Beyond the New Deal

[DroppinScience]

Here's a good Howard Zinn article on the Democratic candidates. Man, wouldn't it be nice if any of the candidates right now could speak in this language?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/zinn

Beyond the New Deal

by HOWARD ZINN

[from the April 7, 2008 issue]

We might wonder why no Democratic Party contender for the presidency has invoked the memory of the New Deal and its unprecedented series of laws aimed at helping people in need. The New Deal was tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them. It created many jobs but left 9 million unemployed. It built public housing but not nearly enough. It helped large commercial farmers but not tenant farmers. Excluded from its programs were the poorest of the poor, especially blacks. As farm laborers, migrants or domestic workers, they didn't qualify for unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, Social Security or farm subsidies.

Still, in today's climate of endless war and uncontrolled greed, drawing upon the heritage of the 1930s would be a huge step forward. Perhaps the momentum of such a project could carry the nation past the limits of FDR's reforms, especially if there were a popular upsurge that demanded it. A candidate who points to the New Deal as a model for innovative legislation would be drawing on the huge reputation Franklin Roosevelt and his policies enjoy in this country, an admiration matched by no President since Lincoln. Imagine the response a Democratic candidate would get from the electorate if he or she spoke as follows:

"Our nation is in crisis, just as it was when Roosevelt took office. At that time, people desperately needed help, they needed jobs, decent housing, protection in old age. They needed to know that the government was for them and not just for the wealthy classes. This is what the American people need today.

"I will do what the New Deal did, to make up for the failure of the market system. It put millions of people to work through the Works Progress Administration, at all kinds of jobs, from building schools, hospitals, playgrounds, to repairing streets and bridges, to writing symphonies and painting murals and putting on plays. We can do that today for workers displaced by closed factories, for professionals downsized by a failed economy, for families needing two or three incomes to survive, for writers and musicians and other artists who struggle for security.

"The New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps at its peak employed 500,000 young people. They lived in camps, planted millions of trees, reclaimed millions of acres of land, built 97,000 miles of fire roads, protected natural habitats, restocked fish and gave emergency help to people threatened by floods.

"We can do that today, by bringing our soldiers home from war and from the military bases we have in 130 countries. We will recruit young people not to fight but to clean up our lakes and rivers, build homes for people in need, make our cities beautiful, be ready to help with disasters like Katrina. The military is having a hard time recruiting young men and women for war, and with good reason. We will have no such problem enlisting the young to build rather than destroy.

"We can learn from the Social Security program and the GI Bill of Rights, which were efficient government programs, doing for older people and for veterans what private enterprise could not do. We can go beyond the New Deal, extending the principle of social security to health security with a totally free government-run health system. We can extend the GI Bill of Rights to a Civilian Bill of Rights, offering free higher education for all.

"We will have trillions of dollars to pay for these programs if we do two things: if we concentrate our taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, not only their incomes but their accumulated wealth, and if we downsize our gigantic military machine, declaring ourselves a peaceful nation.

"We will not pay attention to those who complain that this is 'big government.' We have seen big government used for war and to give benefits to the wealthy. We will use big government for the people."

How refreshing it would be if a presidential candidate reminded us of the experience of the New Deal and defied the corporate elite as Roosevelt did, on the eve of his 1936 re-election. Referring to the determination of the wealthy classes to defeat him, he told a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden: "They are unanimous in their hatred for me--and I welcome their hatred." I believe that a candidate who showed such boldness would win a smashing victory at the polls.

The innovations of the New Deal were fueled by the militant demands for change that swept the country as FDR began his presidency: the tenants' groups; the Unemployed Councils; the millions on strike on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South; the disruptive actions of desperate people seeking food, housing, jobs--the turmoil threatening the foundations of American capitalism. We will need a similar mobilization of citizens today, to unmoor from corporate control whoever becomes President. To match the New Deal, to go beyond it, is an idea whose time has come.

I know. It's a pipe dream, but it's a good one nevertheless.

[DroppinScience]

I also have a second Zinn article about this election season, and his message here is particularly important: there's much more to democracy and change than elections every four years.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/24/7261/

Election Madness
by Howard Zinn

There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held-security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.

Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”

On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ‘07.”

The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ‘06 rate.”

A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.

Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.

This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.

And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.

Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?

The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.

No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal-Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing-were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army-thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

I hope these columns offer a source of inspiration.

[D_Raay]

They sure do droppin.

<insert any number of cynical remarks here and let the mud slinging begin>
^oh how I wish that weren't so either...

[saz]

that would require the democrats to grow a spine, ditch their corporate friends and lobbyists, and be the party they once were. but that's not going to happen, because they're too busy being republican-lite useless cowards.

meanwhile (http://www.gp.org/index.php)...

[DroppinScience]

Hey, if the Greens were to make in-roads that would be nice, but that is an almost historic impossibility.

But here's at least a hopeful narrative if we do indeed inaugurate a President Obama come Jan. 20, 2009:

Party Like It’s 1932: The Obama Option
by Norman Solomon

Seventy-six years ago, to many ears on the left, Franklin D. Roosevelt sounded way too much like a centrist. True, he was eloquent, and he’d generated enthusiasm in a Democratic base eager to evict Republicans from the White House. But his campaign was moderate — with policy proposals that didn’t indicate he would try to take the country in bold new directions if he won the presidency.

Yet FDR’s triumph in 1932 opened the door for progressives. After several years of hitting the Hoover administration’s immovable walls, the organizing capacities of labor and other downtrodden constituencies could have major impacts on policy decisions in Washington.

Today, segments of the corporate media have teamed up with the Clinton campaign to attack Barack Obama. Many of the rhetorical weapons used against him in recent weeks — from invocations of religious faith and guns to flag-pin lapels — may as well have been ripped from a Karl Rove playbook. The key subtexts have included racial stereotyping and hostility to a populist upsurge.

Do we have a major stake in this fight? Does it really matter whether Hillary Clinton or Obama wins the Democratic nomination? Is it very important to prevent John McCain from moving into the White House?

The answers that make sense to me are yes, yes and yes.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In 1932, there were scant signs that Franklin Delano Roosevelt might become a progressive president. By the summer of that election year, when he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, his “only left-wing statements had been exceedingly vague,” according to FDR biographer Frank Freidel.

Just weeks before the 1932 general election, Roosevelt laid out a plan for mandated state unemployment insurance nationwide along with social welfare. Even then, he insisted on remaining what we now call a fiscal conservative. “Obviously he had not faced up to the magnitude of expenditure that his program would involve,” Freidel recounts. “Obviously too, he had not in the slightest accepted the views of those who felt that the way out of the Depression was large-scale public spending and deficit financing.”

Six days later, on October 19, FDR delivered a speech in Pittsburgh that blasted the federal budget for its “reckless and extravagant” spending. He pledged “to reduce the cost of current federal government operations by 25 percent.” And he proclaimed: “I regard reduction in federal spending as one of the most important issues of this campaign.” If he’d stuck to such positions, the New Deal would never have happened.

As the fall campaign came to a close, the Nation magazine lamented that “neither of the two great parties, in the midst of the worst depression in our history, has had the intelligence or courage to propose a single fundamental measure that might conceivably put us on the road to recovery.” Looking back on the 1932 campaign, Freidel was to comment: “Indeed, in many respects, for all the clash and clamor, Roosevelt and President Hoover had not differed greatly from each other.”

The Socialist Party’s Norman Thomas, running for president again that year, had a strong basis for his critique of both major-party candidates in 1932. But in later elections, when Thomas ran yet again, many former supporters found enough to admire in FDR’s presidency to switch over and support the incumbent for re-election.

“The Roosevelt reforms went far beyond previous legislation,” historian Howard Zinn has written. Those reforms were not only a response to a crisis in the system. They also met a need “to head off the alarming growth of spontaneous rebellion in the early years of the Roosevelt administration — organization of tenants and the unemployed, movements of self-help, general strikes in several cities.”

Major progressive successes under the New Deal happened in sync with stellar achievements in grassroots organizing. So, in Zinn’s words, “Where organized labor was strong, Roosevelt moved to make some concessions to working people.” The New Deal was not all it could have been, no doubt, but to a large extent it was a stupendous result of historic synergies — made possible by massive pressure from the grassroots and a president often willing to respond in the affirmative.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Support of a candidate does not — or at least should not — mean silence about disagreement. There shouldn’t be any abatement of advocacy for progressive positions, whether opposition to nuclear power plants, insistence on complete withdrawal of the U.S. military and mercenaries from Iraq, or activism for a universal single-payer healthcare system.

For good reasons, Obama doesn’t say “I am the one we’ve been waiting for.” He says in speech after speech: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Whether that ends up being largely rhetoric or profoundly real depends not on him nearly so much as on us.

A crucial task between now and November is to get Obama elected as president while shifting the congressional mix toward a progressive majority. Next year will bring the imperative of organizing to exert powerful pressure from the base for progressive change.

At a recent caucus in California’s 6th congressional district, I was elected as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. It’s clear to me that Obama is now the best choice among those with a chance to become the next president.

Barack Obama has the potential to become as great a president as Franklin Roosevelt — while social and political movements in the United States have the potential to become as great as those that made the New Deal possible. I seriously doubt that Hillary Clinton has such potential. And John McCain offers only more of the kind of horrific presidency that the world has endured for the last 87 months.

[saz]

Hey, if the Greens were to make in-roads that would be nice, but that is an almost historic impossibility.

how do you know?

there are currently 228 greens (http://www.gp.org/elections/officeholders/2008-04-06Green-Officeholders.xls) holding elected office throughout the united states. (if that link isn't working, go here (http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml) to download the spreadsheet which lists all of the greens in elected office.


But here's at least a hopeful narrative if we do indeed inaugurate a President Obama come Jan. 20, 2009:

soloman is being very naive, and i completely disagree with him.


Corporate America Hearts Obama

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted April 30, 2008


Barack Obama's campaign message, filled with lofty promises of change and hope, is also filled with repeated reassurances to the corporate elite. Pick up a copy of Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope." The subtext is clear. It is a steady reminder to corporate America, a reminder bolstered by Obama's voting record, that corporations would have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency.

"Of course," he writes, "there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or a DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some of their more radical ideas into law. The prevalence of regional, ethnic, and economic differences within the party, the electoral map and the structure of the Senate, the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections -- all these things tend to prevent Democrats in office from straying too far from the center. In fact, I know very few elected Democrats who neatly fit the liberal caricature; the last I checked, John Kerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary Clinton believes in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of the Congressional Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins."

He praises the "recognizably progressive" Bill Clinton, whose disastrous welfare reform (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060829_robert_scheer_clinton_welfare/) he lauds, for showing that "government spending and regulation could, if properly designed, serve as vital ingredients and not inhibitors to economic growth, and how markets and fiscal discipline could help promote social justice. He recognized that not only societal responsibility but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty." Obama excoriates "those who still champion the old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from the liberal interest groups. But these efforts seem exhausted, a constant game of defense, bereft of energy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of globalization or a stubbornly isolated inner city." (asshole)

The same Beltway lobbyists, corporate donors and public relations firms, the same weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, nuclear power companies and Wall Street interests that give Clinton and John McCain money, give Obama money. They happen, in fact, to give Obama more. And the corporate state, which is carrying out a coup d'état in slow motion, believes it will prosper in Obama's hands. If not, he would not be a viable candidate.

There have been some important investigations into Obama's links with major corporations, including Ken Silverstein's November 2006 (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275) article "Barack Obama Inc: The Birth of a Washington Machine" in Harper's magazine. Newsweek has also detailed many of Obama's major corporate contributors. Obama's Leadership PAC includes John Gorman of Texas-based Tejas Securities, a major supporter of Senate Democrats as well as the Bush presidential campaigns. It includes Winston & Strawn, the Chicago-based law and lobbying firm. It also includes the corporate law firms Kirkland & Ellis, and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fundraisers for Obama as well as donors. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Henry Crown and Co., an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense, are all funding the Illinois senator.

Individual contributors to Obama come from major lobbyist groups such as those of Jeffrey Peck (whose clients include MasterCard, the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and Rich Tarplin (Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers). Exelon, a leading nuclear plant operator, based in Illinois, is a long-time donor to the Obama campaign. Exelon executives and employees have contributed at least $227,000 to Obama's campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fundraisers. Obama has also accepted more than $213,000 from individuals (and their spouses) who work for companies in the oil and gas industry, and two of Obama's bundlers are senior oil company executives who have raised between $50,000 and $100,000. I could go on, but you get the point.


Obama, as you will see if you examine his voting record, has repeatedly rewarded those who reward him:


• As a senator he has promoted nuclear energy as "green." He has been lauded by the nuclear power industry, which is determined to resume building nuclear power plants across the country.

• He has voted to continue to fund the Iraq war. He opposed Rep. John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal.

• He refused to join the 13 senators who voted against confirming Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state.

• He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

• He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.

• He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872.

• He did not support the single-payer health care bill HR 676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers.

• He supports the death penalty.

• He worked tirelessly in the Senate in 2005 to pass a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama's second-biggest single bloc of donors. The law, with the Orwellian title the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. This has long been a cherished goal of large corporations as well as the Bush administration. It effectively denies redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges. It moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges. Even Hillary Clinton voted against this naked effort to allow corporations to carry out flagrant discrimination, consumer fraud and wage-and-hour violations.

• Obama likes to paint himself as an opponent of the war. He reminds voters of his one -- and only one -- speech opposing it. But he swiftly changed his mind. Obama told the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." Obama added that he "now believes U.S. forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation, a policy not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration." Obama wants to leave an estimated 50,000 troops in Iraq to protect our superbases and the Green Zone, our imperial city, to fight terrorism, and to train Iraqi forces.

• Obama's policy director is Karen Kornbluh, who as a senior aide to Robert Rubin, the head of the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, pushed through NAFTA and other free-trade policies that unleashed the assault on organized labor and devastated the country's manufacturing sector. And Obama's senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago, privately assured Canada's consul general in Chicago in February that Obama's NAFTA-bashing "should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans," according to a leaked memo of the meeting.

• Most of Obama's senior advisers, including Penny Pritzker, a member of one of America's richest families and the current finance chair of the campaign, have a long history of oiling the government apparatus for corporate interests and personal enrichment. Pritzker was the chair of Superior Bank of Chicago. The bank collapsed in 2001 with over $1 billion in insured and uninsured deposits, and 1,406 people lost nearly all their savings. The bank owners, who fabricated profit reports, made much of their money promoting risky subprime home mortgages. Those around Obama are as wedded to corporate interests as those around Clinton and McCain.

link (http://www.alternet.org/election08/83890/?page=2)


i just can't see an obama administration embracing progressive and populist policies and programs.

[DroppinScience]

how do you know?

there are currently 228 greens (http://www.gp.org/elections/officeholders/2008-04-06Green-Officeholders.xls) holding elected office throughout the united states. (if that link isn't working, go here (http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml) to download the spreadsheet which lists all of the greens in elected office.

Well, historically speaking, 3rd parties haven't done well in the U.S. at all. And this is from its inception to today. If I get proven wrong, that's wonderful, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

I perused your list of elected officials belonging to the Green Party. Most of them are on school boards or city councils. Nothing wrong with that, and that's a good first step, don't get me wrong, but until there are actual Congressmen or Senators getting elected, it's a long, long road ahead. But at least there are independents like Bernie Sanders in the Senate already, so there's always small glimmers of hope.




i just can't see an obama administration embracing progressive and populist policies and programs.

Maybe they wouldn't (at least not to the extent that we'd like to see), but Solomon's position was to get a good grassroots movement going on simultaneously to make sure that those in government could not ignore them (and what's wrong with this thinking and calling it "naive" when there's historical precedence to back it up).

The fact is that neither of the three men or women who would be president are everything we'd like them to be. But going by the choices presented in front of us, I have a feeling that those within the activist and grassroots community would have an easier time dealing with Obama than they would with either Clinton or McCain.

[afronaut]

Zinn is a good man. And as much as I'd like to put all my trust behind Obama to be a good, progressive president, I just can't. Don't get me wrong, I still support him, I'm just too realistic to buy completely into him. While I do like him better than a lot of other mainstream politicians out there, the fact still remains that he's one of two mainstream candidates in one of the two major mainstream parties in a two party system that seems designed to be adverse to any real change, in any direction.

If the Republicans would stop trying to destroy everything, perhaps we could feel safe to truly vote our hearts. Until then, many of us are too scared to vote for the candidates we really support in fear of giving the election to the Republicans. It makes me feel a bit empty to be voting this way, but right now at this particular moment in time, I think the first step is to not have a Republican in office. If we could just fulfill that one requirement, we could start making some real momentum for viability for third parties.

Perhaps if the public gets shafted first by Republicans, and then by Democrats, they'll realize "hey, this two party system fucking sucks. why not vote third party for a change?"

[DroppinScience]

Here is an interesting, albeit perhaps "naive" viewpoint in which it would be better to stand in defeat with Obama than stand in victory with Clinton.

I would rather stand with Obama in defeat, than stand with Clinton in victory. Every once in a while in life and in politics, we get a clear choice to do either the morally right thing, or to continue to cut corners and believe that the end justifies the means. We should have no illusion about this choice after following Bush’s road to the White House in which all of the ugliness and hatred he fostered on the campaign trail followed him and us through the last eight years. Now we are standing at that crossroads again watching the unfolding drama and contrasting styles of two Democratic candidates.

Hillary will get in bed with anybody. She has no internal moral compass. Her only choice is what is politically expedient. Her recent gas tax holiday proposal, an idea borrowed from fellow conservative McCain, is so stupid that I am surprised she can defend it with a straight face. Then I consider that it has no substance, it is just another means to an end for her. There are countless other examples that have made her appear harsh and arrogant, bullying in tone, threatening and menacing, pandering to our fears instead of inspiring our hopes. She knows that this works, and gleefully embraces it no matter whom she harms. The clearest example of her olitical calculus was her vote for the war in Iraq. Like Kerry and Edwards who were also anticipating runs for the White House, she jumped on the war wagon, because she thought, like most insiders, it would be over quickly, and her vote would make her a more credible candidate on national defense. It would also make her look tough! But toughness is not something you have to prove; it is formed by a constant adherence to principled positions that form one’s moral center and cannot be buffeted about by political winds. My own senator, the late Paul Wellstone, showed what that center looked like when, in a tough reelection fight, he voted against the war, and for his ourage and consistency of message his popularity surged ensuring his re-election.

Obama has shown this kind of courage, too. He resists the temptation to get in the mud with Clinton when it would be the politically expedient and the expected thing to do. He resists her taunts. He does not infantilize voters. He does not pander to fear and he remains unwavering in his determination to win by the means that he believes will be necessary to govern this country. He is now being tested in this firestorm swirling around him. In the inferno ignited by his former pastor and fueled by the media, Obama has remained teadfast. He is undeterred by the ugliness of racism and continues to move with the confidence of a man who is grounded in a strong and principled sense of self. There is a basic decency about him that one catches in his smile and the spontaneous way in which he interacts with crowds. There is a steely determination reflected in his eyes that gives us a clue to the character behind them. He inspires and speaks to our higher nature, recognizing that underneath our fears and spitefulness we are basically a good and generous people. For these reasons alone, I would rather stand with him and lose, if necessary, than win however possible.

But the most important reason to stand with him is that his election in the fall would give us a chance for atonement, to get back what we have lost over the past 25 years through a politics of division and hatred, where our government has been corrupted for the benefit of the very few; where the common good has been denigrated by a narcissistic worship of individualism and the wealth of our nation has been measured only in economic terms. Moreover, we might make amends to the rest of the world by electing a president who leads with humility and does not need to prove himself by killing others. We could atone for our warring ways, for torturing and terrorizing others, and for promoting hatred around the world. We could talk to our enemies, find common ground, share the world’s resources, promote the general welfare, and regain our place as a country with a basic regard for the well being of all human beings. Rather then talk about Christian principles, we could put them into practice beginning with loving our neighbors. This is the hope and dream that Obama engenders in me. It is refreshing, and even surprising that at the age of 60, I could once again be inspired by a politician.

Bud McClure is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He welcomes your emails at bmcclure@d.umn.edu.

[yeahwho]

Bud McClure seems like a nice enough fellow. I am still just sickened by the way Hillary Clinton has run her campaign.

I was very optimistic about her last year. Now I honestly believe each and every hour she campaigns the democratic party suffers. If she continues up until Obama gets his irreversible winning delegate count, the party will be in shambles and her underhanded political maneuvering style will only damage democrats.

If Obama ever needed a miracle it is now, he needs a win this Tuesday and a major endorsement from the likes of Gore, Edwards even Biden who already said,

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that's a storybook, man."

The fact Bill Richardson supports Obama keeps my hope level high.