Tag Archives: Senator Bernie Sanders

Initial thoughts on the Democratic Presidential Field for 2020

As the Democratic field gets more and more crowded, and trump gets more and more clinically insane and politically dangerous, the anxiety level just rises.

My initial thoughts: Any Democrat is better than any Republican at this point in time. There is a difference between the parties, even when the Democratic Party is at its most conservative. Get real: In terms of Justices, not just SCOTUS but at the level below, it is a national emergency though of course my ideal candidate would be a progressive with the ability to communicate convincingly to a wide electorate, because it is important to provide a vision different than the one that got us to being so vulnerable to the current disaster and because some truth telling is in order: sappy  “all we need is love” or “this is not who we are” type statements need to be buttressed by what we are or should be: a country of immigrants that has been enriched, literally, by immigration, for example, a country that understands we exist on a small planet–basic things like that.

It goes without saying that any pandering to the trump base is out of the question from my point of view. There is much more purchase in inspiring young voters, in keeping the activists who helped create the 2018 congressional sweep interested, while giving lifelong Democratic Party voters renewed enthusiasm.

Given that, first of all I feel that anyone who would be close to 80 at the beginning of their term is simply too old physically and also in their ability to deal best with contemporary challenges, even if they are in the vanguard of old progressive politics (Sanders). Thus no country for old men right now, Sanders and Biden, NO, please please don’t run. They also are both problematic for women who for various reasons feel it’s time for a woman. They each carry baggage on that score that can’t be erased.

As a warning, I would bring up the story of Elizabeth Holzman’s 1980 campaign for the Senate:

“In the general election, Holtzman faced Republican nominee Alfonse D’Amato and incumbent Senator Jacob Javits. After losing to D’Amato in the Republican primary, Javits ran on the Liberal Party ticket. He retained his union endorsements and drew liberal and Jewish voters away from Holtzman.[ A theme of D’Amato’s campaign was that Holtzman had never voted for a Department of Defense appropriation bill in Congress.D’Amato won the election by a margin of 1%, or 81,000 votes, over Holtzman.” [from Wikipedia]

FYI: JAVITS WAS 76 AND HAD A DISTINGUISHED CAREER BEHIND HIM AS A LIBERAL REPUBLICAN WHEN HE LOST THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY, AND AGAINST ADVICE AND PLEAS RAN A SPOILER’S RACE THAT STUCK US WITH D’AMATO FOR THREE TERMS AND DAMAGED HOLTZMAN’S NATIONAL AMBITIONS PERMANENTLY. IT WAS A TOTAL VANITY RUN AND HE MAY ALSO HAVE ALREADY BEEN SICK WITH THE MYESTHENIA GRAVIS THAT HE DIED FROM A FEW YEARS LATER. SO NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN PLEASE. **And no billionaires please.** And sorry, no Clinton, for the age and for the baggage. She won the popular vote, she would have been a decent normal president. But times change and I think some freshness is required. And practically speaking, keep in mind there are fewer financial resources for Democratic Party candidates, so vanity candidates will siphon off important resources.

Another no: please not Beto O’Rourke. I was electrified by his visits to immigration detention centers at the border in June. For the clarity and passion of his presence and his comments at that moment, I am grateful to him. I donated to his campaign, I wish he had won the Senate race in Texas. I’m even marginally interested in what he is doing right now driving around the country, but it seems more of a kind of art work, a performance piece that may develop into a mature political identity or something else. So, I don’t think so, even though he meets the longing for a Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington type of guy, a young white hope. NO, not now.

Of the candidates who have already announced, I find the three top women qualified and effective each in their own way. Compared to any Republican each would be fine. I mean, that’s not saying much since trump has buried the bar in the lower depths of hell. However here are some of my preliminary views with some reservations.

I feel that Warren, who is a good communicator and feisty in a good way, is stuck with her basic views on economics and doesn’t make the broader connection for the American people that would be so important, the link between current tax policy favoring the rich and all the other anti-middle class and poor and pro-super rich GOP policies, with the country’s inability to invest in schools, roads, new technologies. She needs her message to get bigger.

I never trust Kirsten Gillibrand–there’s her early support of the NRA, and her role in the Al Franken affair, which still rankles. But then I listen to her and she can be surprisingly effective and might have appeal with the electorate beyond New York State. I think she shouldn’t be underestimated. I also always wonder if I don’t discriminate against her because of her girlish looks and voice.

(though speaking of voice, is it too much to ask for someone who didn’t yell at us..not just Sanders and trump of course, but also Andrew Cuomo, god what a nightmare)

Kamala Harris is a strong candidate. She exudes the aura that she can do it, she can take it. She has the energy and just the requisite amount of experience and freshness. However for all that I was a bit disappointed with her in the Judiciary hearings this fall, where she would seem to be moving in for the kill and then not do it, for reasons unknown to me (for example she must have known that Kavanaugh had watched Blasey Ford’s testimony when she asked him if he had, no prosecutor would go fishing without having the info, so she got him to lie, but then didn’t tell him there was evidence he had watched. Why not? Still don’t get that). I think that Rachel Maddow picked up on her strengths and appeal when Maddow somewhat surprisingly and it seemed to me very prematurely and possibly unethically put her imprimatur on Harris’s campaign for the nomination.

Cory Booker has the best announcement video, out today, incredibly well put together. He’s likable and he’s been smart about supporting other Democrats around the country, but he seems a bit of a lightweight, and he has pro-Pharma and other reactionary history, and while I respect his privacy about his personal life, I wonder if that very discretion won’t be a liability in the glare of a national campaign.

There are a couple of other candidates or near candidates I just don’t know enough about, and then there is the one who is considering but so far holding back from announcing a run and that is Senator Amy Klobuchar. I think of her as the Angela Merkel of the field. I think her placement in the mid-West and her ability to win by huge margins in a conservative area is strong and her speech at the Kavanaugh hearings was a knock-out. I am not utterly convinced by “Minnesota nice”– I mean I think it is authentic to her but we need an avenger also–so I would hope she would show also more of the toughness of that speech and also use her Minnesota nice to move slightly to the left in terms of some policy.

Sherrod Brown is another mid-Western nice, he’s making some going to Iowa gestures, he’s OK, but I’d rather Klobuchar and she has better winning percentages.

I also think of the very talented women who are not positioned to run for President in this cycle, Stacey Abrams for example, and hope we see their candidacies in the next cycle. I hope Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez matures into a potential candidate. She’s brilliant, but she’s 29 and has been in public office for a month, let’s take a deep breath. But a Democrat has to win in 2020 for us even to think we’ll have anything like real elections in the future.

Another point: I’ve noticed on Facebook posts by men, many are happy to put together tickets where the female candidates or possible candidates (Klobuchar) are always in the VP position. I don’t see a single one of those women choosing that as a viable alternative to being a Senator. It is more the patient white man’s long game. These women are going for the top position now.

The question of who can win, winability, is misplaced: character and general affect are important certainly, but the new formula, for worse (the current occupier of the White House) or for better, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that a candidate who is able to speak with truth and conviction about policies that maybe branded as radical can win in the current atmosphere. Be truthful and positive. And someone has to be the adult in the room.

Finally I would wish for the contemporary equivalent of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both were very good politicians, and/but also had good politics, good instincts, instilled enthusiasm and courage. They arose in the greatest moments of crisis in our history and were able to use both sides of their personality to bring us through. We are in another great moment of crisis. I’m not sure if any of these candidates has that inner core but all are decent enough. We’ll see. I think for someone to put themselves through such a brutal process they have to have what it takes to win, but one also hopes for a sense of destiny, not of entitlement but of generosity of spirit, something that I think Obama had and was able to exude. They have to have a personal sense of destiny that you are the one to take on the challenges of your country at that moment.

*

If we can’t defeat this creature from the depths of hell who has invaded our country and is destroying it daily, then fuck us.

#2020presidentialcampaign #SenatorElizabethWarren #SenatorAmyKlobuchar #SenatorCoryBooker #SenatorKamalaHarris #BernieSanders #JoeBiden #BetoORourke #RachelMaddow

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This Past Week in Activism: Three Modest Gestures

Three modest political gestures have deeply touched me this past week:

Thursday, December 9th, in London, there was a teach-in at The National Gallery in conjunction with the street demonstrations of students protesting the tripling of educational fees by David Cameron’s government.

Teach-in about the raise in tuition fees, National Gallery, London, December 9, 2010

There is a general impression, which I often encounter among my students, that activism of the 1960s variety, including demonstrations in front of public institutions, occupations of educational and other institutions, are not effective. I am not sure that is true, but of one thing I am sure: any small engagement with the kind of political activism that brings people into a room or a public space, including the street, changes the life of the individual who participates, even if that individual does not further pursue a life of activism. You are in a room with other people, people who may think like you, people who may know more than you, people who feel passionately about things you dared not admit that you did. For a moment you are not alone. It can be stressful and confusing: you can experience some of this in play in the video clip I’ve included below, lots of people talking at the same time, a contingent atmosphere, but generally polite, good-natured, and modest, even including the behavior of the museum staff (they let it happen instead of banning everyone for life). No one on this particular clip is a great speaker, that actually makes doing something like that easier to imagine. For anyone who participated, something memorable has happened. And when I look at the picture of these people joined together in the same room with one of Manet’s four versions of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 1868, I am so so envious.

Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1867-68. Oil on canvas, 6'4"x9' 3 13/16", Collection of The National Gallery, London

The painting in the National Gallery that served as the backdrop for this week’s teach-in is the second in Manet’s series (see information about the history of the postmodern fragmentation of this work here). All the paintings of this series are big and they appear monumental, I’ve rarely been so struck and impressed by the size of art works. The modest scale of the exhibition space only enhanced this effect because the works were both monumental and intensely intimate in relation to the scale of each viewer.

This painting was included in Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, one of the best exhibitions held at MoMA. This small but intense, visually powerful, historically informative, wonderfully researched 2006 exhibition brought together Manet’s four paintings of this subject along with subsidiary paintings he painted during of the same year including his small but memorable painting of Charles Baudelaire’s funeral, along with a series of contemporaneous photographs of the execution and its aftermath, which were sources for Manet’s rendering and which included recreations, alterations, and falsifications of the actual, undocumented event, many of these by the ingenuity and dexterity of their photographic tricks and politically driven imagination anticipating Photoshop by over a hundred years. The exhibition also included a timeline of the events of the year Manet devoted to this work. Strangely relevant to ongoing discussions about political art (what is it? can art with overt political content be good art? does any so-called political art have any effect politically?) is also the fact that these works were not exhibited in Manet’s lifetime. So when I look at this picture of teh teach-in in London, with the painting providing a backdrop and visual anchor, I feel that the painting is fulfilling the role of a political art work in a way that Manet perhaps could not have anticipated when he painted it or when he put it away out of public view (in a gesture of pre-emptive self-censorship).

Meanwhile back in the States, this week saw a revival of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s, with the removal from the National Portrait Gallery of the video clip of David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly.” There has been excellent coverage and commentary on this, including by Holland Cotter and Frank Rich of The New York Times, Blake Gopnik of The Washington Post, and Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times, as well as on art blogs such as Hyperallergic, and by Stephen Colbert on a must-see full show on art and censorship including a piece de resistance art critical analysis of Republican right wing Rep. Eric Cantor, totally brilliant because it could only be done with full knowledge and understanding of and ability to correctly use “The Language” or “Theory” but also devastatingly on target about the cliches that go with that knowledge and its vocabulary! & on Comedy Central!!!

But the gesture that most touched me was the quietest, a two-person protest that took place November 30 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington:

This protest by Mike Blasenstein and the friend who filmed him Mike Iacovone was so simple: Blasenstein just stood there, with an ipad tied around his neck running the censored clip (best comment to this story on Hyperallergic, by Coco Lopes: “best use of an ipad ever.”) Blasenstein had explanatory flyers in his hand for anyone who might want one, which the museum security guards forced people to give back to him. Ben Davis published an interview with Blasenstein which foregrounds the spontaneity and modesty of his impulse to do this: “I just felt this is an important issue. I’m not really an artist or an activist, but when I heard that they took it down, it just seemed to send such a clear negative message. So I thought to myself, I would send my own message and bring this art back into the museum.” Could an instance of activism be any simpler?

The week ended with Senator Bernie Sander’s nearly 8 hour filibuster-like speech Friday December 10th, explaining and lambating the tax cut deal arrived at by President Obama and the Republican Party.

The speech can be seen on Senator Sander’s website as well as on C-Span. Here is a clip:

I only found out the speech was happening late in the day through comments on Facebook, I would have loved to watch it live but I watched about an hour and a half later that evening. I kept on trying to change the channel, thinking well , this is very interesting but let’s see if there’s something else on, but then going back to it: it was in its own plain spoken way, riveting. Sanders reminded me of the kind of politician I grew up witnessing: contrary to today’s cookie cutter hairdos with pre-fab talking points, you could count on a greater number of stalwart liberal figures, often speaking with emphatic local accents — Sanders is the Senator from Vermont but he’s from New York and sounds a lot like Bella Abzug to me — and they weren’t “Socialists” in those days, they weren’t “Independents,” they were in the Democratic Party, one of the reasons I’ve stated for being a “yellow dog Democrat.” It was fun and inspiring then, it was inspiring and a welcome respite now. I couldn’t help but think of what might happen if just one other Senator did this, and then one other one and then one other one, maybe pretty soon the cautious, craven and cowardly would begin to see a group to blend into and next thing you know you’d begin to have yourself a movement.

One can dream: each of these events is a drop of water in the worldwide tsunami of reactionary activism (tsunami, uh oh, cliche alert, but I’m thinking not only of the big crashing wave type of tsunami, but also the slowly inexorably rising water type that seems to have us suddenly clinging to lamp posts as our feet unexpectedly get wetter and wetter), seemingly, maybe even surely, futile for the moment, but still, are we not better off that a group of students and teachers occupied the National Gallery in front of Manet’s wonderful painting, and that two guys just decided to show up at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and use an ipad for peacful protest, and that a United States Senator had the guts and stamina to give a speech that if people could hear it, they would be persuaded by it? Let’s say they are all dreamers and what they did won’t change any immediate policy. OK. But what a greater nightmare we’d be in if such people did not do such small gestures of activism.

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