Latenight: Repurposing a song

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what keeps me going in this election season.  My house is a mess, my car desperately needs to be cleaned and every waking minute I am immersed in a giant game not of my making.  I see the players clearly in a vast landscape and recognize the butterflies that ripple the air and cause the players to adjust their next moves.  It’s a monkey on my back.  I need to unwind.

So, I’m headed to Joe’s.  That’s where the smell cool air meets metal barstools at a long gleaming bar.  Joe threw the smokers out years ago so the atmosphere is clear.  My friends and I find a small table in the shadows and release the stick ramroded into our spines.  There has to be release.

There is a new band on the small stage tonight.  A singer with sweet lips and soulful eyes and a song about looking for a life saver.  I’ve heard this song before.  It was a long time ago and when I heard it, I was just a young adult and it was already old.  Someone played it for me and got the desired response.  And it has been my song ever since, the song that I have carried with me since my coming of age, always a cerain beat and a strum, lurking in the back of my mind, as I walked along roads of my own.

But tonight, I hear a new meaning in the song.  Because all my life, there was also a little blue pilot flame that burned.  I knew it was always there but I didn’t know for what purpose.  And then, suddenly, this year, that little blue pilot uncurled into a long flickering tongue of flame.  It took me a long time to find my destination and I’m no longer just playing to keep myself amused.  We are here to take hands and lead each other through the absurdity of this year’s rabbit hole and pull us through.  We will pull through.

Set’em up, Joe.  I’m here with my friends and it doesn’t get any better than this.

Delegate Account #1: We the Sheeple

This account is number one of a series that we hope to bring you with the help of Michele Thomas of 300 Delegates.  These are first hand accounts of what happened in the lead up and during the Democratic National Convention in 2008.  We hope to present new ones right up to the eve of the election.

Note to the media:  Here was a real story for you.  What happened during the convention should go down in history as one of the most infamous abuses of the primary voting system.  But we in the blogosphere have heard precious little media coverage of the story.  In an election year when the Democrats had everything going for them, the reason for their inevitable loss isn’t the fault of Hillary’s dogged refusal to leave the race, nor the entry of Sarah Palin, though both of those two events, both entirely reasonable, were contributing factors.  The primary reason why Barack Obama is going to lose is because he burned his bridges during the primary caucuses and during the largest caucus of all- the convention.  The media should be aware that these are not the days of falling trees, forests and no ears.  In the era of the Internet, the ability to get the truth out has a much lower threshhold barrier.  First hand accounts are always the most valuable.  When the narrative of the first hand account clashes with consensus reality, it is the consensus reality that starts to break down.  The media becomes progressively less trustworthy.  Hey, it’s your livelihood, not ours. We do this for free. Just sayin’.

Without further ado, here is the first hand account of sbc, a delegate from Portland, Oregon:

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Thoughts on the Denver Sham(e) by We the Sheeple

I was SO looking forward to this Convention.  Staying in a hotel w/ Arizona and Washington, my two former home states, I knew many of their delegates and wanted to reconnect.  Many of us were Wes Clark delegates and recalled how welcome we felt by the Kerry/Edwards people in Boston in 2004.

But there was this strange undertone when talking to some fellow delegates.  A furrowed brow or quizzical look.  “Hillary lost.  Don’t you ‘get’ it?”  I was repeatedly asked when I was going to “let go” or “get in line.”  After being berated on the streets of Denver for wearing my HRC T-shirt on Saturday, I was loaded for bear.  Don’t tell me how Obama is better than McCain.  My DOG is better than McCain!

Tell me what is it about Obama that is supposed to impress me.  His health care plan that leaves 15 million people still uninsured?  How’s he going to pay for it?  Rolling back my tax break?  That’s going to pay the $60 billion plus health care price tag?  Well, we really don’t know if it’s $60 or $70 billion.  His policy peeps can’ t seem to come up with a figure.  Or will that be covered by the AMT redo?  Or will THAT money go to shoring up Social Security?   Or infrastructure?  Or cancer research?  You know – his mother died of breast cancer while fighting those dastardly insurance companies.  (Will the trite People Magazine personal anecdotes never cease!)

Or is it his strong stand on filibustering any legislation that let telco’s off the hook for illegal wiretaps that inspired you?  Is that what he stands for?  Oh wait.  His FISA vote?  Did he do that while scratching his head and asking “What’s a filibuster?”

And he’s going to reform our broken educational system with what?  Vouchers?  Or even MORE faith based initiatives than Bush dreamed of – to the tune of $500 million a year?  Why not!  Obama’s Chicago Trinity United Church of Christ already pocketed $1.5 million in such programs.  And did anybody take note of the fact that Obama’s “community organizing” was done thru a church group?  This gets creepier by the talking point.

I guess I couldn’t recite Sen. Clinton’s policies chapter and verse either.  But I knew her RECORD.  She actually HAD a record.  What we thought we knew of Obama’s record seems tossed aside for the sake of political expediency.  Gun control?  Death penalty?  Um…where does he stand today?  Thursday?  How about next Thursday?  Please – someone tell me?

So here we are.  Once again adrift and bereft of any substantive leadership in the Democratic Party.

As a delegate, I kinda knew the “roll call” was going to be theater of the absurd.  I just didn’t think it would be that absurd.  The thing that broke my heart?  The text message from my sister who lives in NJ.  We were never a politically active family.  We were god-fearing daughters of a staunch Republican father but voting was never a required activity.  I convinced her it was important in 2004.  She’s a nurse.  She has three (gorgeous) kids.  She’s seen health care at its worst and deals with it everyday.

Last February, she bundled up her 3 year-old daughter and her 1 year old twin sons and put them in the stroller for the short walk to the courthouse to vote.  The Baby Girl (she does have a name but we call her the Baby Girl) proudly wore her Hillary t-shirt and her “I Can Be President” button and the polling place workers let her keep the button on.  My sister was thrilled that NJ came down on the right side of history in her primary.  My mother, an 80 year-old Japanese woman who was always proud of her country when she became a naturalized  US citizen, thought she would be able to see a woman become president in her lifetime.  When Gov. Corzine cast their 127 delegate vote for Barack Obama in Denver, my sister furiously sent a text: WTF!  My vote doesn’t count?

How am I supposed to defend a system that’s broken?  What civics lesson do I teach the Baby Girl the next time we walk past the courthouse where she went with her mom and her brothers to vote?  The courthouse is white.  The Baby Girl thinks THAT’S the White House and that’s where Hillary lives.  Do I tell her that there are still men out there who will try to hold her back, who will call her names and will tell her that she is “less than?”  Do I explain she will have to fight harder than ever because we couldn’t get it done?

I am all outta love with the hope ‘n change mantra.  Give me facts.  Give me substance.  Tell me how he’s going to get troops out of Iraq.  Immediately or after listening to the ground commanders?  And if the ground commanders say “don’t blink,” will he listen to them or get new commanders?  And can he PLEASE come up with a REAL stimulus package?  One that actually stimulates the economy.  Not one that send checks out so that people can pay off their credit card debt.  A jobs growth program that can carry us into the next decade, taking into consideration a truly global economy and an undeniable manufacturing dilemma?  And what about a small business plan?  THAT would show true initiative when it comes to women since women start small businesses at twice the rate of the weaker sex.  An actual PLAN, please, hold the rhetoric.

This weekend, I’m headed to do some serious diving/sailing in Hawaii, where the messiah went to high school.  I’m sure there’ll be plenty of Obama swag at the airport and on street corners.  Maybe a left over Hillary nut-cracker or two.  I’ll swim with real sharks.  Not the poseurs we are now left with in this political hell hole.

Apparently, BHO has recently taken a stand on what IS off limits.  Palin’s daughter and sexist comments about Palin herself are off limits.  It’s a sham(e) that he couldn’t take such a bold stand when Chelsea was being “pimped out” or when Sen. Clinton was being told “iron my shirt.”  Or when Tucker Carlson said he crosses his legs whenever he hears Hillary’s voice or when Alex Castellanos called a fellow Democratic senator a “white bitch.”  The anointed leader of this progressive party sat and didn’t say a word.  That would have taken real leadership and true leadership sometimes means taking a principled yet unpopular stand.  What would he have lost?  The nomination?  No – but he might have gotten my vote.   sbc

NO WE WON’T: Michele Thomas and John Siegel

ACK!  I was so busy cleaning my fridge I forgot to post this.  Please join Sheri Tag tonight on NO WE WON’T as she discusses the delegate fiasco with Michele Thomas of 300 Delegates and John Siegel (the cowboy hat guy in the Audacity of Democracy trailer).  That’s tonight at 8:00PM EST (that’s like, NOW!!!) on PUR (PUMA United Radio).

Sunday: Patti Davis cries for MOMMY!

I want it and I want it NOW!!

Some days, the posts just write themselves.  Yesterday, Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, wrote a cringeworthy letter that was printed in Newsweek titled, What Hillary Should Say Now.  Oh, she was probably sincere when she wrote it but by the time I’m through critiquing this baby, she’s going to wish she had hit the unsend button.

First, let’s look at the subtitle.  “An Open Letter to an Almost Nominee”.  Well, there you go.  There’s the problem right there.  Before you get to the first sentence, you already know ahead of time that this writing exercise was pointless. Where does Patti get off telling an “Almost Nominee” to say anything?  She is an “Almost Nominee” because her own party hit her over the head with a blunt object.  The party made it extraordinarily clear in no uncertain terms that in spite of the fact that Obama and Hillary were virtually tied in pledged delegates, they were going to humiliate her and set the bar so high for her nomination that it would be unattainable for her. They wanted to strip her of any power and make her go away. They were quite open and nasty about it.   Fine.  She’s not the nominee.  But this isn’t a game of horseshoes.  She doesn’t “almost” count.

What Patti doesn’t seem to understand is that she already *has* a nominee.  His name is Barack Obama.  He’s not my choice.  He’s got glaring weaknesses.  Not only is he inexperienced but his inexperience has caused him to make some pretty stupid strategic errors.  Joseph Cannon found this comment on The Confluence by Janis and at the risk of sounding like an echo chamber I am reprinting it as summing up perfectly why Obama should have never been allowed to run this year:

…this preposterous charge, constantly repeated, that Hillary’s primary campaign was a total shambles, a complete disaster, and that Obama out maneuvered her with his “brilliant” scorched-earth attack campaign.

That attack campaign is what’s dooming him now, you stupid fucking Obots. There is a reason that primaries are historically softball — and must be. If you come out guns blazing in the primaries, you lose the general. More to the point, your party loses the general. A scorched-earth PRIMARY campaign leaves half the dead bodies on the field wearing your uniform.

Obama’s campaign was “brilliant?” Hillary “didn’t fight back hard enough?” Okay, let’s accept that. Obama fought like a cornered weasel against Hillary Clinton. Where does ti get him and his party now? The bots were always guilty of forgetting that there were two elections to be won. They sunk everything they had into the primary, and forgot about the general. Their candidate came out in full-on attack mode against his own party members, while playing softball with the other guys, expressing admiration for them, practically fellating Reagan’s dead body. Did he forget who wore what uniform? Did his brainless, koolaid-addled, foamy-mouthed followers?

Hillary’s campaign didn’t hit back hard because, if she had, she would have been in precisely the position that Obama’s in now … with the other side going after her gunz blazing, and half her own voters abandoning her. She lost, but there is a reason that primary campaigns are waged the way she waged them. Unfortunately, she was up against a stupid, out-of-control neophyte who decided that he was going to win the less important election at the cost of the most important one by deliberately immolating half his party.

Well, that’s the end of the critique.  It stopped at the subtitle.  You can read the rest for your amusement.  It’s full of the fearmongering trope about Roe v Wade.  Funny thing about Roe.  When I was looking through the ActBlue pages yesterday of all of the candidates, I found precious few that even mentioned reproductive rights on their sites.  According to Gloria Allred and Patti Davis and Gloria Steinem, Roe is THE issue.  It is life and death itself.  And yet, you’d never know it from the Democratic candidate’s websites as a whole.  Not only is Roe not mentioned but there is no mention of contraceptives either.  It almost looks as if some Democratic consultant gave these candidates a list of issues to push and told them to take reproductive rights off in case it annoyed the evangelicals who they were hoping to court.  Those are the very same voters that McCain got back when he nominated Sarah Palin.  So, it looks like a couple of months ago when the websites were developed, Roe *wasn’t* the be all and end all of the campaign.  It has suddenly become important because the wimmin aren’t coming home and now the Republicans that the Obama campaign was hoping to replace us with are gone as well.

But that’s OK.  Mommy Hillary will come and save all those stupid women who flocked to Obama in droves, mesmerized by his hope and change, bedazzled by their entry into the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Models with PhDs in Architecture Club. Back then, it was soooo much more important to be transcendent and to feel superior to all of the rest of the ignorant hicks in the Democratic base.  It was taken for granted that, as the young bright things they are, we would immediately sacrifice all that we hold dear in order to make them happy.  These lovely Veruca Salt’s wanted it and didn’t think about their rights enough to fight for them when the Obama campaign was quietly erasing them from websites.  It’s only now that another woman poses a threat that they want mommy to rescue them after they sass mouthed and disrespected her.

Too late now.  Obama is the one you’ve got.  There’s nothing Hillary can do to change it.  It’s his battle to fight.  The DNC invested HIM as its champion.  Hillary has done everything she could at this point.  She doesn’t have the power to do more because she is NOT the nominee.   Almost doesn’t count.  She’s entitled to work for the downticket Dems now who will be left holding the bag.

But No, a mother’s job is never done.  Patti wants her to rescue Obama from his mistakes, pick up after his messes, cover up for his bad behavior so he can get ahead without really trying.  It’s Mommy’s fault if he fails.

Really, Patti, you’re 55 years old.  Grow up already.

More good stuff to read:

• Anglachel and Willi Brown admire Palin’s playfulness if not her politics.  Yep, the Dems royally screwed themselves with women.
• The Centrality of Character in Political Leadership by Heidi Li.