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September 9 -- Every day I've been thinking a lot about the presidential election, and I want to do everything I can to think clearly, to be smart, and to communicate to others exactly what's important, what's at stake, and why it's important to do everything possible to ensure the election of Barack Obama as our next president -- first and foremost, to end eight years of Republican misrule, characterized by George W. Bush's lying and taking the country into an unnecessary, unprovoked, and mismanaged war in Iraq, which has not only failed to bring to justice the perpetrators of 9/11 (Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda) but has alienated our allies and emptied the substantial federal budget surplus into the pockets of the war machine (aka business partners of Dick Cheney). The domestic consequences have been terrible. As Obama said in
his acceptance speech in Denver: Eight is enough!
Right now, the electorate is all wrapped up in tabloid-mentality fixation on Sarah Palin, John McCain's off-the-wall choice for running mate. It only takes two minutes of thinking to realize that someone who's been governor of Alaska (one of our least-populated states) for 18 months and before that major of a small town (pop. 7000) is completely unqualified to take over in case of the president's death or disability, which is the primary job of vice president. End of story.
The media is being tricked into focusing on Palin's colorful
personality (she is the Spice Girl to provide contrast to
McCain, who's about as exciting to see and hear as a bowl of
leftover mashed potatoes), and we're being lured by the media into an obsessive fixation on her. This is exactly what Karl Rove and
Steve Schmidt, his protege who is running McCain's campaign, want to happen, in order to distract the American public from considering what a weak candidate McCain really is.
Let's keep our eyes on the prize.
As Richard C. Hoffnung wrote in a letter to the editor of the Financial Times, "the Republicans' chances of winning depend not only on appealing to people who refuse to accept scientific reality, but on persuading the voters to believe in a whole series of other incredible propositions. These include not only the Orwellian role reversals of "elitist" Barack Obama from Chicago's black ghetto and John McCain, the "man of the people" who cannot remember how many properties he owns, but also the ideas that the US can continue to dominate the rest of the world through military power, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the US economy, that even more tax cuts for the rich and rape of the environment by large oil companies will solve the problems of the US's vanishing middle class, that the best way to heal its social and racial divisions is to hand out more guns and deport more immigrants, and that we can stand up for freedom by tapping more phones and building more Guantánamo prisons."
Some things I gleaned from reading The New Yorker (an excellent source of reputable reporting) this week:
Ariel Levy's excellent profile of Cindy McCain notes that her personal fortune is worth $100 million and that she owns ten homes. So there are deep pockets supporting McCain's campaign. The article also reminds me that in 1983 McCain voted against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. And it reminds me that McCain was involved personally and financially with Charles Keating, Jr., the disgraced chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. McCain accepted more than $100,000 in contributions from Keating, and his wife (with her father) invested in a shopping mall that Keating was constructing. This is important insofar as the savings and loan scandal was one of the hugest pieces of corporate welfare given out in the 1980s, and McCain was on the wrong side of it.
Levy's profile is a slyly nasty evisceration. Sample: "Cindy’s profile on the McCain campaign Web site begins with the sentence “Cindy Hensley McCain has dedicated her life to improving the lives of those less fortunate both in the United States and around the world.” Charity work, as she put it in a video posted on her daughter Meghan’s campaign blog, “is inspirational to me and it does absolutely invigorate me and keep me going.” The
two to three weeks a year that she spends on her missions [emphasis added by me] are, she says, her best times: “I think I’m happiest when I’m out in the field working and being a part of what I can do to make the world a better place.”
Other gleanings from the New Yorker this week: Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention was written by a former Bush White House speechwriter before McCain had chosen his running mate -- it would have been delivered by whomever McCain chose and was adapted at the last minute for Palin to deliver.
Henrik Hertzberg's lead editorial says of McCain's convention speech: "His retelling of his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam was powerful, and the lesson he drew from it—that it caused him “to learn the limits of my selfish independence”—was the very opposite of Republican boilerplate. But its backward-looking orientation—at one point, McCain described where he was when he learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—underlined his age and, with it, the recklessness of the most important decision he has made as a candidate."
A Talk of the Town piece
by Ryan Lizza details the opposition to Palin voiced by Lyda Green, the 69-year-old Republican president of the Alaska state senate.
Among other things, Green says Palin is not qualified to be
governor, let alone President or Vice President, and that she
turned every policy disagreement into a personal
vendetta.
It's of a piece with the letter you might have seen circulated by Anne Kilkenny, a voter registrar and housewhife who observed Palin up close on the Wasilla city council in the 1990s.
New York magazine also has an interesting
cover story this week on McCain and Obama's campaign managers,
Steve Schmidt and David Axelrod, and how they're pitching their candidates. Schmidt, whose nickname is The Bullet, is trained by Rove to come up with the most alluring lies, such as "McCain puts the country first, Obama puts Obama first."
All I can say is, I hope I have the intelligence to keep spotting talking points when I see them and expose them to people who are inclined to swallow them whole.
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