The Mound of Sound

Why does Steve Harper lie so damned much?

Steve knows that lying is the new political currency. It pays off big time with his committed supporters, who take pretty much everything he says as gospel, and with those just too dumb or lazy to see through him. Harper, as a student of his American Idols, Bush & Cheney, knows that lies work, if you tell them enough and get them in the media.

Politicians who rely on lies rather than sound policies and the persuasion of leadership are essentially undemocratic. They seek to win by manipulating voters, reaching through to their fears and prejudices and greed. That pretty much describes the schoolyard bully types like our own Steve Harper.

Now I don’t expect Steve to come out admitting he’s an absolute control freak with a blistering bad temper but his TV spots depicting him as just a humble, placid, regular guy are stomach churning. It’s not as though he even wants to be that sort of man, anything but. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig!

The uber-right have embraced this idea that it’s okay to pull the wool over the voters’ eyes at every turn, in every way. Is it really that much different if you get a vote by lying than if you just straight out buy it? Surely one currency is the same as the other.

The challenge facing Stephane Dion is to prevent Harper from framing the election on neutral issues.

Harper is going to play on the economy, arguing that Dion’s fanciful ideas would only kick us when we’re already going down on an international downturn.

The downturn, call it a recession if you like, is a global phenomenon – not Harper’s doing, not the Tories’ fault. All the big headline stories have come out of the US or Britain. Just one of those things but a spillover crisis in any case that needs a down to earth leader to fend off. “Down to earth” as in none of that nonsense about global warming or carbon taxes.

How will Dion refute that in a way that resonates with the electorate? He’s already allowed the Libs to be neutralized on Afghanistan. Not only are the Conservatives comfortably off the hook but they also get to boast about revitalizing the armed forces. The Conservative scandals have died down over the summer and won’t surface again until well after the election – if at all. Harper is going to have the gullible scared crazy about economic hard times. The last thing on their minds will be ambitious programmes to fight global warming.

If Dion can’t reframe the election on issues on which the Tories are vulnerable or weakest, he’s left to whine about Harper’s lies. We may find them outrageous but don’t expect the voting public to turn on the Conservatives over them.

Should Mr. Dion not go on the attack and effectively skewer Harper it’s hard to see how the Tories will be defeated. One thing I’m sure of – if the Libs try to wage their campaign on the Green Shift, they risk spinning themselves into a corner to the delight of Harper and Layton alike.

I’ve always had serious reservations about Mr. Dion but now, at least, he has a chance to prove his defenders and supporters right. I sure hope he proves me wrong.

Another feminist icon has denounced McCain VP nominee, Sarah Palin. This time it’s Gloria Steinem. Excerpted from Steinem’s op-ed piece in the LA Times:

“This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters.

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, “women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,” so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.”

At a time when merely questioning a candidate’s qualifications for the job means running the risk of being branded a misogynist, I was relieved to read Judith Warner’s rebuke of Sarah Palin in The New York Times. Here are some excerpts:

It turns out there was something more nauseating than the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate this past week. It was the tone of the acclaim that followed her acceptance speech.

“Drill, baby, drill,” clapped John Dickerson, marveling at Palin’s ability to speak and smile at the same time as an indication of her unexpected depths and unsuspected strengths. “It was clear Palin was having fun, and it’s hard to have fun if you’re scared or a lightweight,” he wrote in Slate.

Thus began the official public launch of our country’s now most-prominent female politician. The condescension – damning with faint praise – was reminiscent of the more overt misogyny of Samuel Johnson.

“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” the wit once observed. “It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?

Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots. This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It’s a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party’s tax policies have helped create an elite that’s more distant from “the people” than ever before. And from the fact that the party’s dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism — an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to “balance” five children and her political career with no need for support — is leading to a culture-wide crack-up.

One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. This need isn’t limited to women; it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them.

But in the past, it was possible to fill that need through empathetic connection. Few Depression-era voters could “relate” to Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician background, notes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It was his ability to connect to them that made them feel they could connect to him,” she told me in a phone interview.

“This election is not about issues,” Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager said this week. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That’s a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people’s fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.

We’re not likely to get a worthy female president anytime soon.

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/the-mirrored-ceiling/?hp

It’s time to tackle the old computer/new computer tango. XP to the dreaded Vista. Files to transfer, etc. I’m told it may take a few days before all’s well again. See you all soon.

MoS