2008 Elections

Politicians Are at It Again in Nevada

davidswanson — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:13:12 -0400

To: Friends of ACORN
From: Steven Kest, Executive Director
Re: News from Nevada
Date: May 4, 2009

Politicians in Nevada are at it again. Seven months after executing a carefully staged raid on the Las Vegas ACORN office - a publicity stunt purporting to gather evidence of “voter fraud” in ACORN’s 2008 voter registration drive - Nevada’s attorney general and secretary of state today announced that they were filing a complaint against ACORN and two voter registration managers. Specifically, the complaint alleges that ACORN implemented a “corporate mandated quota system,” and that bonuses were paid for exceeding this quota, in violation of a Nevada statute that prohibits payment based on the total number of registrations.

What the attorney general and secretary of state did NOT announce were any indictments against any of the 44 individual canvassers ACORN identified, as early as April 2008, as having submitted fraudulent applications to their supervisors. If Nevada officials were truly interested in protecting the integrity of the registration process they would cooperate with ACORN in seeking prosecution against these individuals. Instead, after seven months, the state of Nevada has chosen to divert attention from their failure and attempt to justify their attacks against ACORN with this ridiculous complaint.

If you were to work at a Bennigans making steaks and burgers, you would need to in fact make food to retain your employment. Even university professors must “publish or perish.” ACORN, like any business or professional organization, establishes standards for performance and a reasonable basis for evaluating its employees. For canvassers, who are paid by the hour to assist members of the public in completing voter registration applications, these expectations are based on the only measurement that makes sense: the number of complete and accurate voter registration applications a canvasser collects per shift. Based on years of experience conducting community-based voter registration drives, ACORN has established 20 applications per four-hour shift as a reasonable performance standard.

Performance standards do not represent a “quota,” or payment per registration, but simply a baseline for job performance. And, as the complaint itself makes clear, failing to meet this standard does not result in automatic termination. ACORN supervisors are trained to evaluate canvassers on a case-by-case basis, and are given wide latitude in determining the appropriate course of action for under-performing canvassers, ranging from re-training or reassignment to disciplinary action or dismissal.

Moreover, the statute invoked in the complaint does not even address such job performance standards, nor does it address the situation in the Nevada office, in which unauthorized but moderate bonuses (in the amount of five-dollars per shift) were awarded in September to canvassers who exceeded expectations. In fact, the poorly written statute merely states that it is illegal to pay anyone to register voters based on the total number of voters registered. ACORN canvassers are paid and evaluated by the hour. The absurd legal interpretation under which the complaint has been brought suggests that it is illegal for a voter registration drive to set ANY job performance standards for hourly employees, or to evaluate employees and hold them accountable. In effect, their interpretation of the law would make conducting a paid voter registration drive impossible.

Few states need active and effective voter registration drives more than Nevada, which rates 50th out of 51 states (including the District of Columbia) in voter registration rates. Over 900,000 of 1.6 million eligible Nevadans remain unregistered, including 106,000 of the state’s 199,000 eligible low-income residents. ACORN’s registration drive, by election officials’ own conservative estimate, resulted in over 23,000 new Nevada voters casting a ballot in the 2008 election.

There will surely be a fierce hue and cry in the media over these charges; for that is, after all, largely the point. We look forward to the opportunity to beat back these false claims. Meanwhile, ACORN members will continue to fight for quality affordable healthcare, for living wage jobs, and to stop home foreclosures. And yes, we will continue to fight for the government to do its job and provide a means for universal voter registration for every citizen.

President-Elect Obama and Getting the Change We Deserve

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:40:04 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Now that the street dancing is over, and President-elect Barack
Obama is measuring the drapes for the new Oval Office (let’s hope he
loses the mounted Saddam Hussein matching pistol set and that he has
the direct hard-wired link between the Vice President’s Office and the
Pentagon severed), it’s time to start focusing on how to make this new
president live up to his mantra of “Change We Can Believe In.”

Well over 65 million people voted Obama in on the belief that he
meant what he said with that largely empty slogan. They are going to be
hugely disappointed if he doesn’t deliver.

Yet Obama’s first steps as president-to-be are not promising. His
first official appointment, naming Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of
Staff, was probably the worst possible sign of “No Change.” Emanuel, a
fellow member of the Chicago political gang, far from being something
new, is a relic of the Clinton administration, where he served as a
political strategist, pushing the disastrous “triangulation” strategy
that gave us the end of welfare benefits for poor women, the gutting of
habeas corpus, deregulation of the banking system, and an economic
program that favored bond traders over working people. Worse yet, the
naming to such a key post of Emanuel, a rabid Zionist who actually
holds dual US and Israeli citizenship and was a member of the Israeli
Defense Force (IDF), will poison Obama’s chances to broker a real,
lasting peace deal between Israel and Palestine by aligning him clearly
with the Israeli side in every Palestinian’s eyes.

Other appointments aren’t likely to be much better. Obama’s
advisers during the campaign, especially on economics and foreign
policy, have been not forward-thinking “change”-oriented outsiders, but
rather hoary old-timers like Paul Adolph Volcker and Zbigniew Brezinsky
(both veterans of the Carter presidency!). Why would we expect his
cabinet appointments to be any different? (I recently attended a talk
that featured Volcker, who was Federal Reserve Chairman under Carter
and Reagan, along with Nobel economists Robert Mundell and Joseph
Stiglitz. Volcker sounded almost senile as he rambled on and on in a
barely comprehensible mumble about the need for a “global” currency.)

But the point is, no one should have expected anything different
from Obama. Let’s face it; If he had run a campaign using Stiglitz as
his chief economic policy guy and Ramsey Clark as his foreign policy
expert, his candidacy would have gone down in flames. And don’t tell me
`Good, we should have all voted for Ralph Nader.’” The political left
in the US is a pathetic joke. Instead of a unified third party on the
left, we had that 1-5% sliver of the electorate divided between
independent Ralph Nader and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia
McKinney! How stupid is that? If the left cannot unite when its public
standing and support is so pathetically small, how can it expect anyone
to back it (I’m being generous here in using the singular to describe
such a fractured group of people)?

No, it was correct to elect Obama. Failure to do so (and remember,
he only won the popular vote by a slender 6-percent margin, and many of
the key states that provided his much larger electoral vote victory
were won by margins that thin or thinner including 034 percent in North
Carolina), would have meant a President John “Bomb-Bomb” McCain and his
loopy VP Sarah Palin.

But as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and others, myself included,
have long said, change in America has not for the most part been made
from the top down, or through the electoral process. It has been the
result of political struggle in the workplace, on the campus and most
importantly in the streets. And that brings us to where we are today.

Progressives should complain loudly at the pathetic nominations
that Obama is making to his new administration. The new president-elect
should take heat for appointing old Clintonian hacks and for “reaching
out” to Republicans in the interest of “bi-partisanship.” But more
importantly, we on the left need to work hard to organize, demonstrate,
and protest to achieve our goals and to make President Obama and the
new solidly Democratic Congress do the right (left) thing.

For me, the two most important issues we need to focus laser-like upon are ending the wars, and obtaining worker rights.

It is time to plan a massive march, to coincide with Inauguration
Day, to demand a prompt end to the Iraq War and occupation, and a
negotiated solution to the chaotic war in Afghanistan. The protest
should also demand an end to the so-called “War” on Terror, beginning
with the immediate closing of Guantanamo’s prison, and of all the black
sites around the world.

Secondly, the left and the labor movement need to organize a million-worker march on Washington--hell, a two-million worker
march--to demand immediate passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, a
long-delayed reform of US labor law that would end almost 50 years of
bias against workers that has seen employers able to simply flout the
law and prevent workers from forming unions. Under the proposed act,
which already passed the House in the last session of Congress only to
die in the Senate (before having a chance to be killed by the
president), workers would no longer have to go through years of delay
trying to get a secret-ballot election in the workplace; they would
only have to obtain signed cards supporting a union from a majority of
employees. It would mandate that employers bargain in good faith with a
new union, and would mandate a contract if management stonewalled
negotiations. It would also, for the first time, impose penalties for
violating workers rights—for example firing union activists and their
supporters.

Why is this bill so important? Because without a powerful labor
movement, we will never see the Democratic Party, or any third party of
the left, become a serious force for progressive change. It is working
people, and only working people, organized into powerful unions, who
have the potential of pushing the government into making progressive
change, but with union representation now down to less than 8 percent
of the private workforce, and 13 percent of the entire workforce,
counting public employees, what chance is there of such a thing
happening?

Polls over the years have consistently shown that, despite all the
media propaganda against unions, and the lack of any education about
the union movement or the importance of unions in our schools, between
60% and 70% of American workers nonetheless say that they would like to
have a union on their job if they could get one. The problem is, with
the laws and the Labor Relations Boards stacked against them, they
cannot get a union, and indeed, put their jobs and their families at risk by even trying to get one.

Obama and most of the Democrats who won election in this cycle have
pledged to pass this act this year. They also owe their victories to
the extraordinary effort that what’s left of the labor movement put
into getting them elected. Workers and leftists of all stripes need to
act now to demand that they make good on that promise and on the debt
that they owe.

It is the first essential step in moving a President Obama and a
Democratic Congress—as of now still in the grip of the corporatocracy,
with little in the way of any countervailing organized pressure from
the left—in a progressive direction.

The time for dancing is over, but nothing is easy. Now it’s time
for marching, for shouting, for sitting in and for organizing to get
the “Change” we’ve earned.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphie-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Obama Revolution

Bob Fertik — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:23:46 -0500

Harris & VandeHei did a good job of describing the massive shift in power from conservatives to Obama, which is nothing short of a revolution.

The rout of the Republican Party, and the accompanying gains by Democrats in Congress, mean that Barack Obama will assume office with vastly more influence in the nation’s capital than most of his recent predecessors have wielded.

The only exceptions suggest the magnitude of the moment. Power flowed in unprecedented ways to George W. Bush in the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It flowed likewise to Lyndon B. Johnson after his landslide in 1964.

In both cases, the power shift followed the shock of a sudden tragedy - 9/11 and the assassination of JFK. Obama's revolution followed the slow-motion tragedies of Iraq, Katrina, innumerable scandals, and finally the market meltdown.

For most of the past 30 years, since the dawn of the Reagan Era, conservatives have held the momentum in American politics. Even the Clinton years were shaped — and constrained — by conservative ideas (work requirements for welfare, the Defense of Marriage Act) and conservative rhetoric (“the era of Big Government is over”). Republicans rode this wave to win the presidency five of seven times since 1980, and to dominate Congress for a dozen years after 1994. Now the wave has crashed, breaking the back of the modern Republican Party in the process.

In reality, conservative "ideas" were never very popular. Reagan beat Carter because Carter was both ineffectual (Iranian hostages, oil prices) and unpopular ("malaise"), not because of Reagan's conservative "ideas." Reagan betrayed those "ideas" by creating huge deficits, raising taxes to reduce them, and negotiating Start II with the Evil Empire.

Reagan was never very popular because of his attacks on the poor, and George H.W. Bush had to run as a "kinder and gentler" candidate. Bush only beat Dukakis because he looked like Snoopy in a tank and wouldn't even defend his wife. Even after driving Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, Bush lost to neoliberal Bill Clinton.

Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution stormed Congress in 1994, but their victory was driven by Democratic disappointment over Clinton's failed health care plan. Gingrich was never popular, and his relentless attacks on Clinton - including impeachment - only made Clinton more popular.

In 2000, George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" who promised a "humble foreign policy" and a prescription drug plan. Even so, he lost to Al Gore. In 2004, Bush only beat Kerry through a vicious Swift Boat campaign and constant Code Red terror alerts.

Democrats are positioned to do more than move legislation. They will flush Republicans out of key positions in the federal government and lobbying firms. They will install their people in the federal courts. They will be positioned to raise money for those who usually give to Republicans and easily recruit the most desirable candidates in 2010, as other Democrats look to join what looks like a winning team.

Before the election, I said the biggest problem facing the Republican Party is its pathetic bench. Because of the ideological takeover by the far right, the GOP has no credible candidates for President, for the Senate, for the House, or for any other office. And it will be impossible for the GOP to recruit decent candidates for 2010 because of its losing record, its lack of money, and its shrinking base.

A party dominated by white males is poorly positioned to prosper among an increasingly diverse electorate. Somehow, the GOP needs to find new ways to appeal to minorities — or risk a long life in the wilderness as a percentage of the overall population continues to shrink.

Karl Rove tried desperately to reach out to hispanics through comprehensive immigration reform, but his friends on rightwing hate radio went into full-scale revolt, and conservatives in Congress quickly followed. Thanks to Jim Sensenbrenner's draconian anti-immigration bill, Hispanics went for Obama by 67-31.

Obama is the Google of politics: He has technological expertise and an audience his political competitors simply cannot match. Looking ahead to 2010, House and Senate Democrats will be jealously eyeing Obama’s e-mail lists and technology secrets — giving him even greater leverage over them. Republicans will be forced to invest serious money and time to narrow the technology gap.

Republicans can invest as much in technology as they like, but web 2.0 is all about bottom-up user participation, not top-down messaging. The only grassroots activists who are still Republicans are neofascist ideologues who believe Obama is a Muslim communist. Why would any normal voter want to associate with crazies like them?

Watch the GOP Shrink

Bob Fertik — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:26:01 -0500

This county map shows how the GOP is shrinking compared to 2004. The only growth areas are eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma. (The red dots on the Gulf probably reflect poor Democrats driven out by hurricanes, rather than actual Republican gains.) The heart of the Confederacy - Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, along with most of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi - is actually turning blue.

One of Ben Smith's readers found a map that roughly overlaps the red-leaning counties.

The reader comments:

This second map is based on census data and shows what the largest (self-reported) ancestry is in county of the United States. Take a look at it and you'll see that the interior south, where Obama could get no traction and almost the only part of the country where people voted more Republican in 2008 is the part of the country dominated by people who describe their ancestry as not German or English or Spanish or Irish but "American."

This sounds at first blush like simple ignorance of the concept of ancestry, but the map's annotation notes that "The region had very low levels of immigration for 200 years. ... According to the 1870 census, less than 2% of the south was immigrants." In most of the rest of the deep south's counties the biggest ethnic group is African-Americans descended from slaves. While the rest of the country has gotten more ethnically mixed recently, the south, and I'd guess particularly Appalachia, has had a nearly static, isolated population for two centuries.

And now those "American" Americans are the most reliable Republican voters.

Interesting, eh?

During the primaries, bloggers traced Appalachian voters to their Scots-Irish ancestors. Josh Marshall wrote:

These regions were settled disproportionately by Scots-Irish immigrants who pushed into the hill country to the west in part because that's where the affordable land was but also because they wanted to get away from the more stratified and inegalitarian society of the east which was built by English settlers and their African slaves. Crucially, slavery never really took root in these areas. And this is why during the Civil War, Unionism (as in support for the federal union and opposition to the treason of secession) ran strong through the Appalachian upcountry, even into Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi.

As I alluded to earlier, this was the origin of West Virginia, which was originally the westernmost part of Virginia. The anti-slavery, anti-slaveholding upcountry seceded from Virginia to remain in the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union. Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the linchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.

This is history. But it shapes the region. It's overwhelmingly white, economically underdeveloped (another legacy of the pre-civil war pattern) and arguably because of that underdevelopment has very low education rates and disproportionately old populations.

For all these reasons, if you're familiar with the history, it's really no surprise that Barack Obama would have a very hard time running in this region.

The End is at Hand (to Leftist Conspiracy Theories)

dlindorff — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:36:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the polls continuing to show Barack Obama holding a steady or
even growing lead heading into Election Day, especially in the key
swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire
and Virginia, and with Democratic challengers looking strong in at
least 10 Senate races and dozens of open-seat or Republican-held House
races, it’s looking like this will be a big win for Democrats, both in
the presidential and the Congressional races.

Hopefully one thing such an across-the-boards win will lead to
would be a withering away of the self-destructive conspiracy-theory
paranoia that has gripped much of the Left over the last eight years.

Once largely emblematic of the far Right, which saw black
helicopters of the dreaded United Nations behind every mountain, Jews
running everything, Communists working nefariously under every bed,
fluoridation plots, an immigrant assault on the Anglo-Saxon gene pool,
and a liberal cabal out to steal their assault hunting rifles, now the
Left is awash in the same kind of fevered thinking.

Chief among the leftist conspiracy theories are that the
Bush/Cheney administration was behind the 9-11 attacks, that the
current administration has plans to cancel or annul the November 4
election and institute martial law, that there are plans for a “false
flag” attack on American forces which will be used to justify an
all-out war against Iran, that there is a false-flag terror attack
planned inside the US set for before the election, designed to throw
the vote towards John McCain, that the Wall Street meltdown and
subsequent bail-out are a deliberate scheme to steal the nation’s
assets and funnel them into Republican pockets, and that Republican
operatives have the technological capability, and plan to steal the
current election by manipulating the results on the electronic voting
machines used by many election districts. In a variant of the Right’s
anti-Semitic ravings, the Left attributes god-like powers to the Israel
lobby and its formal lobbying organization, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

Never mind that some of these conspiracies are mutually exclusive
(if Bush and Cheney are going to declare martial law, they should have
no need to steal the election), or that it’s getting pretty late in the
game for others to actually happen. The common thread running through
these conspiracies is that “they” (the Republicans, AIPAC or the ruling
corporate elite, as the case may be), have superhuman powers beyond our
wildest imaginations, as well as flawless execution, and are going to
achieve their evil ends no matter what we do.

Following this line of thinking (if it can be called that), there’s
no point in voting, because “they” are going to steal the election
anyhow (and that, of course, is if the election is even held next
week!). There’s no point in going to rallies or marches in Washington
DC, because “they” are going to attack Iran and start World War III
anyhow. Public protest is also dangerous, because “they” are going to
declare martial law, and then all of us who go out and publicly oppose
the government will end up locked away in detention camps in the Mojavi
desert.

I confess, as a journalist, to having unwittingly aided and abetted
some of this conspiracy thinking, for example with my reporting on the
evidence that all four of the so-called “black boxes” from the two
planes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 were recovered, and that
the FBI actually has them, despite its testimony to the contrary before
the 9-11 Commission. I make no apology for, and still stand by that
report, which was based upon reliable sources at the National
Transportation Safety Administration and in the New York Police
Department, but I want to stress that such a report does not justify
going beyond asking the logical question, “What is the government
hiding here?” to making the wild speculation that it means the
government planned and carried out those attacks.

I also reported on solid evidence in 2006 that the Bush/Cheney
administration was moving several aircraft carrier battle groups into
position in the Persian Gulf in advance of Congressional off-year
elections in what appeared to be possible plans for an attack on Iran.
I still believe that may have been the administration’s game plan, but
that it was derailed by senior Republican leaders who prevailed on
James Baker, chair of the Iraq War Study Group, to release his team’s
bi-partisan study three months early, which called for negotiations
with Iran and Syria in order to bring peace and stability to the Iraq
region. I would add that this is a far cry from imagining that the
administration was planning to fake an Iranian attack on American
forces.

I am not saying that governments don’t engage in treacherous
conspiracies. Certainly the faked tale of a Gulf of Tonkin incident was
a conspiracy designed to allow the Johnson administration to begin an
all-out war against the Vietnamese. And certainly there was a
conspiracy in the Bush/Cheney administration during 2002 and early 2003
to mislead and lie to the Congress and the American people about Saddam
Hussein’s alleged links to 9-11 and to global terrorists. But those
relatively simple conspiracies actually prove my point—both have been
clearly exposed thanks to leaks, turncoats, and good investigative
reporting.

What I am saying is that the grander conspiracies being concocted
in the more fevered brains of some people on the Left do not hold up
under careful and critical inspection. The biggest failings they share
are two: first of all, conspiracies as grand as multi-state election
thefts via electronic fraud, and the carrying out of a two-front,
high-casualty mass terrorist act on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, require the cooperation of such large numbers of people that
leaks, turncoats, informants and simple screw-ups are inevitable; and
secondly, this administration in particular has shown itself to be
phenomenally inept, intellectually stunted, and tactically clueless.
The War in Iraq, which was supposed to be a “cakewalk,” has been an
unmitigated disaster for Republicans. The War in Afghanistan is a
fiasco. The War on Terror, while a success in terms of helping
Republicans win seats in Congress in 2002, and Bush to win re-election
in 2004, has been a bust longer term. Management of the US economy has
been a model of incompetence. So has the grand plan to crush Democrats
and create a dominant Republican Party for the next century. The Rovian
campaign strategy of lies, smears and dirty tricks, while initially
successful, appears to have worn out its effectiveness in just three
two-year national election cycles.

None of this would matter except that I think the Left’s embrace of
conspiracy-theories has become profoundly damaging to the whole
progressive movement. Conspiracy thinking produces a deep cynicism
towards positive action and towards the kind of long-term organizing
upon which real social and political change depends. When people think
that the fix is in, they are not inclined to put time and energy into
the hard work of organizing unions, working to get local candidates
elected to office, running for positions on party committees, etc.
Conspiracy thinking also leads people on the left to completely write
off the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive change, as the
notion that “they” run everything is broadened to include in the term
“they” the elected Democrats in the White House and Congress. Democrats
may be weenies, but such a conflation of Republicans and Democrats is
also self-defeating nonsense, as is the notion that Obama is “just
another tool” of the corporate/imperialist power structure. Democrats
are not just Republicans by another name, and Obama is not just McCain
or Bush with a better tan.

The reality is that if Obama is elected president, and if Democrats
end up gaining solid control of Congress, it will be critically
important for progressives to organize powerfully to press this new
government to do the right things—promptly ending the two wars in the
Middle East, taking strong and far-reaching action to tackle global
warming, restoring some basic equity to the economic and tax system,
making health care affordable and available to all, restoring the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, demanding punishment for those in
the current administration who have committed crimes, and so on.

We cannot expect Obama, or the Democrats in Congress who have
proven themselves to be such gutless compromisers, to take significant
progressive actions on their own. They must be driven by force of
public action to do the right thing.

Maybe when this election goes right and isn’t stolen, making Obama
the president, and debunking the vote-theft fear-mongers, and when
Obama goes on to be inaugurated in January, without being blocked by a
military coup, these paranoid conspiracy theories will fade away and
people on the Left will start working to make change happen instead of
imagining reasons why it can’t or just moaning that “they” are going to
destroy us all.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Fun Thoughts: Messin' With Republicans

dlindorff — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:55:55 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

A week out from Election Day, with the polls looking pretty good for Barack Obama's election, especially in the Electoral College, focus is shifting to the Senate, where Democrats would need to pick up 10 seats in order to be able to both prevent Republican obstruction via filibuster, and send Connecticut's turncoat Sen. Joe Lieberman into well-deserved oblivion.

Getting to a 10-seat gain may look like long odds, but it occurs to me that this really doesn't matter. In fact, a President Obama could have fun picking off a couple of Republican senators from states that have Democratic governors, by naming them to posts in his administration, thereby simultaneously demonstrating a bi-partisan approach to governance while ensuring solid Democratic control of both houses of Congress. And he could do this without having to name out-of-synch conservatives to any position.

For example, Obama could invite either Sen. Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe, both Republican senators in Maine, to serve in some capacity in the cabinet--perhaps in the role of EPA Administrator or Secretary of the Interior, or as Secretary of Health and Welfare or of Education. Either one would be hard put to turn down that offer, and if accepted, Maine's Democratic governor, John Baldacci, would get to name a replacement, who would be a Democrat.

Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith is in a tight race for re-election in that liberal state. If he succeeds in returning to office, Obama could offer him a cabinet post, too--perhaps Secretary of Commerce. Smith has been campaigning almost as an ally of Obama in his effort to defeat Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley, so he'd be an easy fit, and that would give Oregon's Democratic governor, Ted Kulongoski, the chance to name a Democratic replacement--probably Merkley. So everybody (except Senate Republicans) wins!

If still another Democratic Senate seat were needed to hit the magic number of 60 in the next Senate, Obama could find a job for Tennessee's Lamar Alexander, or even Pennsylvania's senior senator Arlen Specter.

Republicans, of course, would be livid if their numbers were pared in this way, but that would be fun to watch. All the named Republican senators above are relatively liberal and have suffered at the hands of their party's conservative majority. Most would probably jump at the chance of a cabinet post.

So if Obama wins next Tuesday, but Democrats fall short in the Senate, look for some entertainment in the coming few months.

________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Update: The 5-90-95 Expressway to Victory

Bob Fertik — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:42:21 -0400

Way back on June 20, I dreamed of an Electoral College map for Obama that rode the I-5 I-90 I-95 expressway to victory:

Of course we're not there yet, but we're getting close!

Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina, and Florida are tossups, while Georgia is pink. The only solid red state that stands in the way of my fantasy map is South Carolina. Sweet!

I'm Calling the Race for Obama

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:36:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I’m ready to call this election. It’s going to be a big win for Barack Obama.

I know this because of a story I heard from an employee of a major
polling organization. He tells of a poll worker who was interviewing
homeowners in a small town in central Pennsylvania, part of that “real”
American hailed by Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
The man knocked on the door, and when the woman of the house answered,
told her he was a pollster and wanted to know how her household planned
to vote in November.

The woman turned and yelled into the house, “Honey, how are we voting this year?”

From inside the house, a male voice yelled back, “I guess we’re voting for the nigger.”

The woman turned to the stunned pollster and, without a hint of embarrassment, said, “I guess we’re voting for Obama.”

Simply put, Obama has won the racist vote, a core Republican constituency since the late 1960s.

Indeed, it is likely that instead of the famed “Bradley Effect”
(named after the Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, who famously lost a
race for California governor which the polls said he would win
handily), according to which some white voters supposedly tell poll
takers they are voting for the black candidate in a race for fear of
appearing racist, while in fact they plan on voting for the white
candidate, the opposite is going to occur. That is, there are probably
many white racist voters like the one in this small Pennsylvania town,
whether in some northern suburb or village, or in Southern states like
Virginia, North Carolina or Georgia, who are fed up with the Bush
years, want a change, and are planning to vote for Obama, but would not
want their friends to know they were voting for a black man. Call it
the “Obama Effect.”

If I’m right that this anecdote is reflective of a broader
phenomenon, look for just the opposite of what we saw happen in the
2004 election, when the exit polls and the networks were calling the
election for John Kerry, and in fact key states like Ohio, supposedly
solidly in the Democratic column, went for Bush. (Sure there was voting
machine chicanery, but there were also problems with the exit polls.)
This year, if there are substantial numbers of white voters who vote
for Obama but sheepishly tell exit pollsters that they voted for
McCain, we may hear that races are close, or that states are going for
McCain that will ultimately, when the actual votes are counted, go for
Obama.

In a broader sense, even based upon the pre-election poll numbers
we are seeing, with Obama ahead in Virginia and North Carolina and
within the margin of error in Indiana, Georgia, North Dakota and
Montana, what seems to be happening in this election is the collapse of
the long-successful Republican strategy of using “social issues” and
fear-mongering, particularly fear of African-Americans and immigrants,
to convince white working class Americans to vote for a party whose
interests were and are clearly against their own. Republican campaign
ads and candidate speeches are larded with code words that seek to
appeal to those fears: “pals around with terrorists,” “don’t know who
he really is,” “anti-American preacher,” “wife not proud to be an
American,” “community activist,” “socialist,” “not really born in
America.” But they’re not working. Neither is the old Republican
nostrum of cutting taxes for the rich on the pretense that it will lead
to jobs for the poor. When McCain charges, as he has been doing
frantically of late, that Obama has been outed by “Joe” (sic) the
Plumber as a “socialist” and that he will be taxing the rich "to spread
the wealth around,” most people today are probably thinking, “Hey, that
idea of spreading some rich folks’ money around sounds pretty good to
me!”

That is to say, Obama’s populist rhetoric, whether it is sincere or
not, and particularly his promise to cut taxes for most Americans while
raising taxes on the wealthy and on the large corporations, and to make
college and health care affordable to all, is winning over a large
number of Americans, including many who for decades have been
responsive to Republican fear- and race-mongering and to Republican
"free-market" ideology.

There are many people on the left who argue that Obama and the
Democrats are a sham, and that they won’t really tackle taxing the rich
and corporations in any serious way, or offering real help to
struggling working class Americans. They may well be right. Certainly
the flood of campaign contributions from Fortune 1000 corporations
suggests that corporate America will have a big seat at the White House
table in an Obama administration, as they do already in the Democratic
Congress. At the same time though, the rhetoric of this campaign is
setting up a major expectation among millions of ordinary voters for
real progressive action on economic issues. This hope, given continued
organized political pressure after November 4, could lead to real
action.

I would argue that when the real “Joe’s” and “Jane’s” of America,
the ones who have been suckered in for years by cynical Republican
fear-mongering and race-baiting campaigns finally turn away and vote
for hope—even if that hope is being over-sold--it creates the chance
for a real movement for progressive change in the country.

At any rate, it certainly looks like my theory will be put to the test come Inauguration Day.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

McCain and Obama's Animated Election Spectacular

Chip — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:30:50 -0400

Why I'm Voting for Barack Obama on November 4

dlindorff — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:04:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.

It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now,
according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the
Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14
percent over Republican John McCain—enough to overcome even the most
devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine
chicanery.

I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a
seriously flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform,
saying not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that
it was “the wrong war.” Since then, he has backed away even from saying
he wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable
that would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer
than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an
escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that more
troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called for an
expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of the Army
and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more killing
and more waste of precious resources.

Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by
President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and
abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the
National Security Agency—spying that we now know is massive almost
beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private family
conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of journalists,
and almost certainly of Bush administration political “enemies.” By
backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost impossible for
victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to sue and find out
what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to all these years.

In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about “change.”

Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has
consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they
are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system,
which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a more
cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system than
the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the
Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the economic
bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate criminals who
have been sucking the life out of the US economy for years.

And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I
lived in Ohio or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is
too close to call, and so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to
do so here in Pennsylvania is really a cop-out.

But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and
right-wing yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear
people calling for Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the
rabid hate mail circulating in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a
secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Marxist and a black nationalist, I want
to see the man resoundingly win this election.

But it’s more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and
experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep
thinking that a guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard
Law School grad (and even law journal editor!) who could have named his
price at a Wall Street law firm, but who chose instead to be a
political and community activist, a guy who has relatives who live in
humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent some of his childhood
actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to mention a guy who
has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to bring
something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the
history of the country has come to the office with such a background.

Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn’t be
heading for an election victory. He wouldn’t even be the Democratic
nominee. He’d be, at best, where Dennis Kucinich is—holding a seat in
Congress where his every progressive effort would be stymied or mocked
by the House leadership.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke
(many of its purists even mock successful left candidates political
figures like Kucinich, for god’s sake!). Fractured and fractious small
groupings have little or no link to the organized labor
movement—traditionally the bedrock of any successful left political
power. And the labor movement itself is as weak as it has ever been and
keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such as it is, has even less
connection with the broad mass of the American public, thanks to years
of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao and Soviet Communism.

I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic
Party. Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made
it into office—people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ
Feingold, Rep. Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the Democratic
Party has shown itself to be in thrall to the moneyed interests on Wall
Street and in the corporate suites.

That said, there are important things that could happen—and I
stress the word could, not would—if this election were to be won by
Obama and by Democrats in the Congress. One of these things is that
there will be new Supreme Court justices named over the next four
years. Some will inevitably replace some of the aging “liberals” on the
bench (some of whom have not always been so liberal on economic
issues). Some could also replace current conservative justices
(Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don’t
look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years,
and even Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem with
epilepsy or some other ailment that has caused him to collapse in a
frothing fit of unconscious on occasion).

Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course
for workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the job.
A major reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of the
workforce in the 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce (and
13 percent of all workplaces, public and private) today, is that labor
law has been whittled away and turned to management’s advantage to such
an extent that it is almost impossible now to win a union election.
Employers who break labor laws suffer no penalty even when found
guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for union activity can hope,
at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and back pay after
fighting for years. Most just give up.

If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a
President Obama signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if
new pro-labor officials were appointed to the national, regional and
local labor relations boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see
a genuine revival of the labor movement in America with consequences
for workers’ lives, and for the political system that would be far
reaching and profound—and that could even pave the way for a resurgence
of a left/labor political movement.

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take
Obama’s warmongering seriously. Given the man’s background, I am
confident that he is not a militarist by nature. It may be politically
opportunistic for him to try during this campaign to out-tough McCain
on Afghanistan while calling for a wind-down of the war in Iraq, but it
would be a disaster for him to pursue a wider war in Afghanistan after
taking office, ensuring that his presidency, like Bush’s, Lyndon
Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s before him, would be dragged down by an
endless bloody conflict.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an
unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as
quickly as possible. Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I simply can’t
see a smart guy—and Obama is a smart guy—getting dragged into another
quagmire.

Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global
warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make
itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which
will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right
person at the right time, to lead that response.

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As
crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a
solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old
man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted
and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin,
as vice president, would in all probability end up becoming president
during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader
of America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It’s not
just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a
Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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