McCain: Off the Rails

In an amazing rally today, the McCain campaign showed that it was running off the rails completely. At one point he began to tell his audience something, and then decided, "Never mind." At a pivotal moment, he called for Michael - I mean "Joe the Plumber", to come on stage, and then learned that Joe wasn't actually at the rally. And then, in the middle of his speech, he said something that sounds a bit like, "abrgjik". I kid you not. Listen to the speech. I replayed it a few times, because it sounded so very odd. It sounded like suddenly, he was speaking the language of an outer space alien. Which frankly, raises far too many truly frightening scenarios for me to contemplate.

And yet, for all of these rhetorical errors, that was not the most glaring nor revolting mistake of the speech. In McCain's bid to try to make American tax law, McCain's past policies, and Obama all sound socialist, McCain is now bringing up an old radio interview of Obama's, where Obama also used the R-word- redistribution. But here's where McCain has entered truly dangerous waters.

In this interview, Obama very clearly is speaking of the legacy of slavery. He speaks of how the civil rights movement lead to freedom for blacks, and the right to vote, but didn't redistribute income- and this still remains to be done. He speaks of mistakes the founding fathers made- as everyone acknowledges who has any understanding of the ammendment process in the US constitution. This is of course particularly true with ammendments like the 14th.

I recognize that some conservatives feel that everything is now right with the world, between races, and in regards to civil rights. I suspect- I hope- that those conservatives are a minority even among conservatives. Most recognize that one of the horrible legacies of slavery has been lingering racism and a continued relegation of the majority of blacks to the lower economic classes. Beyond that, there is the slightly more controversial proposal of compensation for slavery. After all, not only was there the broken promise of "40 acers and a mule", but all the wealth in terms of human productivity that was stolen from African lands, and stolen from the Africans themselves, made into slaves. To date there has been no true payment to those defrauded by the American government and American people. But the proposal is not so controversial that is has not been considered by the American Congress at times.

Some combination of these issues is what Obama was obviously referring to in his radio interview. From the context, I suspect that it was more of the former- establishing economic parity between the races in America, to remove the blemish and stain of slavery that shackles us all- rather than the more touchy issue of compensation. He was trying to seek a more just society, and make up for the wrongs that America has perpetrated on her citizens of colour.

And this...this is what McCain was referring to today in his speech, when he said that Obama was being socialist.

Before McCain denigrates calls for racial equality, it might be helpful for him to remember the immortal words of Frederick Douglass.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

How Can She Fool Everyone?

Hillary has managed to convince, it seems, the entire nation. Again and again, working class whites are voting for her, because she's one of them. She speaks of not accepting money from large donors. And she has convinced the nation that Obama is an "elitist".

But this is a woman who regularly accepts money from lobbyists, unlike Obama, who everyone acknowledges is the first viable candidate in American history to accept money only from small donors, and never from lobbyists (except as individual contributions).

This is a woman who, with her husband, is worth 100 million. This is not to say Obama is poor- but being worth millions is different from being worth tens of millions. Indeed, Obama is the poorest of all the top Democrat and Republican candidates in the race to date, and got his millions only in the last few years. I'm not saying Obama is poor, or even close to it. But how does a woman who has 100 times the money get off saying the less wealthy guy is less in touch with the working class?

Perhaps it's their histories. Perhaps one of them grew up poorer, and that's how Hillary is able to say this.

From Wikipedia:

She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago, and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.[1] Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a child of Welsh and English immigrants who managed a successful small business in the textile industry.

Not a wealthy lifestyle, to be sure. Not poor either. More...middle class.

How about Obama?

Obama wrote his first book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, before he was in politics. Lest you get confused, the inheritance he gets has nothing to do with wealth.

He states:

A few months after my twenty-first birthday...the apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

Later Obama shares of growing up in Indonesia, where the family was not the poorest of the poor, for they had their own house- but certainly would be considered poor by American standards. He describes the people around him:

I didn't tell [Grandma] and Grandpa about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind -- the terror that danced in my friend's eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields, bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away.

Obama's experiences are not that of a typical American, middle class or even working class. Perhaps some in New Orleans can relate, but for most of us, what he's experienced, what he's seen, is a level of poverty far lower than the poor of America. Obama may be out of touch, not because he is too elite, but because most Americans have experienced and seen less extreme poverty than he has!

And not to take delight in his relative poverty, but if Clinton is going to take out the measuring stick, does she have some sort of comparable experience in poverty when she was also nine years old? Or at any time growing up in suburban Illinois, is there something that would help her more greatly identify with the plight of the poor and working class?

I have no disagreement with the concept that Hillary did not grow up in the upper class. I affirm that she's solidly middle class in upbringing. And Obama is working class, in upbringing. Sadly, in this election, as in all others, we again and again hear about the needs of the middle class, and the working class, who do not vote in as large numbers, get ignored. And so Hillary can get off with saying she is in touch with voters and not elitist, because she grew up middle class.

What about his experiences makes Obama elitist? What could Hillary possibly be referring to?

One gets a sneaky, very disturbing feeling that it's because of where Obama went to school - Harvard (like Hillary's Yale). That's a fairly elitist school. But if so, then what she objects to is when those of the working class pull themselves out of their situation through hard work and education.

Long before this controversy came up, I liked Obama for many reasons. One was that, for the first time in a long time, I felt like here was a candidate who could identify with the situation of the lower class. I'm lower class, and proud to be so. I want a candidate who can understand it. I want a President who understands what it's like to try to make ends meet. I want a President who has a heart for the poor and the disenfranchised. I do not want a candidate who tries to put one over on the lower class, thinking we are all rubes, and will believe her when she says she's in touch with us because she grew up with more money than we're likely to have, and now has tens of millions more money than we'll ever have. I do not want a candidate who will call me elitist because, though I grew up in poverty, I went to a good school. Hillary Clinton, start speaking Truth.

I don't get it.

I was away from the internet and the news for the last few days, so I missed all of the hub-bub about Obama's remarks on the bitterness of the disenfranchised. I agree with the candidate- not the best choice of words, but fairly accurate for how the poor masses feel- he seems to have his finger on our collective pulse, so to speak.

So I was shocked and confused by Hillary's response- that Obama was "out of touch" with small-town America. Granted, it doesn't appear that most of the public is believing her on this one. But how could she even imagine that we would believe her? Obama grew up in poverty and overseas. He is the most committed Christian candidate we've had for this office since Carter. Or does Hillary think small-town America is the same as wealthy America, and therefore Obama is out of touch with the wealthy?

Let us compare this with a candidate who has little open display of her Christian beliefs- so much so that she said that if she'd heard what the Rev. Wright said from the pulpit, she would have long ago left that church, telling all of us who do attend churches that she's very unfamiliar with actually being part of a church, rather than just attending. For all of us have heard items from the pulpit that we strongly disagree with from time to time- its part of being part of a church, as opposed to a cult, where everyone agrees.

Let us compare this with a candidate who with her husband made 109 Million since leaving the White House. This is not to say Obama's hurting economically- he's made a couple million in book sales. But they aren't even in the same league. If we're asking who's more out of touch with the poor, the small-town resident, the average voter- is this even a contest? How could she not see she's shooting herself in the foot?

Perhaps this is why Obama appeared to be more angry than I've ever seen him before, in his response to Hillary's attacks. Oh, he wasn't frothing at the mouth, like some sort of John McCain. His anger is certainly understated, but also fully present. You can say a lot of things about Obama. But to accuse him of being "out of touch" with the poor and downtrodden is simply too ludicrous a proposition.