Author: Captain Future

It’s the last week before the elections. It’s the moment when potential voters are most focused. It’s the time to nail down organizing for GOTV and get it started, especially in early voting states.

It’s the time for action. And if you need a few words to keep you going, I suggest these: Guard the Change.

Because when you strip away the side issues, that’s what this election is about.
President Obama said it in September: “The last election was a changing of the guard. Now we need to guard the change.”

Part of the electorate is discouraged that the change isn’t faster. Part of the electorate is going to scapegoat the President and blame the party in power for bad economic times. But the energy on the GOPer side is coming primarily from those who are afraid of change.

They are mostly white people who are feeling overrun by demographic change. They are afraid of Mexican immigrants and Muslims. They see President Obama as the leader who is taking away everything from whites and giving it to blacks and browns. They want their country back.

These voters are being managed with complete cyncism by corporate interests and their millions, who must hide themselves to retain credibility. They really want their country back.

This energy is coming also from people who see liberals as lording over their lives, anxious to take away the last of what they have–their SUVs, their big screen TVs–with the excuse of global warming.

The importance of the change underway can be measured by the extremism of the opposition. Many of the GOPer candidates don’t even pretend to know very much, or base their actions on anything more than discredited ideologies and narrow religious faiths.

We know the political change that has begun will benefit everyone in this time of inevitable stresses, and especially that it is crucial to a decent future.

It’s time to guard the change.

Some voters can still be persuaded, because many extremist zealots running for the House haven’t been sufficiently exposed for what they are. I suspect most voters would prefer that the people they elect to be the government are competent.

But the most important task is to get Obama voters of 2008 to vote in 2010. This message is particularly potent for them: Guard the change.

What GOPers fear most is that black voters, Latino voters and young voters who believed in Obama will rally to his defense, to guard the change he began. That’s why they are busily engaged in the voter intimidation tactics for which they are so justly infamous.

Change is hard. Political change is messy and often ugly. President Obama at USC:

“But I told you this was going to be hard. Power concedes nothing without a fight.

Inch by inch, day by day, week by week, we’ve been grinding it out. That’s the nature of change in a big complex democracy. And it seem so distant from those wonderful times [of 2008 and the Inaugural.] We haven’t gotten everything that we hoped for. Maybe a neighbor is out of a job, but don’t let anyone tell you that our fight hasn’t been worth it, or that we’re not making a difference.

Because of you, there are people right here in CA who don’t have to choose between cancer treatment or going bankrupt. There are women who can look their children in the eye and say, yes you are going to college. Businesses able to keep their doors open during a recession. 100,000 brave men and women home from Iraq. We will continue to fight to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We will have an energy policy for the future of America.

So don’t let them tell you that change isn’t possible. Here’s what I know. Change is always hard. And if your parents, if our gradparents, if our great-grandparents had listened to the cynics, we wouldn’t be here today.”

This election is important, if only for this one reason:

Guard the change.

It’s been days and days, and the reaction continues, but while some folks I’ve read seem to imply it, most don’t get the message of President Obama’s Nobel Prize, at least the one that came through loud and clear to me.

While it shocked the Right, it surprised everyone else (including the President), as the Nobel committee knew it would.  So why did the Nobel Committee take this surprising step? Why did they choose to single out the American President after only nine months in office? Because surprise was part of the point.

And the point is urgency. The Nobel Committee didn’t just hand out an award—it stood up and screamed, pay attention before it’s too late! This award is the diplomatic, international community equivalent of standing on the table, jumping up and down and shouting: this is our last best hope! This is the fierce urgency of now!

Many European leaders in politics, sciences, professions, etc. and many leaders around the world, all understand that the future survival of civilization more or less as it is hangs by a thin thread. That progress must be made quickly on controlling and ending nuclear weapons, negotiating agreements that are just to all sides in areas of the world where conflict could be imminent and would be catastrophic, and especially that the world’s great nations must band together to lead a rapid response to the Climate Crisis before it is too late for the future of human civilization.

They know what American leadership still can mean. They know what President Obama is up against in this country. Political leaders told him at the G20 in Pittsburgh that they couldn’t understand the attacks on him as one kind of radical or another, when he would be comfortably centrist in any other western democracy.

They don’t understand that the wealthiest nation on earth is undermining its own economy while failing to meet its responsibilities, when it remains alone in not supporting universal health care.

They are afraid of a nation with such a powerful military machine and yet so careless about violence that citizens wear guns to a political rally, and that children gun down other children in the streets, while apparent adults oppose the most rudimentary controls on deadly firearms. They saw the same gunslinger attitude rend the world for eight dangerous years. They saw the world slip back towards barbarism, thanks in part to the shocking sponsorship of torture by a nation that aspires to moral leadership.

The Prize is an official anguished cry on the Climate Crisis. They awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, and America still didn’t get the point. In the UK, our closest cultural and political ally in Europe, conservatives don’t engage in Climate Crisis denial–they compete with liberals and Labourites on devising and implementing the most effective and most urgent measures to address the Climate Crisis.

Now China is beginning to move its massive state machinery to address it–and to corner the market on the renewable energy technology of the near future. Now India seems to see the light.

But even if leaders and political dialogue in other nations are more focused on these problems, it doesn’t mean they can act effectively without the U.S.  They need and want America to be part of this, and they see President Obama as the key to American leadership and American cooperation, and the return to American responsibility in the world. They know these problems are urgent, most of them made far worse by American actions in the past eight years, and that as the Climate Crisis gets worse, they will intersect and mushroom–and that image is deliberate. They are telling us how important it is that President Obama be successful.

They look at this country and our media-fueled self-renewing cyclones of distraction, our 24/7 locust plagues of pettiness, our twittering fits of trivial obsessions, our instant acting out and the dead slogans nailed to our identities and shouting matches, and they’re crying out: on the really big stuff, we value this man, the world desperately needs him as your leader, we hear him, why can’t you listen to what he’s saying? Can’t we please focus?

Since the Nobel, there are signs from China and India, and Brazil, that the rest of the world may be ready to get really serious about the Climate Crisis.  The U.S. is the critical player.

The Nobel Peace Prize was exactly as President Obama said: a call to action. And what we’re missing is that it was a decorously desperate, very loud, very urgent call.

Earlier today (at my blog as well as Orange and ET) I posted my first response to the speech and to the first round of media reaction, plus the sections of the speech I found most significant.

Here are a few further reflections on the content and form. First, the most obvious: Obama presented himself to Europe as the anti-Bush, and at some risk.  He’s going to be hammered by the rabid right simply for the line very early in the speech in which he says he is speaking as a U.S. citizen, and a citizen of the world.

He referred to–but did not dwell on–ending the war in Iraq.  The crowd probably would have liked more of this, but Obama did not criticise a sitting President while overseas. (His later reference to American imperfections apparently sounded to rabid rightists like airing dirty laundry, but in context it was welcome humility.)  But he struck all the issue notes Europeans needed to hear: nuclear proliferation, climate crisis, Darfur, torture, etc.  Yet he also called for more NATO involvement in Afghanistan, not a popular position in Germany.

But most of all, he expressed his view that the U.S. must be ready to cooperate with its allies again, and to become a world citizen again.  This is not only what Europeans wanted to hear, it is what Independents in America want to hear.

Another point on content: Obama presented a rational framework for attaining certain foreign policy goals.  For example, he coupled military action in Afghanistan with humanitarian aid and development aid.  He spoke out against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but he negated the current hypocrisy of U.S. policy by calling for an end to nuclear weapons everywhere, including the U.S.

A few thoughts now on form.  Obama used the Berlin airlift to create a structure in several ways.  As a story about U.S. and German cooperation so soon after World War II, it was about strengthening that old alliance.  But it was also about widening the cooperation it started, as exemplified by the European Union. Widening further, it is about creating more cooperation globally, to address global problems–and Obama showed that most problems we face are inevitably global:

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

As a story about the U.S. and West Berlin standing firm against the blockade by the Soviet Union, it was about allies standing together against other enemies, which also includes working together on tough problems like nuclear proliferation, unfair trade, the Climate Crisis and world poverty–which appear at least as hopeless.

  As a story about cooperation that overcame barriers, the airlift led naturally into the sub-theme of tearing down walls of prejudice. In terms of diplomacy, Obama’s willingness to talk to everyone was demonstrated on this trip to be his ability to talk to everyone, and this speech reinforces that image.  

As a story about the U.S. dropping food, not bombs, it was about the power of peaceful means.  And as a story about how this U.S. effort won praise and trust from Europe and elsewhere in the world, it is a story about how the U.S. can regain its international reputation, which Obama showed was in other ways commensurate with characteristic American ideals.

In its rhetoric,it was of a piece with other Obama speeches.  But it also recognized the two most famous American speeches in Berlin: given by John Kennedy and Reagan.

 From JFK, Obama took the repeated refrains featuring the name of the city.  JFK said several sentences in a row, “let them come to Berlin.”  Obama said “Look at Berlin” several times in a row.  And instead of the famous Eich bein ein Berliner of JFK, Obama said simply,…”all free people – everywhere – became citizens of Berlin.”

Reagan’s only famous line was, “Tear down this wall!”  Obama made tearing down walls a repeated refrain of his speech. Then there was this fascinating section:

“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.”

So there is Reagan and tearing down walls, but also an echo of Lincoln and “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  In fact, Obama uses “stand together,” and “cannot stand” in interesting ways several times.

There’s another hint of Lincoln–of the Gettysburg Address.  Lincoln said: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Obama said: “They won hearts and minds; love and loyalty and trust – not just from the people in this city, but from all those who heard the story of what they did here. Now the world will watch and remember what we do here – what we do with this moment.”

As for the themes and rhetoric familiar from Obama speeches, they gained new meanings in this particular context.  He spoke about generational change and seizing opportunity (another JFK theme) with his signature refrain of “This is our moment.  This is our time.”

 He used his biography to link hope in the context of individuals hoping for a better life, and the freedom to follow individual dreams and destinies, and the opportunity to make those dreams a reality, but carried these ideas through on a global rather than national scale.  This is a point about America’s role in the world–America as the symbol of hope, freedom and opportunity–but also shows that Obama’s vision for America and his vision for the world are coherent, and both center on these key qualities necessary at the level of individuals.  This is where issues connect with people:

What has always united us – what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America’s shores – is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

These are the aspirations that joined the fates of all nations in this city. These aspirations are bigger than anything that drives us apart.

             

The damage done to Barack Obama by the New Yorker cover won’t be fully known until November 4. I will predict this: on November 3 and 4, that image will reappear in thousands if not millions of email in-boxes and mail boxes, so that a large number of voters will go to the polls with that image in their heads.

Because in this culture, seeing is believing.

There have been a lot of arguments made defending this cover on the basis of freedom of speech, press, expression, which to my mind completely miss the point. No government or corporation either suppressed that image, or forced anyone to print it. That cover was printed because of an editorial decision, which in my view was a very bad and irresponsible decision. Bad enough that the editors in question should resign, because they don’t have the judgment to justify their jobs.

There have been a lot of arguments made defending this cover on the basis of freedom of speech, press, expression, which to my mind completely miss the point. No government or corporation either suppressed that image, or forced anyone to print it. That cover was printed because of an editorial decision, which in my view was a very bad and irresponsible decision. Bad enough that the editors in question should resign, because they don’t have the judgment to justify their jobs.

Let’s go through the arguments that excuse the publication of that cover, and then why I believe it was irresponsible to print it.

Free Press, Expression, etc.

I know something about censorship, because I was censored. I was a columnist for a weekly youth-oriented newspaper in the late 80s, suddenly forbidden to write anything more about a subject I’d been covering, smoking and health, cigarette advertising, especially aimed at young people. I was forbidden to write about it because the paper started taking cigarette advertising from two big companies, and one of them specifically forbade any anti-smoking copy. Because I wrote such a column, and it was suppressed, I resigned, at considerable personal cost.

I got no political support for my action. At the time, being censored by a corporation was apparently too complicated a concept. Most people thought it was my own fault. It made perfect sense to them that the company paying for ads could control editorial content. And most of the time, they can. That’s realistic. But it’s also a real threat to a free press.

So I am aware of how elusive the concept can be. But I don’t see it as the issue here. The New Yorker editors choose their covers. Nobody forced them to choose this one, and nobody said that they couldn’t choose it. But to say they shouldn’t choose it, and should pay the price for a serious misjudgment, is another matter.

They had many potential covers to choose from, I’m sure. Not everybody’s idea or drawing gets to be expressed on the cover. And those whose covers aren’t chosen, are not being censored. There’s no free expression issue here.

I’ve been an editor. The job is to make judgments. In suggesting that New Yorker editors should have exercised better judgment, that their decision was seriously wrong in many ways, is a perfectly legitimate position.

Satire

The cover is justified as satire. I’m sure Don Imus justified his “nappy headed” comment as humor. That’s not good enough. Especially when racial imagery and other inflammatory images are used.

I don’t doubt it was meant as satire. But part of the reason it is so offensive is that it is so clumsy and ill-conceived that it functions less as satire than as incendiary imagery.

Political caricature is usually about the people depicted. The only interpretation of this drawing as satire is that it is not about the Obamas but about what some people say or believe about the Obamas. That’s already a step removed. The usual way to view this is as something about the Obamas themselves. That’s how such images are “read.” That’s how they work.

There are other complications. For example, everyone is familiar with the imagery of the fist-bump between the Obamas. The fact that it happened seems to justify what else is pictured. The fist-bump was true. The rest must be true. (I’m told someone on TV made this point Monday.) That may not be a reasoned interpretation. But seeing is believing.

It’s Art

Is the artist responsible for how everyone will interpret an image? I’ve heard that argument made. The answer is that the artist is not. But the New Yorker cover is not a venue for art in the same way as a gallery or museum. It is the cover of a prestigious magazine that contains high level journalism within it.
The New Yorker articles used to be called “fact pieces.” The person who decides what goes on the cover is not an art curator, but the editor of the magazine.

Is the artist responsible for how everyone will interpret an image? No–but in this case, it is the duty of the editor to consider how everyone could interpret that image. This is an image depicting one of two major candidates for President of the United States, in arguably the most important election since at least 1932. It is imagery that evokes racial if not racist stereotypes.

It puts in visual imagery a number of false charges made against the Obamas, which apparently a significant percentage of American voters believe. These lies no longer have to be explained to them. They can now see them–as Rachel Madow said, in one handy 8×10.

It doesn’t take a contemporary brain scientist or psychologist to know that imagery can be incendiary. Though one such scientist has already criticized even the Obama campaign’s web site refuting these lies as keeping them alive just by repeating them. If words are that powerful, how about making a picture out of them?

This also comes into play when viewing this as satire. Those who read the New Yorker regularly may know that in recent years it has published covers of political satire. But on the other hand, this is not Mad Magazine. It is a serious magazine, and this cover is serious political comment. Therefore, the political interpretation of the cover should be a serious concern for the editors.

Of course some people will look at the picture and see how ridiculous these lies are. Perhaps some proportion of those people will have believed or half-believed those lies before, although I suspect that most people who get the joke already know they are lies. Otherwise, why would it be funny?

But I suspect that some people are going to look at this picture and be scared out of their wits. It may reflect back their own racial bias, or simply their fear of people who aren’t exactly like them. But they no longer have to make a picture in their mind based on lies they would have to take time to read or listen to. Now they can just see it. And seeing is believing.

Political Correctness

Some make the argument that this cover is just like the Daily Show or Steven Colbert, and that to condemn this cover is just political correctness gone wild. Personally I believe this imagery is more in the Imus realm than the Colbert. The context comes into play here as well. Colbert has created a character in a TV show. This image is on the cover of a prestigious magazine with serious–and presumably sincere–political content. Colbert is on television, and his show is available only if you seek it out. This cover will be available as a virtual handbill before this campaign is out. The editors should have understood this.

Judgment

The defense given by David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, suggests to me a remarkable tunnel vision–you know, like the Lincoln Tunnel. He must know he is editing a magazine for more than New York intellectuals. He must know, or should have known, that this image would be seen by millions around the country and around the world on the Internet and TV, and he should have realized that it would be used by Obama opponents to depict the Obamas precisely as they are pictured.

This alone–considering the inflammatory racial and political imagery–should have told the New Yorker editors that publishing this on the cover was a very, very bad idea.

They should have known that the cover image is especially powerful, and therefore this was an especially important decision. Many thousands more people, perhaps millions more, will see this image than will read the articles on Obama inside. They can’t be blind to the power of images in this country, this society–especially simple, emotional images, such as those using racial images–Muslims (the stereotyped enemy, the Other), Black Muslims (to be feared, like those black prisoners on TV), 60s revolutionaries (Black Power, Communists)and beneath it all, the first black candidate for President.

They should have known that this cover could become a powerful partisan weapon to defeat a particular candidate, and that it would become a powerful if not totally predictable factor in this presidential election, and that fact alone should have told them what an important decision they were making. But their statements tell me otherwise. They either didn’t think it through, or they didn’t care.

An important task and responsibility of the editor is to judge whether the editorial content communicates what it intends to communicate to the publication’s audience. In my view, the editors have failed in this task. The most basic failure is that they apparently believed this image is so ridiculous that it exposes how unbelievable the lies about the Obama are. Some people will respond in that way. But many will not. To assume that this image communicates that message is a serious misjudgment.

There should have been enough doubts, enough red flags to call printing this into question, and then the stakes they are playing with–the presidency of the United States, and no less than the fate of the planet–should have weighed heavily in their decision. That it did not demonstrates arrogance as well as misjudgment.

I believe it is a serious enough failure that they should resign. I believe it is a serious enough act that I will boycott the magazine, and urge others to do the same.

I call on New Yorker writers and others in the New York and national press to protest this cover. But I don’t expect this will happen. Even those who believe it is a serious and perhaps even a morally serious error, are unlikely to say so. The New Yorker and its parent corporation, Conde Naste, are too powerful. They have friends involved. They have paychecks to worry about.

Besides they can always shout about freedom of expression, and art and satire and political correctness, and people will snap to attention, afraid to be charged with supporting a fascist America, as I already have been at Daily Kos. Anything to divert from what they’ve actually done.

This controversy will probably die down in a day or two, if it hasn’t already. We will have fresh disasters to consider. But that doesn’t mean this cover will go away, not really.

I think you’ll see it again, much closer to the election. You can believe me or not… but seeing is believing.

I had the same reaction to reading Hillary Clinton’s assassination comment as many people here and in the media.  Either this was another insidious political dog whistle–the worst possible one–or more likely, another bit of evidence that she is out of conscious touch with the darker side of her unconscious.

Others have also pointed out that she could have picked many other election years to make her point that nomination battles go into June and beyond. But what makes the RFK example especially awful is that it doesn’t even make sense.

Because had Bobby Kennedy lived beyond that horrific day I remember vividly, the 1968 Democratic nominee was still not going to be decided until the convention.  His assassination is irrelevant to her point.    

The candidate Bobby Kennedy defeated in California and other states in 1968 was Senator Eugene McCarthy, who, like Kennedy, was an opponent of the Vietnam War, and vowed to stop it as President.

But there was another candidate, not even formally declared in June, who was the favorite for the nomination: the sitting Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. He was a supporter of President Johnson, and had a lock on the party machinery.

In the 1960s, the primaries were young and few.  In 1960, JFK won a short string of primaries and essentially disposed of Hubert Humphrey and several other candidates, but he was not the presumptive nominee going to the convention.  Lyndon Johnson still had support, and some party elders were backing Adlai Stevenson.

The primaries were more important by 1968 but in that year they still couldn’t name the nominee. Even after California, RFK was in for a summer of politics and a fight at the convention.

Back then, the general election campaign was much shorter.  It didn’t really begin until Labor Day.  The media and the parties did not assume there was a candidate for either party until the conventions had named the nominees. It was very different from the present situation, with John McCain acknowledged by Republicans as their nominee who will go to the convention without real opposition, free to attack Barack Obama.  But Obama’s responses and his own points (like the comments he made in Florida about McCain’s problems with lobbyists)are partially blocked by Hillary Clinton’s loud and absurd contentions, as she made also in Florida that counting the votes of phony primaries is a Civil Rights issue.  

So Clinton’s entire point about 1968 is invalid.  There wasn’t going to be a nominee until the convention in any case.  And the eventual nominee, Hubert Humphrey wasn’t even in the race officially in June. He was still the favorite, even with RFK’s victories in the primaries.  So why use this comparison?  To answer that requires examining her psyche, and we’ve all gotten a few glimpses that make us shudder, especially considering that she might have become President.  

The pundits and political experts hear Barack Obama talking about changing Washington and ending the old politics, and say how inspirational he is.  And then they demand that he act according to the old politics.

It’s starting again on the questions of Hillary Clinton leaving the race, and the related question of who Obama will choose for vice president. I happen to believe that on both of these topics, the conventional wisdom will once again be wrong.

For example, there’s an article by Dan Conley in Salon that Teagan Goddard’s Political Wire calls a “must read,” which suggests the kind of deal that Hillary might get in exchange for her support.  His major suggestion is money–a bunch of Obama cash to retire her campaign debt.  

   There were similar discussions during the endless wait for the Indiana primary finish Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  Carl Bernstein said that a couple of Hillary staffers told him she wants the vice-presidential nomination.

I’m pretty skeptical on both specifics.  First, the money.  If the Obama campaign didn’t want to pay Democratic Party people in the wards of Philadelphia to get out the vote, why would they spend their contributors’ money on extortion for the Clintons?

Then the vice-president.  There’s a lot of misinformation about the process going around.  The way presidential candidates choose vice-presidential candidates these days isn’t the way the Kennedys picked Lyndon Johnson.  There’s an elaborate and collaborative process of getting information–and specifically, of vetting. That process is only beginning in the Obama campaign, according to somebody’s reporting the other night–it may have been Howard Fineman. In any case, no decision will be made for weeks or months.  And in the end, only one person will make it: Barack Obama.

Hillary may or may not be on the initial list.  If she is, the campaign will try to discover just what the Republicans will use on her to discredit the ticket.  Then they will weigh carefully what she brings to the ticket versus how she weakens it.  They will balance her appeal and power within the party against Billary’s negative campaigning and above all, her real belief in the old politics, and her identification with the old politics in the mind of voters—especially Obama voters. And they will present all of this information and these views and evaluations to Barack Obama.

And then Obama will decide, on these and other considerations: can he work with her (and Bill)?  Will they undermine him in the White House? Will she even be able to see transforming government in the way that he does?  I doubt it.  But it’s his call.

My guess is that he will look most favorably on someone younger than Clinton, someone from his generation.  This worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore–it was a powerful visual and political message in 1992.  I do think he’ll consider women first.

The other conventional wisdom is that he’ll have to pick someone who supported Hillary.  (I saw Ed Rendell’s name mentioned–I don’t think there’s a chance of that.)  But Obama isn’t going to make the conventional choice: he isn’t going to choose on the basis of geographical balance, molifying Clinton or her supporters, going for a military/foreign policy figure, or a governor.  If the person who interests him the most has any or all of those particular advantages, those will be ancilliary reasons, or just plain bonuses.

He’s going to choose someone who identifies with his brand of new politics–someone who also represents the kind of change that was the moral center and the centerpiece of his primary campaign, and will be of his general election campaign.

And the factors that none of us can measure are his judgment of someone’s fitness to be President–his kind of President–and of how they relate personally.

So while Gov. Kathleen Sibelius is often mentioned, she has to go through a vetting process (her son has apparently made some waves–how serious is that?) and we have no idea how they get along. On the other hand, Obama is said to be friends with Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. (And she would break another barrier, though it’s never mentioned: there has never been an Italian-American in the White House.)

And while Senator Jim Webb is seldom mentioned, he is Obama’s generation, and though he has remained neutral so far, he may be an Obama kind of new politician.  I don’t know.  The point is, no one does.  It’s a fun game but let’s also be realistic. Obama is going to decide, and if he is true to his campaign so far, it isn’t going to be a choice made chiefly by the old criteria. Hillary is not going to dictate the v.p. choice. If you believe that, you haven’t been listening.  

Plus, the premise of all this is questionable, and may become more questionable very soon.  Because the party may force Hillary out, before she has to be bribed out.  Consider this quote fromanother story in Salon:

And perhaps most dangerous for Clinton now is the fact that a number of superdelegates — whom she needs to win over in large numbers to have any chance to emerge the victor — are losing patience. West Virginia Democratic Party chairman Nick Casey told Salon in a phone interview Wednesday that he wouldn’t be surprised if Clinton pulled the plug on her campaign before Tuesday.

Did you get that?  The Chairman of the party in West Virginia, where the next primary is held, and where Clinton is supposed to have solid support. And that was only one of the examples.

It’s pretty likely now that by as early as May 20 and as late as June 5, Barack Obama will be the presumptive nominee by virtue of having obtained the necessary number of delegates.  

How important is Hillary’s support in the general election? I don’t think that’s as obvious as it’s being treated.  Part of the drama in this campaign has been the loosening grip of the Clintons on the Democratic party, and the resentments that have surfaced.  Hillary has strong appeal to constituencies of voters, but in the end, she is part of the old politics that Obama is campaigning against.  It is more to her political advantage to be seen as supporting the party ticket, I believe, than it is for Obama to muddy the image of the kind of politics he wants to bring to Washington, by being seen to give in to her demands.

Yes, the party needs to be unified. But the leader of the party sets the tone and the conditions.  And that’s not Hillary Clinton. The leader is Barack Obama.

               

Whatever the ultimate meaning of the results in the PA primary, Tuesday night the TV pundits will be making their judgments based on the percentage of victory.

Both campaigns are trying to set expectations, but clearly the Clinton campaign must regard any margin of victory as a huge vindication, and a reason to go on.

But an analysis on Bloomberg.com should bring a little reality check to the meaning of PA. Many have pointed out that it is almost impossible for Clinton to surpass Obama in elected delegates.  But one factor some in her campaign have suggested might break her way is the popular vote.  The Bloomberg report looks at that.  And it’s conclusions are devastating.    

Even if the New York senator wins by more than 20 percentage points tomorrow — a landslide few experts expect — she would still have a hard time catching him.”

The story goes into excruciating detail of what that means:

Clinton would need a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, plus 20-point wins in later contests in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Even that scenario assumes Clinton, 60, would break even in Indiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon — a prospect that’s not at all certain.

More than just big margins, Clinton would need record voter turnout too. In Pennsylvania, she would need a turnout of 2 million, about half the state’s registered Democrats; in the 2004 primary, about 800,000 voted. She would also need turnout to almost double in other states where she leads, and reach some 1 million in Puerto Rico, which is about how many Democratic- leaning voters went to the polls in a 2004 gubernatorial election.

That’s more than a mountain to climb–that’s walking to the moon. And maybe without shoes–because the one bit of news Sunday night was the fundraising numbers the campaigns had to file by midnight. According to official numbers, Obama started April with $42.5 million cash for the primaries. A spokesperson for the Clinton campaign there said they started April with about $8 million it could spend on primaries.

So what are the pundits going to say Monday and Tuesday? That she needs a 10 point victory, or any victory to stay in? Or are they going to say that realistically she needs a 25 point victory in PA?

The media is full of Katrina recollections and evaluations right now, and by Labor Day, they’ll be gone.  Democrats can’t let America forget Katrina.

I say this because those responsible for the unnecessary tragedies in the Gulf, and the sickening fact that they continue, must be held accountable, and must be prevented from endangering more lives. This is a dangerous situation for the American present and future, and just about all the nation can do about it at this point is to break the Republican rule of the federal government by electing Democrats to Congress.

So I am going to be unapologetically political here.  What follows is my first draft script for a Katrina campaign ad, simple enough for amateurs to produce but designed for wide distribution. I’ve posted a version with photos at Dreaming Up Daily that gives a rough idea of what it might look like.    
Each congressional race is different, but there are themes and storylines that unite the Democratic quest to regain Congress.  These stories should be part of all campaigns, but they can also be told nationally, as a national effort that supports local candidates.  Those major storylines are Katrina and Iraq, and Democrats demanding accountability.  As I wrote last time, the main message is that Republicans control Congress: Republican One Party Rule.

The storylines are that Republican rule is responsible for the ongoing tragedies of Iraq and Katrina.  These catastrophes are characterized by lies and corruption, and it is the responsibility of Congress to get explanations, to get facts on what should be done and what will work, and take action.

But with Republican One-Party Rule we haven’t gotten the facts and we won’t.  No one is asking questions and demanding answers.  Government is broken.  It’s time to end Republican rule.  

Some pols believe it isn’t advantageous to sound a Democrats v. Republican theme.  National polls may not tell us how local races will turn out, but they sure show one thing: the generic Republican candidate is a loser.  I believe it is precisely the Democrats v. Republican theme that will work, because voters don’t like how things are going, they can register that disapproval and try to improve things in a fairly low-risk way by electing Democrats to Congress.  (It’s low risk because it will mean a divided government, so they aren’t turning over the country entirely to the Democrats, yet.)  

Anyway, I illustrate one storyline, Katrina, with this first draft for a TV spot.  The writing isn’t polished, I didn’t time it or anything, but I think it’s useful.

Again, there’s a version of it with images at Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily.

KATRINA SPOT

IMAGES: hurricane winds and water; computer weather maps of approaching hurricane

VOICEOVER:
A terrible storm was bearing down on the Gulf Coast.  The National Weather Service issued a public warning:

IMAGE: teletype of this warning,

VO: If the storm hits the city, “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,” the Weather Service said.  They warned that homes would be severly damage or destroyed.”Power outages will last for weeks. … Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”

IMAGE: Bush being briefed via video
VO: The Weather Service warned President Bush that New Orleans levees could fail. It was Hurricane Katrina.

IMAGES: levees, Superdome, etc.  

Mayor Nagin ordered New Orleans to be evacuated, but hundreds of thousands who couldn’t get out were stranded when levees broke and much of the city flooded.   Tens of thousands of people–including elderly and families with children– were abandoned in the Superdome for days, with no food and water, while a shocked nation watched.

IMAGES: Bush with guitar, Rumsfeld at Padres baseball game, Condi Rice on Broadway

VO: While the pleas of the Democratic governor of Louisina went unheeded by the Republican administration in Washington, President Bush attended political events, and members of his cabinet went to baseball games and Broadway shows.  

IMAGE: Bush and FEMA director

VO:Not for hours but for days and weeks, the federal government was failing to avert one of the greatest tragedies ever on American soil.  And President Bush’s response was to pat the director of FEMA on the back and tell him, “You’re doing a heckava job, Brownie.”  

IMAGES: Gore, Waters at airport, Kerry  

VO: Still the disaster grew, and as FEMA failed and actually refused help that poured in from around the country and the world, citizens tried their best to respond, including Al Gore, who flew more than 100 patients from New Orleans to medical facilities in Tennessee, and Maxine Waters, Jesse Jackson and the Louisiana Black Caucus, who rescued  some of those stranded at the New Orleans airport, and John Kerry, who took a plane of emergency supplies to the Gulf.  

IMAGE: Demonstrators at White House, holding up signs: SHAME

VO: Citizens saw what no one believed they would ever see in America, and they knew who was responsible.

IMAGES: destruction

Why wasn’t the federal government prepared?  For years engineers told the government the levees could fail.  Three years earlier, a in-depth study in a New Orleans newspaper warned that nearly a quarter of a million people would be unable to evacuate from New Orleans.  Yet the Republican government cut back funds for those levees, and shortchanged emergency preparations.  What was the Republican response?

IMAGE: Bush viewing New Orleans destruction from Air Force One

VO: President Bush looked down on the devastation from Air Force One.  “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” he said.

IMAGES: construction, texts

VO Then the Bush administration began awarding no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other crony corporations for relief and reconstruction. In Sept 2005 the Wall Street Journal warned that they were bringing “many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq.”

A year later, waste and fraud was estimated at up to $2 billion, New Orleans and the Gulf are still in shambles, lacking basic services and housing.  And engineers fear the New Orleans levees are still not strong enough.  

IMAGES: Capitol Hill
VO: Why wasn’t the Republican Congress demanding that the federal government do its duty to the American people?
Why aren’t they  watching how that money is spent?  Why aren’t they asking questions and demanding answers on behalf of the American people they represent?

An arrogant Republican leadership won’t allow real investigations or oversight. They close down committee hearings rather than let Democrats ask questions.  They won’t allow a bill to be voted on that they don’t approve. They refuse to find the facts or to fix what’s broken.  

No answers.
No action.

America is less safe, and less fair.  Our government is broken.

IMAGE: voters–all kinds– at the polls

VO: Only you can fix it.

End Republican One-Party Rule.  Elect Democrats to the US Congress— to the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.  Together, we can do better.

It’s crunch time.  It’s time to get the main messages out. With candidate speeches and blogs, big money ads and homemade video, with all the means there are. Because it’s not going to be as easy as it sounds from the latest batch of predictions, each inflating the other.  It’s going to take work to close the deal.

It’s time for Democrats to tell their story, and the first thing the party must recognize is that they need to tell it from the beginning.  That’s where most good stories start, but there are real world reasons for what I mean.

From the beginning means: don’t assume.  Don’t assume voters know a lot.  Don’t be condescending or phony, but just deal with that fact.  And understand the story they want to hear this election year.
Where is the beginning?

The documented lack of knowledge about government and politics extends to crucial matters.  A 1996 study showed that younger voters could identify the town in which “The Simpsons” takes places more frequently than the identity of the party that controlled Congress.

That’s the crucial fact: that’s the beginning:

Republicans control Congress.

Republicans have used their absolute power to exclude Democrats from the process of making laws and calling the government to account for its actions.  The Republicans have misued their power to create a “democracy free zone” in the U.S. Congress.

(The “democracy free zone” is a quote from Rep. Louise Slaughter. The Republicans’ unprecedented misuse of power is documented by such political scientists as Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, and is summarized in Alan Wolfe’s new book, “Does American Democracy Still Work?”)

This is the beginning to the story of ACCOUNTABILITY.  As Alan Wolfe writes, “…accountability, as its name implies, involves telling a story.”  

Accountability is giving an account of actions: why they are taken, what are the consequences, what went right and wrong, and why.

Democrats have two basic and very powerful stories to tell: Iraq and Katrina. A third story is the Republican misuse of power in Congress.

But the story behind the story is that Republicans are preventing us from fixing what is broken, from looking at the facts.  They are preventing us from making things better.

The stories must show what’s gone wrong, but also what Congress is supposed to do about it: 1. investigate, make the executive give an account of their actions. 2. Make better laws.

Why will this work?

Americans don’t generally like one party to have absolute power.  As Chris Bowers showed months ago, voters usually vote against the party they believe is in power.

That’s generally because Americans don’t pay much attention to politics, and they don’t want to.  They generally favor compromise, and they elect people they trust, and expect them to do what’s best without voters watching them closely.  But since they don’t trust politicians in general, they feel safer if power is divided.  

This year they have extra motivation for electing Democrats, which can carry over to 08.  But the presidency and the executive aren’t on the ballot this year.  Democrats must take advantage of Bush’s unpopularity by showing how electing Democrats to CONGRESS will help change things.

So Chris Bowers is right: the message is that Republicans control Congress.  But the message is only the beginning, the beginning of the story–of every story–that Democrats tell to win this election.

Water is not just necessary for life.  Water is life.  Our planet is mostly made of it and so are we–one species of intelligent aliens identified us as “ugly bags of mostly water.” (Bonus points to the comment that correctly identifies the source.)  

We grow up knowing the simple formula for water: H2O. Yet for all our vaunted science and technology, we have no idea how to make it.  Our science knows a few things about it, but we don’t know really what water is.

We can’t build or manufacture or create water.  Our lives depend on the water that exists, that our earth as a complex system provides.  Water is in many ways the basis of civilization, and how water is shared is a primary creator and medium of culture.  But as the world’s fresh water is increasingly threatened by what the modern world has done to the planet, water again becomes a test of our civilization and our future.  For many, it already is.  For the rest of us, it soon will be.
crossposted with photos eventually at Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily.

Problems

Right now more than a billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water. Water-related disease are the leading cause of death in the world, and are responsible for 80% of all the sickness experienced.

According to the World Resources Institute, some 41% of the world’s population– or 2.3 billion people- “live in river basins under ‘water stress,’ meaning they are subject to frequent water shortages. Some 1.7 billion of these people live in `highly stressed’ water basins where problems with local food production and economic development abound.”

The world’s fresh water supply has been diminishing for centuries, due to chemical pollution from industries, and bacterial pollution from human and animal waste.  Among the nations that currently have serious water problems are India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Ethiopia and Honduras.  

The World Bank predicts that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will suffer from lack of clean and safe drinking water.The United Nations General Assembly recognized the extent of the problem by declaring the years 2005 to 2015 as the International Decade for Action, “Water for Life.”

Now the current distribution of the world’s fresh water, and ultimately the systems that support all water in the world, are threatened  by the Climate Crisis.  Droughts will be larger and longer.  But even when more rain falls it will end up meaning less water: warmer temperatures mean moisture will fall earlier as rain rather than snow, which slowly melts into the land; warmer seas, etc. mean the normal rainfall is dumped in big storms, in a time too short for the land to absorb and hold it.

We are likely already seeing the first Climate Crisis war in Darfur, where “increasing drought cycles and the Sahara’s southward expansion” created conflicts between nomadic and urban groups over water and land.

Deserts are rapidly expanding in Africa and Asia, as the land is ravaged of forests and vegetation, a situation that the Climate Crisis is unlikely to improve.

Desalinization to turn abundant sea water into fresh water was  once believed to be the cure-all, but it turns out to have many problems, one of which is the cost and amount of energy required.  So we mostly depend on the fresh water that exists in the world.

Another possible problem looms, however: privatization of water delivery systems and water supplies. Huge corporations are now busy buying up water reserves with the aim of selling it as bottled water or in bulk shipments, and they are already using their clout to lower water quality standards. (The aforementioned World Bank is backing some of these companies.)

 One has to assume that companies buying up systems and resources are out to make a profit, and know that as water gets scarcer, they are in position to hold the biggest gun to the head of the public ever conceived.  It could make “Urinetown” look like a socialist utopia.

Water, goes the glib cliché, will be the new oil.  But try drinking oil when the water runs out.  Human beings can survive without a trip to WalMart indefinitely.  But without water, we are all dead within days.        

Solutions

The Climate Crisis solutions are obvious if complex (basically the two part fix it and stop it I’ve been advocating)but that’s not precisely the specific kind of water story on the UN’s underreported list.

They are talking about solutions now, in the “fix it” phase of the Climate Crisis, as well as for the many other reasons for water shortages, such as pollution, overpopulation, deforestation and poor management.

Knowing how vital water is, its simple to assume that the attempted solution would most likely be war. And that’s been tried–something like 7 wars in modern times are attributed to fighting over water. But you may be surprised to know that historically this has not often been the case.  Water sharing has been far more common than water conflict becoming violent, or so the scholars say:

Aaron Wolf, a leading authority on the politics of water, makes a compelling case that unlike diamonds, oil, and land, the demand for water resources does not promote conflict. Historical records and data from over 400 fresh-water agreements decidedly demonstrate more cooperation than conflict.[3] Many scholars share Wolf’s view that water is a resource “whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation and incite violence only in exception,” resulting in water-sharing treaties that are “creative, resilient, and manage to transcend other conflicts.

If this is so, we perhaps owe it to traditions begun in more civilized times, if you take civilized to mean when cultures recognized their dependence on nature and each other.  People in particular who live with scarcity and drought have integrated cooperation into their traditional cultures.  One such culture is the Gabra, as described in the landmark book Millenium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World by David Marbury-Lewis (he is the founder of the organization Cultural Survival.) The Gabra live in the Chalbi Desert area now in Kenya, and have a longstanding tradition of lending camels, their most precious and sacred possession, to others who are in need because of drought.  This even extends to people outside their own culture:

“They will also lend them to outsiders in time of dire need.  During the last, particularly vicious drought they lent many camels to the neighboring Boran. In fact, many Boran came to live with the Gabra during those difficult times.”

This is not only a deeply felt obligation, it is a relationship that offers protection, for the recipients take on the obligation of helping others in need when they are able, and specifically to help those who helped them.

“Whether the lending is between Gabra and Boran, or among the Gabra themselves, the ties created along the lending paths endure for generations, and a herder must therefore know the genealogy of his animals so as to know to whom he is indebted.”

Still,there are some modern precedents. The UN site on the topic notes:

With world demand for water increasing six-fold over the 20th century, there was no let-up in disputes over transboundary water issues, prompting some experts to predict that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water. While freshwater’s propensity to strain relations among countries frequently makes headlines, the other side of the coin – water as an agent of cooperation – rarely gets sufficient attention. Nevertheless, research has shown much more historical evidence of water playing the role of a catalyst for cooperation, rather than a trigger of conflict. There are examples of workable accords on water reached even by States that were in conflict over other matters, including the cases of India and Pakistan, and Israel and Jordan.

Which brings us to one of the stories the UN has highlighted: Lake Titicaca which is partly in Bolivia and partly in Peru.  Using the technical sophistication of the World Water Assessment Program and a planning process aided by the European Community, these two nations created a common Autonomous Water Authority (known as ALT) to manage water use for agriculture, electricity generation and drinking water and sanitation.  

Focusing on water use has led to analyses of the local economy and in particular highlighted the need to improve public health.  There are substantial remaining problems.  The area is still subject to sudden flooding which is likely to get worse.

  But the combined authority has some important accomplishments: new floodgates, dredging of the Desaguadero River, new sewage treatment facilities, and the beginnings of a cooperative biodiversity conservation program by the governments of Bolivia and Peru, and the United Nations .

It has in turn become a model for similar large-scale situations:

The lessons learned from this large process of the studies and negotiations between two countries oriented to the preservation and sustainable use of a shared hydraulic resource, for the regional importance for two countries, were collected in different instances. Steps like the ones listed below,
are an example of the procedures, which could be followed by local organizations, regions and nations that share hydraulic resources:

• Define the juridical situation of the basin
• Carry out basic studies of the basin in a joint basis
• Obtain international assistance, if necessary
• Elaborate a Master Plan to determine the handling of the water resources and its use
• Establish a technical mix organisms (if possible) for the handling of the Master Plan
• Make the studies in a joint way and realize a system of geographic information t define the positive or negative aspects which may happen in the future.

One notable achievement: Indigenous cultures and populations have become part of the decision-making process, and Native communities are planned to be participants in the biodiversity conservation program.  There is often conflict between contemporary governments, advised by international banks and their globalized economists, and the cultures that have been living the natural environment for thousands of years.  Their traditions often embody the knowledge appropriate to the local environment and the natural economy that outsiders miss.    

Another example the UN points to is in the former Soviet Union:

The Northern Aral Sea is being successfully restored after its surface had shrunk to less than half its original size as a result of a massive diversion of water under the Soviet Union, which had drained the two rivers feeding it and devastated the surrounding environment. The Aral Sea is shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but its fresh water basin also encompasses Afghanistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Thanks to a World Bank project, the sea has now begun to fill up following the completion of the Kok-Aral Dam. Newly rehabilitated waterworks along the Syr Darya River are benefiting farmers by irrigating their lands. The next step is to improve the irrigation efficiency of two-thirds of the land in the Kazakh part of the Aral Sea basin.

It’s obviously a complex set of problems, that will be at the center of things for a long time.  If it’s a bit too much to take in all at once, perhaps you should take a couple of aspirins, or the pain reliever of your choice.  With a nice drink of water, of course.