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Michael Winship

By Michael Winship
Senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

One of the most memorable moments in television coverage of American politics came during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Out on the streets, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations were attacked viciously by law enforcement officials in what later was described in an official report as “a police riot.”

Inside the convention hall, tightly controlled by the political machine of the city’s notorious Mayor Richard J. Daley, CBS correspondent Dan Rather was attempting to interview a delegate from Georgia who was being removed from the floor by men in suits without ID badges. One of them slugged Rather in the stomach, knocking him to the ground. As the reporter struggled to get his breath back, from the anchor booth, Walter Cronkite exclaimed, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan!”

It was an uncharacteristic outburst from America’s Most Respected Newsman, indicative of just how terrible the violence was both inside and out and how shocking it was for a journalist to be so blatantly attacked while on the air by operatives acting on behalf of politicians.

As appalling as that 1968 assault was, thuggery is nothing new in politics; it transcends time, ideology and party. But what’s even more disturbing in 2010 is how much of the public, especially many of those who count themselves among the conservative adherents of the Tea Party, is willing to ignore bullying behavior — and even applaud it — as long as the candidate in question hews to their point of view.

Here in New York State, of course, we have Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who combines the boyish charm of J. Edgar Hoover with the sunny quirkiness of Pol Pot. So extreme are Paladino’s views, so volatile his temper, that even Rupert Murdoch’s right wing New York Post has endorsed Democrat Andrew Cuomo, which is a bit like the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano dissing the Pope and singing the praises of Lutherans. (more…)

Amy Traub

By Amy Traub
Research Director Drum Major Institute for Public Policy

A cognitive dissonance animates the Right in America, and the New York Times nails it with today’s front page case study of Alaska. The state depends more than any other on public support, from its earliest days when “the federal government expended great amounts of money carving this young state out of the northern wilderness” to the present in which Alaska benefits from an outsize allocation of stimulus dollars and other government spending – not to mention tremendous public subsidies for the oil and gas industries that have driven the state’s economy. Yet Alaska is also a hotbed of anti-government sentiment, denouncing the very support that built it and keeps it functioning. “It just feels like the federal government intrudes everywhere,” complains a local GOP official, apparently heedless of the ways that this “intrusion” enables Alaskans to get by on a daily basis.

The same contradiction has lain at the heart of American conservatism from the birth of the New Right in 1960′s Southern California (see historian Lisa McGirr’s brilliant book on the topic) to the present day: the very people who denounce an interfering government most intensely are often among the greatest beneficiaries of our public institutions. How is the contradiction bearable? It helps if you don’t think too much about it, if the government’s role in one’s life can be made invisible, even forgotten. Dependence on public support must be made to look like rugged individualism; reliance on webs of regulation must appear to be the work of unconstrained free markets. Problems may not arise until the efforts to hack away at “big government” become too successful: the “invisible” public services we need to live our daily lives are most apparent when we begin to lose them. Alaska may still be cushioned by disproportionate federal largesse, but in communities across America, the loss of basic services is happening now. Reporter Michael Cooper recently summed up: (more…)

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

When presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his intended vice presidential running mate, those of us in the lower 48 learned that her husband, Todd Palin, not only was a champion snowmobiler and commercial fisherman but also a steelworker.
At the press conference, Palin trotted him out, stressing his steelworker credentials. Here’s a good union man, she emphasized.
But his United Steelworker card doesn’t include an automatic auxiliary membership for her. Or her running mate at the top of the Republican ticket, McCain, whose record on labor issues would require some serious penance before he could ever earn a union card.
John McCain opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, which would enable workers to collectively bargain and secure contracts with corporations more easily, like the employment contracts CEOs demand to have with corporations. McCain has jeopardized retirement by championing Bush’s privatization scheme for social security. McCain has voted for every American-job-killing free trade deal, without regard to human rights or environmental standards. And he has proposed, instead of providing health insurance for all Americans, a plan to tax the insurance of those lucky enough to still have employer-provided coveraage.

Soul mate
McCain has characterized Palin, 44, as his political soul mate. How he determined that is unclear since he met her only twice before selecting her, and her resume for VP is paltry, at best. She served two terms on Wasilla City Council and two terms as Wasilla Mayor. At that time, Wasilla had about 5,000 residents. She also served as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a job she quit in less than a year. She ran for lieutenant governor and lost. While seeking the governor’s post, she said she supported the bridge-to-nowhere, a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska to an island of approximately 50 residents across the Tongass Narrows.
Then, after Congress squelched the bridge, she said, as she put it, “No thanks,” to the “earmark.”  Despite all that, when Congress offered Alaska about half the money from that “earmark” that John McCain claims to have so opposed, Palin took it and spent it on other road projects.
While mayor, she lowered property taxes, before she raised sales taxes. She hired a Washington lobbyist to secure some of those McCain-dreaded “earmarks” for little Wasilla, a task it succeeded in doing. She left the town with millions in debt and a dispute that ultimately cost it $1.3 million to settle over ownership of land on which she wanted its $15 million sports complex built.

Plucking Palin
Even the New York Times in an editorial Wednesday questioned McCain’s judgment in plucking Palin from a state with a population (670,053) roughly the same as the twin cities’ where the Republicans are meeting: “If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov Sarah Palin of Alaska.”
The workers of America cannot afford bad judgment after eight years of economy-crushing, debt-creating, Bush-Cheney. Unemployment, the national debt, inflation, home foreclosures and gas prices are all rising at demoralizing rates, while Bush and McCain continue to proclaim the economy is basically strong and any recession is all in workers’ heads, just some sort of psychological problem. Maybe that’s true — if you’re a multimillionaire like Bush and McCain. Or if you’ve got seven homes in which to hide from the reality of everyday American life like McCain.
Ms. Palin needs to stop trotting out her husband as an exhibit until she explains her positions on workers’ issues. Just exactly where does she stand on the Employee Free Choice Act?
Her family has benefitted from her husband’s ability to be part of a labor union. Workers in labor organizations earn higher wages and are more likely to have pensions and health insurance. Because he works for BP and is a member of the USW, which collectively bargained a good contract for workers at BP, Todd Palin earns a good wage and has good health insurance. The Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for other Americans to join unions and earn better money and obtain health insurance. Polling shows that 70 percent of Americans support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
Inquiring minds want to know, Ms. Palin. Where do you stand on Employee Free Choice? Where do you stand on privatization of social security? Where do you stand on job-killing free trade?
Are you with McCain – and against workers – on these issues? If so, you need to stop using your husband’s membership in the USW as a prop, because then his union card cannot possibly cover up your or John McCain’s worker-savaging positions.

By Holly Hart
USW Legislative Director

Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, on his 72^nd birthday, announced a selection that revealed the depths of his cynicism and the shallowness of his judgment – and his disregard for women’s intelligence.

After looking into a pool of vice president candidates deep with qualification, he plucked out the least experienced person.

This follows four months in which he and his surrogates continually blathered that Democratic nominee Barack Obama was unqualified. Former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani just got done giving that GOP talking point to TV commentators during the Democratic Convention, contending repeatedly that Sen. Obama’s credentials made him unfit to be commander-in-chief – an accusation Sen. Obama effectively refuted in his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

That speech was so effective, the McCain campaign had to do something – anything – to steal the spotlight away from a defining moment in American history.

The very next day the McCain campaign played their trump card – McCain announced that he’d selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Although a dedicated public servant, wife and mother, here’s the sum total of Palin’s experience: not quite two years as governor; two terms as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, population, 8,000; two terms on Wasilla city council; chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission; TV sports reporter; small business owner for three years; mother of five; bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of Idaho, and Miss Alaska runner-up.

If McCain, who has suffered melanoma, were elected, Palin would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Palin’s competition for the VP slot included Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Every one of them has at least one advanced degree; Romney has two, both from Harvard. Every one has substantially more years of experience in governing than Palin.

The least experienced might be Pawlenty. But even he has, in addition to that city council experience, a dozen years in the state legislature. And he’s serving his second term as governor, not his second year.

With Palin at his side, McCain now is open for the same ridicule he’s heaped on Obama. And the reason he opened himself up for that mock-fest is clear: He believes women are stupid.

Put a woman on the ticket, he cynically figured, and he’d garner disgruntled supporters of unsuccessful Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The strategy of selecting Palin shows he believes women, who supported Sen. Clinton, an abortion rights advocate, are so Stepfordesque that they’ll just follow the Republican ticket now that there’s a woman attached to it.

Palin, unlike Sen. Clinton, is anti-choice. She is a member of an anti-abortion group called Feminists for Life. In 2002, when she ran for lieutenant governor in Alaska, she sent an e-mail to the anti-abortion Alaska Right to Life Board saying she has “adamantly supported our cause since I first understood, as a child, the atrocity of abortion.”

She’s a member of the National Rifle Association and backs drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (McCain picked her, though he does not support drilling there.)

But McCain doesn’t think Clinton’s supporters will notice any of that.  He figures they’ll blindly accept any female – whether she has a strong record on the issues that affect working families or not.  There is no doubt that Palin’s a successful woman.  But what we know of her record does not qualify her to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  McCain has so little respect for women’s intelligence that he thinks we will make a choice based solely on gender.

When Obama was in the process of vetting vice presidential candidates, he told reporters he couldn’t make a hasty decision. The reason, he said, was the selection of a running mate was “the most important decision that I will make before I am president.”

In choosing Palin, McCain has clearly shown he lacks the judgment to be president. In this most important decision, he made his choice based on cynicism and politics instead of choosing a leader qualified to govern this country should something dreadful befall the president.