Possible Speakers for the Democratic Convention

As my choice for the best Democrat was Joe Biden, I can’t be as passionate as others are in the battle taking place right now between Clinton and Obama.  Though I support Hillary, I think both candidates are good.   So I’ve looked towards the oncoming Democratic convention.  The convention is the time to show off the Democrats best face, and I think it would be a good opportunity to show how large a tent the Democrats have as compared to the Republicans.  Here’s my own wish list of speakers.

 I think Joe Biden and Bill Richardson would be great speakers to enunciate the depth of the Democrats positions on foreign policy.   One of the things that most impressed me about Biden during his run for the Presidency is his vast experience as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his 35 years in Congress.    I especially liked his plan on partitioning Iraq.    And he is a good at attacking the Republicans supposed strength in foreign policy.  John Nichols wrote in the November 26 issue of the Nation: “Biden is best understood as a relatively rare political archetype:  a Democrat who pays less atention to internal party politics than to winning elections and governing.  This skill makes him the one Democrat Republicans feel compelled not merely to attack but to answer.  That’s because Biden has so far been the one Democrat who has consistently understood the importance of taking the fight to the other guys.”

Bill Richardson offers the same sort of experience to a strong critique of Iraq policy.  As a member of Congress, a UN ambassador, Energy Secretary and governor of New Mexico, he was able to canvas his broad experience to back up his positions on withdrawal from Iraq.  I was deeply impressed with his performance in the New Hampshire debates, and think the combination of Richardson and Biden speaking about Iraq and foreign policy in the convention would convince many of middle America of the Democrats readiness in foreign affairs.

Dennic Kucinich would be another effective speaker to highlight in the convention.  Kucinich represents a segment of the Democratic Party that often feels ignored because of it’s farther left views on a single payer health care system, a quicker withdrawal from Iraq, the flaws of the current free trade agreements and reigning in corporate power.  Many Democrats fear a Nader candidacy would siphon off votes from a Democratic candidate in the general elections, and I think the best way to lessen Nader’s impact is to show these potential Nader voters that there are voices within the Democratic Party that share their views, people like Kucinich and Barbara Lee, who are affecting change in Congress and local government.   It would be a more honest way to blunt Nader’s influence than to push lawsuits in states to prevent Nader from going on the ballot.

John Edwards would be an important speaker for the role that he played in bringing poverty into the forefront of the election season.    He has gained stature within the Democratic Party for his persistence in pushing issues of economic justice when it could easily have been ignored.  In the February 18 issues of the Nation, John Nichols wrote:  “Those words rang true because the steadiness of the speaker’s focus during this campaign had led even cynical Democrats to the conclusion reached by Martin Luther King III, who told Edwards, ‘You have almost singlehandedly made poverty an issue in this election.’ …  Edwards shaped the 2008 race, offering the first universal healthcare plan from a major contender, proposing the first economic stimulus package, making an issue of war profiteering.  And he was heard.  Obama’s rhetoric has grown more powerful and effective as he has borrowed Edward’s policies as well as his populist phrasing.  And when Clinton tells urban audiences she is campaigning to help Americans ‘lift yourself and your family out of poverty’ it is impossible to miss the Edwards echo…  Forget the empty speculation about him as a vice presidential prospect;  Edwards’s best role will be as the voice of conscience for a party that has yet to recognize that its historic commitment to economic justice must be renewed in a time of recession.”

 If Obama is the candidate, it would be nice to see Jesse Jackson speak.  Obama wouldn’t have been able to achieve what he has done without the Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988 to break the ground.  And Jackson is one of the greatest orators in the Democratic Party.   If Hillary is the candidate, her husband should be given a chance to speak.  He is also a great speaker.  Whoever is candidate, Ted Kennedy should be given a prime spot to speak, especially since the cries of change that have been a large part of this primary season have invoked the spirit of his brothers John and Bobby.

The Presidency and Leadership in a Democracy

When I was in college I checked out from the library a book by Hedley Donovan, a renowned political reporter, entitled Roosevelt to Reagan.  It was written in the 1980s, and it described his experiences with 9 Presidents.     Based on that experience, Donovan made a list of 32 qualities that he looked  for in a person that was running for the Oval Office.  I photocopied that part of the book and kept it all these years, looking at it in every Presidential election since 1988, a useful guide to judging the candidates during the primaries.  As a liberal Democrat, I’ve always gone for the Democratic candidate during the general elections, but I’ve learned about political leadership qualities that I admire even from Republican Presidents whom I strongly disagreed with.  Like Donovan, I would like to reflect upon the qualities that make my favorite Presidents.

Written just after Reagan was reelected to a second term, Donovan gave this evaluation of the 9 Presidents that he presided over:

The modern Presidency begins with Franklin Roosevelt, and nine men (as of December 1984) have held the job.  In the twenty eight years, from 1933 to 1961, we had one great President, FDR, one very good President, Dwight Eisenhower, and by my own ranking, one good-to-very-good President, Harry Truman.  None of the next four Presidents could be put in any of those categories.  The short Presidencies of John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, for all the differences of philosophy and style, were the best, or perhaps the least unsuccessful, of the 1960s and 1970s.  Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation was a noble achievement but his Presidency is forever blighted by the tragic failure in Vietnam.  Richard Nixon was our best President of foreign policy since Eisenhower, not just because he had the wit to employ Dr. Kissinger.  And he presided over Watergate.  The full returns are not yet in on Jimmy Carter, nor, of course, on Ronald Reagan.”

As a reporter who covered Washington D.C. for several years, he had some interesting insights on each of the men he covered who inhabited the Oval Office.  One of my favorite Presidents, John F. Kennedy, did not leave a good impression on Donovan.  He found Kennedy less substantial in office, and Donovan felt that Kennedy’s brother Bobby would’ve been a far better President than John was.  Donovan was bothered by Reagan’s inattention to detail, an observation that foreshadowed the troubles Reagan would go through later in the Iran Contra hearings.  Donovan was a deep admirer of Roosevelt, but what surprised me was Donovan’s admiration for Eisenhower’s Presidency.  Donovan felt that Eisenhower was effective behind the scenes, that his genial public smile hid a shrewd political mind.   In a chapter in his book, Job Specs for the Oval Office, Donovan came up with a list of 32 attributes that he thought a person should have to be a good President.  I liked the list and thought I’d use some of those attributes to evaluate my own list of favorite Presidents.   

One of the things that I’d want from a President would be his or her ability to inspire the country.   Franklin Roosevelt inspired America during the depths of the Great Depression with his confident style and his oratorical skill.   Kennedy inspired a generation of young people into public service with his great speeches.  Though I didn’t like Reagan’s politics, I have to commend Reagan for his ability to make America feel good about itself again after the traumas of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis (although I would argue that he made America feel good for the wrong reasons).  From looking at these Presidents, I think the ability to inspire is important because it enables the nation to move with the President towards his or her goals.  I look at two Presidents who weren’t able to inspire the nation:  Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.  When Carter was elected in 1976, he was riding a wave of change brought on by Watergate:  he had large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress;  and he came with a strong work ethic and a lot of good will.  Despite his intelligence and integrity, however, Carter was unable to inspire the American people as it went through long gas lines, high inflation and interest rates, and a grueling hostage crisis.   When Bush became President in 1988, he succeeded a very popular President and the economy was doing well.  I didn’t like his policies, but I really liked his “thousand points of light” and “kinder gentler America” speeches, and thought they were a good attempt to light a fire to get more Americans to volunteer to community services, like Kennedy’s speeches had inspired the young 20 years before.   The first Bush President didn’t have Kennedy’s charisma, however, and when a recession hit, he didn’t have a feel for the suffering of the average citizen.   Both Carter and Bush lost the people’s confidence because they didn’t have that inspiring presence.  I think the key to inspiring people is the ability to communicate confidence and direction and neither was able to do so.

I want a President who is a tough politician who can garner tough votes in Congress, knows how to handle the various egos in his or her Cabinet, and knows how to reach out to different voices so that the President doesn’t get trapped listening to a narrow set of views.  Two of the most successful liberal legislative achievements, the New Deal and the Great Society, were brought to fruit by two Presidents, Roosevelt and Johnson, who knew how to play politics and wheel and deal.  Reagan showed that same type of political manuevring when he had a Democratic House passing his major conservative legislation.  Eisenhower didn’t have the legislative achievements to match these 3 other Presidents, but he had a good cabinet that he made sure followed his agenda, and not follow their own.  I think Eisenhower’s management skills were the best of all the Presidents of the past 50 years.   Kennedy’s Best and the Brightest cabinet, I feel after reading a few books, seem a bit overblown, but I think Kennedy learned how to access a wide variety of views.  This learned talent helped JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he reached out beyond his cabinet and the military to find options other than immediately bombing Cuba.   I think this was the great flaw in our present President.   I think the original cabinet of George W. Bush was too narrow ideologically, and during the run up to the Iraq War, Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to marginalize the moderate voices in the administration, primarily Powell.  A more diverse ideological cabinet would’ve made such a marginalization less likely.   Both Reagan and the present Bush tend to overdelegate, and that lead Reagan to the Iran Contra scandal and led Bush to conferring too much power to Cheney.  Nixon gave his cabinet an “us-against-them” mentality and this led to Watergate.

A crucial quality for Donovan and me is a President’s perceptiveness about the American people.  I think this perceptiveness enables a President to know when to push for difficult reforms and when to wait for a more receptive time.  And I think a President should be open enough to be moved by the grassroots movements.    Lincoln and Roosevelt are the best examples of this.   Lincoln had to maneuvre through a cabinet of political rivals, border states staying uneasily in the Union, egotistical Union generals, and abolitionists who were impatient for change.  Lincoln made sure not to move too far ahead of the general Union populace, making preserving the Union his top goal and going forward with the emancipation of slavery after the efforts of the abolitionists.  Kennedy, in a similar fashion, came into office lukewarm on civil rights and was pushed into civil rights legislation after the freedom rides and the protests at Birmingham.   Both were perceptive to the mood of the general public and knew when to act.   Nixon and Johnson are examples of Presidents who lost touch of the American people.  Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam wrecked his Presidency because he didn’t see that the people who supported his Vietnam policy tended to be against his Great Society programs, and visa versa.   It caused a huge generation gap, and fueled a growing skepticism of government.  Nixon only made the divisions worse.  Ford was not a great President, but I think his personality and the openness of his wife Betty did a lot to help heal the divisions of that time.

As the primaries roll on, I’ve been trying to see how much of these qualities are found in Clinton and Obama.  Both are good candidates with very different strengths.  At her best, I see Hillary as being like Eisenhower, a strong manager with a depth of details in policy.  That’s the impression I get when I see her in the debates.  Obama at his best is like Kennedy.  Whenever I hear him speak, I get really inspired.   I voted for Hillary in the California primaries because I like her command of the issues and I like her toughness.   I like the fact that both candidates are inspiring young people, women, African Americans to get involved in the political process and to be passionate about the state of our nation. 

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an essay on leadership for a series of young adult books on famous leaders.  He wrote:

“Government by reflection and choice called for a new style of leadership and a new quality of followship.  It required leaders to be responsive to popular concerns, and it required followers to be active and informed participants in the process…  The signal benefit the great leaders confer is to embolden the rest of us to live according to our own best selves, to be active, insistent, and resolute in affirming our own sense of things.  For great leaders attest to the reality of human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history.  And they attest to the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of us, which is why Abraham Lincoln remains the supreme example of great leadership.  A great leader, said Emerson, exhibits new possiblities to all humanity.  ’We feed on genius…Great men exist that there may be greater men.’

Great leaders, in short, justify themselves by emancipating and empowering their followers.  So humanity struggles to master its destiny, remembering with Alexis de Tocquiville:  ‘It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass;  but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free;  as it is with man, so with communities.” 

Jules Feiffer and Satirical Art

This may be shallow but I was first influenced in a liberal direction by Gary Trudeau’s comic strip “Doonesbury“. I was around 12 at the time, and it forced me to read the paper to get some of its humor. I also loved Bloom County,a comic strip by Berkely Breathed, but it was always better as an inciscive commentary on pop culture while it’s political commentary always seemed soft to me. When I went to college, I bought an issue of the Comics Journal with an interview of Jules Feiffer, and that interview was my first real exposure to radical leftist thought. After reading his interview, I checked out from the library “Jules Feiffer’s America“, a collection of Feiffer’s cartoons from the Eisenhower era to the Reagan era, and it really influenced the way I saw politics.

The Comics Journal interview, conducted by magazine founder Gary Groth, touched on the range of Jules Feiffer’s life:  his early work under famed comic book artist Will Eisner;  his books, plays and screenplays;  and especially his editorial cartoons for the Village Voice.   His cartoons at first seemed like they are quick scrawls on paper, but they show real drawing skill:  his characters are finely delineated and show individuality and personality.  The Feiffer cartoons are done in a fine thin line during the 1960s and 1970s, but as the 1980s roll in, it looks like the cartoons are done in marker.  His cartoon characters are lonely, neurotic people, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the problems of society.  The villians of the cartoon are the demogogues, politicians, and national leaders.  Feiffer’s cartoons aren’t laugh out loud funny.  They are more introspective, like the musings of a sensitive philosopher, pondering the state of the world and the apparent contradictions of racism, poverty, and the monopoly of power within a few hands.

My favorite Feiffer cartoons are those that catch the contradictions between what our politicians tell us and what they actually do.   Even though I’m a big RFK fan, I especially enjoy Feiffer’s Bobby twins cartoons.  They contrast the good Bobby image of the compassionate liberal icon with the bad Bobby that approved wire taps on Martin Luther King and worked for Joe McCarthy.  The cartoon caption went as follows:

These are the Bobby Twins. 

One is a Good Bobby.

One is a Bad Bobby.

The Good Bobby is a courageous reformer.

The Bad Bobby makes deals.

The Good Bobby sent federal troops down South to enforce civil rights.

The Bad Bobby appointed racist judges down South to enforce civil rights.

The Good Bobby is a fervent civil Libertarian.

The Bad Bobby is a fervent wire tapper.

The Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals.

The Bad Bobby is ill at ease with grownups.

If you want one Bobby to be your president you will have to take both…  for Bobbies are widely noted for their family unity.

Feiffer’s cartoons on the Presidents are very insightful.  Nixon is hunched at the shoulders, as if Nixon forgot to take out the hanger before he put on his coat, his body language is stiff, and his monologues are selfpitying and sad.  Ford is a simpleton with a can perpetually on his head.  Carter is a smaller than life figure, constantly begging for attention from an America that barely notices him.  Reagan is bold and movie star strong, indifferent to the plight of the poor as long as his policies look good on t.v.  He teaches us not to have too much confidence in our leaders, that even our political heroes have the same human frailties and foolishness as the rest of us.

From reading Feiffer’s America, I had my first exposure to far left politics.  As a radical influenced by the leftist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, Feiffer was able to give a nuanced view of the various grassroots movements that moved America in the past 40 or so years.  The civil rights movement, the rise of the New Left students movement of the 1960s, the feminist movement, the Black Power movement, the generation gap, the frailties in the relationships between men and women,… I learned a lot about the changes in America from reading Feiffer’s America.  Jules Feiffer wrote a nice ending on why he did his cartoons.

“Surviving our leaders is not just a struggle, it is a joy;  that is the irony of the work I do.  The more outraged I am as a citizen, the more fun I find as a cartoonist.  In the long and short run, I may not affect much but the state of my own sanity.  The cartoon keeps it in bounds, it continues the illustion of hope, it raises for me the distant possibility of actual solutions to some of our problems.  That possiblity of actual solutions to some of our problems.  That possibility is my muse.  It gets me out of bed in the morning, it makes me read the papers, it forces my mind off unpaid bills and the writing of plays, it humanizes me, it galvanizes me into combat.”

Progressive Christians in History

A lot of the great progressive movements of the past were led by Christians of various different denominations who had different interpretations of the Bible. In the 1500s in Santo Domingo, a Dominican named Antonio de Montesinos, preached a sermon to Spanish squires and officers against slavery: “Are they not human beings? Have they not souls? Are you not bound to love them as yourselves?” Another Dominican, Las Casas, was inspired by Montesinos and took up the cause of helping the Indians. This lead Pope Paul III to write the bull Sublimis Deus in 1537, which stated that all peoples on Earth are human and have a right to freedom and must not be robbed or made into slaves. It didn’t have an effect on the oppressed peoples of the time, but it planted a seed that grew later.

Samuel Johnson, a devout Anglican, fought slavery in the 17th Century. The book “A History of Christianity” by Owen Chadwick, noted that the antislavery movement was made up of 5 groups: intellectuals of the enlightenment; the more humane of the American and French revolutionaries; Catholic missionaries in the Americas (the Jesuits never allowed slaves in their settlements); radical Christians like the Quakers; and devout English evangelicals like William Wilberforce.

The women’s suffrage movement gained a lot from the abolitonist movement and many of the same Christians worked on both. Susan B. Anthony stated that her Quaker upbringing formed her ideas about the equality of women. Minister Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone and other Christians derived their understanding of women’s equality from their own readings of the Bible.

The antiwar movement had many Christian adherants. William Jennings Bryan was a great anti-imperialist who protested America’s forced colonization of Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish American War. Dorothy Day held a strong pacifist position during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. During the Vietnam war, Southern Baptist Martin Luther King Jr., Presbyterian William Slane Coffin Jr., Catholic priest Eugene Boyle, and ministers from various denominations went against the war. In the two Gulf wars, Pope John Paul II, Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Jimmy Carter were among the Christians trying to stop those military interventions.

The workers rights movement received a major boost from Pope Leo XIIIs encyclical, Rerum Novarum in 1891. It spoke of the dignity of the worker and the right of workers to form unions to protect themselves, it talked of the right of a decent wage, and it talked of the responsibility of the state to create fair conditions or social justice. This encyclical helped persuade Dorothy Day that the Church was just as sympathetic to the poor as Communism and it led to Catholics like Day, Father Berrigan, Father Eugene Boyle, Cesar Chavez, Lech Walesa, Philippine Cardinal Sin, and El Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero to fight for the poor and downtrodden.

The Civil Rights movement were joined by Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers, Catholics, Unitarians, and various people from various denominations. Bishop Gene Robinson, Bishope Katherine Schori, and Christians of various denominations are fighting for women’s and gay rights. And now the fight for AIDs, the fight against poverty, the fight to end genocide and intolerance are being fought by Christians.

All of these Christians were from diverse denominations with diverse ways of reading the Bible and of various theologies. Some took the Bible more literally, some took it more metaphorically. Yet all were important to Progressive movements of their times. Some people think of progressive movements as being made up of only secular people or secular humanists, but history shows that they are wrong. Gary Vance was right when he wrote “Study of scripture and history reveals that the essence of the noblest elements of liberalism flows directly from Jesus Christ.” I know my own lifelong liberalism stems from Christian heroes like Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, St. Francis and Dorothy Day. I’ve being reading Howard Zinn lately, and he’s right when he says that we can find Progressive impulses all through out history and as Christians, we can find those same liberal impulses in the history of Christianity.

Progressives and Liberals

In an interview with the Comics Journal in 1988, Jules Feiffer, the political satirist, said:

“I’ve always seen liberals as people who’ve taken radical ideas, whether from socialists or communists, finding ways of redefining them, relabeling them, reforming them, compromising them, and then improving the society with them. And the liberal’s job generally has been to process and homogenize the more radical notions out there for some time and make them acceptable to the mass society. And to that extent, liberals have played an important part. That liberals innovate anything is questionable. But that they innovate anything worth innovating is doubtful. The innovation comes from more radical sources generally.”

This is something that I’ve been coming across a lot lately in books and documentaries about progressives history: the interdependence between the radical and more moderate wings of a progressive movement. In the women’s suffragist movement, for instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton provided many of the arguments and radical ideas on women’s equality that society later adopted, but Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone did the dirty work of building coalitions of more moderate and conservative people for the immediate goal of getting women the right to vote. In the book “Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone“, author Robert C. Cottrell wrote of the New Deal:

“There was a sense of excitement in the air as the New Dealers devised one program after another that at least harked back to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century and at times beyond that to the Populist and Socialist platforms as well. Long-standing calls by American reformers and radicals for greater government control over business operations, for support of labor unionization, for social welfare measures, for public works projects, for planning, and for a discarding of laissaz-faire approaches appeared to be heeded to some degree or another by the roosevelt Brain Trusters. While it was clear, after a brief spell, that the New Deal was not ushering in a hoped-for revolution of the left or a feared one spearheaded by the right, it was also evident that the influence of progressive intellectuals and activists on government policy was greater than ever.”

I think this dialogue between the moderates and radicals is important. It seems to me that an important sign health of this dialogue is how responsive Democratic politicians are to the grassroots.

In the documentary on Ralph Nader, An Unreasonable Man, the DVD has a great special features that has a talk on what is wrong with the Democratic Party. One of the people commented that during the 1980s, Democrats were worried because the Republicans seemed to have an advantage in elections because of their ability to raise money. So Democrats started competing with Republicans for corporate money and Nader and many activist feel that this led to corporations having too much influence within the Democratic Party and that the party has strayed from its earlier egalitarian values.

It seems like Progressives are trying to reassert their voice with in the Democratic Party. In the year 2000, Doris Hadock, a 90 year old activist, walked across America to fight for campaign finance reform, and she ran for the Senate in the year 2004 to fight corporate interests. In the House, Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee have formed a group of congressmen whose goal is to push the Democrats towards being more Progressive. The anti-war movement had a profound influence on the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Nader stated that one of his goals in his Presidential runs of 2000 and 2004 was to influence the Democratic Party the way Norman Thomas influenced the New Deal in the 1930s.

In these upcoming Democratic primaries, I think it’s good that we have all these voices competing to be heard. We have to be sure our candidates forcefully and articulately argue progressive views, and we should really test the 3 frontrunners. Election years are times when politicians listen to the grassroots to get their votes, and this is when we can press them on issues of war and peace, on curbing the bad side of globalization, on issues of poverty.