Reply #101: I think the core of that letter and the whole presidential campaign

[tomg]

is in the lines Tom Hayden so eloquently wrote:

"Will you live up to the standard set by Bobby Kennedy in 1968? He who sat with Cesar Chavez at the breaking of the fast, he who enlisted civil rights and women activists in his crusade, who questioned the Gross National Product as immoral, who dialogued with people like myself about ending the war and poverty? Yes, Bobby appealed to cops and priests and Richard Daley too, but in 1968 he never distanced himself from the dispossessed, the farmworkers, the folksingers, the war resisters, nor the poets of the powerless. He walked among us."


This is something we need to ask all of our candidates, and we can't accept a candidate who leads us with anything less. Why is it that the capacity to honestly change is now derided as "flip flopping." Kennedy began working for Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. He didn't draw people from all avenues of life by "triangulating" or "playing to the middle" but by coming to a position where he could stand his ground in good conscience and we were brought together by him and his position.

David, thank you so much for your post. I also met Tom Hayden - although only in passing once when I was just 19 and had just filed CO. At the time, I didn't realize what an honor it was, although I did think it was pretty cool.

I don't think Obama intended to dismiss Tom Hayden - or Scoop Jackson, for that matter. But that he can so cavalierly, if unintentionally, dismiss two positions embodied in two people that really need to be considered and brought into the progressive conversation now above all else, points to three serious problems:

Lack of historical perspective ( ironically many on the left in the 60s, including moi, took this position vis a vis the Old Left, union people, and others who were our allies but whom we alienated);

An implicit rhetoric of division that belies the main rhetoric of unity that Obama sounds;

The current inability to see that "splitting the difference" between very divergent positions - the same approach he tried with his Gospel tour and that is where he lost me completely and utterly - is not the same as having a reasoned, and principled position that will draw others to you, or where others can finally say "I respect this, but I disagree."