Bitterness, Hope And Obama In Western PA
Unfortunately they weren't, and now the cable news punditry and right-wing talk radio has a new diversionary cause of the week to dump on Obama in lieu of serious discussion of policy and programs.
I'm born and bred in
Take it from me. There are a lot of bitter voters in these mill towns and the townships outside them. If they don't express it to the coiffured media, they do to each other. It's easy to see why. The towns are mostly empty, ravaged by deindustrialization. And the brown fields where the mills once stood are so poisoned grass won't even grow. After sitting empty for years, the first new structure to go up not too long ago on one near here was a new prison.
Does this mean it's a clear path for Obama? Not at all, it's a rough climb, full of difficulties. But he's doing better than anyone expected. None of the polls are that trustworthy, because some tell the pollsters the 'right' answer, while others, such as new youth voters with only cell phones, are hard to find. Obama's closing on
'White male identity politics' is the unpredictable elephant in the room. I've talked with older blue collar voters who claim John Edwards was their runaway favorite, but are now leaning to John McCain, in spite of their hatred for the war. White workers generally split three ways, roughly proportional, between the three candidates.
Younger working-class voters, male and female, white or Black, are not so caught up in it, and they are Obama's ace-in-the-hole. If his campaign can get them to the polls in droves, he can win it. That's the long and short of it, and if you can get here to help, please do so. Everything counts.
The bitterness runs deep, favors no single candidate, and comes in several varieties. Retired steelworkers here had their pensions stolen by speculative capital, winning only part of them back by hitting the streets. There's also another kind of bitterness in
Does this mean it's all bleak? No, not at all, although Hillary Clinton is just dissembling, or worse, to assert that there's no bitterness, only resilience and hope, in these towns. People here like to pull themselves up independently whenever they can, like the Scots-Irish and Germans who predominated here in the 1800s. Their class solidarity means they'll accept a hand-up, and offer one, too. But they don't like hand- outs at all, unless you're at death's door, which is why their anti-'Fat Cat' populism also contains antipathy to some features of liberalism. It's also why Obama gets a standing ovation when he tells college students he'll help, but challenges them to give back, with community service work.
This blue-collar populism runs the political gamut- left, center and right. You can get colorful examples in the hot debates in the interactive pages of the online edition of the largest daily paper, the Beaver County Times. Pick any topic or candidate-you'll get fierce denunciations of the rich man's war for oil, combined with warnings against Hillary' 'socialism', claims that Obama's a secret Muslim, and despair that McCain's a clone of Bush.
In this lively public square, Obama or any candidate would do well to discern the main themes. Don't get me wrong. People here are open and friendly. They don't expect you to agree with them, or vice versa. But they do expect authenticity, so when you get out organizing, speak from the heart, and don't put your head higher than anyone else's, and expect the same in return.
At the top of their list is stopping the war now, since it's preventing any solutions to anything else. Next, do something about health care-single payer is best, but either Obama's or Hillary's plan rather than nothing. Then debt relief and fuel prices, although no miracles are expected here.
Finally there's creating new jobs and new wealth. This is probably most important strategically, but people have been spun so many promises, they're cynical, and Obama was right to point it out. Still he should look deeper here, and more often.
What gets people's attention are 'high road' programs like the Apollo Alliance, new 'green' industrial jobs building the infrastructure of energy independence. All those wind turbines and wave generators and whatnot have to be built somewhere, and what blue collar Pennsylvania, white and Black, knows how to do very well is build things that create high value and new wealth.
This is what gets people's attention, not rebates, handouts and McJobs. Obama's a natural on this subject, and he'd best spend less ad money on how's he's not in thrall to lobbyists, and spend more as an advocate of green industrial policy that would give these mill towns real hope for change.
Carl Davidson, a CC-DS member, is a peace and justice activist, a 'Solidarity Economy' organizer, and webmaster for 'Progressives for Obama' at http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com.
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Progressive, or Progressive-Center...
By Davidson, Carl at Apr 19, 2008 17:59 PM
Here\'s a puzzle for you, Paul.
What program or platform, in 2008, could you put out that would unite a majority of voters--left, progressive and center--and include a sector of the bourgeoise?
Because that\'s what you need to win the White House this year--not a progressive candidate, but the best candidate for a progressive-center coalition.
Anything to the left of that this year hands it to McCain, don\'t you think?
Now I don\'t think Obama\'s even got the best package, even if he came out for the Apollo Alliance and green industrial policy the other day. Icould improve it a lot, if he bothered to ask.
But contra Klugman, I don\'t think Hillary is running to his left. So the choice is pretty clear-cut.
But thanks for the vote, anyway. And if you have a commonly agreed upon CODA of all progressive principles, I\'d love to see it sometime. I\'ve been through all the classics, and I guarantee you, there\'s no common definition or set of socialist principles in them, either.
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\"Calculation versus principle\"
By Street, Paul at Apr 18, 2008 10:49 AM
My heroic service, totally without illusion (as someone well to the left of Kucinich) for Edwards (wore out my shoes and cell phone for JRE) in Iowa shows that I am not above getting above my hands dirty in bourgeois politics, but you have to give me more than Obama gives. He crosses the line. I saw the guy lie again and again out here: (1) flyer telling me I could "join the movement to stop the war" by Caucusing for Him, who was/is a supporter of the war (my next book will give all the ugly details); (2) constantly using the fate of the Maytag workers of Galesburg, Illinois (I saw and heard this again and again in boring professorial Obama Iowa orations) as part of his faux-populist rap while the the actual union representing those workers noted that he didn\'t mention their plight once to one of his top funders - a Mr. Crown - who sits on the Maytag board; (3) abject lying about his reponse to the Braidwood Exelon leak of 2005 (recently exposed in NYT).
I am sickened by his pro-nuclear Exelon-funded position and his backtacking from claims (last year) to work through the public presidential financing system, his 2005 vote for plutocratic class action "reform," his milquetoast health care initiatives and centrist "Obamanomics" (David Moberg).
One thing I remember from Iowa was Obama going after Edwards for being beholden to "the special interests who run Washington and who John claims to oppose" because JRE got television ads from labor- (SEIU-) based 527s. How loathesome: labor unions are not the special interests that dominate policy, corporations are. And of course the Dali Obama turned around and got 527 ads from labor in Nevada and ever since.
Don\'t you get tired of His constant reference to the "lobbyists and PACs" who have "turned our politics into a game?" It\'s corporate power that runs the show. Corporate power, See Moberg (no left-anarchist like yours truly) in the April issue of In These Times.
Did you not see where Doug Henwood pointed out that leaving the DLC list (under pressure from Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford) is meaningless compared to the fact that his top economic advisor Austan Goolsbee (of the University of Chicago...of course) is tor was he DLC\'s top economist. How about Jermey Scahill\'s expose on Obama\'s "realistic" campaign distancing themselves from relatively progressive Chicago area congressperson J. Schakowsky\'s bill to ban Blackwater Worldwide and other private security contractors from Iraq? The list of these sorts of offensive incidents just goes on and on, like his speeches and books - terrible, boring, conservative, reactionary, and by the way,.....totally elitist. For me, the Obama phenomenon is literally nauseating. It both reflects and advances the death of the left.
I don\'t ask Obama to be a left Marxist/left-anarchist or even anything close to King; that would be absurd...apples and oranges. But Christ, you;ve got to have some standards. I mean Obama isn\'t just too right wing for Socialistworker.org; he\'s too right wing for a nice liberal like Paul Krugman. And pragmatically, he\'s a terrible choice to go up against McCain, i might add. You guys got behind the wrong viable candidate. You blew it.
Vote for him? Well, might take 2 minutes to block McCain in a swing state. Work for him: never.
Iowa City, IA
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Time to lend a hand
By Davidson, Carl at Apr 18, 2008 05:18 AM
Yes, Paul, the quote is accurate.
There\'s more to it SW choose to ignore, but no matter.
Yes, I stand by it, especially considering where things were at when I made it. I was backing Kucinich, and then Richardson back then, as our best options on the war. \'Gotcha\' doesn\'t work here--there\'s no media glare and I\'m not running for anything.
Now the field has narrowed, and Obama has shifted, too. Every speech he give here in W Pa, he asserts he\'ll end the war in 2009, and he gets a standing ovation--much better than what he was saying back then. He\'s also told DLC to take his name off their roster. He still could do better, and drop a lot of the foreign policy wonk triangulating, as far as I\'m concerned. Especially his butt-kissing of AIPAC, which didn\'t do him a damn bit of good. They still see him as dangerous to Zionism, even if not because of \'positions.\'
But Obama\'s not McCain, the main danger on the war, don\'t you agree? And since we\'ll have to keep any White House under fire to end the war, I\'d much rather it be Obama\'s than McCains, wouldn\'t you?
Our project, \'Progressives for Obama\', is independent of the campaign, and we speak our minds critically all the time, even as we work to see our \'best option\' win. Don\'t you think it\'s time you signed on, and lent a hand?
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His Holiness the Dali Obama
By Street, Paul at Apr 17, 2008 18:50 PM
Carl Davidson of "Progressives for Obama," here is a passage containing a quote from you in an earlier incarnation, before you took up residence in an Obamanist temple...or should I say retreat:
Carl Davidson, a former Vietnam War protest leader who helped organize the 2002 rally Obama so famously spoke at, says that after the protest and the 2003 invasion, Obama’s position on the war began to morph.
“ After he visited Iraq when the war was on, he turned," Davidson wrote recently. "Now we had to set aside whether it was right or wrong to invade, now we had to find the \'smart\' path to victory, not Bush\'s \'dumb\' path...[I]n dealing with Iran, we had to leave on the table bombing their nuclear sites. For this, a lot of the local antiwar activists started calling him \'Barack O’bomb ’em.\'"
“\' He wasn’t listening much to us anymore, but to folks much higher up in the [Democratic Leadership Council] orbit. He had bigger plans.”
The source of this quote is Adam Turl, "Is Obama Different?" Socialist Worker.org (February 2, 2007), p. 5, available online at http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-1/617/617_05_Obama.shtml
Were you quoted accurately?
BTW it turned before that visit.
Obama\'s a "natural" when it comes to selling out...and you know it. I could give you 83 examples.
Why don\'t you throw up some "Marxist" bs about what you will claim is some dialectical defense of your pointless effort to speak truth to His Centrist imperial Exelon-sponsored Holiness the Dali Obama. I know. I need the subtle underlying Marxian wisdom - the difficult grasp of where shilling for the BaRockstar (who is contemptuous of radicals) links up with the iron laws of history. I need to be mercifully enlightened. I may not get back as I\'m finishing proofs on a study of why your choice is absurd.
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Thank you, Carl
By Pavlick, Mark at Apr 17, 2008 04:31 AM
Carl,
I\'m originally from the eastern end of Pa. (Carbon County, Hazelton), but everything you say applie to that region too. Thanks for doing such a great job of describing that part of humanity that lives and works in small-town Pa. Best of luck with your organizing and education.
Sincerely,
Mark Pavlick
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