Tag Archives: George Bush

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I have to say, I was honestly impressed with Kerry’s performance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He laughed at the jokes without seeming forced and figured out how to play along with them and make one or two of his own, he talked about policy in a clear, concise, persuasive manner, and he managed to come off as relatively likable. His line about the attacks on his service was spot-on:

I’ve been through worse.

In a few words, it rebuts and disregards the attacks at once by minimizing them relative to the threats to real threats he faced down which said attacks are impugning. Equally clever was his assertion that

President Bush has won every debate he’s been in

Not only does he show that two can play at the expectations game and deprive Bush of the advantage of obscenely low standards he milked against Gore, he appears gracious towards the President while chipping away at one of his advantages: the perception that Bush is an unpackaged, unhandled straight-talker. Rather, Kerry rightly suggested, Bush has a shiny, studied presentation – but no record to run on.

If Kerry could find a way to walk on and wave without looking quite so awkward, or someone could tell him not to start re-buttoning your jacket until the cameras are off, it’d be even better.

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Watching the Young America Foundation Conference, where young conservatives are asking questions of a pair of Barry Goldwater experts. Just saw one of them go up and say he “couldn’t imagine why anyone is thinking of voting for George Bush” given his perceived selling out of the right on immigration, deficits, medicare and such. One panelist proffered the tax cuts as the main conservative accomplishment on Bush’s watch. The other panelist, Goldwater biographer Lee Edwards, sidestepped the question of domestic policy entirely, simply invoking the idea that “Everything changed on 9/11,” saying a few words about how frightening the prospect of another terror attack is, and then – without suggesting any Bush policy which would make us safer – nodded to suggest that the question had been settled.

I’d be curious to know how the kids in the room took his answer.

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Senator Trent Lott recently stumped for Bush in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Reagan declared his campaign by condemning “welfare moms” and championing “states; rights” not far from the graves of murdered civil rights activists:

— U.S. Sen. Trent Lott today told an enthusiastic Neshoba County Fair crowd that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry is “a French-speaking socialist from Boston, Massaschusetts, who is more liberal than Ted Kennedy.” It was a line that Lott said he’d been working on for a while, and it produced loud applause from hundreds of Mississippians gathered at Founders’ Square, the centerpiece of the historic fair.

Obviously a vile remark. Boilerplate red-baiting aside, condemning a man for speaking French is a cynical appeal to isolationist nativism. It’s an insult to this country to suggest that we’re stronger if our leaders can’t communicate with the rest of the world in any language but their own. But degrading the speaking of French isn’t just an insult to the international community. It’s an attack on the most vulnerable members of our national community, those who’ve immigrated here, increasing numbers of whom come from France and former French colonies, like the large and growing Haitian community here in Florida. An attack on Americans who speak French is simply another incarnation of the less-politically-expedient attacks on those who speak Spanish and the more-politically-expedient attacks on those who speak Arabic. This isn’t populism – this is a divisive attack on the populace. Don’t hold your breath for our “uniter” of a President, whose campaign equates criticism of his record with “political hate speech,” to condemn Senator Lott’s chosen attack on his challenger.

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I’d say Kerry’s speech is comparable to Edwards’: it hiet each of the major points it needed to, with some good moments that were memorable in the short-term but seem un-likely to get re-aired on on C-SPAN at future conventions, and some low points too.

I’d say he did a largely effective job of talking sympathetically in about his own life in a way which personalized him while tying him to a national narrative and avoiding appearing self-aggrandizing or apologetic. His explicit gendering of his parents was irritating. His unapologetic ownership of the accomplishments of 60’s movements was gratifying. His refusal to mention gay liberation, or the gay community, was not.

It was good to hear the word “poverty,” but disappointing not to hear more about it, and particularly not to see Kerry’s support for raising the minimum wage and recognizing card count neutrality agreements touted as centerpieces of his economic plan. I did think he set forth his stance on the Bush tax cuts with admirable frankness and simplicity, and in a way which doesn’t leave the Republicans much room to maneuver.

I remain pleasantly surprised to see Kerry talking about spending more money on Head Start instead of the prison system, a welcome departure from Clinton’s strategy of apeing Republican rhetoric on crime. The fact that the line has the entire staff of The New Republic apoplectic is a good sign. Calling the “family values” crowd on not valuing families is well-deserved and long overdue. Reaching out to those who self-identify as people of faith is all well and good, but you don’t need to announce that you’re doing it. The Lincoln quote is one of the great ones in American politics, and put here to great use.

All that said, it’s an exciting night.

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Barney Frank has just “come clean” on behalf of GLBT Americans: “We do have an agenda” – the right to serve their country in the army, the right to be considered for jobs based on performance, the right to have their love and commitment codified in law as marriage. Shame he had to end a strong speech by condemning Nader in stronger terms than Bush.

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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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Speaking of Ehrenreich, Jay at HipHopMusic.Com is pondering the reaction among the center-left blogging establishment to this column, in which she skewers Nader’s 2004 candidacy and repents for voting for his last one. As Jay says:

Most of the A-List lefty bloggers are not really all that far to the left, at least compared to the wild-eyed hippies I hang out with at WBAI. And I don’t have any problem with that, we need a variety of voices out there.. but it’s disappointing to see how smugly contemptuous some of these guys can be towards folks who are a little further left than themselves. Ehrenreich’s crime, evidently, was to voice her support for Ralph Nader in 2000, which so offended these guys that four years later they still disparage her mental health and (quoting Lenin) diagnose her with an “infantile disorder.” And now that Ehrenreich is joining them in rejecting Nader’s 2004 campaign, they can’t let go of their grudge, and just keep on with the sniping and condescension even when she’s on their side…sometimes you can cling to a grudge so tightly it stops the flow of blood to your brain. And if you want those who supported Nader in the past to feel welcome joining you this time, you should probably stop treating them like you think they are idiots.

That last sentence can’t be repeatedly enough. It’s something many of us have said in many fora, but it seems strangely inscrutable to a crowd all too eager (as they should be) to welcome the conversions on the way to Damascus of those who literally, willfully voted for Bush the last time but seemingly congenitally unable to organize or organize with those who cast a vote in 2000 which they see as equivalent to a Bush vote. Had this crowd – or the larger Democratic establishment – channelled a fraction of its anger against those who cast Nader votes against those who systematically expunged Gore votes, things might be very different right now.

As Jay says, one of the more perverse manifestations of this selective Nader-induced blindness has to be the refusal to understand the irony in the following Ehrenreich paragraph:

So, Ralph, sit down. Pour yourself a Diet Pepsi and rejoice in the fact that — post-Enron and post-Iraq war — millions have absorbed your message. You’re entitled to a little time out now, a few weeks on the beach catching up on back issues of The Congressional Record. Meanwhile, I’ve thrown my mighty weight behind Dennis Kucinich, who, unnoticed by the media, is still soldiering along on the campaign trail. In the event that he fails to get the Democratic nomination, I’ll have to consider my options.

Get it? In other words, I too harbor hopes for progressive national leadership of a kind we’re unlikely to see in a Kerry administration, and I continue pushing challenges to the conventional wisdom of the two-party system. But I also recognize political reality as it is now, and however reluctantly, I’m ready to make the sacrifices necessary to see Bush out of office.

Only when she says it, it’s a hell of a lot more clever. To read her paragraph and claim that it shows she hasn’t learned her lesson and isn’t ready to support Kerry is just absurd. For those who did, and who think that I’ve somehow misinterpreted it in the preceding paragraph, let me just say that I know what she means not only because the article makes it abundantly clear but also because she told me so personally six months ago when she came down to New Haven to participate in our women’s arrest. Quoth Ehrenreich: “I’m throwing whatever weight I have behind Kucinich for now, and when the time comes, I’ll throw it behind Dean or whoever the guy turns out to be.” And by the way, when she mentioned having weight to cast, in person as in writing, she clearly meant to be fecicious.

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In a speech yesterday to the Urban League perhaps most notable for the cuts to shots of Al Sharpton trying to keep a straight face, Bush asked for the Black vote and listed questions the Black community should be asking. “Does blocking the faith-based initiative help neighborhoods where the only social service provider could be a church?” Nobody’s blocking them, we’re demanding they be held to the same regulatory standards as everyone else doing business with the government. “Does the status quo in education really, really help the children of this country?” No it doesn’t – so we need more funding, not less. “Does class warfare — has class warfare or higher taxes ever created decent jobs in the inner city?” Well, the question of who’s really perpetrating the class warfare aside, the fact that no Republican President in the past century has created as many jobs as any Democratic President might be more than a coincidence. One of these questions was whether we should be “making excuses” for drug-users. Maybe Bush could learn something from another Republican who’s recently concluded that it’s his party that should be asking itself some tough questions about drugs:

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) yesterday touted drug treatment as an alternative to prison for nonviolent offenders as he launched a panel designed to coordinate Maryland’s fight against substance abuse. “As regard to treatment, I believe in it,” Ehrlich said during a morning visit to a parole and probation office in Gaithersburg. “We know treatment works. The facts are treatment works.”

Ehrlich introduced Andrew L. Sonner, a retired judge of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and former Montgomery County prosecutor, as chairman of his new Maryland State Drug and Alcohol Abuse Council. The panel is intended to oversee the efforts of county drug and alcohol abuse councils that were established by the General Assembly. The signature provision of the law seeks to divert nonviolent drug offenders into treatment rather than prison. The bill, which called for spending $3 million to set up treatment programs, passed in this year’s session with widespread bipartisan support. It is expected to save money on incarceration.

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Yesterday, one of the dozen or so folks out to support Bush amidst the few hundred of us there to protest as his motorcade passed yelled out “The economy’s the strongest it’s been in twenty years!”  Today the Times highlights one of the reasons it’s not true:

The amount of money workers receive in their paychecks is failing to keep up with inflation. Though wages should recover if businesses continue to hire, three years of job losses have left a large worker surplus.  “There’s too much slack in the labor market to generate any pressure on wage growth,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research institution based in Washington. “We are going to need a much lower unemployment rate.” He noted that at 5.6 percent, the national unemployment rate is still back at the same level as at the end of the recession in November 2001.  Even though the economy has been adding hundreds of thousands of jobs almost every month this year, stagnant wages could put a dent in the prospects for economic growth, some economists say. If incomes continue to lag behind the increase in prices, it may hinder the ability of ordinary workers to spend money at a healthy clip, undermining one of the pillars of the expansion so far.

Thing is, those CEOs whose taxes Bush cut don’t change their spending patterns much based on fluctuations in income.  But the folks who are paying for that tax cut in the gutting of the social services they depend on sure do.

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Thanks for the shout out from Sean Siperstein on the Brown College Dems (cleverly-titled) blog, where he offers trenchant thoughts on the meaning of today’s NLRB decision on his campus:

Not only is this a widespread overturning of precedent and part of a larger trend, but it also ensures that the results of a referendum held among those Brown grad students eligible to unionize will remain permanently sealed and ultimately meaningless (the NLRB ruled previously that all non-science Brown TAs would be eligible, but held up the results being revealed until the current overall appeal was decided). At the time of that referendum, the Brown Democrats were part of a coalition of student groups which campaigned for undergrads to sign a “neutrality card” stating that this was a matter to be decided and debated among grad students themselves (and indeed, active organizations for and against unionization had formed in their ranks), and that undergraduate students and clubs, the administration, the Corporation and alumni ought to all recognize that principle, stay out of the debate, and let the vote proceed without further obfuscation. The effort was highly fruitful in terms of getting student signatures– perhaps the most effective thing that the Dems did during my freshman year– even if (as expected) the administration largely ignored its plea and actively pressured against/tried to prevent unionization, and I’d definitely like to think that this decision that ultimately defeats it will give us all pause to think and at the least serve as an exemplar of the direct impact of the Bush administration’s across-the-board conservatism.

Interesting that Sean sees graduate employees’ right to organize on his campus as an issue which could ignite students to get more involved in electoral politics; if anything, I think those of us organizing around the issue at Yale are struggling to mobilize students to bring the perspectives they believe in or fight for in national politics – on workers’ rights, women’s rights, free speech and such – to bear in confronting the conflict over unionization on our campus.  Among the differences which affect the climate, as Sean observes, is a radically different face on a similar administration agenda – I’ve never heard of Ruth Simmons doing or saying anything that would lead NYU’s administration to observe that she would “rather burn the university to the ground” than recognize graduate students’ right to organize.

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In a shameful, if unsurprising, assault on the right of all workers to organize, the Bush National Labor Relations Board overturns the historic and unanimous NYU decision recognizing graduate students’ right to organize with a 3-2 decision buying into the Levin-Simmons-Bollinger-Rodin line that graduate students employees, whose low-wage work makes the university function, are not employees with workers’ rights.  This is of course, what they used to say about public employees, about teachers, and about all workers before that.  None of which stopped those workers from courageously organizing anymore than this decision will be able to halt the national movement for graduate student unionization.  As the dissenting judges wrote:

…the majority’s reasons, at bottom, amount to the claim that graduate student collective bargaining is simply incompatible with the nature and mission of the university. This revelation will surely come as a surprise on many campuses -not least at New York University, a first rate institution where graduate students now work under a collective bargaining agreement reached in the wake of the decision that is overruled here…Today’s decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality.

Shame on the Bush administration for another callous and backwards slap in the face of all workers, and shame on the Yale administration for its years of lobbying for this result.

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Took part in a strong protest this morning here in Tampa as Bush’s motorcade passed on its way to a conference on trafficking of women, an issue which, opportunistic photo ops aside, has only become more grave since Bush cut $20 million in enforcement.  It was a good chance for a range of groups – Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, MoveOn, several union locals – to come together to bear witness to this administration’s real record of broken promises.  My estimate would be about 300 folks out against the President’s policies and about a dozen there in support, which is a proportion similar to what it’s been both of the other places (in Pennsylvania and Connecticut) I’ve seen his motorcade go by.  Was it this way under Clinton?