How These Gibbering Numbskulls Came to Dominate Washington | CommonDreams.org

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century – Franklin Roosevelt, JF Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived – but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter – stumbling a little, using long words – carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said: “There you go again.” His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others – were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

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This a “PSA” from various movie and sports personalities (Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston, Ellen Degeneres, Dustin Hoffman… even Sarah Silverman who otherwise has built a career out of anti-establishment behaviour, albeit with obligatory “radical” bra removal tricks and reference to herpes):

It is split into two parts. The first part has the personalities urging you to not vote, since it doesn’t matter. The second and longer part turns this around: well, if you care about [insert issue here] then may be you should vote?

This advertisement highlights the danger and possible self-defeating nature of this sort of cleverness, for unfortunately, the first part, taken seriously, makes its argument much better than the second one does. During the first part, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio exclaims “This is one of the greatest financial disasters in American history” closely followed by, I believe, the tennis player Andy Roddick asking us, “Why would you vote?”. Then come a range of voices:

Who cares? The economy is in the toilet!
Who cares about your children’s education?
Reading? Literacy?
Global warming?

Well played (if unintentionally)! Indeed we are in the midst of one of the biggest financial disasters in history. How do your representatives and candidates for PotUS act? They ignore the majority of you who were against this bailout and support it and pass it, including in it such wonderful measures as waiving federal acquisition regulations favouring minority and women owned businesses. Would your vote for McCain or Obama matter? Not really, since they both support the same action in response to the “one of the greatest financial disasters in American history”. Global warming? Both men support “clean” coal and off-shore drilling for oil. Children? McCain has battled all his congressional life against “quotas” and affirmative action, while Obama is worried about the excesses of 70s civil rights and is more interested in lecturing to black fathers.

Where the PSA shines (in the first part, that is) is in pinpointing exactly why your vote doesn’t matter: Who cares? Certainly not most of the candidates you will be permitted to choose from.

Susan Faludi offers a litany of pending women’s issues (not in the quoted section below), in describing the anger among feminists regarding the treatment of the Hillary Clinton candidacy, and offers a timely and appropriate caution against post-feminism or new wave feminism attitudes:

Second-Place Citizens – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

As it turns out, they won’t have one. But they will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?

Thanks to her bad-mouthing incisive commentary on Brangelina, Roseanne’s blog is gaining (as she notes) a lot of new audience. I am one of them. And I plan to stay!

As the five of you who read this blog know, the Hillary Clinton primary experience pissed the hell off of an old-fashioned feminist like me and my spouse. And neither of us can stand Hillary, but that is exactly not the issue, as Maureen Dowd and every other “post-feminist” or n-th wave feminist who ♥s Obama but has to find some high-minded justification for the infatuation, don’t get. Roseanne on the other hand, gets it, and that’s why I am staying. Below are two bits from her blog:

Women’s struggle for equity and dignity will not be silenced, cowed, or stopped by any man, or any woman hating females like Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey, Randhi Rhoades, Nancy Pelosi, or a host of other running dog lackeys of corporate whoredom. Have a nice day!

And:

It’s all a set up to get the females to think that they are being listened to, but it’s all planned canned and fixed. Obama is the nom, and there is no getting rid of him for the dems. If he had any brains he would announce right now that a vote for him is a vote for hillary, because she is his choice for vice, or his nominee for the supreme court…some triangulation would work for him. He has a blindspot where feminism and females are concerned, and he figures that claire mccaskill (sp) is all he needs. (kind of like when people say…”i asked my maid what she thinks of immigration, and she said”…..). He just doesn’t get it that it is female boomers that have kept the dem party alive since the sixties, and that he has insulted their intelligence. He just doesn’t get it, and neither does david axelrod. I do not think any men get it at all. As it was for me in Hollywoodland, men in power are not comfortable with any woman that is not serving them coffee. They tried to fire me off of my own show, like they have done to hillary clinton. It was her show and they fired her. they got all heady over winning against her, but that was all the winning they could do. now they have to crawl back to her and ask her to win it for them. they look like weak mama’s boys, which they are…however, america loves weak mama’s boys though…john mccain is the embodiment of that…

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In case it isn’t obvious, I am not a Hillary supporter. I am an old-fashioned leftist and I have severe problems with her positions on Palestine, the Iraq War, US foreign policy and a raft of other issues. I am not a Obama hater either — he is only as far from (and perhaps less so!) the just position on these same issues as Hillary is, by my principles. However, as a feminist I want to write some comments on the subtle and not so subtle sexism and “woman beating” that has occured through this campaign.

What has struck me is the parallels in the technique and rhetoric of Obama supporters (and the campaign itself) and the typical GOP one. One analogy is George Bush’s 2000 image of a friendly, uniting “compassionate conservative”, even as those who pushed his candidacy indulged the most vicious attacks on McCain and then Gore. The GOP uses hired thugs and pundits to carry out this task, while the anti-Hillary campaign has benefitted from voluntary abuse from the so-called “netroots”, media, and public intellectuals (examples are below). Obama himself has taken on right-wing talking points gladly: see Paul Krugman on Obama’s health insurance issue attacks on Hillary, or Obama’s description of blocking Iraq war funding as “playing chicken with the troops“, to offer but two examples. And if the media gave Bush a free ride and now McCain a positive one, they have done much the same with Obama but, again as Paul Krugman points out, done quite the opposite with Hillary.

Any voice that is raised against such abuse is accused of being part of a “lather of angry victim-hood that blames sexism” (Debra Saunders on SFGate) — once again a striking parallel with right-wing rhetoric, which uses such terms to ridicule and deny Black claims, ironically the very group whose success Obama is supposed to represent — even as heavyweights like Barbara Ehrenreich post on Alternet and elsewhere about the lessons to draw about women as a whole from Hillary’s “Nasty, Deceptive” behaviour. In other words, Hillary’s sex matters only in so far as it can be used to critique women — but an attempt to identify attacks on her with her sex would be “angry victim-hood”. We are told (by miscellaneous NYT Op-Ed columnists) not to vote for Hillary because of her being a woman, even as Obama wins Southern states based entirely on black people voting for him (ostensibly, and unsuprisingly/understandably, for his being black and an embodiment of their dreams). Strikingly opposite is the verboten status of any question of Obama’s black identity and experience, even if raised by prominent Black activists.

I am not sure the anti-Hillary camp can have it both ways, at least logically speaking (rhetorically speaking, they are enjoying great success, for sure). So one cannot have Ehrenreich drawing broad conclusions about women on the basis of her understanding of Hillary’s campaign (and throwing the few convicted women of the Abu Ghraib scandal under the bus, to arm her arguments), Maureen Down using gender specific adjectives to describe Clinton’s words in the NYT, the media obsessing about her clothes and cleavage, the Obama campaign using gender specific slang (”Stop the Drama” i.e., Hillary is a drama queen?) as T-shirt slogans, while at the same time exhorting us to abandon our “victim-hood” and not see this as a sexism issue. Here is a simple question: in the tens of anti-Hillary FaceBook groups is one titled “Life’s a bitch, why vote for one?”. Can you search for and find one titled “Your neighbour isn’t a nigger, why vote for one?”. I couldn’t find it. And if some racist idiot where to set one up, how long would it stay up?

The reason why Hillary supporters and non-supporting feminists such as myself have to keep this issue active is not so much to elect Hillary (in which I have no interest) or to defeat Obama (who is infinitely better than McCain but will ultimately end up achieving as little as any other Democrat before him, after Johnson), but to step up when we see a woman getting beaten up. The reason is not so much to stop Obama but to stop the attitude, rhetoric and the threat of the actions that are the consequences of such attitude and rhetoric, that is the staple of a large segment of his supporters.

Some additional data/comments:

RealClearPolitics has the vote totals and among the various numbers, here is one:

Popular Vote (w/MI uncommitted to Obama)

If estimate for caucus states that do not release data is included, and “Uncommitted” in MI is assigned to Obama, Obama comes out a mere 61,703 votes ahead (0.2%).

I wrote above of parallels with right-wing electioneering, and this perhaps offers more in that vein: the question of who won the popular vote (Gore v Bush) and the disenfranchisement of low-income voters (Gore v Bush, Kerry v Bush) — of not since low-income voters break for Clinton over Obama, and they suffer burdens in caucus states that are not felt by their richer Obama-voting counterparts.

As has become the norm these days, most of the media is agog over Obama’s Race In America speech. To his credit, the man tackled some of the controversies that led to this speech more directly than employ his usual forceful repetition of uplifting trivialities. The intent of this blog post is to ponder on the trend (in the way we talk about things) that seems to have reached its nadir in the rhetoric surrounding his campaign. I will offer two examples, at least one of which any member of the broad left will appreciate.

The first example is that incongruous claim of Fox News: that they are Fair and Balanced. It is not arguable (I hope) that even those who disagree on whether Fox can make this claim will agree that Fair and Balanced is a good goal for a news organisation. I believe that is not necessarily so. Why not instead Objective and Factual? We are aware of the valid critique of notions of objectivity and fact as offered by philosophers, post-modernists and relativists. Yet, all that suggests is that a fair and balanced approach is a good means to the end of informing the public in a critical manner of events and issues. Instead, a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) substitution of terms occurs, where Objective is replaced by Neutral or Centred. As some have said: “Nazis and gypsies/Jews get equal time — we report, you decide!”.

Similarly, you have this class of political citizens now known as “independents” — the name denotes that these individuals are independent of political parties and (by some extension) ideologies. But where do they stand on right and wrong? After all, those who support this or that party or ideology do so (typically) not because of some arbitrary preference, but because they believe their ideology to be right or just. It should perhaps be unsurprising then that independents tend to be those who are least affected by issues of truth and justice.

A second example is the appeal, via Obama, of the term “unity”. We, the public, are “yearning for unity”, some sort of “middle path” (as one New York Times writer, Ron Klain, puts it), implying either that disunity is the primary problem facing us, or that unity can simultaneously serve as both the means and end. The real problem however is that it can be neither, exactly because it cannot be produced from thin air (or hot air, for that matter!), for the resolution of the issues of contention rightly preclude unifying behind a programme, agenda or methodology towards a common goal. We are often offered the analogy of ‘herding cats’ to highlight the problems of extreme fractiousness, and it is not an entirely invalid argument, but it is not the central problem. Feminists, labour activists, minority rights advocates, animal welfare activists and others are not acting out of a sense of feline disobedience, but rather constantly working on reconciling the righteous demands of their cause with the limits of immediate political change.

As in the case of creationism vs evolutionary theory, the divisions among political groups reflect fundamental disagreements in the way we see and project the world, how it is and how it should be. Unity cannot resolve the issues but rather the resolution of these issues can bring about unity: if the parties involved can agree upon a mechanism for resolution. And that, in my humble opinion, is the real issue. The divisions among groups remain intractable because these groups do not even share a methodology for resolving disputes. The routine fallback, in the face of this block, is the invocation of allegedly shared “values”, common roots, mythical glorious pasts, and such bromides. Which incidentally are a large part of many of Obama’s “inspiring” speeches. If you don’t believe me, here are the “greatest hits” from the Race in America speech as they appear in the first few paragraphs:

• Obligatory introductory reference and eulogy to founding fathers
• Unite for “our children and grandchildren” — childless need not apply!
• “Unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”
• “… no other country on Earth is my story even possible” (why not?)
• “we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity” (this is a leap of rhetoric even for Obama, that people hunger not even for “unity” but for a “message” of unity. Jon Stewart pointed out something puzzling about George Bush’s speeches: the man would arrive at various spots facing emergencies and proclaim that he was there to reassure the people, and so on. What Stewart found strange was that Bush would tell us what he was there for, which is more or less obvious, but fail to give us a clue on how he planned to go about this task!).

Obama is possibly a more honest chap than many others in his sphere. Rather than capitalise on the Geraldine Ferraro controversy, by continuing the ongoing “framing” of her comments in a racist context (no doubt ably aided by her continued blathering), he astutely nails the crux of the criticism:

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.

In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t speak for Ferraro or her psychologist, but the above is the legitimate form of what I would like to call the “Obama as a non-threatening black man advantage” thesis. And as noted in a previous post, this is the promise offered explicitly by Obama supporters like Oprah Winfrey: “[you] are free from the constraints of gender and race”.

Rolling Stone, firmly embedded among the Obamaholics, reports with glee that a poll in Texas shows the miracle man is running even with Hillary. Buried in the report is this quote from an official Obama hack:

According to a source in the Obama campaign, they’re also on air in every TV and radio market in the state, spending at a rate that the Clinton campaign is going to have “difficulty keeping up with.”

In a previous post, the same Rolling Stone blog reports approvingly that Obama is now polling third (behind McCain and Huckabee, and ahead of Ron Paul) among Republicans.

That should put to rest any lingering doubts about what these elections, and this candidate, are about!

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Exit poll data (as reported on the New York Times blog — Patterns of Distinction) has it that in New Jersey 71% of white Democrats, who said “race matters”, voted for Hillary. Am I getting this wrong or are these 71% of white Democrats saying that they voted against Obama because he is black (or for Hillary because she is white)? Will someone from among my few readers step up and correct me on this? If not, this is a pretty troubling bit, isn’t it?

Update: Of course it is possible that the number of white Democrats who said “race matters” is a miniscule percent of white Democrats in NJ. Which would make this not that horrifying, but still leave open the curiosity of why these people are Democrats… isn’t that what the Republican party is for? ;-)

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Back in 2000, when we were still belabouring under the impression that democracy is an open sport, those of us who supported Ralph Nader were castigated for promoting a “spoiler” candidate. This artful term summarised the idea that a few deluded idealists (that would be us) were not just throwing away votes but worse helping the real opposition win. Let’s play this logic out a bit…

The “SuperDuper Tuesday” results are pouring in and one trend seems to be emerging:

Obama is winning big in the red states: Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Utah (and losing in the liberal ones — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts — not counting his home state of Illinois). With some small modifications, one can now apply the “spoiler” argument to Obama: he is drawing upon the votes of idealistic minorities (African-Americans, in this case) to establish a lead that is worthless in the real election where the votes of these groups, in those states, will be swamped by that of the white majorities who will prevail as before in installing a Republican in the White House.

Extending the logic a bit further, we can see that Hillary is a spoiler candidate too. Because she is drawing upon the votes a few idealists (women, in this case) to win primaries… etc… you get the drift!

I, of course, do not accept this strange logic, and am under no compulsion to consider any of these three a spoiler candidate.

The Democrats finally have their “Mission Accomplished” moment and boy is it good to get all that guilt off your back! In a piece that is embarrassing for not just the lack of content but also the adolescent gushing, Andrew Rosenthal writes in the New York Times:

Michelle, Maria, Caroline and Oprah on the Hustings in California – New York Times

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Ms. Winfrey — finally — spoke to the most emotionally fraught aspect of this contest. “Now look at this campaign: the two front-runners are a black man and a woman,” she said. “What that says to me is we have won the struggle and we have the right to compete.”

Instead of seeing a painful choice, voters, Ms. Winfrey urged, should see a moment when they “are free from the constraints of gender and race.”

After watching the candidates struggle with the issue, painfully and awkwardly, in the past month, it was a relief to hear someone finally frame it in a way that celebrated what the Democratic Party has achieved — and then move beyond it.

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And that ladies and germs, is the promise of Obama (and Hillary too, if you believe Oprah). His candidacy assuages the soft leftist’s guilt about the disparities and discrimination that surround us, offering him the opportunity to cast one small vote for himself but achieve a giant leap for humankind. Vote for Obama and you can keep your SUV and iPod and save the environment too! Vote for Obama and you can move beyond all pain and awkwardness! Free of the constraints of gender and race! This is a competition between unbounded hope and inescapable history. Is it a matter of surprise that older people, women, and those with lesser formal education, choose Clinton over Obama (though they may prefer neither)?

Note that that is the explicit core of the Obama campaign which started out frugally short on detail and gained steam while staying light on substance. As Obama and his wife point out, his campaign is not about him (a messianic Christ-like figure who thunders about “his God”) but about “you”. And if by voting for him and electing him, you have not managed to move beyond the constraints of gender and race, it cannot be your class (which we eliminated from consideration via John Edwards) or the environment you are thrown into, but as Reagan would say, perhaps its your lack of responsibility? (Obama identifies the success of Reagan with dissatisfaction with large government growth and excesses, without accountability).

If there is any further doubt that Obama’s rhetorical dictionary is an approximate facsimile of the Republican one (he has consciously but barely stopped short of calling himself the “uniter”), you can consult Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who points out repeatedly that not only is Obama’s healthcare plan to the right of Hillary, but that his tactic of criticising Hillary’s plan echoes that of conservative and insurance industry operatives in 1992.

Recently, there have been a spate of pro-Obama editorials and opinions on the online pages of the New York Times. One among the many was poignant — it quoted the words of a younger feminist parting ways with her feminist mother on the issue of Obama vs Clinton. The young feminist offered that “her [Clinton's and by extension her mother's] issues are not my issues”. In keeping with Oprah’s proclamation, I guess she felt that she was free from the constraints of gender. But her characterisation is inaccurate. Her mother’s issues will always be her issues (at least so long as she considers herself a feminist), especially if she is unaware of that!

As Gloria Steinem writes writes in the same rag, under the apt title “Women Are Never Front-Runners“:

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

(I would ignore the part about Clinton’s “progressive policies”)

Some very intelligent people whose opinions I respect greatly are supporting Obama today. I do not believe that they are misled by the baseless hope that Obama represents. I do not even think that they are weary of struggle and want for once to taste some victory (even at some cost). Nonetheless, I think they are on the wrong track.

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