• Tag Archives Obama

  • Any Woman or Any African-American? NO

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    70  bar steady 30.02  0mph E  dew-point 54  sunrise 6:33 sunset 7:53  Lughnasa

    New (Harvest) Moon

    “The cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg.” – Margaret Thatcher

    I agree with Margaret.  She laid several big eggs while Prime Minister. One of them was the poll tax.

    Let me be clear about the post below.   Voting for a candidate based on any secondary characteristic, i.e. skin color, gender, national origin, religion or sexual orientation without careful consideration of the policies and general political stance concedes your political principles.  I know in some cases this is very tempting, say for example Hillary as a woman or Obama as a black man.  Even some folks will consider Palin just because she is a woman.  I believe there are good arguments for electing somewhat less than ideal women candidates, black candidates, Muslim candidates (less than ideal=politics somewhat different from your own) in order to increase diversity in the policy making branches of government.

    This less than ideal concept does not apply to President.  Why?  Simple.  The President has too much power.  A Presidential candidate must be as close to your politics as possible to be worthy of your vote.  Unlike a Senator or a House member, they have no caucus to leaven their views, no entire body to smooth out the rough edges.  A President decides and disposes within the Executive Branch. The President determines his/her parties agenda in Congress, at least on certain important matters, matters that will have priority to those who voted for them–like you.

    Is it important that a woman become President?  Yes, I believe it is.  Is it important that any woman become President?  Absolutely not.  Is it important that a black person, male or female, become President?  Yes, I believe it is.  Any black person?  Absolutely not.  In the primary races I did not support Hillary or Barack because they are both too centrist for me.  I preferred Kuchinich and Edwards.  Now that the winnowing process has ended though, Barack is the Presidential candidate closest to my political views.  He is to the right of my own positions, but the choice is down to two.  In this case proximity to my own views and his skin color both matter to me.

    As I wrote the other day, Obama’s policies and political rhetoric don’t excite me, but the visual of an African-American as President, so long as they are not, say, Alan Keyes or Clarence Thomas, does.  Last evening I rode up in the elevator with an African-American couple.  They were young.  He had the Star-Tribune in his hand and read a quote to his girl friend.  “See,”  he said, “He spoke to the women who were supporting Hillary.  He’ll get their support.”  I don’t know about his analysis, but the fact that he was excited gladdened my heart.  Blessed be.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • An Old Guy Observation

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    56  bar steady 20.00 ompn NE  dew-point 44  sunrise 6:28  sunset 8:02  Lughnasa

    Waning Crescent of the Corn Moon

    The Democratic convention.  Ironically for our family, in Denver where our clan has strong roots.  The Republican convention.  Equally ironical, here in St. Paul.

    Here’s an, oh my god I’m an old guy thought, but conventions aren’t what they were when I was a kid.  When primaries began to take the decision about party nominees out of the hands of power brokers and the politics of a particular convention, conventions became mass marketing.  No fun.  Not interesting.  In the past I watched convention coverage as eagerly as the final 4 in the NCAA or the Indianapolis 500.  No more.

    My gut tells me that Obama will sit down with his folks, figure out a strategy to focus his campaign on two or three issues-probably the economy, health care reform and energy independence.  He and Biden will punch those home.  They will be more dynamic, more thoughtful, and not Republican.  In the end this should be enough.

    Obama needs help, no doubt about that.  He’s a young, inexperienced politician running against a Washington insider, again.  I mean, Hillary was a prime example of an insider.  He’s black.  He’s smart.  He needed this non-incumbent race following an unpopular presidency to give his way outside the box personal situation a chance.  He has it and I think he’ll win pulling away.

    Gazpacho tomorrow and planting.  Gazpacho first.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • Is Obama the End of Black Politics?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    69  bar rises 30.00 0mph NE  dew-point 63  sunrise 6:15  sunset 8:20  Lughnasa

    Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon   moonrise 1926  moonset 0334

    A fascinating article in the NYT magazine, Is Barack Obama the end of black politics?

    One of the more interesting ideas, which comes from the new generation of black leadership–more Obama than John Lewis–that an Obama presidency might find itself hampered when trying to deal with black issues.  How can you present your community as victimized if Michelle, Barrack and the kids are in the Whitehouse?  A speculation, in my opinion, that reveals the extreme naivete of American politics.

    That there are issues in the train of identity politics goes without saying.  Women earn less than men.  Still.  Blacks still end up in jail disproportionately to whites.  Gays do not have the right to marry or have partner benefits.  All these are true.  But.  The big divider is not identity, not gender, race, or sex.

    No.  It is, as it always has been, class.  While identity plays a role, class determines.  If you do not have adequate cash, you do not live in the good neighborhood where your kid goes to the good school, learns dominant class cultural mores.  This whole argument goes back to the rise of the new left.  The new left did not pick up socialism as its banner, but struck out for analysis of the “system.”  Was there an oppressive overclass that manipulated power to the disadvantage of the poor, women, blacks? Of course.  It was then as it is now the capitalist elite, the ruling class.

    I know what you’re thinking.  This train left the station a long time ago and never arrived at its destination.  Look at Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, even the People’s Republic of China.  None of them are poster children for socialism.  Correct.  They illustrate the bankruptcy of Marxist-Leninism, a system in which even communism did not have a fair chance.

    The failure of early 20th century Marxist-Leninism is not a critique of socialism.  It is a critique of a unique experiment in totalitarian government and a corrupted revolution.  Furthermore, it does not dismantle the critique of capitalism made by socialists.  It only highlights the genuine difficulty of changing the course of a behemoth long underway.

    Obama does not need to deal with black or Latino issues.  He needs to deal with poverty.  We need a government which allows no child and no adult to go without housing, food or health care.  We need a political system which ensures the equal education of all its children and full employment for its adults.  As the rise of the black middle-class has shown, if the issue of poverty is dealt with the dynamics change forever.  Has this rise eliminated racism?  No.  Has Hilary Clinton’s run for the presidency eliminated sexism? No.  Will these pathologies of a traditional society still remain and need amelioration?  Yes.

    Economic empowerment increases the capacity of these groups to fight for themselves and to find their natural allies in our political system.

    So, no.  An Obama white house will not weaken the ability of advocates to make their case, because the first case to be made is against poverty, against class bias.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • Obama By Five Percentage Points

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  bar rises 29.84 0mph NW dewpoint 30 Beltane

            Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

    The Hare moon stands in the west, just above the treeline a ways off our deck.  The night is misty and the crescent has a faded glow around it.  These nights, still cool, and days that don’t get too hot, ideal.  I like the cool days for garden work.  Today I stayed out in the sun too long and got a little woozy.  Just because the air is cool doesn’t mean the sun isn’t out to get ya.

    I wrote Hillary asking her to get out quite a while back.  Now the hounds are at her heels.  Money won’t come in.  The math doesn’t work.  Superdelegates have begun to flee.  Yet, she has decided to press on.  Why?  Pride, maybe?  Certainly a commitment to being the first woman presidential candidate and then the first woman president.  Both laudable and signficant, but by themselves insufficient to keep her in the race.  She may not believe what’s happening.  She will.

    My own take is that Obama will look like very different against McCain than he has against Clinton.  He embodies change, as she did, too, but he will look younger, stronger, less hidebound, though he will also look less experienced, less weathered by fate and circumstance.  The race will hinge on his ability to pick up some of the Reagan Democrats who swung so decisively behind Hillary.  How can he do that?  VP is one strategy.  I still think his best shot is Bill Richardson, but I read some pundits who think a strong woman would be a good choice.  Maybe John Edwards? 

    Obama by 5 percentage points in the end.  That’s my prediction.  And I have no basis for it, other than hope and gut instinct, neither too reliable, but there you are.

               


    📂This entry was posted in Great Wheel Politics 📎and tagged

  • Plants and a Particular Location + Gardener = Dialogue

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    40  bar falls 30.27  6mph  SSE  dewpoint 24  Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Winds

    Ah.  Can you feel the sigh?  A weekend with no outside obligations at all.  I plan to do clean up, plant some more seeds, read, maybe watch a bit more of the NCAA.  How about that Davidson, huh?  Took out Wisconsin.  That’s a student body of 1,700 versus one of what, 30,000?  I will read chapter 3 in the Permaculture design book for sure, perhaps polish off a novel or two, maybe start writing one of my own.  I have an idea that’s been bouncing around for some time now.

    Tonight at 5PM I get to celebrate Chinese New Year again with the CIF guides.  I look forward to this each year, this one especially because I’ve done my homework on China and Japan over the last few months.  Saw MingJen, who organizes this event, on Wednesday at the Naomi Kawase film, The Mourning Forest.

    If you can, would you write Hillary and tell her to get out now?  We need a chance to even up with McCain and a bitter end to the Democratic primary race just lets him have the field to himself.  I don’t have anything against Hillary, in fact she and Obama are about a horse apiece politically, but Obama has won the field, has the delegates and deserves his chance.  Hillary will have another shot.  She’s established that a woman can run as a serious candidate, a remarkable and historic achievement in itself.  Nothing in the feminist revolution demands that women win all contests or get all the jobs. 

    Snow continues to retreat in our yard, but slowly.  As in years past, the Perlick’s grass is almost fully visible, while ours remains under 6-8 inches of snow.  They face south, we face north and that makes all the difference.  Spring comes to our property about a week later than theirs, weird as that is. 

    On Thursday I followed the dog tracks in the snow and went out to check on my trees planted last spring.  Some animal, either rabbits or deer, have eaten the tops of them down to the garden hose I put around them as protection from mice.  I didn’t think tall enough up the food chain.   These were the trees I planted nearest the area we call the park.  Further north, also on the eastern edge of our westernmost woods, another group of oaks, white pines and Norway pines look like they’ve done well over the winter. 

    This is the nature of gardening.  Try this and it works.  Try that and it doesn’t.  Listen.  Repeat what worked, change what didn’t.  Plants and a particular location engage the attentive gardener or horticulturist (as I’m beginning to think of myself) in a constant dialogue as shade patterns change, seasonal sun shifts become more understood, rain falls or does not fall and various cultivars and seeds prove well suited to the site or not.  This dialogue is multi-lingual as one party communicates in one language and the other has to translate, but it is true discourse as each can alter the others ideas.      


    📂This entry was posted in Friends Garden General Great Work Our Land and Home Politics 📎and tagged

  • Hillary Needs to Quit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    31  bar steady  29.86 0mph SSW windchill 31

         Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

    Hillary Clinton got an e-mail message from me tonight asking her to quit the race.  She can’t win, the mathematics of the upcoming races don’t allow it.  No matter how you feel about her it’s time for her to get out, unify the Democratic party and get going to whip McCain. 

    This does not have to be her only year, nor has her campaign been in vain.  Ever after this year a female candidate for office will be a serious contender if they have the political credentials and more and more women do.  She has proved that women can run presidential campaigns.

    Obama is not so much a better candidate, as an acceptable candidate who has done what the primary process demands, collected votes.  The differences between them are not great and the hair-splitting over who would be better on day one comes down hard beside the point.  The point is, who has convinced the Democratic party faithful that they are the candidate for this race.  Obama. 

    Has he done it in an overwhelming manner?  No.  Praise be to God we have two candidates with good qualifications.  In that case the method of choosing between them is just as it was when we were choosing among them, go to the voters and follow the process.

    In a political campaign the voters decide the outcome, not prior expectations or the hopes of any one constituency.  This primary season has had the most excitement and genuine campaigning I can recall since I became aware of politics at age 5. 


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • Ten Thousand Schools

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    29  87%  26%  5mph NNW  bar29.89 rises windchill25  Imbolc

                      Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Saw Scarlet Johanssen talking to a group of Minnesota students tonight.  She’s pushing Barrack.  The political firestorm that will sweep the nation tomorrow will have a brushfire here in the Minnesota caucuses.  It remains to be seen whether a strong youth turnout for primaries and caucuses will  translate into votes in November, but I find the youth surge a hopeful phenomenon.  Maybe we’re getting back to a situation where the politics of compassion, not compassionate conservatism, and the politics of economic justice, not unjust foreign policy will prevail.  It’s got my vote.

    The snow petered out, a dusting only after the vigor of the mid-morning.  Things did get freshened up.

    Watched an anime on the Science Fiction Channel.  Saw why Miyazaki is considered an anime god.  This stuff is much more slapdash, also has a slasher feel to it without the grace of the samurai or wu shu movies like Crouching Tiger. 

    I seem to find myself digging deeper and deeper into ancient China, especially the Warring States period when Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism plus many others–the Ten Thousand Schools–emerged.  It is also the time of the Qin unification and Qin Shi Huang Di fascinates me.  After the Qin the Han dynasty began and lasted for four hundred years or so, one of the first golden ages of China.  Later, the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties would, each in their own time and in their own way, count as golden ages, too.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television General Politics World History 📎and tagged

  • Obama and Huckabee

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    16  85%  26%  omph S  bar 30.07 falls windchill 16  Yuletide

                   Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

                             Iowa Caucus Night

    Oh, the political junkie in me is humming tonight.  Obama takes Iowa.  Huckabee takes Iowa.  Who knew all these folks wanted Iowa in the first place?  It would have been fun to be in Iowa tonight. 

    If you’ve never submitted yourself to the pleasures of an Iowa subcaucus evening, you haven’t lived politically.  The DFL here in Minnesota adopted the Iowa subcaucus process.  In three hotly contested elections I subcaucused in Minneapolis.  It’s sort of the political version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  How many gender neutral, pro-labor, anti-gun McCarthy voters are there?  If there are a few left over for a viable caucus, who can we cut a deal with to get  more for our issue?  It’s wild and if there are a lot of people it’s exciting.  Horse trading and dickering at a fast clip.

    It also makes tallying up winners an interesting process as Wolf Blitzer kept saying all evening.  In the end CNN counted the total of Iowa state delegates each candidate got, created percentages and called their winners.  The more sedate Iowa Republicans took straw votes and went home.  Much easier, but not nearly as much fun.

    What does this mean for the race as a whole?  Well, Hilary doesn’t look inevitable anymore.  Obama is far from having it locked it up, but, as a commentator on CNN said (not poor bewildered Wolf Blitzer), if he carries two predominantly white states, Iowa and New Hampshire, black voters will flock to him and quite possibly away from Hilary.  They won’t want to stand in the way of the first black president.  By February 5th, a quick time in politics, it may done since AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, GA, IL, MN, MO, NJ, NY, ND, OK, TN & UT primaries plus New Mexico, Idaho and Kansas Democratic primaries are on Tuesday, February 5th.

    That would mean the general election race would begin that night and last until November.  What does that mean for an election process usually compressed in the days following Labor Day?  Don’t know.  Anyhow, lots to keep us junkies up nights until then.


    📂This entry was posted in News of the Strange Politics 📎and tagged