Random Thoughts about the Election

First, make sure to Vote and get your friends and colleagues to vote. Second, volunteer and participate in the Get Out the Vote Effort. Third, adopt a candidate in another state and financially support him or her. I'm supporting Scott McAward in Alaska--"the little campaign that could".

For this Saturday, the whirling computer projectors are settling on 52 seats for the Democrats in the Senate and 227 seats and control of the House by the Republicans. But there remains alot of uncertainty in the House races. Of those House Republicans, 33 will be teabaggers ,who will make it virtually impossible for the Tan Man to reach an accomodation with Democrats on anything.

I'm still haven't l0cked in on the Republicans taking the House because vulnerable House Democrats are actually looking strong for the last two weeks. Also, unusual House Republicans are looking to lose.

We should welcome to the campaign the Koch Brothers, the billionaire "twins", who are now semi-publically pouring millions into the 60+ Campaign, which is a conservative PAC funded by conservative millionaires to act against Democrats. Earlier in the week, a video tape was released that showed one of the Koch brothers hearing reports from individual teabag delegations and giving a speech praising their efforts.

Can we now dispense with the view that the teabaggers are a populist backlash? It's now obvious that they were simply the trial-run for the corporations to take over the elections further in the process. This was made clear by Dick Armey's speech on behalf of Pat Toomey this week when he spoke of Toomey's 2004 campaign as a model for this type of nonsense. Armey also praised George W. Bush as an inspiration for the Tea Party movement. People always asked where the teabaggers were when W was shredding the constitution. racking up $12 trillion in debt and giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Now we know, they were backing him.

Joe Miller has quickly morphed now into the Club of Growth candidate like Pat Toomey. He doesn't want it known he was a Tea Bag candidate even though they are about to dump the lion's share of his campaign funds on him this weekend. This is happening through teabag land, candidates are now openly aligning themselves with the anonymous corporate donors.

Remember the Tea Party Movement was ignited by the TARP Plan. Yet now we have Tea Party maestro Glenn Beck openly donating to the Chamber of Commerce. At the height of the TARP debate, the Chamber's lobbyist was openly on the floor of the House to strongarm members to vote for it.

Tim Kaine said that the floodgates of anonymous money into these elections was worse than Watergate. In Watergate, the Nixon people, including Bebe Rebozo, secretly laundered American corporate money from abroad and here into the Nixon campaign. This triggered the last thirty years of moving to a more transparent system of campaign financing.

Kaine is right. By yesterday, a breech was made in the Democrats' defense, when it became apparent that liberal groups could not match the funds of the conservative anonymous donors and that the game has now been reduced to the Get Out The Vote effort.

Think of the consequences of this. A political party with a 24% approval rating but with endless money can buy the House of Representatives. Stunning. So Democrats who laugh at Sarah Palin's 25% approval rating should sober up because billions upon billions will be made available in the Presidential election.

On the presidental election, throw in 35 states with serious voter registration problems and the lack of security in our electronic voting system. A professor, the Iranian and Chinese governments all successfully hacked into the new D.C. electronic voting system being given a trial run this week. So the issue of the integrity of the vote will be major in 2012.

Tim Kaine claimed that the Republicans were running on a hidden agenda. This is absolutely true. The Pledge to America was just poor showbiz. If you look at the corporate and foreign money involved, the Republicans want to accelerate not just restore the de-regulation of the George W. Bush years. This is why Dick Armey paid homage to George W. It is a calculated strategy of redistribution of wealth to the richest top Americans. The corporate funders of this election have made cold caculations about what they need to preserve their profit-margins and their personal wealth. In a new House, they already know the Tan Man has the laundry list.

There is nothing surprising in this. Do yourself a favor and listen to President Obama's weekly address of today on ending tax cuts for corporations sending jobs overseas and the need to create clean energy jobs. It was a standard and not very exciting message. It was just commonsense. But listen to it in the context that this was the coded speech of a dissident faced with the immense challenge of the corporate world. And it becomes somewhat alarming.

Then why would people actually vote for a party that is against what the President says? This question comes back full circle to a question a frequent reader of this blog asked me months ago,"What specific freedoms do these people believe Obama is going to take away from them?"
Remember the healthcare debate, all the fuss about death panels and socialist medical care, etc.? We can pin alot of this propaganda on to the health insurance industry. But I think the whole issue comes down to the ideology ( not idea) of American exceptionalism.

We're talking about a large swathe of our society that truly believes America is still number 1 in the world in almost anything and that is the product of our free enterprise system. None of these people know about tax policy or rewarding outsourcing or the massive tax breaks for the oil and gas industry versus alternative fuel sources. Barack Obama's case for healthcare reform hit a raw nerve with these people because the President of the United States told Americans that millions were going bankrupt because of medical bills, over 40 million Americans didn't have any health insurance and that America was paying from two-three times what other developed economies paid for health care. Americans are used to hearing about the problems of minorities and then they can blame the minorities without reflecting on the society at large. But in the healthcare debate, having a President essentially say we were not Number 1 lit a fuse. Remember when Newt Gingrich accused President Obama of trying to turn us into Europe. There were op-eds after op-eds about President Obama lacking a sense of America. This struck me odd since the President was talking about individual Americans with a great deal of sensitivity. But I now think his focus on highlighting a deep deficiency in our society touched off a real intense defensive reaction.

What the corporate world and the energy companies know is that Barack Obama wants to adjust our economy for the future. I don't think he's doing enough in this area but again the counter-revolution is saying that President Obama and the Democrats want to change our way of life. And that is true because it is not sustainable. But you can not openly talk about this. It undergirds the "Drill, Baby, Drill" mentality among the teabaggers and the Right. All objective evidence shows we can not keep consuming the amount of oil we do forever--let alone the next ten years. Not even the cost of oil has changed behavior. So that's where you hear nuttiness like " Barack Obama wants to tell you what car to drive". Currently, the energy companies and corporations have all the tax advantages to keep us locked into our old economy until it exhausts itself.

This ideology of American exceptionalism really came to be solidfied with the George W. Bush and Cheney regime and their strange idea of America as the sole hegomic power in the world. And part of this strategy was the vociferous outsourcing of American jobs overseas. The American Chamber of Commerce is actually doing us a favor by making this issue very clear. This process has been going on since the early 1990s and then given a further boost by W. While there are solid profit reasons for this, it's very unclear about any larger benefits to the American public at large. In fact, many economists attribute outsourcing to the alarming erosion of our manufacturing base.

But wrap yourself in the flag, wear a tri-corner hat, and chant ,"U.S.A! U.S.A!" and everything will be fine. The phrase "real Americans" used by Sarah Palin refers to the half of our population who adhere to the political religion of American exceptionalism. Then we have the offshoots and re-inforcing pillars of this--constitutional originalism,religious fundamentalism, and the worship of the "free market". So now we know why the religious right composes a large portion of the tea baggers.

All this is the work of a generation. When I knew people who worked for the Reagan Administration, conservatives prided themselves on their knowledge of Aristotle, Plato and Shakespeare and could talk authoritatively about the influence of Roman Law and John Locke on the Constitution. Those days are over.

Clearly, the collapse of our own economy in 2008 was a shock to Americans, who are still reeling. In part, this led to the election of Barack Obama but also to the counter-revolution, which does not want to reflect on the actual problems in American society. So the reaction latches onto some of the most extreme right-wing notions that had been banished forever by our political culture. The problem remains what Reagan said "government". But now the problem extends all the way back past Roosevelt and the whole idea of the social welfare state. One curious paradox, these people celebrate that America is the number 1 military power in the world and claim that we are the most infuential country on the planet; while one of the reasons for this is a strong government with a social welfare state. America without this was never a world class power and would also not be a modern political economy.

So, instead of focusing on how to revive the country, the energy is channelled into scapegoating the "outsider" and , in this case, the number 1 outsider is the President of the United States himself , a mulatto who is said not to "believe in American exceptionalism." So not only is government the problem but the head of the government is the problem and if we get rid of them will be fine. So the strategy is clear, all efforts must be made to gain hegemonic control over the economy and the government so everyone will believe we are number 1.

There is no room for rational debate here. This is an intense emotional complex. We laugh at Tan Man Boehner saying that President Obama and the Democrats are taking away the cuntry he grew up in. The rejoinder is a country that was segregated and oppressed gays, etc. But that's not the point. It's the country where you could drive gas-guzzlers, throw garbage anywhere, and not question the motives of one's employers and the government. We could go into the whole change in the family structure and the nature of the economy but that would soil the dream.

That's why you have the strange resistance emerging to President Obama's call to spend $50 billion on the infrastructure. Again President Obama reminds people that we have to compete in the modern world economy ("why?") and to do so we have to modernize our infrastructure, even building high-speed rail service ("why?"). No one blnked an eye over President Eisehnhower's Federal Highway Bill. Both parties at least looked at such projects as a good source of pork. Not any longer.

Despite a stimulus-funded Transportation Bond offering by New Jersey, the Governor just wipes out $600 million already spent on a new tunnel to Manhattan because of the "deficit". In New Hampshire, the Democratic candidate for the House kept pushing her Republican opponent about the extension of a rail link into the state and finally the candidate invoked the deficit and the fact that railways don't make money. She rightly countered by listing all the highways in the state and pointed out none of them make money.

Again, President's challenge is that America is not Number 1 in infrastructure. And this doesn't ignite the American competitive juices the way Sputnik did. Nor does his admonitions on the state of our educational system. The reaction now is to raise the question of public education in general. On almost any issue, the counter-revolution avoids reality.

The number one issue in the election is the present economy and also the future one. By the way, President Obama this week surpassed in private sector jobs the total number of jobs created during the entire 8 years of George W. Bush. But this does not compute because we are not even generating replacement jobs, let alone jobs for the increased workforce.

At one level, the American people instinctively know the truth about economic theories of the past and the ones' advocated by the Republicans for the future. But emotionally they can't quite reconcile themselves with the changes required to continue the American dream.

We know the floods of money are meant to buy key components of the corporate economic agenda. But extremely dangerous is the effect on our representative democracy. Who will these people be representing? Many of the Senate teabaggers don't even come from the states where they are running. Do they simply check in with the approved list of lobbyists? Will they be introduced to their foreign donors?

Last election, I had the horrible thought that Barack Obama would be our last democratically elected President. I knew then if we continued on we would certainly face a type of authoritarian democracy. It looks like the same forces at work to erode our representative democracy over the last eight years appear re-invigorated and now are looking to finish the job.While they were abysmal failures in governing, bringing the country near extinction, they were masterful with their ideology of American exceptionalism and the United States as the world's hegemonic power. Governing simply doesn't matter to them, mythology does.