Progressivism Gone Awry? Direct Election of the Senate

July 6, 2009, 1:07PM


Section. 3.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html




AMENDMENT XVII

Passed by Congress May 13, 1912. Ratified April 8, 1913.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html



Two Republican Senators from Wisconsin : One elected by the State Legislature, one by the people directly.  Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I Rest my Case.

Whoops.

I'm informed that I have to make my case before I can rest it.  So here goes.

First let me make myself clear.  I am not advocating the repeal of the 17th Amendment, though there have been calls for that from the intellectual right and the left.  In fact, the top cluster on Clusty (anyone use Clusty besides me?) was "repeal".  Rather what I'm arguing is that the direct election of senators, another centerpiece of Progressive Reform, was less than successful.  How should success be measured?  One way would be to compare Senators of both eras by standards of responsiveness to national needs, integrity, and authoring legislation producing lasting public good.  One would be hard pressed to defend the superiority of either the class of Senators elected prior to the passage of the of the 17th Amendment or post it.  The Wisconsin legislature produced Robert M. Lafollete.  The people of Wisconsin produced Joseph R. McCarthy. 

It would be hard to argue that the "Most Exclusive Club" isn't overbalanced with fairly mediocre members most of the time. So here's a little test.  How many Senators in the current Congress can you name without peeking?  (Back 15 minutes later after taking my own little test, I came up with 33, including two whose names I'm spelling dubiously, and a 34th I can only remember by L-I'm obviously repressing him, he's one of those Carolina guys who gets ten times the airtime he deserves to pontificate on foreign policy).  If I get the name off the tip of my tongue I'll come back and fill in his name.  Give me another half hour I'd probably come up with two or three more, as well as a couple who are dead, or really Governors or in the House.  And I'm a political junky.  My point, such as it is, is that I would remember more if they did anything bad enough or good enough or even funny enough to make remembering them worth the brain cell space.

So if neither system produced universally savant Solons, why care?  I'd suggest that while the 17th amendment was supposed to take the Senate out of the hands of the "interests" and place it in the hands of the local people, what it did was nationalize the election by paving the way for the kind of campaigns we now have, largely funded by out-state money and more expensive every cycle.  It is far easier for big Pharma or Big Insurance or Big anything to purchase the requisite number of votes to weaken, sidetrack, or kill legislation.  At most, one would have to buy 100, but that's hardly necessary-five or ten does nicely.

Though I have no proof, I suspect it would cost national interests significantly more to purchase the legislatures of a simular number of states, and once the states had made their choices, the bought legislators would owe primary allegiance to the state political machine and not to the national corporation.

But wouldn't it be better to modify the system to reduce corporate influence entirely, or if not entirely, at least to an absolute minimum.  McCain Feingold could be strengthened, but it looks as if the Conservative Judicial Activists are more likely to gut it next term.  

What would be your dream solution.  Here's mine: utterly impractical, but being a dream practicality doesn't figure into it.

  1. Accept the meme that Wall Street is trumpeting these days: that bloated compensation is necessary to attract and keep the best talent. 
  2. Then raise the salary of senators to the mean compensation of the CEOs of the Fortune 500. 
  3. Then require incumbents to finance their campaigns entirely from their own pockets.
  4. And finally, provide public financing for challengers to incumbency, with a fairly low bar for qualifying.  Challengers would be allowed to raise funds from their supporters to augment the public financing, but there would be ceilings set for campaign spending, with challengers allowed a bonus to erase some of the competitive edge of incumbency.  Only one's first election would require anyone to recruit contributors, and no contributor could rely on his/her candidate taking orders from the office, as the trough would be off limits after that first campaign.

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Progressivism Gone Awry? Initiative, Referendum, and Recall

July 1, 2009, 9:29PM

"Direct Democracy" has a noble sound to it.  Its instruments, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall, were introduced by Progressives about a century ago, and they were introduced for noble reasons.  The idea was to take politics out of smoke-filled rooms and into the streets, where regular people could act on their own behalf, rather than rely on pols controlled by the "trusts".   Did this work?  How long? And if it no longer works as its advocates intended, what if anything can be done about it?  This entry might be a little shorter than I usually post, and filled with links to provide the major support for its thesis: If these reforms worked at all, they worked for a very short time, and in the last thirty years they've become a danger to liberal social interests.



Hiram W. Johnson of California was the father of I.R.R.

    A voter Initiative is a piece of legislation proposed by any citizen that is circulated through a petition phase to qualify for the ballot. If it receives a statutory minimum number of valid signatures it qualifies for the ballot and is then voted for by the electorate. Twenty-four US States allow statewide initiatives.

    The referendum is a petition from citizens to seek an election to put legislation that has passed the executive and legislature up to a vote of the citizenry. The referendum provides a form of citizen veto for legislation. Sometimes even the referendum causes politicians to reverse course of legislation. In California the referendum process was used to qualify a referendum on SB60, a piece of legislation that would have extended drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. The legislature quickly responded by repealing the unpopular legislation instead of defending it in a spring election the following year.

    Perhaps amongst the most controversial form of popular democracy is the recall. The recall is a process by which the people seek to remove a elected official from office. While it is commonly used in some municipalities, it has only been used successfully against a Governor twice, against Lynn Frazier in 1921 and against California Governor Gray Davis in 2003. The exact details of state recall statutes vary, but it is amongst the least popular of the three different forms of direct democracy. Only 18 states allow for the recall of state officials.
    Extempprep.org, Initiative, Referendum, Recall: Direct Democracy
    
Chiefly, Initiative and Referendum have been used to impose limits on state or local governments to raise taxes, or in some cases to require them to be lowered-without reference to services state and local governments traditionally supply.  While this sort of thing actually began in the 1920s, the big push came following 1975.  California's Proposition 13 is probably the most famous of these, and as California is preparing to write IOUs as the budget deadlock there continues, it continues to wreak havoc.  East Coasters are probably as familiar with Proposition 2.5, by which Massachusetts citizens imposed limits on their towns and cities to tax property.  It also lowered the excise tax on automobiles-the more expensive the auto the more the tax savings.  Similar limits on the ability to tax have been adopted by initiative in other jurisdictions.  Massachusetts' local governments were sustained by state contributions to local budgets-but this year and in other tough times the State's contributions have been reduced, leaving localities between rocks and a hard places. 

The promise of lower taxes is almost irresistible, and methinks that public officials have done a terrible job correlating benefits and costs.  We know there is no free lunch, but if the menu were placed before us in a bit more attractively we might order the plat du jour a little more enthusiastically.   As it is, the menu is rigged against the public by a number of practices never dreamed of by Governor Johnson:

  1. No one anticipated the use of professional signature grabbers being paid to acquire the minimum number of signatures to get a question on the ballot.  The number of signatures varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but in no jurisdiction is it so large to make the costs prohibitive to the deep pockets crowd.
  2. There is no requirement that persons soliciting signatures tell the truth about the issue for which they're working.
  3. The funds public officials have available to fight an initiative or referendum are severely limited or non-existent.  While the money folk can not only hire firms to conduct the campaign, they can also use their own employees.  In most jurisdictions public servants are forbidden to work against these campaigns.
  4. I probably don't have to remind anyone here of Proposition Eight out in California.  Democracy has two objectives: majority will and minority rights.  "Direct Democracy" is singularly unsuccessful in protecting those.   The record is pretty dismal across the country, as this publication on rejection of Same Sex Marriage from the University of Southern California's Initiative and Reform Institute shows.  There are a lot of interesting materials for political junkies at that website.

As far as recall goes, I think I need to point no further than the Gray Davis recall in 2003.    There is a certain poetic justice as The Gubernator faces his own budget crisis.  Oh California What Hast Thou Wrought?



Could it get worse?  Yep, it could.  The Supreme Court has delayed ruling on a case which could gut McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation.  We could be in a situation where Corporate "Personhood" strikes again, and wonder of wonders, there's a group all ready to take "Direct Democracy" national.  The group's name?  The Direct Democracy Center.  There is no list of persons responsible for this travesty, of course.  If the Supreme Court does its worst, contributors to Political Action Committees may have enhanced anonymity.  But among the persons these anonymities consider worth watching are Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck, David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham and Patrick J. Buchanan.  Patrick J?  Is he putting on airs?  Just a little sample of their rhetoric and I'll close:

    Just remember one thing: The Obama phenomenon and the economic crisis are brewing the perfect storm, in which a magnificent obsession collides with a malignant deception that -- if we let it -- could unleash more social, political and economic devastation upon us than we can handle.  Unfortunately, a reckoning may be what is needed for an American Awakening.

So what's the answer?  Anyone have one?  My own thinking is that the true Direct Democracy follows the Community Organizing Model: We organize, and DIRECTLY force our representatives to represent us, or, hey, there are other pols we can tempt to take their places.
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Progressivism Gone Awry? The Price of Ballot Secrecy.

June 30, 2009, 12:55PM





    There was no right to a secret ballot; having been sworn in, the voter simply called out his choices to the election clerks who sit on the porch behind the judge tallying the vote. Each clerk has a pollbook in which he writes the voter's name and records his votes; multiple pollbooks were a common defense against clerical error. There are several people in the painting holding paper tickets in their hands. We know that these were not paper ballots because Missouri continued to use voice voting until 1863. In a general election, however, many voters might have wanted to bring their own notes to the polling place.

    Douglas W. Jones, An Illustrated History of Voting

So that's how it was done in our bucolic, raucous past.  I've always like the pictures of George Caleb Bingham, and I have had an especial fondness for this picture of a county election in Missouri.  There's no sanctity of the voting booth here-but there's a different kind of sanctity: the sanctity of a transparent public arena.  John Q. Voter declares his vote to the whole world, (well, a little corner of it anyhow), his Justice neighbor swears him in, and his neighbors the clerks record his vote next to his name.  Chaos surrounds, politicking on the steps, enticements to vote one way or vote the other, and plenty of tipple to celebrate democracy.

Voices for reform of this system arose in the gilded age and eventually paper ballots, provided at the polling place and marked in private, were to replace the system Bingham painted.  The reformers saw this as a way to avoid "corruption" in the forms of bribery or threats and intimidation by citizens of influence and power in the community.  The anonymity of the voter was secured, and by the Roaring Twenties the paper ballot was nearly universal, whether of the partisan kind (tickets for one party only) or the ever more popular Australian kind, where all candidates for office appeared on the same ballot.

The progressive "reform" was to mend the infrastructure of the democratic system.  But did it? And if not, why?  I think a pretty good argument can be made that gains by the reform were pretty much balanced by significant losses: privacy was gained; but the price paid was anonymity, and with the introduction of anonymity the voter loses the ability to verify his/her vote was indeed counted and counted as the voter intended.  Believing in the sanctity of my ballot becomes an act of faith on my part.



One doesn't have to go all the way back to the days of Nast and the Tweed Ring to see the problems the secret ballot and its machine variants has caused.  And how are your chads hanging these days?


 
    Chad, n. pl. [var. of CHAFF or perh. Scot. small gravel?] 1. the circular pieces of paper punched out by a paper-tape punch, as used with a teletype machine: PUNCHINGS, CHAFF, CONFETTI. 2. the pieces of cardstock punched out by a keypunch, as used with punched-card data processing: CHIPS. 3. any waste produced by a paper punch. 4. the punchings produced by a Votomatic voting device, when used with pre-scored machine readable punched-card ballots.

    Douglas W. Jones, Chad Page

Can any Floridian say of a certainty that his/her ballot was counted?  Can any Floridian, confused by the butterfly ballot, be assured that he/she had her vote counted as intended?  Can we ascribe the roots of the Bush election in 2000 to the ballot reform measures of a century before?  Deibold??? Touch screen voting machines-even with a paper trail, cannot verify that the individual votes were cast as individual voters intended.  

I feel for Al Franken, and I want him in Washington A.S.A.P., if not sooner.  I also feel for those Minnesotans who voted in good faith and have no way of knowing individually whether their ballot was contested and/or counted.  This seems to be a pretty high price to pay for voting booth privacy.  I'm wondering, too, if every scandal of this particular sort doesn't discourage persons from exercising their civic duty.  When so many votes literally don't count, and there's no way to determine which votes are in that category, persons might just figure they might as well stay home.

Is voting booth privacy an issue which concerns a significant number of Americans?  I don't know.  I gather that there isn't overwhelming reluctance to indicate their votes in exit polls, or even to appear on television to tell the nation how their votes were cast.  But this has its own problems.  If the finally tally is different from the statistical predictions made on the basis of exit polling, and the pollsters do their business well, take an adequate sample, how is this to be interpreted.  Voters lied?  Perhaps.  Votes were miscounted?  Perhaps.  Deliberately?  Perhaps
.

Polls Close in 1910... Contest for District Attorney's Post Continues

By Roger M. Grace

Looking back, historians tend to ask a fairly standard set of questions.  Did the action achieve what it was supposed to achieve?  If not, were other alternatives available which could have been applied instead?  If neither, are their repercussion of that action to this day?  If so, is there a remedy or is the action so embedded culturally that it impossible to change.

I'm on vacation so I'll leave these questions for you to answer...I'd love to see what you folks think about this.  Would you be willing to give up a degree of privacy regarding your electoral decisions in return for an iron-clad method guaranteeing that your vote had been recorded as you intended, and offering you legal recourse if that wasn't the case?  If the secret ballot went awry, how can it be returned to alignment with democratic principles?        
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Progressivism Gone Awry? A few speculations.

June 29, 2009, 2:29PM



I've told you how I got rich by honest graft. Now, let me tell you that most politicians who are accused of robbin' the city get rich the same way.  They didn't steal a dollar from the city treasury. They just seen their opportunities and took them. That is why, when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin' to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don't find them.  The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that's never goin' to hurt Tammany with the people. Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn't isn't likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend. Why shouldn't X do the same in public life?

Senator George Plunkitt,  "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft"  (1905)

When anyone bothers to ask, I identify myself as a "liberal" or "liberal democrat" or "left of center".  If I thought most people would understand the phrase, I'd probably call myself a "Social Democrat".  Over the past few years as persons of my ilk (more or less) have resurrected the use of Progressive as a descriptor, I've been uncomfortable adopting the title for myself, for reasons which are perhaps a little clearer now than they were before-I have more time for navel gazing in the summer.  Part of the reason was a reluctance to allow "liberal" to be turned into a dirty word.  We've not completely recovered from the Republican's attempt to do that to "intellectual".  I've refused to take cover behind a synonym bush, so far.  

Let me make sure that I don't allow myself to be labeled "reactionary" because I don't use "progressive" as a self-reference.  Looking back at the Progressive Movement-(giving it about a generation, more or less, from 1880 to World War I,)-- I'd be most comfortable in the company of the Social Progressives-everyone from literary figures like Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser to journalists like Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett - to William James and John Dewey who would both be aghast that pragmatism has received something of a bad name in "progressive" circles today.  The list is not endless, but it could take up a number of additional paragraphs-Jane Addams and the women who came close to inventing the profession of social worker, Walter Rauschenbusch, Liberal Baptist (there were/are such types) and author of A Theology for the Social Gospel and Washington Gladden, to name just a few more. 

I have deep respect for a number of Politicians associated with populism and progressivism, among them William Jennings Bryan, and Robert LaFollette.  Poor William deserves better of us than ridicule for all that monkey business in Tennessee.  Fighting Bob was a Republican, along with Lincoln one of the few I can usually find something nice to say about.  

But the Progressives of the last century who give me pause are those who focused their Progressive energies on "Reforming the System".  The "goo-goos" as they were called-the good government reform guys.  Together, they instituted four types of political change which remain with us today, and we generally accept each as a "good thing"-after all the changes are historic, the history books generally applaud them and their sponsors.  Yet the years since 2000 have led me to wonder-to scratch my hairy chin (it itches anyway) and wonder whether the specific reforms achieved much of anything-and whether or not in some instances the old bugaboo, "unforseen consequences," may have, in the long run, negated some of the short term benefits.  When I release in mere bytes, (drum roll, please), I'm quite sure most are going to think I've gone around the bend.  And I'm absolving myself from imagining the tinker which would fix each of the problems I'm going to diagnose.  But anyhow...the four reforms which may have gone awry are
1.    The secret or Australian Ballot
2.    The Direct Election of Senators
3.    Direct Democracy (Initiative, Referendum, and Recall)
4.    Zoning by use and related planning tools.

Looks like four more parts coming up, doesn't it?  I guess I'll take them in the order above, which happens to be the chronological order as well.


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Yet ANOTHER Health Care public service announcement.

June 28, 2009, 6:59PM

I'm really beginning to see this as an example of a new technique of governing...  I've written a bit about my (limited) understanding of how Community Organizers work, and I've speculated that Obama might be trying to craft a new technique--working as an "outsider" from the "inside".  A couple of weeks ago I got the e-mail from The President to which Vice President Biden refers.  At the time, I thought of it with my "yeah, yeah, right!" brain.  But here it comes--the book of stories collected by that effort, together with a request that I give this the widest distribution possible.  So here it goes to you, for consideration to send it off to your mailing lists.  It has already been passed on to mine.

Thankee, 

Amike


Michael --

A few weeks ago, President Obama asked you to share your personal story about how the health care crisis has affected you and the ones you love. Hundreds of thousands of stories poured in from every corner of the country. The President and I have read through many of them ourselves -- and now I'm encouraging you to do so as well.

Read these powerful, personal stories from people in your area and around the country.

Read these powerful stories
And after you do, please forward this note on to as many people as you can.

For folks who don't yet understand why health care reform is such an urgent priority, these stories make the case far better than any statistics ever could.

For those who support health care reform but haven't yet found the time to join our campaign, these stories provide more motivation than any speech any politician could ever give.

So please read these stories, pass this note on to everyone in your address book, and help us show everyone in America why fixing our broken health care system is a necessity that just can't wait:

http://healthcare.barackobama.com/stories

Thank you,

Vice President Joe Biden
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A Tale of Three Fathers and Seven Sons

June 25, 2009, 12:13PM

This entry is provoked (that's a good word) by two of the most disturbing Father's Day news stories I heard this week.  Marshall, Landon, Bolton, and Blake were left by their father in the care of their mother over Father's Day.  He was off to Argentina on business of his own.  Nathaniel was beaten by his father on Father's Day-beaten so badly that the decision whether to take him off life support rests in a Judge's hands today.  A court gave his father custody of Nathaniel for the summer.  He was repeatedly abused and beaten the four weeks before the ultimate injury which left him brain dead.  Mike (me) and Steve (my little brother) are doing just fine at 68 and 64 respectively, though their father passed away ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday, more than 30 years ago.

How lucky we were, the two of us.   How different Richard was from Mark or Leslie.  Richard was not powerful and didn't seek power.  He had a high school diploma and learned a bit about repairing radios by taking a correspondence course.  He wasn't one who needed a fuss made over him.  I suppose he got his share of pretty awful ties on Father's Day, though that was not as big a deal in the forties and fifties as it is now.  I'm sure there were times the whole family simply overlooked it.  There was no recognition in Church similar to Mother's Day, when Mothers stood up embarrassedly while the Preacher gushed over their virtues, and no one got a boutonniere for Father's Day (living dad, red, dead dad, white) as they did on Mother's Day.

My dad never "governed" anything.  He wasn't on the church board.  He was an usher-passing out bulletins and greeting people.  At other times, he sang in the choir.  All of us were singers.  I suspect he could have become church chairman if he wanted to...everyone liked him.  But perhaps one of the reasons everyone liked him was that he could care less about the chairmanship.

My dad was a placid man, at peace with himself-or so he seemed on the outside.  Mom was not the easiest person in the world to live with.  He loved her, and us, and cared for us, and sheltered us, and lived to sixty-five.  She passed 6 days before her 100th birthday.  No doubt there were times when I deserved a bit of correction.  I got one spanking-just one.  I stole a package of Blackjack Gum from the corner grocery store one block from our house.  Do they even make Blackjack Gum any more.  Mr. C.B. Johnson-everyone called him CeeBee, was a member of the family Church.  He had eyes in the back of his head, and walked the short block to my home to inform the father of his son's malefactions.  Mom it was who insisted on the spanking-she was terribly embarrassed.  So I was marched down to the basement, laid over my father's knee, and given three swats-pants down, underpants up.  I remember my dad saying that the spanking hurt him more than it hurt me.  In this case, I believe that was true. 

Dad was the most ordinary of men, which makes him a superman, of course.  He dressed up in a bathrobe and put a lampshade on his head to tell us bedtime stories as King Hezekiah.  The stories were his own-about two goldfish, Sammy and Susie.  Later, he embarrassed me yearly at the annual basketball game and the high school faculty.  Fifteen year olds are really good at blushing, and when dad's uniform shorts fell down revealing a pair of boxers with huge red hearts on them, the people in the bleachers howled with laughter.  I just howled.  But if he had refused to play the fool one year, I would have been as disappointed as everyone else would have been

Dad taught my brother how to be a super dad himself, and he taught me how to be a pretty darn good uncle.  Gay males of my generation weren't in a position to adopt-but I've had about 6,000 "children" in my university teaching career...and I see a lot of my father in the way I've treated them.  (I've yet to spank any, but then I don't have any who have stolen Blackjack Gum from C. B. Johnson).

So while we rail or gloat at Mr. Family Values of South Carolina, depending on our temperaments, and while we stand aghast at what Nathaniel's father did, and how an agency charged with protecting children from domestic violence failed him utterly, maybe we can count our blessings for our absolutely ordinary absolutely wonderful fathers-the majority of us who were so blessed.  Belated Happy Father's Day.

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My Letter of Complaint to the Management: it Worked!

June 25, 2009, 9:36AM

I just fired this off to TPM via the e-mail address at the top.

Greetings, to whomever gets this: I wrote yesterday about two spam posts--advertisements in the form of advertisements.  They remained up all day.  Nothing was done.Today I sign on and There are Fourteen of them:  12 related to mortgages and one to refinancing automobiles and one to survey software.  This means fourteen reader posts have been scrolled off the front page.   If you want to kill reader blogging, all you need to do is do nothing.  I for one will not post again until these leeches are expunged.  Except, perhaps, to post my discontent at TPM inaction in this matter.


I'm now off to post this to management blogs as a comment.  I don't often get my dander up...but it's up now.


UPDATE:  They're GONE!  Yea!  Cheer!  Hat in the Air, and Thank you, kind TPM managers, editors, and the like.

 My dander is back down.  Now if I only had as much control over my dandruff  (sigh).
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I'm trying

June 24, 2009, 12:53PM

Some of my friends think I'm Really trying, but generally they forgive me, shaking their heads ans saying that's just his crazy way. 

I got another health care e-mail.  This time from Bold Progressives for their "We want the Public Option" campaign.  They're collecting names for commercial they plan to run 100 times in Washington.  I'm not betting on the ad capturing the Senate's attention directly, but maybe if the news media picks up the story of the advert running 100 times on small contributions and gives it some coverage, maybe the slower ones will see we're really serious about this.

Anyhow, you might want to add your name through the link above.  If you catch the advert--maybe you'll see someone from R.I. named Mike, and that just might be me.


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ANOTHER Public Service Announcement

June 22, 2009, 8:07PM

I just received this e-mail from Democracy for America signed by Dr. Howard Dean, and I'm betting many of you did as well.  This is the kind of community pressure to which I referred in my previous post.  I've already signed, and I've forwarded the letter to everyone on my political e-mail list.  And I've asked them to send it forward to ten more.  Howard is asking for 10,000 more signatures by Thursday.  Let's surprise him with 100,000 more.


Michael -

Even while Republicans fight tooth and nail against allowing Americans the choice of a universally available public healthcare option; the American people continue to show overwhelming support -- 8 out of 10 Americans in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

But for-profit insurance companies and HMO's are working hard to strip it from any upcoming healthcare bill. They don't want Americans to have a choice because they know they'll have to lower costs and provide better care. They will stop at nothing to kill real reform and there are a lot of Senators in Congress looking for ways to help them.

Republicans have insurance companies on their side. We have the American people on ours. Now that we have the momentum for real reform, we need to make it clear we won't accept anything less than a strong public option.

We're at 350,000 signatures as of this morning. How many more can we get before I present the signatures this Thursday in Washington D.C.? Please add your name right now or -- if you have already signed -- forward this message to a friend, family member or likeminded co-worker and ask them to join you.

www.StandwithDrDean.com/LastChance

We can guarantee healthcare for all if we give every American the freedom to choose between keeping their private insurance - if they have any - and a universally available public healthcare option like Medicare. A public option is the only way to guarantee healthcare for all Americans and its inclusion in any healthcare reform bill passed this year is non-negotiable.

Our friends in the Congressional Progressive Caucus have stood strong and united, insisting they will vote against any legislation without the choice of a public option. They are working hard to beat back pressure in the House to "compromise" for right-wing special interests. Now's the time to make it clear we back members of the Progressive Caucus up. First we led the way, now we'll have their backs.

But for the rest of Congress, they still need to decide. Do they stand with the 76% of the American people who want the choice of a public health insurance option? Or are they working for the health insurance industry that will deny Americans the choice of a public health insurance option?

They will decide. We will hold them accountable.

Let's see if we can get another 10,000 signatures this week before I present them Thursday morning at the Capital.

ADD YOUR NAME NOW THEN PASS IT ON

Working together, we will get healthcare for all Americans. Thank you for everything you do to make it happen.

-Howard


If the link doesn't work with this cut and paste job, here it is:


http://www.standwithdrdean.com/LastChance

p.s.  Dr. Dean was a little pessimistic.  Since the letter was sent, the number of signatures has passed 367,000.

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Parsing the President V: It's all about Community

June 22, 2009, 3:13PM

    The Chicago Tribune greeted the publication of "Rules for Radicals" with a lead editorial headlined "ALINSKY'S AT IT AGAIN" and concluded:

              "Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky's amusement."

    To which Alinsky responded: "The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at. What bugs them most about me is that unlike humorless radicals, I have a hell of a good time doing what I'm doing."
The Progress Report, Interview with Saul Alinsky.



I want to thank those who have borne with me to the bitter end as I've explored President Obama's rhetoric over the past four postings.  Number five concludes it all, as I can count better on one hand than two, and besides, the world and TPM have moved on to more important things like the green revolution in Iraq, Universal Health Care, and whether or not Ma'am Boxer was overbounding her steps in asking a General to call her Senator.  

My thesis throughout is pretty simple.
  • Obama's life history as a bridge between communities (racial, ethnic, religious, philosophical) in conflict, plus
  • a big picture view of history as the story of either communities interacting for the common good or in conflict to their detriment led him to
  • Law, and especially constitutional law, as a field which uses language precisely in a matter which clarifies the causes of conflict and through that clarification allows mediation and negotiation to lead to resolution, making
  • Community Organizing properly understood a natural field of interest for him.

It is the nature of Community Organizers to reform a political system from outside, as the quotation with which I opened this essay makes abundantly clear.   A Community Organizer is not like a Small Town Mayor, Governor Palin.  Community Oganizers are "in your face" types to mayors of towns of all sizes-including Mayor Giuliani.  They don't dismiss Community organizers- they dislike and fear them.  This is true for "professional" politicians regardless of party, though the Democrats may be a wee bit more subtle about this than Republicans are.  How many Democrats in office rose to the defense of Project Acorn?  How many hunkered down and waited for the ruckus to blow over?

I hope you read the entire interview with Alinsky-which first appeared in Playboy, of all places.  It will place community organizing on the landscape of politics in the position it belongs.  If you can stomach it, you might read some of the rabid right's comments on him-the web is rife with this.  I'm not going to provide a link for this, but Saul Alinsky Grooming N*gg*rs for War at Podblanc (no link for that, either. Google it if you have a strong stomach) is typical.  I will provide a link to The Southern Poverty Law Center's Report on Craig Cobb, the evil genius behind Podblanc.  

Sorry for the digression. 

It might be better to call Community Organizing Community Building, because a populations sense of community may not exist before the Organizer's activities begin.  The story of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council is enlightening.  Watch the Video at the link and read the history.

 
 

The photo tells the tale-St. Rose of Lima meets the Polish Falcons, the St. Cyril Girl Scouts, and who knows who else to put a little fire under the aldermen and mayor of Chicago (Richard J.'s Chicago?  Don't know, the picture isn't dated-but some Democrat or other's Chicago).  Alinsky and his philosophy stopped these groups from fighting each other and start fighting a common enemy, their own political powerlessness.

What I think is interesting and audacious about Barack Obama is that he's trying to create a hybrid model:- governing as an insider with the tools of an outsider.  This is a new model-it may or may not work, but we don't really understand it as well as we need to.  Obama has very little direct power over Congress-much less than we think he has.  We can thank that partly on James Madison who designed a Constitution complex enough so government  wouldn't do very much and what it did do it wouldn't do very fast.  We can also thank the nefarious deed which defined corporations as persons-I'll write about that sometime, perhaps, if there are some who don't know the story.  We can also thank those who wrote a limitation to Presidential terms in office while scrupulously avoiding term limits for themselves.  I wrote elsewhere that there are many Democrats just waiting for the Obama Effect to blow over-hopefully in only one term-but certainly in two.  Maybe they're secretly in the majority, who knows?  But as long as 90 per cent of congressional seats are secure and big money runs the campaigns, Democrats and Republicans alike can thumb their noses at the President and make nice sounds while frustrating him at every turn.

The President has one tool-the majority he organized to first win the nomination and then the election.  His tactic-get everyone to the table and bludgeon them with us.  We push them through him.  But we have to do the heavy lifting.  That's how it works.  That's how it worked for King in Birmingham. And we take what we can get at the first round and go right back to get more.  "Why after all the turmoil did you settle for three clerks in downtown Birmingham?"  "Three clerks?  We mean three clerks in every store." The idea of a window of opportunity which will close forever is not really a vision compatible with the way community organizers work.

If he's going to move Congress, he's going to move them through us, and we're going to have to make not nice, loud, and often.   But can he hold us together and keep us organized?  Aye, there's the rub.  I suspect it wasn't easy to keep St. Rose of Lima and the Polish Falcons on the same page.  But I think it will be harder for him to keep us coherent enough to provide pressure.  

I look at the advice Obama gets through the pages of TPM.  Robert Reich says drop everything and focus on health care, because that's the most important.  For someone else-trying Bush and and his cronies for war crimes is most important...drop everything else and focus on that.  No-closing Guantanamo is the most important...focus on that.  Hey, what about unemployment?  That's most important.  No, solving the Palestine Conflict is most important, attack that first- and so it goes.  And when he devotes attention to most important number seventy-three everyone else pounds on him except those for whom number seventy-three is numero uno.  

And what's true at TPM is not less true elsewhere.  Obama says (rightly, I think) that we should not let the Iran Regime cast the current protest as an American issue.  So of course near unanimous votes in both Houses of Congress ignore the President's wishes and play into the hands of the Supreme Council and the Theocrats.  There is a greater Obama Effect in Teheran than there is on Capitol Hill.

Imagine a world where an endorsement from Obama of Universal Health Care with a public provider option for all evoked letters to Senators and Congressmen from thirty million Americans-less than half of those who voted for him, and far less than the numbers polls indicate would favor such a plan.  Aside from ridding the Post Office of debt, don't you think Congress might pay some attention?  Suppose five per cent of those voting for Obama happened to drop by the local office of their Senator or Congressman-just happened to do it on the same day.  I have a feeling there would be some powerful speeches in support of Public Health Care.  Or same scenario for global warming, or regulation of the banking system?  I have a feeling congress would work a little harder and a little more efficiently.

That's not a world I live in-yet.  So maybe I ought to look for 1%:  that would still be 694,000 persons wielding their influence on day to day issues they thought were important.  How many mail trucks would it take to carry 694,000 letters to capitol hill?

Thankee for reading, as always.  See you again if I think of anything to say about anything.


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The Parsing of the President IV: The Letter of the Law.

June 18, 2009, 3:52PM

    For of all the questions on which our philosophers argue, there is none which it is more important thoroughly to understand than this, that man is born for justice, and that law and equity are not a mere establishment of opinion, but an institution of nature.

    Cicero, On the Laws.

    By the first of these laws, man as he was enabled so withal is commanded to love his neighbor as himself. Upon this ground stands all the Model of Christian Charity precepts of the moral law, which concerns our dealings with men. To  apply this to the works of mercy, this law requires two things. First, that every man afford his help to another in every want or distress.

    Secondly, that he perform this out of the same affection which makes him careful of his own goods, according to the words of our Savior (from Matthew 7:12),  whatsoever ye would that men should do to you.

    John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity

    The law, being an inherited accumulation, imposes itself on each generation willy-nilly. Any society whose members enter and leave it severally must for very convenience, to say nothing of deeper reasons, proceed by tradition; the neophyte must adopt existing habits and ways of acting, if for no better reason, through inexperience and diffidence. Mere custom will do the rest as he proceeds. And so the rule is canonized, its origins, and therefore its meaning, are ignored. But genuine learning is quite different.

    Learned Hand, Justice Holmes at 85, at http://commonlaw.com

Let me quickly disavow any attempt to paint Barack Obama a Strict Constructionist by the subtitle for today's effort:  or to paint him any other kind of constructionist for that matter.  Previously I've tried to find insight into Obama's rhetoric in his personal history and allegiance to many groups, and in his understanding of the nature of history.  Today, I'm exploring his legal training and professional experience as a Professor of Constitutional Law rather than a practicing Attorney.  Tall as I am, I'm out of my depth here, and counting on DickDay to set me straight when my speculations go awry.

My institution has a small law school attached, but the contact between Law Faculty and the rest of us is fairly limited.  I know something of how Law Students are taught, and the adjunct institutions (like the moot court and the Law Review) which augment learning in the classroom and library.  But the nuts and bolts of legal education-is it anything like portrayed in The Paper Chase?  I don't know, is it?.  

To the extent that Obama went to Law School and served as a Legislator, his experience is not very different from many persons drawn into politics.  So If I'm to look for specific ways his experience shapes his rhetoric (and, or course, his thinking), I probably have to look to his tenure as President of the Harvard Law Review and his tenure as Professor of Constitutional Law for any possible insights.

When I started assembling materials for this entry, I wasn't exactly sure what the President of a Law Review did.  I have a slightly better idea now.  Michael Levenson and Jonathan Saltzman of the Boston Globe interviewed classmates at Harvard during the runup to the Presidential Campaign.  They described him as "an even hander:" rather than tossing gasoline on the fires of ideological conflict, he listened and sought accommodation between persons of different views:

    Beyond his appearance, what set him apart was his approach to argument, the lifeblood of the law school and the constant occupation of the young lawyers-in-training. While other students were determined to prove the merits of their beliefs through logic and determination, Obama preferred to listen, seek others' views, and find a middle way.

    "A lot of people at the time were just talking past each other, very committed to their opinions, their point of view, and not particularly interested in what other people had to say," said Crystal Nix Hines, a classmate who is now a television writer. "Barack transcended that."

Memories tend to accentuate the positive from a distance of fifteen years-no matter what Shakespeare says about the good being interred with the bones.  Yet Obama as remembered  in 2007 and the Obama we see in 2009 seem to be remarkably consistent.

Elsewhere in the same article, another Law School peer said his bearing was more professorial than anything:

    "If anybody had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor," said Thomas J. Perrelli, a classmate and former counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno. "He was leading the discussion but he wasn't trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating."

    Obama was so evenhanded and solicitous in his interactions that fellow students would do impressions of his Socratic chin-stroking approach to everything, even seeking a consensus on popcorn preferences at the movies.

How does a person do this?  First, by precision in language-hence my title "letter of the law".  The landscape cannot be in flux: words have to mean something consistent-even for the purpose of shifting that meaning to new ground, the old ground has to be steady first.  I think that is one of the things Judge Learned Hand meant in his observation on tradition which I quoted above. 

The next is going to sound like its contradictory: even the ambiguities must be consistent and deliberate.  The last thing one can do is let the adversary steal and redefine the language of the discourse.  We're beginning to see how sensitive Obama is to this.  He is pretty much dispossessed of flap.  This doesn't mean that he doesn't push back in certain distinctive ways.  Not too long ago he scolded a NPR reporter, saying, "Now don't you go putting words in my mouth".  The reporter had done a quite common thing: he had paraphrased a statement Obama had just said, and then asked a question based on the paraphrase.  Most probably wouldn't have noticed much difference between the paraphrase and the original statement.  Most politicians I follow would have been so busy anticipating the question and framing an answer to it that they wouldn't have even noticed how the reporter had turned the phrase.  Not Obama.  He quoted himself and used the quote to respond to the reporter's query.  Talk about being a careful listener.

We see this care about language in his speeches too.  I spent some time at Whitehouse.gov in the Briefing Room, to see how many times he used a phrase attaching himself to clarity in some form or other.  Here are the results for the first eighteen days in June.

  • So I want to be clear that there is another path available to North Korea  (6/16/09)
  • And I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be; (6/15/09)
  • Now, let me be clear -- I just want to clear something up here -- identifying what works is not about dictating what kind of care should be provided  (6/15/09)
  • The President -- President Mugabe -- I think I've made my views clear, has not acted oftentimes in the best interest of the Zimbabwean people and has been resistant to the kinds of democratic changes that need to take place.  (6/12/09)
  • Now, I don't know how clearly I can say this, but let me try to repeat it: If you've got health insurance that you're happy with through the private sector, then we're not going to force you to do anything.  (6/11/09)
  • We want peace, we want dialogue, and we want to help them develop. But we do not want military nuclear weapons to spread, and we are clear on that.(6/06/09)
  • And then in the autumn when we meet at G20 we will also state very clearly that strengthening the multilateral system is also one that we consider to be important. (6/05/09)
  • And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together.(6/04/09) Eleven other references to clarity in this speech alone.
  • From the beginning, I made it clear that I would not put any more tax dollars on the line if it meant perpetuating the bad business decisions that had led these companies to seek help in the first place (6/01/09) Three other references to making clear in this speech.  

Clarity and logic sit at the center of scholarship-and probably especially at judicial/constitutional scholarship.  It is certainly possible to claim clarity as an objective and be lying through one's teeth.  I suppose Nixon wasn't a crook in street parlance.  But then that wasn't what he was accused of, was he?  Coming up next, a trip to the "Back of the Yards" and a remembrance of Saul Alinsky.

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Parsing the President III: Connectivity, Place and Time

June 16, 2009, 9:47AM


    More particularly, it came down to the men who landed here -- those who now rest in this place for eternity, and those who are with us here today.  Perhaps more than any other reason, you, the veterans of that landing, are why we still remember what happened on D-Day.  You're why we keep coming back.

    For you remind us that in the end, human destiny is not determined by forces beyond our control.  You remind us that our future is not shaped by mere chance or circumstance.  Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman.  It has always been up to us.

Barack Obama, Speech at Normandy, June 5, 2009

In my last, I wrote about how I saw connectivity as a central theme in the rhetoric of President Obama.  I saw that connectivity having lateral and linear dimensions, each moving from the center out.  In the first instance, the key was community and I offered some thoughts on how his extremely mobile formative years may have set him on his quest to form communities throughout his life, and to reach out to groups and individuals who of themselves would refuse to cooperate.  I also spoke to his garnering wisdom from older generations, framing discussion of behavior in ways which echoes the language of ordinary people.  I now turn to a few thoughts on the way Obama uses history in his rhetorical style.

"History proves" is comforting language to many people-the vast majority of them not historians.  On the other hand, Henry Ford is reputed to have said "History is Bunk"-which doesn't comfort historians much either.  

Politicians since the days of Pericles have conjured up historical references to prove the superiority of their particular corner of the earth: perhaps it comes with the territory.  Lincoln certainly did it in his most famous speech-given at yet another battlefield.  One might entitle this approach  as "history as judge".  History stands aloof and weighs us in the balance, and we a marked successes or failures by comparison with the actions of the noble past.

Martin Luther King used history in a somewhat similar fashion, particularly in the Letter from Birmingham Jail.  But he added two other historical devices.  He called upon the authority of historical figures to support his arguments on Non Violent Civil Disobedience, among them St. Augustine, Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.  He also argues by historic analogy:   
    In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock?
King is also conscious of the sweep of the African-American experience from its earliest beginnings, and writes of it with force, conviction, and passion.  The Letter is history plus a projection of that history into the future.  It bears reading and re-reading.

Obama is closest to King in his use of history, MHO.  I think there are two ways in which he extends King's use, however.  I point to the first with the quotation from his remarks at Normandy with which I began this offering.  Over and over, Obama tells us that history doesn't bind our futures into inevitable paths.  "It has always been up to us".  Yet denying historical inevitability doesn't simultaneously suggest that the course of history can be changed by the wave of a hand.  The length of time it took to put us in the straits in which we find ourselves suggests the length of time it will take us to get out of those straits.  Consider this passage from the Berlin Speech.

    The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

    We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.

    So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.

Finally, he argues that history shows us the impermanence of the present state of affairs.  We see that in the extract above, and I believe  similar examples from the Cairo speech were among the most powerful moments in the address.  He begins his address with a history-based compliment:

    For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning; and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. And together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress.

Tradition and progress in harmony.  I think that a powerful ideal-persons with knowledge of the history of their own culture will recognize that tradition and progress are not always in harmony.  But is this inevitable and irreversible, either within cultures or at their intersections?  Obama seems to follow the thinking of Arnold Toynbee, who saw history as cyclical or perhaps spiralled.  Progress over the long run isn't linear or inevitable.  Toynbee would find no problem with this particular passage:

    As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam -- at places like Al-Azhar -- that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities - (applause) -- it was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and  places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial  equality.

He proceeds to drive this home by quoting one of the founding fathers himself, and citing an interesting fact which I suspect most Americans didn't know: "I also know that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President, John Adams, wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims."  So Morocco recognized us first.  Interesting!  It's also interesting that John Adams provides historic precedent for Obama's declaration in Ankara, reiterated in Cairo: "I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds the United States and Turkey has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. So let me say this as clearly as I can: The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam".

So history gives its blessing to the quest for community and understanding at all levels. It shapes the quest and our understanding of it, and contributes mightily to Obama's rhetorical tools.
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Parsing the President II: Connectivity

June 13, 2009, 6:38PM


No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
As well as if promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery,
As though we are not miserable enough of ourselves
    but must fetch in more from the next house,
In taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

I heard Barack Obama live, at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC, two years ago.  I was in the Ballroom of the Washington Hilton with a bunch of hardened political junkies, aging hippies, reformers and bloggers, not that these are hardened categories.  Lunch was over: people flowed in from every door until every inch of wall space was occupied.  Persons who need a lot of personal space would not have been happy in the crush.  Obama opened his mouth and started to tell us stories.  No pin would have dared to drop, and if one did, nobody would have paid it any attention.  There were no applause lines, as I recall, and no applause once he launched into the meat of his address.  When he finished, silence for perhaps an eternity, or perhaps 10 seconds.  Who knew?

I thought about entitling this little piece The Rhetoric of Narrative, but I may save that for another entry.  Connectivity through narrative is probably what this is/will be about.  I think feeling connected is very important to our President-I read this in his books and in his speeches.  And I'm risking hubris to muse upon why this is so important to him.  A tentative thesis is that outsider status makes a person either alienated or crave community, and I would suggest that the second alternative is the choice Obama has made.

I think Obama seeks to make both linear (i.e. historical) and lateral connections, and he does this at levels from the personal on outward.  I think I'll hold off on his use of history for a bit, if no one objects, and think more about his forging of community, though the two are interrelated to a point where separating them for discussion's sake doesn't really do justice.  

MHO, Obama is unique among public personages in having ties to so many communities deeply suspicious of each other.  I remember early in the campaign Bozos (mainly white Bozos) wondering if he was black enough.  How does one establish roots of any kind when one lives in so many different places, and when the choice of place is not one's own. It wasn't just the geographic mobility  which was unusual:  it was the age at which it was experienced.  The only comparable experience might be children of the military--yet there's a similarity base to base which makes the constant change a little less disorienting, I think.

A few years ago, the New York Times published a series called Class Matters, and it is still available online.  I use it in a course I teach on Class and Culture in America.  (I'm being even more oblique than usual, but bear with me-or not).  One of the sections which caught the class's interest the most was Day Eight-the "Relo Class"...which told the story of the Link family (ironic name there), at that time of Alpharetta, Georgia.  The narrative was about the endless community hopping which marks the career path of the upwardly mobile...belonging everywhere, belonging nowhere.  The Links had no links.  It turns out that one of my students had lived in Alpharetta-and in six other communities and was currently living in Connecticut.  He was nineteen years old.  I asked him how he liked it.  He hated it.

Barack Obama: of Hawaii-of Kansas-of Indonesia-of Chicago-of California--of Cambridge- of the White Community-of the Black Community-out of Kenya-out of Ireland-attached to the Christian Tradition-attached to the Muslim tradition.  It makes the head spin.  I haven't heard him tell an Irish tale, but everything else appears somewhere in his writings or speeches.  His personal story relies so much on tradition that I catch a special reliance upon and affection for persons a generation or more older than he is.  I resonate with this as the grandson of Swedish immigrants who were geographically mobile but rooted in a settled tradition to a far greater degree than their grandchildren are.  That Washington noon he spoke about a one hundred and two year old woman who came out to see him, and how honored he felt by that.  One of the great themes of the Conference was the beating back of threats to Social Security-one of Josh's great causes.  Obama didn't cite statistics-Tom Harkin and others did that.  Obama told us a story about a magnificent woman of one hundred and two who deserved better of us... of the future senior citizens who would be equally worthy.

One thing I've also noted is that he increasingly uses language of the grandparents generation-or at least language my grandparents would have been comfortable with.  I listened to the Cairo Speech, and out of it the phrase "hateful and ignorant" burrowed direct into my brain.  Perhaps the reason was that I heard that phrase growing up more than once.  What a difference there is between "Axis of Evil" and "hateful and ignorant".  The first could have been written by any six figure Madison Avenue Mogul: the second could have been said by any granny in any of the United States-the language of the slogan is met by the language of the people and bested by it.  

Now my grandmother's racial ideas weren't all that different from those of Obama's grandmother.  But she would never allow us to use the N word in her house.  That was hateful and ignorant.  The Bozo Brethren in Media Land (the Cisterns too) (groan), immediately tried to make this yet another code in replacement of the War of Terror.  But I think they really underestimate Obama's subtlety... "hateful and ignorant" describes a type of human behavior applicable to individuals of any religious or national group.  The killing of Dr. Tiller was "hateful"-Bill O'Reilly's use of "Tiller Baby Killer" was hateful and ignorant.  I expect to hear the President  condemning behavior in granny language again and again.  The slaying at the Holocaust Memorial testifies to the hateful ignorance of radicals on the right.  And so it goes.

And so it goes with me too.  Too many points doth a boring blog make, and I've probably put all but the hardiest to sleep.  One last thing-a teaser to something I expect I'll write about later, and probably get thwacked for when I do.  At the core of connectivity is empathy, about which George Lakoff wrote some interesting words at Huffington Post.  I don't know if anyone else has drawn attention to this, I suspect I'm late to the game.   I was grieved when Obama backed away from this a bit, and I sent a note to Whitehouse.gov to let some minion know that I want empathetic judges.  More empathy, and less irrationality in the penal system--if it ain't broke don't fix it, but if it is broke, fix it quick--like Dickday suggests.

 
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We pause for a brief public service announcement.

June 13, 2009, 9:59AM

I'm on far too many e-mail lists, but I can't bring myself to take myself off of any.  It's rather like being unable to put down a boring book because I'm afraid the next chapter will get interesting, or leaving  the pub before closing, figuring that the interesting stuff will happen as soon as I leave.  (This was a problem visiting  New Orleans, where closing time is a myth).

Anyhow.  I got a message from Chris Dodd's Organization  today:

We have now put forward landmark legislation to reform the nation's health care system, and I need your help.

The first step is to get input from as many people as possible all over the country. I want you to have your chance to speak out.

I made a comment about this kind of involvement on someone's blog, and I'm going to speak out as soon as I finish this.  And of course I'm going to argue for government insured health care for all.  I'm also going to send the page to the people on my e-mail list.


Click here to add your voice.

I suppose to hope that this e-mail on health care goes viral is too big a groaner to tolerate.  I apologize in advance.


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The Parsing of the President I:

June 12, 2009, 10:58AM

Read And Listen.

Parsing:
To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components:
To make sense of; comprehend: I simply couldn't parse what you just said

Hopefully people will be able to parse what I say as I start a little series in which I attempt to relate Barack Obama's rhetorical style backwards to his life experiences and forwards to his widespread public appeal.  Today's installment is by means of an introduction and a plug for a website useful to anyone interested in Oratory and Rhetoric.  American Rhetoric is one of my favorite websites.  I direct my students there all the time.  Not only does it have tools for understanding rhetorical techniques: it also has a bank of over five thousand speeches of all types for study and analysis.  Among those are over 25 examples of Barack Obama addresses, most of them with both text and real audio.  All his major addresses since the Democratic Convention of 2004 are here, as well as many less known examples of discourse in a number of different situations.

I believe that one ought to both listen and read a speech whenever possible.  In some ways the written word is a sorry substitute for the spoken word, or so Cicero, whom I quote more often than I should, leads me to believe.  People who follow my blog from time to time notice a kind of Victorianism which I hope is not just an affectation.  I like to use italics and boldface type.  Underlines, too.  Ctrl I, Ctrl B and Ctrl U are very familiar with my gentle carresses.  I do this to indicate the stresses one would hear if my blather approached them through their ears and not through their eyes.  A few of the senior set here may remember one of my favorite Pogo Characters, PT Bridgeport.



Bridgeport the barker bear spoke in balloons adorned with elaborate and exuberant fonts of all types.  Everything was an emphasis..no two emphases alike.  A bit over the top, PT-a bit over the top.

Yet, as I tell my students meaning is simple sentences is concealed behind emphasis, and this meaning either must be revealed by context or orthography if the author is to control the meaning contained and avoid unwanted ambiguity.
    Bring me the blue pen on the table suggests what?
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (and don't give it to someone else in the room)
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (I'm not interested in the black, red, or green one)
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (not the pencil or crayola, silly, the blue pen).
    Bring me the blue pen on the table. (Not the one on the counter, or the one in your pocket)

Stupid little example, I know, I know.  But listening to the speaker's emphasis can nail down meaning which might be missed otherwise. 

The text can differ from the delivery in other ways, as well.  For example, the words gonna and wanna don't appear in the written text of many of the speeches delivered.  Going to and want to, on the other hand are prominent.  Obama swings effortlessly from the gonna/wanna camp to the going to/want to camp, and back again.  I lay this up to consciousness of his audience, and to an awareness that Americans don't much appreciate being talked down to by "pointy-headed intellectuals".  Probably Adlai Stevenson's greatest campaign blunder was is reflected in this anecdote:  A supporter once called out, "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!" And Adlai Stevenson answered, "That's not enough. I need a majority."  Thinking this was one thing: saying it was quite another matter.  Using popular idiom increases one's popularity, as long as it isn't forced or mannered. 

As an aside (I'm allowed one per post), most of the elite misunderstood the import of Obama's bad bowling badly.  They laughed at him...not noting how happy he was to laugh at himself, and how willingly the folks in the alley were to laugh with him.  No one in politics can afford to seem better than every one else at everything.  (I thing some of the reporters might actually find bowling fun if they weren't so afraid of betraying their class by appearing ridiculous in public).

So, as I meander through some of Obama's life experiences and some of his rhetorical arsenal, I'm going to speculate about how they connect.  Nobody has suggested he learned his effectiveness at public speaking school, so he must have cobbled it together from things he learned elsewhere.  I have no doubt I'll be spanked when I'm wrong.  But I hope any one who reads my next few posts will have some fun on the way.
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amike

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  • Location Little Rhody
  • Party Democratic
  • Politics I think I'm left. Either that or left out.

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  • Favorite Books The one I'm currently reading, plus anything by Dr. Seuss. The Ring Cycle (Tolkein's not Wagner's). Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Reis' How the Other Half Lives.
  • Favorite Quotes Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

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Jack of all trades, master of some: Ph. D. American Studies, 38th year in the classroom coming up. Jolly fun, what what.

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