Voter Suppression? Really?

May 23rd, 2008

Well, sister-chicks [and others reading,] … it was the silly season, then the mean season — now it’s the bonkers season.

I’ve tried hard to like Hillary Clinton, it’s been a spiritual challenge; when someones motives become transparent and don’t align with their pronouncements, I tend to tune them out. But Hil’s made herself hard to ignore. And today, from out of nowhere, she summoned the specter of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination — that’s it, she’s lost control.

We need to come to unity soon, and I want to join hands with my sister’s and march together, step by step, toward a world that can defeat not only racism but sexism as well. I respect those who think Hillary’s greater than sliced bread, but it’s getting tougher by the day to listen to over-the-top rhetoric and flip-flop, or consider her behavior appropriate to the office she seeks. Now she’s invoking not only the Florida recount in 2000, but the stolen elections in Zimbabwe in her push to seat Florida and Michigan.

Zimbabwe??? Dear God, who IS the evil bastard that’s trying to steal all those hard earned votes???

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., Sept. 1, 2007 ~

Three of the major Democratic presidential candidates on Saturday pledged not to campaign in Florida, Michigan and other states trying to leapfrog the 2008 primary calendar, a move that solidified the importance of the opening contests of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Hours after Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina agreed to sign a loyalty pledge put forward by party officials in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York followed suit. The decision seemed to dash any hopes of Mrs. Clinton relying on a strong showing in Florida as a springboard to the nomination.

“We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” Patti Solis Doyle, the Clinton campaign manager, said in a statement.

The pledge sought to preserve the status of traditional early-voting states and bring order to an unwieldy series of primaries that threatened to accelerate the selection process. It was devised to keep candidates from campaigning in Florida, where the primary is set for Jan. 29, and Michigan, which is trying to move its contest to Jan. 15.

NOBODY is trying to victimize Mrs. Clinton — she didn’t have to agree to this; and frankly, she wasn’t all that concerned that “every vote be counted” last year, when she figured to have her nomination sewn up by Super Tuesday.

“It’s clear,” Clinton told New Hampshire Public Radio in the fall, “this election [Michigan is] having is not going to count for anything. I personally did not think it made any difference whether or not my name was on the ballot.”

I back away from people who use their history to draw you in and manipulate your emotions — the first hint of that kind of Drama Queen persona, I wave bye-bye … because pity-party’s are not only boring, they’re defeating. And now Hillary’s gone glassy eyed and mindlessly beating her drum like the energizer bunny, not even watching her mouth anymore — she won’t, won’t, won’t give up, not ever, not if the sky falls, not even if the Fates conspire to put a stake in her heart, she’ll still be there telling us she’s The One; if you think that helps the feminist movement, guess again.

I get Mrs. Clinton’s emails in my inbox but I find them hard to read — it’s not that I don’t believe in her capability, she has the skill to be president and she’s getting better at stump speeches; it’s because every new letter has another reason why she should continue past the point of good sense, leaving behind dignity and grace for something shrill and reminiscent of GWB’s delusional stonewall of reality — and now, after watching the lengths she’ll go to in pursuit of what she wants, she’s caused me to question all those years I defended her backroom deals and bright-eyed disclaimers; and still, she tells me … she’s doing all this for me, so my voice will be heard.

I’m thinking she’s got a bridge in Zimbabwe she wants me to buy.

Today, on CNN, [that explosive interview] she was asked why she thought she was being urged to step down, and she said that she didn’t know … it’s “curious,” she said, several times. “It’s never happened in history.” Yeah? And when was the last time a Dem candidate endorsed a Republican candidate over their competitor? When did the damage done by one candidate to another make winning the presidency for their party problematic? And none of that addresses the actual answer to the question — which she MUST have opinion about besides, “I don’t know.” She’s just ladylike and bemused, doncha know; wide-eyed and innocent. Almost believable, until … Bobby Kennedy???

Hillary is making it harder by the minute for me to think of her as anything but a first class manipulator and opportunist, and maybe just a little off in the head; all those things the Pubs accused her of. And those of the sisterhood who will take this as a grudge fight … those who find a cozy haven at [or frankly even CONSIDER something like] McCainB4Obama.com … well, I doubt that they were real Lefty’s in the first place — because the millions of women, children and working class citizens that are desperate for a change in leadership aren’t interested in the “Hillary was abused” sob-story. I expect they’ve got one of their own.

It’s a staggering thing to contemplate — that anyone who supports either Mr. Obama OR Mrs. Clinton would turn to the Republicans in a fit of pique. And dare I suggest … oh, hell — I will … that if their values are so limited and their vision so frail as to pout and punish their way into the presidential season, then they’re stuck in the old paradigm and nothing will please them but more of the same anyhow. Their pursuit of a good battle and a take-no-prisoners competition is just one more polarization, one more dead-end at “us v. them.” Winning at any cost — isn’t that the same argument that led us to preemption and torture?

I didn’t start this as a rant, but I’m so bloody tired of boo-boo lips and poor-me’s, all wrapped in the feminist flag, that I could retch. Enough, already. Pony up, women! All my years of hitting glass ceilings, of lateral moves and workarounds, taught me that snits and tantrums will get you nothing but sympathy from those victimized like yourself; certainly not respect. And that’s the thread that runs through the dialogue Hillary’s campaign promotes — victimization. Those who insist her gender has defined her current difficulties might look at the way she’s handled herself and her campaign in these last revealing months; her unpaid debt, her swinging door on advisers, her fondness for playing a new card every few days [like her latest, Selma and Susan B. Anthony] and asking us to believe this has always-always-always defined her, instead of something she just thought of.

The cartoonish qualities of her run reminds me of looped episodes of Desperate Housewives; NOT the feminist ideal that lifts womankind above the stereotype. Those who are so sure Hillary’s position as underdog is all about misogyny ought to examine her record — especially her vote on the war, and more recently, Iran. Maybe being as tough as McCain isn’t the woman skills we were expecting, maybe we wanted to hear about diplomacy and peace talks instead of “obliteration.” Maybe Kucinich and Feingold and, yes, even Obama are displaying more obvious female energy than Mrs. Clinton has shown us. Maybe there’s something wrong with the product instead of the wrapping.

Both Clinton and Obama are Establishment Democrats, we’re selecting style and temperament [I speak to this astrologically in my weekly piece, here] — this nominating process is designed for us to discover the character of the candidates. Hustling her supporters onto the emotional train-wreck of voter suppression seems to me a hysterical last shot at achieving her dream. Sisters! Hysteria? Is that what we present to the world to get what we want? And if you think I exaggerate, go to any blog piece and read through the comments: we are being as vile to one another over this as any Republican trash-talk from Limbaugh’s hate radio, and worse.

It’s time to think bigger thoughts than the little ones we’ve entertained; it’s time to think about how we can keep the Left from providing any more glee for the pundits 24/7 propaganda campaigns — and fodder for the Republicans — long enough to get one of us in the White House. We don’t need any more whine from the Left to go with all the cheese the Bushies have hit us with in the last eight years. I’m in total agreement with Bob Herbert’s piece, below, asking us to let this nonsense go and get serious. Even uber-fem Erica Jong has capitulated to reason.

Hillary Clinton has already changed history for the better, but every day she loses more street cred — I’m not even sure she’s aware of it. Her allegation that only she can pull the white vote is defied by the numbers. This is beginning to look less like blind ambition and more like emotional problems. So, perhaps there won’t be a woman in the White House in ‘08 [or then again, maybe this is all about an offer "Obama can't refuse"] — some disappointments we just have to swallow, looking at the big picture; like the news from Texas that will give Nancy Grace a bump in ratings … more drama for the masses.

Here’s a ‘toon for Memorial Day [pffft!], when we remember those who, in good faith and love of their country, sacrificed their all. Today the military-industrial complex mentality has triumphed with another chunk of our dough going to the war, but at least we got the GI Bill folded in … leaving us with serious work to do, serious times ahead; we need to get on with actual issues.

Have a good, safe weekend — and be ready to change plans in an eye-blink; that’s how the energy is shaping up.

Jude

Hillary Clinton: “Why Would I Drop Out Before Barack Obama Is Assassinated?”
David Rees, HuffPo
May 23, 2008

[open link for Youtube]

Anybody watch Step It Up And Dance last night? HOT STUFF!

Anyway gang, I just read something remarkable. “Remarkable” as in, “It is remarkable that my eyeballs are still in my head after reading that.”
In an interview with the editorial board of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader today, Hillary Clinton brought up Bobby Kennedy’s June, 1968 assassination as an argument against her dropping out of the Democratic primary.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

She has a point: June is a great month for political assassinations.

Why drop out of the race before all the assassins have had their say?

After all, we know Barack Obama has received multiple death threats — because he is black, of course, and because some of our fellow citizens think he’s a secret Muslim terrorist who is going to take the oath of office on the Koran and make us all pray to Mecca five times a day with that screechy music coming over the loudspeakers(?) and then he’ll fly Air Force One into the White House(?).

And the truth is, Obama has consistently failed to win over those voters who want to see him murdered.

UPDATE (5:45 PM):

In the interest of fairness, I should note that Hillary has since apologized for her curious statement. That is, she has apologized to the Kennedys. ++

Clinton’s Shocking Florida Gambit
Jonathan Chait, TNR
21.05.2008

Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric today about counting the results in Florida and Michigan is simply incredible. Her speech compares discounting the Florida and Michigan primaries to vote suppression and slavery:

She said “there’s a reason why so many have fought so hard and sacrificed so much. It’s because they knew that to be a citizen of this country is to have the right and responsibility to help shape its future. Not just to have your voice heard but to have it count. People have fought hard because they knew their vote was at stake and so was their children’s futures.

Those people, she said “refused to accept their assigned place as second-class citizens. Men and women who saw America not as it was, but as it could and should be, and committed themselves to extending the frontiers of our democracy. The abolitionists and all who fought to end slavery and ensure freedom came with the full right of citizenship. The tenacious women and a few brave men who gathered at the Seneca Falls convention back in 1848 to demand the right to vote.”

It’s worth repeating: They supported this “disenfranchisement.” Here’s a New York Times story from last fall, headlined, “Clinton, Obama and Edwards Join Pledge to Avoid Defiant States.”

Moreover, it’s obviously true that Obama not campaigning, organizing, or advertizing in those states hurt him, and helped the more familiar candidate in Clinton. She decided to campaign to change the rules only after it became her interest to do so.

This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination. It’s obviously not going to work, because Democratic superdelegates don’t want to commit suicide. But this episode is very revealing about Clinton’s character. I try not to make moralistic characterological judgments about politicians, because all politicians compromise their ideals in the pursuit of power. There are no angels in this business. Clinton’s gambit, however, truly is breathtaking.

If she’s consciously lying, it’s a shockingly cynical move. I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency. ++

Clinton Compares Florida, Michigan Situation To Zimbabwe Elections
The Huffington Post
May 22, 2008

Hillary Clinton is pushing harder and harder to convince the DNC to count the votes held in Florida in Michigan. And with reports suggesting that she is just going through the motions of the election, Clinton has apparently decided to ratchet up the rhetoric. During a rally in Florida yesterday, she not only compared the current situation to the 2000 election, she also referenced rigged elections in Zimbabwe:

Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe,” Clinton explained. “Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

“So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote. It is the single most important, privilege and right any of us have, because in that ballot box we are all equal. You’re equal to a billionaire. You’re equal to the president, every single one of us.”

Steve Benen, for one, isn’t exactly pleased with Clinton’s comparison:

I’m 35, and have been following politics for quite a while, and I’ve never been so disappointed with a politician I’ve admired and respected. Yesterday’s tactics weren’t just wrong, they were offensive. For that matter, they seem to be part of a deliberate strategy to tear Democrats apart and ensure a defeat in November….

Instead of trying to help bring the party together — Election Day is 24 weeks away — Clinton went to Florida to argue that if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, his nomination will be illegitimate. And if the DNC plays by the rules Clinton used to support, it’s guilty of vote-suppression — comparable to slavery, Jim Crow, and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, the Obama camp has suggested their willingness to find some form of compromise. David Axelrod told NPR:

“We are open to comprise [sic]. We are willing to go more than half way. We’re willing to work to make sure that we can achieve a compromise. And I guess the question is: is Senator Clinton’s campaign willing to do the same?”

Axelrod continues:

“Well, obviously, any compromise is going to involve some give, and that means if there’s something on the table, we’re willing to consider it. That may include us yielding more delegates than perhaps we would have, simply on the basis of the rules.” ++

Clinton Invokes 2000 Recount
Kate Phillips, NYT
May 21, 2008

Toxic
Josh Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo
05.22.08

For the last week it’s seemed that Sens. Clinton and Obama were adhering to their tacit truce, continuing the primary campaign but avoiding the harsh exchanges that make later party unity a dimmer and dimmer prospect. Clinton particularly had deescalated her rhetoric. Then we have a speech like Sen. Clinton’s yesterday in Florida in which she compared the controversy over seating the Florida and Michigan delegates to the Florida recount debacle and many of the great voting and civil rights battles of the 20th century. She is of course also claiming that whatever the delegate count, she leads in the popular vote and that that is what really counts. Never mind of course that even if you count Michigan and Florida she’s still not ahead in the popular vote without resorting to tendentious methods of counting.

I’ve always assumed, as I think most people have, that once the nomination is settled the Florida and Michigan delegates will be seated. And I can see if Sen. Clinton wants to embrace this issue to claim a moral victory even while coming short of her goal of the nomination. As things currently stand, seating them would still leave Sen. Clinton behind in delegates.

But Sen. Clinton is doing much more than this. She is embarking on a gambit that is uncertain in its result and simply breathtaking in its cynicism.
I know many TPM Readers believe there is a deep moral and political issue at stake in the need to seat these delegations. I don’t see it the same way. But I’m not here to say they’re wrong and I’m right. It’s a subjective question and I respect that many people think this. What I’m quite confident about is that Sen. Clinton and her top advisors don’t see it that way.

Why do I think that? For a number of reasons. One of her most senior advisors, Harold Ickes, was on the DNC committee that voted to sanction Florida and Michigan by not including their delegates. Her campaign completely signed off on sanctions after that. And Clinton was actually quoted saying the Michigan contest didn’t count. Michigan and Florida were sanctioned because they ignored the rules the DNC had set down for running this year’s nomination process.

The evidence is simply overwhelming that Sen. Clinton didn’t think this was a problem at all — until it became a vehicle to provide a rationale for her continued campaign.

Now, that’s politics. One day you’re on one side of an issue, the next you’re on the other, all depending on the tactical necessities of the moment. But that’s not what Clinton is doing. She’s elevating it to a level of principle — first principles — on par with the great voting rights struggles of history. There’s no longer any question that she’s going to win the nomination. The whole point of the popular vote gambit was to make an argument to super-delegates. And that’s fine since that’s what super-delegates are there for — to make the decision by whatever measure they choose. But they’ve made their decision. The super delegates are breaking overwhelmingly for Obama. They simply don’t buy the arguments she’s making.

As Greg Sargent makes clear here. There are very good reasons to think Sen. Clinton won’t take this to the convention, even as today she suggested she might. But that’s sort of beside the point.

What she’s doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she’s gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her — a belief many won’t soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there’s every reason to think she doesn’t even believe in.

Late Update: In this post I originally said that Sen. Clinton had “numerous” quotes saying the disputed primaries wouldn’t count. On closer inspection, the only quote from her directly seems to be the one about Michigan not counting. ++

Even More Confused About Women and Hillary
Jonathan Leigh Solomon, Smirking Chimp
May 22, 2008

How can it be said that Senator Clinton is expanding the boundaries of what is possible for all women when she keeps defining her continued legitimacy by claiming working class, particularly older, white women voters will never expand theirs – i.e. will not, no never, vote for Barack Obama?

That’s only the first of several questions I would pose to women supporting Clinton. To help me diagram my other confusions and the counterpoints to them, I’ll turn to Susan Cheever. It was her radio essay last week on NPR titled, Why I Love Hillary, that brought me to the conclusion that after seventeen months of Clinton’s run for the White House, the disconnect between men and the women who support Clinton has not gotten smaller – it’s gotten larger. Not what I would have hoped for.

Cheever started her essay by posing the following question:

“Why is it that the more Hillary loses, the better I like her?”

I don’t know. I don’t like Hillary better the more she loses. More importantly, I trust her less. This has nothing to do with her being a woman or me being a man. I felt the same way about John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden when they kept running even though they had no shot at winning. They all, kept saying they knew they could win, but I didn’t believe they believed it. Therefore, I began to believe less that they actually cared for the voters and more that it was just their id run wild.

The most optimistic explanation is that Clinton is staying in the race because she feels she has something to say on the issues that only she can say. But, I think by now she has said it all. Proceeding further, and doing it by attempting to undercut Obama, certainly doesn’t make me like her more.

But Cheever doesn’t expect me to understand: “When I tell a handsome…” – that part is not me – “…man at a party that I support Hillary…” he says, “‘that figures, you’re an older woman.’” Which leads me to another question: Since Cheever has accepted a huge limitation on the possible by embracing Clinton’s conviction that some women will only vote for her, how could she possibly think I could get beyond, “that figures.” (I admit, that’s a rhetorical question.)

But Cheever has a second reason men can’t get beyond “that figures” and here she has a good point: Men can’t understand the affinity some women have for Clinton because we can not identify with the sexism, propelled by objectification, that women confront. As Cheever explains, Clinton “was never the pretty, simpering, long-legged blond we were all supposed to be; she had to find another way to be a woman. Me too.” It’s true. I can appreciate that, but on a gut level, I’m not even remotely qualified to speak on it.

The “me too” sentiment also helps Cheever explain why she likes Hillary more, the more she loses. Clinton “is a loser, and I’m a loser.” I must emphasis here, just as Cheever does, that this “loser” label is not in regards to being accomplished or a success in your work. No, the point is, “women don’t get respect for being hard workers, they get respect for having good legs.” And again, for a guy to say he can truly appreciate how this feels would be entirely foolish.

Nonetheless, the “me too” and the loser/loser idea leads me to another question that I do feel entitled to ask: If Hillary had the same smarts, resume and health care plan, but looked and talked like Gwyneth Paltrow, would Cheever be supporting Obama? To put it another way, shouldn’t a leader have to do more than be just like you, to earn your love?

Because what – besides being like Cheever – has Hillary done?

Well, she voted for the war. To explain her vote she claimed criminal naivety, but I’ve never bought that. She voted for the war in an effort to “look tough.” I hear Cheever saying, “if it wasn’t for sexist stereotypes, Clinton wouldn’t have had to ‘look tough.’” I don’t agree. She could have voted “no” and then taken to the floor of the Senate and given an inspiring speech, delving into the all the nuances, manifestations and ramifications of sexism, just as Obama did with racism. It could have ended with the words, “I say this because I want Susan Cheever to be even more proud of me than if the only blow I struck for feminism was never giving up on super delegates.”

Instead, she did exactly what Bill Clinton did in ‘92. To prove Democrats were “tough,” he flew to Arkansas in the middle of his presidential campaign to sign the death warrant upholding the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was the guy so without mental faculties that he left the pecan pie from his “last meal” on the side of the tray, telling the guards he was saving it “for later.” Hillary’s vote, sending more than 4,000 Americans to their deaths, and countless Iraqis, was her version of sending Rector to the gallows.

And so we return to my question: shouldn’t a leader have to do more than be like you to earn your love? I say, yes.

In fact, shouldn’t a leader have to behave as if – to paraphrase Henry Hassett Browne and John Donne – all men and women are born brothers and sisters and anything that diminishes either of them, hurts me? Yes. And, on that score, Clinton has failed. Confusions aside – that’s the reason I don’t love her. ++

What Hillary Wants
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
Friday, May 23, 2008

Commentators trying to discern Hillary Clinton’s endgame strategy have posited any number of wheels-within-wheels scenarios worthy of a spy novel. The simple truth has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct: Keep moving forward until you drop.

It’s not that she’s making a calculated play for the vice presidency or trying to set herself up for another campaign in 2012 or 2016. To those who know her, it’s that she really wants to be president, and that she has come tantalizingly close, and that she’s going to keep moving toward that goal even if there’s no obvious way to reach it. At this point, her campaign is about getting to tomorrow, and then getting to the next day, and then getting to the day after that.

Long ago, the Clinton campaign took to heart the Talking Heads’ advice to “stop making sense.” Back in January, the campaign’s position was that amassing delegates was the only true measure of who was winning the nomination. But when Barack Obama surged ahead in the tally of pledged delegates, winning 11 primaries and caucuses in a row, the Clinton brain trust started making a case for “the popular vote” as the most reliable indicator of the party’s wishes.

Does an aggregate count of votes mean anything when some states held closed primaries in which only registered Democrats could participate, some states held open primaries where independents and/or Republicans could also vote, and some states held caucuses that basically involved a show of hands in gymnasiums and community centers?

It means nothing. But the Clinton campaign has found a way to claim that if for some reason you did this ridiculous exercise of lumping together apples, oranges and bowling balls, and finally came up with two numbers, hers would be greater than Obama’s. Since Obama now leads substantially in both pledged delegates and superdelegates — and since he has enormous leads in fundraising and the number of states won — the spurious “popular vote” metric is all that Clinton has. So she’s playing the hand she was dealt.

Even this tenuous advantage, however, requires counting all the votes cast for Clinton in Michigan, where Obama wasn’t on the ballot, and in Florida, where neither candidate campaigned. A few months ago, Clinton had no problem with the fact that votes in those two states — which defied Democratic Party officials by moving their primaries up in the calendar — wouldn’t count. Rules, after all, were rules.

Now, maybe rules aren’t rules after all. Keep moving forward until you drop. In a speech Wednesday, Clinton evoked the Declaration of Independence, the abolitionist movement, the civil rights struggle and the campaign for women’s suffrage as she demanded that the votes from two unrecognized primaries be counted.

“Over the top” is an inadequate characterization of the speech Clinton gave in Boca Raton, Fla. She spoke of “a shared civic faith . . . equal justice under the law . . . extending the frontiers of our democracy,” and even the men and women who “knelt down on that bridge in Selma to pray and were beaten within an inch of their lives.”

“Now, I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules,” Clinton said.

Yes, it would be.

“I say that not counting Florida and Michigan,” Clinton went on, “is changing a central governing rule of this country — that whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their votes should be counted.”

Any Democratic politician who goes to Florida and rails about the “clear intent” of voters is making a not-so-subtle reference to the post-election mess in 2000, when the nation learned more than it ever wanted to know about hanging chads.

It won’t work, though.

Clinton knows that even the disputed delegates she “won” in Florida and Michigan won’t get her to the magic number she needs to win the nomination. Some commentators have speculated that she wants to have the votes counted simply so that she can semi-plausibly claim to have had more popular support than Obama, a distinction that would serve her well if she ran again in four or eight years. I say dream on; the Clintons don’t do moral victories.

Hillary Clinton is after the White House, and if that means using the Florida and Michigan “issue” to tie the party in knots until the convention, so be it.

If that’s not what party leaders want, they’d better do something. Because Clinton is going to keep moving forward. ++

Let’s Be Serious
BOB HERBERT, New York Times
May 20, 2008

The general election is about to unfold and we’ll soon see how smart or how foolish Americans really are. The U.S. may be the richest country on earth, but the economy is tanking, its working families are in trouble, it is bogged down in a multitrillion-dollar war of its own making and the price of gasoline has nitwits siphoning supplies from the cars and trucks of strangers.

Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II.

And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness — fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.

In his book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?,” Jared Bernstein reminds us that the economic expansion from 2000 to 2006 was something less than nirvana for working people. The economy grew by 15 percent during that period, and the official rates of joblessness and inflation were low. But as most of us know, the benefits of that expansion were skewed to the high end of the economic ladder.

Mr. Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, writes: “Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families’ real incomes are down and some key prices are growing a lot faster than the average.”

Steven Greenhouse, the labor correspondent for The Times, has also written a book that examines, among other things, the imbalance in the way the benefits from the expansion have been distributed. In “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” he says:

“This is a decade during which the American economy has thrived by many measures, with corporate profits and C.E.O. salaries soaring, yet wages have languished for most workers, and health and pension coverage has grown worse.”

Let the candidates wrestle with this issue of increasing economic inequality, rather than President Bush’s spurious and deeply offensive rant comparing advocates of international diplomacy with those who appeased Hitler and the Nazis.

Let the candidates wrestle with the war without end in Iraq that is not just destroying lives but is taking a toll on this nation’s soul. The war is sapping the resources and energy needed for the hard work of putting the U.S. back on a sound socioeconomic footing.

And the way we are treating the troops belies the pretty words that never get farther than a bumper sticker.

The country that professes to be so proud of its men and women in uniform is playing Russian roulette with their lives by sending them into the war zone for three, four and even more tours. Stop-loss, the involuntary extension of an individual’s term in the military (making them subject to still more combat duty), is another dangerous affront to those who have already given so much.

The Houston Chronicle did a long takeout on Sunday on the suicide in March 2007 of an Army recruiting sergeant, Nils Aron Andersson — just one day after his marriage to Carry Walton. Sgt. Andersson, 25, had spoken of the many horrors that he had encountered in Iraq and was deeply depressed. He shot himself while sitting in his pickup in a parking garage. Distraught, Ms. Walton bought a 9-millimeter handgun at a sporting goods store the next day and killed herself.

Suicides have become a big problem for the military. Combat does terrible things to people. An independent study by the RAND Corporation found that nearly 20 percent of the troops who returned from tours in Iraq or Afghanistan reported symptoms of major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Let the candidates talk about these things. Let them talk about the fact that the Bush administration, which has pushed the troops so unmercifully, opposes a bill (sponsored by Senator Jim Webb and widely supported in Congress) that would expand the education benefits of veterans who have served since Sept. 11, 2001.

Let them talk about health coverage, which is a scandal, and the vanishing American pension. Let them offer competing plans for rebuilding the American infrastructure and creating real employment opportunities for the newest generation of workers. Let them go at it over energy policy.

Forget the foolishness for a change. No Willie Hortons this year. No Swift boats. No attacks on John McCain like the mugging he endured at the hands of the Bush crowd in South Carolina some years ago.

For once, let the election be serious. Show the hacks and the hypocrites the door. Argue substance. And then let the people decide. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves