Commentary Update for December 9th, 2003
1. This Week's Show: Due to technical difficulties, our interview with UW Oshkosh political scientist James Simmons did not get aired last week. It will be on channel 66 in Oshkosh at 7 p.m. every night this week. We are sorry for the technical difficulties.
2. A Cruz Bustamante Democrat Gets Gored: Today Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean for president, an endorsement that the Associated Press reports was "plotted in secret." . Democratic pundits were quick to point out that the endorsement gives Dean the necessary "insider" approval to balance the "outsider" support he has had to this point. In his endorsement speech, Gore referred to Dean's "grassroots" appeal as the main reason he is deserving of the Democratic nomination for prez.
In my view, the Gore endorsement is the death knell for any kind of reform agenda advocated by Dean. By that I do not mean that Dean will necessarily lose the nomination or the general election (even arch-conservative Bill Kristol acknowledges the real possibility of a Dean victory). I mean that Dean now risks being reduced to what I call a "Cruz Bustamante Democrat": A basically decent fellow whose reformist sounding rhetoric is undermined ultimately by alliances with "insider" forces that resist reform and in fact profit from the corrupt status quo in place. An alliance with Gore is an alliance with the Republican-lite Democratic Leadership Council, Wall St. financiers and moguls, the neoliberal "free trade" gang that dominates both the Democratic and Republican hierarchies, and the big money access that comes with such alliances. Perhaps Dean should ask Cruz Bustamante or Gray Davis how much the Gore endorsement was worth in California. It wasn't worth much more than two tickets to Terminator Part III.
If Howard Dean truly was what his supporters claim--the "insurgent" candidate representing the "Democratic wing" of the Democratic Party (is anyone else offended by pragmatic middle of the roaders like Dean using Paul Wellstone's phrase?)--he would have accepted Gore's endorsement only on the condition that Gore himself join that wing. Dean didn't do that. Instead, he signaled that he is willing to move in the Democratic Leadership Council direction, the direction that in a little over 10 years has lost the Democrats both houses of congress, the majority of governorships, the majority of state legislatures, and virtually every traditional Democratic constituency except seniors, a few unions, and those racial minorities that still bother to vote.
But what I find most distressing about the Gore endorsement is that it appears to be just one more part of Terry McCauliffe's (Democratic National Committee Chair) strategy to make pointless the Democratic Party primaries in 2004. First the primary dates were moved up so as to make sure a candidate would be chosen as soon after Iowa and New Hampshire as possible and well before the summer convention. Then Dean reverses an earlier pledge to play by the public financing rules and announces that he plans to raise as much money as possible (ignoring pleas from Kerry, Gephardt, Clark, and other candidates to wait until the end of the primary season to make such a move so as to maintain as even a playing field as possible in the Democratic primaries). And now Gore announces an endorsement of Dean before even one vote has been cast--without either of them appreciating the irony of praising the "grassroots" nature of Dean's campaign at the same time maneuvering to make irrelevant the grassroots in almost every state.
Cruz Bustamante lost the California recall election not just because he was up against a Hollywood star with name recognition, but because too many Californians felt that Arnold S. was the real populist in the race. In sucking up to the establishment Democrats and caving in to the pressure to play the money game, Howard Dean now risks turning George W. Bush (the best friend the richest 1% of Americans have ever had in the White House) into the populist candidate of 2004. Only in America.
3. The Saddamino Theory: The Oshkosh Candlelight Club recently allowed me the opportunity state my case for why America should leave Iraq immediately. I called my remarks The Saddamino Theory.
4. Simile of the Week: The New York Times' Bob Herbert on the Medicare bill recently passed by the congress and signed into law by Dubya': "Think of Medicare as a giant chicken coop. Keep in mind that the hostile-to-Medicare Republicans control the presidency and both houses of Congress. Now you decide who the foxes and the chickens are. (Hint: we're not talking about spring chickens.)"
5. Rummy Gets "Foot In Mouth" Award: As a rhetorician I've taken interest in the British "Plain English Campaign." This year the organization gave the "Foot In Mouth" award to our own Dapper Don Rumsfeld who said, "Reports that say something hasn't happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."
6. The Most Asinine Editorial of the Year?: I thought the Oshkosh Northwestern could never top the editorial from a few months back in which the proposal by about 8,000 medical doctors to expand Medicare to include the entire population was reviled as some kind of socialist plot. But last week they actually attempted to debunk a Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance study of the relationship between size of government and tax burden by accusing the study of solving a "fifth grade math problem." Clearly not reading or understanding the study, the editorial writer thought that all the researcher had done was take the total size of the budget and divide it by the number of elected officials in the government body. Thankfully, someone contacted the editorial board, and the next day this statement was placed in the "corrections" section of the paper: "Dec. 4, Page A6: The report by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance on county board size and spending was incorrectly analyzed in an editorial. The WTA report compared county budgets per capita, not per supervisor."
Here's something for the editorial board and the Winnebago County Board "reformers" to ponder: New Hampshire has the largest state legislature, yet it has the lowest per capita tax burden in the nation. If large governments are as bad as the editorialists and the reformers suggest, how is that possible?
7. The Extraordinary Cluelessness of the Educated Elite--From James
Howard Kunstler, one of my favorite writers: . . . anyone seeking
to understand the extraordinary cluelessness of the educated elite in this country
need look no further than the the New York Times, our newspaper of record. Last
Sunday, a pitiful story ran in the front news section about the little town
of Bryan, Ohio, where the town's leading company, Ohio Art, which had produced
the childrens' Etch-a-Sketch toy in Bryan for forty years, shut its factory.
The mayor had an Etch-a-Sketch pictured on his calling card. Every year, a giant
Etch-a-Sketch was set up in front of City Hall as part of the Christmas display.
This year, Ohio Art moved more than a hundred manufacturing jobs to China, where
workers are paid 24 cents an hour and compelled to work 12 hours a day, seven
days a week without overtime. Chinese factory workers don't have much leverage.
There's no shortage of labor there, and the country is still essentially a police
state, despite the 'new economy' patina.
In the same issue of the Sunday New York Times, in the Week in Review
section, was a front-page story titled "Is WalMart good for America?"
The whole question was idiotically reduced to the question of pricing and market
share vis-a-vis other chains. No mention was made of the fantastic destruction
of middle-class social capital and of local community civic infrastructure by
the onslaught of predatory Big Box swarm organisms the past 30 years. No mention
was made of the desolation of American towns, or the loss of occupational niches,
or social roles. Or of the stupendous massacre of the American landscape. No
mention was made of foreign labor conditions that Americans would never tolerate
in our own country. And the conclusion of the article seemed to be that whatever
the unmentioned pernicious externalities might be, Americans probably are better
off being able to buy cheap hair dryers. Better off than what?
I have to conclude that the American elite universities that provide the graduates hired by the New York Times are unable to teach their students how to think anymore.
8. AFL-CIO Seeks Probe of Miami Police: From the AFL-CIO--The AFL-CIO is asking the U.S. Justice Department and the state of Florida to conduct separate, independent investigations of the "massive and unwarranted repression of constitutional rights and civil liberties" by Miami police Nov. 20-21 during peaceful protests by more than 20,000 people against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. "Our right to deliver this message in a peaceful environment was systematically thwarted by police in Miami," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in letters to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R). The massive police presence in Miami--which included 2,500 officers from some 40 jurisdictions clad in riot gear with batons and armored personnel carriers--was financed in part by $8.5 million in anti-terror federal funds passed by Congress in its $87 billion appropriation bill to rebuild Iraq. The USWA (steel workers) also called for a congressional investigation into the police actions.
Meanwhile America's preeminent civil libertarian Nat Hentoff argues that Ashcroft has become the new Hoover. But two Wall Street Journal writers think the panic over the Patriot Act is much ado about nothing.
9. The Great Election Grab: Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign passed along this great piece from the New Yorker by Jeff Toobin on the abuse of gerrymandering. He says in part, "In 2002, only four House challengers defeated incumbents in the general election—a record low in the modern era. In a real sense, the voters no longer select the members of the House of Representatives; the state legislators who design the districts do." And we wonder why voters are apathetic?
Best,
Tony