Up for grabs - Comment - Presidential election

The Democratic race for the Presidency has been a triumph of progressive politics. With the exception of Joe Lieberman, every other candidate in the race has, for the most part, embraced the liberal tradition of the party. All the energy, all the passion, all the momentum is from the left.

After suffering through eight years of Bill Clinton's neoliberalism, progressives are now prevailing on issue after issue.

On health care, Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton all have come out for a single-payer system. And by staking this moral high ground, they have forced the other candidates to come up with at least partial measures to insure more Americans, especially children. With forty-three million citizens uninsured, this is an issue that won't go away. And no Medicare flimflam by Bush will solve it.

On civil liberties, every Democrat has taken it to Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft. John Edwards has been particularly outspoken, stressing the vast powers that Ashcroft and Bush have arrogated to themselves, including the power to hold U.S. citizens in prison indefinitely and not charge them with a crime, not let them see a lawyer, and not let them appear in court. (Edwards, however, does not have a sufficient answer when asked why he voted for the USA Patriot Act. "Well, here's the reality about the Patriot Act," he said at the Des Moines debate. "There are provisions in the Patriot Act which never get any attention which do good things. Al Gore recognized these. A lot of the commentators since have.")

John Kerry recently picked up the civil liberties issue, as well. In an Iowa speech on December 1, he criticized the Bush Administration's excesses. "They have used police powers in secret ways and for political purposes," he said. "It is time to end the era of John Ashcroft." (Kerry, too, voted for the Patriot Act. Here's how he explained that vote in his Iowa speech: "It clearly wasn't a perfect bill--and it had a number of flaws--but this wasn't the time to haggle. It was the time to act.")

When the gay marriage issue came up, several candidates--including Moseley Braun, Sharpton, Edwards, Kerry, and Clark--stressed the importance of looking at it as a civil rights, equal rights, and human rights issue. Kerry, however, did vacillate when he said, "I think the term 'marriage' gets in the way."

On tax fairness, each Democrat has made the case--and it's an easy one--that the Bush Administration's economic policies reward the wealthiest individuals and the corporations, while the bulk of the American people are left to fend for themselves.

On the environment, one Democrat after another has gone after Bush's abysmal record, from Kyoto to "Clean Skies" and "Healthy Forests."

But on some other issues, the Democrats do resemble the old Bill Clinton. Howard Dean, for one, supports welfare reform and capital punishment, two issues that Clinton used to sail into the White House.

And on overall economic policy, most of the candidates heaped so much praise on Clinton's policies that it looked as though the former President won several of the Democratic debates. In particular, the willingness of Kerry and Dean to embrace balancing the budget as a key element of their economic policies should give us pause. Reducing the deficit almost always means cutting social programs.

On trade issues, only Dick Gephardt, Kucinich, and Sharpton made the strong case against NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The other candidates paid lip service to strengthening labor and environmental side agreements, but those won't get at the essence of these pacts, which is to elevate the untrammeled pursuit of profit over everything else.

Still, the political direction this year is unmistakable. The talk is not about "New Democrats" anymore, and no one is demagoguing on the race issue (e.g., Sister Souljah) the way Clinton did. Even Al Gore, when he endorsed Dean, spoke of the need to reclaim the Democratic Party.

It is on the war issue that the grassroots progressive movement has made its presence felt the most. Any candidate who voted in favor of the Iraq War--Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry, and Lieberman--has had a lot of explaining to do, and they've done it poorly. They may thunder now against Bush's unilateralism, but we could not count on them when it mattered most. Wesley Clark also looked foolish early on with his opportunistic flip-flopping on this issue.

Only Kucinich and Sharpton have opposed the war from beginning to end, and they are the only two who are demanding that the U.S. troops come home now. Kucinich has been the most vehement: Bring the U.N. in, and the U.S. out, he says at every opportunity.

But many anti-war folks have lined up behind Howard Dean, even though he is for leaving the troops there, saying he is concerned about what might happen to Iraq if the troops leave right away. (Others, like Clark and Lieberman, want even more troops.)

Dean launched his campaign with his foresighted and outspoken criticism of the war, and he still scores heavily when he excoriates Gephardt and Kerry for taking the Democratic Party along for the war ride. His supporters view him as more electable than Kucinich, even though the latter has carried the progressive banner down the line, including issuing a refreshing call to eliminate nuclear weapons.