WE
HAVE DECIDED TO RESUME BLOGGING “PUBLIC LITURGIES.”
After a long season of illness and family loss (a daughter and a wife) the
growing realities of global inequality, demagoguery and rising nationalism call
us to return to our prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power.
Hillary Clinton is beginning to look like the candidate who
may not be electable as postmaster by next Fall. Bernie Sanders continues to stalk
her as a candidate supported by Wall street money, asking her to release the
transcripts of her highly paid speeches to Goldman Saks. The landscape is changing rapidly In Iowa and Nevada among
voters between the ages of 17 and 29, Bernie Sanders won 84 percent of the vote
to Hillary’s 14 percent. He
also bested her 58 to 37 among voters aged 30 to 44.
Meanwhile Republicans are as one in questioning her home
emails and Benghazi performance. Chris Christie’s endorsement of Trump today seems
like piling-on; and Hillary is just not very exciting beyond her older middle aged
women admirers.
Sanders, however, contiues to disappoint in recent appearances.
In yestersay’s hour-long sympathetic MSNBC interview by Chris Matthews in froint
of a mostly White University of Chicago student audience he was repeating
slogans instead of articulating specific strategies. Never going near the details
of his proposed tax on Wall Street speculation (Is it a “transaction” tax?
Which transactions?)
Pressed again,
and again by Matthews to say just how he
would turn the electoral tide to do campaign finance reform such as reversing Citizens
United, he conspicuously avoided the need for a Senate majority and electoral
strategies to make it happen. There may be insider democratic delicacies about
this but Sanders is beginning to sound shallow instead of shrewd.
His stump
speeches iterate “When Congress sees millions of citizens rising up to demand
fairness and justice it will happen” is hollow as anyone who reads history
knows. History does
not support this fantasy. Millions opposed the Vietnam war; millions opposed
the invasion of Iraq. The incumbent Johnson
and Bush warmakers did not fold.
Charitably,
hopefully, we might assume that Sanders’ ‘keep it simple’ message is tactical,
but since it is so repetitive it sounds more and more like a man out of his depth. Intentionally or not, he is avoiding getting
into the water where it’s deep. Either he can’t swim or he is making a possibly
fatal tactical maneuver.
It’s a
cheerier footnote that film maker Spike Lee (“Do the Right Thing”) and The Atlantic
writer Ta Nihisi Coates have endorsed Bernie.
Hillary, on
the other hand seems by now completely exposed as the establishment Democratic candidate.
She and Bill have taken tons of Wall Street money and it will take a nuclear
attack to get those Goldman Saks speech transcripts released.
Meanwhile
the Republican circus sounds worse than Hitlerian propaganda. Nearly always bombastic
rather than factual, Rubio, Cruz and Trump use slogans and right wing mantras
intended to please their following of angry, largely disenfranchised White
evangelical and hardline conservative voters—many of them people left out of the
often inherently unjust American opportunity system; ironically they are the
very neglected people Sanders and maybe Clinton are talking about.
There’s
something else: Eight of the eleven
Super Tuesday states have their roots in the practice of slavery. This underlying
culture has clearly shaped the anti-Obama obstruction of the Republicans in and
outside Congress who now draw on the same slavery roots to run their election
season circus.
