I'm keeping my own list.
Includes getting more "responsible" about withdrawing from Iraq; support death penalty for rapists; supports Supremes nullification of D.C. gun ban; does Sister Soldjah number on MoveOn.Org; rejects public financing; back-tracking on NAFTA; dissing Wesley Clark.
Some of these in my book are defensible or at least much less important than others. Welfare reform is a biggie. The list is growing. I'm thinking about hobbies. ======================================== I think there are two issues for consideration here:
1) Is there any value for leftists to work actively on behalf of the Democrats?
I've always supported US leftists like Julio, Max, Charles, and others who engage with Democrats, especially when there is motion in the party and the possibility of an organized left wing developing within it which could again give the left a political home. The present experience with Obama strikes me as the first real test of that orientation. Other candidates who challenged the party establishment like Eugene McCarthy or Jesse Jackson never even got close to winning the nomination and charging up the base of the DP as Obama has. I'm prepared to wait and see how the party ranks respond to Obama's twists and turns before abandoning that perspective.
Unfortunately, the only other options, as Max says, are to drop out of active politics and take up a hobby or to deceive yourself into believing that isolated local activity or participation in the Greens or some other marginal third party is somehow meaningful. The track record of the left outside the DP is no better than inside of it.
If the Obama campaign bombs in the eyes of its supporters, it will lend credence to the view that in an imperialist country the possibilities are very limited for building a left in any context. Gallup polls suggest that the only institutions supported by the majority of Americans are the military (by far), the police, and small business, with less than 10% support for labour unions. Those surveyed must include a significant percentage of Democrats, and these allegiances may prove to be less susceptible to change in a period of crisis than I'm inclined to believe. If so, it's possible that a sizeable chunk of the party ranks in that context would move to the right rather than to the left - not to the extreme right, to be sure, but perhaps to a new party in the centre as Bloomberg and others have mooted. Is it possible that Obama, sensing where the political centre of gravity is in American politics, might be positioning the Democrats to forestall this kind of development, which would represent a far greater threat to the party than Nader's campaigns?
2) Should leftists cast their votes for the Democrats?
If I were not a disenfranchised subject of the empire, I'd be voting for the Democrats as the "lesser evil", pending the appearance of a mass party to it's left, even a small mass party like the CPUSA or SP both once were in the country's history. My first loyalty is to the unions and the various social action groups which look to the Democrats for protection against the forces in the Republican party which want to destroy them. Liberal/social democratic parties generally have a better mix of tax and spending policies, and make better judicial and bureaucratic appointments, than conservative ones, though neither will encroach on capitalist power and property.
That's pretty much how I presently support the NDP in Canada - half-heartedly and having ceased to be active some time ago. It's much farther away from government than the Democrats and hardly in a position to be of any support to the unions and allied groups or to affect public spending, which makes voting for it even less compelling.