Go to the Progressive Gala, Ready to Question

You may have noticed by the calendar entry to the right that this weekend is the big Progressive Gala, a time for all the progressive groups on campus to get together and have a unified progressive time of it. This is a good idea, and it promises to be fun. You should go--hey, James Carville is even headlining.

However, Hollie Gilman, the self-proclaimed originator of the Progressive Gala idea, has an article in today's Maroon in which she says, "Amidst discussions of New Initiatives and ordering food, this basic core idea of the Progressive Gala [i.e. uniting progressives] has been lost." I'm not a big campus insider, and she doesn't really explain what that means, but I take it there is some dissension as to the usefulness of the event.

For my part, while I certainly encourage you to go enjoy yourself at the Gala, I do have a James Carville timeline you may wish to keep in mind:

1992: Bill Clinton retakes the White House for the Democrats after 12 years of Republican rule. James Carville gains fame and adulation as lead strategist.

2002: As recorded in the 2006 documentary Our Brand is Crisis, Carville and allied Democratic strategists enact an eerie presage of the fraudulent sale of the Iraq war to the people of America by traveling to Bolivia. Establishment Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada brought in the American hotshots as part of his successful bid to return to the presidency after a one-term absence.

November, 2004: According to Bob Woordward's latest book, John Kerry was all set to fight it out, through recounts if necessary, in Ohio in 2004. There is some pretty clear evidence that significant voter suppression was carried out in Ohio by Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and others, so it might have been productive to challenge that suppression.

Surely, as a loyal Democrat, James Carville would support Kerry in taking a stand and making sure the election was conducted lawfully. But instead, revealed Woodward, Carville called his wife, who was working on the Bush-Cheney campaign. He told her about Kerry's plan, so that Republicans, including Blackwell, could prepare to rebuff any challenges from Kerry. Kerry did not end up making any such challenge.

November 10, 2006: Carville leads the charge amongst out-of-touch DC consultants to depose Howard Dean as chair of the DNC on the heels of the wild successes of the midterm elections. The crux of his argument is that Dean should have lavished more money on third-tier races, ignoring that Rahm Emanuel is the primary reason Democratic money was concentrated on long shots like Tammy Duckworth (IL-06) rather than spread around to lots of long shot candidates. Carville's alternative is to install losing Tennessee Senate candidate (and current chair of the DLC) Harold Ford, who was the only Democratic Senate candidate last cycle who was in a close race and ran a center-oriented DLC-style campaign. Ford was also the only one in such a race who lost.

Since everyone else thought Dean did a great job, even a begrudging Rahm Emanuel, the coup didn't go anywhere. As Chris Bowers wrote on MyDD at the time, under Dean's 50-state strategy, "small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville's base of supporters hate Dean so much."

February 12, 2007: Carville appears on the CNN program Situation Room and defends Hillary Clinton's original vote for the Iraq war. Clinton herself usually defends this vote by pointing out that the intelligence the Administration showed her made it look like a really good idea, to which everyone usually replies, "Yah, but it didn't look like that great an idea, especially since other members of Congress had the same intelligence and voted against it."

To which James Carville replies, on Situation Room, "But they weren't from New York. Their state wasn't hit. They didn't have to deal with the grief of these 3,000 people." Confused, everyone else nonetheless has a ready comeback: did you seriously just buy into the fraudulent Bush-Cheney frame that 9/11 had something to do with what happened in Iraq? Really? Even after all this time, when it was conclusively proven years ago that 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq and Bush knew it?

March 30, 2007: A stir is created in the blogosphere when it is determined that Carville, a Hillary Clinton strategist/analyst, has been appearing on CNN without divulging his attachment to Clinton. The problem is that he uses his time on CNN to trash Obama without any mention that he is on the Clinton campaign. He and CNN show no regret for misleading the public and admit no wrongdoing.