If what Roll Call is reporting (via DailyKos) is true then Hallelujah! (to use a religious phrase just to further infuriate Sam Harris). Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats will unveil this fall a broad, inspiring Democratic agenda for midterm candidates to run on. If true then the desperate cries from insiders and outsiders like HuffPosters Donnie Fowler, Jamal Simmons, Rahm Emmanuel, RJ Eskow, Flavia Colgan and myself have finally been heard. All I ask is that we be bold, positive, inspiring and that you allow us regular folks to participate by electronically posting the new platform on the web for anyone to sign at the same time you present it to the press. Johnkerry.org has a vast mailing list leftover from the last election and every Democrat holding elected office could add the link to their homepage. By allowing all of us to co-sign this new Constitution you would energize us all tremendously, we whose sails have yet to refill since the night of the last Presidential election. We would all see that hundreds of thousands of Americans all want our nation to change course and follow this new direction. I can't think of anything more exciting. To make it even more of a movement you should make up stickers and buttons with the name of the new document as if the midterms were as important as a Presidential election (which, this time, they are). Orchestrated with half the panache that Karl Rove put into his events I’m betting we’d all be surprised by how quickly our new clear message would take hold. Mr. Bush has pushed his party into a dank corner so not just the Left but the entire fluid, independent Center now hungers to be lead out of our current national malaise.
I’m sure you’re finding, in drafting this document, that the trickiest point in the platform to sharpen is Iraq. Our party’s response spans from the “Get Out Now”ers to the “Stay the Course”ers and though finding common ground won’t be easy, not offering something concrete and inspiring to the American people on the number-one issue currently plaguing us dooms any Democratic agenda to irrelevance. Both sides need to concede something. Maxine Waters, Russ Feingold and the others who advocate (as do I) beginning troop withdrawal at a date certain need to listen hard to experts like Wes Clark who urge aggressive regional diplomacy before any talk of significant troop withdrawal. Uber-Hawks like Lieberman and Hilary need to see that they are hitched to Bush’s millstone and it will sink them all to the bottom of the Potomac if they don’t free themselves right away. Just because Bush and Rove have framed the debate on Iraq as "stay = strong," "leave = weak" doesn’t mean they are right. Seventy-percent of Americans no longer believe them, Mrs. Clinton why do you still?
What I would humbly suggest is that we pull out our Ace in the Hole – Bill Clinton. In the platform we should urge the current President to appoint the former President as his special envoy to the Middle East. His tireless work for a Middle-East peace gives him impeccable street cred in the region when the rest of the U.S. government has none. Bill could sit down with the regional players, the Arab League and the U.N. and hammer out an accord where pan-Arab troops would help Iraqis police their streets and train Iraqi troops – Sunnis in Sunni regions, Shiites in Shiite regions. We would still provide an overall umbrella of protection but we would become less of a lightning rod for the insurgents. A stable, peace-loving pan-Arab Iraq is in the best interest of everyone in the region and a pan-Arab solution would bring a face-saving pride to the regional players, allow us to strategically disengage and prove to the world that we have no long-term colonial designs on the region either for oil or for Western-styled secularism.
The final carrot we would hold out for the Arab League is that Mr. Clinton would re-engage the U.S. in hammering out with Israel a timetable for a peaceful Palestinian state. That one (huge) step will take countless suicide bombers off the streets and back in the high schools and universities where they belong. That one (huge) step will save more lives than every airport screener on the face of the earth.