Why Barack should turf Jim Johnson

So, what do you all think about the recent Jim Johnson/cheap loans flare up?

Personally, I think it is important for Obama to deal with this fairly, transparently, and promptly, and in a manner that is consistent with the politics of change he has been preaching the last year or two.

In other words, I think he should can Johnson, acknowledge poor vetting and be the first to say he believes in his message and understands that Johnson's role in his campaign is at odds with his message.

I really hope Barack does this, but it seems that for the moment he is disinclined to. I wonder why that is? Any ideas, folks?
Read more!

Texass Democratic (C)arnival

As PCC readers know I was fortunate enough to be elected as an Obama Delegate to the Texas Democratic Convention, which took place June 5-7. I'd never been to something like this before and so I was psyched. The political true fan in me was excited to be a part of the process on such an important election year and the academic in me was excited to see what happens when 15,000 politically active citizens convene at their state convention. The Texass Democratic Convention satisfied both my true fan and my academic hopes.

True Fan Observations:

1. People will dress up in all of their political true fan glory, which shows that 1) you are among your people and 2) the TDC is a safe space for you to let loose your real political true fan self. Costumes, flags, co-ordinated true fan outfits, donkey furries, etc. are all accepted here. If it is befeathered, bejeweled, besparkled, beflagged, or betexased, then it is appropriate for the TDC.

For example, HuffPo ran this story on the fashions of the TDC (pics are better than sounds)



2. As a political true fan your main job at the TDC is to cheer for your candidate (even if she is no longer a candidate), but also make sure to acquire as many t-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers as you can carry/ wear on your person (these only enhance your pre-planned true fan outfit!). Before you leave you must commit your heart and soul to "Turning Texas Blue" this November. You will not be asked to make any important decisions over the course of the DTC, so don't worry your pretty true fan self about that. Yay!


3. Texas political true fans in particular will have the opportunity to pledge, sing, pray, hand-hold, dance, and party it up with their fellow Texas true fans, which number around 15,000. All of this closeness can only help you to reach the nirvana of your true political true fan self, so do not under any circumstances attempt to separate yourself from your fellow true fans, even if you are a little bit frightened. Remember, we are all one now. U-N-I-T-Y.


Academic Observations:

1. The official tasks of the TDC are: 1) County Delegates sign in for their candidates, which in effect, is their vote for who should be the presidential nominee; 2) Elections are held for the Texas State Democratic Party offices and committees; 3) Elections are held for DNC Delegates and Electors (yes, this is where the Electoral College is formed!); 4) the Texas Party Platform is debated and ratified. The first tasks happens easily as Delegates sign in and get their credentials, but the other tasks will require Delegates to vote within their Texas Senate District Delegation (by county). Everyone who wants to stand for an office gets the opportunity to make a speech. There will be run-offs for each election.


It took nearly an hour just for our Senate District to figure out how to sit together in our County Delegations. After gathering together and finding our seats we discovered that Williamson County Delegates out-numbered the other 13 county delegations put together and if we didn't pool all of the little counties together, then we would always be out-voted by Williamson County. Williamson County, to their credit, was very organized. They didn't put up so many candidates for each post that it divided their Delegation (like we did), they voted as a block, and they had t-shirts! Our Senate District deliberations lasted until almost 2 a.m. Friday night, but in the end we got folks elected where we needed to. I could say a lot more about the details of this, but it isn't that interesting after the fact. There was much politicking--some of it was not quite honorable, I fear. But, in the end I'm very happy with they whom we elected as Obama Delegates to the DNC and that is all that really mattered to me.


The other functions of the Convention (electing State Officers and debating the Platform) will occur in the Committee of the Whole by voice vote and by District-level votes. This part of the process seemed even less organized for it was difficult to know by how loud 15,000 Ayed whether a particular item passed or not. Calls to Divide the Question (count the vote) led to agonizing delays. The first order of business tabled the question of whether or not to debate eliminating the controversial "Texas Two-Step" and many other proposed Platform items suffered the same fate. The Platform debates lasted well into the night, which meant that many things passed by the sheer determination of those who could stay up past midnight after the long two days of deliberations.


2. Because of precisely when the TDC fell in the primary calendar--just after Obama claimed to be the presumptive nominee and before Hillary dropped out--the main theme of the Convention was unity. We heard all about unity, uniting the party, Clinton and Obama supporters joining together to "Turn Texas Blue" and other such things ad nauseum. On the one hand, the timing of the Convention meant that we were already less divisive--I even talked quite a bit with the Clinton Delegates who had tried to steal my Obama Delegates away from me at the County Convention--but it also meant that every speaker hit the same notes and stressed the same ideas in their speeches. From a rhetorical standpoint, the Convention was crap. The only real rhetorical highlight was when David Van Os took the stage in his quest to replace Boss Hogg doppelganger Boyd Ritchie (who Van Os said represented Old School Texas Politics). Van Os was not only (a little nuts) inspiring, but he offered some real problems and specific solutions and vowed to really try to win Texas for Obama, not merely "rebuild" the Party. While Van Os electrified the crowd and changed a few votes in my Delegation, he won less than 20% of the vote. Boss Hogg will continue to reign over the TDP.


Prior to attending the TDC Delegates received email after email supplicating them for their votes for the various positions. Once we got to the TDC we were bombarded with stickers, flyers, posters, and speeches all advocating for candidates. I rejected the flyers and pocketed most of the stickers, but I noticed that when someone peeled a sticker off of its backing and then handed it to me that I was more likely to do something with it. It's a simple observation, perhaps, but when you give someone a sticker they are more likely to stick it somewhere if they have to. I've got a sticky sticker in my hand, it needs to go somewhere, shrug, I guess I'll put it on my tag/bag/shirt. Obviously stickers show support, but they also help folks to remember who they said that they would vote for (an important point when the night gets long)


3. Upon reflection, I believe that the Texas Democratic Convention can best be understood as political carnival. Merriam-Webster says that a carnival is "an instance of merrymaking, feasting, or masquerading; an instance of riotous excess; an organized program of entertainment or exhibition," all of which I believe fit what I saw at the TDC: Delegates were certainly merrymaking, feasting, masquerading, and indulging in riotous excess and the TDC seemed to be much more about entertainment and exhibition than it was about real politics. I hardly heard anyone talk about the real problems that Americans face today and I didn't hear a single solution to any problem. I heard many calls to colors, party unity, and winning offices, but I didn't hear anything about what any leader hoped to do with power once it was theirs. Once again, I fear that party politics is more concerned with organizing people to win elections than it is concerned with problem solving or the common good. Alas.


There is another sense of the word "carnival," which Mikhail Bakhtin has made central to his work that might help us here. For Bakhtin carnival was a space where “all were considered equal" and "a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.” I think that there is a way in which the TDC was carnival in this radically egalitarian sense, but only among the Delegates.


It didn't matter if you were African American, White, Brown, Young, Old, Rich, Poor or whatever, because you were a Delegate and so the status of Delegate trumped any other identifiers within the space of the TDC. We elected two Delegates in their 90s and one who had just turned 18. All 3 of our Obama DNC Delegates from Senate District 5 are African-American. We 15,000 of us all hung out, shared stories, offered one another a smile of support when things went long, and generally formed a community over the course of the TDC and in that sense it was carnival in the best sense of the word. The Delegates formed a community (yes, we united) and we worked together.


However, there was definitely hierarchy at the TDC and so Bakhtin's radically egalitarian sense of carnival does not quite fit here. While the Delegates formed a semi-united and egalitarian community, the Democratic Party leadership was not in anyway a part of that community. The leadership stood apart from the community, it instructed, it lectured, it urged, but it did not join with us. Elected officials dutifully came by and talked to us, but they didn't talk with us. They didn't sit with us. They didn't enjoy our long hours of decision making. They didn't listen to what we had to say about them or the nation.


The whole TDC was top-down, one-way communication between political leaders and political true fans, not at all the egalitarian space that one would hope for in a party that claims to be democratic. Read more!

Texass Democratic (C)arnival Pictures

On June 5-7 there were 15,000 Texas Democrats in Austin

for the Texas Democratic Convention.

Hillary and Obama supporters were urged repeatedly to UNITE! And "Turn Texas Blue!!"

Hillary supporters in particular went nuts when Chelsea showed up to give us a speech.


Mostly, I found the convention to be a sort of political carnival, full of fancy outfits, but very little political action.

The Brazos County Delegation were very nice folks to spend a few days with,

but were completely out-numbered in Senate District 5 by Williamson County who voted in a block and wore matching t-shirts.

This blurry picture is a synecdoche for the whole Texas Democratic (C)arnival. Read more!

Texass State Democratic Convention

I'm on my way to Austin this afternoon for the Texass State Democratic Convention. I'm super psyched to be able to cast my fourth vote for Senator Obama during the primary season. Gobama!

I have no love for representative republicanism organized through a strong two-party system. I mean, I'm obviously thrilled that Obama is the Nominee and I'm hopeful that I'll learn something about politics from attending the Convention, but I have to admit that so far my experiences this year have not given me any added confidence in the two-party system. As I suspected, and as the Founders knew, political parties organize people in order to keep their party on top, not for the common good. Right now we need politicians to care about the common good, not their party. I think that Obama might be that candidate, but I have seen little concern for the common good so far among the Texass Democratic Party. It's all Bush-bashing (which is fine with me) and rah-rah Democratic Party will win kinds of talk and very little talk of specific problems and solutions.

I'm most excited to go to the Progressive Populist Caucus tomorrow. I'm hoping that Texass Progressive Populism is at least a little progressive or populist. Will report more later. Read more!

Does dap count as rhetoric?

So Barack and Michelle kicked off the celebration with a little dap action last night, huh? That's cool.



I guess I didn't think it was that weird until I saw this slate.com round-up about the difficulty the media is having with describing fist-bumping. I suppose I've done it with my friends since 6th grade basketball, but for media old-heads that apparently weren't paying attention during Vietnam, it must be something new.

Some of the better quotes:

“At 09:09:27 Central Time, Michelle Obama gave Barack Obama a pound in St. Paul, Minnesota.”—Lola New York

“I never realized how romantic and respectful and mutually appreciative and loving a frat-tastic fist bump could be. Could it be the new peck-on-the-cheek?”—The Frisky

“... Obama, who was joined on stage by his wife Michelle, with whom he shared a celebratory fist-bump.”—Reuters

I love it.

Read more!

Monday Morning Happiness

There isn't a lot of good news today, but I saw this over on BoingBoing and it made my Monday suck a little less.

Click To Play

Reminds you of People's Park a little bit, doesn't it? This is apparently an international effort, supported by various blogs and this book.

Power to the People, y'all. Read more!

DNC MI/FL Delegate MESS Open Thread

I'm listening to the DNC meeting on CSPAN while working this afternoon. Jeez, what a mess. I know that Daniel is there, I'm sure he's got a lot of thoughts to share with us about it. Anyone else? Open thread.

Watching the debates I am reminded of Walter's wise words

Read more!

Hold off on that self-congratulation/victimization, media folk

I don't know if it is because of the forthcoming McClellan book or what, but lately I keep seeing internet chatter and coverage about how media figures keep shifting the blame away from themselves regarding their utterly catastrophic failure to question Bush Administration efforts leading up to the Iraq War. We've seen bits and pieces of this type of thing ever since the MSM realized we'd sorta messed up by invading, but lately the tide seems to have strengthened.

Glenn Greenwald has been all over this lately, from pointing out defensive arguments raised by Brian Wilson and Charlie Gibson and blame-shifting to the White House (by Katie Couric) and corporate honchos (by Jessica Yellin). Both posts also contain numerous links to other talking heads and their full-throated defenses of the MSM establisment.



For the record, I call bullshit on all of these people. (Bullshit!)



But the one I want to complain about specifically is Yellin's excuse-ridden, half-assed mea culpa.



In a nutshell, she claims that corporate pressure came down to coerce news organizations to reject critical coverage in favor of stories less likely to upset the folks on Pennsylvania Ave. Moreover, she claims that there was a direct positive correlation between Bush's level of approval an this pressure.



That seems plausible, at first. But then you start to think about the dynamics of Bush's approval over these last several years and it seems a little more like, well, a crappy and empirically unsupported excuse.



For example, beyond a few spikes in approval -- a HUGE one immediately following 9/11, a sizeable yet smaller one following the Iraq invasion, and a minor and short-lived boost following the capture of Saddam Hussein midterms -- Bush's level of approval has been a consistent downward trend. Following the argument that corporate pressure increases as approval increases, then corporate pressure should have declined over time, barring idiosyncratic spikes. In fact, while Bush and co fought hardest to sell the war (i.e., the several months leading up to the actual invasion), the president's numbers were dropping week after week, falling from the fear-based and impossible-to-maintain levels of late fall 2001.




Now I'm not saying that the Bushies are getting a raw deal here -- far from that. Those guys were as deceptive and disingenuous as we've ever seen in the Oval Office. And I'm not saying the corporate stooges are blameless, either. I have no doubt that they were pressing for the type of coverage that would gain the most viewers and, thus, sell the most advertising. After all, they are corporate stooges -- bottom-line thinking is pretty much their job, for good or ill.



What I am saying is that these blame-dodging, self-congratulating, rationalizing and just plain lame media figures ought to do is suck it up, realize that they really hurt their country by failing at their jobs, and make their peace with the facts that they either sold their souls or were too stupid to realize they were being deceived by the Keystone Kops of White House chicanery.
Read more!

The Obama-TR link

Jennifer directed me to an article written by a Theodore Roosevelt scholar, Joshua Hawley, who noted the similarities between TR and Barack Obama.

Assuming Obama wins the presidency, like TR, he would be coming to power at a time of social and economic upheaval, calling for a "politics of transformation" to "transcend left and right," and challenging people to uplift their moral character.

Now, while I agree with the writer about these similarities, he misses the most important difference. When TR spoke about social/economic reforms, he was candid about who would share in such transformations: whites first, immigrants primarily from northern Europe who had divested themselves of all traces of their ideological and material origins, Native Americans who had enough of their “redness” burned away to be white, and those exemplary blacks (i.e., the few rather than the “seething mass of black atoms”) who should strive for the promise of equality with the knowledge that their skin color prevented the realization of true equity.

For Roosevelt, it was a lot easier to “preach” messages about economic change since the racial/social hierarchy was still going to remain intact at the end of the day. If Obama directly addresses the relationship between the economy/race/ethnicity in a substantive, sustained way as president, would his discussions have to challenge that hierarchy? Read more!

One good thing about HRC

For all the ill will toward Hillary evident in my previous posts, I am semi-proud to admit I saw something today that made me realize that she's a little human.

Sort of like Darth Vader still had a little good left in him.

But still, a little humanity. Here's a glimpse of it.

PS - Anyone know how to paste youtube videos into blog posts? Or is that, like, illegal?

Read more!

Just think about that

Killing time this morning, waiting for my summer class, I read this op-ed in the Washington Post.

It wasn't any different than any other op-ed on the same subject (i.e., why Hillary is still in the race), until I came to the following sentence:

"She has been the first major-party presidential candidate in memory to tout her appeal to white voters."

Think about that. Robinson is right, she does do that. I mean, duh. I had always just thought of it as some ham-fisted way to keep finding a metric that both matters and helps her.

But for the first time, I realize how dark, dangerous, and despicable it is. Read more!

What Goes Around....

It looks like the vast right wing conspiracy is at it again...

The push of the Clinton camp to ignore the opinion of the people and the super delegates for the democratic nomination does nothing but highlight why HRC should stay the hell away from Pennsylvania Ave. Read more!

A Repudiation of Neoliberalism?

NPR reports that according to their May 15 poll Americans aren't very happy with the economy or the government: a whopping 80% of Americans report feeling "pessimistic" and think that the country is "headed in the wrong direction." I've been thinking a lot about what these kinds of polls might tell us. I mean, obviously the people's discontent has driven more people to participate in the primary process as everyone has already noticed. Increased electoral participation--in this case--is an immediate effect of the discontent, but such an increase in participation doesn't tell us what the discontent means. I'm not usually someone who tries to write histories of the present; like Hannah Arendt, I think that we can only know the true meaning of our collective life's stories in retrospect (which probably doesn't make me the best blogger). However, I have been wondering whether or not taking the long view of the poll numbers might possibly suggest a kind of popular repudiation of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism and a kind of popular re-validation of FDR New Deal socialism.


Academics, progressives, and old school Democrats have decried the potential effects of neoliberal policies since Chicago School economists began applying and testing their theories in the 1970s. The title of Noam Chomsky's 1998 Neoliberalism: Profit Over People pretty much sums up the basic critique of neoliberal policies: neoliberalism is great for the corporations that increasingly run the world, but are potentially disastrous for everyday people like you and me. Yet, while academics and other left-leaning Cassandras shouted against the dot-com whirlwind of the 1990s, the majority of Americans seemed pretty happy with the economy and didn't seem to mind the application of neoliberal principles in the U.S.

In fact, on February 9, 1998--two weeks after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke-- a rather shocked Washington Post pollster reported that 61% of respondents reported that they believed that the country was "headed in the right direction." That same month Clinton's approval ratings reached an all-time high of 67%. The Post explained that the surprise "good mood" of the nation was either because the public didn't believe that Clinton did it; they didn't care if Clinton did it; or, that the economy was just so good that the whole scandal didn't matter. Indeed, President Clinton's 1998 State of the Union had informed Americans that the nation was doing pretty well:

"Because of the hard work and high purpose of the American people, these are good times for America. We have more than 14 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 24 years, the lowest core inflation in 30 years; incomes are rising; and we have the highest home ownership in history. Crime has dropped for a record 5 years in a row, and the welfare rolls are at their lowest levels in 27 years." (President Clinton, SOTU, January 27, 1998)

My, how the nation's finances and mood have changed over the last 10 years! President Bush's 2008 State of the Union was far less celebratory:

"As we meet tonight, our economy is undergoing a period of uncertainty. America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months, but jobs are now growing at a slower pace. Wages are up, but so are prices for food and gas. Exports are rising, but the housing market has declined. At kitchen tables across our country, there is a concern about our economic future." (President Bush, STOU, January 28, 2008)

Bush's approval ratings have reached an appallingly bad 23% and 80% of Americans believe that the nation is "heading in the wrong direction," which is probably a reflection upon the incompetency that the Bush Administration has shown in handling the War on Terror, Katrina, and the economy, among other things, but I wonder if the particular tenor that the dissatisfaction has taken--calls for increased regulation of financial markets and lending institutions; calls for socialized health care and reduced prescription prices; and calls for the government to step in to provide relief for rising gas prices and stagnant wages--and both Republican and Democratic politicians' willingness to consider these kinds of policies--might signal a demand for a renewed New Deal economy?

I'm not sure if it does or if it does not, but I'm going to be thinking/writing about this more in the coming weeks. I know that many PCC co-bloggers and lurkers know much more about the economy, economic theory, and recent history than I do, so I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Read more!

Hillary steps in it ... again

Many keystrokes have been logged in recent days reporting on and analyzing Hillary's recent idiotic statement about RFK being assassinated in June 1968. Honestly, I think I've read every single article, too, just because I'm still in disbelief she actually said it. (And because I stupidly missed a flight to a conference in Seattle and couldn't get on stand-by for anything else, thus leaving me with a whole lot of nothing to do this weekend but read media coverage of the election. But I digress.)

Anyway, for as much as has been written, Emily Yoffe's recent post on Slate.com's The XX Factor blog is about as perfect as can be. Pithy yet comprehensive, and as comfortable yet incisive as Yoffe's writing often is, it is well worth a brief gander. Certainly beats all the redundant and atrocious AP wire stories about the gaffe. Read more!

The Last Debate by Maureen Dowd

As a columnist Maureen Dowd is hit or miss for me... I'm much more of a David Brooks fan, however, I really felt that she summed up how the democratic campaign will end. Humor, wit, and Hillary bashing... a good article indeed. Read more!

Rising Middle Class Homelessness

According to CNN "There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers." Read more!

Red State Update

You will LOVE this. (thanks to Rick Street for the forward)

Read more!