On Wednesday, February 13, 2008, some of us witnessed one of those
important moments in U.S. political television election coverage. For reasons which were never made clear, General Electric’s MSNBC decided to drop its winning (for McCain) strategy of keeping their candidate out of sight and using its reporters to promote him as a
maverick a
truth teller a Republican
independent and someone who
gives the finger to the establishment. After it became clear that Obama and McCain had won Virginia, DC and Maryland, the 24 news network, showed Obama delivering a powerhouse speech to an adoring crowd of 17,000. Then, they cut to John McCain, sort of mumbling his way through some notes to a handful of people who did not seem much more enthusiastic than the candidate himself.
The contrast could not have been more stark.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m9Gbb6NSwMIgnore the image of something moving up Tweety’s thigh. Focus instead on KO’s words:
KO: In a statement which I hope transcends political orientation and party affiliation…the rule has to be speak before Barack Obama, not after Barack Obama.
John McCain is staking his political future on the fact that he supported the surge in Iraq, and now the Pentagon is issuing statements via commanders like Major General Rick Lynch which say (in effect)
Yessirree, that surge is sure doing the trick. We are kicking butt in Iraq and securing the civilians. Thank God for brave Republicans like John McCain who stood up to cut and run Democrats!”
http://www.zimbio.com/Major+General+Rick+Lynch/articles/7/Iraq+Surge+Citizen+Participation+SecurityHowever, Barack Obama is staking his political future on a different kind of a surge.
A surge of hope. Go on-line and Google Barack Obama and “Surge of Hope”, and you will find over 8000 hits.
That is a lot of hope. As Keith Olbermann pointed out later, McCain is notorious for his pessimistic straight talk, which means this years’ contest is shaping up to be a battle of
Hope vs. Pessimism . And in the United States, Hope always wins.
Notice that I call my journal
Barack Obama and the Great Surge of Hope . Anyone ever the age of forty will recognize the reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s famous article
Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith from 1976. Published in the
Rolling Stone , it included a roundabout account of how Thompson attended the Georgia Law Day in 1974 as a guest of Ted Kennedy and heard Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter (who was not running for president then) deliver a stunning extemporaneous speech about the inequities in the criminal justice system and about how America must become the land of liberty
for all again.
Here is a summary of the article’s effect on the 1976 election.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/books/chapters/0424-1st-mahler.html That night Rolling Stone magazine threw a big bash for Carter's campaign staff at Automation House on the Upper East Side. A month earlier the magazine had splashed Hunter S. Thompson's maniacal twenty-five-thousand-word profile of Carter-JIMMY CARTER AND THE GREAT LEAP OF FAITH-on its cover, thus sewing up the youth vote for the Democratic candidate. (Thompson insisted that the article wasn't an endorsement, but you would have to have been high to read it as anything less.)
Here is what Thompson actually said:
“I have never heard a sustained piece of oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon May 1974”
And also
“There was no written text of the speech, no press to report it , no audience hungry to hear it , and no real reason for giving it---except that Jimmy Carter had a few serious things on his mind that day, and he figured it was about time to unload them, whether the audience liked it or not…”
Thanks to a tape recording that Thompson made of the speech, we have a transcript (Carter had no notes since he made it up as he went along). Thompson began playing it for people in 1976 when Carter started running for president.
http://www.narsil.org/politics/carter/law_day.html Governor Jimmy Carter’s Law Day Address (excerpts)
snip
My own interest in the criminal justice system is very deep and heartfelt. Not having studied law, I've had to learn the hard way. I read a lot and listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equity is from reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of his books that Bill Gunter gave me quite a number of years ago. The other source of my understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. After listening to his records about "The Ballad of Hattie Carol" and "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Times, They Are a-Changing," I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.
I grew up as a landowner's son. But I don't think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan's record, "I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More." So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.
Snips
I don't want to go on and on; I'm part of it. But the point I want to make to you is that we still have a long way to go. In every age or every year, we have a tendency to believe that we've come so far now, that there's no way to improve the present system. I'm sure when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they felt that was the ultimate in transportation. When the first atomic bomb was exploded, that was the ultimate development in nuclear physics, and so forth.
Well, we haven't reached the ultimate. But who's going to search the heart and soul of an organization like yours or a law school or state or nation and say, "What can we still do to restore equity and justice or to preserve it or to enhance it in this society?"
You know, I'm not afraid to make the change. I don't have anything to lose. But, as a farmer, I'm not qualified to assess the characteristics of the 9,100 inmates in the Georgia prisons, 50 percent of whom ought not to be there. They ought to be on probation or under some other supervision and assess what the results of previous court rulings might bring to bear on their lives.
I was in the governor's mansion for 2 years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a prisoner - a woman. One day she came to me, after she got over her 2 years of timidity, and said, "Governor, I would like to borrow $250 from you."
I said, "I'm not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much."
She said, " I don't want to hire a lawyer. I want to pay the judge."
I thought it was a ridiculous statement for her; I felt that she was ignorant. But I found out she wasn't. She had been sentenced by a superior court judge in the state, who still serves, to 7 years or $750. She had raised, early in her prison career, $500. I didn't lend her the money, but I had Bill Harper, my legal aide, look into it. He found the circumstances were true. She was quickly released under a recent court ruling that had come down in the past few years.
Snip
My heart feels and cries out that something ought to be analyzed, not just about the structure of government, judicial qualifications councils and judicial appointment committees and eliminating the unsworn statement - those things are important. But they don't reach the crux of the point - that now we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.
Snip
The point of the book is, and what Tolstoy points out in the epilogue is, that he didn't write the book about Napoleon or the Czar of Russia or even the generals, except in a rare occasion. He wrote it about the students and the housewives and the barbers and the farmers and the privates in the army. And the point of the book is that the course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like Presidents or governors or senators. They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people. If that was true in the case of Russia where they had a czar or France where they had an emperor, how much more true is it in our own case where the Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be?
Well, I've read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney general, who protected his boss, and now brags on the fact that he tiptoed through a mine field and came out "clean." I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a mine field on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterwards.
I think our people demand more than that. I believe that everyone in this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form ought to remember the oath that Thomas Jefferson and others took when they practically signed their own death warrant, writing the Declaration of Independence - to preserve justice and equity and freedom and fairness, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
In 2004, another as yet undeclared presidential candidate would make a similarly memorable speech.
Why is Barack Obama a superstar right now and Jimmy Carter an after thought? The Right Wing-Corporate Machine---Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, David Rockefeller made sure that the nation remembered Jimmy Carter as a loser. America hates a loser. However, the man who ran for president in 1976 was a winner. He answered the needs of an America that was sick and tired of Nixon’s executive abuses and his Article II power grabs. America in 1976 wanted something it could believe in again. It was ready to make the “great leap of faith.” It wanted “hope”.
Even with Obama and Iraq dominating the television news airwaves, when you Google “Surge of Hope”, the first thing you find is not Obama. It a
Time magazine article from December 19, 1977.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945843,00.html “A Surge of Hope in the US”
In the roseate afterglow of Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Israel, Americans experienced a powerful surge of hope for peace in the Middle East. About 86% of Americans believe that the Egyptian President's initiative increased the chances for peace. That mood of confidence was shared, overwhelmingly, by citizens of every political stripe, including 87% of Republicans, 84% of Democrats and 90% of Independents. These are some of the results of a nationwide survey of 1,050 registered voters conducted for TIME by the opinion-research firm of Yankelovich, Skelly and White Inc.
That’s right.
The very first surge of hope did not come from Barack Obama. It came from President Jimmy Carter. The Camp David Accords lead to one of the few lasting positive changes in the Middle East—peace between Egypt and Israel.
When is the last time we have had any hope for Middle East peace? It sure would be nice if it could happen again, wouldn’t it?
Well, back in 1977, under Jimmy Carter, almost all of us had hope for peace in the Middle East.But I didn’t start writing this journal to discuss the situation in the Middle East. This is about the election.
What I really want to talk about is election history. Republicans and right wing pundits are fascinated by 1964, 1968 and 1972. Recently Pat Buchanan said that Obama is either George McGovern or Barry Goldwater (!!!!). I think the point was supposed to be that Buchanan was calling him a loser, since that is about all the two men have in common. Tom Brokaw warned the MSNBC Super Tuesday GOP audience that they must resist repeating 1968, with McCain as their own Hubert Humphrey destined to be let down by a fractured party in the general if conservatives refused to get behind him, just because he is a waffler who votes which ever way the wind blows (kind of like Humphrey). Republicans have been attempting to divide and conquer Democrats with inflammatory on-line posts that betray their origins with their references to Vince Foster and “Clintonistas”---shades of CREEP and 1972 dirty tricks designed to artificially reproduced the natural
freakiness of 1968.
The year that Republicans do not ever mention, and the year that they do not want Democrats to even think about is 1976. Why? Because
in 1976, we kicked their ass. And this year is very much like 1976. We are seeing the end of the reign of despots who attempted to use Article II to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. Election integrity came under attack during both the Bush and Nixon administrations. The White House broke laws. They blackmailed. They spied. They engaged in illegal wars (for that Article II excuse). They ran rough shod over civil liberties like bulls in a china shop. Their popularity went into the toilet. Nixon got himself a pardon, by resigning and appointing Gerald Ford. Bush wants to get himself a pardon by throwing the full weight of his illegal political operation--- the DOJ, Federal Agencies, the Pentagon--behind John McCain. Gerald Ford, bumbling, unattractive, saddled with the Nixon administration could never have been elected on his own merits. John McCain (as he is now) seventy something years old, bumbling, dispirited, saddled with Bush’s war can never get elected on his own merits.
And the front runner for the Democrats in 1976 and in 2008 is/are self styled
outsiders , charismatic
change candidates, untainted by the wars and by establishment political corruption. Both Carter and Obama astounded the Democratic establishments by organizing grass root campaigns modeled on that of George McGovern . They took the nation by storm in the early primaries---New Hampshire in 1976, Iowa in 2008. Both of them had obstacles to overcome. In 1976, a white southern man who talked about Jesus had to convince northern liberals that he was not a stealth George Wallace. In 2008, Obama will still find a few isolated pockets of racial prejudice(though Katrina showed that this is fast on the decline). Both of them counter criticism of their lack of experience with the promise that “lack of experience” is another term for “freedom to try new ideas.” In Obama’s case, being a lawyer with a little bit of Capital Hill experience, he will probably fare better than Carter who was a nuclear engineer and a complete Washington outsider.
Despite the differences in their backgrounds, the two men’s campaigns have a lot in common, and it is their commonalities that make then so successful this year, when people are looking for hope. In an older journal, I analyzed the rhetorical style of Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter to show that they are quite similar.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/116This miffed some people. Those who grew up during the Reagan era were taught that Carter was a failure as a president. This is a distortion. His big sin, as far as most Democrats are concerned, is his loss in 1980. ABC and Ted Koppel are partly responsible with their “America Held Hostage” media atrocity which ran night after night for months. And then, Bush cut his deal with the devil. In the early 1980s, the exiled president of Iran told the European press that George HW Bush had arranged a hostage for votes deal so that Reagan could win the 1980 election. Only PBS reported it in the US. No one here seemed to care. The Big Lie
Carter is a Loser had been accepted. The nation had given up hope. It had accepted AIDS, crass materialism, cocaine and the politics of self interest---in other words, it had succumbed to despair.
Or did we?
Although government has its limits and cannot solve all our problems, we Americans reject the view that we must be reconciled to failures and mediocrity, or to an inferior quality of life. For I believe that we can come through this time of trouble stronger than ever. Like troops who have been in combat, we have been tempered in the fire; we have been disciplined, and we have been educated.
Guided by lasting and simple moral values, we have emerged idealists without illusions, realists who still know the old dreams of justice and liberty, of country and of community. Jimmy Carter
Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. Barack Obama
Divide and Conquer is the Republicans favorite strategy. They will divide white collar Democrats from blue collar Democrats. They will divide Blacks from Hispanics and men from women.
They will even attempt to divide us from our own heritage---make us forget the lessons of the past. They will tell us
“Jimmy Carter was so 1970s. You do not want to be like him. You want to be new.”There is a reason why social studies is taught by coaches in public schools. If the same attention were given to educating the American electorate to their history and their political system and their laws that is given to teaching them algebra and calculus, they might leave school with the ability to understand the machinations of corporations and the news media and politicians. They would know how to look at the events around them and look back in history for similar circumstances and see how similar problems were resolved (or worsened). For people are basically people, no matter how the times may change. The struggle for freedom from oppression under the corporate machine has been going on since the days of the monopolies that people like Teddy Roosevelt were busting one hundred years ago. Science has gotten bigger and better, but greed has not changed, nor has ambition, nor have the lies.
Dick Cheney tried to recreate the Nixon Administration and the Vietnam War. It is practically inevitable that the American people will recreate the presidential election of 1976 in response. This is why so many Republicans look so very, very afraid right now.
Read the entire Jimmy Carter Law Day Speech. The problems he spoke about spontaneously—the two tiered justice system, legal corruption—still exists. Consider what inspired an outgoing governor of a state like Georgia speaking to a room full of rich, establishment types to deliver such admonishment and then think about what must have been going through his mind when he decided that it was time to run for president. Barack Obama may felt the same way when he was thinking about whether or not to make a run for the White House.
Barack Obama is fresh. He is new. But he is also part of a tradition of great Democratic leaders who have emerged to give voice to the hope that is always there inside of us, no matter how hard the opposition tries to bury it under a pile of despair and apathy. Some may not like me for saying that Obama is not the first person to ever say what he is saying, but for my part, it fills me with a tremendous sense of hope, because it means that
human beings are by nature optimistic and no matter how much you oppress us, we will keep springing back and we will keep looking for a leader to guide us out of the dark.
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