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This Is What Democracy Looks Like
Today's Note From a Madman
June 9, 2008
McBush Doesn't Get It
There is a John McCain sighting after all. The man running as the Republican
contender for the White House; the man who admitted to knowing nothing about the
economy; the man who thinks that the Bush tax breaks for millionaires - the same
tax breaks he, himself, voted against on their first go-around is finally
chiming in on the horrific jobs report of Friday afternoon with his :Statement
By John McCain On Today's Jobs Report":
"Today's news about unemployment is a stark reminder of the economic challenges
facing American families. As the worst single monthly increase in the
unemployment rate in two decades clearly shows, Americans across this country
are hurting, and we must act now to support workers, families and employers
alike. This means getting our economy back on track by providing immediate tax
relief, enacting a HOME plan to help those facing foreclosure, lowering health
care costs, investing in innovation, moving toward energy independence and
opening foreign markets to our goods. These policies will help small businesses
create the jobs that families need today. The American people cannot afford more
inaction from Washington.
"The wrong change for our country would be an economic agenda based upon the
policies of the past that advocate higher taxes, bigger government,
government-run health care and greater isolationism. To help families at this
critical time, we cannot afford to go backward as Senator Obama advocates."
-From JohnMcCain.com
McCain doesn't get it. The guy who once said "I don't know too much about the
economy," should stick to his statement and get someone into his campaign who
does. McCain's ignorance about what can save our nation's workers, falling
dollar and her economic health is staggering in its depth. Surely he can see
that the Bush economic policies of the past seven-plus years, which have gotten
us into our current economic quagmire, need to be reversed, not endorsed today.
Doesn't he?
George W. Bush has surrounded himself with those who will blindly follow him
regardless of how bad things get, how low our dollar falls or how many jobs are
lost. john McCain's plan seems to be even worse: To follow Bush's lead no matter
where it leads him, and us.
McCain's statement is nothing but pandering to those who still support President
Bush and those who think that this tax break for millionaires is really a
bonanza for them. Those who have lost their jobs, their homes and/ or their
health care don't need a tax break, In fact, many, if not most, aren't paying
taxes at all. It's hard to pay taxes when one has no income, after all.
Tax cuts won't pay for health care. McCain's "plan", if you can call it a plan,
has our treasury handing out checks of $2,500 and $5,000 to single and married
persons, respectively, to pay for health care coverage. With the average health
care plan costing in excess of $12,000 per year, very few who can't afford it
today will be able to afford it tomorrow. That is, of course, unless they no
longer need food, gas or fuel in the Winter.
And those tax give-backs for health care will cost those same Americans an
additional $700 billion each and every year. Add that to McCain's lowering of
the corporate tax rate (from 35 percent to 25 percent) and his "100 year plan"
for Iraq and one has to wonder where all of that cash is coming from.
But the thing that bugs me the most is McCain's alignment with President Bush. I
get it that he needs the Bush faithful in order to get the big bucks into his
coffers. After all, he does have an uphill battle in his bout against Senator
Barack Obama this November. The Senator Formerly Known as "The Maverick" is just
a Photo-Op away from being John McBush.
McCain obviously thinks that his only chance is to get those Bush supporters
behind him, and to do so, he has modeled his campaign after President Photo-Op.
It's even beginning to appear that McCain is now taking the advice of former GOP
leaders and former Bushies alike in order to get his campaign, and its financing
going. And do we really want another four-to-eight years of Bush's people making
decisions for us again?
I don't think so.
In the end McCain will stick to Bush's policies because he has no real ideas of
his own. The economy will continue to slide under a McCain-McBush presidency.
When the dust finally clears, the United states will no longer be model for the
rest of the world it used to be. We'll be just another third-world nation with a
few rich people running roughshod over the rest of us.
-Noah Greenberg
A DREAM ACHIEVED, A DREAM DENIED
by Victoria A. Brownworth
copyright c 2008 Journal-Register Newspapers, Inc.
On June 7th, after 17 months of grueling campaigning that staffers less than
half her age had trouble keeping up with, Hillary Clinton officially suspended
her campaign for president. Her speech, attended by more than 50,000 people in
Washington, D.C., was breathtakingly inspirational. Clinton said many things,
but the only one Democratic Party officials wanted to hear was her enthusiastic
endorsement of Barack Obama.
Enthusiastic she was. To a fault. Even the media, which has had a tone of
overwhelming disdain and belittlement of Clinton throughout her historic
campaign, could find no fault with her speech. Obama himself said he was
“thrilled and honored” by her comments and “immensely grateful” for her support.
Now if only Obama’s supporters could acquire some of their candidate’s
graciousness in victory.
In the days between Obama’s announcing he had garnered enough super delegates to
put him over the magic number to become the Democratic Party’s presumptive
nominee (he won’t officially be the nominee until the convention nominates him
in August in Denver) and Saturday when Clinton gave her speech, the vitriol from
Obama supporters was extreme. For those who don’t understand why the candidate
who won the popular vote, but not the delegate count needed to let her
supporters down easily, let me explain.
While the media was realizing their dream of seeing Obama become the presumptive
nominee and those of us who grew up watching the hard-won changes wrought by the
black civil rights movement reveled in the reality of a black man shattering the
fetters of racism in America, the 18 million Americans who voted for Hillary
Clinton and passionately supported her were seeing their dream crushed.
It’s important for all Americans, regardless of political affiliation, to
understand that for women and girls of every race, ethnicity and religion,
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy represented the possibility of gender equality for
the first time in American history.
I worked on Clinton’s campaign from New Hampshire until the last primary in
South Dakota–which she won–on June 3rd. I worked hard and long and passionately
for a candidate I admired and respected and felt would be the best president
we’d had in a generation.
Contrary to the media representation of the Clinton demographic, it was vast and
diverse. In Philadelphia, her headquarters was run by two African-American women
and staffed by women and men of all ages and ethnicities. In fact, when I first
went to the office, I was thrilled by that diversity, having been told time and
again that only white women over 50 supported Clinton.
Instead I saw college students–male and female, black, white, Latino and Asian.
I saw an extraordinary support from African-American women and men. But mostly
what I saw was a determination and a dream: The workers for Hillary wanted
nothing more than to see the first woman president in their lifetimes.
I understand the thrill African Americans–regardless of whether they supported
Obama or Clinton–must feel at Barack Obama’s ascension. I grew up with parents
deeply engaged in the black civil rights movement. I was privileged to meet some
truly great men and women as a young child, including the estimable Rep. John
Lewis. There can be no question how momentous Obama’s achievement is in U.S.
history when Jim Crow laws were still in play less than a decade before his
birth.
But my excitement and that of other Clinton supporters over that barrier being
broken came at the expense of our own dream of equality being crushed. Why can’t
Obama supporters understand that? Why can’t the media get it? Our bid for the
presidency was just as historic as Obama’s; the legacy of inequality for women
runs just as deep if not deeper than racism in America.
If there has been one cold, brutal realization in the hard-fought Democratic
campaign, it has been the realization that sexism and misogyny predominate in
America, still. Those of us who grew up during the second wave of feminism in
the 1960s and 1970s saw that writ large during the Clinton campaign. And it is
the breach created by that realization that will have to be healed if Obama
wants to win in November.
In her speech on June 3rd, Clinton spoke directly to her supporters, asking them
what her next step should be. This was considered bad form by the pundits who
have tried to orchestrate this primary election from beginning to end and slant
it toward the newcomer. But even a glance at American presidential history shows
that very few primaries have ever reached this stage to begin with. And none has
resulted in the winner of the popular vote *not* getting the nomination.
Male candidates have taken their battles to the convention floor and those
candidates did not have the weight of numbers on their side. Ted Kennedy battled
Jimmy Carter in 1980, even though he didn’t have even half the votes Clinton
had. Gary Hart battled Walter Mondale in 1984, even though he didn’t have the
votes either. Clinton had the votes–but was told no, no, no by the Democratic
Party itself.
Many Clinton supporters will tell you that Hillary Clinton was cheated of the
nomination. Perhaps, perhaps not. The Democratic Party system is so convoluted
and skewed it amazes me that anyone is ever nominated. I don’t understand why
Clinton had to have 11,500 votes to capture a delegate and Obama only needed
10,000. I don’t understand why caucuses are allowed when not everyone can vote
in them. I don’t understand how delegates and super delegates get to make
choices about who the favored candidate is, when actual voters should be making
that determination. I don't understand how the candidate who won all the major
states takes a back seat to the candidate who won none of them.
All those factors were in play in this primary. Plus, the disastrous debacle
over Florida and Michigan likely lost the Democrats thousands of voters for
November. As one friend in Florida told me, “Why should I vote in November for a
candidate I don’t want when I was told my vote in January for the candidate I
did want doesn’t count?”
Obama’s move into the presumptive nominee spot was accompanied by poignant video
clips of the black civil rights movement in all its hard-fought reality.
Those images are moving and compelling for those of us who grew up either before
or during that era. And while Obama’s unique ancestry–his father was a Kenyan
immigrant and his mother was white and he grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii–means
that he doesn’t actually share the legacy of most blacks in America, for his
African-American supporters, those images linked with his presumptive nomination
equal a dream realized. As one Morehouse College student noted, “Dr. King talked
about the dream. But usually you wake up from a dream. This time we woke up and
the dream was real.”
There was newsreel footage in the heads of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, too,
and it is also about civil rights--for women. My personal newsreel includes
images of my maternal grandmother, a suffragist, who chained herself to the
gates of the White House along with other women who were marching for the right
of women to vote. I was a college student marching for the Equal Rights
Amendment 30 years ago, just as my grandmother had marched for the right to
vote. I still have my Mondale/Ferraro t-shirt commemorating the first woman ever
on a major party ticket.
And I have the images of the assault on Hillary Clinton, too, which was an
assault on all women. Throughout the primary I heard pundit after pundit on
cable and network news refer to Hillary Clinton–a sitting U.S. senator and
former First Lady–as a bitch, whore, the C-word, ballbuster, cry baby, whiner,
witch, man killer, scold, the first wife every man hates, the mother every man
hates and numerous other slurs.
I read stories about her in respected newspapers like the New York Times and
Washington Post talking about her laugh, her cleavage, her thick thighs, her
pantsuits covering her fat ass, her wrinkles, her sexlessness, her voice being
too high, too shrill, to screechy.
I listened to pundits I had previously respected say that the only reason she
could run was because she got a sympathy vote from people because her husband
cheated on her. I heard one newscaster say on CNN that she did well in March
because it was “White Bitch Month” and another say that she was called a bitch
because “some women deserve to be called that.”
I have had male friends tell me that the sexism that has pervaded the campaign
is “no big deal” and that I and other women, especially Clinton, should just
“get over it.”
But the reality is that Clinton had a much harder path to forge than did Obama.
Obama had hundreds of years of male presidential candidates and male privilege
to follow–including plenty who ran on a “hope” campaign, most recently Bill
Clinton.
Hillary Clinton had no models for her run. She had to consistently cope with
men, men and more men telling her that she wasn’t tough enough or she was too
tough. Obama himself made a PMS reference about her, while other men in politics
and in the media repeatedly questioned her as a woman, not as a candidate.
No male candidate has to run against gender. It’s presumed that a man is a man.
But a woman has to run against being a woman: She cannot be too soft or she’ll
be perceived as weak and unable to stand up to foreign leaders. She cannot be
too hard or she’ll get the bitch/ballbuster moniker. The line Clinton had to
walk was a tightrope with no net and she had to walk it constantly.
In her speech on June 7th, Clinton reminded the huge crowd that although she
hadn’t completely penetrated the glass ceiling of the presidential nomination,
thanks to their votes and support that ceiling now had 18 million cracks in it
and a lot of light was shining through those cracks.
Clinton also spoke about all the little girls and young women who had flocked to
her speeches, telling her that now they knew that they too could run for
president.
When I was working the polls on primary day in Philadelphia in my 95 percent
black neighborhood, I tried to convince many of the African-American women who
came to vote for the first time to vote for the woman candidate. I asked them to
vote for their daughters as well as themselves and their mothers.
Several African-American women working the polls with me that day–for
Obama–whispered to me later that they had voted for Clinton. It was a revelation
to me; they had gotten in the booth and chosen to vote gender over race.
One friend said that choice was very hard. “I wanted to vote being black and
being a woman,” she told me. She felt like a race traitor, she said, for voting
for Clinton.
That’s part of the issue of this campaign. For months we have heard predictions
about what would happen if Obama had the nomination “stolen” from him by
Clinton. Yet no one objected when Obama quietly filed lawsuits to prevent
re-voting in Michigan and Florida. Nor did anyone ever suggest that women voters
might not vote come November if *they* perceived the election was stolen from
*them.*
Yet that is where we are today. For months I heard Obama supporters tell me that
they would vote for John McCain if Clinton were the nominee. I heard Michelle
Obama say she wasn’t sure she could support Clinton if she were the nominee. I
waited to hear Obama himself say that he would support Clinton if she were the
nominee as she had repeatedly said she would support him–and heard nothing.
I heard the DNC express outrage whenever there was an even marginally racist
comment floating in the news. But I heard resounding silence when outrageous,
violent, sexist statements were made daily in the media about Clinton.
Since Obama clinched the presumptive nomination, his supporters have continued
to bash Clinton. When he said something in support of her campaign on June 3rd,
the audience booed. There was no such booing when Clinton congratulated Obama.
Pundits and politicians have said that it’s Clinton’s job to heal the party.
No, it isn’t. It’s Obama’s job to heal the party. It’s the DNC’s job to heal the
party. Clinton didn’t create the atmosphere of sexism and corresponding outrage.
That was done by a triumvirate of the media, Obama’s campaign and the DNC.
Clinton made a lovely case for supporting Obama on June 7th. She gave a rousing
and inspirational speech that proved once again what a strong, valiant and
courageous candidate she truly is. But her speech does not undo the damage done
by Obama’s supporters and the DNC to women in the Democratic Party.
Obama’s campaign and his supporters have always behaved as if they don’t need
the half of the Democratic Party that voted for Clinton. They have always acted
as if the female vote is a given that they can count on.
But as Clinton noted in her speech, there have only been two Democrats elected
in the past 40 years: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. So thinking that there
isn’t a fight ahead is foolhardy at best. John McCain is a formidable candidate
and the media loves him just as much as they appeared to love Obama. Now that
the media no longer has Clinton to be the scapegoat for all their bile, they’ll
have to choose a new victim. And McCain has been a favorite for a long, long
time.
McCain is also wooing the women who now feel so disenfranchised by their own
party, the women who the DNC shrugged off as unimportant. He is lauding Clinton
the way the Obama people should have been.
I congratulated a neighbor I know supports Obama last week. He told me Clinton
still had atoning to do. This is the kind of poor sportsmanship that will lose
Democrats the election in November if they don’t reel it in.
Hillary Clinton fought a harder fight than Barack Obama, because she had to
fight against him, the media, gender and–sadly–her own party. She garnered more
votes than any candidate in a primary season in the history of American politics
and she won the popular vote. But she did not win the nomination. That glass
ceiling really is impenetrable and women voters now know that it will be a very
long time before they see another woman candidate–or even the same woman
candidate–running for president again.
It’s the end of a dream for millions of Americans. So when the media and the
Obama supporters question why many of us are not ready to jump on the Obama
bandwagon, remember all the commentary from the other side about not supporting
Hillary if she won.
Rev. Jesse Jackson said on June 7th that the best way to heal the party was to
have Clinton on the ticket with Obama. Jackson is a veteran of civil rights
battles. He sees that women are hurting and angry and need to be drawn back to
the party. If Obama is the man he claims to be, the man who unites and doesn’t
divide, then he should start with his own party. Because if he cannot woo the
women back, then he doesn’t have a prayer come November and *all* our dreams go
up in smoke.
In response to Eddie Konczal's plea for Democratic Party unity, Victoria
Brownworth responds:
I want to thank Eddie Konczal for being the only respectful Obama supporter I
have met in six months. Thanks for that. Clinton workers (myself) and voters
have indeed had our guts kicked. The execrable behavior of both the Obama
campaign and the media has made it difficult to imagine voting for Obama. But I
totally agree that one cannot vote for McCain. How could I work for Clinton for
six months and then vote for someone who is antithetical to her platform? It
makes no sense. But I can vote for Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party with a
clear conscience. It would be great if Obama and his campaign could pay
attention to folks like Eddie and stop re-gutting the Clinton supporters. McCain
is wooing Clinton supporters. McKinney is wooing Clinton supporters. Obama? He's
letting his surrogates continue to trash Clinton. You'd almost think that he
doesn't want to win in November.
Send your comments to: NationalView@aol.com
-Noah Greenberg