Accidental Blogger

or,

Huckabee the Hatemonger

A Republican, a bigot? Surely I must jest. Of course Mike Huckabee opposes gay marriage — all of the Republicans do. (For that matter, as far as I can tell, all of the Democrats do, albeit less badly.) The way in which he does so is interesting, though. Huckabee says that "it’s a lot easier to change the constitution
than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what
we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards
rather than try to change God’s standards." That’s right, he wants a constitutional amendment to bring the Constitution in line with the Bible. Or his version of the Bible, really. The point is, he’s using anti-secular language and promising to govern the masses according to God’s will.

But that’s not even the fun Huckabee-is-a-bigot story that caught my eye. No, I’m talking about the one out of South Carolina.

"You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling
you what to do with your flag," Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of
Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated
Press.

"In fact," he said, "if somebody came to Arkansas and
told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the
pole; that’s what we’d do." [link]

That’s not just the states’ rights meme, that’s the states’ rights meme vis-à-vis the Confederacy, i.e. slavery. It’s barely (if at all) veiled code for "vote for me if you hate black people." Or insert a worse word for black people.

Even Fred Thompson — vying for the same portion of the electorate as Huckabee — has acknowledged that the Confederate flag is a "symbol of racism," and is "glad that people have made a decision not to display it as a prominent flag symbolic of something in a state capitol."

You know, a Huckabee-Obama matchup might tell us where this country is on race.

I hope we don’t have to find out. I’m afraid of what the answer might be — and the possibility of an even-more-disastrous-than-President-Bush, eight years of President Huckabee.

"Will they play the race card?" asks Marjorie Valbrun in the Washington post. By "they," she means the Clintons.

I’m scared for Barack Obama, but not for the same reasons that many other black voters are. While the possibility of a crazed gunman coming after him does worry me, my real fear is grounded in something more probable — that Hillary Clinton, after her less-than-stellar showing in Iowa and her close call in New Hampshire, will now go straight for Obama‘s jugular. Race, whether used subtly or as a blunt weapon, will undoubtedly be a factor.

I believe that the Clintons already have played the race card against Sen Obama.  (See here and here.)  Code words hinting at Obama’s possible past "use, abuse and distribution of drugs" or Senator Bob Kerrey’s condescending nod to Obama’s  –  "capacity to influence in a positive way without spending a penny the behavior of a lot of underperforming black youth today is very important, and he’s the only one who can reach them," have already been brought up.  But the clearest indication that the Clintons plan to use the race card came from a statement that Hillary Clinton herself made without the help of hired help or personal /political friends.

Clinton herself has made racially tinged comments that could be taken as either insensitive or patronizing. The most widely noticed was in her efforts to dismiss Obama’s talk of "hope" and "change" as empty idealism. In doing so, she offhandedly diminished the important role played by Martin Luther King Jr. in pushing America to meet its promise of equality for millions of black Americans.

"Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done." (emphasis mine)

So, Martin Luther King, Jr. was an attractive rabble rouser, Rosa Parks an obstinate bus rider and all those men and women who faced police dogs, bullets, batons and water hoses in Selma and Montgomery, mere part time agitators. It took a white man to get things really rolling for African Americans. Okay, I agree that in 1965, America did indeed need a white president to pass the Civil Rights Act in the face of savage opposition from southern politicians. American blacks were marginalized then both socially and politically. But is that still true in 2008?  Can black leaders in America not realize dreams or put into legislation their hope for America without a paternalistic (in this case, maternalistic) white person in power to enable them? Sen Clinton is now denying that she meant to diminish King’s role in the civil rights movement or that she wished to patronize Sen Obama.  Her statement was taken "out of context" she claims, without explaining what her larger context was.

No matter how Bill and Hill explain their pure intentions, I am not buying. It appears to me exactly what Valburn suspects – a warning to black voters that their aspirations and opportunities for betterment rest in Hillary’s capable "white" hands and not in Obama’s promise of "hope and change." Is there any other interpretation of what she may have meant by the above statement about MLK and LBJ?  If someone has a more charitable reading of it, please do explain it to me. Thanks.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table, here. Like Ruchira, I have had difficulty summoning a great deal of enthusiasm for any of the front-running Democratic candidates. I’m a pragmatist, when it comes to voting in national elections, so the annoying and complicated combination of factors that narrow the numbers of viable candidates (including but not limited to political funding, the media’s obsession with mano-a-mano battle narratives, people’s inability to keep more than a few characters in mind at one time) have effectively reduced my choices at this point to Obama, Edwards, or Clinton. I would give Obama the slight edge among these three.  I enjoy hearing him speak, though I find his speeches a bit windy. I could criticize Obama as naive and excessively process-oriented, but I believe he has substantive and consistent character, and I believe in the expressive value of his candidacy, especially to the part of the world where we’ve communicated the worst values in the last eight years. Edwards’ populist rhetoric appeals to me, but his policies don’t strike me as hewing far from the indistinguishable party lines of the others, and I often find myself wondering if deep down he’s shallow.

The candidate who does raise my passions, if only in that the candidate renders me apoplectic, is Hillary Clinton.  Perhaps because the policies of the Democratic contenders are so similar, the reasons for my dislike of Hillary Clinton are fairly personal: she strikes me as managing to embody both an empty carapace of ambition and an easy, self-righteous paternalism (a peculiar combination that presents with only too much ulcer-inducing familiarity to me from my time at Yale Law School). If Hillary Clinton were elected, I’d have to stay in my print news purdah, away from the TV, for another eight years, since as with G.W. Bush, her speaking mannerisms are like nails on chalkboard to me. If I could handle the triumphal– "I might have agreed with those to the Left of me, before I learned better"– themes of what she has to say in print, I would still subscribe to the New Republic. I don’t.

Yes, I’m saying that I find Hillary dislikable, and I don’t care if that’s "mean" or makes her cry. Read the findings and statements sections of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) and decide whether it doesn’t take a far more "mean" person to sign a document like that into law, or to execute a person with mental retardation for political gain, or to ignore the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people and then disingenuously profess ignorance as a political excuse for inaction. Far more tears have fallen as a result of those (among other Clinton policy) choices than Hillary has shed over her treatment in this primary.

"But, those choices were made by the other Clinton."

Yes, but if we buy that Hillary’s a bright, independent woman, she could have spoken out about them, then or now. Instead, she’s worked very hard to align herself with Bill, and to profit from his popularity, however sleazily gained. Other than a term-and-change as Senator (don’t get me started on her time as Senator), of what else does her endlessly self-advertised experience consist?

I’m troubled to see how little attention is being paid in the media to what seems to me an extremely notable point: in addition to choosing candidates in this election, we are given the choice of deciding whether, as a democracy, it is wise or even appropriate to have just two ruling families control the highest office in the country for almost a quarter century. I fail to understand why this issue receives so little press, except in catch-all references to the appeal of "change," which seems more identified, however, with non-partisanship and the politics of identity than with dynastic change. Why aren’t people more concerned? Are we a nation of neo-Whigs? Is this Pakistan? Every political persona I hear associated with Hillary’s campaign is like an unpleasant blast from the past. Last night, the commentators were interviewing self-satisfied clowns like Terry McAuliffe and James Carville on her behalf. This interesting article in The Nation that a friend sent to me this morning, about the foreign policy differences between Clinton and Obama, raised the specters of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger. Next, Hillary’s posse will be trotting out Janet Reno; then, I’ll really lose my lunch.

In 2004, I endured the soul crushing experience of campaigning, hard– with my feet in New Mexico, with my wallet, and through a phone bank organized by Andrew at our house– for John Kerry, trying to convince others to vote for someone when I was only voting against another, since I neither agreed with Kerry, nor admired him. Many others did the same. I will campaign again against any of the current crop of Republicans, even if Hillary wins the primary (though it makes my head nearly explode just to write that sentence). The example of 2004 does not bode well for the outcome of such an exercise, however, in terms of either my private or our public well-being.

Editor’s Note: The author of this post is Anna Levine.  Due to an error, Ruchira Paul’s name appears on the footer. 

Glen Greenwald wrote a piece a couple weeks ago at Salon about media hostility toward anti-establishment candidates.  I think this is an important and interesting article which is very much worth reading.

It should be obvious to anyone who paid attention to the Democratic nomination process for the 2004 election that the mainstream media killed Howard Dean’s campaign.  Coverage started out with by asking, "Who is this guy from Vermont and how did his grassroots movement become such a fundraising giant?"  The narrative then shifted to, "This guy’s unhinged and unelectable."  Senator Kerry, the establishment candidate, of course went on to win the nomination despite a distinct lack of electability.

The Greenwald article looks at the press coverage of Edwards, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul.  I think it’s basically correct, and I think the fact that the press is systematically failing in a particular and anti-democratic way is important, even apart from my desire to shill for John Edwards.  An excerpt follows:

There is no question that the media has paid far less attention to Ron
Paul and Mike Huckabee than the respective successes of their campaigns
merit. To that list, though, I would add a third candidacy that has
received far less media attention than it merits by all objective
metrics (polls, stature and money): the John Edwards campaign. In 2004,
Edwards was the party’s Vice Presidential nominee, came closer than
anyone else to beating Kerry, and has continuously been very near the
top of Iowa’s polls. Yet the media has all but ignored him — it’s
Clinton v. Obama in their World — except to mock him on the pettiest
of grounds, from his hair to his house.

[ . . . ]

It is very striking how little Edwards’ substantive critique of our
political system has penetrated into the national discourse. That’s
because the centerpiece of his campaign is a critique that is a full
frontal assault on our political establishment. His argument is not
merely that the political system needs reform, but that it is corrupt
at its core — "rigged" in favor of large corporate interests and their
lobbyists, who literally write our laws and control the Congress.
Anyone paying even casual attention to the extraordinary bipartisan
effort on behalf of telecom immunity, and so many other issues driven
almost exclusively by lobbyists, cannot reasonably dispute this
critique.

(more…)

The New Hampshire primary results are in. While the Republican contest went as projected by the polls, the Democratic outcome has come as somewhat of a surprise.  John McCain is the Republican winner and Hillary Clinton has finished first on the Democratic ballot.   The race is now wide open for candidates of both parties – no coronation is imminent.

Abbas Raza explains in 3 Quarks Daily.

I’m surprised by the results of the Iowa caucuses in two ways. First, the voter turnout. It was way, way up on the Democratic side: from 125,000 in 2004 to over 200,000 this year. The campaigns were expecting something in the 150,000 range, and first-time voters and young people showed up in large numbers–this just doesn’t happen in U.S. politics, but somehow it did. And second, the Obama For Change meme. If the commentators in the corporate media (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews) are correct, voters are identifying Barack Obama as the change candidate.

Of the three Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton is of course the "dial back the clock" candidate. She’s a woman, which would be new, but she’s also a Clinton campaigning on a platform of "my husband was President and this makes me the most ready to be co-President and haven’t you missed triangulation?". Clinton politics is a change only insofar as George W. Bush would no longer be mucking stuff up (and without a constitutional amendment or a Musharrafian move, that’s a foregone conclusion). No one would seriously question that the Clintons are the Democratic establishment.

But that still leaves Obama and Edwards–and somehow Obama is the change Democrat. From an ideological purity perspective, it seems pretty clear that Edwards is the progress–the "change"–guy. This country has been drifting to the right for decades. Clintonian Democrats accepted and popularized economic conservatism. Free trade, reduced government spending, and "whatever Wall Street wants" are ideas that came to be unquestioned in this country’s two major parties. John Edwards is now running a populist campaign. He’s talking about creating jobs by fighting corporate greed and solving our healthcare crisis by taking on the pharmaceuticals and the insurance industry. (By way of illustration, I’d say that if anyone can be said to speak for the left, it’s Ralph Nader–and Nader recently endorsed Edwards as the only tolerable Democrat.)

Obama, meanwhile, is campaigning on a platform of building bipartisan coalitions, of achieving broad support by sitting down and listening to the other side. His rhetoric seeks out the Clinton territory in the middle, and he’s refusing to take any really progressive policy stands. Obama is much more favorable to corporate interests than Edwards. (Which makes it awfully convenient for the corporate media to paint Obama as the change candidate, incidentally–its own institutional interest is presumably best served by a Clinton [status quo] vs. Obama [change] dichotomy.)

To the extent that Obama’s argument is that he stands for change based on his message–less partisan bickering, conciliation with the other side, compromise–his argument strikes me as both naive (he can’t stop partisan bickering) and dishonest (political compromise/centrism/moderation is hardly change in any meaningful way).

But to the extent that an Obama election would be a big deal because he’s black–yeah, that’s a pretty big change. That would be a huge deal for this country. It would be a huge deal for the world (one might note that half the the world’s countries, irrespective of wealth, have elected female leaders; dark-skinned leaders have been decidedly less common in countries with diverse populations). In other words, the election of Obama would be the progress itself and at once a signal thereof. This narrative has real value–maybe even more than Edwards’s greater ideological purity.

And finally, if Iowa is any indication, Obama is bringing in the ever-elusive youth vote and otherwise increasing voter turnout. I wouldn’t really call that a change, since it’s a response to exceptional circumstances and probably won’t last. Those exceptional circumstances, of course, being the mess President Bush has made of this country and the world… and Obama himself. I get the sense that people want to be able to say, "I voted for Barack Obama; I helped elect this nation’s first black President." It’s kind of like being able to say that you marched with Martin Luther King–who wouldn’t like to be able to say that?