Election ’08: The bailout that is actually needed

            We have seen them on the campaign trail.  We have seen them lampooned on Saturday Night Live.  Now we have seen the two candidates stand next to each other and question each other’s judgment and policies.  Presidential debates are usually overhyped and Friday’s was no exception: their views on the economy and foreign affairs were bracketed by rigid adherence to talking points and a low degree of polarization.  A few jabs were traded about presidential seals and songs about bombing Iran, but, much to the dismay of pundits, there was no winner or loser.  Each candidate’s supporters were positively reinforced by their performance: Obama fans saw that he was calm and articulate, proposing populist reforms.  McCainiacs were happy that their man showed determination, wisdom, and won the praise of Obama eleven times (according to strategist Steve Schmidt).

            Whatever.  Despite front-page coverage on national newspapers, rabid blogging, and sporadic rallies across the country, the percentage of Americans who are willing to sit down and learn about these men and what they stand for is tiny.  52.4 million people watched the first debate of the so-called most important and historic election in our lifetime—at a point in our history where the stakes could not be higher from eight years of dumbfoundingly awful leadership.  Yet this is no record (62.5 watched the first Kerry-Bush debate four years ago).  In fact, by my calculation, of the approximately 201 million people who are of voting age (and who are not illegal or felons), only 26 percent of them tuned in.

            And really, why is that surprising?  Polls continuously show that Americans are uneducated not only about their elected officials, but about government in general.  Political enthusiasm is more of a cult than mainstream.  Those of us who follow politics closely can pinpoint the egregious verbal gaffes that Sarah Palin has made in her month in the national spotlight, but some people do not even know the names of the candidates who are running. 

            The Washington Post highlighted one such subset of people in surveying a depressed town in Mississippi.  Median household income is low, high school dropout rates are high, employment is not stimulating, and the people think that politicians are far too detached from their world to impact their lives.  These are not the people who cheer at rallies, holding signs for Hope and Change—they are suspicious of both of those buzzwords.  How could Senator McSeven-Houses and Senator OHarvard possibly know what they go through?

            The Obama campaign immediately attacked McCain after the debate for failing to acknowledge what he would do to help the “middle class.”  But the middle class is fine.  Why not concentrate on how to help the lower class?  After all, as long as the middle class does not slip down into the latter category, they will still manage to own a house, afford food, and have the hope of putting their children through college.  Is it a middle class problem that neither parents nor children have high school diplomas?  That neither parents nor children see the efficacy of voting?

            On Father’s Day, Barack Obama said that empathy was key to relationships. “Not sympathy, but empathy—the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in ‘us,’ that we forget about our obligations to one another. There’s a culture in our society that says remembering these obligations is somehow soft—that we can’t show weakness, and so therefore we can’t show kindness.”  He was talking about the necessity of fathers in helping grow a family, but both candidates would do well to heed his advice.  Take the road less traveled by—show these people that you are not all talk.  Offer to bring new technology and new industries to towns.  Encourage kids to complete school.  How about gathering all fifty governors and pledging federal support in reviving and expanding failed towns in exchange for the states’ ability to increase graduation rates and employment?

The elites have been vilified; the middle class has been lionized.  Many others, though, have been forgotten.  Yes, there have been many people struggling over the past eight years.  But some people have been struggling for decades.  True enough, not all small towns are struggling and not all residents are immune to the dynamics of the political landscape.  But if these men are unilaterally declaring Hope and Change, they need to work hard to win over those who fall under the scope of the Hope-radar.

Phunny Fotos

Say my (funny) name

       In a campaign where political stunts, Paris Hilton, and pigs trumped the seemingly more pressing issues of the economy and foreign relations, one act of pandering has been taken to a different level altogether.  Since Larry Craig (R-Gaysexachusetts) is inexplicably not running for reelection to the Senate, one of the candidates vying for the seat is a strawberry-farming Independent named Marvin Richardson.  Or, that was his name when he ran unsuccesfully for the governorship two years ago.  Now, he has legally changed his name to Pro-Life, to underscore his position that abortion doctors and women who receive abortions should be tried for murder.  “If I save one baby’s life, [my candidacy is] worth it,” he said (even though a child dies every eight seconds from lack of clean drinking water…but this man’s not a miracle worker, folks.  Our problems can only be fixed by unrestrained demagoguery.)  Some pro-lifers are worried that his name would cause confusion, since voters may check one candidate’s name and also check Pro-Life–interpreting the name to be simply a policy position.  Aside from that fact, Pro-Life Richardson and several other candidates are being asked to stop campaigning lest they draw support away from the frontrunner Republican.  That may be a prudent maneuver, considering the relative unelectability of past politicians who have gone so far as to make their first name a policy position:

Phunny Fotos

Virginia GOP courts the Macaccan vote

     This Saturday in Northern Virginia, Republicans will hold a 1,000-plus person rally that will hopefully draw more ethnic minorities to the party and to John McCain.  Democrats have usually scoffed whenever Republicans try to cast themselves as diverse, partly fueled by the images of this year’s vanilla-pure RNC.  Still, McCain campaigners have translated his policies into Spanish and Korean and are managing bi-lingual phone banks in an attempt to widen their base.  Fairfax County, the largest in Northern Virginia, has a non-white population of approximately one-third of its total residents.  Though NoVa has trended Democratic in statewide elections, Democrats are hoping Obama can carry the state in the presenditial election while Republicans are praying to maintain their hold.  The Republicans have enlisted the help of Representative Tom Davis and former Senator George Allen to speak at the rally.  Allen, of course, narrowly lost his Senate seat in 2006 largely because he was caught on videotape calling an Indian-American “Macaca.”  While he obviously will take care not to insult his audience extemporaneously, a draft of his speech released to the press shows that great pains have been taken to ensure restraint:

Guns in the hands of Congressmen

       Okay, so it is unconstitutional after all to ban handgun ownership in the District of Columbia.  That’s a minor setback to those who think that allowing for more guns in a crime-ridden city is unconscionable, but life goes on.  All the D.C. City Council has to do is retool their gun regulations to be less restrictive, allowing so-called “law abiders” to defend themselves in their homes.  The Supreme Court acknowledged that D.C. does not have to provide for Sarah-Palin-moose-hunting types of firearms but neither can they prevent gun ownership of any sort. 

            All was progressing according to plan until Congress decided by legislative fiat to exercise its largely dormant prerogative of “exercise[ing] exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” in the District (which has been under home rule since 1973) to grab the reins of the efforts to retool the gun laws.  The D.C. Council’s new plan would be to allow gun owners to register more than one gun, do away with requirements for a ballistics test, ban magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds, and allow the guns to remain loaded and assembled in the home.  In other words, if the clichéd intruder were to break into a gun owner’s home, it seems that he has ample wherewithal to deal with the threat.

            But 47 conservative Democrats and five Republicans in the House have put forth a bill that micromanages D.C.’s semi-sovereignty.  It would allow citizens to own multiple unregistered semiautomatic pistols and rifles, buy guns in Virginia and Maryland, and prevent the guns from remaining disassembled and unloaded at home.  This bill will be competing with one offered by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton that basically allows D.C. to legislate for its own self.  Naturally, the National Rifle Association wants to maximize the number of guns in homes: “D.C. has lost all credibility in dealing with this issue,” said one of their lobbyists.

            I suppose it is cavalier of these congressmen to push aside the people who must live in the crime-ridden city 365 days of the year, and say “Don’t worry—we know how to fix the mess you made,” before going back to their safe neighborhoods in their own states and be hailed as constitutional heroes.  At the same time, it is a shame that D.C.’s only delegate is not able to vote on her own bill which staunchly opposes congressional intervention.  I guess those conservatives figure that D.C. can live without full representation, but not without guns. 

      Unlike the times when Congress intervened in local governments to abolish segregation and Jim Crow laws, this issue is more nuanced regarding what is the “good” and “bad” way to uphold the Constitution, as the Supreme Court recognized.  The motivation behind this insanity was best summed up by outgoing representative and social moderate Tom Davis, (R-VA) who said, “We’re here out of concern for the political safety of some conservative Democratic members of Congress,” not a genuine concern for District residents.  He added that although Congress in the past has had to bail out the city, they “should exercise that power thoughtfully, surgically and sparingly.”   Perhaps since the House is on a binge of altruism towards the District, they could institute programs to combat homelessness, provide affordable housing, and improve the productivity of local youths to combat violence.

      Or they could just give everyone more guns.

Behind the Lipstick: Palin’s ABC Interview

Whether you love her as a working mom who forged her way to the top of the good-old-boy network of pork barrel politics or hate her as a two-faced, inexperienced beauty queen capitalizing off of Hillary Clinton’s fall from stardom, Sarah Palin is the new political celebrity and is here to stay.

            Which is why her interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson was watched so closely—it was a candid, unscripted glimpse into how she presents herself when McCain and his staff aren’t whispering into her ear and feeding her zingers about Bridges to Nowhere and pit bulls in lipstick.  Gibson treated her very fairly for the most part, asking frank and serious questions about international relations and the extent of her religious fervor.  In the beginning he may have seemed like an impatient college professor peering down his nose at the struggling freshman while she tried to recap everything she has learned from an all-nighter.  Maybe Katie Couric would have been more sympathetic.  Perhaps Brian Williams would have been less intimidating.  (At the very least, it probably would have been less annoying to hear her chirp “Brian” every other question as a nervous tic.)  But Gibson’s appearance aside, she herself was very defensive, somewhat incoherent, and never seemed to achieve the right amount of nuance in her answers.

            Case in point: Gibson questioned her about the Republican ticket’s crusade against earmarks and for fiscal responsibility.  But he mentioned that she hired a lobbyist for Wasilla while she was mayor, left the town in debt, and approved of $3.2 million as governor for research into the genetics of seals and the mating habits of crabs.  Furthermore, she was a proponent of the Bridge to Nowhere before Congress pulled the plug.  To reconcile this cognitive dissonance, she said that the seal money was for “research” and that “It’s not uncommon for a mayor or for a governor to request and to work with their Congress to plug into the federal budget along with every other state a share of the federal budget for infrastructure.”  So, when you do it for your state, it falls under the category of infrastructure, but when everyone else does it, it becomes wasteful spending?

            To complicate matters, she said that she hired a Washington lobbyist for her town because “we’re thousands of miles away” from the capital.  But in a later segment, she took pride in motioning out the window of her home to show that she was a bona fide Washington outsider.  Again, she can’t have it both ways: working the system while simultaneously decrying those who work the system.

            While her gaffe about the Bush doctrine may not have been the answer that Charlie Gibson wanted, she was right in a sense that it involves trying to spread freedom and democracy where there is none.  However, when she tried to defend her words that God willed us to be in Iraq, she lamely cited Abraham Lincoln’s apocryphal quote that my concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God’s side.”  That is completely different from her statement to her church that the Iraq was is “a task from God.”  Abraham Lincoln was musing about the righteousness of all wars, but she thinks that God is clearly backing the U.S. in Iraq.

            She showed a further lack of clarity by declaring that Russia’s invasion of Georgia was “unprovoked” and that if Russia were to do it again, “perhaps” we would have to go to war.  To make her point clear, she argued that everyone ought to “live and be protected with inalienable rights that I believe are God-given, Charlie.  And I believe those are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That, in my worldview, is the grand plan.”  That was a surprising lesson in civics and she might as well have added, “Is that not okay with you, Charlie, you goddamn communist?”

            It’s not that Americans don’t think that way.  It’s just that our leaders are not supposed to boldly declare intentions that would alienate our allies and commit ourselves to places that are not in our interest.  There was a reason that America and the West called for a diplomatic end to the Russo-Georgian conflict rather than invade Russia, and it was not a matter of moral righteousness.  There is a lot more to foreign policy than saying “it’s God’s plan” or “democracy should prevail at all costs,” and we cannot afford to have another administration that thinks of the world on a good-bad binary scale.

            One final note: she mentioned half-seriously (at least, I hope it was half-serious…) that the fact that “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska” counts as a foreign policy credential.  I can’t help but wonder if the reverse has ever been said in Russia.  “You ask why I should be your foreign policy advisor, Mr. Putin?  Well, if I stand on the edge of the ocean and squint really hard, I can almost see Alaska.  Imagine how easy it would be to spy on the Americans that way!”

            Overall, given her newness on the national scene and disgust with the “liberal media elite,” I guess the fact that she didn’t shoot and field dress Gibson was a welcome sign.  Still, she didn’t tell us everything we ought to know about her; and what we did learn was at times frightening.  Hopefully in the coming weeks she will learn to be more tempered in her rhetoric and more open on the issues.