Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
Drew Westen in Huffington Post reels out his impressions of what we learned from the Election of 2008. There are some remarkable insights in this essay and in other ways it falls prey to adulation and 20-20 hindsight.
I like, for instance, Westen's description of the political scene that evolved during 2008.
All Democrats need to do is to wait until a corrupt, incompetent, reckless Republican President gets two chances to collaborate with an ideologically extreme Republican Congress and makes such a mess of the country and the world that even suburban white Republicans vote Democratic.
But this is only part of the situation in which we found ourselves.
The truth is that the political right had reduced the political left to a caricature of itself through incessent brainwashing of its base in the anti-intellectual precincts of angry America. The political left represented by the Democratic Party had further abused itself by taking cues from the so-called Democratic Leadership Conference, the pantywaist, centrist, corporatist DLC. And, then Obama showed up, a person of Black Kenyan and White Kansan descent, a monkey wrench if ever there was one to throw into a perfect storm.
The results are known now, but the lessons learned are yet to be elucidated, even with Westen's good try.
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post attempts to debunk five of the current myths describing the recent general election. Some of Chris's thoughts are based on equally "conventional" wisdom, some on outright facts.
Take for instance the failure of Blacks or young first-time voters to materialize at the polls. The problem with debunking this myth is that there were plenty of reasons to believe it. Registrations were way up. Given that the new potential for voting in these two demographics, what caused the only modest increases? I am thinking that these groups are strongly inhibited by employment absence issues and news that polls would be crowded and lines long. Likewise, I believe that both groups are easily put off their enthusiasm by reports that their vote is not necessary to achieve the goal. One hopes that they learn soon that some elections boil down to very close margins.
Chris's suggestion that Representatives who are already "campaigning" for the mid-term elections in 2010 will try to establish a centrist record is pure hypothesis based on the prevailing press impression (a genuinely false myth) that America is a center-right country. The vote this time does not say that. America understands that the ideology of corporatism and greed is effectively bankrupt. They are not particularly interested in a Johnsonian New Society, but a more classical FDR approach, more pragmatic, yet fully committed to national solutions (rather than private ones) is the mandate.
The Cillizza debunking does have a salutary effect, however. It is much too easy to grab a handful of laurels and wear them around too long. His five myths whether they are debunked or not are useful for prodding Democrats out of their post-election lethargy.
First, Tom Englehardt cannot see the future from the wild array of appointment lists fluttering around Washington. He cannot see the thinking of Barack Obama from his catbird seat at the aging and ineffective journal that has the hubris to call itself The Nation. He cannot understand domestic politics from a humvee in Iraq, nor can he understand foreign policy by weeping over the impossibly profane activities of the USAF in Afghanistan.
More to the point, Tom Englehardt seems not to understand that history is both continuity and change and that the heaps of merde on Barack Obama's plate are not going to go away by themselves, nor will the fresh faces of inexperienced idealists from the nation's universities scare these heaps away. Wring your hands, Tom. Criticize the shadows playing on the walls of Washington and imagine Plato's surprise when the flickering went out and the "conspiracies" conjured in your head turned out to be the anxieties we all have about the mess we have made of our country.
Voting out congressional incumbents failed this year, showing the anti-incumbency movement to be a clear letdown. For some years many groups and their websites have been advocating voting out congressional incumbents as an effective means to reform government and make it work better. Two of the better ones are Vote Out Incumbents Democracy and Tenure Corrupts.
My colleague in NYC asks an important question this morning as the rumors fly about President-Elect Obama's supposed choice for White House Chief of Staff. In fact not only he but millions are wondering what sort of administration would it be with Rahm Emanuel guarding the president's back and filtering the access to him? Emanuel is a long time friend of Barack's and he's from Chicago, and he's been around, but his reputation is bad.
Rahm Emanuel is over the top on several counts, perhaps the least important being that like David Plouffe his every sentence is punctuated by the f-word. For me this denotes a thinly disguised rage burning within and, yes, intellectual laziness. It also suggests that Emanuel sees social intercourse through a lense I don't want to look through. He is a penetrating person, in your face and insistent. Frankly, I would probably punch the little bastard out within a month.
As the evening built like a wave moving to a beach, the inevitability, the truth of this remarkable victory became history, and many of us wept in our homes or in gathering places of every kind. In Arizona John S. McCain gave a concession speech that brought me to understand this man, his love of country, his gracious acceptance of a wonderful truth, that his defeat was not a defeat for America. It was a wonderful moment.
But an hour later, President Elect Barack Obama spoke and he laid the victory at our feet and using the trope of repetition urged us to understand that with this victory comes the awesome responsibility of our citizenship, the essential message of his entire campaign, that not only must we put our minds and backs to renewal and progress, but that yes, we are Americans and, "yes, we can!"
My hat is off to the editors of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch one of America's top five newspapers for many, many decades. Their endorsement of Obama for President is so much better than the strangled, choking, mealy-mouthed endorsements out of TNR and the WaPo among several as to remake the craft of endorsement entirely. It is this: when you have chosen a candidate for political office you praise him and thereby praise yourself. It isn't rocket science, it is a commitment.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economics and currently professor at Columbia University, published a very interesting and damning article in Vanity Fair (which I do not read habitually), but which was republished by truthout and forwarded to me by my colleague in Massachusetts. Stiglitz calls it like it is. You get the impression from this essay that we could not have planned a more destructive public policy if we had tried. The essay is a little tardy, I would say, because I have been ranting about this stuff ... most of it ... for years. Still, it is nice to see a Nobelist get it right for posterity.
The point made least well of all the damning remarks is that in cleaning house ... soon ... we must remove some people bodily from the public dialogue. They are just too full of their own laissez fair ideology to be of any conceivable use to us in cleaning this up. I am not suggesting abrogation of the First Amendment, but I am recommending a certain ruthlessness in getting rid of the deregulation folks. So, reaching across the aisle will be to people who understand that their culture of greed and unnecessary risk taking with the macro-economy is definitely out ... for good!
My Arizona colleague and I share a love of genealogy and it is something to which I fear I have, at times, become almost obssessed. Not happy to just know all my "direct" line I have branched out to see where all those elusive cousins and aunts and uncles, several times removed, might have ended up. So when I read this morning, in the Biloxi Sun Herald that John McCain had deep roots in Mississippi I was pretty much taken aback. Here I have been believing that the furthest south the McCains might have been was Virginia.
With John McCain speaking of growing up in Georgetown and in the suburbs of D.C. (meaning just across the Potomac River in VA.), I never would have thought that he might lay claim to roots in the deep south. But it turns out that his great, great grandfather, William Alexander McCain, had bought a plantation in Teoc, MS. and had owned at least 52 slaves. I found this all rather ironic given the nature of the campaign and the two major players.
I habitually take a 5K walk each morning at first light. First light in Arizona is the coolest time of day and, we Arizonans avoid daylight savings time completely to afford ourselves the extra early morning hour of light ... and the extra evening hour of grateful darkness. Most mornings I run into a neighbor who also walks and who, incidentally, is a mover&shaker in Democratic politics here in Pinal and Pima counties. She informed me that the Democratic County Recorder of Tucson's Pima County presided over an accidental shut down of the voting computer yesterday. Now hundreds of voters must vote again. With this kind of incompetence the suggestion that Democrats might upset McCain in his "home" state begin to look silly. But just look at the graph in this article! Obama is closing fast and could give McCain-Palin a seriously embarrassing race. Arizona's Tucson is like Texas's Austin (where I just came from) a blue dot in a sea of red. There are other strongholds, too, like mining town turned hippie Bisbee down near the border and some of the burbs of conservative Phoenix. I guess the point is that the disaffected are beginning to get restive and McCain may be presiding over a real debacle. We hope so!
Michael Gerson, a columnist in the Washington Post, writes this morning about the interpretation of a sweeping vote for Obama and the Democrats. The word "mandate" necessarily comes up and is banged around by narrow and carefully worded syllogisms and inferences that the election is probably about the economy, not Iraq, regulation, Supreme Court, etc., etc. The truth is I don't know Gerson all that well, but the way he ends his column today suggests that ... if the election goes the way we all think it will ... the Republicans are going to have a "mandate" to rethink their entire raison d'etre.
The Cheney-Bush regime has been characterized as a kleptocracy, a feeble theocracy, an attempt at corporatism, and so forth. The "mandate" that Obama is almost sure to get with a hundred point electoral vote margin (or greater) is to undo virtually everything that Cheney and Bush have done, reconstitute the federal government on the basis of needed and efficient services, and otherwise to drastically stanch the bloodloss from welfare and military spending. The "magic" of the Obama message is that to do this, to accept and carry out the mandate of the people, he will absolutely have to engage Republicans in solutions and people in their own economic situations. If I would add anything to Gerson's artificially narrow definitions of what the "mandate" will be, it would be that people might just as well get used to hearing about personal responsibility for their own situations and for the democracy itself!
There is a notion abroad in the evangelical Christian sector of the United States that the Christian God is the ultimate Founding Father of our nation. It is an inescapable truth among them in the sense that the nation was founded, in part, by people seeking religious freedom and, therefore, under the guidance of God. The various branches of fundamentalist Christianity see things slightly differently among themselves, but all of them see the secularization of America as something definitively not neutral, rather something detestable and against their understanding of the will of God. With that as background, the activities of the religious right outside of religion and in political matters raises a matter of considerable importance—the separation of church and state, which is a two-way street guaranteed by the First Amendment, to wit:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
First things first, of course. We must have the election to know what path the American people want to follow. If McCain-Palin win, which is not as likely, Europe and much of modern Asia will begin to write America off as a hopeless case, a "Matrix" all by itself, deluded and preyed upon by cannibal corporations, descending into a hell not yet expressed in world history, a race-riven chaos of religious zealotry mixed with dark, dark politics. If Obama-Biden win, the rest of the world will exult that finally America has taken a giant step away from its natal disfigurement toward a more cooperative and progressive future.
But what of the cast of characters at the national level. At the state levels, of course, the problem is coat-tails and anger, and Republicans are bailing out of McCain-Palin politics as fast as they can. At the national level three candidates are Senators and have productive jobs to which they could retreat. Governor Palin is the object of much debate these days, and both Rachel and Keith brought up the possibility that she is running against McCain-Palin already, setting herself up for a four-year crash course in government, the better to make herself attractive for 2012. Not everyone thinks so, however, and I agree with whomever it was that said it all depends on what happens to the Republican Party in the aftermath.
Romney represents the center, I think, the hope to unite the Party around traditional Republican small government, low tax, strong military, values. But there are centripetal forces: the Neocons, the Religious Right, the Libertarians, the Family Values voters, even some Silent Majority types left over from previous eras. There are mandarins who will support Sarah Palin because she was such an exciting boost to the moribund campaign of McCain for three weeks or so. But, the fact is that Republicans, should they lose this election, will fall into disarray for a while and with Obama's novel bipartisanship at work, they will be hard pressed to find leadership before the next mid-term elections, leadership satisfactory to the chaos of factions that have developed in their midst. There is even the distinct possibility that moderate and liberal Republicans will bolt the party entirely, some going toward the Ron Paul Libertarian side with the hope of smoothing out his message, others going into the BlueDog ranks of conservative Democrats. The key is how Obama and Biden play this game. They could do with kindness what Rove and Gingrich failed to do with arrogance and anger.
I awoke this morning to news that the Asian stock markets had a very, very bad day. "Korea Crushed" was one of the headlines. Then I got an investment advice from a friend in Florida that boldly stated that today would be a crash on Wall Street. It has been predicted and attempts have been made to plunge into the abyss, but today was supposed to be the day for a 1,000 point dive to the low 7,000's on the DOW, with more to come. But, as of right now the market is only down 250 or so, give or take. It is surprising how easily we become inured to bad news when there are months of it on end.
Mark Morford feels the earth moving beneath his feet. Of course San Francisco is famous for sour dough bread and earthquakes, so the rumbling he hears could be anything. But, it is not. It is the approaching election and the possibilities it brings. There are many opportunities for mischief yet, and the stock market crash may be just one of the October surprises this election year. No one in the Obama camp is claiming early victory, because no one knows whether all those new registrants and young people—both groups being classically absent from the actual voting booths in past elections—will vote. Yet, when you see a poll with Virginia's Obama supporters outnumbering McCain's by 10% you have to wonder. Maybe people are ready to make this next earthquake happen!
Okay. There are people still out there who cannot make up their alleged minds. Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle suggests a few reasons why these people are so mugwumpish and intractibly perverse. You come away from his piece with mixed emotions and a fair amount of confusion about the "undecideds."
First, are they the same as "independents?" I think they are a non-exclusive subset of independent voters, most of whom have made up their minds by now. Second, are "undecideds" really one or two issue people and have one issue championed by one candidate and the other by the other? Yes, and I think that "undecideds" could have a race issue, such that they want to be voting for the first Black candidate, but they don't like his policy on Iraq. Something like that. Third, "undecideds" must be going through huge tortures these days. Everyone else is ranting from the tree tops and around corners at blank walls like so many troops trying to put down an insurgency. Minds are made up, but not these minds!
My secret view is that "independents" and "undecideds" are egoists who believe their "take" on the candidates is definitive. Since you can't get definitive in politics, they are hamstrung, paralyzed, voter-blocked, and so full of themselves they can hardly contain their secret joy in being the putative swing voters. What a picture! What hubris! Most of them will discover that it is raining (somewhere) on election day and will stay at home in bed or concoct some other fabulous excuse like finally getting to the rolling of their socks.
Gary Younge, who writes and videos for the UK Guardian in America, created a short video of a paradox about health care set in Roanoke, Virginia, formerly the largest railroad marshalling yard in the east, now a medium-sized city "dominated" by a medical corporation. The paradox is that health care seems to be "beyond" regular people. They just don't understand how to get their interests registered in the public dialogue.
Health care is probably one of those necessities of life that get short shrift because of the negativity about disease and injury. People would rather not think about health care ... excepting perhaps some lip service to nutrition ... at all. As Gary Younge uncovers the real economics of health care in Roanoke, the rightwing internet machine is stoking up issues about medical doctors being against the Obama health care plan. Here is a page from the A.M.A. website that links to both candidates' relevant web materials and also provides a statement of A.M.A. positions. As you can see the wild claims of individual medical personnel circulating on the internet and given legs by Fox News are substantially bogus.
Health care for Americans is a public health issue and a national security issue in times when pandemics can emerge or be launched by an adversary. Health care policy cannot be taken lightly or be dealt with as if it were strictly an individual's concern. Of course, the nexus of health care is the individual, but the general public is the national concern. It is a time for placing profits within "reason" and for statesmen to understand the public discomfort and lack of knowledge about the issue.
The pundits everywhere said before the debate this Wednesday evening that for John McCain to turn his failing campaign around he needed a knockout ... not a TKO, but real knockout. The blogosphere and the mainstream media were in total agreement. John had to sully Barack, he had to take the Ayers "terrorist connection" or some other perceived chink in Obama's armor and penetrate into the heart of Obama's character. McCain brought up Ayers and it bounced off the gloves of Barack Obama. John brought up the remarks of the Black Congressman who compared the style of McCain-Palin campaigning to the style of George Corley Wallace segregationist race-baiting. The blow never reached McCain's target and instead became a matter of his putative hurt feelings rather than dirty politics. McCain did not achieve anything like a knockout and in this sense failed in his objective.
McCain's composure was better than previous behavior in these debates, but he continued to interrupt Obama ... in my view deliberately to egg Barack into a tussle ... he continued to speak to him somewhat dismissively and could not even come up with Michelle Obama's name at an instance where he was actually trying to be "gracious." McCain's answers to some questions were well delivered, and he appeared to be using "talking points" less than in the previous engagements. McCain landed the "redistribute the wealth" blows several times, and Obama parried only with grins, the kind that Ron Reagan had on his face when he said "There you go again!" McCain's use of the plumber example, a case of someone just above the $250,000 income mark, and therefore part of the group from which Obama intends to achieve some increased taxes, was effective, if not completely honest. Obama did not parry this as well as he could have. He needed to meta above the plumber and indicate that the vast majority are not the plumber who bought the company. It was a standard Republican ploy executed quite well.
The question of whether Obama made McCain look like George Bush was pretty well squelched by McCain. McCain came out against Bush and, for all intents and purposes, the Republican Party. But, and this is important, McCain did not actually separate himself very well from the past eight years or the Gingrich/DeLay years of the 1990's.
It is tempting to give this debate to McCain on the basis of improvement, but in fact he did not achieve his goals. Obama continued to look and sound Presidential. Obama was not lured into some kind of endless debate over his associates or people who speak against McCain from their own pulpits. Obama's explanations continued to be cogent and yet not exposing any new areas for dispute ... included the health care issue of fining businesses that do not provide health care to their employees ... a question that was asked and answered in the previous debate.
The temptation fades, and the urge to call it a draw hangs like a pinata in the room. In fact, both men did well, neither made any big mistake, both improved, but McCain improved more, but from a lower level to a level not quite as good for his purposes as Obama for his. I give it to Obama. You pick the number: ten points, five, fifteen? The quick/snap polls are in this range.
Well, finally! The last debate is almost upon us and since the first debate Senator Barack Obama has surged ahead in the polls to the point where, if Senator John McCain does not win this debate by a knock out ... almost literally ... then the contest will be essentially over. The moment of "truth" will be the Obama response to the Ayers Question, namely, why does Barack Obama "pal around with" former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers? The professor shown in this video interview at American University in Washington, DC, believes that Obama must treat the question as an issue, "...because it is an issue," she says. It is an issue for people who believe that a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago is still a radical domestic terrorist, despite the fact that he would not have a professorship at a public university if he were. It is an issue if you believe that an eight year old boy would be even have known of the Weather Underground and what its beliefs were. Or, that Barack Obama having discovered that the Bill Ayers was suddenly in his community and that wishing to emulate the younger Ayers, he sought him out to learn the terrorist trade.
No, it is not really a serious issue. It is a "media issue" manufactured in the McCain campaign HQ by disciples of Karl Rove. Now Rev. Jeremiah is a serious issue, because Obama hung in there with Wright for twenty years, learning the ways of urban black culture from him. Wright was definitely Obama's teacher and mentor, whereas Ayers is nothing to Obama, just another person in the world with a past, a present, and presumably a future. Too bad Obama cannot parade Ayers before the crowd and show that he does not have horns or smell like sulphur.
Just so we are clear. Although Rev. Wright is a serious issue, Barack Obama has already answered all questions about that in Philadelphia months ago. That speech will go down in American History as one of the great speeches. It stood its ground and opened up the truth of the Black American experience for everyone to understand. It did not convince everyone that Barack Obama is actually White or actually Black. He is, obviously, both and benefitting greatly from the perspective of a man with one foot in each culture. Whether McCain brings Jeremiah up again or not, Obama will be prepared for it. McCain risks the appearance of rampant racism if he does, and given McCain's volatility and shotgun temperament, he well may. It will fail as a tactic and it will succeed in bringing the McCain campaign to its knees!
The Washington Post leads this Sunday morning with an article about race creeping into the Presidental contest as if race has not been the central issue in America for 350 years! Race is the crack in our Liberty Bell as nearly every child understands by the fourth or fifth grade. Race is the original sin of a country that believes in original sin and its consequences. Race certainly is the pivotal, if not the most important issue in the campaign. It is the hinge upon which swings the final vote of people who are trapped by circumstance into lives of not-so-quiet desperation.
The hinge of fate is whether the so-called Bradley Effect will turn a significant number of voters away from voting for Barack Obama despite their statements to pollsters that they would vote for him. And, now, there is a Reverse Bradley Effect, one I encountered in reverse in my own phone-bank experience last week. I called a man with an Hispanic first and last name and asked him if the election were today did he know whom he would vote for? He said "yes" rather than Obama or McCain. I stumbled for a moment and said that I wanted to know which of the two men he would vote for. He said, that's not the question you asked. I heard other people in the room where he was. I said, if I name the candidates will you tell me yes or no? He said yes. Obama, no. McCain, yes. This man was afraid to name his vote in front of his family. The Reverse Bradley Effect is like that, but it says that people who favor Obama, but live in racially sensitive cultures are likely to say "no" to Obama to pollsters, but vote "yes" for Obama in the peace and quiet of the voting booth. No one knows how strong the Bradley Effect or the Reverse Bradley Effect will be.
During Wall Street's worst week ever the McCain Campaign learned an important lesson. The lesson is that the American people are very much afraid of the future and are willing to believe nearly anything that fits their preconceptions of what the causal factors in public life are. Many of them have been brainwashed—like the poor people of Kansas—into believing that "Liberalism" is the cause, that people who are Liberal have fundamentally different ideas about cause and effect and about basic principles. So, when Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin began their trek down the low road, bombarding their live rally audiences with the "Hussein" meme and the "terrorist sympathizer (Ayers)" meme, people became unglued. They began to shout out their fear with "Kill him!" "Bomb Obama!" and the like.
These people don't understand political rhetoric that is intended to be fully false and designed to incite them to emotional frenzies. This is America, they say to themselves, responsible people would not tell such lies. There must be some truth to something I hear many times a day, week after week, month after month. These people are not feebleminded; they are brainwashed. They have been taught to find egregious unfairness in the world and to blame the great satan of Liberalism for it all. They have been taught to rail against things that cannot be fixed easily or at all, because these rages keep them in a constant state of fear and victimhood.
As the evening built like a wave moving to a beach, the inevitability, the truth of this remarkable victory became history, and many of us wept in our homes or in gathering places of every kind. In Arizona John S. McCain gave a concession speech that brought me to understand this man, his love of country, his gracious acceptance of a wonderful truth, that his defeat was not a defeat for America. It was a wonderful moment.
