This is just nice. Somebody sent it to me; you’ll like it.
.
I’m leaving it for you while I’m offline for Yom Kippur. I want my country back, too
Tag: Obama
SARAH PALIN, SARAH PALIN, SARAH PALIN AND THE DANGERS OF A DESPERATE PARTY
This photo says it all. I took it yesterday, on our second Sunday canvassing for Obama in Virginia. When I got home I decided to review the stats for this blog and discovered that no post has drawn either the traffic or comments as those I’ve written about Sarah Palin. Friends tell me the same is true of theirs. I don’t think it’s brilliant writing that’s doing it. Sarah Palin has captured a large chunk of this presidential campaign as well as either the imagination or the rage (depending on perspective) of many American voters.
The Tina Fey stuff is funny, and effective, as I’ve mentioned before. The mean stuff is plenty mean. The "middle-class hockey mom" stuff is more effective than I wish it were, especially since the Palin family is worth over $2M and they made close to $200,000 last year. None of this matters as much as it should. She draws huge crowds. She’s cute. Those who support her either believe she is a wonder of accessibility and straight talk or have twisted themselves like pretzels to find reasons to justify her presence. For me, at least, it’s kind of sad.
What makes so many people prefer a less-educated, less-experienced candidate with a limited academic past, no curiosity or sense of exploration, untrammeled ambition and not much of a history over far more capable, experienced leadership? I remember when I was a kid and my mother’s adored Adlai Stevenson ran for president in 1952 and 1956, people called him an egghead, he was accused of being too cold and not able to connect to voters. And some analysts have compared him to Obama – two Illinois candidates too smart for the room.
I don’t see it. Obama appears to me far looser and more accessible- and more well-rounded in experience and education – and he’s younger and more available to young voters; Stevenson was a different man at a very different time and he was running against the man who, at least partially, won World War II. Even so, the question really is, how far have we evolved since then? AND how much have we learned from voting for the guy we’d "rather have a beer with" when that guy was George W Bush? AND in times so very dangerous that by the time each post is replaced at the top of the que, markets around the world have gone down once more and international tensions risen – will we still, as a country, opt for the "mavericky mom" who is not, at least on paper and on the stump, capable of understanding, much less solving, our problems? (OH and that guy who’s running with her…..)
As I write this, Palin, just introduced by Joe Lieberman (%#@!!**&) to a huge Florida crowd screaming "Sarah, Sarah, Sarah", continues to draw the faithful to great emotional response. It’s hard to know if, when people go into the voting booth, this emotion will translate into votes – or the reality will hit them and they won’t be able to do it.
My other fear is that because the race is moving toward Obama, acts of desperate chicanery will be part of the election day landscape. Here are some things that are already happening;
- Republicans purging voter rolls, particularly of young first-time voters
- De-listing voters whose homes have been foreclosed – with the claim that since the voters no longer have an address, they can’t vote.
- Closing polling places in Democratic areas and intimidating officials
- Trying to keep absentee ballots from newly registered voters
- Names missing from voter rolls that affect legitimacy of absentee ballots
If you’re an attorney or law student, you can help with these things and the others that will happen.
We Americans will be tested in many ways in the next few years: economically, militarily, educationally, diplomatically and more. The first test, though, is this: As we face these challenges and all the others certain to emerge, and we think about our kids and what we want to leave for them, will we be able to take a deep breath and vote for "the smart guy" or is the phenomenon that is Sarah Palin the canary in our coal mine – warning us that our electorate is, even after W, not ready to choose the most capable and visionary, who has inspired so very many of our next generation to enter the fray, when they can elect Tina Fey light and her "old guy" running mate instead?
OBAMA AND RACE: THE LESSONS OF DINKINS AND BRADLEY
I lived in Manhattan in 1989 when David Dinkins ran to become the first African-American mayor of New York, challenging an entrenched but increasingly unpopular Ed Koch in the primary, then defeating Rudy Giuliani in the general election. In that race, Dinkins was far ahead in the polls but didn’t win by much. Here’s how Adam Berinsky of The Monkey Cage describes it:
I
examined data from a 1989 New York City Mayoral election. There, the black
candidate David Dinkins held a fourteen- to eighteen-point advantage over his
white opponent Rudolph Giuliani in polls taken only days before the election,
but ended up winning the race by less than two percentage points. Correcting
the polls using statistical techniques that accounted for the “don’t know”
improved the predictive power of those polls. Clearly, some people who said
they didn’t know how they were going to vote in fact did know – they just
didn’t want to tell us.
The same thing happened earlier, in 1982, to one of LA’s most popular, and first black, mayors, Tom Bradley, when he ran for governor of California. The gap between the polls and the electoral results was so large that the phenomenon was named "the Bradley effect." Way ahead in polls right up to election day, Bradley lost decisively to George Deukmejian.
I’m so afraid that this presidential race may be tainted by some of the same behavior. Of course I’m not covering new ground, just aggregating some good thoughts. Listen to the work of the very wise Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks, in which she quotes Tim Wise’s "This Is Your Nation on White Privilege." The fact that that post generated some very heated comments speaks to the currency of this issue, right now.
Continue reading OBAMA AND RACE: THE LESSONS OF DINKINS AND BRADLEY
CANVASSING FOR OBAMA: ARE YOU STRONG OR LEANING? THE OBAMA-MCCAIN RACE FROM THE GROUND FLOOR
That’s my four year old friend, his dad and our friend Lea at the door of a home in Virginia. We spent Sunday afternoon canvassing for Obama and the down ticket races in this housing development whose residents had names from Gomez to Kim to Ilbibi to Hussein to Brady.* These were town homes with small back gardens, beautifully kept and facing out onto mini-wooded areas that made it feel peaceful and apart. Not fancy, just well-designed and executed. Plastic bikes and push toys sat out in the open; we even saw some skateboards left leaning against a tree. Not too much worry about theft, apparently.
As we walked, I realized that this – these homes occupied by families of so many backgrounds, were part of what we were campaigning for: the opportunity of all Americans
building their lives to find a place – a home — a life. And that the battle, underneath the craziness, is about the best way to guarantee those rights — and possiblities – to more of us.
The past week or two have been painful for Obama supporters. Polls are down, Sarah Palin seems to have hijacked much of the campaign, the McCainies are attacking and the attacks, however vicious or frivolous they may be, (and the are) seem to be sticking. That’s what drove me to Virginia Sunday. In all my years around politics I’ve never done field work; for most campaigns I’ve been a reporter and during those years I was scrupulously careful to remain neutral and apart. Now though, I’m out of the news business and I can campaign. And so Sunday I was walking around Virginia with three friends, a water bottle and a clipboard. Our assignment: talk to the folks on our list, find out if they’ve decided for whom they will vote and check the right boxes. We check Strong, Lean, Undecided. If they support our guy, we make sure they’re registered and ask if they want to volunteer.
We didn’t really meet anyone we could try to convert and in our 57 stops we hit lots of "not home" — it was Sunday afternoon after all, and the rest were either for Obama or "We’re for the other guy — you’ve come to the wrong house." The lack of conversion candidates didn’t matter though because we were mostly building a registration and GOTV (Get Out the Vote) list that will be accurate and useful on election day. The coolest moment: meeting an 18-year-old first-time voter– I suspect a first-generation American and clearly excited to be voting for Barack Obama.
*I’m using names of the same ethnicity but not the real ones; that feels too intrusive.
RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS – BUT DID THEY EVER LEAVE?
Some very smart analysts, including POLITICO and PressThink founder Jay Rosen, are talking about the current Republican strategy in support of Sarah Palin as a "reigniting of the culture wars." Attacking with all the code words of past anti-"left" vocabularies. And here’s Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:
I’ll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the
culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too.
The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she’s
slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a 
bad mother to be
all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack
Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates’ children is out of
bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and
therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That
was the lovely sound of class in American politics.
When the McCain Summer of Love ad debuted, I wrote this – They Will Campaign Against Us Until We’re Dead, and Maybe After. If you watch CSPAN, especially Washington Journal, you know from the phone calls how much anger still exists; how much hatred of the generation I grew up in. Against our opposition to the war, mischief and outrageousness, and even more, our search – no, demand – for peace. Going after all of us, FORTY YEARS LATER, still works.
I guess that since I’ve been posting quite a lot about that time forty years ago, the memories are long on both sides. But Barack Obama was 7 years old in 1968. It’s not and never was his culture war. It is, however, the never-ending flash-point in the conservative playbook, a safe way to rile folks up and re-ignite the hatred and anger manifested in the 60’s and 70’s and again in the 90’s when that Boomer couple, the Clintons, were in the White House.
I’ve given up trying to figure out how to respond. Most Americans, including us 60’s people, love our country and loved it then. It was the a desire to return the country to its true nature — just as it is today — that drove us. But it’s far more useful to the McCain campaign to taunt us — and Barack Obama; and to divide us, too, with these ancient battles. The tough part is figuring out how to answer.
SPEECH OF A LIFETIME– Oh – and that Sarah person
At
last. Our whole day had been built around this. Obama accepts
the nomination with the highest TV ratings of
any acceptance speech in modern US history, according to the Hollywood
Reporter:
Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech for the Democratic
presidential nomination Thursday night was seen by 38.4 million viewers — 57%
more than watched John Kerry four years ago — and was the most-watched
convention speech ever.
Thursday
night’s viewership set a new record for national convention coverage, according
to Nielsen Media Research. Naturally, it’s also the largest number since the
convention began, up 42% from Hillary Clinton’s
speech on Day 2.
Obama’s
speech was seen by more U.S. viewers than the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony
(34.2 million).
It was a remarkable speech in a spectacular setting. You either watched it or
you didn’t – watch it here. It’s actually worth more than one viewing for
not only the substance but also the environment and symbolism. Watch it —
it’s pretty amazing.
Here’s
a
transcript, too.
I
waited until today to write this because I felt so much emotion last night that
I thought I should let it all sink in. I’ve seen so many acceptance
speeches, and my sense of Obama’s role is so deep that I didn’t think I had
much new to offer. It doesn’t seem to be wearing off though — not that
I’m alone. MSNBC super-conservative and often inflamatory and somewhat
cruel Joe
Scarborough was still rhapsodizing when I woke up. I think any aware
American, anyone who’s lived through a substantial portion of our modern racial
history, anyone with any desire for a better, more just country — any of us —
could not have watched what happened last night and remained
dispassionate. Tweets all night, and not just from those in the arena
kept saying "Tears everywhere" "Tearing up"
"Didn’t think I’d cry but…" I was fine until the family
walked out to the center of the stadium holding hands. Then I just
disolved.
Beyond
the moving historic moment, and the incredible tableau of two decent committed
families who have made public service a life-time commitment, who are the kinds
of people who seem to manifest what Americans used to think of as "real
American" character, the substance was also inspiring, at least for
me. You can read blogger comments on the wonderful CSPAN Hub — assembled by a team that
includes that very smart woman you keep seeing on CSPAN, Leslie Bradshaw. This post of
hers will give you an idea of
what it took to run the Hub operation – so valuable to so many bloggers.
Continue reading SPEECH OF A LIFETIME– Oh – and that Sarah person
MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY
I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod. All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players. Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.
Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch. On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. I was transfixed. Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn’t really paid much attention. Until that moment. It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life. As I watched, I knew that I belonged there – where there was purpose – in the middle of history. It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music. When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren’t there already.
How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn’t sure he could make it through his own speech — that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he’d watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy. Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears. This is important.
Continue reading MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY
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.
1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE
I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call “a true believer” and to see policemen behave like that. To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a “kike” (you had to read his lips – there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps. To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you’d worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.
That’s how it was. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, of course, on this momentous anniversary – when hopefully another, happier landmark will emerge in the extraordinary nomination of Senator Obama. I’ve been to every Convention from 1968 until this year. It’s kind of sad to break the chain after 40 years but I think I’m ready. I did a workshop on convention coverage at the BlogHer conference to pass the torch; I’m so excited for all the women who are going. Just as Senator Obama is a generation behind me – in his 40s to my 60s – a little kid when we faced billy clubs and tear gas in his home town, so are many of the bloggers credentialed to cover the week. I know it will be great for them and that they’ll make certain we know – in twitteriffic detail, what’s going on.
I know too that, 40 years from now, it will still be a milestone
memory in their lives. I started to write “hopefully, a happier one”
but despite all the agony of those terrible days in 1968, I’m embarrassed to tell you that I wouldn’t trade the memory. It’s so deep in my soul and so much a part of my understanding of myself and who I’ve become that despite the horrors within it, I cherish its presence. So, what I wish my sisters in Denver (and Minnesota) is to have conventions — happy or not — as important to their lives, sense of history and purpose and political values as Chicago was to mine. Along with, of course, the fervent hope that this time, there will be something closer to a happy ending.
BARACK OBAMA, BERLIN, AND WHAT WE SHOULD AND CAN BE
First I got this email from a young friend: "LOVED IT – Just brilliant and I am happy to vote again." Then I watched The Speech again early this morning on C-SPAN and marveled at the reaction of 200,000 Berliners in a city that has been, in recent years, a tough room for American leaders. We’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, so I know the city; in my parents’ lifetime it was the capital of the most racist country in the world but now it’s urbane, cerebral and pretty sophisticated, with a stunning history and a development we’ve watched throughout the last ten years that is unparalleled. War(and communist)-ruined buildings and just plain ugly ones have finally been replaced by gleaming new market and skyscraper squares, there’s fabulous mass transit as well as renewed activity in its two opera houses and many theaters and ballet companies. OH and enough museums to keep you busy for months. Just the kind of place to be particularly hostile to a president like George Bush.
So what did Senator Obama bring that made the difference? David Brooks was pretty harsh in the NYTimes: " Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney." To be fair, I guess it can sound that way. The reality, to me though, is that after eight years of a president of whom we could not be proud and whose policies, war, rhetoric and attitude shoved our allies far from our side, a bit of warmth and solidarity is a legitimate introduction. Beyond that, the most profound thing about the speech, in my view, wasn’t Obama but the response to him. Sure, Europe is liberal and politically correct (except, often, about their own immigrants, unfortunately) and a black candidate (even half) for president in the US is attractive, but it’s more than that. It looked, at least to me, like Europeans have been longing for a United States they can believe in again; that perhaps part of the reason Europeans have been so angry at us is that beneath the rubble of the Bush years, we still represent a promise and ideal that Europe has been furious that we’ve abandoned.
Of course, I could be projecting my own heartbreak over Abu Ghraib and the Patriot Act and all the other profanities done in our name; at the horrific lack of inspired leadership both at home and abroad just after 9/11, at the war (How could it happen again – after Vietnam; the same lessons never learned, the same hubris?), at the craven attitude toward energy and life at the bottom end of our economic ladder – at all of it. But I don’t think so. Rather, it seems that under all the anger Europeans have manifested toward the United States, they, like us, want an American leader they can believe in. An America they can believe in. And Barack Obama is about as close to that is you can get without moving to another dimension.
The foundation laid by that inspiration will get us, and our old friends newly re-engaged, through the terrible, tough days ahead. Without a leadership of hope and belief, natural allies outside our borders will be lost to us, as they so sadly have been these past years. And as Senator Obama reminded us, we can’t afford that. Not now.