Excerpt:

Iowan and Olympic Gold Medalist Shawn Johnson started the day off by leading the pledge of allegiance.

Bill Richardson outlined how McCain has consistently changed his position on numerous issues and then nailed McCain on wearing $520 pair of Italian loafers, saying…

John McCain may pay hundreds of dollars for his shoes, but we’re the ones who will pay for his flip-flops.

Al Gore spoke last night and had this great line…

Today, we face essentially the same choice we faced in 2000, though it may be even more obvious now - because John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them, the same policies all over again?

Hey, I believe in recycling, but that’s ridiculous.

Then a group of everyday people who were Republicans, but are now supporting Obama spoke. One of these people was Barney Smith from Marion, Indiana who summed up the difference between Obama and McCain…

We need a president who puts the Barney Smiths before the Smith Barneys.

I will write more later about Obama’s speech, but this article by David Sirota sums up Obama’s speech, saying that Obama has made an economic populism the key theme to this election.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

The Economist takes a look at Sen. Jim Webb possibly being Obama’s running mate.

Webb has great resume on foreign policy issues and opposed the Iraq War from the beginning…

In his prescience on this issue, Mr Webb, who is now a senator, has much in common with Barack Obama. The difference is that Mr Webb is a military man. He attended the Naval Academy (also John McCain’s alma mater), was decorated four times and wounded twice in Vietnam, and served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy. His father was in the air force; his son served in Iraq. No one, therefore, can accuse Mr Webb of being an effete peacenik.

Webb comes from a swing state and is a Washington outisder…

He is from Virginia, a battleground state with 13 juicy electoral votes. At 62, he is reassuringly older than Mr Obama, but he has been a politician for less than two years, which fits nicely with Mr Obama’s message of freshness and change.

However, they conclude that Webb would be a poor choice because he is a fire breathing economic populist.

The main worry about Mr Webb, however, is that he is a genuine fire-breathing economic populist. He appears actually to believe the sort of stuff that Mr Obama only says during Democratic primaries. Since vice-presidents sometimes become presidents, this matters. American workers, says Mr Webb, “are at the mercy of cut-throat executives who are vastly overpaid, partly as a consequence of giving [the workers’] jobs away to other people.” Illegal immigration and globalisation “threaten to dissipate” the American middle-class way of life. He predicts that, unless the government acts to restore “economic fairness”, America “may well go the way of ancient Greece [or] greed-ridden Rome”.

I think that might be the biggest reason why Webb should be Obama’s VP.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

I have been reading The Uprising by David Sirota. Sirota was on PBS’s NOW last week to discuss the book.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Mike Huckabee’s latest TV ad in Michigan highlights the struggles of working families and the loss of jobs.

The best line…

I believe most Americans won’t their next President to remind them of they guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

EJ Dionne of the Washington Post has a story out about the economic populist themes of John Edwards and Mike Huckabee’s campaigns. From my experiences talking to Republicans about different issues, one thing we can agree on is that government policy favors corporations and the wealthy over the interests of average people and that big money has too much influence in the process.

Dionne has this quote by Huckabee at a recent campaign event in Iowa…

“I’m not exactly the pick of some of the East Coast establishment Republicans,” the former governor of Arkansas said in a nice bit of heartland understatement. “I think they don’t understand a lot of us who don’t live in their world.”

“If you ask a hedge fund manager what’s he worried about, he’s going to give you a very different answer than a guy who just lost his job in a factory in Orange City,” Huckabee continues in a quiet voice, referring to a town in the western part of the state. And then he speaks up for “the guy in Orange City” who is alarmed by the price of gasoline, the rising costs of college and health care, the inexorable increases in “deductibles” and “co-pays.”

Dionne concludes…

Since the Reagan era, the heroes of the nation’s economic story have been valiant entrepreneurs who “took risks” and “created wealth.” This narrative advanced the Republican cause and seeped deeply into the Democratic Party. If Iowa is any indication, there is a new narrative in which the old heroes are cast as the goats of the story and the new heroes are people like “the guy in Orange City.” There is a thunder out of Iowa, and it is shaking both parties.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Paul Krugman has an article that shows how the country is becoming more liberal. He cites polls that show Americans agreeing with liberal positions and the elections of progressives in red states in 2006.

Krugman then discusses the need for progressives to take advantage of that shift by pushing ahead on bold ideas.

The question, however, is whether Democrats will take advantage of America’s new liberalism. To do that, they have to be ready to forcefully make the case that progressive goals are right and conservatives are wrong. They also need to be ready to fight some very nasty political battles.

And that’s where the continuing focus of many people on Bush, rather than the movement he represents, has become a problem.

Krugman concludes…

So, here’s my worry: Democrats, with the encouragement of people in the news media who seek bipartisanship for its own sake, may fall into the trap of trying to be anti-Bushes—of trying to transcend partisanship, seeking some middle ground between the parties.

That middle ground doesn’t exist—and if Democrats try to find it, they’ll squander a huge opportunity. Right now, the stars are aligned for a major change in America’s direction. If the Democrats play nice, that opportunity may soon be gone.

As Ned Lamont stated no one is looking for a moderate to run their company, they want someone who stands up for their strong beliefs. The idea of a moderate is a trap because the term moderate is defined in the political dialogue today means “being in the middle of elite opinion in Washington, D.C.”

The dismal approval ratings of the President and of Congress shows that Americans are overwhelmingly disappointed in their government. This is not because of partisan bickering, but because it seems that both parties represent corporate profit instead of the people that elected them.

The 2006 elections showed that candidates that run on a platform of economic populism win regardless of what state they come from. People are looking for candidate that have the courage to push big ideas, not ones that run to the middle.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

Mike Lux takes an in depth look at swing districts. His overriding theme is that…

a populist/progressive message tends to out-perform a traditional John Kerry-esque establishment/liberal message in most swing districts. This goes against conventional wisdom that swing voters tend to be “office park dads” and other Mark Penn/DLC swing voter constructs.

Lux tested his theory by looking at districts that are held by Democrats, but lean Republican in Presidential elections.

I counted 22 members of Congress who have clearly run either progressive message campaigns, been champions of progressive issues in Congress, or both. They include some newcomers like Hodes and Shea-Porter from NH, Braley from IA, Hall and Gillibrand from NY. And they include some of the best populists in Congress who have been around for a while, like Obey from Wisconsin, DeFazio from Oregon, Doggett from Texas and Allen from Maine, members of Congress who survived many big Republican elections years. They include people like Phil Hare from the working-class Quad Cities area of Illinois, who beat back the Republican for an open seat in the Republican year of 2004, replacing another great progressive hero, Lane Evans, who had won that very marginal district election after election since 1982 despite being one of the most progressive members of Congress.

To claim, as many establishment Democrats do, that strong progressives can’t win or keep marginal seats in Congress is simply not true. We need to constantly challenge that kind of conventional wisdom, and do our own candidate recruitment drives to get strong candidates.

Iowa’s 4th District would definitely fit into this category. Hopefully, a candidate steps up and runs on a strong populist/progressive message.

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

David Sirota has a great post about John Edwards and Barack Obama battling it out for the Populist mantle. Sirota takes a look at the populists stances each has taken and writes…But now, Obama is taking Edwards more seriously, trying to match — if …

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

The message of economic populism helped Democratic candidates earn victories in the 2006 election. One of those candidates that pulled off an upset was James Webb who won his Senate race in Virginia. David Sirota writes about this quote from Webb in t…

Related Posts:

Excerpt:

EJ Dionne of the Washington Post has an article today about the country moving to the left. He has a couple interesting points…Today’s left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for “l…

Related Posts: