RobertaBlog

Clinton’s support of McCain’s summer gas tax moratorium idea is a classic example of Democrats who think they can win by being “Republican Lite.” Only Obama had the integrity to tell the truth about this silly idea, that every respected economist says it will only raise gas prices in the long run, while giving yet another windfall to the oil companies.

This is from Today’s Times:

The result [of yesterday's special election] in Mississippi, and what Republicans said was a surge in African-American turnout, suggested that Mr. Obama might have the effect of putting into play Southern seats that were once solidly Republican, rather than dragging down Democratic candidates.

In other words, a lot of newly enfranchised African Americans will effect the fall election results if Obama is the nominee. (This is assuming that the Republicans in the state legislatures don’t completely succeed in their legislative efforts to disenfranchise traditionally Democratic-leaning voting blocs with phony “voter id” initiatives.) According to this article, Republicans are worried that they are more likely to come to the polls for Barack Obama, and will not only effect the Presidential election but Congressional races as well.

Woody Jenkins, a Louisiana Republican who lost in a special House election this month, said in an interview that the high African-American turnout in his district was “probably the decisive factor” in his loss.

The election results also raised questions about what had been a main Republican strategy for the fall, if Mr. Obama wins the nomination: to link Democrats in conservative districts to Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama, campaigning in Sterling Heights, Mich., said the outcome in the Mississippi contest, to fill a “hard-core Republican seat,” proved that the strategy would not work.

Driving up the crowded West Side Highway last Friday on a clear and dry afternoon, my car was slightly side-swiped on the driver side above the rear wheel by a commercial van. I signaled the driver (a portly middle-aged man with an unkempt grey beard) to stop but he ignored me. After a mile or so we had to stop at a traffic light. I got out of my car and approached his window. He kept the window rolled up and stared straight ahead. I was able to get the name and contact info for the company that owned the van. I called the company, AHL Tone Communications, which apparently has locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and told the woman who answered the phone that I had just been side-swiped by one of their vans and the driver had left the scene of the accident. She was remarkably casual and unapologetic about the incident. She asked for my cell number and said she’d have the driver call me. Thirty minutes later, still no call. I called her back and she was uninterested in speaking with me further, to say the least. In fact, she hung up on me.

I considered calling the police but decided it was not worth the hour I would have spent waiting for them to show up. So I cut my losses, reported the incident to my insurance company (not as a claim, just for informational purposes), went home and ate Green and Black’s hazelnut and currant dark chocolate.

This is the place to find live concert footage of the trio. You can also visit our myspace and jazzvision.net pages, but I will embed everything here so for video of the trio performing there’s no need to look further.

Thanks to Jim Merod for recording us at Soka University last November.

Roberta Piket Trio West Coast Tour 2007: Make Someone Happy:

Roberta Piket Trio West Coast Tour 2007: Shmear (by Billy Mintz):

Roberta Piket Trio West Coast Tour 2007: Billy’s Ballad (by Billy Mintz):

Roberta Piket Trio West Coast Tour 2007: My Friends and Neighbors (by Roberta Piket):

Roberta Piket Trio West Coast Tour 2007: If I Loved You:

On NPR’s To the Point today, the point was made that Obama will have more credibility than Clinton in the general election as he will be the only candidate who opposed the Iraq war from the start. This is a great rhetorical advantage that Clinton would not have, and adds weight to my theory that Obama is more electable than Clinton in November.

I REALLY tried to watch the GOP debates. But how long can you spend watching a bunch of guys fight over who cut taxes more and whom Rush Limbough loves most.

(Really, any idiot can cut taxes. It’s not exactly an unpopular stand with most voters. What I don’t hear is anyone illustrating that they have cut taxes responsibly.)

The level of sophistication in the Republican debates is so much lower than in the Democratic debates. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after the conventions. Will the intelligence of the debates go up or down? It will probably depend on who the candidates are. If Clinton is the nominee, we will have a Democratic candidate who has illustrated while in the Senate that she will acquiesce in letting the Republicans set the agenda. If Obama is the nominee, I hope that he will raise the level of discourse as he has in the Democratic debates.

It occurred to me today (I’ve been busy and haven’t had much time to think about it) that, now that Edwards has dropped out, it is almost guaranteed that for the first time in American history the presidential nominee of a major political party will either be a woman or an African-American. What an exciting time this is. It’s almost enough to make me want to stick around in this country to see if, perhaps, there’s hope for us.

Zcott makes some good points in his comment on my last post. It’s true that Hillary and Bill have more experience dealing with the opposition than Barack does. (I think this was what Hillary was getting at in her MLK/LBJ remark. The implication was that Johnson was able to overcome the southern “Dixiecrats” in Congress because of his experience and ties to the legislature.)

However, I don’t think the Clintons have been terribly successful negotiating with the right wing, unless giving in can be considered a successful negotiation strategy. After the GOP won Congress in 1994, Clinton all but gave up his agenda out of fear he would not be reelected. After 9/11, Hillary, along with most other Democrats, caved to the right wing agenda. I am not sure that is the kind if “experience” we need.

Obama is not as seasoned, but neither does he appear to be completely naive. Based on his ability to fend off the Clintons’ attacks, Obama is very skilled at defending himself and his positions. (He clearly hopes that his recurring “one America” campaign theme will help neutralize the right-wing attack dogs.)

Moreover, Obama is better prepared than Clinton was in 1992. First, he has experience in the Senate. When Bill Clinton was elected, he had no experience in Congress. He had been a governor. Secondly, Clinton was elected just as the right wing media machine was getting going. Obama will be better prepared because of what Clinton, and the country, went through. He will not be taken by surprise, and neither will the country, by bogus impeachment hearings and lying state troopers, by the Rush Limboughs and David Brocks and by the Newt Gingrichs and Grover Norquists.

Still all of this is conjecture and zcott may be correct that Hillary Clinton will have a better chance of accomplishing her agenda. I’m just not sure that, after all the battle scars, what’s left of her agenda is worth accomplishing.

[Kudos to the Word Press people for their awesome autosave feature. My internet connection has been spotty all night. I almost lost this entire post and was not looking forward to recreating it from scratch. Remember people: backup backup backup.]

I’ve been going back and forth for weeks - Obama or Clinton. I admit I was leaning towards Edwards after seeing him in person at Cooper Union back in the fall, but I don’t think he’s dynamic and quick thinking enough to effectively fight the right wing machine that would be attacking him in the general election.

The truth is I could live with any of them being President. Let’s face it, Claude could do a better job than the moron we’ve got now. (For those of you who don’t know me well, Claude is my cat. Or I should say, my cat is clawed.)

An important question is who is the most electable, who has the best chance in the general election? Of the three leading candidates, I would never have imagined I would choose the only white male as the least electable. It’s too bad about Edwards because I’ve liked him since 2004 when I thought he should have been leading the ticket.

But I’ve paid close attention to Edwards, at Cooper Union and then at the debates. I don’t find him terribly articulate or quick on his feet. Now granted that didn’t stop Bush from getting elected, but the Republicans play a different sleazier brand of politics to which Democrats may never measure up (although lately the Clintons are coming close), and so different criteria apply.

Looking at the last several elections, going all the way back to Mondale vs. Reagan, I can’t remember one Democratic candidate who had the charisma and savvy to respond strongly and articulately to the right-wing attack machine, except Bill Clinton. (Not coincidentally, he was the only one to win.) Every four years, save for ‘92 and ‘96, my heart would break watching that year’s Democratic sacrificial lamb walk on eggs to avoid getting the Republicans mad at him. I remember Mondale assuring us in a debate with Reagan that he did indeed “respect the President.” I remember Dukakis defending himself against “accusations” that he was a liberal. (I will never forgive him for allowing that to become a dirty word in America.) I remember cringing when I first heard Kerry’s new campaign slogan - “‘W’ is for ‘wrong’”. Lame. Lame. LAME.

So watching Edwards up there, repeating the same two or three talking points over and over, I know he wouldn’t make it. He may be qualified to BE president, but he is not qualified to RUN for President. Not that I question the validity or sincerity of his platform. I just cannot stomach another electoral season of yelling at the TV the things the candidate ought to be saying while he sits there like a deer in headlights repeating the same uninspiring line.

Hillary is an improvement over Edwards in terms of her ability to rally an audience, but let’s face it. She is not in Barack’s league. He is the most inspiring and articulate politician we’ve had since Bill. And Bill and Hillary know it. That’s why they’ve had Bill on the campaign trail doing what Hillary can’t - stirring people up. (After 7 years of pre-fab speeches delivered by a brain-dead frat boy, I have to admit I’ve enjoyed watching Bill and Barack spar remotely. They’re both so good at it.)

There is also Hillary’s vote to let Bush go to war in Iraq. I remember how she stood up and gave a speech passionately supporting her position, as Congress abdicated it’s constitutionally mandated responsibility to declare war, handing it over to the President. I might have to forgive her and vote for her if there was not another candidate in the race who did NOT support the war, but that is not the case.

I was very impressed when I came across this video of Obama back in 2002 predicting all the issues we would face if we went to war in Iraq. (Did I mention he majored in International Relations at Columbia?) This is exactly the kind of insight we need in a leader if we are going to repair our standing in the world:

[Hey, this is cool. I just discovered I can embed video in my blog. Okay, inner tech geek receding as inner political geek returns.]

Watching the debates, I was impressed with Hillary’s command of the issues. She was very substantive. But Barack was even more substantive. I have to confess, before I watched the debates, I was falling for the media myth that Obama was inexperienced and had no concrete ideas. On the contrary, he has mastered the issues, and I found him enormously substantive and articulate. For the first time since early Bill Clinton, I found myself nodding in agreement while listening to the positions of a serious presidential contender.

In terms of their intellectual grasp of the issues, Barack and Hillary are both fully in command. Her demeanor, however, seems stiff and often insincere. On Hillary’s official Myspace page, there is a link to videos of people who “know” Hillary. The unfortunate implication is that we cannot really know her, except possibly through a third party. Barack, on the other hand, is simply a natural orator.

There is not much difference between Hilary and Barack in terms of their general philosophy. Where they differ is in how far they are willing to go. For example, early in the campaign an issue came up about handling the predicted social security deficit. While Hillary refused to consider the possibility of raising any taxes at all, Obama was not afraid to discuss the possibility of raising the social security tax threshold. Currently, it is $80,000. That means that someone making a million dollars a year pays exactly the same dollar amount of social security tax as someone making $80,000. Payroll taxes such as social security are where the true inequities of our tax system lie. Wealthy people who don’t work for a living don’t pay payroll taxes on their income, making these taxes regressive. I don’t doubt Hilary’s words of concern for working people; but her fear of being labeled a “tax loving liberal” by the conservatives has paralyzed her, keeping her from saying what is clearly right. Obama feels no such stigma.

When Hillary made the remark a few weeks ago about President Johnson getting the Voting Rights Act passed, she was accused of playing the race card. I felt then that this was not a fair assessment. After watching the video, I still feel that way. I’ve embedded it below. [Cool!]

Note that Clinton did not bring up this issue on her own. Nor do I believe she was attempting to inject the race issue into the campaign. A reporter asked her to comment on a remark that Obama had made wherein he discussed King’s ability to inspire and lead despite politicians who said he should hold back.

Hillary is a policy wonk, like Bill. They believe that being able to implement policy and legislation is how politicians get things done. Clinton was merely pointing out that it took a savvy and experienced politician to strong-arm a reluctant Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act. Of course Johnson would not and could not have acted without the enormous impetus that King and the civil rights movement created. No sane person could suggest otherwise. However, it is clear from the video that she was not implying, as a NY Times editorial egregiously suggested, “that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change”.

So I was ready to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt, feeling that she had been unfairly portrayed as racist. But then things got nasty. The Clintons tried to make the case that Obama’s record on the war was identical to Clinton’s. They brought up his alleged drug use as a youth. They made an issue of the fact that Obama pointed out that Reagan changed the direction of the country in 1980, while Nixon and Clinton didn’t. (Obama’s comment on this in his South Carolina victory speech was brilliant as he obliquely referred to “the kind of partisanship that says you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican ever had an idea, even if it’s one you never agreed with.”)

Barack’s point which Hillary was responding to is well taken. President Clinton did some good things while in office, but his changes were incremental. (To some degree this goes back to he and Hillary’s “wonkish” perspective, the idea that politicians take small steps to make people’s lives better, rather than leading great movements. It’s also obvious that, with the outcome of the 1994 Congressional election, he was afraid of pushing a more transformational agenda.) Whether he could have done more or not, Obama is correct that Clinton’s successes, while good for the country, were hardly transformational.

The Clinton attacks are having the opposite effect of that intended. They allow Obama to appear to rise above the fray as he eschews responding in kind (at least directly) while demonstrating his ability to fend off the kind of nasty attacks that he would no doubt face from the Republican nominee in a general election.

I believe I’ll be voting for Obama in the primary. I don’t want to get too fired up too soon. I’m still feeling pretty cynical. I’ll have to ask Claude who he thinks will win.

This is a completely unsolicited plug for emwd.com. These people are awesome. As I said they are not the cheapest, but the time they have saved me has already paid for itself.

Last week I attempted to upgrade my Word Press installation to the latest version, and in doing so I screwed up my config file so that it could not connect to the database - so NO blog! I submitted a support ticket to EMWD that night and by the next morning they had reconfigured the database so it would work with the changed config file. All I had to do was reinstall the other files (this time after reading the WP instructions) and all was well. Can you imagine Blue Host reconfiguring my database for me? Can you imagine Blue Host even responding by the next day just to tell me they couldn’t do anything? NO NO NO!

Thank you EMWD. I think my hosting troubles are over!

Reading over my last post about my web hosting issues, I had to laugh. I have another life apart from music, a company called New York Geek Girls. The name was originally tongue in cheek, but now I have to acknowledge I really am a geek! Who but a geek could rant so passionately for three paragraphs about mail server issues?

Or maybe it’s not my geekiness that inspired those railings. Truth is, I have a low tolerance for stupidity, illogic, and hypocrisy in general. Just today, I wandered into my beloved Park Slope Food Coop, where I have been a member for over 15 years now, and I became irritated at a series of consecutive assaults on my senses. Those who know me are aware of how enthusiastically I expound on the Coop’s fantastic quality, prices and ideals. So I am sure I will be forgiven for grousing about 1) the silliness of having the blank classified ad forms and the bin where you deposit the filled out forms on opposite sides of the store (forcing me to navigate through a thick mass of humanity several times due to my unfamiliarity with the process) 2) new brands of baby spinach and field greens in hard plastic containers that are not recyclable and take up lots of landfill space 3) people who stand immediately behind me near the avocados and talk loudly into their cell phones, thereby creating the annoying sensation that a perfect stranger is speaking right into my ear. (I don’t care if she was eight months pregnant, as Billy pointed out.)

These three things happened within minutes of each other. It seems I simply cannot navigate the constant offensive barrage that has become modern life. Does anyone else feels this way? Am I the only one who walks out of a cell phone store because I simply cannot STAND the loud horrible mindless drone of corporate-created urban pop music?

Or am I just getting old?