Come Into My Parlor

Somebody was hard at work last night on our porch swing:






Saturday, two other Obama volunteers and I registered voters at an intersection in downtown Kirkland. 80% of eligible voters in King County are already registered, and the office staff told us in advance that they would be happy with 3-4 new registrants. We got ten, however -- some first-time voters, one brand new citizen, and a couple of address changes. We also heard a lot of encouragement and support. The campaign regards Washington as a swing state, but in truth if Obama is in big trouble if he can't win here. They just don't want to take anything for granted, and that kind of running scared is a good thing...

...Still, how can this be anything but depressing? "An elderly woman in a New Jersey hair salon is overheard complaining about Barack and Michelle the other day, about how blacks supposedly have larger bones than whites, and about how she’s fleeing America if Obama wins..." 

Even Republican operatives admit the truth of the matter: "'“I know a lot of Republicans who are aware of surveys in this race that ask the ballot question ‘Who are you voting for?’ and then ask the ‘Who are your neighbors voting for?’ question,” says a GOP operative, referring to a common pollsters’ tactic of seeing through obfuscation revolving around race. “And between the first and second question, you see a five-to-ten-point shift in the answers. There’s a great big lump under the rug...'” 

In Defense of Community Organizers. This letter appeared Sunday in the Seattle Times: 

Along with many other Roman Catholics, I was deeply offended at Sarah Palin's demeaning reference in her acceptance speech to Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago.

Community organizing is so important to Catholic social teaching that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has operated the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, its domestic anti-poverty and social-justice program, since 1969.

In 1968, the U.S. Catholic Bishops issued "Economic Justice for All," a pastoral letter on Catholic social teaching and the economy, which said, "Human dignity can be realized and protected only in community."

In the 1980s, Obama worked in several Catholic parishes, supported by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, rather than pursue a lucrative career on Wall Street.

The McCain campaign owes an apology to the thousands of community organizers, the organizations that have supported them, including the Campaign for Human Development, and particularly the countless working families who have been helped in communities across our country.

— The Rev. Roger G. O'Brien, senior priest, Archdiocese of Seattle

Father O'Brien might well have added that without community organizers, Sarah Palin wouldn't have the right to vote, much less serve as governor of Alaska or run for vice-president...

Don't forget Rachel Maddow's debut tonight on MSNBC...

The R's make a big deal out of Sarah Palin being a middle-class mom who has worked her way up to governor blah blah blah -- a typical woman who realized atypical aspirations. But you know, when I was in high school, I couldn't stand the Sarah Palin types: The entitled beauty queen cheerleader who wouldn't give the rest of us the time of day had she known we were alive which she didn't. This story in yesterday's Seattle Times only reinforces my perception...

Women Against Sarah Palin...

This Darkness Got To Give

So, it started to rain last night just as we set out for St. Edward's State Park. So, no Red Stick Ramblers. Our best laid plans having ganged aglae, we repaired to Kirkland's Cactus! restaurant and sat under the eaves sipping Patron tequila and eating ceviche and chorizo tamales. Not a bad consolation prize at that. Less traffic, too...

I'm sitting here listening to "Katrina" -- Dr. Michael White's brilliant jazz dirge -- and pondering the McCain campaign's accusation that Barack Obama introduced race into the campaign with a "negative, abhorrent, nasty, vicious comment." (Obama said Republicans would try to scare voters by questioning his patriotism and "funny name" and by pointing out he doesn't "look like those other presidents on those dollar bills.") 

Now, race has been an issue one way or another in every American presidential campaign since the Constitution artificially boosted southern political power by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person at the same time that it disenfranchised them. Exploiting white resentment toward blacks has been a central tenet of Republican national ambitions since 1968, a strategy that they've honed and refined ever since. As recently as 2000, the presidential election came down to a choice between between two members of the southern aristocracy (even if one was a bit of a carpetbagger). 

The MSM has taken McCain's part by reporting the matter narrowly, as if it were a matter of McCain personally raising the issue of race in the first place. The Republicans have become adept at using surrogates -- witness the Willie Horton and Swift Boat campaigns -- to do their dirty work for them, but the MSM doesn't bother to examine this. Instead, pundits focus almost gleefully on the possibility of McCain successfully appealing to white resentment. 

The very fact that white resentment is there to be exploited proves the enduring power of racial demagoguery in this country. After all, affirmative action and welfare -- the two lynchpins of white resentment -- have largely been gutted. And yet the resentment abides. In his fine book Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship, Mark Perry points out that both men abhorred racism at the same time that they couldn't see it in themselves. When a man doesn't see himself as caught up in a problem, he can resent the idea that it exists or that he has any responsibility for addressing it. In the convoluted psychology of white resentment, some whites will see voting against Obama because he is black as a blow for racial equality. That's what the McCain campaign wants to tap into with its overheated rhetoric. We can only hope that they are preaching to a small enough choir. Otherwise, Dr. White's dirge is for all of us...

Friday's Choice: The Grateful Dead perform "New Speedway Boogie" to an appreciative audience: