Saturday, April 19, 2008

Bitter Dead-Enders -- Republican and Democrat

The Dead Enders in America tried to ring the death knell for Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy last week. And for America too.
The Dead-Enders -- those that wish only to fight the culture wars over God, abortion, guns and evolution while America slips into financial ruin, spiritual death and political dementia -- the Dead Enders finally got the “Gotcha!” they’ve been waiting for.
Obama’s remarks at a San Francisco fund raiser about “bitter” white, working class folk clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia will be playing at your local Swift-Boating Cineplex until the Democratic National Convention, and possibly held over until November. And its popularity as a dirty trick will be helped in no small part by the leader of the Democratic Dead Enders – Hillary Clinton, who brought out all guns to blast Obama for nothing more than his candor and insight.
Because the “Gotcha!” that they’ve got is not that Obama actually dissed the white ethnics known as Reagan Democrats, the gotcha is that Clinton, Fox News and CNN now have official “proof” that Barack Obama is too smart and honest to be president of the United States.
An unabashedly smart and honest leader, in many ways, is what this election is really about. And why it is a seminal opportunity in what is too often a horse-and-pony show. This might be the last election in which America can choose leadership which will alter what increasingly appears to be our fate: that the American Experiment of the last 250 years will turn out to be an evolutionary dead end.
Think of it this way: What nation in the world – given the choice -- would ally itself to the US through NAFTA rather than join the European Union with its economic tigers from Ireland to Spain? Given the choice who would choose to be paid in yankee dollars rather than Euros as you’d be making 50 percent more? Given the choice who would choose the American health care, or child care system, over Canada’s? Who would rather ride the Amtrak “Water Buffalo” than a sleek Japanese or European “Gazelle”? Who would choose the American public school system which produces the most under-educated graduates in the industrialized world?
Given the choice who would choose to be America? The world’s lone “hyper power” is a reviled bully mired in the bloody chaos of Iraq where its multi-billion dollar state-of-the-art military is getting bested by ragtag militias. Our economy is wilting under the burden of the Iraq fiasco, draconian tax cuts and one ruinous financial ponzi scheme after another brought about by a frenzy of deregulation which the Republican Dead Enders promised 25 years ago would set us free. Who indeed would choose America except the poor immigrants so mistrusted and hated by the very Dead Enders who’ve led us to the precipice?
And all of this occurs in the warming pressure cooker of climatic change when once again the United States – with 5 percent of the world’s population greedily devouring 25 percent of the world’s resources -- is completely out of step with science and forward thinking policy.
This election truly offers a choice between the Dead End ideas of the past 25 years and a new way of thinking and seeing – a chance for a new majority to emerge which is not bound by the self-destructive, divisiveness of the phony culture wars. And a desire to vote for Hillary so she can be the first female president is as Dead End an idea as voting for Obama so he can be the first black president. Racism and sexism are as real and important phenomenon as patriotism and terrorism. But they are still “isms” in an age dominated by “tions” – pollution, education, United Nations, solutions.
Barack Obama represents the only choice in this election for some new ideas to lead us to a new way of doing things, a new way of organizing our national priorities. To do this he must be braver than the average politician and smarter than the average citizen.
And that might be why the bell tolled last week.
In case you missed it Obama, answering a question about why he lags in the polls in Pennsylvania, said
“You go into these small towns…and like a lot of small towns…
the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing replaced
them. And they fell through the Clinton and Bush administration,
and each successive administration has said that somehow these
communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s
not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion
or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustration.”
And from that prescient analysis, filled with his usual empathy for people, the McCain and Clinton Swift-Boaters are fashioning a noose from the word “bitter” with which to hang both Obama’s presidential ambitions and America’s hopes for real change.
The increasingly desperate Clinton responded with a treacly homily about her church going family, and Daddy teaching her to shoot -- as if she has faith in any god other than her own ambition, or is shooting for anything other than her own coronation. She will use his honesty to leverage more Super Delegates to her tally and drag out the nomination fight, feeding the Republicans ammunition as she goes.
And she is helping to hand the Republican Dead Enders precisely the poison bullet they need: to tar Obama as the too-smart boogey man; the “elitist, effete intellectual” who makes us too nervous about our own intellectual failings to win the presidency.
Clinton is already trying to turn Obama’s insightfulness into attack ads portraying him as somehow un-American for calling it not only as he sees it, but as it actually is.
But should he yet squeak past Clinton’s Dead Ender juggernaut the Republican Dead Enders will use it against him without mercy.
Obama may yet prove himself too smart for America’s breeches. And if we reject him for it then we deserve the dunce, and the dunce cap, we will get.

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