Civility and harmony are not words which typically depict the 2008 election cycle. And after what has already been a rather venomous campaign season, it may seem as though the chances of Republicans and Democrats coming together on the big issues we face are at best, unlikely.

But alas, a ray of hope remains.

This morning, the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations, released a joint-statement signed by all three major party candidates, Obama, Clinton and McCain, in unity over ending the genocide in Darfur.

While not unprecedented in presidential politics, this statement represents a defining moment in the struggle to call the world’s attention to this crisis. Today all candidates have spoken in one voice and declared that ending genocide in Darfur is a priority of not just a U.S. Administration but also of the international community, which is primarily tasked with handling situations of this nature.

Here’s an excerpt of the statement:

“As we campaign for President of the United States over the next several months, we expect there to be significant focus on the many differences between us,” reads the statement, which is also featured today in a New York Times advertisement. “It is with this awareness that we are taking the uncommon step of issuing a joint statement about an issue. After more than five years of genocide, the Sudanese government and its proxies continue to commit atrocities against civilians in Darfur. This is unacceptable to the American people and to the world community.”

In addition to the statement, the Coalition has taken out a paid advertisement in the New York Times with signatures from the candidates.

The past seven years of Bush Administration foreign policy have been destructive in terms of America’s ability to be a moral leader in the world. The Bush Administration characterized the situation in Darfur as genocide yet, as on so many other issues, it has offered empty rhetoric in place of meaningful action towards confronting the regime in Khartoum, Sudan.

January 20, 2009 will be a new day for America. Whichever candidate is administered the oath of office will be tasked with cleaning up Bush’s messes and, when it comes to Darfur, implementing a policy that truly works towards ending the genocide.

Today, we should all pause and regardless of political party, be proud that when it comes to ending genocide each of the candidates are ready to declare “never again.”

We Democrats are balancing on a live wire and need to take decisive and immediate action after the primaries are finished to ensure the nomination battle does not make it all the way to Denver. That, surely, would cost us the general election in November.

I am writing today in strong support of a plan I’ve been reading about for the past week to end this primary process with transparency and fairness. If you haven’t already done so please check out my recent appearance on MSNBC (here comes the plug!) where I argued this prolonged primary process is good for Democrats and especially good for Obama. I want to see him tough and tested in the primary so he can be ready to stand against the crap that McCain will have coming in the general. If Clinton only managed to throw the kitchen sink, McCain and his doofi will surely throw the sink, cabinets, bathroom fixtures and the family minivan.

So, how does this all end neatly?

Phil Bredesen, the current Governor of Tennessee, has proposed a plan to hold a superdelegate primary immediately following the final party primaries in South Dakota and Montana on June 3, 2008. The plan, which Bredesen outlined in a recent New York Times editorial, makes sense because it brings closure to the process and pressures superdelegates to act swiftly in casting their votes.

Here is some more from the New York Times:

Here’s what our party should do: schedule a superdelegate primary. In early June, after the final primaries, the Democratic National Committee should call together our superdelegates in a public caucus.

Of the 795 superdelegates, over 40 percent have not announced which candidate they are supporting; I’m one of them. While it would be comfortable for me to delay making a decision until the convention, the reality is that I’ll have all the information I reasonably need in June, and so will my colleagues across the country.

There will have been more than 20 debates, and more than 28 million Americans will have made their choices and voted. Any remaining uncertainty in our nominee will then lie with the superdelegates, and it will be time for us to make our choices and get on with the business of electing a president.

This is not a proposal for a mini-convention with all the attendant hoopla and sideshows. It is a call for a tight, two-day business-like gathering, whose rules would be devised by the national committee, of the leaders of our party from all over America to resolve a serious problem. There would be a final opportunity for the candidates to make their arguments to these delegates, and then one transparent vote.

This is our electoral process at work in a way the founders would be proud of.

The formal nomination itself obviously awaits the Denver convention. However, if most of the superdelegates were to come to the table in June, there could be a clear conclusion, and enormous moral pressure on the candidates to accept the result and move on.

Some might raise reasonable concerns about the cost and logistics of assembling these superdelegates. But those would be manageable; this is a business meeting of a few hundred people almost three months from now, not an extended, cast-of-thousands convention.

Possibly the nominee will become clear by June and such a gathering will no longer be needed. That’s fine: it can be canceled or turned into more of a formality. The chance to have our nominee clearly identified in June as opposed to late August far outweighs any logistical or financial concerns.

Much ado been made about the rules that govern the Democrats’ nominating process. The angst that been expressed from many people comes from the feeling that, after all of the campaigning and votes cast, there would be a chance that superdelegates could make a decision that would seemingly overturn the “will of the people.”

My biggest concern is that with over three months between the final primaries and Denver, all parties will have too much time to meddle, court and lure the uncommitted superdelegates and as a result we could end with a stalemate or worse– a result that is seen by many as tainted.

The superdelegates have had over a year to study the candidates and analyze their candidacies. After the South Dakota and Montana results are reported and the campaigning officially ends, the ball moves squarely into their courts and they must immediately get off the fence and pledge their support.

We all know there is a lot at stake in the coming weeks. Without a superdelegate primary, I fear we stand a good chance of squandering an opportunity to win this election and change the direction of our country. However, worse than losing an election, we stand to lose the trust of millions of voters from around the country and that will prove fatal for the future of our great party.

Just watch it, it is more than worth your time:

Says the New York Times:

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.

Let me just say I have been a big fan of Paul Krugman’s for quite a while now. Even prior to September 11, Dr. Krugman had the Bush administration figured out for what they were. And in the insanity of 2002 and 2003 he was one of the very few mainstream voices that recognized the dangerous path we were pursuing. But this election season, Krugman has taken a turn away from economics (his specialty) and its intersection with politics. He’s repeatedly inserted himself into the race as an opponent of Barack Obama over his health care plan.

I understand his argument and even agree with parts of it, but Krugman has now crossed the line from Obama critic to Clinton shill. Witness his op-ed today about the Fed and financial markets. It’s full of interesting observations about the economy that help a layman like me understand this increasingly chaotic and complex element of our national debate. But he ends the whole thing with a non sequitur Clinton talking point:

But hope is not a plan.

At least we can now put all his past denials behind us and acknowledge that for all intents and purposes Paul Krugman is now a Clinton surrogate.

Looks like the folks at The Caucus Blog are fans!

H/T to listener Rachel Adler for always having DoubleSpeak on her mind!

‘If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.” {New York Times Aug 19, 1990}

Dennis Kucinich? Al Sharpton? Ted Kennedy? Nope!

John McCain said this in 1990.

John McCain: “Against the war…before he was for it.”

HT: Cliff Schecter

As expected, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives Keith Ellison was elected to serve as the first Muslim in history in Tuesday’s election. The New York Times has an article discussing both the national and international reaction to this historic victory.

We met Keith and if you haven’t heard our interview with him yet, you should. He is something else.

From the NYTimes:

But Muslims across America, and even overseas, celebrated his election Tuesday as the first Muslim in Congress, representing Minnesota’s Fifth District in the House of Representatives, as a sign of acceptance and a welcome antidote to their faith’s sinister image.

“It’s a step forward; it gives the Muslims a little bit of a sense of belonging,” said Osama A. Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News, a weekly in Dearborn, Mich., a state with one of the heaviest concentrations of Muslims. “It is also a signal to the rest of the world that America has nothing against Muslims. If we did, he wouldn’t have been elected.”

Mr. Ellison’s success was front-page news in several of the Arab world’s largest newspapers and high in the lineup on television news programs.

Few of his supporters expect Mr. Ellison, a 43-year-old criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a 19-year-old college student, to effect any policy shifts in areas of concern to Muslim Americans, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and civil rights.

The Final Push.

There was a very interesting piece in the New York Times today on the sons of politics past. The story focuses on Chet Culver (D-IA), son of former Senator John C. Culver (D-IA), Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), son of former Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Jack Carter (D-NV), son of President Jimmy Carter (D-GA). I thought power skipped a generation. I guess not. Oh, that’s twins. Either way, very interesting story, worth the read!

In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.

Now, that election has a sequel.

Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.

Read the rest of the story here.

A Senate Race in Connecticut
Editorial
July 30, 2006

Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.

But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.

This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

Read the rest of the New York Times endorsement