Hillary Clinton

More Blood Money from Our Democratic Congress and Democratic Presidential Candidate

dlindorff — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:49:05 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended
benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to Congressional
Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision onto a bill giving
the president all the money he asked for (and then some) to fund the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through next June. Veterans of the
Iraq War will also be getting tuition benefits equal to the full cost
of in-state public college tuition plus $1000 a year for books and
supplies.

When workers pick up those unemployment checks from their state
Department of Labor offices, though, they should see them as dripping
blood. Those checks have been bought with the blood of American men and
women in uniform who have been sent over and over into harm’s way in
those two countries in misbegotten and criminal adventures that have
nothing to do with defending America and everything to do with boosting
the profits of oil companies and defense contractors, and with getting
Bush re-elected and Republicans elected.

Iraq Vets, too, should not
overlook the blood on their VA education benefits checks, because their
tuition will be paid by the blood of active-duty comrades still left
stranded in battle zones overseas.

It didn’t have to be like this.

For generations, Congress has voted supplemental funding for
unemployment benefits to be extended during economic downturns—not
always willingly, but always eventually, following enough pressure from
workers and the labor movement.

For generations, too, Congress has voted for education benefits for veterans.

This being an election year, passage of a freestanding supplemental
benefits bill for unemployment insurance and a restoration of decent
education benefits for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans would have
been a sure thing. Even Republicans facing the prospect of re-election
campaigns would have signed on to both measures by Labor Day and the
votes would have been there to override any Bush veto. Neither
measure—both important in themselves and badly needed—had to be tied to
a war-funding bill.

But Democrats in the House and Senate leadership weren’t really
thinking about the plight of the unemployed or the needs of returning
veterans in this case. They were, rather, thinking of a way of putting
some “progressive” window-dressing on a war-funding bill that they
wanted to pass without having to take responsibility for it. Their
objective was to push the whole issue of funding the wars out past
Election Day, in hopes of not having to discuss it in the coming
campaign.

Funding Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq especially has, after all,
become a more and more unpopular and difficult affair for Democrats. In
this last go-round, fully 141 House Democrats voted against further
funding of the war—nearly the same number as voted for it (149). At
first, back in mid-May, the measure didn’t even pass, because
Republicans cleverly joined with the anti-war Democrats in blocking the
measure, forcing Democratic leaders to scramble to round up the votes
to pass a bill the second time around.

Americans clearly don’t want the war to continue, and Democrats
don’t want to have to face the voters, as every member of the House and
a third of the Senate have to do this November, being labeled as war
backers. That’s why they come up with these pathetic excuses like, “I’m
opposed to the war but we have to support the troops.”

Any sentient being in the country by now knows that most of the
long-suffering and abused troops, as polls have shown, think that the
best way to support them is to bring them home immediately. A Zogby
poll of active-duty troops in Iraq taken in 2006 found that 72% wanted
the US out within a year, while one in four wanted all US troops out
immediately. Only one in five supported staying “as long as necessary.”
(With many of those troops on yet another rotation, in some cases their
fifth, those numbers are probably even more in favor of immediate
withdrawal today.) Military experts have also written about how all the
troops in Iraq could be pulled out safely in as little as two weeks’
time. All the Pentagon would need to do is start running a constant
convoy of trucks south to Kuwait, carrying troops and weapons systems.
They could leave the porta-potties, the McDonalds stands, the bowling
alleys, the gyms and the barracks to the Iraqis and then blow up
whatever they didn’t want falling into the wrong hands. It would be
easy and fast. There’s no need for Obama’s proposed 16-month staged
withdrawal, which would just mean more unnecessary deaths and killings.

Democrats in Congress know all this, but congenitally spineless and
devoid of principle, they’re afraid if they don’t fund the war they
could be accused by Republicans of being “soft” on defense—as though
the Iraq War had anything at all to do with protecting America.

And so they have come up with this shameless ruse of attaching a
$95-billion domestic spending package, including unemployment funding
measure and a veterans’ education benefits measure, to a $162-billion
atrocity—a measure that assures more death and destruction in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and more dead and maimed American military personnel.
They’re pretending that they “pulled one over” on Bush by forcing him
to sign an unemployment extension bill and a veterans’ bill, when they
know Republicans would have forced him to sign those anyway, later in
the summer.

The real joke is on the American people, and on those very workers
and veterans who will be receiving the unemployment checks and tuition
reimbursements funded as a result of this duplicitous tactic.

The $162 billion that Congress has voted for the continuation of
the two pointless and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together
with the money already allocated for the so-called “War on Terror,” is
all borrowed, and is a major contributor to the collapse of the dollar
and to the resulting soaring of the price of oil, electricity and
imported goods. It is thus a major contributor to the credit crisis and
the collapse in the housing market that has pushed the nation into what
may be the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Furthermore, the blood-money unemployment and tuition checks bought
through his gutless subterfuge by House and Senate Democrats will be
pissed away in no time on higher gas prices spent by workers on
desperate job searches, or on long commutes to distant jobs or commutes
if they are lucky enough to find them. It will be pissed away too for
veteran/students on their commutes to college, and on higher heating
bills for their families at home.

Equally important, the $160 billion wasted in Iraq, along with the
half trillion dollars being wasted every year on military spending for
a military colossus that encircles the globe for no good purpose other
than intimidation of other nations, assures that those Democrats who
control Congress can do nothing of consequence to shore up retirement
funds, to develop a national health program, to improve our dismal
school system, to repair our crumbling infrastructure, or to develop
alternative, non-polluting energy sources that could combat global
warming.

The Democratic Congress has shown itself to be worse than useless.
It is part of the problem. That includes Sen. Barack Obama, who like
Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain, signed onto this
contemptible funding bill.
_______________

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

Thank You, Hillary

Bob Fertik — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:11:26 -0400

Thank you, Hillary!

Thank you for making history by nearly becoming the first woman President.

Thank you for inspiring 18 million women and men to vote for the first serious female candidate for President.

Thank you for putting 18 million cracks in the ultimate glass ceiling, so you or another outstanding woman can become President soon.

Thank you for proving to every girl and boy in America that a woman can be President or do anything she wants to do.

That you for proving to every woman and man in the world that an American woman can be President or do anything she wants to do.

And thank you for uniting the Democratic Party behind our extraordinary nominee, Barack Obama.

The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand, is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him. And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me.

Obama returns the love:

"Obviously, I am thrilled and honored to have Senator Clinton's support. But more than that, I honor her today for the valiant and historic campaign she has run. She shattered barriers on behalf of my daughters and women everywhere, who now know that there are no limits to their dreams. And she inspired millions with her strength, courage and unyielding commitment to the cause of working Americans. Our party and our country are stronger because of the work she has done throughout her life, and I'm a better candidate for having had the privilege of competing with her in this campaign. No one knows better than Senator Clinton how desperately America and the American people need change, and I know she will continue to be in the forefront of that battle this fall and for years to come."

That sure sounds like Unity to me - we're on to Victory in November!!!

Hillary: What Went Wrong

Bob Fertik — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:11:41 -0400

As Hillary Clinton ends her campaign, I can't help but note that she came so incredibly close to being the first woman to be nominated by the Democratic Party, and the first woman President.

Hillary started as the frontrunner because of her fame, her dramatic personal story, her powerful organization and fundraising machine, her very popular husband, and her powerful charisma. So what happened?

As a candidate, she had just a few weaknesses: the Hillary-hate industry, her vote in favor of the Iraq War, and plain old-fashioned sexism.

The Hillary Haters were a powerful force on rightwing TV, radio, and blogs. They got started during the 1992 campaign, and they never went away. They published endless books and spread endless lies. I thought they would be a factor in the Democratic campaign, but I was wrong - they never made a serious dent.

But Hillary's pro-war vote hurt her far more than the pundits are willing to acknowledge. The millions of activists who protested the war before it began are the "base" of the Democratic Party. Hillary could have won our votes, but she made a decision early on to ignore us - and that proved to be a very bad and possibly fatal decision.

I was in Washington DC at the "Take Back America" conference in 2006 when all the candidates gave their first major speeches to progressive voters. It was early in the campaign and no one was in a rush to make up their minds, especially since there was several excellent candidates. So we listened carefully to what each candidate had to say.

Hillary gave a good speech touching on the full list of progressive issues. But when it came to Iraq, she blew it. Unlike John Edwards, who also voted for the war in 2003, she refused to apologize for her vote. Unlike the other candidates, she refused to call for a deadline for bringing our troops home. And finally, she tried to blame Iraq for its problems, which outraged the audience and elicited angry boos. At that precise moment, Hillary lost the anti-war vote forever.

The anti-war vote never coalesced around any other candidate; it split between Kucinich, Edwards, Richardson, Dodd, and Obama. Still, it was a powerful enough force to keep Hillary from winning Iowa, where she came in third. And while she bounced back with a big win in New Hampshire, she lost the "inevitability" factor and GHWB's "Big Mo," momentum. It's safe to say that if Hillary had won Iowa, where anti-war activism was particularly strong, she would have been our nominee.

Finally, there was raw, old-fashioned sexism all over TV (collected video here). That TV sexism forced Hillary to avoid any mention of the actual problem of sexism in society (she was viciously attacked for her Wellesley speech) or show her femininity in any way (she was viciously attacked for a hint of cleavage). TV sexism managed to turn her strongest political asset - being the first viable woman candidate in history, in a country where women are the majority - into a liability.

As her campaign ends, her supporters find the sexism hardest to deal with. I wasn't a Clinton supporter, but I do too. As always, Digby says it better than I ever could:

Clinton's campaign ripped open a hole in our culture and forced us to look inside. And what we found was a simmering cauldron of crude, sophomoric sexism and ugly misogyny that a lot of us knew existed but didn't realize was still so socially acceptable that it could be broadcast on national television and garner nary a complaint from anybody but a few internet scolds like me. It was eye-opening, to say the least.

So I will do what I can to make sure Hillary and all of her supporters get treated with the respect they deserve - and have earned the old-fashioned way, through the hard work of campaigning and winning.

Update 1: Hunter makes a number of good points about Clinton's strategic error of running a safe race as the frontrunner.

I think her early anointing by the media did her campaign a disservice. She campaigned as the frontrunner from the outset, and as a Democratic frontrunner at that, and the age-old Democratic mandate for running campaigns has been one of excruciating timidity. The goal of most recent high-profile elections, the Kerry campaign included, the Gore campaign included, and several dozen other campaigns besides, has not been to win, but to simply avoid losing.

Towards that end, no large issues are addressed with too much passion, and no stances are taken with too much vigor, and for the love of God nobody is made to feel the slightest bit uncomfortable. It is playing to the middle writ large, and in crayon, and with big block letters. The goal is to assemble the broadest coalition possible -- by saying nothing that could possibly offend anyone. The premise is to appeal to "independents", and "centrists", and most of all the "undecided", that group of people so uninterested in politics that they cannot fathom the difference between the parties, but who allegedly can be mobilized into action if only you do absolutely nothing that will get them the slightest bit worked up. It is a cynical, wretched excuse for leadership, but more to the point it provides absolutely no room for error: it is an all-defensive strategy. If your opponent is a block of wood, incapable of making any positive plays on their own, you may pull it off; but if your opponent scores any point, you are left unable to answer it.

Hung Up on Hillary?

davidswanson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:16:22 -0400

There's a new group on the DNC website called Democrats Against Obama. Sometimes the loyalty of party loyalists escapes me.

Why Puerto Rico's Democratic Primary Won't Matter

dlindorff — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:10:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

There are a number of reasons why the Puerto Rican Democratic primary election set for this coming Sunday won’t matter, in terms of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the party’s nomination.

The main one is that she’s not going to get the big vote that she has been predicting.

Clinton, trailing Obama by about 400,000 votes nationwide with only three primaries to go, is fantasizing that she will win the lion’s share of one million Puerto Rican votes, which would put her in the lead for the nomination in terms of the popular vote, though not in the delegate count.

The problem with this fantasy is that Puerto Rico, a colonial possession of the US since the 1898 Spanish-American War, while famous for its passionate electorate when it comes to island elections, is not going to have that kind of turnout for a Democratic presidential primary. Indeed, local politicos in Puerto Rico are saying they will be surprised if even 600,000 people turn out to vote.

Clinton may well win the majority of those votes that are cast, but her margin is shrinking as Obama campaigns and runs ads on the island. She’s already down to a 13% lead, with 11% still undecided, and that lead is liable to shrink further, not grow. Even if Clinton kept that lead in the voting, however, if the turnout were just 600,000, she’d only pick up a net 88,000 votes. And Obama is likely to win Montana and South Dakota two days later, by large margins, erasing much of that gain again.

The other thing is, why would Democratic leaders and the all-important remaining undecided so-called superdelegates care what Puerto Rican voters do? Thanks to the continuing colonial status of the island, although its residents are all American citizens, free to travel to and from the US and to carry US passports, they are not allowed to vote in national elections, have no representation in Washington, and don’t even pay federal taxes (only Social Security and Medicare taxes). Puerto Rico has no Electoral College votes.

That in a nutshell is why Puerto Rican voters are so uninterested in this primary—so uninterested that the Democratic Party of Puerto Rico earlier this week requested that the island’s election authorities close 1000 polling stations. It wasn’t that they thought nobody would want to vote in them—they couldn’t find volunteers to staff them!

The other thing is it would not surprise me if the vote this Sunday comes out a lot closer than the polls have been predicting. For the most part, the early advantage held by Clinton has been a matter of name recognition. Clinton’s husband was president for eight years, and moreover, with half of the eight million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland US, most of them in New York, Clinton is familiar as “their” Senator. By rights, she ought to be considered Puerto Rico’s home state senator, as sure to win this primary as she was of winning New York, or as Obama was of winning Illinois.

But in fact, there are reasons for Puerto Ricans, particularly those on the island, to view Clinton negatively. Her husband, after all, helped get rid of corporate tax breaks for American companies doing business on the island—tax breaks that kept a lot of US manufacturing jobs on the island. Doubling the felony, the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, pushed through the NAFTA treaty that made it easy for those same companies, when their tax breaks were lost, to pack up and move to Mexico, since Puerto Rico also lost its advantage of being inside the US customs zone. Now US companies can make things in Mexico, where labor costs are a fraction of what they are in Puerto Rico, and ship them tariff-free to US consumers.

Puerto Ricans also do not have the same latent hostility towards blacks that some Mexican-Americans may harbor, and which the Clinton campaign so shamelessly tried to stir up in her Texas and California campaigns.

Unlike Mexican-Americans, who are ethnically a mix of white and Indigenous American, Puerto Ricans are much more a mix of white and African—a legacy of the slaves that Spain brought over to the island to replace the native Indians who were slaughtered, worked to death or who died of disease and starvation. Many Puerto Ricans are indistinguishable from African-Americans in appearance, and when they come to America to visit or live are likely to experience the same racism from whites that African Americans experience. They are not going to be easy marks for a campaign that tries to stir up racial fears or animosity.

Obama’s skin color will not be a liability in Puerto Rico. It will more likely be an asset.

Although predicting this kind of thing is always risky, I’m going to bet that Clinton will win a narrow victory in Sunday’s Puerto Rican primary—somewhere between 5-9 percent, with turnout of perhaps 550,000.

If I’m right, she will pick up a net 55,000 votes and 5-6 delegates. There are also 11 Puerto Rican superdelegates, but they will also probably split fairly evenly, at best, for her.

So no big deal—especially since Puerto Rican voters, in the end, simply don’t count.

Until the island is either made a 51st State—an unlikely occurrence since it would be a reliably Democratic state virtually ensuring Democrats of Senate and House majorities for years to come, and thus would never be admitted by Republican members of Congress, and since almost half the island is passionately opposed to such a submerging of their unique culture—or set free as an independent nation, the citizens of Puerto Rico will mean next to nothing to the powerbrokers in Washington.

The Democratic Primary is over, whatever Hillary Clinton may say or do between now and the Democratic Convention in August.

Obama has won it.
___________________
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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DEMS UNITE!

redhed67 — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:18:17 -0400

Well, as we all know, election season is once again upon us. Our choices are, as always, a great source of controversy and strife among the American people. This is understandable as not every candidate fits our ideals of the perfect President.

However, I've noticed some very disturbing trends among voters and, most glaringly, the Democrats. Frankly, it's appalling. I can't get through a blog or a chat room without seeing Democrats at each other's throats, each bashing the views and private lives of one another's pick as the Dem candidate.

You know what, people?? Knock it off. I'm not particularly wild about Hillary nor Obama either, to be honest... but all have a common goal here. That goal is to do everything we can to keep the GOP out of the White House.

Haven't the GOP done enough damage already? For the past 7 years, we've been subjected to two recessions, the invasion of a sovereign country with no violent designs on us, over 935 lies from this administration ABOUT IRAQ ALONE, and the blatant trampling of our civil rights such as our privacy with the warrantless surveillance and with free speech with arrests of peacful protestors and even people whose only "crime" was merely wearing an anti-war or anti-Bush T-shirt.

John McCain has stated that he plans on continuing our occupation of Iraq. He has also stated that he not only wants us to stay in Iraq for 100 years, but is already planning on attacking Iran, as he so playfully reiterated in his rousing rendition of the Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" titled "Bomb Bomb Iran."

Obama and Hillary's ideas are really not so different from one another. They have similiar ideas on health care, Iraq, national security in general, etc. There are subtle nuances that make their plans slightly different but when it comes down to it, one is really just as good as the other.

It's bothersome that people are saying things like "Hillary is a warmonger"... or "Obama is a Muslim sympathizer." These same lines that Rightwingers were using against the two of them just a few short months ago and the Dems were scolding them for, the Dems are now using. I, personally, never chose a particular party with which to label myself. I consider myself an Independent even though I never formally even declared myself as such... and this is why. Both sides seem to go off the deep end when elections come up and I am so disappointed that Dems have allowed themselved to stoop to the level of "The Righties."

I don't like any party spreading lies and innuendo about any candidate, whether he or she be Republican or Democrat. It's juvenile and ignorant. I don't approve of McCain's policies but I'm not going to perpetuate the rumor that he committed treason while in the service. I have no proof that he did. On the same token, I won't perpetuate the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist sympathizer. We have more than ample evidence that he is not.

Let's think about that particular rumor for a moment. George W. Bush has been more in the pocket of Muslim terrorist sympathizers than anyone else. Despite the fact that the Saudis not only have an appalling track record on human rights but they're also funding terrorists and helping to fund the insurgency which is killing our soldiers... Bush calls them "friend." Not only that but he's also given them weapons which are in turn being used against our troops in Iraq.

Same with Pakistan who has openly harbored Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden for a couple of decades. Then there's Uzbekistan, a nation with a record of committing unspeakable atrocities against its citizens...again, Bush calls them "friend."

So to say anything about Obama is not only stupid but incredibly hypocritical if you're Bush supporter. If you're a Dem, it's insincere and ridiculous. We need to pull together in these elections this year and vote for whomever the Dem nominee turns out to be, even if we have to hold out collective noses to do it. I know I will. If a GOP president gets in again, I would hate to look back and know that my missing vote helped to get him in.

So come on... remember that common goal we have to do something good for this country and keep the GOP out.

VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE!!!
_________________
Don't blame this mess on me... I'm an Independent!

Politicians, Kids and an Audacious Hope

dlindorff — Sun, 18 May 2008 12:39:02 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I remember back in 1970, when I was a student and anti-war activist in Connecticut, watching an ad on TV for Lowell Weicker, who was running for US Senate. The ad was very powerful: It showed Weicker playing in the yard with his son, who looked like he was maybe 10 or 12. Weicker was saying that when his son was a tot, the US was fighting in Vietnam, and he didn’t want us to be fighting there when his son reached draft age.

I voted for Weicker, a Republican who went on to win a Senate seat where he played a key role in helping to bring an end to the Nixon presidency.

As it happens, the Vietnam War ended five years later, when Weicker’s son was probably 17. He didn’t get drafted, but I remain struck by the fact that we could, back then, even contemplate the idea of being at war for so long.

Today, I have a son, Jed, who is 15. America doesn’t have a draft, but we do have a war in Iraq which has been going since Jed was 9, with no end in sight. John McCain, the prospective presidential candidate for the Republican Party, says America can win that war by 2013. 2013? That’s five more years! At that point Jed will be 20 years old! We will have been at war in Iraq for more than half of a young adult’s life! And worse yet, if McCain has his way—or if President Bush beats him to it and even before the next president is inaugurated on Jan. 19, 2009 decides to, as McCain so light-heartedly put it, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”--we will be at war with the entire Arab world. And believe me, we would have a draft then, and my son would be near the top of the list.

That’s the future we look forward to with a President John McCain: permanent war.

Now I know Barack Obama has made some remarks about not allowing Iran to “get the bomb,” and about “not taking any options off the table,” but I think it’s highly unlikely that if he were president we’d go to war with Iran. First off, Obama has called for “unconditional” talks with Iran, as well as with other countries with which the US has disagreements. That’s the antithesis of belligerence, and certainly is the antithesis of the approach of the Bush administration, which equates talking with surrender. Second, where Bush’s whole approach to government has been to create fear and chaos and then to rule as a tyrant while accusing critics of being traitors or cowards, Obama’s whole approach has been to challenge that campaign of fear, and to call for calm and reason. I take some heart from his full-throated challenge to Bush’s and McCain’s charge that his willingness to talk with Iran is akin to Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Hitler—something neither Al Gore nor John Kerry, as candidates, would have had the guts to do.

Obama has also talked about the US possibly having troops in Iraq for years, but I don’t think that’s what would happen, either.

Think about it. For McCain, war is a good thing. He sees nothing wrong with it. He likes it. He has no idea how to run the country (he admits he doesn’t even understand economics!). So he’s going to end up doing what Bush did—ramp up the wars, and keep the people scared. It’s the only way the Republicans know how to govern anymore.

But whatever one may think of Obama—and certainly he’s taken some lame and politically timid positions over the years as a senator—he doesn’t like war, and moreover, wants to do things domestically as president that endless war would prevent him from doing. Furthermore, this Iraq a war he had nothing to do with starting. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he opposed it from the outset. So what advantage is there for him politically in allowing it to fester through his first term as president? Better to be shed of it right away, take any political heat that might come from calling it off, and then move on to better things.

I think it’s a safe bet that an Obama presidency will see an end to the Iraq war, a rapprochement with Iran.

For my son’s sake, and all our sons’ sakes, I’m voting for Obama this year. I’m doing it not thinking that he will usher in a golden age of progressive politics, but because I’m sick of living through endless war.

McCain promises endless war.

Obama offers at least the hope of peace.

The human race is heading off a cliff. The ice caps are melting, the seas are rising, one-third of the life on the planet has vanished, and species of plants and animals are vanishing with a rapidity not seen since the late Cretaceous Period. Unless we want to go the way of the dinosaur or the mastodon, we don’t have time for wars of imperial conquest, or for petty squabbling anymore. We need to focus on fixing the big things. And until Americans can be talked out from under the table so we can focus our attention on something other than “terrorists,” nothing is going to be done.

Obama hasn’t talked much about these big things, but again, I believe that once he’s in office, and the reality hits him, he will.

Why? The man has two young kids, and unlike our current president (who at best reads a one-page news summary written and delivered by a team of cowering yes-men afraid of crossing him, and who claims to think God works through him), he is actually smart and reads his own newspapers. He also has a smart wife who speaks her own mind.

John F. Kennedy, for all his faults, had the good sense to look out the Oval Office window at the falling rain, consider that it was dumping radioactive Strontium 90 and other dangerous fallout across the land, and call a halt to open-air nuclear testing.

I’m pretty sure Obama will have the good sense to listen to his scientific advisors, including the Goddard Center’s James Hansen, and that he will initiate dramatic action to try and actually do something to combat climate change.

I know expecting anything good from a politician is a fool’s errand, but I’ve looked at the alternatives. Let’s call it an audacious hope.
_____________
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

The New Media (and Clinton) Story Line: Democrats Need to Worry about Obama

dlindorff — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:38:07 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Before the West Virginia primary vote on Tuesday, it was a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton would sweep the state, perhaps by over 70 percent. In the event, she came close to that, with 68 percent of the vote. Now that the vote has happened, Clinton and a corporate media anxious to spin out the ratings-boosting contest as long as possible, are arguing that Obama is in trouble.

It is true that twenty percent of those voting for Clinton in this almost lily-white, low-income, low-education state said they voted for her on the basis of race, which is to say they wouldn't vote for a black man. Theirs was a vote Clinton has actively pursued. Forty percent of her backers said they would not vote for Obama in the general election if he were the Democratic candidate.

What was not asked or reported, though, is what percentage of her voters would not vote for Clinton either, if she were to become the nominee. I'm guessing it's a fair number. That is to say, I think that people were voting for Clinton not because they support her, but because they wanted to vote against a black candidate.

You read it here: Hillary Clinton clearly has no more chance to win West Virginia in a general election than does Barack Obama.

So let's move on to a more salient question: Does Obama's poor showing in West Virginia mean he is going to lose in other states where many of the voters are white, working class, and don't have high school diplomas or college degrees?

No. Of course not.

West Virginia is not just Michigan without car companies and pasties. It's Michigan without Motown and Rap music. It is, that is to say, an almost totally white, incredibly insular, racist state--the kind of place that if you're a black person traveling through on the Interstate, you'd best stick to the highway rest stops to get your coffee. It has plenty of fine people living inside its boundaries, but it also has people who'd be just as at home in rural Mississippi--except that then they'd have to live--god forbid!--in the vicinity of "colored people" (West Virginia is only 3% African-American--you can walk around even a city like Wheeling all day and not see one).

Certainly Obama will have his work cut out for him winning over working class Americans. Hillary Clinton and her seemingly pump-headed husband Bill (see my April 28 column Invasion of the Pumpheads) have been hard at work turning them against him for months now, and Republican John McCain, who knows a thing or two about how racist some voters can be (Bush's campaign during the 2000 South Carolina primary, successfully spread the vicious lie that McCain's adopted Indian daughter was the "love child" of an adulterous relationship with a mythical black woman) can be expected to pick up where she left off, probably courtesy of surrogates and 527 campaign groups.

But the reality is that most of the American white working class is not racist. In most states, whites and blacks work together every day, share lunch and after-work beers, and get along fine. Most working-class people know that their real political enemies are the bosses who keep cutting their real wages, shipping their jobs overseas, busting their unions and financing the politicians who help them screw average Americans.

All Obama has to do is make it clear, during the general election campaign, that he understands all this, and is really going to take their side, by restoring labor law to some kind of at least impartiality, so that unions can start to organize the vast unorganized workforce whose members overwhelmingly want a union. All he has to do is say that he will call a halt to unfair trade agreements that encourage American firms to move overseas and sell their crap back to the US instead of making it here. All he has to do is say that he will start taxing the rich again, and corporations, and cut the tax burden on working people.

Racism thrives on irrational fear. Hillary Clinton has been playing to that fear with her evocation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. McCain will play to that fear too. That's why Obama's "hope" campaign has made sense, but he needs to go further than just hope. He needs to start making concrete what he will be doing for those working people who are the targets of the insidious fear campaigns.

The voters of West Virginia are probably a lost cause. Too many of them, like the Germans of the early 1930s, have been convinced by the fear-mongers that their enemy is a group of "others"--in this case black people. There's not much a candidate like Obama can do about that. But the toxin of racism has been in retreat, thankfully, for years, in most of the nation, and Obama's excellent showings in states like Virginia, Missouri and Wisconsin are solid evidence of that.

The false calculus offered by the Clinton campaign, which argues that no Democratic presidential candidate can win the presidency without winning West Virginia, is based upon races that were won from the middle, leaving working class people with no real reason to vote--the kind of campaign Bill Clinton ran, and that Clinton could be expected to run, should she improbably win the nomination.

What Obama has demonstrated in his primary campaign, is that he can reach beyond the hard core Democratic Party base, and attract the votes of independents (mostly white people) and even Republicans. He now needs to work to replicate his successes in states like Virginia, Wisconsin and Missouri, to expand his reach to those working class voters who have been leaning Republican or to Clinton.

To do that, he needs to make a much more populist case than he has to date.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Pennsylvania-based journalist. 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

Hillary Clinton, John McCain and the "Stupid" Vote

dlindorff — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:57:57 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I want to be clear here from the start: there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Stupidity is a lack of intelligence. But even here, there are subsets. Some ignorance results from a lack of access to knowledge, while some is the result of a laziness or unwillingness to learn. Some stupidity is the result of some genetic or nutritional deficiency or perhaps of some abuse or lack of care or attention during early childhood, while some is the result of mental laziness or a willful desire not to think.

Having lived in Asia and traveled widely in the remoter areas of rural China, and in Laos and other desperately poor countries, I have had an opportunity to see people who are truly ignorant about many things, but who are anything but stupid. In a remote part of Anhui Province, back in the spring of 1992, for example, I visited a small village that had been completely inundated and destroyed a year earlier by an epic flood, which completely destroyed their rice fields and washed away their mud brick, dirt-floored homes. They had, in less than a year, rebuilt the town, and were preparing to plant a new rice crop. They were also, using nothing but their hands and wheelbarrows, building a massive levee that would keep the river at bay the next time around. The villagers had never seen an American in their lives, had no televisions or phones, and in most cases had never been farther than the next village, but they knew how to survive disasters that would have killed the average American.

They were also intensely interested in learning whatever they could from two visitors from halfway around the world. The whole village quickly crowded around me and my traveling companion, another American, peppering us with questions about America. We were invited into the home of a village elder, and served a delicious meal, which we ate among wandering chickens and rabbits in a dirt-floored room, as half the village peeked in through the window openings. Significantly, the thing they were proudest of, and which they brought us to see, was their new school.

I mention this because I am trying to imagine how the average American community would respond to a surprise visit by a couple of Chinese peasants from that village. I suspect that far from surrounding them and peppering them with questions about China, there would be calls to the local police to pick up to wandering vagrants. Instead of trying to communicate, and perhaps learn lessons about how to make gardens grow during a drought, local Americans would be studiously avoiding the visitors. An invitation to have dinner in a local home seems particularly unlikely.

When I lived in a small town in upstate New York for a few years back in the 1980s, I found myself briefly the president of the local little public library, which was wholly supported by donations. One year, we tried to get a donation of $1000 from the local Lions Club, which had an annual carnival and donated the proceeds to worthy projects (ours was an expansion of the building to accommodate books which at the time were sitting in piled up boxes for lack of shelf space). The president of the Lions, a local businessman, responded to our request saying, “What do we need a library for? I haven’t read a book in years!” (My fellow library board member, a local businesswoman herself, responded, “I’m no surprised to hear that, but I am surprised that you’d be willing to say it publicly.”) I also remember overhearing, in the local supermarket checkout line, a cashier talking to her friend. She said, “I wish my daughter would drop out of high school and get a job. I mean, she’s 16 already, and what does she need a high school diploma for? She can work a cash register without one.”

All this brings me to Hillary Clinton’s proud assertion that she is the candidate of the uneducated white worker. It is of course, precisely why she’s likely to win the West Virginia primary today by a lopsided 75:25 or maybe a 60:40 margin. One news program I watched about the West Virginia primary yesterday included an interview with a Clinton supporter, in that state, an older woman who said she couldn’t vote for Obama “because he’s a Muslim.” The reporter responded, “Well, for the record, you know he says he’s a Christian.” The woman replied, “Well I don’t believe him.” In West Virginia, one in four residents doesn’t have a high school diploma. That compares to one in five nationally. I’m guessing this woman was one of that one in four. Only one in seven West Virginians holds a bachelor’s degree, compared with one in four nationally.

Now taken by itself, this isn’t to say West Virginians are stupid, or at least any stupider than the average American. (And don’t get me wrong. I love West Virginia-- particularly its brilliant musical heritage and the musicians and artists of the region who carry on those traditions, and its gutsy labor union history, which played such a key role in the development of the American labor movement.) In large part, it is rather a reflection on the state’s relatively low average income, a legacy of historically low expenditures on education, and a general lack of opportunity. Moreover, I’m certain that many of those West Virginians who never completed high school are smarter than your average college grad, in the same way that the Chinese peasants I met in rural Anhui were smarter than many much better educated Americans. But I’m also certain that a lot of West Virginians without high school diplomas, like other Americans without an education, are woefully ignorant, and vulnerable to manipulation by candidates who appeal to their baser instincts and fears, as Clinton has been doing in her sinking campaign. It is why states like West Virginia have, election after election, backed candidates like George Bush whose policies manifestly work against their own interests.

A depressingly large number of Americans, not just in West Virginia, but also across the land from Maine to California, including my own state of Pennsylvania, fall into this willfully stupid category. They are content to get their information from television programs that offer no facts—just propaganda and ratings-boosting rants. They don’t read newspapers. They reject facts that conflict with their prejudices. They’ll believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. They’ll believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11. They’ll believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago. They’ll believe the moon landings were faked in a Hollywood studio.

Certainly one cohort of voters that is keeping the leaky Clinton dirigible airborne is women, particularly older women, for whom her candidacy is a feminist milestone. That is understandable. But the other cohort, which Clinton has referred to as “working, hard working, white Americans,” and as “whites…who had not completed college,” is hardly something she or any candidate should be bragging about.

And yet that is what she is doing: bragging that she’s got a lock on the stupid, racist white vote.

She should be leaving that for John McCain.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. 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 Democratic Presidential Race: A View from Pennsylvania

dlindorff — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:39:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The results in Tuesday’s twin primaries—Barack Obama by 14 percent in North Carolina and Hillary Clinton by 2 percent in Indiana—confirmed that Clinton is finished as a contender. Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president this fall.

Clinton, the private-schooled, Wellesley and Yale-educated millionaire lawyer from Chicago, who first tried to present herself as a White House veteran, and then, in recent weeks, as a NASCAR mom on Food Stamps, and who in Pennsylvania resorted to cheap race-baiting and red-baiting in an effort to derail her opponent, has failed. Barack Obama, another private-schooled Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer, but one who actually did have to work his way up the economic ladder, won decisively in North Carolina, even drawing a significant number of working-class white voters in a state where white voters have not traditionally voted for candidates with dark skin.

As a resident of Pennsylvania, I can only express a sense of shame for the large number of white voters here who bought Clinton’s subtle racist message. North Carolina, my mother’s home state, proved to be more resistant to the Clintons’toxic campaign than my adopted state. Exit polls suggest that as more than one in five Pennsylvanians voted in the primary on the basis of race. Now, if half of the 14 percent of the voters who were black voted for Obama for racial reasons, this still means that perhaps 14 percent of the state’s white voters, or about one in seven, voted for Hillary simply because her oppponent was black. I would argue that for a black person to vote for a black candidate because he is black is qualitatively different from a white person voting for a white candidate because the other candidate is black. First of all, blacks have not had the opportunity, ever, to vote for a candidate of their race who has a real chance at winning the nomination. It is a historic first. They are not saying they would not vote for a white candidate, and indeed, if they voted in the past, they probably did vote for white candidates, since that’s all there were on offer. It’s akin to women (and men) voting for Clinton because she is a woman. Obviously they are not saying they won’t vote for men, just that they want a chance to vote for a woman. A white candidate voting for a white candidate because they won’t vote for a black candidate is simply being racist, just as a person voting for Obama because Clinton is a woman would be a sexist. What we had in Pennsvlvania—indeed, accounting for more than Clinton’s entire 9 percent victory margin—was white racists voting against a black candidate.

Part of the problem for Obama in Pennsylvania, too, was the self-serving decision by Philadelphia’s new African-American mayor, Michael Nutter, to endorse Clinton instead of Obama. Nutter, clearly looking ahead to statewide office, when he will need white votes, opted for a candidate who, with her husband, helped pull the rug out from under many Philadelphians, white and black, with the Clinton administration’s ending of support for welfare programs on which many of the city’s poor and minority families desperately rely.

But at the same time, Obama himself contributed to his 9-point loss to Clinton in Pennsylvania by barely campaigning in Philadelphia, and by an over-reliance on television advertising—a mistake he did not repeat in Indiana and North Carolina.

In the end, the Clinton end-game strategy of using the race card, and of trying to recast herself, absurdly, as a working-class hero, may end up being all to the good for Obama. Clearly it forced him to move away from his empty “change” and “hope” slogans and to address the issues of ordinary working-class Americans—something he had largely avoided doing earlier in the campaign. It also put the issue of race—which the Republicans can be expected to use even more blatantly in the general election—out front and center, where it could be exposed to the light of day.

What seems to be happening is that racist Democrats, those who cannot vote for a black candidate, are rejecting Obama, and will probably either skip voting in November, or swing over to McCain, just as they swung over to Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before, on different but related issues. The difference is that Obama seems to be able to reach independent white voters and even liberal and libertarian Republican voters who are turned off by the Republicans’ overt racism, as well as by many of the Republicans’ so-called “social policy” positions, such as abortion bans, opposition to gay rights, denial of global warming, etc.

From here in Pennsylvania, I’d say the outlook for the fall is likely to be a strong win for Obama in a McCain/Obama match-up. In a funny way, he will have Pennsylvania, and Hillary’s sewer campaign, to thank.
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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