My 1000th post - redux. From 2008, but just as valid today.
After 6 years of membership, and 7 years of being on DU, I have finally gotten to my 1000th post. As you can surmise, I am not the most chatty, but I do spend at least a couple of hours a day on DU. So, I have had a long time to figure out what I want to say in my 1000th post.
A few weeks ago, a friend told me that he is planning to check out the opportunities to stand for election for the state legislature of his home state. When we're together, we often discuss politics, and even tho' I am a democratic socialist, and he decidedly is not, we respect each other. Our on-going joke is that when he's elected president in 2024, he'll appoint me as his Secretary of State. I told him I will support him and that I will help him get elected, because I believe he will do a much better job than those currently elected.
The catch? He's a republican. Granted, an old-school republican who voted for Kerry, and who holds to the values that Bush** has trampled on as surely as he has trampled on the Constitution, the respect, and the dignity of the USA - fiscal responsibility, small government, states' rights, non-interference abroad, the right of people to live unmeddled with. But still, a republican. And because I know him, and he's a friend, I will support him, all the while challenging him on the policies on which we disagree.
But, to my point. Here we have a republican, who has been marginalized in his own party, whose values are not upheld by his own party, and who has decided to do something about it by participating in the election process. I say it is decidedly the time for the progressives, the anti-war people, the leftwing, the socialists, the activists to do the same. You must start standing for election in each and every slot - from dog-catcher on upwards. The only way you will transform the election process is by participating in it. The Democratic party needs a pool of electable candidates from which the presidential candidate of 2024 will emerge. The more truly Democratic that pool, the less the chance of a DINO. That is the only way American politics can move back from the right, and start occupying the proper axis. If it is successful enough, it might even start moving America's political parties to the left.
Now, I know that it will be an enormous undertaking, especially as the American economy is on the brink of disaster, and those under economic attack are the very same as would be needed to implement such a plan (which is not a coincidence.) But it is necessary. Even in states where the people with a (D) after their name has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected, there should not be one slot where the only candidate is the opposition's candidate. There needs to be a (D) on every local election paper. That doesn't mean you should give up the national efforts that you are doing, but it is imperative that the future presidential and Congressional candidates are from the grassroots rather than only the millionaires.
You may ask, why is this foreigner meddling in American politics? While you may not like it, you must realize that who you elect, do not only have consequences for you, in your districts, your counties, your states, your nation. It very much has consequences, often most dire consequences, for the rest of the world as well. In no other country in the world today, is the leadership of such importance to the rest of the world. Ahmadinejad, Kim, Mugabe, Chirac, Putin, Wen - none of them has as much to say over the rest of the world, simply because they do not have the power, the veneer of respectability, the willingness to throw away the rules as Bush** does. We, the rest of the world, must put this in your hands if we are to uphold the laws and principles that we wish you would follow. I hope you manage it.