Letters to the Editor
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An inconvenient truth
So Barack Obama has told the painful truth? Maybe not a good move at the primaries and one with which John McCain is going to pick up and run with come an Obama-McCain contest after November.
Hillary Clinton knows the truth and probably believes the truth : however she's experienced enough not to say what Obama said, especially not in the heartland. If she is the Democrat's candidate, Obama's truth is going to return to haunt her as well.
At this end of the globe, we are watching the US primaries with intense interest, having just disposed of Bush's best lil Antipodean buddy.
And our own "rubes, retros and racists" were John Howard's "battlers", driven by the same visceral, simplistic and emotion-laden perceptions as Obama has bluntly but correctly identified. A limited social welfare system protects Australia's "battlers" from some of the more acute effects of untramelled capitalism eperienced in the US, but in the end Howard was defeated because his proposed draconian workplace laws were going to hit those "battlers" directly and personally.
Obama's remarks describe a situation common to some extent in all Western democracies, no matter how enlightened and progressive they may be, and however small the number of the disgruntled.
Conservative parties are naturally going to reach out to this constituency, and owe their existence to them more so than to any of the moneyed patrician elites of popular imaginings. Progressive parties therefore need to identify, uncover and address the underlying drivers of this constituency of the disgruntled - and these drivers are always economic and social.
When you live in an environment of uncertainty and change which you do not understand, and your governments cannot or will not either deliver economic security and universal basic services, truthfully say why things are happening, or eschew scapegoating, then gods, guns, gullibility and gut-feelings become your refuge.
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Aussiedame
Thanks for an overseas perspective. We were in Australia last year and were delighted to encounter anti-war sentiments there and the anger toward your government. He is gone now and so will Bush.
Can you come and vote in Pennsylvania next week?
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Greater New England, Greater South, Greater Everybody Else
A while ago, I compared a map of the 2008 Democratic primary outcomes (including the likely outcomes for states that haven't voted yet) with the map of linguistic regions in David Hackett Fischer's book - and thought the parallels were striking. So this article is a nice affirmation for my own personal amateur hypotheses.
But by equating Barack Obama's support with Greater New England, I think you're overlooking something: Those parts of the west where neither New England/Nordic nor Southern/Mexican settlers predominated.
Insofar as Obama belongs to any regional American culture, he belongs to his mother's Kansas - in other words, to a state settled by Methodists from the Mid-Atlantic States. And Obama's success in predominately white states extends beyond Greater New England to the central Great Plain and Rocky Mountain states.
Political parties based in Greater New England tend to be minority parties - fine. But political parties based in Greater New England AND the (north) west? (i.e. Essentially that combination made the Republican Party the majority party from the end of the Civil War until the New Deal.) Allowing that Barack Obama can't compete with John McCain in the South and might have trouble competing with him among urban blue collar white people, is it impossible to imagine him succeeding in those western "red states" where McCain was crushed not only Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but even (in Montana and Nevada) by Ron Paul?
A Democratic Party that constantly relies on candidates from the South to snatch one or two swing states from the Republicans doesn't look like something that could ever attain the status of a real majority party. And a strategy that requires the Democratic Party to nominate candidates from one particular regional culture is unfair to everybody else in the country. (Anyway, as the quasi-Southern Al Gore showed, nominating Southerners isn't even a guarantee of success.) Maybe it's better to take a risk on broadly redrawing the geographical/political lines of the United States, instead of simply making 2008 the eleventh round of "Woo the South".
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Question for the group: Am I an elitist?
Grew up in a mid-sized town in Tennessee. Always dreamed about going out to see the world. Got admitted to a good school. Dad said he couldn't afford to pay tuition. I applied for and received a four-year Army ROTC scholarship. Realized about 3 years into the program that I was a lesbian, and that if they found out I could be kicked out of the program *and* forced to repay my scholarship. I knew neither I nor my family could afford that, so I kept silent the best I could.
Served in the Army for four years after graduation as a PATRIOT Air Defense Artillery officer in Germany and also a stint in Kuwait. Towards the end of my tour, I picked up a book on how to take the LSAT. Studied at home, took the LSAT, ended up doing pretty well on it. Got admitted to an Ivy League law school. Clerked on a federal appellate court, got a decent law job in DC.
So, does it make me elitist that I got into an Ivy League school, regardless of where I came from? Or does the lesbian thing automatically make me a latte-sipping East Coast liberal? I'm just curious what the criteria are. Does it have to do more with income, or with education level? Is pretty much everyone who graduates from an Ivy League school a presumed elitist? Is that how it works?
By the way, ShawnM, you said, "I don't know a single person that isn't black or an urban liberal white young guy that supports him." Now you know of at least one.
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Shawn
It was those with experience that got us into this mess. Cheney,Bush,Powell,Condi,Breemer,Wolfowitz and Rove on the Rep/conservative side and H Clinton and the democratic congress on the liberal side.
When Clinton cast her vote and found out Bush had lied,why didn't she filibuster and fight for a timetable to bring our troops home.
Mrs. Clinton is just a Rep in disquise. The other night she said that Gore and Kerry lost because they were defined by the Republicans as liberal elitist. That is the biggest lie!
Being coined an elitist was not the reason Gore or Kerry are not President today. Scalia and the Supreme Court stole one election and voter fraud stole the other.
All the people Att. Gonzalez fired were investigating voter fraud in states like MO,AZ and OH. So all the talk about the right wing smearing Obama is just that talk.
With the Dems in controll they would be able to stop the voter fraud and Obama can beat McCain in the general. For those who keep saying he needs white voters, please catch a clue. Obama raised 90 million dollars in two months, do you really think that it came from thousands of middle class black people. LOL!
Those online donations were from working class of all races including working class white males and females.
If the Shawns and Michael Linds of the world would stop trying to play the race card Obama would win in a landslide.