• Tag Archives Nixon

  • Michele, My Belle

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                         Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    My representative.  Michele, my belle, Bachmann.  Even the very low tide of American political consciousness that washes up on our civic beach heads these days has the collective will to turn back Michele.  My instincts have been wrong before, but I cannot imagine an American election where a person with the ideological baggage Michele has wins.  I think the election in recent memory that seems similar is McGovern-Nixon in 1972.  That time, I was a member of the analog to the Tea Party, the anti-war movement, New Left wing of the Democratic Party.

    Nixon was not a popular president, but he was lucky.  He ended the Vietnam War and opened a way to China.  The economy was ok, too.  McGovern’s nomination felt like a real victory for the American left.  Finally, a banner carrier in the race.

    Oops.  Forgot.  The American electorate votes centrist politics, perhaps center-right a bit.  Think Bill Clinton or Gerald Ford, even George Bush in his first race.  Michele’s power right now comes from her energized base, a cohesive and well-funded movement on the far right of even her own party, the Republican.  To win a national election she has to widen her base beyond the Tea-Party and Libertarian right and I don’t see that happening.

    Here’s a cynical thought I’ve had lately, though.  You know the gaffes that keep on coming?  Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire.  Congratulating Elvis on his birthday which turned out to be the date he died.  And most recently her admonishment to watch out for the rise of the Soviet Union.

    What if these are a carefully orchestrated attempt to separate her from the “elites”, that is, most of you who read this blog, the college-educated upper middle class and upper class folks who run most of the countries businesses and institutions.  And the reporters, artists, intellectuals and political operatives of the left like union organizers and community organizers.

    Here’s how I imagine it goes.  Michelle makes a gaffe.  The elite delights in running articles proving how stupid and unaware she is.  Just like the Bushisms and now Perryisms.  The result is that those Americans who wouldn’t know how to answer the questions either–general knowledge is at an all time low in America–have  a moment of fellow feeling with one of their own, a victim of the elite’s petty insistence on knowing everything.  This fellow feeling gives her a wide margin of error with those folks,  in fact a presumptive imprimatur.

    We need to debate her on the substance of her proposals and their impact on middle and working class families, not sit on our degrees and howl with laughter at the rube, my representative, Michele, my belle.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • Inaugration Day. Bright, Sunny. Cold

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter

    Waning Wolf Moon

    The day has begun well.  Sunshine comes from a sky with cirrus clouds, a nice break after the cloudy weather.

    Today Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States.  After our discussion last night at the Woollies, I realize I do run on a different political path than most.  The politics I care most about happen because citizens, folks like you and me, make them happen: neighborhood economic development, movement toward single payer health plans and initiatives that promote a sustainable human presence on mother earth.

    The players in Washington create the atomsphere in which local politics occur.  That is, a president like George Bush can make federal level policy and bureaucratic administration so obstructive that local politics become shoring up of dikes, attempts to stave off catastrophe in poor communities or in rivers and streams, woodlands and lakes.  In the best case a president like Obama can make local politics the art of adapting federal level initiatives to particular places, particular situations while continuing the local political level work that has no federal equivalent.

    Whether Obama can turn the great ship US Bureaucracy and Law very far from its collision course with the natural world remains to be seen.  Presidents don’t matter much to me unless, as in George W. Bush’s case and Ronald Reagan’s, they ignore science, shove aside the poor and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t matter.   Yes, they entangle us in wars and produce fiscal policy that either mainline’s greed or provides reasonable checks and balances, and, yes, these matters are of crucial importance to certain people in certain situations; but my day to day reality, the politics of economic justice and the politics of sound ecology, must go forward no matter what the national government does.

    So, I hope Obama will prove helpful in some way, but I’m not counting on it.  We still have to push the Clean Car initiatives and Mining without Harm.  Programs to help folks get back to work have to get money from somewhere.  Affordable housing has to get built.

    In my youth I believed, along with many of my contemporaries, that a mass movement could push the federal government into stopping a war, creating a just economic society and dismantling racial barriers.  Now I understand that it is much more important to keep on working at the local level, doing those things that are necessary to  move what can be moved.  Why?  Because anticipating the federal government will, with a single whoosh, solve a problem is like imagining Daddy can come and solve everyone of your problems.  Can Dad help?  Sure.  But only if you’re ready and able to receive help.  That’s the local politics.  And it goes on whether Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton is in office, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter, and, yes, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics Weather +Climate 📎and tagged