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Monday, October 20. 2008
Powell Says ...
Did you see Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live? Me neither, but I’ve been watching the video and it’s pretty funny! Everyone has a likable side, even the Caribou Barbie.
“I am beyond honored and deeply humbled to have the support of General Colin Powell.”
So said Barack Obama Sunday Morning after the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Obama on Meet the Press yesterday.
Powell said many things that any of the rest of us couldn’t say because we are partisan, anti-Republican and therefore anti-McCain, but things we know to be true because we’ve seen the television ads, read the chain e-mails and listened to Republican Party leaders question Obama’s religion, citizenship, friends and his patriotism: “He doesn’t wear a flag pin.” Well, neither do I.
In 15 days the nation will do the one thing that, more than anything else, has defined us as a culture: vote for our president. The definition of our culture has changed over the years; the national opinion is that we are collectively center-right, at least since the 1980 when Ronald Reagan won the job.
Maybe, with the election of Barack Obama, if Obama wins, that will change. This center-right distinction, created with movie-clip jingoism and divisional sound bites that have appealed to the worst of our natures, greed and xenophobia being chief among those traits, have created a nation that is as polarized as it was 150 years ago when our forefathers were heading into an all out civil war between one section of the country and another.
People openly display racist attitudes like an effigy of Obama hanging from a tree. The flipside, no less objectionable, McCain dressed as a Klansman.
Regardless of what people on each side are saying or doing, this began with the Republicans when they used the politics of race and fear to get George H.W. Bush elected president in 1988. Willie Horton, a name that still rings 20 years later, openly picked at the scab of racism, using the face of a Black man as the bogeyman unleashed by the Democratic nominee for president.
That ad was credited, more than any other factor, for swinging the undecided voters to Bush and Quayle. Sure, everyone laughs at the picture of Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, but it was Willie Horton that won the election for Bush 41. Lee Atwater, Bush’s chief campaign strategist, even bragged about how effective it was, about the reliability of targeting ads to the racial fears of average White Americans.
Atwater learned the politics of racial fear from the Republican campaign of 1968 when the Nixon campaign devised the “Southern Strategy” to use race, with abstract terms that don’t say “nigger” directly, but subtly, letting the White voters — and everyone else for that matter — know exactly where the candidate stands when it comes to race. While dying of brain cancer, Atwater later apologized for many of the things he said and did as a campaign operative over the years.
With Atwater now gone, Karl Rove “retired” from politics and on Fox News, who is leading McCain’s “get out the White vote” strategy? Hard to say since McCain is on the defensive and losing. Guess no one wants to take credit for a failing campaign.
The Republican National Committee is producing ads now talking about Obama “paling around with terrorists,” but no individual wants to brag about it. Sarah Palin will be the scapegoat on November 5. She’s the most public Republican official to use that phrase.
John McCain will return to the Senate and he might even repair a few relationships he’s trampled on in his quest to be president. Sarah Palin will return to Alaska, her reputation trashed — in large part because of her own making — and looking at the possibility she and her family could really be facing life in the “Middle Class” if Alaska’s voters reject her as national voters most likely will reject her come November 4.
She’s not the top of the ticket though. We don’t vote for vice presidential candidates, although this year, it was a vice presidential candidate that put the Republican candidate back into the game. Until Palin, John McCain didn’t have the support of his party’s base.
The ultimate snub: Last week three of the four candidates were called by the White House for a briefing on the pending Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. Palin was not called.
Claiming it wasn’t a snub, the White House said she wasn’t called because she was a governor, not a senator or congresswoman, but in the same explanation, said the three men were called as a courtesy because one of the presidential candidates would be president when the accord took effect. Make you dizzy just thinking about it.
The San Diego Union-Tribune came out and endorsed Senator McCain. No surprise really. The U-T hasn’t endorsed a Democrat … ever! But, if the U-T were going to endorse a Democrat, Obama would have been that candidate … but the editorial staff took their tried and true approach and went with the Republican, just as they did in 1996 when they endorsed Senator Bob Dole.
In what appears to be a contradiction, the U-T opposed Proposition 8, titled “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” The ballot initiative would add a section to the California Constitution that would legally define marriage as being between one man and one woman. Opponents have been quick to point out that the amendment would be codifying the discrimination of one group of people based solely on their sexual orientation.
As much as most Californians are put off by same-sex couples, they are more put off by legislating discrimination. There’s a good chance the religious forces who crafted the initiative and have pushed it this far will be sadly — and justifiably — disappointed. Another point California voters find objectionable is that the people pushing “Prop 8” are not from the Golden State. We don’t like people coming into our state and dictating their political and social views to us.It will be an interesting election. Once again my representative to the U.S. Congress is Duncan Hunter. Again, I’ve voted for his opponent. Well, not his opponent, but his son’s rival. After nearly three decades in the House of Representatives, Duncan Hunter is leaving government. Running as the Republican candidate will be his son, Iraq War veteran and Marine Corps Reservist, Duncan D. Hunter.
Hunter’s opponent in California’s 52nd District: Mike Lumpkin, a retired Navy SEAL commander who has a history of looking out for the troops and veterans alike. As a liaison to Congress for the US Special Operations Command, Lumpkin was instrumental in getting body armor and treatment for PTSD for the troops. He’s a good man. Lumpkin got my vote.
And now I’m going to bed.
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