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archived: 19 - 25 Dec, 2004 Back Next UPDATED: December 21, 2004 REID & ROEMER REEL RIGHT Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is our new Minority Leader. Senator Reid replaced Tom Daschle who was defeated in his campaign for re-election. As Minority Leader, Senator Reid faces a great deal of responsibility. Described as a staunchly pro-life Democrat, Senator Reid has recently dubbed Timothy Roemer as his choice to replace the outgoing DNC Chairman, Terry McAuliffe. This is a revelatory tactical gambit for it opens Senator Reid’s strategic agenda to the penetrating light of day. Timothy Roemer is the President of the Center for National Policy. Previously, Mr. Roemer was a member of the House of Representatives. From 1991 until 2003, he represented the Third District of Indiana. During his service to the people of Indiana in the House, Representative Roemer was a consistent opponent of abortion and abortion rights. It is now perfectly clear that a pattern has formed in the mind of the new Minority Leader. Senator Reid is leading a sharp shift to the right, and women’s rights are directly in his line of fire. Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the House, is a strong and consistent supporter of women’s rights. Representative Pelosi is generally regarded as a leader of the Pro-Choice movement in Congress. In recent days, her support for Timothy Roemer has become an item of political discussion. Initially, CNN reported that Minority Leader Pelosi was supporting Roemer. However, the Boston Globe is now reporting that our Minority Leader is not supporting Mr. Roemer to head the DNC. Representative Pelosi’s current posture on Roemer is, therefore, somewhat ambiguous. Pelosi’s spokesperson says that the Minority Leader approached Roemer about running for the post, but that she is not now endorsing him. Here comes the doublespeak: the same spokesperson in the same interview says that Pelosi can tolerate a future chairman of the party who is opposed to abortion rights. It might be worth remembering that John Kerry carried a lower proportion of women voters than Albert Gore. At this point, it is perfectly clear that women are being asked to redefine their understanding of civil and human rights, and they are being asked to do so by powerful elements within the leadership of the Democratic Party. In effect, Senator Reid and Mr. Roemer are preparing to launch a new definition of human rights – potentially, the rights of the unborn for which they are prepared to dispense with rights previously held by American women – the right to chose between giving birth or not. In Europe, these women’s rights are sacrosanct. The only nations with limitations on these rights of women are currently operating under some form of theocracy including Sharia. With the acquiescence of Minority Leader Pelosi, Senator Reid and Mr. Roemer are plumping for a big government and Big Brother approach to the redefinition of abortion rights and women’s rights. They see the problem in terms of the state versus the individual women who might chose to have abortions in certain circumstances that the government will define for them sometime in the future. In opting for an interventionist approach into the traditional rights of women in these still undefined circumstances, Senator Reid and Mr. Roemer are moving in the direction of an Orwellian form of theocracy that invades the bodies of women allegedly in defence of the rights of the unborn. Another way of expressing the dilemma that Senator Reid and Mr. Roemer represent for the Democratic Party is that they are willing to abandon the march of civil rights from the Declaration of Independence to the stillborn Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Even though the ERA passed both houses of congress in 1972, it failed to be ratified in the requisite thirty-eight state houses. It has been ratified in thirty-five of the required thirty-eight states, but it is now languishing in a political form of limbo in Bush’s America. Given the conservative political direction of Senator Reid’s leadership, the ERA could well languish for another three decades sans ratification. The political scuttlebutt is flying thick and fast about the selection of the next Chair. In a meeting of the state chairpersons held in Orlando recently, the potential candidates were allowed to make statements and to answer questions. Afterwards, they talked with three-dozen state chairpersons present. Tim Roemer was not present at this crucial meeting. With the support of the Senate Minority Leader and the tentative non-opposition of the House Minority Leader, Mr. Roemer is playing a slightly different sort of game. He is appealing directly to the leadership on a one-by-one basis both personally and through surrogates. Last week, after Mr. Roemer’s candidacy became known, I received an interesting email from one of the most successful and highly respected Democratic political consultants in American history. His message to me was a simple one. He said that Tim Roemer would be a disaster for the Democratic Party, and he would ensure that the Democrats would remain on their losing streak. Senator Reid’s and Mr. Roemer’s strategy is simply one more page out of the discredited Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and New Democrat playbook. They are opting for the same strategy that cost the presidential campaigns of Michael Dukakis, Albert Gore and John Kerry. As I have pointed out, the DLC has been a strategic disaster for the Democratic Party since its inception. The DLC have been attempting to rewrite history to disguise this embarrassing fact, but they cannot run, and they cannot hide any longer. In recent newsletters, they have begun to invoke the odd theory that Ross Perot took more votes away from Bill Clinton than he took from George Bush in 1992. This is not only untrue, this disingenuous subterfuge disguises the fact that not only did Ross Perot weaken Bush (41) but Bush was also further weakened by the presidential campaign of Patrick Buchanan. The New Democrats do not deserve any credit for winning any election ever. None. Not even one. Dead Zero. They have been the architects of political defeat, and they are now poised to strip away the hard won rights of American women in their quest to deprive the Democratic Party of its traditional identity. They believe that by jettisoning pro-choice women, the Democratic Party will be in a stronger political position. Given the breakdown of the vote in the past two presidential elections, this is nothing less than Orwellian doublethink straight out of the pages of his novel, 1984. The Democratic Party is – and always will be - the Party of civil rights, human rights and equal rights, and we should never forget it. Post Script Last week, I rang Mr. Roemer’s office and left voicemail on his answer phone. I suggested that he find another way to support the Democratic Party rather than to serve as its Chairman. I left my telephone number, and I am looking forward to his returning my call. If you feel inclined to offer your advice to Mr. Timothy Roemer about his campaign for the DNC Chair, please, use his contact details which you will find below. Today, I have just spoken with Senator Reid’s staff raising my concerns about the direction he appears to be taking. They kindly offered to send me a written reply or to have the Minority Leader ring me when convenient. When I spoke with the staff of the House Minority Leader, they very kindly agreed to draft a memo for Representative Pelosi. For the convenience of the readers of this column, the contact details for the Minority Leaders appear below. Do not hesitate to mention my name or to refer to the column above in either written or spoken communications with either of them. CONTACT DETAILS / ROEMER / REID / PELOSI TIMOTHY ROEMER
Mr. Timothy Roemer
Phone (202) 682-1800 SENATOR HARRY REID – MINORITY LEADER
Carson City
Las Vegas
Reno
Rural Nevada Mobile Office
Washington REPRESENTATIVE NANCY PELOSI – MINORITY LEADER
San Francisco
Washington, D.C. SOURCES
Reid, Pelosi backing
Roemer for DNC chair
Democrats Eye Softer Image
on Abortion _____________________________________________ UPDATED: December 14, 2004 GRASSROOTS REVOLT 12th December 2004 – the fourth anniversary of the end of American democracy Four years ago today, an era in American democracy came to an abrupt close. This was the date that the United States Supreme Court ruled that the counting of votes in Florida must be halted. The bottom line is that American citizens retain their right to vote, but they do not have the right to have their votes counted. The counting of votes is not an individual right in Bush’s America: it is the right of the states to tabulate votes according to their political persuasions. Last week, Jesse Jackson argued on Capitol Hill for a Voting Rights Amendment to the Constitution to guarantee that every vote cast in US elections is counted. At this point, Jackson’s proposal has the support of the Black Caucus, but little more. Senator John Kerry has not endorsed Jackson’s proposal for a voting rights amendment, nor has Senator John Edwards and neither has the outgoing Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe. These may be some of the reasons why, in Democratic Party terms, the grassroots are now in revolt. Eli Pariser, head of MoveOn, is well on the way to sacking Terry McAuliffe and his nest of New Democrats who have plunged the Party into its longest series of losses since the Civil War and Reconstruction. In a previous comment, I have noted that the New Democratic movement has never won an election. They have touted their political prowess as the architects of the two presidential victories of Bill Clinton. Wrong. Even though Clinton was a charter member of the New Democratic movement that had nothing whatsoever to do with either of his victories. The Party, America and the world can thank Ross Perot for both of Clinton's wins. Perot's campaigns severed a core of right-wing zealots from the Republican power base in both 1992 and 1996. Clinton never won fifty percent of the vote. Neither did the New Democrats have anything to do with Clinton's winning the nomination in 1992. They can thank James Carville and George Stephanopoulos for that one. Carville masterminded Clinton's primary campaign, not by positioning him in the center-right of a field of candidates, but by his brilliant crisis management of the Jennifer Flowers affair. People identified not only with Clinton, but also with Hillary. In the Clintons, America saw a talented but imperfect pair of human beings who deserved a second chance. Calling himself the 'Comeback Kid" and admitting to problems in their marriage, Clinton made the political connection on the strength of his own personal integrity. He had the will power and the common sense to admit his humanity and his imperfections. That was something new in American politics, and it spoke volumes to the main-streets of America. Call it charisma or what you will, Bill Clinton became the quintessential American, an everyman who spoke the language of the average American. He even had the honesty to admit that he was a man who could feel the pain of his people. With Clinton securely in the White House, the New Democrats masterminded the campaign of 1994 by running to the Republican center-right, and Newt Gingrich's Contract on America was the immediate result. The New Democrats lost; the radical religious Republican right won, and the rest is history. Eli Pariser is dead right. The New Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council and the center-right tendency have alienated the party of FDR, JFK, LBJ, HHH and Jimmy Carter from the grassroots. The New Democrats can talk all they want about economic issues as the populist road back to power, but that will not work until America is in the throes of another depression. Another theory frequently touted by the New Democrats is that of values voters. This values based argument tells us that Democrats need to be more zealously religious and spiritual in their quest for the support of mainstream America. This is just a coded message advocating deplorable policies including: racism, sexism and creationism. The New Democrats seem to have forgotten the religious conviction of Jimmy Carter, our last liberal president. There are plenty of Americans who did not vote in this election, because they simply could not see the point. They rejected the messages of both Bush and Kerry. Hindsight is always 20/20, but the message of a candidate who voted for the war but ran in opposition to it, and then said that he voted for the eighty-seven billion dollars before he voted against it was simply not plausible enough to be taken seriously somewhere on main street. The Real Deal of John Kerry did not seem real, but the New Democrats heralded it as their very own construction. In this attribution, they were right. They vociferously lauded Kerry and Edwards as their dream New Democratic ticket. To the mainstream, Kerry’s message seemed like a double talking deal of dubious veracity. The New Democratic Party line is just that – all political double talk and no trousers. For their parts, Rove and the Republicans have been laughing ever since Kerry surged to the front of the pack in Iowa. They knew then that they could label him a serial flip-flopper, and he would repeatedly oblige them with doublespeak. They did, he did, and it worked. Simple as that. Even with a deeply compromised candidate who was running a dubious excuse for a campaign, over fifty million people voted - not for John Kerry but against George Bush. Try as he might, Kerry did not have a message until he took Clinton's and Carville's advice and began attacking Bush for his disastrous war policies. Kerry had little choice at that point, because his New Democrat campaign had tanked in the polls only one month after his nominating convention had fizzled with the most minute bounce in recorded history. It is worth remembering that during his acceptance speech, Kerry leveled a warning directly at his opponent, George Bush. Kerry boldly warned Bush that he would stand up against any attempt to violate the constitution. Standing up against immense odds when he was up to thirteen points down in the polls, Kerry rose to the occasion, and he performed brilliantly in the debates. With a reversal of the tides of momentum, he did have a ghost of a chance. Then, Osama Bin Laden popped out of the Jack-in-the-box right on his Rovian cue, and the tides of momentum developed into a fear driven back-lashing riptide, or so we are being asked to believe. Based on exhaustive demographic analysis, John Zogby and other reputable pollsters predicted Kerry would win the election. Today, Zogby's organization is backing the Congressional probe launched by John Conyers and Mel Watt into the integrity of the vote and the voting process in America. The point here being, we really do not know who won this election, but we certainly know who lost it. John Kerry has repeatedly conceded and re-conceded. Jesse Jackson was the star player at the Conyers-Watt briefing for members of Congress last week. Jackson hurled some pithy comments at John Kerry criticizing him for not standing up and fighting for voting rights and the integrity of the electoral process. The message here is not heavily coded, but it safe to conclude that it will be unlikely that John Kerry will enjoy any palpable Afro-American support in his next run for the presidency. As stated at the beginning of this column, it was on this date in 2000 that the Supreme Court ruled against Albert Gore and the voting rights of the American people. For the nine weeks between the day of the election and the Supreme Court decision, Albert Gore defended the voting rights of average Americans. Al Gore stood up against the earthly powers arrayed against him, and he fought down to the wire for the integrity of American democracy. John Kerry did nothing of the sort. Less than twenty-four hours after the polls closed, John Kerry collapsed into a tearful whimper on the stage of Faneuil Hall. Kerry collapsed and so did his campaign even though they could see an unprecedented number of reports of voting irregularities flooding into their inboxes from many battleground states. Worse. Kerry folded his campaign even though the exit polls in the key battleground states reported that he would definitely win the presidency. This unforeseeable psychological collapse of the Brahmin warrior that we knew as John Kerry of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War will be studied by generations of American historians for years to come. It simply does not compute. Kerry’s bold convention promise to stand up against Bush over constitutional rights disappeared into the ozone, a vapor that simply vanished when a barrage of statistics and complaints of a second stolen election hit him head on with the force of a freight train. Kerry collapsed and the trainwreck of American democracy is the direct result. It is exquisitely ironic that exit polling became the straw that broke the camel's back in the Ukrainian presidential election. Today, America is in the unenviable position of being a second-class democracy, inferior even to the former Soviet Republic of the Ukraine. The historical guilt for this political catastrophe will be shared equally between the Republicans who unscrupulously manipulated voting procedures in key battleground states and by John Kerry, along with his top New Democratic advisors who urged him to concede both rashly and prematurely in the face of the largest number of official allegations of election fraud in American history and the overwhelming tide of exit polls announcing him as the winner of the election. Joseph Lieberman and his staff should take a major amount of the blame for this series of events. On the morning after the election, Lieberman’s henchmen leapt eagerly in front of the cameras at Fox News where they lauded Bush’s victory by lampooning Kerry as a bad candidate with no message. To this day, Lieberman loves to validate the horrendous policies of George Bush. On the Republican side, it is difficult to name only one of the culprits other than the most obvious, Karl Rove, but Kenneth Blackwell does rise to prominence as an Afro-American product of affirmative action who was eager to disenfranchise voters from his own ethnic community in order to gain political advantage even if it came at the cost of democracy. For the Afro-American community, Kenneth Blackwell is a political Judas who is obviously headed for higher office in Ohio. American history has appointed an obscure attorney in Ohio named Clifford Arnebeck to lead the charge for voting rights. Affiliated with neither the Democratic National Committee nor the Kerry campaign, Arnebeck petitioned the courts in Ohio to throw out the suspicious election results. Arnebeck is critical of John Kerry. "I can't for the life of me understand why Kerry isn't fighting harder for this. Maybe it's some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you're not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck mused. Arnebeck’s comment is not the first time that the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members has borne the brunt of sarcastic comments among Democrats. Looking forward, the Democratic Party must inspire those Americans alienated from voting by articulating what will always be our core message: We stand for the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, civil rights, voting rights, equal rights, gay rights and the progressive policies of the Carter and Clinton administrations. The grassroots are in revolt, and there are big changes in the pipeline. __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global political action organization based in the United Kingdom.
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
