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A NOTE FROM THE MOVEON TEAM
Last week we asked if we should consider early endorsement of a Presidential candidate, and the results were overwhelming. 96.3% out of 186,000 who responded said YES to an early "MoveOn Primary." So we’re moving forward. If one of the nine candidates receives more than 50% of the vote next Tuesday and Wednesday, we will officially endorse that candidate. Today's message is one of three we'll be sending by email from the candidates favored in our first straw poll on May 29th. To make sure you have the information you need, letters to the MoveOn membership and responses to the MoveOn interview questions from all the Presidential candidates are online now at http://www.moveon.org/pac/cands/. Invite your friends to register to vote in the MoveOn primary by going to http://www.moveon.org/pac/reg/. The more of us that join in this process, the better the chances that ordinary voters, not pundits or big donors, will determine the Democratic nominee. Thanks, --Carrie, Eli, Joan, Peter, Wes, and Zack Read letters from all the candidates here
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Leading up to the MoveOn Primary next Tuesday, we've offered to forward emails from the three candidates who polled highest with our members. You can also view letters from all nine candidates here. Here's the third email, from Representative Kucinich: ____________
Dear MoveOn.org Sisters and Brothers,
On February 17, 2002, more than a year before the war with Iraq, I sat down and wrote "A Prayer for America," a speech I delivered later that day to the Southern California ADA, to a rousing reception. If that speech, or this essay, touches or inspires you, volunteer--help us speak truth to power: http://www.kucinich.us/volunteer.php
More than a year before the Bush Administration bombed Baghdad, I spoke of "...the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President."
Months before anyone else now running for President, I spoke these words: "Let us pray that our country will stop this war...
Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq.
We did not authorize the invasion of Iran.
We did not authorize the invasion of North Korea.
We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan.
We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
We did not authorize the withdrawal from the Geneva Convention.
We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.
We did not authorize assassination squads.
We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.
We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.
We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.
We did not authorize national identity cards.
We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.
We did not authorize an eye for an eye.
Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.
We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases.
We did not authorize war without end.
We did not authorize a permanent war economy."
It was still early in 2002, but many of us shared a feeling of uneasiness and anger about the Bush Administration’s unilateral foreign policy, and the response to my speech was incredible--thousands of emails, letters, calls. Obviously there was a spirit alive in our nation, waiting to be released. Those of you at MoveOn.org understand that spirit, because you have touched it, too.
Like you, I didn’t just speak against the war, I acted against it--voted against it, organized against it, campaigned against it. As Co-Chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, my friend Barbara Lee and I led the fight against the war resolution, organizing 126 House members to vote no, in just a few weeks. I reintroduced my bill to establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace and Nonviolence, so that we can promote peacekeeping, conflict resolution, and the nonviolence principles of Gandhi and King. I was even attacked in the mass media for suggesting that the Administration’s obsession with Iraq had a lot to do with its oil reserves. Imagine that...
Then on February 15th, 2003, a new spirit of peace exploded out of millions of hearts, with 15 million marchers, including many of you, in 600 cities around the globe, as the world said no to war. The President was not listening, but the people of the world heard us, for our voice was clear. This war was unnecessary, destabilizing, illegal, immoral. This war was not America at its best. This war would cost us our young soldiers, our children’s treasury, and our moral authority with the rest of the world.
That February Saturday was cold, but our hearts were on fire as I spoke to the half million demonstrating in New York City: "Peaceful coexistence or war. The whole world is watching. A fist or an open hand. The whole world is watching. First use of nuclear weapons or leadership in global disarmament. The whole world is watching. Bombs or bread to the Iraqi people, to the Iranian people, to the North Korean people. The whole world is watching."
http://www.kucinich.us/speeches/speech10.htm
And when the war finally came, like MoveOn.org, I did not flinch from my American duty to dissent. This is what I said, the same night the war started: "This is a sad day for America, the world community, and the people of Iraq. Tonight, President Bush has commanded U.S. forces to go to war in violation of American traditions of defensive war. This war is wrong; it violates the Constitution and international law."
http://www.kucinich.us/speeches.htm
At that point, some politicians backed away from dissent. Some stayed silent, hoping that the national agenda would soon pass on to other issues. But you and I kept fighting, kept calling for the truth, and kept challenging the so-called evidence that was used to sell this war.
And in the last few weeks, day after day I have gone down to the well of the U. S. House to call on the Bush Administration to finally come clean about the pre-war evidence for the weapons of mass destruction. Just last week, I introduced H. Res. 260, a "Resolution of Inquiry" demanding that the Bush Adminstration produce the evidence for their charges about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. I now have 36 co-sponsors, and am adding more every day. We are having an impact, the Administration is beginning to feel the heat, and some in the mass media are finally asking the right questions. I hope you will join me in this effort, which MoveOn.org and TrueMajority.org and Working Assets and Win Without War are also stressing now.
We know the Bush team cheated in Florida in 2000, when Bush Co-Chair Katherine Harris made thousands of false felon purges. We know they manipulated the 2002 elections, using fraudulent charges of an imminent threat from Iraqi WMDs to scare the voters and force a rush to war. If we don’t stand up to them now, they’ll do it again in 2004. Help me expose the truth about the cooked-up intelligence.
Sign our petition to call on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld to release the evidence.
Email your Congressperson, either to thank them for signing on as a cosponsor, or to urge them to join me on this resolution, H. Res. 260.
Fax the committee, to urge them to hold open, public hearings.
Go to www.kucinich.us and join me in forcing them to come clean.
When the Progressive magazine calls me "the Peace candidate," I accept that label with pride. Like MoveOn.org, I am not afraid of the names we are called for upholding the best traditions of Jefferson, Paine, Lincoln, and Dr. King. Like you, I understand that America’s roots are in dissent, change, reform--and that change agents are always attacked as threats to the established order.
My political career has been built on big ideas, fighting for them, and winning. I have a history of defeating entrenched Republican incumbents. And in this Presidential race, I still have the big vision. When I was interviewed by Bob Edwards on NPR, he asked me if I was running to win, or just to raise issues. I told him: by raising these issues, I’m going to win.
(link to NPR interview, http://www.kucinich.us/npr_transcript.htm)
Of MoveOn’s top tier, I’m the only one who will cut the bloated Pentagon budget. With George W. Bush’s proposed increases for next year, the U.S. military budget will just about equal the military budgets of all other nations in the world combined. That’s too big. America is not supposed to be an Empire; we are supposed to be a Democracy. As the ranking Democrat on the House Reform Subcommittee on National Security, I know about wasteful Pentagon spending firsthand. I will cut the military budget, because we have to cut it, in order to have real money to spend on education. More money is desperately needed to rebuild our schools; to pay our teachers; to allow our children to be taught in smaller classes; to wire our older schools for the internet, and help bridge the "digital divide;" to at long last fully fund Head Start. Without cuts in the Pentagon budget, there will not be enough money for education, much less health care, environmental cleanup, and other needed domestic programs. Among the people of America, this is a common sense position; but among the MoveOn top tier candidates, I stand alone on this issue.
The military budget is not the only issue on which I stand apart. I am the only Presidential candidate who voted against the civil-liberties-shredding Patriot Act. From nuclear weapons in space, to nuclear disarmament, to medical marijuana, to the role of the W.T.O. in the too-fast expansion of genetically-modified foods, to opposition to the death penalty, to Canadian-style national health care, my position is the progressive position, the standard that other candidates will not match.
On core Democratic issues, I stand with progressives on the fundamental positions of our party--I am for more money for social safety net programs; I am for a total, not partial, rollback of the extravagant Bush tax cuts for the rich; I am pro-choice, and will not appoint any Supreme Court justices who do not affirm Roe v. Wade; I strongly support clean air and clean water, affirmative action, tough civil rights and voting rights enforcement, strengthening OSHA and the rights of workers to organize, gay and lesbian equality, Title IX protection, affordable housing, living wages, and signing the many treaties that the Bush Administration has rejected, including the Kyoto global warming treaty and the land mine ban treaty. I will fight hard to get private insurance companies and their bureaucracies out of health care, and to keep your Social Security retirement safe for Main Street, rather than privatize it for Wall Street.
I will fight against sweatshops and child labor worldwide; to thwart the takeover of family farmers by agribusiness giants; to return the Social Security retirement age back to 65, as our elders were promised; to pass a massive renewable energy program that provides jobs to Americans, renewable power for the world, and "small-is-beautiful" technologies to developing nations.
I am committed to international cooperation, to working with the U.N. and our historic allies. I want to help build a world where billions of people do not have to try to survive by living on $1 or $2 per day, by cutting down their forests for heat, or by giving away their national resources in order to repay debts that were previously incurred by dictatorial regimes, often supported by our government. I am committed to fair trade practices that provide a higher quality standard of living in the developing world without unsustainable consumption; to providing clean water to the entire world; to placing children into schools rather than into child labor; and to joining Brazil’s new President, Lula da Silva, as he seeks to eliminate hunger in a world of plenty.
In short, I am a leader in the "Wellstone wing of the Democratic Party," and like most MoveOn.org members, I’m proud of it. Maybe that’s why Paul Wellstone was the lone Senator who joined the Progressive Caucus that I co-chair (with that brave peace advocate, Barbara Lee).
Like Paul, I am a passionate, populist advocate of principled politics. Like Paul, I believe in organizing as well as legislating. And like Senator Wellstone, I won my seat by defeating an incumbent conservative Republican, thanks to a volunteer-based grassroots campaign that united Democrats, Greens, independents, and former "Reagan Democrats" into a winning coalition.
The gatekeepers of conventional wisdom would like you to believe that I cannot win. These big shot media types, of course, are the same crowd that didn’t understand the worldwide web, thought the Beatles were a fad, never believed Jerry Brown, Jesse Jackson or George McGovern would win any primaries, and laughed when a rumpled, unknown, progressive college professor climbed onto a green bus in Minnesota to challenge a popular, well-funded, experienced conservative incumbent. They laughed; but the voters responded--and Paul Wellstone won the upset victory of 1990 to take his place in United States Senate history.
The fact is, like Paul, most of the base of the Democratic Party is both antiwar and opposed to corporate-dictated trade deals. That’s why, with your help and your passion, I can win this nomination. My principles, and MoveOn.org’s principles, are those of most Democratic Party primary voters.
When we do win, the gatekeepers of conventional wisdom will then try to tell you that George W. Bush cannot be beaten. Of course, they said that about his father, too.
Once it is clear that George W. Bush’s credibility gap has grown to Nixon-like proportions, his Teflon shield will be cracked, and his reckless mishandling of the economy will send him back to Texas.
The big pundits will also tell us that the only way we can win is to be cautious, to run to the middle. But that’s not what the Right wing did--when they were in trouble, they turned to their champion, Ronald Reagan. The conservatives ran on their issues, stood fast on their principles and ideas, and triumphed. Now it’s our turn.
The truth is, the so-called experts never see the change coming beforehand. They never see the paradigm shift. They’re too busy explaining the old habits, while a new world is being born.
A year ago, they would have told you MoveOn.org was declining. A year ago, they would have told you there was no peace movement in America.
The pundits never saw the "Teamsters & turtles" coalition coming together against the WTO in Seattle in 1999; but I was there with 50,000 blue/green protesters as we changed the way the world looked at corporate globalization.
And the pundits never, ever predicted that on a cold Saturday in February of this year, millions and millions of people around the world would gather together at one time, to speak in one voice, to say no to a destabilizing, aggressive, unjust war.
You know how that massive demonstration came together, because you and I helped build it. We organized using the internet, creating a new model of localized, principled, non-hierarchical action. We created, in the words of the New York Times, a new global superpower--world popular opinion.
And we can do it again in 2004--only bigger and stronger. Together, we can win this next election. Together, we can put the brakes on the war machine. Together, we can take our country back from the would-be empire-builders, and come home to democracy. Together, we can build a world of peace and prosperity and unity.
One final point--if you help my campaign strike a strong blow for peace and justice, you will not just gain a candidate for a year--you will gain an ally for your causes for a lifetime.
I am running to be President, but I intend to struggle for a better world for the rest of my life. I think those of you in MoveOn.org and my growing network can work together as a formidable team, as we did in the days leading into February 15th, and as we are doing even today in our battle to force the Bush Administration to come clean on its pre-war claims about the weapons of mass destruction.
Join me, at www.kucinich.us.
A better world is possible.
Peace,
Dennis Kucinich
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Paid for by MOVEON.ORG PAC, P.O. Box 9218, Berkeley, CA 94709. Website: www.moveonpac.org.
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