Obama will win. But he’s a centrist, and there are more interesting politics out there.
Posted on | September 26, 2008 |
I sat down to watch the presidential debate on the internet tonight. I couldn’t find the video in its entirety, but I did find this ad from Ralph Nader. It translates my sentiments about the presidential race and captures the essence of what I said in my article about Nader.
I intended to move this over from my old blog at some point and put it on here. So, I will post it with the video. See Ralph end the conversation here.
. . . .
Cowardice asks, is it safe? Expediency asks, is it political? Vanity asks, is it popular? But conscience asks, is it right?– Martin Luther King, Jr.
When I walked into his rally at the University of Georgia in Athens, it felt more like a small lecture than a campaign stop. The talk among the little crowd failed to overpower the muted, gooey, mind-numbing jazz in the lobby. The elevator curse to America’s greatest art sapped the soul out of an event that was already struggling to find enough heart to spur small talk, let alone a grand debate on the future of the country.
Yet, it was precisely that.
Ralph Nader’s campaign grinds away home-to-home, 50-dollar-by-100-dollar, 75-by-20-people-stump-speech even though he attracts no media attention and even many who agree with his ideas dismiss him. Those who are willing to leave their cynicism at home for an evening return with a new outlook on the American politick and a new philosophy of civics. He’s got no catch-phrase. Change for Ralph (and everyone around him calls him by his first name) is taking on the auto industry alone and presenting people with a stark reality-check. Presenting people with the dismal reality means being willing to lose, get humiliated and being dismissed as a “spoiler”. It is not the CNN-ready, flash-and-glitz voter-getter that Obama has imbued with ambiguity and emptiness. Adopting Ralph’s harsh message is more akin to settling into a long love affair, as opposed to the fleeting orgasm of a one-night stand that Obamamania is shaping into.
When he gets elected, we will wake up in the metaphorical morning after to realize we just got in bed with a strumpet whore. His make-up is already starting to run. His slew of smut with AIPAC, domestic wiretapping, campaign finance reform, NAFTA and the “War on Terror” are starting to prove his occupation to be A-One Political Prostitute, not the Messiah of Hope. The nightmare will begin when we realize this one-nighter is not going anywhere-he will be in office to get bullied by more convicted political forces for at least four years.
At the end of a long day-I drove out with two friends working on a documentary on poverty to film Nader’s Athens speech at 3 p.m. and we wrapped up the day back in Atlanta at the private gathering at midnight. (Who knows when Nader got started, but he was leaving for Birmingham, Alabama early this morning. He works just as hard as the two “front-runners” just to get on the ballot and a second-page, two-paragraph mention in the paper). Even though he had just spoken for over seven continuous hours, but he was willing to postpone giving in to his obvious exhaustion to sit down with a trio of college kids to talk about health and poverty for the documentary. He kept talking even as his campaign manager, a nervous young man who is just as committed as Nader, signals to him that he must stop. His answers were as genuine and down-to-earth as you might expect from your mother. In fact, he told us about the best nutrition advice he ever got. It was from his mother when he was eight she told him the “I” in his rebellious “I don’t like that and I won’t eat it,” was his tongue and he had turned it against his brain.
That’s just to say that Ralph sees the world like many liberals and progressives, holistically. What we eat, namely meat that comes from gross processing plants, effects climate change, which is related to our cars, which are made by guys who profit from bad fuel standards, which the Exxon guys like because they make more money when you buy more gas, which is what motivated our war in Iraq, which makes the world hate us, which prompts terrorism, which makes people think we need boost security, which means more war and on and on.
In his fifth run for president, even the likes of The Nation and The Progressive magazines won’t print Ralph’s articles or cover his campaign-in spite of the fact that he champions the causes that they embrace. “What do I have to do to get attention?” He asks the media. “Wear a Panda Suit?”” Pandas get front-page coverage. In Ralph’s estimation the two-party system and the suspiciously non-democratic electoral college turn progressives and in on one another.
His withered, basset-hound face and slumped-over posture betray the fire in his belly. At 74, older than John McCain, but not near as close to death, his rumpled shirt, lowbrow, and sagging presence give him the airs of a tired warrior. Maybe he is. He tells the crowd at UGA, “Its the same old story for hundreds of years,” about his narrative of trying to change the nation’s power structure and move it from moneyed classes to the common man. Unlike the weak, visionless people leading the Democratic Party, Ralph Nader aims to make you mad at the State of the Union. His narrative against corporations, the military complex, and inequality is fishing lure that hooks you, instead of the watery, feel-good net of undefined “change”to catch the masses.
Those progressives who deride and ignore him and those who have given in and voted for mediocre candidates have succumbed to what Nader calls a “least-worst” mentality. These are the yellow dog democrats who will vote for their party regardless of how bankrupt, corporate and militaristic it becomes. We have gotten so desperate to get Bush out and stem the long tide of the conservative movement we will vote for anyone but McCain. They have cease to vote for something and begun to vote against something. It’s the logic of the desperate, not the strategy that will turn this country around.
The secret of the conservative movement’s success is their construction of a national narrative centered on moral values, security and small government. This is proven by its success at making the military establishment sacred, the Supreme Court a bastion of regressive ideologues, and reserving the presidency for right-wingers and centrists. Their voters vote for an ideal, not in opposition to something. No anti-abortion voter will ever vote blue. Nor will most military types or small businessmen. Why? It is because moral value has become the language of conservatism. Security is now a republican word. So is free enterprise.
What the democrats need to produce is a counter narrative, one centered on a cleaner world, economic equality, and a social, economic and environmental concept of security. “Change” is not a narrative. It might work one time to get into office, but it will not capitalize on the opportunity that Obama has at his fingertips. Obama needs to tell the people what they are voting for, not what they are voting against. We know what we are voting against.
He could start by using the brutal recklessness and secretive lawlessness of the Bush years to make the Democrats the party that stands for the rule of law and transparency. This should include campaign finance, which he has rescinded on, and corporate practice. He should to make the party the party of progress. Green is the future should be his slogan. Green is safer for the consumer, will reduce the need for interference in the Middle East and will not destroy the environment. He should explain to the American people that he stands for the common person. Our economic woes are not a mystery, but bad corporate, individual and government practices. We can enrich ourselves if we stop listening to the Phil Gramm’s and start building sustainable markets, he should tell us. We are a nation of extreme wealth, and increasingly extreme inequality. The democrats need to become the party of equality and economic justice; they should seek not just to role back the tax cuts, but change the tax structure to a redistributive system. Counter the Reagan narrative of trickle down that produced the poles.
But, to do that you have to work within the system. After all, voting for a third party candidate is throwing your vote away. No third part candidate has a prayer. If Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t do it in 1912, Ralph Nader certainly can’t do it today. So, goes the faulty spoiler argument against third party.
Those who make it miss the point. The point is to vote against the system. The point is to express the values that have been ignored or abandoned by the larger parties. Most of all the point is to draw a line in the sand and force the major parties, especially the Democrats, to recognize that if they do not adopt a more progressive, positive agenda that reflects their views, they will not vote for the Dems. The shaky least-worst logic produces Barak Obama types who think the leftists have no other choice but to vote for him. He’s needs to do this to get into office.
We have subdued our expectation level on the left and given in to “situational determinism.”
Ralph makes it clear that the cynics on the left who are trapped least-worst are not sophisticated intellectuals, but idealists who have “rationalized their futility.” The power structure wants those heady-cynics to leave status quo alone by comforting themselves with the lie of being ineffectual. “We must vote for Barak Obama. There is no other way.” Okay. But, if we don’t stand up at some point and make some demands of them, they will never stand up and make demands of the conservatives. Nor, will they know what they are fighting for when they get power. We must question the Democrats and not accept them blindly because they aren’t the Republicans. When we do that they will continue on their path to become Republicrats, because the economic, political and social conservatives control the central power structure of this country.
Afford me an analogy. Each party is a magnet, over the last forty years the conservative movement has energize their magnet so that today it is enormous in comparison with the Democrat’s magnet. The Democrat’s magnet gets sucked toward the right. The talk would have us believe Obama is moving toward the center, but power is not evenly distributed in this equation. Moving to the center in the current context means moving right. This is why a man like Obama, running as the “left-leaning” or Democratic candidate, must assure the military establishment he won’t cut their exorbitant budget. It’s best if he prays in Hebrew, and he advocating a single-payer health system would be the sure mark of a communist.
Because of the magnet effect and the trap of the two party system progressives and liberals vote for Less-Than-Savories, and wind up seeing little of their agenda coming to fruition. Think of all the Republicrats that they voted for recently. Think Hillary Clinton, who sat on Wal-Mart’s board of directors. Think Bill Clinton with NAFTA and his inhumane sanctions on Iraq. Think John Kerry’s trying to out-military George Bush in ‘04. Think about the utterly ineffectual democrats that gained a majority riding the wide discontentment with Iraq in
‘6. They lead the Democrats in a collective roll-over on the invasion, the surge and now that they are in the majority they are too cowardly to even whisper the “I” word. That’s right; they won’t even put impeachment on the table for the most impeachable president in history. Two depressing to go on . . .
So, compromise in contemporary politics means giving in to that power, it does not mean give-and-take. Someone, for the sake of my sanity, tell me something the democrats have “taken” during the Bush regime while “giving” up so much.
In an age when anyone who reads the news and has half a mind realizes that “our civil liberties are withering” is an understatement, Ralph Nader redefines freedom. Far from the slobbering, dog-like flag-wagging patriotism of so many an SUV caked with yellow ribbons and toy banners, freedom for Ralph Nader is Cicero’s definition: The ability to participate and share power. If you do not feel you have any power or are voiceless, you are not free. If you feel helpless when Barak Obama reneges on the shining promises that enchanted you, or are ashamed at the country’s current gun-slinging failure in the Middle East, then you realize our real lack of freedom–Civic Freedom.
Yes, you are free to travel, free to tote a gun, free to believe in any religion, and free to buy. But most of all, you are free to agree.
Mr. Nader loves to lace one of his heroes, Eugene Debs, into his speeches. Debs, like Nader who identifies closely with him, ran for president multiple times on the socialist ticket and spent his life dedicated to the union movements in the United States around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Toward the end of his life a reporter asked Debs what his greatest regret was. He responded, “Under the Constitution the American people can have almost anything at all, but it seems like they just don’t want much of anything at all.”
“How do we people to be angry?” Ralph asks. What will it take to reject the status quo and start making demands for a better world and a brighter future for every man? When will we start asking for more?
Ralph will give you plenty to get mad about when you stop to listen to him. Minimum wage is $3.40 lower in terms of purchasing power and adjusted for inflation than it was in 1968 when the average worker productivity was half what is today. That means the American worker does twice as much work and gets paid less for it than he or she did forty years ago. “By working harder and harder for less and less,” in Ralph’s words we are “moving backwards into the future.” Last week on the campaign trail he didn’t stop for any photo-ops while hunting or with a NASCAR star to look manly or strong (media stunts of the like Obama will no doubt begin doing shortly), but he did in a genuine moment ask the BudgetRental car lady how much she makes. The smile that she used so expertly to cajole him into buying dizzying fine-print insurance policies and other “encircled injustices” faded, and she asked, “Do you really want to know how much I make?” “Yea I do. How much?” “I’ve been here for fifteen years and I make $8.75 an hour.”
That’s the America that is. It is tacked with a ten-trillion-dollar-debt. Her banks are shuddering from credit crises (eerily pertinent to Ralph’s story about his dad asking: “Why will Capitalism always survived? . . . because Socialism will always be there to save it.”) Masses of people work full-time but cannot to pay the bills, let alone afford health care or education, while corporate executives make unseemly sums. The law locks away Marijuana users while tobacco peddlers get rich. University directors dine with loan agencies to cohort and trap students in a web of debt, effectively ensuring their slavery to the Man when they get out. The military is bogged down in a war on a civilian population that makes the rest of the world hate us and bloats the budget with strapped astronomical expenses. We are a polluting behemoth that sells out its workers for cheaper labor in foreign countries.
The military-industrial complex has all the weapons and runs foreign policy. The Israel lobby has Washington by the balls. Pharmaceuticals and corporate insurance profit off the disenfranchisement of the bottom sixth of the population. Auto giants, Oil bigwigs and Washington Fat Cats are undermining the rule of law and will ensure environmental destruction to protect economic growth. The mainstream media sleeps with the ruling elite every night and toils to protect the entrenchment of their power. We have a two-party system and it will always be that way. So, we must accept that and move on.
Even if you don’t buy all of that, you must give credit to a man that will look you in the eye and point out an America riddled with lies and problems; speak with specificity instead of generality; project a real vision, and not a blank “Change Canvass” for each listener to fill out on his own. His song, the same on he has sung all along, sounds sweetly different than Obama’s eloquent appeals for change and more change accompanied by back-room deals with the devil. Every social justice movement Ralph will tell you got starts with people who are willing to lose, Ralph tells his audience with conviction, and “I want Obama to talk justice.” Not looking like a man ready to lose, Obama embodies the modern voter-one who will contort himself into any crooked position in order to win.
Just as my giddiness swelled at discovering a politician who speaks at great length with piercing honesty and argues with expert articulation the same points that I had made to my friends earlier in the day, Ralph stopped to tell the living room crowd joined around him, “I don’t mean to depress you.” Depression? I have been depressed and disillusioned about American politics since my political awakening in high school at the time Bush began bullishly banging on the war drums. This was elation! Here was a man who did as he urges other to do: Speak Truth to Power. Later on, the our Atlanta host told me outside about Ralph setting out on his own after Harvard Law school and standing up to the Detroit automakers. “That takes balls!” He said of Nader’s one-man campaign that made cars safe to drive. “They did everything they could to taint him and create dirt. Even threw women at him. He turned it all down.” His wife added, “No else could have withstood that.”
Unfortunately, Obama seems to be giving in to the right to get into power. He is crumbling as he rises. Gone is the noble community organizer on Chicago’s South Side and Iraq War Protester; here is the man who appeases the Right, the Military, the Israel lobby, and the corn-based ethanol lobby. I question whether a man who caves in this much will have the conviction and leadership to deliver on his promises. If you are like me, and have been soured on Obama’s failed promises, failure to vote, and flirtation with the Right, you will appreciate a tireless campaigner like Ralph Nader who refuses to change in the name of true change.
If Barak is the only hope to prevent the continuation of the Bush disaster, and the two-party system is here to stay, why would I advocate voting for a man who has no hope of winning? I see Ralph Nader as a little magnet to Obama’s left. If he is a threat he will keep Obama from moving too far to the right. Voting for Ralph Nader is a vote to keep Barak Obama honest.
On 1968, that year when the progressive social movements of the 1960’s seemed to collapse, Hunter S. Thopmson observed, “You can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.” Maybe this is my youthful idealism, but I think that wave is finally remounting. The major issues of the day, militarism, economic inequality, energy security and environmental change are ever more interrelated, people are concerned and working on these issues. I think the voters who care about them are there and enough of them exist to elect a true progressive. We just need a leader who will congeal them into a single narrative, one able to challenge the social and neoconservative one that has brought us war, economic crisis, the disappearing middle class and deepening addiction to dirty industries.
The day we set unplug our televisions, a medium that excludes rational debate and breeds heedless consumerism, and begin to fight power will be the watershed that finally ends the days of the Nixons, Reagans, and Bushes. Barak Obama would like to think he is the poster boy for this movement, but the veneer of change is so thin that it wore off before he even made it to democratic nomination day.
All is not lost. There still is a progressive movement alive in this country. I believe that it will not be long before all the various progressive programs, organizations, magazines and people will get organized and and begin to affect serious change. We are beginning to understand what we want. We can get what we want.
We begin by expressing our outrage at the Democratic Party failing to hold George accountable for his trampling of the constitution and disdaining the American ideal. We begin by telling them that we will not vote for a candidate who reneges on his promises. We tell them this fall with the vote that we will no longer vote for wish-washy candidates of the ilk of John Kerry and Barak Obama who take progressives for granted. We demand they stop war, bring war criminals to justice, deliver on a single-payer health care system, take aggressive steps to ease climate change, and begin to listen to the will of the American people. We are in the majority, we just have to vote together.
If enough of progressives vote for Ralph Nader, he will become a threat. When he becomes a threat, the voice of the progressive will overpower the voice of the right and the centrists. In 2004, Nader presented John Kerry with a 20 page list of positions and told Kerry that if he made any three issues part of his campaign platform that he would agree to not run. Kerry lost. By more than Nader’s 411,000 votes, but he may have won had he picked those up in key states. Nader did not spoil the Democrats victory, the Democrats ignored their constituency.
The democrats are slow learners it seems and it might take a while to force them to get convicted and take a stand. Nader will likely not have much of an impact on this election. If Barak Obama, like Nader told Tim Russert, can’t win in a landslide, the democratic party should be disbanded altogether. If Ralph can get 5% of the vote, he will get federal funding for the next election and therefore pose a real threat of spoiling the Democrats. Maybe then, in 2012, the democrats will quit letting conservatives set the national agenda.
As Ralph says, “better to vote for someone you believe in and lose than to
vote for someone you don’t and have them win.”
For more thinking on Obama’s compromising with the right and the disillusionment of his liberal supporters, check out Paul Street’s blog on zmag. The article is “Obama backers on the left are doing the wincing now.” You have to register for free though. http://www.zmag.org/blog/view/1780
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3 Responses to “Obama will win. But he’s a centrist, and there are more interesting politics out there.”
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October 14th, 2008 @ 8:08 pm
Transformative night with Nader indeed. Great article and good looking site!
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October 24th, 2008 @ 6:42 am
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