It's been a very long time since I posted on this blog, but it doesn't matter much, since no one reads it anyway. Apparently. This just gives me an opportunity to vent. The internet is a wonderful thing. I get to be an inveterate smartass on facebook. I get to blog about music on my website www.terryhillmusic.com and I can vent at length about other things on this blog.
I've been, as usual, watching the political news. I've written elsewhere before that my interest in politics came early. When I was only nine or ten years old, my Grandpa Ryker would bait me and cajole me into arguing with him about some article in the newspaper. I loved to visit with my Grandpa, so I took to this (reluctantly at first) with eventual enthusiasm. In Junior High, I devoured the course in Civics and found it fascinating, largely because it explained many things I'd read about in those newspaper articles, but didn't understand. All of this morphed into an intense interest in politics and current events. I'm a news junky.
I'm a devout liberal, always have been. Grandpa believed that Herbert Hoover was evil, and that FDR was akin to the Second Coming. My Uncle Loris said, "Vote straight Democrat and you'll never go wrong." My Mother said, "All my life, when the Democrats are in power, the little guy does well. When the Republicans are in power, the little guy suffers." My Dad was a local union leader, at least part of the time. When I got old enough to understand the issues and make up my own mind, I gravitated to the left. Sydnee and I worked on the McGovern campaign in 1972.
I sort of reluctantly supported Obama in 2008. I actually liked Hillary Clinton best, but my big issue was health care. I strongly believe in a single payer system. Hillary didn't support single payer. Obama thought we needed to get there in stages, but said he believed single payer was best. That tipped my support to him.
While in many ways, Obama's first term has been a disappointment to me, I have to say this: with the exception of gasoline prices (which is not in the control of the president) every single problem we had as a nation is better today. Not good enough. We haven't improved things as quickly or as much as we need, but they are improved. Maybe it's "slow but sure wins the race." I disagree with Obama on Afghanistan: we need to get out now, not in a year or two. We should be out by Halloween. I think Obama did the right thing with regard to Bin Laden. And there are other things:
The stimulus plan was not just a good idea, it was a necessity. However, Obama, like FDR, failed to go far enough. The stimulus should have been much bigger. FDR was faced with the same problem, it was politically impossible for him to do as much as he needed -- Congress just wouldn't go along with it. So he settled. As a result, the Great Depression started to recover, then faltered, and by the end of the 1930s, the country was back in depression. It took World War II to get us out, which was what? A huge stimulus, but accompanied by hundreds of thousands of deaths. Obama didn't have as bad an economy to deal with, but it was a similar outcome. Had the stimulus been bigger, we'd be seeing less unemployment, and more recovery.
Bottom line, I think Obama's done a fairly good job. His most bitter and angry critics pretty much just make stuff up, and their nasty criticisms are a thin veil for their real objection to him: the color of his skin, and maybe the sound of his name. Obama's story IS the American dream. While he didn't come from poverty, his father did. And Obama came from basic middle class Mid-western family roots (you can't count his father's family, because Barack didn't know that side of his family growing up.) Through scholarship and student loans, he managed to go to the best schools and took himself from his Hawaii home where his grandparents worked in a furniture store and a bank, to Harvard Law School. He worked as a community organizer, which is kind of a combination of social work, law, and politics. From there, he went on to state politics, and eventually the United States Senate, from where he launched his presidential bid. If that ain't the quintessential American Dream, I don't know what is.
Which brings us to Mitt Romney.
I was around and paying attention to politics when George Romney, Mitt's dad, was on the scene. While they share the same last name, the difference between George and Mitt was day and night. George was a solid Republican, but he was considered "moderate" then, which would probably be a "blue dog" or conservative Democrat now. He ran as a moderate opponent against Goldwater in the runup to the nomination in 1964.
George was born to American Mormon parents in Mexico who were poor, but hardworking. His parents' fortunes went up and down, with his father working in construction and farming. George did not grow up the child of wealth -- not your "fortunate son." He was a savvy businessman of the old school: he built businesses that built things. He pretty much saved American Motors by betting on smaller, more efficient cars (the Rambler.) He was governor of Michigan, and ran for President, famously sharing 12 years of his tax returns.
Mitt, on the other had, was born to wealth. He's about four months younger than me. As a comparison, if Mitt and I were running a 100 yard dash against each other, it would be as if Mitt's starting line was about ten yards from the finish, while I had to run the whole 100 yards. Ann Romney talked about how she and Mitt lived in a basement apartment with borrowed furniture, and about how Mitt paid for his own graduate school "by selling some of his stock." Kind of brings a tear to your eyes, doesn't it?
Well, my wife and I lived in crummy apartments and houses with hand-me-down furniture, but I didn't have any stock, and my wife, in the first year or so we were married, had to wash diapers in the bathtub with a washboard, because we couldn't afford either a washing machine or a laundromat. Mitt's "humble" beginnings seemed to me like what it was: privileged wealth that he did not earn.
From there, Mitt went on to become a successful businessman on his own, ultimately becoming far more wealthy than his father. But he didn't do it by building a company that build and sold things like George did. Instead, he did it by building a company that raided other companies, loaded them down with debt, then sold them (off? out?) at a huge profit. In the process, most of the companies were forced to lay off hundreds, probably thousands of their employees. That's where Mitt's wealth came from, and that's what Mitt supports.
Two things resonated with me in Romney's acceptance speech. First, his sort of appeal to nostalgia, with his repeated references to "return to . . ." and his line about coming from Middle of American in the middle of the century. Romney seems to be saying "we're in a period of hard times, so I want to take us back in time to. . " what? Mayberry? Bedford Falls? You can't go back in time, nor should we even want to. It's fun to watch old movies on TCM and reflect on "the good old days." But there was always something bad about the good old days. We can only go forward, and try to progress to something better. That's what this country has always done. We progressed from an agrarian society to an industrial society. We moved from wage slavery to worker's rights, from a 12 hour a day six day week to the 40 hour week. From women being second class citizens to women voting and holding office. From slavery and slaves being counted as a fraction of a person to an African American in the White House. Going backward is not the answer.
The other thing that resonated with me was Romney's story about his father giving his mother a daily rose. That was sweet, but what it reminded me was that my father couldn't afford to give my mother a rose every day. My Dad fell trees in the woods as a gyppo logger. He worked in 90 degree heat in the summer, having to take salt tablets to keep his sodium level up, and in freezing cold in the winter, sometimes having to dig six feet of snow from a tree to be able to fall it. Dad would bring my Mom wild flowers -- fairy slippers -- home in his lunch box each evening. They were free. All Romney's "rose" story did was remind me of the difference between living in wealth and privilege and working hard for a middle class living. Mitt just doesn't have a clue.
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