Category: Politics – US State Related

The Bluest State

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The Book of the Week is “The Bluest State, How Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster” by Jon Keller, published in 2007. This short volume contained a mishmash of anecdotes on politicians and issues in Massachusetts from the 1980’s to the single-digit 2000’s.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, and a Bibliography), Democrat politicians in Massachusetts (such as Ted Kennedy and John Kerry) displayed “Aloofness. Arrogance. Entitlement. Condescension. Hypocrisy.” They and their supporters consisted largely of aging, elitist Baby Boomers, such as the Clintons, Al Gore, and John Edwards. The author cited some data that showed this (without listing his sources).

In 2004, the Democrats chose Barack Obama to deliver the keynote speech at their convention in Boston. The author commented on how African American politicians had changed the tone of their rhetoric: “American liberalism’s black face this time around would not be a fire-breathing preacher with a sermon full of angry demands [like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson]. Instead, as the crowd roared in approval, a dignified light-skinned black man spoke compellingly about his love for America in Hallmark terms.”

And yet, as Barbara Walters wrote in her book, “We [the media] really seem to care only if they [celebrities and politicians] are outrageous and call our president a devil or declare that the Holocaust never existed. Stand up and scream and we will interview you, or be reasonable and unheard.” Political races are won or lost with the right messaging at the right time. It is a delicate operation.

The author wrote of another politician– Deval Patrick– who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Patrick’s charisma helped him just before the election– he and his rival were neck and neck in the polls, but a good bit of last-minute messaging gave him the win. After he took office, however, he immediately began to ignore his constituents and reap political spoils in various ways, breaking his campaign promises. Is it relevant that he is African American?

Identity politics is alive and well for various reasons. One reason is that it is a way of maintaining two rivalrous parties– which has helped maintain a democracy more or less, for the United States for more than two centuries. Indefinite one-party dominance would be a dictatorship. There would be total cooperation, but the leader would rule his empire by fear.

There are always leaders who have embarrassing stories to tell about numerous political contacts and those contacts know it, so by threatening to tell those stories, the leaders can cash in on favors from those contacts in the future whenever necessary. Unbeknownst to voters, all the time, infinite acts of political puppetry are going on behind the scenes.

Anyway, read the book to learn of how the author gave a few examples of the hypocrisy of the Democrats, especially in Massachusetts, on the usual major political issues that get voters riled up: scandals, affordable housing, the environment, education, taxation, gay rights, abortion, crime, etc., etc., etc.

Flipped

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Flipped, How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power” by Greg Bluestein, published in 2022.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography), in the 2010’s, a Republican candidate in Georgia would better their chances of getting elected when they were on Fox News all the time and became a darling of hard-right conservatives.

Former president Barack Obama said manufacturing and mining jobs weren’t coming back. Former president Donald Trump contradicted him, saying the coal industry would be returning (but he was wrong). Similarly, in 2017, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told her opponent Stacey Evans, that a certain scholarship program wasn’t coming back. Significant funding that would assist financially challenged students was part of a bygone era in Georgia. Sadly, she was right. Nevertheless, a new Democrat political coalition in the state was on the rise.

For decades and decades well into the twentieth century, the Democrats, via gerrymandering, maintained a stranglehold on Georgia politics. The GOP implemented voter-suppression tricks in order to turn the tide, beginning in the 1990’s. In 2018, state election officials sent a postcard to voters telling them they were required to re-register to vote even if they changed residences within the same county in Georgia, or else they’d be ineligible to vote come election time. The ACLU put the kibosh on that with a lawsuit.

As is well known, the most recent decade saw especially vicious feuding between Democrats and Republicans in Georgia. A bunch of cliches apply to the campaigning environment:

Turnabout is fair play, but–two wrongs don’t make a right. And a pox on everyone’s house– because an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Two other cliches apply in politics, too: A man is known by the company he keeps, and when you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.

When former vice-president Al Gore was campaigning for president in 2000, he cringed when former president Bill Clinton insisted on helping him campaign by making appearances and endorsing him. Gore’s association with Clinton was not a good look anymore. Similarly, messaging of former president Trump was unwelcome during the Georgia runoff campaigns between Democrat and Republican senate candidates at the end of 2020. The Democrats enjoyed the delicious irony that their side was helped when voters (who would have voted for the GOP candidates) were told by Trump to stay home and not vote in revenge for the “rigged” presidential election.

One theme the author also could not help but mention that involved the state of Georgia, was the recently concluded but contested, presidential election. Lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan appeared on CNN and Fox News shortly after election day in November 2020 to “… invite Georgians who had evidence of legitimate voter fraud to come forward. None could do so.” Governor Brian Kemp also stood pat and did the right thing, because the fact was, “State lawmakers can’t retroactively change election law after a vote to help a candidate [such as Trump].”

Read the book to learn of: the candidates’ campaigns, conflicts and confrontations, and their many attendant issues, such as GOP senate candidate Kelly Loeffler’s part ownership of a WNBA team and the suspicious timing of her stock transactions; the ambivalence of most GOP candidates in uttering anything negative about Trump lest they lose votes; and much more.

What’s the Matter…

“Where the destruction will end depends only on what a small scientific elite and a generally apathetic public will advocate and tolerate.”

The above was said by Dr. Everett Koop and the theologian Francis Schaeffer in 1983, with regard to the abortion issue.

The Book of the Week is “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” by Thomas Frank, published in 2004.

American politics in the last forty or so years can be described in one word: HYPOCRISY.

The author spent his formative years in Mission Hills, Kansas. While there, he realized that wealth and various nefarious activities go together– such as dishonesty, white-collar crime, marital infidelity, mean-spiritedness and hubris syndrome.

The author explained how Kansans were converted to the Republican party beginning in the Clinton era. President Bill Clinton aligned the country economically with the conservative Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, a far-right capitalist. Clinton signed an agreement on free trade, making the Democrat and Republican platforms largely indistinguishable, save two emotionally charged, never-to-be resolved issues: abortion and gun control.

Thus began the political trend: the “culture war” and the “backlash” that opened the floodgates for propagandists to scream loudly and repeatedly in a hysterical manner about non-issues to distract voters and increase media ratings. Hardly anything has changed since then.

The author named the most prominent conservative Republican rabble rousers (in no particular order): Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Ann Coulter, Gary Aldrich, Laura Ingraham, David Brooks, Bill O’Reilly (remember him?) and Rush Limbaugh.

But in Kansas, even prior to the Clinton era, president Reagan distracted the unwashed masses with abortion and gun control so they wouldn’t care about the economic damage he did with his union-bashing.

In the early 1990’s, the Republican party in Kansas split into moderate and far-right Christian factions. In the 1994 mid-term elections, the latter won the hearts and minds of blue-collar Christian Democrats in Wichita.

In the late 1990’s, Kansas saw three corporate scandals; these from the utility companies formerly known as Western Resources, Missouri Public Service, and United Telecommunications. Each wanted to be pre-scandal Enron, as unbridled greed was all the rage in that unregulated time.

But take heart! In 1890, radicalized farmers had a “… revelation, a moment when an entire generation of ‘Kansas fools’ figure out that they’d been lied to all their lives. Whether it was Republicans or Democrats in charge, they believed, mainstream politics were a sham battle distracting the nation from its real problem of corporate capitalism.” Those farmers voted their “masters” (who happened to be Republican at the time) out of office.

At this very time in American history, voters can do it again. However, there are a range of problems involving voting. The following video covers those problems, and suggests a way to mitigate them starting at 17:00.

Read the book to learn: the intimate details of the culture war; the backlash; about a Kansan who named himself Pope in 1990 because he refused to recognize the one in power when Vatican II began; and people passionate about pushing the conservative Republican agenda who obviously aren’t doing it for the money.