The Socialist Mystique

I've been puzzled recently by why the crowds at McCain rallies are booing wildly at McCain and Palin's claims that Obama is a socialist who wants to "spread the wealth." Part of my confusion is due to the fact that I have no problem with redistribution of wealth, but I think a larger part is because calling somebody a socialist hasn't been a common political tactic for most of my lifetime. I seriously doubt that most Americans even know what socialism is. In that case, what is the resonance of the term for people a generation older than I, people for whom "socialist" is a bad word?

I initially hypothesized that socialism is just a 21st-century way of accusing Obama of being a communist, and I'm well aware that calling somebody a communist during the Cold War was both a very serious charge and a cynical political tool. To be a communist was--as, if you follow McCain's rhetoric, being a socialist is--to be anti-American. What I hadn't considered was the connection such accusations had to race. As Adam Serwer explains in the American Prospect, "Conservatives, now and in the past, have turned to 'socialism' and 'communism' as shorthand to criticize black activists and political figures since the civil-rights era."

What I am still at a loss to explain is the McCain supporters' horror at the idea of "spreading the wealth." That is (to a limited degree) what taxes and church tithes have done for centuries. Were the Republican party still pro-small government and anti-spending, I could understand opposition to this idea. But can you remember who our last fiscally-conservative, Republican president was? Popular consesus among my historian friends says--Herbert Hoover. Ah, the irony.

Rallying together

"I didn't want to have to tell my kids, twenty years from now, that there was this amazing movement that drew thousands of people to rallies across the country--and I never went to one," I told my friend as we were leaving yesterday's rally in West Philadelphia. Obama has been to Philly several times in this campaign, and I've somehow missed the chance to see him every time. Until yesterday.

The rally at 52nd and Locust St was Obama's fourth of the day in Philly, scheduled to begin around 1 p.m. I boarded the bus from Center City at 10:15 to head over and get in line. As it turned out, almost everybody on the bus was going to the same place. When we got off of the bus, we joined a stream of people arriving in a neighborhood that usually doesn't draw visitors. As a blogger for The New Republic described it, the block closed off for the rally "could easily be a Hollywood backlot stand-in for any depressed inner-city strip in the country." The street is lined with awnings advertising fried chicken, pizza, and even "Cousin Danny's Erotic Den."

It took me a while to find the end of the line--by 11 a.m., when I arrived, there were two lines that each stretched over two blocks. For some reason, I didn't mind standing in line for two hours. Even when the whole system disintegrated and throngs just pushed into the area to watch the speech, I wasn't as annoyed as I would usually be at such unfairness. And when, from almost 2 blocks back from the podium, I could only catch a glimpse of the top of Obama's head--and only when I stood on tip-toes on the police barrier--I wasn't that frustrated. And somehow, it didn't matter that I didn't hear much of what Obama said, or that what I did hear was pretty much the same as what I've heard him say dozens of times before on t.v.

Yesterday's rally wasn't, for me at least, about seeing Obama up-close as much as it was about being part of a movement. While some have questioned or even mocked the optimism of Obama's campaign, I can find only hopefulness in a crowd of 20,000 people of widely-varying background coming together in an inner-city neighborhood in the spirit of improving their country. It was the most mixed crowd I've ever been a part of--whether by age, gender, class, or race. As the African-American man standing next to me said, "This is just wonderful. It's like a rainbow."

Irony, doggy style

This was perhaps the most creative "costume" at the dog festival in Rittenhouse Square 2 weeks ago.

Protesting Palin

The one and only Sarah "Barracuda" Palin graced my neighborhood with her presence on Friday night. We heard on local news in the afternoon that she'd be stopping by a local bar for a fundraiser. It just so happened that our weekly department happy hour was at the bar right next door. So, as crowds began to gather outside and there were signs that the motorcade was about to arrive, we abandoned our drinks to join the Obama supporters/Palin haters outside.

How, exactly, do you protest somebody's mere presence? There were a number of clever signs, ranging from "I'm more qualified to be VP than Palin" to "Sarah Palin? Thanks but no thanks!" Others addressed specific issues relating to Palin, from reproductive choice to banned books.

I often wonder about the purpose of protests, especially small ones like this. For me, at least, being there and chanting with the crowd was a way to release the frustration and anger I've felt since Palin was picked at the republican VP nominee. I can only hope we made her uncomfortable enough in the neighborhood to keep her from a return visit.

Ignorance and the American Voter

There are two things I think every voter in America should be at least vaguely knowledgeable about: recent political history and candidate's current policy positions. In both this campaign and the last one I worked on, I wanted to be able to engage with voters who were undecided and make the case for the candidate I was supporting. But as I wrote recently, American politics and the media coverage of it seem to operate on truthiness rather than truth, on instincts rather than facts. It's hard to engage with voters and have a meaningful debate when they are utterly uninformed.

The author of a recent book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter argues that once television news became more popular than newspapers, "shallowness was inescapable as Americans began judging politicians by how they looked and acted." Voters today are more ignorant than ever on even the basics of our political system. If only 2 in 10 Americans knows how many senators we have, can we really expect them to know the candidates positions on the issues?

Being informed is not just about reading up on policy during the elections, though. A deeper understanding of recent political history is often necessary to really understand candidates' positions. A perfect example is John McCain and the Keating 5, particularly given what's happening with our economy right now.

This amusing video from Blogger Interrupted illustrates my point about lack of both historical and policy knowledge perfectly. Enjoy!

Registering Stories

Yesterday I spent a while at the Obama campaign checking over voter registration forms before the information was entered into the campaign's database. I thought it would be a pretty boring job; all I had to do was review all of the required fields and make sure things were filled in properly. As it turned out, though, sometimes the data told a story.

For instance, a fellow volunteer and I each found a registration form which had the word "human" filled in for race. It's optional to list race, so we have to assume that these forms were filled out by two people registering at the same time who decided to make either a statement or a joke. Then there were the ones with "change of party" checked off at the top and "Democrat" checked off below. Since we're past the primaries, changing party affiliation at this point is most likely a statement of great frustration.

One voter I noticed was born on November 1, 1990. That means he is just making it; if he had been born 5 days later, he would have had to wait another four years to vote for president. Other voters were at the other end of the spectrum; I saw many forms for people born in the 1920s or 1930s who were just registering for the first time. If this is really the first time these people felt compelled to vote, the election is even more monumental than I'd thought before.


P.S.--In retrospect, I realize that the way I was reading these registrations is actually the way social historians read data. Some historians can do really sophisticated analysis from data just like these forms, ranging from immigration forms to census records to account books. It's not the type of history that's ever

The Triumph of Truthiness

A blogger on Daily Kos today stated what's been on my mind a lot lately: "For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright." While lying isn't an exclusively Republican phenomenon, it certainly figures large for the Karl Rove Republicans. The problem seems to be that to Rove and his followers, "truthiness" is more important than facts--and, sadly, the media has played along.

Truthiness, a word coined by Stephen Colbert, was defined by the Macmillian English Dictionary as "the quality of stating facts that you believe or want to be true, rather than stating facts that are known to be true." Wishing something was true doesn't make it so: in Freud's terms, that's what creates an illusion. Illusions derive from and play to our instincts rather than our intellects.

We know all too well from the Republicans' attacks on Obama, evolution, global warming and academia how they feel about intellectualism. Bush, Rove, and his followers represent the triumph of truthiness and instinct at the expense of rational thought. You can't debate an instinct; but when does truth via instinct--truthiness--become lying?

Fortunately, two groups are fighting truthiness with truth. FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan organization that is doing the job the media isn't: revealing the truth behind politicians' claims (this site, too, avoids the term "lying" to use more neutral words like "flubs" or "false claims"). Media Matters investigates conservative "misinformation" spread by the media.

I want to live in a country of truth rather than truthiness, of intellect rather than instinct. As this campaign season progresses, I'm increasingly worried that truthiness is winning the battle.

Update: WaPo covers this same topic. The article notes that "Fed up, the Obama campaign broke a taboo on Monday and used the "L-word" of politics to say that the McCain campaign was lying about the Bridge to Nowhere."