Paul Waldman: Paying a Fair Share

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from TomPaine.com:


Paying A Fair Share
Paul Waldman
January 31, 2007


Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success. The views expressed here are his own.

These are heady times for Democrats. They took back both houses of Congress, then immediately passed their 100 Hours Agenda through the House, just as they had promised. On the most important issue of our time—Iraq—their criticisms have been vindicated and the public is overwhelmingly on their side, not to mention the fact that Republicans are deserting President Bush like rats from a sinking ship. As the 2008 presidential campaign begins rolling, the Democratic hopefuls as a group far outshine their Republican counterparts in talent, experience, political smarts and even charisma (think about what a change that is).

So this is precisely the time to be thinking not just about what’s going to happen in this session of Congress or in the upcoming presidential campaign, but in the years and decades to come. This is the time to lay the foundation for enhancing and sustaining a long-term Democratic majority.

In recent years, the most cutting criticism of the Democratic Party has been that it doesn’t know what it stands for. This attack may have been exaggerated by a contemptuous press corps, but it contained some truth: Because Republicans have for so long defined their ideology in the simplest possible terms, by comparison Democrats have looked muddled, scattered and consumed with the dreaded “nuance.”

So now that they are in the best political position they’ve had in over a decade, Democrats need to start defining for the public—and for themselves—not just where they stand, but why they stand there. In the coming months in this space, I’ll be addressing this question as it relates to a number of different issues, but today’s topic is taxes. .....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/31/paying_a_fair_share.php