Every August for 46 years, until she retired two years ago, Duffy Lyon carved the butter cow sculpture that has occupied a place of honor at the Iowa State Fair. But newly inspired, this summer she crafted 17 pounds of butter into the campaign logo of Democratic presidential aspirant Barack Obama, proudly displaying her creation at an Obama forum on rural… return to article
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Reader Comments (7)Page 1 of 1 pagesI honestly wonder whether the broad electorate wants bold departures at all.
Here are five bold departures.
1. Publicly fund campaigns and mandate TV, cable, and radio time in equal proportions for all candidates. Not “both candidates”, all! Eminent domain law will be the basis, except that air time will be paid for.
2. Open up the televised debates once the various parties (all of them!) have made their nominations. Make them more like symposia, every candidate allowed to tell his or her party’s position on the issues that face the nation. No more presuppositions about who has a “chance to win”. It’s not for a news organization or the conglomerate that controls it to prejudice the issue by filtering who gets to speak their piece to the country. Save digital, full-time copies (not excerpts) on the web, so people can peruse them at leisure, to make sure what the candidates really said in their own words. Again, all this can be at public expense.
(it would be cheaper than a week at war!)
3. If you insist on goddamn voting machines, mandate 100% hardcopy backups, not just idiotic little receipts that could never in a thousand years be re-collected. Electronic data will be compared for congruence with the (100% recycled) paper record. Local and state election boards can bear legal responsibility for keeping this honest.
(personally, i’d abandon the things… all of the companies that make them have a direct interest in who wins an election, objectivity is impossible… but so many of you all seem insistent upon them, and so i insist on backed up data)
4. Evidence of disenfranchisement of legitimate voters, messing with the count, stealing or destroying ballots to freak the result, should not only be a federal offense (as now), but the penalties should be vivid and scary, e.g. general population, no Club Fed. Also big-ass fines that would intimidate even people as rich as Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. Also bar the perps from public office forever, e.g. if a Secretary of State (state-level, of course) should be involved in such a thing. Make it stick. One or two real-life convictions would deliver the message.
5. All contesting parties should have representatives at the vote-counts at the local, district and state levels, overseeing the process, all together with the official tabulators. All will have a shared interest in a true count by way of the competitive relationship among them. Count slowly, and do it twice by mandate. If results vary, do it again until the actual numbers are found, agreed upon by all, and are not disputed by the partisan reps nor the members of election boards. The press and public can wait for accurate results, no more half baked winner-projections that may influence vote patterns in westward time zones.
I said above I wonder if the voters of America really want any truly bold departures, and I further honestly wonder whether Mr Obama or any one of the candidates from any of the parties would endorse a single one of these new directions. But they sure would “expand the boundaries of American democracy”.
If that’s their agenda.
Posted by Kuya on Sep 18, 2007 at 9:44 AM David Moberg’s article raises several pungent issues:
(1) By focusing, realistically, on Obama’s potentially conflicting “personae,” Moberg highlights the degree to which national politics, even at the grass-roots level, hinges upon successful public relations. In other words (and I say this without cynicism), is it possible to imagine a presidential candidate nominated, let alone elected, without being “branded” successfully to a consumer-electorate?
(2) Questions of authenticity—e.g., Is He Progressive Enough? or Is He Post-Ideological Enough? or Is He Black Enough?—have seemed to dog Obama more than the other Democratic contenders. Whether or not such questions are valid in the first place, are they being applied uncritically to this candidate?
(3) In the ensuing months, we certainly will be subjected a ruthless barrage of dirt-digging and fact-spinning by all presidential campaign teams. Should Obama’s team deliberately act to keep their guy above the fray? If so, how?
Posted by francis frank on Sep 19, 2007 at 4:28 AM I honestly wonder when people are going to stop supporting the democrats, and realize that no matter who they vote for, a vote isn’t going to represent, democracy, freedom, equality, or any serious change. To believe that voting for Obama, or any other clown, democrat, republican, or otherwise, is going to seriuosly produce any real difference in this government is flat out stupid. Has no one realized that there is little difference between any of the administrations, democrat or republican? All the liberals and progressives believed that voting in the democrats was going to produce a serious change on this war, yet, here we are, almost a year after they got into congress, they have yet to end the war, more neoliberal economic policies are being enforced, they have done nothing serious to challenge the Bush regime and it’s policies of rejecting our rights, and it really has done nothing different from the Republicans other than minor things. The only thing they’ve done is attempt to end the war somewhat, as they refuse to cut funding which would effectively end the war. They are too afraid of being seen as not supporting the troops (after all, neither party is concerned with the lives of the Iraqi’s, only the American soldiers which are over there killing). Most of the candidates for Presidnet who speak of ending the war don’t even want to seriously end it, they just want to reduce troop numbers, and continue to conduct counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism operations. A new direction is needed which certainly isn’t going to be provided by your government, and until we realize that, then no serious freedom, or change will ever come about.
Posted by anarcho-liberation on Sep 19, 2007 at 6:36 PM Dear Anarcho-Liberation:
In broad principle, I agree with your critique of the U.S. electoral system.
Yes: Powerful people exert power and get results. Yes: People who exert said power very often are ignorant and make horrible decisions.
Your vote is pretty much as impotent as mine in directly causing those in power to be less ignorant or make fewer bad decisions.
Nevertheless, Anarcho-Liberation, your sweeping rhetoric about “real difference” (as well as your more or less random use of pronouns) suggests that you have not yet formulated an organized thought about U.S. politics, let alone paid attention to the politics in your locality.
I respect your passion, but does you passion have a practical direction?
Posted by francis frank on Sep 21, 2007 at 4:15 AM Francist frank-
I do have an organized thought about US politics. My “real difference” is not what you consider to be “real difference” obviously. You might vote democrat because they promise a better healthcare system, or because they are promising to bring about “real change”, they are going to hold corporats accountable, or some other nonsense that they preach, but its obvious that they won’t. Both parties are now bought off by corporations, and both parties will represent corporate interests, so while they talk tough now, once they are elected, any difference they make which is actually reflective upon their care for the people will be minimul. None of them are going to deconstruct the US empire, they won’t address the power that corporations have, they won’t seriously try to bring change about in the world and stop US aggression, and they won’t be giving us our rights back, nor will they give us any more freedom or equality. The capitalist system will continue, and they will probably further disaster capitalism (as naomi klein calls it), we will continue to be wage slaves, and there will continue to be those in poverty, while an elite group filters in billions of dollars a year. We will continue to be oppressed as we have before. There is a practical direction, although you probably won’t f ind it to be practical, nevertheless, the practical direction is to abolish the State, and all hierarchical institutions which are oppressing us. It is to set us free from our masters, and to stop being slaves. Such a solution I see in anarchism, or Social Libertarianism (as some obviously like to cower away from the term anarchy, an example can be found with Spain during the Spanish civil war). It is to create a true democracy, a country which is actually ran by the people collectively, and all decisions are made collectively, not by a few elite people. I’ve paid attention to your politics, and your politicians and “leaders” haven’t given any reason to keep this system, for they may speak of freedom, and they may speak of change, but in the end, they don’t care about you or me, which is why we must take charge and provide ourselves with that which they are refusing to give us. Anarchy as preached by emma goldman, rudolf rocker, peter kropotkin, of course, not as the “chaos” type that the mainstream has propagated the idea to be.
Posted by anarcho-liberation on Sep 21, 2007 at 5:03 PM “To believe that voting for Obama, or any other clown, democrat, republican, or otherwise, is going to seriuosly produce any real difference in this government is flat out stupid.”
So you believe that if Gore had won, there would have still been an Iraqi war? Seems dubious to me. From what i can tell, individuals can and do make significant differences in the life of a nation (and thus the world).
Posted by wolf on Sep 21, 2007 at 7:43 PM Wolf-
Note that I said “real difference”. There of course will be some differences with every candidate. If Gore was elected, we may not have gone to Iraq, but who knows where else we would be, they all have agendas, and Gore would have gone to war with someone else as well, the only difference is, is that Bush is so extreme and stupid in his vision (much like your ideas about Iran actually) that he doesn’t really care about what the result of the actions he takes are, nor does he put any thought into how to not create chaos. Look at the candidates now though, how many of them are actually serius at ending this war? They say they want to end it, but when you listen to them explain what they mean by ending the war, they just mean lowering troop levels and keeping some amount of troops there for the purposes of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, so basically the only thing they are calling for is troop reductions, and more likely than not, an increase in corporate troops from corporations such as Blackwater (I realize they got their license revoked, but it’s highly doubtful it will stay revoked or that they will leave). The idea that any one of your candidates is going to make an extreme difference is naive. If you would actually read my comments and think about all of them instead of just picking up fragments from them, which you seem to enjoy doing, you would perhaps understand me more clearly. None of them will bring about any serious differences in the way the government is being ran by Bush, hence why they aren’t impeaching him, because they want that power for themselves. The elite will still be catered too, as the poor are screwed over for their benefits. Corporate crime will be virtually untouched, and corporate welfare will continue to flow. They will still go along with the disater capitalist system which we are becoming (largely already are, but not fully). No matter who is elected president, they will still cater to Israel, and screw over the Palestinians. They will still not do anything about the problems of class and the oppression of the people (except they will continue to allow it to happen, and help it along to an extent). They’ll turn a blind eye to vulture funds, and that sort of thing. They won’t do the will of the people, for your “democracy” is dead. Of course, for you that are blinded by the capitalist system, and are still convinced that they are going to bring change, you’ll conjur up some way in which they’ve made things better for you, and bring to life the quote “ignorance is bliss” once again, because it’s a democrat, not a Republican, right? Because we all know that they are different, that’s why they didn’t vote for the Iraq war, that’s why they didn’t support the war in Afghanistan, that’s why they didn’t impeach Bush, that’s why they passed the Protect America Act, that’s why they passed the Patriot Act, and the Military Commissions Act (no, the latter two weren’t while they were in the majority, but democrats still voted for them), and the list goes on. We still won’t be free, and we still won’t be equal, and there will still be an elite group which controls society, and there will still be an elite group which gains all the benefits from the work of everyone else, if you want to say there’s a real difference because they’ll maybe do some things like make gay marriage legal, then you need to open your eyes.
Posted by anarcho-liberation on Sep 22, 2007 at 7:50 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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