Truthdig.com
Thursday 24 January 2008
Lancaster, SC - Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys took the stage at a rally for John Edwards here Wednesday, and out of a clear sky it started raining metaphors.
Stanley, who turns 81 next month, is the country music legend - I'm talking authentic country music, not the formulaic schmaltz manufactured these days in Nashville - whose work was introduced to a wider audience by the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" If you remember the movie, you may remember two songs in particular, and Stanley performed both of them for the candidate who needs to win the Democratic primary here Saturday, but almost surely won't.
First, he sang "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," about a gentleman who's seen trouble all his days. Then Stanley dismissed the band and gave a haunting, a cappella performance of "O Death," a dirgelike lament whose title is self-explanatory. They don't make metaphors any more obvious.
But when Edwards made his choreographed entrance - bounding in from the back of the hall and coming down through the audience, shaking hands all the way and flashing his movie-star smile for the cameras - he looked neither dead nor sorrowful. Of the three candidates leading the race for the Democratic nomination, Edwards is the most consistent performer at campaign events. He never seems tired or preoccupied, never has the wrung-out look of someone who has been riding a bus all day. He always dazzles when he enters the room.
Still, Edwards is in third place. He was born in South Carolina, not far from this mill town, and if he finishes third in the primary here on Saturday, it's hard to imagine how he keeps pace with the better-financed front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
"I am the underdog," he told the crowd, in a part of his stump speech that's new since I last heard it in Iowa. "I don't have $100 million like the other candidates. ... And I don't stand at the debates and have petty arguments."
Since Obama and Clinton smacked each other around at the debate Monday, Edwards has been running as the mature adult in the race. "I was proud to be there representing the grown-up wing of the Democratic Party," he said at the rally, to warm applause. "I realize that this is not about us personally."
Gil Small, the chairman of the Lancaster County Democratic Party, was wearing an Edwards button at the rally. He said he thought the debate had "helped him a lot," but wouldn't venture any bold predictions. Hopeful is probably the best description of the local campaign's mood.
Ben Jones, who played Cooter on TV's "The Dukes of Hazzard," was the emcee for the event, and much of his warm-up monologue was about how the media keep forgetting that there are three major candidates in the race, not two. Truth be told, he has a point. Edwards has a coherent, consistent message and is running a top-shelf campaign. He has beaten his rivals to the punch on several issues, and he's the most skilled debater of the bunch. The problem is that Clinton and Obama aren't candidates so much as phenomena. They take up so much space that it's impossible to see the other guy.
Such is politics. But every time I go to an Edwards rally, I come away feeling disheartened - not for Edwards, but for the people whose disappointment and disaffection he captures in his cadenced rhetoric about taking back the country from "special interests" holding it for ransom. Dismissing him as a born-again "populist" ignores the fact that Edwards has touched a nerve, especially in small towns and rural areas where, for the unskilled or the unlucky, "the economy" basically means Wal-Mart.
"You have been ignored too long," Edwards told the people in Lancaster. And he's right.
In campaign appearances and television ads, Edwards cites an aging CNN poll (it was published Dec. 11) showing that he would defeat any of the top four Republican opponents in the fall. Maybe, but how does he get to the fall? Given the power of the Obama and Clinton juggernauts, how does he even stick around long enough to be there if they falter?
For a while, it looked as if his strategy was to team up with Obama to knock Clinton off her stride. But in the last debate, he joined Clinton against Obama - and then met privately with Clinton afterwards.
I asked him what they had discussed. "We talked about how the media isn't giving me enough coverage," he said with a smile.
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Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
Who Will Take On the Banks?
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig
Tuesday 22 January 2008
It was smart of the top Democrats to cut presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich out of that South Carolina debate, where they lamely attempted to deal with the dire consequences of the banking meltdown without confronting the banks. They made all the proper concerned noises about millions of folks losing their retirement savings and homes, but none was willing to say what Kucinich would have said: Bankers are crooks who will steal from the public unless the government holds them accountable.
How do I know Kucinich would have said that? Because I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times back when he was mayor of Cleveland and the banks foreclosed on his city after he refused to sell the public power plant. Others can talk a populist line, but Kucinich lived it. He was forced out of office that time, but voters realized 10 years later that Kucinich had been right. Thanks to the public power alternative that Kucinich refused to sacrifice, Cleveland had cheap power, and he was elected to the Ohio Legislature and then to Congress as his reward.
I bring this up now not to push a Kucinich presidential candidacy, which seems quite forlorn given the power of big money and big media to set the stage for permissible political debate, but rather to hold out a yardstick for measuring the "progressivism" of the top three Democrats. Sure, they all would be preferable to their likely Republican alternatives, although Sen. John McCain has been far better than all three Democrats on both campaign-finance reform and taking on the defense contractors who have been bleeding us dry since 9/11. I got a little worried when Sen. Hillary Clinton said she could do the best job in confronting McCain on national security; she is shameless in throwing money at war profiteers, while McCain has held the line on some of the more egregiously wasteful military expenditures.
With a military budget that has more than doubled since 9/11, soaking up trillions of dollars in obligations for future generations, it is stupid to argue about whether the Democrats or Republicans would spend more on needed domestic programs, because the money for those programs will not be available. Kucinich was the one candidate on the Democratic side willing to do what Rep. Ron Paul has in the Republican debates - challenge the phony patriotism of ripping off the taxpayers for war-fighting expenditures in Iraq and elsewhere, leaving us less secure.
While Paul is very good, indeed the best candidate, on the waste of taxpayer dollars on foreign military ventures, as is expected from a libertarian, he is hostile to the need for government regulation to control the excesses of the marketplace. And it is those excesses that are at the root of the financial chaos we have visited upon the world. As with the Enron scandal, which was the direct result of the bipartisan-supported deregulation of the energy industry, so too the subprime mortgage and easy-credit scandals now upon us. For decades, banking lobbyists have pushed through legislation freeing them to wreak havoc on our lives while they profit from lucrative personal bailouts even as their own companies suffer.
Deregulation became the mantra covering corporate theft in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and it is amazing that not one of her interlocutors at the South Carolina debate asked Sen. Clinton about her husband's signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which permitted banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies to merge, overturning one of the major regulatory achievements of the New Deal. More important, both political parties have refused to place any serious restraints on the interest charged by banks and think it perfectly normal, indeed healthful, for the economy that folks are given home loans or credit cards at unrealistically low interest rates calculated to soar after an introductory phase. What a sorry scene to see the top Democratic contenders unable to agree that some interest rates below 30 percent may rise to the level of usury.
For those unfamiliar with the moral crime of usury, believing it's only a legal crime if loan sharks threaten your knee caps, let me quote from Ezekiel 22:12 of the King James Bible: " ... Thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God." Not being overly familiar with Scripture, I am grateful to Kucinich, a product of a stern Catholic upbringing, for having informed me, more than a quarter of a century ago, that the bankers, and the politicians who service them, are courting the wrath of God - even if they fool the voters.
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