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Monday, January 19, 2004
September Surprise
Okay, let's say that we have Osama bin Laden. Had him for months, stashed in a Motel 6 near the Bagram airport. The question is: when does Karl play the "captured bin Laden" card? Late July? That may be too early. Can't do August...Shrub will be clearing brush in Crawford and anyway no one rolls out a new product in August. October is too obvious...October Surprise and all that. I'm thinking mid-September. You heard it here first.
posted by Jerry Bowles
4:29 PM
MLK’s Legacy
I have been reading about the Reconstruction period in U.S. history, which recently received excellent treatment on PBS’s American Experience series. I was drawn to this period after robbing my mother’s bookshelf of a memoir by my mother’s grandmother’s first cousin, who lived from 1848 to 1931. Her story was published in 1928 and composed a personal history that was heavy on the antebellum period and the glorious sacrifices of the Lost Cause (she had a brother and many other relatives killed,) but in which Reconstruction gets short shrift, with a gloss-over mention of the local federal garrison, an explanation for why the slaves left (“they were, naturally, desirous of a change of scene”) and a wonderful anecdote about General Lee right after the war at what became the Greenbrier resort, escorting two young Northern officers across the ball room to meet stand-offish Southern belles.
I think my ancestor tried to ignore this period because it is so difficult and complex – unlike the war, which had a beginning and an end, and whatever the outcome, preserved a sense that for the most part, both sides were acting honorably and from a conviction that they were doing the right thing. Historians have rightly called Reconstruction the second Civil War, when the South and the Democratic Party eventually defeated the Radical wing of the Republican Party in their attempt to create universal male suffrage and empower black people of all states. In this war, the winning side was an alliance of people of property in both sections whose primary interests were – depending on your point of view – the suppression of black power or the establishment of a political system and a stability that would be good for the large landowners, the railroads and other businesses that saw the South as we see China and India today. (Racism in this period was not confined to the former Confederacy by the way. The first states to pass the kind of laws mandating racial segregation that eventually became known as the Jim Crow laws were Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky.)
Another theme common to both sections was the anathema to increased taxation, imposed on the South during Reconstruction to fund basic common purposes like the first public schools. For those interested in this period, a recommendation is Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
When Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the South and the Democratic Party began to part ways. The Republican Party, in fact, became the new Democratic Party, opposed to taxation and public spending, willing to ignore social injustice in order to promote “law and order,” and willing to use race-baiting to get elected. The Republican Party today is using many of the same tactics as the old Southern Democrats to stay in power, i.e. purging voter rolls (Katherine Harris in Florida), gerrymandering congressional districts (Texas and elsewhere), and cutting in a few visible exceptions to their overall racist practices (“see, y’all, we have a Booker T. Washington High School!”)
The success of Martin Luther King in empowering the black South to take back its rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments, as well as the realization by the white business interests that racism was bad for business, finally meant an end to Reconstruction. But are we entering a new period of quiescence like the post-Reconstruction period? Groom’s piece on school segregation would seem to indicate that we are. And while one cannot discount or diminish the peculiar and distinct nature of white-on-black racial discrimination, our new definition of racism cannot ignore the new victims of group injustice, whether they are Arab-Americans or gays and Lesbians. Who will be the next MLK and when will she or he emerge? And what will that person do to re-align the ruling party? Because importantly, the agents of change in the sixties were not from the minority party, but from the dominant Democrats. If there is a new Martin King, will there also be a new LBJ? (Evelyn Keyes)
posted by Jerry Bowles
1:30 PM
Some Thoughts on the Internet and Democracy
In January 2003, Howard Dean was an obscure former governor of a small New England state who frequently traveled alone to campaign stops because his organization couldn’t afford to send along an aide. One year later, on the day of the Iowa caucuses, Dean had raised $40 million from 280,000 contributors--more money than any other Democrat in history--and is the leading contender for the presidential nomination of his party.
Whether Dean wins or loses the presidency, or even gets the Democratic nomination, he has reinvented American politics. His campaign has proven that the Internet can transform presidential politics by providing inexpensive ways to raise money and organize grass-roots supporters while reducing the importance of television advertising and big-money contributors.
Dean’s Internet campaign, headed by Zephyr Teachout (Zephyr is a gal, by the way), incorporates a number of truly revolutionary ideas that allow Dean supporters to set up a campaign headquarters anywhere across America. The campaign’s main Web site, DeanforAmerica.com, lets Dean supporters print campaign posters, search for other Dean supporters in their area and organize real-world meetings. All of the other Democratic candidates, as well as President Bush, have now rushed to leverage the power and reach of the Internet to provide information and spin, to raise money, and to organize real-world meetings. Every campaign now provides tools online for people to organize themselves into potent political groups. Most of the candidates now keep a daily web log—or “blog”—to keep supporters up-to-the-minute.
The Dean Internet/politics revolution is real, but I fear for the future. There are many in the Washington political establishment—both Democrats and Republicans—who are anxious bring the Internet to heel. Too much in American politics depends on keeping citizens in the dark. As a result, the future of Internet democracy is far more uncertain and fragile than most citizens realize.
The real reasons most politicians (and traditional businessmen) fear the Internet is basic. Information is power. Knowing something that others don’t know has an economic value. Appointed officials shuffle back and forth between industry and government bringing with them the value of things they know (or contacts they have) that others don’t. Making it easy for citizens to find out what politicians did favors for which companies dilutes the value by making both the politicians and the companies more accountable. The Internet is antithetical to the style of crony capitalism preferred by the Washington establishment and now rendered cartoonish by Dick Cheney’s relationship with Halliburton.
Arrayed against the forces of control are the geeks and libertarians who built the Internet and the millions of ordinary citizens who have come to believe that the Internet can be an enormous force for genuine democracy—but only as long as no one owns or controls it. They want to make sure civil liberties aren't trampled in the push for greater security. They want privacy respected. And they want the media and the political conversation in general to be freed from the dominance of a small number of powerful groups and corporations. They are both Republicans and Democrats. Their views are best summarized in a statement of Internet principles issued by the Dean campaign.
The Internet has proven itself in the 2004 election to be a powerful tool for grassroots activism and genuine participatory democracy. Used properly, it could become the most important global medium for political news and analysis, fundraising, organizing and even direct balloting. But, that future is by no means assured. There are powerful forces that are seeking to harness the Internet in the same way that television, newspapers, and radio are now controlled by an ever decreasing number of stakeholders. Unless we are very, very vigilant the revolution that was not televised may be over before it gets an opportunity to blossom.
posted by Jerry Bowles
11:50 AM
Back with a vengeance… school segregation in the South
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national holiday. Wonder who’s going to be slipping in to the White House in business casual to put in a day‘s work? Stepford Child Condi has the perfect excuse… national security.
But while Condi plays poster girl for “I have a dream” a Harvard study by professor Gary Orfield finds that public schools in the US are becoming more racially segregated, and, not surprisingly, the highest rates of segregation are found in the New Republican South.
In King’s home state of Georgia, the study found that 37 percent of black students attend schools that are at least 90 percent “minority.” About 25 percent of Georgia’s black students attend schools that are “majority-white.”
Orfield’s data reveals a consistent drop in the number of black students attending public schools where at least half the enrollment is white, down from a peak of 45 percent in 1988 to 30 percent in 2001, which is roughly the same number as 1970, just two years after King was gunned down.
What better reason for our AADD leader to celebrate in Atlanta with a fund raiser. Morning in Amerika or mourning for America?
posted by Groom
1:53 AM
The NASCAR Dads
The New York Times has an interesting Jeff MacGregor story about NASCAR dads, who, it seems, have replaced "soccer moms" in pundit analyses of American electoral politics. Toward the end of the story (easy to miss if you read the first graphs and figure you know what the story will say) are the following paragraphs:
Political cynics on both sides of the aisle, the self-described "cognitive elite," are pretty sure they know what Nascar Dad, the caricature, wants. All Nascar dad wants is another beer, they'll tell you, and an Earnhardt in Victory Lane. Nascar dad wants a 56-inch plasma flat screen. Nascar dad wants to be left alone during the James Bond marathon. Nascar dad wants a brand new 4-by-4 crew cab pickup with a V-10 and the heavy-duty towing package and a 200 mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate. Nascar dad wants a happy hour booth at Hooters, and a double order of buffalo wings. Nascar dad wants another shot of Jim or Jack or Johnny, another week on disability, another satellite dish, another four-color neck tattoo of a showroom stock '68 GTO.
And that's true, as far as it goes. But Nascar dad wants some other stuff, too.
Nascar dad wants not to be talked down to. Nascar dad wants not to be told what he thinks. Nascar dad wants not to be pandered to by candidates or condescended to by operatives or deconstructed by eggheads and television's talking haircuts.
Nascar dad wants a political process, a president, a government, that make him feel the same galvanizing, heartbreaking pride he feels when he looks at his flag. Nascar dad wants to be moved, inspired, encouraged. Nascar dad wants to be put in touch with his better angels.
Nascar dad wants to know that all his hard work, all his effortful virtue and his diligent vigilance, all his ancient bravery and his bone-deep devotion, all his canny intelligence and his remarkable ingenuity, all his abiding love of country, and all the struggle in his living and his dying, is in service of something much greater than himself.
As I read this description, I think about my brother, who doesn't go in for NASCAR; he prefers hunting and fishing. He says he's a rock-solid Bush supporter. The question is how to convince him that Dubya's crusade for democracy is a shuck-and-jive cover for the cronies' ripping off the Republic. Any ideas?
posted by John
12:41 AM
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