Day 2 at Take Back America: on standing for something

Day 2 at Take Back America ...

Two years ago, I was here in DC for the Take Back America conference when the various Democratic candidates were just declaring their plans to run. Today, Howard Dean, now head of the Democratic Party, and Senator John Edwards were back.

Dean had much to say that the crowd was waiting for: We need a Democratic Party that does more than criticize the Republican agenda, he said. We need a positive agenda.

The crowd is on their feet.

We need not only to save Social Security, Dean said. We need to fix the private pension system that is underfunded by billions of dollars. CEOs working for bankrupt companies continue to earn millions while they take money out of the pension funds, money that belongs to the workers, not to the corporations. Pensions need to be portable, so workers can take their pensions with them when they change jobs, and they should be under the control of the workers who earned the money.

Dean spoke out in favor of campaign reform, including Instant Runoff Voting. This is the first time I’ve heard a Democratic Party official endorse IRV, which, if enacted, could allow third parties like the Greens to run candidates without risking the spoiler effect.

Yes!

One of Dean’s biggest applause lines was his call for voting reform so we no longer have “two voting machines in a black district and ten voting machines in a white district.”

Whenever speakers here talk about repairing our broken voting system, they are getting standing ovations.

He talked about the “dark, difficult, and dishonest” vision offered by the Republicans.

And he said something else that progressives here clearly wanted to hear – the Democratic Party has to stand for something, and its leadership has to be made up of people with “deep conviction.” Voters want to know that “if something happens to our family, if something happens to our community, if something happens to our nation, the people who are making decisions are making them not from polls or propaganda, but from deep conviction."

Once again the crowd was on its feet.

So it is ironic that Howard Dean, who won widespread support because of his opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, said nothing about the war in his speech.

That was left for Arianna Huffington, once a Newt Gingrich Republican, now one of the most articulate spokespersons of the left. You can’t be a majority party without having something to say about Iraq, she said in a speech immediately following Dean’s. We are a country at war.

Clearly, many in Congress are compromised by their vote to go to war. They will have to do some soul searching and perhaps admit that they were wrong. The Downing Street memo now makes absolutely clear that intelligence was trumped up. Those who now know this should have less difficulty formulating their own exit strategy from support for this war. And they would be serving the cause of transparency and accountability if they would join in the call for a full investigation following on the leads contained in the Downing Street memo. Who knew what about the cooked intelligence, and when did they know it?

If Howard Dean is right and Americans want a party that stands for something, Democratic leadership will have to take a stand on the Iraq War and should be calling for a full investigation into how this tragedy came to be.