Kos and Effect: The Debate Moves to the Center With Markus and Harold

Harold Ford and Markos Moulitsas, met Sunday, August 12th, on Meet the Press. It was a friendly debate (transcript). But if this debate were a book I would have to title it: “The Bourgeois and the Blogger.” While these monikers are not mutually exclusive one of the questions I want to examine in this match-up is that of the centrist (for either party) label versus the progressive label (usually reserved for Democrats).

Markos Moulitsas (Kos), also a native Chicagoan is ex-military and believes himself and his book: Crashing The Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, to have single-handedly harnessed and “organized” what is now called the net roots populist movement.  He has critics. There were no less than thousands of groups and blogs already devoted to populist politics. I know because I was one of them, over the past seven years, time well-spent crawling the Internet looking for like-minded groups and found them. When the Internet came of age, so too did the visibility and the voice of those once-silent keyboards; already in full bloom—ripe with people pushing the buttons to the tune of “power to the people.”  Kos might do well by rebooting his thinking under the cover of “who started what movement?” Harold Ford hails from a near-political dynasty. His pedigree and ambition are impressive:

In 1974, Harold Ford beat a white incumbent to become Tennessee’s first black congressman. That same election sent John Ford to the state Senate and brother Emmett Ford to the Tennessee House. Harold Ford kept his congressional seat for 22 years, and when he retired in 1996, he turned it over to his son, Harold Ford Jr., who is now considering a run for the U.S. senate.

He famously lost his bid for the Senate with the help of familial scandals and racy ads holding him out as a playboy who liked white women. He moved on to his current role as DLC chairman, a post formerly occupied by Bill Clinton who made a surprise visit to the recent DLC convention, where he said that “the best poverty program is a job."  His statements indicating unhappiness with the DLC's failure to move forward and address poverty issues head on. On all fronts, it seems that Harold is fighting an uphill battle to win over the left, liberal and progressive young people to his centrist position. Has centrism become a dirty word? Is it now a third-rail issue popularized mostly by net-root negativism? Kos seems to be the leader of that pack with his, not-so-original call for Democrats to abandon the center, stand firmly progressive while quietly moving to the far, far left. And when pressed for more clarification, Kos said he did not want to “pigeon hole” anybody, nor did he want to be a “king maker” by declaring an endorsement on national TV. He’s modest like that.

Article Author: Heloise

Author, writer, physics teacher has a new blog The Trough where she writes. Also visit The Politikos which highlights her keen observation of anthropology, occultism, science/research into rebirth. She combines spirituality and politics as no other. …

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