They Get to Take Out Davis in 2003; We Get to Take Out Bush 2004

[Composed Thinker]

Look at it that way.

[kalian]

1. Hmmm...

I don't think so... Wishful thinking does not win "elections"... The powers arrayed against us are too overwhelming. Unless we get monitored elections (UN monitored that is)...repukes get to keep their "boy wonder"...

[Composed Thinker]

2. What? Stop with that nonsense.

[kalian]

3. No...YOU stop with the wishful thinking....

The first thing you have to realize is that the repukes managed to stage a recall. Something unheard off in the scale under which is has transpired.
If a dem would have tried to pull this crap off against some incumbent repuke governor, you would have been astonished at the political backlash that would have ensued. Let's just start with the media...

THINK about what has happened tonight in California....

[Emillereid]

4. God, I wish I could share your optimism, but I really think that

this victory of the gropenator is more ominous than that. I think it tells us about the unthinking, gulliable, uninformed, authoritarian electorate that we have in America. They are 'good' Germans. They want a 'strongman' leader. They resist complicated answers to complicated issue. They simply want the trains to run on time. I personally wish I didn't know and I wish I didn't care so much -- it hurts.

See this article in the editorial forum:

Of all the explanations offered for the mystery of why people vote against their own economic interests by voting Republican, this article is definitely one of the best I've ever seen.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16885

George W. Bush is sinking in the polls, but a few beats on the war drum could reverse that trend and re-elect him in 2004. Ironically, the sector of American society now poised to keep him in the White House is the one which stands to lose the most from virtually all of his policies – blue-collar men. A full 49 percent of them and 38 percent percent of blue-collar women told a January 2003 Roper poll they would vote for Bush in 2004.

In fact, blue-collar workers were more pro-Bush than professionals and managers among whom only 40 percent of men and 32 percent of women, when polled, favor him; that is, people who reported to Roper such occupations as painter, furniture mover, waitress, and sewer repairman were more likely to be for our pro-big business president than people with occupations like doctor, attorney, CPA or property manager. High-school graduates and dropouts were more pro-Bush (41 percent) than people with graduate degrees (36 percent). And people with family incomes of $30,000 or less were no more opposed to Bush than those with incomes of $75,000 or more.

We should think about this. The blue-collar vote is huge. Skilled and semi-skilled manual jobs are on the decline, of course, but if we count as blue-collar those workers without a college degree, as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers do in their book Why the White Working Class Still Matters, then blue-collar voters represent 55 percent of all voters. They are, the authors note, the real swing vote in America. "Their loyalties shift the most from election to election and in so doing determine the winners in American politics."

<snip>

We can certainly understand why Bush wants blue-collar voters. But why would a near majority of blue-collar voters still want Bush? Millionaires, billionaires for Bush, well, sure; he's their man. But why pipe fitters and cafeteria workers? Some are drawn to his pro-marriage, pro-church, pro-gun stands, but could those issues override a voter's economic self-interest?

Read the whole piece, HIGHLY recommended!

sw

[regnaD kciN]

5. You got that right!

What makes this so depressing, if not surprising, is that it highlights once again the sheer level of apathy about politics in the U.S. It has become so devalued that it has reached the status of pure entertainment, where the only thing that can get people excited enough to go to the polls is a chance to vote for their favorite movie star. Issues, concerns, and challenges facing the officeholder? The need for education, experience, ideas, and a track record of facing those challenges? Who cares??? They're all too hard or boring to figure out. The only thing that will fire me up is the chance to elect The Terminator! ]<001!

People don't care about politics -- only about elections, in other words a short-term contest where you can root for one celebrity or another, judge how they "perform" on pre-scripted events, and so on. From the vantage point of the average Californian voter, is there much difference between the recall election for governor and the latest edition of "American Idol" or even "Survivor"...? Hard to tell from here.

What makes this apathy so dangerous is not that it gives The Powers That Be the ability to take over any office, anytime, by simply building an expensive and slick campaign around an empty-headed entertainment "star," but that it also allows people to concentrate on "the contest" rather than on the effects of life under the eventual winner. After all, lots of people watched the month-long Florida 2000 controversy with interest, but when it ended (with a naked power-grab that would have been unthinkable even the day after the election), they basically turned away with a shrug.

In my darkest moments, I wonder what might happen next November if, somehow, Bush were to lose the election, then declare that he wasn't giving up power anyway. Say, he'd declare that there was a major new terrorist threat (or maybe even "allow" a worse-than-9/11 event), and that it required declaring a state of emergency and suspending the Consititution..."temporarily," of course, but until further notice. Would the citizens of the U.S. react with outrage and take to the streets? Or would they decide that it really didn't matter whether Bush or the newly-elected Democrat was in charge, and just "trust" that Bush would do the right thing and step aside when the time came...and, if not, it didn't make a whole lot of difference to them, anyway?



Italian director Fredrico Fellini once spoke about his autobiographical film Amarcord, set in 1930s Italy, and how it dramatized the "infantilization" that comes about in a fascist society. How, since you have a "parental" government deciding the big issues for you, people revert to a childish level of excitement in trivial things: spectacle, sport, lowbrow comedy, movie stars, and the like, all the while ignoring everything that's going on under their noses. I can't help but think that America in this decade seems to be about where Fellini's small-town Italians were under the fascisti. Or, to put it another way from the same era, have we become a nation of "good Germans?" If so, it would certainly explain how a supposedly "Democratic" state could elect an Austrian who has voiced Nazi sentiments to their highest office. Today California, tomorrow the world? (Oh, wait...they've already got that, too...)

[John_Shadows_1]

6. we all have to get involved in the process...

... we're the ones who belive in the party (and thus America) the most. Be prepared when the big campaigns come - you've got to go out and work and help candidates - let's take this f***ing country back from these corporate jackasses!