Hillary Clinton – Don't Gel Too Soon

Canvassing Las Vegas, a Scary Moment Just Before Election Day

nv-please-go-away — Sign on the gate 2 doors from the home of our Las Vegas trouble-maker.

“Get out of my neighborhood. I have guns! If you two don’t leave right now I’m gonna go get them.”

It was the Saturday before election day and we were canvassing in Las Vegas in a sprawling cookie-cutter development – not a fancy one – with “front yards” of sand, not grass. Worn Halloween figures and flags hung on the doors; fake spider webs stuck stubbornly to doorways and bushes. My son Dan and I had just arrived and this was our first block. It was the weekend before his birthday but both of us were beyond anxious about the election and hoped that going door-to-door, even more than making calls, might ease our souls a bit; at least we were doing something.

A moment earlier we’d been joking with this same 30-something guy over the neighborhood Halloween decorations. He asked what we were doing walking along his block and Dan said “Just talking to people.” “What about,” he asked. “What are you talking to people about?” “Hillary Clinton” I said, smiling at him – (that almost always works.)

Not this time. As we moved beyond him and on up the street, he was still yelling. “Get out! Get out!” Shaken, we decided to move up a block and try the next house on our tally sheet but he and his friend were making their way toward us, his friend telling him to “do something about it” if he was going to yell anyway. We fled.

I’ve seen angry crowds before, including demonstrators and police in Chicago in 1968. I’d seen reports of scary Trump rally crowds too. But this single person, focused on us with such rage, was a different kind of scary. My heart was pounding as if I’d had way too much coffee. As that response ebbed, I just got sad. And then sadder. “This isn’t how our country is supposed to be.” I kept saying to Dan. He, wisely, was more concerned about danger than he was with analyzing the social meaning of all this. He has a two-year-old son and was unsettled more for him, and for his wife; he needed to stay safe for them.

That was wise, but for me, the cruelty and rage of these two men, who’d turned on a dime from “We all DO love our Halloween here” to “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood” was painful on so many levels.

They weren’t the only ones. At least two more times, the response to our question: “Have you voted yet?” was “I don’t do Democrats. Go away,” declared with icy affect and stone cold eyes.

Saturday afternoon, as we waited at headquarters for a new neighborhood assignment, we were visited by Gabby Giffords, and her husband Mark Kelly, as well as Lucy McBath, one of the Mothers of the Movement, a sad sisterhood of moms whose children, her son Jordan Davis among them, had been killed by police officers. The combination of the realities faced by these people and their efforts to reenforce the critical nature of every vote we could pull out of our assigned areas was a reminder of all that is at stake in our country.

hq-crowd-1 — Enthusiastic volunteers wait for Gabby Gifford and husband Mark Kelly to address to the crowd.

lucy-mcbath-mother-of-movement-jordan-davis — Lucy McBath, one of the Mothers of the Movement. Her son was Jordan Davis

Here’s the thing though:

This anger didn’t arise on its own. It’s been enabled, and not just by Mr. Trump and his allies and followers. Not all the angry people we met lived in lesser circumstances, with less education and income, than the norm but they do live differently from the people who govern them – and the people who cover them.

Listen to Columnist Sarah Smarsh in The Guardian

* Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000– higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporterss.

* Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. . . .
These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue. . . .
* The faces journalists do train the cameras on – hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags – must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well.
* One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago – not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

* In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Sure political passions on both sides are self-defined far differently than they’re defined from the outside. But if those who cover non-elites never go near them except to write about them; if they’re described more through sociology than personal stories, oddities instead of neighbors, the divisions we’ve experienced in this election will not ease.

We don’t go to the same schools, we don’t live in the same neighborhoods, we don’t share military/non-military histories and we don’t agree on politics. We also don’t have access to simple exchanges: in the carpool line, as room parents or scout leaders, at the supermarket or the gas station, at the playground or even at neighborhood Halloween events.

I grew up in a steel town on the Monongahela River. I was the lawyer’s daughter; when we graduated I went to an Ivy League college that almost no one in my community had even heard of. Several of the kids from my high school who went to college did so by joining the Army. Because of Viet Nam, many of them never made it home to enroll.

We all went to the same dances and football games though, and parties in each other’s homes. I know – know – that every day that I spent as a journalist I did a better job because I’d grown up among so many different kinds of kids, even though it was always clear my future was going to be different from many of theirs.

We need to be able to depend on journalists to translate a bit for us and right now that doesn’t happen enough. Of course no American should threaten another with a gun. Of course not. But we also need to be able to expect from those who deliver information to us that they’ve gone beyond their own experiences to learn how others live- and to share that understanding with the rest of us.

Big Birthday Memory #16: (More 1968) Obama, Clinton, New Hampshire And Primaries – 1968 And 2008

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from January 8, 2008.

In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, 40 years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote running against Lyndon Johnson .

That was enough to be viewed as a win, since no one thought he’d get anywhere close to those numbers. That victory by the only national politician with the guts to run against the Vietnam War sent a shock through the Democratic Party.

McCarthy’s effort, often called “The Children’s Crusade,” was comprised largely of college students (including me) who abandoned their studies to come to New Hampshire and work to help to stop the war. Now, as I watch Barack Obama, and see the the numbers of young people propelling his success, I know just how they feel — and what awaits them if they fail.

Then too, win or lose, things will be tough for Senator Clinton. Obama, seen not only as a change agent but also as someone who offe

That’s exactly what happened in 1968. The New Hampshire victory brought Robert Kennedy into the race – establishing, until his tragic death, a three-way battle – two dissidents against the juggernaut of the Democratic establishment. Then later, Hubert Humphrey , candidate of that establishment and for years, as Vice President, public and energetic supporter of Johnson’s war, won the nomination.

To all of us, he had stolen the nomination. Many (not me) were so bitter that they refused to vote for him. (2016 NOTE: Let’s not let this happen again! That reluctance led to the election of Richard Nixon and all that followed. Think how different things would be…) Remember, for most of us, as for many of Obama’s young supporters, this was our first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she prevail further down the line, will face the same broken-hearted campaigners. Once the anti-establishment, anti-war student and Watergate hearing staffer, in the eyes of these young people she’ll be cast as the villain.

For evidence of how long that bitterness lasts, take a look at this quote from the American Journalism Review, from the 1968 Chicago Convention recollections of veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder. It’s about me – but it’s also about any young American who takes a stand and loses .

He recalls coming into the hotel lobby from the park where demonstrations were underway and spotting a woman he had first met during the Eugene McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire. “Her name was Cindy Samuels,” Broder still remembers. “She was seated on a bench crying. She had been gassed. I went over and I put my arm around her and I said: ‘Cindy. What can I do for you?’ She looked up at me with tears on her face and said: ‘Change things.’

NOTE: As I searched for links for this post I found a David Corn piece saying much the same thing. I want to take note of it since the ideas came to me independently but I didn’t want it to seem that I drew from his.

HILLARY SUPPORTERS AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN: DON’T DO THIS!

This is breaking my heart. Why is it that we Democrats are incapable of NOT shooting ourselves in the foot (feet even)? In my view (and I’m hardly alone in this) this may be the most critical election of my lifetime. I’ve written (are you sick of it yet?) about the parallels to 1968 when the refusal of many anti-war voters to show up at the polls and vote for Hubert Humphrey brought us Richard Nixon and a cascade of disaster. That could and most likely will happen again if we don’t all pull ourselves together.

I heard a commentator quote — I thought Jefferson but can’t find the source — “True democracy means acceptance of defeat by one vote.” Sounds right, doesn’t it? But there is what we wish were true and there is political reality, and the reality this year is that every moment of hesitation by Senator Clinton’s supporters puts another barrier between Senator Obama and the White House. My most-respected friend PunditMom has a very smart analysis of where all this antipathy is coming from. And there’s a survey of much of the conversation in Lisa Stone’s summary at BlogHer.

As I write this I think about the suffragists who won us the right to have this fight in the first place just 88 years ago. What would they think now? They were willing to stand up to those who asked them to halt their campaign until WWI was over. Should women have the same singular focus now — placing their anger ahead of the outcome of this election? Is the injustice so great that it justifies putting another conservative Republican in the White House?

I think not. Our sisters will do us a disservice that will last a very long time if they continue to stand in the way of an Obama victory or even just sit on their hands, because that will betray women who are at the bottom of the power pile, raising children alone, struggling for childcare, lacking health insurance, vacation or sick leave and any kind of job security. Feminists rightly say that “every issue is a women’s issue” and that means that every decision in a McCain administration will have a heavy impact on these women, and on the rest of us.

Beyond that, in my view, the perils of an anti-choice administration that will nominate judges like those who overrode violence against women laws in Virginia and frequently support employers over women seeking redress to sexual harassment or other discrimination, an Administration that will carry on the Bush foreign policy and continue to decimate our constitutional rights — oh – you know the list — those perils outweigh any grievance.

So if sisterhood is powerful, let those whose hearts are broken by the Clinton loss recall their sisters who need so much – and consider how little their interests would be served if Barack Obama does not prevail. On this, Women’s Equality Day, let them ease their pain with the knowledge that they will help on “every issue” and therefore every “women’s issue” if they can move past the pain of their defeat and see to it that our country itself is not defeated too.

WHO WANTS HILLARY? WHO WANTS BARACK? WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE? WHAT’S AT STAKE?

You really need to read this guest post at Political Voices of Women, Catherine Morgan‘s remarkable combination of editorial and aggregator. There are links there to more than 400 women who blog about politics – and guest posts. And (full disclosure) yes, sometimes that includes to my work. But I digress.

On Wednesday, April 23, just after the Pennsylvania primary, Slim, whose blog is called No Fish, No Nuts, was Catherine’s guest blogger. Slim’s post, which first appeared on her blog, wrote a loving but sad analysis of the Clinton supporters at her county convention where local Democrats elected their delegates. Listen to this:

Obama’s voters are looking toward Obama as a standard
bearer, as a point man for the change they want to see in the country.
Hillary’s supporters, at least the older women among them, are voting for their
surrogate: because they want to see a woman in the Oval Office before they die,
and because they themselves were denied so many opportunities for advancement
in their own lives.

I do not doubt that they also desperately believe in
Hillary Clinton, but their investment in her goes much deeper than politics.
Hillary Clinton is proof that they had it in them all along, the fire, talent
and creativity, and they could have been leaders but for the glass ceiling that
seemed to rise only inches a decade.

Slim also wrote that she was reluctant to offer these observations but that given polls showing many Clinton supporters saying they will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination, and some the other way around, she felt that times were so desperate that she had to weigh in. In her view, "We cannot afford another 4 years of war, debt and economic stagnation,
the prescription of a McCain presidency. So we Dems cannot allow
Clinton voters (or for that matter, I add, Obama supporters if it goes the other way – though they report this feeling somewhat less frequently) to take their ball and go home come November."

To that I say "amen!" I was a member of the "Children’s Crusade" that was the 1968 anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. We worked like demons through New Hampshire, did so well there that it was considered a win even though, technically, we lost, then saw Bobby Kennedy enter the race against us. We persisted, as did his supporters, until his assassination in June of 1968. After that, many of his supporters joined us, working still to try to elect a president who would stop the war. And then.

The riots in Chicago. The nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and for way too long a staunch supporter of the war. And then. Many, many of my colleagues and friends indeed picked up their footballs and went home. To stay. Not only did they not work for Humphrey – that would have been very hard after what had happened in Chicago. They didn’t even vote for him. Or vote at all. And that, my friends, is how we got Richard Nixon. Which is how we got Watergate. Which is how we got Jimmy Carter– who made such a mess that we got Ronald Reagan. Who took apart so much social safety net, environmental and regulatory and other federal function that we thought more was impossible. Until we got George Bush. Who decimated much of what was left, including much of our hope. Until now, when we have two candidates who stand for so much.

Of course that’s simplistic, but what really really upsets me is that every time we educated activists, in our righteousness, take a walk because things aren’t perfect, we aren’t the ones who get hurt the most. People who are poor, whose kids go to bad schools, whose unemployment insurance runs out too soon, who no longer can afford even in-state tuition or, for many, community college tuition, to say nothing of HEALTH INSURANCE (an issue which reaches up into the middle class) — and of course the war, where low-income people do most of the enlisting…these people are the ones who are hurt the most.

We let our singular perception of what’s perfect become the enemy of the good – or at least better than bad – that we could help to bring into being. It’s infantile. It’s sad. It’s shameful. And unless all of us in the blog universe who feel this way make a lot of noise and take lots of friends to lunch no matter WHO gets the nomination, it’s going to happen again.

Thanks to Slim for her great post that inspired this rant.

SELLING THE PENTAGON, SELLING THE WAR IN IRAQ, SELLING THEIR HONOR

In 1971, when I worked at CBS News in Washington, the network
aired a documentary called The Selling of the Pentagon. The Museum of Broadcasting website says: "The
aim of this film, produced by Peter Davis, was to examine the increasing
utilization and cost to the taxpayers of public relations activities by the
military-industrial complex in order to shape public opinion in favor of the
military." The Congress tried to cite CBS for contempt – it was
a real drama. In his book The Place to Be, my mentor
Roger Mudd tells the whole story better than I ever could – he was the
correspondent on the award-winning program. Despite all that happened,
there was real satisfaction in knowing that the film had made a difference –
that our defense dollars would go to protect and support our soldiers, not a
military PR campaign.

Ah, but like all good news, it was short-lived. Maybe not too short – we
made it to 2008 — but the whole thing is back – and because it’s about Iraq
and Guantanamo this time, not just some recruiting and appropriations
manipulation, it’s far more malignant.

Sunday, the New York Times reported on the courtship of
those military "experts" who show up on the TODAY SHOW and NIGHTLINE
and CNN to tell us the facts behind our country’s military initiatives.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar
fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as
“military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative
and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11
world.

Hidden behind that appearance of
objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those
analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the
administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has
found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit
ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic:
Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war
policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever
disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But
collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts
represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives,
board members or consultants.

Of course, this one is a little different – these
guys are consultants to the media, and while the Pentagon enables their
"expertise" and offers the heft of the tours of Guantanamo and classified briefings, their money comes from their lucrative consultancies with military vendors, not from the Pentagon directly. But think about it. If we really
were manipulated; if the arguments for the Iraq war were as flawed as we now believe, then these consultants — follow the bread crumbs — are at least partly responsible for the attitudes that permitted the war to take place and discouraged many of those who might have stopped it
I don’t know about you, but when I hear stories
about Abu Ghraib and the things that
were done in our names, and think of how little I’ve done to instigate change,
resting instead on the actions of my youth. I think about all the Germans who
said the "didn’t know" what was going on. I don’t mean that a
few soldiers, none of whose leaders has been prosecuted and who are taking the
rap for things that went way beyond them — are the equivalent of Nazi
Germany. That would be stupid and facile. What I am saying is that
the horrible things that emerged from this war are on all our heads – and that
these guys whose testimony to us via countless talking head interviews
legitimized what was going on, enabled it all.

The reason I started with The Selling of the
Pentagon is that it’s such a lesson. Whatever change we help to
implement won’t last – Abolitionist Wendell Phillips was
right when he said that "eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty." In 1971 the documentary outraged Americans who
demanded change. Today we still recall the events at Abu Ghraib the same
way – with a deep and painful sense of outrage. Once again, on our watch
this time, bad things have been done in our names.
Once again, dissemblers reign. The consequences of their betrayal,
whether the story is true or not, are tragically visible. Once again —
our hearts are broken. Once again – we must share the blame for what
happened there.

Once again, whatever is left of our better angels
looks warily about, frightened, silenced, sad and ashamed.

BOY DO I HAVE SMART FRIENDS: MORRA AARONS CALLED IT WHEN NO ONE ELSE DID!

Yup. There’s lots more to say about the Hillary victory and I’m sure there will be plenty of time. It was pretty damn amazing, and her speech, I thought, was good and more like the woman we think she really is. I have admired for years her work with the Children’s Defense Fund, foster care advocacy and the innovation of HIPPY (Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters) in Arkansas. She’s always been a champion of children and so I’ve seen her as a force for good. hat’s what she needs to continue to communicate along with the rest of her message — she’s done a lot of what Obama is talking about too.

Now, before I show you how right Morra, of Women and Work, and TechPresident and Huffington Post, was, I have a very superficial but interesting question. Remember all the crap Al Gore got for getting fashion advice from Naomi Wolf? Well. Last night was the first time I remember seeing Mrs. Clinton wearing other than a solid color. I only noticed because it struck me how much it had reduced the severity of her look. (And because I never learned to dress in a way that looked good on me until I was well into my 40s so I notice these things.) So I wondered if it was on purpose. That does not take away from any of the substance of her candidacy or victory – it’s just an interesting question.

OK Now – listen to Morra – from January 6 in New Hampshire (the prediction is near the end):

OBAMA, CLINTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE AND PRIMARIES – 1968 AND 2008

In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, 40 years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote running against Lyndon Johnson .

Then too, win or lose, things will be tough for Senator Clinton. Obama, seen not only as a change agent but also as someone who offers the hope and optimism of a JFK, has captured the imaginations not only of young people but also of many journalists, most notorious of whom is the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks. That means that anyone who wrests the nomination away from him will be perceived as the breaker of young hearts, standing in the way of idealism and the candidate who brought young people fully in to the system.*

To all of us, he had stolen the nomination. Many (not me) were so bitter that they refused to vote for him. Remember, for most of us, as for many of Obama’s young supporters, this was our first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she prevail further down the line, will face the same broken-hearted campaigners. Once the anti-establishment, anti-war student and Watergate hearing staffer, in the eyes of these young people she’ll be cast as the villain.

For evidence of how long that bitterness lasts, take a look at this quote from the American Journalism Review, from the 1968 Chicago Convention, riot and Hum prey coronation recollections of veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder. It’s about me – but it’s also about any young American who takes a stand and loses .

HILLARY, THE TONKIN GULF AND 1984

OK, those folks who run TypePad and YouTube haven’t found a way to add this blog host to automatic video posting so I’m hooking a link in right here so you can watch this. I can’t decide what I think – it’s funny and clever and a perfect definition of a mashup but it’s also mean and off-mark. While many, including many feminists, have issues with Senator Clinton – this 1984/Apple Commercial version isn’t representative of most of them. Accusations of opportunism and flabbiness on the war are not the same as totalitarianism. True, she voted for the Patriot Act, but so did all but two Senators – and one of them didn’t vote at all!

Now, I remind myself – we still remember who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska) and that was in 1964 so maybe this vote will last too. Anyway, I don’t know where I’ll land politically this year – I’m really just thinking about the power of the kinds of media manipulation (in the technical sense) that are possible today. How will we ever help newer voters figure out how to determine the truth? Are they so much more evolved than we are in a media sense that we needn’t worry, or is the dismal lack of critical thinking work in current No Child Left Behind education going to affect how people think in the voting booth as well as our educational standing in the world?

Thoughts?