In the two days since John Edwards arrived in Columbus, Ohio and delivered a speech in the Plumbers & Pipefitters Local #189 union hall, I’ve not seen any full transcript of his remarks provided by either media outlets or Edwards’ own campaign website. So, on the theory that someone might like to know what is on the mind of a candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, I’ve decided to transcribe my audio of the event and provide a full text version of Edwards’ speech, along with some quick snaps of the candidate and the local that day. I’ll withhold any editorial remarks I might have on Edwards’ speech for following posts.

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Thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you Marilyn very much for the introduction, and thank you for your support. I’m proud to have your support. Glad to be here with all of you. I want to send you first a personal message from my wife, Elizabeth. She’s in California today, but doing great, absolutely great. I don’t know about you, but I kind of enjoyed her little dustup with Ann Coulter.

I think we have an awful lot at stake in this election. We need desperately to change Washington DC. I think the system there is broken, that it’s rigged against the interests of ordinary Americans. And you can see every single day the cost to America. Why don’t we have universal health care? I’ll tell you why we don’t have universal health care. We don’t have it because of drug companies, insurance companies and their lobbyists in Washington DC. That’s why we don’t have universal health care. And we’ve got to stand up to these people. We will not have universal health care until we have a president who’s actually willing to take these people on. It’s that simple. It will not happen.

Some say the way we get to universal health care is we bring the lobbyists and the drug companies to the table. You give the drug companies a seat at the table, and they’ll eat all the food. They’ll be nothing left for America, and we have to take on this fight. We have to be strong. We have to bring America to this effort. We need change, serious substantive change in America in the worst kind of way. So let’s start with health care. The first day that I’m president of the United States, this will be my message to the Congress and to my cabinet: if you don’t pass universal health care by July of 2009, July of this year, then you lose your health care. Because there’s no excuse for politicians in Washington having health care when Americans don’t have health care.

What kind of health care do we need? We need health care that’s mandatory for every man, woman and child. We need to require by law that everyone be covered. We need to ensure that all cracks in the health care system are fixed, which means mental health parity, mental health treated the same as physical health, ban pre-existing conditions, includes preventive and chronic care, long term care, all hospital costs. Good care, decent care ought to be covered. And you’ve got to be able take your health care with you, any place you go in America. There’s no excuse for people losing their health care when they get laid off, when they can’t get a job, when they move from one place to another.

Now nothing in my health care plan is free, it costs $90 to $120 billion dollars a year, but I do have a way to pay for it: get rid of Bush’s tax cuts for people making over $200,000.

We also have extraordinary economic inequality in the United States of America, the worst it’s been since the Great Depression. It’s just, you know, those pictures that came out of the 9th ward of New Orleans? You know, I started my presidential campaign from the 9th ward of New Orleans. Those pictures: we’re not the only ones that saw them! The whole world saw them. I saw a headline overseas after the hurricane hit. It had pictures of the victims of the lower 9th ward. Big headline: “The Shaming of America.” Brothers and sisters, we don’t need a surge in Baghdad. We need a surge in New Orleans.

It’s so obvious what needs to be done. We need to make the city safe again. The levees need to be rebuilt. They need more police officers. The infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. We need to help create jobs. Now here’s a novel idea: instead of bringing Halliburton in, and giving them hundreds of millions of dollars, suppose they gave those jobs to the people of New Orleans and let them rebuild their own city.

What are we going to do about the incredible inequality that exists in America today? There are many things that we have to do. You know, back in the 1990s we didn’t get universal health care, but we got NAFTA, and since that time we got CAFTA, and we got a whole series of trade agreements that have been devastating for America and American workers. Listen, the question has been asked in the past about trade deals, “Is this trade deal good for the profits of big multinational corporations?” That will not be my question. My question will be, “Is this trade deal good for working middle-class Americans? Is this trade deal good for jobs in America? And we will have real environmental and labor standards in those agreements. I will enforce those standards, and we’ll close those tax loopholes that give tax breaks to American companies that are taking jobs overseas.

There are a few other things we need to do. Congress finally raised the minimum wage; it’s going to go to $7.25 an hour. Great. It’s not enough. The minimum wage ought to be at least nine and a half dollars an hour. It ought to be indexed to go up on its own. The greatest anti-poverty movement in American history is the labor movement. I want to say, first, thank you to all the men and women from organized labor, thank you to my hosts for having me here tonight. God bless you for that.

Here’s the way I think about this. First of all, if we’re going to maintain strength and growth in the middle class in this country, we must strengthen and grow the organized labor movement, the union movement. And I intend to be the president that walks out onto the White House lawn and talks about the importance of the union movement in the history of America, and the importance of growing the union movement in the future of America. I have a very simple view about this. In my America, when I’m president of the United States, if you can join the Republican Party by signing your name to a card, any worker in America should be able to join a union by doing exactly the same thing. That’s democracy in the workplace. And I’ll say something else to my brothers and sisters in the union movement: when I’m president, and it becomes necessary for you to go out on strike, standing up with strength and courage for decent wages, for health care, for pensions, when you’re walking that picket line nobody, nobody will be able to walk through that picket line and take your job away from you. Not when I’m president of the United States.

What about access to college? Bush has taken billions of dollars out of the federal budget for financial aid for kids to go to college. This is insanity. We should do exactly the opposite. Here is my idea, really simple. It’s called College for Everyone. We say to every young person in America, “You graduate from high school, qualify to go to college, and commit to work at least ten hours a week while you are there, America pays for your tuition and books. And we’ve actually started a model of this idea in Eastern North Carolina, Elizabeth and I did, we raised the money privately, but it’s been hugely successful so far. It only applies to the first year of college, because that’s all we could afford, but it’s been hugely successful so far. You don’t give it away; these kids have to earn it. I worked when I was in school; it didn’t hurt me, it’s a healthy thing. And then they graduate from college without so much debt that so many of our young people are faced with every single day. We have brought a level playing field over there. We’ve want to give everyone in this country a chance.

I also want to say a word about what I think is a crisis: the crisis of global warming. You know, I read a piece in a foreign newspaper, I believe it was a week or so ago, and it said in 23 years, if America doesn’t change its — the world, not America — doesn’t change its behavior, the polar ice cap will be gone. This is a serious problem. We are 4 percent of the world’s population; we put out 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. We are the worst polluter on the planet. Here’s what I think we should do. I think we should cap carbon emissions in America. I think we ought to reduce our carbon emissions by at least 80 percent by the year 2050. That cap ought to come down every single year. We need to make polluters pay to have a permit to emit carbon dioxide. That money ought to be invested in wind, solar, cellular based biofuels. I am against building any more nuclear power plants. Beyond that, I am against building any more coal-fired power plants unless they can capture their carbon. And I also want to see us investing a billion dollars into making sure America is making the most creative, the most innovative, most fuel-efficient vehicles on the planet — with union workers.

And then finally, finally, it’s time for the president of the United States to ask Americans to be patriotic about something other than war. It’s time for the president to say, “We are in this together. If we’re going to fight global warming, if we’re going to preserve this planet, we’re going to actually have to be willing to sacrifice.” You know, I think of that great John Kennedy inauguration speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you.” We are at that place again. The president of the United States needs to ask Americans to be willing to sacrifice. In this case, to conserve in your homes, conserve in your workplaces, drive more fuel efficient vehicles. We’re going to raise the fuel efficiency standard to at least 40 miles to the gallon over the course of the next few years.

I also want to say a word about what’s happening in the world, because I don’t believe — I’ve spent a lot of time overseas over the last few years. I don’t think George W. Bush has injured our reputation in the world. I think he’s destroyed it. We have so much work to do to turn that around. I just have to say — I just want to make an editorial comment here, because the Republicans spend all their time rushing to the mike and the T.V. monitors when MoveOn ran their ad about General Petraeus. Well, yesterday Rush Limbaugh said on the air that the men and women wearing the uniform of the United States of America coming home from Iraq and speaking up against the war on behalf of their fellow men and women wearing the uniform were “phony warriors.” And here’s what I want to see. I want to see if those same Republican leaders are rushing to the mikes now. I want to see if they’re rushing to the television monitors now, to the television cameras to speak out against Rush Limbaugh speaking falsehoods about patriots who wear the uniform of the United States of America. Because in my America, dissent is not unpatriotic. Dissent is democratic! We have to defend a democracy where people can speak their voice.

I know what we have to do. What we have to do to reverse what has happened over the last seven years is we have to start by reversing the damage of what Bush has done. The starting place is to end this mess of the war in Iraq. The Congress has a huge responsibility here, because the American people gave them a mandate in the election of November of 2006, and that mandate was “Force George Bush to end this war. Use the power that you have, the funding authority, to make him end this war.” They shouldn’t submit a single funding bill to this president that doesn’t have a timetable for withdrawal. And if he vetoes it, they should send another one with a timetable for withdrawal, and if he vetoes that, they should send him another one, until George Bush promises to start bringing troops out of Iraq.

And I have to tell you that on some of these issues, there are differences. There are obvious choices that have to be made by Democratic voters. Because there was an important vote that took place in the Senate last Thursday. And that vote was a resolution to call the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a military organization in Iran, a terrorist group. That was the resolution. Now, I’m against it, I was against it, I’m against it, because I do not want to give George Bush the authority or the first step in moving toward the authority to go into Iran. Others, you know who I mean, have felt differently. And there are real — take a wild guess who I mean. My view is you cannot give George Bush that kind of authority. Have we not learned our lesson? I learned mine. And I do not want to see this happen again.

Now, it’s more than ending the war, and by the way, let me make very clear that if I were president today I’d pull out forty to fifty thousand troops immediately, continue to bring our combat troops out of Iraq over the next eight or nine months. I would engage, I would have dialogue for a period of time. I would make sure that the Iranians, the Syrians and other countries in the region were engaged in helping stablize Iraq and try to push for a political solution. Because there is no military solution. The Shia and Sunni have to reach an agreement that brings stability to Iraq.

The world stage beyond Iraq: I think Guantanamo is a national embarrassment, and I will close Guantanamo. I will stop the illegal spying on the American people. No more secret prisons. No more torture. This is my America. And it’s an amazing thing that a presidential candidate has to say these things. I mean, really, what does it say about how far we’ve come?

But beyond that, that’s to get rid of the negative, there’s so much opportunity for America to do great things in the world. It’s just riding the crest; we just have to take advantage of it. For example, suppose instead of spending $500 billion and counting in Iraq, American led an international effort to make education, not a loan, to make education available to 100 million children in the world who have education at all. Suppose we led on stopping the spread of disease with simple things like sanitation and drinking water. I’ve seen it with my own work in Africa, how important these things that we take for granted, how important they are and what an enormous difference they can make. Economic development: you know, simple things like micro-loans, microfinance.

Look, this is not just “do good.” This is very much in the interest of the United States of America, because right now, there’s an entire generation of young people in the world, and they’re sitting on the fence. On one side is Bin Laden, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad. And on the other side is America. Which way will they go? That depends on us. Because if they see us as selfish, bullying, only interested in the expansion of American power, we will drive them in the other direction. If, on the other hand, they see America as a source of hope and opportunity, a country who actually meets its responsibility to humanity, it will pull them to us like a magnet. We need to be that magnet again.

And I want to say you’re so important. You’re so important in bringing about this change that I’ve just been talking about. Because I do have another difference from some candidates for president. Because I don’t believe that what we want to see happen is a bunch of Washington insiders negotiating with each other. And I don’t believe we should replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats. What do we need instead? Your voice must be heard. We need a president who actually believes that an America exists outside of Washington DC, who cares what the American people think, and who mobilizes and motivates America to take action. The great movements — and that’s what we need; this is a movement for change. The great movements in America history, they did not start in the Oval Office. I grew up, and some of you did, with the Civil Rights Movement. I know where it started. It started in places like this, where people had backbone and courage and spoke out and marched and worked hard at change. The same thing instructed the same things out and changed the moral equation. Whether you were protesting Vietnam, or are this war in Iraq, every single day.

But we need you. We need you. Your voice needs to be heard. To paraphrase Gandhi, you have to be the change you believe in. I listen to Bush about as little as I can get away with. And when I listen to him, this is what I hear: “Stay home, watch television. Dick Cheney and I, we’ll take care of you. We’ll protect you.” I don’t want that guy taking care of me! I don’t trust him, first of all, and second, that’s not America! That’s not who we are. We work hard for it; we’ll take care of ourselves.

So while I’m thinking about it, I saw a bunch of you with your cell phones taking pictures and doing other things. If you want to join the movement, you text today to 30644 and we will then know how to give you the information to join this movement. But we need you. We need every single one of you in this movement. The question is, well I’ve been through a personal experience which all of you already know about, where I was in a hospital room for many hours back a few months ago, and Elizabeth and I had to decide what we were gonna do. I do want to tell you a quick story about that, because it’s so Elizabeth. I said, “Sweetie, I will do whatever you need me to do. I’ll come home, we’ll stay at home,” and she said, “And then what? Stare at each other?” But this is the cause of our lives. This movement for change, this cause on behalf of working men and women in this country, this is who we are. So that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. But we need you in this movement. We need you to join in this movement. I’ll tell you: if you want to live in a moral, fair and just country where everybody gets a chance no matter where you live and what your family is — I don’t know about you, but I didn’t win a genetic lottery. No matter the color of your skin, no matter who your family is, if you want to see an America once again leading a moral and just world, your voice needs to be heard. We need you. We need you involved. Join us in this cause. Join us in this movement. And together, build an America where all of us are a part of it, and we’ll live in a world where the rest of the world joins us in mutual respect. That’s our America.

The latest in the growing list of 2,008 reasons to elect a progressive President in 2008 comes from a right wing supporter of the lobbyist corporation Unity08. It’s a quote from John Stuart Mill:

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

Consider what this means, for a moment. John Stuart Mill is actually claiming that it’s a good idea to go to war in order to keep people to feeling patriotic. It’s better to bomb, shoot and stab people in massive numbers, John Stuart Mill says, than to allow people’s patriotic feelings to wane a little bit. Sending your own countrymen off to their deaths is better, from this point of view, than seeing some people wave the flag a little bit less fervently.

This isn’t a theoretical argument. It’s one of the main justifications behind the invasion and military occupation of Iraq by the United States.

Please, don’t vote for a candidate that supports this bloody and wasteful philosophy of war.

Mother Davis puts down her embroidery as she notes,

Newt Gingrich is the Lady Catherine de Bourgh of the 2008 presidential campaign. In Pride and Prejudice Lady Catherine de Bourgh tells everyone who comes to her mansion how they ought to practice the piano more, and comments that, if she had ever learned to play the piano herself, she would have been a true proficient.

Newt Gingrich is now playing the same sham game. Last week, Gingrich promised to run for President in 2008 if supporters could get 30 millions dollars in pledged contributions for him in three weeks. Heck, J. Clifford pledged 5 trillion dollars himself, just to see Gingrich make a jackass out of himself.

It turns out, though, that Newt Gingrich doesn’t need to run for President to make a jackass out of himself. Just two days after his promise to is supporters that he would run if only he was given lots of money to do it, Gingrich broke his promise, and announced that he would not run for President no matter what, because running for President would force him to give up his career of making political speeches at the rate of $40,000 per lecture.

Now, one day after that speech, Gingrich is adding salt to the wound by declaring that, if he had had the courage to run for President, he would have been a suuuper genius at it, and would be competitive financially against all the money that had taken his opponents the whole year so far to accumulate. “I think we would clearly have been competitive financially within three weeks, and we literally had not even set up the Web site yet,” he said.

Sure, Newt. And Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have been a true proficient, if she ever had learned to play the piano.

What’s next? Will Gingrich announce on Monday that he is running for President after all, and he needs one hundred million dollars before the end of the week, or the Lord will call him home?

Mr. Gingrich, your mommy is calling you home.

Wondering if Mr. Gingrich’s aides would like to join her for a game of whist,
Mother Davis

In the political campaigning world, a huge number of very silly emails are flying about just now. It’s the end of the fiscal quarter, you see, and so political campaigns feel under pressure to come up with impressive fundraising statistics to be reported by the FEC a few weeks from now. It’s become a tradition for political campaigns to send emails to their supporters, urging that “time is running out”, and if supporters don’t get out their credit cards and make a contribution now, it will be their last chance to make a difference… until the next last chance to make a difference, three months later.

Still, this quarter, one political fundraising solicitation stands above all the others I have received in the depths of its silliness: An email from Senator Barbara Boxer.

Rose Kapolczynski, the campaign manager of the Barbara Boxer for Senate campaign, writes, “We need to show all of Barbara’s potential Republican opponents (including a certain Governor in Sacramento) that she’s going to have all of the resources she needs to win…”

And why do we need to show Barbara’s potential Republican opponents that she’s going to have all the resources she needs to win now, and not later next week, or a few months down the line? Well, because the re-election vote for Barbara Boxer is coming up very, very soon! “We need to show all of Barbara’s potential Republican opponents (including a certain Governor in Sacramento) that she’s going to have all of the resources she needs to win in 2010.”

In 2010?!? Am I really supposed to believe that there’s an urgent need to make a donation to Barbara Boxer’s re-election campaign now, in September 2007, instead of next week, in October 2007, because Barbara Boxer faces election in three years and two months from now?

Come off it, Babs. This approach is about as genuine as the Republican tactic of telling us all that we need to give Wall Street America’s Social Security investments now because there is a possibility over 30 years from now of the Social Security system having a budgetary shortfall.

I’d suggest that Barbara Boxer get a new campaign manager - one who doesn’t try to rally the troops for a last-ditch defense years before the battle has even begun.

Just a few days after opening up a Newt Gingrich section over under our general Election 2008 section, we’re having to close it down. Why? Well, just a few days after Newt Gingrich announced that he would run for President if his supporters could gather 30 million dollars in pledges for donations to his presidential campaign, Gingrich said yesterday that he had reconsidered, and would not run for President no matter what.

Why did Newt Gingrich change his mind? Apparently, someone advised Gingrich that, if he ran for President, he would have to give up his business of giving speeches in exchange for money. The Associated Press reports that Gingrich sometimes is able to convince groups to pay him “$40,000 for a speech”.

Campaign money would be a much less direct form of income. Sure, Gingrich could use a lot of that pledged 30 million dollars for things like rides in fancy airplanes and dinners out at expensive restaurants, but much of the money would go to consultants telling Gingrich what to do. Newt Gingrich doesn’t seem to like anyone telling him what to do. So, he’s opting out.

It’s a decision that reveals a lot about Newt Gingrich’s values. Gingrich has said that the United States is in serious trouble, but when it comes to a choice between serving his country, doing it for a rather nice income too, and making loads of money without doing much work, Newt Gingrich chooses making money.

Progressive activists around the country are making the opposite choice. We don’t make $40,000 for giving a speech. Most of us don’t make any money for our progressive activism at all. Yet, we go ahead and do what we can. That’s because progressive activism is not a tool for making money. It’s a way of living based upon the ideal of personal sacrifice for the sake of high ideals that will make the world a better place for everyone in it.

In 2008, step back from all the big money games and find the presidential candidate who best matches that truly progressive mode of activism.

(Source: Associated Press, September 29, 2007)

“The first day that I’m president of the United States, this will be my message to the Congress and to my cabinet: if you don’t pass universal health care by July of 2009, July of this year, then you lose your health care.”

- John Edwards in Columbus Ohio, September 28 2007

Boy, that line sure is great and all. It has such pizazz and demonstrates such resolve. Too bad that the president doesn’t set the terms for Congressional health care or appropriate money for it. The Congress does that. John Edwards couldn’t remove it from the congressional budget as president, because the president hasn’t held line item veto authority for a decade. What’s John Edwards’ plan? To sneak a PaperMate pen in to budget proceedings and have one operative erase congressional health care while another cries, “Look! Is that Al Gore running down the Mall in a speedo?”

I had a dream about Chris Dodd last night. I dreamed that I read an article in which Dodd announced that he would be dropping out of the presidential campaign. I dreamed that Dodd announced that the reason for his withdrawal was a lack of adequate campaign donations.

I also, in my dream, remember thinking that this official explanation didn’t add up, and that it was, rather, the complete failure of the Democrats in Congress to revoke any aspect of the Military Commissions Act that had led Chris Dodd to conclude that there was no reason for his presidential campaign to continue.

Senator Dodd’s campaign had originally been based upon Restore-Habeas.org, with its drive to pass the Restoring the Constitution Act. That has recently been replaced with the watered down Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, which only addresses the revocation of habeas corpus, and not the other abuses of the Military Commissions Act.

Even that watered down legislation has failed, and last week, Harry Reid announced he wouldn’t even try to defend an amendment which might restore habeas corpus in some small ways, because it wasn’t his top priority any more.

In such circumstances, why wouldn’t Chris Dodd, whose presidential campaign was premised on the idea that Democrats would be up in arms about Republican attacks on American liberty, drop out? Most Democrats, in Congress and out in the rank and file, seem to care more about whether the new Bionic Woman television series is worth watching.

The dream seemed so real that, when I woke up this morning, I got online to see if Chris Dodd really had dropped out. It seems that he has not. Can Dodd, however, be long in this race without any hope that American liberty will be restored by the Democratic Congress?

If Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are terrorists, how are the US Army and the CIA not terrorist?

The Army and CIA go into countries around the world which America is NOT at war with, kidnap people and torture them and threaten them with execution, and even show some of the prisoners on international television as a warning to others. They go around the world dropping bombs, invading other countries, resulting in immense civilian deaths and woundings, not to mention destruction of people’s homes.

How are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards worse than this?

The US Congress passed resolutions declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist organization. Now, Iran’s legislature has returned the insult, and declared the US Army and CIA to be terrorist organizations.

If we are to say that the US Army and CIA are not terrorist organizations, how is it justifiable to say that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is?

Yesterday evening I attended a rally for John Edwards at a union hall in Columbus, Ohio — not because I’m necessarily an Edwards supporter myself, but because I wanted to see Edwards and his message for myself, unfiltered and, as Darth Vader would say, through my own eyes. While waiting for Edwards to arrive, I asked the person next to me why she supported John Edwards for President. Interestingly, what she and another person standing next to her had to say was more about their thoughts on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama than about John Edwards.

You can click here for a short podcast of the conversation, or you can read it below.

Transcript:

Ann: My name is Ann and I support John Edwards because he’s the only one I’ve heard so far who has a really definitive, different kind of plan for health care for this country. He wants to get out of the war, which is a good thing. We never should have got into it. He brings a fresh face to Washington. He’s not part of the establishment. Never has been part of the establishment up there. Hillary’s too defensive and Obama doesn’t have enough experience.

Me: OK, now…

Participant 2: Obama can’t make it. He’ll never make it.

Me: Why can’t Obama make it?

Participant 2: He’s got two strikes against him. He’s a black man, and he’s a Muslim.

Me: But… he’s not a Muslim.

Participant 2: Yes, he is.

Me: He’s a Christian.

Ann: He’s a church member.

Participant 2: Are you sure? Because I’ve read articles. Has he always been raised Christian?

Participant 3: Have you been watching Fox News?

Ann: I watch Fox!

Me: Barack Obama’s not Muslim.

Participant 2: Oh, that’s good. He still can’t get it, and neither can Hillary. She’s a woman.

Ann: Hillary will probably get it. I just don’t want her to; she’s so defensive.

Participant 2: Well, the only thing with her, is you get two for the price of one.

Ann: Well, yeah, that would be OK. But…

Me: Did you see her in the debate that night?

Ann: I did.

Me: Did you see that moment where…

Ann: Yes, I did! I thought that was so, “I’ll have to talk to him tonight!”

Me: Or, “He’s not on this stage right now.”

Participant 2: Yeah, “You’re talking to me, you’re not talking to him!”

Me: So, I hear from you why not Clinton and why not Obama. Obama is just not realistic, and…

Participant 2: No, I just don’t think the country is ready for a black man or for a woman. We’re not ready in this country yet to treat those minorities as real people.

Me: What do you think it will take?

Participant 2: More time. More time.

Ann: I think Hillary could win, but I think that she will… I think that she’s a polarizing candidate, and you either love her or you hate her. There’s no middle ground with her, and women? The women who like her are, I think, not in my age group. They’re maybe younger women. You know, I grew up during the feminist era, so it’s not like I’m some… but I’m not some rah-rah-rah down to the wire “you’ve got to treat me different because I’m a woman” woman. But I think Hillary had to fight her way through the glass ceiling, and she wears those scars, and she’s always in there: “I have scars and I can prove it and I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and so can you, America.” Well, I don’t want someone who’s on the defensive all the time. We’ve already got a nutcase in the White House who’s on the defensive, always wanting to pick a fight. Hillary wants to pick a fight with somebody. I don’t want somebody like that. It’s in your face.

Me: If she ended up being the nominee…

Ann: I’d vote for her in half a minute, because I wouldn’t vote for a Republican if he was the last candidate on the face of the Earth…

Participant 2: Not one more vote for a Republican.

Ann: … because they have no heart and no soul, and they don’t give a damn about this country. They care about their pocketbook and that’s all.

Earlier this evening, I attended a rally in Columbus Ohio at which John Edwards was scheduled to speak. He did, and I’ll share that with you later. But first I wanted to share with you the remarks of someone standing next to me:

Rally Participant: Obama can’t make it. He’ll never make it.

Me: Why can’t Obama make it?

Participant: He’s got two strikes against him. He’s a black man, and he’s a Muslim.

Me: But… he’s not a Muslim.

Participant: Yes, he is.

Here’s the audio of that conversational snippet.

I need to give my conversational partner some credit. She wasn’t saying that Obama should be excluded from the presidency because he’s black and because she thinks he’s Muslim. She was trying to argue that the American people are too bigoted to support a black man and too bigoted to support a Muslim — which is why she wasn’t going to support a black man who she thinks is a Muslim.

And of course, you know that Barack Obama is not a Muslim. You know that’s a Fox News talking point which is completely false. Obama is a regular attendant at a Christian Church. How sad that this Edwards supporter is so strikingly and persistently misinformed. How sad that we still have the argument that we need to pick our candidates based on irrelevant characteristics because of who “can win.” That didn’t work so well with John Kerry, did it? And how depressing that a candidate’s race and religion are being used over and over and over again as a test for political fitness.

Not so long ago, we gave a link to a web site called BushVote.com, which was described as, “Home of the Take Back America Fund, which works simultaneously on four fronts: Local Campaigns, Voter Registration, Supporting a Progressive Democratic Party, and the Take Back the Media Group to support challenging media voices.”

It all sounded so wonderful. So much taking back of things! So much energy! So much… all gone.

It seems that BushVote.com has taken back all of its taking back. It’s all gone, and replaced by a generic fill-in-the-blank site.

No activism left. Just sponsored links.

We did our little bit for them while they were around, giving them a touch of our Google mojo. In fact, if you search Google for “Take Back America Fund”, you’ll find our link to BushVote.com right at the top… well, you would now, but not for much longer. Now that the site is just a generic placeholder filled with sponsored links, it’s lost our link.

The fate of BushVote.com seems like one symptom of a larger malady. After winning the 2006 election, many progressive activists seem to have largely given up resisting the agenda of George W. Bush. With George W. Bush becoming a lame duck President, they are becoming lame duck activists… all of which plays into the hands of the Bush White House. In case you hadn’t noticed, George W. Bush has not at all given up on trying to impose his agenda on the American people.

A hard lesson for online activism: Persistence is 75 percent of resistance.

I see that Harry Slatkin, who claims to be America’s #1 home fragrance expert, is declaring on behalf of Bath & Body Works that the store has “the world’s best pumpkin fragrance ever! Guaranteed.”

Here’s what I’m wondering: How would you ever cash in on that guarantee? What are you going to do, bring in a pumpkin and say, “I’m sorry, but this smells better?”

Also, if Harry Slatkin is America’s #1 home fragrance expert, who is Lithuania’s #1 home fragrance expert?

In a large number of the congressional elections of 2006, candidates for office were not chosen by the people, but selected by political party bosses instead. There were no Democratic senatorial primaries in California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio or Wisconsin in the 2006 elections, and the Democratic Party didn’t even bother fielding a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Indiana. In House races, campaign boss Rahm Emanuel intervened to clear out challengers to his hand-picked favorites. Primaries were axed all over the place. Already, people appointed by the Democratic Party to run as congressional candidates in 2008 are crowing about the lack of a primary as if it were a good thing. But it’s not a good thing to limit citizen choice, at least from a citizen’s point of view.

But how can we increase choice in congressional elections? Adding another candidate might do the trick…

Into the mix steps an entity called GOOOH. I like to think it’s pronounced like the word “goo,” although the folks at GOOOH insist it’s pronounced “go.” GOOOH is an acronym for Get Out Of Our House, and it’s a website at www.goooh.com. Tim Cox, the person who’s running GOOOH as a limited liability corporation, proposes the following steps for generating an alternative congressional candidate in each of the 435 congressional districts in the nation:

Members will have until some time in February or March to declare their candidacy by completing the six steps in the candidate process. Once the deadline has been reached, all candidates will follow the process summarized below, with one person in each of the congressional districts ultimately bubbling to the top of the system as their district’s nominee.

1) Candidates will be randomly assigned into pools of 10 participants within their congressional district. There will be as many pools as are needed in each district. Pools will meet simultaneously at predetermined locations across the country. If, for example, there are exactly 1,250 participants in each district, there will be 125 pools in the initial round, all occurring on a Saturday morning.

2) Each pool of participants will select two candidates to advance to the next round, via the GOOOH Selection Session process outlined in the book. Sessions will last approximately five hours and will begin at 9:00

3) Advancing candidates will be randomly assigned into a new pool within their district. Steps 2 and 3 will repeat until there are only ten candidates remaining in each district.

4) If there are 1,250 participants, there will be four rounds. The actual number will be determined based upon the number of participants in each district. There will be a maximum of eight rounds, though four to six are more likely.

5) Before the final round, we are considering having the 4,350 finalists participate in a weekend retreat to ensure they fully understand how the final selection round will work and to ensure they are committed to representing their district if selected. Details will be determined as the time nears.

6) The final ten candidates in each of the districts will select a single nominee to represent their district.

7) The 435 nominees will be placed on the November ballot, in their respective districts, to compete against the Republican and Democratic politicians.

8 ) The campaign for each of the candidates will be orchestrated by the system, which will provide all necessary funding.

Even a cursory review of GOOOH makes clear that this isn’t a blow-dried PR website (although Cox has retained the services of Phenix Publicity), and that makes me somewhat inclined to feel sympathetically toward the website and its aims. I encourage you to check it out for yourself. But when you do, I encourage you to read closely. Beyond the feasibility of this project, there are some curiosities that make me wary of GOOOH and its goals, and they have to do with money.

Cox envisions 1,250 or so participants in the GOOOH process per congressional district. With 435 districts, that’s 543,750 participants if all goes as Cox plans. Each of these anticipated 543,750 participants must contribute $100 to GOOOH LLC as a condition of participation. That leads to a total of $54,375,000 in the GOOOH LLC coffers. Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? The problem is that when you divide that by 435, you only get $125,000 per district — and according to the Washington Post, the average cost of a House campaign in 2006 was right around the $1,000,000 mark. Contrary to point 8 in the GOOOH plan, this funding scheme won’t provide “all necessary funding” for a successful congressional campaign. It will, however, put a lot of of money under the control of GOOOH. What’s the cut of $54,375,000 that gets taken out by GOOOH LLC headquarters? What happens if members contribute their required $100 and there aren’t enough people to get the process going in their district? Will the $100 contributions be returned, or not? That’s unclear and it’s important to know.

You can tell the GOOOH website isn’t written by a political or public relations professional, part of the nature that endears it to me, because it is a bit transparent in the way it talks about money. The GOOOH FAQ poses and answers this question:

Why do I have to pay $100 to participate?

The Republicans and Democrats will spend around a billion dollars on the 435 House races. We need money to compete. If every person will contribute $100 we will have ample funds. If we cannot get sufficient funding from the people we will be forced to raise it from special interest groups, and they will want favors in return. If Americans are not willing to spend $100 on a cause such as this we have bigger problems.

That last sentence is evasive used-car-salesman speak, and it sets off my BS detector. There are a lot of Americans who don’t have $100 to spare to spend on any cause, and that is a bigger problem. The GOOOH process virtually guarantees we’ll only have candidates who have $100 to throw around, with a supporter base of similarly comfortable people.

There’s a sock puppet named “Eric” that’s been used to prime the pump of the GOOOH discussion board, and he asks and answers this question:

Question:
Isn’t this some kind of money-making scheme masquerading as political activism?

Answer:
We cannot unseat the politicians without funding, and having each GOOOH candidate contribute $100 is an equitable way to raise the needed money. Until today, we have not had a viable way to address the control of the parties and the behavior of the politicians, but we cannot evict them from our House without financing. If you have a better alternative, please speak up.

If the idea of a “money-making scheme” hadn’t been on GOOOH’s mind, GOOOH wouldnt have thought to ask it. Did I mention there’s a book for sale, and that Phenix Publicity is a public relations firm for authors?

I’m not saying that GOOOH is bad or corrupt or awful. I think it has an innovative idea at its core, and I agree with the premise that more choices, made out of the hands of the large political parties, is a good thing. But I do have some questions about its viability and its motivations — questions that I recommend you keep in mind if you decide to visit or participate in this very new, very interesting effort.

I’d post my concerns over at GOOOH, by the way, but GOOOH’s rules specifically prohibit any visitors from writing anything there that “Attacks or insults any Forum administrators/moderators/participants.”

One indicator of a “snap” reaction to the Democratic presidential debate of September 25, 2007 is the percent share of sales of our Democratic presidential bumper stickers, buttons, shirts and posters garnered by each of the Democratic contenders in the 24 hour period from the close of debate at 11 pm on the 25th to 11 pm on the 26th. The distribution looks like this:

Hillary Clinton: 20.8%
Barack Obama: 18.8%
Joseph Biden: 16.7%
Dennis Kucinich: 6.3%
John Edwards: 5.2%
Mike Gravel: 4.2%
Bill Richardson: 3.1%
Christopher Dodd: 2.1%

You may have noticed that the percentages here do not sum to 100%. That’s because I’ve left out a highly visible non-candidate:

Al Gore: 23.0%

While Hillary Clinton is at the top of the heap of declared Democratic Party candidates, Al Gore tops her. After a few months staying out of sight, Al Gore returned to international visibility this week with a speech before the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. With that return to visibility came an increase in sales of items promoting a Gore presidential candidacy. There’s a lot of support out there for a Gore alternative to the increasingly powerful Clinton juggernaut, but there’s not much time left for Gore to take advantage of that support.