tom_thinks

I have to say from what I saw the Democratic Convention was alright. I really enjoyed Barak Obama, I thought Bill Clinton had some interesting points, I'm happy Al Sharpton deviated from the script and I missed a lot of the rest of it, because I'm traveling in South Florida. That said, I did see a bit of John Edwards' speech and he seemed ok, but then at the end chanting "Hope is on the way" seemed a bit ridiculous. "Hope is on the way" seems more like something I'd say if Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean were the nominee. Norman Solomon agrees with me. Check out this article:

No, hope does not gallop in like Paul Revere. And it certainly doesn't arrive
breathless from a corporate party convention.
Movements for peace and social justice can bring realistic hope -- not with rhetoric but with the tough daily tedious uplifting work of political organizing. Yes, we'd be better off with
John Kerry in the White House instead of the Rove-Cheney-Bush regime. And the
only way that's going to happen is if enough people in swing states (http://www.swing04.com/) vote for Kerry on November 2.
But I'm already getting tired of the bulk email messages claiming that Kerry is the embodiment of progressive dreams. Please. We can simultaneously walk, chew gum and be clear about the reality that Kerry embraces a centrist matrix of militarism and corporatism -- and, at the same time, in a world of contradictions, it's extremely important that George W. Bush lose the
election on November 2... Let's not make stuff up. And let's not imitate the Democratic Party's hype machine. Just because you think people should hold their nose and vote for Kerry, don't act like there isn't a stench.
Meanwhile, it's unfortunate some progressives feel compelled to claim that overall the
political differences between Kerry and Bush are insignificant. Sounds righteous all right -- but for anyone who's been paying attention to the Bush administration for nearly four years, it shouldn't pass the laugh test.

He goes on a bit, but the article is brief. It would be easy to be swept up in the fervor of the Democratic Convention and forget that Kerry isn't the perfect candidate. However, even as its necessary to cast a vote for him to kick Bush out, we need to remember that the struggle isn't over. With Kerry holding similar positions to Bush on the future of Iraq, the Palestinian-Israeli situation and the idea of pre-emptive attacks, progressives have a lot of work to do.
Then there's this article from Naomi Klein that makes another good point about the prospects of a Kerry Presidency.

We know this, yet there is something about George Bush's combination of ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives I've come to think of as Bush Blindness. When it strikes, it causes us to lose sight of everything we know about politics, economics and history and to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd personalities of the people in the White
House. Other side-effects include delighting in psychologists' diagnoses of Bush's warped relationship with his father and brisk sales of Bush "dum gum" - $1.25.
This madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect John Kerry, not because he will be different but because in most key areas - Iraq, the "war on drugs", Israel/Palestine, free trade, corporate taxes - he will be just as bad. The main difference will be that as Kerry pursues these brutal policies, he will come off as intelligent, sane and blissfully dull.
That's why I've joined the Anybody But Bush camp: only with a bore such as Kerry at the helm will we finally be able to put an end to the presidential pathologizing and focus on the issues again. Of course, most progressives are already solidly in the Anybody But Bush camp, convinced that now is not the time to point out the similarities between the two corporate-controlled parties. I disagree. We need to face up to those disappointing similarities, and then we need to ask ourselves whether we have a better chance of fighting a corporate agenda pushed by Kerry or by Bush.
I have no illusions that the left will have "access" to a Kerry/Edwards White House. But it's worth remembering that it was under Bill Clinton that the progressive movements in the west began to turn our attention to systems again: corporate globalization, even - gasp - capitalism and colonialism. We began to understand modern empire not as the purview of a single nation, no matter how powerful, but a global system of interlocking states, international institutions and corporations, an understanding that allowed us to build global networks in response, from the
World Social Forum to Indymedia. Innocuous leaders who spout liberal platitudes while slashing welfare and privatizing the planet push us to better identify those systems and to build movements agile and intelligent enough to confront them. With Mr Dum Gum out of the White House, progressives will have to get smart again, and that can only be good.

Gotta love Naomi. I hope progerssives will get smart again, we've got a lot of work to do.