Sherry Chandler

Issues

In this I-hope-almost-post-Bush world, I have seen some strange disclaimers from journalists’ anonymous sources but this one from Jon Meacham’s The Palin Problem takes the cake (my emphasis):

Even devoted Republicans doubt whether the Sarah Six-Pack case is the best one to make. After the vice presidential debate, a senior figure in the party, who asked not to be named because he was telling the truth…

That got a belly laugh from me, one that the spouse described as my Hillary cackle.

I haven’t said much about this election since the primaries. I’ve been trying to process the changes I underwent as a result of that experience. One change is that I lost my feeling of tribalism, the automatic Democrat good, Republican bad (or vice versa) that actually dictates the way most of us vote.

Not that I have any plans to vote for John McCain. He is way too wrong on all the issues I care about. And I do have serious reservations about Palin’s readiness to be Vice-President, which I think this Newsweek article addresses in a fairly objective way while recognizing her obvious strengths as a campaigner:

A key argument for Palin, in essence, is this: Washington and Wall Street are serving their own interests rather than those of the broad whole of the country, and the moment requires a vice president who will, Cincinnatus-like, help a new president come to the rescue. The problem with the argument is that Cincinnatus knew things. Palin sometimes seems an odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There” and Marge from “Fargo.”

Is this an elitist point of view? Perhaps, though it seems only reasonable and patriotic to hold candidates for high office to high standards. Elitism in this sense is not about educational or class credentials, not about where you went to school or whether you use “summer” as a verb. It is, rather, about the pursuit of excellence no matter where you started out in life. Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton were born to ordinary families, but they spent their lives doing extraordinary things, demonstrating an interest in, and a curiosity about, the world around them. This is much less evident in Palin’s case.

…

We have had terrific presidents and vice presidents from humble backgrounds, and we have had terrible presidents and vice presidents from privileged ones. The unease with Palin is not class-based. It is empirically based. She is a rising political star, a young woman�she is only 44�who has done extraordinary things. It takes guts to offer oneself for election, and to serve. It is far easier to throw spitballs from the stands than it is to seek and hold office. She is a governor, and she has the courage to go into the arena. For that she should be honored and respected. If she were seeking a Senate seat, or being nominated for a cabinet post�secretary of energy, say, or interior�the conversation about her would be totally different.

But she is not seeking a Senate seat, nor is she being nominated for a cabinet post, and so it is only prudent to ask whether she is in fact someone who should be president of the United States in the event of disaster. She may be ready in a year or two, but disaster does not coordinate its calendar with ours. Would we muddle through if Palin were to become president? Yes, we would, but it is worth asking whether we should have to.

…

What Palin knows, and what the country knows about her, is an issue for the next few weeks. Barack Obama is not the Messiah, and Biden is no Simon Peter, but it stretches credulity to say that Obama is no more qualified to be president than Palin is. Though you may prefer McCain-Palin to Obama-Biden, there is not the same threshold question about the Democrats that is now being asked about Palin.

But while I can’t vote for McCain, I still have reservations enough about Obama that I can’t become a cheerleader for him. And so I have been quiet.

I had hoped that after the primaries he would win me over but so far that hasn’t really happened. (This post and the comment thead, especially the one from art, go some way toward explaining where I am here.)

This was the year when I — and others on the left — had high hopes for moving the nation’s political conversation to the left: to matters of healthcare, education, social support networks, and to undoing some of the horrid civil liberties violations of the Bush years. Instead, Senator Obama has chosen to run right. (He has been steadily moving to the right for his entire political career, and this video gives the lie to any claims that he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate.) I wish he hadn’t voted for the FISA bill. I wish he hadn’t helped railroad this bailout bill through by courting Republicans instead of holding out for fixes like a Home Owners Loan Corporation. I wish he wouldn’t keep talking about “fixing” Social Security.

I could be totally wrong about all of this. I have friends who say that Obama, because of who he is, has to run to the right to get elected. They seem to think that he will then transform himself back into the liberal he really is. Worked for Bill Clinton, didn’t it?

Oh well, like Harry, my political instincts aren’t that good. I usually back losers and tilters-at-windmills like Dennis Kucinich. I don’t think about politics actually, but about issues that are important to me. Obama’s strategy seems to be working for him and Geraldine Ferrarro is not the only one who thinks he is a lucky politician. This financial meltdown seems to have broken just in time to work in Obama’s favor.

So I think he will be #44.

And he has promised to double the Peace Corps. And restore funding to the U.N.’s birth control efforts (which is a biggy, see this).

But I would be more comfortable about our future if we had a more strongly liberal Congress, one more willing to do its oversight job and put checks on any president. Downticket races are still very important! The vital job of putting our country back on the right track is too important to trust to one human being.

I do celebrate that Obama may well be the first man of mixed race to occupy the White House. That is a significant landmark. And frankly, I think it is an indication that the left’s affirmative action programs have worked. Not that Obama has needed affirmative action necessarily, but it is because of affirmative action that we have become accustomed, as a nation, to seeing those other than white men in positions of power. Affirmative action helped Colin Powell. It helped Clarence Thomas, much as he resents the fact.

According to Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, Obama will only lose about 5% of the vote to racial prejudice. In a country that still gives 25% approval to George W. Bush, that looks like a pretty good number to me.

I have long held that people would vote for Obama if he gave them pocketbook reasons to do so, and now it seems those racist, Hillary-supporting Appalachians are breaking in his direction. Women came over to his side long ago.

I am not denying that there is racism in the country and some of it is virulent, which is why I think Sarah Palin is playing a dangerous game in rabble-rousing rallies like this one in Clearwater. [Update: This is the kind of fire Palin is playing with, and it is contemptible of the McCain campaign to do so.]

Meanwhile, I invite you to write your own punchline to this sign that I found at Shakespeare’s Sister

Here’s an obscenity

From the NYTimes:

JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are not the only winners to emerge from the long presidential primary season.

The two presumptive nominees, along with the many candidates who bowed out along the way, spent more than $900 million through the end of May, about $470 million more than was spent on primaries in 2000, when both major parties last had competitive primary battles. Nearly half of the current spending has been paid to just a few dozen companies.

…

Some experts say they think that as campaign spending rises, the candidates benefit much less than the companies. �The total amount of money doesn�t matter, especially since you start to see diminishing returns,� said Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale who studies economic influences on presidential elections. �What matters is the difference in spending between the two parties.�

Elections are bought in this country. So, while it may be one (wo)man, one vote at the polls, it is not on human one dollar. That’s only on your IRS return.

On politicians, leaders, and radicals

Contemplating this year’s three candidates for president, I see John McCain who promises four more years of governing just like George W. Bush. Such promises violate the rule of holes. Barack Obama seems to offer voters an empty slate on which they can write the transformational dream of their choice. He was careful to run before he had any substantial record that would prevent him from running such a campaign of inspiration and high ideals. Hillary Clinton offers a long history of substantial accomplishments and substantial losses, mistakes and self-reinventions. It is this very history that infuriates some voters.

What I don’t see, among the three candidates, is much in the way of innovation or leadership. Certainly I see no radical leaders, not even Jeremiah Wright. (He, I think, is flogging a book.) Why is that so in a year when the country is so eager to be taken in a new direction? Because the candidates are politicians, and politicians deal and compromise. They legislate and govern. They have to be elected, a process that tends to smooth away any radical edges. They hide behind “the will of the people.” They have tremendous egos necessary to believing they should be the elected one. But they rarely lead.

We need politicians. They can accomplish great things.

Even Abraham Lincoln was a consummate politician. So was FDR.

George W. Bush is not much of a politician and look where he got us.

But great leaders don’t come from the government, they rise from the people. I was reminded of that when Rosalie sent me this article on climate change by Michael Pollan, Why Bother?

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we�re living our lives suggests we�re not really serious about changing � something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking � passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists � that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It�s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s � an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! � was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives � the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the �split between what we think and what we do.� For Berry, the �why bother� question came down to a moral imperative: �Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.�

Wendell Berry is a man of truly radical ideas. He’s a libertarian and a hard-nosed moralist. But I think he’s right when he says it is we, the people, who have to do these things. Does that mean Dick Cheney was right when he sneered that ecology is a choice of personal morality? Yes, I think he was, though the sneer is his problem, not ours.

I don’t mean this post to be about climate change in particular but about change in general, taking the country in a better direction. Cheney is living proof of at least one of Jeremiah Wright’s preachings: governments fail. Politicians, even Barack Obama, do what politicians do. It’s up to the people to hold them accountable. Where is the outcry about torture? Where is the outcry against war crimes done in our names? Where is the outcry about our huge military expenditures? About our huge prison population? About mountaintop removal? About our staggering national debt? We all seem to want some one to change these things for us, but not if they have to raise our taxes. Not if it means we can’t have TiVo and iPod.

If George W. Bush had been a leader, he could have used the fall of our topless towers to strengthen our moral fiber. Instead, being a coward himself, he chose to play on our fears in order to keep his own power.

So it looks like we’re going to have to grow our courage from the grassroots if we want to survive. We are, after all, a democracy.

Or, as Anglachel put it:

It�s easy to denounce the entire corrupt US government, or to declare you are not a part of the great unwashed, but belong to an archipelago. It does not require courage. One needs nothing but an ego, a distorted view of your own self-importance, and an internet connection for that form of radicalism. It is not very radical, nor does it really make you part of Left politics.

True radicalism is the courage to say �No, I�m sitting here,� on a bus ride, not knowing if this might mean your death. And that courage is the heart and soul of Left politics.

Equality has always been the most radical thought in politics.

Pollan, by the way, doesn’t even ask you to do something this dangerous. Just give up meat or take a sabbath from consumption or plant a garden in your yard:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it�s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren�t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can�t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives �as if� they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for food

Why Hillary Should Be Winning�

Men, It’s Not Your Place To Tell Clinton To Quit the Race. Found at Donna Darko.

The Audacity of Depression, found at Suburban Guerilla

Worst. President. Ever. H/t Hullabaloo

Climate Target Not Radical Enough Link thanks to lambert at Corrente.

U.S. Shifting Prison Focus to Re-entry Into Society. See also Jeralyn at TalkLeft.

If you happen to be in NYC this Friday.

Watch this video.

And why is it Cindy McCain hasn’t filed for divorce?

Why isn’t this abuse?. Found via I See Invisible People

Gotta add one: Don L. Blankenship of Massey Coal makes threats