Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: Forum Live-Blog

by Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium: Sat., Aug 4, 2007
Filed under: Media Consortium: journalism project

The forum is divided into three segments: domestic policy, foreign policy, and candidate philosophy.

Domestic Policy

Bill Richardson said he would have an explicit Roe vs. Wade “litmus test” for Supreme Court nominees.

Dodd basically agrees.

Hillary Clinton, elaborating on the battle scars for her ‘93-’94 Hillarcare debacle, reiterated her support for universal health care, and suggested that she’s learned a lot about tactics in the intervening 13 years. It would be, she says, her top domestic priority.

Obama would abide by budget deficits to fund important domestic initiatives if those initiatives are in kind investments. Health care and global warming policy fit well in that category.

Edwards: “If you want change… who will be the best candidate to do that?” My guess? John Edwards thinks this person is John Edwards.

Richardson doesn’t have a lot of support in the netroots on his tax policy. Loud, sustained boos. But his position on corporate welfare (against!) is, of course, broadly popular.

Shorter Dodd: corruption? Not so good.

Hillary Clinton is touting the need for greater media competition, but is a little bit unclear on what this would mean on the regulatory front. “We need to do everything we can to open up our media environment,” she says, but is somewhat unspecific about how to do this.

Dennis Kucinich supports the John Conyers bill–H.R. 676, Medicare for all. This is, as is so often the case with Kucinich, an extremely large distinction between him and the big three candidates.

Edwards announces that, if elected, he will close Guantanamo on day one. Huge applause for his call for Democrats to, as a matter of policy, refuse to take any money from any Washington lobbyists. He and Obama have already adopted that policy.

In response to a question about his flat tax policy, Mike Gravel went into a long disquisition about corrupt politics. His points about corruption are perfectly fair. His inability to defend his flat tax policy seems to have more to do with the fact that it’s an indefensible policy.

Foreign Policy

Hillary Clinton says she’ll begin withdrawing troops at the start of her administration.

Kucinich responds that Congress (that includes Clinton and Obama’s Senate) isn’t doing enough. He also wants to impeach Dick Cheney, which pleases the audience. Dodd calls for leadership in the Senate, and thinks getting 60 votes in that body is perfectly possible, but will require better leadership. Clinton and Obama, everyone should recall, voted against the supplemental quietly, in the last moments of the vote.

Richardson points out a significant difference between himself and the leading three. He’ll pull out all troops in six months. It’s a popular policy here, but it seems like somebody should ask him whether six months will be long enough to ship all of the arms that we’ve brought to Iraq out of there. Gravel makes a lot of sense when he suggests that cloture votes should be happening much more often than they are. Day in, day out, in lieu of August recess, etc. He backed Richardson, too, saying that the idea that we’ll only remove combat troops is a bad idea.

Obama’s focus, he says, would be on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. He says there’s no excuse for what happend on 9/11 and, when pressed on whether he thinks this was actually a blowback, he conceded rightly that our policies in the Middle East and Muslim countries have contributed to the milieu out of which emerged al Qaeda.

Edwards: “I do not agree with those who say this president has made us safer… this has been a foreign policy of convenience and the American people are paying the price for it.”

The war on terror “is a complicated long term struggle,” says Senator Clinton. It is also not a “war on terror.” Edwards, of course, deserves credit for driving the idea that the slogan is both a tool the administration has used to push forth disastrous policies and also inaccurate. Kucinich adds that a bit of analysis about Iraq itself could well have proved sufficient to keep us from invading the country in the first place.

Obama sees much to learn in (the humane) parts of China’s foreign policy–diplomacy, engagement, respect for others. “It is critical for us to get out of iraq… because we are neglecting all sorts of opportunities around the world that China is taking advantage of. ”

Chris Dodd likes the idea of national service. Many others do too, in theory. In practice absolutely nobody does.

My internet cut out and, as a result, I lost a big chunk of stuff. Bummer. Shorter Edwards: We should fund public schooling in anti-American parts of the world instead of engaging in “a foreign policy of convenience” where we trade arms with Saudi Arabia instead. He should probably add that this category of short-sighted and self-interested policy ideas are, in a long term sense, terribly inconvenient.

Philosophy

Official White House blogger? Edwards would hire his wife. Gravel says it should be the president him (or her) self.

Battery soon to be dead. But! Obama and Hillary Clinton basically endorse the Howard Dean 50-state strategy. I certainly think it’s possible that Clinton is coming around (or has come around) to this idea, but she’s more typically associated with Rahm Emanuel who subscribes to the idea of targeted campaigns. That difference has created a significant rift between the DNC on the one hand and the DSCC and DCCC on the other. Kucinich thinks the two parties still have too much in common. People here seem unsurprisingly to strongly disagree. Richardson notes that this should be done in the context of broader electoral reforms, including by creating a record–with paper receipts–of electronic votes.

Hillary is very unsuccessfully trying to convince people that the money her campaign takes from lobbyists doesn’t influence her: “The idea that somehow a contribution is supposed to influence you…” It’s sort of a ridiculous contention, but she’s quite correct and convincing when she points out that many lobbyists represent people like nurses, teachers, and other non-evil things. Somebody should break down her contributors by interest group to see how many of her funders represent normal people. Either way, she says she will not stop taking money from them.

Obama is fighting her on this very, very successfully “these people aren’t spending that money to contribute to the public interest. They have an agenda!” There’s wide agreement on stage, though, that elections should be publicly financed–a lot of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, of course, don’t hold this view.

Due to a dead battery and the lack of power outlets, I missed about 10 minutes of good stuff about elections, foreign policy, and the Constitution.

Clinton and Edwards have an extended back-and-forth about whether we’re safer as a result of Bush’s policies or not. I’m not sure it’s a question one can possibly answer with a yes or a no, but her argument–that we are safer because in the post-9/11 era we’re taking off our shoes at airports–is extremely weak, especially as, to my mind, this makes us no safer whatsoever.

And, with that, we’re done here. Since this is a quasi-reportorial venue, I’ll refrain from saying exactly who I think came out on top, but suffice it to say it was the rich white dude who’s really popular with the netroots. Cheers!

Update: More live-bloggers here and here.