Jaw Flapping

Obama said that the Republicans had been the party of ideas.

Did he praise Republicans?

Hillary says he did. Obama says he didn't.

I understand the dilemma. I, too, have said that the Republicans have out-thought us and, if the simple fact of new ideas were sufficient to earn a win, then the Republicans deserved to win the White House in 2000. This is not the same thing as saying I like their ideas, approve of that party, or am glad Bush got into the Oval Office.

It simply says that they rubbed their brain cells far more energetically than we did. We sat on our laurels of the last 40 years, and didn't pay attention to things like the Republicans' superior use of language to frame issues and box in their opponents. I give you "Pro-Life" as an example.

I made my comments in emails to friends. I wasn't running for office. And that makes a huge difference. Obama said much the same thing, but in the context of the campaign, his comment was a chameleon. In other words, it can be heard as a values-neutral statement, or as praise, and it was heard as praise by a lot of people.

Where Obama, the Democratic candidate for President, dropped that ball and did a disservice to his party was not following that sentence with, "Too bad their ideas were uniformly disastrous."

I think it's very likely that he did not do that because he wants to walk the fence.
Obama wants Republicans and independents to hear that statement--and the statement about Reagan as a transformative president, as well--as compliments. But, but, but: At the same time, if he should be called out for that, as Hillary called him out, his phrasing gives him plenty of wiggle room, and he took it. He said, with technical accuracy, "But oh, I didn't praise the ideas or agree with them!" "I didn't say Reagan was a good president!"

This is disingenuous in the context of the campaign, especially since Obama sees himself as the bridge candidate, the unifer. What would anyone expect from a bridge candidate but a compliment? Obama has been noticeably loathe to attack Republicans. Why would anyone hear his comments as values-free? I don't buy it.

I think Hillary is right to call him on this, and I think that this exactly illustrates what she means when she said he won't take responsibility for his votes. He won't take responsibility for his statements, either--and in the same slippery way. He should have said this: "I stand by saying that the Republicans out-thought us, in the sense of quantity of big ideas. But I should have added that I thought those big ideas are a disaster for the country. Let me make that clear: Just because I say you have more cattle on your ranch, it doesn't mean that you're a better rancher or that your cattle are first rate."

She "Cried"!

Menu this morning: Words on toast.

What's clear is that nobody knows how to call it when a woman and an African American are candidates for President. Obviously the pollsters are not asking the right questions, and have an insufficient understanding of how women vote and why. (Not that I did such a great job of prognostication.)

The MSM analysis, such as it is, is fascinating. Every commentary suggests that there is a phalanx of angry New Hampshire women, and that they came out to support Clinton in an act of massive "gender solidarity." Nothing else, mind. Just "gender solidarity." They've reached into their collective subconscious and hauled out the fourth grade playground.

You know what I think? If it weren't so trivializing, I'd think it was funny. Imagine: Thelmas and Louises in their trundling hundreds, galoshing up the snowbanks and down the frozen sidewalks screaming "WOMAN!"

But what we can reliably infer from this fantasy is that there is a frightened phalanx of freudian males writing election commentary. The most obvious tip-off came in that sublimely enlightened "Vaginal-Americans" exchange between Tucker Carlson and Cliff May, President, can you believe it, of the alleged Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. (Footmote: Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson was also present, but to his credit, seemed embarrassed and wasn't having any of it, maybe partly because the premises underlying this projectile vomitfest also implicitly ridicule the African American cohort! That's how clueless these guys are, and on national TV, yet.)

In case you've forgotten:

Tucker Carlson: "Gene, this is an amazing statistic: 94 percent of women say they'd be more likely to vote if a woman were on the ballot. I think of all the times I voted for people just because they're male. You know? The ballot comes up, and I'm like, 'Wow. He's a dude. I think I'll vote for him. We've got similar genitalia. I'm--he's getting my vote.' . . . the Clinton campaign says: 'Hillary isn't running as a woman.' Well, that's actually completely false, considering the Hillary campaign--nd I get their emails--relentlessly pushes the glass ceiling argument. 'You should vote for her because she's a woman.' They say that all the time."

Cliff May: "At least call her a Vaginal-American."

Tucker Carlson: "Is that the new phrase? Boy, that's nasty. I don't think I can say that."

And off they gallop, yukking it up, to Planet Mysogynistica, where they remain, lost and wandering.

Tucker's assertions make two things clear about Tucker. One, he is one of the most intellectually dishonest individuals in media, and that's saying something really damning. Two, couldn't be plainer: When he thinks of "gender solidarity," he goes right to the crotch, to the genitalia, in his words.

The layers of trivialization in that construct are just boggling. The contempt blown across the TV screens is frightening, especially since the disease isn't limited to that little clod, Tucker.

He and his fellow Penile American pollster/spokesmen cannot see that gender encompasses anything else. No brains are involved here. No complex social histories, no variations by race, class, age, culture, religion. Women in New Hampshire didn't vote for Hillary because they support her policies. Their vaginas voted for her vagina.

And at the time, Digby made this excellent point:

For as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been desperate to "recapture" the white male vote and nobody thought it was illegitimate to appeal to a constituency on the basis of their race and gender. But when Clinton is said to be appealing to women, it's as if she's breaking some sort of taboo --- that she's being narrow and opportunistic and cheap.

It's "moronic" in Carlson's jumped up little world for the Clinton campaign to consider what might appeal to 50% of the nation, but it's sound strategy when the boys do it? It's just so. tediously. typical.

And then there's this. "Gender solidarity?" Oh yeah right. I haven't seen "gender solidarity" since Billy Jean King whupped Bobby Riggs in the tennis match of the sexes. That was like in 1973, after Riggs bragged about male superiority.

Gender solidarity? Outside the game field, there never has been any such thing and there never will be, because women are not reducible to a single common denominator--not even biologically.

Too much, maybe 90%, of the commentary about the Clinton campaign boils down to a fixation on gender stereotypes and a sexist "body politics" masquerading as political analysis. Cris Matthews is notoriously obsessed with this stuff. From practically panting for Bush's package to ridiculing Hillary's voice, for Matthews, Tucker, and the boys, it's all about the Cult of Masculinity's revulsion at the mere idea of a vagina in the White House. Can't stand her. It's her voice. No, it's her laugh. Wait, she's too old. It's the woman vote. She's controlling (read self-actualized, thinking person). She's cold. She's unemotional. She cried.

Here's a thought: Let American women make Tucker's nightmare come true. For when they do it unto Hillary, they do it unto you, too.

Hillary!

Delighted to see that New Hampshire has given Hillary a new lease on the campaign.

You know, it surprised me to notice how sad I felt to think that Hillary might be out and done. I realized that I didn't like that outcome, and didn't want that outcome.

And now I'm listening again. I want her to show us who she is, want her to show us her passion, her heart, and her feeling. If she does that, I think she can pull it out.

Anger, Campaigning, and Body Politics

An email friend reminded me recently that some things still belong to white males only. We can tell which by the vast difference in the reception they receive and others receive when they usurp the privilege--as in the privilege of unmasked anger. That's still reserved for white men. Not that others can't show it. They can, but when they do, the reaction they get will be tinctured by our projections based on who they are or who we think they ought to be.

For example, John Edwards, white and male, can build an entire campaign around in-your-face anger at the establishment, corporate greed, the gutting of the American middle class. But Hillary cannot show a similar anger. When she (or any woman) even approaches cresting the hill of outrage, she is derided as a shrill bitch. A ball-buster. Harridan.Bad. Dangerous. With Vagina dentata no doubt.

And Obama cannot. No Black man can. Obama so much cannot that he has built his whole campaign around conciliation and nonpartisan cooperation. I won't say "collaboration" because it remains to be seen whether Obama has a cleansing vision and integrity inside that he can't afford to put on display just now. So when I say that he can't afford to show his anger, don't misunderstand. I'm not calling Obama a "Tom," an appeaser. (That remains to be seen, and that, I think, may be what is meant by "Is he Black enough?")

What I'm saying is that Black male anger is so profoundly threatening to whites that if he campaigned in the John Edwards style, Obama would be DOA. We wouldn't see in Obama the anger of a righteous patriot infuriated at the selling of America to Bush's cronies, or at the racist anti-immigration movement. We wouldn't be able to hear him. We would see the ghost of Nat Turner, of Malcolm X.

This needs to be kept in mind when we analyze his message and find it wanting for being too "why can't we all just get along." We may want the fire of righteous indignation, but not all the candidates can display it to their advantage.

Survival of the Cutest, or The Difference Between "Gut" and "Smart"

Has anyone done a study of candidate faces and voter appeal? I know we've done the Alpha Male thing, and apparently, judging by the person now in the White House, it's a real thing. (Can you believe it?)

I'm thinking that at least 87% of the animosity directed at Hillary and Al Gore has to do with their faces.

Now wait. Before you go all hooty on me, remember that the nation is as one on the principle that no president shall ever resemble Dennis Kucinich, Ross Perot, or Ron Paul. These things matter in the arcane process of selecting candidates for national orifice--er, office.

Allow me to begin.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Gore has a prissy mouth. To me (and I like Gore; I'm from Tennessee, and before the crust formed on the earth, I worked for his father's re-election, much to my Republican father's outrage), to me, Gore's face looks most appallingly, regrettably Victorian in a particularly parsonish kind of way. The long, thin nose points inexorably to the thin, parsimonious lips, and I recoil, expecting Rector Gore's long, thin fingers to whip out the table of contents of my own personal book of sins. We don't have time for that.

Whether he's actually like Vicar Gore doesn't matter. I suspect he isn't like that at all, or he'd never have been elected to public office, by Democrats, at least, in the first place.

What matters is what we think we see there. His odd vocal cadence, nasal tonality, arching eyebrows, and, oh yeah, formidable intellect, move him even farther from our reach. Gore looks the patrician part, has the heritage, the wealth, and the access, and by all logic ought to be a Repubican. That he is not perhaps sets up an irreconcilable dissonance between who he is and the values he espouses. Indeed, if Gore had those values, if Gore were a Rightwing Republican, with all that those sad words imply, he'd probably have a marble monument on the Mall.

All this, then, makes for essentially the same set of questions that besets Hillary, except that she has the added complication of being female. If there's anything we hate more than persnickety, withhholding Protestant parsons, it's Women Like Hillary. We just know that she eats mountain oysters for breakfast.

Let me own now that, despite my unassailable standards for good judgment and rationality (hork!), I, too, am vulnerable to these perceptions. Consequently, I don't particularly LIKE either Gore or Hillary as individuals, though I do love Gore's policy constellation and respect his intellectual powers and intellectual integrity enormously, with a caveat related to his about-face on choice. Also, I like most of what Hillary stands for, if not her penchant for obviously playing it safe. I hate that.

That said, there's something about Hillary's face that also inspires less than affection. Eyes, cheeks, and mouth, I think. Come on, admit it. She looks like she's got something up her sleeve, like she's oozing sarcasm. I don't really believe she is. Everyone who's met her says she's very nice, and if she were as sarcastic and nasty as, say, Mean Jean, I don't think Democrats would like or elect or respect her as they do.

Again, it's what her face seems to say. Those cheeks invoke Pinnocchio. They conspire with that mouth to suggest that just possibly, her nose is growing, and in any case, if we knew the half of what she knows. . . . Only, who likes to feel left out of the joke? On this score alone, you just know that Hillary is the beneficiary of 300 million unresolved high school vendettas.

But there is the tedious fact that after $80 million or so, the Republicans were never able to turn up a damn thing on Hill and Bill. When she says she's been vetted, baby, she means vetted. We're not talking Skull and Bones here.
So maybe there's no joke at all.

Still, this isn't rational stuff. This is pure gut. And the one thing Bush has contributed to American political discourse is that there is a huge difference between gut and smart.

I know where we wouldn't be if Gore had been sworn in, as he should have been. We wouldn't be up to our eyeballs in Iraq, in debt, in spies, and inflation.

Maybe we ought to reconsider how we respond to Hillary and Al. This ain't a beauty contest.

The Irrational Hatred of Hillary

HuffPo offers up an article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that sheds some fascinating history on the Bizarre Hatred of Clintons Rightwing monkey hammer sling fest. This teaser only sets up the good part. You'll have to go to HuffPo to get that:

Even some Democrats who agree with Hillary Clinton on every issue and consider her an effective, inspiring leader, fret that the blind, irrational hatred, that burdened her husband during his presidency and that continues to dog his wife, might impair her electability. 'She is too polarizing,' they say, parroting the verdict of television's Sunday morning gas bags.

It's worth recalling the historical parallels with an earlier presidential couple. 'No other word than hatred will do,' observed a May, 1936, Harper's Magazine feature, 'They Hate Roosevelt,' by Marquis W. Childs. 'The phenomenon to which I refer goes beyond objection to policies or programs. It is a consuming personal hatred of President Roosevelt and, to an almost equal degree, of Mrs. Roosevelt.'

The similarities are striking.

It's not Immigration. It's the Economy.

To control the immigration debate, the Right has constructed a box made of the same-old, same-old tried-and-failed reactionary memes, and all of us are trapped within it.

Have you noticed? We never, ever seem to talk outside that box. Even when we seek to rebut, we repeat the memes and reinforce them in the public mind.

Individually and collectively, these sound bites are nothing but voter registration and privatization enhancement devices. That’s it. They have no basis in reality because that’s not the point. The point is to obscure reality, not reveal it. The point is to create a new reality and marshal the masses to defend it.

Observe the trap. Every one of the handful of popular immigration disinformation nuggets is designed to hook, recruit, and redirect the attention of one or more vulnerable sectors of the public. The disgruntled, the fearful, the racist, the desperate, and/or the bankrupt and the medically besieged have to be distracted from reality, captured for the Republican Party, and given a pressure valve, a scapegoat to shoot at. Ergo, “illegals.”

It’s no accident that Lou Dobbs--voice of the populist Right--commiserates with the middle class while he pumps far Right propaganda to the masses: Elections aren’t won without the middle class. So far, thanks largely to his megaphone, we either lamely rebut the memes (a lost cause; you can’t prove a negative), or we sit on the sidelines, frightened ourselves or frozen between false polarities like opposing labor or opposing immigrants.

But today's election results in Virginia and elesewhere, and the economic trends highlighted in today’s Financial Times may point the way for a whole new conversation. It turns out that voters are not driven as one to the GOP by immigration after all. It turns out that after a long post-traumatic stress disorder coma, Americans are waking to the real dimensions of the disaster the Right has wrought. Let's hope the Democrats wake up and smell the anger.

Meanwhile, indeed there are real considerations to be faced in the complex immigration issue, but we're trapped in a GOP sound chamber and missing the facts pretty much entirely.

Here’s my take on some of the memes, who they target, and how they function.

“Illegals” steal jobs and force down wages. There are millions of underpaid and un-benefitted “union orphans” and unemployed workers stranded on our shores waving adieu at jobs gone overseas and wages depressed by the GOP wealth transfer machine. How better to channel their rage than by telling them that a horde of brown people is stampeding across the land to steal their jobs? The sheer beauty of it! This meme positions the Right as the outraged friend of the workin’ man, and polarizes African Americans and Latinos. It also puts rotten rock liberals, who acquired their political values from a bumper sticker, between a rock and a hard place: Oh Lordy! Whom to support when the union people are fighting with the Black people! God forbid we question the premise.

“Illegals” steal elections. So many corruptions beset us, but undocumented workers lining up to vote is not among them. Still, this meme is perfect cover for Rightwingers who want to diddle state voter registration rules and tweak those little black boxes. It hooks the racism in us all, and drives a lot of Americans to the polls to support “voter fraud” propositions that actually are intended to defraud minorities, not to un-fix fixed votes. Heightened ID requirements and other measures are designed to keep poor people and minorities from voting, but under cover of “voter fraud,” GOP secretaries of state and tainted highway patrolmen get away with tricks that ordinarily would land them in jail.

“Illegals" bring crime to the neighborhood. "Illegals" drive down property values.” How many people who’ve played by the rules actually haven’t gotten where they expected to be? Hard work hasn’t automatically brought the American Dream—not since the 1970s, not since corporations took health insurance and pensions off the table and gave 99% of the productivity yield to the CEO.

More recently, millions were prodded to seize lowered mortgage interest rates, but weren’t told that their lenders were giving kickbacks for higher home appraisals. Now that house values are tanking and crime driven by poverty and drugs is rising across the country, a lot of furious people want something more tangible to smack down than Countrywide’s voice mail hell, and a lot of corporate lobbyists, drug dealers, and mortgage raiders desperately need the GOP to divert them.

They’re nothin’ but a bunch of "illegals!” This meme of perverted genius is the cinder-like heart of Rightwing xenophobia and racism. It reduces a whole person—a human being with a name, a family, a story, and a dream—to one word, a word that acts to numb us to the huge difference between what is merely legal and what is just. As cleverly, that word points us away from our own complicity: It was we who allowed our politicians to create NAFTA and CAFTA, and it is we who benefit from prices that are subsidized on the backs of the very people we demonize. Nice. But as long as we focus on those “illegals,” we aren’t likely to focus on NAFTA and CAFTA or global warming. It’s old-fashioned rabble-rousing; if nothing else can get the rabble pissed off and to the polls, the vision of thieving brown hordes and cowboy militias surely will. This is class war, only, as “employer sanctions” measures are about to demonstrate graphically, we’re shooting each other.\

“Illegals" don't pay taxes. Not exactly. The fact is that working Americans are funding the war, the country, and wealthy Republicans, who simply are not carrying their weight. But taxes are always a sore point. Paint the Democrats as tax raisers and friends of dirt-poor free-loading "tax cheaters," and paint the GOP as the party of law and order. Like the “illegals” meme, the tax meme appeals to the dutiful, unassuming law abiding voters among us—the so called “moral majority.” They may be God-fearing, but all the same, somehow they aren’t part of the new GOP aristocracy. Like the rest of us, they may wonder where the money went. Better to vote righteous indignation than to consider the possibility that they’ve been had, bad, by King George II.

“Illegals" have driven our hospitals into the ground and shred our safety nets and public schools. Somebody has, that’s for sure, but not brown-skin immigrants. For-profit hospital corporations like that owned by the Frist family shut down small rural hospitals to drive down costs. Right-wing fundamentalists attack school funding in favor of privatization—charter schools, private schools, and school voucher programs--and in favor of curriculum control through coordinated home and private Christian schooling. Neo-Con Republicans un-fund New Deal federal safety nets in the name of privatization or small government (except in Iraq), and shift social service costs to already overburdened states. We may notice that the lynchpins of the New Deal lie in tatters, but it’s hard to see clauses buried deep in government funding bills. Besides, it’s easier to gratify the dispossessed if we put fences militias on the border. It’s also more profitable to build private mercenary armies, private prisons, and miles of walls than tend to the nation’s social and physical infrastructure.

The debate as it is currently constructed really isn't about immigration. That's just the screen. It's the subtext that is controlling us. Time for us to get out of the box, look at the facts about immigration, and notice that loud crashing sound around us.

It's our disintegrating country, thanks to the GOP. This is what the Virginia voters are waking up to. And Rahm Emmanuel, James Carville, and Hillary Clinton are dead wrong to steer the party away from telling it like it is.