(Andrew Halcro, who ran as an independent against Palin, said that debating Palin was an exercise in frustration.)
"She has a way of walking in a room and filling the room with her
presence, so people suddenly forget about their concerns about health
care or education or anything else." LA Times
I
have been surprised by the firestorm that McCain's choice of Sarah
Palin as his running mate has produced: the virulence of it all, the
truly savage, hysterical, Rovian type abuse, an outpouring of sexist,
personal and ad hominem (ad feminem?) attacks that only Barack Obama
has had the sense to distance himself from. Something that does much
credit to his intelligence.
Why so much hostility?
The
answer if pretty simple in my opinion, this lady is a monster
politician and unless they destroy her and her story before she is
really out of the gate; catch her in the political
nasciturus stage
as it were, then she is going to do to Barack Obama, exactly what
Barack Obama did to Hillary Clinton: take the candy right out of his
mouth.
This brings me to a question that I keep coming back to over and over again:
Why
can't the Democrats, who are supposed to be the "people's party", come
up with candidates that connect solidly with "deep" America?
How
is it that Sarah Palin is the one who isn't a millionaire, the one who
went to a state university, who was a commercial fisherman,
(fisherperson?) served on the PTA and whose husband carries a
steelworker's union card? Why is this formidable,
working woman a Republican?
Why is it that the only Democrat that seems acutely aware of this problem is a born aristocrat like Howard Dean?
To paraphrase the demon Rumsfeld, you go with the working class you have, not with the working class you would like to have.
America's
working people are in need of health, education and welfare, but they
are also social conservatives. They are religious. Their rejection of
much of contemporary life is bringing together Protestants and
Catholics for the first time since Luther nailed his stuff to the door.
Why should this
automatically be a force for reaction?
There
is nothing in the teaching of Jesus Christ that intrinsically supports
economic liberalism, military adventures at the expense of health or
education or connects in any way with the beggar thy neighborism of the
disciples of Ayn Rand.
Why are America's working people so socially conservative and religious?
In my opinion, not because they are "bitter", but because they are
terrified.
During the Republican primaries
I wrote a couple of pieces about Mike Huckabee's Evangelical populism that received a lot of
kind attention. Out of laziness, or pressed for time, I'll quote myself:
The
entire American economy is based on making people feel bad about
themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid,
inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain
of rejection and failure. What, despite all its grotesque fanaticism,
is truly healthy about all this Evangelical, rapture, mishegoss is that
it is a real rebellion against the basic, inhuman tool of the system...
Its unhappiness factory. (...) Of course many of the same old vultures
feed off this rebellion, in the same way that they feed off all the
other unsatisfaction, but this is a true rebellion for all of that.
(...) Why are so many of the poor of America, white and black, socially
conservative? Because without a welfare state, the only institutions
that offer any comfort or protection are the church and the family. The
family is the first welfare state. Here is Spain where we have a
welfare state and a fine public health system, the traditional family
is still in place. In the hospital system this means that the
operations are fantastic, but the nursing is deficient, because
normally the patients are surrounded by solicitous family members
carrying bed pans etc and nurses only come around if patient suddenly
takes a turn for the worse. In the USA there is no welfare state and
the family is also under heavy pressure from the system. Poor people
are terrified: frightened people take comfort where they can. A
divorced waitress with two kids who has to take them to an emergency
room to treat their asma can't be criticized for being a "Left Behind"
enthusiast. There is no better country than America in the whole world
to be rich. It is probably the only country in the world where the rich
are loved. Conversely there is no worse country in the world to be
poor. Of course these people are paranoid, the system literally hates
them.
I find any rebellion of the "lower orders" in the
USA positive per se. I start from the premise that it is really the
poor, the sniggered at, the excluded and the disadvantaged -- what are
called the "lower classes" -- that have to be the protagonists of any
authentic change. Up till now, all the "struggle" is coming from the
top against the down.
What is new is that now it is America's
lower middle classes, once the envy of the entire world, that can't pay
for health and education any more and find themselves losing their
homes and being pushed toward pauperization.
You have to start from where you are.
Perhaps
the only thing that the white, black and Latino populations really have
in common is their fear and their faith in Jesus.
There has to
be rebellion for anything to happen and the culture of the people has
to be taken into account. The lower middle class and poor people of
America are religious and we have to start from there.
You don't believe in any of it?
If you are a truly progressive and want to change the system, then you should say like
Henry of Navarre,
"Paris vaut bien une messe".Like
Howard Dean, I believe that America's progressives have to make their
peace with evangelical America and find defenders of the "little man"
that vibrate in the same cultural key as they do. Where is a
contemporary
William Jennings Bryan? It is absurd that a credible case can be made that the Democrats are elitist.
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