{"id":1522,"date":"2006-07-28T20:24:13","date_gmt":"2006-07-29T01:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.marcstier.com\/wordpress\/?p=1522"},"modified":"2011-07-23T22:05:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-23T22:05:50","slug":"mad-dogs-and-democrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=1522","title":{"rendered":"Mad dogs and Democrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of the folks who commented on my post endorsing Casey <\/a>for Senate made interesting arguments to which I want to res pond here. Albert <\/a>pointed out that the process that gave us Casey will go on if we don\u2019t stop it. And Liz<\/a> said that the first rule of dog training is don\u2019t reward behaviors you don\u2019t want.<\/p>\n

These are arguments well worth reading and considering. But I think they both miss a key point about how our party works. Ask yourself, who is in control of this process we want to stop? Whose behavior do we want to stop rewarding?<\/p>\n

What we activists and reformers need to understand about the Democratic Party is that no one is really in control over it. And thus there is simply no Democratic Party we can punish for giving us Casey. If you want to punish someone, vote against Rendell since he more than anyone else is responsible for Casey. (I\u2019m just joking\u2026.there are a lot of ways in which Rendell has been terribly disappointing, but Swann as Governor would be disastrous for us.) And if you want, punish the progressive candidates who backed out at Rendell\u2019s insistence when they next run for office. But remember that Rendell is only going to be Governor four more years and then his power to anoint candidates will be gone. And he will leave a vacuum behind him. The state Democrat Party will, once again, consist of a lot of factions none of which have the power to nominate anyone.<\/p>\n

Much the same is true in Philadelphia. Progressives often blame Congressman Brady for everything they don\u2019t like about the Democrats. But while Brady is influential, he does not determine what the party does. He is elected by ward leaders who can unelect him. And he responds to all the powerful factions within the party\u2014the South Philly faction of Senator Fumo, the Northwest faction of Dwight Evans and Marian Tasco, the three West Philly factions of Carol Campbell, Chaka Fattah, and Jannie Blackwell, the faction of Marge Tartaglione; the various Latino factions, the Northeast factions and so forth. And then there are all the unions who play a role in the party as well by supporting some candidates rather than others. Congressman Brady\u2019s role is to try to get these factions to work together to elect Democratic candidates. But to do that, he has to share power with all of them and work out arrangements between them over candidates for particular offices, over patronage positions, and so on. Brady would, I think, prefer not to fight with any of these factions. The only time he has done so recently was when he believed that John Dougherty went too far and threatened to upset the balance between all the factions.<\/p>\n

So there really is no one leader or even group of leaders we can hold responsible for Casey. Indeed, if you talk to many of the leaders of the various factions in Philadelphia, you will find that they are no more happy with Casey than most of us progressives are.<\/p>\n

So there is no one to punish or reward. What we can do to prevent a recurrence of behavior we don\u2019t like is to build progressive organizations across Pennsylvania so that our faction is one that the other factions here in Philly and across the state have to satisfy. And we have to build our capacity for getting out the vote so that progressive candidates for Senate and Governor will not back away from a difficult race because they know that they have a powerful progressive force behind them.<\/p>\n

We still have a long way to go, but we actually have made some progress in doing this. All but one of the mayoral candidates, for example, have reached out to Neighborhood Networks and asked to meet with our leadership and members.<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party is not a monolith. It certainly is a dog but it is not a dog with a single mind. It is a dog that suffers from a severe case of multiple personality disorder. And we progressives are one of those personalities. If we want to stop the process that gave us Casey, we have to organize to become one of the stronger personalities so that we can as much as possible, get control of the behavior of that dog.<\/p>\n

Working to defeat Santorum is a good way to build our organizations. And the plain fact is that, in politics, you can\u2019t just run against someone. If we want to defeat Santorum, we are being disingenuous if we say anything else but that we want people to vote for Casey.<\/p>\n

I think we progressive can ask people to vote for Casey even though we disagree with him on so many issues. I have suggested to the Neighborhood Networks Steering Committee that, if we endorse Casey, we should make our views clear by making a few thousand clothespins with the \u201cCasey for Senate\u201d printed on them.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t think we should, as my mother would put it, cut off our nose to spite our face. Casey has done a lousy job of articulating how dramatically he differs from Santorum on economic and labor issues. But they are certainly there. And it should be clear a Democratic Senate will, if nothing else, start investigating all the wrong doing of the Bush administration and set the stage for the election of Democratic president in 2008.<\/p>\n

The defeat of Casey will do us progressives no long term good at all. The reelection of Santorum will, on the other hand, be horrendous for our state and country<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of the folks who commented on my post endorsing Casey for Senate made interesting arguments to which I want to res pond here. Albert pointed out that the process that gave us Casey will go on if we don\u2019t stop it. And Liz said that the first rule of dog training is don\u2019t reward behaviors you don\u2019t want. These are arguments well worth reading and considering. But I think they both miss a key point about how our party works. Ask yourself, who is in control of this process we want to stop? Whose behavior do we want to stop rewarding? Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[56,59],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p35YuU-oy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6030,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions\/6030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}