Only two people have commented on this blog since I began writing it, and both times they were in tune. In tune not only with me, but probably with most everybody else reading and writing on the site. A few days ago though a friend emailed me a response to the blog from a friend of hers - Monica - and right now while our Obama waits to take over is the time to deal with it.
Monica lives in New York, and doesn’t disapprove of Obama. She probably would be one of the 78 percent approving – if she answered the pollster’s questions, and she might not. Her attitude is aligned with many Americans who think it doesn’t make much difference who’s president. Their lives will be unaffected. So why not vote for the guy Joe Six-pack wants to have a beer with? This sentiment resulted in the runaway train wreck of the Bush years, and if we’re not careful will curtail the Obama possibilities. My guess is that even many of people who voted for Obama share her point of view. It sounds intelligent and rational.
First, her commentsl:
“Below is a reply I was formulating regarding your friends blog on Obama. I didn't finish it, but I can't think anymore.
Even in Sydney there were expatriates from the US because of Bush. Sean said he came to Australia after Kerry lost to Bush. He just had to "get away". But I don't think anyone really knows how to manage a nation’s economy. It's intricate and interdependent and it comes down to the consumer in the end. Every democratic nation is that way. Sure, some nations have policies that by themselves sound great (like health care in Switzerland), but when you step back and look at the larger picture (over-worked and under-paid doctors that want to leave; short medical staff equating long waiting lines) it doesn't look like the solution to the problem. People like the idea of minimal government intervention in business and it's great for a country's economic growth where businesses can monopolize and mass produce(Starbucks, Barnes & Nobel, McDonalds), but that can also cause greed, over-production and wealthy businesses that can buy politicians that will give them tax-breaks, tax-credits. Compare that to a country with over-regulation like India. Businesses had to wait forever to get state approval to start a business, and then they get over taxed where the employer ends up making less than the employee. Anyone with average intelligence could see that the housing-market boom was a scam. What determines how a house should be valued at? Aside from the appliances, the materials cost to build the house, it's what the house next door is selling including the value someone places on it. Who determines this value? The consumer. No one wanted to intervene because that's business. Let business take care of itself.”
Okay, not that offensive, right? More neutral, almost legitimate? But isn’t this the problem? The “yawn” constituency. The close to a majority of Americans who think, “Whatever,” are the ones who will hold us back. It’s time to pull together, not just secretly hope something might improve.
So my response:
First, sure, managing most anything is complicated, and a nation’s economy – especially the U.S.’s – is complicated and difficult. But when you put people in charge who don’t believe in the task it’s far beyond difficult; it’s doomed. This defines the Bush years. The people who are running the show ideologically don’t believe in government, and if they did, many are too incompetent to function effectively. Saying no one knows how, just encourages and excuses failure.
Heath care in Switzerland? How about in every first world country? (Except the U.S., of course.) Every single country spends less per capita and by any measure gets more for their money than the U.S. does. This isn’t opinion – as is hers about Switzerland – this is true.
Doctors, insurance companies, HMO’s, the drug industry have all conspired for various reasons to provide inferior service at higher prices. And in one way or another have paid off government officials to keep it this way.
Overworked doctors, long lines, short medical staff? Sounds like she had a bad experience in Switzerland. I do know first hand that Canadians, Brits, and the French are very happy with their health care, and many studies extoll the virtues of the Swiss system. Monica might ask what nurses think about healthcare in the hospital closest to her in New York. It won’t be good and these are people in the trenches.
Saying what people want is usually reflective of personal beliefs. Monica says people don’t want government oversight. Monica I suppose doesn't but I wonder about the rest of us. Certainly having the “right” amount of government oversight is an ongoing process but the hands off approach will never work. Ask Alan Greenspan what he thinks now in retrospect about unregulated markets.
Sure it takes too long to start a new business in India, here in Brazil too. We need to improve.
But to say that employees make more than their employers is silly. I know more about Brazil, but also know something about India. In both countries, it’s all about unreported income. Employees’’ income is almost always reported. Employers on the other hand often do not report their full income. If you are in a business of some kind that has government oversight, maybe then you report all (or pay off a government official or two), but offhand I don’t know of such a business. Such a Brazilian business or Indian business, I mean.
Probably the most accurate reporting of all business in these two countries are foreign corporations. The U.S., for example makes it a felony for its corporations to evade income tax or bribe public officials in foreign countries. I doubt much enforcement took place during the Bush years, but this too should change. And will, I believe.
About her comments on the economics of Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, she needs to understand that they are subject to the same economic forces as other businesses, and that monopolies are illegal (it's just the definition that shifted during Bush). Starbucks closed 150 stores last week, yet they almost always beat the competition. In everything but price usually.
However, when an independent takes them on in terms of a cool designed place, competent and friendly employees, and a great product, the independent often wins. Sometimes they even charge more too! Sure many fave hole in the wall coffee houses bit the dust during Starbucks' acendancy, including the one around the corner from me in Santa Monica where I used to live. It was my fault too. I just decided that being ignored by the help, and the place smelling like vomit were big reasons for going to the Starbucks next door.
Barnes and Noble are in a huge fight with Amazon and many other internet book sellers. Their world has changed. In addition, public libraries now see them as the enemy. Newly remolded libraries all around the U.S. now look like Barnes and Noble, only cooler. And mostly free! This is the world of business and has nothing to do with government regulation.
Insofar as Monica’s comments about the housing market, she’s talking about one little part of the problem: the appraisal. So let’s deal with it. The appraisal is in fact supposed to be based on what similar houses in the same or similar neighborhood sell for. This is not corrupt. The corruption comes from the idea that the appraisal is part of a process of selling people houses they cannot afford. For example, I want to buy a house that costs one million dollars, but I can’t afford it. So the real estate agent who knows that I can’t afford it “works” the appraiser to value the house at say two million. Then the agent can (sort of legitimately) tell the bank or mortgage company that if the buyer defaults they can always foreclose and clear a fast million in profit. Now this is corrupt. It didn’t happen in all cases, but some.
How do they sleep at night? Here’s how: the agent and even the bank in on this scam tell themselves that the housing market will always go up. And the buyer will always earn ever more income to one day soon be able to afford the mortgage payment, and in the meantime structure the repayment schedule to relect this. BUT WHAT IF THE HOUSING MARKET GOES DOWN, AND THE BUYER’S INCOME DOES TOO? This is happening now, and is one of the many things that happened. Is it corrupt? Yes, to value a house based on anything other than comparative worth is corrupt. Appraisals however are a tip of the iceberg of the housing crises. Greedheads on Wall Street pushing credit default swaps and other nonsense dirivative products dwarf this problem.
Mostly what I disagree with is Monica's attitude. “This is just the way things are and will always be, so just get over it,” she seems to be saying. Bush has wrecked the world economy and is a mass murderer. People have lost their jobs, houses, life savings, and self respect. Others are dead, leaving grieving and impoverished families. He has done this with a combination of ideological wrongheadedness and stupidity. But at least I wasn’t there in the U.S. every day to listen to people who think much like Monica.
Last, let’s talk about something not commented on by your friend: world peace. To say world peace is unattainable makes it so. And pisses Obama off.
Let there be peace.
“Too Handsome. Too Young. Too Liberal. Doesn't have a chance. He's PERFECT” was the tagline for Redford’s movie, The Candidate. The arc of its main character Bill McKay was from cocksure activist at the start to lost soul asking his campaign chief at the end after he won the governorship, “What do we do now?”
Great movie and in the sequel surely McKay finds himself and figures out what to do. In my Hollywood days, I pitched such a sequel. It opened years after Governor McKay fired his manipulative and soulless chief and won over voters with his essential goodness, and now he’s ready to run for president. This time his campaign is run by pragmatic idealists pulling together to defeat yesterday and create the possibility of tomorrow, but to do so meant the end of politics as Americans had come to know them. Sound familiar? However the ending shot of this movie, this sequel in my head, was McKay in a nameless sniper's crosshairs. Meaning that such a guy even if plausible doesn’t stand a chance.
I know it’s not cool to even think about Obama in what is surely a dated way. I can’t help it because my political awareness begins with RFK. Not so much with his assassination as with the possibilities of his life. His weeping in a Mississippi shantytown wasn’t as important as his being there. His Jack Parr one on one interview in NBC prime time significant not because of the media event that it was, but because of this obviously private person undergoing a public peeling to let people know who he was and what he thought and felt. We felt his sensitive and even poetic struggle and I and many people of my generation yearned for him to become president.
Surely we’ve had candidates since Robert Kennedy that struggled to reveal themselves, but what they revealed was inevitably ugly and/or banal. What else, however, can we Americans expect? After all we are mostly right of the political center. Most of the world thinks of us as violent, greedy and insensitive. And for too long, the rest of the world has been right. But hopefully after tomorrow that will change. Our Obama will see to that. The political center will shift. Perhaps not in terms of government’s role in its citizens attaining The American Dream - which has been almost entirely one of materialism. But now that dream will broaden to include ways and means of helping all our citizens live life with the dignity that a minimum standard would involve. The rest of the first world and some of the developing world are already there. America must run to catch up. Obama talks about “bottom up” economics and for most of us this is just common sense. The rich and powerful do not need the help of government. They need the balance of governments caring about quality of life. It’s everyman and for sure every small businessman that needs help.
Here in Brazil much has been accomplished since this new Republic was formed after the military dictatorship peacefully ended. Still, the rich either helicopter to work or ride in bulletproof cars and live in well-guarded enclaves. Security is everywhere. But the need for it is on the wane.
More people in Brazil for the first time in its history are middle or upper-class. This is a miracle for a developing country, and it was accomplished by leadership that believed such a goal was attainable. Both President Lula da Silva and his predecessor Fernando Henrique Cardosa (known as FHC) who couldn’t be more different in backgrounds, believe that it’s simply unacceptable that so many in their country live in poverty and set about in various ways changing it.
Brazilians still have catching up to do but now the history is made, its foundation poured, and the future is possible. This is something Brazil shares with America or will share after the election, I hope. In this hemisphere, Brazil plays a similar role to the United States, and a partnership is possible. In the last debate when McCain criticized Obama for his lack of support for a trade agreement with Colombia who McCain referred to as America's best ally in the region, Obama replied that the regime itself was repressive and a hundred union leaders had been targeted for assassination. The look on McCain’s face said he was either unaware or unconcerned about this. Obama is neither.
After the election hopefully gone will be the days when America’s foreign policy was solely determined by its business interests. What’s good for United Fruit - or now the many American companies here - is not the only consideration, or even the most important. Certainly Brazil can improve its corporate climate, but so can the United Sates. Wouldn’t better ethics on the part of business leaders be a great place to start? On CNN I heard the head of Japan Air Lines say that it was corrupt that his American counterparts made hundreds of millions even when their companies went bankrupt. He paid himself about the same as a senior pilot and said until his company was profitable again and was not laying off people, that he will share the pain. This is ethics, something American corporations have too little of. Corruption doesn’t always mean government, even in Brazil.
What’s good for the United States and good for Brazil is what’s good for us all. Let ethics lead the way to a common path.
In ending this blog and returning to more personal and pressing problems, I’ll quote Obama a couple of time. First, there’s “What if I disappoint people?’ ” He asked this of close friends and advisors at several points throughout the campaign. In just Obama’s asking is the answer, I think.
And when Obama’s Democratic crowds jeer at the mere mention of Senator John McCain, he offers a gentle scolding, “You don’t need to boo, you just need to vote.” In a slime ridden Republican campaign that inflammed its base into chants of “Kill him”, Obama reminded us all why he’s running and what his contribution will be. Is Obama too perfect to be elected? I thought so once, but now I’m not so sure. Not that he's less perfect, but perhaps the electrorate has become more so. I look forward to a prosperous and harmonious future – for both my countries. And for both of them to lead together.
How and on what issues? That’s for Wednesday. I have a hunch I’ll still be blogging away.
God wants Barack Obama to be president, I say, when yet another rung is nudged or slammed into the Obama ladder. Many of these rungs have nothing to do with our Guy, like the economy and the financial meltdown, and the deceitful and stupid Iraq war. But some do, of course, and all rungs including Reverend Wright and Dr. Ayers have become such by the way our Guy sees the world.
Through Reverend Wright most Americans first heard the term “prophetic preaching,” made peace with it, and from Obama’s sensitive handling of the issue diffused a Swift Boat opening for the straighttalker who has proven himself to be anything but.
The name Bill Ayers is a name that time forgot, until its Republican use reminds us of a time we don’t want to return to. It was a time when opposition to the Vietnam War almost turned into a revolution, and juggernaut thinkers like Ayers believed they were leaders of this revolution. It wasn't and they weren't - but it was a violent confrontational time.
Then there's Acorn. Doesn’t it really bring the electorate up to speed on where and how the election is likely to be stolen? It sure points up to me the weeknesses and dangers of our registration and voting apparatus, and alerts us that the Republicans have been some busy crooks. Sometimes I ask myself whether the Republican campaign is a subliminal subsidiary of ours.
Then there’s the larger question of whether Obama would have even made the run if the Republican brand weren’t in the gutter. Maybe, but I think that with the abject failures of confrontational politics and of governing from the ideological gut, a peacemaker negotiator – Obama – can naturally move center stage. However to deny the hand of God, the presence of the force or whatever we call it is to deny the meaning of life.
To be human or probably just to live requires us to be on the lookout for patterns. These patterns of course can and often do turn out to be random coincidents, but some are more. In my own life, I felt the force a couple of times - always at points where I was attuned to it. Worry and even suffering made me a receiver, and when I gave in to it, the right way opened up. Magnified from my puny problems, it is the stuff upon which religions are founded, and it’s for this reason that we must be careful.
This hand of God is fickle. It comes and goes. Yes, God wants Obama to be president, but this does not mean that Obama is God. It means that for right now the force is with Obama, and this will be proven enough to put him in the White House. But dark forces combine and move forth to stop the hand. When Joe Biden’s mouth flew open to say that our Guy will be soon tested, this too is the hand. It is preparing us. Let us hope and even pray that the force stays with Obama. The stakes have never been greater.
In this blog I’ve criticized the campaign heads for spending huge money targeting people who won’t vote for our guy. Spend the money on fence sitters, I reasoned, and on the committed folks and our enthusiasm will be the wave that sweeps Obama into the White House.
But let me say here and now, I’ve reconsidered. I was wrong in a betterment of the electorate kind of way. Oklahoma and Missouri where I grew up are home to exactly the people I thought the Obama campaign should write off. There is no way those knuckleheads will ever vote for a Democrat, much less a black one.
With a few notable exceptions, teachers mostly and one friend’s father who ran for Governor, everybody I knew was a Republican. Democrats it seemed were fools who didn’t understand the nature of human beings and were prone to spend money on wasteful programs for unsalvageable people.
After a few weeks of posting that criticizing blog, it occurred to me that I’m guilty of the same kind of thinking. Write them off because of their knuckleheadiness? No, we can’t do that, as much as we’d like to. We can’t and be true to what it means to be moral, progressive, liberal, or to just reasonably egalitarian. Our campaign may not actually move these knuckleheads to vote for Obama, but Obama and his campaign are not writing them off. They are included. By the campaign speaking to them, a seed is planted. This maybe is the best that can be done. Or maybe they’ll not vote because murky foul stuff is moving inside them.
Voting for McCain no longer interests them. Maybe they don’t know why. But maybe, just maybe, they do. Not likely but so what. The Republican base is now in play.
Like Obama, I monger after hope, and my hope is that by the time Obama’s terms are over these Americans whose opinions are now shifting - will have shifted. Those days of Republicans leading knuckledads around by their wedge issues will be gone.
When the knucklehead from Texas stole the presidency the first time, I thought Americans should protest. A week long strike would be a good place to start to make the will of the people heard. But no, nothing much happened. Americans may be tough and innovative but things, meaning the economy, looked pretty good. What’s one little stolen election? No doubt in the American tradition of moving on, the media didn’t mention the rotten tomatoes thrown at him during the inauguration ceremony (making the traditional walk impossible for the moron).
Americans shrugged. Only Bill Mayer called for Bush’s immediate resignation on the basis that he was far too stupid to be in office. Ha, ha, Bill, funny. “What can you do?” I was asked this by a worker in Gore’s campaign, who said she was sick to her stomach about it all, but needed to get on with her life. You know what I found myself saying to her? “I’m leaving. My family and I can move to Brazil, where they’re re-inventing themselves again. Maybe I can too.” I hadn’t thought about it, but there it was, the words.
For the first stolen Bush election, the appeal of Ralph drew me. Corporate money was playing too obscene a role in politics. And Gore, in whose primary campaign I’d worked when Dukakis became the nominee, was turning a deaf ear to this. I went door to door for Ralph but you know when it came time to vote, I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t throw my vote away and I voted for Al, who I knew as a sensitive and good man.
It took awhile and I even tried to convince myself that it wasn’t what it was, what it was going to be, and now what it is. But the everyday criminality of the Bushies begin to make me crazy. I couldn’t watch the news hour, a practice since college. I ranted at it, and scared my wife. So I stopped watching TV news, and I even stopped the L.A. Times from coming to the door. But one day while reading it in a Santa Monica coffee shop called the Novel, I had an irresistible impulse and ripped it up. I didn’t stop until it was in shreds and wads on the floor. My fellow patrons looked at me, wondering if I was a mental patient out on a daytrip. I felt crazy too, my heart beat wildly and I wanted to beat the crap out of somebody. Punching a speed bag no longer helped.
I told my wife it was time to go, and we begin the arduous process of immigrating. She wasn’t 100% behind me, more like 60, but within a few months we had left. At least I wouldn’t have the immediacy of being there as America was eaten alive by the corrupt ideologs of the Republican Party. I wouldn’t bear daily witness of the complicit press. My wife paid the price to not have me go crazy, and for the first year here, she was clinically depressed. There came a point where for her sanity we started to make plans to return to California. But her bleak view lifted and now for me to go back, I’d have to return without her.
I have a bud who’s a congressman and I bug him about the likelihood the fix is already in and unless there’s a huge landside, McCain will be the first mafia U.S. president. I send my friend stuff on vote suppression and paper trails and on and on. But he, like probably most Americans and for sure most politicians, thinks it’s not that bad. Or at least until this meltdown he thought this.
Sure, the housing market is a con. Anybody bought a house, along with a corrupt appraiser, and dropped their jaw at the theft masquerading as closing costs? Probably everybody. So was the internet boom a con? Of course. And for a long time everybody has known the stock market is absurd. People laugh when I’d say Greenspan should go to jail. Things looked good, or at least not bad enough to take action. Has the time for action now come? Read the NYTimes today and see Karl Rove’s handiwork: States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal.
Everybody, please write your representatives and join with other Americans to rally around Obama. It’s not that he’s hope, he’s the only hope.
I watched the sage of Omaha on Charlie Rose yesterday after the vote in the house failed the first time, and he was making his pitch to pass it. I watched it on the web, and then read the comments of other eyeballs. One person wrote one line - “One day very soon the great Buffet and the U.S. will fall.” It was signed “Mike,” my name. It wasn’t me, but it made me ask myself: Do I believe this? I do, unless we act now!
Begin those protests now, send a wake up call to the greedy fixers! The sandbox they’re shitting in is yours!
I was in school when I came across a study of NFL game strategies - to win and to not lose. Not the same thing, and worth examining in light of last night’s debate. From the study it showed that those teams using a “win” strategy won significantly more games than those teams with a “not lose” one when competing against each other. A win strategy in football means taking chances, passing, going for the down rather than punting for breathing room, and doing the unexpected.
Sure, in a game’s final moments all teams in the lead try to run out the clock, but we are not yet in the final moments. In the final moments it’s a tactic, not a strategy, and even then sometimes doesn’t work. A gutsy opponent forces an opening and then well … McCain’s the 44th president and Palin the 45th, the American Century draws to a close and the world sinks into the new dark ages.
We must not allow this to happen. Obama is the light. Let it shine. Be bold, our team, bring your A game. Okay, what needs to be done now to avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?
Let’s assess: We have a slight advantage right now, but it’s not enough to counter all the polling problems the Republicans will be creating. They will be going all out to suppress voting, especially of new registrants, and Black and Latino voters. We must fight this with lawsuits now where groups are being disenfranchised by computer programs that strike minorities with similar names to felons, and get photo I.D.s for voters that don’t have them. T
hey will also cheat on the count, and we must continue efforts to insist on paper trails, and call for recounts at the first whiff of irregularity. That’s behind the scenes and necessary, but for us to win Obama must lead. This means Obama must score, must continue to put points up, avoiding missteps is not enough.
I heard on CNN that this is no a time for two or more presidents, that we must unite behind President Bush as he and his team try to alleviate the financial meltdown. This makes no sense. The sooner the incompetent Bushies are pushed aside, the better. A huge majority of the electorate knows this for certain, and more suspect it. To unite behind the administration that put us here, and that has shown across the board wrongheadedness in every sector would guarantee disaster.
I think Obama must say that legally, constitutionally, there are restrictions on what a president elect can do until he assumes office, but as a practical matter he is working now, and will work harder beginning November fifth to lead us out of this mess. I think this will cut into the fear factor immediately. We all fear the hand of Bush and Obama is the only hope, is both the message and the messenger.
We the people must know that help is on its way now. Remind us that transition teams can be more powerful than the outgoing administration in governing, and team Obama will be there for us.
And, last go after the opposition. Unlike us at the moment, these are the guys going for the ball. Don’t let them have it and if they get it, take it away. Remind people, like Joe Biden did in his finest debate moment, that a wolf in what, sheep, maverick clothing is still a wolf. McCain is the wolf pack’s wild card. After the sheep know the pack and know avoiding them is life and death, send in the whack job disguised as something else.
This is the pack’s only way to fool the sheep one more time.
Obama, lead us - we’re not sheep. We’re Americans, people that care about fairness, and we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!
Like any informed person who cares about other people, I want Obama to be our next president. From Brazil where we live now, the situation looks dire. The first debate can bump a candidate up significantly, and the senator from the great state of Illinois did a credible job, but so incredibly did the opposition.
McCain conveys warmth all the while distorting, misrepresenting and lying. Even his fidgets and tight-ass smile gets across his message that he’s been around, and he is only barely tolerating our guy’s candidacy. He says the election isn't about what happened in the past.
Sure McCain wants to look ahead, not to the past. He cannot be in this election otherwise. The past is his albatross and he shrugs it off by misrepresentating who he is. He claims he’s a maverick when at best he’s a grumpy contrarian. It’s working too. It works because we’re hardwired to look to today and to figure out what it all means for tomorrow.
So this is where to hit him. Hit him about now. Who’s going to jail? Who should apologize for the mess? Who should pay to clean it up? Who should be rewarded for cleaning up the mess? McCain cannot and will not lie convincingly about this. Sure, Americans think we can clean it up and we’ll pull together to do it, but damnit someone’s gotta pay. I’m talking about all the governmental and executive folks who brought us 9/11 with their mis and malfeasance, and the many disasters that followed.
As Americans and also collectively responsible, we’ll work for the future - but prosecute and put those irresponsible criminals in jail! Hit McCain on his plans for the future. Hit him for all of us living the Republican nightmare. Please tell him the shellacking is for us, the shell shocked. McCain wants to know what happened to accountability. Ask him if who gets fired right now will include him. Not just the disgraced intelligence CIA and FBI executives, the governmental muckety mucks, the business greedheads, but him. Sure, fire the head of SEC but how about all the Bushies including himself that were busy stoking the flames of a war that has now gone on longer than WWII and the biggest financial disaster in history? And these two are just the highest peaks of a mountain of shame that the John McCains created.
Prosecute McCain while at the same time charting the course for the future. Obama does not need to distort and lie. Just be the visionary he is, and make accountability more than something McCain pretends he’s all for. Make him personally accountable. If Obama does stick McCain in the frying pan, it won’t take long for McCain to start clicking those ball bearings together and the John McNutz to make an appearance. Which will be a good thing. Isn’t it better that we see him for what he is – sooner rather than later?
Naive is a good word for this election. Naïve was what we, the American people, were following the Clinton Administration. By now we’ve grown up, and gotten experience. Clinton was such a centrist that we forgot what Republican philosophy was all about. It’s only about them, screw us. Just remind us. Look McCain in the eye and say it is not important whether the surge tactic worked, or whether or it only worked in conjunction with the shifting nature of the fight. What matters is that since it was initiated thousands of additional lives – both American and Iraqi – and additional billions of American dollars have been lost.
Get a grip, Senator McNasty, this is more important than any right wing think tank’s failed theory of how to right the Middle East. Especially when you sold it as WMD and Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and oh, yeah, Saddam was bad. Well, those were lies, and Saddam is dead.
For us, nation building begins at home. We Americans think it’s past time to get with it, and that means get out of Iraq. McCain can’t see this. How can he? Like most troubled people, he’s limited. Limited to dealing with his demons, whether or not the demons are of his own creation. And rants and raves at the rest of us for not seeing his demons too, and soon concludes that therefore we must be demons too.
I come from a family that includes more than its share of the mentally troubled. I wish I could say that they were only Republicans, but that’s neither here nor there. From experience, I know the look that Humphrey Bogart found for his Captain Queeq especially under pressure, know it as the look on John McCain’s face when he’s stressed: anxious, angry, confused. I suspect that most Americans have some experience with this type of person. But we keep giving the clever ones a break.
Sure, I’d like everyone to vote for Obama for the sterling person and candidate he is, but if it takes an OMG moment to bring over the fence sitters and a good number of the McCain people themselves – bring it. Most people around the world fear the fix is already in for the polling place and the count, that for Obama to win he must win near 70% of the vote. For this to happen, many of the base need to switch. So again, bring it.
From the moment Obama wrenched the primary from Bill and Hillary’s cold dead hands, our Obama has been lusting after votes he’s never going to get. Let’s call it the mean and ignorant vote. Isn’t that what it is, the flat earth society? Mostly this part of the great American electorate wonders how a black guy can run for president.
No amount of sticking up for the death penalty, guns, and huging the anti-abortion, anti-peace, greed-is-good-lunatics will put lipstick on him. Look, he’s black, did you notice? Case closed.
However, the tremendous cost of media, polling and campaigning for this effort has made a lot of the Obama team rich. The question is: are you guys now rich enough that you can go back to getting Obama elected? The world hopes so.
Our guy as is - this is the product. And the best salesman for this super product is Obama himself. Once he starts selling again – not pandering - then the rest of us will wake up. And we’ll sell too. And our enthusiasm, our conviction will win over the fence sitters. The fence sitters who haven’t even yet registered, and or might not even vote. Especially if the pandering and parsing continues.
The fence sitters, that’s the part of the electorate that will cancel out the flat earth folks. Let our Obama go!
OBAMA MY MAMA
A mother cries for what can't
And when it can and doesn’t
She worries about what will, if and might.
For her child today mixes its blessing
Tomorrow nips at her baby’s heels.
The mother in Obama sings for what can
Urge flight.
Soaring possibility wraps a present.
Tomorrow's prickly reality
Laughs and embraces his.
Isn’t narcissism deranged by definition? CNN International apparently doesn’t think so because this is how they described Hilary Clinton’s speech last night. Sure, extra-high self-regard is necessary to run for president, and this is true for both the darkly deranged like Nixon to the foolishly saintly like Carter. This extra self regard probably does boost presidential candidates over the narcissism line. Hopefully just enough so that they can endure the “outrageous slings.”
As I said in this blog earlier, my sister and wife voted for Hillary in the California primary. We voted absentee in January, early in the season, and I think both of them now regret their votes. Even I then was pro-Hillary as a person if not a presidential candidate, and would never have believed that “deranged narcissism” would be a phrase used to describe her. At least not by a main stream news source, especially CNN, who mostly has been pro Hillary.
Now though we’ve seen her primary colors.
Over the years, her story has gone first from bright student political activist to young lawyer working to impeach Nixon. Then as the tough lawyer who supported her family while her husband governed Arkansas for a stupidly low $35,000 or so. Then Hillary was the suffering wife humiliated by Jennifer Flowers – who remarkably resembled her. Flowers could have been Hillary’s prettier younger sister. When husbands and wifes stray isn’t it usually for a different type? This subliminal fact probably is what made Bill’s assertion in the famous CBS interview that “we love each other” plausible to the great many who voted for a man they knew to be a philanderer. They excused it as a mistake in a long term marriage under stress, not as the character flaw people of my dad’s generation saw. “Cheat on your wife, lie, you’re just a cheat and liar, and he’ll be a cheating lying president” was something I heard a lot. The electorate answered “maybe, maybe not” and Bill went on to prove that point. Sometimes he was and sometimes he wasn’t.
The Hillary story though was only enhanced for most of us. Brilliant student, industrious lawyer, good mother, long suffering wife was what we thought and we ignored the pampered girl from a rich family, get-even political strategist, conflict of interest lawyer charges that were leveled at her. After last night’s speech however we truly know her and something in us shifted. Only in terms of perseverance can we give her any of the respect she so aggressively demands from us.
Last night she had an opportunity and she chose to blow it. Instead of talking about the campaign in terms of voices heard by both her and Obama, of the people’s expressed desire for decent and competent government, and congratulating the presumptive nominee, she talked almost entirely about herself. Yes, Obama being the sterling person he is will meet with her and no doubt will listen as she talks more about her exalted view of herself.
Obama, please do not, however, anoint her vice president to no doubt go on to become the contentious thorn in the side of your administration. We no longer reject the Republican view of Hillary, because we are now at least sympathetic to it ourselves. After all we have new information. Being a Democrat today is all about adjusting our opinions as we get new information. We know now that Hillary is all about winning. She had a chance to show her colors and she did. Her colors are mean. When she has the chance to quiet internal dissent with her own staff, she turns up the heat. When she has the chance to address racism by asking no votes be cast because she’s white, she chose instead to point it out and ask for a bigger turnout. White working class she defined as the bigot vote, and now Obama must work all the harder to overcome it.
Is Obama better off for having run against her, better prepared to run against the mean machine of the Republican Party? Obama graciously said yes last night, but personally I think she weakened him. When she had the opportunity to explain to white America how prophetic preachers warm the hearts of African-Americans who think they can’t speak out, she chose to fan the flames into a white backlash against their backlash.
In every single case when she had the opportunity to say “This is me, I’m older and hopefully wiser and for sure have spent a long time involved in the political process, and then gone on to say, “But I understand his appeal,” she chose instead to tear him down. This is the meaning of deranged narcissism. Hers is “deranged” because Hillary must destroy Obama to feel good about herself. She failed, but she wounded him and in the political process Obama sees as a journey and she sees as war, Hillary pointed out for Republicans which attacks work best.
She has worked to divide, and for most Obama supporters who once thought that if our guy didn’t, couldn’t win that Hillary was a great alternative, we now see her clearly. She clearly has no place in an Obama administration. She is yesterday, he is tomorrow. To those Hillary supporters who want a woman to be president, we answer we want that too. The campaign he ran will make that all the more plausible. He is opening our hearts and minds to possibilities.
The high started with Indiana, especially when I heard the exit polls showing thousands of Republicans proudly voting Hillary to subvert the democratic process. I figure thousands more know this is wrong, but still voted for her, just not owning their Republican label to exit pollsters. This must be what pushes those figures upward of Hillary voters who say they wouldn’t vote for Obama in the general election. Sure, there are some Hillary supporters who are rabid, and will be pissed if she doesn’t get the nod. But most, I’m sure will gather round our guy once she bows out. And the rest? -
The rest of those voters are the Republican base, I’m sure. The partisans who will do and have done anything to win. They are the same 30% or so who still think Bush is doing a good job. Their minds, they won’t be a changing.
So, why not relax, breathe. Hummmmmmmmmmmm. Okay, I still get the middle of the night sweats and the “what ifs,” including the unthinkable and certainly never mentionable – but mostly I feel good.
Here’s a little free verse to go with my feeling:
Too young to vote but old enough
to feel the JFK promise.
Intelligence, empathy and innovation
had returned to the land
and the brave freed
from the shackles of political shame.
The best and the brightest answered his call
Not to arms but to join all arms to bring sense
To the twentieth century that died with
the man who couldn’t walk around.
To the next century comes a man to fill his shoes
And his brothers too lost to us all.
Kennedy decedents and their crews
Rise as one to pin their hopes
On the donkey’s many asses.
Big shoes to fill for all but the biggest feat.
Red neck slip into the shade, or better -
Bask in the sun’s shine on American again.
Yes, we can!
I heard what Obama had to say about Hillary and McCain’s promise to lower gas prices and it made me think about when my family and I were in the U.S. over the Christmas holidays. We rented a Prius and every time we filled up, I smiled. This car gets about the same m.p.g. as my Vespa. Now just solve all the battery issues, recharge with renewable energy sources, eliminate fossil fuels entirely and we’re on to something.
Here in Brazil there is no such thing as hybrid technology. It’s because like most things here, the fix is in. Newer cars are flex-fuel, which means they run on either gas or ethanol. At around three bucks a gallon ethanol is cheaper than gas at five. To a large extent. profits and taxes are fuel based, and there are no doubt disincentives in place preventing car manufacturers from either increasing mileage or using batteries. Someday a politician will come along and things might change, but in the U.S. that politician has already come along. All we need to do is elect him.
There, the fix is in too - though they're are a lot more fixers who compete - and rarely does a day pass that I think no way are my fellow Americans electing this guy. I get gloomy. Isn’t politics mostly about fooling the fools? A good person in office has to make do with crappy legislation and lie about its worth to the electorate, who “can’t handle the truth.” This, I believe is what Obama is running against. He’s running for good and truthful government, something that Hillary and McCain want him to do because they believe that America isn’t ready for it.
They think it makes Obama an easy target. Oh, McCain likes the way it sounds, even naming a bus after the idea, but can’t bring himself to pay the political price to actually do it. Hillary though has never been in the game, and for her small incremental improvements are the best that can be hoped for. Look at the polls and react is not a bad policy, as long as leadership isn’t required to inform the people they’re eating horseshit and being told it’s filet mignon.
I too want something done about obscene oil company profits (along with many other unfair things that America has learned to live with.) I do not want to vote for someone who tells us that these profits are “windfall.” Windfall is the unexpected, and oil companies and their lobbyists have carefully plotted for such profits for decades. Subsidies, mergers, price fixing, and dare we say war? To oil companies does Afghanistan mean much more than a pipeline? Does Iraq mean more than an experiment to gain influence gone bad? This is the kind of crap that must stop.
Can Obama sell it? Yes, we can!
We’re down to elbows, and this is not good. The campaign for team Hillary is all about untruthful emotionally laden innuendo, and Obama responses are inadequate. To the discredit of the electorate, her tactics are paying off. Attacking works if perceived as fair with emphasis on “perceived,” and too many of us are too willing to give the woman a break – of which she’s had a great many.
And then ask yourselves what Hillary’s campaign reveals about a possible Hillary presidency.
I feel for Obama and forgive him his exhaustion when he says a guy can only take so many elbows before he throws his own. But if you continue with the basketball metaphor, you see how wrong it is. The aggressive unfair player who goads a fancy shooter into being something he’s not, wins. She’s prepared by experience and inclination - and our guy isn’t.
By elbowing back, he plays her game and even if in the end our team still wins, we are all the worse off for it. The shine was taken off our shooter.
The good basketball coach counts on the team. He will protect his fancy shooter with different plays and tactics that counter nasty ones. This, I hope, is what we do. As our team’s coaches consider what to do, please consider humor.
Let’s win by letting Obama be the winner he already is. Yes we can!
Like everything about Obama, I love his reasons for not wearing a flag pin. I also think he’s being singled out by the nincompoop brigade, when for example John Edwards didn’t wear it either.
I’m not sure that all these folks will ever be won over, but some will be and others could be – at least in time for the general election. But more importantly, it also worries main street Republicans considering switching parties to vote for him, and those right of center Hillary Democrats who are looking for a reason to stay home in the general.
Sure, it’s way past time for truth and like many Obamamites I yearn for it. But first, we yearn for an Obama win. Symbols are fine, but words and deeds are better.
Explain why you haven’t been every single time you get an opportunity, and make opportunities when there are none. And go on to explain why you’re wearing it again now – to take away the cheap shot and to show that you know when you’ve been a bonehead. And if Americans think wearing a flag in your lapel means a person loves America, you want them knowing you do. And voting for you.
Something in my scoffer soul doubts most everything anybody says on the subject of religion – including words out of my own mouth. But of course I tuned in to CNN to see their latest over the top coverage of the primary with the Compassion Forum. Obama, my mama, laid it out and made it tasty. Our guy just keeps on wading into deeper waters. Most of us would have first taken out against CNN’s round-the-clock airing of his words “cling to religion” to hype this Forum. Then pointed out Hilary’s transparent desperate opportunism, and related it to how we can expect her to behave as President. And for sure made the no-show McCain joke and pointed out his campaign’s laughable depiction of Obama’s reasonable words (even to the people he’s talking about) as “breathtaking.” At the least we would have defended by going on offensive in some way.
Not Obama though.
He said it was a misunderstanding due to his clumsy use of language. Meaning I think that he should have not have used the world “cling.” While clicking on the Encarta finds nothing offensive in any of its definitions, most of us had a clingy relationship that haunts us emotionaly and maybe it was even us who did the clinging. We don't like this word, or like to think of it applying to us. He probably realized this later. In the same sentence of Obama's “cling” this word sticks to other sillies of American society that have been and are being heavily exploited.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs has a huge career based on a couple of them.
The Encarta number one definition is “to hold onto somebody or something tightly …” Yeah, that’s it whether it’s religion or arms. For most NRA members the Association is their religion, though chances are every single one of the other sillies gets them hot under the collar and fuels their siege mentality. What Obama made clear last night with his words and presence was that he intends to lead us out of the bunker we’ve been in for far too long. Under seige does not work for him even when he finds the heaviest of cannons firing away. Somehow, someway, they miss and he emerges stronger than before.
Borack Obama is a beautiful human being and being on the planet during his run is creating all by itself a pro-American mentality not seen probably since the euphoric years following WWII. I know not everyone will vote Obama into office.
But what if they did?
An optimist usually, I woke up in the middle of the night and as I breathed in the smell of something rotten that Sao Paulo nights are famous for, I feared for all things American. Far beyond my usual selective pessimism about America now, I felt real fear. My gag reflex even kicked in. Earlier in the day as I watched Obama on CNN ask questions and make his points about Iraq, something dropped into the pit of my stomach.
Afghanistan is the country that can pull this off. It is part of their history, the humbling of the mighty. Slowly as we appear to be doing better in Iraq (thanks not to the Surge, but to religious nut cases who are reigning in or sending their followers elsewhere) we are fighting a war that every day grows fiercer in Afghanistan. Our enemies throughout the Islamic extremist world are not quite ready for all out offensives there, but strategically they are preparing by testing us and themselves with their new skills and weapons. Just read any account of the war there. It is no police action against a ragtag band of thugs. Our enemy is a sleeping giant flexing his muscles.
Afghanistan has to become a U.N. thing or else. Or else it kills us. It's not too early to prepare Americans for this. McCain and the Republicans are and will continue to try to make the war the central issue of the campaign. And it is.
The Obama advantage is that only he is able to personally and politically cut through the fog of war through which we currently see Iraq and the Middle East.
Since I started blogging here I’ve changed. I’ve gone from God bless Hillary, but go Obama! to something much different. Now I fear a Hillary presidency will just be a tragedy of a different order than a McCain one.
Her sense of things is skewed, unfair and mean, and has she ever been wrong about anything? Her touted experience makes her a menace at worst and much less effective at best.
As I contemplate her huge lead in Pennsylvania, dread enters my being.
Then there’s the lost opportunity of Obama. A future that won’t be until it’s too late. Are other Americans, especially those Pennsylvanians who could decide our future perceptive and open enough to see and hear him?
Like my mother I suppose, I fear the future. But like Obama’s mother, believe that it’s there waiting and wanting to be claimed. Yes, I read the NYTimes today and their article about her.
Sing Obama Sing
The mother in me cries for what can't
And didn't happen
Worries about what will
Thinks today is a mixed blessing
And tomorrow nips at our heels
The mother in him sings for what can
And should
And will
And urges flight toward
Possibility that wraps a present
Tomorrow reality
I've been thinking for some time about attack politics and the more I think, the stupidier I become.
Here' a NYTimes quote today:
The Clinton campaign has, since Bill Clinton ran for president, mastered the art of the “war room.” And this week, suddenly smelling blood, it seemed on full alert. On Friday alone, Mrs. Clinton and her aides held forth with telephone calls and news conferences hitting Mr. Obama on Iraq, Ms. Power and trade.
In High Noon and many other reluctant hero stories, it is only after seemingly endless humilation that the good guy straps on the guns. Two or three lost opportunies of Texas, Ohio and R.I do not "endless" make. Obama himself is responding perfectly. It is his campaign - which is also Obama - that is not doing so hot. Or maybe they are doing great by speaking freely and refusing to stay on message. It does depend on interpetation, doesn't it?
But for now the overriding interpretation is the voter's, and the voter sees weakness. It will take a tough president to get us out of Iraq, put the economy on course, and provide health care. Is he tough? seems to be what voters want to know.
In High Noon, Gary Cooper does not make himself a target. He dodges behind buildings, hides, and yet the fight doesn't turn until his supporters take a stand with him.
Obama's personal response is working BUT
It is time the townsfolk, the campaign, got behind their sherriff and stayed on message and met her fire with sharpshooting of their own.
Many of us wish another kind of campaign could be run. A campaign that concerned itself only with issues and relied on voters good judgment to make the right choice.
But that's not reality, and voters know this too.
They, we, respond to tough. And we won't elect a President who we don't see as tougher than the tough competition. Sure, the human race has evolved, but this part of us has remained the same. If fight or flight kicks in and we flee, then we must go back. And fight. And win.
Or we're no hero. And most of us see or want to see Obama as THE hero.
I wish this weren't true and sometimes it isn't, but now it is. More or less. (See, stupidier)
Go Obama!
Loved the Jewish/Black bond stuff.
Israel worship though needs a little air. Harsh Israeli governmental policies within Israel and even within its military are very unpopular. Believing in and supporting your friends, maybe our best friend, is good of course. But a good friend helps in other ways. Helping Israel move away from the toughest nuclear power on the block that will kick anybodies ass long before a need for it develops IS important both for Israel and for the world.
And it does not do any good for Israel to have us fueling this attitude. We become a bigger de facto bully. Until Bush, most administrations tried to help facilitate this movement away and find peace. Without much success though. We need fresh initiatives. It can only make the world a safer place.
(Oh, my family is Jewish and I’m working on a screenplay about anti-Semitism, and my best buddy is a congressman who happens to be Jewish. I’m coming from an Israel supporter place.)
I know that many Jews are looking for some signal that Obama might be anti-Semitic and today this means anti-Israel to many Jews. Further, anti-Israel often means any criticism whatsoever. So it’s good for Obama to be careful - but bellicosity will not work. Other than for the Rebublican conservative base who may not get out and vote anyway. And those right tilting Jews who would not agree with this would not vote for Obama anyway. They like Hillary and/or McCain.
It’s also shameful that Farrakhan is used as the litmus test. I believe that he’s a changed man in this area AND throughout his life has helped far more than hurt. It make me wonder that if once Obama is out of the race and President whether his personal pendulum will swing like a scythe cutting down his own words because of all the crap he’s had to swallow. I think this must be occurring to a lot of people just hearing Obama talk about their “non-relationship”. Impossible, they’re probably saying. A community organizer in South Chicago not having a working relationship with the man, and it is well known that Obama campaign staff includes Nation of Islam people. It doesn’t add up, in other words. There’s a better way than out-dissing Hillary (and soon I hope McCain.)
Still, great work and be still my beating heart!! Go Obama!
