I posit two observations: one, that New York has a Progressive movement, and two, that this movement faces clear challenges and opportunities, in the electoral and policy sphere, and also as far as infrastructure is concerned.
In terms of common electoral and policy goals, I would identify several.
On the Federal electoral level, obviously, there is the Presidential contest. The conventional wisdom has it that Hillary will carry New York easily; I'll believe that when the other candidates cede this state, and when I see a primary poll that has the Senator above 50%. Also on the Federal level, there are three Congressional seats well worth targeting: NY-03 (Peter King), NY-13 (Vito "Independent" Fossella), NY-29 (Randy "Shotgun" Kuhl).
In the Twenty ninth, we're seeing a primary challenge to the 2006 candidate, Eric Massa, one that is causing considerable consternation in some quarters. The liberation of Congress last November enfeebled the principal enablers of the Bush administration; now, the agenda is one of rebuilding and fighting the inevitable depredations of an administration heading for the exits as its legacy burns all around it.
At the state level, arguably the most consequential at this moment in our history due to the sheer awfulness and pervasiveness of the dysfunction in Albany, Governor Spitzer's reform agenda remains partially blocked by a recalcritant legislature attached, mollusk-like, to a status quo that is untenable. In New York, citizens do not choose their legislators - in a very real way, legislators choose their citizens. The system of acquiring and defending power in Albany is comparable to The Matrix in its sheer imperviousness to citizen discontent; breaking it open is our challenge. The tool to achieve this, given that the legislature recently demonstrated its utter shamelessness in the selection of Tom DiNapoli over Martha Stark as Comptroller, is to win the State Senate and hope against hope that a new majority in that chamber will lead the way on reform. If that does not provide the impetus for change, the only remaining lever to fix a broken system is a new constitutional convention and taking reform directly to the people, who want it, away from the bi-partisan incumbents, who do not.
Locally, in New York City, we are waking up to the fact that our legislature is nearly as streamlined and as un-small-D-democratic as its Albany equivalent. And while it's still over the horizon, the 2009 Mayoral race will be critical in regaining that office not just for Democrats, but for Progressive Democrats. For this movement to be healthy, it needs to govern and test its ideas and philosophy in the nation's largest City. We also, and clearly, have a responsibility to devise policies that arrest the trend of New York City becoming a luxury product inhospitable to the middle and working class. Great cities solely for the rich cannot thrive and remain great. This is as much a philosophical issue as one of politics; what space is there for the poor, and for average American working families, in Michael Bloomberg's shiny new branded metropolis?
The question of health brings me to the Progressive movement itself. Simply put, we need to do a better job at building and maintaining thriving, relevant organizations. Chris Bowers has written about this. We find it generally very easy to raise money for individual candidates; but when it comes to raising funds for our own organizations, to recruiting the fresh annual crop of citizens for the engines of our own activism, too often, we could do a lot better. We shouldn't be having to rebuild Downtown for Democracy every four years.
To be sure, the new Progressive movement has a wealth of organizations and tools at its disposal undreamt of, say, when the Supreme Court defied the will of the people and elevated George Bush into office; but if we want this movement to succeed, and to thrive and prosper for decades to come, we need to pay closer attention to how we organize ourselves, and how we nurture the tools of that organization. I hesitate to give examples, but any comparison between the thriving infrastructure of 2004, a Presidential year, and that of three years later is illustrative of a cycle that needs to be superseded. We can't simply expect a John Edwards or Barack Obama to come along and rescue the polity. The challenges facing us are not cyclical and do not magically reappear every four years.
Progressive reform is a bigger job, and one that requires the efforts of every single one of us. No one is indispensable; at the same time, we can't reclaim our party, our state and our country for our vision if we don't invest the blood, sweat, toil and tears to make it happen. The right understands this, which is why the surest path to an iron-clad employment contract for a budding right-wing tool is in one of the innumerable cubicle farms that turn out position papers, astroturf initiatives and write insipid Op-Eds. Our ideas are better, immeasurably better, but in terms of execution, there are things we could learn from the opposition. New York does better than many states, to be sure, but we could be doing better. Check out your local DFA group, folks; give them, or others like them, some time, some money, in short, some love. We've come very far as a movement, but we have quite a bit of work left to do.
(Crossposted at The Albany Project)
