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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (46508)	10/15/2010 6:02:07 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

A Brand New Fallacy Michael Kazin October 15, 2010 \| 12:00 am Midway through her recent TNR article “Building the Progressive Brand,” Sara Robinson makes one essential point: Progressives, she writes, “have always been at our best when we speak from a place of strong moral authority, rooted deeply in a daring vision of the kind of world we’d like to create.” Unfortunately, she completely ignores how such visions emerged in the past and, worse, assumes that a clever ad campaign can substitute for serious political thinking and organizing. Powerful, history-changing ideologies—whether of left or right—are not commodities. They take shape gradually as activists, intellectuals, and politicians respond to mass grievances and desires, make demands on existing institutions, and build new ones of their own. The original progressives, circa 1900, were motivated by a fear of corporate domination and inspired by the Social Gospel and an equally fervent belief that applied social science could fix the injustices and inefficiencies of industrial society. Their successors in the 1930s advocated a mild, but quite moral, version of Social Democracy; while liberals from the 1950s through the 1970s shifted the focus to winning equal rights for black people, women, and homosexuals. The Center for American Progress has an excellent, ongoing series of essays that outline the key ideas and achievements of these earlier progressives: Despite their differences, I suspect that all would have found either ludicrous or appalling the suggestion that they should “brand” their ideologies as if they were marketing executives at Coke, Ford, or McDonalds (all of which Robinson praises for establishing “corporate identities”). William Jennings Bryan, FDR, Martin Luther King, Betty Friedan, and their followers vigorously resisted the notion that the market should be the main arbiter of winners and losers in American life. Robinson is also wrong about how conservatives built and have maintained a movement that puts forth a simple ideology of laissez-faire economics, an aggressive military, and “traditional” values. After World War II, the right slowly put together a coalition united by a hatred of communism and a profound suspicion of where secular liberals were leading the nation and the “Free World.” Conservatives were able to fit their core ideology on a single index card for two main reasons. First, unlike most progressives, they appreciated that a movement can prosper only in symbiosis with a major party—and parties always translate their agendas into headlines and slogans. Second, as a group composed mainly of white middle- and upper-class Christians, they had no cause to fragment into the various identity clusters that have both enriched American culture and made it difficult for liberals to say precisely what they stand for. But, if it were so easy to be anointed “the Official Conservative Candidate,” as Robinson believes, why have such conservative officeholders as Robert Bennett and Lisa Murkowski been trounced this year by Tea Party Republicans? The best and perhaps the only way for progressives to regain their sense of moral authority is to build movements and nominate candidates who can speak in clear and rational ways about the need to build a decent society that mixes the creativity of the marketplace with the altruism of well-funded, well-run government programs and community and religious activism. A compelling self-definition will arise from that process. Leave the branding to Don Draper. tnr.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (46508)	10/20/2010 6:11:24 PM
From: sandintoes	2 Recommendations Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 71588

Mean old republican women Lead StoryExtreme Girls: All the president’s radical women By Michelle Malkin • October 20, 2010 09:39 AM My column today is a rejoinder to Maureen Dowd’s plaintive wail about Republican Mean Girls in the NY Times on Sunday. I’ll take a GOP mama grizzly who wants government to leave you alone over a Democrat bully bureaucrat any day. As yesterday’s failed attacks on Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle showed, the ladies of the Right have the harridans of the Left in a frenzy. If you’re catching flak, you’re over the target. *** Extreme Girls: All the president’s radical women by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2010 We are in the era of Democratic Extreme Girls — Big Nanny handmaidens who demand control of your children, your health care, your energy use, your pocketbook and your news. And that’s just for starters. If you think President Obama will move to the center after the midterms, think again. Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the possibility that environmental czar Carol Browner could be appointed White House chief of staff next year. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder floated the trial balloon this week, arguing that despite zero national security experience, Browner “has more than enough experience dealing with Congress, with the rest of the government, and is a subject matter expert on the subject that will occupy a considerable amount of the president’s attention in the next two years.” Browner is the neon green bureaucrat who sits on the board of the George Soros-funded, anti-business Center for American Progress and was listed by the Socialist International umbrella group as a member of the “Commission for a Sustainable World Society” until her czar appointment was announced in 2009. A ruthless, power-grabbing regulator since her days in the Clinton administration, Browner has spearheaded the Environmental Protection Agency’s war on carbon, with EPA Secretary Lisa Jackson serving as her front-woman. Their anti-carbon agenda’s job-killing effects are so alarming that several House Democrats have signed on to legislation curtailing the draconian greenhouse gas emissions rules. You want to talk about “mean”? Browner has plenty of “experience” bullying American business executives. She infamously told auto industry execs last year “to put nothing in writing, ever” regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated on a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. She is salivating at the prospect of ramming through the massive, increasingly unpopular cap-and-tax plan in the lame-duck session. And more recently, she gained hands-on experience telling falsehoods to the American public about the BP oil spill. The independent presidential commission on the disaster criticized her earlier this month for repeatedly misrepresenting the findings of a federal analysis, which she claimed showed that “more than three-quarters of the oil is gone.” The oil spill panel also singled out fellow environmental extremist Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Obama’s head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former high-ranking official at the left-wing Environmental Defense Fund, for misleading the public and “contributing to the perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually were.” When she isn’t spreading misinformation, she’s overseeing policies that mom-and-pop fishermen believe will lead to drastic reductions of commercial fishing fleets and recreational fishing activity in favor of centralized control. At the Department of Health and Human Services, chief inquisitor Kathleen Sebelius rules the roost — threatening private companies and insurers who increase rates to cope with Obamacare coverage mandates and lashing out at newspapers who dare report on the costly consequences of the federal law. Among his inner circle, Obama has leaned on senior adviser and Chicago consigliere Valerie Jarrett, the woman who bragged about being “delighted to be able to recruit” disgraced Marxist green jobs czar Van Jones; Anita Dunn, the former communications director who touted Chairman Mao as her favorite philosopher and was the mastermind behind Team O’s war on Fox News; and, of course, the Big Nanny-in-Chief herself, Michelle Obama, who’s using her bully pulpit to pressure restaurants and schools to change their menus and to lobby Congress to redistribute $8 billion away from the federal food stamp program for her public employee union pay-off disguised as a child nutrition bill. While liberal New York Times harridan Maureen Dowd gins up fear about Republican “Mean Girls,” it’s the left-wing women pretending to be our benevolent caretakers who pose the greater threats to our families and freedom.