Speech For The Ages

Barack Obama gave an amazing speech today on race and politics. Don’t just read the commentaries on it — it’s well worth the time to watch or listen to the video of the speech, or at least read the complete text of it, all of which can be found here.

Maine Caucuses II

Well, my mother braved a blizzard and waited in line for three hours to try and vote yesterday. She had two women with her, fellow alumnae from Mount Holyoke, who were in their upper 80s.

The line went out for 1/5 mile. It was so slow, and so overwhelming, they ran out of registration forms, had to send someone to City Hall to copy more.

In the end they left before they got a chance to vote. But she’s never seen anything like it and wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

In my sister’s town of Norway it was also a mob scene, where the officials gave up and just asked people to raise their hands for Clinton or Obama. (More hands up for Obama.)

On another, sadder, note, I just learned from a friend of the death of Sheldon Brown, founder of Harris Cyclery in Newton, Massachusetts, and known affectionately in the cycling world as “Uncle Sheldon.” Tailwinds, Uncle Sheldon…

Maine Caucuses

My mother moved to Maine recently and left the straightforwardness of California ballot elections for an arcane primary caucus system.

She’s registered “Decline to State” or whatever the designation is in Maine because she doesn’t want to be harassed by canvassers (in my experience this makes you more, not less, likely to be harassed, but that’s what she wanted to do). It turns out she’s able to change this designation on Sunday at the caucus and then go and stand on whichever side of the room she feels corresponds with her candidate. (This whole system of standing here or there feels medieval to me.)

Bucking the predictions of the New York Times and other worthy sources, her candidate and mine appear to be the same (I’m over the magical 44 that designates women-for-Hillary). She’s planning on voting for Obama. A lot can change between now and Sunday, of course. But still: I consider this a great transformation. (She campaigned for Eisenhower in ’52, came from a solid Republican family, one that valued fiscal responsibility and, well, responsibility period. I’m just glad my grandmother never lived to see the likes of W.)

This is by far the most interesting election I’ve lived through since I moved to the US in 1988…

Focus the Campus

Despite the US Federal Government’s incredible lack of initiative on the topic, there is a great deal of activity taking place here to confront global warming. In California the legislative mandate for this is coming from AB 32, a bill passed in 2006 which requires California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020, and to 80% of that by 2050. It seems the lead in this country on this issue will have to come from the bottom up.

Yesterday there was a nationwide teach-in on global warming called Focus the Nation. This was perhaps the largest teach-in ever in this country, with over 1750 institutions participating. The University of California took the event quite seriously, and our Davis campus had many events going on.

I didn’t go to any of the panel sessions that ran all day in the student Rec Center, but went to the Ideas Fair and the World of Ideas Café in Freeborn Hall nearby my office. The Ideas Fair which I went to over lunch was populated by lots of groups, everyone from the Community Alliance with Family Farmers to the campus Transportation and Parking Services department. My favorite booth was the one setup by Campus Utilities that invited you to do a blind taste test comparing UC Davis tap water, UC Davis filtered water, City of Davis tap water, and Arrowhead bottled water, the point being that bottled water isn’t necessarily better tasting than tap water.

The World of Ideas Café ran at the end of the day. 17 teams each with a different theme presented their ideas for dealing with greenhouse gases and increasing energy efficiency, and we got to wander around and talk to team members and then vote on what were our favorite ideas. I liked the ideas on achieving efficiency through eco-friendly urban design and transportation systems.

The Latest Poll Figures

Numenius reads me the latest poll figures. I think he’s joking. He isn’t.

From the Back of the Yards

Answer: Saul Alinsky.

Question: What mid-century radical activist and community organizer deeply affected the early political education of both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton?

This is a story I just learned a couple days ago, though it has been chronicled in various places, for instance this report on “All Things Considered” last May.

A year after Barack Obama finished college at Columbia, he took a job as a community organizer in Chicago, and thereby fell in with with several old-time Chicago activists who taught Obama the ways and tactics of community organizing. These old-timers had in turn been mentored by Saul Alinsky, who had started off his career as an organizer in the Back of the Yards district in Chicago in the 1930s.

Obama has never left his identity as a community organizer behind. After his U.S. Senate win his wife Michelle said “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” To which he later responded “I take that observation as a compliment.”

The interesting twist is that a decade-and-a-half earlier, Hillary Rodham studied and came to know Alinsky. Rodham started off at Wellesley College as a Goldwater Republican, and ended up a supporter of the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy. When she was scouting around for a senior thesis topic, her professor suggested Alinsky, whom she had met earlier on a youth church outing to inner-city Chicago. Her senior thesis was titled “ ‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”

Rodham was quite taken by Alinsky himself, calling him “a man of exceptional charm”, but in the end felt that Alinsky-style actions were too small-scale to lead to widespread change, and instead believed one could effectively change the system from inside. After graduation she had the options of going to India on a Fulbright, entering law school at Harvard or Yale, or taking a job offered to her by Alinsky at his new training institute. She chose law school.

Vote By Issue Quiz

Last night’s election results show that this election campaign is going to have more twists and turns to it than a braided river in the Yukon. For those who are interested in trying to separate out candidates’ campaign platforms from their personalities, there is a very instructive quiz put together by radio station WBUR. The way it works is you read a set of unlabeled quotes by issue from each of the candidates, mark which ones you agree or disagree with, and at the end the quiz tells you which candidates have views most similar and dissimilar to your own. Don’t be surprised if you’re surprised.

Democrats Want My Opinion? Not Really.

A survey arrived in the mail yesterday from the Department of Processing and Tabulation, Democratic Party Headquarters. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the way the questions are framed makes me wonder whether they aren’t just dying to hand the whole baby along with the bathwater back to the Republicans in 2008.

Consider, for example:

Which of the following would strengthen our nation’s economy?
_ More big tax breaks for wealthiest Americans (clearly, we’re not supposed to check THAT one)
_ Targeted middle-class tax relief (tipping our hand a bit, here, aren’t we?)
_ Both (not likely to be answered by anyone except by mistake but hey, that’s statistically as significant as “neither,” below)
_ Neither (hmmm… almost rhymes with “spoiler”)

If you check “neither,” there’s no way to say what you think might be appropriate in terms of “strengthening” the economy (always an assumed “good” thing, like “growth”). Like maybe weaning ourselves off this disastrous institutional perceived link between “consumer confidence” (read rampant spending on shit we don’t need based on lies and paper, debt and borrowing, all of it unhealthy and unsustainable) and “economic strength.” Like maybe taxing gasoline at appropriate levels to modify behavior because we’re going to need to modify it at some point, control of Iraqi oilfields or no, Arctic drilling or no, whether the democrats or the republicans or the half the country that votes or the other half that doesn’t like it or not, and they won’t like it, so they certainly won’t be “encouraged” to (one of the survey questions) by mere political cant.

If I had to make a decision today, I was asked, which of the following would I like to see running in the general election? Looking the names before me on the paper, Biden Clinton Dodd Edwards Kucinich Obama Richardson, I had to swallow hard. I looked at Kucinich, dismissed the notion as romantic fantasy. I nearly checked Obama. Romantic fantasy again. I removed my hand.

In the end, whatever they say about grass roots and listening to the “base,” it’s going to be the one with the war chest, with the big democratic machine behind her, that wins the nomination. (Just below the names was a place to check just how much money I was willing to contribute to the cause, in case we were in any doubt about this.) The lip-service paid to wanting my opinion is lip-service only; they don’t care about the progressive agenda. Our questions aren’t even on the survey form. (Like just f’rinstance the connection between poverty and race and how to address that, or the connection between justice and race and how to address THAT. If I were black and had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, say, or if I were black and lived in Jena, Louisiana, and had been sent this survey, I’d have assumed, completely correctly, that it was being misdelivered. It doesn’t apply. N/A.)

I believe Hillary Clinton is unelectable. Her supporters still seem to have no idea quite how much she is hated and despised by the very constituency she’s trying so hard to court (who, exactly? NASCAR fathers’ wives? because it certainly ain’t me), tip-toeing around the hard questions, fudging, fudging, because you have to be so careful, don’t take any risks, but make sure you look and sound tough. (Those of us who endured Thatcher’s “be a woman but sound and act and as far as possible look like you have cojones and then go ahead and tear apart the national infrastructure to prove it” masquerade are weeping in disbelief.) I predict, however, that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

In consequence, I think the Republicans will win the 2008 general election. Despite the lies, the dead and maimed and irreparably damaged American military personnel (not to mention because we never do mention it, do we, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they’ve killed maimed and irreparably damaged), the billions we’ve wasted on this interminable fiasco and are now so far in the hole that rebuilding any kind of human services will take years and probably be abandoned as impossible or unpopular or both. Despite the scandals. Despite the much more serious systematic disregard for the constitution. Despite the continued rape of the planet. Despite the rictus on the face of the demon-clown and the grotesque cackles of those who pull his strings. Despite the continued almost comical reappearance of the demon-clown’s nemesis, exhorting the faithful to commit this or that atrocity when he was supposed to have been smoked out of his hole how long? six years? ago by the demon-clown’s Action Men, by the most powerful military machine in the world. I’m angry, people. And I’m feeling patronized by questions such as “Should the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan be reformed to make it less confusing to seniors?” I mean, come on, are they kidding? Is this a joke question?

I’ll send in my survey, though, because in spite of everything I still believe in democracy, and because I do actually have an opinion, in case that’s not apparent. The survey will be heavily annotated, even though I expect the annotations will be ignored, because along with a bonkers irrational aversion to taxes Americans have an irrational aversion to the complexity of the “essay question,” favoring instead multiple-choice answers that can be easily tabulated by Diebold and their ilk, from kindergarten quizzes to IQ tests to customer service at Jiffy Lube and Burger King to tertiary-level examination questions to deciding an “official presidential strategy.”

Yes No Maybe Not Applicable? Check.

Ethical Shopping In Your Back Pocket

Pica ran into a pal at the coop today who was raving about a book entitled The Better World Shopping Guide, by Ellis Jones, who is here in Davis. So she picked up a copy of it. There are plenty of books about socially and environmentally responsible shopping but this is a very practical guidebook. It’s small, so it easily fits in one’s pocket, purse, or pack. It gives A to F grades to many of the prominent companies in about 75 categories of consumer goods ranging from airlines to wine. Some of these ratings are expected (under ice cream, Ben and Jerry’s is an A, Nestle is an F); others are not, and may cause us to rethink our shopping choices. The author has a website for his book here.

Raising Hell for Molly

Molly Ivins is dead after a long fight with cancer. In her final syndicated column, Stand Up Against the Surge, dictated because she could no longer write, she reminds us: “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

Her editor Anthony Zurcher has written a moving tribute here.

What will I do? What will you do? What will we do for her memory, and the memory of the dead in Iraq, and the memory of those who died, recently or long ago, risking their lives or at least their comfort to do what was right?

I write this as a beautiful set of colored pencils sits on the counter, waiting for me to use. Time for some more subversive calligraphy, methinks… last time I did that on Feathers of Hope, the blog was put under military surveillance. Ha. Go ahead, guys, you’re welcome here…