Vote!

Today’s note comes from Joe Biden:.

If we get out the vote, we will win this election – it's as simple as that.

Now, here's where you can help.

We need to fill more than a million volunteer shifts all across the nation between now and Election Day.

Our team has put together a simple way for you to get out there and make the difference.

Find your get-out-the-vote volunteer location now, and sign up to help when you can.

This election isn't going to be decided by TV ads, news cycles, or the polls. It's going to be decided by people talking to voters about Barack and the issues that matter – and then getting them to the polls.

This week is our last chance.  It's either the change we need, or four more years of the same.

And it's up to you.

Find out where and when you can get involved, get out the vote, and make history on Election Day:

http://my.barackobama.com/november

I hope to see you out there this week.

Thanks for all you're doing,

Joe

Underestimating Gov. Palin comes at some risk

There is no doubt that John McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin has energized the right and given some badly needed CPR to his campaign. It appears that not picking a woman to serve as his running mate, Hillary Clinton or otherwise, has hurt Barack Obama’s campaign. It’s self-evident, I think, that Palin is intelligent & a superb speaker, whatever her beliefs, lack of experience, or level of corruption. I also think it’s self-evident that Obama’s long drawn-out battle with Clinton, which dragged on months longer than necessary, has exhausted his campaign and that right now, on the surface at least, it looks very much the same way Clinton’s campaign looked the day after Super Tuesday. As tho it had focused so long on a single goal (Super Tuesday for Clinton, gaining the nomination for Obama) that whatever came next appears to have been a surprise.

However, in the long run, I will be the one who will be surprised if McCain manages to pull this rabbit out of the hat on election day. Because, in the long run, I think picking Joe Biden has done Obama more good than picking Palin will have done McCain. On the other hand, had Obama picked a woman & had McCain picked Tom Ridge, old pro-life, not-much-of-a-speaker, Bush-appointee Tom Ridge, I think McCain would ultimately have won this election. Picking Palin instead is a game changer alright, but McCain doesn’t appear to grasp the game.

I know that’s counter-intuitive, but I think American politics are counter-intuitive, precisely because electoral politics are not national politics. As George W. Bush demonstrated quite effectively in the year 2000, thank you, national polling numbers mean exactly nothing. Nada. Zip. The real question – the only question – is which votes did you get where? A pick like Palin, that increases McCain’s victory in Texas and Alaska and maybe elsewhere in the Bible Belt, all states McCain was going to win anyway, has no real impact, except insofar as her coat-tails may decide some down-ticket races for local office. I can’t think of a single state that she actually turns from red to blue. At best, she mutes the remote possibility of Libertarian candidate Bob Barr tipping Georgia to the Dems, the way Ralph Nader tipped Florida in 2000 into the hands of the Supreme Court.

Joe Biden, however, has taken Pennsylvania from the toss-up category to blue, rather the same way that a Tom Ridge would have had just the opposite effect. With 21 votes in the electoral college, the shift of those choices equals a swing of 42 electoral votes, enough to have ensured McCain a victory. Biden is well-known in Pennsylvania because Delaware is functionally a suburb of Philadelphia, save for the very southern part of the state, which is a suburb of Baltimore. Plus Biden was born & spent a portion of his childhood in Scranton in Pennsylvania’s hardscrabble northeast. He talks the talk and people can see that.

In spite of national polling, and in spite of eight years of unparalleled incompetence and rapaciousness on the part of the Bush administration, this is going to be another razor thin election. With eight weeks remaining, there really appear to be just four states that truthfully are still in play, and which aren’t leaning clearly one way or the other: Ohio, Virginia, Colorado & New Hampshire. If Obama wins either Ohio or Virginia, all he needs is one of the smaller two to win. McCain has to win both those states, or three of the four, to beat him.

McCain and his camp actually do believe that this is an election about change, and that whatever feels furthest from business as usual is an advantage. As David Brooks put it in The New York Times the other day, “weirdness wins.” The problem with Palin is not that she has so little experience, but that she may have too much, and that voters will realize that she’s just one more pol, Mike Huckabee with a gun instead of a guitar. And there is no way you are not going to see that clip of McCain admitting he votes with Bush 90 percent of the time a thousand times in the next eight weeks.

But the reason that change is the issue for both parties has a lot to do with what’s wrong, from the war to the economy, which is worse off even than Obama is prepared to let on.

So I think this election ultimately is about economics. Not, according to his own admission, McCain’s strong suit. Nor Palin’s. Plus, according to Bizjournals, four of the ten worst metros for jobs right now are in Ohio, while two others are nearby in Michigan. That and the profound demographic shifts in recent years in Virginia work to Obama’s advantage.

But it was Karl Rove’s hypothesis that, once you broke the unions, manufacturing states like Michigan & Ohio would be more apt to vote like southern states, that their demographics are much closer to the American south than they are to either seaboard, and that many people in the manufacturing sector are in fact transplanted southerners with value systems the GOP understands well. Thus, in theory, the worse things are in Ohio, the better the GOP should do there. This election should present an opportunity to put this premise to the test. That’s why Palin’s job is to turn the election in yet another round in the culture wars.

But this is where I think Obama continues to show, as he did in beating Clinton by demonstrating that he understood the importance of the caucus states & the caucus process, that he understands the task before him better than any Democrat before him. And that’s why we have Joe Biden, a pol with distinct regional appeal, rather than somebody who bumps a demographic but whose impact is filtered out by its distribution throughout every region. There may be regions where the African-American, Jewish-American, Spanish-American, Arab-American, even Hmong- & Sikh-American vote is concentrated. But women account for roughly half the vote everywhere. The percentage who don’t mind the fact that Palin is to women as Clarence Thomas is to African-Americans is a fraction of that vote, and the places where it concentrates are in the (surprise) red states.

All of which suggests that, barring any major gaffes from camp Obama,unless the GOP can concentrate the powerburst impact of Ms. Palin on some geography, such as Ohio, all her presence on the ticket will have accomplished is to ensure the election of Barack Obama, regardless of whether or not he wins the popular vote. And until such time a female politician can demonstrate the kind of pull that shifts an important state from column A to column B, all this kafuffle over the so-called Palin effect is exactly that, the mumbling of cable talking heads who need something to yatter on about, and who certainly won’t choose news or the issues as an obvious topic.

Barack Obama & Bob Casey in Paoli on April 19

The word I least expected to hear at the Democratic Convention in Denver this week was the name of my home town, Paoli, PA, population 5425. Paoli is but one portion of Tredyffrin township¹, which in its 300 year history, has elected exactly one Democrat to the local council. But there was Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s conservative Democratic senator, on the dais Tuesday night, proclaiming that he supported Barack Obama because he knew Barack Obama, partly because he had traveled with him “from Pittsburgh to Paoli” during the Pennsylvania primary.

Our one Dem, Paul Drucker, won a couple of years back &served mostly to wake the slumbering GOP, which promptly organized and made him a one-term pheenom. But the demographics of these here ‘burbs are changing, and Paul has a decent shot at the state house of representatives this coming November. Ironically, it’s been the Republican impulse to approve every new real estate development deal that has made the area affordable for folks moving out either from Philly or one of the inner suburbs. Right now both a steel mill and a golf course have been plowed over for new town home communities in the immediate vicinity. Thirteen years ago, when we moved here, this was the border between the suburbs and Pennsylvania ’s farmland. Now you have to drive at least 30 miles west to find that divide. A little more development & the GOP won’t be the majority party in Paoli or Tredyffrin.

 

¹ Townships are an odd governmental unit that I’d not come across until we moved to Pennsylvania. They aggregate multiple towns &/or parts of them – Wayne, the town David Brooks has memorialized in two books as “Paradise,” is partly in Tredyffrin here in Chester County, but also partly in Montgomery & Delaware counties as well. Paoli’s two real institutions are a post office and a volunteer fire department. Tredyffrin includes the local government, police & parks, but the school district combines Tredyffrin & a neighboring township.

For some time now, political pollsters have been telling me that I vote just like an African-American female under the age of 30. Given just how far that is from the 60ish white guy I see in the mirror every morning, it’s a characterization that has given me pause. What I think it comes down to is that the political self-interest of young black women more closely aligns with the broadest needs of our society. While everyone benefits from peace, economic prosperity and social justice, younger African-American women vote that agenda more often than anyone else. Address their political concerns and everything else will follow. According to this logic, I ought to be voting for Barack Obama when the Democratic primary process finally rolls into Pennsylvania late in April. Right at this very moment, however, I find myself filled with ambivalence.

Readers of this blog know from experience that I have no hesitation saying what I think on the subject of politics, at least when I know what that is. I first came out for Howard Dean here in October 2003, well before he’d started his net-based leap from obscurity to briefly become the next new flavor among the Democratic contenders of ’04. I felt that he had the best program, which he did, and which propelled him to the front of the polls in advance of the Iowa caucuses. It was there, of course, that Missouri Senator Dick Gephardt, whose own campaign chances required Gephardt to carry Iowa, went negative on Dean, the result being that John Kerry ended up carrying the state & ultimately the nomination.

This time around, the serious candidate who was saying the most useful and important things last fall seemed to me to be John Edwards. Edwards’ class-based social populism still strikes me as undeniably a more accurate take on what is wrong in this society than anything I have heard the other two candidates say. But Edwards was never able to break through with an electorate that appears to have grown very weary of white males. That’s not necessarily the entire electorate, just the Democratic one. By the time the primaries reach Pennsylvania, nobody will even remember that Edwards once was one of the Big Three who elbowed aside more veteran Democratic senators like Joe Biden & Chris Dodd with ease.

So we now find ourselves in this very curious two-person race. Curious in that the policy differences between the two candidates are minimal. Barack Obama clearly has the better record on Iraq, but his plans for the future there are not measurably different from Clinton’s. Hillary Clinton clearly has the better plan for health care – she’s absolutely right when she says that Obama’s kids-only universal health care is a set-up for something being nibbled to death by the health care industry. Except that Senator Clinton has what I would call an imperfect record on health care herself.

Voters so clearly want anything that looks different from what we currently have in the White House that they seem far less concerned with what the actual alternatives might be. In debate after debate, I heard candidates – even McCain & Huckabee – articulating how they will create change going forward. I get that. I think we all get that.

What I really need to know is which change, and how. It isn’t the Bush presidency I need them to differentiate themselves from – any halfway literate bumpkin could do that – so much as it is the Clinton administration before it. What I want to know is how will the next regime look different from that. I don’t hear Clinton addressing this at all. And the terms I hear Obama using, about getting beyond the divisions between red state & blue state, sound to me nothing less than Jimmy Carter with an Ivy League accent. My gut reaction is thank you, no. Been there, done that. The result wasn’t pretty.

But I don’t buy into the argument that this spiel signals any naiveté on Obama’s part so much as it taps into a genuine desire in the American public, the same one that has driven many Democrats out of the party, the same one that has driven many Republicans out of their party, all swelling the ranks of independent voters. But frankly I worry about any administration that attempts to embody post-partisan values. What in practice will that mean? I wish I heard Obama addressing this with greater specificity.

If I look at Obama’s staffing as senator, I see a lot of inside-the-beltway experience, something Carter’s team lacked. Pete Rouse, the chief of staff, previously held the same position for Tom Daschle, whom he’d met when the two served as legislative aides to James Abourezk. Obama’s policy director, Karen Kornbluh, is an economist who has worked for everyone from John Kerry to Alan Greenspan. Kornbluh is one of several former Clinton administration officials in the Obama camp, along with foreign policy advisors Anthony Lake & Susan Rice. The other key figure, as best I can tell, is Samantha Power, the Irish-born journalist who won the Pulitzer for her book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. This isn’t a bad team at all, but it also isn’t the outsider profile that the campaign has been trying to paint for Obama either. Maybe he won’t get slapped around by Congress the way Carter did – I don’t see any obvious “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” like Bert Lance or Hamilton Jordan on the horizon. But I worry about what happens when the expectations set by the rhetoric of a post-partisan future meets the harsh partisan present running the government.

Hillary Clinton has a completely different problem. Actually two. One is that the Bill Clinton administration was nothing to write home about. After it got beaten up over gays in the military & then health care reform, Clinton retreated to his Democratic Leadership Council roots and was content to behave like the mayor of America, with incremental this & incremental that, so that the only major policy accomplishments from two terms in office – NAFTA, welfare reform & the No Child Left Behind Act – were all Republican initiatives, primarily benefiting the GOP and its agenda. None has proven over time to be good policy.

The second problem is more pragmatic. I’m convinced at this moment that there is almost no path available to Hillary Clinton by which she can become president. I’m convinced that she can conceivably win the nomination – if she uses the brute force of the Democratic establishment, especially the so-called Super Delegates, to do so. But I’m also convinced that this will lead to a fall campaign in which black and younger voters will stay home in droves & independents will turn instead to John McCain.

The alternative – an Obama campaign in the fall – is by no means a gimme. The states he has been winning are precisely the ones most apt to go to the other party in the fall (a curious phenomenon that McCain has replicated on his side of the contest as well).

The Republicans do seem set, against all their instincts, on nominating the one person in their party who could beat the Democrats after eight years of Bush. The possibility of a rightwing third party insurgency is at best a long shot, tho it’s worth remembering that Bill Clinton himself would not have been a two-term president without the active assistance in each election of H. Ross Perot. The more chilling prospect of a Michael Bloomberg candidacy would sink whatever hope the Democrats might have. Many of Bloomberg’s domestic positions – on gun control, on abortion, on the rights of gay people – are to the left of both Democratic contenders.

So what about a dual ticket? It seems clear that Hillary Clinton will never be anyone’s vice-president – she had more power than Al Gore in the first Clinton administration. That leaves us with only the possibility of a Clinton-Obama campaign. Right now the national pundits are saying that Obama is recoiling at that idea, and I can’t say that I blame him. Unfortunately, I can predict – with a lot of historical evidence to support it – that if he doesn’t become Vice President at the very minimum, Barack Obama will almost certainly never become president.

The reason is simple. America has only twice elected a sitting senator to the presidency: Warren Harding & John F. Kennedy. When presidents depart, the candidate is almost always going to be the sitting VP: Nixon, Humphrey, Bush I, Gore. When the other party – doesn’t matter which – is trying to oust the incumbent, somebody from outside Washington is a much more believable candidate for change. This is why we get so many governors when parties change hands: Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 2.

But 2008 is an anomaly. Cheney isn’t running, the governors who ran – Romney, Richardson, Huckabee – all had something distinctly wrong about them, and the one governor with a national constituency – Arnold Schwarzenegger – is constitutionally prohibited from becoming president. So we are about to have our third sitting senator become president. That still represents less than seven percent of all presidents in history. Unless something changes dramatically going forward, the winner this year will be the last such exception to the “No Senators Need Apply” rule in my lifetime.

I do think that a Clinton-Obama ticket might be the one combination that would enable Clinton to make it to the White House, but I’m very skeptical that it’s apt to happen. Picking an “alternative” African-American running mate, such as Harold Ford, won’t even carry Ohio.

So this leaves me in this pickle. I don’t dislike either candidate. Hillary speaks directly to my own wonkish side (like you haven’t noticed), while I have to concede that Obama proposes to at least change the terms of the debate, if not the actual existence of one.

But in spite of the rhetoric, I don’t see either candidate doing much to seriously break the control of corporations on the Democratic establishment. Any more than I see John McCain doing much to make the Republican party safe for moderates in the future. I think, after eight years of openly dishonest government, a brutish administration with no respect whatsoever for the Constitutional rights of Americans, it is vitally important that the next president be a Democrat. And the person who has the best chance of winning is Barack Obama. So that puts me right back with my traditional voting demographic – young, black & female once again.

If, tomorrow, Bob Casey wins his election and becomes the senator-elect from the state of Pennsylvania, as I sincerely hope he will, he will also become, by that fact alone, the worst Democrat in the U.S. Senate. This is a man who gets his marching orders from the so-called right-to-life movement, actively supports the NRA, and who continues to be pro-war with regards to Iraq. He goes so far as to oppose stem cell research. Casey is well to the right of several Republican senators, including Pennsylvania’s own Arlen Specter, a man who likes to sound liberal but who invariably does the bidding of the far right, if ever (and whenever) he feels threatened from that direction. It was Specter, after all, who enabled Clarence Thomas to perjure his way onto the U.S. Supreme Court. Bob Casey is to the right of that.

But Bob Casey will vote to raise minimum wage and will help to put Democrats in control of the senate. Plus, he’s not Rick Santorum. In fact, that has been virtually his entire campaign strategy – he is not Rick Santorum. Santorum has clearly had presidential ambitions and would love nothing less than to deliver the U.S. into the hands of something not unlike Opus Dei. We are talking about a very seriously dangerous individual. So not being Rick Santorum is a real qualification.  

But, in a year in which a lot of the Democratic challengers are moderates, Bob Casey is about as indigestible an alternative as one can imagine. That’s the nature of choices in the election in 2006. Governor Ed Rendell made a conscious political decision to force virtually every other credible candidate, most notably former Congressman Joe Hoeffel, from the race. He could do this because Rendell functionally controls so much in the way both of campaign funding and party endorsements. The lone plausible alternative who could have mounted a campaign without relying at least partly on Rendell was MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews, one-time aide to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill. But Matthews, who is no liberal, chose not to run in a year in which his brother is the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor.

Rendell’s logic is simple. Casey enjoys tremendous name recognition because of his father, the late governor (and also an anti-choice well-to-the-right-of-center Democrat). Having finally won a statewide race (after a few attempts, one of which saw him lose the Democratic nomination for governor to Ed Rendell), Casey has shown that he can plausibly win. Also he did endorse Rendell after losing to him in 2002. With his record so far to the right, there’s no way really for Santorum to gang up on him as a gun-controlling abortionist. So Casey, who is largely ineffective as a speaker, has been able to run against an incumbent using something very much like a “rose garden” strategy, keeping debates to a minimum. This race thus is nothing more than a referendum on Santorum. And people in Pennsylvania finally have Santorum figured out. His loss tomorrow won’t be because of any mistakes George Bush has made.

And, yes, there are no third party candidates on the ballot. Santorum actually tried mightily to get a pro-choice Green Party candidate certified, just to split the Democratic vote.

My biggest fear is that tomorrow, Democrats will win 49 seats and the GOP will win 49 seats, with independents Bernie Sanders & Joe Lieberman taking the other two. Sanders, a progressive, will line up with the Democrats, but I can just imagine Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1998, opting to line up with the GOP, so that our friend Dick Cheney will end up casting the vote that determines that the GOP continues to chair (and govern) committees in the senate. My second biggest fear is a voting machine debacle, less because of conscious fraud – I think that comes later unless we get systems that keep a paper trail – than because the offices in charge of administering elections are typically small operations that get big just once or twice each year for one day, and that the probability of systems not operating correctly, or key cards being missing, that sort of thing, seems very high in a year when so much of the country is using automated voting machines for the first time. I’d recommend that you get to the polls early and bring a book.

It will be interesting to see what the new Congress does once it arrives in session. I wouldn’t count on very much. If only the House is in Democratic hands, I think its focus will turn to investigating the shenanigans of the past six years – there is fertile ground there. If both houses are in Democratic hands, I think there will be serious discussions about whether or not there is more political advantage to be gained by impeaching Bush or using him as a whipping boy for two more years – I expect the Democrats to do the latter, frankly.¹ By then, it should be patently obvious that Bush is the only American president ever to lose two wars. Functionally, he already has, but so long as he can pour in fresh bodies to get blown apart in Iraq and Afghanistan, he can postpone the final reckoning. That’s why his rhetoric about these places is so upbeat that it seems deranged.

By now it should be beyond obvious why it is important to elect the next president and not get bogged down in the narcissism of Ralph Nader. 2008 will also be the strangest political election this country has seen in a long time, with no president or vice-president in the mix (save possibly for Al Gore, which was awhile ago). One thing that makes it hard to gauge what might happen in two years is that the political media is unbelievably unreliable on this subject. For example, virtually all of the major news outlet pundits will end up, as they always do, favoring one or another senator. They all live in D.C. and this is all they know. They all know these guys (and a few gals) and who doesn’t want to be on speaking terms with the next president of the United States? This in spite of history that suggests that it is all but impossible for a sitting senator to get elected president. In the whole of American history, it’s happened exactly twice: Warren G. Harding and JFK. When the people want to make a change, it doesn’t occur to them that the guys at the other end of the mall in D.C. represent anything but the same-ol’ same ol’.

However, because of the particular nature of this election, with no candidate carrying the record of incumbency, it just might be different. Just this one time.

But the second thing to keep in mind is that window for running for the presidency is incredibly narrow. The Democratic frontrunner Senator Sam Nunn decided not to challenge George H.W. Bush in 1992 and to wait until 1996. But by 1996, tho, people were already forgetting about him since he played no role in the Clinton administration.

What all this means is this: if Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain don’t get elected in 2008, they will never be president. Period. End of story. It doesn’t mean that they could not subsequently be nominated. But it does mean that they would be running the same sort of handicap as Bob Dole had in 1996.

As it is, being a senator is a heavy negative and it still will be. The last time we had a genuinely open election like this, in 1952, we got the governor of Illinois running against the president of Columbia University, and the latter won since he was also a war hero. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something like that again. When the beltway crowd says that it can’t happen because of the war on terror and the need for foreign policy experience matters, it’s a total canard. Even for Republicans, the 2008 election will be about change.

But for such a race to happen, of course, the front-runners, Clinton & McCain, will have to stumble. They have organizations, name recognition, and money, lots of it. However, both are wearing huge bull’s-eyes for the other candidates (and Fox News) to aim at for the next two years. History is littered with the failed campaigns of front-runners. Watching the feeding frenzy around John Kerry this past weekend when the so-called botched joke wasn’t funny mostly because it was true – economic disadvantage kills you – reminded me of what piranhas these folks will be, given the slightest chance. We’re going to get to see that game played out again a few times between now and the fall of 2008.

I would like to think that the Democrats winning tomorrow would change the tenor of the election in 2008 by ending the war in Iraq early in 2007. But the only person who could make that happen is George W. and the only thing he can be counted on to do is whatever is the worst possible option. Certainly if the war is still going on in 2008, don’t count on Hillary Clinton to bring it to closure. In theory, that should mean that there will be a huge groundswell for Russ Feingold & there just may be. But history teaches that anti-war candidates are notoriously fragile as candidacies. In 1968, Robert Kennedy’s campaign to seize the banner of the antiwar movement from Eugene McCarthy was completely cynical. And when Kennedy was murdered, his political chits went over to Hubert Humphrey, the only Democrat in America who ran by defending LBJ that year. So I wouldn’t be shocked to see an antiwar candidate emerge whom I haven’t even thought about yet for 2008. I just hope I don’t have to see it happen again in 2012.

 

¹ For one thing, you would have to impeach both Bush & Cheney, since he controls American foreign policy. And one thing no Democrat in the U.S. Senate wants is for another Democrat, whether its Nancy Pelosi or any other Democrat to become Speaker of the House, to be an incumbent president come primary time in 2008. So while it makes far more sense than the impeachment over a blowjob of the Clinton administration, it’s just not going to happen.

Maybe from down in Tribeca or Battery Park it looked majestic, but from midtown Manhattan, where I found myself on business yesterday, the two shining beams of light rising up from Ground Zero seemed tepid, reminding me that, outside of Tokyo perhaps, Manhattan is the number one source of light pollution in the night sky. A more visible reminder that yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the attacks was the presence of every off-duty fireman in the New York region, all in uniform (sort of, a lot of the jackets & shirts were literally falling off) wandering in & out of the bars. Seeing that many snockered firemen was surreal. I turned on the news on the fancy flatscreen TV in my room at the Westin Times Square, but watching Bush & Rumsfield & Cheney & Tom Ridge work their respective crowds so cravenly sickened me, so I shut it off. I couldn’t even turn the sound off & just appreciate how the letterbox presentation stretched all of their features just a little.

I hate being right, sometimes. I got into all kinds of trouble in the fall of ’01 when I noted on a listserv that I thought a war with, or for, Afghanistan was inevitably the consequence of U.S. soil having been attacked. I couldn’t think of any president in history who would have responded otherwise. The populace would have torn an incumbent limb from limb who didn’t do exactly that. But I also wrote that being led into war by the worst president in American history, not only the least competent, but the most shallow, dishonest & malevolent as well, was not the prescription for a happy outcome. Boy, was that an understatement! Not only have the Taliban resprouted like a perennial that just lay fallow in the soil through a winter because we failed to follow through with the nation-building basics – roads, schools, electricity, hospitals, economic alternatives to harvesting opium, etc, etc, etc – that remain a prerequisite for success in even the most narrow, reactionary terms. But, to go further, we’ve positively rewarded al-Qaeda by giving them a huge bonus called Iraq, complete with its own failed state. As a result we have given them resources (in Iraq, al-Qaeda controls everything west of Baghdad), intensive training, and a means for motivating every disaffected young Muslim in the world. And we tossed in uncritical cheerleading for Israel’s insane adventure in Lebanon because there wasn’t enough salt in that wound already.

Even if one imagined that the neocon fantasy of a democratic Iraq would transform the Middle East, there is no way to accomplish this and ravage the public trust at home by continuing to transfer wealth in our society to the superrich. Bush lost Iraq – irrevocably – because he was never really committed to winning it. The problem for his successor, regardless of their party, is that al-Qaeda really is going to benefit enormously from having an even bigger, potentially wealthier (all that oil!) failed state to call its own, regardless of what jerry-rigged parliament is put in place. Which means that the world will be a nastier, more brutish place. And I don’t expect the next president, again regardless of party, to do much to improve the current assault on civil liberties. Presidents in war time want to get their hands on every lever of control they can conceive of – it was Lincoln who suspended habeas corpus, after all; Roosevelt who authorized the work on the atomic bomb.

I first heard someone say with certainty that they thought the two main opponents in the next world war would be the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalists in 1989. The speaker was an anthropologist who served on the flood control commission of what was then called Leningrad. Islamic fundamentalists had, after all, defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan. Defeating the other superpower didn’t seem such a challenging prospect from that point of view. His point was that I should see the collapse of the Soviet system as a (partial) consequence of that defeat. I’m still not sure that I'd go that far, but the rest of his prediction has been true enough. An enemy that doesn’t believe in a state is like capturing mercury with chopsticks. I know only this – Iraq will continue to be a source of trouble because we made it so. Worse yet, there is no way we can be part of the solution. All we can do is to stop pouring gasoline on that fire.

So the empire has dug itself a hole over these last five years. One from which it just might not be able to climb out. Especially with an infrastructure in such decay & global warming moving well beyond the point of no return. The 21^st century is going to be one hell of a ride, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to call it the American Century – we had ours & now we’ve squandered it.

I was born in Pasco, Washington, one of three towns that form the Tri-Cities region along the southern border of that state. The other two are Kennewick, where my grandfather was the mayor for a time and where my cousins still run the Farmer’s Exchange, tho I hear it tends as much to the gardening needs of engineers as it does to farmers these days. The engineers all work in Richland, home of the Hanford Site, the nuclear facility first used to construct the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. That is the subject of this chilling tale in today’s Los Angeles Times. Clean up of this site is only 20 years behind schedule.

We have been reminded again this week of why the saying “May you live in interesting times” was a curse. In Mosul & Basra, citizens have relearned what the citizens of Hue and Hanoi already knew – why it is you don’t ever want the American people, so ignorant of geography & history, to learn the name & location of your city.

 

But in New York, San Francisco, London, Madrid, Chicago & elsewhere, the past few weeks also have seen the growth of a global anti-war movement at a pace that is unprecedented. That this movement has neither thwarted nor yet halted the war is not surprising, but that it has grown so rapidly from such relatively small roots is heartening. People have accomplished in days what literally took years in the 1960s, in terms of communication, outreach & education. In some respects, it is not so much the large actions in San Francisco or New York that drive this home most clearly as it is the simpler candlelight vigils in places like the Chester County courthouse here in Pennsylvania. In the 1960s, it was not until after the shock of the Kent State massacre that the peace movement permeated that far into the American hinterlands. & that took so long that it was no longer, properly speaking, even the sixties, but May 15, 1970, almost six years after the Gulf of Tonkin “incident.” This is an accomplishment & lesson that the organizers of the new peace movement should not take lightly. It is, in fact, something profound upon which to build.

 

Ironically, I suppose, the February-March issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter finally showed up in my mailbox, weeks – indeed it seems like months – after I first heard about its “Blank Generation” feature. I’d actually seen the feature itself – Steve Benson was good enough to send me a photocopy a few weeks back – but I would have missed Nick Piombino’s “Tessera,” a wonderful poem, had the issue itself not finally arrived.

 

The Blank Generation feature starts off from two comments, one made by Lyn Hejinian, the other taken from my Nov. 21^st blog entry, both to the general effect that there had been a depoliticization of the younger generation when contrasted with our own experience of the 1960s. This is followed by comments from twelve writers, ten of whom are significantly younger than either Lyn or I. Obviously, events have substantially rewritten recent history & my initial criticism about depoliticization is one charge I’ll never be able to raise again. That’s the good news.

 

But I’d like to revisit that comment of mine in the slightly broader context in which it was originally made, a part of Carl Boon’s interview, a response to the question of why I was doing this blog. In the passage that follows, the italicized boldface portions are what were given to so-called Blank Generation respondents & published in the issue:

 

But there has also been a depoliticization of younger people generally & that has impacted poets. Some of it has to do with the lack of tangible alternatives to unfettered capital following the collapse of the old Stalinist bloc – although for decades it has been difficult to find any western Marxist who would defend the so-called “actually existing socialist countries,” in large part because state control over capital is not socialism. In the West, there has been no primary shared point of agreement as to the goals of the left since the U.S. exited Vietnam in 1974. That’s a long time for groups to go without much sense of cohesion. The antiglobalism movement is not one thing, but many, & many of them contradictory. Identarian tendencies were a logical extension of the civil rights movements of the 1950s & early ‘60s, but they have inescapably fed into this demobilization by isolating the very people they seek to empower. You see the long-term result in a lot of writing these days that is simultaneously politically correct and depoliticized, a politics really of cynicism and disgust. So this also becomes an incentive not to organize, not to write critically.

 

Those edits – the excision of history, to be exact – are worth noting.

 

Like Lyndon Johnson & Richard Nixon before him, George W. Bush has provided just the sort of “primary shared point of agreement” that has been lacking for so long. To some degree, the response to date has been predictable, although dramatically accelerated. The real issue, it seems to me, will come after the war, when the U.S. and the ever-faithful United Kingdom are bungling the reconstruction of all that they have laid waste. That is the point in this process that the left of my own generation never successfully negotiated. To date, I do not see it being addressed, but it’s too soon & I would dearly love to be wrong in my skepticism on this point.

 

The first Gulf War evaded the issue neatly by its sheer brevity. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al would like to do that again, but at this moment in history it’s too soon to tell. If there is a dramatic affective difference thus far between the experience of the antiwar movement of the 1960s & that of this spring, it is simply that the level of crisis & action that people have gone through this past week lasted in the 1960s & ‘70s for ten straight years. In the context of that degree of exhaustion & frustration, the mistakes of, say, the Weather Underground or the SLA become, if not excusable, at least understandable. Try doing this for a decade – it will change who you are.

 

My comments were a response to Carl Boon’s question of why, exactly, I was doing a weblog. Since I made those remarks four months ago, I’ve been thrilled to see so many other poets pick up the form. It really doesn’t matter what your aesthetic commitments or heritage might be – acting, writing & thinking critically will add a dimension to your work, your poetry as well as anything else you might do, that I believe can only lead to good things. One excellent example of how this can be extended in ways that go far beyond poetry is Brian Kim Stefans – one of a handful of poet-bloggers to be blogging longer than I – and his Circulars project, a weblog that has become a focal point for collecting & disseminating information related to the war. The last I heard, it was getting thousands of hits per day. It should be on everyone’s favorites list.

 

I want to dedicate this blog to an old friend, Wade Hudson. I first met Wade over thirty years ago when we worked together on dozens of projects as part of the California prison movement & he never ceases to amaze me – I once ran into him giving Felix Guattari a tour of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. This week Wade is in Baghdad as part of the Iraq Peace Team. He’s taking an enormous risk for the benefit of the entire world. I recommend that you read his own weblog.

What does Peter Coyote have in common with Marvin Bell? The same thing that Clayton Eshleman has in common with Anselm Berrigan, Bill Berkson with Maxine Kumin, Ursala LeGuin with Julia Vinograd, and Stanley Kunitz with August Highland. All have participated in Sam Hamill’s still-growing poets protest against the war.

As hokey as the official chapbook of Poets Against the War might be, the website’s database of more than 5,000 poets is a remarkable collection of the diversity of American writing, an amazing statement in opposition to a war in which the shooting has not yet begun. While The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball might not recognize these names, here (based on the most perfunctory scroll through the website’s index) are a few that might be familiar to you:

Addonizio, Kim

Alarcón, Francisco X.

Alcalay, Ammiel

Alexander, Charles

Alison, Dorothy

Aplon, Roger

Balaban, John

Ballardini, Anny

Barks, Coleman

Barnstone, Willis

Baron, Todd

Bass, Ellen

Beban, Richard

Behrle, Jim

Bell, Marvin

Bennett, John

Bentley, Scott

Berkson, Bill

Berrigan, Anselm

Berry, Jake

Bertolino, James

Bialy, Harvey

Blumenthal, Michael

Bly, Robert

Bowering, George

Brandi, John

Braun, Henry

Breit, Luke

Chernoff, Maxine

Cisneros, Sandra

Clausen, Jan

Cohen, Ira

Cole, Henri

Conrad, C. A.

Corbett, William

Corey, Joshua

Corn, Alfred

Coyote, Peter

Creeley, Robert

Dacey, Philip

Dennis Browne, Michael

Doty, Mark

Dove, Rita

Ehret, Terry

Ehrhart, W.D.

Ellingham, Lewis

Eshleman, Clayton

Finch, Annie Ridley Crane

Foley, Jack

Forti, Simone

Fried, Daisy

Frym, Gloria

Fyman, Cliff

Gallaher, John

Gavronsky, Serge

Gibbons, Reginald

Gilbert, Sandra M.

Gioseffi, Daniela

Gizzi, Peter

Goedicke, Patricia

Gontarek, Leonard

Gordon, Kirpal

Griffin, Susan

Hacker, Marilyn

Hahne, Marj

Hamill, Sam

Harjo, Joy

Harrison, Bob

Hazo, Samuel

Healy, Eloise Klein

Herron, Patrick

Highland, August

Hine, Charles

Hirschman, Jack

Hogue, Cynthia

Hollo, Anselm

Holman, Bob

Hoover, Paul

Howe, Fanny

Howe, Marie

Hudspith, Vicki

Jaffe, Lawrence

Jaffe, Maggie

Johnson, Halvard

Jones, Hettie

Joron, Andrew

Kalleberg, Garrett

Katz, Eliot

Kaufman, Shirley

Kelly, Dennis

King, Basil

Kingston, Maxine Hong

Kinnell, Galway

Kizer, Carolyn

Knott, Bill

Kumin, Maxine

Kunitz, Stanley

Kushner, Dale

Lally, Michael

Le Guin, Ursula K.

Lenhart, Gary

Loden, Rachel

Lourie, Dick

Luschei, Glenna

MacAdams, Lewis

Machlin, Dan

Magee, Michael

major, devorah

Marcus, Morton

Matson, Clive

McVay, Gwyn

Meltzer, David

Menefee, Sarah

Merwin, W.S.

Metzger, Deena

Miller, Jane

Mohammad, K. Silem

Montag, Tom

Moore, Daniel Abdal-Hayy

Moramarco, Fred

Moure, Erin

Muske-Dukes, Carol

Myles, Eileen

Napora, Joe

Nelson, Marilyn

Newth, Rebecca

Niatum, Duane

Olson, John

Orr, Gregory

Ortiz, Simon

Orvino, Jennie

Ossman, David

Ostriker, Alicia

Padgett, Ron

Palmer, Michael

Piombino, Nick

Pollitt, Katha

Randall, Belle

Randall, Margaret

Raphael, Dan

Ray, David

Retallack, Joan

Reyes, Carlos

Rich, Adrienne

Rodney, Janet

Rogow, Zack

Ronk, Martha

Root, William Pitt

Rothenberg, Jerome

Rothschild, Douglas

Rumaker, Michael

Saner, Reg

Schulman, Grace

Scott, Peter Dale

Seidman, Hugh

Skratz, G. P.

Snodgrass, W. D.

Spivak, Kathleen

Stern, Gerald

Stewart, Susan

Strongin, Lynn

Stroud, Joseph

Swensen, Cole

Swenson, Karen

Sze, Arthur

Tabios, Eileen

Tall, Deborah

Tarn, Nathaniel

Tepper, Craig

Thomas, Heather

Torres, Edwin

Tysh, Chris

Vangelisti, Paul

Vincent, Stephen

Vinograd, Julia

Waldman, Anne

Weigl, Bruce

Whitney, J.D.

Willard, Nancy

Wilner, Eleanor

Yourcenar, Joy

Zamora, Daisy

Zinnes, Harriet

Not all of these links lead to poems – several are statements of conscience. And I’m sure that as my eyes literally glazed over the table of contents, I missed a lot of other obvious “name brand” poets. The list above represents less than four percent of what can be found at the website and I heartily recommend scrolling through & reading widely. One way to start is to read everything from your neck of the woods. Collectively, it has that mind-numbing, awe-inspiring overwhelming quality I will always associate with the AIDS Quilt.

Given the balkanization of American letters & Sam Hamill’s own less-than-innocent role in same – the site’s chapbook itself underscores the problem perfectly – I think it takes an enormous amount of goodwill & sense of urgency to send a poem or statement to this project. That so many American (& a few Canadian) poets have done so is a testament to the lateness of the hour & the importance of the idea. If/when this war begins, these writers are on record that George W’s assault on the people of Iraq is not being conducted in our name.