The Chris Moeller Archives

The Vichy Caucus-goer

I've been shifting back and forth to various options on how best to handle the Iowa Caucuses, but trying to make something democratic out of this most undemocratic of political events might be a fool's errand. As Slate's Christopher Hitchins points out, the Iowa rules are arcane and "in a genuine democratic process... Tammany tactics"- like shoveling someone's sidewalk or babysitting their kids- "would long ago have been declared illegal," while the mainstream news media, which I've struggled against my entire adult life, takes the caucus structure and runs straight to the bank. When my downstairs neighbor stops by and invites me to a pre-caucus eat and drink for candidate Obama, I simply nod and smile, but what I really want to say is "If you forget that I turned down free alcohol and an hour of fellowship with the newly-formed condo association, I'll forget that you just tried to bribe me."

Over the course of a year, I've weighed the following options in relationship to the 2008 caucuses, which arrive tomorrow night...

a) Supporting John Edwards, the newly-populist progressive candidate, going so far as to write an endorsement for his campaign on the blog.

b) Skipping the caucuses altogether, boycotting a party-organized event that not only props up our nation's unconstitutional and demonic two-party system, but roots out and crushes less-financially-heeled candidates within the party that the establishment-appointed precinct chairpersons so fascistly deem "unviable."

c) Supporting Dennis Kucinich, who largely shares my worldview, but who has absolutely wasted his time attempting to be taken seriously within an increasingly conservative and corporatist Democratic party, and who was completely ignored by Iowa's largest newspaper-- nothing if not the state's self-appointed cheerleader-- because he didn't operate a political office out of the state. (Strangely though, Republicans Rudy Guiliani and John McCain were routinely included in candidate features in the paper despite announcing they would not be campaigning in Iowa upon dropping out of the GOP Straw Poll last summer. McCain even ultimately picked up the newspaper's endorsement.)

...and most recently, d) Going to the caucus but only getting as far as the door so I could see if they were handing out the state's new court-mandated voter registration forms in which you can now register as a member of the Green Party, saving me a trip to the courthouse.


I think I've come up now with a solution that combines three of these four options. Three things happened on New Year's Day that helped to crystalize my mission for caucus night.

Firstly, candidate Kucinich made another of his last-second appeals yesterday for his Iowa supporters to back a 2nd choice candidate. In 2004, I thought he erred in choosing the (at-the-time) more conservative John Edwards over the anti-war candidate Howard Dean, and now he's done it again, giving his 2nd-choice endorsement to Barack Obama over Edwards. Kucinich's action, though, helped to drive home the point for me that at the party primary/caucus level, when a progressive and liberal's participation and support is not being taken for granted, choosing a viable alternative to the corporatist's agenda can be grounded in logic and practicality. A registered Democrat, as I remain until I can get my hands on one of the new voter registrations, can strike an important blow in support of the resurrection of the party by casting their vote, in this case, against Hillary Clinton, the coldly-calculating, triangulating, unprincipled closet Republican favored by the party's corporate paymasters.

John Edwards is that opposition candidate, leading me to point number two: public advocate Ralph Nader expressed his "strong support" for Edwards this week, saying that Edwards "now has the most progressive message across the broad spectrum of corporate power damaging the interests of workers, consumers, taxpayers, of any candidate I have-- leading candidate I have seen in years." Adding, "the key phrase is when he (Edwards) says he doesn't want to replace a corporate Republican with a corporate Democrat. It's the only time I've heard a Democrat talk that way in a long time."

Many of Nader's corporate and turn-coat detractors on the left, still so enslaved to their unfocused anti-Bush anger to reason like adults, have already denounced Nader's action, blind to the fact that just like in 2000 and 2004, Nader is hand-delivering a group of voters and a winning electoral agenda to the Democratic party if they're only willing to take that agenda and run with it. (My guess though is that, once again, they'll choose the path to quick corporate fundraising instead with the same results come November.)

His critics argue that Nader's pull in electoral politics continues to be low, and to a certain point that's true. Nader's supporters are not "ditto-heads," to use a once-popular Republican phrase, and Nader has never asked his backers to follow him into the fires of hell (though some of us would.) Nader is instead an advocate of active citizenship and the democratization and diversity of ideas and voices, demanding nothing more of people than what he has given himself, which is the highest ideal. But of course, his principled voice and a Nader endorsement does carry a tremendous weight with me, and he makes a very strong case this time for Edwards.

When a candidate sounds a trumpet against the corruption by the corporate state, the mainstream media that the state controls will lash out against the candidate, and in the case of Edwards, they have this time. In recent weeks, pundits have accused Edwards of being increasingly "angry," which will always be the spin du jour when the issue of class conflict is waged by someone with their heart in the camp of the lower economic class. In these instances, it is important that we rally around the message to show that it has resonance.

Edwards has strongly established himself as the anti-Hillary candidate, where sadly, Barack Obama has not. Clinton's unapologetic vote for giving President Bush war authority on the Iraqi people was bad enough, but her judgement was even worse when she voted a second time to grant war authority to Bush and Cheney this summer on Iran, and she looked like an even bigger fool when later intelligence reports, like with Iraq, later contradicted the reports of imminent danger the neo-cons and the Liebermans were trying to hawk to the American people. (Hillary's been fooled more times by this president than she was the last one.) It would have been nice to have an opposition candidate of Obama's stature that could have called Clinton out on this preposterous voting record, but unfortunately, Obama didn't show up for the Senate vote on Iran.

Furthermore, despite Obama's initial opposition to the Iraq war, he has subsequently backed all of the military funding measures, and he's shown a lack of political sophistication by falling for the conservative rhetorical lies about harnessing nuclear energy and questioning the long-term financial viability of Social Security, whose destruction, if and when it comes, will be the ultimate betrayal of the New Deal. If these are some of Obama's ideas for "transcending partisanship" in Washington, than he can take his entire agenda back to Illinois. Also, I resented his recent attack on Edwards in which he attempted to brand and denigrate his opponent as "a trial lawyer." Edwards' record on fighting corporations in the courtroom is nonpareil, and the courtroom has been one of the few places, thanks also to the efforts of Ralph Nader and the like, where the country has still been seeing progressive action (except, of course, from the Supreme Court.)

The third thing that happened yesterday to help coalesce my caucus plan is that John Edwards finally delivered an Iraq policy that I can get behind completely. President Edwards would immediately withdraw 40,000 to 50,000 troops from the country. Nearly all of the remaining troops would be out in 9 to 10 months, with the only remaining contingent there to protect the American Embassy and in humanitarian efforts, and the military would only train Iraqi forces from outside the country. "I absolutely believe this to my soul: we are there propping up their bad behavior," Edwards says, "I mean really, how many American lives and how much American taxpayer money are we going to continue to expend waiting for these political leaders to do something? Because that is precisely what we are doing."

So this is what I've decided, and of course, it's subject to change up until the very last moment: I'm going to attend my caucus at the Edmonds Academy at the top of the hill as a member of the Democratic party. I'm going to slip a voter registration form into my pocket on the way into the meeting (assuming perhaps naively that they'll be providing the new updated forms.) Then, I'm going to caucus for Dennis Kucinich in deference to his extraordinary progressive record in the Congress. Then assuming that he will not be deemed "viable" by the caucus nazis, I will shift my support to John Edwards.

The only element of this plan in which I still need to reconcile myself is that I'll be choosing to play ball within a terribly corrupt system. To express this guilt on my conscience, I'm going to link again here at the end of the post to the Chris Hitchins article I linked already at the beginning. If you're an Iowan and you choose to stay home on caucus night, don't let anyone tell you that you're ignoring your civic duty. You'll have my respect. I leaned both ways, but decided to go.

posted by CM @ 12:27 PM