November 7, 2008: A Splendid Wreck, Not A Sailor in the Lot, Wretched Exhibition of Seamanship.

This would not be the last time a “Maverick” would run amok, wreaking havoc in it's wake. A dozen years later another Nor'easter would come up the coast out of Florida, touch the Carolinas, take Virginia and sweep clean the landscape as it pressed down hard on New England. When the sun rose on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, not a Goppite was to be found. Representative Chris Shays of Connecticut became the last of the New England pachyderms in the House of Representatives to go the way of the pterodactyl. Now no Republican representation in the House is to be found anywhere in New England. In the Senate Republicans have only the two seats from Maine. For the Republican party fertile ground, once home to the Lodge's and the Sunnunu's, Governors Sergeant, King and Romney, Senators Edmond Brooke and Warren Rudman, has been laid waste by two land-lubbers in the persons of McCain and Palin who had seized the helm of the good ship “Maverick”,cut her loose from her moorings, and proceeded to run her hard aground.

It was a splendid wreck, but a wreck nonetheless, reminiscent of the days of Katrina when McCain then partied down with 'Ol Two-Cows while the city drown. One could sense as the storm bore down on the country that nothing good, from the GOP's point of view, could come of this. A generation ago another senator from Arizona would happily wage war on both New England and the Middle Class producing similar results for the Grand Old Party. McCain, now sitting in Goldwater's seat, came north avowing to finish the job. A certain giddiness took over the campaign as it lurched from issue to issue, pseudo-issue to pseudo-issue, and smear to smear, seeking to right itself in the face of the howling winds. The good Marshall, unfamiliar with either storm or sea, took to the ship-to-shore radio and announced that “we've got them just where we want them, c'mon everybody let's party!”, as if by whistling past Davey Jones'Locker he could keep the inevitable at bay. Palin, for her part, went on a spending spree like a drunken sailor, becoming what one McCain aide was later quoted as saying “Wasilla Hillbillies plundering every Neiman Marcus store across America”. It was a wretched exhibition of seamanship demonstrating that there was not a sailor in the lot.

Indeed there was not a sailor in the lot. McCain's campaign had early on been taken over by lobbyists. In fact John McCain himself, since the days of the "Keating 5", had been nothing but a shill for the K-street gang. His campaign, accordingly, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington lobbyists. Every major policy, advisory, or staff position was held by a lobbyist, right down to former Senator Phil Gram his economic advisor and author of deregulation turned lobbyist for the very industries he deregulated; and right down to his foreign policy advisor who was a paid lobbyist for the nation of Georgia. Lobbyists certainly have a role to play. At best they are a vast source of information, at worst a vast source of disinformation and corrupting campaign contributions. They can help craft legislation in ways that certainly protect industry, but can also move to eviscerate laws by unduly influencing the rule-making process through which enabling legislation is implemented. Until McCain recruited them 'en masse' to run his campaign, however, they have not heretofore played serious roles in political campaign organization. The consequences were telling. Lobbyists, by their very nature, influence the political process through making political contributions and pigeonholing. This is best known as 'inside the beltway' politics, the kind of politics often accused of thwarting the 'will of the people', but effective nonetheless. Campaigning, on the other hand, is 'retail' politics, in which the nominal leaders of the country stump the nation in an effort to persuade and convince. This takes an entirely different approach, best perhaps demonstrated by advertising consultants and pollsters, and requires an entirely different set of skills. The 'Forked-Tongue Express' while consulting pols and pollsters nevertheless was, root and branch, a creature of K-Street. Accordingly political decisions, the choice of Sarah Palin for Vice President a perfect example, was based on a series of erroneous assumptions that only complete amateurs could have made. For instance women, it was held, would readily move from Hillary to Sarah despite having to cross party lines and leaping across a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon on issues such as abortion, child care, health care, social spending, and education. Similarly the steadfast refusal of the 'Fork-Tongued Express' to address the screaming needs of a middle class writhing in economic pain, a failure even to utter the words 'middle class', belied a tone deafness that can only be attributed to a band of complete amateurs. No, there was not a sailor in the lot, a campaign that had all the earmarks of a “Three Stooges” comedy, right down to calling the middle class a bunch of 'whiners', threatening, if successful, to transform the ship of state once again into a “Ship of Fools.”

The nation would have no more of it. Late this week the Goppites met in Virginia to discuss the future of the Republican Party. The first order of business was to gather up the remains of the good ship “Maverick” and put her to the torch.

November 5, 2008: Oh Happy Day, Shot Heard 'Round the World, The Sun Also Rises.

“Oh happy day
oh happy day....


Yesterday, at high noon, the good Marshall was gunned down in the streets of Tombstone by a young Jedi who had said he'd had enough. It was a resounding drubbing, carrying at latest count 28 states with Missouri and South Carolina too close to call. States that had not gone Democratic since Lyndon Johnson's landslide in 1964 returned to the fold. Moreover Obama made serious inroads into the deep South carrying Florida and Virginia, and the far west winning Nevada and Colorado. He even carried Indiana a state that for a short period in the twentieth century was run by the Ku Klux Klan.

It was an impressive victory winning as a Democrat, for only the second time since the FDR-Truman years' over 50 per cent of the popular vote. In the end Obama was able, by demonstrating an ease and a confidence on the political high wire, to convince America that he, not John McCain, is the safer bet in these very troubling times.

Obama's resounding victory was, like Lexington and Concord, a shot 'heard round the world' as the entire planet seemed to erupt in joy as a combination of elation and relief replaced fear and loathing. In Chicago's Grant Park, scene of angry rioting 40 years earlier, a crowd of over 150,000 happy souls gathered to greet the new President-Elect. Tears of joy ran down faces of every color. Old civil rights workers like Jesse Jackson, who had seen the dream come true in his lifetime, openly wept tears of joy.

While not winning the majority of the white vote, Obama carried a number of predominately white states. States like Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado not known for having large minority populations.
The numbers beneath the numbers reveal the broad trends as Obama improved on the performance of Gore and Kerry among white voters overall, and winning by a 10 point margin white voters aged 18-29 (1). There was much discussion during the primary season concerning Obama's ability to win the votes of those making less than $50,000 annually. According to the exit polls Obama crushed McCain winning by a margin of 73% to 25% those making under $15,000, 60%-37% those making $15-30,000, and 55%-43% among those earning $30-50,000. In fact McCain bested Obama only in the categories of those making between $50-75,00 and those making between $100-200,000.
Oddly, given the Rescumlican screed about Obama's socialist tendencies Obama in fact drubbed McCain 52%-46% among those making over $200,000 annually.

Perhaps it isn't so odd. The last time a senator from Arizona ran for President the technocrats and professional classes deserted the Republican Party in droves. Likewise this time the more comfortable and well-to-do have deserted conservatism. This is demonstrated not only by his winning the majority of voters earning over $200,000 annually but winning over, for the first time in the history of the Democratic Party, a majority of college graduates. Those with some college education voted 51-47% for Obama; college graduates went 50-48% Democratic; while those with postgraduate educations went with Obama by a resounding 58%-40% (1). Not FDR, not Truman, not JFK nor LBJ, Carter or Clinton were able to convince a majority of the college educated to vote Democratic. Here is graphic evidence of a new coalition being born as groups that had heretofore voted Republican have shifted ground.

It is difficult to say, and only time will tell, how much of this is temporary and how much is permanent. Much will rest on how well the nation is governed in the next few years and how successful Obama will be in consolidating his gains. But he has laid to rest fears that he cannot appeal to working class white voters and he has expanded the Democratic presence not only geographically into the West and the South but among critical income and age groups, not the least the young, who have demonstrated themselves to be the cornerstone of the new governing coalition.

Yesterday America made history, demonstrating its boundless capacity to adapt and surprise. For forty years we have wandered in the wilderness and groped in the darkness.
But, we have learned, the sun also rises. Yesterday America took another great stride toward creating a more perfect union. Yesterday America looked into the mirror and beheld in it's reflection the face of Barack Obama


Footnotes:

1. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/

November 2, 2008: Further Reflections on the Swine, Kicking and Squealing, No Badge of Courage

“The size of our challenges have outgrown the smallness of our politics.”
----Barack Obama, speech at Henderson, Nevada 11/01/08


Obama has been quite right to make this election a referendum on the “generation of swine”. The swine have held sway over the electoral process for going on four decades now and have done their level best to lay waste every last vestige of our ancestor's legacy. Following the siren song of greed they have done their level best to realize Newt Gingrich's dream of returning America to the glory days of the roaring '20's. It is now 1929 and the time has come for this country to pry from the throat of the republic the cold fingers of this “boomer” generation. It is time to end the death grip of this “Generation of Swine”.

The swine will not go quietly for they have had their snouts and both front trotters in the trough for far too long now. No instead they will have to be forced from the trough kicking and squealing. It is an unpleasant task but a necessary one in order to get on with the nation's business.

Of late the good Marshall of Tombstone and the Guttersnipe have been about the country accusing Obama of being a socialist. Quoting his remark made during an exchange with “Joe the Plumber”, about “spreading the wealth a little”, the McCain campaign has torn the words out of context and blown it up into a full blown ideological confrontation between “Capitalism” and “Socialism”, even as McCain joined the ranks of those who moved to save the Capitalist from himself by way of huge injections of government funds into suddenly unstable institutions. Nevertheless adopting Adams' view that every American is an aristocrat on the make, the good Marshall was found making his last stand on Main Street deploring the lurking “socialism” and decrying Obama for wanting to take money from the well-to-do (the fittest and therefore the deserving in the eyes of the Social Darwinists) and giving it to those who “pay no taxes at all”. This line is met with the predictable chorus of boos from the assembled and is taken to mean the lazy and shiftless welfare recipients; the 'unfit' and, therefore, the 'undeserving'. While the good Marshall makes such references frequently on the stump he appears to do so with some discomfort, half believing his own press releases. To shore up this line of attack the Rescumlican slime machine brought out that old Austrian Arnold Swartznegger who promptly tells audiences, after mocking Obamas evident thinness and body physique, that he fled the old country because it was socialist. Some appropriate surrogate in the Democratic camp needs to respond by telling Arnold that Obama is more fully developed than the governor is certain more important areas. Then, after a pregnant pause, say “the brain". He possesses a more superior intelligence than the Governor of California as evident by the political party he chose to join.

Political Columnist David Broder, discussing a column he wrote in the Washington Post on NBC's “Meet the Press” today said that McCain has run a campaign free of racism. I disagree. To hold such a position is to give McCain a free pass, one which he does not deserve.

McCain rightly deserves the calumny of history for the campaign he waged for the presidency this year. This business about “Socialism” goes directly to the point. On the surface it is made to appear as a simple, albeit false, ideological dichotomy in which the voter is asked to chose between two competing economic systems. This is, of course, nonsense inasmuch as Obama is no more a socialist than either Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower for that matter. But to pose the election in those terms is to set up a convenient 'straw man' to flagellate for the benefit of the electorate. It isn't the first time an overt appeal to the greed, gluttony and avarice of the American people has been made, nor is it the first time that the public has been underestimated. And, of course, it makes perfect sense if one hopes to ride to power on the backs of real swine.

But the issue as presented cuts much deeper into the psyche of the nation. Beneath the ideological and pseudo-ideological posturing runs a message that hopes to further open the deep divisions of class and race. One hears it in how McCain follows his introduction of the issue. Charging Obama with being, at heart, a “Socialist”, he then accuses his opponent of wanting to take money from the rich, thereby “punishing success”, and giving it to “those who pay no taxes at all” thereby rewarding the unsuccessful and the undeserving.

This is, of course, complete nonsense for the Obama plan is aimed primarily at middle class tax relief. But no matter, lets take the Marshall at his word. Lets assume that that the Marshall is right and that Obama wants to take money from the rich, successful and therefore deserving and give it to the Welfare Queens. What are we to make of the characterization? For decades the face of welfare has been a face of minorities. Never mind that until well into the 1990's the majority of poor in America were white. Never mind that with the seven million that have fallen from the middle class into poverty under the Bush Administration the face of poverty in America may again be white. The fact is that when most Americans think about poverty in America, when they think about it at all, they do not conjure up their own image. Think about it. Obama was ridiculed as being a “social activist working in the projects”. Now he wants to take money from the 'fittest' and give it to “those who pay no taxes at all”. This isn't the first time campaigns have been waged against “Welfare Queens”. Ask George Corley Wallace. Class divisions in America have racial overtones. Here is high relief is the secret of the Republican success and the reason the good Marshall has finally used his last bullet in his shootout with Obama at high noon. By waging war against 'welfare' he can unabashedly support the rich while using race to keep the middle classes in line. This is why you will search in vain for any references by McCain to the middle class in America. To bring it up would highlight his weakness, for he has nothing in his bag of tricks for them. Instead he will appeal, as the Republican party has always appealed—at least since the days of Richard Nixon and Kevin Phillips—to the middle class using race, not economics, as the medium. That's how, as Phillips so astutely observed all those years ago, one goes about forging a majority when one's natural constituency is a mere 7 percent.

Is it not clear why the good Marshall begged off talking about economics from the first, saying that he didn't know as much as perhaps he should about the subject? Is it not clear why internal memo's leaked from his campaign saying that McCain needed to shift the subject from the economy to Obama because to talk about the economy would mean certain defeat? And so, true to recent form, the Rescumlicans have gone about the business of devising weapons of mass diversion. They have set up a socialist straw man, questioned Obama's character, patriotism, religious convictions, even going so far as saying that he “pals around with terrorists”. None of this, given the current economic crisis, has gained traction. And so it is back to race. Race reintroduced through the back door, but race nonetheless. Reverend Wright meet the Socialist Bogeyman and the Welfare Queen by extension. The more things change the more they remain the same.

David Broder is wrong. The Marshall isn't wearing the badge of courage.

October 31, 2008: October Surprise, Rats Jumping Ship, Reading the Tea Leaves

“The Republican fears democracy like the Capitalist fears competition.
----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

It is Halloween, and the much feared October Surprise, long a staple in the Republican play book did not materialize. The surprise was that there was no surprise. No hostages held because the GOP had negotiated with their captors to hold them till after the election, no Bin Laden tapes, no “secret plan to end the war”. Perhaps it is because the good Marshall from Tombstone has been a bit preoccupied with defending solid Republican turf. Entering the final week of the campaign, Obama will campaign in Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida—all so called “red” states that had vaulted 'Ol Two-Cows to the presidency.

The rats, metaphorically, are leaving the ship. In the wake of the Colin :Powell endorsement came word that the Goldwater family has endorsed Obama, along with former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan and a former Reagan Chief of Staff. Even the kindly old Governor Bill Milliken of Michigan has been overheard saying that the good Marshall is not the man he endorsed earlier this year in the Michigan Primary.

At this point the race for change is beginning to look hopeful. As of this writing more than 3.4 million had reported voting in Florida with Obama holding a commanding 12 point lead in early voting. Huge turnouts have been likewise reported in the Carolinas and here in Georgia nearly 2 million have voted waiting in lines for as long as 10 hours. This is a testament to the nation's hunger for change.

The national polls, by some lights, show a tightening of the race particularly in the swing states. North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, Florida, some say Pennsylvania are now within the margin of error. Nevertheless most polling nationally show Obama with a five to seven point lead, some much larger than that. The website www.fivethirtyeight.com also shows the race tightening. What may save Obama in the end will perhaps be the early voting in which votes were cast before the final flurry of campaign smear ads and voter anxieties. In any case this race, unlike any in our national experience is compounded by new technologies which limit pollsters' ability to reach certain demographics, particularly the young, who use cell phones almost exclusively. The result may be a huge unsampled segment of the electorate that the pollsters have not consulted and who are nevertheless making their way to the polls and registering their opinions. If so this portends a huge Obama victory. Certainly the early voting results in states like Florida and the movement of Georgia into the “swing” category reflect that something has happened in recent weeks on the ground. What this means, however, is not entirely clear and has left observers in the dark as to the possible outcome. What was once an exacting, if not an exact, science has now because of new technologies and the looming “Bradley Effect” become something like reading tea leaves. Nothing is certain and the Obama forces are taking no chances with the candidate reminding voters at each stop to vote early if they can but vote in any case.

In any case change is in the wind. One can see it in the videos of the long lines of voters waiting to record their considered judgment. One can see it in the 98% registration of the good people of Michigan who are, apparently, waiting to stampede the polling places on election day. One can also see it in the frantic attempts at voter suppression as the Rescumlicans try to hold back the tide. In Florida Republican Governor Crist outraged his fellow Republicans by sidestepping a state law—passed by his Republican majority—limiting early voting to eight hours a day. The Governor, knowing that his political life extends past November 4, heeded the cries of the people and extended by executive order voting at polling places to 12 hours a day. At least one Republican legislator was moved to comment that the governor had, by his actions, given Florida to Obama. Perhaps. Perhaps not. It may, by reducing the long lines, make it more probable that older citizens will now vote in larger numbers thus favoring McCain. It is a hard calculus with no certain outcome. Everyone, it appears, is feeling their way through this experience.

But certain old habits remain. Again in certain states, Virgina prominent among them, the GOP tricksters are up to their usual Halloween pranks. Letters have been sent to known Democratic voters that because of the high voter turnout and expected crush at the ballot box, voting for Democrats has been moved to November 5. This, of course, is nonsense but has worked in certain jurisdictions to favor Republican fortunes in the past. Likewise attempts to keep students from voting in college towns. An old trick that keeps paying off for the GOP—Grand Old Prostitute.

The United States Supreme Court ruled nearly 30 years ago that students had every constitutional right to vote where they lived. Many jurisdictions had been challenging them claiming that they were “temporary” residents and fearing their large numbers would dominate local politics. I remember in the good old days at Grand Valley we used to muse as we passed through Allendale and read the sign welcoming us—“Welcome to Allendale”, it said, “Home of Grand Valley State College”. We read it differently. “Welcome to Grand Valley”, we mused, “Home of Allendale, Michigan”. The College, at the time simply outnumbered the residents of the small town. Faced with these realities many such locations challenged students voting in their elections. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and such laws and regulations were overturned affirming the extended franchise to students who could now vote. Nevertheless the old Rovian Rescumlicans tricksters are back at it sending out warnings to students That they would somehow be violating the law if they tried to vote. Likewise, mailers to certain voters that if they have outstanding traffic tickets or are behind in child support payments or cannot bring proof of citizenship to the polls with them they will be challenged. In Ohio four years ago, the state GOP warned voters in some precincts that they would be arrested at the polls if they had outstanding traffic or child support issues. The courts intervened a few days before the election but the tactic had accomplished its goal by creating enough fear to dampen turnout and perhaps throw the election.

The Grand Old Prostitute has always feared the wrath of the electorate and has, accordingly, always fought tooth and nail the extension of the franchise. At least since Teddy Roosevelt. The old line conservatives have resisted extending the franchise to women, the Voting Rights Act of 1964, lowering the voting age to 18, the “motor-voter” laws passed by many states making it possible to register while getting one's driver's license renewed or updated. The action of the Republican dominated Florida legislature to limit voting hours during early voting is also of this ilk. Let there be no mistake about it, the Republican fears democracy like the capitalist fears competition. Both seek to limit it whenever they can; one under the guise of “conservative” principles, the other as “sound business practices”. The Republicans have every right to fear the electorate, fully 93% of the country now says that the nation is going in the wrong direction. The Grand Old Prostitute has now been reduced to representing her natural constituency-- a mere seven percent of the population-- and this time her old bag of tricks my not pull her through.

October 19, 2008: Colin Powell Steps Up, Acts of Courage and Vision, Spontaneous Combustion

This morning, on NBC's “Meet the Press,” with Tom Brokaw, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps America's most famous military leader and statesman calmly and quietly told his American audience that he will vote for Barack Obama for President of the United States. Professing great admiration and friendship for John McCain the Secretary quietly and convincingly explained what led him to cross party lines and tell the country that he will vote Democratic in this year's presidential contest.

First, when questioned, he said it was not race that led him to this decision. “If that were the case”, Powell said, “I'd have endorsed Mr. Obama months ago”. Speaking with Brokaw, Powell related having met with both candidates several times over the last year. What really moved him, he said, was the conduct of both candidates during the current financial crisis, as well as the tone of both the McCain campaign and the Republican party, which he accused of moving further to the political right and out of the American mainstream. Citing the McCain fixation on the Bill Ayer's connections which, he said, was near demagoguery, the Secretary evidenced a growing unease in the company of the Rovian Rescumlicans. Powell has always been a decent, albeit sometimes not the best informed, man. A genuine giant in Republican circles, often mentioned as a possible Vice Presidential candidate, who has nevertheless felt betrayed by what one of his aides described as the “cabal” that had taken over the party in the wake of the Bush victory.
Today he made a break, perhaps not a complete break with the party, but a break nonetheless. Cracks are opening in the Republican ruling coalition as the ground shakes beneath them.

Powell said that it was doubtful that he would openly campaign for Obama in the short time remaining before the election. But his endorsement will be felt nonetheless, particularly in Virginia, South Carolina and Florida where huge populations of military and former military families reside. His voice will add gravitas to the Obama candidacy among those yet undecided and especially in pivotal swing states. Colin Powell as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff emerged well over a decade ago during the First Gulf War as America's foremost military authority. It was his critique of the Rumsfeld's handling of the Second Gulf War that McCain quickly adopted producing changes in military command and what is now known as the “Surge”. Powell is one of those “transformative” figures, one of the bridges as it were, between the races. One of the first black men to emerge at the highest levels of the military and move into top governmental positions as national security advisor and Secretary of State. The phenomenon that is the Obama candidacy owes a great debt to men like Colin Powell. In a speech this morning Obama said that he is honored and deeply humbled by the endorsement he received today. The McCain campaign said it was not surprised. It shouldn't have been, Powell was simply exercising yet another act of statesmanship in a career filled with such acts of courage and vision.

The end of the week, now nearly a mere two weeks before the election, the Obama campaign has seen bedrock Republican spokesman move to join the Obama Nation.
The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and now General Colin Powell. Yesterday, in the swing state of Missouri, the Obama forces held a rally beneath the great Arch. Over 100,000 people gathered, 90,000 at the event and a reported 10,000 waiting to get in, to come, see and hear, Barack Obama's vision of where he would lead us in these troubled times. Many, on the periphery, could neither see nor hear the candidate but came to the event and stayed nevertheless because they wanted to demonstrate their support. Meanwhile it was reported this morning that the campaign had raised over 150 million dollars in the month of September. This is approaching near spontaneous combustion reminiscent of the “prairie fire” that swept this nation in the latter 19th and early 20th century with the Grange and Greenback movements. The ground is shaking, a fire is raging and all that the good Marshall can do now is wrap his arms around “Joe the Plumber” and hang on for dear life.

October 18, 2008: The Tribune Comes Out, He is Ready, New Alliances Being Born

The “Tribune is proud to endorse him”, crowed the Chicago Tribune at week's end as it endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States. Citing it's Republican roots and noting that the Tribune's first “great leader” Joseph Medill was a founder of the GOP, the Tribune broke it's 161 year tradition and for the first time endorsed a Democratic candidate for president of the United States.

Writing that “On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that”...

The editors continued: “Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them...We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator; to an aspiring U.S. Senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president....We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass, and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.” (1)

This is quite a statement from a journal that predates the Civil War. An early and ardent supporter of Lincoln, the Tribune has remained solidly Republican ever since, endorsing only Republicans or in the case of Horace Greeley in 1872 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Republicans who were running as independents against corrupt or ineffective incumbents. Greeley, the Tribune pointed out, was later adopted by the Democrats. Nevertheless the Tribune has been a dependable Republican rag. It even endorsed Hoover, Wilke, and Dewey over FDR, Nixon over Kennedy in 1960,Goldwater over Johnson in 1964, even Eisenhower over Illinois native Adlai Stevenson in both 1952 and 1956 so predictably Republican has been the Tribune. Not this year, not this time. This year, says the Chicago Tribune, the paper is proud to add the name of Barack Obama beside that of Abraham Lincoln in the long list of men it has endorsed for President of the United States. On word of the Tribune's unprecedented action came news that the Los Angeles Times has likewise endorsed the young Jedi. Like the Tribune, the Times have also been a foghorn of the political right, and predictably Republican. To say that these endorsements are remarkable is an understatement. The ground beneath the political landscape is shaking, new coalitions are being formed, new alliances are being born.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-08endorsements-htmlstory,0,5602186.htmlstor

October 16, 2008: Say It Ain't so Joe, The Marshall and the Guttersnipe, Paper Doll World

In last night's final Presidential debate, the good Marshall of Tombstone brought up an encounter last Sunday between an Ohio plumber named Joe and Barack at an Obama rally in Toledo. Seizing upon the brief encounter McCain tried desperately—mentioning poor Joe some 21 times during the ninety minutes—to make the Ohio Republican the leitmotif of his latest effort to liberally smear vast quantities of lipstick on a quite ugly Republican pig.

To hear the good Marshall relate Joe's plight, the hapless plumber has been working doggedly long hours of overtime in order to get his slice of the American Pie. As McCain described the encounter the erstwhile plumber, working long hours for a number of years, now makes enough money to purchase his boss' business, but would be prevented from entering the “ownership” class—becoming one of the “elect” as it were-- by Obama's alleged confiscatory tax scheme. After a brief chat, the good Marshall quoted Obama as ending the conversation by saying that we need to “spread the wealth around”.

Joe the Plumber has become, virtually overnight, America's latest celebrity with news satellite trucks parked in his yard. The “everyman” of the Republican campaign has now taken to holding impromptu news conferences and interviews holding forth on reactionary politics and likening Obama to Sammy Davis Jr. He has become the rage of the reactionary Rescumlican talk-show circuit. But, as they say, does he wash?

The first indications emerged from the post-debate polling done by CBS in which 54% of those watching judged Obama, about 35% thought it was a tie, and the predictable 25% or so who judged McCain the winner. For all the talk about the hapless Joe, McCain's numbers nudged not a bit. America remained unconvinced.

Moreover, things began to quickly unravel as the media began to focus attention on this latest Republican ruse. Keith Olbermann reported on his “Countdown” program tonight that Joe was not in the tax bracket, that is does not make over a quarter of a million dollars a year, and would not be subject to increased taxation under the Obama plan. Furthermore, Joe was making only $40,000 a year and would fare much better under the Obama plan. In addition there were no plans for Joe to purchase the business which in any case did not make a profit of over a quarter of a million dollars, in fact it was less than half that. Lastly poor Joe has no plumber's license. He is an “independent” contractor, one who works for a “general” contractor but as an independent laborer. A 1099 employee as they say in the tax business. One who works by the day, with no benefits and, because his “employer” is not required to pay withholding taxes, finds himself one of the hundreds of thousands of such folks who owe back taxes. In fact Joe the Plumber is no plumber at all. He is simply a day laborer with no rights and no protection. Why this man votes Republican is anyone's guess; why he should act as a rescumlican shill is an even greater puzzle. Nevertheless there he stood on a bright Toledo Sunday coaxing from the Democratic nominee a pledge to “spread the wealth around a little”.

During the debate Obama retorted that he meant sharing some of Warren Buffet's wealth and giving it to people like Joe the Plumber, but McCain would not be deterred from his single-minded effort to smear mass quantities of red lipstick. Here it was in bold relief, the party of privilege pretending to defend the aspirations of the “common man”.

Alas, for the hapless Marshall, the Republican understanding of the “common man” is a rather shallow one, reduced to caricatures and misrepresentations. Here was a boldface admission by the conservatives that their ideal “common man” is a white, deeply suspicious, angry, middle-age male on the cusp of “making it” but held back by the demands of the great “undeserving”. The party of Darwin in microcosm. It can be heard in the adjectives they choose to describe him, “Reagan Republicans” conjuring up Macolm county Michigan, a Detroit suburb that swung Republican in the great white 'backlash' of 1966 and has remained so since, but has nevertheless been forever identified as “Reagan Country”; the “angry white male” and “white working-class voters” that one hears Patrick Buchanan continually refer to—hardworking, play-by-the-rules, male (by inference) deserving whites on the make. These are the wheat in the Republican grist, all others are chaff.

It is perhaps laudable that the Republican Party occasionally rediscovers at least some remnants of the once great late American Middle Class, albeit a narrow one. But the condescension is palpable. “Joe the Plumber”, a mere caricature of the millions who strive to make it in these United States, is transformed in the mind of the Guttersnipe into 'Joe Six-Pack' and his “Hockey-Mom” wife. “Joe Six-Pack” is a derogatory term used by many of the “New Left” back in the sixties to describe the beer guzzling hard-hat who could not bring himself to raise his eyes about the rim of his beer can to see what was happening in the world around him. “Hockey-Mom” is a derivative of the old “Soccer-Mom” given currency by rescumlicans in the 1990's to describe middle-aged stay-at-home mothers whose sole function in life was to chauffer their kids around and run errands all day. The Marshall and the Guttersnipe have reduced this campaign to nothing other than lip-service, to mere characterizations, when they deign to address the legitimate needs of the struggling American. For the Marshall and the Guttersnipe, the world is peopled by mere two-dimensional cut-out characters. When they hold a mirror up before America, the country sees a mere characterization of itself in the reflection; not a photograph but a cartoon. A paper-doll world for a paper-doll boy and girl.

“Come back when you grow up girl
You’re still living in a paper doll world
Living ain't easy, loving's twice as tough
Come back baby, when you grow up”
---Bobby Vee, “Come Back When You Grow Up Girl”

October 12, 2008: A Day at Houseman Field, The Belly of the Beast, Up on the Stage.

Forty years ago, at about this time, I joined several members of the College Democrats and attended a George Wallace rally at Houseman Field in Grand Rapids. We went as protesters. I recall that it was a bright sunny morning but the mood was anything but cheerful. At one end of the field was erected a platform upon which a country music group entertained the crowd as we entered. After brief introductions, which included former Detroit Tigers star pitcher Frank Lary, the old hate-monger was duly introduced.

Wallace, a former pugilist, was a short, squat man with deep sunken eyes and countenance that betrayed a deep suspicion of anything that smacked of urbanity. His was not a message of tolerance. Delivering his standard stump speech in which he would ridicule the “pointy-headed intellectuals” and condemn the “brief-case totin' bureaucrats” and threatening to run over any protester who would dare lie down in front of his vehicle, Wallace worked the crowd into quite a lather. We played our part, holding signs saying “If you liked Hitler, You'll love Wallace” and shouting “Seig Heil” at what we thought were appropriate moments as we protested what we thought were fascist undercurrents in the Wallace campaign. I was struck by a coin thrown in our general direction by one of the faithful. It was great theatre, but in the end Michigan went for Hubert Humphrey.

I had thought that I had seen the worst side of American Politics. I had been to the belly of the beast and survived to tell of the experience. I find now that I have not. My wife showed me a clip on Youtube in which people gathering before a McCain-Palin rally were questioned about what they thought of Barack Obama. The tape is frightening.

What it reveals is that the Marshall needs to do very little to rile the crowd for the assembled have already been spoon-fed so much misinformation—so much slime—the internet hate mongers, Fox Noise, the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign itself-- that they arrive fully intending to demonstrate, in ways that the Wallace people were not, to vent their fear and rage. On this tape one finds recorded the group assemble, mostly if not entirely white, fully convinced that the Democratic Nominee is a Muslim, has terrorist ties, and is as one man put it “a one man terror cell”. In the eyes of these people the nominee of a major political party, in fact the party that has fought for the interests of such people for most of the last century, has somehow been transformed into an alien, indeed an enemy of the state. Under these circumstances it doesn't take much convincing to get these people to believe the rescumlican screed, in fact it takes no convincing at all.

During the week a middle aged man took the microphone at one of McCain's rallies and shaking with anger in his voice protested that McCain had not taken it to Obama in their last encounter. McCain, in response, assured the assembled that in the last debate he would finally summon the courage to bring up these charges to Obama's face. By Friday, things were getting out of hand. In a rally at Minneapolis McCain, already warned by Senator Norm Coleman, who is now fighting to hold his seat against the up-and-coming Al Franken, to tone down the rhetoric took to the stage and held yet another of his famous “town hall” meetings. The problem with these affairs is that a microphone is given to the audience and given the nature of those attracted and the opinions they have been fed to believe, the result was predictable. A young firefighter told the Senator that he feared raising his as yet unborn child in an Obama nation. With a look of resignation in his face the good Marshall told his follower, to a chorus of boos from the crowd, that Obama is a decent man, a family man, and that he had nothing to fear from an Obama presidency. Moments later a woman informed the Senator that she had been reading, without mentioning the source, that Obama was an Arab. Again the good Marshall made a correction, seizing the microphone and telling the audience that Obama was not an Arab and that the only thing separating the two of them are serious disagreements over fundamental policy and views of governance, again to the disapproval of those in attendance.

It struck me as I watched these images flash before me that this was a new low in American political discourse. With the possible exception of Joe McCarthy, nowhere in American political history can one find the vilification of one's political opponents at such a visceral level. To be sure McCarthy made his charges of treason, but McCarthy focused on bureaucrats and citizens both inside and outside government. The Rovian rescumlicans make charges of treason and trucking with the enemy not only in the political arena but in the very contest for the highest office in the land. At Houseman Field, all those years ago, I never heard George Wallace or his followers shout “Traitor”or Kill Him”. George Wallace, forever remembered as the voice of intolerance and hate, never brought our political discourse so low. Forty years ago it was those of us at the edge of the crowd that lowered political discourse. Today its the ones up on the stage.

Footnotes:

1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?=Kjxzmz.XAg9E
Google youtube, then McCain then McCain-Palin mob.

October 11, 2008: A Lotta Nerve, Losing Ugly, What A Drag It Is To See You

“You got a lotta nerve
to say you are my friend
when I was down
you just stood there grinnin'

You got a lotta nerve
to say you got a helpin' hand to lend
you just want to be
on the side that's winnin' ----Bob Dylan “Positively 4th Street” (1)

“My friends”, the old Marshall of Tombstone says before he issues yet another savage attack on an honorable man. It is said of McCain that he addresses all of his adversaries with this disclaimer. The words are spoken with a tight-lipped smile and often through clenched teeth. The tone is ironic and full of sarcasm, but is always a prelude to a statement dismissive of either his opponent, the matter at hand, or both. The pattern is so pronounced that his real friends recoil at its use preferring instead to be referred to as his enemy or not at all. There is a certain disingenuous quality about his use of the term. It isn't simply that John McCain comes across as a grumpy old man it is that when he tries to enamor himself with his audience by addressing them as “My Friends” a certain chill goes down the spine. Those assembled think that perhaps the good Marshall has confused them with his North Vietnamese captors.

In any case it is the penultimate irony that the good Marshall should, at this late date in the campaign, now find himself in a position wherein he must address those of middling means as his friends. For nearly thirty years McCain stood grinnin' as the middle class was savaged by the public policies of his party. Now that he finds himself about to be hoisted on his own petard, he suddenly has an epiphany discovering at a time in life well past retirement that something has gone terribly wrong;; perhaps that his conservative “principles” weren't principles at all but mere window dressing for greed; that all those platitudes pronounced with such conviction at the conventions and the 'rubber-chicken' circuit were, in the end, simply lipstick on a pig.

The problem that is John McCain is that he is arguably the most ethically challenged member of the United States Senate. Yes, the Senators of Louisiana and Idaho have had their sexual malfunctions but they can be relied upon to vote the party line and stand for good old pachyderm principles however misguided they be. The Marshall, on the other hand, is driven by blind ambition and will resort to unlimited political expediency in an effort to achieve what his father and grandfather could not—become “commander-in-chief”.

To achieve the ultimate prize the good Marshall must be on the side that's winnin'. To that end, McCain early joined the Republican party, aligning himself with the politically and economically well placed. Blaming the Democrats for “losing” Vietnam, he joined up with the Republicans becoming an eager water carrier for the well-heeled K-Street lobbyists and the military defense contractors. No sooner had he warmed his newly won congressional seat then he set about selling himself to Charles Keating (2) and other moguls of the financial industry. Today his entire campaign is run by lobbyists, men who are still on the payroll of their respective companies and who regularly conduct business from the bus of the “Straight-Talk Express”. From the moment he stepped into the political arena John McCain was a wholly owned subsidiary of K-Street.

Epiphany always, it seems, comes to desperate men in moments of desperation. Dukkakis and the Clinton's always discovered the “unwashed” when clear defeat was on the horizon. So it is now with the good Marshall as he tells us with a straight face that he now has a helpin' hand to lend. McCain displayed a lot of nerve in the debate last week. Between clenched teeth and prefacing his proposal with the inevitable “my friends”, the Marshall of Tombstone unveiled a 300 billion dollar plan to buy up bad mortgages. Like the selection of the the Guttersnipe as his running mate, and his “withdrawal” from the campaign to confront the financial crisis, this was yet another attempt to reset the clock and put himself and Obama back on the starting blocks. It didn't wash, post-debate polling showed Obama the clear winner and winning independents by 15 points, 54-39.

By the end of the week it was back to the old Rovian tactics of smear and fear. In an unprecedented spectacle would-be First Lady Cindy McCain took to the stump smearing the differences between the Democratic nominee and her husband. Calling attention to her own son's service, she accused Obama of not protecting her child saying that if the Democrat were to, if only briefly, stand in her shoes, he would feel a chill run down his spine. The chill, however, is running down the collective spines of the entire Republican ticket. By week's end some polls, Gallup and Newsweek among them, had Obama up by 11 points, roughly 52-41% nationally. With Republican fortunes dropping faster than the Dow Jones Industrials, so desperate had it become for the McCain camp that Indiana is fast becoming a contested state. With a bit more than three weeks left before the election the Republicans are losing and losing ugly.

The McCain's own more mansions than John can literally count. Cindy, it has been reported, spends as much as a quarter million dollars a month on credit card purchases. They find themselves now representing the party of wealth, the stock-jobbers who have systematically gutted the American industrial and commercial base; the party of corruption and greed. Now as the Republican ticket stands before us seeking a new lease on the White House, they have once again reverted to the politics of smear and fear.
“It won't work, not this time...” says Barack Obama.

As we watch the sorry exhibition that are Cindy and Sarah and John, I'm once again reminded of the words of Bob Dylan:

“I wish that for just one time
you could stand inside my shoes
and just for that one moment
I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time
you could stand inside my shoes
you'd know what a drag it is
to see you.”

Footnotes:

1.http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/positively-4th-street

2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_5

October 10, 2008: Guttersnipe in Heels, Cowardice at High Noon, A Sheep in Sheep's Clothing.

Enter the guttersnipe. Announcing that the “gloves are off and the heels are on”, Sarah Palin took to the hustings in an erstwhile attempt to assassinate the character of the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. It seems that the Jedi had made the acquaintance of one Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the “Weathermen” or “Weather Underground”, an off-shoot of the 60's group “Students for a Democratic Society” or SDS. The Weathermen got their name, it is held, from Bob Dylan's line “you don't need the weather man to know which way the wind blows”, and became a more radical and violent exponent of resistance to the Vietnam war. Ayers, it is held, was involved in plans to bomb government buildings back in the late 60's or early 70's, but by the time he met Obama he had become a Professor at the University of Illinois and was serving as a board member on a charity run by the Annanburg family, staunch Republicans who had earned high level appointments from none other than Ronald Reagan himself.

It was on this conservative board that Obama met Ayers who, he understood, had by this time become rehabilitated. Nonetheless the Resumlicans, led by their newest howler the guttersnipe in heels, have attempted to paint a disturbing picture of the Democratic nominee as somehow threatening. Palin was out on the stump screeching that Obama “thinks nothing of palling around with terrorists”, with “people who would hurt America”.

The strategy is straightforward enough. Chris Matthews of MSNBC has caught on to it: “Connect the dots” he said, the use of Obama's middle name “Hussein” as McCain and Palin are introduced, link him with the “weather underground” and label him dangerous, investigate his contributors and charge that he is getting money from “Arab” sources. Already a flourishing internet campaign alleging that Obama is secretly a Muslim has been doing its worst for months. Seen Hannity has given these charges national accreditation. Building on this the Rescumlicans are working to “swift-boat” Obama into a 'One-man sleeper cell'. Playing 'all-Ayers-all-the-time', and doing her best imitation of Ann Coulter, the guttersnipe in heels has been addressing rancorous rallies in which the undertone has become increasingly hateful, dangerous and violent. Shouts of “traitor” and “kill him” and “terrorist” come from the crowd as the two Republican nominees spew their rescumlican screed.

“why did you throw the jack of hearts away
why did you throw the jack of hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck
that I had left to play” ----The Doors “Hyacinth House”

The awful truth is that the good Marshall cannot bring himself to throw away the only card in the deck that he has left to play: the race card. By painting Obama as an “Arab”, an “African-Arab” if you will, by alluding to imaginary “terrorist” connections, and a “foreign religion” the “Straight-talk Express” can avoid the charge of conducting a racist campaign as it has been traditionally understood in these United States by conducting an untraditional racist campaign. The Marshall and his minions were made to understand, in the wake of Obama's European Tour that the charge that he was presumptuous in appearing presidential to enthusiastic European crowds—crowds larger than JFK or what is worse to the political wrong Ronnie Reagan himself—were quickly decoded by a discerning electorate as a simple code word for “uppity”. Similarly the angry old curmudgeon, and author of the Nixonian Code Words, Pat Buchanan was quickly called down by a black woman for his use of the word “exotic” when describing Obama. “What is that, a substitute for the “N” word?” he was asked. No, the rescumlicans discovered, these tactics simply won't do. Another strategy must be employed. And so it was deemed that they would tar the Democratic Nominee with associations to our current enemies by any means necessary. The old code words simply won't do, new code words are necessary.

This week saw not only the guttersnipe bring political discourse down to the level of her expectations, but his wife Cindy excoriate Obama for voting against funding for the troops. Citing her own son's service “ol sin savagely criticized Obama for voting against funding for the Iraq war that did not include a time line of withdrawal forgetting to mention that her husband likewise voted “against” the troops when funding included such a time line. But in an unprecedented act by a potential First Lady, Cindy McCain joined the chorus as the rescumlican slime machine went about the business of ginning up the base.

But, alas, during this week's debate with Obama, the good Marshall would bring none of this up. For ninety minutes he squared off with the Jedi and not once were these charges brought up demonstrating that the good Marshall would rather hide behind the skirts of his wife and his running mate, as they do the “heavy lifting” of the campaign. No, it seems, the good Marshall of Tombstone has not the courage of his convictions and when he faced his adversary in the middle of main street he simply “Quayled”. “A sheep in sheep's clothing”, Winston Churchill had once derisively referred to a political opponent; perhaps none dare call it cowardice.

October 5, 2008: Politics of Desperation, Lipstick on a Pig, An empty Blouse

The good Marshall of Tombstone set the country a titter with his nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for the Vice Presidency. It was an act of political desperation in the wake of Barack Obama's triumphal performance days earlier in Denver in which after securing the Democratic nomination he led the party from the convention hall to what once was called “Mile High” stadium to deliver an acceptance speech before and audience of 85,000. The speech was a masterpiece, conveying hope and promise in these troubling times. Falling in the polls by nearly 7 points, McCain knew he had to have a “game changer”. He chose Sarah Palin. In so doing, the Marshall of Tombstone attempted to put a populist veneer on the politics of greed. Lipstick on a pig.

Last week saw the much heralded debate between Palin and the Democratic nominee for Vice President, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. Biden brought to the debate the experience of 30 years in the Senate, including chairmanships of the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. Palin brings 18 months as governor of Alaska during which time she has embroiled herself in an abuse of power fracas involving a former brother-in-law. She now stands as the only candidate for national office in the history of the United States to stand for election while under supenoae. The debate began amicably enough when she greeted the senator on stage and asked if she could call him Joe. Thats where civility ended. During the ensuing 90 minutes the governor rambled on reciting apparently well memorized “talking points” of the Republican National Committee-- none of which were true-- and playing the guttersnipe. Finally, near the end, she boldly announced that she would answer only questions she wanted to answer in the way she wanted to answer them, in effect telling the moderator and the audience that they could collectively go to hell.

Later Kieth Olbermann in his “Countdown” program on MSNBC, pointed out that debates, if they serve any purpose at all, are meant to throw the candidates into situations that most closely resemble governing. Situations wherein they have no control over the subject matter nor the order in which they appear. Palin steadfastly refused to follow the format, suggesting an unease with reality as it usually presents itself.

Much was made of the governor in the days following the Republican convention. She was experienced they said, she was poised they said, she was ready they said. But for the first time in our national experience a candidate for Vice President was kept from the media and the talk circuit, even kept off the Sunday morning talk shows after the first Presidential debate between Obama and McCain. McCain campaign aids descended upon the Palin group and threw a protective ring around her, shielding her from the public and limiting her exposure to well orchestrated photo-ops and campaign rallies. Finally a few interviews were authorized, most notably with Charles Gibson and Katie Curic, in which our worst fears were made manifest. She was rambling, repetitive, unfocused, sounding very much like the Dana Garvey's savaging of Pappy Bush in the late 80's endlessly repeating “stay the course, a thousand points of light”....Her performance was laughable were it not so painful to watch. Accordingly her standing in the polls plummeted. By debate time several influential conservatives, including writers at the National Review were calling for her to do the right thing and resign from the ticket.

By Tuesday night the whole world was watching, Nearly 70 million Americans tuned in to see if she would self-destruct on national television. Such is the nature of American politics, a truly blood sport. The issue by Thursday night was not whether she would win but whether she would survive. Armed with several talking points which, as the contest dragged on, became endlessly repeated, Palin managed to lay against the ropes and let the clock run out. By debate's end, fewer than a quarter of independent voters thought she had the right stuff.

Though her performance was unremarkable it was nevertheless telling for the points she kept reiterating were not only the same shopworn cliche's that Reagan had used so well but several hostile jabs at the stock jobbers on Wall Street. This, of course, did not translate itself into a full-throated call for re-regulation, on the contrary. But the spectacle of a Republican openly criticizing Wall Street was, nevertheless, worth the price of admission. More laughable was her steadfast criticism of “Washington insiders” and “Elites” as she was punching her ticket of admission.

The spectacle that has become Sarah Palin, however, says more about the Good Marshall than it does about the erstwhile candidate. The correct choice would have been Willard “Mitt” Romney. Romney had earned a spot on the ticket having challenged McCain and winning several states. More importantly he would have brought Michigan into the Republican column and perhaps put Massachusetts into play. But McCain did not have the courage to stand up to the Bible-thumping howlers on the political right who view Mormonism as a cult and, therefore, find Romney unpalatable. He could have chosen Lieberman and created a 'national unity' ticket much as Lincoln had done by choosing the Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee to run with him in 1864. Instead he chose Palin, a bone to the political Right which on balance might bring him three votes in the electoral college. By picking Palin the good Marshall demonstrated that he would prefer an empty blouse over substance, a vessel into which one can pour as much bull shit as one person can hold. In this she resembles 'Ol Two-Cows. The difference is that she apparently doesn't hold it very well.

Meanwhile the McCain camp announced as the world focused on the debate that they were pulling out of Michigan.

October 2, 2008: A Question of Will, Exile on Main Street, Victims of Property and Standing

Once, when writing about his youth, political columnist George F. Will described growing up in the plains of central Illinois. His friends, he said sadly, were St. Louis Cardinals fans, and grew up to be happy and liberal. Will tells us that he became an ardent Chicago Cubs fan and grew to be, in his words, “bitter and conservative”. Baseball can do that to a man.

There are two subjects about which George F. Will writes passionately and convincingly. The first is poverty in the South Side of Chicago and the second is the Cubs. While his remedies about the insufferable conditions that plague both his major interests remain suspect, his description of their plight is deeply moving. No one in America writes as lucidly as Will about what it is to grow up in Chicago's tenements. No one in America writes as lucidly as Will about the “lovable losers” who have not been champions of baseball since well before they took up residence at Wrigley Field. Over a quarter century ago Will wrote about the hapless Cubs sounding very much like a boy writing about a drunken or absent father; a boy bonded with his 'hero' but nevertheless brought to the awful reality that Dad had not accepted the responsibilities of adulthood. There is something about naming a team after an immature animal, he opined. Think about it: Bronco's, strong, fast; Boilermakers, huge manly biceps; Lions and Bears, fast, strong, ferocious: Cubs, warm, friendly, playful. Chicagoans regularly and lovingly refer to the Cubs as the “Baby Bears” and they have lived up to that moniker.

It has now been a century since the Cubs were last champions of their sport. A lot has come and gone in the interregnum. Many years later Will would write bitterly by counting the number of Presidential administrations since the last Cubs' championship and pointing out that there have been two world wars, a Great Depression, and numberless other events marking the intervening years, finally proposing a one game season so that the Cubs would never finish any more than one game out of first place.

To be a Chicago sports fan in general, and a Cubs' fan in particular, carries with it a weight of significance transcending sports. The word “Fan” is, of course, a contraction of the word “fanatic”. To be a true fanatic one must hold that the object in question—be that his beloved Cubs or conservative political philosophy—embodies untarnished “goodness”. It follows then that one's opponents therefore represent the forces of “evil”, all that is bad and sullied about the world. To be, therefore, a Chicago sports fan one must at a tender age come to grips with the awful reality that the forces of “Evil” almost always prevail. A persecution complex emerges hardening over time into a bedrock conservatism. George Will became, in his own words, “conservative and bitter.”

You're out of time my baby
my poor discarded baby
'cause baby, baby, baby, you're out of time” -- The Rolling Stones “Out of Time” (1)

Corey Robin in an essay entitled “Out of Place” quotes the opening statement of Ronald Story and Bruce Laurie's “The Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945-2000” that 'the central story of American politics since World War II is the emergence of the conservative movement'. “Yet”, writes Robin, “for some reason Will still feels that the travails of his political kinsmen are insufficiently appreciated and recognized”. Robin continues: “Will is not the first conservative to believe himself an exile in his own country. A sense of exclusion has haunted conservatism from the beginning when emegres fled the French Revolution and Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre took up their cause. Born in the shadow of loss—of property, standing, memory, inheritance, a place in the sun—conservatism remains a gathering of fugitives. (2) Buckley and his cohorts saw themselves at “out of place” with their badge of exclusion making them just about the “hottest thing in town” (2)

“Plato's guardians were wise”, writes Robin, “Aquinas's king was good; Hobbes's sovereign was, well, sovereign. But the best defense of monarchy that Maistre could muster in “Considerations on France” (1787) was that his aspiring king had attended the 'terrible school of adversity”. Similarly Edmund Burke in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) would describe Marie Antoinette “dragged 'almost naked' by 'the furies of hell' from her bedroom in Versailles and marched to 'a Bastille for kings' in Paris'. “Marie Antoinette”, Robin continues, “ was a particular kind of loser, a person with everything who finds herself utterly and at once dispossessed. Burke saw in her fall an archetype of classical tragedy, the great person laid low by fortune. But in tragedy, the most any hero can achieve is an understanding of his fate: the wheel of time cannot be reversed; suffering cannot be undone. Conservatives, however, are not content with illumination or wisdom. They want restoration.” (2)

What we have here, according to Robin, is the truly “bizarre” nature of modern Conservatism: a ruling class that for the first time rests its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood asking “us not to obey them but to feel sorry for them—or to obey them because we feel sorry for them.” Whereas other political movements must persuade “the disenfranchised that they have rights and power”, the modern conservative poses a novel justification: “they are aggrieved and entitled—aggrieved because entitled—and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection.” (2)

This, in large measure, explains the tone of our national political conventions. For the most part, red meat to the party faithful aside, the Democratic conventions offer visions of hope with Obama leading his convention into a packed outdoor arena and an audience of 85,000 telling the country that we are in this together. The Republicans echoing the pattern of Goldwater and Buchanan gathered in the confines of a Minneapolis arena to grouse about what has been taken and what they fear is about to be taken from them. It was an exercise in the politics of bitterness, the politics of victimhood. At no time did they speak to the economic crises facing the working and middle classes; instead embracing novel ways to continue the business of unraveling the New Deal. No the conservative conscience knows neither intelligence nor compassion; to embrace either would simply impede the restoration.

There are many roads that lead to the miserable place called the Republican Party. Some have been laid low by fortune and find themselves backsliding into the indistinguishable masses and are embittered by the experience. Victims of property and standing. Others, with far less pretensions, simply embraced the wrong team.

Footnotes:

1.http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/rolling_stones_lyrics_278/flowers_lyrics_1416/out_of_time_lyrics_62959.html

2. Robin, Corey. “Out of Place” The Nation June 23, 2008 pages 25-33

May 17, 2008: Generation of Swine: Tale of Two Narratives, Tombstone Meets Rock Ridge.

As befitting a man who does not know, in his heart, who he really is, ‘Ol Two-Cows is always playing the part. He is constantly in costume, constantly assuming an identity. He has been seen variously as a firefighter in New York, a fighter pilot landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the Rancher of Crawford, and the race-car driver at Daytona. He is a frustrated thespian playing, it seems, nearly every role, occasionally even President of the United States.

Ever since the Gipper crossed that line between acting and politics to becoming, in Bob Schieffer’s (1) words, “The Acting President,”(2) it has become increasingly possible to ‘suspend disbelief’ and by so doing, confuse fact from fiction; real from surreal. It isn’t simply that we have witnessed, in our lifetime, the likes of George Murphy, Ronald Reagan and Sonny Bono move from the stage to the political arena but, more recently, in the personages of Fred Thompson and, most notably, ‘Ol Two-Cows, the easy movement back and forth between acting and politics; between the stage and the political arena. In Thompson’s case moving from politics (minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee) to acting, back into politics (Senator from Kentucky), then back again to acting, then again into politics (2008 Presidential campaign), then back again to acting. In the case of ‘Ol Two-Cows, we have a complete blurring of the line in which the present incumbent has become the penultimate “acting president”; the political arena has become a stage with the president ‘stage managed’. He appears only at carefully planned events before friendly audiences gathered by invitation only, a veritable house of mirrors and a perfect echo-chamber. Everything is reduced to a ‘photo-op’, and political life has become a serial presentation in which random events are eliminated, and issues are reduced to a set of ‘canned’ images orchestrated around the talking points of the day. Reality, political reality at least, is thereby reduced to a series of stage-props reflecting no greater depth than the movie sets on the back lots of Paramount, MGM or Warner Brothers. All of this befits the first generation of Americans raised on television, those self-same, “Boomers,” whose tender young minds were molded by the old ‘morality plays’ that were the “Westerns” of 1950s network television.

The circle has now been closed, wherein the republic stands transfixed as its own narcissistic images reflect back on themselves as in a house of mirrors; two dimensional forms endlessly replicating themselves, creating an illusion of infinity when, in fact, there is no depth at all. The real becomes surreal; so unreal as to be real. Fact and fiction become hopelessly confused, the political landscape becoming a kaleidoscope in which each twist produces wholly novel but seemingly symmetrical configurations.

Enter the Swine. In its endless quest to, “lead us now into the nineteenth century and deliver us from liberalism,” the swine have reduced our political discourse to a mere ‘morality play’ in which everything is reduced to black and white -- two-dimensional characters -- wherein eternal good battles eternal evil for the soul of the nation. To this end, every issue is subject to a reducio ad absurdum in which figures are drawn in high contrast; everything reduced to mere black and white with no chromatic spectrum, no whiter shades of pale. Only in a reality so transmogrified can it now be possible to hopelessly confuse Saddam Hussein with Hitler, or more incredibly, ‘Ol Two-Cows with Winston Churchill. In this context, our political discourse is to the real issues of the day what the modern cowboy movie is to the real history of the ‘wild’ west; mere form and no substance; all hat and no cows. The ‘Generation of Swine’ has been presented — at least, since that grand ‘ol cowboy John Wayne went to war in the movies — with the complete confusion of modern foreign and military policy with the western morality play.

To this end we now have, in its most recent manifestations, the tale of two narratives: The first is the Republican or Conservative narrative of Dodge City or, more appropriately for our present purposes, Tombstone. The latest Marshall of Tombstone, John McCain, is about to take over from ‘Ol Two-Cows after the townsmen have grown suspicious of rumors of collusion with the forces of evil and occasional cowardice in the face of danger. To combat the threat to ‘law and order’ posed by the liberals, and the ‘open-banditry’ of the Clantons (make that the Clintons), the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce has pressured the city council to replace the ‘acting’ sheriff with the genuine article. Here is a narrative cast in stark black and white. The forces of good (Republican, here represented by the good Marshall McCain) confront the devious forces of lawlessness and banditry who, if they take over, will Quayle before our enemies and, by ‘appeasing’ them, invite future acts of terrorism against the good people of the city.

The second is the Democratic or Liberal narrative in which the play parodies the Republican proposition. Here, Tombstone becomes Rock Ridge and the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (3) becomes an updated version of “Blazing Saddles” (4). In this narrative, Barack Obama emerges as a modern sheriff Bart who, through cool aloofness and a demonstrable wit and courage, wins the hearts and minds of a town heretofore awash in bigotry. It is difficult not to see some amusing parallels, as in William J. Clinton parroting the fictional Governor William J. Lepetomane (played by Mel Brooks). Confronted with the man he is about to make sheriff of Rock Ridge, the governor in that famous scene takes his Attorney General Hedy Lamarr (played by Harvey Korman) aside and says to him — as Clinton figuratively spoke to the Super Delegates — “Are you crazy? Can’t you see this man’s a n….”? But in the end, as in all morality plays Good triumphs over evil, and all is well with the world.

The differences in the narratives and how they reflect the mindset of each political party are telling. The Republican narrative, parroting the stark contrasts of western lore, presents us with a simple, albeit oversimplified, morality play. What is interesting here is that be it the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” or “High Noon” (5), one is confronted with tales that reflect conflicts that could, and should, have readily been avoided. What has been lost to our collective understanding by these oversimplifications is that the Earps, while wearing the badge, were always dancing on both sides of the law, often seeing law enforcement as a means of waging personal vendettas. The Clantons, too, emerge as two dimensional villains but were actually seen by their contemporaries much more favorably. Likewise in “High Noon” Gary Cooper, here playing Marshal Will Kane had retired and was leaving town when he learns that Frank Miller (played by Ian MacDonald) is returning to town. Miller had been sent up to the big house by the Marshal and was on his way back to Hadleyville seeking revenge. This too was a fight, like modern Iraq, that could and should have been avoided. Kane could have simply kept going, got a court order restraining the criminal from contacting him but instead, significantly, decided to put his badge back on and fight, without the support of the townsmen, in the open streets.

The Democratic narrative is much more nuanced. Being a parody, the Democratic morality play gives us a chance to see conflict — especially conflict as it has come to be understood by a generation raised on ‘western’ morality plays — for what it is: mere two-dimensional cardboard cut-out figures battling over exaggerated claims. When I was a young man managing drive-in theatres, I asked the booking agent to send me “Blazing Saddles,” the subtitle of which was, “Or Never Give a Saga and Even Break.” Since that time, back in 1974, I have watched the film many times, and through the years many of my peers have asked the simple question: “What was the point of that movie”?


The point that Mel Brooks made in his classic comedy is the point that I am making here. That is our understanding of our collective history — in this case, the settlement of the Western frontier — is no deeper than the card-board cut-out figures that the townspeople made of themselves to create their fake “Rock Ridge”, in order to bamboozle the villains. Our understanding of the settlement of the west is no deeper than a back-lot set on the Warner Brothers studio lot. And, as in the old “Roy Rogers” television western, wherein Pat Brady would appear at the end of each episode with his Jeep, thereby transporting us back into the twentieth century, the fight that erupts in the fake “Rock Ridge” quickly pours out into other sets and through the Warner Brothers studios, out into the open streets, ending up at a theatre showing “Blazing Saddles” a perfect parody in which a parody becomes a parody of itself, as in those famous house of mirrors which have so much mesmerized the Generation of Swine.

The contrast in these two narratives is instructive in that it explains a great deal concerning the disconnect between the two political parties and why the respective political discourse passes by, like the ‘Flying Dutchman,’ unnoticed in the night. As Bill Maher once said, the Republicans accuse the Democrats of not loving their country. It’s not true. The difference is that the Republicans love their country like a four year old loves its mother. The Democrats love their country like an adult loves another adult, understanding and sometimes overlooking its faults, correcting it when it is wrong, but nevertheless loving its beauty and its character. Democratic love, Liberal love if you will, is much more nuance and much more mature, trying its best to become multi-dimensional in a two-dimensional world.

In the meantime, Barack Obama, by playing his best sheriff Bart, is slowly winning over the hearts and minds of main street America leading us, perhaps in time, to a more mature understanding of ourselves.

Footnotes:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Schieffer
2. Schieffer, Bob and Gates, Gary Paul The Acting President, 1989 E.P. Dutton, New York. 397 pages
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfight_at_the_O.K._Corral
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Saddles
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Noon

May 16, 2008: Raw Politics, The Political Mendoza Line, Bullshit in Cowboy Boots

‘Ol Two-Cows, perhaps the most divisive and certainly the most arrogant political figure in at least a generation did, however, make great strides in uniting the Democratic Party. Rushing to Obama's defense, Senators Joe Biden (D-Del), Jim Webb (D-Va), and Chris Dodd (D-Conn) worked the talk-show circuit, savaging Bush and his Rescumlican surrogates for their remarks. Even Hillary was driven back into the Democratic camp as the president’s remarks, by forcing her to defend her position as well as Obama’s, drove a wedge between the McCain and Clinton camps who were heretofore making common cause against Obama. “Biden, who made waves this week by telling a Politico reporter that Bush’s comments were ‘bull___” [shit],” appeared on ABC’s “This Week” to discuss Bush’s comments before the Israeli Knesset and defend the likely Democratic nominee. ‘“It was so outrageous,” said [the] Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman…”This is raw, raw politics demeaning to the president of the United States of America.” Then Biden proceeded to point out that the Bush Administration has had direct talks with Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, ‘”a ‘known terrorist’ as Biden put it.”’ (1)

Two other Democratic Senators, Jim Webb and Chris Dodd, “pointed out that previous Republican presidents have met with rogue leaders without giving up the option of military force.” (1) ‘ “If…Bush were to use the right historical example, he should be looking at China in the 1970s,” Webb said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”’ (1) But Joe Biden was the most vociferous in his defense, correctly pointing out that both current Defense Secretary Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have advocated direct talks with Iran moving the Foreign Relations Chairman to coyly suggest that perhaps they should be fired.

“If Bush were to use the right historical example…” Oh my. If Bush had only the slightest idea, the most cursory understanding, perhaps a proper example would have leaped to mind. But one cannot operate on such assumptions in this White House. Remember, this is the very president who, incredulously, asked the Brazilian ambassador, “You have Black people in Brazil?” The problem with ‘Ol Two-Cows is that as his presidency wanes, his polling numbers now dropping below Nixonian levels — the political equivalent of baseball’s ‘Mendoza Line’(2) — his maladroit accusations, explanations and justifications serve only to further solidify his standing as perhaps, short of Zachary Taylor, the most ignorant man ever to occupy the presidential office. Early in this bastard administration, when America was stunned and reeling from the political larceny that brought this man to power, the country exhibited an unwarranted propensity to forgive his malapropisms, and excuse his ignorance as one befitting a Governor of Texas. But with each emerging crisis, and the Chief Executive’s — make that the Great Decider’s — wretched response, it became increasingly obvious that the country was not being led by a man whose native intelligence was betrayed by an inability to master the common language. What became increasingly clear was that his use of language reflected precisely what lay beneath: an empty suit, an intellectually challenged man who presented the Neo-Cons with a blank slate — an empty vessel — into which they could pour or write whatever they wanted. The awful truth is not simply that George W. Bush has no intellectual curiosity. It is that he is not smart enough to be curious, and into his empty head the Neo-Cons could deposit, as Senator Biden calls it, all the ‘bullshit’ that one man can hold. And so the critics of the administration re-emerge as modern Neville Chamberlains playing the wimps to ‘Ol Two-Cows’ John Wayne as Winston Churchill.

Napoleon Bonaparte once described French Foreign Minister Charles de Talleyrand, a man of great political acumen who survived the Ancient Regime, the Revolution, Robespierre, Bonaparte, and the Restoration, as “shit in silk stockings”. ‘Ol Two-Cows, a man of much lesser talents and no political acumen who nevertheless survived two military quagmires, the loss of a major city to a hurricane, two dubious elections, and an imperial vice presidency, can best be described as “bullshit in cowboy boots”.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10432.html.
2. The Mendoza Line is a baseball term referring to “an offensive threshold below which (a) players’ presence in the Major Leagues cannot be justified despite their defensive abilities” The term is said to have been coined by Kansas City Royals’ great George Brett for shortstop Manny Mendoza who hit .198 during the baseball season of 1979. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wikki/Mendoza_Line. Keith Olbermann on his “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” is credited with creating the “Mendoza Line of Presidential politics” while referring to Rudy Giuliani’s withdrawal from the 2008 contest for the Republican Presidential nomination. I suggest that the true “Mendoza Line” was the Nixon approval rating during the waning days of his administration soon to be superseded by the current occupant in the White House.

May 15, 2008: Return to Munich, A Question of 'Appeasement', Television is no Medium for an Ignorant Man

“Television is no medium for an ignorant man”
--from The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

Wrapping up another unsuccessful journey to the Middle East, in which ‘Ol Two-Cows had sought to get the Saudis to turn on a few more oil spigots, the empty-handed President appeared in the Israeli Knesset to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the modern state of Israel. Instead of focusing on American and regional foreign relations, the President chose, instead, to transform this festive occasion to launch a dark assault on the critics of his actions, likening “those who call for talks ‘with terrorists and radicals’ to those who appeased the Nazis.” (1)

“‘We have an obligation to call this what it is,” he declared, “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.’ There are few words more fraught than “appeasement” and no place where they carry more emotional weight than in Israel.” (1)

The White House tried to put some distance between itself and the politics of the campaign, with “White House Press secretary Dana Perino, insist[ing] the president’s remarks had nothing to do with Obama and slyly suggest[ing] that the Democratic senator was being narcissistic.” (1)

But the good Marshall of Tombstone was quick to pounce on the remark, endorsing the president’s ‘slash and burn’ politics and suggesting, “It was Obama’s responsibility to explain why he was willing to talk with Iran.”(1)

The spin-machine went into overdrive, drawing a line of sorts in the desert sands. The choice is clear they cried: choose a stalwart defender of freedom who will search out and destroy our enemies, or elect someone who will misjudge our adversaries and, by degrees, imperil Western Civilization itself. Once again, the political ‘wrong’ is relying on fear in order to terrorize America into keeping the Rescumlicans in power. To this end, they trotted out right-wing radio talk show host Kevin James to carry the banner into battle. James is, like ‘Ol Two-Cows, an intellectually lazy troglodyte who regularly trolls the cesspool of right-wing politics for nuggets of ‘wisdom’ with which to regale his audience. Being work-shy, he usually relies — like Fox Noise and other conservative mouthpieces — entirely on the daily talking points of the Republican National Committee. There he looks and looks no further, for he has, from the oracle itself, the very words with which he will fearlessly wage relentless battle against all enemies foreign and domestic; real or imagined. The results of such conflict can be, depending on the venue, variously frightening, comical, or painful to witness. They are, however, never enlightening.

Tonight on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” the nation watched, with frighteningly comical bewilderment, what happens when one of the sirens of talk radio attempts to lure the brave Ulysses of television. Chris Matthews is a hard-nosed reporter who delights, as he puts it, in playing ‘hardball.’ He asks the tough questions and expects forthright answers. What happened tonight was a clear demonstration of what will transpire when one walks between the striped lines on the playing field prepared to do battle protected only with the paper thin armor of the RNC’s ‘talking points’, and no discernible historical understanding whatsoever.

“Tell me, Kevin, what do you mean by appeasement?”

“The President is right, we’re talking appeasement here,” replied James.

“What do you mean by appeasement?”

“What Chamberlain did with Hitler”, replied “Hardball’s” guest.

“What did Chamberlain do that constituted appeasement?” asked Matthews.

Nearly two dozen times Matthews asked the question, suggesting after several attempts that perhaps his guest did not know. James responded indignantly that he did know, but couldn’t answer the question which was precisely what did Chamberlain do at Munich in 1937 that constituted appeasing Hitler. Finally, while protesting that he knew, James said that he couldn’t give a definitive answer, but the critics of the President were appeasing our foes and repeating the mistakes at Munich all over again.

Finally, after shuttling his guest off the program and getting a chance to explain himself, Chris Matthews clarified, one last time, the point he was trying but not allowed to make by the constant protestations and interruptions of the night’s conservative spokesman. “Meeting with Hitler did not constitute appeasement”, said Matthews, “giving away most of Czechoslovakia did. The error was not in meeting and negotiating, but in conceding.” Precisely. Kevin James had no idea what had transpired on that fateful day in Munich in 1937, as Europe lunged toward another total war. He had no idea what bargain was struck nor the reasons why.

Tonight’s debate, reminiscent of the Kerry-Bush debates wherein Kerry mopped the floor with ‘Ol Two-Cows, was a complete mismatch. Chris Matthews is an old pro, a protégé of Representative Thomas “Tip” O”Neil, the former Speaker of the House. Matthews is also a graduate of the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill has one of the best History programs in the United States, and on this night, it was telling. Matthews could have added more. He could have related the weakness of Chamberlain’s bargaining position; neither the French nor the British had the armored divisions necessary to intervene in Eastern Europe, and both — especially the French — were deeply divided politically. He could have informed his guest that one of the first things Chamberlain did upon returning to London was reinstate conscription and begin the rearming of Britain in preparation for what was to come. Churchill would be invited back into the government from political exile and placed over the Admiralty. None of these steps are much referred to when mentioning Munich and it’s aftermath. Instead the ordeal at Munich has become a card-board, two-dimensional cut-out banner that is waved whenever those who have no legitimate reasons for doing what they are about to do need an excuse to do it.

What Kevin James demonstrated this night on “Hardball” was not that Barack Obama is a political neophyte, but that unlike talk radio, and Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity notwithstanding, television is no medium for an ignorant man.

Footnotes:

1. “Bush’s Unseemly Attack on Obama”, International Herald Tribune.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/18/opinion/edbush.php