Tag Archives: George Bush

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A strong speech by John Kerry this morning, although also one whose sometimes somewhat stilted delivery provided a good reminder of one of the great benefits of having John Edwards on the ticket. Kerry hit the right marks:

John Edwards and I are going to work together to build one America for all Americans.

We need a President whose working as hard to keep Americans’ jobs as he is to keep his own.

I have worked with John Edwards side by side and sometimes head to head…I know his skill, I know his passion, I know his strength, I know his conscience. I know his faith.

And he quoted Langston Hughes’ tremendous “Let America Be America Again.”

And the crowd loved all of it.

The talking heads are already making hay of Edwards’ supposed inexperience. I’d say Edwards brings exactly the experience George Bush (and arguably John Kerry) lacks: Experiencing the hardship of poverty and personal tragedy, building a career and securing economic security for himself and his family, and working to secure justice for other working people wronged by powerful interests (that, and he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee). That’s not to say that the policies Edwards (or Kerry) advocates to bridge the two Americas are as radical as the ones that I and friends of mine with personal experience as members of the American underclass would like to see. But it is worth noting that between them, Kerry and Edwards bring to bear the experience of facing poverty at home and of facing war abroad, of a lifetime of public service and of building a tremendously successful career on one’s own while serving others – and that George Bush has none of the above experiences. He came to Washington with neither the independence of an outsider nor the experience of an insider. When he ran, he’d experienced neither the ravages of war nor the ravages of poverty – and he still hasn’t. Only this time around he can run on the experience of presiding over a three-and-a-half-year trainwreck for our jobs, our economy, our healthcare, our social security, our homeland security, our international leadership, and our civil liberties and civil rights. I’d likely support a ticket running against that record from the left (even if from not far enough to the left) from whatever personal experience. But if Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove want to make an issue of experience, bring it on.

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Campaigning yesterday, John Kerry noted that the Bush Administration is touting it’s economic record and calling him pessimistic for criticizing it. “There’s no greater pessimism,” he retorted, “than to say that America can’t do any better than this.” He’s right, and the most recent disappointing job numbers underscore the point.

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New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has officially removed his name from consideration for Vice-President. This seems to be a largely symbolic move at this point, since Richardson’s name, which was being thrown around a great deal six months ago, had gone more or less unmentioned for a while based (according to Washington types and some friends in New Mexico politics) in large part on a reputation for maritial infidelity. Richardson’s fall from the short list strikes me as an unfortunate development; while some of his politics (particularly fiscally) were somewhat more conservative than I’d like, he’s a tremendously popular Latino executive from the South with a reputation for a strident populist progressivism and a savvy and pragmatic political instinct. So given that John Lewis didn’t seem to be on the table this time around, I would likely have taken him over Gephardt or Edwards.

The latest chatter seems to be that a Vice-Presidential announcement (read: leak, followed by later announcement) will come in the middle of this coming week. If, as many have suggested, it comes down to Gephardt or Edwards, my vote’s for Edwards. While both men campaigned to the left of Kerry on trade and arguably on jobs, Edwards was immeasurably more effective in articulating and demanding a vision for working America. While both men, like Kerry, voted for Bush’s War, Gephardt as Minority Leader is personally responsible for orchestrating the party’s shameful surrender on the issue. It was perhaps the defining moment of Gephardt’s sad tenure of compromise to the Republican party as a Democratic leader; at risk of sounding trite, Gephardt gives off the impression of a fading star, Edwards a rising one.

In this race, as in the Presidential primary, everyone seems convinced that Gephardt is labor’s candidate except for those actually involved in the labor movement, perhaps in part because (near) everyone outside of the labor movement visualizes it as the Teamsters. But absent a real progressive, Edwards is my pick, is SEIU’s pick, and hopefully will be Kerry’s as well.

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In a victory for transparency and democracy, a judge in Leon County has ordered the release of Florida’s list of felons to purge from the rolls:

Florida’s error-prone list of 47,763 suspected felons who could be tossed from voter rolls before November’s presidential election contains nearly three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. Almost half are racial minorities…Circuit Judge Nikki Ann Clark said in her ruling that the Florida Constitution “grants every person the fundamental right to inspect or copy public records.” Further, the state had previously allowed the public and news media to inspect the list and not make copies, but Clark cited previous state court rulings that said the public’s access was “valueless without the right to make copies.”…Among racial groups, the largest reported group was non-Hispanic whites with 24,197, followed by 22,084 non-Hispanic blacks, 1,384 unknowns, 61 Hispanics, 14 Asian or Pacific-Islanders, 12 American Indians and 11 others. The list consisted of 37,777 men and 9,986 women.

Mistakenly purging eligible voters from the rolls was among the state’s biggest stumbles in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, which decided the presidency by 537 votes. The list included voters who had never been convicted of crimes, some whose rights had been restored by other states and others whose names matched those of felons. Nobody knows how many valid voters were disenfranchised. In response to those errors, the state asked the counties to verify the list in advance of elections and, if they could not, to remove questionable voters from the rolls. Florida is one of just seven states where felons must petition to regain voting rights after serving their time. Counties must issue letters to voters who could be declared ineligible. Only those who can prove they’re eligible to vote will be left on the rolls. Secretary of State Glenda Hood said in a statement announcing the release of the information that it contains potential matches and is not a final list.

To describe the 2000 purge as “mistaken” is misleading at best. As Greg Palast wrote recently:

This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures. Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It’s not surprising that the First Brother’s team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled. The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. That’s not surprising. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.

Releasing the lists is a vital step in stopping the whitewashing of the voter rolls from proceeding as planned again. In the meantime, Bush and company are scoring double victories by convincing all too many of those we’re out in Tampa pressing to register to vote that it isn’t worth it because, as many have put it, “They don’t count the votes – they just put whoever they want in there anyway.”

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America Coming Together Spokesman Jim Jordan on hiring felons:

Given that the president and the vice president have three DUI arrests between them, we assume that they both believe in forgiveness and second chances.

It’s a funny comment, but there’s a very serious point to be made about the classed and racialized construction of felons by media and political elites who themselves benefit from the sickening double standards towards crime in this country. For the Bushes and Cheneys, second, and third, and fourth chances will always be available, as will be the chance to condescend to those with far less agregious crimes and only empty promises when it comes to rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

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(Cross-posted over at Undernews:

The past three days were my first here in Tampa working on a non-partisan voter registration campaign targeting underrepresented voting groups in the area. No one was asked about how they planned to vote. But several people – at the supermarket, at the Wal-Mart, at the gas station – made comments to me about it, including:

“I’m not voting for Bush because he doesn’t care about poor people like me. Maybe if I owned this store, I might vote for him.”

“Of course I’m voting – we need to knock Bush out of that chair while we can.”

“I’m voting for John Kerry because he wants to make my health insurance cheaper.”

“No, I’m not voting. I don’t like Bush or Kerry – neither of them cares about people like me.”

“I’m definitely not voting for Bush. But who’s the other one that’s running?”

Most of the folks I’ve talked to have a very clear idea of what they think of George Bush – generally a very, very negative one. Many fewer have a clear idea of who John Kerry is and what he’s about – and it’s not because he hasn’t run enough TV commercials. For some hurt by what these years under Bush have wrought, here and nationally, haziness about Kerry won’t make much difference in whether they show up in November. For others, it will make all the difference.

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As Memorial Day approaches, Secretary of Veterans Anthony Principi claimed Thursday that “our active military respond better to Republicans” as the White House announced its plans to cut the budget for veterans. The question isn’t how we on the left can support the troops but oppose the war – the question is how Bush and company can continue to support the war but oppose the troops.

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You read it here first: Today at Yale’s Class Day, Keynote Speaker Ken Burns delivered, to repeated and riotous applause, a clever and moving speech which included an impassioned and poetic condemnation of the dangerous course down which unjustified military aggression abroad and suppression of dissent at home are leading this country. Warning that America’s greatest threats come from within, he blasted a corporate and consumerist media and an ahistorical and extremist political establishment. And the crowd – made up of graduates, students, faculty, administrators, and family and friends of President Bush’s alma mater – loved it. Afterwards, several of us gathered to protest as Bush, who chose not to attend the ceremonies, entered Sage Hall for a meeting with Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead (the topic? Bush-Brodhead 2004? Who knows…). There was one guy one the other side of the street yelling “Four more years!,” but he seemed lonely.

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Among the papers I wrote before finishing sophomore year a couple weeks ago was one tracing the development and dominance of culturalist views of poverty in American discourse and policy on poverty, bringing together quotes from Republican and Democratic think tanks popularizing the ideas, from Presidents Clinton and Bush endorsing them, and from welfare recipients attesting to the devastating impact of the policies they wrought. I talked about the intuitive appeal of a culturalist perspective – of the idea that the poor are suffering from a culture of poverty and not from material deprivation and economic displacement – as an alternative for the middle- and upper-classes to recognition of responsibility for the conditions of the poor and the potential for themselves to become poor in the future, not through moral failing but through economic crisis. No quote in that paper, however, could sum up the seductive appeal and utter dishonesty of the culturalist view as well as this one delivered yesterday by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso Jackson:

Being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.

Perhaps I can be among the first to call for Secretary Jackson’s resignation.

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Dennis Hastert made news yesterday questioning whether John McCain was a Republican. Republican and Democratic commentators alike would do well to remember, before the former get too indignant and the latter do too much gloating, how conservative John McCain actually is.  He’s vehemently anti-union, anti-choice, and pro-war.  What McCain is is a traditional conservative who, to his credit, is more ideological than partisan, which sets him apart from any number of Senators on both sides of the aisle.  McCain’s increasingly apparent disgust with the Bush Administration is an indication of Bush’s lack of fidelity to the American conservative tradition in favor of an even more dangerous radicalism, not a demonstration of McCain’s liberalism.  He’s not our Zell Miller – Zell has simply become an opportunistic conservative who gets more airtime as a Democrat.  He is also, emphatically, not the man to fill out John Kerry’s Presidential Ticket.

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Picture this scenario:

Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry takes a break from his whirlwind campaign tour to fly back to Washington DC to cast the crucial sixtieth vote to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans left jobless in the Bush economy. He emerges from the Senate Chambers to a triumphant rally with unemployed workers in which he blasts the White House’s callous indifference to the plight of ordinary Americans and pledges to keep fighting to send him looking for a new line of work.

Of coure, that’s not what happened today. Instead, John Kerry spent the day campaigning in Kentucky, a state which, by his party’s count, has lost over 36,000 manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. And, with 59 votes, the ammendment failed.

Kerry’s spokespeople are claiming that the Republicans staged the timing and the closeness of the vote to embarrass him, and I’m sure their right that the Republicans were out to trap John Kerry. But it’s a trap that he walked directly into. More importantly, it’s a vital opportunity to use the power of his office by addressing, in however insufficient a manner, the needs of his constituents, and his hundreds of millions of potential constituents-to-be.

The people of Kentucky didn’t need John Kerry in their state today to talk the talk and shake hands and take photos and raise money telling George Bush to bring it on. They needed him in DC doing his job by defending those who’ve lost theirs.

As November approaches, John Kerry makes it that much more difficult for himself to get working-class voters to take the time out of their day to cast a vote for him every time he has better things to do with his time than cast a vote for them.

(Cross-posted, for the first time, over at the Undernews Blog.)

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Over at Blogs for Bush, they’re reifying myths about the willful docility of Latinos and gushing about the joy of exploiting them:

the more Hispanics the better – or would you rather have us get a flood of Euro-trash, socialistic weenies emigrating here to demand welfare?…While the race-hustlers of the Democratic Party have been playing a pied-piper tune for Hispanic Americans, trying to get them in on the useless resentments and feelings of entitlement they have laid out for other American minorities, the plain, hard fact that Hispanic Americans are enthusiastic volunteers for the American dream has made them a tough nut for the Democrats to crack. Its got to be kept in mind that these Hispanics are either the immigrants themselves of the sons and grandsons of immigrants who came here to work and prosper…

And then there are the comments:

As an employer of a legal Alien and at times his brother who is illegal I can tell you they do work at the bar that I could never get the bartenders to do.

If these people really believed in empowering Latino workers and valuing their work, they’d be calling for the robust defense of their right to organize for respect and dignity on the job. But then they wouldn’t be blogging for Bush, would they?