RobertaBlog

By now everyone’s heard the story of an Iraqui journalist throwing a shoe at Bush. Actually he threw BOTH shoes! If you watch the video, you can see that no one got up or entered the room until AFTER the second shoe was thrown.

I understand someone throwing a show at the man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. But here’s my question: HOW DID THIS GUY HAVE TIME TO THROW NOT ONE BUT TWO SHOES AT THE PRESIDENT. Where was the Secret Service?

My point is that soon we’ll have a new President who will be a target for reasons both old and new, and whose life will be in the hands of the Secret Service. I seriously hope they are more on the ball than they appear to be in this video.

On a lighter note, my favorite line in this video is: “Lemme talk about the guy throwing the shoe.”

I spent Election Day in Pennsylvania, canvassing to get out the vote for the Obama campaign. After checking the NY Times electoral map religiously every day for the past six months, it was clear McCain had to win Pennsylvania in order to win the election. It was also clear I needed to get out more.

Anything was preferable to spending Election Day waiting for the evening returns to start coming in, so when I received a mass email from bassist Kevin Ray asking for volunteers to canvas around Lansdale, PA, I jumped at the chance.

I drove out to Lansdale, PA, about two hours from Brooklyn, to canvas in the nearby town of Hatfield with Kevin and pianist James Weidman. You may think that three people canvassing together was overkill, but when you’re in a strange neighborhood, following vague Google maps and trying to keep track of which residents you spoke to and what they said, it actually helps.

I did not know Kevin very well before Tuesday, but that day I was grateful to learn that there is at least one person on the planet with a worse sense of direction than me. (Billy has a nickname for me. He calls me “Babylon”, because we once ended up in Babylon, L.I., while trying to get to my cousin’s law office in Baldwin, L.I.) Fortunately James did an excellent job as our de facto navigator.

The way canvassing works, at least on Election Day, is that you are given a list of people to visit who are believed to be supporters of your candidate. Your job is to make sure they get to the polls, by informing them of their polling place, finding out if they need a ride, or simply reminding them how important their vote is. If nobody is home you leave a door tag with their polling place on it. The outcome of each visit is mark it on your sheet, and another canvassing team is supposed to follow up later with another visit.

The poor people in these swing states. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have people constantly knocking on your door for weeks before the election. As a canvasser you always end up unwittingly knocking on a few McCain doors, or you get a “split household”.

There was the McCain supporter wearing Khakis playing with his guns in the garage who was nice enough to fetch his Obama-leaning son for us. As we left, dad said glumly, “Don’t worry. He’s gonna win.” I told him, “We’re liberals. We worry about everything!” That remark elicited what was probably the only chuckle of his day.

There was the woman who just stared grimly at me when I gave her my standard tag line, “Can we count on your support today?” After several seconds of awkward silence, I finally said quietly,”You can say ‘no’ if you want to.” She said “no”.

We also met some people who, for the first time in years, were excited to be voting, and thanked us for coming by. It was amazing to see the enthusiasm people had.

The three of us did a lot of walking around that day. At around 6:30pm we were back at headquarters, ready to let the evening shift take over and head back to NY. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. We heard a rumor that turnout was not as high as had been hoped for in Lansdale. The head of the Lansdale team approached us as we sat drinking eating home-made chili and turkey sandwiches, and asked if we would consider going out again to some streets where, although for some reason they didn’t have the normal documentation to guide us as to which houses to go to, they believed there were a lot of Obama supporters who might not have gotten out to vote.

We were pretty tired at this point, but he pointed out there was only an hour and a half until the polls closed. An hour and a half left, after two years of campaigning! How could we turn him down? So out we trudged, to disturb people sitting at the dinner table, or trying to get their kids ready for bed. This part of the day was not so fun. After a couple of blocks it was clear that everyone who was going to vote had voted by now and we decided to head back to HQ.

Around 8pm we decided it was time to take off. I had driven from Brooklyn separately, so we said our goodbyes and left. I got in my car and turned on NPR. By now we’d heard that Obama had won New Hampshire. As I was getting buckled in, I heard Michele Norris say that Pennsylvania had just been called for Obama. I thought, “Did she say Pennsylvania?’ Then Robert Siegel said,” Did you say Pennsylvania?” He sounded as surprised as I was. From inside the campaign headquarters, I heard a loud cheer that sounded like a roar. We had done it! I went back in to celebrate, and we took these photos.

In today’s NY Times, David Brooks writes,

Only 17 percent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most or all of the time… So the members of my dream Obama administration understand that they cannot impose an ideological program the country does not accept. New presidents in 1932 and 1964 could presuppose a basic level of trust in government. ..But today, as Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution observes, the new president is going to have to build that trust deliberately and step by step.

Brooks disengenuosly fails to acknowledge that it’s not that Americans don’t trust government in general. They don’t trust our current government. If Americans had a problem with government as an institution, they wouldn’t have been voting in record numbers. David, in case you didn’t notice, the election results across the board indicate that it’s Republicans they don’t trust.

This is the same tack Brooks took after the Katrina disaster:

liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America’s faith in big government.

The intellectual dishonesty of this argument is stunning: Republican extremists believe government shouldn’t do anything because government has proven to be ineffectual, incompetent and untrustworthy. And hopefully no one will notice that it’s these extremists who made government ineffectual, incompetent and untrustworthy.

Brooks, and many other right-wing extremists (if you don’t believe he’s a fascist in sheep’s clothing, go back to his older columns before Republicans became so unpopular) claim that Obama didn’t garner enough votes to have a mandate for his policies. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote. In 2004 he barely won it. We didn’t see Brooks writing then that Bush shouldn’t implement his policies because he didn’t have a “mandate”.

In Brooks-speak, to “implement an ideological program the country does not accept”, means to change course from the extreme right-wing policies of the last eight years. As Paul Krugman points out today,

Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent…. That’s a real mandate.

If the country was not ready to accept Obama’s completely transparent platform, he wouldn’t have been elected. It’s extremist Republicans like Brooks who can’t “accept” Obama’s platform. What a relief these hypocrites are out of power and, more important, have finally lost all credibility with the majority of Americans.

I often feel kind of powerless living in a “non-swing” state (from a political, not jazz, perspective). To alleviate my sense of not being able to do enough, I’m offering a free CD while supplies last to anyone who can make the following donation.

Donate at least $35 to Barack Obama’s campaign this week and you have a choice of one of the following:
Sharp Five: Intersect
(great quintet featuring myself, Virginia Mayhew, Jamie Baum, Nicki Parrott, Alison Miller).
Roberta Piket and Alternating Current: I’m Back in Therapy and it’s All Your Fault
(Roberta goes psychedelic electric with a Wurly. Featuring Bruce Arnold, Cliff Schmidt and Kirk Driscoll)

I am trying to make this affordable to everyone. If you can afford to donate more, please do. The race is still very tight.

This video says it all. Tax breaks for the rich and the Iraq war are creating a fiscal deficit that will takes generations to repair. Lack of financial resources means less funding available for education. Less funding for education means more people like this. More people like this means more Republicans are elected. More Republicans means tax breaks for the rich and more war. And the cycle begins again.

It’s unfortunate that in his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, John McCain has yet again demonstrated his willingness to continue the Bush administration’s tradition of choosing political expediency over what is best for the country.

No one is going to believe what I’m about to say. (I wish I’d blogged it.) I predicted McCain would pick a female running mate. From a political point of view it was entirely foreseeable. Today’s Republicans can not possibly win on the issues. This has been true for quite a while. They have won using political tactics. Seen in this light, McCain’s tactic of choosing a right-wing female vice presidential candidate is obvious. He is playing catch-up to the Democrats. Given the historic events that have unfolded vis-a-vis Clinton and Obama (who just happened to be two great candidates), can you actually see him up there with another white man?

Gail Collins said it much better (and it was much funnier) in the Times.

Has McCain forgotten that the purpose of the vice president goes beyond helping him convince disaffected Hillary supporters and Christian extremists to vote for him? McCain would be 81 at the end of a second term and his health has been questionable. Do we really need to risk having another president with no demonstrable understanding of foreign affairs who views the world through a prism of religious fundamentalism? Been there, done that.