Whigs, Dodos, The Democratic Party?: The Last Chance

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There is a wonderful new post today from Jim Schumacher and Debbie Bookchin, "Hillary and Race Relations: GOP Tactics That Threaten the Democratic Party." They chronicle the low points of the current campaign and issue this warning:

"Hillary is betting that if she becomes the superdelegate nominee, blacks and liberals will have 'no place else to go' and will fall into line. But if Hillary's race-card politics make them feel sufficiently disenfranchised, these Obama supporters may abjure Hillary and sit out the general election altogether. Worse still for Democrats, they may see the party as no longer relevant: a moribund party hijacked by the Clintons' ambition, one that lacks the vision so desperately needed to revive our democracy, a party better left behind and replaced with one built on a new politics of unity and hope."

I urge you to read the full post. It is very strong and clear. Nevertheless, as strong as it is, I think the authors underestimate the peril in which the Democratic Party now finds itself.

Many of us lifelong Democrats have already lost almost all faith in our party because of the abject failure of its leaders. As the Opposition Party, they have provided almost no opposition to the worst president in history, a man with a 28% favorable rating who has led his own party and his country to every sort of embarrassment and disaster. They not only snatched resounding defeat from victory by taking impeachment off the table, but they have seemed even more frantic than Republicans to keep themselves from discovering any smoking guns in any of the Bush administration scandals, including war crimes and serial subversions of the Constitution, that would make impeachment and removal from office both quick and certain.

Why? Why haven't they impeached this failed president, whose high crimes and misdemeanors seem so apparent to most Americans and all the rest of the world, who blithely contemplates new ones every day, and ability to commit them is unimpaired? (Nancy Pelosi will be, for me, as accountable for the bombing of Iran as Bush and Cheney are.) The eternally shameful reason to take and keep impeachment off the table is that impeachment might risk what our Democratic leaders believe to be their otherwise certain progression as they shoulder their Republican Tweedledees aside in November and take their places at the big Washington trough. Michael Mukasey proclaimed that the president has the authority to ignore any law he chooses, and despite this bold assertion of the enabling principle of fascism, Mukasey was confirmed as this nation's attorney general, with my party, the Democrats, in the majority. When Senators Schumer and Feinstein voted to send Mukasey's nomination to the Senate floor, they were voting to send me and people like me to another party. They weren't any more worried about that than the Clinton campaign is now worried about the ultimate vote of blacks and liberals. They thought we would fall in line, sooner or later, because we had to, because we have no place else to go.

I think, and hope, they are wrong. We are hanging around so we can, perhaps, vote Democratic one more time -- for Barack Obama. If we don't get that choice, or if the centrist collusion of the leaders and the depredations of the Clintons and their surrogates help achieve a Republican victory in November that should have been unimaginable, we will be gone, and their opportunities to slobber at the trough will be greatly and permanently reduced. We'll still support and vote for progressives, of course, if they are running on Democratic lines, but I believe and hope we will also be able to support and vote for the candidates of a new Progressive Party. It will take us a long time to elect a progressive president, time the nation and the planet probably don't have: but Tweedledum Democrats are not, for us, an acceptable alternative. We know -- and with Clinton's nomination or McCain's victory it should be obvious to all -- that the collusive mediocrity of centrist Democrats is a greater enemy of the Good, because it will stand in the way of Good forever, than even the Republican Bad.