Barak Obama vs Dao report

Peter Daou just posted a new segment of his articles on the state of the opposition party (read it here ). (hattip to Shakespere's Sister) Following is a snippet:

First, the root deficiency of Democrats with respect to message is not that Democrats don’t match Republicans blow for blow (as Obama puts it, “energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion.”) It’s that they fail to project core convictions. What passes for Democratic conviction today is a mutated form of “press release speak,” the political version of an evolutionary dead-end, a soulless evocation of ideals and principles devoid of the visceral connection with a human heart that gives it meaning.

Press release speak is endemic in the Democratic leadership, but it is absent in the blog world, which explains the appeal of blogs to rank and filers. That’s not to say that Democrats don’t give the occasional stirring speech, but the Democratic establishment sorely lacks a modern-day Martin Luther King, someone who speaks words so unfeigned, so blunt, so true that by sheer force of will their words move public opinion and rouse people to action. It is that unshakable strength of character that resonates with ordinary voters, not, as Obama says of Paul Wellstone, his “ability to deliver a scathing rebuke of the Republicans without ever losing his sense of humor and affability.” Humor and affability have little to do with netroots disenchantment, and I suspect little to do with Wellstone’s lasting and well-deserved appeal in the progressive community. What netroots activists sorely miss is the unfettered expression of a deep-seated faith in the inherent humanity and goodness of progressive ideals, the willingness to express that faith in loud, earnest, and most of all, authentic terms.
~emphasis mine

Progressives want someone with a clear voice to champion their values. Hillary lost my vote when she started to pander to the right to lifers as an effort to "triangulate" - a skill that won the White House for her husband.

What's needed now is a fresh voice, one who believes in what their constituents stand for; what we do not need is a calculating politician who is going to end up doing whatever they think will win the next election. That's the crux of the matter: if the representative does not passionately believe that progressive values will bring a better world, they cannot be expected to let those values inform their actions. Any promise is justifiable, and easily abandoned for the next calculated triangulation.

The Progressives have had a problem with the media distorting their views, shouting over everything they can say, and championing the president's propaganda. With only 6 major corporations owning all of the media news outlets, Democrats cannot even buy their way onto the small screen. Newspapers are just as bad. After the recent anti-war demonstrations, the
Boston Globe(touted as the most responsible and news-oriented paper in the states) buried the coverage of the Saturday march that drew over 100,000 people on page SIX, with no mention of it on the first page. The counter demonstration, involving only 400 people was on page TWO of the monday paper, proving that this last bastion of balanced reporting is in truth just sniffing after Bushco along with all the rest of those 'ol hounds.

As was proven during the coverage of hurricane Katrina, only gritty reality will cut through the talking points. What we need now is straight talk from progressive leaders: leaders that can speak truth from their hearts, not their calculators. We need bold speech, that outlines the good that this country does in the world when the leaders believe in the principles of real compassion, of equality, education, conservation, freedom, and liberty. And Sacrifice. Yes, that's what it'll take at this point, is a whole lot of sacrifice from the people who have been carpetbagging our south as well as Iraq. The tax cuts that Bushco pushed through in his first term have not spread prosperity. They have confined the prosperity to the upper reaches of the most rapacious corporations that don't pay taxes in the United States.

The time for tax cuts and service cuts is over. We stand at a crossroads: the Democratic party can haul their asses over to their base, and start articulating the values that created the prosperity that Bushco spent, or the progressives can declare solidarity, and leave the Dems behind - indeed leave the great experiment in democracy to it's internal rot of corruption, crony capitilism, and strongarm partisian politics, - to define a new path into the future.