When will America be ready to elect a progressive president running on a progressive agenda? [View all]

[Douglas Carpenter]

When will America be ready to elect a progressive president running on a progressive agenda?

Perhaps some people think my question is silly because we already have one and with Hillary waiting in the wings we are all set to elect another one in 2016. But I suspect most people who think that are those too young or too unfamiliar with the world before Ronald Reagan when Keynesian economics dominated and even many Republicans accepted both the short term and long term agenda of the New Deal and the Great Society.

So when I say progressive It means a campaign that defines entitlement reform and welfare reform as moving our country as rapidly as possible toward a genuinely comprehensive social economic security system such as we find in almost every other modern democracy. It means publically sponsored and completely comprehensive healthcare for all such as we find in almost every other modern democracy. It means a livable wage for all those who work and those who cannot work due to no fault of their own such as we find in most other modern democracies. It means rights for workers enshrined into law that equal or exceeds those in most of the liberal democracies of Western Europe. It means reducing military spending and moving away from the quagmire of an unsustainable military empire.

For almost forty years we have heard that these may be good long term goals - but we cannot run on them now. We need to move more and more to the "center" in order to win. Then perhaps during the next election cycle or maybe the one after that - then finally we be able to run the great progressive campaign.

At the same time during most of the last forty years the rightwing which forty years ago would have been considered the lunatic fringe extreme right - has pushed the boundaries so far to the right - the "center" at least on economic issues is now being defined in the mainstream of the media as something pretty close to where the far right used to be. While what is being called liberal or even "far left" is more or less close to what thirty to forty years ago would have been considered moderately conservative. After all in 1976 Gerald Ford picked Bob Dole as his running mate to appease the rightwing of the Republican Party - the Senator who along with George McGovern designed the Food Stamp and School Nutrition program. That is how far our public debate has drifted to the right.

So, when can we have a progressive campaign again? Can we do it in 2016? If not - when?

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Please excuse my melodrama - but sometimes when I think about these questions I recall this campaign song Johnny Rivers wrote way back in 1972 for the McGovern campaign. It seems to me the words are even more relevant now than the were then.