1. Money can buy you an election in NYC, but not by nearly as much as you thought.
2. "Red States" are a myth. North Carolina elected an openly gay mayor of Chapel Hill and the first Democratic mayor of Charlotte in three decades.
3. "Blue states," sadly, are also a myth, as Corzine goes down in Jersey. Any bets on whether he'll return to Goldman Sachs?
4. Boring Blue Dogs don't win close elections, progressive, dynamic reform candidates win close elections. See Deeds, Creigh, losing a state that Obama won fairly easily.
5. Palin is still poison. And Democrats have two more vote in the House.
6. People are still willing to vote to take away the rights of others. Dear Maine, I am sorely disappointed.
7. While gay marriage is still scary, apparently gay politicians, at least in cities, aren't.
8. Most importantly, there IS no coherent narrative from last night. Maybe the only thing we can say is that organizing matters, GOTV mattters, and the media don't have a clue.
And incidentally, I'd like to point out that Lincoln, the least "Republican" of these men in terms of what "Republican" actually means now, is the only one with his back entirely to us. Clearly, the artist was uncomfortable with his own lie that Lincoln and Reagan were of the same ilk (nevermind Nixon), and couldn't bring himself to make that association face-to-face.
And my favorite comment: "'But honestly, I really did care about the plight of the Negro' Lincoln said, as the room erupted in laughter"
I wrote briefly about Santelli's disingenuous attempt at populism the other day.
Turns out, there's more to the story. A whole lot more. The whole "Chicago Tea Party" movement is a front for some familiar right-wing faces, according to this piece published at PLAYBOY, of all places. Some highlights (it's long):
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
So today’s protests show that the corporate war is on, and this is how they’ll fight it: hiding behind “objective” journalists and “grassroots” new media movements. Because in these times, if you want to push for policies that help the super-wealthy, you better do everything you can to make it seem like it’s “the people” who are “spontaneously” fighting your fight. As a 19th century slave management manual wrote, “The master should make it his business to show his slaves, that the advancement of his individual interest, is at the same time an advancement of theirs. Once they feel this, it will require little compulsion to make them act as becomes them.” (Southern Agriculturalist IX, 1836.) The question now is, will they get away with it, and will the rest of America advance the interests of Koch, Santelli, and the rest of the masters?
Read the whole thing. It's worth it. It's real journalism.
This prompts another bit of thought: with this piece coming out of Playboy, Greg Palast publishing at Suicide Girls and Larry Flynt's willingness to sue the government to get journalists battlefield access, is porn the new way to fund investigative journalism? New media models, indeed.
I'm half joking, of course, but it bears consideration, with newspapers dying left and right. Somebody's got to do the work, and somebody's got to pay for it. And good journalism is good journalism, whether it's published at the New York Times, Mother Jones, or Playboy.
Rachel Maddow addressed populism the other night and got me thinking. During the election, we most often heard populism mentioned in reference to Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and often in a sort of derogatory tone from certain David Brooks-ish commentators who pined for a more elitist Republican party (oh, the irony, it is thick).
But populism is inherently little-d democratic, and should also be a mainstay of today's Democratic party. Yet we somehow got pigeonholed as the party of East Coast and West Coast champagne liberal snobs. The party that actually supports the rights of working people got written off as the party of pointy-headed rich intellectuals.
Barack Obama won by not being afraid of that label and utterly defusing it. The idea of calling this man, raised by a single mother and forged in the streets of Chicago as a community organizer, was somehow more elitist than a guy who couldn't remember how many houses he owned, was laughable.
Also laughable were the desperate attempts of his opponents to make him look out of touch. Hillary Clinton's stage-managed whiskey shot, anyone?
This might be the election where we figured out that populism doesn't mean condescending to America. It means actually understanding the crap Americans are going through.
Michelle Goldberg (h/t matttbastard, who inspires more of my posts than I should admit to you lately), wrote an excellent piece about the rise of the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican party.
Now, the irony is that the more marginalized the GOP becomes, the more powerful the religious right becomes within it because it’s one of the last constituencies standing. The 2006 and 2008 elections each left the party more socially conservative than before, as moderates were defeated. The remaining voters seem to like it this way: According to a recent Rasmussen poll, a plurality of Republicans think their party has been too moderate during the Bush years, and fully 55% of them want their party to model itself more on Sarah Palin. The conservative intelligentsia has spent the past generation hymning the virtues of simple heartland believers indifferent to the opinions of coastal eggheads and cultured cosmopolitans. Now, they’re going to have to realize that that includes them.
She referenced Tom Wolfe's famous "Radical Chic" essay, which pokes fun at Leonard Bernstein's attempt to hobnob with Black Panthers.
In one of my courses last year, we read Wolfe the same week as we read Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson was the kind of populist that we should be looking at now, moving forward. The consummate outsider, constantly angry at the powerful, constantly on the side of the little guy.
When I get angry at NPR's Science Friday for being completely clueless about the purpose of an auto industry bailout, it's that spirit that I'm invoking.
It's not condescendingly taking a whiskey shot or implying that your audience is racist. It's much more than that. Obama managed to ride populist support into the White House without ever attempting to change who he was. Because he gets it. He knows what it's like to be broke, to have to decide between paying your heat and buying food. And yeah, it's been a long time and two Ivy League schools since he's had to make those choices, but I don't think he's forgotten.
Thoughts? I think populism is a word we should be looking at and reclaiming more. (as in, this might be the first post in a series.)
Not that it really matters I guess. But I certainly wouldn't expect it from the Bernalillo County sheriff who is running as a Republican to replace Heather Wilson in my old New Mexico district. White is the definition of Republican jerk and is about to have his hat handed to him by Martin Heinrich.
