I've started and abandoned about seven different posts since the election. Nothing I'm able to summon in words can describe the enormity of what has passed in this country with the ascension of the Junior Senator from Illinois.
We, America, land of Wounded Knee and Dred Scott, where non-white, non-male people have had to fight for their rights & freedoms using the very governmental structures that should have unambiguously guaranteed them in the first place, took 219 years to elect its first non-white chief executive and -- as an added bonus -- he has an African/Arabic name shared by the current president's vanquished foe at a time when that same political opposition has gained and maintained tremendous political advantage not just by pressing the electorate's xenophobia button (at the expense of an entire race & culture both here and abroad who share little more than a religion, language-group and skin tone with a small band of men who successfully and spectacularly struck at us here on our own soil) but also from the demonization of anything simply guilty of being vaguely "not American" or least somewhat French.
44th President of the United States of America: Barack Hussein Obama.
This is no longer just the whimpering of a few disaffected ex-hippies and assorted leftist student groups. The country is disintegrating after 40 years of Rethuglican "leadership" and the foot-soldiers who enabled and reinforced the Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II regime are reverting to type as the failure of all their most-cherished tropes and assorted other lies bespeaks their own personal failure and it makes them angry and prone to seek a scapegoat. Like Germany in the 1920's & 1930's. McSneer and Moose-a-lini are doing everything they can to solidify the racist, persecution-complexed middle of American society. Note that I didn't characterize it as "underbelly" or some such. It isn't. This putrescent hatred is interwoven in the very fabric our national character. It is the legacy of a nation built on genocide and human chattel slavery.
I'm not sure what they think will come of it, but the way I see it, McCain is a rich, grumpy, entitled old man who doesn't understand why the world won't just give him what he wants by dint of his gender, skin color, pedigree and resume and if he has to dip his widdle-footsie into the stinking, sulphurous, seething pool of evil that bubbles in the heart of the political right, then so be it, it can't possibly stain him because so doing furthers his ambitions and thus must be for the greater good; not the greater god of all Americans, mind you, but the greater good of the good Americans, the pro-Americans, his friends & family & business partners. His denials of the actual ugliness of his campaign's behavior stem, I think, from his pathological inability to see the wrongness of the underlying worldview that drives the behavior. In other words, the rabble who advocate violence are only doing so in the name of defending John McCain's America. As another senator from Arizona said at the beginning of the Right's nightmarish march to political hegemony (just before going down in defeat to the last Democrat to preside over a national consensus):
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
Which, in light of how utterly without principle or scruple they've conducted their political affairs since reads now like marching orders for a movement. Rethuglicans have seen every action through that lens and John McCain is no different, which is why the souring tone of his rallies doesn't phase him and the preposterousness of his distortions of fact and outright lies simply don't compute for him. His moral compass is broken, his internal ethical radar calibrated to different priorities.
Sarah Palin lies on the other side of McCain's cynical political calculations. She is a dimwit and a demagogue, but she is not a leader, good or bad. She is just another slack-jawed, Kool-Aid drinking rabble who got herself fast-tracked up the ranks through sheer pluck, luck and a total absence of core principle. If she were smarter, she'd be like Karl Rove - a collaborating member of the proletariat who knows his place on the food chain and instead assists the plantation masters in keeping the other slaves in line to earn favors, priviledges and access. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is too stupid to know that she isn't one of them, but rather is the type of manipulative social-climber who takes any apparent lack of social status as merely a failure of perception to be remedied by MILF-y charm, will to power or a well-timed shivving. She is the shiny new face of the same old blood-thirsty, Dixie-anchored rump of an electoral coalition McCain's approaching defeat will reveal.
By "Dixie-anchored" however, I don't mean geographically, although that will be true as well. The Solid South will remain so, even if the city-fied transplants from DC and other dins of iniquity further up the Eastern Seaboard make Virginia and North Carolina swing back and forth over the next few election cycles. No, I mean the mindset and values of The South, the mythical south of the redneck NASCAR "Lost Cause" Sunbelt sprawling cookie-cutter suburb & mega-church popular imagination. THAT South, the one that gets weepy when Lee Greenwood sings "Proud to be an American," is nationwide. And the policies of the ruling class over the last 40 years - enacted through the vigorous machinations of their pet political party, the GOP - have made their lives immeasureably worse through regressive taxation, crony capitalism, a self-justifying military-industrial war-making complex , industrial sell-off, rigging of the financial system and a relentless culture war. These are the ways that a greedy, pernicious ruling class maintains its power not just in America, kiddies, but everywhere in the world. They create a politics, through violence or bribery or both, that will eventually come to resemble the political Right in any country anywhere at any time in history for they are all the same in their fundmental desire to protect power & priviledge and supress the masses for fun & profit. Sometimes this is called monarchy, sometimes a dictatorship or a banana republic or a fascist state, sometimes it is "The People's Republic of..." and the plutocrats mouth communal doctrines of the "for thee not for me" variety, but the desire to constrict, restrict and suppress is an impulse of the political right.
Billmon, who vanished for a few years before re-surfacing recently back over at Daily Kos, wrote about the American variety of this eternal theme on his now-defunct blog (hence - no link):
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology), libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government. . . .
Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists -- both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman). The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as "multiculturalism") coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists -- as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times. . . .
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
A running topic on his blog was the Spanish Civil War, which he persuasively argued was a strong analog to the type of war we're going to have when our Civil War 2 breaks out. The Spanish Civil War was a brutal affair that pitted neighbor against neighbor, neighborhood against neighborhood. It was not a matter of armies blue and gray (or is it blue and red?) ranging against each other across open fields. It was fought with meat cleavers and clubs in alleyways and in the streets. The Nazis helped out with planes and guns, which gave us "Guernica", but that conventional 20th Century-style warfare was the exception. The rest of the war was vicious and rife with atrocities.
I think this time in our history is comparable to the years leading up to our previous civil war in the hostile balkanization of the political camps. Back then, it was about slavery. BTW, never let anyone argue that our Civil War was ever about anything else but whether or not we would be a nation that allowed the ownership of human beings. Anyone who does argue thusly is a southern apologist merely muddying the waters to dilute their own reflected regional culpability.
So, I think we are barreling toward a civil war, something like the Spanish Civil War, a war lacking in front lines, where neighborhoods fielded partisan gang armies against the gang armies other neighborhoods, where neighbors hacked their next-door neighbors to death, where not even churches could offer safe harbor against murderous mobs. I fear for this country because predominant regional political differences as expressed by congressional representation belie deeper cultural differences that have more to do with religious affiliation, level of education and line of work and union affiliation and exist everywhere all at once apart from larger political culture. I am thinking, for instance, of true-blue Austin, an island of education and cultural sophistication in deep-red Texas, a sea of menacingly willful ignorance, hostility to cultural diversity and easy violence. I am also thinking of the fact that the police force in this bright blue city (to say nothing of the firefighters, or even blue-collar union members in general - the number of IATSE stagehands who LOVE George W. Bush is both sickening and shocking - and the entire Borough of Staten Island) are a bright shade of scarlet because red-ness & blue-ness is not an expression of regional difference, but rather of deep-seated cultural impulse. Police in general, NYPD in particular, are always on the side of authoritarianism. As metaphive once pointed out to me - for the police the whole civilian population is divided into two groups: perps and sheep. For police it is not about "protecting and serving" but rather maintaining order first and protecting property second, and serving people only insofar as it reinforces the first two items.
When the shit hits the fan, in Austin I would fear for the safety of the community that has grown up around the University at the hands of an armed and culturally resentful wider population with a collective chip on its shoulder - the animosity between Texas A&M and UT-Austin is only good-natured to a point. In New York, the police are also armed and deeply sympathetic to the racist, violent, and culturally resentful impulses normally attributed to the dark side of Jeff Foxworthy's America. Up to this point, NYPD and their blue-collar fellow-travellers have reached a kind of truce with the liberal forces that dominate this city, but unleashed by widespread social unrest, who knows what kinds of ugliness could ensue.
That is why I argue that the next Civil War, as murky as the lines of our previous war of brother against brother were, won't be even as well-defined as that one.
And, sadly, the fascists won in Spain. They were never defeated and Franco died in his bed of Parkinson's on November 20, 1975. If Obama wins this one, I fear an epic outbreak along all the traditional social and cultural and class lines in this country that could escalate, spurred on by rhetoric from the hate-spewers on talk radio, into a gradually-escalating civil conflict. Their side doesn't view any Democratic administration as a legitimate governing body. Add to that the racial component brought on by Obama's skin color, intensified by the cultural bigotry of his odd-sounding name, amid an economic crisis and a deeply unpopular war abroad, and you have the Ruling Class' Frankenstein's monster going off the rails in a likely violent national social upheaval.
I fear for the health of the candidate and that of our nation.
I haven't posted in a while - starting a new show can really soak up all your free time - but I have to post the following, moved as I am to the act of contributing money not once but twice today.
Contribution Number One: I threw a few bucks to the Obama campaign here - because of this:
Barack Obama is remaking American politics, truly, deeply and (hopefully) for all time. He isn't taking public money for the general election, because he can quickly raise piles of money in small amounts from a huge swath of the American public - which is why he can make the map look like this:
It's bad enough watching the likes of Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and a disturbingly disoriented Nancy Pelosi eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, exempt their largest corporate contributors from the rule of law, and endorse the most radical aspects of the Bush lawbreaking regime. But it's downright pathetic to see them try to depict their behavior as some sort of bipartisan "compromise" whereby they won meaningful concessions:
"When they saw that we were unified in sending that bill rather than falling for their scare tactics, I think it sent them a message," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "So our leverage was increased because of our Democratic unity in both cases.
Not even the media establishment and the GOP can refrain from mocking this pretense they're trying to peddle. What's amazing is that they're actually as devoid of dignity as they are integrity.
As I noted yesterday, the GOP couldn't even wait for the ink to dry on this "compromise" before publicly -- and accurately -- boasting that they not only got everything they want, but got even more than they dreamed they would get.To The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau, GOP House Whip Roy Blunt derided the telecom amnesty provision as nothing more than a "formality" which would inevitably lead to the immediate and automatic dismissal of all lawsuits against the telecoms, while Sen. Kit Bond taunted the Democrats for giving away even more than they had to in order to get a deal: "I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get."
Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi's lap dog, has worked hard these last few weeks to try and pass this bill. I called my representative's office in Washington, Charlie Rangel, last night and urged him to vote against this bill. Happily, he did. To check and see how your representative voted, go to this link.
It pisses me off that it has passed today, 293-129. Thanks, Nancy "Off-The-Table" Pelosi. And Steny, too. Who both voted for it. Despite their spin to the contrary, this is not a compromise, it is a capitulation that gives the president everything he wants. I just don't understand why the Dems have been so eager to bend over and take this one up the ass from a record-settingly unpopular president. Every few months or so, they'd keep putting this bill out there and we (until today) kept defeating it. This time, they got it through with a convoluted set of procedural rules. Again, thanks, Nancy "New-Sheriff-In-Town" Pelosi.
Their eagerness, I suppose, on the one hand comes from the same impulse that has kept them from impeaching George and Barbara's idiot son despite his manifest crimes against the Constitution and common human decency. Somehow, that urge also makes them want to give him whatever he wants in a Quisling-Renfield sort of way. I call it Democratic Battered Wife Syndrome, their fear of an out-of-control Rethugli-bot Party makes them collaborators in their own degradation. That, and I'm sure not a few of them are complicit in the crimes of the telecoms and they hope that this immunity will either put off the retribution for their wrong-doing until they can get out of office or thwart it altogether. Either way, they need to be out of work, up to and including Pelosi and Hoyer. THE 4th AMENDMENT: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Frankly, her "victory" is sickening for a great many reasons, not the least of which was having to hear her fingers-on-a-chalkboard voice claim 2, 209 delegates to clinch - which is the goalpost-moving number her campaign has been peddling because it includes the otherwise uncontested but nevertheless completely disqualified Florida and Michigan delegations. The greater reason is the on-the-ground ugliness behind the lop-sided numbers. She won because the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a (whispering now) nig-ra.
To which I say to the good people of West Virginia (except for you John Cole, because you rock!): Fuck You.
You deserve to stay stuck in the 19th Century. Besides, we all know you're going vote en masse for Johm McSame in the fall anyway, so we don't really need your vote. It's shit like tonight that makes the rest of the country (especially all us coastal elites) take such glee in depicting you like this:
I will come back to the Peak Oil issue I raised a couple of posts ago, but in the meantime this post from the very wonky and always incisive Matt Stoller over at the (decreasingly so, but nevertheless staunchly) pro-Clinton Open Left just nailed down into words what for me has been up to now that je ne sais quoi that has drawn me inextricably to the Obama campaign.
It's the feeling of change, real change. Big change. Of difference. Of finally being on the winning team. For a dumb 'ol boy from Texas who grew up watching the horrific, inexorable march of the cornpone Nazis grow from a few angry, sanctimonious, Christo-fascist bigots in backwoods rural Texas spread like a cancer to infect first the governing apparatus of the state and eventually the whole country. As I have said many times, I left Texas because it is the kind of place that actually elected George W. Bush - on purpose. Twice.
So, for truly the first time in my entire life, I am seeing the vast, nationwide cultural wave of xenophobia and willful, mean-spirited, Dixie-fied ignorance that - after college in West Texas - chased me first to the true-blue heart of Texas (Austin, yawl) then on to New York City, before the cackling gremlins in the Reich-wing's high command with their army of flying monkeys usurped the United States government, the people's government, in a bloodless coup. Since then, they have blown up the world, grinning all the way to their secret swiss bank accounts.
And all along, the most galling, frustrating thing for creative-class types like me and, well, everyone I know, was that we knew - KNEW - we were smarter, harder-working, more clever and overall just plain better at organizing shit in a dynamic and interactive way than the lock-step goobers we faced every election cycle. Which is why we all retreated onto the inter-webs. The hive-mind of the blogosphere was where we could and would organize, find our voice and our power again.
Barack Obama understands that. It is unfortunate for Hillary Clinton that she and her husband, as I wrote a few posts back, are relics from another age. Prior to Obama's emergence, Hillary was salable mostly because she was an only slightly prickly reminder of better days, those indian summer salad days of Clintonian dot-com-&-SUV's-on-cheap-gas prosperity, before the onset of this dystopian winter of BushCo.
We can appreciate what Bill & Hillary did for us back then, but Obama makes us now see them both, and her specifically, for what they truly are: the compromised remnants of the-best-we-could-have-hoped-for as the hurricane of right-wing Dixie-fied hatred (30 years in the making) finally make landfall on the shores of decent society.
Obama has successfully remade the Democratic Party already, and shown that old partisan Washington politics is over if you are a Democrat. Can he do that with Republicans? By stripping power, money and responsibility from outside groups and opponents, Obama is increasing his control of the party apparatus. He is also, however, putting everything on his own shoulders. When the Swift Boaters come back, and they will, it's all on Obama and his movement to hit back. He's betting that he can strip power from their base just as he stripped power from the old Washington way of doing politics within the Democratic Party.
I do not doubt that he can do this during the general election. McCain is such a weak candidate, and the Republicans are in such disarray, that a solid White House victory, 5-7 Senate seats, and 40-50 seats in the House are clearly possible. House Republicans are especially mean right now; insiders tell me they are going to cause problems with the war funding tactics just because they are so depressed from losing in Louisiana and Illinois. They have no money for the House and the Senate, and a depressed base. I'm curious about Obama's governing philosophy, as that is where the Republicans are going to make their stand in 2009. Without traditional outside groups (and he doesn't want them involved, witness his lobbyist ban in his new administration), Obama is going to be relying on the emergent networks that come from his campaign to buttress his priorities, but since we don't actually know what they are, it's hard to figure out what his governing strategy will be.
As Mike Lux wrote earlier, it's time to get ready for Obama as the nominee. I would amplify this and point out that it's time to get ready for a party that is being taken apart and rebuilt as the Obama movement. It's incredibly refreshing, in a sense, for politics to be completely reimagined on top of the internet and with a strong focus on leadership development, volunteers, and outside of DC leadership disdainful of partisanship and the give and take of politics-as-usual. It's also displacing the anti-Bush arguments of the last eight years and the political dynamic it fostered on the left.
There's certainly a danger here of relying on projected numbers instead of traditional power bases, though I don't think he'll be abandoning groups like unions and black churches, nor will any progressive movement structures abandon him. But I really think that the Obama campaign is reacting to this demonization campaign from the right by saying "OK, I'll find voters in so many nooks and crannies and make you work in so many states that you won't have a chance to make this narrative work." His response is not necessarily building a progressive electorate; that would be accomplished by plugging into the nascent progressive structures that already exist. Obama appears to want to build an electorate aligned with Obama's principles and values, and fostering greater participation in politics as a means to move the country forward and break the current polarization. Some Democrats would play on the same playing field and try to win it; Obama's building an entirely new field, one where these narratives and negative ads and the need to tailor the entire general election to 10 independent voters in the middle of Ohio won't matter anymore.
I can't say if it will totally work, but that looks to be the strategy. We've been tantalized with these kinds of efforts before; it's actually a very traditional belief that increased turnout is good for Democrats.
I think all of this is exactly right. You should go read the whole thing, but for now I will end with this quote (also from Stoller's post) before returning to this issue tomorrow in discussion of Peak Oil:
I've been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven't, and they know what it's like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he's not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi's just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force.
That is why Clinton is fighting so damned hard. She and her husband's entire political legacy is at stake. Obama is about to re-make the entire Democratic Party in his image, as Bill did fifteen years ago. He very well could re-make the entire political system before he's through, like Saint Ronnie did thirty years ago. Whether that is good or bad I leave to time and history to decide. Either way, he is a very different creature in very fundamental ways because he has harnassed new technologies and modes of thinking into a movement. None of this would be possible were it not for Howard Dean's campaign four years ago and more recently his 50 State Strategy. As The Great Orange Satan says: Barack Obama is Howard Dean 2.0
ONE: Today is May Day. I will overcome my usual aversion to things red (strangely arising only in the last seven years or so) to celebrate in the traditional color of Labor and The Left. I am a union man and many people fought and died for me to have the living standard I enjoy, even if it has been and continues to be under attack. If the Rethugli-bots had their way, I'd be working for a couple hundred a week (paid in a steeply weakened currency, too, BTW), before taxes, and have no benefits whatsoever. In other words, I'd be working off-Broadway. Been there, done that. I like it here much, much better.
TWO: Today is also the five year anniversary of Mission Accomplished. This text is also in red to symbolize the blood on the hands of George W. Bush and Richard "The Big Dick" Cheney. It is to the Democrat's everlasting shame that they didn't hang that fucking banner around his neck and re-run that fucking picture of Kommander Kod-piece over and over and over again. A failure of nerve, I say. The man is a buffoon, an embarrassment and an utter, complete, epic failure. The saddest part of the whole bloody mess is that he is too fucking stupid to have sufficient inner life to undergo any personal examination that may result in some degree of personal anguish. He will return to Crawford to clear brush all goddamned day, secure in the knowledge that he did right and good, when he should be in an orange jumpsuit in The Hague on trial for war crimes (along with a raft of other people: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc...). Anything less than the whole lot of them imprisoned for life - perhaps in a place not unlike Gitmo - for crimes against humanity at the VERY least is a moral failure on the part of the American people. With two stolen elections and no public outcry to go on, I'm fully prepared to be disappointed.
I think Hillary Rodham Clinton is politically radioactive and always has been. I don't think it is all entirely her fault, nor her husband's, but the fact remains that for a complex cocktail of reasons, she is a lightening rod for large swaths of the voting public and though the vastly greater part of their hatred for her is stupidly irrational, misogynistic, bigoted and unevolved, it is not entirely without some basis. She demeanor is off-putting. From anything except a red state street-cred building perspective, her voting record in the Senate hovers somewhere between mixed and shameful. She and her husband together may make for a rockstar pair when allowed to be the unchallenged king and queen of the Democratic prom, but their survival mechanisms are truly ugly to behold when they have to defend their status.
As one of her constituents - a constituent who has voted for her twice, mind you - I still see her as a coldly calculating political operative who is incapable of having an honest emotion, other than a raw thirst for power. Up to now, that's been fine. I knew what she and Bubba were up to when they selected New York for their post-White House life. I've just been glad she wasn't on the other team and as far as bringing it home for New York, apart from larger more statesman-like concerns, she has represented The Empire State just fine.
But she does have some very steep negatives.
In other words, I kinda, sorta buy into a diluted, de-fanged version of the Washington-insider/Rethugli-bot/Rush Limpblob caricature of her as a the type of person to cold-bloodedly murder Vince Foster and then cover it up. No, I don't actually think she's a murderer or any of the other inhuman things the Reich-wing blowhards accuse her of (without actually believing it themselves - it's just to tap the lizard brains of the rubes and shit-kickers), but I do think she's a coldly calculating manipulator, just as is her husband, if slightly less skilled. As is, frankly, any politician who is any good. Including Obama.
In the face of an unrelenting assault from the right, and the inevitable and equally relentless capitulation on the part of the Dems, for the last several, well, decades, the Clintons may have been imperfect warriors, but they were our warriors. I was not a fan of Bill Clinton's, but I would never admit to anyone from across the aisle that I didn't like him or his wife, because then it would seem like we agreed that he deserved what was happening to him. My reasons for not liking Bill Clinton were precisely the 180º opposite of theirs. They hated him because he was not enough like them - too smart, too cultured and right about Vietnam and Civil Rights; for me he was too much one of them - too quick to appease the hell-hounds of The Right, to sell out his left-wing and otherwise affect a good ol' boy persona in an attempt to keep the haters from hating him too terribly much. In other words, a phony, a suck-up and a striver. But he and his wife were the best we had in a difficult situation.
Until, that is - amid a deepening BushCo dystopian winter - a broken and defeated Al Gore emerged, phoenix-like, from the shadow of the Clintons to cleave to Howard Dean and become something almost more than human at the same time that the inter-webs resurrected a moribund progressive movement by way of a hivemind army of bloggers and activists. Something new was emerging and this flawed man and his equally flawed wife, who had been the storm wall The Left needed as a bulwark against the hurricane of eliminationist, single-party-state Reich-wing power that reached landfall during his administration, began to appear as surviving relics from another, darker era. Impeachment had been the hammer blow which expended the hurricane's energy. That the two of them remained standing amid such fury is worthy of mine and everyone else's respect, but the world has changed and Hillary has not.
In many ways, the very character traits that allowed the Clintons to weather Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" storm, traits baked into the very porcelain of their political shells by decades in Arkansas politics, are exactly not what America and the Democrats need now - traits that manifest as DLC/centrist/"third-way" triangulation. Survival tactics of the abused, not a vision with an actual corresponding strategy. Hillary, like her husband, is a reflexive dinosaur, a relic from another era when cackling neanderthal Dixiecrats and unreconstructed Nixonite operatives colluded with their pearl-clutching financiers in the hippie-hating Old Money crowd to remake the stodgy GOP in their image while the Dems for the first time in their 150-year history were forced to learn how to hold on to power without a Southern Wing. Hence, they developed a fetish for drawlin' white southerners.
It has been a steep and painful 40-year learning curve for everyone involved, including the electorate. The object portion of the lesson for them has yet to truly endeth, BTW, as the repercussions for decades of believing GOP hype are just now starting to make themselves felt. As the economy craters and our infrastructure crumbles and the oil runs out and the planet heats up, those lessons will echo down for generations to come. At any rate, despite the fact that he had the second-best progressive bona fides in the Democratic field (and I supported him for it), the era of the white male with a Southern drawl as the only viable Democratic candidate ended ironically when John Edwards exited stage left.
Obama was traveling inside a protective shield made up of the Beltway Insiders' Clinton-hatred. As is becoming clear, once she's out of the way, that shield will be powered down. Obama will be just the Democrat running for President and if there's anybody the Insiders' loathe and despise nearly as much as they loathe and despise the Clintons it's any Democrat who runs for President.
The longer the primary campaign has gone on the more lessons Obama has had to learn about what it's going to be like in the fall.
---It's infuriating the Beltway Insiders.
They have been rooting from the beginning to see Clinton humiliated. Way back when, when the show was just getting started and they were declaring that her nomination was inevitable, they were consoling themselves with the hope that Rudy Giuliani would mop up the floor with her in November. Then they saw that Obama had a chance to give them what they wanted a lot sooner, with the bonus of giving them another Democrat whose humiliation in November they could root for and aid and abet.
They've wanted nothing more than to be able to laugh at her in defeat and declare that it proof that the country had rejected...Bill Clinton, at long last.
It's always been about Whitewater.
Yes, Lance, that's true. And yes, I am somewhat guilty of being too invested in the whole thing to be truly objective about who should or should shouldn't leave the race. I follow it every day. The only ones really suffering from "Clinton-fatigue" are the Washington insiders who have always hated Hillary and the political junkies who follow this stuff every single day. But Ma & Pa Peoria don't know and don't care. For them and the average Democrat in "fly-over country," the race has been invigorating and a real-life, real-time extension of Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy. For the first time in most of their political careers, and especially in the entire lives of the young and enthusiastic who are the life-blood of any campaign's ground game, what they think matters and someone in power cares to learn what that is.
I don't think it is Pollyana-ish to think that all of this could actually be good for the party. Washington insiders are the ones who always proclaim - no matter what "it" is - that "it" is good for Republicans and bad for Democrats; heads the GOP wins, tails the Democrats lose. The media have become a self-policing spin-zone for Rethugli-bot talking points. That comfortable bubble is being invaded by history (reality having a well-known liberal bias) and even if Obama may not be as progressive as I and many of my fellow-travellers on The Left would like, he is so much more the Man of the Moment than his opponent - who is burdened by baggage not entirely of her making, but for which she nevertheless liable.
I maintain my belief that this campaign is being driven by seismic forces in the political firmament that transcend personality. This isn't 1972 or 1984 or even 1988, no matter what people say. The Democrats aren't running against Republican incumbents or even a popular Republican predecessor. The economy is rapidly deteriorating. We are in the midst of a moneypit, quagmire overseas and there actually are terrorists out there who require attention. Oh --- and the US is now considered to be a force for evil in the world due to the fact that we kidnap people off the streets of foreign countries, torture them and keep them in prison without trials or any hope of being set free. Oh, and we invade countries based on lies.
We are in a hell of a mess and the country knows exactly who is responsible for it. They will logically vote accordingly. But with the economy now a huge part of the equation, I don't think political reform is the best campaign theme for Democrats. It's early enough for him to pivot off reform and put some meat on the bones of the Hope and Change message. But he should do it soon. The Democratic candidate can ride to victory on a tsunami, but he or she still needs to stay with the wave.
All of which is to say, I think this whole nomination fight has been a tough one because it had to be. We are fighting for the soul of the party and we are fighting for the life of our beleaguered nation. Such transitions are never pretty or clean or bloodless. Nor should they be. If they were easy, they wouldn't be powerful enough to actually change things for the better (I'm looking at you, you starry-eyed Reagan-Revolutionaries).
Bottom line: I am resentful that I find myself once again via a vis the Clintons with a political opinion that superficially resembles one held by my mortal enemies in the Reich-wing. I don't really hate Hillary Clinton, I just think her time has passed. My fear that she is damaging the party could very well be just so much Chicken-Little-ism, but I grant that I could be just buying the hype.
Hillary is still in it. The result is not unexpected, but I still was too depressed last night to even watch the coverage, fantasizing as I was of an Obama blow-out, so I went to bed.
40 years ago today, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot with a rifle fired by James Earl Ray.
I want to forget this sad, sad day in anticipation of the event wherein Obama would give his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention 45 years to the day after MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech. That will make for a much better anniversary.
One man come in the name of love One man come and go One man come here to justify One man to overthrow In the name of love! One man in the name of love In the name of love! What more? In the name of love!
One man caught on a barbed wire fence One man he resists One man washed on an empty beach One man betrayed with a kiss
In the name of love! What more in the name of love? In the name of love! What more? In the name of love!
...nobody like you...there's nobody like you...
Mmm...mmm...mmm... Early morning, April 4 Shot rings out in the Memphis sky Free at last, they took your life They could not take your pride
In the name of love! What more in the name of love? In the name of love! What more in the name of love? In the name of love! What more in the name of love...
The wheels of justice turn slowly, sometimes so slow as to seem like they don't move at all, but they do in fact turn.
Don Siegelman is a free man, again walking the street, breathing free air.
He isn't completely in the clear on the bribery charges, as his case still needs to be heard on appeal, but now at least he can appeal because the corrupt, Banana-Republi-thug judge Mark Everett Fuller (who, since the summer of 2006, has been holding-up the release into the public record of the transcript from his trial - which prevents him from even filing for appeal) finally had his decision overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.
It was, naturally, a Karl Rove hit job and I think this might just be the one that brings down the Dark Sith Lord. But whether it does or not, America is just a little less of a banana republic that jails opposition party members on trumped-up charges than we were a couple of days ago.
Considering how bleak these last seven years have been for the rule of law and a just society, this is a welcome ray of sunshine. I'd like to think that this might be the beginning in a long string of chickens coming home to roost for the thugs, thieves and theocrats in the GOP. Whether a reckoning comes to pass or not, at least this man now has a reason to smile:
I saw the title of this post as a phrase this morning at Glenn Greewald's digs over at Salon.com. I agree with his assessment that there is "no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction." Period. Over at my old site, I have called it the "Dixie Stench" because the particular flavor of crypto-racist, persecution-complexed Christo-fascism that has fused itself so thoroughly to the very DNA of the GOP (the political arm of the modern conservative movement), is a direct descendant of the violently racist political culture of the post-confederate south. This is the long-term fallout from Nixon's odious "Southern Strategy" wherein the knuckledragging, mouth-breathing bigots of Old Dixie were told, while still seething about a full decade of federal intervention in their "traditional" way of life, that they had friends in the (former) Party of Lincoln. Of course, this seduction and pandering on the part of the GOP didn't become overt until the 1980 campaign when Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun deliberately used the phrase "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi as a dog-whistle signal to the southern racists - a scant sixteen years after three Civil Rights workers had died there while trying to overcome the awful legacy that jingoistic political formulation circumscribes.
Which brings me to Bill Clinton.
Make no mistake, when a white, southern man stands in front of a crowd of white people in a place as rigidly old-fashioned as a VFW hall in a state that was among the first to secede and last to rejoin the Union, and says, in his best Arkansas drawl, this (bold face mine)...
"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country, [...] And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."
...it means exactly what you would think it means if you were as ungenerous as possible in interpreting it. Doubt me? Watch the video.
As Bob Cesca says over at his place "you can see his sly little smile as he says "other stuff"." Also note that he uses the phrase OUR politics, a very loaded phrase when uttered by a white southerner to other white southerners about a black person. Bill Clinton knows that. He is playing directly to the sense of threatened tribalism.
Now, I've had fights with my family. All of you know this about me. During the entire Clinton presidency, but particularly in the fall of 2000, I had screaming fights over politics in the living room of my parent's house where things were said that have over time come to erode and ultimately diminish our relationship. One of those fights involved pointing out to my father, who grew up dirt poor in West Texas, got himself college-educated, into the middle class and married with two successful children despite the class-based limitations of his upbringing, that Bill Clinton is the embodiment of the American Dream - a brilliant and intellectually curious kid who grew up dirt-poor without a father in a two-room shack in Arkansas became President of the United States and would lead the country during an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity - the essence of the class-blind, meritocratic American ideal. Mister Smith in Washington and all of that. George W. Bush is the embodiment of the un-American Dream - a dimwitted and incurious spoiled brat who used his family name and connections to avoid any adult responsibilities or consequences for his actions, amass an unearned fortune and achieve the White House (again unearned - twice) where he lead the country into a waking nightmare of squandered blood and treasure in wars of personal vanity to the financial benefit of his cohorts and financed on the backs of the poor - the essence of the very worst of Old Europe's aristocracy. We had a revolution over just those sorts of things, if I recall, but I have never been able to convince my father of any of this. To him, Dubya is a good ol' boy from West Texas, just like him. And Bill Clinton is a Lib'ruhl.
And he buys it because Dubya and the slick GOP operatives who manufactured his good ol' boy image understand how to tap into that very tribal ideal, about which Digby has been writing for years and which is finally getting enough intellectual currency out in the lefty inter-webs to catch on with a leading light like Glenn Greenwald.
Bill Clinton, being the bright guy that he is, understands all of this - whether overtly or intuitively I cannot say - and he used that notion of the "threatened tribalism" in that speech he gave to tap into that part of the GOP lizard brain against a fellow Democrat who happens to be dark-skinned, for the benefit of his wife. That act (amid all his and his wife's other attacks on Obama) reveals the true nature of the political climate in Washington - that we actually have three major political classes in America, but only two formal "Party" representations to encompass them: the Ruling Class, the Bureaucratic Class and Labor.
The Ruling Class is self-explanatory - either a group of entitled individuals either with inherited wealth who cast a longing eye to the old aristocracy of Europe and resent democracy, or with "earned" wealth and a wildly inflated sense of their own potency as rockstar C.E.O.'s or captains of industry or Nietzschean supermen. They have most of the money but are at a steep numerical disadvantage in a democracy. In Britain they would be called the Tories. In America, the GOP is their party.
Labor means more than just labor unions. It is what used to be meant by blue collar, working class and working poor. It also includes immigrants and service industry wage slaves. They may have numerical advantage in a democracy, but little money or time to be involved in politics, a hole once filled by Big Labor but now exploited by the other classes. The Renfields from the Bureaucratic Class, along with their collaborators from Labor, have been able to break up this group along racial and tribal lines in a very successful, multi-generational divide-and-conquer campaign most saliently detailed in "What's the Matter With Kansas." The Democrats should be their party but they have been successfully sub-divided along mostly racial lines between D's & R's.
The Bureaucratic Class is most often mis-identified as the "swing voters" or middle class. In an earlier day, they would have been known as "The Merchant Class" or the bourgeoisie. These people range from office-tower cubicle drones to temp workers to the Creative Class to small business entrepreneurs to school teachers and college professors to government office clerks to middle management in industry across the United States. They are the cogs-and-gears of the vast machinery of our economy, the million little pieces that allow the whole system to operate. They are its greatest beneficiaries, and to some greater or lesser small extent, complicit in its crimes. They can be Dems or Rethugs, depending on how they self-identify - which is itself a function of biography, perceived social mobility and various historical socio-regional influences. It is also the most fluid and permeable group. New members of the Ruling Class almost exclusively derive from this group while old members of the Ruling Class arrive (though they usually stop) here when in social decline. Fresh blood from Labor arrives here occasionally but usually very tenuously (a long trip up and a short trip back down) and rarely move beyond. Especially under Rethugli-bot rule, people drop out of this group far more frequently than they join it. Under the programs of the New Deal, this group flourished to unprecedented levels, and since Saint Ronnie, they have been in steep decline - which should make them the natural allies of the Democrats, except that it doesn't for reasons that have been examined ad nauseum across the inter-tubes for almost a decade now.
Which brings me to another point I have made off and on the last couple of years. I have argued, as have others, that the choice between the two parties is not like a choice between a red car and a blue car, or the red team and the blue team. The neat labels of liberal and conservative or Left and Right are not descriptive enough for the complex world we live in. What we are talking about is such a fundamental difference in belief about Life and how to live it, about the nature of Truth and how it is obtained, about how society should be structured and who should benefit from its products, about who should live and who should die, that to reduce party affiliation to one's stance on whether the boys should be allowed to kiss each other is the height of distraction politics.
But over the last 40 years, the Renfields have waged a very successful PR campaign in the form of a ginned-up "culture war" (in order to disguise a class war already fought and won by the other side) that grew out of Southern racial animosity and cross-regional resentments, then spread across the country along racial and class lines, resulting in a world where my formulation of the GOP as a coalition comprised of "The Stupid, The Deluded and The Corrupt" is the dominant party of the land. If we only evaluate our politics as Left or Right, the triptych doesn't make any sense. But if we can see it as class-based, then from Labor comes those too stupid to know the GOP is fucking them over (I should say "ignorant" but "stupid" scans better), while the Bureaucrats provide those too deluded to understand they are not part of the Ruling Class and the Ruling Class itself almost entirely provides those too ethically and morally compromised to give a shit about anything except enjoying the fruits of their own corruption. We are ruled by a group of people who resent accountability and are largely detached from reality or the consequences of their actions. Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.
So, along comes William Jefferson Clinton, that rare animal who has been able to successfully leave Labor for the Ruling Class. His impeachment witch-hunt was both a punishment meted out by the Ruling Class for forgetting his place and an induction ceremony of sorts - a test and rite of passage - which he obviously passed as we now see him and Poppy Bush hangin' out around the golf course.
As a full-fledged member of the Ruling Class, he has clearly forgotten his roots as fully as my father, and I believe that he and his wife now see themselves as having so successfully leveraged the apparatus of the Democratic ""brand" over the last several decades to their own personal political advantage as to now be synonymous with "Democrat." Bill and Hillary Clinton really do think of the Democratic Party as their own personal route to respectability within the rarified air of the Halls of American Power, except that rather than making their fortune in oil or timber or, say, collaboration with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis (I'm looking at you, Prescott Bush) - a fortune made in exploitation of some commodity - they've made their social and political fortune as a kind of political service provider to the Ruling Class by re-engineering the Party of the Left and delivering unto the Ruling Class a pliant, apologetic, capitulatory Blue Team - for the kinder, gentler aristocrat. Why else do you think Hillary has been siding with McCain? She sees herself as part of the same social class. As the reigning queen of the Blue Team, she genuinely, honestly thinks it is quite simply her turn and Obama is just an upstart who should wait in fucking line, make his bones and pay his goddamned dues. That's why she saw no irony whatsoever in magnanimously offering him the veep position a few weeks ago, despite being hopelessly behind by every measurable indicator. "L'Democrats, c'est moi," indeed.
Going even further, Bill resents the hell out of this new guy who is challenging his wife's bid for immortality because not only does he see himself as the first in a long line of future rulers (along which his wife would be the next natural step until Chelsea can make a go at it - ad infinitum), at a personal level this slender, handsome, charismatic rising star is a challenge to Bill's legendary virility, his status as "The Big Dog" and de facto leader of the Democratic Party, the very source of his power and respectability. While a Hillary administration would obviously deepen and strengthen his primacy as the Greatest Living Democrat (possibly all the way into immortality), an Obama presidency would signal the end of it and his reversion to (by way of his wife's failed presidential bid) just another Democrat with a vague presidential history - just another Carter or Kerry. He wants to enjoy his time at the top unsullied by a natural rival. The fact that the brewing conflict between the two is taking on racial overtones is incidental, I think, because for Bill it is simply about having the biggest dick in the party. The fact that Al Gore has found his own path to a parallel super-celebrity he can dismiss as merely the social striving of a nerd who never was quite as cool as him, but the easy charm and sex appeal of Barack Obama is harder to attack because it is a direct threat to the underpinnings of his manhood, a real and present danger to his perceived and, frankly, deliberately engineered social standing in the social galaxy of the Ruling Super Class.
Which is why he is pulling out all the stops and triangulating like hell, just like he did fifteen years ago along class lines, this time along racial ones. As a poor boy from rural Arkansas, the lower reaches of the Labor Class, he has fought and dug and scratched his way to the top, to membership in the Ruling Class, and he now intends to pull up the ladder behind him.
We can't let him or his wife win this one. This is bigger than the both of them. I leave the final words to Frank Schaeffer at Huffington Post:
Obama offers civility in the midst of a drunken national bar fight. Obama speaks in complete sentences, well-turned paragraphs, offers thoughts with intellectual depth, nuance, humility and compassion.
[...]
By providence or blind luck, we are being given a second chance. In Obama our founders appear once again stepping from the mists of time to offer a wayward great, great grandchild an opportunity for redemption.
[...]
If we squander this undeserved reprieve and choose business-as-usual, if we don't elevate ourselves out of our self-made mire, we will step into a future of steep and steady decline and war without end. It won't matter if you are right or left. It won't matter if the Republicans or the Democratic Party wins. We will all lose.
Haven't had time to post a whole bunch the last few days. I'm also rather tired. Daylight savings cut into an already foreshortened night Saturday into Sunday morning. I spent Sunday night (after two shows) polishing up paperwork for a new show, which has me working during the day. Yesterday, while we were working, a fire destroyed the apartment of one of my friends and co-workers and I helped him clean up last night. It was bad. He loved his cats. He had ten of them, two are now dead and three are badly burned at the vet's. The last dead cat was found right before I left, so even as the place was looking better (and - by "better" - I mean looking less like the inside of a piece of charcoal) and our spirits were improving slightly, the hope of there only being one casualty evaporated. I rode home on the subway depressed, damp, muddy, covered in soot and smelling like a chimney. I didn't sleep well last night and awoke with a splitting headache.
But that's my personal story. On to politics. So much has happened. Obama wins in Mississippi. Cool. No doubt Clinton is still conniving about how to fuck up the whole process.
And about that whole Eliot "Ness" Spitzer and the hookers thing? Whatever. He's probably guilty and if he is then fuck him. And, on this topic, Izzy has a teh awesome post today that offers a fantastic way to handle the legalization of something that shouldn't be against the law in the first place.
But as for Spitzer I think someone called in a political hit. The clock is running out on the Rethugli-bots and they know it and they're scared. Let's face it, unless they steal it (and they likely will), a Democratic president will bring in an army of the best and the brightest and all of them animated by a pent-up fury at being treated like diseased red-headed step-children for years or even decades by the sneering, sleazy and smugly self-righteous membership of the opposing party. Spitzer was the odds-on favorite to be tapped for Attorney General and his record as a fearless, tireless crusader against the thieves and criminals on Wall Street means that the sleaze in the GOP would have had a great deal to worry about.
All of this happened way too fast. And it isn't even the incredible mess of detail that the press already seemed to have (insider tips?) but rather the not one but twospoof songs ("Love Client #9" & "Prostitutin' Spitz") I heard on the radio this morning that had lyrics and everything. Way too fast, even in the Internet age. I'm just saying this whole thing has a Rovian PR negative campaign roll-out feel to it. I'm too tired to elaborate right now, but I will go into more detail soon. Let me just say that I think the Spitzer sting boils down to the AG mess being not about who was fired for not following the orders of the dark masters of the GOP Star Chamber, but who kept their jobs. Digby says it all much better than I can.
So, yeah, I think it was a hit and I bet Don Siegleman in Alabama would agree with me.
The most cloying thing about the Oba-maniacs is the thing many of his most vocal critics (with some justification, I admit) decry as "cult-ish." Such as it is with movements, I reckon. But then, without at least some emotion, we would never have any real social change. Emotion, vis a vis politics, arises from convictions affirmed or offended and Barack Hussein Obama, despite his rather slim progressive bona fides, is still a walking, talking affirmation of the better angels of our nature, a flesh-and-blood manifestation of racial harmony, cross-cultural understanding and colorblind meritocracy. (NOTE: He will deliver his nomination acceptance speech 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" - if Hillary doesn't fuck it all up)
Because Obama speaks to that part of all of us that longs for change, the emotional response can be overwhelming at times. For technocratic Establishment players like Hillary and good ol' boy "maverick" Sky Captain Andy Rooney, such abstract, non-commoditizable merits lack malleability; they are axiomatic and have their own inherent, non-reducible value. For minds steeped in the tit-for-tat, swap-meet atmosphere of the prevailing D.C. culture, a thing so-resembling actual principles simply does not compute. They see it as weak. Or naive. Neither can comprehend why he would appeal to so many people, which is what drives Hillary to mock it, and the GOP with their enablers in the media to dismiss Obama and the wave he is riding as mere enthusiasm, just more post-1960's naivete that will evaporate in the pressure-cooker of Washingtonian realpolitik. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." Whenever anybody has the temerity to rile people's emotions up like this, to make them believe that things don't have to be the way they are, angry loners always materialize to dispatch them. I fear for the inspirational ones, for America has too often had a way of neutralizing them, from a schoolbook depository in Dallas, a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, a motel balcony in Memphis.
Please, Mister Secret Service Man, keep "Renegade" safe at night. Please. Please.
Please.
For, though I have my doubts about his ultimate power (and his commitment) to really change things, he is still the best available option. And besides, people change (see "Roosevelt, Franklin D." + "class, traitor to his") and Obama is not leading a movement as much as he is riding a wave. The four-decade GOP pushback against modernity is at an end. With Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, the ruling class was able to seduce the Dixie bigots and their like-minded fellow 'Mur-kuns that it really was a white, Christian nation afterall and it's the fault of all the dirty fucking hippies, uppity negroes and snooty wimmin-folk that it isn't more so. Just ask William F. Buckley. As usual, the 1960's become a Rashômon moment in the American experience. Where you stand on the 1960's is, frankly, where you stand on America in general. America in her best moments has always been about expansion and inclusion, but the Rethugli-bots have leveraged the forces of counter-revolution, not the better angels of our nature, to electoral advantage as far as reduction and exclusion can go - to the likely economic and social ruin of the United States.
With Saint McCain, I can sort of understand why he doesn't get it. He thinks the way he does since he really is just a mean old white guy who was supposed to inherit a world run on the principle of the white man's burden, but those meddling kids got in the way. He and his GOP ilk are barely part of the 20th Century, much less the 21st, so he and his fellow-travellers have simply become irrelevant to the grand stage of history. Had Chimpy McLies-A-Lot been clearing brush in Crawford, Texas that day, mentally replaying his defeat over and over again in the hot September sun, instead of reading "My Pet Goat" in Florida, he too would represent a similarly point-sized endnote in the Grand Narrative of American History, a road not-taken that faded into historical irrelevance. Instead, Dubya now gets a whole chapter, but there's little we can do to change that now.
But Hillary is different. We have to pay attention to her for two reasons:
One, the positive reason, we cannot escape the fact that it is deeply significant in American history that a woman finally has, or (until recently) had anyway, a very real shot at the White House. In world history, though, who gives a shit? If a violently misogynistic, Third World, quasi-medieval cesspool like Pakistan can elect a woman (much less the 60+ other women that have been world leaders in just the last 50 years - to say nothing of woman monarchs like Queen Elizabeth or Nefertitti), the US doesn't get credit for showing up at the address for a party that happened and dispersed long ago. No, apart from her gender, Hillary is just another candidate with no unique qualifications. She has unfortunately become the Establishment candidate, her Rovian antics over the past couple of weeks should be indicator enough of that.
Two, the negative reason, she is the wife of a former president, a very popular former president, no matter how many GOP-enablers may acquiesce to Rethugli-bot revisionism. And this number two is the negative reason we have to pay attention to her because we have to ask ourselves if we want Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton. 24 years (at least - maybe 28) of the same two families. Really? When did we surrender to the notion of a ruling class? I know we've always had one in reality, but never have we so formally embraced it. Should we not fight that trend? Is that not why we had a revolution? Isn't that one of our ideals?
Hillary doesn't think so. I boil down my problem with her down to two things:
She and Bill have come to think of themselves as inseparable from the identity of the whole of the Democratic Party. "L'Democrats, c'est moi." Her arm-twisting of the superdelegates is a function of this self-serving delusion. She presented herself as the inevitable candidate. She thought she could get away with basking in Bill's reflected glory because her husband is a rockstar in the Democratic pantheon. She and her husband took notes when the conventional wisdom about Gore became that he should have embraced The Big Dog, the most popular living Democratic president. My problem with that is the one I have always had with Bill, that he and his whole DLC project burned the Democratic left wing and did long-term damage to the party to say nothing of the republic. He certainly helped himself politically, but he came to power by triangulating against the larger membership and traditional power base of his party at a time when that seemed like the only option for a national Democrat. As we sit amid the wreckage of the GOP's forty-year scorched-earth campaign against the modern world, the time for that kind of "third way" self-serving capitulation has clearly passed. Bill & Hillary's historical moment was fleeting and has gone.
She was so traumatized by the astro-turf witch hunt against her and her husband in the 1990s that it seems to me she now thinks of herself as finally having earned membership in "The Club" or "The Establishment" and godammit no fucking upstart from the hinterlands is going to derail her inevitable candidacy. Her praise of McCain and denegration of Obama in recent days shows that she is more loyal to fellow members of Sally Quinn's "Village" than to the unwashed masses and other assorted riff-raff in her own party. Her arm-twisting of the superdelegates is also a function of this delusion. But this is not a recent phenomenon. Her votes for the AUMF and the UN Resolution, for the bankruptcy bill, for Kyl-Lieberman all reveal either a striving politician befuddled by the fog of Rethugli-bot lies, or a cynical operator building street cred for a future tri-angulating presidential run. Of course, we knew what she and Big Dog were up to when they settled on New York for their post-Washington life, but we here in the Empire State elected (and re-elected) her anyway.
So this seems like Obama's moment. The tide began to turn in 2006, but last night's defeat of a heavily-funded Rethugli-bot in Denny "the Manatee" Hastert's old district show's that the GOP "brand" is degrading everywhere its power isn't tied to overt racism, which bodes well for such a transformative candidate as Obama. No, he isn't as progressive as I would like. I was a Kucinich supporter before I switched to Edwards. Obama as a politician isn't far enough left for me, but no one else is even close. Frankly, he doesn't have to be because a ship this big underway doesn't stop or turn easily; he only has to begin the process. If change is truly afoot, forty years of corrosion to the body politic won't mend in a few election cycles. This fight will take generations. I recognize that Obama is only human - not some kind of vessel - but symbols do have power nevertheless. Somebody not-white with one, two, three atypical American names in the most powerful office in the world is a very potent symbol indeed, both here and abroad.
When William F. Buckley stood athwart history and yelled Stop! some half-century ago, he only succeeded insofar as he inspired a movement that enabled the luddite forces of bigotry and hatred to build a dam in the path of progress. That dam has been showing cracks for a very long time and I hope and believe that Obama could be the historical wedge to finally split one of those cracks wide open, carrying the GOP and the DLC-wing of the Democrats with it while "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
I've started and abandoned about seven different posts since the election. Nothing I'm able to summon in words can describe the enormity of what has passed in this country with the ascension of the Junior Senator from Illinois.
Barack Obama understands that. It is unfortunate for Hillary Clinton that she and her husband, as I wrote a few posts back, are relics from another age. Prior to Obama's emergence, Hillary was salable mostly because she was an only slightly prickly reminder of better days, those indian summer salad days of Clintonian dot-com-&-SUV's-on-cheap-gas prosperity, before the onset of this dystopian winter of BushCo.
