John Nichols does a beautiful job of capturing Bruce Springsteen's eloquent idealism, in this report on the Boss's appearance with John Kerry in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this week. I sure wish I could have seen Springsteen invoke Paul Wellstone's name, as he did that day. A few weeks ago, I did hear Springsteen perform one of his benefit concerts at the Meadowlands, and give a shorter version of the same statement of principles:
economic justice, healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage so folks don't have to go out and break their backs and still not be able to make ends meet...[and]...the protection of the environment, a sane and responsible foreign policy, civil rights and the protection and safeguarding of our precious democracy here at home.
If Kerry wins, which I hope he does, we're going to have to break our backs to hold him to these principles. But I'll take a president who will listen to those social movements that Springsteen speaks for, over one who thinks he's infallible and who is cahoots with the greediest and most dangerous bunch of rascals ever to run Congress.
As Springsteen says, "the country we carry in our hearts is waiting, and together we can move America towards her deepest ideals."
"A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief." President George W. Bush, October 27, 2004.
I believe this is what psychologists would call "projection."
UPDATE: Jon Stewart just did a brilliant montage of clips showing Bush jumping to conclusions about the "threat" presented by Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. I'll add a link if they post it.
First it was Howard Stern turning against Bush. Steve Earle told us the "revolution was now." Then, Bruce Springsteen and a whole crew of aging rockers. This morning, I got an email from Patty Larkin and Dar Williams, two of my favorite singer-songwriters, urging a vote for Kerry. (Signers of their missive included Catie Curtis, John Gorka, Janis Ian, Lucy Kaplansky, and Christine Lavin, more faves of mine.)
I saw Bruce play one of his MoveOnPac concerts in New Jersey and he was terrific, especially when he spoke about his ideals for America. But, let's face it, these are old fogies trying to relight a flame among an older generation that already pretty much knows what it thinks. (Well, maybe Stern can influence young men.) When the Springsteen tour was announced, I remember a newspaper story where a reporter talked to students in Rutgers, NJ who didn't even know who he was.
When it comes to reaching young people, none of these cultural stars can hold a candle to Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem. Run, do not walk, to watch his new music video, "Eminem's Mosh." It's an eloquent blast against racism, fear, militarism, and most of all, Bush.
UPDATE: Voting at MTV's website (prompted by bloggers like my friend Doug Ireland, who first alerted me to the significance of Eminem's video) have put it at #1. A friend with contacts at the Internet Archive reports more than 100,000 downloads of the video as of Tuesday night. And if you want to ponder more interpretation of its imagery and lyrics, check out this essay by DailyKos diarist kid oakland.
Any idea when the election will be over?
I'm not kidding about that, by the way. I think we're heading for a national nervous breakdown/constitutional crisis, starting the night of November 2nd. Consider it all part of the Latinamericanization of our politics.
Here's the problem. There's little consensus about two really important issues at the moment:
1. No one agrees about the exact shape of the race. The polls aren't helpful at all. Unlike in 1996, when it was clear Clinton was going to beat Dole, here we have a great deal of uncertainty about who is leading whom and by how much. So, there are a whole array of outcomes that a significant number of people will view, immediately, as suspect.
2. No one agrees about the credibility of the vote-counting system. Lots of stories are bubbling up already describing names being left off of ballots, purge lists that target African-Americans, Democratic registrations being torn up, and so on. If we have a couple of states with very close results generating calls for recounts, arguments over provisional ballots, etc. I expect the fight will very quickly get ugly. Unlike in 2000, when Bush, Baker & crew fought to win and Gore fought to avoid instability and negative editorials in the New York Times, this time there will be no holding back.
If, by some blessing, there are no closely contested states left unsettled Election Night, perhaps the worst will not come to pass. Sure, the loonies on both sides will still cry foul if their guy loses. But without formal recount proceedings and legal wrangling, we won't see the worst. I'm just not very optimistic about that.
Sometime this spring, I started getting emails from the Bush-Cheney campaign's "Jewish Outreach" department. That's because when I signed up on their list, I think I listed "Middle East" as one of my areas of interest. Maybe I said I was Jewish. Frankly I don't remember.
Obviously, this is a form of message narrow-casting that lots of campaigns are doing, and it gives them an opportunity to say things they might not want a general audience to hear. (Anybody on BC04's "Christian Outreach" list?)
Today's message really got my blood boiling, because it revived a very old form of red-baiting among Jews. "Kerry Receives Endorsement of the PLO" was the title. Here's the first paragraph:
Last spring, John Kerry boasted that a number of foreign leaders supported his campaign, but refused to name them. This week he received his first foreign-leader endorsement -- from the Palestinian Authority. Congratulations, Mr. Kerry. An organization known the world over as the linchpin of terrorism has now awarded you its support. When Kerry was talking about his popularity in foreign capitals, he said "you can go to New York City and you can be in a restaurant and you can meet a foreign leader" that supports him. Well, it's unlikely that he met the leaders bestowing this week's endorsement at Katz's Deli.
That last reference, for readers not from New York, is to a famous Lower East Side delicatessen that is a must-stop for politicians seeking the Jewish vote.
The email goes on to link Kerry as well to the former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamed, for urging Muslims in America to vote for Kerry. Mohamed, the message notes, has made numerous anti-Semitic comments (though it doesn't cite the his anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, since that would sort of confuse things, wouldn't it?)
You have to read deep into this BC04 email to discover the basis for its claim that the PLO has endorsed Kerry:
Palestinian Authority Expresses Support For John Kerry. "The Palestinian Authority made its first open statement Monday expressing support for US democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. PA Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said that the future of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is unsure if George W. Bush is re-elected to office." ("Shaath: US Election Stalling Peace Process," The Jerusalem Post, 10/18/04)
Well, this is scarcely an endorsement. And, if you actually go read the Jerusalem Post story, you'll find that nowhere is Shaath quoted as saying "the future of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is unsure if George W. Bush is re-elected." All he does say is that Palestinians are paying a deadly price for the lack of attention to the peace process during the run-up to the election, and he calls on "America's friends and allies" like Britain to fill the gap. "I do not think the three coming months should just witness Palestinians getting killed," he pleads.
So, where is the PLO "endorsement" of Kerry? I had to hunt down this Agence France Presse report on an interview he did with the BBC to find more details.
In an interview with the BBC Sunday, Shaath refused to openly take sides in the White House race, although he said a re-election of US President George W. Bush would be unlikely to bring progress to the Middle East peace process.
“If Mr. Bush is re-elected, he promised that he would reinvigorate the peace process, but with his team around, and with his views so far, it doesn’t look very promising,” Shaath told BBC television.
Shaath said victory for Democratic challenger John Kerry could signal a better outlook but that any progress would take time. “If Mr Kerry were to win, most likely some of (former US president Bill) Clinton’s team would come back. That is okay, but it might take them a year before firming up a policy (on the Middle East). We cannot wait that long.”
Does that sound like an endorsement by the PLO to you?
Will money, in the form of lucrative Blogads, or Google Ads, ruin blogging? That's the question being discussed by Jason Kottke and Doc Searls (last post of a long series) at the moment. I have two quick thoughts.
1. Does money ruin humans? If you think the answer is yes, then why should blogging be any different? If, on the other hand, you think the answer is "sometimes yes, sometime no," again, why should blogging be any different?
2. The critical question is: can you take money from others and not be corrupted by it? In the old world of opinion journalism that I once worked in at The Nation, our answer was: we'd take any ad (other than those we considered in poor taste), including from advertisers we disagreed with, but we insisted on the freedom to criticize any advertiser. In other words, independence of thought is what matters most. Plus the expectation that readers are smart enough to distinguish between what we want to say, and what advertisers might want to say. So, my attitude is, if bloggers can get paid for doing what they love, great! But if getting paid, or the prospect of getting paid, warps and skews what they may write, that will inevitably dampen their appeal to readers. I trust there will be plenty of people who can maintain their independence.
Here's The Nation's advertising policy. A nice piece of writing by the wily and parsimonious Victor Navasky.
It looks like all of Tom DeLay's ethics violations, congressional arm-twisting, corporate money-laundering, special-interest favor-mongering and general thuggishness may come back to haunt him.
The good folks at Campaign Money Watch are raising money to run a tough ad in his district (I'm helping a little). I hear that Democracy for America, the successor to Howard Dean's organization, is about to get involved in the district. Campaign for America's Future is calling on all the Members of Congress who have gotten money from DeLay's political committees to give it back. Democracy21 just issued a new report on DeLay's ethical sleaze.
There are lots of reasons to wish this guy an early retirement. Here's one: he's the embodiment of the worst aspects of our pay-to-play political system. “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules,” DeLay tells lobbyists. He has two lists of the 400 largest PACs, those who he deems friendly and those he deems unfriendly. “We’re just following the old adage of punish your enemies and reward your friends,” DeLay says. He once told Congress Daily, “Money is not the root of all evil in politics. In fact, money is the lifeblood of politics.”To find out more, go to the Daily DeLay, which is going to be counting down the top 14 reasons as we go through the last 14 days to Election Day.
Or, the triumph of anti-politics. Whatever you want to call it, Jon Stewart's recent appearance on Crossfire was absolutely sublime. For fifteen minutes, the comedian completely turned the tables on his hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, by violating one of the cardinal rules of cable TV "news": you don't admit that you care.
Stewart was one serious citizen, and his two hosts had no idea what to do. He mocked Carlson for being a 35-year-old whose affectation is to wear a bow-tie, he chided them for hurting the country and he said both men were "doing theatre, when you should be doing debate...what you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery."
Probably my favorite line:
After the debates, where do you guys head to right afterwards? You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don't you think that, for people watching at home, that's kind of a drag, that you're literally walking to a place called deception lane?
Neither Carlson nor Begala knew what hit them. That's because it's been a long time since anyone has spoken honestly on their program about anything that matters.
Funny, my friend David Corn has often told me, in an amiable way, that I was banging my head on the wall on this or that effort. Now, he takes an admirable, if completely futile, swing at his old boss Ralph Nader, in a column for TomPaine.com. Talk about head-banging!
UPDATE: I just got a press release from the NY Independence Party called "Dr. Fulani to Bring Ralph Nader to Harlem." The event touted: a church appearance on October 23rd. Even after Nader's own spokesman Kevin Zeese admitted to reporters that Nader's appearance last winter with Fulani and her co-cultist Fred Newman was a mistake, Ralph is determined to dig his political grave even deeper. I used to feel saddened by this; now I'm just disgusted.
See my short essay on this topic on PBS's "By the People: Election 2004" site.
Isn't it amazing how the topic of race has all but disappeared from the national radar screen?
I don't think it's stretching things at all to suggest that one reason is that people of color are vastly outspent in the campaign money game. After all, candidates are far more responsive to donors than non-donors. And a new analysis by my colleague Nancy Watzman for the Color of Money shows that both Bush and Kerry drew most of their money from the same non-diverse pool.
Only about 10 percent of their more than $475 million in private campaign contributions during the primaries came from neighborhoods that are predominantly of color. Meanwhile, about 30 percent of the population is of color. Details here.
Nothing like a visual depiction to explode the silly notion of America being radically divided into blue vs red states. See this county-by-county map by Princeton prof Robert Vandebei, which shades counties by the actual vote distribution (red=Bush, blue=Kerry and green=Nader). And check out the little green patch in Utah!
I've been busy lately and thus haven't had much time to blog. On top of that I just bought a PowerBook G4 to replace the IBM Thinkpad that died on me over the summer, and I've got a lot of files to move over, mail programs to synchronize, and new tools to learn. Luckily, lots of people have been very supportive, including brother Dave, Britt Blaser, Doc Searls, Andrew Rasiej, and the good folks at Technorati.
Speaking of Technorati, one of the high points of my trip to San Francisco last week was attending their "hackerthon." I came with a project that I hoped someone might want to code: to take a list of the urls of Members of Congress and create a ranked list of who the blogosphere was talking about. Much to my pleasure, a young man named Aaron Swartz walked up to me after I made my pitch and quietly said, "I'd like to give it a try." I then watched as he banged out a very workable first whack at a solution in less than an hour. (Only later did I learn that three years ago, at the tender age of 15, Aaron was the de facto IT manager of the Creative Commons site.) I don't know about you, but this sort of thing doesn't happen every day, at least not back in NY!
We're working on some issues with the code, but hope to have it ready for the re-launch of the Personal Democracy Forum site in about a week. The big problem is that while bloggers mention Members a lot, they don't tag them with their website url very often. I think that is because it's relatively hard--compared to clicking over to Amazon to get a book url--to find politicians' web addresses.
We could do the same ranking by keyword, but it won't be as accurate (think of those Congressmen Adam Smith and Jerry Lewis, for example, if you want to see how sloppy a keyword search can be). So we're going to make it real easy for bloggers to tag Members of Congress. Hopefully, that will improve the data stream for all. If you have any ideas on this front, let me know. Or just stay tuned for the re-launch.
Over all, from January through September 2001, according to an analysis by NRDC, task force officials had 714 direct contacts with industry representatives and only 29 with non-industry representatives. What organizations were represented? They included the National Association of Manufacturers, the mammoth trade association whose members include ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil, and Arch Coal; the Nuclear Energy Institute; the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for the utility industry; the National Mining Association; Westinghouse; the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby group for the oil and gas industry; and yes, Enron, among others.According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bush has raised over $4.2 million from the energy and natural resources sector for his re-election campaign; by contrast, Kerry has raised just $560,000. Edwards could have made these points and connected them to things that really matter to people, such as the alarming rise in childhood asthma rates that is occurring while Clean Air Act regulations are weakened. Likewise, I think it would have strengthened Edwards' points about the administration's Medicare prescription drug program, which is indeed an enormous boon to the pharmaceutical, insurance and HMO companies, if he had mentioned how much money Bush-Cheney have raised from those interests. Campaign Money Watch is hard at work doing those things, including running some tough ads in Wisconsin. Go here to find out more.