Letters to the Editor
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So Why Can't We Have a President Who Doesn't Fake Blue Collar Credentials?
Personally, I want a president who is comfortable with a lot of different kinds of people, who has broad experiences not because they make him a better human being(though they might) but because they equip him to deal with many circumstances; who has practiced using analytical skills in the policy arena; who has practiced using language to convey subtle ideas across a range of subject matter; who has experienced real-life cross-cultural challenges, and who is deeply compassionate. If that person was someone who lives in a blue-collar area of Pennsylvania or anywhere else, who worked in a factory, that would be fine. But I wouldn't vote for the blue collar guy because he could throw back a beer and a shot or talk with a local accent. I wouldn't be measuring him constantly to make sure he didn't say anything that would reveal he "isn't one of us" anymore. If I lived in a Catholic blue-collar area, I wouldn't expect a person from a Protestant blue collar area to know the catechism. I wouldn't expect a blue collar candidate from Massachusetts to suddenly support the Steelers. I would even expect a Carnegie-Mellon graduate with parents who'd worked making steel to make use of his education on their behalf, maybe even to use fancy language, not to just come home and try to prove he's still just "one of us."
I'd want someone who actually could do something at the top for those who were losing out, not someone who was just as stuck as the rest of us.
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Obama Was Right
I grew up in the Midwest. Not entirely working class, but in small and medium sized cities, like Evansville, Indiana. And people in those small and medium sized towns are bitter, and narrow-minded, and often cling to religion because Jesus will settle all your scores and give you what you always deserved "someday". Sit in a church on a Sunday and listen to stories about the "End Times" and you don't have to read too far between the verses to basically see the book of Revelations as a Working Class Revenge Fantasy where at the end of the World the trucker and his chubby wife who have kept the faith get to sit on thrones of gold as all the people that pissed them off (Homosexuals, Hollywood Types, Rock Stars, the Banker down the street) burn in a lake of fire.
There is nothing "Elitist" about pointing that out. It is the naked, bald truth that no one wants to talk about (that maybe 60% of our country is hopelessly backwards and has a world view more suited to 1908 than 2008).
Personally I resent the notion that Obama or any Democratic candidate has to reach out to those people on their terms. The Democrats simply cannot out pander the Republican Party when it comes to "god, gays, and guns". Even if a candidate could does anyone want to vote for her? What good is a Democratic President who governs like a moderate Republican?
A Democrat Candidate can win by making the case that -- regardless of social class or education or demographic -- the economy is falling apart, the Iraq War is going nowhere, and the United States simply cannot persist as a First World country much longer if it continues down the road laid out by the Bush Administration. Those are the issues the Democrats can win on, because they transcend the bitterness of the working class.
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Why is it that...
when the "elites" "liberals" "city-dwellers" or whatever criticize the ill-informed voting patterns of the parts of the country that gave us 8 years of hell under George Bush and 8 years of hell under Reagan, we are shaouted down by the media, denounced by politicians, and hauled through the mud? Why is it unfashionable to be educated, metropolitan, and worldly? I'm sorry, but yes, it's true - uneducated rural people have to be "extra-convinced" to vote for a black man... any little mistake and it's over for him with the "rubes" as you put it? What does this tell you? I am so sick and tired of this I'd like to have a beer with him politics bull that my head just wants to explode. If the "gods, guns, and gays" crowd is so smart, then why are we in the situation we find ourselves in now? Please answer that for me.
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In The Tank for Firestorms
Could all American political pundits agree to desist from using the word "firestorm", as long as the American military is involved in wars of aggression where actual, physical firestorms, in the first definition, are in danger of being caused: "A storm in which violent winds are drawn into the column of hot air rising over a severely bombed area."
Another 50 dead in Iraq today from a car bomb -- no word from Lind, Traister or Walsh (they were busy, you understand, surveying their friends on how badly Obama and his bots had blown things) on whether an actual firestorm ensued -- and the "progressive" American web site Salon.com wants to discuss the "firestorm" caused by Obama pulling an H.L. Mencken and ostensibly offending the cow states by observing how the policies of the same political party that continues to wage an illegal war in Iraq has turned much of middle America into the third world, and commenting on the ways an understandably bitter populace might seek to console itself.
Also, let's stop using "in the tank." It sounds nice and colloquial and distinctively American. Let's call it what it really is: betraying your ideals by becoming too closely aligned with a given personality so that one no longer scrutinizes critically with reason but defends unequivocally with passion.
I don't mind that Lind and Traister write such breathless faux sociological cultural critiques. I mind that I have to read them here. Joan Walsh betrayed her ideals and has no integrity. That's what being "in the tank" is and there hasn't been any question that Walsh has been in the tank for Clinton for several weeks. As long as Salon continues with her at the helm, the web site operates without integrity, without any ideals beyond Walsh's corruption. I don't mean corruption in the sense of theft, but in the sense of destruction. Joan Walsh is destroying Salon, even as she builds its readership.
What you read in the letters is a firestorm caused by Walsh's tankdom.