[Mb-civic] Tip-Toeing on the Platform

Fri Jul 23 11:47:36 PDT 2004

Tip-Toeing on the Platform

By John Nichols, The Nation
 Posted on July 23, 2004, Printed on July 23, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/19292/

Rosa DeLauro, the savvy Connecticut Congresswoman whom Democratic leaders
and the Kerry for President campaign put in charge of drafting the party's
2004 platform, says, "It reflects John Kerry. It reinforces who John Kerry
is."

Unfortunately, DeLauro is right.

Instead of a manifesto for change that might attract new support, or at
least energize the base, the platform that delegates to the Democratic
National Convention are expected to approve without debate is a tepid
document largely defined by Senator Kerry's fear of being identified as a
liberal  let alone as a progressive seeking to surf what polls suggest is a
rising tide of antiwar sentiment.

Indeed, on the question of Iraq, the platform is every bit as difficult to
pin down as the candidate. DeLauro, who unlike Kerry and vice presidential
pick John Edwards voted against authorizing the Bush Administration's use of
force against Iraq, argues that the platform rejects the Administration's
approach to the world, and she can point to some strong words of
condemnation. The Administration is taken to task for its willingness to
"[rush] to war without exhausting diplomatic alternatives," to "bully rather
than persuade" and to "[walk] away from more than a hundred years of
American leadership in the world to embrace a new  and dangerously
ineffective  disregard for the world." Yet, under the direction of Kerry
aides and party chieftains, drafters meticulously avoided identifying the
war as a mistake, refused to embrace any kind of timeline for bringing US
involvement to a conclusion and failed to reject clearly the doctrine of
making pre-emptive war. The draft document was so murky that Tom Hayden, the
anti-Vietnam War activist and former California legislator, penned a letter
warning that "the candidate and the Party establishment already are risking
voter disillusionment with transparent vagaries on Iraq."

Backers of Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich's
presidential bid joined antiwar activists in a last-ditch attempt to press
the platform committee to improve the document in mid-July, at a final "dot
the i's, cross the t's" session in Hollywood, Florida.

In a measure of the commendable determination of the Kerry campaign to keep
Democrats in the fold, Kucinich backers were treated respectfully 
especially after they delivered petitions signed by more than 200,000
supporters of an antiwar plank. But in the end they were ceded only a few
words to take back to the faithful. Added to a section on getting NATO
allies to contribute more military forces to the Iraq endeavor was a line
that reads, "The U.S. will be able to reduce its military presence in Iraq,
and we intend to do this when appropriate so that the military support
needed by a sovereign Iraqi government will no longer be seen as the direct
continuation of an American military presence." It was a small victory that
allowed one of the two Kucinich backers on the 186-member committee,
Minnesotan John Sherman, to suggest that he could go back to "our folks" 
antiwar activists  and argue for Kerry. But even that was too much for
Sandy Berger, the Clinton Administration National Security Adviser who was
monitoring the platform session for the Kerry campaign. "We didn't give up
anything," he claimed.

Berger was wrong. He and the other guardians of platform language did give
up something: the prospect that the document might actually attract new
votes to the Kerry/Edwards ticket  especially the Nader voters, about whom
Democrats still spend so much time worrying. While Kerry strategists got the
platform they wanted, they failed to understand the essentials of Platform
Writing 101. It is true that party platforms are not so widely read or
analyzed here as they are in other democracies.

But Republicans recognized something in the 1980s that Democrats still have
not figured out: that a platform ought to be a rousing call to arms, a
powerful signal of what the party would do if given power, rather than a
dull recitation of platitudes, conventional wisdom and established stances.
Republicans write platforms to excite the cadres and attract fellow
travelers who might not be all that impressed with party nominees. Democrats
write platforms from a place of fear; they do everything in their power to
avoid giving Republicans new targets for criticizing the party and its
candidates  as if Karl Rove and his crew really need any help.

When allies of the Backbone Campaign, a grassroots movement to push the
party in a progressive direction, offered an amendment spelling out steps
the party would take to rewrite the Patriot Act and protect civil liberties,
there was clear enthusiasm even among Kerry backers on the platform
committee. To the surprise even of the Backbone Campaigners, they won enough
support to force a rare debate at the Florida session. Then Berger and
others rushed in to counsel caution. "This is very tricky," said Eleanor
Holmes Norton, Congressional delegate from the District of Columbia, after
announcing to the committee that she was speaking "regretfully" against the
amendment. Warning that taking on the Patriot Act too forcefully would
attract Republican charges that Democrats are soft on terrorism, she said,
"Don't play into their hands." The amendment was defeated, leaving the
national Democratic Party with a platform that is no stronger in its
criticism of the Patriot Act than the platform of the Idaho Republican
Party.

In fairness to the Kerry backers, and especially to DeLauro, a solid
progressive who was handed a thankless task, the platform is an improvement
on the documents produced by the party for the Clinton and Gore campaigns.
In deference to Kerry's personal opposition to the death penalty, it drops
references to backing capital punishment. It respects the advice of former
Senator Gary Hart about how to do national security right  with real
investments in infrastructure at ports and other vulnerable sites  and it
adopts Kerry's good thinking on the need to achieve energy independence. It
features tougher language about the need to include labor and environmental
standards in trade agreements. It proposes a $7-an-hour minimum wage. It
supports the establishment of a Palestinian state, a stance never before
featured in a Democratic Party platform  although the call comes with
strings attached that impede the establishment of a viable independent
state. And, thanks to pressure from Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., a
Howard Dean backer who brought a measure of that campaign's feistiness as a
platform committee member, it includes some strong language on the need to
insure that "every vote is counted fully and fairly."

But even with that improvement, Jackson correctly notes, "This is a cautious
platform. It says the one priority of Democrats is to beat George Bush.
That's a good goal. But I'm still looking forward to the day when we
recognize that the best way to elect Democrats is not with caution but with
the boldness that builds mass movements for change."