Hi all--
I went to an organizing meeting for Hillary Clinton in Providence, Rhode Island yesterday.
The meeting was attended by over fifity people; at least half of whom were from Hispanic and African-American communities. Rhode Island state senator Juan Pichardo attended and spoke as well as Congressman James R. Langevin and Mayor of Providence David Cicilline. Roger Lau, director of Hillary Clinton's campaign in New England, expressed confidence that she would win Rhode Island. I'll continue to canvass primarily Hispanic neighborhoods in Providence next week. More later.
Kathleen
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4 comments:
Welcome to the wide world of blogging. I will definately be checking in to see you as a participant of history in the making! This is going to be quite a year for all of us.
Greetings from RI! The Newton volunteers are all showing up this weekend!
I had to express my concern about all the newly politicized Obama supporters......people who have expressed that politics has never interested them, or they did not trust politicians, or had never been involved before........what will happen when their super pol is not able to live up to their expectations? and can not deliver all of what they want him to?
Won't they retreat from politics again, disenchanted and skeptical,and the Obama campaign becomes a recipe for disaster disenfranchising all these new voters? Greetings from Christine and my first blog ever!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgLAn5a_Kcc
You gotta see this! Christine
Straight from the State House! Christine
Q AND A: ANALYST KELLER LOOKS AT PRIMARY RACE IN LIGHT OF “BLUEST STATE”
By Craig Sandler
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, FEB. 29, 2008….The most significant book on Massachusetts politics this season, by one of its most significant political analysts, provides a frame for viewing Barack Obama – and he doesn’t look good.
In “The Bluest State,” CBS4 political analyst Jon Keller posits that Obama typifies a hollow, narcissistic ethos in public leadership that he says has left Massachusetts with an economy, educational system and infrastructure that John and Robert Kennedy would find disturbing and disappointing. He blames the Democratic leadership of the “Me Generation,” now in absolute control of state government. “The Bluest State” asserts that fuzzy, feel-good rhetoric impedes long-term progress on important issues such as education and the environment. And, Keller argues, selecting candidates with this style has cost the Democrats the White House repeatedly.
The glee this book has generated on Beacon Hill is bridled in the extreme. But that’s not slowing Keller down – he’s working on the preface to the paperback edition, which he’ll finish once Ohio and Texas cast their Democratic ballots and the race between Hillary Clinton and Obama presents a clearer picture.
Of course, as with most other theories this campaign season, the premise of “The Bluest State” has taken something of a battering by the electorate. Democrats are rejecting the “establishment” candidate and swarming to a candidate Keller says personifies the kind of politics that’s hurting America: thematic and centered on personal narrative. And the conservatives and evangelicals who decide Republican nominations and, lately, general elections are aghast that the boomer candidate has departed.
Keller cheerfully acknowledges that this is a year where models, frameworks and hypotheses don’t go as far as usual. If nothing else, a Q and A with the CBS4 analyst on the primary campaign in the light of his book produced some “A’s” that qualify as vintage Keller.
Q: Now that the book’s been out there a while and its thesis subject to the rigors of reality, do you still feel good about your premise?
A: It’s a work in progress. It’s a useful tool to have in your belt as you’re trying to navigate through all this. Not the only tool, not an infallible tool. It certainly helps explain what happened on the Republican side, and we’ll see on the Democratic side. I do believe that generational analysis is an important way of trying to figure out not just what’s going on with our political culture, but our overall culture.
Q: The central thought of “The Bluest State” is that the Baby Boom has so far produced leaders who are too self-indulgent, narcissistic and hypocritical to move the nation forward. So having written this, what does it tell us about the primary here and elsewhere?
A: Well, on the Republican side you have John McCain over Mitt Romney – so far, so good, right? I think he strikes a boomer-fatigued electorate as “not a boomer.” And “not a boomer” is a good thing to aspire to be. I think there’s widespread fatigue with the more negative aspects of the boomer political culture, that’s been building through the Clinton years, the Bush years, that’s flowering now.
Q: The subtitle of the book is “How Democrats created the blueprint for American Political Disaster.” What’s the blueprint?
A: Identity politics, NIMBYism and “do as I say-ism.” A chronic disconnect between your rhetoric, which aspires to uplift the poor and the working class, and what you wind up doing and advocating which doesn’t deliver. That’s my indictment about Massachusetts under boomer control: it talks a big game but doesn’t deliver the goods for the people it aspires to represent.
Q: So does Obama fit the mold, in your view?
A: Yes. This is where I think my book is a useful tool for people trying to figure out what’s going on. Not the only tool, and certainly a debatable tool, but…Obama’s trying to pass himself off as post-boomer. I beg to differ – he’s boomer all the way.
Q: And you see danger signs in his approach to the campaign and the presidency?
A: Absolutely. Where Obama really loses me and slips into hopeless boomerism is he, even more than his twin, Deval, indulges in this sort of masturbatory groupthink – feeling good about yourself, this narcissistic self-adulation, without connecting it to anything really specific. He doesn’t even have the nerve that John Edwards had, to specifically call for massive tax hikes on business to fund health care. Where’s the beef? Even Deval, as much as he was reviled for being just vague and together we can, it seems to me offered more specifics than Obama has. He specifically talked about at least stabilizing property taxes. I’m not big on giving Deval credit, but he has offered a series of specific proposals to do that.
Q: So you see too much vagueness and narcissism in the Obama phenomenon.
A: Quick, what is it in the Obama platform that you can really hang your hat on? His exploitation of the PR aspects of the Kennedy legacy without addressing the meat of what Kennedyism was, is appalling. I quote in one of the early chapters where John F. Kennedy believed that supply-side tax cuts would raise the water level of the economy, thereby lifting all boats. Argue with it as you will, he believed in it. He proposed and won what at that time where the most sweeping supply-side cuts in American history. Bobby Kennedy talked at length about specific political reforms. These guys connected their rhetoric and lofty vision with real, actual measurable results with the people they purported to represent. Obama doesn’t do that – boomer political culture doesn’t do that. It thinks it does, but it doesn’t.
Q: Yet voters are flocking to it. Why is that?
A: You have to evaluate how Obama did and didn’t follow the Massachusetts blueprint. There’s no question about it - without ever having to say so, he’s followed the Deval Patrick/David Axelrod playbook and said to boomers, here’s a chance to redeem your generation and by extension yourself. Change is hip. Generational transition is hip. Post-partisanship is hip. He’s definitely surfing the boomer predilection for identity politics. Boomers, certainly on the Democratic side, want to feel good about themselves and their generation, and he’s giving them that chance. He’s adopting the positive part of it, and has done a pretty good of steering clear of the negative parts of it. He’s endorsed charter schools. He’s said no to the basest special-interest instincts of his party. He’s said I’m hewing to neither the Republican nor the Democratic line, this blame-America-first line, on the war in Iraq. When you see him saying “we are the change” and substituting the personal for the policy or the platform, that’s when he’s engaging in boomerism.
Q: That’s when he’s following the blueprint?
A: Right. And I’m not arguing it never works. You know that it can be successful in Massachusetts. The $64 trillion question is, can it be successful in a national election? My fundamental premise is that this blueprint results in political failure – nationally, in a failure to win. We’re going to see if Obamaism can win. The fascinating thing for me is from the perspective of the Bluest State, in the battle with McCain you couldn’t have a clearer contrast. We’re about find out whether the public is willing to let the boomers drive one more time, and McCain is anything but a boomer. The Democrats have everything going in their favor in terms of the economy and how the war has played out. McCain has to really tie Obama in to the boomer culture and say, do you really want to give them the wheel again? The Bluest State should be must reading for the McCain campaign – and I’m not saying that to boost sales!
Q: So getting back to Patrick, are you saying that he’s a hopeless case of boomerism?
A. I don’t think he’s hopeless. I think he may have inherited a hopeless situation. I think we remain in the grip of a boomer political culture that is inept and shortsighted and that doesn’t see its own flaws, and therefore is a long way away from being able to correct them.
Q: How about Romney? Did you see boomerism contributing to his downfall?
A: Romney’s demise certainly fits my premise. Voters recoiled at the self-centeredness of his candidacy, the shallowness of its affect. Because my book is about Massachusetts, it’s focused heavily on liberal Democrats, but I did try to make some effort to point out that these generational characteristics I’m identifying don’t stop at ideological and party lines. Gingrich rides this wave of voter anger to the forefront of Congress and within a year burns himself to the ground basically by egomania run large. He was angry because he didn’t get to sit up front on Air Force One. He threatens to shut the government down. No – hello – that is not what anyone wanted.
Partly [with Romney] it was another boomerism – the love of ideological posturing that we’re famous for, as in his famous, now infamous, decision to sew up the social right. So basically this guy who had always been indifferent to the red meat social issues – abortion, gay marriage – he was…sort of, “come on, can’t we all get along, let’s get back to talking about the economy and reforming the Big Dig” - suddenly, pay-per-view porno in hotel rooms is a problem. When boomers posture that way, ordinary people recoil. When boomer elites do that, ordinary people say, what are you talking about?
Q: So what’s the cure for boomerism, or the antidote? Is it about offering specifics?
A: All I really feel competent to say is, let’s do a better job of seeing through the b.s. You’re right, the b.s. often wins. Obama may well win, and if he does, I hope he transcends everything I think about him.
Q: What spurred you to write this sort of alarm-bell critique of your own generation?
A: Turning 50. I know it’s a wicked cliché, but it happened to me. I didn’t go out and buy a Jaguar, but I kind of reflected more in the sense of a generational reflection. As I say in the book, I grew up in Cambridge, in the 1960s. I’m the son of academics who were Kennedy-era Democratic activists. While I hardly grew up a flaming liberal, I do believe in what Jack and Bobby Kennedy stood for, and I have carried that, as have so many others of my generation, as my generation’s marching orders, to sort of fulfill that legacy. So I’m a middle aged boomer, and I’m looking around at my own state – this unique laboratory, as I argue in the book, for delivering all this bacon – and I have to look around and say, we’re not doing very well.
Q: Is it game over for the boomers, in your opinion? Did this generation just blow it?
A: I’m not saying put us in the nursing home and let the Gen X’ers take over because we’re done, but tick, tick, tick – we have to get our act together. We have to stop wallowing in our own narcissism. It could be that the best place to start is with our edifice complex. We’re always trying to produce the biggest this, the best that, the most complex and revolutionary x. The Internet, the Big Dig. It’s all going to be the greatest ever and no one’s ever seen anything like it. We’ve got to stop doing this. There was a time when there was a big fad, “Small Is Beautiful. Well, when it comes to politics, the best stuff that happens, happens much closer to the grass roots. Mayors who don’t have Potomac fever. I write about one in this book [Boston Mayor Thomas Menino]. Community activists and community development organizations who do great work with affordable housing. Habitat [for Humanity]. The smaller the scope, the more focused the vision, the less grandiose the plan the better. I think that’s where the future is. So I guess what I’m saying is, in the upper echelon of our political elites, we need leaders with humility.
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