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

Gobsmacked

Much has been made lately of Sarah Palin’s attempt to ban books when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, though I think more should be made of the fact that the local librarian was having none of it. (Speaking of acts of individual courage. Time says “The librarian was aghast.”) The currently-circulating list of books Palin supposedly banned is erroneous because the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons Baker, stopped her in her tracks.

(Side note: You can read the much-circulated e-mail from Anne Kilkenny about Sarah Palin here at Washington Note, where Steve Clemons has also pasted this interesting photo of the Wasilla Public Library circa 1950.)

(Second side note: I’ve seen Wasila, Wasilla, Wassila, all from good sources. Google goes with Wasilla.)

I must say that I have developed a great deal of admiration for librarians over the last eight years. I remember how they resisted the Bush administrations attempts to secretly pry into citizens’ library records by using National Security Letters.

Anyhoo, from my husband’s favorite newspaper, The Guardian, apparently the U.S. is not the only nation given to censorship, Poet’s rhyming riposte leaves Mrs Schofield ‘gobsmacked’:

“Today I am going to kill something,” says the unnamed protagonist of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure. “Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God.”

Duffy, one of Britain’s most admired poets, might have been tempted this week to feel the same way, following the news that the exam board AQA had ordered schools to remove from its GCSE curriculum an anthology containing the poem because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

Happily, in a move that may suggest she did not intend her work to be taken literally, Duffy has chosen the more measured response of penning a poem in reply. The verse, entitled Mrs Schofield’s GCSE and published here for the first time, makes reference to acts of violence in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello killing Desdemona, Macbeth’s dagger delusions, Tybalt’s stabbing in Romeo and Juliet.

“What it seems to me to be saying is that Shakespeare – the greatest writer – some of his stuff is a bit dangerous [too],” Duffy’s literary agent Peter Strauss said yesterday. “It’s saying, look at what’s been written previously before you criticise this.”

He described the decision to remove Education for Leisure from the syllabus as “absolutely ridiculous. It’s an anti-violence poem. It is a plea for education rather than violence.”

…

The Mrs Schofield of the poem refers to Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, who complained about the poem and who welcomed the decision to ban a poem she described as “absolutely horrendous”.

…

Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt “a bit gobsmacked” to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as “a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that’s me”.

You can read the riposting poem at the link.

Addendum: More on the subject of libraries via Lambert at Corrente, this McClatchy article on libary use as an economic indicator:

Check it out.

That’s what users of public libraries are doing these days. In an effort to stay entertained and informed without breaking the family budget, people across the country increasingly are taking advantage of the best deal in town: everything � books, CDs, DVDs � is free.

“That’s pretty typical,” Stanislaus County Librarian Vanessa Czopek said. “When the economy goes in a slump, libraries see more usage.”

The American Library Association says use nationwide was 10 percent higher in the past year than during the 2001 economic downturn, when it tracked a similar spike in visits and circulation. Libraries recorded 1.3 billion visits and patrons checked out more than 2 billion items from April 2007 to April 2008

Addendum the Second: Via Heraclitean Fire, Scottish poet Rob MacKenzie says it is high time the authorities clamped down on gangs of poetry-reading teens:

It�s good to see the authorities finally getting to the root of the problem of street violence. For years it�s been obvious that studious poetry-reading youths have been terrorising our streets, and how it�s taken so long for the authorities to make the connection between poetry readers and knife crime is beyond me. In almost every knife-related murder in London this year, a copy of Carol Ann Duffy�s poem has been framed on the offender�s bedroom wall. In one case, a recording of the poem being recited backwards was found, with the words, �Kill for Satan� clearly audible around 1.12min. One knife-wielding teenager told me, �It�s all Duffy�s fault. Before I read that poem, I liked to play Risk every evening with my friends. And look at me now! I�m out on the street every night with my bread knife and a copy of Mean Time in my jacket pocket. My best friend, who�s just sawed a goldfish in half, he�s into Wallace Stevens, and he just can�t stop reading Harmonium when he�s not beating up innocent passers-by.�