Going Rouge (19 page)

All of which tells you about what you’d expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She’s a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you’d think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.

The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job—but not in America. In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you’ve been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He’s been on TV every day for two years, and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that’s a lifetime of hands-on experience.

It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin’s Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears that Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage, “I love you, Obama!” ritual at the Democratic nominee’s town-hall appearances.

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we’re actually going to need in government if we’re going to get out of this huge mess we’re in.

Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing “I’m Lovin’ It!” during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

And when it comes time to vote, all you have to do is put your Country First—just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Sarah Palin’s Faux Populism

Jim Hightower

It was not my intention to be writing about Sarah Palin, since everyone with a laptop, a No. 2 pencil, or a red crayon seems to be covering that beat. But then came the pundits:

“She’s a populist,” gushed Karl Rove on Fox TV. Weird, since this right-wing political slime and corporate whore loathes, demonizes, mocks, fears, and tries to destroy real populists.

“Perfect populist pitch,” beamed CBS analyst Jeff Greenfield right after Palin’s big speech at the GOP fawnfest in St. Paul. In his less infatuated moments, Greenfield surely must realize how ludicrous his comment was, since once, long ago, he co-authored a book that had
populist
in the title, so he has at least had a brush with the authentic people’s movement that the term encapsulates.

So they made me do it. Karl, Jeff, and other pundits who are rushing to place the gleaming crown of populism atop the head of this shameless corporate servant—they are the ones who have driven me to write about Palin. Someone has to nail the media establishment for its willing perversion of language, American history, and the substance of today’s genuine populism.

Palin might be popular, she might be able to field dress a moose, she might live in a small town, she might enjoy delivering “news flashes” to media elites, she might even become vice president—but none of this makes her a populist. To the contrary, she is to populism what near beer is to beer, only not as close.

You want a taste of the real thing? Try this from another woman who hailed from a town (smaller than Wasilla, Alaska) and was renowned for her political oratory:

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.... Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags....

There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. There are half a million looking for work.... We want money, land, and transportation. We want the abolition of the National banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the Government pays its debts to us.

The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.

That, my media friends, is populism. It comes from Mary Ellen Lease, who was speaking to the national convention of the Populist Party in Topeka, Kansas, in 1890. In a time before women could vote, Lease traveled the countryside to rally a grassroots revolt against the corporate predators of her day, urging farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” She didn’t need to brag that she was a pit bull in lipstick, because her message, idealism, and actions made her an actual force for change.

America has been blessed with populist women ever since, including such honest and insistent voices as Ida Tarbell, Mother Jones, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, Rachel Carson, Karen Silkwood, Barbara Jordan, Molly Ivins, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Granny D. Measure Sarah Palin against these.

Populism was and is a ground-level, democratic movement with the guts and gumption to go right at the moneyed elites. It is unabashedly class-based, confronting the Rockefellers on behalf of the Littlefellers. To be a populist is to challenge the very structure of corporate power that is running roughshod over workers, consumers, the environment, small farmers, poor people, the middle class—and America’s historic ideals of economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all.

Populist
is not an empty political buzzword that can be attached to someone like Palin, whose campaigns (lieutenant governor, governor, and now veep) are financed and even run by the lobbyists and executives of Big Oil, Wall Street bankers, drug companies, telecom giants, and other entrenched economic interests.

Populists don’t support opening our national parks and coastlines to allow the ExxonMobils to take publicly owned oil and sell it to China. Palin does. Populists favor a windfall profits tax on oil companies that are robbing consumers at the pump while milking taxpayers for billions of dollars in subsidies. Palin doesn’t. Populists don’t hire corporate lobbyists to deliver a boatload of earmarked federal funds, then turn around and claim to be a heroic opponent of earmarks. Palin did. Populists favor shifting more of America’s tax burden from the middle class to the superwealthy, while opposing another huge tax giveaway for corporations. Palin doesn’t and doesn’t.

Another thing populists don’t do is sneer at community organizers, as Palin did in her nationally televised coming-out party. Indeed, populists of old were community organizers, as are today’s. They work in communities all across our great land, putting in long days at low pay to help empower ordinary folks who are besieged by the avarice and arrogance of Palin’s own corporate backers. Since the governor likes to put her fundamental Christianity on political display, she might give some thought to a new bumper sticker that expresses a bit of Biblical populism: “Jesus was a community organizer while Pontius Pilate was governor.”

Environmental-justice groups, ACORN, living wage campaigns, the Bus Project, clean water efforts, union-organizing drives, PIRG, Fighting Bob Fest, Jobs with Justice, Apollo Alliance, United Students Against Sweatshops, the Evangelical Environmental Network, clean election initiatives, stopping mountaintop removal, USAction, community-supported agriculture, Campus Progress, local business alliances, Citizens Trade Campaign, Wellstone Action—these are but a few of those doing terrific community organizing today. They embody the vitality of modern populism, doing the essential grunt-level work of democracy.

What gives Palin any legitimacy to denigrate that? She embraces none of these causes, instead supporting the rich and powerful whom grassroots folks are having to battle. She’s a plutocrat, not a populist. Big difference.

The Sarah Palin Smoke Screen

Katrina vanden Heuvel

“Here’s the deal: Palin is the latest GOP distraction,” Bob Herbert wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed. “She’s meant to shift attention away from the real issue of this campaign—the awful state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule. The Republicans are brilliant at distractions.”

Herbert’s right on target. Barack Obama homed in on that point in Denver, too: “If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”

On cue, Sarah Palin attempted to paint an absurd caricature of Obama in her speech at the Republican Convention: “What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger... take more of your money... give you more orders from Washington... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world.”

More than anything, this election should be about the big issues of our time—ending a disastrous war, restoring America’s reputation in the world, and building an economy that works for more than just the very rich. The challenge for Democrats is to frame these issues in a way that connects with traditional American and progressive values, exposes Republican callousness, and extremism, and in doing so trumps the GOP’s political marketing which cynically and cleverly plays on symbolism. As George Lakoff wrote, “Just arguing the realities, the issues, the hard truths should be enough in times this bad, but the political mind and its response to symbolism cannot be ignored.... Democrats, in addition, need to call an extremist an extremist: to shine a light on the shared anti-democratic ideology of McCain and Palin, the same ideology shared by Bush and Cheney. They share values antithetical to our democracy.”

In order to have a fighting chance after eight ruinous years of Bush, the Republicans need voters to lose sight of where we are as a nation and how Republican leadership got us there. We saw that with the GOP’s politicization of Hurricane Gustav in an attempt to whitewash eight years of hostility to the notion of government’s role as a force for public good. We see it with their hypocritical media-bashing. (Let’s not forget, as Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt told the
New York Times
, “Probably no one in American politics over the last twenty years has had a closer relationship with the national press than John McCain.”) And we are seeing it again now. McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis admitted as much when he said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

That’s exactly how Republicans win. Democrats can’t let them get away with it. So it was good to see Obama and Joe Biden both calling the Republicans out for the lack of attention being paid to the economy at the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

“You did not hear a single world about the economy,” Mr. Obama said. “Not once did they mention the hardships that people are going through.”

Harold Meyerson also wrote about the Republicans’ failure to address the economy at their convention in an op-ed in the
Washington Post
: “I have combed the schedule of events here without finding a single forum... devoted to what John McCain and the Republican Party propose to do about America’s short and long-term economic challenges.... For all these woes, McCain offers only a continuation of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and an ideological bias toward the very kind of deregulation that has wrecked the housing market.... If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked—and their silence this week on nearly all things economic means that they know it.”

If the Republicans succeed in making this election about something other than the big issues, they are likely to win. If it’s about a likable woman governor who can shoot a gun and field dress a moose, or a churchgoing commander of the Alaskan National Guard, they are likely to win. Or if they pull off the feat of making the reactionary right-wing McCain/Palin ticket seem more “connected to the people” than Obama/Biden, whose stance on the issues is in touch with millions of Americans who seek a more active government in these economically squeezed times, then they are likely to win.

If voters really want real change, rather than Reality Politics TV–style change, here are some important facts to consider: Since 1948 the economy has grown faster on average under Democratic presidents than under Republicans; and income inequality trended “substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats,” according to Princeton professor of political science Larry M. Bartels, author of
Unequal Democracy
.

These historical trends have serious implications for today’s challenges of increasing poverty, stagnating wages, and a greater concentration of wealth than any time since 1928.

Until the election, small-d democrats who are committed to forming a more perfect union will need to do everything we can to stay focused on the big issues, expose Republican callousness and antidemocratic policies for what they are, and lay out the clear choice that lies before us.