WHAT’S WITH THIS ELECTORATE?

 

I remember thinking, ‘now we’re in for it!’, when George W. Bush got reelected in 2004, over the erudite Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts, and now, after Senator Obama’s thumping in the Pennsylvania Primary last night, I’m experiencing the worst kind of deja vu: Haven’t I had this nightmare before?

Why is it that people scream, “Change, we want change,” and then when they are presented with candidates, opportunities for endemic change, change that goes to the heart of our problems, they get cold feet? Are these the same people that, “cling to their guns and religion”, when times get rough? The same people that  are afraid to leave their houses without a firearm strapped to their belts, the so-called Christians,  so afraid of their neighbors and in fact their own true natures that they have to go to mass every Sunday to ward off  their urge to be the real bastards they are– and that they would be, if they didn’t drown their worse natures in holy water? 

Nobody has much trouble understanding the crooked cop or the big city police department crippled by corruption. We’ve seen all the movies, “Serpico”, and “Prince of the City”, all the mob movies that tell us, “You can’t fight city hall” or “buck the system”, that make it painfully clear that the golden rule, “He who has the gold makes the rules”,  still holds sway. So why can’t we apply the same logic to our elected representatives in Washington, D.C.? Is it that we don’t see it on a daily basis in the flesh? Is it that we don’t want to assign the same mere-mortal fallibility to our esteemed congressmen, senators and even presidents, men and women that went to ivy-league law schools, that told us they would fight for us, for our best interests once in office? Do we not want to believe such things of the “best” of us, because then what would that say about us, about what our political system has devolved into?

If there was ever a time for change, if there ever was a time of opportunity for an unconventional presidential candidate to have a chance, isn’t this it? Isn’t it? We had a few candidates of change in the field at the start of this campaign season. On the Republican side we had Rep. Ron Paul, whose supporters proudly and rightfully put forth his uncompromising voting record as proof of his integrity and capability to lead this country. On the other side of the aisle we had people like Kucinich and Gravel, who spoke truth about the, “broken system” in D.C. Even a Washington insider like Joe Biden shook his weary head and conceded that unless we went about the business of fixing the system nothing was likely to change. And John Edwards, who came out fighting like the bulldog we need, most consistently had the special interest problem in his cross hairs. But let’s face it, where are all these people now? The only one left is Barack Obama, and that’s why I support him.

Nobody, at least, nobody with any sense, thinks Barack Obama walks on water. Yeah, he’s a good speaker, yeah he’s got a charisma, but those qualities only give him an edge when it comes to presentation; if you’re listening to what he’s saying you know that he consistently brings the discussion back to the lobbying in D.C that, put simply, amounts to bribery, and that in turn puts the interests of the American people on hold for yet another day. It keeps our medicine damn near cost-prohibitive, our health insurance inadequate, and the manufacturers of firearms operating with impunity, our price of gasoline at record highs one day after another, which gets us into wars like the one in Iraq, that has claimed the lives of over 4,000 of our young men and women and seriously injured over 30,000 more, and that by many estimations, has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and displaced over 1,000,000 more, largely consisting of that country’s destroyed middle class. A country that by Western standards would have been considered one of the best in the Arab world before our first attack and before the relentless, U.S. imposed embargos that followed for the next ten-plus years,  one of the most advanced of the Arab countries, blasted and starved and denied medicines and technology into the Dark Ages.  

America is for sale, and you can’t afford it, and nothing will change until we hang a “Closed For Business” sign on the steps of the Capitol and start doing a better job of looking out for the needs of the American people, just because we can; like the one honest cop in a corrupt precinct who doesn’t take money just for the hell of it, just out of some old fashioned idea about right and wrong and fairness. Sound a little corny, a little too Kumbayah? Fine Pennsylvania, my home state, you can afford to see it that way. You can afford to stay home on the most important voting day you’ve had since November 2004. Only half of the eligible voters of that state are registered, and only half of them bothered to show up at the polls yesterday. Only one-fourth of you who could vote yesterday, did. But it’s not fair of me to single out Pennsylvania since those percentages are pretty standard across the country.

But the next time that one of you wants to complain about gas prices or prescription prices or the fact that your job has been phased-out or shipped overseas, those of us who vote in every election without fail, despite the fact that it will most certainly mean a bout with jury duty, won’t want to hear it. And those of you who did cast your vote, but did it because of race or gender, listen up! You’re holding us back! The weight of your ignorance and prejudice and fear is a burden the rest of this country can no longer afford to bear.

HEY PENNSYLVANIA? BITTER? GUESS WHAT…WE ALL ARE…OR AT LEAST, SOMETHING LIKE THAT

If Obama erred in describing the feelings of many Pennsylvanians as bitter, it was only in his terminology, not his meaning. Even someone as educated and eloquently spoken as Barack Obama can occasionally choose the wrong word. He’s since corrected that characterization to be, “angry (and) frustrated”, but the message for most of us, Pennsylvanians or not, was clear all along.

The problem of course was with the definition of the term, in Webster’s or in common usage, which connotes a permanent cynicism, a lost cause hater or a hopeless naysayer who wouldn’t know a stroke of good luck or a helping hand if it were to reach out and pull him out of the way of a runaway train. Not that it’s not understandable that some would devolve into that state of heart and mind, given the state of America today, but we don’t encourage or revere a sentiment that rules out all hope for a better day, because Americans are historically not a people that surrenders to the gravity of our difficulties. We fight and fight hard.  We just don’t want to quit; we know by our birthright, the one laid down by our revolutionary, high-idealed founding fathers, and the one fought for generation after generation after to preserve, that our submission is equivalent to death.      

But “anger”, good old fashioned righteous anger, is as American as John Wayne. Contrary to what the Bush people would assert (with all extremities crossed), in their futile attempts to silence an increasingly disappointed electorate, it is not just our right to protest, but as a patriot, not the lapel-pin-wearing, flag waving variety, but a true patriot, it is an obligation; lest we devolve as a nation into a the mass bitterness and habitual cynicism of a beaten down third world nation.

Depending on which polls you’ve seen or believed, over 70% of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. And the president’s approval rating is even worse; only about a quarter of us think he’s doing a good job. Now, even by new math calculations that means that a lot of us, young, old, rich, poor, red state or blue, are something akin to bitter; the only difference is one of longevity and/or severity of condition, and of tolerance and heartiness, of fight; just how far up the food chain are you?

Where I live, in one of the largest, most affluent (and most impoverished) cities in the country, I see plenty of bitterness, and thankfully, a lot of frustration and  anger too. And not just where you’d expect it either. You don’t have to sit down in a home (valued at somewhere around 3 or 4 hundred thousand dollars) with a black family in South Central or a Latino family in East L.A. to find it. Even out in the Valley or over on the West Side where homes go for a million and up you will find the same fear, anger and frustration bordering on bitterness. The only difference of course is the numbers. A mortgage payment, whether it is one or ten thousand a month, if you don’t have it, your palms are sweating and you’ve picked up that nasty liquor and nicotine habit you thought was in your past, and these days, you’re witnessing too many Los Angeles dawns from the wrong end.

I’ll tell you what I’m betting on: The people of Pennsylvania (my home state) will read this one with their eyes closed. The people I’ve talked to in Pennsylvania aren’t offended by the “bitter” reference; they’re offended by the patronization by Hillary Clinton and by much of the media that they’re too stupid or sensitive or bitter to see such feigned indignation for what it is; a desperate political ploy at their expense, a truly “elitist” stance that treats their economic misfortune as an unmentionable disease rather than the geographical luck of the draw that it is.

People are bugged all over, not by words but by actions and inactions, and by an administration that for the past seven and a half  years, has acted time and again on behalf of big business regardless of how it would effect them. The interesting thing, as I see it, is that a lot of you two-time Bush voters that thought you were voting with your best interests in mind, for tax breaks and corporate passes, in the end or maybe even in the middle, will awaken to find that you too have been sold down the river.                             

CLINTON/ABC AMBUSH,TAG-TEAM OBAMA IN PHILLY… WILL WE NOTICE, VOTE ACCORDINGLY?

Watching ABC’s Pennsylvania debate last night I had the feeling that I had either unmindfully drifted into that hazy territory of the chronically conspiracy obsessed, or I was witnessing something that I had never seen so clearly before, live and in-living-color: the grinding gears of the unholy marriage of big business and big politics, coming together in an ugly display of their self-interest, bullying Sen. Obama, as well as every voter in Pennsylvania and in effect in the country in a desperate attempt to Hail-Mary the rock down field into scoring territory.

Charlie Gibson set the ground rules up front, such as they were to be, flexible but not permissive. Really Charlie? Not once did you ring the bell on Clinton, who if I didn’t know better, or want to believe better of our political process, seemed to take each question as her cue. You could almost see the handwritten Cliff notes running through her head, as she launched into one speech after another on the essay question at hand- the latest raps on Obama’s questionable associations, or the re-wringing of his most recent misstatement for the hundred and fiftieth time for the first forty-five minutes of the two hour time slot. An embarrassingly grueling time, after which I took a breath, I steadied myself, and I resolved to start anew, to give my country, my country’s trustworthy mainstream media, a chance to redeem itself, the benefit of the doubt for the good of us all. But of course we only got more of the same, and straight through the few substantive questions, into the staged recap by a “journalist” standing by in one of Philly’s historic, and for some of us at least democratically symbolic cites. In a suspiciously curt way ABC’s man-on-the-scene then rattled off Clinton’s various takings of Obama to task, on such vital issues as Rev. Wright and the infamous beaten-to-death “bitter” remark in a tough but kind as she could be manner. So transparent, even Charlie Gibson had to laugh in embarrassment, a reaction wreaking of, ‘Hey! Couldn’t you have played it up a little? Don’t you know that we’re supposed to appear impartial in this thing?’

PLEASE. DO YOU THINK THAT WE ARE ALL STUPID, OR JUST ENOUGH OF US SO THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH IT?

And George Stephanopoulos as moderator? Hmm … Wasn’t he Bill Clinton’s press secretary? And a Disney owned ABC with its CEO Robert Iger, isn’t he a big Hillary Clinton supporter, a big campaign contributor? Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? It should, but don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t connect all the dots. You’re not supposed to see behind the curtain. It’s hard enough to figure out what these people are up to on our behalf when we have all the facts. But as Bob Dylan put it in a time long ago but so very discouragingly similar to the one we live in now, “Look out kid they keep it all hid.”

And the most discouraging thing about last night was that it was just the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of a systemic, insidious, lethal, hope-breaking, apathy-inducing problem that in my opinion, is the issue of our time. The one that we will have to tackle if we are to see improvements in our lives or in the lives of our children, our grandchildren, great granchildren … etc., and that is the power that big business concerns wield over our politicians, the ones we elected into office, the ones supposed to act on our behalf, who are supposed to have our best interests in mind, not Disney’s. The ones that even in our time of disbelief, can bring lumps to our throats and water to our eyes, the ones we entrust with our futures and the futures of our descendants, the ones that we put our faith in to deliver us from a life of random shootings– school shootings no less, in our high schools, universities, and now even  in our middle and elementary schools– of a monopolized pharmaceutical industry that charges us much more than we can afford to pay, of health insurance costs that are out of reach to many and at best provide a net to catch us one moment before we hit the ground, right before our bodies splatter into untreatable, of a war that has been the most privatized of all wars, a war that when it all comes out years from now, I believe, will prove itself to be just what many of us suspected all along, a bonanza of a business opportunity waged only with those special interests in mind. And when millions of dollars are gained or lost on Wall Street with the minuscule movement of a stock in one direction or the other, can we really wonder why those that can, do not hesitate to manipulate it? Wake up America, Americans, the country I love, the people I love, we are being duped, taken, scammed, hoodwinked. Doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you sad? Isn’t your heart broken for the country that we used to claim with such pride that has since sold us out?

Truth is, until recently, I didn’t have anything against Hillary Clinton. In fact, coming into this campaign season I was more likely to vote for the Senator from New York than anybody. This is not an election for the unelectable. This, like 2004, is not a time to vote for a candidate that cannot win; and this comes from a guy who has voted for Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and who also voted for Ronald Reagan and George Bush The Elder, and who has still not quite gotten over the fact that even though “W” early in ‘04 seemed to be, either due to an oblivious brain or a sinister heart, leading us into disaster, still managed to persuade 52% of the American voters that he was the better man for the job.

I enjoyed the refreshing illuminations of the few honest candidates on both sides this time around; but in candor, I have to say that Ron Paul was the only Republican that I would have considered in November. But I liked Kucinich and even Gravel for his upturning of the poker table, and Senator Joe Biden, as the old time workhorse too tried and tired to lie about much at this late stage of his game. And if Hillary, Bill’s tried and jaded comrade in the rough game of big time political survival gets the Democratic nomination, I like most of us on the blue side of the political template will vote for her; but it will be reluctantly, with a heavy heart and braving an irritating hitch in my git-along, because I believe that with a vote in that direction, in either direction if Obama is out of the picture, will be a vote for “big business” as usual.

I heard a number recently a couple of times that some of you may not have heard, a statistic that brings some perspective: In the late sixties, forty years ago, there were under 3,000 lobbyists, special interest liaisons running around D.C. Now … are you ready? There are ten times that many, somewhere around 30,000 of these characters operating in the capital. Guys that are paid money, lots of it, to influence the Congress and the Senate, to either champion their bills, bills that in most cases are pre-written for the politicians, or to vote pro or against bills that will either greatly hinder or aid their industry. Their interests, not yours and not mine, but theirs. Such as whether the sick can buy medications they need to stay alive from Canada at a reasonable rate or not. Which in many cases, means that they have or have to go without; which, in some cases- we have no way of knowing how many, means they live or die. In America? Really? This is how we live? This is how we treat our elderly, our parents and grandparents, our neighbors from the old neighborhood that never complained about throwing our balls back onto our side of the fence, and now and then even gave us a tip or two to improve our batting or pitching, or threw in an extra handful of penny candy from time to time on the house at the five and dime store just because they could and it made them and us feel good for a while. It affirmed something to us about us. Something that made us feel better about who we were, about who we all were and what America was; was of course being the operative word.

In generalities it’s simple. The grasping of it in any depth is always more complex or at least more involved. Suffice it to say that it costs around one hundred million dollars to run for president today, and who of us, other that the extremely rich or extremely corrupt can afford to run? Who, except for the few candidates, two that I can name off the top of my head, Barack Obama and Ron Paul that refuse to take special interest money, and who finance their campaigns strictly from grass-root donations, can take office in early 2009 beholden to nobody? Can wake-up on day one, look at themselves in the mirror and say, “I owe no favors and no special considerations to anyone, other than to the greatest number of Americans?”

If a bill comes across the desk to President X, a president that long ago sold him or her self out, right along with all of those high ideals and blurred good intentions of his well-intentioned youth, a bill that if he goes one way will benefit a major corporation/contributor, and if he goes the other will bring some relief, some correction to our freefalling quality of life, just an inch of an improvement that will enable us to carry with us a little more hope in our day to day lives, that will allow us to look into the eyes of our children and tell them without lying that it will be ok, that their lives will be better than ours. That this country, our country, their country, not Halliburton’s or Blackwater’s, not the United States of Fox or of Disney or of Bear-Stearns or Countrywide or any other non-living and breathing entity, tell me which way do you think President X will go? Consistently go? And where do you think that will leave us? Wake up Americans! Ignorance is no longer a defensible defense. Either that or you won’t be able to complain about it when things that matter to you, anything that matters to you, but lies in direct conflict with the interests that have so much more juice than you do in D.C. that you are invisible and your best interests aren’t even a genuine consideration.

Barack Obama presents us with an opportunity for a change, a change in the way business is conducted in Washington, D.C., and a challenge to be the best that we can be as a nation. Are we up to that challenge? Are we ready for a change that will restore us, we Americans, to the greatness which we once took as a given? America … it’s the greatest country in the world … Remember?