“A community organizer,” former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sneered, referring to Barack Obama’s years on the streets of Chicago, from June 1985 to May 1988, as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens [Wikipedia]. And this was *before* earning his Juris Doctorate from Harvard and teaching constitutional law for twelve years. Giuliani, like most of the “red meat” republicans in attendance, wrote of Obama—a man they know very little about—as though the senator has been lounging on a sofa for twenty years waiting for the nomination.
Giuliani made it seem that such work was negligible and unimportant, and that it didn’t contribute to the overall fabric of the man who would be president. I’ll have to think hard, but I really can’t remember if we’ve ever *had* a U.S. president who had any real street-level experience solving the problems of average Americans. I would tend to suspect such experience should be a vital qualification for high office and, rather than sneer at Obama for his years of service, I’d tend to criticize Senator McCain’s résumé for *not* having any community service on it. The GOP spent four days telling us, often in grating detail, the suffering McCain went through in Vietnam which, I suppose, Obama would be doing if he’d had that experience as well. But McCain’s outstanding military service record neither prepares him nor qualifies him for the Oval Office. It was four days of emotional blackmail, three of them spent finding 7,000 ways to attack Obama without using the “N” word. The entire event was fairly difficult for me to watch. It was sad, all of those people in such denial, actually booing—yes *booing*—Obama’s service as a community organizer. Which was both shocking and revelatory of how disconnected from reality these folks are. ABC News reported the GOP convention was 93% white, with 51% of delegates reporting an annual income above $500,000.I guess if you live in a big house in an upscale neighborhood, community service is some esoteric “other,” some “thing” done by some people over there, where the poor folk live. Well-off people don’t understand it beyond the most basic pass-out-sandwiches face of community service. Their booing Wednesday night said volumes about who these people are and how utterly un-plugged from reality they are.
Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the [Republican] convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern -- a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years. [Washington Post]
"You have plenty of images of committed white people for McCain; you need pictures of committed black people," Krim Ballentine said as he surveyed the Xcel Energy Center. As one of just 36 black delegates, Ballentine stands out. The retired chief deputy U.S. marshal printed up business cards for the occasion calling himself a "Constitution Philosopher" and "The Last Negro." The latter title, the back of his card explains, is in honor of the "First Negro," Othello. "Disrespect is the main ingredient in every act of violence, with racism being the most discernable negative attribute of disrespect," the card reads. Ballentine is a committed McCain supporter, but he won't be voting for him in November. "I'm from the Virgin Islands," he explains; he can't vote in presidential elections. The black man standing nearby won't be voting for McCain, either. "That's my son," Ballentine said. "He's with Republicans for Obama." [National Journal]
Their heroine was, of course, Alaska Governor Sara Palin, whose big hair and shrill voice made her sound like every well-off stay-at-home soccer mom I’ve ever met. I’m not a big fan of soccer moms. That simply was not my experience. People who don’t work have a very different view of the world from people who do, from people who struggle. They tend to get fixated on minutiae like when are their neighbors going to mow their lawns and what time the mail arrives. Soccer moms with mini vans are not necessarily rich, but their worldview is so different, usually so much smaller than the planet actually is, that it makes being around them a real chore. Having one of these people take the oath of office of president of the United States ranks among my worst nightmares.
But Palin really isn’t a soccer mom (or hockey mom as she says). And, despite her claims to Christian values and her giant republican hair, her record and her stated values don’t always add up. She’s doing a lot of backpedaling now on the trooper scandal and some business about her pressuring a librarian to remove “questionable” books from the public library, the governor never apparently having heard of the First Amendment. But it is both her pregnant teen daughter—who, for all we know, is being forced into a marriage destined to fail—I mean, look at that poor boy’s face—and the fact Palin went back to work just two days after giving birth to a son who suffers from Down Syndrome. I’m trying to put this all together, this woman of faith, this paragon of virtue. If Barack Obama had a pregnant daughter and had tried to ban books and fire troopers and went back to work two days after his Down Syndrome son arrived—this convention would be talking about nothing else.
But Republican convictions are relative: that’s what I hate about fundamentalism and, frankly, fundamentalists. If you believe something, then believe it. The pregnant daughter forces me to question what values, if any, are being taught in the Palin home. If Palin’s values are her husband’s values, if they are her children’s values. Sure, kids make mistakes—black teens most especially. I am in no way judging the kid herself, but it’s reasonable to asses what someone claims to be by the evidence of their lives. Palin says she never tried to get this trooper who was allegedly abusing her sister fired, but then she admitted to more than a dozen contacts with the police chief she later fired, leaning on him about the trooper.
Both pre and post-convention the McCain campaign has been keeping Governor Palin unavailable to the press citing privacy issues and seemingly concerned with the press’s hunger to tear into Palin. Well, the press *should* tear into Palin. Perhaps the most chilling part of all this is how benignly Palin is accepted—mostly by white women—at little more than face value. John McCain is 72 years old, a cancer survivor, not in the greatest health, and the rigor of the campaign is clearly and obviously wearing him down. All of which makes who this nation swears in as his vice president of paramount importance. But the press can’t get Palin to sit down—not on any of the Sunday talk shows, not on Nightline, Dateline, certainly not on Hardball. Palin’s pregnant teen daughter is the smokescreen: the McCain campaign’s brilliant outrage over invasions of the child’s privacy while invading that same privacy every chance they get—this time as a shield for protecting Mommy from Keith Matthews, an MSNBC anchor with a well-deserved reputation for slicing through political spin and hammering his guests on-air. From my chair, the fear, here, is that Pain is not ready for Meet The Press, that her overall shallowness would be exposed to the detriment of the McCain campaign. But, if she’s not ready for Meet The Press, how on earth is she ready to be president? At a time when Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden is chasing virtually every news truck and camera crew he can find, Sarah Palin is, likely, the first major party vice presidential candidate in modern history to not make herself available to the press. It is simply unheard of.
Meanwhile she continues journeying across the country scoffing at Obama’s two years as a “community organizer,” deeply offending and alienating tens of millions of lower-middle working class voters while further underlining John McCain’s estrangement from the challenges facing ordinary Americans. While continuing their assertion that Obama is an elitist, these two severely out-of-touch people have gleefully cemented the “community organizer” mockery into their stump speech—an absolutely jaw-dropping, stupid thing to do given how offensive, divisive and borderline racist such condescension is. It’s all snobbery, all code. That nether the candidates nor their staff seem to realize it’s a terribly offensive bit of business makes a profound statement about who these people are, who they represent, and what they intend to do in Washington.
Look, I’ve got nothing against Governor Palin. I don’t even know her, which puts me and John McCain on an even playing field, I suppose. But, looking at the GOP love fest, all I saw was an ocean of white folks gathered to attack a black man. Now, mind you, had Hillary prevailed, they would have likely been even meaner. But the conservative rhetoric was so phony, so plastic, and so selective—these folks celebrating—*celebrating*—Palin's preggers daughter as some paragon of virtue, applauding he for an unquestionably selfish act (and a likely cry for help: the underage daughter of a sitting governor having unprotected sex) and dragging this equally stupid and selfish teenage boy into the glare of the national spotlight—then applauding them?!? The GOP apologizing to them, falling just short of giving them a *medal*?! This stuff was just shameless. These people are…Christians? This is Christian conduct?
There’s an awful lot of lying going on. Oh, I have no doubt there’s a bunch of lying going on across the aisle in the Obama camp, too. But the GOP thing is just so full of dog biscuits that it stinks up my room just watching it. The two-facedness of it. It seems obvious to anyone who can add that Palin was not properly or thoroughly vetted, and the McCain spin machine is in overdrive lying about it while huddled in dark corners worried about the next Palin eruption. I don’t know many people who interpreted Palin’s virtual seclusion over the past days as anything but a huddle to prep this otherwise clueless person on where Iran is on a map while the McCain spinsters tried desperately to find a way to dump her for Romney—whose appearance at the con *really* made Palin look small and McCain look doddering for choosing her over a guy who rocked the house the way Romney did.
And this love-fest over the pregnant daughter is utterly shameful, considering, were that Obama’s daughter, they’d have talked about virtually nothing else. I applaud Senator Obama’s restraint for not allowing his campaign to run wild with it, but I’m quite sure Obama knows, were the tables turned, the GOP would have exploited his daughter at every opportunity.
The theme of every speech: Obama Not Ready, Palin Not A Bimbo. Both statements are lies. You can hear it in their voices. This strenuous defense of Palin rings hollow, stresses these folk out. But the GOP faithful do what they always do: gobble up whatever horsepucky the leadership spins, adopting it talking point for talking point, without question. Lying, lying, lying. And, so much of it in the name of Jesus.
Even sadder: they’ll probably get away with it. Obama is just not fighting tough enough. He *is* too much of an egghead, a believer in lofty ideals and an elevation of the human spirit. This is a blood sport. These people fight nasty, fight dirty. They rig voting machines and invalidate ballots. And they win, every time, because Democrats can’t seem to find the fire in the belly to get into a street fight with these bullies.
I would like to see an end to this politics of destruction: winning by destroying the other guy. But, I suppose, that’s up to us. I mean, as long as the Karl Rove stuff continues to work, it’ll continue to be used. The kinder, gentleman’s campaign McCain promised us—before lying about Obama being the first to go negative—is a quaint idea, but not practical.
Meanwhile we, as Christians, will hear appeals, mostly from white evangelicals, to vote our convictions—which usually means abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research; the same three phony issues that got George W. Bush re-elected. White evangelicals voted for him based on that stuff, turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the mess in Iraq and the faltering economy among many, many other failures of the Bush administration. Abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research.
Personally, I’d tend to encourage people to vote their convictions as well, but in a different sense: vote for the candidate who most embodies those qualities of Christ. Vote for the candidate who lies less, who is less mean, who is less ruthless. Who is kinder. Who speaks to our hopes and not our fears. My bumper sticker might read, “Vote For The Grown-Up.” And, maybe the day will come when this process is more abut ideas and less about smarm, lies and hate.
