Sam
Smith
So now we
face the prospect of the sleaziest, least competent, and most politically
repugnant Republicans of all time running against a Democrat who is corrupt,
dishonest, had three of her closest business partners go to prison along with
nine of her major backers, designed rotten healthcare legislation that
fortunately didn’t pass, made $100,000 on a $1,000 investment in highly
questionable cattle futures, and supported a guy for head of Homeland Security
who subsequently withdrew and eventually went to jail.
Back
during a milder political dilemma, I proposed that we think of our relationship
with Barack Obama as that of a one night stand – we vote for him and that’s it,
but since Hillary Clinton’s backers would find this sexist, I’ll suggest
another metaphor, namely that if Hillary Clinton is nominated, we approach the
election as emergency room politics.
Emergency
rooms are not there to cure illnesses, but to prevent them becoming worse. They
are not there to replace severed arms or legs but to control matters until a
surgeon can take over.
In a
similar way, elections rarely solve our political problems. They only allow us
a chance to mitigate or postpone disaster until we get our act together better.
What was once the First American Republic has collapsed into a greedy and
careless oligarchy and it will take far more than a mark on a ballot to change
that.
As I wrote
during the last election:
I
don’t share with many of my Green Party friends the notion that politics is a
form of religion and that one should react at the polls as a born again voter..
First, there is no historical evidence that at the presidential level this has
worked since Abe Lincoln won for the new Republican Party and, second, I have
lived in places like Boston, Philadelphia and Washington where one rarely
associates politics with the higher virtues. It is not about personal salvation
brought about by casting the right ballot, but a collective, pragmatic way to
make things work as best one can in a town, state or nation.
But
many assume when we go to vote that we are helping to define the future and
thus can be passionate when it works and angry when it fails.
The
truth is that elections are basically a formal poll of where we are at that
moment in time. It is the product of all the political activity, organizing and
arguing that has gone on before.
It
doesn’t determine the future for a large number of reasons, one of which has
been dramatically demonstrated by Barack Obama: namely that politicians rarely do
what they promise, either because of deceit or difficulty.
For
such reasons there are those who will not turn out in November on the grounds
that both choices are worthless or evil. And there are those who will not turn
out because the whole subject just depresses them or no longer is of interest.
But
what if we change our view of elections so they are seen as one tool for what
one is trying to achieve rather than an ultimate goal? What if the purpose of
voting is not to come up with a saint, but to make our struggle easier? What if
the most important day is not Election Day but the day after?
Of course,
Clinton may blow it on the way to the nomination and we’ll find ourselves in a
totally different situation. Her past is rife with questions, facts and issues
that could prove extremely uncomfortable in the coming months.
But
assuming she gets the nomination I would suggest that the question is not
whether you vote for her but whether you vote in a manner that is least
likely to make the future more difficult.
For
example, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination and loses the election, then
the rightwing extremists still called Republicans will control the White House,
Congress and Supreme Court. Even though I view Hillary Clinton and her husband
as the most successfully corrupt politicians I have ever covered, and even
though I wouldn’t lend my car to either one of them, it is far more important
that we don’t have any more anti-constitutional justices on the Supreme Court.
I realize
this attitude may seem strange to some. We have been trained, since the arrival
of television, to view life in terms of its images rather its realities and
nowhere has this been more costly than in our politics. People – even liberals
with Phds – often prefer to imagine someone like Hillary Clinton by her images
rather than what she really is about.
And she
has gotten away with a raft of illusions including with her claim that
criticism of her stems from hate, specifically from a vast rightwing
conspiracy. In fact, some of the significant early journalistic exposure
of the real Clintons, which the major media still chooses to ignore, was the
result of work by progressive journalists like Christopher Hitchens, Alexander
Cockburn, Sally Benton, Roger Morris and myself. My first tip came not from
right wingers but from a progressive student group in Arkansas.
But then I
suffer from the handicap of having been introduced to a different sort of
politics than most liberals imagine themselves to be in. At the age of 12, I
stuffed envelopes in a successful Philadelphia campaign to end 69 years of
corrupt GOP rule. I covered the Cambridge Massachusetts city council while
James Michael Curley was still alive next door in Boston. When one of my
sisters got married, I happened to be out back and spied a Philly police car
being loaded with a case of champagne. I saw two FBI agents come to interview
my politically active father about corrupt city councilmembers he opposed but knew
something about. And I worked with Marion Barry and watched him descend into
his later problems.
I see
politics as a matter of choosing battlegrounds rather than candidates. Just as
a doctor approaches a ruptured body in the emergency room not as test of
personal nobility but based on pragmatic experience, neither can we approach an
election as merely a test of our virtue.
The
election of a Republican president in 2016 could easily destroy the
Constitution, lead us into a fatal military conflict and/or collapse the
economy. And there is no virtue in making life, as it would definitely become,
far more painful for minorities, the poor, and the middle class.
The day
after the election we can start to work on the substantial Hillary Clinton
problem. But if she is nominated, we need to concentrate first on the larger
malevolence of the Republicans.
Sam
Smith, 2012- I often
hear people say that there is no difference between the two parties and their
candidates. In fact there is a big difference on a number of them: abortion,
Amtrak, birth control assistance diversity of
appointments extension of unemployment benefits. food stamps,
unemployment benefits environmental issues, gay marriage and
separation of church and state to name a few.
What I
would love to see would be a movement that recognizes the fact that many
Americans are annoyed, disappointed, or frustrated and that others have just
given up - and that attempts to offer the justification for a one night stand
with Obama. A few parts to the plan:
- There
must be a clear cause centered on a few key economic issues. Not ones
that affect the GDP, international trade or make the private sector feel
“fine” but real live things that help people with jobs, income and mortgages.
And no gay marriage stuff, no abortion talk, no liberal gobblygook.
Rather basic, gut bucket issues.
- There
must a clear plan to launch a new movement for these causes the day after the
election, making the point that having a Democrat in the White House and a
Democratic Senate is essential to get these things going, not because we can
expect their enthusiastic support but that their opposition will be much less.
The kickoff should involve thousands of groups across the country on the
same page, the same issues and the same day.
- Keep the
Democratic Party and its front groups like Move On out of it all. They’ll just
muck things up. Labor unions, churches, activist groups of all sorts: fine.
- Start
now bringing the people who feel so frustrated and defeated together. The could
be social groups called Apathy Anonymous and there could be cross-issue
gatherings of local activists so they begin to discovered that there are more
us than they think.
The best
solution is to give Obama one day and keep the rest for America.
