I am going to update everyone on the project Chris Bowers came up with, you know the one with the nine articles we want to push up into the top 20 search results for John McCain and McCain.

Chris Bowers has some funny ideas.

Bowers envisions a new black-"creative class" alliance in the Democratic Party to wrest control from the current "Democratic Party Establishment." He defines those in the creative class as non-christian (secular? educated?) whites, who with the added support of African-Americans would be able to win Democratic primaries. Bowers saw Barack Obama as the possible architect of this coalition, and is very disappointed by Obama's indifference to the "netroots."

I think I know what Bowers is getting at. Howard Dean, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, etc.  - all the good-government liberal reformers who have run for the Democratic nomination have been undone in part because of their inability to win black votes. Black voters, while quite liberal, or liberal in a very specific way: like union voters and seniors, they are very much aware of their own economic and social interests, and vote accordingly. This is a tale that has been told throughout 2007 - "that Barack is having trouble winning over traditional Democratic constituencies because he talks about abstractions rather than concrete interests. Hillary, like her husband, or Walter Mondale, or Al Gore in 2000, appealed very explicitly to union and african-american interests, and were rewarded with their political support.

Hillary Clinton is simply not more tied to the establishment in any profound way than other major candidates.

                                                                                                  --Chris Bowers

I don't mean to pick on Bowers. Okay, maybe I do, but aside from the increasingly incoherent Taylor Marsh, he's probably done more than any other blogger to help Hillary blur the differences between her and the more progressive candidates, including and especially the one I support, John Edwards. The statement above is demonstrably inaccurate. It's hard to understand how a good healthy brain could produce such a steaming pile of crap. The difference between Clinton and Edwards in this area is nothing if not "profound."

I suppose it would be helpful if we had a working definition of "establishment." Howzabout: "the established centers of powers." Will that do? In the case of politics, we're talking about the mainstream media, K-Street, Wall Street, DC thinktanks, DC-based consultants, Congress, and the political parties themselves. It's perhaps too easy to demonize the establishment--there are some good people and good groups inside the establishment--but as a general rule, the more anti-establishment, the better. Put another way, the more entrenched you are in the established order, the less likely you are to change it: common sense.

It's hard to imagine a more establishment candidate than Hillary. A few google searches give you pages upon pages documenting her ties to Wall Street, Corporate Power, media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, and establishment "thinkers" like surge architect Jack Keane and surge apologist Michael O'Hanlon. She's tied via her closest advisor, Mark Penn, to notoriously criminal corporations and notoriously awful members of the GOP establishment.

She may be doing well among unmarried women, but her real base is composed of wealthy Washintonians:

The level of support here for the junior New York Senator approaches what an incumbent president seeking re-election might expect.

The people and organizations run the gamut: Togo West, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs and CEO of The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation's premier black think tank; Elizabeth Bagley, former US Ambassador to Portugal whose Georgetown home has been the gathering place for countless fundraisers; Elizabeth Birch, former head of the Human Rights Campaign, and her former partner, MSNBC and CNBC commentator Hilary Rosen and, of course, former DNC chair and money-man extraordinaire Terry McAuliffe.

Those names only touch the surface of Clinton's support among the Democratic establishment.

Take Matthew Bernstein, a prominent Hillary-backer. He is a classic Washington success story. Once a lowly legislative assistant to former Senator Howard Metzenbaum, he is now a lobbyist whose clients paid his law firm $1.98 million during just the first half of 2006, according to reports filed with the Senate. Among those clients is the Estate Tax Coalition seeking permanent elimination of the burdensome levy placed on the nation's wealthiest citizens.

And then there is Vernon Jordan, one of this city's highest-profile wheeler-dealers, who is now a Clinton $100,000-plus bundler. And Vernon is not the only major bundler in the Jordan family. His wife, Ann Dibble Jordan is also a $100,000-plus bundler whose credentials as a player in Washington include past or present board memberships at Johnson & Johnson, Automatic Data Processing, Citigroup, and Catalyst; service as a trustee at The Brookings Institution, the University of Chicago, WETA (Washington's PBS affiliate), and the Phillips Collection; and chair of the Board of Directors at the National Symphony Orchestra.

You could argue that the Clintons used to stand somewhat outside the establishment, back when the atrocious Sally Quinn was chastising them for soiling her lovely town. But they are now the quintessential insiders, linked socially, financially, and politically to every important pocket of power. This is a fact, one that Bowers would have to concede. His claim, in any case, is not that Clinton isn't part of the establishment but that Edwards is just as much part of the establishment. It's an absurd claim, one that makes you wonder which presidential race Bowers is watching.

It's not that Edwards doesn't have connections to the establishment. Of course he does. He raises money from Wall Street execs and rich DC lawyers. Some of his advisors are establishment figures. But his connections aren't defining, unless you consider Big Labor and Trial Lawyers part of the establishment. In any case, both unions and trial lawyers generally advocate policies that benefit people outside the establishment. The same goes for JRE's campaign manager, David Bonior, a longtime Congressman who championed proworker policies.

What's amazing, in fact, is the extent to which a former senator and vice presidential candidate has broken free from--and run against--the traditional power centers. Considering our political system, ruled as it is by money and access, Edwards is about as anti-establishment as a viable presidential candidate could be.

Even as a senator, Edwards wasn't popular among the establishment. Maybe it was his refusal to play the game, or his anticorporate lawyering, or his populist bent, or his working class background, or the way he wore his ambition and his money or his sleeve, but Beltway elites never considered him one of their own, and the wariness was mutual. His distance from the establishment only grew when he spent the years after his 2004 campaign working with labor unions and grassroots antipoverty organizations like ACORN. It was clear that he was running for president, so why he wasn't spending his time raising money and courting elites? That's what you're supposed to do. Said the National Journal (subs only):

Perhaps most bewildering to some inside-the-Beltway Democrats is that Edwards doesn't seem to care whether they think he's making all the wrong moves.

Speaking to Ezra Klein, Chuck Todd, himself a DC insider, marveled at the mutual dislike of Edwards and DC elites. If this doesn't make you like Edwards more, then I'm not sure the sphere is the place for you.

...[F]or some reason he's pissed off half of DC. I can't tell you why, I don't know. But half of the Democratic elite here in DC just hate John Edwards. It's amazing, some of it's irrational, and the Edwards people know it and see it as a badge of honor, somewhat. Maybe they feel like it's because he didn't play ball, maybe they feel like he forced himself onto the ticket, that he was too brazen in how he campaigned for that second slot. There's no one rational reason, but there's a not insignificant clique of elites in DC who are not Edwards fans, and who are borderline irrational about it. It's not unlike that sort of clique of Republicans and John McCain.

But it's his distance from one particular part of DC that is particularly exciting: that redlight district known as K-Street. According to an article in the Hill several months ago, he has "little discernible support" on K-Street, and his moves in recents months have done nothing to change that. Edwards has never taken money from federal lobbyists, and this summer he went one better, calling on all Democrats, including Hillary, the national party, and the Congressional committees to join him in rejecting K-Street cash. If you're trying to anger the establishment, this is a good way to do it.

And here's another: you go around the country describing the choice facing the country as "the establishment elites versus the American people," pointing out that the system is:

controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed.

Hillary couldn't credibly give that speech even if she wanted to. Note in particular his appropriately harsh words for the elite media. He may not have been planning to run against the press, but once it tried (and failed) to bury him, it made sense for him to blast the corporate media, and blast them he has. At the You Tube Debate, he used his video to condemn their obscenely skewed priorities, and later, opposing media consolidation, he called on Hillary and all Dems to refuse contributions from Rupert and other Newscorps execs. Edwards doesn't like the mainstream media, and as Jeff Cohen discusses here, they don't like him.

So if you're keeping track at home, Edwards is opposed, both in rhetoric and reality, to the elite Dems of DC, K-Street, and the corporate media. You should also know that Wall Street pimp Jim Cramer calls him Public Enemy Number One," and that the netroots are one his important constituencies, and that in addition to Bonior and Elizabeth Edwards, other important players on his campaign are two anti-Walmart activists and the most antiestablishment of the big name consulants, Joe Trippi.

In terms of antiestablishment cred, Edwards may not be say, Zack de la Rocha--he's a mainstream pol, after all--but he puts Hillary Clinton to shame. Note to big bloggers: it's fine if you don't want to support Edwards (or Obama.) Really, it is. Many good progressive aren't. But please please please don't rationalize the decision with bullshit.

John Edwards gave the speech of everyone's life the other day, a masterpiece of progressive populism, a verbal grenade tossed at the Establishment. The key line should be tattooed on Rahm Emanuel's face: "We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other." RTWT.

Not every pol could credibly deliver that speech. Few could. Only one top-tier contender could. It's the speech Edwards has been working toward since--well, perhaps since he was growing up working class in a struggling mill town, probably since he was an attorney fighting violent crime by corporations, certainly since he was making economic inequality the focus of his last campaign.

Edwards earned the ability to deliver that speech by preaching populism before populism was cool, by never taking a cent from K-Street, by fighting HMOs when he was a Senator, by helping to make poverty a big issue again, by breaking free from the Beltway, by casting his lot with unions, and, above all, by advocating positions that would give power to people at the expense of rich people and corporations. You can't say these words unless you have policies to back them up. The system, he said, is corrupt:

It's controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don't stand a chance.

Real change starts with being honest -- the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it's rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They'll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are -- not for the country, but for themselves.

In short, Edwards gave a speech saying exactly what progressives want pols to say. Most people in the sphere were thrilled. Ivan, a Gore supporter, wrote a Daily Kos diary on the speech and it shot up the rec list, where it co-existed for most of the day with a diary on the same subject by Edwards blogger Tracy Joan: a rare twofer. You could feel the buzz.

But the reaction from the big blogs was mixed, at best. The only blogger with a sizable platform to praise the speech was Matt Yglesias. Taylor Marsh and Open Left's Brklyn Girl objected to Edwards's criticism of Hillary, Marsh because it reminded her of the GOP and Brooklyngirl because it reminded her of Nader. Hmm. As if the Clintons' corporate-kissing were delightful and should be beyond criticism. Note to Marsh: the Lincoln bedroom trangressions were exaggerrated but not fabricated by the rightwing. If progressive bloggers want the next president to be no less plutocratic than Bill Clinton, then they should say so. Oliver Willis complained that Edwards waited till he was behind (God forbid) to give this speech. Willis seems not to know that Edwards has been banging essentially this same drum for years and gave a very similar speech in June. Like some conventional journalist, Willis is hanging on the national horserace.

The reaction of big bloggers to JRE's sublime speech points to a larger issue: the failure, or slowness, of progressive bloggers to line up behind what Striling Newberry calls the "essentially progressive major candidate." Edwards isn't the only option for progressives--a case can be made for one or two others--but he increasingly looks like the best option, a once-in-a-generation combination of electoral and ideological strength that shouldn't be bypassed without a good reason.

Determining the relative progressivism of the candidates isn't a science, but conclusions can be made, differences discerned. Let's look at two vital issues: health care and climate change. Edwards is the only viable candidate to offer both a plan for universal health insurance and a bold plan on climate change. And he alone is prepared to give these issues the priority they deserve. Listen to the Nation.

The Democratic debate has been driven by the populism of John Edwards's "two Americas" rhetoric, as well as the boldness of his proposals on healthcare and energy...Only Edwards has challenged the Democratic fetish about balanced budgets, arguing that moving to new energy and providing healthcare are more important.

Yet the only big or biggish (subjective, I realize) blogger to have endorsed Edwards is The General. Chris Bowers declared himself a "staunch Edwards supporter" but retracted his endorsement without offering a reason. David Sirota often praises JRE but is holding off on an endorsement. Amanda Marcotte went to work for Edwards but hasn't endorsed him. None of the Daily Kos frontpagers has endorsed a candidate.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with being undecided--I remained undecided through the last election--but the paucity of endorsements tells me that bloggers are reluctant to take sides. Chris Bowers agrees. In a typically thoughtful post, he cited three reasons why he hasn't endorsed: the presence of netroots handlers on the campaigns (who are his friends), a desire for access to the campaigns, the lack of consensus among readers, to whom he's accountable. His reasons are understandable--but not compelling. If his readers are split, then he can't endorse? Come on. Lead. And if you're not doing something for fear of straining your relationships with people in power, friends or not, it's time to reevaluate your priorities.

Am I being too harsh? Maybe bloggers are doing what a lot of progressives are doing: waiting to make sure Gore doesn't run. I wrote a Kos diary a while ago calling on big bloggers to get off the fence. It prompted mostly indignation, but Miss Laura of Daily Kos made an interesting comment.

The fact that tons of people will be reading, judging, and often taking violent exception to your choice means you're going to think it through a little more carefully. Am I really prepared to have this conversation with hundreds or thousands of people who will feel free to use it to attack every single thing I say? Note that here I'm saying something deeper than "I have a preference but don't want to say" - I'm saying that knowledge of the meatgrinder my preference would be put through is making me extra extra careful in my choices.

Fair enough, but surely Miss Laura overstates the awfulness of Kossacks. The vast majority of us would accept and even respect a thoughtful, well-reasoned endorsement. Would a few jerks use the endorsement to attack her? Of course. Deal with it. Such is the price of having a prominent platform.

Blogs shouldn't try to force consensus; nor, though, should they remain neutral for neutrality's sake. Why does this matter? Because, for one thing, if progressive positions and framing don't win candidates progressive support, there will be less incentive to run left. And Edwards or Obama will likely need a push from the netroots to beat Hillary: make no mistake, to remain neutral, whether you're a union or a progressive blog, is to help Hillary. It's odd to see elite bloggers fretting about Hillary's lead at the same time that they refuse to get behind an opposing candidate. And the sphere itself will suffer if it fails to give explicit support to a candidate, or candidates. There's strength in consensus, obviously. A progressive sphere that doesn't back a progressive candidate is less influential than it could and should be.

PLEASE FORWARD

1. Don't Miss Thursday 8/25 with Drinking Liberally & Openleft's Chris Bowers
 

I'm really pleased to see the great work being done by Todd Beeton, Jonathan Singer, and of course, Jerome.  I'm particularly excited for the anti-NRA campaign, as they are obviously a cornerstone of right-wing power and someone should take them on directly.  At my new home, OpenLeft, we've already had a bunch of significant discussions that are bearing on progressive power.  Here's a sampling:

• The most significant discussion on the site was with Chris Bowers and Maren Hesla of Emily's List, on why so many top-tier female House candidates lost last cycle while male candidates won.  Chris's intitial post is here, and Hesla responds here.

• The awesome-est conversation was Living Liberally's discussion of the Transformers, which I haven't yet seen to my eternal 7 year old boy shame.

• Chris Bowers has an analysis of momentum from Iowa, and a piece titled 'Democratic Nomination Campaign Dangerously Stable'.  He has also done some good reporting of where Presidential candidates stand on leaving troops in Iraq.

• I'm doing a series on the iPhone, and the net neutrality/internet freedom issues surrounding the release of the phone and the upcoming sale of a huge chunk of the public airwaves next week.  

• I also wrote a piece on the Sierra Club's new partnership with Moveon and Brave New Films taking on Fox News and Home Depot.  This is the first time a major non-internet advocacy group has taken on Fox News, and it's an important coalition to watch.

• Mike Lux has a good piece on how Democratic insiders failed in the 1970s titled 'The assumptions of taking for granted that you are a majority', and Living Liberally has jokes and stories from around the country.

• We're also looking at races in Washington's eighth and the special 'Actblue' election in Massachusetts fifth.

• Finally, David Sirota has a good column on prioritizing issue campaigns, and I've done two videos with lobbyist Ben Scott that clearly explain the upcoming public airwaves auction.  

We're trying a number of things on the site, including videoblogging with people in politics engaged in big fights, comedy, and a 'right to respond' feature where groups that are criticized have the official right to respond on the front page.

Come by, and let us know what you think.

I guess I'll start explaining why I'm leaving MyDD by giving you the real story of why I'm in politics, and what I actually believe.  I wish I could say that it starts with a noble battle with developers, a war, or a fight with an employer, but the reality is that it's a lot more petty and unnoble.  It started with my relationship with my immediate family, along my relationship to the past.

You might have wondered what happened to Larry Kissell after November's election.  We haven't been bringing much news out from North Carolina about him, so wanted to update you on all that has happened.    

Larry Kissell immediately declared his intent to run again in 2008.  He might have slowed down over winter holidays, but he hasn't missed a beat.  He is already running like an old pro and is doing what he can to help other prospective congressional candidates in North Carolina.

This past weekend Larry and his staff attended the annual convention of the Young Democrats of North Carolina.  A reception was held for him with DCCC recruitment chair, Rep. Artur Davis, Rep. Brad Miller, NCDP Chair Jerry Meek and Chris Bowers attending.  A full post about the event is at BlueNC.