Another Look

Small dreams

I'm not a fan of Rahm Emanuel, who's apparently become a shining star in the Democratic pantheon without actually winning anything. But as the lead face in the Democrat's effort to retake the House, his views are important. That's why the evident disappointment in this Jonathan Weisman Washington Post review of his new book, The Plan: Big Ideas for America, should get Democrats thinking. This is not, Weisman concludes, a book of big ideas. Nor is it, one can infer, a party that welcomes them. The party of Rahm Emanuel is the party that's still afraid of Lieberman. As Emanuel said in the New York Times recently of the Connecticut Senate race (TimesSelect subscription required), Explain to me how two Democrats running can be bad.

On one level, that's true, but regarding a man who chose to defy democracy and the wishes of the Democratic voters as a true Democrat says much about what is wrong with the party, and why despite the abysmal Bush/Cheney/Lieberman track record of the past six years, we still have to be worried about November. It shouldn't be surprising that the leadership of a party that has cared little for our Constitutional rights at home, that caved when the issue was a war of choice abroad, all in the name of retaining power, should now be so craven as to ignore democracy and party rules at home in a headlong rush to appease what they think Lieberman could be - the vote deciding who rules the next Senate. But if this is the Democratic Party, we have to go to war with, it is not a Democratic Party worth going to war for. This is not the Democratic Party that was willing to wage any battle, pay any price for freedom.

What we need is to recreate a Democratic Party that knows in its heart the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

What we need is not the Emanuels, but the Bobby Kennedys, the kind of leader of whom a brother could rightly and righteously say, "My brother need not be idolized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

Looking at the spineless tacticians that have replaced the heroes who used to lead the Democratic Party, it may be hard to envision our focus group-dependent national leadership ever again being so worthy of support. But I look at the everyday Democrats who came out in such numbers to vote for Lamont and think of the George Bernard Shaw quote with which Sen. Ted Kennedy concluded his eulogy for yet another brother sacrificed to the American dream: "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' - I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?' "

Betrayals notwithstanding, the dream is still worth fighting for.

posted by Andy Mais @ 12:48 PM