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The politics of nothingness The politics of ethnicity, gender and zipcode Missing in action: the American left Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Vanna White What do Joe Manchin, Brian Schweitzer, Dave Freudenthal, Brad Henry, and Rocky Anderson have in common? How to tell if you're still a liberal Liberals losing it Nobody left but us What life would be like without liberals Lies of our times Viral politics State of the Bush Report Michael Kelly's libel Why liberals lose elections Pickups for Dean Is that all there is? Democrats: open up or shut up Of heroes in politics The American Idol election Talking about politics The politics of anger Whose left is it anyway? The rise of the liberal aristocracy and the decline of America How I got fired as a liberal |
The politics of nothingness Perusing still more puerile pandering in the cause of pacific politics by Barack Oblather, a vision suddenly appeared. While, according to Google, a few others have already experienced this transformational experience, it is still rare enough to deserve mention. The apparition was, without doubt, Chauncy Gardiner aka Chance the gardener, the last manifestation of magnificent nothingness to appear on the American political scene - albeit the fiction of Chance was safely contained in the movie "Being There" while Obama is running for election to a real White House. Like Obama, no one knew where Chance had come from. Even the CIA and FBI were unable to discover any information, with each concluding he is a clever cover-up by one of their own agents. In the final scene, reports Wikipedia, "Chance is seen apparently walking across the surface of a lake while the most important movers and shakers in the USA discuss running him for President. This scene continues to generate discussion and controversy. Clearly we see Chance walking on water, an act with a clear biblical reference. . . Is there a prosaic explanation, such as hidden stepping-stones? Or is Chance the Savior (as so many of the characters are looking for)? Does he truly possess some special grace, given his simple innocence and simply being present to each moment without filters and ideas? In his 2001 book, The Great Movies, Roger Ebert argues for the latter interpretation. Another view is that the director (and the author) are simply asking the audience: "How much more would you have believed? We've been kidding you all along you know!" The novel upon which the movie was based was written over thirty years ago by Jerzy Kosinski. The Obama candidacy may elevate Kosinksi to one of the most precient political authors of modern times. After all, what is more Obamesque than the sort of phrase that got Chance started? - "In the garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again." Of course, there are differences between Obama and Chance. Obama does have a modest political record and he is intelligent where Chance was dense. But the dynamics of his unprecedented rise has painfully similarities, especially in the willingness of the public and the media to turn the corny platitudes into evidence of a Second Coming. At a time of economic disjunction, enormous military failure, a national reputation on the skids and massive political corruption, it is not hard to see why the unwary should be attracted to one whose name in Swahili means "one who is blessed." This illusion is aided by a media that has, to a major degree, given up covering facts in political campaigns in favor a deconstruction of images, rhetoric and sensations. One of the results is what candidates pretend to be becomes infinitely more important than what they actually are. Thus the media has all but ignored the long list of scandals in Hillary Clinton's past in favor of such things as positive coverage of how she cynically responds to mention of her husband's impeachment. Obama is playing this same card for all its worth. He knows full well that the presidency is not about the "audacity of hope" and that, even if it were, he has no right to control its downloads as though he was the CEO of the RIAA of optimism. Obama is engaged in a sophisticated con with a long history in this country. We normally associated it with evangelicals - the Elmer Gantrys and the Jerry Falwells - but the scam can be used by liberals as well. Born-again liberals can turn their backs on reality as well as any conservative, finding solace in the comforting chicken soup of faith and hope. The problem, of course, is that reality just keeps truckin' along and Americans need far more than cliches to get them through the next few years. While Obama is clearly being intellectually dishonest, this is, to be sure, a lesser sin than the congenital variety practiced by his leading opponent. The little available evidence suggests that Obama would more likely be a disappointment than a disgrace. Still in the end it's a sad choice between the venal and the vacuum. The politics of ethnicity, gender and zipcode SOME readers may have noted that this journal is not particularly impressed by the fact that Barack Obama is black and Hillary Clinton is a woman. There are several reasons for this heresy. It's happened already The election of either Obama or Clinton would be fully predictable confirmation of a change in American attitudes that occurred a considerable while ago. That it happened later in the White House than in tennis, the Supreme Court or the House leadership more likely reflects the biases of campaign operatives, funders and media than it does that of the public as a whole. A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that 94% of Americans would vote for a black for president, 92% for a Jew, 88% for a woman, and 87% for a Hispanic. If you want a real cultural shift, you would have to elect a gay or an atheist who would get the support of only 55% and 45% respectively. But, with the help of the most manipulative media coverage of a presidential campaign that I can recall, Americans are being sold the myth that virtue lies in voting for a black or a woman and you can forget about all the other stuff. Obviously some extremely powerful interests - with little concern for either blacks or women - benefit from such an illusion. Icons and issues At the heart of the myth is the assumption that an icon is as good as an issue. To test this, name three issues of particularly concern to blacks or women on which Obama or Clinton would demonstrate a considerably more positive position than the other candidates. The problem is that Obama and Clinton are not Jesse Jackson or Betty Freidan; they are conventional centrist Democrats being backed by extremely wealthy individuals and interests. One reason this is not generally understood is because we have so few examples of an ethnically oriented campaign really looks like. A rare case was Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential run with a coalition that has been described as including "urban blacks and Hispanics, poor rural whites, farmers and factory workers, feminists and homosexuals, and white progressives." As Time reported, "In Iowa and New Hampshire, where blacks are less than 2% of the population, Jackson got about 10% of the vote. In . . . Minnesota, with a black population of about 1.3%, Jackson swept to an impressive second-place finish with 20%, ahead of all save Dukakis. Indeed, some whites in these states have had a remarkable experience: one of the few black men they had ever seen up close turned out to be running for President." Obviously that was not good enough to win the White House. On the other hand it was two decades ago and the electability of blacks has improved considerably. Further, if Jackson had not abandoned the coalition he developed during that remarkable campaign, American history might be quite different. Now we find ourselves with a black candidate who will obviously do much better than Jackson but if you care about the sort of issues he is meant to represent in the liberal mythology, you'd better go with Dennis Kucinich. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, voters will be choosing between the icon and the issues. The downside of equality While there is far less prejudice against blacks and women than twenty years go, the white liberal sense of noblesse oblige on matters of ethnicity and gender obscures a serious problem. True equality means that incompetence, corruption and other mortal and venal sins are just as fairly distributed by ethnicity and gender as is virtue. This is taken for granted in some places like Washington DC where we have been electing nothing but black mayors since 1974, where two of the leading mayoral candidates in the last election were black women, and where two gays sit on the city council. History - unlike modern liberal sensibilities - suggest that in such situations choosing empirically is preferable to selecting by noble abstractions. In fact, a white city council chair was considerably more progressive than the black woman and man who followed him. Although it is obscured by legend, blacks, women and gays made their greatest headway under the drug-addicted Marion Barry. And one of our gay council members is such a prig he wants to severely limit the ability of teenagers to go to music clubs. Race and ethnicity One of the reasons this all becomes more complicated than it has to be is because of the myth of race, which is itself a racist idea - a definition of no scientific basis conceived in order to discriminate. It's why you will find the word 'ethnicity' above; it's a cultural rather than a scientific description. Still the hold of race on our culture - even liberal culture - remains strong. Thus we have Obama constantly portrayed - yes, even above - as a black when, in fact, he is multicultural as is an ever increasing portion of America. We cling to definitions with which we are comfortable even when they do us harm. Similarly, the new mayor of Washington, Adrian Fenty, is multi-cultural but this is not widely known even in the city. The media doesn't mention it; he doesn't talk about it much. A rare exception was an interview with CPAN in which Fenty said, "It's been very healthy to me to see people grow and mature, and that friction evaporated over time and people realized that human beings are just human beings. And I tell people that I think kind of my tolerance and the racial tolerance I have individually, my just optimism about bringing people together, seeing my own family do that around my mother and father's marriage that has lasted, you know, some 40 years now. . . My Dad, again, born in Buffalo, New York, but his father's from Barbados and from Panama. He's the epitome of a - of a - of a person who's soft-spoken and who leads by example. My Mom was born in Buffalo, but from Italian heritage. She's the epitome of a mother who wears everything on her sleeve." Obama, to his credit, has been quite open about all this and it may be part of his appeal to the young whose ethnic context is quite different from that of their parents. But once you define someone as multicultural, it makes it harder some people - both black and white - to vote for you. And so the myths continue. The politics of zip codes In the end, if you really care about the future of women, blacks, latinos and others who have come out the short side of the American dream, then finding sanctuary in a comfortable icon isn't going to do the trick. You have to ask the hard question: when it's all over, who's going to be better off? One way to think about it is to put ethnicity and gender aside and consider the politics of zip codes. Under each candidate, which zip codes will do better and which will do worse? And who will do better: the white soccer mom or the black waitress mom? The answer doesn't necessarily lead you to the most comfortable icon. Symbolism and rhetoric deceive easily. Toni Morrison, for example, was taken in by Bill Clinton, whom she called the first black president, even though he made life harder for those on welfare, increased economic disparities and substantially intensified the conflict against young black males, aka the war on drugs. She had forgotten Mahalia Jackson's warning that "you can't say one thing and then do another; be a saint in the church and a devil under cover. You've got to live the life you sing about in your song." Those seeking salvation in an Obama or a Clinton are looking at the wrong end of things. It's not the color of gender of those at the top that we should be mainly considering but the state of those at the bottom. It's not as much fun and it doesn't leave you feeling quite as smug but, in the end, it's not the nature of the glass ceiling at the White House that counts as much as what goes on behind the doors that tens of millions enter each day in their struggle to survive. Missing in action: the American left IF nothing happens to change things, it looks as if Hillary Clinton will be running against Rudy Giuliani in 2008. Let's hope something happens to change things because it is hard to imagine a more depressing choice, the final triumph of money and media over democracy and sanity. Yet, even on the left, one doesn't get much sense that we seem to be moving from frying pan to fire. Six years bitter experience has left many liberals and progressives convinced that exorcising the demon in the White House and finding a Democratic replacement is all we need for happiness. It doesn't work like that. It is a reasonable bet that after eight years of the next administration - of whatever party - the overwhelming majority of the sins of the Bush years will remain, quietly institutionalized either because of lack of will, lack of votes or an excess of inertia. The primary reason for this is that in politics we get the presidents we deserve and a Clinton-Giuliani race would reflect the fact that in neither party is there sufficient will to do things differently - to rebel against the corrupt, cynical anti-democratic spirit that these two power-obsessed leaders represent. As the right has demonstrated over the past quarter century, the creation of a new popular paradigm is a complex, expensive and lengthy business. One can argue that the right had a grossly unfair advantage by controlling the hearts of corporations, mass media and evangelicals who happily and mindlessly spread its message to an unwitting electorate. This is true, but there is another factor that hardly ever gets discussed. The left has blown it. In fact, since the beginning of the Reagan administration there has not been a single mass movement on the part of the left that has made any significant impact on the country. Part of this has been a matter of priorities. Under Reagan and the Bushes, the left was happy to do what it seems to like best: protest. Under Clinton it switched gears and quietly and obediently complied. In either case - dissenter or drone - the left did little to offer Americans an alternative vision, platform or movement. Twenty years ago, as a member of the board of a national liberal organization, I found words for my concern as we discussed the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. Defeating Bork, I noted, was a necessity but it was not a policy. And we needed more policies. I could tell from the room that I had said something alien. Who are we, I sensed around me, if we are not in opposition? As recently as the last presidential campaign, I suggested a national progressive confab at which a list of major priorities would be compiled so everyone would know what we wanted, instead of leaving it to Fox News and David Broder to define for us. Again, it fell flat. I suspect a part of the problem is that liberals behave much like many abused children; they view themselves more as victims than as survivors. This is not surprising given that two of their major constituencies - blacks and Jews - place particular emphasis on victimhood in their political rhetoric. But in the end, it is a choice that even the worst treated make in different ways, which is why some of the most impressive survivors are found in some of America's worst neighborhoods. Rather than exhibiting the will to rewrite the story of themselves and America, too often liberals wallow in the mud pits into which their opponents have driven them and, when they can't take any more, willingly grab the hand of whatever hustler comes their way. In this way, 2008 already reminds one of 1992 when liberals lined up for Clinton because he looked like he would win and might throw them a few bones along the way. In fact, in different ways, both Hillary Clinton and Brack Obama are modeling their efforts on Bill Clinton. With HRC it's a quality that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette found in her husband: "It is not the compromises [Clinton] has made that trouble so much as the unavoidable suspicion that he has no great principles to compromise." With Obama it's the cynical use of hope - or, as Clinton put it, Hope - treated as though it was the candidate's personal gift to provide. In fact, in the last days of his campaign, Clinton ran a television commercial filmed from the window of a moving bus. The voice-over said: "Something's happening out there. A feeling. Call it hope. That a country can move in a new direction. That the future is something to look forward to. Not fear. If that's what you're feeling, you may have noticed something else. You are not alone." Obama before his time. In either case there is a quality that Christopher Hitchens found in early Clinton Washington as being like that in Peter Pan, in which the children are told that if they stop clapping, Tinker Belle will die. That pretty well sums up today's liberalism: you either oppose or you clap. There are at least three other reasons beyond the psychological why this is so. First: Major liberal organizations function much like all lobbying groups. Not only are they too far removed from the grassroots and too close to power, they are extremely protective of their own position in among the elite. Thus the mere notion of an effective coalition is troubling. Second: Since they don't have as much money as the right, it would seem logical that liberal groups became expert as grass root organizing. They're not. One explanation for this is that since the advent of television, everyone has played by the rules of virtual communication and part of this reduces the voter to a viewer, petition signer, or contributor. One rarely finds anymore the sort of organizing spirit of, say, Saul Alinsky or the anti-poverty era and - on the left - scarcely ever does one see the multi-faceted organizing of the Christian right. If the left only uses the tools of mass media, they will have their Move Ons to be sure, but the right will just keep moving on. Third: Much of the power and the money in liberal organizations comes from a new liberal elite - including large numbers of successful urbanites, women, gays, blacks etc. This elite has its own agenda which - regardless of its virtues - tends to ignore or deemphasize agendas of the less powerful and less well off who, incidentally, vote in much larger numbers. This is not an incurable problem but it at least has to be faced. One big exception to all this is the Democratic populist wing, an ill-formed amalgam that believes Democrats are here to do the most good for the most people. But it, too, has yet to find good footings for a new movement. Even the efforts of John Edwards in this regard will ultimately fail unless people rally to his cause and not just to his candidacy. Another major exception is the Green Party which, good as its heart is, has yet to tie its platform into a small and neat enough package that the media, let alone America, can grasp. In short, the American left has a choice. Either it remains the victim of alternative predators - the right on one hand, the Clintons and Obamas on the other. Or it takes charge of its own future and that of the country by agreeing within itself on a clear program and then - in the manner of the abolitionists, populists, socialists, suffragettes and civil rights activists - takes this message to every little corner of the land it is trying to change for the better. Hillary Clinton,, Barack Obama
and Vanna White 2006 What do Joe Manchin, Brian Schweitzer, Dave Freudenthal, Brad Henry, and Rocky Anderson have in common? They're among the most popular Democrats in the country and you've probably never heard of most of them. SAM SMITH - When someone asks me who I want for president in 2008, I chase them away quickly with the answer: Rocky Anderson. It isn't really true, but it symbolizes what I really think about the way the Democrats are once again fouling their own nest by spending more effort pleasing campaign contributors than reaching a natural constituency. The Vichy Democrats who have been wrecking the party since the early 1990s are still in control and unless there is a Dean-like revolt, Democrats will once again pay the price in 2008. Rocky Anderson is the ACLU-card carrying Democratic mayor of the largest city in one of the most conservative states: Salt Lake City. He is a member of the ACLU. Here's how Wikipedia describes him: "Under his mayorship, the city has purchased wind power, increased recycling, and is converting its fleet of city vehicles to alternative fuels. Anderson has supported initial measures to make the city more bicycle-friendly and pedestrian-friendly while opposing "monster" home rebuilding projects in the historic Avenues and Sugar House districts. He helped manage the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, and is a major proponent of downtown revitalization projects. He is an ardent opponent of tobacco use and has supported legislative measures limiting smoking; conversely, he is one of the most outspoken public critics of Utah's strict alcohol laws (state law permits the sale of alcohol only in restaurants, private clubs, and state-run liquor stores). "Anderson opposes English-only legislation, supports gay rights and same-sex marriage, and has launched living wage initiatives. This is notable in the state that in the 2004 presidential election gave George W. Bush his greatest percentage of the vote of any state in the Union. . . "In 2000, Anderson had Salt Lake City police officers end their participation in the DARE. program. He was characteristically blunt, telling DARE. officials: 'I think your organization has been an absolute fraud on the people of this country ... For you to continue taking precious drug-prevention dollars when we have such a serious and, in some instances, growing addiction problem is unconscionable.'. "Anderson attracted praise and scorn in August 2005 when, after accepting an invitation from the Bush administration to participate in a visit by the President, he sent an e-mail to local advocacy leaders calling for 'the biggest demonstration [Utah] has ever seen' to protest Bush's appearance at Veterans of Foreign Wars' national convention at the Salt Palace. Speaking to a rally in Pioneer Park (in downtown Salt Lake City), Anderson justified his protest against Bush, suggesting that the 'nation was lied into a war.'". . . "Incidentally, Anderson was raised LDS but is no longer associated with the church." If Anderson actually did run there would be controversies over some of his management policies and his spending habits. But that's not the point. The point is that there are more where he came from, but you'll never know it if the media only covers Clinton, Edwards and Kerry. The other politicians mentioned above are the most popular Democratic governors in the country, all with the approval of at least two-thirds of the voters, all of them from red states. There are reasons to argue with each of them, but at the same time, all of them are more far honest than Hilary Clinton and more competent than most in Washington DC - pol, pollster or pundit. Plus they actually know something about winning red state voters. The fact that such individuals get ignored by the Washington experts merely illustrates why the Vichy Democrats do so poorly. And they have not only sold out to major corporate interests that oppose much of what real Democrats stand for, they are also wusses. For example, they're desperately afraid of the national security issue despite. the president blowing one of the most expensive wars in history against a minor league country and despite the terrifying incompetence displayed by the Bush regime following Katrina. If you look at the most popular Democratic governors, competence is a recurring theme. Senators don't have to be competent, they just have to know how to talk, especially on Sundays. But if you want to win in the heartland, it helps to have some usable skills. The governors also tend to break the approved Democratic mold in some way. Manchin opposes abortion, Schweitzer is pro-gun. As long as the candidate is only a believer and not a bully, you can live with this. And the beauty is, politically, that you only need to be a single issue apostate to reach whole new constituencies. No one in this list seems up to a presidential bout, although a couple might make useful veep candidates. But, remember, unless the Democrats find an alternative to the complacent, corrupt, and cowardly capital crowd, the party is going to lose anyway in 2008. How to tell if you're still a liberal You are probably not a liberal anymore if:
Liberals losing it ALTHOUGH LIBERALISM HAS been on the skids for more than two decades, it has become the new fashion in that desiccated sect to blame Greens for the problem. Liberals don't worry about the dropping memberships and dramatic aging of groups like Common Cause and Americans for Democratic Action or the irrelevance of archaic liberal journals like the Nation (kept alive in part by charter cruises aimed at those who remember meeting Eleanor Roosevelt). Nor do they concern themselves with the declining viewership of public broadcasting or the chronic ineffectualness of the congressional black and progressive caucuses. Who needs those concerns when there is yet another target - the Greens - to join all those other Americans that liberal leaders can't stand (and then wonder why they won't vote for them) such as gun-owners, church-goers, southerners, people who still believe in local government and so forth. For example, Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect leads with this: "Ask any liberal to identify the force in American politics most intent on destroying progressive prospects and causes and you're sure to hear that it's the Bush administration or the Republican right or some such reactionary power. Let me gently suggest, however, that a very different force has wormed its way onto this list, and may indeed be right at the top: the Green Party. There's something so very pure about the Greens' destructiveness." This fits in well with the liberal myth that Gore lost the 2001 election because of Ralph Nader. In fact, Gore lost the election because he was a poor candidate, ran a bad campaign, and failed to separate himself morally from Clinton. Further, not only the Democratic Party, but the liberals within it, made it absolutely clear over eight years that they had no interest in, nor would respond to, the sort of politics espoused by Greens. That liberals should complain now is an example of the self-defeating arrogance that has done them so much damage. If you want people to vote with you, be nice to them. Just because you're god's gift to Manhattan or Georgetown doesn't give you an exemption from this basic political rule. Meyerson instead takes the stance that "la gauche c'est nous" - "When the Greens run a candidate against a Democrat, however, neither their campaign nor the effect of their campaign advances their agenda one whit. Their goal is simply to defeat Democrats, even the most liberal Democrats. Especially the most liberal Democrats." Meyerson, who gives no credit to the idea that Greens might have a few policy differences with his party, has one valid complaint: the fact that the Greens are running a candidate against Paul Wellstone. But liberal Democrats who gave blind allegiance to the most corrupt president in history who then set about dismantling a half century of liberal progress, are hardly in a position to lecture on wise tactics. Besides, as a fully recognized party, the Greens have a legal, constitutional and moral right to run their own candidates and shouldn't have to ask the decadent liberal aristocracy for permission. And sooner or later - after Democrats like Meyerson get over their childish tantrums - liberals will realize that one way out of their problem is to support proportional representation and instant runoff voting, rather than excoriating others for participating in American democracy. As it stands, liberals rest on the political landscape, as Disraeli once said the opposition bench, like a range of exhausted volcanoes. Your editor was an early advocate of the Green strategy of finding tight races between Republicans and Democrats and then breaking up the party. While I think Minnesota was a poor choice, I have no apologies to make. After all, I didn't leave the Democratic Party voluntarily. It was made quite clear that people such as myself weren't wanted. And besides, I thought if I remained, I might be liable under the RICO statutes. Meyerson is upset because the Greens
actually practice what they believe in: democracy, nonviolence,
decentralization, ecological sanity. They don't want to go along
with the moral charade of the Democratic Party. Myerson writes,
"Beware this party. At the heart of Green politics is a
novel - and ruthless - ethic: The means justify the end."
You're confusing your parties, Harold. That's the Democrats.
The Greens believe the means are part of the end. Nobody left but uS IF YOU'RE WAITING FOR SOMEONE IN POWER to do something useful about this mess, forget it. The axis of violence - Bin Laden, Sharon, and Bush - has turned this into a war of alternative terrors, the only certainty being that, by their bidding, somewhere, somehow, more innocent people will be killed or maimed. In this country, those of influence who should rebel against the madness are too cowardly, incompetent, or complicit to raise their voices. And even if they did, the media would pay them no mind, preferring instead the sociopathic festival of death and brutality in the name of nationhood and patriotism. So it pretty much comes down to us. Just as in every great moment of moral crisis, the fatal flaw of power is to prefer position to principle and to assume that position is an outward and visible sign of inner, invisible grace. Just as in every great moment of moral crisis, it is left to the weak to speak the truth, the outsider to find resolution, and the unannointed to carry out responsibilities that our elected representatives swore to fulfill but have so carelessly jettisoned. There is a great coalition of conscience waiting to be formed, but at the moment it consists of millions who, thanks to the effectiveness of government and media propaganda, have yet to realize that they are not alone. Once that discovery has been made - and oh how the apostles of violence seek to prevent it - then the way to sanity will start to open. If, say, those opposed to the present course represent just twenty percent of the country that's bigger than any lobbying group in America. If that twenty percent were to demand a few basic policies such as Palestinian statehood, an end to the Iraqi embargo, and the commitment to non-violent resolution, the illusionary national unanimity - so heavily based merely on fear of offending or looking foolish - would start to unravel. Any community could help to get this rolling by bringing together concerned citizens willing to stand with others and to say in a group what they have been reluctant to express singly. Religious leaders, writers, teachers, and others not a part of the machinery of power could play a major part as could those whose reputations are not dependent on the blessing of the political and media structure. What started as a few people setting an example could spread until it becomes a national and international movement. There could also be a non-official initiative in the form of a national or global Internet petition to those in power to cease their earth-threatening behavior and to accept a few basic principles of decency. And finally, there could be some symbol - perhaps a revival of the peace icon of the 60s - to make visible our rejection of the ways of our leaders and our commitment to an alternative. There are, to be sure, a wealth of other tactics - demonstrations, boycotts, civil disobedience. But it seems that nothing could do more sooner than to find a number of ways in which those who do not wish to join the axis of violence can declare their rejection and know they are not alone. What life would be like without liberal policies People who complain about liberal policies are like the man from Virginia who went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal deposit insurance laws. Now he's retired and on social security and Medicare. The other day he got into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station, took Amtrak to Washington and went to Capitol Hill to ask his congressman to get the government off his back. Here are a just a few of the things America would be without were it not for liberals in the White House: - Regulation of banks and stock brokerage firms cheating their customers - Protection of your bank account - Social Security - A minimum wage - Legal alcohol - Regulation of the stock exchanges - Right of labor to bargain with employers - Soil Consevation Service and other early environmental programs - National parks and monuments such as Death Valley, Blue Ridge, Everglades, Boulder Dam, Bull Run, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Mount Rushmore, Jackson Hole, Grand Teton, Cape Cod, Fire Island, and San Juan Islands just to name a few. - Tennessee Valley Authority - Rural electrification - College educations for innumerable veterans - Housing loans for innumerable veterans - FHA housing loans - The bulk of hospital beds in the country - Unemployment insurance - Small Business Administration - National Endowment for the Arts - Medicare - Peace Corps Lies of our times YOU SOLVE PROBLEMS BY CREATING NEW CABINET DEPARTMENTS When national politicians get stuck, they create a new cabinet department. There is little evidence to suggest that this helps whatever it is the department is meant to be doing. It does, however, greatly increase the opportunities for waste and fraud. In the post-WWII era there have been a number of new cabinet departments such as: - In 1949, a few years after victory in World War II, the Department of Defense was created. America never again won a major conflict. Instead it fought three wars - Korea, Vietnam and Gulf - to a stalemate and was reduced to bombing and invading tertiary countries such as Granada, Panama and Afghanistan. - In 1965, LBJ created the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A few years later America's cities were ravished by riots and went into a long decline. No new major housing programs on the scale, say, of the VA or FHA programs were ever created again. Further, HUD became a center of fiscal corruption second only to the Department of Defense. - In 1979 the Department of Education was created, following which the quality of American public education has continued to decline to the point that it is now relies on George W. Bush for ideas. The new Department of Homeland Security [sic] will undoubtedly follow in this pattern, especially given that it will even be stripped of civil service protections. You may fairly expect it to be inefficient in its tasks and wasteful in its spending, corrupt, anti-democratic, a honey pot of political patronage, and, as a consequence, an additional danger to the homeland security of the American people. Viral politics THE PROTESTS against the war last weekend, remarkable in both their size and their precociousness, suggest that mass civic action - with no small help from the internet - may have entered a new era of what might be called viral politics. Of course, viral politics - in which ideas are aggregated in the public consciousness in a decentralized, unstructured, and unmanipulated fashion - is what democracy was supposed to be about. Thanks, however, to corruption, cynicism, cultural corporatization, and media myopia this is no longer the case. Politics is now something that happens to us, rather than by us. At every level. I received a notice recently from our city government announcing a town meeting. And on what topic did city hall desire the public's opinion through this great traditional gathering of open debate? Prostate cancer. The concept of a town meeting had become so contaminated that whoever wrote the notice just assumed it was the right phrase for yet another meeting at which the government told the citizens what they should be thinking about something. The deliberate illusion had become the standard definition. As the Iraq war loomed, illusory definitions included democracy, freedom, and justice, Pearl Harbor, and patriotism. The government used the most highly developed agitprop ever, the Constitution was tossed out the window, and the corporate media was as obsequious as Monica in the Oval Office. It should have worked. It worked before with Vietnam and Panama and Gulf War I. What happened? One key element was missing and that was a public that had no way of testing whether what the wizards of war said was true. Now the public had a vast array of alternative sources and slowly - but quicker than during any earlier misbegotten American adventure - a meaningful opposition arose. The internet had previously shown its value in big and small ways, but never before had it been asked to save the whole country. It is still too soon to say that it succeeded but enough has occurred to give us heart, to recognize that there is actually a way to combat even the most technologically abundant and morally bereft American leadership of our history. As Leander Kahney wrote in Wired, "The disparity of protestors is a sign the anti-war movement has gone mainstream, observers said, and it's thanks not to the media, but to hundreds of anti-war websites and mailing lists. 'Never before in human history has an anti-war movement grown so fast and spread so quickly,' wrote historian and columnist Ruth Rosen in the San Francisco Chronicle. 'It is even more remarkable because the war has yet to begin. Publicized throughout cyberspace, the anti-war movement has left behind its sectarian roots and entered mainstream culture.'" "Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, also believes the Internet played a defining role in bringing the movement together. 'The last time the U.S. contemplated war -- 1991 -- the Internet was still an isolated phenomenon, confined to a relatively small population of enthusiasts,' he wrote in an e-mail. 'Now, not only are most of the citizens online, but online activism has had years to mature and perfect its techniques.'" Key to the net's success - and I decapitalize it to celebrate its ownerless ubiquity - is the collapsing of the time and space between when something bad happens and when it is revealed as bad and, subsequently, the time and space between when it is revealed as bad and when citizens find a way to do something about it. It has long seemed to me that the major political struggle in the world was between its citizens and their governments. It is a struggle for people, their places, and the planet. On one hand are government and corporate bureaucracies, with their carefully crafted pyramids of power, their soulless and vicious grasping for power, money, or land, and their ever-expanding technologies of cruelty. On the other hand are, yes, huddled masses yearning to breathe free just as throughout human history, but with one big difference: among them are a growing number huddled over a computer screen discovering the most subversive truth of all: that we are not alone - SAM SMITH State of the Bush Report Patient has regressed since last visit.
Whereas previously he only sought to be sheriff of all of the
U.S. and selected countries he called "the axis of evil,"
his grandiosity now encompasses every nation that has a non-democratic
dictatorial leader. Like his psychotic desire for vengeance against
Saddam Hussein of Baghdad, Iraq, this is another indication of
his intolerance of competition in all its guises. Patient also displayed his sadistic impulses by becoming clearly aroused whenever his talk turned to the possible death or punishment of others. This behavior has been noted previously in his public enthusiasm in condemning fellow Texans to death. But it goes back even further that that according to one of his childhood friends, Terry Throckmorton. "We were terrible to animals," Throckmorton recalled of his adventures with the patient, and offered as an example the thousands of frogs who would come out by a small lake after a good rain: "Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them. Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up." Patient is still in denial as witnessed by the fact that less than one-tenth of his discourse addressed his major domestic failure: the recession and his inability to deal with it. Other failures were mentioned in one paragraph and then ignored in favor of listing the faults of somebody else. Among these failures were the inability to locate Osama bin Ladin, the total collapse of his early ten year budget predictions, the problems with a dividend tax cut too obvious for even some Republicans to ignore, and the fallout from his disastrous education program. As far as the last is concerned, it would appear that the only child not left behind by the patient's plan so far is the one occupying the White House. Patient does have a few scattered positive thoughts. For example he mentioned in passing a hydrogen powered car and an AIDS program, although it is not clear who will be producing the former and whether the latter will be used to subsidize Christian missionary work in Africa. The latter is of some concern given his obsession with what he calls "faith," which - like most virtues - he feels he possesses to a greater degree than most. He proposes subsidizing "faith-based" drug treatment, i.e. using federal funds to convert patients to a form of fanatical Christianity so mind-altering that some medical experts believe it to be merely a form of drug substitution rather than actual treatment. The patient - who himself was treated in this fashion - exhibits some of the characteristics of what, in popular A.A. parlance, is known as a "dry drunk," i.e. one who no longer imbibes but still has many of the undesirable behaviors apparent when he did. For example, he appears merely to have added the subject of Jesus to the others about which he was previously incoherent. While patient is not yet legally qualified for hospitalization, he is clearly a danger to those around him, even those such as the media that have regularly served as prime enablers of his reckless actions. Will continue to work with him, but confess the patient's constant demands that his doctor cut out the gobblygook and just turn to Jesus is beginning to wear on my nerves. The nature of truth The endless argument about who said what to whom about what in order to get us into the Iraq war demonstrates an illusion about honesty shared by all sides. It is yet another iteration of a phenomenon I first noticed during the Edwin Meese nomination hearings. It became clear then, and so many times since, that America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens, had accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief. This stunningly low bar has been implicitly invoked many times - most recently and dramatically to exonerate our two latest presidents - and it helps to explain the decline of American politics. Once you leave your judgment of politicians to a court or a prosecutor, it is far too late to do much about them. Consider, for example, some common synonyms for honesty: sincerity, integrity, frankness, candor, openness. Is there anyone, even on the Fox Network, who would argue that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al at any point displayed such characteristics in dragging us into the Iraq disaster? And how is it that we place such a lower value on such virtues than we do on the question of whether the aforementioned told a prosecutable lie? In 2003, I was asked by Harper's to compile a history of the beginning of the Iraq war told entirely in lies by Bush officials and advisers. As I began to work on the project, I was reminded over and over of how little lying often has to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons. One does not have to analyze such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite is in command. Yes, some of the Bush capos may have done it so poorly from time to time that they can be successfully prosecuted. But our ultimate standard for judging their words and claims - whether as a Sunday talk show commentator or as an ordinary citizen - should be an ethical and not a legal one. If we let such con artists get away with their ultimate trick - which is having us believe that if we can not prove their swindle we must accept it - we will have fully surrendered to their treachery. Michael Kelly's libel THE DESPERATION OF THE HAWKS came out in a column by Michael Kelly much like something Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy would have written in the 1950s:
Since the overwhelming majority of those marching had absolutely no connection with ANSWER, Kelly's remarks were not only tawdry and tacky, they were libelous, and bring to mind the mischievous thought of 300,000 innocent souls filing individual actions against Kelly and the Washington Post. These are times for smears, however, because the establishment has run out of arguments, defenses, and excuses. Kelly's tantrum, and he does seem to have them, is the product of a mind that - as with, say, Communists and Christian fundamentalists - places excessive emphasis on theoretical assumptions and too little on actual facts. Like others of his ilk - such as David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens - he learned too much in college and too little since. Shoving all of life's experiences into theory is an ultimately unsatisfactory business and one of the things that causes such phenomena as wars and bad economics. While I wasn't as lucky as Ring Lardner Jr, who missed Marx because that segment of his economics course conflicted with the opening of the Red Sox season, I did find Marx boring, perhaps because I had already some experience with real politics, including being a gofer in a couple of campaigns that had ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. No one in those campaigns had ever mentioned Marx to me, or even Locke, and I quickly concluded that political science courses were perhaps not the best place to learn about politics. Besides I could never figure out who was meant to run the restaurants in Utopia. People in real politics - even Communists - don't sit around talking about theories like Horowitz, Kelly or Hitchens. They do things, like opposing wars or trying to get someone elected. And one of the first principles of doing things, as opposed to just thinking deeply about them, is to find others who feel the same way. This can lead sometimes in surprising directions. In the 1980s, DC elected delegates to a convention at which a constitution was drafted to be used when and if we ever became a state. Among the delegates in an 80% Democratic town were some Republicans, Statehood Party members, and at least one Communist. I was covering a session, sitting right behind one of the Republicans and enjoying how often he voted with the Commie, whose predilections he had clearly not surmised. At one point, he turned to me and said, "Now we'll see how the hard left votes on this one." I replied, "I hate to tell you this, but you've been voting with the hard left all night." A historical rather than a ideological assessment of American communism can lead in surprising directions as well. For example, as Eric Foner has noted, about the only predominantly white group in the 1930s that made civil rights a priority was the Communist Party. Marvin Caplan, later director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, quotes an anti-civil rights activist at the time as saying, "Integration is the southern version of communism." The Communist Party, buoyed by people with nowhere else to go, fools, ideological partisans, and FBI infiltrators, survived in no small part because the rest of the political system wasn't doing what it should. There were traitors in their midst, but the record suggests that the subversives within the party probably did less damage to the country than, say, the double agents within the CIA. For the most part, the Communist Party provided a home for idealistic but shelterless activists who in better times would have been somewhere else. To superimpose the whole Cold War ideological conflict on top of this peculiarly American phenomenon is to miss much of the story, in particular the role played by radical socialist Jews and by blacks struggling for basic rights. Alfred Kazin described it this way:
During the 1960s, many of the movements for change had Communists in their coalition, in part because of the organizational skills they had developed. When you're planning a march, you don't have much time for ideology. A union organizer in the early part of the last century recalled going to Arkansas and forming a coalition that drew from two remarkably disparate sources: the black church and the KKK. Why? Because these were the two groups in the state that knew how to get things organized. If you're in the midst of action, and not just writing about it from afar, you learn to cope with the fact that the world doesn't all look like you. And what matters is what you believe, not what everyone with whom you are marching believes. Once you have this core of self-understanding you don't have to run and hide under the table just because Ramsey Clark walks into the room. And you learn, based on experience and not theory, when to work with someone and when to get the hell out. I have known a few Communists, just as I have known a few libertarians, black nationalists, greens, creationists, single taxers, liberals, and Washington Post op ed columnists. I have found the Commies to be rhetorically redundant and sometimes tedious but on the whole less trouble in an organization than, say, police infiltrators, another subspecies you meet if you're active long enough. I have never heard a single one mention Stalin, perhaps because they know I might argue with them, but more likely because Stalin is about as relevant these days as the Free Soil Party or the Know Nothings, even though Kelly wishes it otherwise. One of the reasons that Kelly may be upset is that nothing terrifies the establishment more than people coming together who shouldn't by all rights be together. And when you have Republicans and "Stalinists" and soccer moms and the previously apathetic all in the same march, there's plenty to be worried about. Talking about politics Liberals might attract a lot more voters if they would stop dissin' them so much. It used to be that the left had a relatively few bad guys, such as Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, but now not only have these become major Democratic Party campaign contributors, liberal targets have exploded to include a large percentage of the voting pool. Once you eliminate all those who smoke, are too heavy, live in the suburbs, believe in Jesus, belong to the Green Party, own a gun, or lack etiquette when discussing ethnicity, you don't have that much to work with. In many cases, it's a matter of attitude more than policy. After all, if you go up to someone and say, "You're a big, fat pig" or "You live in a sprawling, polluting neighborhood" and then propose to reform them, the reaction is going to tend to be negative even if your ideas make sense. If, on the other hand, you talk about the need for healthier food and more exercise, people don't take it so personally. It is worth remembering, for example, that John F. Kennedy got a huge fitness craze going without calling anyone obese. Similarly, without characterizing another person's neighborhood, you can suggest ecologically sound improvements in urban design - such as accessory apartments, shopping within walking distance, and filling in the empty space around malls and along suburban strips. People support things that help them. Thus, if instead of moralizing over sprawl, one points out the energy costs savings in row housing, one is likely to find a more friendly audience. For a group that professes so much interest in diversity and tolerance, liberals are often surprising parochial and impatient with cultural variety. Thus they have played right into the conservative gambit of reducing politics to personal values rather than being about the public good. The way out of this trap is to rephrase policies so they become non-judgmental of the voters being sought. And, most of all, to find policies that help most people live better. It's how we got a weekend, a 40-hour-week, social security and a minimum wage. And it is still good politics. What's a bribe? The collapse of integrity in high places calls for consideration of our language about such matters. Take, for example, the word 'bribe.' Most probably assume that to bribe someone you have to commit a crime. Not so. Dictionary definitions of 'bribe' include both criminal and merely distasteful acts: Oxford English Dictionary: To take dishonestly. To extort. To influence corruptly by a consideration. On Line Ethics: Something that is given or offered to a person or organization in a position of trust to induce that agent to behave in a way that is inconsistent with that trust. Merriam-Webster: A benefit (as money) given, promised, or offered in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust (as an official or witness) Word Net: Payment made to a person in a position of trust to corrupt his judgment. In fact, for centuries ordinary people have known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone. In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise. But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time during the Clinton administration when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt. The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or "campaign contribution." Clearly, by the aforementioned definitions, campaign contributions fall comfortably within the definition of bribes. Unfortunately, however, words like 'bribe' are controlled by courts as well as linguists and teachers and we would be interested in some pro bono advice from lawyer-readers on whether describing a donation to the Bush inauguration as a bribe is considered libelous or not. If so, then we once
again find ourselves in the situation where the outer limit of
our behavior is defined not by broad standards of decency but
by when it becomes criminal. The Washington standard for confirmation ALBERTO GONZALEZ will undoubted be approved by the Senate since he meets the current Washington standard for confirmation: he has not been found guilty of any indictable offense and doesn't have an illegal nannie. In fact, he and his buddies should probably be prosecuted under the RICO statute for sitting around the White House plotting ways to ignore various national and international laws as they tortured people. And his evasive answers clearly put him the category of other great congressional witnesses such as the mobsters who appeared before the Kefauver committee. Finally, it was clear that Gonzalez, like much of official Washington, considers moral values to be defined not by the Father Almighty but by the criminal code. The idea that one might want to stand further than just the other side of criminality is an alien one to your capital city. Not even the press bothers about such concerns anymore. They are considered quaint and obsolete. One Washington correspondent patiently explained to Diane Rehm why stress positions shouldn't be considered torture and on CSPAN, an editor of City Journal, Heather MacDonald, announced that "we need these tools" and that we are "too good for our own good." It is with the aid of such sophistry that evil flourishes, whether episodic or organized as fascism. Great wrong doesn't just come out of the barrel of the gun; it also comes from the cynical rationalizations of those who are meant to know better. The politics of anger If Americans voted at the same rate that they did in 1964, 17 million more voters would show up at the polls this fall. And most pollsters would not have added them to their equations. The polls would likely be badly wrong. Poll samples are based on the assumption that people are going to behave the way they normally do and the results are usually pretty good. But what happens when that isn't the case? In New Orleans, for example, a poll taken a few days before the runoff election found Mitch Landrieu ahead by ten points. What happened? We don't know yet but it is safe to say that the sample didn't match people's actually behavior on election day. We recently ran a report that found nearly three-quarters of young voters saying they were planning to cast ballots this fall. In a country that barely brings out 55% of the total voter in a presidential race this would be extraordinary and would dramatically alter the results. A Washington Post story finds latino voters turning against the Republicans: "Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent. . . "Even if the GOP does maintain Bush's margins among Latinos in 2008, another study found that Democrats are likely to achieve a net gain in future elections, simply because Hispanics are growing as a share of the electorate. "Ken Strasma, a Democratic strategist who specializes in using demographic data to target potential voters, and the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study concluding that, if past voting patterns hold, the growing Hispanic population means that Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008." And what if latino voters are mad enough to vote in significantly larger numbers than normal? More room for surprise. The Review has been exceptionally accurate on its projections based on averaging the last three polls. But we gotta say our gut tells us this year could be different. 2004 So much for working within the system One of the lessons that Greens, apathetics, disgruntled Democrats and others were supposed to be learning this season was the inherent value of working within the system. This virtue is so apparent, one was told, that it requires nothing more than logic. No benefits, no inducements, no reform, not even simple empathy was required on the part of those who now control the Democratic Party. It was enough to declare ex cathedra that if one disliked Bush, the only choice was whatever the Democratic Party wanted to offer. Well, now the results are in. Not Ralph Nader, not Greens, not Jesse Jackson, but a multi-term, capable, moderate Democratic governor decided to work within the system. And what happened? He was ridiculed, dissed, lied about, and subjected to malicious spin by party insiders, the Washington establishment, and the obese media until eventually the voters believed them and swung to the approved safe, lightweight underachiever, John Kerry. Of course, for inside the system reformers such as Kucinich or Sharpton it was even worse. The NY Times doesn't even think they should be allowed in debates and the rest of the media regularly insulted, excoriated, and scolded them. No one can look honestly at the experience of those who tried to work within the system this season and argue that the Democratic Party can be reformed in this manner. Along with its fellow-traveling troglodytes of the media there is nothing the party leadership wants less, or is more revolted by, than even talk of reform. This is not a matter of whether Dean won or lost, but rather the vicious, inhospitable, insulting manner in which one of the most honest, decent, and interesting political figures of recent years was treated because he dared to run without permission of the party's elite. Now, as Craig Crawford put it, "The House of Lords of the Democratic Party are getting what they want." This is their decision. It is not Howard Dean's fault, it's not Ralph Nader's fault, it's not the fault of apathetic or angry voters. The party has chosen to go into this election with a weak candidate, no platform, no passion other than distaste for the incumbent, no grassroots party building, and no attempt to reach new constituencies. It may just work because George Bush is so bad, or because his chickens come home to roost in some dismal fashion, but that's just dumb luck and not good politics. - SAM SMITH Is that all there is? IF things keep going the way they are, the Democrats will nominate for president a man who was wrong on the Iraq war, wrong on the Bush tax cuts, wrong on the Bush education disaster, and wrong on the Patriot Act. And despite intimations of immutability by the media, all this has happened with many, if not most, Democrats being unaware of the aforementioned. In short, the Democrats are preparing to nominate someone who agreed with George Bush on many of the major issues of the day and has only lately discovered that this may not have been such a good idea and so is making gentle adjustments in both his opinions and autobiography. Not that the latter couldn't use some help, since the most interesting elements of it, according to the candidate's own repeated testimony, occurred more than three decades ago. It may be the best that the Democrats can do, but they should realize that what they have is not so much an opponent of George Bush as a replacement should the president do himself in. This, fortunately, looks increasingly likely. Bush is basically a bully and a con man, occupations that require a regular supply of victims and marks. The number of people either scared of or fooled by Bush has peaked and the only question is how many will have figured it all out by election day. This, however, should not be confused with a political campaign, which requires some self-knowledge beyond that of a victim, some motive other than revenge, some policies other than repeal, and some dreams beyond a Washington free of Bush barbarians. Such goals remain beyond the Democratic Party which has been incompetently and abusively run for the past decade, reflected in the huge loss of electoral positions at national and state levels. The present chair of the Democratic National Committee believes that the sole purpose of his organization is to put a Democrat in the White House, which leaves in the cold thousands of Democratic officeholders and seekers around the land. The DNC has become the permanent capital office of the next Democratic presidential candidate, even to having excess square footage to house such a campaign, but there is no movement, no organization, no ideas, and no true effort to extend the Democratic base into an increasingly insecure homeland. Much as the labor unions have been co-opted and betrayed by a smug, sleazy, and soporific Washington leadership, so the Democratic Party has been turned into the plaything of an elite, narcissistic coterie fixated on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A symbol of this distortion has been the front-loading of primaries, designed to concentrate control of the party in its pinnacles of purse and power. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out like that because a obstreperous governor from Vermont, and an establishment Yalie who should have known better, used the new system to his own advantage until he was bashed and ridiculed back into his place. Democratic primaries used to involve a lengthy courtship during which the voters could decide whether they really did like the choices being foisted upon them. In the end, there was always time and California on your side. Bad stories had occasion to surface, bum candidates could peak and fade, and dark horses could, if necessary, be mounted at the last moment. Now no one even mentions California, despite it having more population than the aggregate of a score of smaller states. Another factor has entered the picture. While American politics has always centered on the 5-10% of voters who were indecisive or indifferent, the power of this strange bloc - a kind of aristocracy of the apathetic - has gained new importance as reality in politics is increasingly replaced by media-generated myth. This election has much more in common with 'American Idol' than it does with its electoral predecessors, a point dramatically illustrated by the number of voters who think it's their responsibility to find an electable candidate rather than one with whom they actually agree. This is a deadly trap, ultimately fatal to what remains of democracy, because it reduces the citizen to the status of a sitcom producer rather than an active political participant. If we are all trying to guess what each other thinks, we will all drown in our suppositions about each other. How important this is can be shown by the exist polls from New Hampshire and Iowa. In each case, eliminating all voters who made up their minds in the last week - the least involved, the least thoughtful, and the least committed to anything - produces strikingly different results. For example, counting just the people who knew what they thought at least a week before the caucuses causes Kerry to lose four points, Dean to gain eight points, and Edwards to lose 12 points. Kerry would have won, but only by eight instead of 20 points, and Dean would have beaten Edwards. Similarly in New Hampshire, Kerry would have gotten the same total, but Dean would have gotten 7 more points to close the gap between the two to only six. Obviously, in such instances, the subsequent media commentary would have been quite different than it was. The point is not to bar the apathetic from the polls, but to illustrate the degree to which our politics has become a measure of temporary blood pressure and not of deep belief. And, with few exceptions, the systolic variations are directly instigated by a media far more interested in its own goals than in the welfare of the nation. We vote like patients gulping down four Dunkin' Donuts before having their blood sugar measured. This hyped-up, hurried-up primary system seems to have produced a candidate that few Democrats know, pursuing a politics that even he can't define, and with rapidly diminishing opportunity to do anything about it. And it's not even February yet. -
During the long years of southern segregation, the white establishment managed to convince poor whites that it was blacks rather than itself that posed the biggest threat. This was not only immoral, it was a con, and a miserably effective one. Only occasionally was the myth challenged, as when Earl Long went after black votes while holding onto his low income white constituency. When Long was elected in 1948 there were only 7,000 black voters in Louisiana. By the time he left office a decade later, there were 110,000. It was not that Governor Long was any moral model. His language, for example, would have shocked today's white and black liberals. What he did do, and quite well, was to put together people who many at the top didn't want together. And at a time when the likes of Lyndon Johnson and William Fulbright were carefully avoiding the race issue, Long took on the White Citizens Council. I was reminded of this the other day when Howard Dean made his comment about wanting to get the votes of people who drove pickups with confederate flag stickers. He was immediately excoriated by Kerry and Gephardt but what he was doing was simply reaching out to a constituency that Democratic liberals have too long dissed, the less successful white male. Uncle Earl would have been pleased. By any traditional Democratic standards, this constituency should be a natural. After all, what more dramatically illustrates the failure of two decades of corporatist economics than how far these white males have been left behind? Yet because some of them still cling to the myths the southern white establishment taught their daddies and their granddaddies, the likes of Gephardt and Kerry don't think they qualify as Democratic voters. In fact, the best way to change people's minds about matters such as ethnic relations is to put them in situations that challenge their presumptions. Like joining a multicultural political coalition that works. It's change produced by shared experience rather than moral by revelation. Martin Luther King understood this as he admonished his aides to include in their dreams the hope that their present opponents would become their future friends. And he realized that rules of correct behavior were insufficient: "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right." This doesn't happen logically, it doesn't come all at once, and it doesn't come with pretty words. Tom Lowe of the Jackson Progressive voted a couple of years ago in favor of a new Mississippi flag without the confederate symbolism. But in retrospect, he wrote later, he realized that the voters' rejection of the change was a honest reflection of their state of mind: "Perhaps a time will come when we have truly put aside our nasty streak of racism. When that time arrives, maybe we will choose to replace the flag with something more representative of our ideals. On the other hand, when we reach that point, we may no longer care about the symbolism of the Confederate battle flag. Or perhaps we will keep it for another reason: to make those of us that are white humble by reminding us of our less than honorable past." Or perhaps do what the whites in the Southern Student Organizing Committee did at the beginning of the civil rights movement: seize the old symbol for a new purpose. The SSOC logo showed a black and white hand firmly clasped across a confederate flag. It is, within my extensive button collection, a favorite because it illustrates how symbols can be transformed and used for better purposes. Yes, the confederate flag is still there, but firmly in the background, reminding one of how hard won were the clasped hands in front. The decline of liberalism has been accelerated by the growing number of American subcultures deemed unworthy by its advocates: gun owners, church goers, pickup drivers with confederate flag stickers. Yet the gun owner could be an important ally for civil liberties, the churchgoer a voice for political integrity, the pickup driver a supporter of national healthcare. We'll never know until we try. Dean, coming off some successful approaches to black voters, has now turned to another group the establishment, including its liberal branch, doesn't really give much of damn about: the struggling white male. These two groups are primarily antagonistic because they have been taught to see life that way by those who really don't want them getting along. Instead of inveighing in the best liberal fashion against all stereotypes save one's own, Dean is mixing things up a bit. A Dean bumper sticker next to a confederate flag on a pickup may not be utopia, but it would be sure sign of positive change which, these days, would be a pretty big change in itself. Pickups for Dean cont'd THE CONTINUED controversy over confederate flags on pickup trucks is a reminder that one of the functions of political campaigns is to take our minds off our problems. It is especially fun when we can argue about symbolism rather than reality because that way no one can actually keep score. It does get confusing, though. After introducing a new idea about whom the Democratic Party should approach, Howard Dean was excoriated by Al Sharpton who, while entertaining and often right, falls somewhat short as a mentor of morality. Sharpton was joined by some white southerners who, in attacking Dean's stereotype, implicitly projected their own - that of a south in which all the bad stuff has passed. Funny that Trent Lott never got the word. Then, in an act of iatrogenic politics, Dr. Dean wounded himself further by describing as 'loathsome' the symbol of his proposed new constituency. That's not the best way to reach out and touch someone. Besides, it also raises the question of whether the Democrats' Jefferson Day dinners should be cancelled since their namesake also had some pretty loathsome view on ethnicity. The stereotype business can be tricky. Not only did some southern pickup drivers complain, but Claude Henry Sinclair Jr., commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans camp in Lancaster, SC, told the Washington Post that he saw yet another kind of stereotype: "I don't have a pickup truck." To be sure, Dean might have done better if he had used (as one of our readers suggested) the term 'NASCAR dads,' but in fact, politics uses stereotypes all the time. And a campaign meeting at which someone asks, "How do we get to the Jews?" has quite a different import than the same question asked at a KKK meeting. From the day in the 1960s when Marion Barry walked into my apartment explicitly looking for a white press aide, I have felt more at home dealing with such matters openly rather than having them whitewashed with liberal euphemisms. The irony is that despite crude terminology, politics is one of the few places where you actually see people working voluntarily across ethnic and class lines for a common goal. When you hear people like Edwards and Sharpton slamming Dean for using political slang in public, you are seeing bad acting and not much else. It is also interesting to note, as William Saletan does in Slate, that Dean received quite a different reception before he was the frontrunner. Here's what he told the Democratic National Committee last February: "I intend to talk about race during this election in the South. The Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us, and I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us because their kids don't have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too." Writes Saletan: "I have that speech on videotape. I'm looking at it right now. As Dean delivers the line about Confederate flags, the whole front section of the audience stands and applauds. It's a pretty white crowd, but in slow-motion playback, I can make out three black people in the crowd and two more on the dais, including DNC Vice Chair Lottie Shackelford. Every one of them is standing and applauding. As Dean finishes his speech, a dozen more black spectators rise to join in an ovation. They show no doubt or unease about what Dean meant." The Dean controversy is driven by several factors. One is the growing liberal preference for proper language and symbolism over proper policy. Thus confederate flags soar above such other possible issues as the drug war with its disastrous effect on young black males, discrimination in housing and public transportation, and the lack of blacks in the U.S. Senate. Further, while liberals are happy to stigmatize certain stereotypes, they are enthralled with others, such as the self-serving suggestion that they represent a new class of "cultural creatives" saving the American city. And from whom, implicitly, are they saving the American city? From the blacks, latinos and poor forced out to make way for their creativity. Another factor has far deeper roots: our fear of public discussion of class issues. Although this has repeatedly been noted by both black and white observers, it has little effect on our politics or the media, both of which project the myth that ethnic conflict occurs independent of economic divisions. One who understood otherwise was the black writer, Jean Toomer - who once described America as "so voluble in acclamation of the democratic ideal, so reticent in applying what it professes." Writing in 1919, Toomer said, "It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition." Dean's real sin was that he got too close to that topic Why liberals lose elections ONE RESULT of the Democrat's hate campaign against Nader and his supporters is a bit more sympathy for born-agains, hunters and others who have likewise been expunged from membership in humanity by hyper-righteous liberals. Here's one recent example from a sociologist at CUNY, Harry Levine: "In the year 2000, Ralph Nader strapped political dynamite onto himself and walked into one of the closest elections in American history hoping to blow it up. He wanted to punish the Clinton-Gore Democrats for having betrayed him and the causes he believes in. His primary campaign mission was defeating Al Gore, but Nader concealed this from his supporters, even as he went after votes in swing states like Florida. On the day after election day, when everyone else was grim, and many Democrats were furious at him, Ralph Nader was a happy man." Isn't there anyone in the Democratic Party who understands that you don't win votes with that sort of nastiness? The Democrats did not do one thing after the 2000 debacle to improve relations with Greens and other Nader supporters. Among the possibilities: adopting some Green programs, avoiding holy wars against Green local candidates such as carried out against Matt Gonzalez in San Francisco, easing ballot access laws, and allowing fusion voting. Instead, those who supported Nader were subjected to a steady stream of blame and insults based on grossly incorrect assumptions. Now Nader is running again and this time, although he has lost considerable Green support, there are signs he may be creating a new constituency of what might be called the zapathetics: people who are so pissed off at both parties that rather than staying home, they will come to the polls to make their point. If the two parties make such a mess that it is hard for any self-respecting citizen to support them, it is simply a further sign of their corrupt arrogance for them to blame someone else for being mad about it. What possible reason is there for someone deeply troubled by the Kerry-Bush choice to change their mind knowing that they will be joining those who hold them in such contempt? While, as a matter of political tactics, I didn't think Nader's run was a good idea (and said so) it is grossly insulting to the principles of this county to argue he doesn't have the right to run or that his decision to do so akin to the act of a suicide bomber. People who say things like that deserve not getting every vote they lose Democrats: open up or shut up For the past four years, the only thing the Democrats and their media enablers have had to say about Ralph Nader is that he was to blame for their troubles. It was an utter lie that ignored, among other things, the lack of correlation between Nader and Gore in the polls leading to the election. For example between August and September 2000 Gore's average poll results rose 7.5 points but Nader's went down only 1 point. Between September and October, Gore's average went down 5.7 points and Nader's went up .8 points. At least 85% of Gore's changes were |
You think the elimination or reduction of social services is
a "reform."
Pickups
for Dean