The even Newer Deal (Update: Look at who's on board!)

Ever have one of those days? Everything I've designed this weekend looks...wrong. Even the soup stain on my shirt seems aesthetically inferior to previous soup stains.

Still, maybe this will work as a logo for the new New Deal movement. Both the font and the decorative element come from the Art Deco movement -- the FDR era -- yet they look modern. (Please don't mention Shepherd Fairey. His sunrays are way different.) This design works in black and white, and in many different sizes.

If you came in late, scroll down a few posts for the New Deal manifesto. We're starting a new movement -- a Democratic analog to the tea party movement. Weirdly enough, the exact same idea seems to have occurred to a number of different bloggers over the course of a single weekend. It was downright spooky. See, for example, Blue Lyon and Riverdaughter and Anglachel and Sky Dancing.

The dispensers of conventional wisdom still pooh-pooh the idea of primary challenge to Obama. From the New Republic:

Most importantly, who would run? Hillary Clinton has ruled it out categorically. Al Gore’s electioneering days appear to be long over. There’s been talk of Russ Feingold running (mainly based on a misunderstanding of an “I’ll be back” statement he made on election night which seems to have referred to a future Senate race). Dean would win headlines, but has a poor reputation in Iowa, where any progressive challenge would have to be launched. There are no guaranteed primary vote-getters out there like Estes Kefauver in 1952, and certainly no one close to the stature of Ted Kennedy. And there's a reason no incumbent president has actually been defeated for re-nomination since the nineteenth century.

So that's it. What we are likely to see is a marginal opponent: a Dennis Kucinich, or a Harold Ford, or some celebrity who hasn’t held office but is willing to spend some money. More serious comers will be chased away by the hard, cold reality of what it would take to mount a presidential campaign against the White House in places like Iowa and Nevada and New Hampshire and South Carolina.

My response? There are quite a few Democrats in this country, and most of them would like a Democrat to vote for. Obama may have a (D) next to his name, but his policies are rated (R).

The New Republic makes the mistake Democrats always make: They accept the terrain as it is. The Right doesn't do that. They get out their bulldozers and remake the political landscape.

Go thou and do likewise.

Build a movement and leaders will appear.

Update: Carolyn Kay hipped me to this amazing piece by Clarence B. Jones, Scholar in Residence, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University -- at HuffPo, no less.

It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected as President of the United States. But, regrettably, I believe that the time has come to do this.

The pursuit of the war in Afghanistan in support of a certifiably corrupt Afghan government and the apparent willingness to retreat from his campaign commitment of no further tax cuts for the rich, his equivocal and foot dragging leadership to end DADT, his TARP for Wall Street, but, equivocal insufficient attention to the unemployment and housing foreclosures of Main Street, suggest that the template of the 1968 challenge to the reelection of President Lyndon Johnson now must be thoughtfully considered for Obama in 2012.

And there's the ultimate answer to those who tell us that challenging Obama will strengthen the Republicans. If Johnson had run again in 1968, he would have done worse than Humphrey did -- and certainly worse than RFK would have, had he lived.

HHH came thisclose to victory; he failed only because the anti-war left could work up no enthusiasm for Johnson's veep. That's why Biden can't be the standard-bearer in 2012. (I'd love to vote for him, but I seem to be the only one.)

To those who think purely in terms of shirts-versus-skins -- to those who say that if you don't love Obama you must love Palin -- I say: Look at history. We are hardly the first Democrats saddled with a disappointing leader. The protesters yelling "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" were not right-wingers, and did not want to see Nixon in office. They protested because conscience required protest, and history justified their stance.

Bobby would have won.

Johnson would have lost.

And Obama...?

PS. I just noticed something striking about the "blue sunrise" logo above: If you squint a bit, you could say that this design resembles the old "eye in the triangle" motif which plays such a huge role in right-wing kook literature. That should drive the far-right conspiracy wackos nuts. Free publicity!