Showing posts with label Left. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Left. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Divided Left



THE ABSURD TIMES



Tax the Churches
Czar Donic


Problems on the left

Maybe this is in a fit of pique.  I don't know.  But as far back as I can remember, there have always been silly and self-defeating fights on the left.  Will Rodgers famously said "I don't belong to any organized political party – I'm a Democrat."  Back then, it was a relatively conservative stance as the Socialist Party had been rising rapidly in light of big business.

It always seemed that there were these petty squabbles: who is more liberal?  Who is really, really, with the earth and freedom?  Who can prove they believe in equality the most?  Show us.

Today, it seems that some of this is dying down just because Trump and his tribe comprise such an offensive and overbearing assault on rights, but even them it continues.  The routing of Al Franken from the Senate is a case in point, a crusade set up by a right-wing talk show host, but finalized by Kirsten Gillebrand, or however it is spelled.  Wonderful.  The Koch brothers were delighted.

In some circles, it is even forbidden to say anything positive about Bernie Sanders because he "sabotaged" Hillary Clinton's chances.  Well, nobody did more to sabotage her chances than she did.  Sure, Comey had a great deal to do with it, but mention that to a Hillary supporter and immediately you are spouting Russian propaganda!  The FBI twice warned the campaign that it's computer security was inadequate, and it was ignored.  The account hacked was on AOL and the password was, cleverly, PASSWORD.  Seasoned hackers might not even try that one as it is too stupid to believe, but there it was.

Growing up in Chicago, I learned a great deal about politics, especially on the practical level.  First you want to get some sort of ally elected, then you work on him, excuse me, him or her.  If you do not have the office, you can do nothing.  At one point, the Catholic Church carried out a crusade to tell Mayor Daley what movies could or could not be shown.  One of his advisors, who I knew, pointed to one of their enormous buildings, tax free, and said "if you want to tell government what to do, start paying property taxes!"  I guess, the church took that opportunity to start sexually molesting children.

At least something was done.  Everyone is convinced that tax cuts were a good thing, but most of the cuts went to the rich and were used to buy up more stock in their own companies.  Some jobs program.

Trump is under criminal investigation and this is an election year.  Midterms are only 2 months away.  Why should be be permitted to nominate anybody to anything? 

I have seen people say that the Carolinas look like some third world country.  Well, actually, in third world countries one does not see animals penned up and their waste matter collected on mass bins, open air bins.  If the hurricane, Florence, had stayed a category 4, or even 4, it may have scattered pig shit as far away as Fargo.

I knew guys like Bret Kavanough, priviledged, of wealthy family, catholic, and bullies.  It is amazing the voting stances of all the catholic justices on the Supreme Court.  It must be an accident, surely.

Why not some Babtists?  Perhaps Pat Robertson, whatever he was or is could sit on the court.  I know he does not have a law degree, but he has studied God's word, as it is called, so that is, after all, a higher law, right? 

You might want to compare the two interviews and decide which is more important, if either.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh have cast doubt on whether President Trump's Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed by the Senate. "The process was bad from the beginning," says Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and president of Repairers of the Breach. "We are poised to have two presidents that did not win the popular vote, now will have appointed four extreme members to the Supreme Court." Barber says Kavanaugh will be dangerous to voting rights, to labor rights, to healthcare and to women's rights.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We're going to turn right now to the Reverend William Barber. We're speaking to him in North Carolina, and we originally had him on to talk about the hurricane. But before we go to that, Dr. William Barber, I wanted to ask you about—I wanted ask you about Judge Kavanaugh. You held a news conference opposing Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court well before Dr. Blasey Ford spoke out and said that he had attempted to rape her when they were both teenagers. I was wondering if you would share your thoughts at this point, both on this latest controversy and why you're so vehemently opposed to Judge Kavanaugh taking a seat on the Supreme Court.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you so much, Amy, for this opportunity. Before all of the latest news, Judge Kavanaugh, first of all, was being put forward after McConnell in the Senate held open a seat for over 420 days, in a way that we had not seen since the Civil War. They literally denied a president his right to nominate someone and for them to have a hearing. This was the same Judiciary Committee that denied two African-American women a hearing to be appointed to the federal court, the 1st District—Eastern District in North Carolina. So the process was bad from the beginning.
Secondly, what we are seeing now, if we look at George Bush and now Donald Trump, we are poised to have two presidents that did not win the popular vote now will appoint—will have appointed four members to the Supreme Court, four extreme members to the Supreme Court. We already have a Supreme Court that rolled back the Voting Rights Act. Kavanaugh, we believe, will be dangerous to voting rights, to labor rights, to healthcare and to women's rights. And that was exposed in the hearings of what he would not answer and what he would not say was settled law. For instance, Senator Kamala Harris asked him, "Was Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act settled law?" Section 2 says—it's basically the protection that says no state can engage in discriminatory practices as it relates to voting and voting rights. He did not answer that question. He could not even say yes on something as fundamental as voting rights. So he was a dangerous, if you will, nominee already.
Now that this has come out—and I've been thinking about it in a number of ways. Number one, this lady did not intend to come out. Dr. Ford, she—it was leaked. And she has asked for a FBI investigation. That's strange for someone that the extremists, who call them Republicans, are trying to say she's lying. But be it as it may, it's all alleged. I heard Michael Moore mention a minute ago about the feminist side of this, the woman's side of this agenda. Let me flip this over. Imagine Obama nominating a black or a Latino man for the Supreme Court, and an accusation comes up that that black or Latino man had attempted to rape a teenage girl. Imagine that for a minute, and imagine what the Republicans would be doing if in fact that was the scene that we're dealing with now. Here they are having a white man for the Supreme Court nominee accused of raping—attempting to rape a white woman, and they are already forming an opinion and wanting to refuse to even give her an FBI investigation. This is nothing but the gangsterization of our politics and our political systems, and people in America must stand up against this entire process, because it is a direct—it's contrary to our fundamental values.

As President Trump visits North Carolina, where thousands are evacuating after Hurricane Florence caused record flooding, we go to Raleigh to speak with Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. Areas devastated by the storm include some of the poorest areas on the Eastern Seaboard. Barber's recent CNN piece is headlined "In hurricane wind and waves, the poor suffer most."


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to turn right now, Reverend Barber, to what you're dealing with in North Carolina, to look at how thousands continue to evacuate North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Florence, now a tropical depression, which has caused record flooding since it made landfall five days ago. President Trump is expected to visit your state, is going to North and South Carolina today. The death toll from the storm has risen to at least 35, including three young children, and in—as well, in South Carolina, two women detainees drowned in a sheriff's van. More than 10,000 people have already fled to shelters. Nearly 400,000 are without power in North Carolina.
On Tuesday, Governor Roy Cooper said 16 rivers were at major flood stage, and three more rivers could peak in coming days. Massive industrial coal ash landfills and pig and chicken farms have also been engulfed by the floodwaters, and millions of chickens and pigs have drowned. The Associated Press reports at least 45 active farms are located in the floodplain. Crystal Coast Waterkeeper Larry Baldwin flew over eastern North Carolina and described the damage to hog and chicken farms.
LARRY BALDWIN: We did see a couple facilities today that were already in serious trouble. They were surrounded by water. Their lagoons were surrounded by water. Their spray fields were completely covered up. The situation is not good. But it's not good today, but it's likely to get much worse throughout the rest of the week as these waters start to get to their flood levels.
AMY GOODMAN: More than 1.4 million people in North Carolina are now without functioning water systems, and even more have been ordered to boil their water. The areas devastated by Hurricane Florence include some of the poorest areas on the Eastern Seaboard. In some counties, nearly one in three people live below the poverty line.
For more, we continue to speak with Reverend Dr. William Barber, who's co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. He's in Raleigh, North Carolina, distinguished visiting professor of public theology at Union Theological Seminary, former president of the North Carolina NAACP, and Moral Mondays leader, recently wrote a piece for CNN headlined "In hurricane wind and waves, the poor suffer most."
So describe what's happening on the ground, Dr. Barber, in your state.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, I'm actually—you're right—in Raleigh and headed back to Goldsboro, where my church, Greenleaf Christian Church, and also Repairers of the Breach were planning to feed children, who many of them are missing meals because the schools are closed, because the rivers, even in my city, have not crested yet. We don't know the rate—what this flood will cause. In Fayetteville, it's over—they're talking about 61 feet, some 15 to 20 feet higher than it was when Mitchell, Hurricane Mitchell, came, that gave us a 500-year flood across the state.
Amy, here's what we have to help people to understand. And Trump is coming, for instance, to visit today, but his policies—the negative impact of his policies were visited on the poor and low-wealth long before he came. We are in a state, before the hurricane, poor people and low-wealth people had a storm. There are over 4.7 million residents in North Carolina that are poor and low-wealth. There were over a million people in North Carolina, before the storm, that did not have healthcare. The counties that are being hit the hardest, Amy, are Tier I and Tier II. Tier I is the most distressed county in terms of housing, healthcare and poverty, and Tier II is the next level. They are being hit the hardest. In North Carolina, 2 million workers make under $15 an hour. And it would take a person making $7 an hour—they'd have to work some 80-some hours just to afford a two-bedroom apartment. That's what existed before the hurricane. Forty-eight percent of people in North Carolina are poor or low-income. That's what existed before the hurricane.
And we have an extremist, Republican-led Legislature that refused to expand Medicaid, which meant 500,000 people in our state could have healthcare right now and they don't have it. The Republican Congress is talking about cutting SNAP. People need those food stamps now more than ever, after this flood. We refuse a living wage. Many of the people who are flooded, they work hourly jobs. They are not getting paid now. When people—they don't have the resources. When the governor and others said evacuate, they couldn't evacuate, because they don't have the money, they don't have the cars, they did not have the ability. And when you think about it, the state is now bringing federal money. The president will say he's going to give federal money. But this state has refused federal money that would have helped the poor prior to the storm, so that they would have buffers against the storm.
So we have two hurricanes—the hurricane of poverty and lack of healthcare and lack of living wages that existed prior to the storm, and then we have the storm, and now everything that was already tough for people has been exacerbated. That's the story we must keep our eyes on, because some people are looking at what happened on the coast. We actually dodged a bullet on the coast. But if you come inland now and see these rivers that are—where mostly the poor live, along these rivers, in these rural communities, they are being devastated.
And when you add to that, lastly, Amy, the environmental devastation—the coal ash, the hog farms, the bacteria, the poison that's being put in the water table and put in the rivers—this is a catastrophe, a tremendous catastrophe. But some of it could have been buffered, could have been made better, if our state, particularly people in Congress, would help the poor in advance of this storm, would make sure everybody has healthcare and living wages, and we had cleaned up these coal ashes, and we—coal ash ponds, and we stopped using fossil fuels. If those kinds of things would happen in advance of storms, there wouldn't be so much damage to the poor and the least of these after the storm.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, speaking of poverty, I wanted to read a letterfrom a resident of Edenton, North Carolina, who wrote to The New York Times this week, quote, "Unfortunately, my family does not have the resources to put gas in our vehicle. … I, myself, came here to this city to care for my father, who was diagnosed with cancer, with next to nothing to my name. We have no way out, so we are staying. We live together in a double-wide trailer." That's one letter.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And then I want to turn to the small town of Princeville in eastern North Carolina. The first town chartered by freed slaves in the United States, in 1885, originally known as Freedom Hill, sits on an unwanted floodplain along the Tar River, that's flooded many times. The town's website notes, quote, "Flooding, like the threat of white supremacy, has plagued Princeville since its settlement. Major floods occurred two years after the community's founding and again in 1919, 1924, 1928, 1940 and 1958." The Army Corps of Engineers eventually built a dike that helped reduce the flooding, but in 1999 heavy rains from Hurricane Floyd submerged parts of Princeville under 23 feet of water for more than a week. This is Princeville resident Linda Worsley speaking to The New York Times about how she was displaced from her home by flooding after Hurricane Matthew caused widespread damage in the town in 2016.
LINDA WORSLEY: We did have a dike built up. But the water actually went around the dike, and it came up behind my house and destroyed everything. Then a lot of the water also came up through the sewer systems.
REPORTER: Are you worried about whether or not you'll be allowed to rebuild on this land?
LINDA WORSLEY: Yes, I am. Trying to do everything I can to make sure I'll still be able to stay in the same land that my forefathers bought, so that we could have somewhere to live, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: So, that clip from Princeville, a 2016 report, talking about the black community, the first community founded by freed slaves. Can you talk more about this, Reverend Barber?
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: I actually did a rededication of that city this past year, and I know people there. I live not far from Princeville. I live in eastern North Carolina. I was raised in eastern North Carolina. So this is my home that I'm seeing constantly hit. We know about what happened in Matthew and Floyd. It literally devastated. I think something like a 15-foot wall of water came through that area. It actually sat the pews inside of churches all the way up, had them standing up inside of the church. The water was that powerful. And people lost their lives, again.
But since that flood, it was after that that North Carolina's extremist politicians said, "We don't need healthcare. We don't need a living wage. We don't need to deal with these environmental issues." If anything, they deregulated. And here we are again. We're in a state where 56 percent of the children, Amy, 1.3 million, are poor and low-wealth. Sixty-two percent of people of color, 2.3 million, are poor and low-wealth.
But this is something people also don't know: The majority of the poor people in North Carolina are white. And even in eastern North Carolina, while those counties are the counties with the highest percentages of African Americans, the majority of the people in those counties are white, and the majority of the people who are poor are white. And so it's a race question and a class question. It's a denial question.
It's a question that after these storms normally happen, people go back to business as usual, or we get something like we see the extremism of Trump, where you deny the things that people need. Then, when the storm hits, you come in and you visit and act as though you're concerned, but your policies prior to the storm created problems for the people in a way that they wouldn't have some of these problems they have now, if you hadn't been so vicious and so mean and so regressive in your policies when the days were sunny. We're going to have to learn how to do this better. People are suffering. People are afraid all over eastern North Carolina.
And think about this, Amy. This is the only glimmer of sunshine in the midst of this. This is what a Category 1 and a tropical storm has done. They thought it would be a Category 4 or 3. If it had been a Category 3 or 4, it is unimaginable what the pain and the travesty would be, what the poisoning to the environment would be, what the need for healthcare would be. Imagine now, people that are getting sick, that could have healthcare, don't have it. How are they going to be treated? You know, homes—as you said, you talked about a lady living in a mobile home. There are so many mobile homes. We could do so much better with affordable housing in these areas, but that's not the case. Some people may be off work two and three weeks. They already were in a position before the storm where if they missed one day, they might not be able to pay their rent or afford their medicine or feed their families. We have to talk about the political and social storms that exacerbate the natural storms when they do happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Just last month, former Vice President Al Gore visited you in North Carolina, and you went on a tour of the coal-impacted communities, Gore speaking here in front of the smokestacks of Duke Energy's Belews Creek Steam Station, which runs on coal.
AL GORE: I want to draw connections between Belews Lake and the coal ash pollution and the gaseous pollution that is threatening to make of our entire planet the kind of mess that they've made here. We had to stop for—on the way over here, for—actually, we didn't stop, but we saw going beside us all these train cars full of coal. On a peak day, this plant over here burns 220 railcars full of coal. And what is left over when they burn it is this toxic coal ash. Now, if you had all these millions of tons of a toxic substance and you just dug a raw gash in the ground and dumped it in there, you would be behaving recklessly. That's what they're doing. This is a crime scene!
AMY GOODMAN: So, that's Vice President Al Gore speaking outside the Duke Energy plant with you, Reverend Barber. Duke Energy—that was before the storm. Duke Energy now says at least 2,000 cubic yards of coal ash were released amidst Tropical Depression Florence's massive flooding in North Carolina, enough ash to fill something like 180 dump trucks. As we wrap up, what this means?
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: And one of those areas is in Goldsboro. It's in the Neuse River. It's one of the sites that was already leaking, that people have been fighting. And they tell us all the time, "The coal ash is not poison." And we say, "Well, then, why isn't it in the rich communities? Why isn't it in the communities of the politicians?" It is poisonous. It is dangerous. It was already leaking. It was already broken. It was already messed up. The storm has exacerbated this, and it did not have to be this way.
Duke, the very company that's now having to send people out to help turn on power, is the same company that has negatively impacted poor communities by placing all of these coal ash ponds and coal ash sites in and around poor communities, in and around sources of water. It is a form of hypocrisy, on one hand, to say "we want to help you" after the storm, but then, when—but before the storm, we engage in policies that continually hurt and harm the poor, the low-wealth and the least of us.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much, Reverend Dr. William Barber. And also, of course, with President Trump coming to the Carolinas today, he proudly denies climate change, calls it a Chinese hoax. In the last 10 seconds, what would you say to him about this?
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: I would say to him what my son, who is an environmentalist lawyer and also an environmentalist physicist—because of the warming air, it's messing up the jet streams, therefore what you have is this erratic hurricanes. They twist and turn and stop and move. And that means they dump more water. That means they hold more water. That means they're more powerful. Anybody who denies climate change is a fool. And it is foolish to do it, because your denial of climate change, your denial of healthcare, your denial of living wages, your denial of environmental protection devastates the poor before storms ever come, and then there is an additional devastation on top of it.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much, Reverend Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, joining us from Raleigh, North Carolina. We'll link to your piece at CNN, "In hurricane wind and waves, the poor suffer most." And interesting you talked about your son, as Vice President Al Gore brought his daughter Karenna, a well-known environmentalist, also at Union Theological.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the Trump administration placing the most severe cap on refugees in history. Stay with us.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.







Thursday, July 31, 2008

Camp-Pain



THE ABSURD TIMES
I never did get around to commenting on the cartoon cover for the New Yorker magazine, but Keith did. In case you missed it, this is what the New York magazine published:
I didn't think much of it because, after all, it did come from New York.
The Campain has become so absurd that I'm just about ready to pack this whole thing in.
For example, last week McCain made the old GOP promise not to raise taxes. He then appeared on one of the Sunday talk shows and said that payroll taxes should be increased to help out Social Security. His campaign then snapped into action, saying that McCain does not speak for his campaign Comittee. Say what?
A recent ad by McCain shows Obama in Germany talking to the 200,000, and then Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton. See the connection? In defending this ad, one of his campaign advisors said that "Obama spoke to a lot of leftist Europeans." Hunh? In Germany? The country that gave us such leftists as Hitler and Merkel? Are Republicans really that afraid of the Left? Obama is left-handed, maybe that's what they meant?
Anyway, here is a nice article with gook links from TOMGRAM:

Tom Dispatch
posted 2008-07-29 16:22:07

Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Will Culture War Overshadow Real War in 2008?
All agree that this is (or should be) the year of the Democrats. But
with candidate Barack Obama still leading, on average, in national polls
by only about <http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/08-us-pres-ge-mvo.php>
two to five percentage points, depending on the day, and the media
proclaiming
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/07/26/ST2008072602046.html>
"oil" now a "Republican" issue, there's certainly a long way to go to
that prospective Democratic victory on November 4th. Still, in
retrospect, this last week may be seen as the one in which Senator
McCain's campaign concluded that this might not only be the year of the
Democrat, but of the Obamacrat as well, and went for the jugular.
Gallup polling, for instance, shows Obama making small but significant
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/109036/Obama-Gains-Over-McCain-Swing-States-Since-June.aspx>
gains in every kind of state (red, purple, and blue) over the last two
months. At the same time, Obama's world tour -- the one McCain and the
neocons practically egged him into taking, with all those online tickers
showing
<http://blogsforjohnmccain.com/days-barack-obama-visited-iraq-widget>
just how many days since he had last been to Iraq -- left the McCain
camp in full and bitter gripe mode. In the imagery of advisor and former
Senator Phil Gramm, they had become a campaign of "whiners."
<http://www.newsweek.com/id/145421> Meanwhile, the /Berlin bounce/
finally showed up
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/109102/Gallup-Daily-Obama-49-McCain-40.aspx>
in the polls.
While Obama was wowing the Europeans, McCain managed to get an
offshore-oil photo-op in the Gulf of Mexico wiped out by a somehow
overlooked advancing hurricane. Instead, he ventured into a grocery
store aisle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, prepped on rising food prices,
where he met <http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/27/10633/> a
"shopper planted by the local Republican Party" and experienced an
unfortunate "applesauce avalanche."
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/07/25/john_mccain_and_the_applesauce.html>
(/The Daily Show/ version
<http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=177446>
of this is not to be missed.) Not surprisingly, by week's end he was
decisively skipping the "issues" and heading for "values" -- that is,
directly for the throat in the style which Republicans have, in recent
years, made their own.
Earlier in the week, he had practically declared his opponent treasonous
for supposedly putting his political campaign ahead of victory in Iraq
-- "It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a
political campaign?" -- and launched a classic Republican campaign
attack on Obama's "character." His latest ad, which attacks Obama for
supposedly going to the gym rather than visiting wounded American
soldiers in Germany, typically ends
<http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=679D4D79-3048-5C12-008AD444C373AA15>:
"McCain, country first." (Versus? uh? Obama, country last?)
It's not exactly surprising that candidate McCain headed for what he
hoped was potential "values" and "character" pay dirt (emphasis on
"dirt") in tough times. As Ira Chernus -- canny TomDispatch regular and
author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594512760/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> --
points out, it may be his only chance. The question is: Will it work?
Will "character," the culture wars, and security fears help elect the
most woeful Republican candidate since Bob Dole -- and in a country that
not only increasingly doesn't think much of Republicans, but has never
cared to vote old? (Ronald Reagan was the exception to this rule, always
running young and vigorous, whatever his age.) McCain, in a golf cart
<http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/2008/07/caption_contest_mccain_in_a_go.html>
being piloted by 84-year-old George H.W. Bush, actually looked older
than the former president. And, gee, you might go for the jugular early,
too, in a year in which the Republicans don't even control the political
machinery of the state of Ohio.
Now, let Ira Chernus take you on a magical mystery tour of the strange
world of American "values," American "values voters," and a mainstream
media that values the value-voter story above all else. /Tom/

War Meets Values on Campaign Trail
*Will the Big Winner of 2008 Once Again Be a Conservative
Culture-Wars Narrative?*
By Ira Chernus
While the Iraq war has largely faded from our TV screens, some 85%
of all voters still call it an important issue. Most of them want
U.S. troops home from Iraq within a couple of years, many of them
far sooner. They support Barack Obama's position, not John McCain's.
Yet when the polls ask which candidate voters trust more on the war,
McCain wins almost every time.
Maybe that's because, according to the Pew Center for the People and
the Press, nearly 40% of the public doesn't know McCain's position
on troop withdrawal. In a June Washington Post/ABC poll
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/24/AR2008072401330.html>,
the same percentage weren't sure he had a clear position. When that
poll told voters that McCain opposed a timetable for withdrawal,
support for his view actually shot up dramatically. It looks like a
significant chunk of the electorate cares more about the man than
the issue. Newer polls
<http://blogs.wsj.com/politicalperceptions/category/peter-brown/>
suggest that McCain's arguments against a timetable may, in fact, be
shifting public opinion
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/16/10393/> his way.
*McCain's Only Chance: Values-plus Voters*
Pundits and activists who oppose the war in Iraq generally assume
that the issue has to work against McCain because they treat
American politics as if it were a college classroom full of rational
truth-seekers. The reality is much more like a theatrical spectacle.
Symbolism and the emotion it evokes -- not facts and logic -- rule
the day.
In fact, the Pew Center survey found that only about a quarter of
those who say they'll vote for McCain base their choice on issues at
all. What appeals to them above all, his supporters say
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/107671/General-Election-Shaping-Change-vs-Experience.aspx>,
is his "experience," a word that can conveniently mean many things
to many people.
The McCain campaign constantly highlights its man's most emotionally
gripping experience: his years of captivity in North Vietnam. Take a
look at the McCain TV commercial
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/2008/07/_while_this_message_delivers.html>
entitled "Love." It opens with footage of laughing, kissing hippies
enjoying the "summer of love," then cuts to the young Navy flier
spending that summer of 1967 dropping bombs on North Vietnam and
soon to end up a tortured prisoner of those he was bombing.
McCain believed in "another kind of love," the narrator explains, a
love that puts the "country and her people before self." Oh, those
selfish hippies, still winning votes for Republicans -- or so
McCain's strategists hope.
Obama agrees that the symbolic meanings of Vietnam and the "love
generation" still hang heavy over American politics. The debate
about patriotism, he observed
<http://www.barackobama.com/2008/06/30/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_83.php>,
"remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s? a fact most
evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq."
Obama is right -- sort of. The so-called culture wars have shifted
away from social issues to war, terrorism, and national security.
The number of potential voters who rate abortion or gay rights as
their top priority now rarely exceeds 5%; in some polls it falls
close to zero. Meanwhile, Republicans are nine times as likely
<http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1295.xml?ReleaseID=1192> as Democrats,
and far more likely than independents, to put terrorism at or near
the top of their most-important list. And Republican voters are much
more likely to agree with McCain that Iraq is, indeed, the "the
central front in the war on terrorism."
Sociologists tell us, however, that the "culture wars" so
assiduously promoted by conservatives are mostly smoke and mirrors.
Despite what media pundits may say, the public is /not/ divided into
two monolithic values camps. Voters are much less predictable than
that. And few let values issues trump their more immediate problems
-- especially economic ones -- when they step into the voting booth.
The almighty power of the monolithic "values voters" is largely a
myth invented by the media.
Yet, the "culture war" story does impact not only debates about the
war in Iraq, as Obama said, but all debates about national security.
Beyond the small minority who are strict "values voters," there are
certainly millions of "values plus" voters. Though they can be
swayed by lots of issues, they hold essentially conservative social
values and would like a president who does the same. This time
around, it's a reasonable guess that they, too, are letting war and
security issues symbolize their "values" concerns. Put in the
simplest terms: They are the McCain campaign's only chance.
So just how much of a chance does he really have? At this point,
only two-thirds of those who say they trust him most on Iraq plan to
vote for him. That means less than 30% of all voters are solidly
prowar and pro-McCain. But another 12% or so who do not trust McCain
on Iraq say they'll vote for him anyway, keeping him competitive
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/us/politics/28web-nagourney.html>
in polling on the overall race. Most of them are surely part of the
huge majority who, whatever they think of his Iraq specifics, trust
McCain most to protect us from terrorism and see him as the person
most desirable as commander-in-chief. (There's that "experience"
again.)
The crucial voters are the 10% to 20% who want troops out of Iraq
soon, won't yet commit to McCain, but "trust him" most to do the
right thing on Iraq and terrorism. They are choosing the man, not
the policy position, on the war. A lot of them fall among the 5% to
20% -- depending on the poll you pick -- who won't yet commit to
either candidate.
McCain can swing the election if his campaign can only convince
enough of them to vote with their hearts, or their guts, for the
"experienced" Vietnam war hero, the symbol of the never-ending
crusade against "Sixties values." So he and his handlers naturally
want to turn the campaign into a simple moral drama: Sixties values
-- or the nation's security and your own? Take your pick.
*Obama's American Values*
Could that "values" script get a Republican elected, despite the
terrible damage the Republicans have done -- and for which voters
blame them -- in the last eight years? Many Democrats apparently
think it might. They're afraid, says Senator Russ Feingold
<http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/continued/3691/why_democrats_wont_stop_the_war/>,
that "the Republicans will tear you apart" if you look too weak and
soft. That's why the Democratic Congress, weakly and softly,
continues to give the Bush administration nearly everything it wants
when it comes to funding the war in Iraq, as well as eavesdropping
on citizens at home. And the Democratic presidential candidate now
goes along, with little apology.
The Obama campaign recognizes the larger "values" frame at work
here. Look at the commercial
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/19/obama_launches_nationwide_ad_c.html>
its operatives made to kick off the general election campaign. In
it, Obama says not a word about issues. He starts off by announcing:
"America is a country of strong families and strong values." From
then on, it's all values all the time.
And the "strong values" the commercial touts are not the ones that
won him the nomination either. Not by a long shot. You'll find
nothing about "change" or "hope" there. It's all about holding fast
to the past. Nor is there a thing about communities uniting to help
the neediest. America's "strong values" -- "straight from the Kansas
heartland" -- are "accountability and self-reliance? Working hard
without making excuses." You're on your own. It's all individualism
all the time.
Sandwiched between self-reliance and hard work is the only community
value that apparently does count: "love of country."
Obama's second ad
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/2008/07/obamas_working_class_pitch.html>
(which /Newsweek/ described as "largely a 30-second version" of the
first) features images of the candidate warmly engaging hard-hatted
and hair-netted workers, all of them with middle-aged wrinkles, blue
collars, and white skins. Both commercials ran in seven
traditionally Republican states as well as 11 swing states. As they
were released, Obama gave major speeches supporting patriotism and
faith-based initiatives.
As Republican consultant Alex Castellanos put it
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062201964.html>,
the Obama campaign made "an aggressive leap across the 50-yard line
to play on Republican turf." Before they sent their man around the
world to focus on war and foreign policy, to meet the troops in
Afghanistan and General Petraeus in Baghdad, they felt they had to
assure the "Kansas heartland" that he shares true American values.
And Obama's message-makers know where that mythical "heartland"
really lies: not in Kansas, Dorothy, but on a yellow brick road to
an imagined past. The America conjured up in his commercials is a
Norman Rockwell fiction that millions still wish they could live in
because they feel embittered (as Obama so infamously said) by a
world that seems out of control. They prefer a fantasy version of a
past America where so many, who now feel powerless, imagine they
might actually have been able to shape their own destinies.
Perhaps the frustrated do cling to "guns or religion or antipathy to
people who are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or
anti-trade sentiment," as Obama suggested
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-exclusive-audio-on_b_96333.html>.
But his ad-smiths know that they cling far more to illusions of a
secure past, when (they imagine) everyone could count on clear,
inviolable boundary lines -- between races and genders, between
competitive individuals in the marketplace, between the virtuous
self and the temptations of the flesh, between the U.S. and other
nations, between civilization and the enemies who would destroy it.
All of these boundaries point to the most basic one of all: the
moral boundary between good and evil. McCain and Obama are both
wooing the millions who imagine an absolute chasm between good and
evil, know just where the good is (always "made in America"), and
want a president who will stand
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80822/how_mccain_stays_popular_despite_supporting_disastrous_wars/>
against evil no matter what the cost. They want, in short, a world
where everyone knows their place and keeps to it, and where wars, if
they must be fought, can still be "good" and Americans can still win
every time.
The Republicans have a code word for that illusory past:
"experience." Their "Sixties versus security" script offers a stark
choice: The candidate who clearly symbolizes the crossing of
boundaries, most notably the American racial line, versus the
candidate whose "experience" and mythic life story are built on the
same mantra as his Iraq policy: "No surrender."
The McCain campaign is not about policies that can ensure national
security by reaching out and making new friends. It's about a man
who can offer a feeling of psychological security by standing firm
against old and new enemies
<http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1826064,00.html>.
*The Media's "Ordinary American"*
Who would choose psychological security over real security? The
mainstream media have an answer: "the ordinary American." Now that
the "values voter" of the 2004 election has largely disappeared, the
media have come up with this new character as the mythic hero for
their election-year story.
It began, of course, with Hillary Clinton's primary campaign
comeback -- portrayed as a revolt of those "ordinary people," who
might once have been Reagan Democrats (and might soon become McCain
Democrats), against the "elitists" -- or so the media story went.
Her famous "phone call at 3 AM" ad
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/channel-08/2008/02/clinton_invokes_your_kids_in_n.html>
suggested that "ordinary people" value a president tough enough to
protect their children. As her husband once put it
<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004926,00.html>:
"When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who is
strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right."
Now the "elitist" Obama still has a "potentially critical
vulnerability," according to the /Washington Post's/ veteran
political reporter Dan Balz
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062201964.html>:
"Voters do not know whether he shares the values and beliefs of
ordinary Americans."
Balz's colleague, /Post/ media critic Howard Kurtz
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/30/obamas_working_class_pitch.html>,
called the second Obama commercial a "White Working-Class Pitch"
designed to show that Obama is "on the side of average workers." The
/New York Times's/ Jeff Zeleny
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/us/politics/10obama.html> echoed
that view: "One of his most pressing challenges is to assure voters
that he is one of them."
The centrist and even liberal media are as busy as conservatives
propagating the idea that, to be one of the average, ordinary
Americans, you have to prize (white) working-class values considered
"Republican turf" since the late 1960s: individualism,
self-reliance, hard work for "modest" (which means stagnant or
falling) wages, faith, and a patriotism so strong that it will never
surrender.
The American Everyman, the hero of this year's media story, is an
underpaid worker who may very well vote Republican against his or
her own economic interests, and all too often against the interests
of loved ones who hope to come home alive from Iraq or Afghanistan.
What about all those Democrats who voted for Obama because he
offered a vision of a new politics, a way out of Iraq, and a new
path for the United States? What about all those who earn too much
or too little, or have too much or too little education, or the
wrong skin color, to be part of the white working class? Evidently,
they are all extra-ordinary Americans; "outside the mainstream," as
media analysts sometimes put it. They may represent a majority of
the voters, but they just don't count the same way. They don't fit
this year's plot line.
Of course it may turn out that the old melodrama of an "experienced"
Vietnam hero against the "summer of love" no longer draws much of an
audience, even with both campaigns and the mainstream media so
focused on it. No matter how things turn out on Election Day,
however, it's beginning to look like the big winner will -- yet
again -- be the conservative "culture war" narrative that has
dominated our political discourse, in one form or another, for four
decades now. With Obama and both Clintons endorsing it, who will
stand against it?
For the foreseeable future, debates about cultural values are going
to be played out fiercely on the symbolic terrain of war and
national security issues. The all-too-real battlefields abroad will
remain obscured by the cultural battlefields at home and by the
those timeless "ordinary American values" embedded in the public's
imagination. It's all too powerful a myth -- and too good an
election story -- to go away anytime soon.
*Creating New Stories*
Yet there is no law of nature that says the "ordinary American,"
white working class or otherwise, /must/ value individualism,
self-reliance, patriotism, and war heroics while treating any value
ever associated with the 1960s as part of the primrose path to
social chaos. In reality, of course, the "ordinary American" is a
creature of shifting historical-cultural currents, constantly being
re-invented.
But the 1960s does indeed remain a pivotal era -- not least because
that is when liberal, antiwar America largely did stop caring much
about the concerns and values of working-class whites. Those workers
were treated as an inscrutable oddity at best, an enemy at worst.
Liberals didn't think about alternative narratives of America that
could be meaningful across the political board. Now, they reap the
harvest of their neglect.
It does no good to complain about "spineless Democrats" who won't
risk their political careers by casting courageous votes against
war. Their job is to win elections. And you go to political war with
the voters you have. If too many of the voters are still trapped in
simplistic caricatures of patriotism and national security created
40 years ago -- or if you fear they are -- that's because no one has
offered them an appealing alternative narrative that meets their
cultural needs.
It does no good to complain that such working-class views are
illogical or stupid or self-destructive. As long as progressives
continue to treat "ordinary Americans" as stupid and irrelevant,
progressives will find themselves largely irrelevant in U.S.
politics. And that's stupid, because it doesn't have to be that way.
What can be done to change this picture? Facts and logic are rarely
enough, in themselves, to persuade people to give up the values
narratives that have framed their lives. They'll abandon one
narrative only when another comes along that is more satisfying.
Democrats started looking for a new narrative after the 2004
election, when the media told them that "values voters" ruled the
roost and cared most about religious faith. The result? Democrats,
some of them quite progressive, are creating effective
faith-oriented frames for their political messages.
No matter who wins this year's election, the prevalence of the
"ordinary American" voter story should be a useful wakeup call: It's
time to do something similar on a much broader scale. This election
year offers an invaluable opportunity to begin to grasp some of the
complexities of culturally conservative Americans. Equipped with a
deeper understanding, progressives can frame their programs of
economic justice and cultural diversity within new narratives about
security, patriotism
<http://www.alternet.org/election08/86816/?ses=5d88b64ec3d34318b2f62f2b0d581a73>,
heroism, and other traditionally American values.
That will take some effort. But it will take a lot more effort to
stave off the next Republican victory -- or the next war -- if the
project of creating new, more broadly appealing narratives continues
to be ignored.
/Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The
Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594512760/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
His email address is: chernus@colorado.edu./
Copyright 2008 Ira Chernus