Post Post Debate Post

Media parrotheads bemoaned John Edwards for not picking a fight with Kerry in the debate, not going for the jugular, not attacking, and all the other stuff that gets their blood and ratings up. They saw it as surrender, since some combination of horserace and warfare is the only way the simpleminded can understand politics.

But one media sage had a different point of view---Bill Schneider, the resident political bobblehead at CNN, the one with the gnomeish half-grin and ability to do political analysis in soundbite size chunks. He saw the civility and high level of discussion at the debate, the four personalities (all different and all attractive in their own way) and their common attacks on Bush as helping the Democrats. In the week that many parrotheads were crediting Bush with retaking the political initiative with his "proposed" anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment, Schneider awarded the debate his Political Play of the Week as a strong plus for the Democrats.

Also on Friday, Edwards picked up some support from Howard Dean activists in Minnesota, making that state's caucuses now his best chance to win something on Tuesday. (Still, Kerry has a lot of strength there, with AFL-CIO backing and organization. There is also the wildcard of Dennis the K who may appeal to the Greenish Dems more than Edwards.) Edwards got some good news in a poll in Maryland that shows him pretty close, but bad news from a poll in Georgia which shows Kerry with a 20 point lead among likely voters. (In other polls the race is tighter.) Kerry also got an important newspaper endorsement in Ohio.

Post Debate Post

The debate in Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the galaxy, was pretty entertaining, thanks mostly to the irrepressible Al Sharpton (with the best applause and laugh lines of the night), the unflappably sincere Dennis the K, and the subtle jabs and feints of the Johns Edwards and Kerry.

Edwards came off well. He is much better in debate, where his clarity of expression has some substance. Since we saw much of the debate on tape we were able to fast-forward through his son of a mill worker stump mantra, and some of the distinctions he draws are without a difference, but he did overtly make a case for himself (though Kerry bluntly said Edwards couldn't document any of his claims of being more attractive to independents and Republicans) and for people inclined to vote for Edwards but concerned that maybe he didn't know where Iraq is, his foreign policy answers were cogent enough to be reassuring.

Kerry gave some very effective answers, crisp and definite when they needed to be, and complete and detailed when they needed to be. He still isn't very good on explaining his position on gay marriage issues, and neither is Edwards actually, but Edwards is probably right that cultural issues do matter to some voters. Kerry is also right that they are not as important, even in how people rank their priorities to pollsters, as issues of security, jobs, health care and education.

But the built-in laughs had to do with Edwards saying that Kerry would make a great running mate, and Sharpton and Dennis the K. talking about their nomination acceptance speeches. (Sharpton actually made a good point several times that the reason for him to stay in the race is to go to the convention with delegates to affect the party platform.) The joke is based on the fact, clear to everyone, that Kerry has the nomination all but sewed up. Edwards probably did himself some good, for those disposed to search for an alternative, but for most, we suspect Kerry confirmed their confidence. Edwards may have moved a bit closer to making Minnesota and Georgia close. Minnesota in particular is difficult to predict because it is a caucus state, with lots of Dean partisans. We haven't heard anything about the Wellstone people, but if any endorse one of the candidates it could be the difference. (Dean is very unlikely to.) But for the moment we're sticking to our feeling that it will be a ten state sweep for Kerry.

This was perhaps the first debate that the death penalty came up. Kerry is the first presidential candidate in a good long while to oppose it, and though some media parrotheads thought this was a throwback, it may very well mirror the changing mood of an electorate disillusioned by mistakes and maybe, just maybe, by the reflexive vengefulness that somehow has become the conventional response. Larry King asked the Dukakis-killing type question: would he favor the death penalty for someone who murders a child? Kerry gave this a great answer, beginning by saying he'd want to choke that person with his bare hands, and that he understands this instinct, but too many condemned prisoners have proven to be innocent.

For those who think Kerry is too political, think about how courageous a stand this is. Clinton felt he had to neutralize this issue, to the extent of signing off on the execution of a mentally retarded prisoner. But given the realities of unjust executions and their symbolism in racial and class inequities reflected in the prison population, for all the conservative white votes in Georgia, for example, that Edwards might pick up by being for captial punishment, Kerry may gain black and other minority votes.

The reason that these issues did come up in this debate, besides the presence of Larry King as moderator, is that the media parrotheads are always happy to fall in line with Bush in making these so-called cultural issues important, because they are sensational, get adrenelin attention (and ratings) and they are seemingly uncomplicated, for or against, basically beyond the control of a president anyway, but a lot more fun to talk about than boring old health care and social security.

The New York Times has endorsed Kerry. The LA Times probably will as well, but even if they don't it won't help Edwards enough. California may like charm but above all wants to back the winner. With New York, California and Ohio, plus the New England states, Kerry should have a very good March 2. With Georgia and Minnesota, it will be even sweeter.

Passionified


Just a month after the merest glimpse of a black female breast became the tipping point (and is there any point in denying the unavoidable puns?) for unease and disgust with relentless commercialized crassness on television, there's pious violence and the violence of piety unleashed on movie screens. Suddenly Jews are screaming at Protestants, Catholics are screaming at Jews, and Romans are pretty upset as well. Another tipping point perhaps, or just a profitable provocation?

Let us provide you with the recovering Catholic point of view. The Passion of Christ has been a mainstay of a certain kind of Catholicism for a very long time. The in-church movie version is called the Stations of the Cross. There are graphic crucifixes, so-called holy picture, depicting in curious detail the agony of Jesus. It is a stand-in for the suffering of the poor, the mass and minions of the institutional church, to bind them to the church's doctrine and especially its authority by glorifying their suffering. It is at the same time a cleansing identification and an awful exploitation.
It is a profound lesson about bearing the crosses of life, and it is a not too subtle suggestion that good Christians seek solace instead of justice.

This is not the Bleeding Heart of Jesus. No, that Jesus is struck to the quick by the suffering of the poor, the hungry the sick, the mistreated, the victims of injustice and oppression. That's what your religious right is criticizing when they sneer at Bleeding Heart Liberals.

No, the Passion is about quaking in your pew. Sure, it's actually about sacrifice, a somewhat new take on a very old theme, perhaps even a primordial one, and certainly a mystery of human societies. The blood sacrifice. But as the Church used it for centuries, it was about scaring the hell out of you.

It is not, you notice, the Christian message of charity, mercy, blessed are the peacemakers. It's not about love. It's about fear.

And it's about visceral emotions, not cultivating a new way of thinking, feeling and behaving, as one might argue is the contribution of Christ, as well as Buddha and other heroes of the human soul.

So it was only a matter of time before the Passion became an action movie. The bad guys, the ultimate Good Guy, the blood, the violence. Except for the extent of the violence and the names of the main characters, the Gibson movie apparently is little different from others in the genre.

We say that based on what's been written about it, and especially on the scenes shown on TV. We haven't seen it, and we don't plan to.

From what we have seen and what we've heard described, it is a combination of movie sadism and Catholic sado-masochism. It's the greatest pornography ever sold.

I can quit anytime!

But I choose to talk about primary politics again. John Kerry swept the small state primaries and caucuses Tuesday, as expected, and by margins that show no movement for Edwards. Looking forward to Super Tuesday next week,polls in California and New York don't show much movement either. Even if Edwards closes in the final week, he doesn't seem to be close enough to win any of the big states, and Kerry is getting the endorsements in the small states, too. Edwards got bumps from big newspaper endorsements in Iowa and Wisconsin, but that's unlikely to happen with the biggest newspapers in New York and California. So the only revision to our prediction last week is that Kerry is now likely to win them all, including Georgia, where years of Civil Rights service are serving him well in a state where African Americans make up about half the voting Democrats. California and New York are secure, and Ohio seems so now. Minnesota voters may remember Kerry's kinship with Paul Wellstone in the Senate. Edwards isn't even on the ballot in Vermont. Where's he going to win? Massachusetts?

In other news, the Secretary of Education who called the National Education Association a terrorist organization said he was just kidding. Officials of the NEA now residing at Guantanamo could not be reached for comment.

Simple, Effective and Forbidden


Let's take a break from the campaign trail and talk about something that is apparently too radical even for Ralph Nader.

A big issue this year that is likely to get bigger is jobs. The U.S. economy has not been creating jobs at the rate of people entering the job market. In fact it has been losing jobs, so even modest job creation will not undo the damage for a long time. There will be people who need to make a living, who can't get jobs.

That's behind a lot of the anti-NAFTA rhetoric, and the furor over out-sourcing: American companies firing or failing to hire U.S. workers in favor of workers in other countries who are paid less, sometimes a small fraction of what U.S. workers would get.

It's also reflected in today's announcement that consumer confidence dropped significantly last month.

G.W. Bush's trickle down economics isn't working, which is hardly a surprise. The Democratic candidates have a number of proposals to encourage job creation, reduce outsourcing and reform trade agreements to build in fair wages as well as environmental standards, which would as a byproduct make some outsourcing economically less enticing.

John Kerry has proposed combining the meeting of environmental and even national security needs by jump-starting a larger scale alternative energy industry, to reduce pollution and greenhouse gases, lessen dependence on foreign oil and create jobs. He estimates half a million jobs. That in itself is not a lot, but a new industry can have a synergistic effect. It's a good idea.

So is attacking the problem from another direction. Kerry believes that creating a better health care insurance system that takes great financial burdens off both workers and employers is part of the solution. He talks about this in terms of cutting costs, and he's right.

But this approach suggests something else-a much simpler and, in our current politics, much too radical solution, that some thirty-five years ago was talked about as just about inevitable.

Even more than thirty-five or forty years ago, people who thought about economic and social trends, and thought about the future, saw a major problem emerging in the rapid development of technology, especially that part of it which at the time was often called automation.

It was clear that although new technology would create many new jobs, it would also destroy many jobs. It would at the very least redistribute jobs and wealth. There would be winners and there would be losers.

What should be done about the losers? That was the question. Future-oriented thinkers looked at how much wealth was being created and would be created, and the trend towards expanding the purview of social justice, and they concluded: because the losers weren't themselves responsible for their plight, since they were victims of technology and global economics, society owed them the living they were going to be denied.

From this sprang the idea of the Guaranteed Annual Income. In most scenarios, it was very simple: everybody would be guaranteed an income sufficient to meet their basic needs. It was so clear that society would be able to afford to do this that the debate moved on to consider long-term social and cultural ramifications. But by the late 1960s, many influential economists and even some politicians assumed it was going to be necessary.

Besides the social responsibility to those who lost out through no fault of their own, there was a second reason for the GAI. This was an idea that crossed political, economic and social lines, as evidenced by the two men who did the most to put it into practice: Henry Ford and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The idea is simply that if people can't afford to buy things, the economy collapses. Henry Ford paid his workers better wages than he needed to, and said quite clearly that this was the reason: he wanted people to be able to afford to buy his cars. FDR was persuaded to enact those New Deal programs that directly paid millions of individuals for various kinds of work that became defined as being in the public good, because people can't spend what they don't have.

Since World War II, the U.S. has fostered a predominately consumer economy. The high consumption lifestyle is spreading with globalization. As it is now developing, that economy is unsustainable simply on environmental grounds. And not even a Guaranteed Annual Income will work until the economic addiction to manufacturing need and greed is dealt with, probably by being diverted. But even so, it's quite clear that an economy that is based on consumption, but concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, is headed for disaster.

So the GAI seemed like a sensible way to both guarantee that people weren't penalized for job losses that weren't their fault, and to guarantee that money for consumption would still flow. Guess what? It still is.

It works for those who lose their jobs because of outsourcing, which is in its way a byproduct of technology. It works to ease the economy through periods of transition. And it can have numerous other benefits, such as freeing people to do work for the public good. We're still living off of some of those "make work" programs of the 1930s that supplied us with so much public infrastructure, began conservation and left us a legacy in the arts that's as close to a golden age as America has seen since Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman were chums.

There are a few proposals currently making the rounds that go about this in a piecemeal or partial fashion. There's the proposal that companies that outsource devote a percentage of the profits they derive by doing so to support workers they displace. There are proposals for various forms of national service that guarantee an income in exchange for public works. Even these health insurance proposals, if they in fact cut health care costs for all citizens, wind up being guaranteed additions to income.

But of course you never hear political figures propose a Guaranteed Annual Income anymore. It's just one of those sixties fantasies of the future now. The kind of thing you'd expect from Marshall McLuhan, say, or Buckminster Fuller, who proposed that the government pay people (like him, for example) just to think. (And he was pretty persuasive that the government would end up making a profit on it.)

On a day that the current president proposes a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, it's not hard to figure out why. In many ways things are changing way too fast, but in other ways, change is much slower and more fitful than anyone would have believed a generation ago. They not only expected we'd have the equivalent of universal healthcare and the GAI by now, but we'd have colonies on the moon and spaceships headed for Jupiter.

So we torture ourselves with complicated half-solutions to problems, admittedly more complex than they appeared in the sixties, but still subject to much simpler solutions. The Guaranteed Annual Income is such an idea. In terms of need, its time has come. But we are so far from it that to even mention it is politically suicidal, and intellectually forbidden.

Lies and Body Bags

So G.W. Bush is beginning his campaign early, trying to stop the bleeding. If the bit we saw on TV is a preview of his campaign, we can’t wait. Poorly delivered same old same old, as if he doesn’t actually want to be president anymore…

Just as we predicted, Ralph Nader put the interests of the nation ahead of himself and…unh, never mind. But the reaction’s been interesting: Democrats are ANGRY with him (seems to be the mood all right) and the pundits seem almost unanimous that he is either not going to have much of an effect in 04, or could actually help the Democratic nominee. Perhaps by adding to the assaults on Bush policies, perhaps by making the Dem nominee look moderate in contrast, or perhaps (the weakest argument, and it’s his) by giving disaffected GOPers someplace to go if voting Dem makes them barf. And as we did sort of predict, Howard Dean immediately issued a statement cautioning his supporters not to throw away their vote, but stick with the Democrat who can beat Bush.

Nader spent Monday on a parade of TV shows. Best question was asked by Jim Leher: who is cheering today? Who is supporting you?

Over the weekend there was a very edgy exchange between the Bush people and the Kerry people, over a Georgia GOP Senator’s warning that Kerry was vulnerable on defense because he’d voted against every weapons system, etc. Max Cleland, who this senator beat, went after him for criticizing a war hero when he’d gotten out of the draft with a trick knee. That seemed a bit over the top, even from an amputee veteran. But Kerry’s response, while similar, was nuanced enough to indicate that he was aware of the underlying message in this attack---that he was soft on defense and hence wouldn’t protect America and hence didn’t love America, etc.---and that he was going to play hardball too, to fend it off. His statement that he didn’t know what Republicans who didn’t serve had against Democrats who did, was not justified by the literal meaning of what he was attacked for (as noted in the White House response.) But it was a return of fire with the weapons he had, showing that if the underlying message was to question his patriotism and willingness to defend the country, he would reply to that underlying message, regardless of what the literal message was, since it was smokescreen. This is pretty sophisticated stuff. It’s live ammo, and it’s dangerous, but it’s powerful, and shows an awareness that’s been missing from Dem campaigns of the past.

On the styles of Kerry and Edwards: it’s become conventional wisdom among the media bobbleheads that Kerry is a stiff and Edwards is the personable, dynamic one. Two things wrong with this. First, if it’s based on recent weeks, it turns out that Kerry has been under the weather, but emerged healthy after finally taking two days off, energizing crowds in Atlanta, bantering with people at a town meeting (Woman in crowd: “Hi, My name is Doris, and I’m a recovering Republican.” Kerry: “I’ve got a one step program for you: vote for Kerry.”)

When he simply showed up for services at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church the congregation was ecstatic. So there’s charisma there that voters are finding, even if the media can't.

Second, the media is still stuck on the Clinton model. Edwards looks and sounds and acts more like Clinton, therefore he’s a better campaigner, the kind people are comfortable with, and want to have on their TV screens for four years, etc ad naseuam. We don’t buy it. Apart from our feeling that Edwards image doesn’t wear well, there’s this to consider: styles change. What attracts people changes, and something different is usually part of the attraction. Plus, and this is the major point: we already elected this folksy nice guy, and where did that get us? Why is the Dem who reminds you of Bush going to be attractive to voters who want more than anything to get rid of Bush? They want the anti-Bush, and that may well extend to style as well as substance.

A couple of other weekend stories: on the extent and power of the Democrats’ anger at Bush (even stronger, some pundits say, than the antipathy of GOPers against Clinton), and one on Republicans who are turning against Bush. (If we were good little bloggers we’d have the URLs for you, but we didn’t record them. Sorry.) The most telling comment of why these GOPers turned against Bush was the most succinct: “Lies and body bags. Bad combination.”