DENNIS KUCINICH-- TRYING FOR A LITTLE OF THE FAUX FAIR AND BALANCED ROUTINE?

No one ever seems to take Dennis Kucinich very seriously, not even in ultra-progressive Democratic circles. Yet he's the anti-war guy and the furthest left, right? Well... his voting record is pretty good over all (though he's no Raul Grijalva, Barbara Lee, Janice Schakowsky, Tammy Baldwin, Hilda Solis, John Olver, Linda Sanchez, Jesse Jackson, or any number of more dependable progressives). On Iraq, his voting record is decidedly mixed, better than most Democrats, but not nearly as admirable as that of over 80 House Democrats who were more opposed to Bush's Iraq war policies than he was. Funny, how many people think Kucinch is so pure in his anti-war record. Even he seems to think so-- which would make him incorrect or even delusional. He asks, rhetorically, "Is it possible that the real conflict was having to take the stage to defend their votes to fund the war?" Only someone who thinks no one would have looked at his own voting record would have the gall to ask that of other Democratic candidates, who, like him, have been inconsistent.

None of my colleagues support him, although yesterday I met someone who voted for him in the California primary last time he ran for president. Today Kucinich put out a clueless press release attacking Democrats for not participating in the Fox propaganda machine's Nevada debate. His lack of basic understanding of the issues involved in the Fox matter were absolutely chilling. This man should reconsider wasting time and money running for president and start spending more attention to the world around him.

If you want to be the President of the United States, you can't be afraid to deal with people with whom you disagree politically,” Kucinich said. “No one is further removed from Fox's political philosophy than I am, but fear should not dictate decisions that affect hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of others around the world who are starving for real leadership.”

Kucinich said “the public deserves honest, open, and fair public debate, and the media have a responsibility to demand that candidates come forward now, before the next war vote in Congress, to explain themselves.”


“I'm prepared to discuss the war, health care, trade, or any other issue anytime, anywhere, with any audience, answering any question from any media. And any candidate who won't shouldn't be President of the United States.”

I've written about this Nevada situation before but I haven't explained it nearly as clearly as Ezra Klein did today in the New York Sun. I hope Kucinich reads it and thinks about why Democrats actually did cancel the debate and then revisits his idiotic response-- or is he just trying, bizarrely, to curry some sort of favor with Fox?

"News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic caucus which appears to be controlled by radical, fringe, out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party," spat the press release from David Rhodes, a vice-president at Fox News Channel. I guess he missed the point. After a week of intense organizing by progressive advocacy groups and the online Left, the Nevada Democratic Party had scotched plans to co-host a debate for the Democratic presidential candidates with Fox News precisely because it wasn't a news organization.

Of course, accusing Fox News of conservative bias is about as insightful as suggesting Britney Spears occasionally acts out. The Nevada Democratic party was able to get out of the debate because Roger Ailes, President of Fox News, was kind enough to open a speech to the Radio, Television, and News Directors Foundation with a series of jokes calling the French cowards, suggesting President Clinton was trying to convince his wife to run for president so he'd have more time to philander, and making light of the possibility of confusing the names of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden (something Fox News has, conveniently enough, managed to do on a few occasions).

Mr. Ailes's classy monologue, however, was just a pretext for the Democrats to bail. The real reason was an unprecedented pressure campaign spearheaded by MoveOn.org, progressive filmmaker Robert Greenwald, and scores of bloggers, online activists, and others associated with the country's resurgent progressive movement. Mr. Rhodes thinks of them as a consortium of "radical, fringe, out-of-state interest groups," but whatever the adjectives he used, the Nevada Democratic Party clearly judged them a more important constituency than Fox News and its viewership, and that presages problems for the Republican channel and changes for the Democratic Party.

In recent years, this New Left has contested the Democratic Party at the ballot box, running primary candidates like Ned Lamont and helping to elect Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. That's organizing from the inside-- progressives trying to change the institution of which they are a part.

But the campaign against the Nevada Democratic Party marks the arrival of something different on the scene: It was an organized movement pressuring the party from the outside, demanding it live up to their expectations if it expected their support. It was the behavior of an interest group, rather than a constituency-- a skeptical ally, not a subsidiary. And it suggests that progressivism is maturing into a movement connected to, but distinct from, the Democratic Party.

As a channel, Fox News is fundamentally hostile to progressivism; it loathes Democrats mostly insofar as they function as champions of the progressive ideology. Indeed, in the past week, the channel hired two new contributors: Rick Santorum, the hard-right former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, and Harold Ford, a centrist Democrat from Tennessee in charge of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization explicitly committed to battling the left wing of the Democratic Party. Fair, meet balanced.

The bipartisan hiring spree demonstrates a subtlety of the Fox approach. Democrats are fine. Progressives are not. Superficially, the channel's new hires demonstrate an admirable, bipartisan bent. Actually, they show a conservative one.

There is a behavioral similarity, not an ideological equivalence, between a Democrat who criticizes Democrats and a conservative Republican who does the same. This was a problem for the Democratic Party, of course, as the intersection between it and progressivism is large, and, in Fox's attempts to murder the latter, it often sprayed buckshot across the former. But conservative Democrats didn't much care, and they even enjoyed being buttered up as the good kind of Democrats. Fox News does have a large audience, after all, and everyone's always talking about how the party needs to reach across the aisle-- and, before you know it, the Nevada Democratic Party has Fox hosting their debate.

What we saw this week was the rise of a progressive counter-establishment that the Democratic Party has no wish to cross. That's why Senate Majority Leader Reid distanced himself from the event, denying knowledge of the decision and saying, "I don't like Fox News." That's why Senator Edwards pulled out of the debate and Governor Richardson rapidly followed suit. None of these figures can afford to lose support among progressives.

Four years ago, there was no coherent progressive movement capable of commanding such attention from the Democratic Party's tribunes. Now, there is. And the progressive movement's success this week is a harbinger of a dark future for institutions like Fox News that rely on the absence of such an organized movement to split the Democratic Party and aid conservatism. It may not be fair, but America's political life is getting much more balanced.