Reply #124: hear hear

[gottaB]

on Newshour Friday I heard Dean described as the progressive candidate, and it just made me want to holler.

Kucinich has earned that label, and perhaps Sharpton, while others are more to the left of Dean on key issues. I feel like the media are still trying to pick our candidates and define our issues, rather than fairly and accurately reporting what we're saying, and dicusssing that. Their excuses for ignoring liberal candidates and ideas are hollow. They don't lay them out and debate them with actual progressives, because no thinking person could come to their conclusions.

Well, I resent that, and I'm guilty of projecting those negative feelings onto Dean and his campaign. Mea culpa. And yet when I look at his campaign and especially the comments made on Dean blogs, I am truly taken aback by the lack of awareness of liberal perspectives, and the almost total deafness to the concerns of certain disenfranchised and politically underrepresented groups.

So I think it's a good thing all around for Kucitizens to turn up the heat, because it raises awareness of a true progressive and what progressive issues really sound like.

Oh, I know there are a whole lot of Deanies who know they themselves are centrists, or that their candidate is actually a moderate neothisandthat, and further to the right than they are. They like him because he's a fighter. And he's better than Bush, I'll buy that. But as long as the media continue to portray Dean as the progressive voice of the Dems, and he doesn't fight that representation, progressives are right to ask what Dean's fighting for.