahm Emmanuel and company to go jump in a lake?
I wish Kucinich would leave the Democratic Party too. He knows the games are being played against him. Dennis could pull it off. He’s the only one with the correct direction this country needs, and the public would support him. Dennis reminds me of Wellstone, a fiery hardheaded clear and direct person that makes sense.
Its not about governance. Its about idealogy. Im sure I can govern better than that moron in the whitehouse.
If we could convert Kucinich to evangelical Christianity and market him as a Samson vs. Goliath and vamp his elflike appearance and mesmerize people on the promised wonders of social spending and compassion, and, and… Aw, forget it.
Ipenek:
Thank you for injecting some humor into the situation. It was a welcome change to the hand wringing I’ve been doing lately.
Last night 13 Democrats voted against House the resolution for troop withdrawal. Very disturbing! I think the one thing that scares politicians a tiny bit is how they will be portrayed historically. Although it has been quite underplayed by the media, the president is as delusional as Hitler in the bunker days. As soon as Bush is out of office, there will be a deluge of information to that effect. That is the approach I intend to use when I contact Congress.
On another note, I was actually surprised by the audacity of Dick Cheney to claim a “medical emergency” which prompted a delay of the Kucinich impeachment announcement. They later admitted the emergency was just a routine coumadin level check. Can’t they do better than that?
coumadin was originally a rat poison. Seems appropriate.
“If not you then who? If not now, then when?” Phillip Vera Cruz said that in the late 1940s during his struggle as and immigrant farm work trying to organize the first labor union. Then President Kennedy said that in the early 60s.
Great words to live by…