I love me some Obama. If you want to debate who should be president, I’d love to talk.
But it’s important to hold your friends’ feet to the fire too, so I’ll point out a couple of things from Obama’s speech that were dishonest. First, if you read the text of Obama’s speech it will be clear that it was not John McCain who called the country a “nation of whiners,” but an advisor (Phil Gramm), but the language was purposely obfuscated to make it sound like McCain made the comment. Second, Obama claimed that McCain defined middle class as anyone making “less than five million dollars a year.” This was in reference to McCain’s answer to the question “what is the definition of rich” at the recent Saddleback forum. I thought McCain was actually pretty nuanced on that issue, he tried to point out that some of the least happy people he knew were quite well off. This could very well be because John McCain doesn’t know any poor people, but I digress.
As promised, Elaine and I walked past the Buffalo Rose last night where Al-Jazeera interviewed some Golden residents re: the election. There were plenty of people in the bar, but the spectacle was out front where folks were holding signs that said things like: “God forgives, we don’t” and generally being rowdy.
As I looked on in quiet disappointment – denigrating Muslims for not eating pork and conflating Al-Jazeera with Al-Qaeda are not the ways to win friends in the Middle East – I noticed a reporter jotting notes. I almost walked up to him and said, “Don’t sensationalize this; it’s just a handful of ill-informed and possibly even well-meaning folks that want some attention.” But I didn’t.
Well it turned out that the guy was Dana Milbank from the Washington Post and he wrote about the incident in a pretty non-flattering tone in today’s paper. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/27/AR2008082703977.html?referrer=emailarticle
And, in a particularly ironic twist, the only coverage of Golden I could find on the Al-Jazeera website was pretty positive.
“On this second day of the Democratic convention, it was off to the small city of Golden, 24km west of Denver. The city sits in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains – just 21 square kilometres nestled in a valley along Clear Creek. Small shops and offices line the streets, and people warmly say hello to each other. When they see our crew, some tell us they're glad to have a chance to tell the world what they think about this political season. The overwhelming message – people are hungry for a renewed sense of economic and psychological security – and they're very keen to see what both Barack Obama and John McCain have to offer them.”
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/08/200882516620749740.html
After we walked by the protest I fished in the creek for a while (I long-released a couple) and Elaine went to the library to knit with a group of needleworkers. When I stopped in to say hi, I noticed that one of the regulars, a girl who wears a headscarf – and is a member of the family who owns the Lebanese place that is probably the best restaurant in town – wasn’t in attendance. If she stayed home because she didn’t feel like it was safe to be out among the protesters, then shame on Golden, and shame on me for not doing more about it.
So I went to see the hoopla today. I rode the bus from Golden to Denver and went to a forum convened by the Progressive Democrats of America (http://www.pdamerica.org/).
The first panel discussed immigration. The two takeaway points were:
A) There are two types of factors that lead to immigration, push factors – that is crummy conditions in other countries – and pull factors – opportunities that exist in the U.S. that don’t exist elsewhere. Immigration policy has largely dealt with the pull side, busting U.S. employers for violations (when it’s politically expedient). But what about push factors? Are we making good-faith efforts to help Latin American countries thrive? The panelists argued that U.S. imposed neo-liberal economic policy, so-called “free trade,” and American military support for corrupt regimes have created de-stabilized conditions that cause people to leave their homes.
B) All people, citizens or not, have a vested interest in immigration policy. If we normalize the idea that some people are illegal human beings because they didn’t have the good fortune to be born here, and we pursue them aggressively (think police raids with lots of guns), then we begin to think of a world where civil liberties are contingent as normal. First they came for the janitors, but I was silent...
The second panel discussed economic justice. The highlight was Jim McGovern, U.S. Rep from Massachusetts who was remarkably candid about poverty and hunger in the United States. There was lots of talk about a new New Deal, such as a modern Civilian Conservation Corps to repair the American infrastructure. The other panelists were the heads of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch (http://www.citizen.org/trade/) and the Front Range Economic Strategy Center (http://fresc.org/). They were pro-Union and anti-WTO, and frankly, a little glib.
This was the truest of the true believers, there was lots of hugging and some painfully sincere acoustic musical performances. On the whole though, I was pretty impressed. I like passionate people, even if I don’t agree with everything they say. Sean Penn was there. Aloha Mr. Hand.
I bailed on the third panel and went off in search of the free speech zone. I was secretly hoping to get caught up in a march for something cool – religious freedom in China or equal pay for equal work or fully funded children’s health care – but it didn’t happen. I couldn’t get within several hundred yards of the convention center. The friendly policemen with machine guns told me how to get to the designated protest area, but it was a total joke. There was a stage and a live microphone, but the place was dead empty. Literally, it was me and some lady looking at each other and asking “where are the protesters?’ Kind of scary.
