I’ve been thinking about what the mass media might soon be characterizing as Barack Obama’s white people problem, specifically why he continues to trail in the primary voting behind Hillary Clinton among working-class white people. I’ve heard the media geniuses chew it over and remain unconvinced that any of them can locate their asses without teleprompter notes.

I also realize that the Obama campaign is unlikely to read this, not to mention they’ve already got plenty of smart folks on board and do not need more chatter from ex-hacks like me.

Nevertheless.

Obama’s dilemma is this: he is perceived as being hurt by Clinton’s attacks, many of which are based on calculated misstatements and really creepy innuendo, and he can’t directly counter this, other than by what he has been doing, namely, rationally critiquing the irrational, and staying about as calm as possible while doing so. Once in a while, he pops off, e.g. his “Annie Oakley” remarks. Mostly, he remains attached to his own message.

His best course is to go past her, not through her, and he’s trying to do that. But in the media orgy accompanying the Clintons’ knee-capping tactics, and its complicity in presenting the “race” as she and her mouthpieces McAuliffe and Carville – and lately Ed Rendell – define it, we get solemn, if disjointed pontification which thinks it is analysis, the parsing of the Pennsylvania vote showing huge Clinton majorities among white women, Catholics, and, especially, ‘white working people.’

The upshot of all of the above is that Obama, whose candidacy offers real hope for Americans caught in the NAFTA-engineered downward spiral which has seen millions of jobs shipped elsewhere, cannot seem to break through. He speaks in generalities, the media types say, while she speaks in specifics. He gives speeches but she’s the “fighter” who will be on their side.

By their definition, he cannot be seen as “strong” unless he gets down into the gutter with those who are attacking him.

Obama also has a problem of a different nature, one that’s deeper and more dangerous than the high-wire act just described. It is one everyone can see but evidently nobody knows how to remedy.

The tracking and exit polls in primary states, especially Ohio and Pennsylvania, give Clinton a substantial lead among what the media terms “working-class whites.” This fact has not gone unnoticed by the media, the super delegates, and the Clinton campaign, which argues that the numbers prove Obama’s weakness in a general election race against McCain. It is these numbers which have halted what had been a constant stream of super delegates declaring for Obama; even with the pressure of party leaders to make a decision, the rest of the ‘undecideds’ are frozen. They are beginning to wonder whether Clinton’s claim to be a stronger nominee have merit.

Obama partisans, and the campaign itself, have responded to the data with several arguments. These include:

* Most of these “working-class whites” for Clinton are older voters, who feel a strong loyalty to Clinton arising from the years of her husband’s presidency.

* There is no group which is electorially more important than another. Obama has very large numbers among voters under 35, and more than ninety percent of black voters. His margins in these groups offset the noted losses, and anyhow most will return in the general election.

* He simply needs more time for these voters to get to know him. And it’s true that his numbers, especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania, improved quite a lot from the 20-point deficits he’s had to run against, closing to 9% in Pennsylvania (the media is, again, wrong, saying it’s 10%).

* The “working-class white” voters are heavily influenced by the state parties, and when a popular governor such as Ed Rendell is backing the other candidate it’s not surprising this demographic would vote for Clinton.

All of which may have some truth to them, but none of them get the to the dangerous heart of the matter.

Consider these things:

* In the days before Pennsylvania, all the polls had the “undecided” number at, roughly, ten percent. The Obama campaign believed that the six- and seven-percent spreads in the final week would therefore narrow to maybe 4% in the vote. An insurgent candidate who is not as well known as the one who is leading, nearly always picks up a majority of these “undecideds.” Not this time. The undecided voters broke for Clinton by a margin of better than 2-1.

* Polls have been consistent that Clinton has seriously bad numbers on questions such as whether she was playing dirty politics, whether she could win against McCain, and even as to her veracity. Really terrible numbers. And, still, she scored big, big margins in districts where her numbers weren’t good.

* A key question –– although the numbers here are obviously unreliable –– asked voters whether they would not vote for a candidate because of his race. The poll showed 5-6%. It would be a reasonable inference that a true number might be twice that.

A lot of people voted for Clinton who do not like her or trust her; many of these have told poll takers that they preferred McCain over Obama (and often over her, as well). Why would voters do that? They would do that if they perceive that Obama is worse. But Obama is not worse, not according to these same polls. He has consistently higher numbers on matters of trust and integrity, for example.

It is not because Obama hasn’t passed the ludicrous Clinton “Commander-in-Chief Test.” With Clinton flat-out lying about “bullets flying” in Bosnia, how could she be trusted to tell the truth about anything. This wasn’t ‘fudging’ the facts but creating an entirely separate reality. There are psychiatric terms for this kind of behavior. Still, the “white working class” voted for her.

Here’s what I think is happening and why I think it’s very dangerous to Obama.

If you asked the working class white voters whether race was a factor in Ohio and Pennsylvania, they would, for the most part, deny it and they would not be smiling. I suggest that a great many of these voters would be wrong about that, and that they do not know it.

But Obama’s race is costing him with this group of voters especially. These are the so-called Reagan voters. Once, they were voters for George Wallace, Alabama’s eternal governor who scored 40% in the Indiana primary in 1964. These are the voters who are bitter, as Obama told a small audience and, of course, the whole world thanks to the internet.

America is still completely messed-up around race. Let’s be honest about this; Obama ackowledges this fact, notably in his remarkable speech from Philadelphia, “A more perfect union.”

In the nineteen-seventies, the remnants of a ‘liberal’ wave from the sixties, coupled with continued agitation for equal rights for blacks, and garnished by a couple of court decisions, invented two things which have so angered working class whites that they broke away from the Democratic Party and gave Reagan two landslides.

Busing of school children. Affirmative action.

To the vast majority of working-class white voters, their antipathy to these programs is not the product of racism. They do not view themselves as racists. But they have experienced these “progressive” changes as coming entirely at their expense, and they are right.

When the courts ordered busing of students in order to ‘correct’ inequalities in education, it was the children in working-class families who were bused to largely black schools; black children were often bused into schools in working class neighborhoods. The children of white, rich liberals, those who are now excoriated as “latte-sipping elitists”, were not bused; they were enrolled in private schools. It was to be the working-class whites who took the cultural impact of busing.

When affirmative action became law, the jobs for which blacks were being hired were those formerly held by working-class whites. These were not new jobs, because the society made no serious commitment to assist the poor economically. Blacks were not being hired to replace rich white people. The economic toll was taken against working-class whites.

These ‘liberal’ policies have thus become synonymous with two crushing blows to the working-class white communities across America, largely in the midwest but elsewhere as well. It would be a fair generality that working-class whites see themselves as hard-working, patriotic, play-by-the-rules Americans who have been shafted –– not by the corporate power structure, as John Edwards tried to convince them, but by Democrats who pushed for these policies. That’s what right-wing commentators told them. It’s what the right-wing mass media told them.

It’s a burden that Democratic candidates for President have had to deal with, largely unsuccessfully. With the Reagan backlash, nominees from Mondale and Dukakis to Gore and Kerry have lost millions of votes because of it. Carter and Bill Clinton were able to overcome it, possibly due to their strong southern support.

The dilemma facing Barack Obama is exponentially worse because there is nothing he can say, seemingly, to overcome it. White, working-class Democrats look at him and think, unavoidably, of busing and affirmative action. It is an image that is at work here, a deep, lasting symbol of what they perceive to be at the root of their troubles.

The seriousness of this problem for the Obama campaign cannot be overstated.

Voters of all political stripes and leanings may believe that they select candidates for cogent reasons. But most of those ‘reasons’, on examination, derive from powerful subconscious responses to iconic or symbolic images. When a candidate stirs voters into a runaway phenomonen, as happened with Reagan and now with Obama, it’s because his (or her) persona resonates with primal hopes and fears in a direct and undeniable way.

It’s not policies or a party’s platform that does this. It is never mundane. The fervor for Hillary Clinton, for example, has almost nothing to do with her “competence” or “experience.” Neither of those qualities have shown up over the course of the campaign, and the candidate has undermined her own claims via blatant lies, e.g. the Bosnia sniper fire causing her to run for the car. Her principal attraction as a candidate is her gender. That fact resonates with a large number of women, especially those over fifty years of age, because their histories are sympathetic with hers. They have lived in a country which systematically denied equal rights to women in nearly every sphere of public life. When they see her it is not really what she says that moves them. It is their loyalty to the struggles they’ve gone through themselves.

The issue of gender, which is still unaddressed by anybody in this campaign, is in its own way as strong and risky for Clinton as Obama’s race is for him. Anything which resonates so deeply has the capacity to create great change or havoc.

One reason for Obama’s likely nomination is that he’s handled the race issue with brilliance and Clinton has not known what to do about gender, playing to it while claiming victimhood, and fiercely aware that she is caught in her own traps on it. She is a very smart candidate, and a pioneer, but she has not been able to solve her puzzle.

Obama’s going to be nominated. The question is whether he can be elected given his race and its cumulative legacy in the minds of working-class white voters. He will have to find a means to help America through this passage.

Let me tell you a little story about a fellow named Tony Schwartz. Mr. Schwartz was a p.r. man back in the sixties who had a nice handle on the onrushing electric information age; he hung around with people like Marshall McLuhan. He also advised at least one political campaign: the Johnson campaign against Goldwater in 1964.

Mr. Schwartz authored a book entitled “The Responsive Chord”, which remains the most vivid and useful account available on how a candidate can win.

Mr. Schwartz was the brains behind the “daisy” advertisement which, effectively, sank Barry Goldwater. In the television spot, a little girl picks daisies until a mushroom cloud suddenly appears behind her. “Vote,” it says, “as if your world depends on it.” You couldn’t beat that. Neither could Goldwater.

What Schwartz understood is that votes are not won as a result of cogent, intellectual argument. People can’t follow those arguments and think they’re being talked down to. They distrust candidates who appear to be remote, and they don’t see how anyone who talks that way can possibly understand them. But human beings are moved by symbols, symbols which represent their most heartfelt desires, longings, fears, and aspirations. The mushroom cloud obliterated Goldwater. No one had to put into words the distasteful argument that the G.O.P. nominee was a crazy man who might blow up the world.

Much of Senator Obama’s success in spreading his message is derived from his appeal to what’s best in us, and to the relentless inclusionary perorations. Even the title of his brilliant Philadelphia speech, “A More Perfect Union”, is an effective symbol because it evokes very strong, positive images in those who hear it.

But in order to solve the riddle, in order to find his natural support among working people, he will need something elemental, something which resonates not only with the target audience but with a vast majority of the population. He needs something so extraordinary that it overrides the racial fears and resentments which still poison the nation.

***

Next post: what Obama might do: ADVANCED TEXT

Sitting here in the ashes of Pennsylvania, we’ve got to wonder what’s going on in the popular mind. Clinton’s ten-point win is, while not as big as the polls indicated a bare two weeks ago, better than many had expected. Tracking polls had shown Obama gaining, the margin falling to as little as five percent.

It’s probably fitting, even if nerve-wracking, for Obama to be weakened, at least temporarily, by the scattershot assaults of the Clinton campaign and the emergence in the mass media of idiotic non-issues. It puts him face-to-face with his own character and his own message.

Tonight there is a serious argument taking place among Obama’s closest advisers. One side is telling him that he needs to strike back, that he needs to now go after Clinton with the ferocity – if not the dishonesty – with which she has been relentlessly going after him. If he does not do this, they say, he risks losing the race. He will appear to be weak, unable to “stand up” to her. He will “fail” the “Commander-in-Chief test” that the New York Senator managed to snow the media with. He will thereby risk losing in Indiana in two weeks, and this in turn will scare the super delegates into fearing that he would be “unelectable” in November.

The other side is telling him something quite different. Their point is that the foundation of his candidacy is his authenticity. He is not, simply put, an asshole or a liar. His strength is not something ‘proven’ by yelling or issuing nasty remarks. His toughness is of character. If he sacrifices that which motivates him, which defines him , then not only would he do damage to his own true self but to the inspired foundation of his campaign.

I don’t know which argument will prevail, but I suspect that he will choose the latter course.

It is not only hard to remain impassive in the face of the viciousness of the Clinton campaign, it is hard to get some people to understand that real strength, real toughness, is often embodied in the ability to remain faithful to principle despite provocation. Maybe we ought, as a nation, to recall Martin Luther King, Jr., who led with courage, intellect, and a gentleness of spirit.

King did not find it necessary to strike back, with fists or even, sometimes, with words. His strategy was to elevate the dialogue, to educate, to win over. He trusted that his message would resonate in enough hearts to change the moral direction of the nation. He was murdered only because he was succeeding.

There were quite a few times during the King era when his faith was tested. History has shown that he was brave, that he was resolute, and that he was right.

I don’t know who Hillary Clinton might have been once upon a time. She’s someone of strong will and an active mind. It’s said that she once really cared to change America for the better. But a reading of her connections in more recent years to some of the most despicable corporate thugs on the planet, as well as an honest review of her nastier campaign tactics, makes it clear that something happened to her along the way.

We’ve seen this before, what becomes of someone whose dreams of personal success overwhelm what might’ve been the best in them. It destroyed Hubert Humphrey (and the Democratic Party) in 1968 and 1972. It is destroying Clinton now.

There is no scenario in which Clinton can win the nomination without simultaneously ensuring that McCain will defeat her. She can only win the nomination in the ruins of the party. She knows this, yet she goes on.

Pennsylvania voters had a chance to make a difference. They did not do so. Now, it is down to Indiana, and to the outcome of the argument inside Obama’s campaign.

Forty years ago, Indiana was the proving grounds for the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy. Having entered the race against an incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, and an anti-war challenger, Eugene McCarthy, he had an uphill fight on his hands. The media in the state was openly hostile. The party apparatus was working for Johnson’s stand-in, popular Governor Roger Branigan.

There were serious doubts whether Kennedy could win the primary, but a failure to do so would have probably damaged his candidacy beyond recovery. There were not many primaries in those days. The bosses – 1968’s version of the ‘super delegates’ – were beholden to Johnson, suspicious of RFK, and nonetheless necessary to any mathematical model the Kennedy people designed.

The bosses were not going to back Kennedy unless forced to do so. His strategy was designed to force them to. And in order to do this, he had to show that his support extended well beyond the overwhelming majorities he could count on from black voters. He had to win the votes of ethnic, working-class whites, some of whom had four years earlier supported George Wallace.

He campaigned from an open car, from the back of a train, always in crowds. On the last day before Indiana voted, on Monday, May 6, he started with speeches in Evansville, Ft. Wayne, South Bend, and La Porte. Then began the most remarkable motorcade in American political history.

For nine hours, he stood in the back of a convertible, flanked by Richard Hatcher, black Mayor of Gary, and Tony Zale, white former middleweight boxing champion, and braced by a kneeling Bill Barry, through LaPorte, Porter, and Lake Counties, no telling where one town ended and another began, suburbs, cities, commercial and industrial zones, more towns and cities, rural and urban, black areas, white areas, back to black areas and back again, all the hand-lettered signs thanking him, imploring him to win, and the cheering never stopped.

By nightfall, Barry’s knees were bleeding and Kennedy’s hands cut, bruised and swollen, and still the roads were lined with people, tens of thousands of hopeful faces, kids running alongside, families sitting on the tops of their cars, children bundled against the chill, and they continued into the dark. The last speech, at Whiting, ten at night and five hours late, was bedlam, and then the crowds still massed along the road all the way to the airport.

That motorcade established the electoral bridge between blacks and working-class whites which would certainly, had he lived, have elected Kennedy to the presidency. It reached that place inside the public which any great insurgency must reach. It reached people’s hearts.

That’s where Obama must continue to campaign. He must gamble, as King did, as Kennedy did, that America is ready to choose hope over fear. He must continue to appeal to that which is best in us, believing that only then can the nation be changed and that only then will he be the one we have been waiting for.

If he does that, he can go all the way.

“Oh, the masters...make the news for the wise men...and the fools
–– I got nothin’ Ma, to live up to...”

It was another time, another age, and I’m paraphrasing. Dylan was very young then, we all were. In those days there was a chasm opening in the world, mostly between the generations, a crack in the earth on either side of which was a people the other believed to be dangerous and unstable.

It occurs to me, in juxtaposing two present, ineluctable facts, that we have come ‘round to that time again, not a new age but the natural continuation, after a relatively brief interregnum, of a historic revolution.

I suppose there are plenty of reasons to dismiss this suggestion. The sixties, if you believe the intellectuals and news-makers, was an abberation, a short and especially loony time in America, crazy social and sexual experimentation, violence in the streets and on campuses. I do not believe them.

The sixties, in the larger context of human evolution, were the first collisions between two ages, the industrial and the electric. My generation grew up during the first wave, the first explosion of electric information; we experienced the world as a very different being. We understood a commonality, probably borne of the photographs of earth from space, a sensory elevation, the sharing by millions of identical television transmissions.

A President arose who resonated with that new time, and the political events of the sixties, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Cuban missile crisis to Berlin and the Test Ban Treaty, to Dallas, and afterward; from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham jail, to the March on Washington, to Selma, and afterward. RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The old world does not surrender gracefully, not especially to historical imperative, and there was a fight for control of the country. The murders of Robert Kennedy and King in 1968 sealed the deal. Or so many thought.

Well, maybe not, as it turns out. The generation now coming of age in America, I think, is the direct descendent of my own, and it is carrying with it the same seeds of a changed planet.

This may be hard to see. I’ve heard and read commentaries which deny any parallel, which point out the vacuousness of modern culture, the shallowness of modern values, the widespread decline in western literacy.

True, the culture itself, as expressed by the dominant forces in media and politics, is laughable. I don’t need to cite examples. As the fellow says in LeCarre’s “Tinker, Tailor”, “(America) today, man, all you’ve got to do is look out the bloody window.”

But, now to the ineluctable facts promised a moment ago. One is that the political landscape, as described and promoted by the mass media, is barren of substance and contested by remote figures who must pass various “toughness” tests. So we witness the continuing spectacle of Hillary Clinton pretending to “experience” she doesn’t have and making bizarre statements about nuking Iran. The last televised “debate” has been defended by its “journalist” progenitors as having asked “tough” questions, especially of Barack Obama.

These important questions, the kind Americans need answered before we make the critical electoral choice between McCain and, presumably, Obama, include why the Senator does not wear a flag pin in his lapel, what he was doing sitting on a community board in Chicago whose membership included Bill Ayers, and whether he thought Jeremiah Wright loved America as much as he does.

The media aftermath generally found Obama wanting. He’d been distinctly uncomfortable under the onslaught; he hadn’t even seized the few openings available to nail Clinton about Bosnia, or something.

He’s taken a lot of these hits lately, Wright and Ayers and the “bitter” comments. This is what the mass media refers to as “vetting.” The thing is, vetting , if one is to use a term which has an odor to it, I’m not sure why, ought to apply to real questions, the questions Americans whose brains have not decomposed entirely are asking. You know: Iraq, unemployment, health care, poverty, the environment, education, immigration...

So, the mass media is now using all the little whoopie cushions being handed them by Clinton – hey, the last ‘debate’ was actually run by Clinton’s people; Stephanopolous asked the numbing question about Jeremiah Wright – and you’d figure that the Senator from Illinois would be cracking from the pressure. You’d figure that his poll numbers would be sinking like bank stock. If so, you would be wrong.

We are finally to ineluctable fact number two:

None of that bullshit, the video loops and threads of anything remotely associating Obama with radicals, or worse, has made the slightest difference in his national support numbers, nor with respect to his prospects in November.

I worried about that after each new episode of “American Gotcha”, there would be a deep loss, Obama’s “newness” catching up to him finally. But, except for a few minor tremors, that hasn’t happened.

ABC’s shameful low in red-baiting journalism was not only denounced in an unprecedented column by a fellow named Shales, who is evidently the pre-eminent television critic in the country, it was buried by an overwhelming, instantaneous, and thoroughly pissed-off popular response. Hundreds of thousands of calls and emails within hours.

National tracking polls over the next three days showed Obama’s numbers rising again, his margin over Clinton growing. That’s the second fact.

Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that the new generation, just as mine, found the mainstream media hopelessly corrupt and useless as an information source? And wouldn’t it be funny if their alternative – as ours had been “underground” newspapers – turns out to be a world-wide electronic net, capable to making the corrupt forms of the past irrelevant?

How it all turns out is still in the balance, but I’m encouraged because I recall something we took as an article of faith forty years ago. We knew by 1969, certainly by 1971, that we’d lost. The powers who run nations do not yield easily to little things like the popular will, and we had only ourselves. If we could get a second generation, we thought. If only our parents could be brought around. It didn’t happen.

But now there are two generations.

The one in between, well, their task turned out to be weathering the painful re-entry of my own after the losses of that decade, and the political backlash of cretins and fools.

The reason that Obama’s poll numbers won’t suffer from ludicrous media-hyped “errors” and trivial “issues” is that he embodies the change everybody in the new generation instinctively yearns for. He, like John Kennedy, summons people to hope, and appeals to that which is best in us.

In a few hours, the polls will open in Pennsylvania. Regardless of the outcome, the Democratic Party will nominate Barack Obama in August. Forty years after 1968, a second chance has turned up. If he lives, we may finally get there.

Depending on who you listen to, Hillary Clinton has or has not a chance to win the nomination in Denver. Much of the mass media, as well as the Clinton campaign, calls it a close race, presumably for different reasons. The media likes a good fight because it sells air time; it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t give a shit about the outcome.

Clinton presumably believes that if she damages Barack Obama sufficiently to cripple his ability to run against John McCain, the party’s “super delegates” will be forced to break her way in Denver. She’s also counting on blackmailing the party into seating the illegitimate Florida and Michigan delegations by way of a nasty credentials committee fight.

Either she believes that, or she believes that once she has finished-off Obama, a one-term McCain presidency would leave her with another chance in 2012. Is she really that craven, self-absorbed, and ethically decomposing? Have you met the Clintons?

There is a tremendous load of anger and frustration not more than a half-inch below the surface right now among the professionals in the Democratic Party, and none of it is directed at Barack Obama. This is not petulance or the dislike of a good fight; nor is it the product of anti-Clinton sentiment in general. Indeed, many of these folks are long-time friends of the family. Today: the public defection of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, who has known and worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton for almost forty years.

What is driving everybody crazy is that they know – know with the certainty of pols who know how to work numbers like most people know how to work a dishwasher – that it is a mathematical impossibility for her to win. Do you think that Bill Richardson “betrayed” Hillary on a whim? Yes, he believes in Obama, as do many who have really looked at him, but Richardson’s a politician, and a politician, especially one as savvy as New Mexico’s governor, is also going to know whether something will gain or lose.

Beginning with Pennsylvania next Tuesday, there are ten more primaries or caucuses, not counting the shafted voters in Michigan and Florida. Delegates will be allotted in proportional measurement to popular votes, generally.

Between March 6th, when I first ran the numbers, and today, the mathematics of the situation, in terms of Clinton’s chances, have moved from remote to as soon as pigs fly. In March, she trailed Obama by ninety-five elected or otherwise committed delegates, and the margin was close as it was only because she’d snagged a good majority of announced “super delegates.”

Today, Clinton trails Obama by roughly 150 votes. These came from the following sources:

* a final tally in Texas where, although the media forgets to mention it, Obama won a majority of delegates;

* defecting Clinton “super delegates,” relatively few but significant nonetheless – there have been zero defections from Obama;

* a rush of new “super delegate” commitments, nearly all of them favoring Obama.

Given the number of remaining “super delegates” and any conceivable electoral outcome in the remaining caucuses and primaries, the only way Clinton could manage to pull it off would be if Obama were, in terms used more than once by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who should know, caught with a dead woman or a live boy.

Clinton has tried to create the idea in the public mind – and in this she has been abetted by a media which happily sold the Iraqi invasion – that “insiders” want to force her out of the race. Well, they probably do by now, even though when it comes to insiders Hillary Clinton is a member of the board. They didn’t care whether she stayed in, for a while, but now that she is trying to kneecap Obama they are pissed-off.

This is a puzzling concept to some, but it’s quite explicable. The pols all know that if Obama goes under to McCain a lot of them will lose their power, if not their own seats in Congress. That is not an amusing notion. Maybe not all of them are enthralled with Obama, but that’s secondary. When you threaten their livelihood, it gets personal.

As to the numbers, specifically, a Pennsylvania landslide for Clinton, even one so big that the news anchors reach orgasm in reporting it, she’ll gain, at best, fifteen delegate votes. That’s it. Hell, she’s lost that many in the past two weeks.

After Pennsylvania, there’s Indiana and North Carolina. Carolina will be an Obama landslide. He may also take Indiana. Doesn’t even matter. Pols can do the numbers; that is why – even if Clinton takes Pennsylvania by 12%, and she probably won’t unless Diebold’s counting the votes again – we will see even more previously uncommitted delegates moving to Obama.

There is a sense of urgency now in forcing Clinton to quit. She and her husband are handing soundbites to McCain every day. From the ludicrous “Commander-in-Chief Test” to the sleazier references to Louis Farrakhan, Hillary is Karl Rove’s wet dream. Everybody knows it.

Look, I also feel some measure of sadness for Clinton. For starters, just being married to Bill is a lot of go through. She thought she was going to get the nomination. She never saw Obama coming. I don’t think we know who she is. For all the typically wrong-headed media babble about how Obama hasn’t “been vetted” yet, a turn of phrase I find nauseating, it is Clinton nobody knows. Hell, she doesn’t know.

The tragedy of Hillary is that instead of being who she is and doing what she believed in, she “positioned” herself. Her vote for the war, her vote against banning land mines, her obsession with appearing tough enough... Maybe she began with what she thought – erroneously, I believe – was a need to overcome her gender. She worried about showing how tough she could be.

We’ll never know if the bellicose side of Clinton, the incendiary comments about Iran, for example, and the threat of attacking anyone, regardless of existing treaties, who hit one of our close allies, e.g. Israel, if this was real. In any case, she adopted it.

That’s not leadership. Leaders lead, period. They don’t “position” themselves. They don’t wait for public opinion to make it safe to criticize an atrocious, bloody, horrible war. Leaders stand up. Hillary yells; it’s not the same thing.

Maybe this is a short obit for her; it’s as generous as I can feel right now. We’ve got a chance, some kind of chance, to become a better country. I didn’t expect to see another one in my lifetime and Obama surprised me, too, just as he surprised Clinton. She needs to do something redeeming now, if she’s still capable of it, and help him defeat McCain in November. That other thing, the Denver meeting in August, that one’s over. Hillary can do the numbers, too.

Can a system this bankrupt survive?

On ABC, the Anti-Christ Broadcasting Company, a bunch of brain-dead yahoos asked Senator Barack Obama, whose lightning campaign to take the country back from the neo-Nazis running it has manifestly scared the shit out of them, whether he loved the American flag.

Really.

No questions about an economy careening toward oblivion. Virtually nothing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing about social security, Medicare, joblessness, the housing debacle. The ABC jerkoffs wanted to know instead why Obama doesn’t wear a flag on his lapel.

The latest issue of urgent concern to America’s voters is, evidently, whether Obama will condemn a fellow named Bill Ayers who, thirty-five years ago, helped lead the radical Weather Underground. Why? Because Obama was a member several years back of a community board on which Ayers sat.

Really.

It may not help Obama with the media that, at the time Ayers and his friends were setting off bombs, the Senator was 8 years old.

There are, by official estimates, 320,000 American troops suffering from brain injuries. The media don’t care. They want to know, instead, about Jeremiah Wright.

As a nation, we’ve got to find a way out of this morass. Public life is not a game show. What is probably the most important, defining presidential race in forty years is being reduced to a sack race at the company picnic.

Let;’s try this: let’s each of us take some small measure of responsibility and use the internet to educate our fellow citizens. Let’s end-run the bullshit. Sign-up for TruthOut or Buzzflash or Alternet and grab the real news, check it out, pass it on.

Lately, I’ve been writing disparaging things about Senator Hillary Clinton, heir-apparant and victimized candidate for the nation’s highest public office, and I fear that in doing so I’ve badly neglected an entire segment of America’s citizenry and its leaders. I speak of the easily-manipulated, the simple or superficial of mind, and the pure crazies, and of the billionaire criminals who run the country’s great plantation.

It’s one thing to fire away at Clinton. She and the rest of her public family are annoying beyond words and there are even signs of mental slippage, with which Americans have become too familiar already through seven years of Bush and the Cheney Syndicate. But in any comparison with the Republican Party and its next nominee, Clinton looks like F.D.R., or at least Tom Dewey.

This has been brought home to me recently quite by accident. As I’ve mentioned before, I am one of about a hundred million special enough to receive a “2008 Presidential Campaign Survey” from the Democratic Party, containing official-looking “Survey Tabulation Codes” and encouraged to answer a few questions.

Of course, the purpose of these “surveys” is to raise money. The dozen or so policy questions are designed to motivate you to answer the last one “yes”, which is whether you care enough to write them a check.

The Republicans use the same “survey” idea to get at people’s checkbooks. I am looking at one of these documents right now, a gift from a friend who, through no fault of her own, according to her, found her party registration “switched”. She rectified this bizarre occurrence some time back, but the Republican Party has evidently not learned of her departure. And thus was a loyal American inadvertently asked by the G.O.P. to answer the questions on their “Census Document” – prior to the money hit – and “return it for distribution to Party Leaders.”

Right away, you can see a difference. The Democrats believe their members will best respond to being treated as poll respondents. The Republicans believe their members will best respond if they think it’s an official government document. What this suggests I can safely leave to your imagination, but the term ‘mail fraud’ comes to mind.

The “poll” questions themselves illustrate something which seems to me highly significant. The Republicans appeal to people based on ignorance and fear; nearly all of their questions are pure flaming rhetoric along the lines of “Should Republicans do everything they can to prevent liberal Democrats from repealing the USA Patriot Act and other important laws that help our intelligence agencies protect America?” That’s the first one asked. They get worse.

Reminds me of the great Bill Hicks’ description of a typical poll question back in 1991: “Do you believe that George Bush, a good, Christian, white man, should send troops to the middle east to prevent Arab terrorists from coming over here and raping our white women?”

The propaganda is indistinguishable from the question. The underlying idea is to shut off thought. There are two sides here, the G.O.P. is saying. One is the side of America. The other is the side of its enemies.

More questions from the party of John McCain:

“Do you support the use of force against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?”

“Should we do everything we can to stop Democrats from weakening border security?”

“Should we make our fight against the Democrats’ massive tax hikes a central part of the 2008 campaign?”

“Should we continue working for serious tort reform to protect individuals and small businesses from predatory lawsuits?”

“Do you support President Bush’s initiatives to allow private religious and charitable groups to do more to help those in need?”

“Do you agree that sowing the seeds of democracy and freedom in the Middle East is a worthy goal?”

Briefly translated, recipients are being asked whether they support military assaults against any other country we feel like blowing up, whether corporate criminals should be afforded legal protection against being held accountable for their crimes, whether tax money should be funneled to quasi-religious groups for “anti-poverty” efforts rather than spent on real programs run by the government. As we also know, the Democrats’ “massive tax hikes” consist of repealing the multi-billion-dollar giveaway to the wealthy and ending the tax breaks afforded the aforementioned corporate criminals. As for “sowing the seeds”of “freedom” by blowing the shit out of innocent people, well, you can’t make a cheese omelet without hitting a cow with a hammer.

This is the party of John “The Maverick” McCain. It would require some nose-pinching to vote for Clinton over McCain, but let’s be clear that pinching it would be preferable to snipping it off entirely.

Dear Boalt Hall School of Law Alumni Center:

I don’t know what difficulty you are evidently having with my previous letters to you. They are written in english which, as the constitutional scholar and United States Senator Sam Ervin once said, is my native tongue.

You send me various invitations, mostly to give money which any self-respecting Boalt alumnus is expected to have oodles of, and I have patiently explained several times that, one, I am the grad who didn’t make all that money and, two, if I had a gazillion dollars I would write checks to pretty much everyone in the universe before I’d hand you a dime.

I have explained why that is.

The Boalt faculty harbors a man who in any just society would be behind bars for war crimes and abetting numerous felonies. I’m sure John Yoo, Satan’s little helper, would disagree.

It was John Yoo who gave legal cover to the Bush policies on torture, who authored legal opinions based on sophistry and infamously informed America that the President had the inherent legal authority to crush the testicles of a child in front of his mother if he believed that to do so would thereby extract useful information.

I don’t know what you folks are teaching these days, but I have a notion of to whom you are teaching it. When I attended Boalt, a professor who espoused as reputable policy this kind of human behavior as a right of the state, would’ve been run out of his job by an enraged student body. It is a very sad fact that today’s Boalt students seem uninterested in the most basic tenets of a free society.

Do not tell me about freedom of speech. People who endorse torture of children, and any who argue that it may lawfully be done, are accessories before the fact to the crimes to which they attempt to extend a fig leaf of legitimacy.

Yes, Boalt Hall has a great and storied history. Its graduates include many worthy and prominent people. I do not believe that its faculty ought to reflect one point of view. But fascism and its enablers are off the charts, or ought to be. And until that happens at Boalt, its reputation is being shamed.

Sorry Travis. It was Abbie Hoffman who said it, trying to explain to the idiot judge at the trial of the Chicago 7, that he lived in ‘Woodstock Nation’ in the same way native Americans “carry (their own) nation around in their heads.”

For forty years, I’ve been carrying America around in my head. Not the ‘America’ long-since perverted by the worst impulses of its people, the consumerized, brain-washed Dream Machine where happiness lies just around the corner with the arrival of your new Lexus with onboard GPS, video, wrap-around-sound, and flame-thrower. The other America. The one I got promised.

It’s been noted by more than one close friend that I don’t like to travel. I’ve also been reclusive, often solitary and withdrawn. Maybe so. But the truth, my truth, is that I’ve been on the road for forty years.

Hillary Clinton was on the road herself today, dodging sniper fire in Memphis, trying to snag a few black votes with a speech about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose revolution was, according to her, one of “hearts and minds.”

I won’t be watching the television specials today. I’ve seen what kind of junk is being
coughed-up as “history” by “historians” who haven’t a clue about what actually happened forty years ago. The mass media ‘honor’ King by depicting him as a sort of plastic dashboard saint, remembering his astonishing breakthroughs in the South, his Nobel Prize, maybe mentioning how he went to jail. They freeze-frame him in 1963, his “dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Those who take the trouble to go further, to King’s radical evolution from Selma to the planning for a Poor People’s March On Washington, will find a man whose vision – and perhaps his reach – was certain to have enormous political and economic consequences well beyond civil rights.

To sugar-coat a 1963 version of King is to obscure the reason for, and the perpetrators of, his murder.

In order to understand King, and the seminal events which led from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to his killing in Memphis on April 4, 1968, it is essential to recognize the context in which they occurred. This requires an awareness of what professor Peter Dale Scott terms “deep politics.”

During the Kennedy administration, a furious war erupted between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, whose frequent companions at the Del Mar Racetrack in California included hoodlums and Texas oil billionaires, publicly denied the existence of the mafia; meanwhile, Robert Kennedy had hauled Joe Valachi before a Senate Committee, prosecuted Jimmy Hoffa, and deported Carlos Marcello. Hoover was also pissed-off at the Kennedy Justice Department’s legal actions on behalf of “Freedom riders” and Negroes who tried to register to vote in the South. He blamed the civil rights movement on “Communists” and termed Martin Luther King “the most notorious liar in America.”

As Attorney General, RFK was Hoover’s boss. You may imagine how this went over with Hoover.

Hoover’s tenure as the nation’s top ranked domestic spook had enabled him to amass a treasure trove of blackmail material on politicians of every stripe, and he was not reluctant to use it. But his sly attempts to pressure the Kennedys – he had tapes of JFK enjoying an afternoon or two with a woman not his wife; later, he informed RFK that one of the President’s lovers, Judith Campbell Exner, was also sleeping with a fellow named Sam Giancana – could not force a change in policies at Justice.

In early 1963, Hoover began pressuring Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps on Dr. King. This sequence of events is of great importance in understanding not only the reasons for King’s assassination in 1968 but, curiously, also evidence of its authorship.

King, according to Hoover, was consorting with known Communists. Several were among his top advisers. It would be very bad for the country if this were so, Hoover said. He wanted to intercept King’s phone calls. Kennedy said no.

In 1963, serious changes were taking place in Washington. Kennedy had turned decisively away from the Cold War and toward disarmament. He initiated the Test Ban Treaty. He began to plan disengagement from Viet Nam. He sent back-channel emissaries to establish communications with Cuba. In June, at American University, Kennedy spoke movingly of peace, saying of the Soviet Union, “...We all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.”

In this context, Hoover pushed harder. The Kennedys were increasingly identified with King and the movement. If it should turn out that King’s politics were infected by hostile ideologies, that could derail the President’s foreign initiatives, including the Test Ban Treaty. Withdrawal from Viet Nam might seem to be appeasement.

Bobby and Jack talked it over. Hoover had already succeeded in planting nasty anti-King stories in major newspapers and magazines. Any future ‘reliable source’ claiming to connect him with Commies was dangerous. The Kennedys needed something to protect themselves if this should happen.

They decided this: give Hoover a one-time telephone tap for a limited time. When it produced nothing, as they expected it to do, not only would it relieve the pressure on King but protect them from the fallout. Under that theory, RFK signed-off on it. It was September, 1963. The President had just completed a Western tour where he spoke of conservation and expanding national parks, and of his vision of peace.

The wiretap was never terminated. Physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping was instituted on King. By the time Robert Kennedy realized that the F.B.I. had not only continued but enlarged its spying, the President was dead and the former Attorney General was boxed-in: now Hoover could do as he wished. If Kennedy made an issue of it, then the feds would produce his initial authorization.

On the day President Kennedy was killed, Hoover’s first act was to order removal of the red – yes, it was red – telephone from his desk, the direct line RFK had ordered.

With permanent surveillance of King being carried out by America’s secret police, it is safe to say that King’s enemies always knew where he was and what he was up to. By the time of his murder, his own staff had been infiltrated by at least one police agent.

King’s politics by 1967 had very little easy saccharin moralism and plenty of direct action. He’d taken the movement North, to New York and Philadelphia and Chicago, leading marches against segregated housing and the grinding misery and despair inflicted on America’s poor by America’s institutions.

On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before they killed him, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a rousing anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York, breaking with the Johnson government over Viet Nam and calling on the country to actively resist it. He’d been under great pressure from others to stay away from the war, stick with civil rights issues; standing against that war was, in 1967, unpopular, and might harm the movement. For King, there was no possible distinction he could draw between the war and human rights.

His own country, he said, was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

That is not the King they tell us about in school, children.

In the summer of 1967, the nation’s inner cities exploded in anger and violence. King saw that resistence, in order to win, had to be channeled into a politically-powerful force. In conversation with Robert Kennedy, who was himself already under pressure to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination the following year, King decided to focus on organizing the country’s poor for an occupation of Washington, D.C., to be preceded by a Poor People’s March on the capital. As RFK had observed, it was one thing to extend to someone the right to sit at a lunch counter, but quite another to give that person the wherewithal to pay for the meal. For both men, civil rights was inseparable from economic justice.

Throughout this period of time, King was under constant surveillance. His telephone conversations were trapped and recorded. Transcripts were provided daily to Hoover directly, who enjoyed passing-on little snippets to favorite media hookers and select members of congress.

King’s plans and schedule were known to Hoover and to those with whom he shared the information.

On the second day of King’s stay at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the two black firemen stationed at a firehouse in visual sight of and in proximinity to the motel were transferred to another locale. The single black police officer patrolling the neighborhood was ordered to take a few days off.

On the third day, three hours before he was to be shot on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine, all police and F.B.I. surveillance of King, including physical surveillance, was suddenly terminated, and all agents, local and federal, were withdrawn from the area around the motel. This is fact.

There’s no space here to delineate the evidence, but there’s plenty of it, including the actual confession of a man, Lloyd Jowers, who owned a bar which backed up to the murder scene, that he’d been paid to hide the real assassination rifle and provide cover for the real shooter. The police actions are documented, as is the alteration of the physical scene itself on the day following, the heavy-handed pressuring of witnesses to change their recollections, the witnesses who saw a man running from the rooming house and said the man was not James Earl Ray. The bullet which shattered King’s jaw did not match the rifle which bore Ray’s fingerprints.

King did not die the victim of a lone-nut racist but of a clear plan carried out by the same production company which had brought us Dallas in 1963 and which would finish things up two months later, in Los Angeles.

To create a false myth about King and the Kennedys, to erase the radical purposes to which they were dedicated by distorting the historical record, is to render meaningless their murders and to blind America to the otherwise quite obvious trail from these killings to today’s military/corporate state and the fear-driven politics we’ve been fed in order to render us silent.

It is impossible to overstate the dangers posed by these three men to the most powerful people in the country. They represented not only the idea but the political reality of two enormous changes: economic justice, and an end to the Cold War (and its colossal budget). In the 1960s, there was a struggle for the very soul of the nation. In that struggle, some people rose to lead toward transformation. With unparalleled power and wealth at stake, with the future of the American empire at stake, do you think that the people who planned and directed the assassinations of foreign leaders would stick at bringing the score back home?

In order to know what we’re up against, it is necessary to understand the real history of the country. We can often tell truth from falsehood, if we only look. It’s the looking that’s hard. You’ve got to be an optimist. You’ve got to believe that you can change things. Because if you can’t, then the truth can fall too damned hard sometimes.

Today, something seems to be happening in America. I’d’ve said it was against the odds; probably it still is. King often remarked that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Forty years since they murdered him. Today, while Hillary Clinton campaigned in Memphis, reminding me a lot of Richard Nixon attending King’s funeral, Barack Obama was in Indiana.

Indiana, where on April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy spoke in the darkness to thousands of blacks, people waiting to see him and unaware of King’s murder until he’d told them. For slightly under six minutes, he spoke to those assembled of love and compassion, of the suffering he shared. He invited them to work with him “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.”

It’s been forty years since I’ve been truly hopeful. I saw Obama’s Philadelphia speech. There is no way that speech can be made by anyone other than a giant. We don’t know if he can make it. We don’t know if Hillary will damage him too badly, or if the media will seize upon some tape-looped remark by someone in his life. We don’t know if somebody will try to stir-fry the election returns. We don’t know if anyone – those whose ‘interests’ are threatened by his election or the country’s first successful lone nut since the attempt on McKinley – will entertain more direct and violent measures.

So, yes, when seen through the lens of how American politics works, the odds seem pretty hard. But you can feel it, not only the Obama candidacy but the intention to which it calls us, an electric current of awakening possibility. For a twenty-year-old college student in Pennsylvania, it’s the first time a leader, any leader, has seemed genuine. For a resident of Woodstock Nation who’s carried America around in his head for a very long time, it’s like coming home.

Debra J. Saunders is a columnist who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. My opinion of her may be summed-up in the text of a letter to the editor I once wrote: “Editor: I am sorry to read that ‘Debra J. Saunders is on vacation.’ I had hoped that she was gone for good.” The Chron didn’t print it.

Saunders is annoying because once in a while she’s actually right about something. It would be much easier to just plain hate her. She’s one of those people, like Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, who can push a noun and a verb together successfully while espousing political views ordinarily held by morons.

She got issued the equipment, but in Saunders’ case it appears that something went tragically wrong.

This column is not about Saunders. It is about sub-prime idiots, and I am not referring to the folks who got suckered into playing the latest corporate shell game.

I’ve been thinking about the sub-prime situation, not in any scholarly depth because I don’t understand either commerce or money, which many people can attest to by now, but as would a visitor from Andromeda happening upon this planet and America for the first time.

As I see it, the entirety seems to be starkly and incredibly upside-down.

Last Thursday, Saunders wrote a column entitled “Some days, you get the Bear.” In it, she criticizes Hillary Clinton and, to a lesser extent, Barack Obama for supporting emergency assistance to home buyers screwed by industry-wide predatory lending.

The government bailed out Bear Stearns to the tune of thirty billion dollars of your money. Well, not YOUR money entirely; also your kids’ money and their kids’ money and... so on. That’s $30,000,000,000.00.

We could theoretically wipe out childhood malnutrition on the entirety of Earth for that kind of dough.

Since the Bear Stearns bail-out effectively gives government insurance, at minimal cost, to the biggest thieves on that same Earth, a few questions have been raised.

Saunders writes: “The ugly fact is that some businesses are too big to fail when their demise would shake confidence in the market and assuming $30 billion of Bear Stearns debt could twart a recession.”

As for you, the individual sucker, you are not too big to fail. You can go face down in the mud and Washington will not give a damn, as a lot of New Orleans residents can attest. New Orleans, you may recall, is also not too big to fail.

A recession, which we’re already in, is nothing compared to depression, which is where we’re headed, thanks in no small part to the economic practices of the most corrupt federal government in history. Paying off crooks does not strike me as a way of averting economic collapse.

Saunders hits Clinton for proposing a similar bail-out of the victims. Obama has also offered that suggestion, albeit with elements of foreclosure counseling and money for people who have to sell homes they cannot afford. Her ‘argument’ is that, basically, two wrongs don’t make a right and thirty billion is all we can manage these days. She does not mention the Iraq war, which she ardently supported.

McCain, meanwhile, calls for “improving accounting practices.” By God, there’s a man of action for you. Saunders thinks McCain is correct. After all, those who lost their homes were likely to lose them anyhow. I am not making this up.

To me, the most curious thing of all is the utter failure of Saunders, not to mention the vacuous talking heads of television Snooze, to consider what this all means in systemic terms. That is not a small question.

The government might well, legitimately, assist individuals who have been burned by these corporate thieves. Those people are citizens. They pay taxes. Maybe they even vote. Among the responsibilities of the government is to “provide for the general welfare.” But the corporate clowns “too big to fail” are not citizens other than through a legal fiction, and they do not pay taxes to speak of because they run everything through the Cayman Islands, and the politicians they’ve bought give them tax breaks on the rest.

But we are through the looking glass here, my friends.

The government in a democracy, it may be said, can legitimately bail out citizens. It cannot legitimately bail out corporate thugs. If the best case for covering thirty billion dollars in theft is that it is necessary in order to reassure Wall Street, then the ballgame is certainly over.