Take Back America conference: Democratic candidates seek “progressive” support
By David Walsh
23 June 2007
At the “Take Back America” conference, held in Washington June 18-20, leading Democrats played to a crowd of 3,000 Democratic Party activists and members of liberal protest groups, promising an end to the war in Iraq and a number of social reforms. The crowd met the politicians more than halfway and chose, for the most part, to believe them.
The annual “Take Back America” conferences have been organized by the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal Democratic Party organization co-directed by Robert Borosage. A contributing editor at the Nation magazine, Borosage was a long-time director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank, and served as an advisor to the campaigns of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Senators Carol Moseley-Braun, Barbara Boxer and Paul Wellstone.
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In his opening remarks to the conference, Borosage sounded several themes. He observed that the political winds were changing, saying, “The conservative era that defined our politics for the last quarter century is at its end.” Public opinion had turned sharply against the Bush administration and “Americans are looking for a
way forward.”
Borosage outlined a program of limited social reforms, a policy repudiated decades ago by the Democratic Party, and warned of the need to “revive the American dream.” He declared, “Corporations are now shredding the social contract that was the linchpin of the American dream—secure jobs that provided a family wage, health care, paid vacations, and pensions ... We must sustain the American dream.” He did not draw out the explosive political implications of a failure to do so.
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Borosage and the other organizers of this conference, however, are not leading a shift to the left. They are making every effort to control the popular radicalization and subordinate it to the Democratic Party. That is their overriding political concern
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jun2007/dems-j23.shtml