Despite the fact that by its very nature, it contradicts Obama's asserted platform that shuns 'negative' campaigning, here's why I believe Obama is justified, both morally and tactically, in presenting this documentary and information to the voting public:
The McCain campaign, particularly in the form of Sarah Palin's memorized talking points, has been unrelenting in the outright mendacity, slander and lies lies lies -- not to mention tons of coded racism -- of its outrageous and ridiculous attacks against Obama for his supposed connection to "terrorist" Bill Ayers: which is just downright disingenuous and everybody knows it. The McCain camp knows it's a lie too, but they have claimed time and again that they 'have no choice' but to continue spreading lies. You do too have a choice, Senator. You could save all of us a lot of headache and take a cue from your recent decision with respect to Michigan: withdraw your cranky-old-racist-asshole operation from other swing states. How 'bout it?
We've seen this kind of irresponsible and deeply dishonest activity from the McCain campaign so much over the last few months, that it has become difficult and tiring at times to bother to care. But we have to care and respond, just as Obama must care, and Obama must respond, even to the kinds of lies and tactics whose coarseness and spuriousness would -- in the company of civilized adults (that is, company in which the likes of McCain and especially Sarah Palin would be fish out of water, to be extra-generous) -- represent the kind of 'discourse' that one does not glorify with a response.
Think I'm exaggerating the level of desperation and dishonestly being perpetrated by Palin and McCain? (Of course you don't, unless you've been living under a rock...) Here's some objective proof for you, from Bloomberg News:
Over the weekend, McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, repeatedly linked the Democratic presidential candidate with a domestic terrorist group from the 1970s, telling supporters Obama used to ``pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,'' a reference to his acquaintance with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground group that carried out a series of bombings in the early 1970s. Obama served on a charity board with Ayers and has denounced the bombings.
Obama ``is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,'' Palin, 44, told donors at a fundraiser Oct. 4 in Costa Mesa, California. ``This, ladies and gentleman, is not the kind of change that I think we should be believing in.'' McCain adviser Greg Strimple said last week that they were "looking for a very aggressive last 30 days.''
"We're looking to turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's liberal, aggressively liberal, record and how he will be too risky for the Americans,'' Strimple told reporters on an Oct. 2 conference call.
So, as this McCain-minion Greg Strimple -- even his fucking name sounds shady -- points out: this is a strategy of out-and-out "aggression." Translation: McCain's filthy campaign wants now to play even filthier. And what that means is not an "aggressive last 30 days," but, rather: '30 days of LIES'. Even when it's stated in Strimple's simple-minded, Orwellian PR terminology, that's an awfully weird thing for a campaign to be admitting out loud, isn't it? Why not just say that McCain's going to endorse a liberalization of federal, state and local prohibitions on lynching.
This fucking Ayers bullshit just gets my goat, man. It is SO dishonest, I can barely believe that self-respecting journalists and politicos -- even those on the far, far Right, can sleep at night after spending a day repeating and spreading these lies and trying cast it as somehow credible. (Which is a difficult feat to pull off when you have zero credibility.) Whatever the details of his life as a young man, in the midst of the politically toxic and contentious political climate in the 60s and 70s, as a younger man -- during which time Obama was EIGHT YEARS OLD and nowhere near Chicago!! -- , William Ayers is a fucking Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. How Establishment can you get? Plus, he does good scholarship and, with his wife Bernadine Dohrn -- a law professor at Northwestern University -- is active in fighting poverty and working to combat racial and economic injustices.
The Ayers thing pisses me of for personal reasons, as well as the obvious moral, intellectual and political reasons. First, because I -- that's ME, y'all, along with my lovely wife and our two cats -- am a resident of the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. I don't live in the same section of town as Ayers, which is an area with nice houses -- some of them truly posh, but the majority of them just everyday nice houses -- in which lots and lots of professionals and academics live with their families.
A number of these professionals and academics are connected to, in some way or another, the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Hospital, institutions which are, of course, located in Hyde Park. Many of the residents of the neighborhood are not connected to the University of Chicago, and simply live there because it's a nice neighborhood in which to live, or because it's got the kinds of houses that many people looking for houses are looking for. I shouldn't have to add that this place is NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION some kind of hotbed of radicalism. I've met some of the people who live there, and I've read the books of others. It is as close to the ESTABLISHMENT as you're likely to find. Trust me.
And, as if that wasn't enough, have people forgotten that the University of Chicago is the home of the Chicago School of economics, whose figurehead and intellectual architect was none other than the most influential proponent of extreme laissez faire economics that this country has ever seen? The Milton Friedman in whose name a shiny new economics/business-school building is soon to be erected on the University of Chicago campus as an enduring and no-doubt-well-funded monument to the conservative movement that gave us the Reagan Revolution, the Bush Administration(s) and with them, the Iraq War, the privatization of public infrastructure, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina, and the recent crash of the stock- and credit markets, which might ultimately usher in a SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION?? Nobody's gonna tell me that my neighborhood is some kind of hotbed of crazy radicalism. If it is, then man, nobody's inviting me to the party, because I sure don't see it anywhere.
Here's Thomas Frank -- former longtime resident of Hyde Park --, back on August 20, 2008, in his column in The Wall Street Journal, describing the soon-to-be constructed Milton Friedman Society. And here's Frank in that same column, on August 16, talking about the cynical, mendacious Republican ploy of portraying Hyde Park as an 'elitist' neighborhood, which..... I mean that's just prima facie the most ridiculous notion. For one thing, as I mentioned previously, I live in fucking Hyde Park.
I am way way way too poor to be an elitist.
But beyond that, the idea of Hyde Park as an elitist neighborhood in preposterous if you compare it to the real elite neighborhoods of Chicago. You want ELITE? Try Chicago's exclusive northern suburbs: Evanston, Glenview, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Hoffman Estates; try western suburbs like: Oak Park, Naperville, try old money urban districts like the Gold Coast, and continue by considering the skyrocketing cost of living in the recently gentrified and continually gentrifying neighborhoods of River West, parts of Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Logan Square, Lakeview, Andersonville, the South Loop.....I could go on, but I think maybe my point is kinda clear, at least?
Hyde Park is to be distinguished from most of Chicago's opulent/posh/trendy neighborhoods not by reference to its supposed 'elitism', but precisely by its comparative diversity: economically, racially, generationally/agewise and according to whatever metric of class, background, or level of education you can throw at it. It includes, over on 53rd Street, a commercial center that has historically and continues to be associated with the black professional class. Oh, by the way, in and around Hyde Park reside members of the South Side's increasingly large black professional class.
In contradistinction to the many posh neighborhoods I cited above, gentrification in Hyde Park is fairly marginal, to the extent that it could really be said to exist at all. I mean, it's not an 'opulent' place: when Hyde Park's lone, solitary grocery store -- one of the oldest (and most mis-managed [although I feel like a jerk pointing it out!]) food co-ops in the country -- went out of business last year, the entire neighborhood was left high and dry (that is to say, we had no grocery store anywhere nearby) for a matter of months -- as many as four or five, if memory serves -- before a replacement owner moved in and set up shop.
It's tempting for some to say that if you've ever been to a typical college neighborhood, you've been to Hyde Park. But that isn't quite right. Hyde Park is a much more down-to-earth, more diverse and more FRIENDLY place than most college neighborhoods. There is a spirit of goodwill here, and almost none of the stuffy elitism that one notices immediately upon entering -- for instance, Evanston, Illionois -- which is the wealthy suburb far to the north along Chicago's endless lakefront, on the other side of town, where Northwestern University is located.
In closing, I leave you with the words of an acquaintance of both Obama and Ayers, and additionally a colleague of the latter, in his former capacity as a high-profile administrator at University of Illinois at Chicago: Stanley Fish. Fish, who served as Dean of UIC's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1999 to 2004, is a man whose politics I would describe as conservative. He's really a bit of a contrarian, in that self-satisfied, Socratic-method, law-school-professor-way. In his scholarship on law, he is just a bit too close to Antonin Scalia for comfort.
These quirks notwithstanding, he is and has always been an intellectually honest man. And so, Stanley Fish's take on this whole Ayers thing -- as published in his column on The New York Times Web site on April 27, 2008, in reference to the use of these 'Ayers-connection' fabrications and innuendo by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the primaries --, is eloquent and convincing. In my opinion, Fish is absolutely correct in his characterization of this sleazy political tactic as a new form of "McCarthyism."
Or more specifically, Fish says: "'McCarthyism' and 'Swiftboating' have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form. I refer to the startling revelation — proclaimed from the housetops by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns — that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized." Fish's response to this 'shocking' revelation, particularly in light of his own professional and regional encounters with Obama and Ayers, should, in my view, be considered definitive. I quote at great length in the hope of demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt (I'm particularly fond of Fish's reference to the fact that the ultraconservative Judge Richard Posner is also among Ayers's neighbors):
Confession time. I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of llinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.
Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).
Indeed in all the time I spent with Ayers and Dohrn, politics — present or past — never came up.
What did come up? To answer that question I have to introduce a word and concept that is somewhat out of fashion: the salon. A salon is a gathering in a private home where men and women from various walks of life engage in conversation about any number of things, including literature, business, fashion, films, education and philosophy. Ayers and Dohrn did not call their gatherings salons, but that’s what they were; large dinner parties (maybe 12-15), with guests coming and going, one conversation leading to another, no rules or obligations, except the obligation to be interesting and interested.
The only thing I don’t remember was ideology, although since this was all going on in Hyde Park, there was the general and diffused ideology, vaguely liberal, that usually hangs over a university town.
Many of those attending these occasions no doubt knew something about their hosts’ past, but the matter was never discussed and why should it have been? We were there not because of what Ayers and Dohrn had done 40 years ago, but because of what they were doing at the moment.
Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for his prominence in the “small school” movement. Dohrn teaches at Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more like it. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”
Least of all Barack Obama, who by his own account didn’t know them that well and is now being taken to task for having known them at all. Of course it would have required preternatural caution to avoid associating with anyone whose past deeds might prove embarrassing on the chance you decided to run for president someday. In an earlier column, I spoke of the illogic of holding a candidate accountable for things said or done by a supporter or an acquaintance. Now a candidate is being held accountable for things said and done four decades ago by people who happen to live in his upper middle class neighborhood. Hillary Clinton and John McCain should know better. In fact, they do know better. To date, Clinton has played hardball, but hasn’t really fouled. I never saw anything wrong or inaccurate about her saying that Martin Luther King’s vision required a president’s action before it could be implemented, or Bill Clinton’s saying that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice. He did, and if the implication was that Obama’s base constituency is African-American, that too was accurate and continues to be so.
As for her saying that all Obama had ever done was give a speech, she was being generous: he gave that speech against invading Iraq at a small event featuring other speakers (including Jackson); the local press coverage did not even mention him; and if this was, as his campaign claims, an act of courage, it was a singularly private one, maybe even a fairy tale. Clinton’s exaggerating the danger of her visit to Bosnia (most likely unintentional because, as she said, “I’m not dumb”) came a little closer to crossing a line, but didn’t. Re-telling a story (about a hospital’s refusal to treat an uninsured patient) that turned out not to be true was evidence of faulty campaign organization, not of deliberate duplicity.
But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold headlines proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).
I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.
As for Senator McCain, in 2004 he repudiated the Swiftboat attacks against fellow veteran John Kerry, but this time around he’s joining in, and if Obama gets the nomination, it seems that the Arizona senator will be playing the Ayers card. Of course, McCain knows a little about baseless accusations and innuendos, given his experience in South Carolina in 2000. And in case he has forgotten what it feels like, he may soon be reminded; for there’s a story abroad on the Internet that says that rather than being a heroic, tortured prisoner of war, McCain was a collaborator who traded information for a comfortable apartment serviced by maids who were really prostitutes. I don’t believe it for a second, just as I am sure that Senators McCain and Clinton don’t really believe that Obama condones setting bombs or supports a radical agenda that was pursued (as he has said) when he was eight years old.
The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt. (Link to article.)
No need to add anything to Fish's comments. Case dismissed.
Well, let me add two things. First: whereas the Palin/McCain/Bush/GOP tactic is nothing but slander and innuendo, Obama's calling out of McCain on his role in the Keating Five scandal pertains directly to McCain's claims that he is somehow a pro-regulatory/pro-oversight force with respect to economic questions. I mean, everybody knows McCain's claims are bullshit anyway, but I think Obama does well to fight back against an attack that's wholly devoid of substance with a counterattack that couldn't be more relevant to our current economic/regulatory situation.
Second, and final (and I haven't seen anyone else put it this way): in a way, the Right's childish, bullshit attack against Obama is worse than McCarthyism and worse than Swiftboating.
Why?
Because in essence, McCain's shameless tactic, were it successful -- which there's ZERO possibility of it being, in anything more than maybe a fund-raising sense among LOONY right-wingers -- would ultimately discourage anyone who has lived an actual life, outside of the beach houses and summer houses and ranches and country-clubs of a tiny elite. I live in fucking Hyde Park, and unlike McCain, I don't really have the luxury of choosing not to live here, even if -- let's say -- I disliked so vigorously the ideas of the Chicago School of economics that it caused a strain on me psychlogically to be so near such rightist ideology. Let's say I just hated the idea of buying my fruit and mil in the same grocery store as a Friedman-acolyte, SO MUCH SO that I wanted to move up north to Andersonville, just to avoid association, and thereby, guilt by association.
Guess what? Unlike George W. Bush, who could just move back to the family compound, and unlike John McCain, who can nestle himself comfortably underneath an awning of his choice, in one of nine houses of his choice, and unlike millionaire Sarah Palin, who can move back either to one of her two summer houses or go flying in her expensive airplane or take a snowmobile through the snowiest and most beautiful snowbanks of the expansive Alaskan countryside.....
Unlike these GOP con-artists, I can't afford to move to some other part of the city. Good thing that, unlike McCain and his Rovian goons, I know that 'guilt by association' is a fundamentally dishonest concept. I love living in Hyde Park. It might not be the most exciting or trendy place; it might not be all that near to CTA train routes, but doggone it, it's A-OK by me; just an ordinary, normal, everyday Joe Sixpack, doing regular-old, outside-the-beltway stuff in my humble but happy Midwestern digs. Paying my taxes, and trying to do what's right by the Lord Above.
You -- Gentle Reader -- and I know what's right: voting for Barack Obama this November.
The protagonist of this film is the New Orleans rap artist Kimberly Roberts whose home-video footage comprises some of the most candid and shocking sequences of the film. She and her friends and family sit huddled in their attic for hour upon hour. Footage captured by Roberts from her attic window reveals common street-signs that are almost entirely submerged by the flood waters. She and the other residents of her neighborhood watch as the water-line continues to rise; many fellow residents -- including elderly people -- are trapped in the crevices of their attics, with no way of freeing themselves. Others are left to perish of starvation.
If you're not one for righteous indignation, this might not be the movie you'll most enjoy seeing, but you should see it anyway. A human being cannot help but get mad at what he sees, as the Roberts and their friends are forced to confront hypocrisy and injustice at every turn, in the fight for their very survival. There are really only a couple of moments at which the film becomes a little preachy. But I think it more than earns the right to be that way a couple of times. Apart from these miniscule, arguable exceptions, Trouble The Water allows its subjects and their circumstances to speak for themselves.
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