Anyone not hear about the Reverend Wright this week? I don’t see any hands (except my own, on the keyboard, of course). This campaign is beyond inane – too insipid to even qualify as absurd. Does anyone really, really, really care about what Barack Obama’s former preacher thinks? Is Wright running for president? Is anyone taking a microscope to the sermons and unrelated public statements of any other politician’s spiritual mentors, friends, associates, neighbors, etc.? Has anyone, for instance, taken a close look at Franklin Graham, who offered prayer at Bush’s inauguration and lectured us all on being squeamish about the use of nuclear weapons? No controversy there. And if Obama’s time on a board with Bill Ayers is fair game, why not Hillary’s time on the board of Wal-Mart? After all, Bill Ayers just talked about demolishing things – Wal-Mart has demolished hundreds of small town shopping districts and driven virtual slave labor in the countries that produce the garbage they sell. Is that all good?

Sure enough, the reason you hear about Obama’s associations so much is because the Clintons want to return to the presidency, and they want it very badly. So badly, in fact, that they’re willing to throw the rest of us under the bus to get themselves there. If they really cared about the relative well-being of working people, they would stop investing so much energy in attacks against their fellow party members. (Not that Democrats are huge champions of the proletariat – just better, generally speaking, than the Republicans.) The Clintons claim that they are only confronting Obama with the kinds of salvos that the Republicans will proffer in the fall, but that is a pretty hollow contention. If their aim – like that of the party as a whole, it appears – is to shut the G.O.P. out of the White House this time around, they shouldn’t be ripping other Dems a third corn chute. Campaigning vigorously doesn’t mean making Democratic victory impossible, should things fail to go precisely your way… but the tactics they’re using threaten to damage both candidates and polarize the party in a way that will discourage turnout no matter who wins the primaries.

Then there’s just plain garden-variety demagoguery, like Clinton’s adoption of McCain’s harebrained gas tax holiday scheme. I expect this kind of idiocy from someone like McCain (pictured here in front of an American flag, by pure coincidence). Clinton’s take on it is a bit more ludicrous, because she is playing it as a working man vs. Big Oil issue – i.e. we’re going to make the oil companies pay the tax all summer, via a windfall profits tax. My ass. Anyone who thinks that that piece of legislation would pass through congress and be signed into law by Mr. 28 Percent before the annual weekend at Myrtle Beach is seriously on crack. Far more likely is that the tax would be dropped and then never added back again (lest Congress members, facing election, be accused of “raising taxes”). I haven’t heard this mentioned more than maybe once since this issue was raised, but the gas tax is a feeble attempt at addressing the actual cost of our car-based economy, with the revenue going to maintaining and repairing highways and bridges. This infrastructure is falling apart now, even with the revenue – without it, the neglect will be considerably worse. And with oil prices steadily climbing, the slight price reduction at the pump will disappear in a matter of weeks, particularly with the summer driving season kicking in.

Long story short, this is all about getting people elected, not making things better. No surprises there.

luv u,

jp

Well, the Clintons won Pennsylvania by nearly ten points, so I guess all that slamming, sliming, and race-baiting was well worth it. Or sort of, anyway… since it’s still hard to see how Hillary can walk away with this nomination short of spontaneous combustion on Obama’s part. No matter – the race continues. In a year when a Democrat should certainly walk to victory in November, the party is inventing a way to lose against a pretty lame candidate on the G.O.P. side. Start with two parts ambition – the kind the Clintons pursue at the cost of all they claim to believe in. Certainly, I’ve never been a fan of theirs, but I would dislike them a whole lot less if they simply stuck to articulating their positions, outlining policy differences with their opponent in a civil fashion, and refrain from all the exaggerated accusations about sixties radicals, anti-American (Marine veteran) preachers, and out of context remarks worthy of Sean Hannity or Matt Drudge.

Are the Clintons crypto-Republicans? I’ve always suspected so, but it hardly matters. They’re just serving their own interests and those of the corporations they represent. The same may be said, to varying degrees, of the other two major candidates. All this hot air about elitism, Bill Ayers, flag pins, and Black Liberation Theology is just the usual business. It happens every national election cycle – the divide and conquer strategy kicks into high gear. As long as the elites in the political class and corporate America (and they are all true elites in the economic sense) can manage to separate us into fractional and mutually antagonistic groups, the power wielded by the wealthy in this country will never be diminished. Working class people – and by this term I mean office workers, truck drivers, field hands, the unemployed, retired folks… everybody who’s not rich – are the supermajority in the United States. That’s why the business of elections is to distract and divide us.

This is a principle as old as organized society. The beast must be kept in its cage. That is why the political culture minimizes or excoriates the mass movements of the 1960s and ’70s – because people were participating in our democracy and involving themselves in policy matters to a degree elites found distressing, prompting them to fret over a growing “crisis of democracy” – the crisis being that the “d” word had any meaning to it at all. It’s the reason why anytime pop culture looks at the civil rights movement, for instance, they focus on Martin King and his “I have a dream” speech, not the thousands and thousands of people who risked their lives alongside him to bring about change. No, the wealthy have no desire to see a return to that level of participatory democracy. Perhaps they understand better than we do how much they rely upon a supine working class to create value in the businesses they own, to purchase the products and services they profit from, to serve their needs in every imaginable way, and so on.

Without workers, riches have no meaning. Think of that next time Charlie Gibson talks about flag pins.

luv u,

jp

Did you see the “debate” on ABC last night? In case you thought there was some slim chance the issues might get at least a cursory hearing, you will have been severely disappointed. This is turning out to be the first 100% issue-free election season, stuffed with infantile claims, charges, and counter-charges that would shame an elementary school contest. An astounding 45 minutes was spent at the outset on 3 points of earth-shattering concern to every American:

1. Do Barack Obama’s recent comments mean he’s an “elitist”?

2. Do Reverend Wright, William Ayers, and Louis Farrakhan speak for Obama?

3. Does the fact that Obama doesn’t always wear a little 59-cent flag lapel pin mean that he hates America?

I’m not sure who put in a more despicable performance last night – the amazingly smug Hillary Clinton or the so-called “moderators”, Charlie Gibson and George Snuffleupagus. First question – why the fuck is something as central as a presidential debate left in the hands of a corporate television network, which has no scruple about serving this up as entertainment content? For chrissake, the lead-in graphic promoted this debate as a “One-On-One” between the two candidates, like it was a boxing match. Who was their consultant on this, Don King? (This was like “The Thrilla in Manila” part two.) More than a debate, it was just a continuation of the obsessiveness that’s been carrying the day elsewhere on the networks and in other media, though apparently not so much in the lives of ordinary Americans (who, bizarrely, are still concerned with a crumbling economy, an endless war, soaring energy prices, and a government that obviously doesn’t care a damn about them).

These events should be hosted by some neutral institution, with questions that reflect people’s actual concerns, not the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. Instead, we have Gibson and Snuffleupagus acting as the arbiters of political virtue and personal propriety, asking Obama at one point if he feels that Reverend Wright is “as patriotic” as Obama is; declaring the flag pin “controversy” as somehow relevant because it is “all over the Internet,” and so on. I don’t know quite what the standard should be for determining debate questions, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t include suggestions from the like of Sean Hannity, who can’t even be bothered to look into the William Ayers comments before opening his festering yap (i.e., Hannity excoriated Ayers for making comments about Weather Underground bombings on 9/11 “of all days”, when it hardly takes a genius to work out that his comments were printed in the New York Times on 9/11/2001 and made a long time before that date). That’s ABC’s research department: FoxNews.

Full disclosure: I’m not a huge fan of Obama, though out of the three choices, he is marginally better. But this method for electing leaders is ludicrous. This is why we get presidents who suck so badly.

luv u,

jp