Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Live --
Title of book by John McCain
Title of book by John McCain
Ok, pointing out hypocrisy in elected officials is shooting fish in a barrel, there's not much sport in it. But this is a good one. Senator John McCain has made a lot of noise about money in politics, though never spent much time talking about what it actually buys. The Senator was worried about reelection this year, so he opened the money spigots. Now, you may have heard a lot about the billionaire Meg Whitman trying to buy the California governorship. People have made a lot of the fact she spent $80 million in the primary, which divided by the number of votes she received equals about $74 a vote. But she's got nothing on the Senator from Arizona, as of August 4th, the Senator spent $25 million on his reelection bid and received 275,000 votes, which is about $90 a vote. That takes some effort, time for McCain/Feingold II no doubt.
In a related note, the political class of this country likes to tell itself a lot of things in an effort to reassure themselves. The most recent has been the political environment isn't really that volatile, allowing the Democratic arm of the political class to tell itself things will be OK in November. However, at this point there's nothing at all to signal the Democrats will not get their butts kicked from the redwood forests to the gulf stream waters, except, for the one point in their advantage that's remained constant, the unpopularity of the Republicans.
Elections take place in a larger political environment and the American political environment can be described as a vacuum encased in tremendous anger. After ruling the country for three decades, the Republicans are a spent political force. The Democrats, having taken power with the American people's exhaustion with Republican rule, have shown they too remain impotent. The only political life of any substance is the Tea Partyers, but it's diffuse, unorganized, and ill-defined. One certainly can't gain a handle on what they're about by reading the New York Times or watching Fox News, the sanctioned opposite ends of political establishment's media spectrum.
But, this gets to a more fundamental point. Without an informed, educated, organized, and participatory movement, there will be no reform in this country, only ever-growing reactionary-ism. Such movements are not common through history, but they are the only way to reform. In Lawrence Goodwyn's introduction to The Populist Moment he writes:
In a related note, the political class of this country likes to tell itself a lot of things in an effort to reassure themselves. The most recent has been the political environment isn't really that volatile, allowing the Democratic arm of the political class to tell itself things will be OK in November. However, at this point there's nothing at all to signal the Democrats will not get their butts kicked from the redwood forests to the gulf stream waters, except, for the one point in their advantage that's remained constant, the unpopularity of the Republicans.
Elections take place in a larger political environment and the American political environment can be described as a vacuum encased in tremendous anger. After ruling the country for three decades, the Republicans are a spent political force. The Democrats, having taken power with the American people's exhaustion with Republican rule, have shown they too remain impotent. The only political life of any substance is the Tea Partyers, but it's diffuse, unorganized, and ill-defined. One certainly can't gain a handle on what they're about by reading the New York Times or watching Fox News, the sanctioned opposite ends of political establishment's media spectrum.
But, this gets to a more fundamental point. Without an informed, educated, organized, and participatory movement, there will be no reform in this country, only ever-growing reactionary-ism. Such movements are not common through history, but they are the only way to reform. In Lawrence Goodwyn's introduction to The Populist Moment he writes:
The sober fact is that movements of mass democratic protest -- that is to say, coordinated insurgent actions by hundreds of thousands or millions of people -- represent a political, an organizational, and above all, a cultural achievement of the first magnitude. Beyond this, mass protest requires a high order not only of cultural education and tactical achievement, it requires a high order of sequential achievement....The simple fact of the matter is that so difficult has the process of movement-building proven to be since the onset of industrialization in the western world that all democratic protest movements have been aborted or limited in this manner prior to the recruitment of their full natural constituency. The underlying social reality is, therefore, one that is not generally kept firmly in mind as an operative dynamic of modern society -- namely, that mass democratic movements are overarchingly difficult for human beings to generate.Nonetheless, that's where we are, that is what's needed.
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