Up for grabs.

• Position: Comment - Presidential election

The Democratic race for the Presidency has been a triumph of progressive politics. With the exception of Joe Lieberman, every other candidate in the race has, for the most part, embraced the liberal tradition of the party. All the energy, all the passion, all the momentum is from the left.

After suffering through eight years of Bill Clinton's neoliberalism, progressives are now prevailing on issue after issue.

On health care, Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton all have come out for a single-payer system. And by staking this moral high ground, they have forced the other candidates to come up with at least partial measures to insure more Americans, especially children. With forty-three million citizens uninsured, this is an issue that won't go away. And no Medicare flimflam by Bush will solve it.

On civil liberties, every Democrat has taken it to Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft. John Edwards has been particularly outspoken, stressing the vast powers that Ashcroft and Bush have arrogated to themselves, including the power to hold U.S. citizens in prison indefinitely and not charge them with a crime, not let them see a lawyer, and not let them appear in court. (Edwards, however, does not have a sufficient answer when asked why he voted for the USA Patriot Act. "Well, here's the reality about the Patriot Act," he said at the Des Moines debate. "There are provisions in the Patriot Act which never get any attention which do good things. Al Gore recognized these. A lot of the commentators since have.")

John Kerry recently picked up the civil liberties issue, as well. In an Iowa speech on December 1, he criticized the Bush Administration's excesses. "They have used police powers in secret ways and for political purposes," he said. "It is time to end the era of John Ashcroft." (Kerry, too, voted for the Patriot Act. Here's how he explained that vote in his Iowa speech: "It clearly wasn't a perfect bill--and it had a number of flaws--but this wasn't the time to haggle. It was the time to act.")

When the gay marriage issue came up, several candidates--including Moseley Braun, Sharpton, Edwards, Kerry, and Clark--stressed the importance of looking at it as a civil rights, equal rights, and human rights issue. Kerry, however, did vacillate when he said, "I think the term 'marriage' gets in the way."

On tax fairness, each Democrat has made the case--and it's an easy one--that the Bush Administration's economic policies reward...