Buddy – you gave me a shot way back when so I owe you a considered response to your last plaint – Though I’m I wanted to start memes, I wouldn’t spend much time arguing 1 against 100 at the Club. My posting here has been an experiment – what happens when someone with my politics makes an effort to connect with folks who don’t share a way of seeing. And though I’m way disappointed with Wretch’s angles on Obama/America – my trying here is a sort a tribute to the fact that I’ve LEARNED stuff from him re Iraq…So I owe HIM too. (Though my guess right now is that he probably thinks he’s been paid in full!) When I post I offer my best read on events (w/ a little help from what I read). Hope I’m right – May be wrong – but always give it to you straight. So…- at the risk of buying into the GOP tendency to make (as per O) “big elections about little things,” I went back to the video tape – The first one I’d seen began when Ms. Palin said what a surprise and honor it had been for her to be picked. I found a more extended one that started with MaC’s talk – including his big pause/smile when he said Ms. Palin’s parents had been…coaches! Have to say that felt clunky/elitist/DC-ist – Like John thought that the Palin fam’s history of athleticism might make a BIG diff to the rubes! (Since you bring up naturalness – Mac looked very clunky at that moment.)Paid special attention this time around to the improvisational moment you cited re Ms. Palin choosing NOT to announce her new son had Downs Syndrome. Not sure I saw everything you did there – but basically I’m with you – She does seem real and I can imagine her making the right, quick call there. She might even have a step on the O’s there. (I was a little queasy how they put their kids Out There.) My guess is that Palin is about a million miles from Cindi – Probaby sweeter than Mac or Biden too. (Though not sure re Mrs. Biden – she seems pretty genuine – as did Beau Biden). If you’re right re Ms. Palin, she’s a natural empath. Which underscores why OBama is something special. It don’t come natural to him. But he knows it’s EVERYTHING. He understand empathy should be the basis of a politics. Not just “women’s work.” Think of how he spoke so beautifully last night about his mom having to argue w/ insurance companies as she was dying or about Toot’s rise or about seeing his grandfather in the face of an Iraq war vet…Mac claims to FEEL the pain of the folks in Dayton – but he doesn’t give a damn about their dailiness (UNLESS their soldiering). Like you, Buddy, he doesn’t really believe working class people have any class-based plaints – If they’re not thrilled with the job or the boss or their insurance – there’s a simple solution…Right? – Resign. Move on. Find a millionairess…
…- Back to the Tape – the audience response still felt ginned up to me. Suprised you’d be suprised at that. We’re talking GOP politics. Spontaneity is not generally at a premium with pubs. Those full-throated – and they still sounded VERY boyish to me – cheers when Mac first touched on the week of the suffragettes felt calculated. For real – is there any basis for it in GOP history as compared to the Dems? Maybe I’m projecting falsity here because I’ve been reading all the speculation at the Club re the need not to pick another Rich White Guy but… RE the USA chant – I was listening on the computer – mebbe my sound wasn’t up to speed. But the first time I heard the chant it seemed to rise up not from individuals but from a chorus immediately – and again the voices sounded pretty manly – But you’re right, I can’t say for certain – it was an impression based on some knowledge of the GOP’s history. I’m not stuck on it. But maybe you might consider that first cheer when Mac invoked the suffragettes. Do you really think there’d been sudden influx of Emily’s List types into downtown Dayton?
I’m going to cut and paste a fine piece that underscores Pub’s history of condescension toward working class people. Dems aint done much better in recent generations. But I think that’s, ah, changing – OF course it may be that Johnny (w/ his heiress) can convince working and middle class Americans that he gets it more than O (w/ his girl from the South Side). We’ll see…
The following piece is by a clasic “scholarship boy” – working class Italian kid who mom was a waitress…Snuck into school and ended up being an English teacher …
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Mike Rose
There was a remarkable moment in former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the Republican National Convention [in 2004], a moment I keep turning over and over in my mind. It had to do with love. About half-way through the speech – after praising George Bush’s leadership in responding to 9/11 and before an affirmation of the Bush foreign policy doctrine – Giuliani offers the following scene.
Bush is visiting ground zero and is soon surrounded by “big, real big” construction workers. Their “arms are bigger than [Giuliani’s] legs, and their opinions are even bigger than their arms.” Using language that Giuliani “can’t repeat,” one of the men begins speaking with deep feeling about the attackers to Mr. Bush, and then “embraced the president and began hugging him enthusiastically.” Giuliani completes the moment by observing this was an act of love.
I don’t know this worker, so I can only imagine what feelings must have been churning inside him, seeking some kind of meaningful expression. And suddenly here before him stands the president of the United States. At ground zero. Overwhelming.
What troubles me, though, what I can’t shake, is the use of that moment by Giuliani – and similar moments by other Republican strategists and speechwriters – to certify George Bush’s deep bond with working people. Giuliani describes the construction worker with genial humor, but if you think about it, the portrait is pretty stereotypical: the big, patriotic hard hat. Joe Sixpack. The working men and women I grew up with were strong, yes, and loyal to country, but they were much more. Smart and skeptical, for starters. Think, for a moment, of all that you won’t see in these GOP portraits. You won’t see the female cannery worker with injured hands or the guys at bitter loose ends when the factory closes. You won’t see people, exhausted, shuttling between two (or more) jobs to make a living or the anxious scramble for minimal health care for their kids. And you sure won’t see people organizing to improve their working lives.
What a funny kind of love it is that undercuts unions, erodes workplace health and safety regulations, opposes increases in the minimum wage, changes overtime rules. The invocation of love at ground zero – and the replaying of the image – mystifies things terribly. Emotion trumps fact: the awful Republican record on working America. God forbid that the fellow embracing Bush develops, as so many have, serious respiratory disease. He won’t find the administration’s policies hospitable to his plight. He’d better seek instead the much-maligned trial lawyer.
American workers don’t need love from their government, especially this funky seduction. They need opportunity. They need an understanding of their struggles. They need an appreciation of the skill and intelligence they bring to their work. They need enough respect for that intelligence that they’re provided with facts rather than emotion. They need the protections of the secure workplace, of the fair wage, of the union contract. They don’t need a one-way romance, the administration taking the embrace, but returning a deadly kiss.
