Interview with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODE PINK and “fair trade” advocacy organization Global Exchange, at the “One Nation Working Together” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on October 2nd.

First Amendment efforts

This is new.

One month before the midterm elections, hundreds of organizations–many of them major organizations the Democratic Party needs to help them get-out-the-vote (GOTV) for November–will send a message to Democrats: No matter how much you beat upon the base for raising its voice and offering healthy criticism, progressives will still vote for you.

In their frontal assault on the dissatisfaction of progressives, the Obama team is making a key distortion that needs to be directly challenged. They are claiming that we are unhappy because the Democrats have not brought about change quickly enough. The truth, however, is quite different. We are upset because Obama is going in the completely wrong direction.

One Nation

One more chance, Barack. I’m giving you one more chance! Let’s have a progressive chief of staff and I’ll consider voting Democrat in November.

I was just going to write about how we should rally the troops to fight for strong progressives (as I did in this video), when Obama dragged me back into the fight between real progressives and the Obama administration. As Al Pacino said in Godfather III, every time I think I’m done with it, he keeps pulling me back in.

Obama’s hectoring the Real Democrats — the base — is a bound-to-fail enterprise. We Real Democrats told him time and again how and where he was losing us and he ignored us. That bill is coming due.

Unless progressives can find ways to counter the false images that our detractors are crafting, we will miss the opportunity to attract people who would be very sympathetic to our agenda. And once the Democrats get their coats handed to them in November, they will see us as a greater threat and will work even harder to distort and discredit our message.