It seems dismal, lefties, but there are still fights left to be fought

Have no fear, progressives, there remain battles that must be waged

Date published: 11/9/2004

By RICK MERCIER

"WE ARE entering a season of hope," President Bush told the nation Wednesday in his victory speech.

To people who consider themselves progressives, the sentence sounded absurd, even obscene, coming from Bush's lips.

No doubt there are many on the left who see a season of doom on the horizon--and that's understandable. There's every reason to fear what four more years of extremist foreign, fiscal, and social policies could mean for our country and our world.

But Bush is right to say that we also have cause for hope--albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with what the president has in mind.

Even though the center-left coalition that formed to oust Bush came up a little short, you who call yourselves progressives were winners in this election cycle.

Think about what you've done the past two years. You were the first ones to show the smarts and the guts to oppose Bush's invasion of Iraq. In a very short time, you marshaled the energy and resources needed to build a massive antiwar movement (or, in Bushspeak, a really big "focus group").

Then, many--but by no means all--antiwar progressives chose former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as a vehicle for expressing their anger over Iraq. The Dean campaign put the backbone back into the Democratic Party and created innovative, grass-roots ways to raise money and mobilize supporters.

Though he is no progressive, John Kerry reaped the benefits of the left's newfound savvy and passion in the general-election campaign, and this gave him a fighting chance of unseating Bush.

So it's not unreasonable to say that progressives were the ones who made this election close. It's not their fault that Kerry wasn't able to gain traction on Iraq and lost the election as a result. The left had the good sense to oppose the Iraq war from the get-go; Kerry didn't.

We'll never know what might have happened if the Democrats had offered a candidate who really could have held Bush accountable for one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in our nation's history, but Kerry wasn't in a position to rake the president over the coals on Iraq.

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Date published: 11/9/2004