#413 – Dick Bernard: V-Day. The Wisconsin Recall Elections

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5:30 a.m. August 9, 2011: Shortly, the polls open in Wisconsin, 15 miles or so from where I sit in eastern Minnesota. One of the people up for recall is the incumbent Republican Senator from just across the border so we have seen, at least, the TV ads. There is huge amount of outside money in these races.
The issues are unique to Wisconsin, but impact on us all.
Recalls are very difficult to win, especially when there are a lot of them at the same time.
Whatever results are announced later today will have meaning, and the meaning will be attached to them and heavily publicized by this or that political interest.
It will be an interesting evening tonight.
8:15 p.m. CDT. Apparently a huge turnout, but no predictions as of this point in time. Huge turnout means a huge amount of concern and a huge amount of on-the-ground organizing.
Stay tuned.
More, later.
5:15 a.m. CDT August 10. I have yet to read anything about yesterday’s election, but it appears that only two Wisconsin Senate seats turned Democrat from Republican in yesterday’s Recall election. Three were needed to retake control of the Wisconsin State Senate. Two more Senate Recall elections are next week, both seats held by Democrats. The Wisconsin Senate will remain Republican.
Everyone with an interest in politics will have an opinion.
Here’s mine, as a retired union organizer.
The outcome in Wisconsin does not surprise me.
It is no cause for celebration by the Republicans (though that is how it probably will be ‘spun’ – and everything is ‘spun’ these days).
There may even be a bit of collective wisdom at work across the border: recalls are a very unusual and rarely used process, and here were nine of them taking place at once in a single state. People all have their own reasons for voting, or not voting at all, so I won’t try to divine those notions. But what happened could well reflect a certain amount of common sense, as in “we made a mistake in November, 2010, but we’re not ready to compound our mistake by making another impulsive decision.” On the other hand, there have been formidable organizing efforts, and those are very helpful for future change.
People in Wisconsin probably didn’t really know the issues and the implications of sloppy political participation in the Fall of 2010. They do, now.
It’s just a thought.
As a Minnesotan, I didn’t “invest” much in the Wisconsin race. I sent $50 to the teacher’s union back in March, and I recall giving $24 to the Wisconsin Democratic party about the same time. Both were simple expressions of support in recognition of difficult times.
I didn’t drive the half hour to Wisconsin to help in organizing. From the beginning I saw Wisconsin as a local (state) issue best resolved by the residents of that state. I still feel that way.
I didn’t predict the outcome. (I didn’t notice many reporters predicting the outcome, though the turnout was heavy.)
In my judgment, Gov. Scott Walker and the new Republican majority did a huge amount of damage to working people in their first six months in office, particularly to public unions. But they did all of their damage before the elections were held, and even if all of the six recalls had been successful, and the two next week had failed, only the control of the Wisconsin Senate would have been changed. There were no challenges in the Republican House, and, of course, Gov. Walker is not open to challenge until January, 2012.
So, the status quo remains…or does it?
If there is such a thing as a warning shot across the bow of a political party in control of everything, yesterday’s results in nearby Wisconsin were such a warning: a very near miss.
The Republicans will make ‘victory’ talk. But there was little to feel victorious about yesterday.
Their future, in particular those who embrace the Tea Party philosophy, is very much in doubt…and they have already done most of the damage that they can do.
4:10 p.m. CDT August 10, 2011: Random thoughts through today. The Democrats “loss” to the Republicans in Wisconsin yesterday create far greater problems for the Republicans, and many opportunities for Democrats. There are many ‘for instances’, most of which are missed by the major media and by those licking their wounds after having their heart set on a clean ‘win’.
In the first place, through the rest of the Wisconsin biennium, the Republicans can not blame the Democrats for obstruction in the Senate. The Republicans control both houses and the governorship. Whatever record they generate from here on will, along with what they accomplished in the first eight months, be the record that they have to run on, and they’ll have to run in front of a much more informed and engaged population than in 2010.
In addition, the spotlight has been turned on the wealthy interests who bank-rolled the Republican success, the true interests of those rich and powerful folks and big business, and on the assorted ways in which these interests manipulated and used the common folks in groups like the Tea Party. It is all a bit like the Wizard of Oz being exposed for the fraud that he was.
So, rather than bemoaning the outcome, the best advice is to use this as a learning opportunity, and use the coming year to rebuild a true democracy in our states and nation. It can be done.

#412 – Dick Bernard: Will this crisis finally wake us up? I doubt it….

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Earlier today I sent to my own e-list the link to the Sunday August 7 Face the Nation.
I added this note:
“One of the most stupid comments I have ever heard was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s on Face the Nation yesterday. You can see it ‘below the fold’…. It was cynical, arrogant, hypocritical and worse.
Of course, it played well in sound-bite land.
Of course, it plays well with a certain audience.
These are sad days for this country…and it’s not Obama’s fault.
WE are the ones who need to do the heavy lifting. No more whining.”
Reader Will Shapira commented back, almost immediately:
“I think this all is very confusing and an abstraction at best to most people who believe it cannot affect them because they don’t understand it. That would generally include me.
You or someone else needs to explain to your readers how it could affect the common folk.”
I said I’d try.
We are a society whose eyes glaze over at headlines, much less essays. If we don’t understand something we tune it out. If it’s too hard to deal with, we generally refuse to deal with it. “Let’s go out and have a big sundae. It’s a nice afternoon. Going bankrupt is a problem for another day.”
But I digress:
Among other statements, Sen. Lindsey Graham said that “in any other private sector enterprise, he [Obama] would be fired.” He added “coach” as another profession from which the President would be fired.
OK. I’m in with “coach”.
There is, indeed, a ‘trickle down’ aspect to the tragedy of years of reckless spending accompanied by tax cuts for everyone, including ourselves. (The rich weren’t the only ones who got a good deal in the George W. Bush years of a Republican majority in both House and Senate.) The national credit card was out and running up a huge balance. We are on a national drunken binge. The culprits: unfunded wars and Medicare improvements, and, primarily, big tax cuts for the already wealthy. That trifecta is basically what got us to 2011. Oh, and we got those tax cuts too….
Team America was losing the game big time. And it all happened long before Obama’s watch.
Then comes Sen. Graham on Sunday, speaking for his Republican colleagues in carefully calibrated sound bites.
Let’s take his coach analogy.
Say someone is hired as a coach of a team, and a significant part of the team decides that it’s main objective is to get the coach fired – to make him fail – even before his first day.
In the real athletic world, that mutinous part of the team would be history, suspended at minimum. But in the United States political version, the mutinous rabble would be cheered on by the fans in the stands, hoping that their own team, the home team, would be clobbered, so that their new coach would be fired, and they could go back to the good old days, whose players and coach not only cost them the championship, but virtually bankrupted the operation. Those were the days when they got free popcorn, and all sorts of other bennies.
That’s what we’re playing with here. Team members who don’t think they’re part of the team. A crowd in the stands who doesn’t think they have any responsibility other than to watch: it’s the coaches fault. Fire the coach.
As previously stated, the key part of Graham’s quote is this: “…in any other private sector enterprise, he [Obama] would be fired.” Yah, right. Watch the mutinous division head become history in any private sector corporation that has hired a new CEO.
Of course, the U.S. is not a corporation, or a football team. Rather, we show ourselves in times like this to be a disorganized rabble.
Those who think they aren’t big enough to be impacted by, or impact on, this crisis had best think again, and think very, very hard.
We citizens may be small fish, but if the small fish start to die, the bigger fish further up the food chain will die as well, and sooner or later we’ll be all dead.
Maybe that’s what we want. For our sake, I hope not.
Update Aug. 8: Janet makes a relevant point: “Yes, but. But, we have been divided into 2 teams. Only 2 teams. Winner takes all.” Yes, but…until the present toxic days, our system seems to have been able to negotiate and compromise as though we were all interested in building a stronger union. There was rancor and division, yes, but there was negotiation and mutual respect. Those have been diminished to the point they have been all but destroyed.
Janet’s counterpoint to mine: “Good point. I have been thinking about this for years. When I say teams, I mean like athletic teams. America is very “team” oriented, whether it be school, college or professional sports, we want our team to win. Some will want to win at all costs and that is represented in extremity by the Tea Party. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that they are representing Koch Industries and other mega-corporations interests above their own. Koch funds Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, ALEC and a host of other organizations that want to destroy all laws and regulations that might affect them. Instead, those laws could apply to the rest of us or we could live like it was the Wild Wild West in a free for all.”

#411 – Dick Bernard: Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama

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Yesterday President Obama turned 50. His counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, was 51 when first elected to the presidency in 1860.
The similarities do not end there.

Cast iron plaque of Abraham Lincoln


Last Sunday evening, July 24, I happened across PBS American Experience on Twin Cities Channel 17. This segment was about the life of the Lincoln’s in Civil War Washington D.C.
The segment ended with the narrator talking about Lincoln’s exceedingly dismal chances for reelection in the election of 1864. His first term, after all, had not been in the best of times. As he took office in 1861, seven states had seceded from the still fledgling Union that was the United States of America. His first cabinet – selected by him – was not exactly a ‘band of brothers’. His entire term had been dominated by the Civil War. “Anybody but Lincoln” might have been an informal street assessment of Abe Lincoln’s chances for reelection to a second term in 1864. He was severely criticized from all sides.
Ultimately in the 1864 election he polled 55% of the popular vote, overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and was inaugurated to a second term. Three months later he was dead.
“Now he belongs to the ages.”
Today Abraham Lincoln easily ranks as one of the most-loved Presidents in our Nations history.
This is how the matter of history plays itself out. The short term assessment by vocal critics means nothing; it is the long term that matters.
One hundred fifty years after Lincoln’s first inauguration a man with similar background experience to Lincoln, Barack Obama, occupies the White House.
In Obama’s case, states didn’t secede from the union. The U.S. now holds ten times the population of Lincoln’s United States.
But from the moment President Obama took the oath of office in 2009, his Republican opposition has been very, very public in their efforts to make Obama a failure: a one-term President. Their weapons: words and media. They have gone to war against this president, using all of the weapons in their arsenal to hopefully destroy him.
Obama’s base of support has for the moment seemed to join the opposition. “He’s sold us out”; “he doesn’t stand for anything”…. I see the litany all day every day on my computer screen.
To those character assasinators and those dooms-dayers and nay-sayers I say, don’t count President Obama out.
He is surviving a Baptism by Fire.
He is a class act.
Abe Lincoln similarly strode a hugely difficult road. But in 1864 the ordinary voters of the day decided that they had been well served, and gave Lincoln his second term.
I believe that there are lots of ordinary voters – the silent majority – who are finally beginning to seriously think about the implications of what is happening in this country.
You won’t see their opinions in letters to the editor, or in opinion polls, or reflected through the lens of the punditocracy or the political establishment, left and right. But they are out there, thinking.
“Is this mess what we want for our future?” they are saying. Who should lead us in this time of desperate trial. They aren’t deserting President Obama.
Will I be right or wrong about 2012? No one knows.
As my friends know, in 2008 I supported Hillary Clinton for President until she conceded the nomination. I thought she had the greatest and best experience to succeed at the job.
This time around, assuming he stays true to his performance so far, my support for President Obama is assured.

#410 – Dick Bernard: 2 days to Default. A tentative agreement.

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As of Sunday evening, a tentative agreement has been reached to resolve the stalemate in Washington. Ordinarily, such announcements are not made without a high degree of certainty that all parties will agree to the terms agreed to. Soon we shall see. There are plenty of loose cannons who need to ratify the results, first.
There are two safe predictions, regardless of whether or not the compromise actually passes and averts a shutdown:
1. The Principals to the deal will all say they wanted more of whatever they wanted.
2. The Spectators who actually comment on the deal from the outside will say it’s a rotten deal for certain specific reasons, and that their particular target should have done more, or less, or nothing at all.
While difficult to imagine the rationale they’ll use, some will declare victory over the evil-other….
Included in one of the endless pieces of e-mail in my inbox when we returned from vacation on Saturday was this most interesting information link about “government spending”. This is a particularly relevant document for this time in our national and state history. (If you’re just skimming things, it’s simply a list of 102 common things on which government spends money.)
A week or so before I saw the preceding item, someone my age, who has thus been long enrolled on Medicare and most likely on Social Security as well, sent me one of those ubiquitous pieces of anti-Obama hate mail circulating on the internet. This particular one purportedly quoted that renowned expert on “Obamacare”, Donald Trump, and, whether true or not, related the litany of the anti-government anti-Obama crowd against universal health care for everyone.
I wrote the gentleman back, saying as follows: “Before I saw this one, I was thinking: why don’t all complainers about government make an estimate of how much government could be gotten rid of, say, 10%, 90%, all of it…. First you pick the number. Then, if you’re serious, make a list of EVERYTHING that comes to you as a government benefit – like a freeway – and decide which one of those benefits you’ll get rid of. Rather than taking away somebody elses benefit, take away your own, first.”
He hasn’t responded, unless a response is considered to be his forwards, without comment, of several more pieces of anti-Obama hate-mail churned out by the anti-Obama assembly line.
One of these forwards was a cartoon I’ve seen before, which has a bunch of sinister looking vulture-like birds sitting on a pyramid like perch, each level befouling the one below. It was labelled “The Political Flowchart”
At the top was the President of the United States (of course);
next rung down a few labelled “Democrats” and “Republicans”;
then a few more, still lower, labelled “State Politicians”;
then on the last and lowest and most befouled perch the “American People”, the purported victims of government.
The narration continued: “When top level guys look down, they see only shitheads. When bottom level guys look up they see only assholes.”
Crude, but cute.
I wrote back:
“Perhaps you might consider sending [my response] along to your entire list, as well as the person who sent it to you in the first place.
I would propose that the flow chart be upended, so that the American People are at the top of the chart, etc.
After all, it is the American People who are solely responsible for who they elect, either by voting, or not voting at all. We are not a dictatorship.
Congress, in my opinion, and state legislatures, best reflect either our wisdom or stupidity in voting. Deal with your state legislators and the Congressperson from your district. How wonderful are they?
President Obama is doing an outstanding job in an impossible environment, especially with ‘crap’ like this which flows incessantly, and speaks profoundly about the people who choose to pass it along and thus apparently believe it.”
“We the people” authored this disastrous mess in which we find ourselves. It has taken years to reach this point.
Regardless of point of view, it’s time to go to work and become leaders to built a society we can be proud of.
And read “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” by Naomi Klein.