Base-building, Electoral Politics and Public Policy

Todd Gitlin describes how the "movement and the machine" must work together to take our country back in this column at Mother Jones News.

"In the tangle and promise ahead, much will depend on activist networks like MoveOn and America Coming Together, but also on lesser-known movement-party hybrids like Wellstone Action. A national effort to train political candidates, teach activists how to campaign, and turn out the vote, Wellstone Action is driven by the fierce desire to harness movement spirit to organizational force. Its director of education and advocacy, Pam Costain, knew Paul Wellstone for 30 years, starting as his student at Carleton College. She spoke to me of 'the Wellstone triangle: base-building, electoral politics, and public policy. You have to work at the intersection.' Wellstone Action trained 7,000 citizen-activists in 21 states in 2004."

Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss

James Carroll gets it right in today's column in the Boston Globe.

"Why don't we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.

Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed."

JobWatch - Back to Anemic Job Growth

Keep this in mind when you hear about new tax cut proposals. "The Bush Administration called the tax cut package, which took effect in July 2003, its "Jobs and Growth Plan." The president's economics staff, the Council of Economic Advisers projected that the plan would result in the creation of 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004—in other words, 306,000 new jobs in each of the 18 months from July 2003 to December 2004. The CEA projected that the economy would generate 228,000 jobs a month without a tax cut and 306,000 jobs a month with the tax cut."

Check out the complete pattern to date here.

"The November job growth of 112,000 jobs falls short of this target by 194,000. Overall, the projection that 5,202,000 jobs would be created over the last 17 months is not close to having been realized. In reality, since the tax cuts took effect there are 2,986,000 fewer jobs than the administration projected would be created by enactment of its tax cuts. Job creation failed to meet the administration's projections in 15 of the past 17 months. It is apparent that, with just one month to go, the tax cuts have not worked as advertised."