Obama: Stumping to the stumped?

I have long enjoyed intellectually spirited email exchanges with a friend in New York who is a frenetic and frequent objector. Joel is a jazz pianist, university professor, fine art photographer and far left activist Democrat. I am a more centrist Democrat yet our exchanges of late seek a common end . . .  however we seem to define a path through the political thicket much differently.

Regarding the present Bush tax cut extension hairball that President Obama wants Democrats to choke down, and Obama's percieved failure to communicate to a wide swath of Americans, Joel writes: 

If Obama had a clearer public profile and ranted against the moneyed interests (à la TR, and FDR), there would be fewer like the elderly lady I met today in the dentist's office who believe he has a sinister agenda for the country. He doesn't say enough, appear enough to reveal this to be an absurdity!                            

Joel,
Folks like your little old lady are to be found in large numbers across the land. I have found, repeatedly, that beneath their dark, irrational suspicions is always the fact that many are only seeing a "Negro" president whose middle name is Hussein.

Grant Park on election eve was not full of little old ladies, it was a much more youthful and diverse crowd of many colors and hues. I agree that Obama has been perhaps too calmly cerebral while he has continued to tackle tough, meaningful challenges during the past two years. Important diplomatic and economic progress has been made in spite of inheriting eight years of the George Bush fiasco abetted by a GOP moral insolvency.

Obama has calmly undertaken complex challenges like preventing a deep national economic depression and restoring America's image around the globe. But right now the general public is unable to appreciate or understand any of that. Simply put, history shows that a huge number of Americans are dumb as chickens.*

Perhaps a bit of populist Obama theater is in order. But with Fox being the "news" channel that so many of these very folks watch, Obama runs a risk of being easily pilloried for what would be characterized as pandering through the use of clever editing, out of context "quotes" and other typical Murdoch machinations.

Teddy and Franklin D. did not have today's frenetic, instant informational circus to deal with. "Bloggers" are now being interviewed as if they were journalists or somehow respected experts. The average Web Log, or "Blog" is a digital stump from which ordinary folks exhort and bellow forth opinions. There is little objectivity or academic credential in the average blog. There is an abundance of opinion.

Next consider the fear and struggling from continuing unemployment, foreclosures and other calamitous results of two terms of the GOP's sorry leadership, and people are just not rational. A dumbed-down presentation of how the calculating GOP got them into this mess would not, and has not, registered with the angry centrist majority.

The GOP, which has no shame, will continue to calculatingly lure these very folks right back so they can give them another screwing. And many will eagerly go back, hearing only platitudes, invocations of God's blessings and outrageous promises.

Finally, mix Ron and Rand Paul into this gumbo, add the other green so-called Tea Party populist winners, and then watch as they experience the harsh realities of Washington politics for freshmen members and back-benchers in both houses. We are in for a fascinating couple of years.

Throwing down extremist gauntlets on either side of the pendulum swing will provide brief moments of irritation, certainly. But if Obama and the nation are to break the paralyzing effects of today's political polarization, which is a pointless, greedy skunk pissing contest, the restive radical centrists must somehow be brought into the streets, whether literally or conceptually.

Imagine their anger shifted to the real villains, the wealthy, conservative Right who plays the ignorance of the average working stiff like a cheap guitar.  You are the historian, Joel. How to organize a truly representative and overwhelming movement from the great centrist majority seems to be the question. Forget screaming leftists or right wing Doom Sayers. Where are the farmers or workers spontaneously organizing and demonstrating in huge numbers? Where are the outraged veterans and students who should be protesting in massive demonstrations over the seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan?

My cynical yet studied observation is that they are all blithely uninvolved. Younger Americans are Twittering and Facebooking inanities to one another in the distracting echoes of the social networking vortex.

How do you see this on your wide angle lens? Will a new orange tinted, weepy Speaker of the House make anyone wonder what the hell this country has allowed to happen?


* ...or very purposefully misinformed. See: U of Maryland poll of midterm voters

Graphic -"Stump Speaker" Courier litho card, 1890's

Brown and Palin : Photogenic Pols a Panacea for 'Independent' Anger?

Politicians Scott Brown and Sarah Louise Palin All Smiles and Skin

Nice looks and shallow platitudes seem to be a winning combination for attracting disaffected voters with short memories and little understanding of complex concepts. That group of so-called 'undecided' voters claiming no political party preference seems not to decide because that might take too much serious thinking. Easier to stick with what they don't know.

That at least seems to have been the case in the narrow election of an unknown but nice looking Massachusetts state senator to fill the remaining three years of the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. Good looks, white teeth, political generalizations, and national magazine spreads showing lots of skin are easier to like than a serious visage and plain old nose to-the-grindstone ability. Brown and Palin's political convictions certainly seem to be only skin deep .

Brown's Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General, Martha Coakley is a very private, straight laced legal scholar and public servant. It was lots easier for independents to see her cold, and stand-offish manner as dumb and klutzy than it was to have taken time to review her impressive qualifications and to look beneath her exterior. She recently brought home $60 million after Goldman Sachs agreed to pay up after she took them to task for promoting unfair home loans in her state. This past December Coakley handily defeated three opponents in the Democratic primary with 47 percent of the vote.

But her lackluster campaign and a couple of foot-in-mouth, seemingly insensitive comments was all the opening it took for Republican spin doctors to pounce and go after independent voters. The Brown campaign reported raised $5 million including a so called 'money bomb' of $1.3 Million from some 16,000 donors in the last days leading up to the election. And Brown's campaigning provided the required outrageous Tea Party prattle for the disaffected and deluded. Brown earlier suggested in a TV interview that Obama was born out of wedlock so the birther nuts were already on board.

But the strongest indication I see that Brown's 52% to 47% win over Coakley was mainly from disaffected independents came from an email exchange with my very conservative Republican cousin late last night literally seconds after the win was confirmed. He wrote to needle me:

First email: Oh my Lord, look at the long faces on CNN !!!!!!! Everything but black arm bands on the reporters ! ha ha, its the message Larry, the message, they already have health care in Mass. they still voted her out!

My reply: Brown didn't win ... the Dem. candidate lost because of her personality . . . a real charmer. The Repugs helped shake up lots of $ for Brown. (And Brown didn't even have on an armband when he posed in a nude centerfold cuz.)

Second email: oh ok, wait, wait, wait, I will take it all back, lets have the election again, my God, they ruined it all on FOX that IDIOT Sara is doing a commentary, pleeease give me a break ... grrrrrrrrrrr we do agree on that one cuz, she has nothing to offer, except on SNL maybe ? Not even sure about that ... they got the gal with the crooked mouth talking to Sara Palin on FOX. Lord help us all !

Before I could reply . . .

Third email: I just threw up all over the floor, turned the TV Off.

Never thought I would ever hear this from my well-off Fox watching conservative cousin with whom I have parried politically for years. And I wonder if his fed-up reaction could in any way be a signal? Might other intelligent Republicans who dislike Obama more than they really dislike Democrats finally call a halt to what a handful of hard core Kamikaze Republicans have been doing not only to their party but to this country?

They now have that one spoiling vote in the senate. Never mind that he is a shallow and embarrassing neophyte ... there are lots of those on both sides of the aisle, but his election kills the Democratic majority in the Senate.

Brown in the buff years ago in a Cosmo centerfold is no real embarrassment in these times, unless photos of him walking nude the Adirondacks surface. But the GOP does have a long list of other real party embarrassments. Topping the chart is their out of control solo black man whom they put in charge of their Republican National Committee and whom they are afraid to fire because of his self-serving outrages. Their embarrassing former GOP Vice Presidential candidate now is able to make an ass out of herself regularly with her own FOX cable TV appearances as a commentator.

When Mr. Brown comes to Washington he will add to the dismal Republican political gene pool, at least for three more years. And the GOP is stuck with Sarah Louise for whom the difference between her and a Pit Bull is not her lipstick, it is that a pit bull is taken seriously when it attacks.

Composite graphic by Larry Ray / Cosmopolitan and Vogue Magazine photos / GOP Mickey Mouse Logo, Thomas Fuchs gop100.com