The Woman of the People

The first of May is an odd day in America. In the rest of the world it is a sort of a Workers Day – the proletariat and their unions march in the streets, proclaiming that they matter. Here they don’t. The former secretary of Education, Ron Page, famously said that unions were pretty much terrorists, trying to destroy America. Then he resigned. But the idea that people could band together and agree that they’d stop work, walk picket lines and demand better wages or benefits, or just demand some sort of better treatment, is now considered somehow subversive. Ronald Reagan set the tone, becoming a hero to many when he simply fired all the striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and pretty much said don’t worry, we’ll find and hire less uppity people we can train to do the job, eventually, for less money. Some thought safety might be an issue, but there was no jump in mid-air collisions and things worked out. Americans accept their jobs, and the conditions and benefits that come with those jobs, and they don’t whine. If you don’t like your job, find another. It’s all Wal-Mart now. 

 

This particular first of May in America brought only one odd strike:

 

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) made good on its threat to stage a virtual strike on May Day, effectively shutting down all U.S. and Canadian West Coast ports. The one-day “work-stoppage,” said ILWU officials, is to protest the war in Iraq and comes at a time when the union is in the middle of contract talks with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA).

 

The idea was to support the troops by demanding that they be brought home, and we stop this nonsense in Iraq. No one expected that. The working class is fed up with the war? Who knew?

 

There were the usual May Day rallies, demanding more respect for immigrants, both legal and illegal – or at least demanding a bit more understanding and humanity. But other than for CNN’s Lou Dobbs, that wasn’t a big deal.

 

No, here in America it was Law Day:

 

Fifty years ago President Eisenhower proclaimed the first Law Day a “day of national dedication to the principle of government under law.” The ABA invites you to celebrate this enduring principle during the 50th anniversary of Law Day.

 

Law Day 2008 will explore the meaning of the rule of law, fostering public understanding of the rule of law through discussion of its role in a free society.

 

We are, after all, an obedient people. We celebrate following the rules, understanding that rules matter, even if some make no sense and seem to do us real harm – that’s what freedom is all about, or something.

 

And this May Day we have our new working class hero, Hillary Clinton, or so everyone agrees. It was her second day of being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, the network of the common man and his rightful overlords – you know, the place where authoritarians and those who worship them feel comfortable.

 

On the other hand, her day did not start off well:

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton was jolted Thursday by the defection of one of her longtime superdelegate supporters, a former national party chairman who urged fellow Democrats to “reject the old negative politics” and unify behind Barack Obama.

 

Her husband had named this man to head the Democratic National Committee way back when. He had endorsed Hillary Clinton long ago. Now he is fed up. He bailed.

 

On the other hand, a few hours later Hillary Clinton got one big gift:

 

Iran’s UN mission has complained to the Security Council over US Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s threat to “totally obliterate” the Islamic Republic if it were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.

 

“The Islamic Republic of Iran expresses its deep concern over, and strong condemnation of such a provocative, unwarranted and irresponsible statement against the Iranian nation and civilization,” Iran’s deputy ambassador to the UN Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi said in a letter to the council released here Thursday.

 

He said Senator Clinton “unwarrantedly and under erroneous and false pretexts threatened to use force” against Iran.

 

He seemed upset with the April 22 interview with ABC television where Clinton was asked what she would do as president if Iran were to launch a nuclear strike on Israel:

 

I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.

 

The response:

 

“Such a statement is a flagrant violation of the most fundamental provisions of the UN Charter and the basic principles of international law,” Danesh-Yazdi retorted. He reiterated Tehran’s position that Iran “has no intention to attack any other nations.”

 

It doesn’t matter. They, some day, hypothetically, might attack someone.

 

This will play well with Joe Six-Pack, or that seems to be the idea, as long is Joe isn’t a member of the wimpy ILWU, of course.

 

In might be fun to sneak into a Clinton rally now and ask the ultimate Joe Six-Pack question – if we totally obliterate Iran and France objects, will you, Hillary Clinton, pledge that you will then totally obliterate France, reducing that entire country of cheese-eating surrender-monkeys to smoldering radioactive rubble, leaving no man, woman or child there alive, ending all their snooty posturing about how smart they are because they read books and know how to live? At the point she grins, bites the head off a rat, and downs a shot of Crown Royal with a beer chaser – and the crowd cheers. It could happen.

 

In the real world, there’s this blog post from an Iranian:

 

Many Iranians are obsessed with Barack Obama. If he goes to Iran, I’m sure he could fill Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, which has a capacity of 100,000. To a large extent this is because of the nature of Obama’s message about change and hope. Iranian people truly want to change their situation, get rid of decades of marginalization and restore their reputation in the world. They feel connected to his message of change. They are tired of living under the threat of economic sanctions and military attacks. Obama’s remark about initiating a dialogue with Iran translated for many Iranians into hopes of normalizing the relationship between the countries and Iran rejoining the international community. For many Iranian women struggling for women’s rights, Hillary is incredibly inspiring. Senator McCain, on the other hand, they see as just as a third term of President Bush, and I see no reason for them to connect to him.

 

Oh – that. There are real people there.

 

It doesn’t matter. See the May Day Pew Poll – Obama Losing White Working Class Dems to Hillary in Landslide. The figures are stunning. But for the wimpy ILWU guys, she’s won that large bloc. She may have won the nomination.

 

And she’s doing the George Bush thing that this crowd admires so much - Clinton: Congress “With Us Or Against Us” On Gas Tax. Every economist, every single one, says her summer holiday from federal gas taxes is nonsense – as supply is limited, increased demand will just make the prices rise to a higher level, negating the savings, and the tax revenue lost will mean a few hundred thousand jobs in highway work will be lost, as the funding is gone. No matter, she says it’s leadership, and the Pew poll seems to indicate most people agree. The “with us or against us” is just a nice populist flourish. It worked well for Bush.

 

See Azi Paybarah in the New York Observer with this:

 

Michael Bloomberg said giving drivers a break from the gas tax is “the dumbest thing I’ve heard in an awful long time.”

 

Expect her now to rant a bit about New York City Jews, those damned elitists.

 

And anyway, she knows things. It’s her deep experience, you know.

 

Andrew Sullivan ponders that issue:

 

The more I listen and read the more thoughtful people who oppose Obama the more I think that the very simple fact of his newness and youth and inexperience in Washington is what gives many pause. And I think these are completely valid reservations.

 

I don’t see it that way. I think of politicians as jejune as Tony Blair was when he won office - with absolutely zero executive experience - and see in Obama qualities that will serve him well. An Obama-McCain match places these two qualities - freshness versus experience - baldly in front of is and gives them a new and profound contrast.

 

One of his readers sets him straight:

 

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

 

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the forces arrayed against him are too strong - just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo - then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

 

And this fellow goes on to say that this has nothing to do with any sort of rock-star hero worship:

 

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that… they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

 

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

 

Opting out of that is not immaturity. It’s intelligence.

 

But she is willing to lose a generation or more of these young folks. She has the common man, the working guy who doesn’t understand his long-haired kid. It’s the sixties all over again – Archie Bunker and Meathead.

 

So she is not the elitist. She knows politics is nasty, and that the system doesn’t work. She seems fine with that.

 

But the Democrats have always had a problem with idealistic upstarts who are seen as elitists. See Jeff Greenfield in Slate with Obama and Orwell, a stroll down memory lane:

 

Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it’s making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

 

The charge that liberal candidates don’t connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like “limousine liberal,” which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969. It was also at the core of “radical chic,” the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe in his savage 1970 account in New York magazine of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. (Wolfe didn’t invent the term, but he gave it currency.)

 

He suggests reading Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier:

 

Orwell … rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, “every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses.”

 

There’s much more detailed discussion, but it comes down to this:

 

The perennial struggle of Democratic contenders to appeal to ordinary Americans seems very much of a piece with Orwell’s sharp descriptions. Election after election, Democrats argue that once Joe and Jane Six-Pack fully grasp the wisdom of the latest six-point college-loan program, or of an 800-page health-care scheme, they will come to wave the Democratic banner. And, sometimes, these voters do just that - provided that the candidate in question has demonstrated a sense that he or she is not treating them as the subject of an anthropological study. Bill Clinton had a full steamer trunk of domestic programs; he also was a product of Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law School. But his 18 years in the vineyards of Arkansas politics gave him the tools to compete for support on a more visceral level. Then there were Clinton’s obvious tastes for earthly pleasures - from Big Macs to more intimate diversions - which made it very hard to label him as an aloof elitist.

 

And Hillary has her Crown Royal with the beer chaser. She gets it. She may get the nomination.

 

On May Day, International Workers Day, she was one of them – or she managed to make it seem so. She wins.