- Health care for every American.
- Access to a good education for every American regardless of ability to pay.
- The right to privacy without government interference except for critical government needs (as in criminal cases.)
- A secure retirement payment from the Social Security system.
- The right to organize a union without being fired for it.
These are the basics. The following are highly important, but more flexible:
- Every American should have the right to practice and teach his or her own religious beliefs. He or she should not be proselytized on government property or paid for by government tax money by either word or symbol.
- The right to a community that is safe from criminals and that is protected from environmental hazards.
- Adequate clean water.
- Security from war and terrorism.
- Honesty, full information and fair treatment from people who sell goods and services, and reasonable procedures for enforcing that fair treatment.
- Sellers have the right to offer and sell goods and services without being cheated and without unnecessary interference. Procedures for enforcing fair treatment to customers need to be reasonable to the sellers also.
- Every potential voter has the right to vote in a reasonable manner in a convenient place. Handicapped voters have the right to assistance in voting. The voter has the right to expect that his vote will be counted.
Those are my idea of a minimum platform for every Democratic candidate for office. Every candidate for nomination or election should be required to sign that pledge. Then they should be held to it, in the way Grover Norquist holds Republicans to the "No new Taxes" pledge.
One other thing is that every Democrat should always remember the 11th Commandment. "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Democrat."
I was reading Digby as well as the discussion of the DLC over at TPM Cafe where the effect of the DLC on the Democratic Party is throughly disected. The two are really the same discussion. The DLC is the institutionalism of centerism and policy wonkism as a substitute for agreement on what it means to be a Democrat.Digby is discussing the new book by Rick Perlstein (see right hand side of this magazing.) Essentially Rick Perlstein is discussing how the effort to conduct "triangulation" and appeal to swing voters has cost the Democratic Party to be viewed as not standing for anything. I think he is right. Atrios refers to this article in the Village Voice in which Perlstein presents his view briefly and cogently.
The DLC wants to take the center position, but when you don't have a fixed position that you stand for, then the center position means you are moving towards the opposition whether they are correct or incorrect.
It is like the story of the husband and the wife who find there is only one dessert left, and they both want it. The husband says he wants the whole thing, so the wife suggests they should split it 50 - 50.
So the husband says "Let's take the center position. I'll get 75% and you get 25%.
The Democratic Party has done little in the last four decades to maintain the base of the Democratic Party, while the Republicans have worked very hard to build their base. The result is that every negotiation starts with the Democratic position and drifts to the Republican. There is no standard that Democrats can use to enforce party discipline. The result is that the country is seen as drifting to the right, and free-lancers like Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman feather their own nests by abandoning their Democratic colleagues - like on the bankruptcy bill.
In the meantime the Democratic Party is seen as not standing for anything at all. Voters may not like the Republican positions, but since there is no known alternative, they vote for the one they know.
So I am proposing the party pledge above as a standard by which Democrats can be measured, and by which party discipline can be maintained. Maybe we can be seen as standing for something, not just a bunch of policy wonks who complain about the idiot Republicans.
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