Maxine Waters of California seems ambivalent. She is a black Congresswoman who is in the habit of declaring that she loves the president and wants to help him be a successful candidate, then poking him smartly in the eye. Most recently she responded to his speech before the Congressional Black Caucus by intimating that it was puzzling, condescending, and insulting.
You can see what she was getting at. There was the lingo -- the dropping of final "g"s, as in workin', trying', complainin' --affected to make him sound either black or like George W. Bush. Then there was his admonition to quit bitchin' and get out of their bedroom slippers and into their marchin' shoes. As though they were a bunch of slackers who were letting him down.
He had better have them with him; if he's the Democratic nominee and blacks stay home, his chances of re-election go from diminished to demolished.
But what would they be voting for? The unemployment rate among blacks was at 11.5% when this administration took office. It is now at 16.7%. The president has not proposed any measure to alleviate unemployment specifically in the black community, where it is worse than anywhere else. He is fearful that any "favoring of his own" (over whites) would worsen his lot. This calculated neglect is part of the price blacks are paying for him, and who can blame them if they aren't convinced he's worth it?
After failing to initially demand a tax hike for the rich because of other priorities and then trading away any chance for one, Mr. Obama has made that his issue of the moment -- now that he has no leverage and it won't happen. This is what his forsaken base always wanted to hear, but today who could trust him to follow through? Despite this new "combativeness", his approval rating goes down and down. He is out of options.
The cynicism of this administration is probably less evident to him than to his apparatus. The money from Wall Street pours in and is heralded as a tribute to his pragmatism and his ability to get along with all crucial elements of our diverse polity. No one says that one pleases the lamb by patting it on the head and the lion by doing nothing while it eats the lamb; this sophistication is the sine qua non of the contemporary statecraft that's all about money.
Part of me would love to see a black candidate enter the Democratic nomination race as an uncompromising truth-teller and fearless reformer. Meanwhile, in Madison and on Wall Street a movement takes shape that will sooner or later go national.
Politics is finally not about money but about support, not about rhetoric but about issues, not about being all things to all people but about being the right person for one's hour. It is time to march -- not with the Barack Obamas and Mitt Romneys but over them to a future that is not theirs but ours.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
MOVING RIGHT ALONG....
Now the Congressional seat of the fiery and phony Anthony Weiner, which had been in Democratic hands since 1923, has been claimed by a 70-year-old GOP buffoon who originally opposed having the Federal government help those sickened in the 9/11 attacks and who told a Jewish district that this is a Christian country -- which means, if it means anything, that Jews are second-class citizens. Jews voted for him anyway, dramatizing their discontent with the administration and in the knowledge that this turkey won't be in office long enough to cause them much tsuris.
Dem angst will reach new highs. But the pols won't do anything, as they're constitutionally incapable of it.
In recent days I exchanged emails several times with Rabbi Michael Lerner, humanitarian and social activist, who months ago proposed the formation of a Dump Obama movement patterned on the Dump LBJ movement of 1968. Rabbi Lerner has a strategy that I take it he doesn't want discussed publicly yet, so I'll say only that I don't believe anything will avail us but the arrival of a hard-hitting Dem candidate who's in it for nothing less than to take the nomination and the election. Nor do I think that any organization can generate such a candidate. It has to be someone self-motivated and undeferential toward what others have in mind.
Optimally, I believe, such a candidate would come from the military, for a combination of forcefulness, patriotism, authority, and bravery. Someone with military credentials could safely propose pulling out of the Dubya wars. The risk would be that he or she would manifest the wrong kind of outspokenness, as political amateurs are prone to do; so the candidate would have
to be very bright, with a shrewd sense of just how far to go.
Best of all I'd wish for some crusty old general, perhaps from a pro-union working class family, who doesn't suffer fools at all but is engaging and pointedly funny and a natural leader able to stir conviction and build confidence.
The campaign should stress necessity rather than idealism and should both sound alarms and offer inspiration and a call to tackle our situation with high spirits. As for the Republicans, it should show them no quarter whatever. The candidate should call them anti-American sons of bitches and should demand their complete and permanent marginalization and their replacement as the opposition party by something patriotic and socially tolerable; this is war, not just politics.
Picture our general telling a rally that the Republicans want to wreck the country so their clients can sell it for scrap. While another kind of Dem wouldn't dare do that, I think someone who was recognized as a realist and a fighter could get away with such hyperbole and make it work. To be willing to raise eyebrows can be to win admiration for having guts. Imagine a minor version of Dwight Eisenhower or Doug MacArthur who channels Harry Truman.
Dem angst will reach new highs. But the pols won't do anything, as they're constitutionally incapable of it.
In recent days I exchanged emails several times with Rabbi Michael Lerner, humanitarian and social activist, who months ago proposed the formation of a Dump Obama movement patterned on the Dump LBJ movement of 1968. Rabbi Lerner has a strategy that I take it he doesn't want discussed publicly yet, so I'll say only that I don't believe anything will avail us but the arrival of a hard-hitting Dem candidate who's in it for nothing less than to take the nomination and the election. Nor do I think that any organization can generate such a candidate. It has to be someone self-motivated and undeferential toward what others have in mind.
Optimally, I believe, such a candidate would come from the military, for a combination of forcefulness, patriotism, authority, and bravery. Someone with military credentials could safely propose pulling out of the Dubya wars. The risk would be that he or she would manifest the wrong kind of outspokenness, as political amateurs are prone to do; so the candidate would have
to be very bright, with a shrewd sense of just how far to go.
Best of all I'd wish for some crusty old general, perhaps from a pro-union working class family, who doesn't suffer fools at all but is engaging and pointedly funny and a natural leader able to stir conviction and build confidence.
The campaign should stress necessity rather than idealism and should both sound alarms and offer inspiration and a call to tackle our situation with high spirits. As for the Republicans, it should show them no quarter whatever. The candidate should call them anti-American sons of bitches and should demand their complete and permanent marginalization and their replacement as the opposition party by something patriotic and socially tolerable; this is war, not just politics.
Picture our general telling a rally that the Republicans want to wreck the country so their clients can sell it for scrap. While another kind of Dem wouldn't dare do that, I think someone who was recognized as a realist and a fighter could get away with such hyperbole and make it work. To be willing to raise eyebrows can be to win admiration for having guts. Imagine a minor version of Dwight Eisenhower or Doug MacArthur who channels Harry Truman.
In the media, that bulwark of the status quo, we have a paper tiger, disliked and mistrusted. The candidate should answer only what he or she wishes to answer and field the rest with good-humored quips and cool firmness. I would have him or her propose that corporations be required to divest themselves of media holdings and that the news business be owned by a guild of reporters and journalists with a charter that forbids editorializing and one-sided coverage.
You never hear a politician mention the population explosion, and they say little about climate change, though these are headed for us and are enormously dangerous. This candidate could incorporate those issues, not by emphasizing them but by indicating that when there is leadership it will be possible to discuss and evaluate them democratically and plan ahead for the sake of our long-term security. People know that we're adrift and want reassurance.
Will we see a new Andrew Jackson come forward? I suppose not. But I continue to believe that we will see an alternative to what we have now. How much of one? Fingers crossed!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
TO STOP THE BLEEDING
Self-sabotage. We in this society believe in competition, even to the exclusion of self-interest. The bosses have wielded their money advantage to win a pyrrhic victory over their own workers, making them underbid each other for diminishing rewards. When workers have little to spend, how can they buy the goods and services that the bosses are offering?
Self-sabotage. The congressional Republicans' chosen weapons -- blind obstruction, appeals to irrational fears, and lying vilification -- would snap back on them if they were to gain the White House. A Dem opposition can play the game of no-quarter-given with as much angry joy as a Repub one can. The precedent is set: If you can't govern, you can't win the next election.
Self-sabotage. Defeatism and complacency abound. For example, Tom Hayden, that old paladin of participatory democracy, is making excuses for Mr. Obama. He says that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. all were likewise faulted for being too moderate. Well, not quite. JFK had a Congress that was immobilized by a coalition of Repubs and Southern Dems. Bobby Kennedy was advancing, bidding to unite and organize white workers and blacks (who conservatives pitted against one another) when he was killed. Death overtook Dr. King as he was preparing to summon forth a new populism to push for peace and the abolition of poverty. They were striving to go somewhere. What Mr. Obama has done is, for the most part, to lie down.
Self-sabotage. On the Internet now are early ads for the Obama campaign, to rally the forsaken base. Featured are pictures of the president grinning dazzlingly, alive with that old flair. The contrast between the promise of '08 and the reality of '11 may be making those pictures counterproductive, I'd imagine. Most who see them must be asking, "What do you -- or we -- have to be so upbeat about?"
Self-sabotage. A recent column says that the reason no one has come forward to take on the prez for the Dem nomination is that campaigns these days are forbiddingly expensive, so that a candidate would have to enjoy backing from the pols, who are too cowardly to risk extending it. (That may be the case, but see below.)
Self-sabotage. Britain's former chancelor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, says he regrets that he and the other Labour ministers didn't take down the hopelessly unpopular and inept Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That possibility was discussed, but they never pulled the trigger. I wondered at the time how they could stand by frozen in indecision while a reckoning at the polls came at them apace? There is something in the psychology of it, the sheer passivity, that not only shocks but mystifies. We are seeing the same thing in this country now.
Well, then --
What would NOT be self-sabotage? First, waking up. At present there are two ways to get the rightists' program for the country -- by voting for the Republicans and by voting for Mr. Obama -- and no way of getting anything else. That has to be seen for what it is.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Someone must personify the great reversal that is urgent. In the absence of a nationwide movement, there must be a candidate who has what it takes to precipitate one. That candidate must be the anti-Obama: liberal, tough, loud, unyielding, ferociously bent on not only getting elected but putting the Repub minority permanently on the defensive and, to the fullest extent possible, driving it from public life so that the pragmatic moderate majority can again have a say. Polls repeatedly show that most Americans agree with the Dems, not the Repubs. What is required to rally the voters is a battling spirit in place of the traditional excessive caution and shrinking defensiveness.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? The recognition that the political scene has changed dramatically just lately. YouTube is the greatest instrument of democracy since the secret ballot. Overnight a believable candidate who made a combative speech would be talked about obsessively in Riyadh, Kinshasa, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Paris, etc., with analysts asking, "What if this person caught on and won?" Here, reporters and journalists would be entranced. The funds would roll in. The volunteers would come cheering, as happened in Madison. It will be ideas, not concentrations of money, that decide the politics of the future. That is the new, more fluid reality.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Opting for survival over fatalism. Daunting prospects await us from the environment, energy, and overpopulation, among other hazards. The one essential factor in getting atop that is the combination of local and centralized leadership. Given it, the forces of divide-and-wreck can be beaten and we can work together with intelligence and have a future.
Anyone can see that that is true. So now what we have to ask ourselves is, What is it that we want: to live as responsible citizens of a democratic society or to die sucking our thumbs?
Self-sabotage. The congressional Republicans' chosen weapons -- blind obstruction, appeals to irrational fears, and lying vilification -- would snap back on them if they were to gain the White House. A Dem opposition can play the game of no-quarter-given with as much angry joy as a Repub one can. The precedent is set: If you can't govern, you can't win the next election.
Self-sabotage. Defeatism and complacency abound. For example, Tom Hayden, that old paladin of participatory democracy, is making excuses for Mr. Obama. He says that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. all were likewise faulted for being too moderate. Well, not quite. JFK had a Congress that was immobilized by a coalition of Repubs and Southern Dems. Bobby Kennedy was advancing, bidding to unite and organize white workers and blacks (who conservatives pitted against one another) when he was killed. Death overtook Dr. King as he was preparing to summon forth a new populism to push for peace and the abolition of poverty. They were striving to go somewhere. What Mr. Obama has done is, for the most part, to lie down.
Self-sabotage. On the Internet now are early ads for the Obama campaign, to rally the forsaken base. Featured are pictures of the president grinning dazzlingly, alive with that old flair. The contrast between the promise of '08 and the reality of '11 may be making those pictures counterproductive, I'd imagine. Most who see them must be asking, "What do you -- or we -- have to be so upbeat about?"
Self-sabotage. A recent column says that the reason no one has come forward to take on the prez for the Dem nomination is that campaigns these days are forbiddingly expensive, so that a candidate would have to enjoy backing from the pols, who are too cowardly to risk extending it. (That may be the case, but see below.)
Self-sabotage. Britain's former chancelor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, says he regrets that he and the other Labour ministers didn't take down the hopelessly unpopular and inept Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That possibility was discussed, but they never pulled the trigger. I wondered at the time how they could stand by frozen in indecision while a reckoning at the polls came at them apace? There is something in the psychology of it, the sheer passivity, that not only shocks but mystifies. We are seeing the same thing in this country now.
Well, then --
What would NOT be self-sabotage? First, waking up. At present there are two ways to get the rightists' program for the country -- by voting for the Republicans and by voting for Mr. Obama -- and no way of getting anything else. That has to be seen for what it is.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Someone must personify the great reversal that is urgent. In the absence of a nationwide movement, there must be a candidate who has what it takes to precipitate one. That candidate must be the anti-Obama: liberal, tough, loud, unyielding, ferociously bent on not only getting elected but putting the Repub minority permanently on the defensive and, to the fullest extent possible, driving it from public life so that the pragmatic moderate majority can again have a say. Polls repeatedly show that most Americans agree with the Dems, not the Repubs. What is required to rally the voters is a battling spirit in place of the traditional excessive caution and shrinking defensiveness.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? The recognition that the political scene has changed dramatically just lately. YouTube is the greatest instrument of democracy since the secret ballot. Overnight a believable candidate who made a combative speech would be talked about obsessively in Riyadh, Kinshasa, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Paris, etc., with analysts asking, "What if this person caught on and won?" Here, reporters and journalists would be entranced. The funds would roll in. The volunteers would come cheering, as happened in Madison. It will be ideas, not concentrations of money, that decide the politics of the future. That is the new, more fluid reality.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Opting for survival over fatalism. Daunting prospects await us from the environment, energy, and overpopulation, among other hazards. The one essential factor in getting atop that is the combination of local and centralized leadership. Given it, the forces of divide-and-wreck can be beaten and we can work together with intelligence and have a future.
Anyone can see that that is true. So now what we have to ask ourselves is, What is it that we want: to live as responsible citizens of a democratic society or to die sucking our thumbs?
Saturday, September 3, 2011
DEAFENING RUMBLINGS
President Obama, who since the midterms has been assiduously defining himself as ineffectual and eager to capitulate, is now carrying that to the point of self-parody. Notice the fate of the ozone standards in consequence of business pressure, for example. Environmentalists were already giving this Democratic president a grade of "F".
Meanwhile, one Huffington Post columnist reports that if you talk with elected officials about Mr. Obama, you hear "unprintable rage", while another opines that it is getting impossible to take the man seriously. There have been no calls for him to step aside, I reckon because the pols assume they're stuck with him and don't want to be seen as further lessening his dwindling prospects.
But not everyone is so guarded. Ernie Chambers is a black man who served as a state senator in Nebraska for 38 years with an outspokenness and a legislative mastery that made him both a state treasure and a holy terror. He got national headlines a few years ago when he lampooned a certain kind of lawsuit by suing the Biblical deity for making terroristic threats against some of his constituents. While recently announcing his candidacy for resumption of the legislative career from which term limits sidelined him, he was asked his thoughts on our first black president. His reply was that the latter should not be in office and that he was "pathetic", "a milquetoast", and "a weak, scaredy man". So much for that monolithic racial support that was touted as the incumbent's ace in the hole.
And members of the Congressional Black Caucus, notably Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, have become thunderous in their exasperation, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver notoriously referring to the president's budget deal with the Republicans as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich". They say they're supporting Mr. Obama, but you get the impression that that support is eroding fast. Unemployment among blacks is at a 27-year high, and that isn't being addressed.
To be fair, Mr. Obama would face the charge of helping "his own" at the expense of everyone else if he did something about black unemployment in particular. But another kind of personality in the White House, white or black, could win respect for having the guts and the fairness to do it. The rationale would be, "We're going to act where the need is greatest, and race be damned."
This White House has apparently decided that Democrats have nowhere else to go. Well, they stayed home in the midterms, and you know how that worked out. The notion that they and independents will be terrified of the Republican nominee and therefore will drag themselves to the polls is ill-founded. You're dreaming if you think the GOP is going to nominate some Marginal Melvin who preaches that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Americans will not vote themselves out of those "socialist" benefits, especially in a sagging and threatened economy.
As for that overnight phee-nom Rick Perry, he has spoken and written enough to guarantee that the Repub establishment will bump off his candidacy if the journalists and rival candidates can't. The nominee will be someone superficially unscary but acceptable to the tea-partiers, such as a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie.
The assumption lingers that there will be no Dem challenger to Mr. Obama. When nothing keeps happening, it's human nature to think that nothing will go right on happening. But ask the people of Vermont: A well-groomed landscape one day, a hurricane's devastation the next.
A credible opponent could count on being photographed with hand held aloft not only by Ernie Chambers but by Al Gore and a number of vigorous Dem activists and celebrities. And that would be before establishing viability. The prospect has gone from inviting to irresistible.
Right now either no one is running yet or someone is being quiet and cagy while laying plans. Whichever it is, you can bank on this: You will see a mightily contested race.
Meanwhile, one Huffington Post columnist reports that if you talk with elected officials about Mr. Obama, you hear "unprintable rage", while another opines that it is getting impossible to take the man seriously. There have been no calls for him to step aside, I reckon because the pols assume they're stuck with him and don't want to be seen as further lessening his dwindling prospects.
But not everyone is so guarded. Ernie Chambers is a black man who served as a state senator in Nebraska for 38 years with an outspokenness and a legislative mastery that made him both a state treasure and a holy terror. He got national headlines a few years ago when he lampooned a certain kind of lawsuit by suing the Biblical deity for making terroristic threats against some of his constituents. While recently announcing his candidacy for resumption of the legislative career from which term limits sidelined him, he was asked his thoughts on our first black president. His reply was that the latter should not be in office and that he was "pathetic", "a milquetoast", and "a weak, scaredy man". So much for that monolithic racial support that was touted as the incumbent's ace in the hole.
And members of the Congressional Black Caucus, notably Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, have become thunderous in their exasperation, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver notoriously referring to the president's budget deal with the Republicans as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich". They say they're supporting Mr. Obama, but you get the impression that that support is eroding fast. Unemployment among blacks is at a 27-year high, and that isn't being addressed.
To be fair, Mr. Obama would face the charge of helping "his own" at the expense of everyone else if he did something about black unemployment in particular. But another kind of personality in the White House, white or black, could win respect for having the guts and the fairness to do it. The rationale would be, "We're going to act where the need is greatest, and race be damned."
This White House has apparently decided that Democrats have nowhere else to go. Well, they stayed home in the midterms, and you know how that worked out. The notion that they and independents will be terrified of the Republican nominee and therefore will drag themselves to the polls is ill-founded. You're dreaming if you think the GOP is going to nominate some Marginal Melvin who preaches that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Americans will not vote themselves out of those "socialist" benefits, especially in a sagging and threatened economy.
As for that overnight phee-nom Rick Perry, he has spoken and written enough to guarantee that the Repub establishment will bump off his candidacy if the journalists and rival candidates can't. The nominee will be someone superficially unscary but acceptable to the tea-partiers, such as a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie.
The assumption lingers that there will be no Dem challenger to Mr. Obama. When nothing keeps happening, it's human nature to think that nothing will go right on happening. But ask the people of Vermont: A well-groomed landscape one day, a hurricane's devastation the next.
A credible opponent could count on being photographed with hand held aloft not only by Ernie Chambers but by Al Gore and a number of vigorous Dem activists and celebrities. And that would be before establishing viability. The prospect has gone from inviting to irresistible.
Right now either no one is running yet or someone is being quiet and cagy while laying plans. Whichever it is, you can bank on this: You will see a mightily contested race.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)