September 4, 2008
Dear Rudy,
I am an independent voter, someone like you, a middle-aged man who has often crossed party lines. I am writing to congratulate you on your warm up speech for Governor Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention last night. Boy, you really had us with you, especially when you laughed about Obama being a community organizer and when you told us Obama had passed “no major legislation to speak of”…
To tell you the truth, Rudy, you are a smart guy, so you have probably already figured out I am faking it. Mind you, not the independent voter part. I am registered with no party, and I vote in every election, but I am not very happy about the speech you gave. It was entertaining. I’ll give you that. A real bell-ringer. But as far as I am concerned it was a hit job. …no, that could be taken as ethnically insensitive, and after last night I know you are a sensitive guy, so I’ll use a phrase that’s less prejudicial and more to the point. It was a hockey check – and not some youth league nudge that could be shrugged off. It was a body slam into the boards intended to split someone’s lip, take out some teeth, leave a little blood on the ice. That was your job. You did well. The timing was perfect, and you made the hit, with a gleaming smile and a glimmer in your eye. The crowd lapped it up. <p>So, just what parts of the speech got me so heated, Rudy? I’m glad you asked. It was your snide dismissal of community organizing and of Obama’s legislative accomplishments. I’ll take them one at a time.
Hockey check #1: You went out of your way … and I mean obviously out of your way by departing from the script, adding a few words, and working the pause until the audience filled in the subtext of your argument. They didn’t get it right away, but on the second go, you had them, and the crowd began to laugh and chant “USA, USA!” But why do I care? What does it matter if you are adept at innuendo and timing? Well, it’s because you went out of your way to stretch a term – organizer – in order to give just a whiff of the old Red-scare (and that’s all that was needed given the hysterical rumors about Obama being a Koran toting socialist). And, it’s because you went out of your way to ridicule people who work long hours, often at great personal sacrifice, to serve democracy. Remember, it was the community organizers who gave us the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1950’s and 60’s great leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez worked alongside hundreds of community organizers to register voters and to offer a helping hand to those in need. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, four community organizers were killed, four more were critically wounded, and 80 were severely beaten. All because they volunteered their summer to help poor folks in the South learn about their Constitutional rights. Others suffered that summer as well. All together, 1,000 people were arrested and more than 60 African American homes, businesses and churches were bombed or burned. If you think I am pushing the limit by talking about community organizing in the South, I’m going to suggest you call up a person who was there and ask what he thinks about your speech. Robert Parris Moses saw things up close because he was the chief organizer of the Freedom Summer project. Back then he was a young school teacher, fresh out of Harvard, who gave up a good job to become a community organizer. Today he is still teaching and organizing. And he is easy to find. He is the founder of the highly successful Algebra Project that, according to their website, is a “national, nonprofit organization that uses mathematics as an organizing tool to ensure quality public school education for every child in America.” Darn, there is that word again, organizing. Well, on second thought, you might not want to talk to Bob Moses. He is after all, a mere “organizer.” He also bears an uncanny resemblance to that other man you so blithely disparaged on national TV last night.
But as bad as that was, Rudy, hockey check #2, this time on Senator Obama’s Congressional record, was probably worse. Here is why. You are the 9-11 man. America’s Mayor. The man who stood shoulder to shoulder along side New York’s finest and helped our nation find hope in one of its darkest hours. You were unwavering on 9-11, and I believed you. But after last night I’m not so sure about all that. I have deep reservations. You see, I have been reading the newspapers for a long time, and I remember a rather important piece of legislation that made a big splash back in the early 1990’s shortly after the fall of the USSR. I am sure you know about it. Your candidate, Senator John McCain, was a strong supporter of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of 1992, a crucially important act, the purpose of which was to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in former Soviet Union states.” Senator McCain was also a strong advocate of a more recent, closely related bill, the Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation of 2007 which helps “other nations find and eliminate conventional weapons that have been used against our own soldiers in Iraq and sought by terrorists all over the world.” You knew about that legislation as well. You had to. You ran for president as the 9-11 Man. You gave secret testimony about national security and nuclear non-proliferation before the 9-11 Commission. But when it came time to look voters in the eye and tell them the truth, you failed. I’ll give you this. When you spoke those words, you lost your smile. Check the tape. You knew it was a lie. You knew Obama had labored along side Republican Senator Dick Lugar to craft and pass this legislation that would prevent terrorists from buying weapons to use against our troops in Iraq or from setting off a dirty bomb on American soil. National security is your specialty. Remember? You also knew Obama had reached across the aisle to work with Republican Senator Tom Coburn. Together they passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, better known as Coburn-Obama. The bill calls for the creation of “a single searchable website, accessible by the public at no cost,” to help voters keep tabs on their elected officials. Your candidate, John McCain was a co-sponsor of Coburn-Obama, not an author, mind you, a co-sponsor. But clearly, neither of those bills was “worth mentioning,” were they?
You know, Rudy, most voters do not have the time to check these things out for themselves. Most of us work long hours, go to bed tired, and get up early. So we trust guys like you to tell us the truth. Oh, we know you are going to shine the apple some times – like when you made goofy over Sarah Palin being “a…. mayor!” We expect that. But on the bread and butter issues, the hard core matters like national security and government transparency, we expect you to tell us the truth. Like I said, most of us are too busy to get to the bottom of this stuff – too busy wondering how we are going to pay our mortgages to contemplate the peculiar ironies of Rudy Giuliani shading the truth about national security… or using fatuous oratory to accuse an articulate opponent of being full of hot air.
You were the right guy for the job, Rudy. You cut your teeth in New York courtrooms. You became a forensic wizard; a smiling, nattily appointed attorney who earned a national reputation for slicing and dicing Wall Street cheats and mafia bosses and serving them up in front of the cameras to grand juries. You were the guy who needed to make the hit. You have the requisite rhetorical skills, and you are (were?) the embodiment of credibility on national security. To be fair, I am sure you justified it to yourself. Sometimes a guy has to do a little dirty work to serve the greater good, doesn’t he? I will close with two comments. First of all, though you could not know this – I am not typically an angry person, and I am not prone to writing letters to prominent people. I wrote because I am truly disappointed. Second, although you spoke in front of a very large audience last night, you may have been forgetting one viewer. History was watching as well. It has a strange way of remembering ugly moments like this. And if you ever wake up at night and reflect upon life…. and history. I hope you think about community organizing and non-proliferation. And repent.
Sincerely,
A former admirer
(Note: I originally wrote this on August 31 for a different venue)
When John McCain selected Sarah Palin – the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 9,000) and, for 20 months, the governor of a state with fewer than 700,000 people – he provided clear evidence the GOP was having an identity crisis. In the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention, John McCain had been playing Peter Ramus to Barack Obama’s Aristotle. If you have never heard of Ramus – the renaissance philosopher and fierce critic of Aristotle - don’t worry. You do not need to know who he is to understand why he -- and his argument with Aristotle -- are important. For his part, Aristotle defended rhetoric (the art of public, persuasive communication) as foundational to any sense of democratic social order. Nearly two millennia later, Ramus attacked Aristotle’s rhetoric as a messy and inconsistent attempt to meld form and content. In layman’s terms, Aristotle, like Will Rogers, believed that public oratory and disputation (i.e., rhetoric) may be a messy business, but it represents humankind’s best bet at a just social order. Regardless, the sixteenth century was not a big time for democracy and Ramus won the day. In effect, he cleaved the teaching and study of rhetoric in two, and in subsequent centuries Ramus’ arbitrary separation of form and content came to be accepted as self-evident. By the twentieth century, most scholars had rejected Ramus’ argument. Nevertheless, it has persisted in the pervasive public bias against the word “rhetoric” as concerning deceptive and/or superficial political oratory. By running a series of television and Internet ads in which the images and words of Barack Obama were placed in association with those of Hollywood stars such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the GOP attempted to tap into this public predisposition. In essence, by adopting a “rock star” strategy were asking voters to accept the Illinois senator’s rhetorical success as prima facie evidence of minimal political content. Put another way, they were betting swing voters would buy into the Republican’s Ramus-like separation of form and content and subsequently refuse to engage the substance of Obama’s arguments. The ubiquitous descriptions of Obama as a Messiah candidate served, simultaneously, to frame and dismiss him as an empty signifier – a slick-talking, inexperienced, political oddity whose arguments were not worth engaging. The strategy was transparent and eerily familiar. In the heat of a presidential campaign John McCain had decided to gamble his political reformer credentials by channeling Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. August 29, 2008, the day McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate, the GOP’s Peter Ramus strategy imploded. With the selection of Governor Palin (a person with arguably the thinnest political resume of any national candidate in modern history) the GOP was sounding more like Herschel Walker than either Ramus or Aristotle. Mr. Walker, many will recall, is the phenomenally talented ex-professional football star who recently admitted to a life-long struggle with a serious mental illness, dissociative identity disorder (better known as multiple personality disorder). And, like Walker, the GOP now faces a serious dilemma. Who are they? Ramus? Or Aristotle? More to the point, in a post-Palin world, who is Barack Obama? Only two weeks earlier Republicans had spent millions telling the nation the Democratic presidential candidate was a glib talker and a political lightweight. Radio talk show pundits such as Rush Limbaugh made explicit what the “rock star” ads clearly implied. By selecting an articulate African American as their candidate, the Democrats provided clear evidence they were more interested in “identity politics” (i.e., the facile manipulation of “superficial” matters such as race and gender) than substantive political issues. The speed with which conservative pundits changed arguments is instructive. For example, despite months of haranguing about the Democratic Party’s myopic fascination with race and gender, within hours of McCain’s announcement, Rush Limbaugh trumpeted his sudden conversion to identity politics by posting a story with the following headline to his website: Sarah Palin: Babies, Guns, JesusHot damn! This is a woman with accomplishments.The statement is blunt, crass, and unambiguous. By selecting Palin, Limbaugh suggests, the GOP has sealed the election. Like McCain, he is clearly betting women will flock to Palin simply because they share her biology. Early results suggest a significant number of female voters, the most clearly contested “identity grouping” in this election, are not impressed. In the Gallup and Rasmussen polls released one day after her nomination, Palin was clearly more popular with men than women and garnered the lowest confidence rating of any VP candidate since Dan Quayle. In other words, it appears Palin faces an uphill climb if she expects to win over significant numbers of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters, most of whom – to be charitable - do not share her views on matters such as abortion, the economy, and the Iraq War. As Sarah Seltzer, a columnist with the Huffington Post wrote, “It's as though the McCain camp believes our irrational she-hormones will lead us, like sheep, to pull the lever for any candidate who looks like us--even if she has a strong record, as Palin does, of standing against women's interests.” To be sure, even some conservatives have been willing to admit that by picking Palin the GOP risks being accused of blatant hypocrisy. National Review columnist Ramesh Ponnuru, for example, attacked tokenism head on by asking, “Can anyone say with a straight face that Palin would have gotten picked if she were a man?” To be clear, none of this should be taken to mean McCain and Palin might not eventually win the White House. Recent elections make clear that voters can be a fickle lot and if the Hillary Clinton campaign tells us anything at all it is that women can think for themselves. If the GOP is to win this election, however, they must find a way to convince voters their new identity as champions of Aristotelian rhetoric and women’s rights is sincere. In that regard, one can hope that at the very least McCain and his strategists spent a long time talking about whether or not voters would perceive a contradiction between their message about Obama’s supposed superficiality at the beginning of August and their new message about the substance of Sarah Palin’s political resume only two weeks later. Whether or not the new strategy succeeds may depend on the degree to which women voters are willing to reflect on the tenor and substance of previous campaigns and on the GOP campaign to date. Palin has only been on the ticket for two days and it is already clear that many women perceive a performative contradiction between the party’s old and new messages. This is not good news for the McCain campaign. If these trends hold – that is if women remain ambivalent toward Palin and if her candidacy fails to gain traction in the blogosphere - the GOP is likely to have at least four years to figure out just who they are as a party – Peter Ramus or Aristotle of Stageira. And if that doesn’t work, Rush Limbaugh has the answer. Embrace your multiple personalities.
Here is what I want to know: Why is the Obama Campaign not emphasizing the Lugar-Obama Non-Proliferation Bill and Obama's education at Columbia University?
On the first point, as a former high school debate coach who has had countless discussions with students about the earlier Nunn-Lugar legislation, I think I have a fair grasp of the importance of Lugar-Obama to national security and international relations. Quite simply, Lugar-Obama is one of the most important pieces of legislation to come out of the US Congress in the last decade. It seems to me McCain's nomination of a candidate with virtually no experience in foreign policy (let alone substantive education in IR) provides a perfect opportunity for the campaign to talk about Lugar-Obama (again), thus underscoring his IR credentials.
Second, Barack has a BA from Columbia University in Political Science with a specialization in International Relations. Governor Palin, by contrast, has a BS degree in communications-journalism and a minor in political science from the University of Iowa. Sigh.... I listend as long as I could last night (maybe 15 minutes) as callers to the Sean Hannity show complained about Obama's "elitist" education. Look, I'm not denigrating Sarah Palin for studying journalism, or having faith or attending a state university. I am a Christian with beliefs many would find conservative, and I'm currently finishing a PhD in communication at a state university. But since when are degrees from presitgious universities with extraordinarily high standards a liability?
I am concerned about these two issues because a quick serach of Lexis-Nexis this morning turned up NOTHING about Lugar-Obama. Meanwhile the McCain campaign is shouting long and loud about Palin's executive credentials.
Please, please... I hope the campaign reads this entry and decides to talk about these things.
Did I mention that Palin is a global warming skeptic? Heaven help us! Really. The world is a very big place and Wasilla, Alaska is a verrrry small town.
