I've always looked at my role in politics as that of "historian". In fact, the subtitle of my blog "Mugsy's Rap Sheet" is "Recording History for Those Who Seek to Rewrite it." Republicans have more than a bad habit of rewriting and white-washing history. Heck, the man Republicans have elevated to near sainthood... St. Ronnie... bears no resemblance to the man we knew as "Ronald Reagan" (I refer you to the book "Tear Down This Myth" for a detailed comparison.) And you'd THINK that since the invention of videotape, these numbnuts would stop thinking they can just make wild claims about The Bush Legacy without somebody calling them on it.

Back during the 2008 Presidential campaign, I couldn't help but notice how frequently & easily the Republican candidates (including Mitt Romney) would rewrite the history of how we ended up going to war with Iraq in order to paint Bush as less culpable. One of the most disturbing arguments was that we were FORCED to invade Iraq after "Saddam refused to allow the weapons inspectors back in", which I KNEW was a load of... eh, rubbish (this is a family site). So I dug through the BBC News archives and pieced together the following video. It's five years old now, but today on the eve of the third and final Presidential Debate, this time on foreign policy, with a Republican candidate whom has (as Rachel Maddow reminded us Friday) SEVENTEEN of his TWENTY-FOUR Foreign Policy Advisors comming from the Bush Administration, I thought that maybe now was the perfect time to look back for a moment to remember history as it actually happened, and think long & hard about possibly returning these people to the White House just four short years later:

Bush Kicked Out the Weapons Inspectors, Not Saddam
(source video is nearly a decade old now, so please excuse the quality.)

Remember all the people that tried to tell us that George W. Bush was already planning the invasion of Iraq almost from the day he took office (with their eyes set on all that lovely oil)? President Bush's defenders (I call them "apologists", which riles them terribly because they don't think they have anything to apologize for) are quick to try and discredit those who dared say such things, but if you won't take those people's word for it, how about the word of George W. Bush?

Forget "9/11 changed everything", Bush was on the Iraq/WMD warpath from DAY ONE of his Presidential campaign.

And here we are once again, four short years later, flirting with the idea of electing another Republican president that appears to be hot for war in the Middle East, only this time, instead of Iraq, it's Syria and Iran. We've seen this movie before folks, and we already know how it ends.

A double feature today from FOX News' resident clown Steven Crowder, who most recently compared food stamp recipients to animals. This time, he proves yet again that right-wingers have absolutely no idea what socialism is. (updated)

In this first tweet, he erroneously dates socialism to the 18th century, which would be an understandable mistake if he were still in the sixth grade. (One wondered: did he actually think that socialism originated in the 18th century, or was he just confused about the fact that the 1800s are the 19th century? One never knows with wingnuts.)

Then, after being mocked for it, he deleted it.

But then for some odd reason, he decided double down on that thought, and tweeted this:

So clearly, he actually does think that the Founding Fathers launched the American Revolution to escape the tyranny of King George's socialist British Empire. Glad we cleared that up!

In future tweets, Crowder will explain how the US defeated French fascism in World War I and praise Ronald Reagan for building the Grand Canyon.

UPDATE
Now, Crowder's claiming that socialism has been around since, oh, forever. What an idiot.

I wrote a book that came out in early 2009 called, “The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be,” that talked about the history of the American political debate. One of my fundamental arguments was that conservatives are using the same arguments against modern day progress that their ideological ancestors used against the progress we made throughout history. What I underestimated, though, is how fiercely and broadly the modern conservative movement is trying not only to block advances in progress, but to actually roll back the gains of our history. Things that had seemed long settled only a few years back when I wrote that book are now being fought over anew, and not by trivial people on the fringes of our politics but by most of the leaders in the Republican Party.

Over the last couple of years, we have seen the Supreme Court overturn 100 years of precedent in dramatically expanding corporate political power, and have seen Supreme Court Justices imply in oral arguments that Medicaid might be unconstitutional; we have seen leading Republican presidential candidates openly calling for the repeal of child labor laws, argue for letting the states ban contraception, and say that Social Security is unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme; there was a Republican governor and presidential candidate, Rick Perry, who opened the door to his state seceding from the union; there is a Republican senator who called for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although he later pulled back from that under intense pressure); and the Paul Ryan budget, passed twice by the Republican House and unreservedly endorsed by their presumptive, ends Medicare and Medicaid as we know them, and calls for a 95-percent cut in domestic spending over the next four decades.

This was the stuff of the extremist fringe -- the John Birch Society, the militia types, the neo-Confederacy fan boys in the South, the Ayn Rand apostles, the Christian Dominionists -- until fairly recently. But this group of outside-the-mainstream ghouls has become the twisted heart and soul of the 2012 Republican Party.

President Obama’s speech this week went after the extremists who control the Republican Party hard, and he nailed it. As a history buff, and someone who wrote at length about the original Social Darwinists in my book, I was glad to see him explicitly tie Ryan and Romney to their Social Darwinist ancestors:

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it is a prescription for decline.

Just to give you a flavor of the original Social Darwinists, their intellectual founder was British writer Herbert Spencer, who happily applauded the divine right of Kings and “anyone who can get uppermost”. He attacked democratic forms of government, as well as trial by jury, where “12 people of average ignorance” would dare to sit in judgment of great corporations or wealthy people. In the US, the leading Social Darwinist was a Yale professor named William Graham Sumner, who said that every society had a choice between only two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest” or “un-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”

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I was there last night for the massive general assembly. I filed this piece for The Atlantic:

Mario Savio was a UC Berkeley student in the '60s and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He's become an activist icon; Mario Savio Youth Activist awards are given out by his memorial fund. By the '90s, the steps of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus where he gave his now famous "put your bodies upon the gears" speech were renamed the Mario Savio Steps. It was there last Wednesday that police raided an hours-old Occupy Cal protest and pounded student activists with batons. Yes, the chancellor of the university that celebrates Savio in its brochures, Robert J. Birgeneau, waited mere minutes before setting in motion a response that saw students beaten on the very steps bearing Savio's name ... just for setting up tents.

As the massive Occupy crackdown unfolded nationally, students facing yet another tuition hike -- in a UC system that has seen its tuition triple in 10 years -- took note and took to organizing.

In less than a week the campus had a general strike. Tuesday most classes were cancelled. And it just so happened to be the day the annual event Mario Savio memorial at Sproul Hall was going to take place. Which in turn led to the largest General Assembly (GA) in the history of the Occupy movement.

An amazing coincidence. One of those historical ironies that should make the school administration cringe indefinitely.

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The funniest thing over the last couple of weeks in the world of politics is no longer the Republican Presidential nomination, which for several months in a row has been the best sitcom on TV. But the building panic from conservatives about Occupy Wall Street has replaced the presidential race as the most delightful show to watch. Eric Cantor is talking about mobs in the street, and Glenn Beck is doing maybe his best meltdown ever (and that’s saying something, because Beck has had some doozies). Conservatives by the truckload are freaking out all over the place.

What makes it even more fun for me is that their panic exactly echoes the kind of panic conservatives have always shown about the idea of democracy and taking on the monied interests throughout American history. In my book on the history of the American political debate, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, I discussed how conservatives throughout our history have always echoed each other on these subjects no matter what the era. Here’s a sampling:

1. Written in 1776 by a pro-British Anglican Bishop: “If I must be enslaved let it be by a King at least, and not by a parcel of upstart lawless Committeemen. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion, and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin.”
2. In the 1790s, friend of the big New York bankers of his day Alexander Hamilton was at a dinner party, and yelled at a pro-democracy advocate: “Your people, sir – your people is a great beast.” An ally of Hamilton’s wrote: “A democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of natural history. Its omens are always sinister. … It is always on trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy. No wise man but discerns its imperfections, no good man but shudders at its miseries. No honest man but proclaims its frauds, and no brave man but draws his sword against its farce.”
3. In the 1830s, conservative hero John C. Calhoun (who first forged the bond between the idea of states’ rights and conservative politics) wrote: “The will of the majority is the will of a rabble. Progressive democracy is incompatible with liberty.”
4. In the post-Civil War era, where the right-wing philosophy of Social Darwinism reigned supreme, conservatives were distressed about the idea of poor and working people voting and then taking from the rich. Charles Adams wrote, “Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English, the government of ignorance and vice – it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic Coast; an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.” And his contemporary Francis Parkman added, “There is probably no sweeter experience in the world than that of a penniless laborer … when he learns that by casting his vote in the right way, he can strip the rich merchant … of a portion of his gains.”

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This study is pretty telling:

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem.

“Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history,” concludes the report, which is to be released on Wednesday.

The report assigns letter grades to each state based on how extensively its academic standards address the civil rights movement. Thirty-five states got an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, it says.

Eight of the 12 states earning A, B or C grades for their treatment of civil rights history are Southern states where there were major protests, boycotts or violence during the movement’s peak years in the 1950s and ’60s.“Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

That weakness is a huge hole in our society and our democracy. It leaves a door for parents to pretend tea party child indoctrination camps are a way of teaching their kids the "proper history", or pretending dinosaurs were roaming the earth with man.

It's a dangerous trend, and one that benefits those who wish to rewrite it.

Most of the time, in political history and in economics, things travel along a fairly predictable and relatively stable pathway. Debate is contained within a fairly narrow set of conventional and familiar choices. When it comes to economic policy, the Federal Reserve can lower interest rates or raise them a little. The government can pump a little more spending into the economy or a little less depending on the rate of growth. The economy generally starts moving again relatively quickly after a recessionary slowdown. In terms of political history, the more progressive party and the more conservative party have periods where one or the other is more powerful, but they each tend to have enough power to slow each other down, to check and balance each other. They resolve their legislative differences through a pattern of competition and compromise that is, again, fairly predictable and stable, and in periods of national crisis they come together and get big things done.

These long periods of relative stability and predictability aren’t nirvana — most people's quality of life and economic condition may not be getting better and might be getting gradually worse, as we have seen in the last 30 years of our country's history. And lots of problems tend to go unresolved in these periods as well, as they don't tend to be periods of major reforms or progressive advance, and people on the bottom end of society don't tend to get lifted up. But stability and predictability at least keeps society chugging along, the economy keeps moving, and citizens have a sense of what they can expect from their government.

Every so often, though, things get so out of whack that we come to a moment of maximum crisis. In these moments, conventional wisdom not only doesn't work but actually makes things far worse. It happened with our economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it happened with our political system in the Civil War era of the 1850s-60s. We are now, on a worldwide scale, in such an economic moment. What is even scarier is that increasingly it feels like we are simultaneously moving toward such a moment in our political system as well. At least in the 1930s, the political system worked well: voters kicked out the political party who had screwed things up, and the new government got things done that helped lift us out of the depression. And at least in the 1860s, the economy was functioning reasonably well in the Civil War era.

Right now, it feels like both our economy and our politics are increasingly dysfunctional, and that is an incredibly dangerous place to be.

Whatever happens next in our country's politics, the economy has become completely derailed. We stopped maintaining the tracks, we stopped checking the brakes and engines on the train, and we have a hell of a crash on our hands. Between the U.S. and Europe, our answer has been to keep bailing out banks (when countries who owe a lot of money to bondholders are bailed out, it isn't the people or government of that country that is bailed out, it is the bankers who own the bonds) hoping that one more bailout will solve things. When government spending goes up and tax collections go down because of the terrible economy, and the bankers demand we "tighten our belts,” it just makes things worse. The Federal Reserve, which has already poured tens of trillions of dollars into saving the banking system, and already has kept interest rates at historically low numbers for years, is mostly out of weapons to fight this battle.

The train has already wrecked, but there's another locomotive with weak brakes coming full speed down the same track.

The only answer is to reject conventional wisdom economics, and start to look at big ideas that go against the established economic ideology, the ideology dominated by the Chicago school economists who believe that free markets solve all problems and that bankers are the masters of the economic universe. Both Europe and the U.S. need to take off the chains that tie us to these monstrously big megabanks, and their utterly corrupt ratings agencies. These enormous banks, far more than any other institution, caused the big train wreck of the economy with their too complex financial "innovations" and their big housing bubble, and now they are making things far worse by using their political and market power to force round after round of government austerity programs and bailouts. It is the big banks as well that have created the black hole of a housing market where prices continue to drop, more and more homeowners are going underwater on their mortgages, and foreclosures continue unabated. That black hole of housing will keep this country locked into a flat-lined economy for as far as the eye can see, unless and until policymakers finally stand up to the bankers and force them to write down those mortgages.

It is, in fact, writing down debt — major amounts of it — that will be the biggest thing that helps this economy recover. We need less debt in our entire economy, and rather than kowtowing to the ones that wrecked the train by one bailout and self-defeating austerity program after another, we should be demanding that they write down a very large share of the debt they themselves helped create- in housing, in government debt, in our trade debt, and in other forms of debt. We need to do something else that bankers hate as well: encourage just a little bit of inflation. Worrying about inflation overheating when you have this amount of economy-wide debt, and the biggest danger in front of you is deflation from a dead economy, is quite literally insane. If inflation went to 4 or 5 percent, it would be a good thing right now because it would make all that debt easier to pay off, and it would mean that the economic engine would start running again.

Finally, we need to focus our efforts — focus like a laser beam, as my old boss Bill Clinton used to say — on creating good jobs with good wage levels. Continually cutting spending in a moment like the one we are in now is utterly self-defeating, because every time you cut, more jobs are lost, more income and the spending that fuels the economic engine is lost. Right now is exactly when we need to be rebuilding our falling-apart infrastructure, hiring more teachers, investing in more job training and R&D, and helping the industries of the future get a solid start here in America. Not just the best but in fact the only way to balance our federal budget in the long run, as we learned in the 1990s, is for every American in the workforce to have a job, a job whose wages are heading up not staying flat.

So stop listening to these Wall Street bankers and their entirely corrupt ratings agencies that rated thousands of derivative deals and credit default swaps AAA when they were pieces of absolute junk. Stop listening to the crazies who think we can cut our way to prosperity, because it has never worked and won't work now — especially now. We need a strong and expanding middle class far more than we need big Wall Street banks with good balance sheets and big bonuses for their execs.

The ancient Israelites had something they called "the year of our Lord" where all debts were forgiven. In Jesus' very first sermon, he announced that he had come to "bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to the captives, bring the blind new sight, set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the year of our Lord.” We need some good news for our poor (which more and more of us are becoming). We need liberty for the captives of big banks and right-wing economic policy. We need the new sight that comes from taking off the blinders of the conventional wisdom that is strangling us to death. We are all downtrodden except for a very wealthy set of elites who are trying to economically enslave us, and we need to be set free. And we most assuredly need a modern version of the year of our Lord, where unsustainable debt is written down by these bankers who have had their run of the store for far too long. It is time for big, bold new ideas that will clean up the train wreck, rebuild the tracks and engine, and finally get it moving again. And it would help a lot if those new ideas were motivated by these kinds of 2,000-year-old values.

[If this video won't play, try this C-Span link and start at about 10:12:09]

One of the aspects of the current Medicare debate that just drives me crazy is how the Beltway pundits treat it as "bold, new, and courageous." I've written a lot on that particular frame in the past, but I ran across something tonight that reminds me of just how not-new it really is.

During the Medicare Advantage debate, Sherrod Brown said this, as recorded in the Congressional Record:

[Privatization] has really been the thrust. From President Bush to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) to Speaker Gingrich a few years ago, to back in 1965, Republicans really wanted this system turned over to the insurance companies. Privatize Medicare and give it to the insurance industry. Go back to 1965, out of roughly 200 Republican Members of the House and Senate, only 23 voted for the creation of Medicare. Gerald Ford in 1965, a future President, voted against it. Congressman Dole, future Senator Dole, Republican Presidential candidate, voted against it. Senator Strom Thurmond voted against the creation of Medicare. Congressman Donald Rumsfeld in 1965, later Secretary of Defense and the architect of this plan, I put in quotation marks, of the rebuilding of Iraq, voted against the creation of Medicare.

Then in 1995, the first time Republicans had an opportunity to do something about Medicare, the Republicans under Speaker Gingrich tried to cut it by $270 billion in order to give a tax cut to the most privileged Americans, the same old story. Speaker Gingrich said in October 1995 that he hoped Medicare would wither on the vine.

Gosh, that sure sounds familiar. But wait, there's more, from Rep. Cardoza:

This motion instructs the Medicare conference committee to reject the controversial and risky privatization scheme of premium support and reallocate that money to increase the payment to physicians who care for Medicare beneficiaries.

Let me first discuss the issue of premium support and why I am concerned that this scheme could potentially dismantle the program of Medicare. I am concerned about subjecting a proven health care delivery system like Medicare to the uncertainty of the private market. I am especially hesitant about the system that relies on HMOs to provide this service to our seniors.

And this, from Rep. Pete DeFazio:

It is a funny thing here, we are being told that the Republicans want to inject competition into the insurance market. Well, if they really want to do that, why do they not support my bill to lift the antitrust exemption from the insurance industry?

[...]

Now we are going to throw our seniors onto the tender mercies of this collusive, anticompetitive industry. O, that is great. My seniors already had this experience. We had Medicare+Choice, HMOs. Oh, this is going to be great. You are going to get more benefits than under fee-for-service. Well, the companies were not able to collude and set the prices quite high enough to satisfy their profits, so they up and left with very little notice. My seniors were left in the cold.

Now there's much, much more in this particular section of the Congressional Record. I urge you to read it. But in a day where 24 hours seems too long for news cycles to last and memories to reach back, this is a really important piece of history in the long, protracted debate over Medicare for seniors and indeed, Medicare for all.

The Affordable Care Act basically repealed most of what Republicans did in 2003 with Medicare Advantage. It stripped away the bonus payments to insurers and established an outcomes-based system of reimbursements. Republicans are now trying to reverse that process yet again and ratchet it back up to their original dream: Full privatization of the Medicare program, lock, stock and barrel.

The part of the debate that's not happening in a meaningful way right now is really the answer to the "problem" of Medicare costs. Medicare costs are rising because it is, by definition, a program designed for adverse selection. It covers the disabled and elderly, a group that will generate the highest costs and the highest need for health care, but the young and healthy are covered under private insurance at far greater cost.

If the Beltway pundit class has a need for a 'bold, strong plan' then progressives should play the Medicare for All card much harder than they are right now. Countering with "don't repeal the Affordable Care Act" is not strong enough. This nonsense about Paul Ryan's 'innovative, bold plan' is just that -- nonsense. What makes sense is to counter it with sensible arguments for Medicare for all, and it should be countered with boldness and facts as to why that, and that alone, will save Medicare and lock it in as something untouchable by conservatives in the future.

Republicans are terrified of Medicare for all because they know they will never be able to undo what has been done. It will be too popular, too right. As long as they can keep Medicare in the realm of adverse selection and costly, they have a chance to kill it.

Photos of the April 4 Day of Action rallies via http://www.we-r-1.org/

Yesterday was the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the third of four assassinations in fewer than five years of inspiring progressive leaders. Those years were the strangest combination of hope, progress, joy, grief, bitterness, and despair than any other time in American history. Those five years gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the School Lunch program, Legal Services; and they gave us 500,000 troops in the most pointless and wrongheaded war in our history, and all the bitter divisions that resulted. They gave us the biggest landslide a progressive Democrat ever won for President, and the election of a dark-souled race baiting conservative who would be forced from office for blatant violations of the law. It brought us the rise of the modern feminist movement, the flowering of the biggest student movement in our history, and the ugliest reactionary backlash imaginable. The contradictions and battles of those intense years have never left us.

Although hopefully with less violence, this moment in history is feeling like it has much of the same drama and contradictions, hope and bitterness, change and backlash. We elect as President a mixed-race man with an African immigrant father and a Muslim African name; we finally pass a comprehensive health care reform bill that puts us much closer to a system of universal coverage; we make the biggest investments ever in green jobs, public education, universal broadband, and a variety of other public programs; in spite of reformers being outspent more than 500-1, we passed a bill that has begun to re-regulate the financial industry. At the same time, we see the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and a bipartisan political class that still seems locked into conventional views on the unalloyed virtues of the free market; a vicious backlash and the coming to power of the most extreme conservative movement since the Social Darwinists in the 1880s; we see far too much compromise and capitulation to the corporate powers that be by the Democratic establishment; and with the Ryan budget, we see the most dangerous and far reaching attack on the fundamental gains of the 1900s — especially Medicare and Medicaid, which he wants to not only radically slash but totally destroy by his “restructuring” — that we have ever seen; we see the most radical attacks on the very idea of unions that we have seen since the flowering of the modern labor movement in the 1930s.

What is most fascinating about the contradictory times we are living in is that both the extremist right-wing movement and the progressive movement are taking to the streets to an unprecedented level. We all saw the tea party movement capture the frame over the last two years, but progressives are now fighting back. Yesterday, on the anniversary of King’s death, our side took to the streets once again. There were more than 1,000 events yesterday — 1,000! — around this great country. People are fighting back in — to paraphrase Dr. King — every state and every city, every village and every hamlet, every mountain and every hill and every molehill of our great nation.

I will be celebrating (mourning?) my twentieth year since coming to work in Washington next year. I came here with the Clinton team, and even though I was President Clinton’s liaison to the progressive community, I still came to town with a bunch of moderate Democrats. Given my banging away on so many topics in my blog posts, I do get asked from time to time whether I have moved to “the left” over the years. The answer is absolutely not. I still believe virtually the same things about politics and the economy I believed a couple of decades ago, including:

1. That the America I grew up in during the 1960s and ’70s, which had a broad and prosperous middle class and a sturdy safety net for those down on their luck or too old to work, was a great country to live in for most Americans, but that the middle class had been squeezed right and left by big corporate interests and the conservative movement.

2. That the growing extremist conservative movement, which had taken over the Republican Party, blindly worshiped the free market along with the wealthiest and most powerful among us, and was determined to roll back social progress of all kinds.

3. That the Democratic Party was deeply flawed because too many Democrats were not willing to fight for progressive policies that would help the middle class and poor, but that they sure were better than the scary extremists who controlled the Republican Party.

4. That party politics alone would never win the progress we needed; that we need a strong progressive movement to fight the good fight.

5. That the New Deal and Great Society policy victories of the 1930s through the early ’70s were what moved this country forward more than any other set of policies. Social Security and Medicare gave senior citizens a measure of economic security they never had before. Labor unions were able to grow and expand, ensuring that middle-class incomes would rise, and that more working class people would get a secure foothold in that middle class. Banks were strongly regulated and kept to a reasonable size, ensuring that the financial crises that periodically wracked the country’s economy in the decades before and after those years didn’t happen. The minimum wage, the end of child labor, OSHA, and the 40-hour work week ensured more dignity and safety on the job. A wave of school building, the GI Bill, Pell Grants, the development of community colleges, and other educational initiatives meant that more Americans got good educations than ever in history. Civil rights, voting rights, and new anti-discrimination laws for women meant far more fairness and equality of opportunity for all Americans. Unemployment compensation, Medicaid, school lunch programs, food stamps, Head Start, and legal services meant that even low-income Americans had a modest amount of financial security in the hard times. The Clean Air, Clean Water, and Superfund acts made our environment far cleaner for all citizens. All of these new policies helped create the wealthiest economy, and most prosperous middle class in world history, and that our goal in politics should be to build on that success rather than tear it down.

I believed all that the day I moved to Washington to be part of the Clinton administration, and I believe it still, so I don’t feel like I have moved to the left at all. I feel very certain that I am solidly within the mainstream of the Democratic Party and progressive thought in America.

But I do think something important has changed. The corporate stranglehold on our media, government, and ideological parameters has shifted, and the Bob Rubin wing of the Democratic Party has grown steadily stronger.

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