The Debate: Nobody Wins Big
McCain NewsLadder

Special Debate Edition

Taking a glance at the liveblogging and instant analysis by progressive media outlets of the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., one thing stands out: none of our bloggers saw a knockout victory overall, though both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama each individually scored points on specific questions.

As David Corn of Mother Jones explains it:

In talking policy, both men came across as knowledgeable. McCain truly perked up when he got the chance to discuss the strategic importance (as he sees it) of the Caucasus region. Obama demonstrated confidence in his ability to challenge McCain on the strategic importance of the Iraq war. But, indubitably, many viewers of the debate would score these exchanges in accordance with their preexisting opinions of the two candidates. As for those knotty undecideds, there was no specific assertion that an analyst could point to and say, “This is going to stir them.”

After a lengthy opening discussion of the economic meltdown, the debate stayed true, for the most part, to its stated focus, foreign policy, which brought Iraq back to the campaign stage. John Nichols of The Nation summed it up like this:

A blistering economic crisis may be the all-encompassing issue of the moment. But the war in Iraq still defines the difference between John McCain and Barack Obama.

The Washington Independent’s Ari Melber, writing from the scene, thought it played to Obama’s advantage:

Sen. Barack Obama laced directly into Sen. John McCain during the first presidential debate on Friday, repeatedly telling McCain “you were wrong” on the key foreign policy issues facing the U.S. Obama blasted McCain for supporting President Bush’s “failed” policies against Iraq and Al Qaeda, tweaked Republicans for failing to catch Osama bin Laden, and chastised McCain for saying the U.S. could “muddle through” in Afghanistan. Obama’s tone was mostly cool and wonkish, but his sparring was more aggressive than his performance during the Democratic primary debates.

Tim Fernholz of TAPPED begs to differ:

On Iraq, it seemed that McCain got the better of Obama because the Democratic nominee failed to present some of his best arguments about the future of Iraq, instead choosing to focus on his correct judgment call at the start of the war.

Among the points Obama should have raised, wrote Fernholz, was the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Obama’s timetable for withdrawal.

In the debate’s second half, McCain claimed that prior to the coup d’etat executed by Pakistan’s former Gen. and President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan was “a failed state.” That was a new one on a lot of commentators — unless what one means by “a failed state” is a democratically elected government prone to corruption, criteria one can now imagine our enemies employing to describe the U.S. as “failed” as well. Obama let this one slide.

At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Hilzoy found others:

Obama, I thought, missed a few opportunities. The most important, I thought, was when McCain said he would never repeat the mistake of abandoning Afghanistan. The response “But John, you did: back in 2003, when you voted to take our focus away from Afghanistan in order to wage a war of choice against a country that had not attacked us” was just begging and pleading to be made. He was also, I thought, a bit tense.

Ezra Klein, whose blog lives on the site of The American Prospect, thought Obama got in a good one when Obama challenged McCain on the latter’s comments, first reported on TPM, to a Miami radio interviewer, where McCain said he might not meet with Spain’s President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose country is a NATO ally. Klein cites CNN commentator Bill Schneider saying that McCain simply misspoke during that interview, then reassesses:

Here’s McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann: “The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero (and id’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview.” I agree that McCain misspoke. But then his adviser turned his verbal slip into official policy. That’s actually worse.

Grist’s David Roberts and Kate Sheppard took on the task of fact-checking the candidates’ assertions about energy policy. Here’s Roberts:

McCain just nailed Obama on the 2005 energy bill, using it as an example of Obama’s support for excess pork spending.

Ouch. Thing is, McCain didn’t really vote against the bill because it had pork in it. But Obama did vote for it because of the pork for ethanol and renewable energy. It’s a legitimate point, and it drew blood.

Sheppard looked at their big-picture energy positions, writing, “Obama said that … ‘we can’t drill our way out of the problem.’”

Obama said that our plan should include “wind, solar, yes, nuclear, clean-coal” and hit on McCain for voting against renewables numerous times over his 26 years in office. He also noted that these energy sources “deal with the issue of climate change which is so important.”

[…]

McCain also argued that one of the solutions to energy concerns should be more drilling: “Offshore drilling is also something that’s very important, but it’s a bridge … it will help temporarily help relieve our energy problems.” But economists, the Energy Information Administration, and the American Petroleum Institute all say that any effects are at least 10 years out. That’s one long bridge.

Oh, yeah, and in case you haven’t heard, John McCain has not been elected Miss Congeniality in the Senate, he thinks Barack Obama doesn’t understand anything, he could not manage to look at Barack Obama once during the debate, and Barack Obama “absolutely agree[d] with John” a few times.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

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If You’re Losing the Game, Choose a Different Game
McCain NewsLadder

In another wild week in American politics, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain began the week on the losing end of public opinion polls, unscripted comments by his surrogates, more reports of his links to lobbyists and a tanking economy branded, in voters’ minds, with the GOP logo. And looming not far in the background was the specter of tonight’s debate in Oxford, Miss., scheduled to be McCain’s first direct confrontation with Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama.

Examining a tide of factors moving against him, McCain did on Wednesday what he had done successfully the last time trends moved against him: he found a game-changer — not one to merely change the existing game, but rather to create a new game altogether into which he could drag his opponent. Claiming to suspend his campaign, he would ride into the Capitol Building on his white horse, save the nation from economic devastation and and sacrifice the opportunity to confront his opponent face to face in the first presidential debate, urging Democratic nominee to follow on.

It helps to remember what McCain faced on Monday: a New Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed Americans favored Obama over McCain by 14 points as best suited to deal with an economy that is, by nearly all estimates, teetering on the brink of catastrophe, thanks largely to the craze for deregulation led by Republicans in Congress over the course of the last eight years. In a series of articles, the New York Times outlined payments made by the disgraced mortgage enterprises FannieMae and Freddie Mac to the firm owned by McCain’s own campaign manager, Rick Davis.

By Wednesday, more bad news was on its way; an interview by CBS News anchor Katie Couric with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s vice presidential nominee, had gone terribly wrong and video had surfaced of a prayer ceremony showing Palin receiving the hands-on blessing of a witch-hunting preacher during the Alaska gubernatorial race.

Palin’s performance on CBS was so appalling that it led Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to correct his own prediction of Palin’s formidability.

[S]he is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues — a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she’s petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she’s been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I’m not really sure which is worse, but it doesn’t really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.

Late last week, The Nation’s John Nichols reported from Alaska that the Alaska state government seemed to have fallen into the hands of the McCain campaign, as campaign advisers sought to effectively shut down the legislature’s investigation of the scandal dubbed Troopergate — Palin’s firing of her chief public safety officer.

And, New America Media’s Earl Ofari Hutchinson reports word was leaking out of Alaska of an April meeting between Palin and 14 black leaders in Alaska at which, alleges Alaska African-American Historical Society President Gwen Alexander, Palin said that, as governor, she didn’t have to hire blacks, and had no plans to do so. Palin spokesperson Sharon Leighow disputed the charge, telling Hutchinson “that Palin did not hire staff persons based on color, but solely on talent and skill.” Hutchinson here quotes Leighgow directly: “Governor Palin is totally color-blind.”

Color-blind, protected from witches and stumped when quizzed on McCain’s record on regulation and her own on Russia, Palin was on the verge of being a two-time game-changer (good change, bad change) when McCain decided that game wasn’t working for him anymore. Though the debate was meant to focus on foreign policy — said to be McCain’s strong suit — questions about the economy were sure to arise. Time for a new game.

Before McCain set foot back in the nation’s capital, reports Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central, Senate Majority Leader asked him not to inject presidential politics into the negotiations under way for a deal to save a raft of financial institutions with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Early on Wednesday, the Democratic chairmen and Republican ranking members of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee announced they had arrived at an agreement that boded well for a legislative deal. Then McCain arrived, and the deal was off when House Republicans suddenly balked.

Salon’s Joan Walsh questioned the wisdom of McCain’s tactics for the sake of his own campaign.

Clearly McCain’s gambit is political, but I think it’s bad politics. I actually think a foreign-policy debate was the only hope McCain had for taking back momentum after a week in which his lifelong devotion to corporate deregulation caught up with him… it would have…provided McCain with an opportunity to taunt Obama about his opposition to the so-called surge in Iraq, and to change the subject generally — and that could potentially be good news for McCain.

Perhaps McCain reads Walsh, because today came word that he was going back on his original word that he would not debate tonight unless there was a deal on the billions-bailout. (Word!) But that came only after McCain told the cameras after yesterday’s meeting at the White House with President Bush, Barack Obama, and a host of other luminaries that the package needed some work.

Or perhaps McCain never expected Obama to call his bluff, which the Democrat apparently did when, even in the absence of a deal, he flew to Mississippi today for the debate.

Unless he aces tonight’s debate, McCain may find he succeeded in creating only a momentary diversion from his troubles. More lobbyist questions have arisen. Despite McCain’s promise to deliver Washington from the clutches of lobbyists, the numbers of lobbyists associated with his campaign are legend. David Corn of Mother Jones this week broke the story of Wayne Berman and James Jay Baker, “two prominent [McCain campaign] supporters” who, according to Corn, “are lobbyists for the National Rifle Association” which “recently began airing harsh attack-ads against Barack Obama.” Their activities seem to break the McCain campaign’s own rules.

At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Steve Benen comments that revelations of the relationship between McCain transition team leader William Timmons, Sr., and Freddie Mac — one of the companies whose near-failure sent markets spiraling downward — seems troublesome, at best. Timmons “earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac,” Benen writes.

John McCain personally spent most of last week railing against Barack Obama’s associations with former Fannie Mae officials were extremely important, worthy of attack ads and overheated speeches. At one point, about a week ago, McCain told CBS, “[T]he influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside-the-beltway, old-boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable.”

As it turns out, though, Americans may not be as worried about the global financial meltdown as politicians seem to think. Mother Jones’s Jonathan Stein decided to see how the term “financial crisis” fared among terms on which people conducted Google searches. (See graph in Stein’s post.) “Turns out ‘wizards’, ‘cupcakes’, and ’sex toys’ retain their popularity in times of national emergency,” Stein writes. All outpaced the less alluring “financial crisis.”

Which means, the week could end up being a bust for McCain. If trends in his home state are any clue, he may not have much pull there, either. Writing in Salon, Mike Madden, conceding that McCain will win Arizona’s electoral college votes, writes:

Despite McCain, Democrats in Arizona are very much looking forward to the elections. Come November, McCain will almost certainly win his home state — but he may find he doesn’t bring a lot of Republicans to victory along with him. Instead, Democrats look likely to pick up a House seat, hold on to two others they won in 2006, and at least challenge — if not overturn — Republican control of the state Legislature.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

See more tagged with: John McCain, John McCain NewsLadder and NewsLadder

John McCain’s Very Tough Week
McCain NewsLadder

It’s been a tough week for a lot of people, what with the global financial crisis and everything, and the Republican presidential nominee is feeling the heat.

The week kicked off with a New York Times/CBS News poll showing that the Democratic nominee had pulled ahead of Sen. John McCain for the first time since the latter had named the photogenic and iconoclastic Sarah Palin as his running mate. The margin claimed by Sen. Barack Obama may be small — 48 percent of registered voters saying they would vote for him, compared to McCain’s 43 percent — but the trend is in his favor.

Beginning with the news of the meltdown on Wall Street, the McCain campaign became a bit of a gaffe machine, with the presidential candidate telling the nation on Monday that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” — words that echoed those used by President Herbert Hoover to try to reassure a freaked-out public that was running on the banks in 1929. (Hoover’s denial about the economy led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.)

When the Democratic nominee seized upon McCain’s remarks, the Republican found a novel way to dial back. “Senator, what economy are you talking about?” asked Obama, to which McCain replied that by “fundamentals” he meant American workers, and that by suggesting that the fundamentals of the economy were not strong, Obama must mean that American workers were weak. Yeah, believe that one, and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you — a Bridge to Nowheresville, formerly known as the financial district of downtown Manhattan.

And speaking of bridges to nowhere, McCain running mate Sarah Palin continued to insist
that she was a pork-fighting refusenik on that very project, even though the record shows
that she supported that multimillion-dollar boondoggle of the ethically challenged Sen.
Ted Stevens before she was against it. In fact, reports David Morris of AlterNet, Alaska is awash in government pork-barrel money:

And when it comes to government pork, Alaska is king. As USA Today noted back in March, Palin’s state ranks number one — no other state is even close. In 2007 Alaska received some 2.5 times as much as runner-up Hawaii and 15 times more than the national average.Alaska has by far the most state government employees per capita as any other state and about five times as many as Obama’s Illinois.

The gaffes continued when Palin seemed to place herself ahead of McCain on the GOP ticket, referring to a potential “Palin and McCain” administration. (The Raw Story has the video.)

However, the deflation of the Palin bubble as shown by the polls could have one upside for McCain: he may find himself less insulted by crowds who come to hear Palin and then split five minutes into McCain’s speech, prompting the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen to ask, who’s the celebrity now?

But let’s not divert ourselves from the fun of gaffe laughs. What McCain operatives
surely expected to be one bright spot blew out the bulb. The defection of former Hillary
Clinton donor Lynn Forester de Rothschild (yes, of those Rothschilds) to the McCain camp, reported by John Byrne of The Raw Story, went terribly awry when she referred to embittered gun owners and religionists by an epithet, saying that Obama was an elitist because he dissed “[t]he people out, you know, who are the rednecks or whoever…” One imagines her playing long games of canasta off-camera with Carly Fiorina, the McCain campaign operative and former Hewlett-Packard CEO who said that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama was equipped to run a large company.

Midway through the week came word, via TPM Election Central, that McCain had given an interview to a Spanish-language radio outlet in Florida in which he appeared not to know that Spain was in the Western hemisphere. He also refused to say that he would welcome a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who leads a nation that is an important NATO ally with a large economy.

Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones begs mercy on McCain’s behalf. The problem isn’t that McCain didn’t know who Zapatero is or the hemispheric location of Spain; it’s that he had a hard time understanding the interviewer because he’s old. I’m sure the McCain camp will pick up that line and run with it.

In truth, McCain did look a little cranky, especially when he called for the firing of Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, blaming the former California congressman and fellow Republican for the Wall Street failures that set off Monday’s stock-market crash. Really, all Cox did was enforce the anti-regulatory policies of the Bush administration, which McCain was for until he turned against them — last week.

All the crankiness and confusion led Steve Benen to draw a comparison between Bob Dole as the 1996 GOP nominee, and John McCain:

The McCain campaign no doubt hopes to avoid the Dole comparisons, but the parallels are pretty obvious — both were quite old during their campaigns, both were seriously injured during service in a war, both ran for president more than once, both have well-known nasty streaks, both are long-time Washington insiders, and both launched campaigns because they thought it was “their turn” to be president. …if the Dole=McCain meme catches on, it would be very unhelpful to the Republican ticket.

To which one of Benen’s commenters replied: “It beats being compared to Hoover.”

Which may be why McCain has suddenly fallen in love with the New Deal, even though the
centerpiece of Roosevelt’s economic rescue plan was Social Security, which McCain has called a “national disgrace.” The Democratic National Committee responded to McCain’s sudden New Deal romance with a video hosted by James Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Franklin and Eleanor, which Mother Jones‘ Josh Harkinson walks us through.

The revolution may not be televised, but the anti-change disinformation campaign surely is. This week found the McCain campaign defending two untrue charges: that Obama would raise taxes on “ordinary Americans” and that he used as an adviser the disgraced former chairman of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines.

On the Time magazine blog, Swampland, Karen Tumulty calls the Raines charge a subtle form of race-baiting. Raines is African-American, and it’s in the McCain campaign’s interest to link Obama to figures who feed racial stereotypes.

Then there’s the taxes bugaboo. Despite consistent debunking of his ads that claim Barack Obama will raise your taxes, McCain continues to make that claim and, despite the absence of truth in it, it’s having an effect.

Lagan Sebert of the American News Project took his camera crew to Winchester, Virginia, a working-class town in a pivotal state, to talk to the locals about Obama and taxes. About half of the people he talked to insisted that Obama was out to raise their taxes, bearing out polls taken in other swing states, like this one in New Jersey. “Republicans seem to be scoring points with their attacks on the Obama tax plan,” said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

It’s all in the messaging, says Joan Walsh of Salon.com:

So I was feeling like Obama had new wind at his back politically — until I saw the two ads Obama and McCain released on Wednesday. Wow. McCain, who has absolutely zero plans for solving this problem, depicts himself as a tough guy and a fighter who’ll vanquish the bad guy. It’s a 30-second spot, edited to make McCain look like an action figure. Obama, by contrast, produced a two-minute ad — when what he needs is a two-sentence ad.

Of course, the messaging is easier if you just don’t tell the truth. For instance, reports AlterNet’s Joshua Holland, despite McCain’s insistence that his health care plan will make coverage available to all Americas, the McCain plan will actually remove the regulatory limits that keep sick people from being priced of the market.

Between all the fibbing and flip-flopping, you’d think the McCain camp had enough going on to keep itself busy without taking on the running of an entire state. But that’s what The Nation’s John Nichols finds in Anchorage: the McCain campaign has all but taken over the running of the Alaska state government as the Troopergate investigation of Sarah Palin grinds to a halt, thanks to the refusal of First Dude Todd Palin, speaking through the McCain campaign, to comply with a subpoena to testify before the the Alaska state legislature. “[A]ides to the governor are no longer answering questions about state business,” Nichols reports. “They are directing calls to McCain campaign operatives, who have flooded into then state…,” prompting the Anchorage Daily News to headline an editorial, “Abdication by Palin: When did the McCain campaign take over the governor’s office?”

Seems the campaign has also gotten its hands into the government of yet another state: the hotly contested Wisconsin, where McCain campaign co-chair and Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has filed a lawsuit demanding that “the state Government Accountability Board order election clerks to confirm the identities of potentially tens of thousands of voters — and possibly many more — who have registered since Jan. 1, 2006,” according to the AP. The work would have to be completed by Nov. 4 — a nearly impossible task. Should Van Hollen win, great numbers of voters could be left out in the cold. The Chelsea Green blog looks at this and similar election protection problems in other states. Starting next week, The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series will feature an investigation week focused on election protection.

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Race and the Religious Right: More Than Just Waffles

WASHINGTON, D.C. — At the annual gathering of the Christian right sponsored by the political arm of the Family Research Council, the Republican Party’s top emissaries have come in past years to bow before some 2000 right-wing foot-soldiers and the leaders who command them. However, this year’s Value Voter Summit, a bit light on GOP dignitaries, made less news in its speaker line-up than it did for the sale of a particular brand of breakfast food: Obama Waffles.

In the far corner of the exhibit hall at the Values Voter Summit two gonzo entrepreneurs hawked a product they described as “political satire”: a box of waffle mix emblazoned with a cartoon image of a bug-eyed, toothy, dark-lipped Barack Obama eyeing a plate of waffles. A pat of butter on the waffles is stamped “2008″. On the top flap, the Obama carton appears in a turban, next to an arrow printed with the text: “Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.” The box of mix is a crude send-up of Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix, which once featured a stereotyped image of a round-faced, turbaned black woman as its trademark.

Although FRC Action claimed in a statement to have demanded that the exhibitors dismantle their display “when the content of the materials was brought to the attention of FRC Action senior officials” on Saturday, the truth is that by the time Obama Waffles creators W. Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss began breaking down their display, the conference was winding down and most exhibitors in the hall had already pulled out of Dodge.

I made my way through a row of unstaffed and abandoned booths on Saturday afternoon, arriving just as Whitlock was packing up unsold product. Although, according to the FRC Action statement, Whitlock and DeMoss had already received the equivalent of cease-and-desist orders from conference organizers, Whitlock, dressed in a cook’s apron and hat, was happy to take my $10 and fork over a box.

Taking FRC Action at the word of its executive director, David Nammo, a trusting reader may accept that the organization’s leaders were unaware of what Whitlock and DeMoss were hawking for two and a half days before the exhibit was shut down. But Whitlock and DeMoss are hardly strangers to leaders of the religious right, and links to racists (and, indeed, the use of dog-whistle references for racists) are hardly new for Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a spin-off of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family empire.

According to a general letter of reference written by DeMoss on behalf of Whitlock (posted by nisperos, a savvy reader at the Denver Post’s Web site), the two men met when both met while working at Focus on the Family, which Whitlock’s resume dates at “1991 - 1992″, when he served as a producer on Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” daily radio program.

The two worked together again, some years later, at FamilyLife Publishers, an endeavor of the Campus Crusade for Christ — one of the very first religious-right organizations. Whitlock’s resume shows him having worked for FamilyLIfe from 1992 - 2004. During that time he served one year on the event team putting together the religious right’s Congress on the Urban Family, which perhaps explains where the author developed an apparent affection for hip-hop music, as evidenced by the bonus “recipe rap” that appears on the side of the Obama’s Waffles box:

Barry’s Bling Bling Waffle RingYo, B-rock here droppin’ waffle knowledge
Spellin’ it out, ’cause a graduated college
Some say I waffle so fast, Barry’s causin’ whiplash
Just doin’ my part, made wafflin’ a fine art
For a waffle wit style, like Chicago’s Magnificent Mile
Spray whipped crem around the edge
Shake it first like Sister Sledge
The say wit me, I can be as waffly as I wanna be!
(That goes out to my Ludacris posse)

Whitlock recently wrote a study guide to accompany the movie “Nim’s Island,” a production of FoxFaith, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox. (Hat tip: FireDogLake’s Julia.)

DeMoss, Whitlock’s partner in the OW venture, also has some friends in high places, having served as the co-author of four books with Tim LaHaye, best known at the multi-million-selling author of the Left Behind series of novels. With LaHaye, DeMoss penned four novels targeted at young adults that include a vetted GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on the eve of the Republican National Convention. LaHaye’s wife, Beverly, is the founder of the influential Concerned Women for America, which was an early proponent of “gay recovery” therapy designed to make heterosexuals out of LGBT people.

It is perhaps not surprising that material as racist as that peddled by Whitlock and DeMoss at the Values Voter Summit failed to set off alarm bells among Family Research Council and FRC Action leaders until reporters began inquiring about the Obama Waffles stand. FRC President Tony Perkins spoke as recently as 2001 before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a well-documented white supremacist group, and directed the 1996 Louisiana congressional campaign of former Congressman Woody Jenkins from the campaign lists of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Perkins paid Duke $82,000 for the lists. Jenkins served as the first executive director of the Council for National Policy, 1982-1985, and again in 1987.

More recently, while reporting for Church & State magazine, I saw Perkins address a crowd of hard-core Christian right believers in 2007 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church of the late Rev. D. James Kennedy. In his speech before those assembled in the church sanctuary at the “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference, Perkins blew the white supremacist dog whistle known as the biblical story of Phineas. (In this instance, Perkins used the Phineas story to make the case against Muslims, urging the assembled Christians to “take action” in the way of Phineas.)

“I am here advocating for Christian citizenship,” Perkins said.Lest any of the assembled miss the point, Perkins offered up the story of Phineas, grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron, from Numbers 25. Phineas was rewarded by God with an “everlasting priesthood” for killing an Israelite and his Midian lover because God had forbidden the mixing of the men of Israel with the women of that tribe.

[…]

“We read that Phineas arose and he took action…,” Perkins said.

“Not only is prayer required…,” Perkins continued. “I warn you that if you begin to pray for our nation that, at some point in time, you’re gonna be prayin’ and you’re gonna feel a tap on your shoulder and hear, ‘Son, daughter, I’ve heard your prayer; now I want you to do something about it.’”

Just in case his message should be misconstrued, however, Perkins offered this caveat: “Now, let me be clear, in case the media’s here,” he said, “I’m not advocating you go home and get a pitchfork out of your storage shed and run into your neighbor’s house.” Phineas, the Bible tells us, used a javelin.

So maybe the FRC people, as their statement suggests, did simply get sloppy and miss the fact that a product to which they say they object for its “coarseness and bias” sat, essentially, on the shelves of the conference store, for a couple of days. Maybe the co-author of one of the religious right’s top honchos went unnoticed by FRC folks, mistaken for just another yahoo hawking an amateur attempt at humor. Maybe the leaders of the Values Voter Summit have a race problem anyway.

See more tagged with: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Bob DeMoss, Campus Crusade for Christ, Council for National Policy, David Nammo, Family Research Council, FamilyLife Publishers, Muslim, Obamas Waffles, Phineas, Tim LaHaye, Tony Perkins, Values Voter Summit, W. Mark Whitlock and Woody Jenkins

Huckabee Hearts Music

It was one of those adorable, bipartisan, even international moments: a Democratic congressman from Queens a former governor from Arkansas in musical collaboration, celebrating the virtues of a 17-year-old girl in a song penned by two Brits. Yesterday, at the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (bass) and Rep. Joe Crowley (guitar and vocal) rocked the tank yesterday with their version of the Beatle’s “I Saw Her Standing There” to promote the Music National Service Initiative a new national service project that uses music as the means of transforming society.

Huckabee, embracing a position that seems designed to rile his fellow social conservatives, has long been a proponent of music and arts education in the public schools. During his term as governor, Huckabee pushed through the Arkansas legislature a bill that mandated music education for every student in the state’s public schools. It’s a cure he prescribes for all of the states.

“Now, it’s going to be rare that you hear a Republican talk about mandates,” Huckabee said, “but… if we don’t force it, we don’t fund it, because there’s too many competing interests. My experience was, once we mandated that music education take place with certified teachers, we started funding it — because we had to.”

While the appearance of the Republican presidential also-ran and Baptist preacher on the stage of a liberal institution may seem a head-scratcher, CAP President John Podesta told of how he and Huckabee got to know each other during a stressful patch of a humanitarian mission to Rwanda. “It’s amazing, I think, Mike,” Podesta said, “how being a plane on a tarmac in Kigali with an engine that’s blowing out on take-off can quickly cause two men to put policy differences aside, partisan differences aside, and become fast friends.”

Huckabee was quick to explain that his advocacy for music education sprang not from some sweet impulse to beautify the culture. It’s about the economy, stupid, he explained (without the stupid part).

“We’ve got to start helping people to understand that there is a direct correlation between the power of our own economy — the power of our own future survival — and the power of stimulating creativity,” Huckabee explained. Because where will we find energy independence? It will be in the creativity that comes from students who will who, maybe, were first artists — because most of the great thinkers and inventors and scientists of the world were first musicians and artists.”

As evidence, he cited Richard Florida’s trend-setting book, The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic 2002). Interesting, as Huckabee, hardly a friend to gay people, is touting a book that cites, as a major geographical indicator of creative-class economies, the number of LGBT residents.

Huckabee has a bone to pick with the “No Child Left Behind” bill passed by Congress in 2001, but it’s not the common complaint about the law’s incentive to make educators teach math and science “to the test” rather than in creative ways. Huckabee noted that while No Child Left Behind was often blamed for the collapse of music and arts programs in poorer school districts, the problem was not with the bill, but with local administrators. The law actually mandates arts education, Huckabee said, but “[s]chools and school districts were not held accountable for the results of music and music education and arts, many schools said, ‘If we’re going to be held accountable for it, we won’t care. If we’re only going to be held accountable for math and science and reading, that’s the only thing we’ll put money into.’” (Perhaps that’s why a music-teacher friend of mine in Washington, D.C., calls the bill “No Child Left a Dime”.)

Founded by Kiff Gallagher, a singer-songwriter “who served on the White house legislative team that created AmeriCorps,” according to his bio, MNSI has won the support of Huckabee and Crowley, especially for the non-profit organization’s MusicianCorps, described by Gallagher as “a musical Peace Corps” designed to bring music education to areas and school districts where access to music lessons is not available.

Crowley, who will co-chair a Congressional Musicians’ Caucus designed to support MusicianCorps, is embracing the program for more prosaic reasons, he said. “You never hear of anyone going to war over music,” he explained. “The worst of if is the battle of the bands.”

While Crowley went all peace, love and understanding, Huckabee couldn’t resist getting in a dig. “Republicans do like the arts,” he said, “and some of us believe that Republicans can rock, too — not just Democrats — even though when we play the music, sometimes the musicians get all mad about it and demand we quit. My band played a Boston tune; Tom Schultz went berserk and demanded that we quit and we reminded him, ‘Tom, you sold the music; we paid a license fee; get over it.’” Last week, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart demanded that the McCain campaign stop using their hit “Barracuda” to promote Sarah Palin at campaign rallies.

See more tagged with: Center for American Progress, John Podesta, Mike Huckabee, music education, Music National Service Initiative, MusicCorps and Rep. Joe Crowley

Sarah Palin’s Party Loyalty

UPDATE: For a comprehensive explanation of Constitution Party theology from a scholar of right-wing movements, check out Chip Berlet’s excellent article on Talk to Action.

Unless you live in a cave, you probably know that Sarah Palin, the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, has a pregnant teenage daughter, an ex-brother-in-law whose supervisor she tried to fire, and you may have heard that she once belonged to a political party, the Alaska Independence Party, which sports the occasional mission of establishing Alaska as its own country. (Though McCain camp denies that report by ABC News, the network is sticking by its story about Palin’s affiliation. In addition, voter rolls show, according to TPM Muckraker, that Palin’s husband claimed membership between 1995 - 2002.) More recently, Palin sent the party a video greeting for use at its convention.

Through it all, leaders of the G.O.P. and the religious right have vowed to stick with her. But what if she supported a third party that’s bent on smashing up the Republican Party? Or one with links to militia groups? Would she still look like your garden-variety church lady to the Republican Party pooh-bahs?

Indeed, it does seem to be the case that Sarah Palin is out there on the fringe. Fred Clarkson of Talk To Action today reported the connection between the Alaska Independence Party and the Constitution Party founded and led by Howard Phillips. Basically, the AIP is the Constitution Party — its Alaska state-level party. In 1996, Phillips tried to lure insurgent presidential candidate Pat Buchanan out of the G.O.P. for a run on the slate of his national party (then called the U.S. Taxpayers Party) and nearly succeeded in doing so.

I first became familiar with Howard Phillips in 1995, in the course of reporting a story on the religious right for Mother Jones. In a 45-minute telephone interview, Phillips laid out for me the strategy and rationale behind his party, whose ideological basis is found in the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism, a theology that calls for biblical law to be implemented as the law of the land. (Yes, that means death for adulterers and “homosexuals”.)

But he’s not an impractical man. Here’s how Phillips saw the fortunes of his party taking shape in 1996, per our conversation:

What I think is going to happen is that we’re probably not going to elect an independent president in ‘96, but ‘96 is going to reveal some fissures within support for the major parties, and I think we’ll have an independent president by the end of the decade. The reason I say that is that i see an enormous financial crisis coming. When you have a $5 trillion debt, every time interest rates go up by a single percentage point, the cost of debt service goes up by $15 billion. And we’ve been able to keep interest rates down for a long time — one of the reasons was that people wanted dollars. They don’t want dollars anymore…And that is going to lead, in my view, to an hyper-inflationary depression in the United States which is going to terminally undermine confidence in whomever controls the presidency when it hits — and, to a lesser extent, in the other party, as well. I think the whole purpose of ‘96 is to position for that crisis and to be able to pick up the pieces when it’s over.

The Constitution Party has long been linked to anti-abortion groups that threaten violence, such as Missionaries to the Pre-Born, a sort of militia organization. Randall Terry, the former leader of Operation Rescue, has organized for the party and run for Congress on its ticket. When I interviewed Phillips 13 years ago, I asked him about alleged links between his party and militia groups, which he denied.

“We are not involved in the killing business,” he said. “Planned Parenthood is Murder Incorporated…That’s not our schtick.”

Phillips’ anti-choice rhetoric is often harsh, and his position — which echoes that of the Constitution Party — is uncompromising: No abortions, no exceptions. Here is how he stated it at an Operation Rescue rally in San Diego in 1996: Exceptions for rape and incest, he said, mean it’s “okay to kill some babies if they’re born to the wrong parents — if their dad was a rapist or a close relative.”

If Palin makes it into the West Wing, would she be Howard Phillips’ ringer, awaiting that fateful day?

Okay, so that’s a bit much. But, as Max Blumenthal reports, leaders of the Council for National Policy, the secretive uber-right-wing umbrella group (of which Phillips is a member), went ga-ga for Palin, and may have pushed McCain to pick her in exchange for their support.

See more tagged with: Alaska Independent Party, anti abortion, Constitution Party, John McCain, militia, Missionaries to the Pre Born, Randall Terry, Republican National Convention, RNC and Sarah Palin

At DNC, the God-Fearing Meet the Otherworldly

DENVER–In the generic meeting-rooms of the Colorado Convention Center, a revolution is taking place in the Democratic Party. The people of faith have arrived.

Every day has seen a panel or gathering or both of religious and spiritual leaders, some gathered together by

And it doesn't end with church-mosque-temple-synagogue crowd. Add in the unchurched but spiritual set, and you've got a negotiation of the higher power in politics unlike any ever tried before.

To the mainstream media, Oprah Winfrey, who will attend Barack Obama's acceptance speech tonight, is spoke this way of making the choice to, for the first time, publicly endorse a presidential candidate: “I feel like I’m out of my pew.”

Because of the diversity of the Democratic party, the Obama campaign’s concerted outreach to what are called “faith voters” is not without risk. In the GOP, the religious faction have a broadly shared agenda, centering mostly on issues of sexuality and women’s freedom. Among the leftward-leaning religious and spiritual types, you find a pretty consistent agenda on poverty, health care and the social contract, but wild divergence on reproductive freedom, same-sex marriage and how far to take faith values into the political arena. And then you have some of the religious types simply dismissed the “unchurched” believers — the spiritual types — as “secular”, when they are anything but.

In the past, the spiritual types — often the refugees of the church experience — have stayed far from people in collars, yarmulkes and kufis, practicing a very individualized form of faith in an almost underground fashion. Now, thanks in no small part to Oprah Winfrey, spiritual leaders like <a href=”http://www.chopra.com”>Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson are part of the mainstream, with significant numbers of followers of their own, and a moral system that demands expression in policy, if not politics.

Yesterday, I attended a panel on “New Faith Voters” convened by the organization Faith in Public Life that truly blew my jaded mind. At one end of the spectrum sat Jim Wallis, the anti-abortion, centrist evangelical minister who founded Sojourners. Wallis is among those who sought to influence the Democratic party platform on the matter of abortion. (The platform language about reducing abortion did not go as far as Wallis would have liked.) On the opposite end of the spectrum sat Marianne Williamson, the spiritual teacher who is now featured on the Oprah & Friends XM radio channel.

Williamson left no doubt that she and her constituents have an agenda based in their own theology of love. The United States, Williamson said, needs to apologize to the world and the people of the world for the harm it has caused. The nation will not find the path to recovery, she said, until official mea culpas are issued in contrition for such sins as the oppression and killing of Native Americans, African-Americans and others — for starters. Then she blamed the degradation of the environment on the early church for its claim of man’s dominion over the earth.

Wallis, on the other hand, is looking for national redemption through the reduction of poverty and the weakening of the Democrats’ pro-choice rhetoric.

At another, more practically-oriented panel today, convened under the auspices of the Obama campaign’s Faith Council, an array of clergy addressed the challenges of staying on the correct side of the tax code when entering the political fray. Among the strategies suggested by DuBois is the faith-based house party, whereupon people of faith gather in someone’s home for a fundraiser or get-out-the-vote effort.

It’s easy to scoff at the surface absurdity of spirtualists and religionists negotiating anything, and I certainly find humor in the sight. But Obama really has done something here that hasn’t been done before. Now, when somebody decides to host an evangelical yoga party, I’d like an invite, please.

–Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

See more tagged with: Barack Obama, bigtentdenver, Democratic National Convention, Jim Wallis, Marianne Williamson, Oprah Winfrey, religion and Sojourners

Michelle Obama: Hillary Made Barack a Better Candidate

DENVER–Today’s meeting of the Democratic Women’s Caucus featured a surprise guest: Michelle Obama.

The potential first lady is making a concerted effort, it seems, to reach out to the different women’s constituency groups in the Democratic party, including those closely allied with Hillary Clinton.  (Earlier this week, Michelle Obama spoke to a gathering sponsored by Emily’s List, the organization that bundles donations to fund pro-choice candidates.)

In today’s remarks, Ms. Obama offered Hillary Clinton some major props, saying, “Thanks to her, my husband is a better candidate.”  The ballroom full of women echoed with cheers and applause.   “Thanks to her,” Michelle Obama continued, “his campaign is a better campaign.  And thanks to her, my daughters — and all of our daughters — have the freedom to dream bigger dreams…”

Michelle Obama went on to list the causes dear to the hearts of caucus-goers:  healthcare, equal pay, reproductive rights.  She spoke rather poignantly of the tensions of being a mother who works outside the home, saying she often feels she short-changing her daughters when she’s at work or on the campaign trail, and feels she’s giving the job and the campaign short shrift when she focuses on her girls.  “We all known that guilt,” she said, “and I know I can get an ‘amen’ on that.”  The audience shouted back, “Amen.”

Her remarks ended in an appeal to the party’s women activists to redouble their efforts on behalf of the Obama campaign.  Predicting the upcoming election to be “a tight contest,” Michelle Obama told a roomful of admirers, “Women are going to make the difference in this campaign…I am going to need you every step of the way.”

See more tagged with: Barack Obama, bigtentdenver, Democratic National Convention, DNC, gender gap, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Womens Caucus and womens issues

Donna Brazile Votes to Place Hillary’s Name in Nomination

DENVER–At the DNC Women’s Caucus meeting at the Colorado Convention
Center, Donna Brazile whipped the crowd into a frenzy with stirring
remarks that invoked a host of iconic African-American women leaders
in the Democratic party, and expressed respect for Hillary Clinton, as
well as pragmatic politics.

Throughout the primary season, Brazile, the CNN commentator who ran Al
Gore’s popular-vote-winning presidential campaign, remained neutral.
Many assumed a certain sympathy toward Obama, and Brazile was one of
the first to publicly object to Bill Clinton’s remarks in South
Carolina, when the former president compared Obama’s prospects in the
state to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 — remarks Brazile called “depressing.”

At today’s gathering of Democratic women, Brazile made an announcement
that began with a bit of a fake-out. “I am honored that I had the
chance now to circulate a petition some 24 years ago to put Jesse
Jackson’s name in nomination,” she said. “Last night, I signed my name
to place Hillary Clinton’s name in nomination.” The crowed roared in
appreciation. “I did it in honor of the woman who was unbought and
unbossed: Shirley Chisholm,” Brazile continued. “I did that in honor
of the first black woman to ever deliver the keynote speech at a
Democratic National Convention: Barbara Jordan. ” And then, calling
the name of one of Hillary Clinton’s most stalwart supporters, the
late Ohio congresswoman who broke barriers of race and gender, she
added, ” I did that in honor of Stephanie Tubbs Jones.”

But always pragmatic, Brazile made a point that seemed to be directed
at the early Obama supporters in the room, saying she signed the
petition for Clinton’s nomination “because Barack Obama understands
that a united Democratic party is a victorious Democratic party in
2008.”

–Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

See more tagged with: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, bigtentmedia, Democratic National Convention, DNC, Donna Brazile, Hillary Clinton and Womens Caucus

Live From Main Street
What Will the Green Economy Look Like?

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We all say we want to go green, but do we all see the same kinds of change when we imagine an eco-friendly economy?

By Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

In Denver, Colo., Tom Plant, director of the Governor’s Energy Office, is practically giddy. It’s just days before the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Colorado’s biggest city, and a long-sought goal in Gov. Bill Ritter’s New Energy Economy program has just been met: Vestas, the Danish wind-turbine manufacturer, has announced its plan to open a new manufacturing plant just outside the city limits — its second in the state.

Plant reels off some numbers: 1,350 new jobs at the new Vestas plant; 650 employees already employed at another the Vesta plant that opened last March, and the prospect of an additional 400 workers at a plant expected to open two years from now. Colorado now generates more than a gigawatt of energy through renewable energy sources — three-quarters of that created in the 18 months since his boss took office.

And how many people does he expect to arrive with the convention?

“About a gazillion, I think,” Plant says, laughing. “Maybe two gazillion.”

A cleaner, greener future has long occupied the dreams of progressives. With an historic “change” election upon us and a crisis in fuel pricing and climate change, the moment appears at hand for the public to accept profound changes in our way of life and the very structure of our economy.

Economists and philosophers, community organizers and labor negotiators, all see in the current crisis an opportunity to create change that reaches beyond the immediate boon of a cleaner environment. Some look through the green crystal ball and see new opportunities for industry or a revitalized labor movement. Others see a new role for government as a change-maker, and still others see a quantum leap in the evolution of the human soul. As goals, they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. But the paths imagined by green advocates don’t always converge. Already the sound of dissonance is audible between those who envision a completely new economic model, and those who seek to work with and clean up the old one.

Democratic Party officials surely had the “change” theme of this year’s presidential campaign in mind when they chose Colorado to host their convention. The Colorado legislature swung from its traditional red to blue when Ritter, the state’s first Democratic governor in 50 years to enjoy a legislative majority, rode into office in 2006, promising a new and vibrant state economy that capitalized on the crisis of global climate change.

Ritter’s New Energy Economy plan got a jump start before he was even elected, with the passage of a ballot measure in 2004 that called for the state’s utilities to bring the level of renewable energy sources in their portfolios up to 10 percent by the year 2015. Executives at Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, protested loudly, then went on to meet the standard eight years ahead of schedule. This year, Xcel’s lobbyists urged a doubling of the standard.

While Colorado’s mandate for renewable sources from its energy providers may have caught the attention of Vestas and other green technology companies, Plant sees something much bigger in their expansion. “When a company like Vestas locates 2,500 jobs in Colorado, it’s not to feed an entirely Colorado demand; I mean, they’re looking at the entire country,” Plant says.

Plant isn’t alone in seeing an opportunity to improve the economic fortunes of everyday Americans in the climate crisis.

Carla Din, Western field director of the Apollo Alliance, doesn’t think she’s asking for much: all she wants is a raft of green energy projects in California that build partnerships between organized labor, developers, environmentalists, social justice advocates and government. The Apollo Alliance seeks to build coalitions among interests that often conflict — such as labor and business — with a focus on meeting the needs of a green economy.

“We’re talking about retooling existing structures, but also about utilizing the workforce that has been in these areas … forever,” Din says.”For instance, the sheet metal workers, the plumbers and pipe-fitters… A lot of these workers are working in targeted industries that will need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for compliance with climate change laws.”

Legislatures in 25 states have passed laws like Colorado’s that require utilities to meet new standards for a minimum percentage of renewable energy sources in their portfolios. (California has the most comprehensive law, designed to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30 percent over the next 12 years.) The Apollo Alliance also advocates legislation that sets efficiency standards for the energy used by state government facilities and weds those requirements to fair labor standards for the workers who will do the required construction.

Asked if the labor movement will need to reshape the industrial-era structure of its trades sector, characterized by individual unions for distinct specialties, Din bristles a bit. “I don’t necessarily think things have to be restructured; I think things have to be done strategically and efficiently with a lot of cross-pollination.”

But a revolution on the scale required to reshape the economy and save the planet just won’t happen without a fundamental change in the way people regard their place in the world, says Oakleigh Thorne II of the Thorne Ecological Institute, an education center he founded more than 50 years ago in Boulder, Colo. Applying the old economic principle of unbridled growth to green industries just won’t do, he says. Thorne argues that the same principles that govern ecological systems control economic systems, as well. “If you violate ecological principles you might be able to make a fast buck on the short term,” he says, “but long-term, you’ll have an economic disaster.”

Van Jones, president of Green For All in Oakland, Calif., wants nothing less from a new green economy than the alleviation of poverty — and a few other things. Voicing a more urgent imperative in the threat of global climate change, Jones, who will be featured as a panelist at The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street program in Denver on Sunday, sees a world of possibilities in an economy gone green.

The revitalization of urban America could reach into the city’s core, says Jones, with green-collar jobs for those who today struggle to find good-paying work — not to mention the health benefits for residents who today choke with asthma on fumes and city soot. While Green For All advocates legislative remedies, that’s just where its efforts begin. If the kind of change he’s talking about is to be made, Jones says, the current economy will need some radical adjustments.

Models used by today’s economists, Jones explains, are based on notions developed in the 19th century. “Whether left or right,” Jones says, “[these models] had one almost unspoken assumption, which is that you’re going to have an awful lot of nature and very few people. So you find these weird terms, like ‘inexhaustible resources’… Now you’re living in a world where you have an awful lot of people and shockingly little nature left.”

You can’t tinker with the equation to fix the flaw in that model, he says. “If you … have to break up with oil and coal, you may as well break up with poverty and a bunch of other stuff, anyway,” insists Jones, whose book, The Green-Collar Economy, is due from HarperCollins in October.

Economist James Galbraith is frustrated by the lack of attention to the climate crisis by his colleagues. “Where is the economic school of thought that addresses the impact of climate change?” he asks. Except for the work of one or two economists, he says, “it doesn’t exist.” Galbraith, a professor at University of Texas (Austin), says solving the crisis will require a complete reordering of universities to foster collaboration across disciplines.

In his recently released book, The Predator State, Galbraith pleads a case for Democrats to abandon the so-called free market system, since Republicans have clearly done so over the last eight years, as demonstrated by a series of bailouts, manipulations and deficit spending. Galbraith suggests, the challenge of heading off the perils of global climate change offers a jumping-off point from which to launch a new, more beneficial economic system. “It’s a sensible application,” he says. That new system will feature of hybrid of government planning, regulated markets and institutions that foster innovation.

Like Jones, Galbraith sees in the current economic and ecological crises the potential to reinvent decaying societal structures and create entirely new ones. But when asked if it is time for a new New Deal, Galbraith offers a caution against “reaching back to a glorious moment and calling for the revival of an old solution.” One thing the next president and Congress should do, Galbraith says, is to create national-level institutions on the order of our great national laboratories, like the National Institutes of Health or NASA, designed to address the climate crisis.

Nothing less than the sort of effort the U.S. mounted when mobilizing for World War II will create the enterprise needed to address climate change and energy independence in ways that will restructure the economy for the better, Galbraith adds. Folded into that enterprise, he says, should be a goal for universal broadband access (”It’s carbon-neutral”) and a national infrastructure project that does not simply repair decaying structures, but completely redesigns roads, bridges and transportation in ways that are energy-efficient and create sustainable communities.

For his part, Jones sees more creative energy for reinventing the economy coming from the human heart and mind — what he calls “the revolution within” — than from existing institutions. “Why be stuck with these little single-issue not-for-profits and broken-up academic departments trying to solve this thing from inside of it?” he asks. Thinking about this crisis needs to be simplified, not made more complex, he explains. “You know, the reason that Green For All has the name it has is ’cause it’s what a child would say… You gotta get back to the complete innocence of childhood.”

Where Jones calls for a return to innocence, Thorne calls for simplification of our lives, a goal Galbraith also seeks through his economist’s lens, noting, for instance, the efficiency of shortening the food chain.

But Thorne’s philosophy, the “deep ecology” first proposed by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, hangs on more than simplicity; it urges humility in human interaction with the rest of creation. “This integral consciousness is the next step… Out of the consciousness will come the cultural change. Consciousness is always ahead of culture.”

Yet even within the green economy movement, consciousness has its limits. Where thinkers like Jones and Galbraith see a sort of creative destruction in allowing the structures of yesterday fall away to make room for the new, pragmatists like Din and Plant have high hopes for greening the industrial model. Conflicts inherent in these two visions could be the next big test of the progressive movement.

This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “So You Say You Want Change? Exploring the Conflicts and Opportunities Ahead.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature Van Jones of Green For All, who is interviewed in the article, and a number of other progressive leaders, including Rep. Donna Edwards, Polly Baca, David Sirota, Faye Wattleton, Andre Banks and Lee Camp of Laughing Liberally. This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, August 24 at 4:00 p.m. MST in Denver. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org.

The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.

See more tagged with: Apollo Alliance, Carla Din, Colorado, Democratic National Convention, DNC, James K. Galbraith, Live From Main Street, Oakleigh Thorne, renewable energy, The Predator State, Thorne Insititute, Tom Plant, Van Jones, Vestas and wind power