Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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I’d say Edwards accomplished what he set out to do with his speech: he put forward a broad and attractive plan, shared a set of sympathetic values, and projected energy, confidence, and optimism. No big surprises, but I don’t think there were intended to be (there are all manner of big surprises I would’ve liked to see, generally falling into the category of John Edwards morphing into John Lewis). “Two Americas” works as a unifying theme, contrary to the grousing of the National Review crowd, because it speaks to a reality which most Americans intuitively recognize and implicitly sets forth an ideal most Americans are ready to work and sacrifice for. Glad to see Edwards at least intimating the connections between different forms of social, political, and economic equality in this country – in education, in healthcare, and such. And it was heartening to hear this graph:

We can also do something about 35 million Americans who live in poverty every day. And here’s why we shouldn’t just talk about but do something about the millions of Americans who live in poverty. Because it is wrong. And we have a moral responsibility to lift those families up. I mean the very idea that in a country of our wealth and our prosperity, we have children going to bed hungry. We have children who don’t have the clothes to keep them warm. We have millions of Americans who work full-time every day to support their families, working for minimum wage and still live in poverty. It’s wrong. These are men and women who are living up to their bargain. They’re working hard, they’re supporting their families. Their families are doing their part; it’s time we did our part.

And that’s what we’re going to do, that’s what we’re going to do when John is in the White House. Because we’re going to raise the minimum wage. We’re going to finish the job on welfare reform. And we’re going to bring good paying jobs to the places where we need them the most. . And by doing all those things we’re going to say no forever to any American working full-time and living in poverty. Not in our America, not in our America. Not in our America. Not in our America.

Obviously, it’s urgent to assert that the New Deal is something which creates a middle class, not something which saps it, and certainly anyone running for office in this country should speak to a strategy for expanding and securing the middle class. But that said, the ongoing invisibility of the American poor in Democratic party rhetoric of the past decade is disgraceful. It’s a tragic abdication of the responsibility of a real social contract. As Edwards reminded Kerry during the primary campaign, while Kerry was heading off voluntarily to war, Edwards was trying to figure out how to afford to go to college. And as Sharpton reminded Edwards, not everyone then – or now – could get a job as a mill worker. So the recognition of the plight and the promise of the working poor in the Vice Presidential acceptance speech is a step in the right direction, even if “finishing the job on welfare reform” sounds somewhat macabre. Let’s hear more about the working poor from Kerry tomorrow.

Hope is a winning theme. “Hope is on the way,” is a frustrating formulation though. Some of us who’ve had the pleasure of several rallies with the Rev. Jesse Jackson like to joke about the frequency with which the “Keep hope alive” slogan is repeated, but that’s fundamentally a good slogan because it offers an urgent, achievable imperative. “Hope is on the way” is inherently top down, and Edwards’ use of it – tell each of the beleaguered people you know that hope is on the way – reinforces the idea that the Kerry-Edwards ticket is some sort of superhero flying through the city saving victims. I’d like to hear less about hope being on the way and more about how we’re going to join together to take on the work of bringing it into being.

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Virginia Sherry condemns the exploitation of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia:

The victims, mostly from Asia, have endured everything from slavery-like labour conditions and sexual violence, to torture and judicially ordered beheadings following secret and unfair trials. There are 8.8 million foreign residents in Saudi Arabia, according to the Labour Ministry. This figure is significantly higher than any previously reported. In other words, for every two Saudis, there is one foreign worker. Foreigners account for 67 per cent of the workforce and hold 90 to 95 percent of private-sector jobs. The overwhelming majority are low-paid, skilled and unskilled workers who arrived legally, to work hard and send money to their families back home. Many came heavily indebted due to exorbitant fees charged by manpower agencies. They clean hospitals and schools, repair water pipes and collect garbage. They are plumbers, carpenters, bakers and barbers. Women clean, cook, care for children, work in beauty salons and sew custom-made clothing for the elite.

Millions are from rural and urban areas in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, where unemployment is high and poverty pervasive. Their monthly salaries in Saudi Arabia – if they are lucky enough to be paid on a regular basis – typically range from US$200 to US$300. In testimonies to Human Rights Watch, these men and women detailed how some employers impose slavery-like work conditions. They recounted how they worked 12 hours or more daily without overtime, had salaries unpaid for months, and never received benefits specified in their contracts. Women workers were locked into places of employment around the clock and denied freedom of movement during the contract period. Tragically, most tolerate the exploitation because they feel vulnerable and powerless.

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AIDS steals lives in Durban faster than South Africans can dig graves:

This city is being battered by an AIDS pandemic so sweeping that people are dying faster than the city can find space to bury them. And so gravediggers like Mr. Gasa are reopening existing graves – the city calls it “recycling” – and interring fresh bones atop the old ones. The job gives Mr. Gasa nightmares. “I think it is not a good thing, to take out the bones” for reburial, he said during a break in his spadework. “But we have no choice.”

Every time southern Africa’s AIDS epidemic threatens to exhaust its store of superlatives, some new, sobering extreme rises to the fore. The latest is Durban, where 51 of the 53 municipal cemeteries are officially filled to capacity, and a surging death rate threatens to overwhelm the remaining two within a couple of years. “Five years ago, we used to have about 120 funerals a weekend, but this number has now jumped to 600,” Thembinkosi Ngcobo, who heads the municipal department of parks and cemeteries, said in an interview this week. “In order to cope with the current rate of mortality – we hope it is not going to increase – we will need to have 12.1 hectares every year of new gravesites.” That is nearly 30 acres. “That would obviously turn Durban and the whole country into one big graveyard if we continue,” he said.

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On the other hand, this Steve Brozak character who’s apparently running for Congress in New Jersey comes off as a cross between a bad SNL sketch and a marionette. Who knew a person could go so long moving his fist back and forth in exactly the same arc, opening and closing his mouth the same way, and keeping the rest of his body perfectly still? That, and while I know this “wouldn’t hesitate for a moment before deploying the army to destroy the terrorists” business isn’t targetted at me, suffice it to say it manages to come off as disingenuous and troubling at the same time.

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An inspired, haunted speech by Congressional Black Caucus Chair Elijah Cummings, who has the reasoned audacity to remind us that education and healthcare are issues of national security and that the right to vote is under attack not from beauracratic error but from an intentional campaign of disenfranchisement.

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Garance Franke-Rutka highlights just how much the message the media are by comparing today’s AP story on Edwards’ speech tonight with one about a speech two weeks ago:

AP reporter Tom Raum hyped Edwards’ speech tonight as “Edwards Slamming GOP in DNC Speech.” His evidence? These words, among others: “In a speech to convention delegates poised to make him their vice presidential candidate, the North Carolina senator was asking Americans to ‘reject the tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past’ and embrace a Democratic ticket he said was full of promise and hope.”

But just two weeks ago, AP writer Mike Glover wrote this story about an Edwards rally, framing the exact same words in a completely different way: “At his rally, Edwards struck that optimistic note. ‘The American people are going to reject the tired old hateful negative politics of the past,’ he said. ‘Instead they’re going to embrace the politics of hope.'”

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John Nichols calls for the Democrats to stand up to conglomerated media or continue seeing their message shafted:

It is true that much of what is said from the convention podium these days adds up to little more than a partisan informercial. But there are still meaningful moments, and Obama’s address was one of them. In fact, the Illinois state senator’s speech was an exceptionally significant expression of the ever-evolving story of American citizenship and political engagement. Obama’s often poetic message — with its “E pluribus unum. Out of many one” theme — was the talk of the convention. It was not, however, the talk of the nation because, of course, the networks chose not give it the same time and attention they devoted to that program about the eating habits of their “pageant girls.” The failure to broadcast the speech by a man many believe could be the country’s first African-American president struck even some media veterans as troubling. On ABC’s “The View,” co-host Meredith Vieira spoke of how, “After (Obama) got done speaking, I had chills” and complained about the decision of the networks to neglect the keynote address. “He is a man that America needed to see,” she said.

…On Tuesday night, delegates approved a platform that recognizes the burgeoning media reform movement in the United States. The language that was added to the platform, under pressure from unions such as the Communication Workers of America that have become increasing active in the fight for media reform, was not radical. But it was on message. “Because our democracy thrives on public access to diverse sources of information from multiple sources, we support measures to ensure diversity, competition, and localism in media ownership,” argues the new platform language. There’s a lot more that Democrats should stand for with regard to media reform. And, hopefully, anger over the decision of the networks to skip coverage of Tuesday night’s proceedings will cause party activists to recognize that complaining about the conservative bias of Fox is not enough. When the major networks choose pageant girls over political history, they themselves are making the case that democratic renewal cannot be achieved without radically altering the style and structure of our media system.

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Todd Gitlin blames the media for creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about Americans’ lack of interest in politics:

…it’s not as though Kerry has been exactly quiet. The pundits may roll their eyes at Kerry’s prolixity, but the networks aren’t exactly giving Americans more than a nibble. Take the gigantic question of foreign policy. George W. Bush’s White House, Kerry said in Seattle on May 27, has “looked to force before exhausting diplomacy; they bullied when they should have persuaded. They’ve gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole team. They have hoped for the best when they should have prepared for the worst. They’ve made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous world. In short, they have undermined the legacy of generations of American leadership, and that is what we must restore, and that is what I will restore. “Shredding alliances is not the way to win the war on terror, or even to make America safer. As president, my No. 1 security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder, and our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy their terrorist cells. Because al-Qaeda is a network with many branches, we have to take the fight to the enemy on every continent — smartly. And we have to enlist other countries in that cause.” Kerry went on in this vein for 3,500 words. And the night of this speech, how many did America’s still dominant news channels convey? ABC: 28 words. NBC: 42 words. CBS: 43 words.

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Matthew Yglesias reminds us of one of the many reasons to be skeptical of the Democratic establishment’s embrace of Barack Obama:

If the party leaders had had their way, not only would Obama not have been delivering the keynote address at the convention, he wouldn’t be the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate at all. Plan A was to hand the nomination to Blair Hull, a millionaire who could have self-financed the race. That’s a recruiting tactic the party’s increasingly relied on since the early 1990s; as we saw last night, it can deprive the country of some of the most dynamic and committed public servants out there in exchange for bland nonentities like Herb Kohl.

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Bush channels Castro – badly:

Bush earlier this month accused Castro of welcoming sex tourism to bolster his failing economy and contributing to a global problem of human trafficking. Speaking to Florida law enforcement officials on July 16, Bush claimed the Cuban leader shamelessly promotes sex tourism. “The dictator welcomes sex tourism. Here’s how he bragged about the industry,” said Bush. “This is his quote — ‘Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world’ and ‘sex tourism is a vital source of hard currency.’” The president made his accusations amid the release of the State Department yearly report on global human trafficking, which lists Cuba among the top ten violators. Three days after Bush’s remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. “It shows they didn’t read much of the article,” commented Charlie Trumbull, the author. Speaking in 1992 to the Cuban parliament, Castro actually said, “There are prostitutes, but prostitution is not allowed in our country. There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist.”

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The Times makes a poor attempt to contrast Kennedy’s and Obama’s speeches last night:

If Mr. Obama reached for the middle with his promise of a new kind of politics under Mr. Kerry, Mr. Kennedy spoke to the most fervent and frustrated Democratic voters, weary after four years out of power.

This unfortunate sentence echoes some of the false synechdoches I find most frustrating in the way we discuss politics in this country: Eliding a positive vision with moderation and a negative critique with extremism, partisanship with ideology, open-mindedness with moderation, and the disengaged or disenfranchised with the moderates. Kennedy’s speech touted the historic accomplishments of the Democratic party and condemned the crimes of the Bush Administration. Obama’s drew on his narrative and those of his neighbors to craft a vision of the urgency and potential of democratic politics. There’s no cause to identify the former as a more radical project than the latter, and strong ground on which to argue the reverse.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, given the tremendous success of Obama’s speech and the lack of Black leaders with popularity and credibility articulating the right’s view of the path to Black uplift, that some conservatives would try to claim the speech as their own. Witness Roger Clegg’s flat attempt over at the National Review‘s Corner:

Barack Obama gave a fine speech, but it was not a speech that reflects the current Democratic Party. It celebrated America as “a magical place”; it did not bemoan our racism and imperialism. It professed that this black man “owe[d] a debt to those who came before” him; it did not call for reparations. It spoke of an “awesome God”; it did not banish Him from public discourse. It admitted that black parents, and black culture, need to change the way black children are raised; it did not blame or even mention racism. It quoted “E pluribus unum” and translated it correctly as “Out of many, one”; it did not misquote it, as Al Gore infamously did, as “Many out of one.” Most of all, the speech celebrated one America, “one people,” and rejected the notion of a black America, a white America, a Latino America, and an Asian America–a notion completely foreign to the multiculturalism that now dominates the Democratic Party.

Give me a break. It’s always been the work of the left to recognize and reclaim what is great about the reality of this country, what is greater about its ideals, and what broken promises maintain the gap between the reality and the ideal. Hence the appropriateness of Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” as a centerpiece of the Kerry campaign: The poem calls out and decries the myriad ways in which America falls short of the American ideal, makes appeal to an inherited vision of America, and yet recognizes that the dream of a just America past is itself a construct, that America never was fully America, but rather might just someday be through a struggle which begins with recognizing what is broken. As Obama says:

I’m not talking about blind optimism here – the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t think about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores.

It’s only by falling back on the tired and baseless image of Democrats as visceral America-haters that Clegg can pretend that Obama’s patriotism leaves him out of place at the Convention. And it’s only by falling back on a similarly tired and baseless image of Democrats as deniers of the agency of the disenfranchised that Clegg can label his claim of individual and collective responsibility as conservative. While I and others might question Obama’s choice to compare waste in the Pentagon and welfare budgets, or his implication that stigma is attached to Black success based simply on choices made by Blacks, they show up in the speech to clarify his central assertion about the urgency of collective action. The idea that human beings bear no agency or responsibility is not a Democratic one, and it’s not a leftist one either, unless Rush Limbaugh is granted the authority to define the left. What is a leftist idea – and sometimes a Democratic one – is that human responsibility extends beyond the individual, or the family, to a broader community, that problems faced by collectives can be faced and defeated through collective action, that government in its purest and most justified form represents a vehichle for the achievement of individual strivings and collective aspirations through collective solutions – and that when a community, and its government, abdicate its responsibility to those wronged, they erodes, not protect, the conditions for the flourishing of the human liberty to which they are each individually born. As Obama says:

If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum.

And to argue that Obama’s celebration of that unum, and his assertion that there’s “one America,” make him an anti-multiculturalist depends on an assumption that that one America is defined on the terms of its white constituents. Clegg would be right to argue that Obama’s no separatist – but neither are the Democrats, and neither are many on the left either. But the narrative he tells of his Kenyan and Kansan parents isn’t a melting pot that forges homogeneity either – he even uses the d-word which has become anathema in National Review circles:

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or ”blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential…I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my two precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

I’d like to know more about Obama’s family and his struggle for and forging of a personal identity. Fortunately, he’s written a meditation on the topic, “Dreams of My Father,” which I hope to read soon. Maybe Roger Clegg should too.

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The gang at the Prospect’s convention blog (inter alia) have been carping about (inter alia) the Convention’s music selections for each speaker. None of the ones they mentioned, though, irk me so much as the pairing of the Beatles’ “Revolution” with Howard Dean. Come on, guys. It’s a song about being afraid of revolution. And certainly, for better or worse, Howard Dean was never quite as revolutionary as his strongest backers or critics made him out to be. But it seems safe to assume that the song was chosen to suggest that he’s an insurgent. And to do that was a counter-insurgent song is an insult to the audience’s intelligence nearly on par with Reagan’s citing “Born in the USA” as an articulation of his brand of patriotism. Anyone who’d like to try to convince me that there’s a subtle point being made about the revolutionary danger posed by Bush and feared by Dean, or the tension between Dean’s conservative record and his more radical rhetoric, or the fear of the Democratic establishment towards Dean, is welcome to try. I wouldn’t suggest it though.

Otherwise, I’d say Dean’s was a solid speech, even if some of the lines make less of an impact for those of us who’ve heard them from him several times before. The same goes for Ted Kennedy, on both counts. Of course, there can only be one Barack Obama.