Pallin: Huckabee with tits?

(Andrew Halcro, who ran as an independent against Palin, said that debating Palin was an exercise in frustration.) "She has a way of walking in a room and filling the room with her presence, so people suddenly forget about their concerns about health care or education or anything else." LA Times

David Seaton's News Links
Ever since I was a kid my birthday, which falls today, September 2nd, almost always coincides with going back to school or work... lifelong, hardly a cause for celebration.

Exactly like when I was a miserable little schoolboy, today is just another day: up at seven and hit the line.

I got a nice present from my wife though, the Egyptian novel, "The Yacoubian Building". It's a beautiful book and was the basis for a beautiful film of the same name. I highly recommend them both.

Back to the business at hand.

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Today, I'm working on my Saturday, "dead tree" column, which will be about Russia and I'll probably be posting with some of the material I'm working up on the subject over the next few days. I'm a bit pressed for time, but I'd like to write about the firestorm that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has produced.

I have been surprised by the virulence of it all, the truly savage, hysterical, Rovian type abuse, an outpouring of sexist, personal and ad hominem attacks that only Barack Obama has had the sense to distance himself from. Something that does credit to his intelligence.

Why so much hostility?

The answer if pretty simple in my opinion, this lady is a monster politician and unless they destroy her and her story before she is really out of the gate; catch her in the political nasciturus stage as it were, then she is going to do to Barack Obama, exactly what Barack Obama did to Hillary Clinton: take the candy right out of his mouth.

This brings me to a question that I keep coming back to over and over again:

Why can't the Democrats, who are supposed to be the "people's party", come up with candidates that connect solidly with "deep" America.

How is it that Sarah Palin is the one who isn't a millionaire, the one who went to a state university, who was a commercial fisherman, (fisherperson?) served on the PTA and whose husband carries a steelworker's union card? Why is this formidable, working woman a Republican?

Why is it that the only Democrat that seems acutely aware of this problem is a born aristocrat like Howard Dean?

To paraphrase the demon Rumsfeld, you go with the working class you have, not with the working class you would like to have.

America's working people are in need of health, education and welfare, but they are also social conservatives. They are religious. Their rejection of much of contemporary life is bringing together Protestants and Catholics for the first time since Luther nailed his stuff to the door.

Why should this automatically be a force for reaction?

There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus Christ that intrinsically supports economic liberalism, military adventures at the expense of health or education or connects in any way with the beggar thy neighborism of the disciples of Ayn Rand.

Why are America's working people so socially conservative and religious?

In my opinion, not because they are "bitter", but because they are terrified.

During the Republican primaries I wrote a couple of pieces about Mike Huckabee's Evangelical populism that received a lot of kind attention. Out of laziness, or pressed for time, I'll quote myself:

The entire American economy is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. What, despite all its grotesque fanaticism, is truly healthy about all this Evangelical, rapture, mishegoss is that it is a real rebellion against the basic, inhuman tool of the system... Its unhappiness factory.

(...) Of course many of the same old vultures feed off this rebellion, in the same way that they feed off all the other unsatisfaction, but this is a true rebellion for all of that.

(...) Why are so many of the poor of America, white and black, socially conservative? Because without a welfare state, the only institutions that offer any comfort or protection are the church and the family. The family is the first welfare state. Here is Spain where we have a welfare state and a fine public health system, the traditional family is still in place. In the hospital system this means that the operations are fantastic, but the nursing is deficient, because normally the patients are surrounded by solicitous family members carrying bed pans etc and nurses only come around if patient suddenly takes a turn for the worse. In the USA there is no welfare state and the family is also under heavy pressure from the system.

Poor people are terrified: frightened people take comfort where they can. A divorced waitress with two kids who has to take them to an emergency room to treat their asma can't be criticized for being a "Left Behind" enthusiast. There is no better country than America in the whole world to be rich. It is probably the only country in the world where the rich are loved. Conversely there is no worse country in the world to be poor. Of course these people are paranoid, the system literally hates them.

I find any rebellion of the "lower orders" in the USA positive per se. I start from the premise that it is really the poor, the sniggered at, the excluded and the disadvantaged -- what are called the "lower classes" -- that have to be the protagonists of any authentic change. Up till now, all the "struggle" is coming from the top against the down.

What is new is that now it is America's lower middle classes, once the envy of the entire world, that can't pay for health and education any more and find themselves losing their homes and being pushed toward pauperization.

You have to start from where you are.

Perhaps the only thing that the white, black and Latino populations really have in common is their fear and their faith in Jesus.

There has to be rebellion for anything to happen and the culture of the people has to be taken into account. The lower middle class and poor people of America are religious and we have to start from there.

You don't believe in any of it?

If you are truly progressive and want to change the system, then you should say like Henry of Navarre, "Paris vaut bien une messe".

Like Howard Dean, I believe that America's progressives have to make their peace with evangelical America and find defenders of the "little man" that vibrate in the same cultural key as they do. Where is a contemporary William Jennings Bryan? It is absurd that a credible case can be made that the Democrats are elitist. DS

Howard Dean: just our luck

"It is possible to be tough without filling Walter Reed with 12,000 wounded kids and then not taking care of them." Howard Dean

David Seaton's News Links
I often have nice things to say about Al Gore... I confess to a weakness for Dennis Kucinich... But I am crazy about Howard Dean.

He is really the guy the right wingers fear. How can one tell? Fascists, and the American ultra-right and neocons aren't "conservatives" or anything like that, (if you take Robert Taft or Herbert Hoover as a conservative model), they are fascists... And as Sinclair Lewis predicted they come "wrapped in the flag and bearing the cross"... When fascists are frightened of anything they ridicule it cruelly, brutally, bullying... not humorously... bestially. Howard Dean is given that treatment, but Dean not only can take it, he can dish it out.... But as the quote above shows, his is the cruelty of truth. He is as tough as a boot and as game as a Jack Russell terrier. Just what is needed at the moment most needed. Maybe America's luck hasn't run out after all.

He has all the right enemies, even in his own party. Dean is working to make the Democratic party a true expression of its voter's values and not just a way of harnessing their votes in order to carry out the agenda of the big check writers. Howard Dean is one of the greatest democratic (with a small "d" or a capital "D") assets in American politics. DS

The New Dean Political Plan - The Politico
Abstract: When I asked him if Republicans would always be seen as tougher than Democrats when it came to national defense, he said: "It is possible to be tough without filling Walter Reed with 12,000 wounded kids and then not taking care of them." Dean went on: "Now that we have a real problem with Iran, there's not much we can do about it because of the president's incredible foolishness in running our armed forces through the gauntlet in Iraq, which wasn't necessary." He also said that having "the moral high ground" is part of defending the country. "A strong national defense depends on having well-trained troops and good weapons systems, but it also depends on having the moral high ground, and this president has given up the moral high ground around the world, and that's a disaster for the country's defense," Dean said. On the pending battle between the two parties on immigration reform, Dean said: "I think the Republicans have decided they don't want to do anything about immigration because they are scared. The best kind of immigration reform is a much better working relationship with Mexico. We will never solve immigration problems in this country without improving the Mexican economy dramatically." Dean is very concerned about world affairs and believes that after the November election in 2008, the president-elect should take a month off and travel the world to bolster America's image. "During the Cold War, we certainly had people who didn't like us, but they respected us," Dean said. "Now, unfortunately, they don't like us and they don't respect us. And that needs to be fixed. And I consider one of my informal jobs to help fix it with like-minded world leaders so we do have some relationships." Dean also said that the Bush administration's failure to cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for the country. "It destroyed George Bush's presidency," Dean said. "Permanently. The one thing that Americans and everybody else in the world have always believed, whether you like America or not, whether you like the government or not, is that the most organized, best managers in the world are the Americans. And if anything really, really awful happens, send in the Americans. And we all saw on television around the whole world, that this just wasn't true of this president and this government. It was just ludicrous. It's still ludicrous to this day." In his famous speech to the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee in 2003, Dean, then a presidential candidate, upbraided the party for too much timidity and too much coziness with Republicans. "That's why Democrats didn't win for a long time," Dean said Tuesday. "Harry Truman said if you run a Republican against a Democrat who behaves like a Republican, the real Republican wins every time."(...) I asked Dean if he agreed with some in his party who say that things look so good for the Democrats in 2008, they virtually can't lose. "That is what I call magical thinking, and Democrats have been very guilty of it for a long time," Dean said. "I don't admire much about Republicans, but one thing I do admire is that they don't engage in magical thinking." Dean said that the Democratic Party is busy raising money and organizing in every state and that "we have a turnout operation that we think is better than the Republicans' now." "But winning is going to be hard work," Dean said. "This race is going to be won in 2007, not 2008. It is all going to be about how well you prepare." READ IT ALL

Mystified by the world? Cherchez le porc

David Seaton's News Links
Perhaps we are being misled by what we consider reality, perhaps the deaths, the suffering, the destruction of cities, either by bombs or by storms, cloud our minds. Perhaps these tragedies are simply incidents, static in the narration of the true story.

There are two articles, one by Paul Krugman and the other by Gideon Rachman, which if read side by side, indicate the true state of the world.

What we consider "democracy" is in fact an elaborate charade, run for the benefit of a very few. This is nothing new, but it was never called "democracy" before.

Until political parties are micro-financed from the base up, on the principal of "the widow's mite" this state of affairs will only get worse. As far as I know the only one taking any practical steps in this direction is Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean. If he is successful he will have executed a true coup d' etat. Much ridicule is heaped upon his head. DS

Who are we finally?

The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. New York Times

David Seaton's News Links

Really that is the question now: who are we? How did we get here and how do we get out? We all know the famous Herman Goering quote, You frighten the people and you take control of them. Since the beginning of the cold war we are living in the "National Security State". All those in power today are stakeholders in the national security state. This is a political construct that has finally produced something as bizarre as George W. Bush. Power is not acquired easily. Those that have it, have sought it all their lives, with all their being. Don't think for a minute that any of the candidates for president in 2008, if elected, would ever do anything fundamental to cut back the powers that Bush/Cheney are hoarding up now for their succesors. None of today's candidates would resist renouncing those powers from any special perversity on their part, but simply for the same reason that it would be difficult for you or me to unlearn riding a bicycle.

What must be done?

The only practical remedy I have seen offered by any mainstream politician so far, the only remedy that would have any chance of succeeding, is Howard Dean's "50 state strategy". Only a major grass roots movement that empowers "ordinary people" can save the Republic from this sinister, systemic dynamic that the cold war has engendered. Why? Because ordinary Americans have the republican values hard wired in their cultural DNA. These values are as central to the US culture as cold logic is to the French or methodical analysis is to the Germans. There is no sentimentality in this, there is simply no other language Americans can speak. Even fascism has to be dressed up as democracy to be sold to Americans.

Leaders cannot reclaim democracy for the American people. Only the people themselves can do that. The leaders must be turned into followers.

Fortunately, at the same time that the new technologies make all this sinister surveillance easier, Web.2 has placed a tool in the people's hands which makes resistance possible.

Web.2, and mass obesity, are the only two things that George Orwell did not envision in "1984". We are living in a period made for activists, not just for voters and leaders. The system has to be brought alive. Reform has to come from the bottom up, there is no other way it is going to happen. Seen from this perspective, we may be living at the beginning of the most attractive political culture in history, one with the possibility of everyone actually being invited to do their bit to create a better world. DS

"You the man!", so says Time Magazine

Uncle Sam says, "Take charge. No 'leader' can do it for you!"

David Seaton's News Links

According to Time Magazine, all us Internet users are the "Person of the Year." You have to wonder why Time Warner of all people is celebrating the loss of their gatekeeper function, but still, they could be right. The 20th century opened with many outsized, revolutionary personalities like Einstein, Picasso and Lenin, who, in the space of only a few years, changed the way the world looked and the way it looked at itself.

Now, at the beginning of the 21rst century, either humans of the Einstein, Picasso and Lenin mold don't exist any more or, as is more probable, they are simply not needed and not called forth. Today, we have Kleenex-like, disposable, "celebrities" to satisfy our need to worship "great men".

On the contrary, this seems to be an era where, for the first time in history, intelligent, mass opinion can be formed and set into motion without the benefit and shepherding of the "great and the good"; those who have manipulated humanity to their benefit since records have been kept of our affairs. We have just seen a clear example in the Iraq disaster: the most serious and defining crisis of our time, where as Strobe Talbot tells us in the Financial Times, "The US faces in Iraq what could be the most consequential foreign-policy debacle in its history".

At this decisive moment most of America's so called "leaders" either voted or lobbied for the war. And as for the "gatekeepers", the great media groups captained by America's newspaper of reference, the New York Times, actively promoted it. At the very same time, in an unprecedented popular movement, millions of people in America and around the world demonstrated against the war and organized to oppose it and haven't ceased organizing, blogging and agitating online against it since the very day it began. Obviously if the "people" had been listened to, an unprecedented disaster could have been averted.

The insight would be, that after decades of nearly universal literacy and public education, the general public with the new technologies at its command, is perfectly able to decide the major issues of the day more correctly than its "leaders," who instead of stewarding the general welfare are for the most part responding to the cocktail of special interest groups whose large contributions finance their campaigns. What we have just lived through in the first years of the new century seems to bear out the theories of "deliberative democracy", Which in Wikipedia's article on the subject is defined as,

"Any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative democracy. In contrast to the traditional economics-based theory of democracy, which emphasizes voting as the central institution in democracy, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can only arise from the public deliberation of the citizenry."

I seem to remember that somewhere Noam Chomsky said that if Americans studied public affairs with the attention and sophisticated powers of analysis that they expend on baseball statistics, it would change the world. Perhaps we are looking at the beginning of that now. Substitute "soccer" for "baseball" and it could apply to the rest of the world.

The only major US politician that seems to have acted decisively on this insight is Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party. Dean (or someone very near him) seems to have read and understood the Hardt and Negri concept of the "Multitude" (no mean feat as the authors can't write their way out of a paper bag). This "multitude" (Hardt-Negri's definition) "is our era's new political class, a fungible mass of political force, which in contrast to the 'proletariat' or working-class, is 'a collection of singularities" who discover what they have in common, but without fusing into some sort of sovereign unity'.

Howard Dean, alone among mainstream politicians, seems to understand the potential of opening political life to this "multitude" by giving them the chance to take their own political fate directly into their hands.

If this sounds a little esoteric to you, consider this simple arithmetic: there are an estimated 40,000,000 Americans without any health coverage... if each of them donated only 50 cents through the Internet to the Democratic Party's "war chest," that would make $20,000,000. By thus short-circuiting of the traditional "big wallet," special interest contributors, the realistic possibility for a new, high-tech populism opens.

The moral of the story? Before they figure out how to shut the Internet down, let us hurry and change the world. DS

You -- Yes, You -- Are TIME's Person of the Year

Abstract: Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious. READ IT ALL

Kucinich to run for president: go for it!

David Seaton's News Links

Full disclosure: I confess I really like Dennis Kucinich. He and Howard Dean got it right on the war in Iraq... so of course they are a pair of nuts, right? The Democrats chose a "winner", John Kerry, who triangulated himself into knots over Iraq and lost. If they were going to lose anyway, wouldn't it have been better to run with people who had the most important world issue after the fall of the Berlin wall correctly diagnosed? At least the Democratic Party would have had some moral capital left. Howard Dean is rebuilding the grassroots of the party, which is a very subversive thing to do. A broad activist base and micro-financing might save the party and, who knows? the republic itself. Dennis Kucinich is hanging in there, fighting the good fight. Miracles happen... I wish him all success. DS
Abstract: Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2004, said Monday he is planning another bid because his party isn't pushing hard enough to end the Iraq war.In a statement, Kucinich said he plans to formally announce his candidacy on Tuesday at Cleveland's City Hall, where he served as mayor of his hometown in the 1970s. The liberal, anti-war Ohio congressman said he was inspired to run because he disagrees with the way some of his fellow Democrats are handling the war, including approval of a proposal to spend $160 billion more on the conflict. "Democrats were swept into power on Nov. 7 because of widespread voter discontent with the war in Iraq," said Kucinich, 60. "Instead of heeding those concerns and responding with a strong and immediate change in policies and direction, the Democratic congressional leadership seems inclined to continue funding the perpetuation of the war."(...) He won re-election to his House seat in 2006 with 66 percent of the vote. He based his campaign on job creation and criticizing rising gas prices. He also was an outspoken critic of his own party, saying Democrats have lost their soul by moving away from liberal ideals. READ IT ALL

Labour drafts in Howard Dean for 'our midterms' - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links
Howard Dean is in my opinion the only truly interesting major politician in the USA today. He really understands how the new forms of communication (like this blog) are changing politics. He has found the solution for taking the Democratic party away from the consultants, lobbies, celebrities and big check writers that have stewarded the decline of the party of FDR. The midterm victory will make it easier for him... I hope he gets another crack at the presidency. DS


Abstract: Labour has enlisted one of the engineers of this week's Democratic victory in the US midterm elections in an attempt to boost its flagging fortunes before the local elections in May. Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and one of the men credited with masterminding the trouncing of the Republicans, will visit the UK next month to brief party officials about his pioneering campaigning techniques. "The Welsh, Scottish and local elections next year are our midterms," said Hazel Blears, Labour's chair. "It has to be done differently for us to carry on being successful ... We're looking at how [the Democrats] have upped their game." Labour is particularly interested in the Democrats' style of targeting grassroots voters through low-key meetings in homes. "We want to look at their experience in campaigning, getting out the vote, holding house meetings where people can come together ... You don't want to transplant American politics, but there's a lot we can share," said Ms Blears. Many political observers will regard the drafting in of Mr Dean as bizarre, given that the Democratic victory was largely founded on voters' anger about the war in Iraq - the very subject which has alienated many Labour supporters and on which Mr Dean has been so outspoken. But Ms Blears believes Labour can benefit from the tactics used so effectively by the chairman of the Democratic national committee. "Part of [their new success] is politics, but it's also about organisation," she said. She also said Labour could benefit from the so-called "viral" tactics Mr Dean helped pioneer. "Politics is increasingly local and decentralised ... People go to people they trust for word-of-mouth recommendations. It's about like-minded people talking, with concentric circles of campaigning, rather than about a political message from the centre." READ ALL