memories can't wait
Looking ahead:
Amid speculation that she could seek the same path to the White House, Hillary Clinton used her speech at the convention to dispel any notion that she would ever run as a “liberal” candidate. In using the DLC platform to call for a “cease fire” among the Democratic Party’s different factions, Clinton was sending a clear signal to left forces within the party, such as Moveon.org: Even the slightest nod to anti-war sentiment will be opposed by the party leadership.
Also speaking were several others considered to be potential presidential candidates, including Senator Evan Bayh from Indiana, Governor Tom Vilsack from Iowa and Virginia Governor Mark Warner. Bayh is the DLC’s former chairman, and Vilsack is its current chairman.
Clinton emphasized her commitment to creating “a unified, coherent strategy focused on eliminating terrorists wherever we find them” and “improving homeland defense.” She envisioned a future society in which “we’ve put more troops in uniform, we’ve equipped them better, and we’ve trained them to face today’s stress, not yesterday’s.” In calling for more troops, she repeated the main criticism that Democrats have directed against Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq—that not enough forces were committed to guarantee victory.
Clinton also endorsed DLC ideas such as welfare reform, implemented by her husband, which has deprived millions of people of government assistance. She called for fiscal responsibility and repeated certain “cultural” themes designed to neutralize opposition from the extreme right. She urged passage of an “enforceable international ban on human cloning” and sounded notes from her recent campaign attacking violent video games. She called for all Americans to come together on the basis of “our faith in God and our shared values,” while pledging to “reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions by promoting family planning and by strengthening our systems of adoption and foster care.”
The proposals advanced by Clinton and the other speakers at the convention were developed in several articles published in the most recent issue of the DLC’s magazine, Blueprint.
In the lead article, “How America Can Win Again,” Al From, the DLC’s founder and CEO, and Bruce Reed, its president, voiced full support for the Bush administration’s escalation of militarism under the pretext of a “war on terror.” After September 11, the pair wrote, “for a brief, shining moment, country—not party—was all that mattered.... Four years later, we have won some important victories against terror and tyranny, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the duty we owe to the victims of Sept. 11—and to the cause of freedom—has not been fulfilled.”
In the event of a Democratic electoral victory, the war would not merely continue; it would escalate. The authors criticized the administration for having “failed to arm us economically and militarily for a war that could go on for decades.... Iraq isn’t the last war we’ll have to fight, and we need a bigger army.” They called for 100,000 additional troops in the US military—a demand that was repeated at the convention itself. This echoes a recent bill introduced by Senate Democrats, including Clinton and former vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, for an additional 80,000 troops.
From and Reed sought to underscore the fact that on questions of foreign policy, they have no differences with the Republican Party. “Winning the war on terror,” they wrote, “is too important for either side to spend all its time pointing fingers at each other. We’re Americans first, and we should approach this war the way the American people do: They don’t care which party wins, as long as America wins.”
In an accompanying article, “Valuing Patriotism,” Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a DLC affiliate, wrote that the Democratic Party’s essential task is to forge closer ties to the military. “More than anything else,” he wrote, Democrats “need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism—a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.”
And ahead:
Looking 20 years ahead, the administration perceives that there will come a time when China will have technology superior to America's. When that time comes, America might well say to China that "we can work together," we will be as the Romans to you Greeks. You will be our extraordinary, well-cultivated slaves. But don't try to dominate us. That would be your disaster. This is the scenario that some of the brightest neoconservatives are thinking about. (I use Rome as a metaphor, because metaphors are usually much closer to the truth than facts).
[snip]
The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives. It will be an ever greater and greater overlay on the American system. And before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way. My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state.
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