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Every day, more than 100 million Americans are exposed to some of the most vitriolic hate speech you can find in the public arena. According to a 2007 analysis by the Center for American Progress and the Free Press, right-wing radio dominates the airwaves. Their “analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets” found that “76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.” Despite all the talk of a supposed “liberal bias” in the media, the reality is that conservatives rule talk radio.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/06/pdf/talk_radio.pdf ).

Despite the dramatic expansion of viewing and listening options for consum­ers today, traditional radio remains one of the most widely used media formats in America. Arbitron, the national radio ratings company, reports that more than 90 percent of Americans ages 12 or older listen to radio each week, “a higher penetration than television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet.”1 Although listening hours have declined slightly in recent years, Americans listened on average to 19 hours of radio per week in 2006.2

Among radio formats, the combined news/talk format (which includes news/talk/information and talk/personality) leads all others in terms of the total number of sta­tions per format and trails only country music in terms of national audience share.3 Through more than 1,700 stations across the nation, the combined news/talk format is estimated to reach more than 50 million listeners each week.4

As this report will document in detail, conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format:

Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.

Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much con­servative talk as progressive talk.

A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.

This dynamic is repeated over and over again no matter how the data is analyzed, whether one looks at the number of stations, number of hours, power of stations, or the number of programs. While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial sta­tions, conservative talk continues to be pushed out over the airwaves in greater multiples of hours than progressive talk is broadcast.

These empirical findings may not be surprising given general impressions about the format, but they are stark and raise se­rious questions about whether the compa­nies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

There are many potential explanations for why this gap exists. The two most frequently cited reasons are the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and simple consumer demand. As this report will detail, neither of these reasons adequate­ly explains why conservative talk radio dominates the airwaves.

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimina­tion of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.

Ownership diversity is perhaps the single most important variable contributing to the structural imbalance based on the data. Quantitative analysis conducted by Free Press of all 10,506 licensed com­mercial radio stations reveals that stations owned by women, minorities, or local owners are statistically less likely to air conservative hosts or shows.

In contrast, stations controlled by group owners—those with stations in multiple markets or more than three stations in a single market—were statistically more likely to air conservative talk. Furthermore, markets that aired both conservative and progressive programming were statistically less concentrated than the markets that aired only one type of programming and were more likely to be the markets that had female- and minority-owned stations.

The disparities between conservative and progressive programming reflect the absence of localism in American radio markets. This shortfall results from the consolidation of ownership in radio sta­tions and the corresponding dominance of syndicated programming operating in economies of scale that do not match the local needs of all communities.

This analysis suggests that any effort to encourage more responsive and balanced radio programming will first require steps to increase localism and diversify radio station ownership to better meet local and community needs. We suggest three ways to accomplish this:

Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.

Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.

Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public inter­est obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

Drizzling morning
Obsolete bumper stickers
New day under way

Long line, aching back
Democracy’s labor pains
New country is born

A warm cup of tea
Election returns
Mounting excitement and joy

The long night of Bush
Seemingly endless nightmare
Has come to an end

A transformation
Cocoon of imprisonment
cast aside; we fly

Limits to growth, change
Self created illusions
Dissolved by ballots

Tomorrow will be
a much brighter day
We have promises to keep

After Four Decades, Finally, the Beginning of the End

Thursday 06 November 2008

by: Mark Weisbrot, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

The nation’s capital came alive after 11 PM on election eve, as thousands poured into the streets to celebrate a victory that everyone was calling historic. Car horns blaring, whooping and shouting, high fives all around, multi-racial crowds celebrating joyously. Historic it is, most obviously in the election of an African-American president, in a country where millions of black people could not even vote when the new president-elect was born. The rapper Jay-Z elegantly expressed the Obama campaign’s connection to the long struggle for equality, along with the enthusiasm that it generated: “Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Obama could run. Obama’s running so that we all can fly.”

But there is another sense in which this election will likely turn out to be historic. For nearly four decades, this country has been moving to the right. Unfortunately we must include the Clinton years in this right-wing trajectory: with such major regressive structural changes as welfare reform, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, the Clinton administration continued the country’s rightward drift on economic if not social issues. In other words, it continued using the government to make rules that would redistribute income, wealth and power towards the upper classes. (These are generally described somewhat inaccurately as “free-market” or “free-trade” policies.)

The right’s ascendancy began with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, who rode into office on a backlash against the social movements of the 1960s, especially the civil rights and antiwar movements. Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy” deployed a coded racist appeal that would help make the South Republican and ensure that no Democratic presidential candidate would get a majority of white voters (they didn’t from 1968 to 2004).

Reagan continued this strategy, but also initiated a counterrevolution on the economic front, decimating organized labor and cutting taxes for the rich. It was an economic failure by any objective measure, but it succeeded in drastically changing the ideological climate on economic issues. By the end of the Reagan (and George H.W. Bush) administrations in 1993, the typical Democratic member of Congress was far to the right of Richard Nixon on most economic policy.

The impact of this economic counterrevolution on the living standards of the majority of Americans can hardly be over-emphasized. Prior to the Reagan years, the United States was on its way to becoming more like Europe, with a welfare state and social safety net that would allow the vast majority of its citizens to enjoy the benefits of a developed, high-income economy. When Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, it was widely believed that insuring the elderly and the poor, respectively, were just the first steps toward universal health insurance.

The assault that began with Ronald Reagan’s firing of 12,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 set the nation on a very different path. By the time George W. Bush took over, he was even able to go after Social Security, the bedrock New Deal anti-poverty program whose beneficiaries include about one-sixth of the population. Bush lost that battle to a grass-roots groundswell of opposition. But the fact that he could even launch such a privatization effort, where Ronald Reagan would not even dare to tread, showed how far America had fallen from the economics, social norms and basic ethical principles that prior generations had taken for granted.

The end result of America’s long right-wing experiment was perhaps the most massive redistribution of income and wealth in our history. Over the last 35 years, there has been virtually no increase in real wages for the majority of the labor force. At the same time, the top 1 percent of households (with earnings of more than $1.2 million) saw their real incomes more than triple. A new “gilded age” of gross class inequalities became the norm; workers without a college degree (still more than 70 percent of the labor force) could no longer have the same expectations of landing a job that would allow them to afford a home and a family.

Now that long journey into darkness has finally come to an end. My own view is that the 2006 Congressional elections may have been the turning point. It was then that Democrats regained the Congress on the basis of a more populist appeal by some of their candidates, and a mass revulsion with the war in Iraq. Even if McCain had won the presidency in yesterday’s election, he would have faced great obstacles in pursuing a right-wing agenda, but he could have taken a lot of people to their graves trying. His best bet for saving the Republican Party from a long walk through the political wilderness would have been the one threatened by Vice President Dick Cheney and other fellow neoconservatives: more war, most likely beginning with a military strike against Iran. This is how they retained the Congress in 2002, when the economy was also bleeding jobs after the bursting of the stock market bubble and the consequent recession of 2001. From August 2002 until the November election, the build-up for the Iraq war pushed all of the voters’ most important concerns out of the news. It worked.

This time they couldn’t pull it off, and Obama’s election has saved us from a repeat of these kinds of crimes. One of the most interesting things about this election is that it also showed how the Democrats could have avoided most of this long nightmare of right-wing rule by simply appealing to the class interests of the key swing demographic, which is white working class voters. Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” their way back to Kansas was right in front of them all this time. Noncollege-educated whites with household income between $30,000-$50,000 voted for George W. Bush by a margin of 24 percentage points; for those with income between $50,000-$75,000 it was 41 percentage points (70-29). Obama did not make the kind of appeal that would really clinch this demographic, which includes many “Reagan Democrats”; but Wall Street did it for him. The financial crisis that exploded in mid-September sealed the outcome of this election. The Republicans’ fake populist appeal to these swing voters, painting the Democrats as an “elite” who did not respect their culture or religion, rang hollow in the face of millions of mortgage foreclosures, job losses, collapsing retirement savings and a shrinking economy. The politics of deploying “weapons of mass distraction,” including the so-called “war on terror,” had finally run its course.

But foreign policy will remain the Democrats’ Achilles’s heel for some time to come. This is also a mostly self-inflicted handicap. The most important Democratic leaders promote the same assumptions about foreign policy as the Republicans: that terrorism is practically the most important threat facing our country; that extremism and anti-US sentiment in the world has nothing to do with our foreign policy; that America is really defending itself, or promoting “democracy,” when it invades other countries or destabilizes foreign governments. If this is really the state of the world, then there is some logic to voting Republican. Why not vote for the guy who is willing to protect us by any means necessary from these unavoidable, mortal dangers?

And someone who won’t be constrained by a political base that includes peace activists and others who might shrink from the violence necessary to defend ourselves? Of course there are millions of Democratic Party activists and primary voters who see right through the charade, and vote Democratic with the hope that the jingoistic campaign rhetoric is just for show. But unfortunately, there are a lot of voters who believe the hype from both parties, which is often reinforced in the media. Thus, on the eve of this election, John McCain still had a 14 percentage-point edge over Barack Obama on “national security,” while trailing on almost every other issue. (Interestingly, the people of Washington, DC, and New York City, the prior victims and most at-risk of any future terrorist attack, are practically deaf to the right’s fear-mongering - McCain lost DC by 93 percent to 97 percent; while the most receptive audiences live in places like Wyoming and Oklahoma where they are more likely to be hit by a meteor from outer space than to get hurt by a foreign terrorist. This is another indicator of how far removed the politics of “national security” are from any real threats.)

This time, none of that stuff mattered, because the economy was going down the drain. However, until the Democrats present a more reality-based program on foreign policy, they will still be vulnerable to external events and the hyping of foreign threats, even if they are ridiculously exaggerated, of our own making or altogether imaginary.

For now, though, the domestic economy will occupy center stage as the new government faces the worst recession in decades, and one that is just beginning - the housing bubble that caused this recession is only about 60 percent deflated. The people have voted for change, including expanded health care coverage and - as they did in 2006 - an end to the Iraq war. How much change we will actually see will depend more than anything on how much pressure there is from below.

But there is plenty to celebrate in addition to the election of our first African-American president. Forty years is a long time for a country to be on the wrong track, and even worse for one that has so much influence on the rest of the world. We now have an opportunity to resume the economic and social progress that was considered almost inevitable a few decades ago, and to address some of the most urgent environmental problems - most importantly, climate change - which have only recently become widely recognized. Who knows, we might even stop invading other countries and move towards becoming a law-abiding member of the international community. Progress is now at least possible, although it will still be an uphill fight. As Obama himself said in his acceptance speech, “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.”

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, DC.

So Little Time, So Much Damage

While Americans eagerly vote for the next president, here’s a sobering reminder: As of Tuesday, George W. Bush still has 77 days left in the White House — and he’s not wasting a minute.

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look — by no means comprehensive — at some of Mr. Bush’s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don’t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans’ rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject’s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends. The changes also give the F.B.I. — which has a long history of spying on civil rights groups and others — expanded latitude to use these techniques on people identified by racial, ethnic and religious background.

The administration showed further disdain for Americans’ privacy rights and for Congress’s power by making clear that it will ignore a provision in the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security. The law requires the department’s privacy officer to account annually for any activity that could affect Americans’ privacy — and clearly stipulates that the report cannot be edited by any other officials at the department or the White House.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has now released a memo asserting that the law “does not prohibit” officials from homeland security or the White House from reviewing the report. The memo then argues that since the law allows the officials to review the report, it would be unconstitutional to stop them from changing it. George Orwell couldn’t have done better.

THE ENVIRONMENT The administration has been especially busy weakening regulations that promote clean air and clean water and protect endangered species.

Mr. Bush, or more to the point, Vice President Dick Cheney, came to office determined to dismantle Bill Clinton’s environmental legacy, undo decades of environmental law and keep their friends in industry happy. They have had less success than we feared, but only because of the determined opposition of environmental groups, courageous members of Congress and protests from citizens. But the White House keeps trying.

Mr. Bush’s secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, has recently carved out significant exceptions to regulations requiring expert scientific review of any federal project that might harm endangered or threatened species (one consequence will be to relieve the agency of the need to assess the impact of global warming on at-risk species). The department also is rushing to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list — again. The wolves were re-listed after a federal judge ruled the government had not lived up to its own recovery plan.

In coming weeks, we expect the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a final rule that would weaken a program created by the Clean Air Act, which requires utilities to install modern pollution controls when they upgrade their plants to produce more power. The agency is also expected to issue a final rule that would make it easier for coal-fired power plants to locate near national parks in defiance of longstanding Congressional mandates to protect air quality in areas of special natural or recreational value.

Interior also is awaiting E.P.A.’s concurrence on a proposal that would make it easier for mining companies to dump toxic mine wastes in valleys and streams.

And while no rules changes are at issue, the interior department also has been rushing to open up millions of acres of pristine federal land to oil and gas exploration. We fear that, in coming weeks, Mr. Kempthorne will open up even more acreage to the commercial development of oil shale, a hugely expensive and environmentally risky process that even the oil companies seem in no hurry to begin. He should not.

ABORTION RIGHTS Soon after the election, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, is expected to issue new regulations aimed at further limiting women’s access to abortion, contraceptives and information about their reproductive health care options.

Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims.

•

The administration has taken other disturbing steps in recent weeks. In late September, the I.R.S. restored tax breaks for banks that take big losses on bad loans inherited through acquisitions. Now we learn that JPMorgan Chase and others are planning to use their bailout funds for mergers and acquisitions, transactions that will be greatly enhanced by the new tax subsidy.

One last-minute change Mr. Bush won’t be making: He apparently has decided not to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the most shameful symbol of his administration’s disdain for the rule of law.

Mr. Bush has said it should be closed, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, pushed for it. Proposals were prepared, including a plan for sending the real bad guys to other countries for trial. But Mr. Cheney objected, and the president has refused even to review the memos. He will hand this mess off to his successor.

We suppose there is some good news in all of this. While Mr. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009, he has only until Nov. 20 to issue “economically significant” rule changes and until Dec. 20 to issue other changes. Anything after that is merely a draft and can be easily withdrawn by the next president.

Unfortunately, the White House is well aware of those deadlines.

The Republican Rump

Maybe the polls are wrong, and John McCain is about to pull off the biggest election upset in American history. But right now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

For example, Larry Sabato, the election forecaster, predicts that seven Senate seats currently held by Republicans will go Democratic on Tuesday. According to the liberal-conservative rankings of the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, five of the soon-to-be-gone senators are more moderate than the median Republican senator — so the rump, the G.O.P. caucus that remains, will have shifted further to the right. The same thing seems set to happen in the House.

Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”

And Mr. McCain has laid the groundwork for feverish claims that the election was stolen, declaring that the community activist group Acorn — which, as Factcheck.org points out, has never “been found guilty of, or even charged with” causing fraudulent votes to be cast — “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Needless to say, the potential voters Acorn tries to register are disproportionately “other folks,” as Mr. Chambliss might put it.

Anyway, the Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify.

Thus, in the face of polls suggesting that Mr. Obama will win Virginia, a top McCain aide declared that the “real Virginia” — the southern part of the state, excluding the Washington, D.C., suburbs — favors Mr. McCain. A majority of Americans now live in big metropolitan areas, but while visiting a small town in North Carolina, Ms. Palin described it as “what I call the real America,” one of the “pro-America” parts of the nation. The real America, it seems, is small-town, mainly southern and, above all, white.

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Congress has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

The Soiled Envelope, Please

There are no awards for the season’s slimiest political messages (Swift Boat statuettes?), but two deserve consideration in the character assassination category.

In the first, Republicans in Pennsylvania flooded 75,000 Jewish voters with an e-mail alarum from a retired Jewish judge equating a vote for Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of Jews who ignored the warning signs of the Holocaust. Quick apologies and retractions were offered once this surfaced in the press, but too late for the unspeakable to be spiked.

In the second, the campaign of Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who is in a very tight race, broadcast her desperation by attacking her opponent, State Senator Kay Hagan, for accepting “godless money” at a “secret” fund-raiser whose hosts included a leader of a secularist group.

At the end, the TV screen fills with a shadowy photo of Ms. Hagan, an elder at her Christian church, as a female voice fairly shrieks: “There is no God!”

Then there is the fringe madness of “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” — an apocalyptic fiction making the rounds from the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. It foresees an Obama incumbency marked by terrorist attacks on American cities, rampant crime as guns are confiscated, a nuclear attack on Israel and the Boy Scouts’ disbanding to avoid court-empowered gay leaders.

It seems just another straight-line for Jon Stewart until the nation remembers that the group’s leader is James Dobson. He is one of the most prominent leaders on the evangelical right, with an audience measured in the scores of millions.

The Democrats have their share of slimy ads, like one targeted at the elderly that falsely claims John McCain would cut Social Security benefits in half. We’re not excusing that ad or any other policy distortions. But frankly, it’s not even an also-ran compared with what the McCain campaign and its allies have been up to.

ACLU survey shows broad misunderstanding of ex-felon voting rules by officials

The ACLU surveyed elections officials in each of the South Carolina’s 46 counties this summer to gauge their knowledge of and ability to administer state disfranchisement policy. In South Carolina, individuals convicted of felonies in state or federal court, or of misdemeanors involving violations of election law, may not vote until they fully complete their sentences. At that point, the right to vote is automatically restored. If convicted of any other misdemeanor, an individual only loses the right to vote while incarcerated.^[1]

According to the survey’s results, 61 percent of elections officials answered questions about voting with a misdemeanor wrong, 43 percent responded inaccurately to questions concerning voting with an out-of-state conviction and 41 percent were unsure of or gave entirely incorrect information about the impact that federal felony convictions have on voting. Notably, officials in populous Greenville, Charleston and Lexington Counties were among those who incorrectly answered these questions.^[1]

This affects anyone convicted of a misdemeanor or felony in federal or state court - nearly 1,500 South Carolinians every month complete their sentences, regain their right to vote but generally do not know it. Election officials lacking knowledge of the voting rights of convicted people may improperly block them from voting.^[1]

See also: the Election Protection Wiki article Felon disenfranchisement.

In Defense of White Americans

IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.

That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCain and Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.

It wasn’t just Allen’s lame racial joke or his cluelessness about 21st-century media like YouTube that made him a harbinger of the current G.O.P. fiasco. It was most of all the national vision he set forth: There are Real Americans, and there are the Others.

The Real are the small-town white folks Allen was addressing in southwestern Virginia. The Others — and their subversive fellow travelers, the Elites — are Americans like the young man whom Allen maligned: a high-achieving son of immigrant parents who was born and raised in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs during its technology boom. (Allen, the self-appointed keeper of real Virginia, grew up in California.)

Cut to 2008. You’d think that this incident would be a cautionary tale, but the McCain campaign instead embraced Allen as a role model, with Palin’s odes to “real” and “pro-America” America leading the charge. The farcical apotheosis of this strategy arrived last weekend, again on camera and again in Virginia, when a McCain adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, revived Allen’s original script, literally, during an interview on MSNBC.

After dismissing the Northern Virginia suburbs, she asserted that the “real Virginia” — the part of the state “more Southern in nature” — will prove “very responsive” to the McCain message. All Pfotenhauer left out was “macaca,” but with McCain calling Barack Obama’s tax plan “welfare” and campaign surrogates (including the robo-calling Rudy Giuliani) linking the Democrat to violent, Willie Horton-like criminality, that would have been redundant.

We don’t know yet if McCain will go the way of Allen in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964, when L.B.J. vanquished another Arizona Republican in a landslide. But we do know that Obama swept like a conquering hero through Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, last week and that he leads in every recent Virginia poll.

There are at least two larger national lessons to be learned from what is likely to be the last gasp of Allen-McCain-Palin politics in 2008. The first, and easy one, is that Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is. In the eight years since the first Bush-Cheney convention pledged inclusiveness and showcased Colin Powell as its opening-night speaker, the G.O.P. has terminally alienated black Americans (Powell himself now included), immigrant Americans (including the Hispanics who once gave Bush-Cheney as much as 44 percent of their votes) and the extended families of gay Americans (Palin has now revived a constitutional crusade against same-sex marriage). Subtract all those players from the actual America, and you don’t have enough of a bench to field a junior varsity volleyball team, let alone a serious campaign for the Electoral College.

But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.

That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle’s prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press’s default setting has been to ominously intone that “in the privacy of the voting booth” ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man.

A leading vehicle for this journalistic mind-set has been the unending obsession with “the Bradley effect” — as if nothing has changed in America since 1982, when some polls (possibly for reasons having nothing to do with race) predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the California governorship. In 2008, there is, if anything, more evidence of a reverse Bradley effect — Obama’s primary vote totals more often exceeded those in the final polls than not — but poor old Bradley keeps being flogged anyway.

So do all those deer hunters in western Pennsylvania. Once Hillary Clinton whipped Obama in the Rust Belt, it’s been a bloviation staple (echoing the Clinton camp’s line) that a black guy is doomed among Reagan Democrats, Joe Sixpacks, rednecks, Joe the Plumbers or whichever condescending term you want to choose. (Clinton at one low point settled on “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”) Michigan in particular was repeatedly said to be slipping out of the Democrats’ reach because of incorrigible racism — until McCain abandoned it as hopeless this month in the face of a double-digit Obama lead.

The constant tide of anthropological articles and television reports set in blue-collar diners, bars and bowling alleys have hyped this racial theory of the race. So did the rampant misreading of primary-season exit polls. On cable TV and the Sunday network shows, there was endless chewing over the internal numbers in the Clinton victories. It was doomsday news for Obama, for instance, that some 12 percent of white Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania said race was a factor in their choice and three-quarters of them voted for Clinton. Ipso facto — and despite the absence of any credible empirical evidence — these Clinton voters would either stay home or flock to McCain in November.

The McCain campaign is so dumb that it bought into the press’s confirmation of its own prejudices. Even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million in Pennsylvania (more than double the 2004 gap), even though Obama leads by double digits in almost every recent Pennsylvania poll and even though no national Republican ticket has won there since 1988, McCain started pouring his dwindling resources into the state this month. When the Democratic Representative John Murtha described his own western Pennsylvania district as a “racist area,” McCain feigned outrage and put down even more chips on the race card, calling the region the “most patriotic, most God-loving” part of America.

Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.

The original “racist for Obama,” after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaii on Friday. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.

When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of “throwing his grandmother under the bus.” But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.

Such human nuances are lost on conservative warriors of the Allen-McCain-Palin ilk. They see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.

The Party of Yesterday

SEATTLE

Two years ago, a list of the nation’s brainiest cities was put together from Census Bureau reports — that is, cities with the highest percentage of college graduates, which is not the same as smart, of course.

These are vibrant, prosperous places where a knowledge economy and cool things to do after hours attract people from all over the country. Among the top 10, only two of those metro areas — Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky. — voted Republican in the 2004 presidential election.

This year, all 10 are likely to go Democratic. What’s more, with Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia now trending blue, Republicans stand to lose the nation’s 10 best-educated states as well.

It would be easy to say these places are not the real America, in the peculiar us-and-them parlance of Sarah Palin. It’s easy to say because Republicans have been insinuating for years now that some of the brightest, most productive communities in the United States are fake American — a tactic that dates to Newt Gingrich’s reign in the capitol.

Brainy cities have low divorce rates, low crime, high job creation, ethnic diversity and creative capitalism. They’re places like Pittsburgh, with its top-notch universities; Albuquerque, with its surging Latino middle class; and Denver, with its outdoor-loving young people. They grow good people in the smart cities.

But in the politically suicidal greenhouse that Republicans have constructed for themselves, these cities are not welcome. They are disparaged as nests of latte-sipping weenies, alt-lifestyle types and “other” Americans, somehow inauthentic.

If that’s what Republicans want, they are doomed to be the party of yesterday.

Not only are we becoming more urban as a nation, but we’re headed for an ethnic muddle that could further shrink the party of small-mindedness. By 2023, more than half of all American children will be minority, the Census Bureau projects.

Ronald Reagan was lashed by liberals for running a “Morning in America” campaign, but he knew this country, at heart, was always tomorrow-looking — and he fared very well in educated cities as well as small towns. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” said Reagan, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears.” Barack Obama, who brings that music to the stage, leads by 30 points on the “hope and optimism” question in polls.

Spurning the Reagan lesson, John McCain made a fatal error in turning his campaign over to the audience of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. In so doing, he chose the unbearable lightness of being Sarah Palin, trotted out Paris Hilton and labeled Obama a socialist who associates with terrorists.

At a recent Palin rally, the crowd started chanting, “We want Fox!” McCain has given them just that. But how isolated and out-of-touch is this audience? At the end of each debate, a sure-fire way to decide who won was to look at the Fox viewers poll — typically showing a landslide for McCain. Within a day, scientific surveys found big wins for Obama.

Whether Americans are real or fake, they can see through Palin, a woman who couldn’t correctly answer a third grader a few days ago when asked to explain the duties of vice president. Somewhere, between the shuffling to costume and accessorize Palin with a $150,000 wardrobe, her handlers never handed her a copy of the Constitution.

Republicans blow off the smart cities with the counterargument that they win the exurbs — the frontier of new homes, young families and the fresh middle class. And it’s true, in 2004, George Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America.

That will not happen this year. Polls show McCain is losing 20 percent of self-described moderate Republicans. And new registration figures and other polls indicate that Obama will likely win such iconic exurban centers as Washoe County, Nev., Loudoun County, Va., and Wake County, N.C.

But in the kind of pattern that has held true since McCain went over to the stupid side, his brother recently referred to suburban northern Virginia as “communist country” and a top adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, said it was not “real Virginia.”

Here in Seattle, it’s become a one-party city, with a congressman for life and nodding-head liberals who seldom challenge a tax-loving city government. It would be nice, just to keep the philosophical debate sharp, if there were a few thoughtful Republicans around.

That won’t happen so long as Republicans continue to be the party of yesterday. They’ve written the cities off. Fake Americans don’t count, but this Election Day, for once, they will not feel left out.

Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com.

Sunday 19 October 2008

by: John P. Briggs, MD and J.P. Briggs, PhD, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

McCain, Obama and the psychology of decisions.

The bailout crisis at the beginning of October dramatically illustrated the decision-making psychologies of the two presidential candidates - that is, their ability to deal with ambivalence.

With the financial debacle coming to a head, John McCain abruptly called for a “suspension” of the campaigns and rushed down the corridors of the Capitol in an effort to clinch the bailout deal. Instead, he threw a hand grenade into the negotiations, giving cover for a majority of House Republicans to humiliate their own party leaders and vote against the bill. He announced to his Republican Senate colleagues that he was prepared to act the maverick: “I appreciate what you’ve done here, but I’m not going to sign on to a deal just to sign a deal. Just like Iraq, I’m not afraid to go it alone if I need to.” For a moment, one of his fellow Republicans said, “You could hear a pin drop. It was just unbelievable.”

Instead of taking the lead in the discussions with the president - discussions McCain had urged as a way to force Obama off the campaign trail - McCain sat silently. For friend and foe alike, the turnabouts by McCain were puzzling.

By contrast, Barack Obama regularly telephoned Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and others, and preferred to let his Congressional colleagues work out revisions to the bill. He met with his diverse group of economic advisers to hear opposing opinions. He refrained from offering his own plan, he said, to avoid roiling the markets. He thought the candidates should debate the economy and consult with their party, but should stay away from politicizing the discussions in Congress. Nevertheless, after McCain pressed the president for a conclave, Obama attended the meeting and cogently presented the Democrats’ case while McCain remained angrily silent.

In the end, both men decided to support the revised plan, but Obama’s decision came after fewer conflicting signals and with more clarity. His widely quoted parable about the need to support the bailout explained in dramatic terms the ambivalence that everyone felt, while offering a nonpartisan metaphor to resolve that ambivalence in their own minds.

“There will be time to punish those who set this fire, but now is the moment for us to come together and put the fire out,” Mr. Obama said, departing from his prepared text. “Think about it. If your neighbor’s house is burning, you’re not going to spend a whole lot of time saying, well that guy was always irresponsible; he always left the stove on; he always was smoking in bed. All those things may be true, but his house could end up affecting your house. And that’s the situation we’re in right now.”

It made sense to feel ambivalent about the Bush-Paulson bailout plan. Most in both parties detested it, and wanted no part of it, though for ideologically different reasons. At the same time, both parties felt the need to do something and the plan was the only viable option on the table.

Contrary to popular belief, ambivalence - the feeling of being torn between opposing paths - lies at the heart of any “real” decision. We all experience ambivalence. In fact, it’s pervasive throughout our individual lives: from vacillating between alternatives of what shirt to wear, what food to eat on the menu, what mutual fund not to invest in, to deeper issues: How do I handle my rebellious child? Am I choosing the right path for my future? If a decision is cut and dried, there is in fact no decision to make. The course is simply obvious. But all of our real decisions - small and large - have some degree of ambivalence and uncertainty attached to them.

How good is an individual at identifying situations where it is appropriate to feel ambivalent and how well does the individual do in transforming ambivalence into a tool for exploring alternatives? Is the individual at the mercy of the ambivalence or is (s)he able to resolve it and explain how the decision fits the context? These may be the most significant signs we have of how reliable that individual might be as a national leader, who must respond to a changing environment filled with genuinely conflicting options that are not easy to sort out.

For the past eight years, American voters afforded themselves the rare opportunity to observe a president who claims to be immune from any ambivalent feelings in making the kinds of decisions that would give any other leader pause: sending troops to engage in an elective war in Iraq, torturing human beings, saving the planet from climate change, saving the financial system. He has sold himself as a great leader on the basis of his self-confident certainty, and for a long time the public bought it. From a psychological perspective, Bush’s repeated assertions that he never experiences doubt in critical matters are simply not credible. They’re a dangerous fantasy.

How do the two men seeking to replace George W. Bush engage the ambivalence of the decision-making process?

John McCain and Ambivalence

By presenting himself as a “maverick,” John McCain seeks to capitalize on an oppositional psychology that developed in relationship with his father. For a male, the paternal relationship is typically a vital focus in developing identity. McCain’s oppositional dynamics seem to dominate the process he uses to make decisions and take action. They reveal themselves in his reflexive defiance of authority, his inability to control his temper, his aura of anger and his touchiness. He is well aware of these characteristics, describing himself as “often impulsive” and admitting, “I have a temper, to state the obvious, which I have tried to control with varying degrees of success because it does not always serve my interest or the public’s.”

He has been known for nastiness as well. In a private school he attended, his peers called him “McNasty” and “the Punk.” (Timberg 24) Neither his Vietnam POW experience nor his adult life as a politician cured him of this nastiness, and he gained something of the same reputation among his fellow senators. Former New Hampshire Republican Senator Bob Smith said what he observed from McCain was “more than just temper. It’s this need of his to show you that he’s above you - a sneering, condescending attitude. It’s hurt his relationships in Congress … ” He has also given expression to sometimes shockingly sexist comments and brutish behavior. McCain’s nasty side was on display in early October in the tone taken by his campaign.

On the opposite page of the ledger lies McCain’s repentance for his bad behavior and his seemingly genuine impulse to eschew the kind of gutter politics he was subjected to by Carl Rove in the 2000 Republican primary campaign. McCain’s frank awareness of his own dark inclinations has made him understandably endearing to both press and public. McCain’s honesty can be disarming, as when he confessed in his 2003 biography, “Worth Fighting For,” that he has “a tendency to overreact” to “slights” in a manner that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”

As they grow up, children go through several stages of oppositional behavior. It’s part of the process of making adjustments to the changing relationship between parents and child. The growing child needs and feels the pressure to be independent. This is countered by the feeling of dependence on the parental bond. The individual resolves the powerful ambivalence between these two feelings by developing an autonomous self. To an important extent, it seems that McCain remains in the struggle. He is not yet free.

In “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain recalls that as a toddler “at the smallest provocation” he would go into oppositional mode by holding his breath until he passed out: “I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious.” His parents responded by cooling him off in a bathtub of ice-cold water. His biography suggests young McCain had deep reasons to rebel. He was expected to follow his father - who eventually made four-star admiral - into Annapolis and a Navy career. McCain’s grandfather had been an admiral and key leader in the Pacific campaign during World War II. A McCain ancestor had served on George Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War. McCains had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. But young John McCain didn’t want to attend the Academy and endure its regimentation. As McCain’s biographer, Robert Timberg, dramatizes it in “John McCain, An American Odyssey,” McCain “knew that if he said what he thought - hold it, screw Annapolis, the place sucks - shock waves would reverberate through countless generations of McCains, shaking a military tradition.”

McCain’s relationship with his father embodies an ambivalent tension he continued to feel throughout his life. Even as he admired his father, McCain has admitted he resented the “distant, inscrutable patriarch” for his long absences and uninvolvement in his son’s life, and for his heavy drinking. (Faith 70) McCain wrote that drinking changed his father’s personality “in unattractive ways. When he was drunk, I did not recognize him” and “I didn’t like to see him drunk. It changed my image of him.” (Timberg 30) “I admired him, and wanted badly to be admired by him,” McCain also says in his autobiography.

Growing up, McCain rebelled against his father and the authority of his family tradition by acting out with punkish, nasty, sometimes reckless behavior. Timberg remarks that McCain felt himself pushed by “forces he felt incapable of challenging.” (33) McCain told him that he felt the strong forces were dragging him into his family pattern. “Perhaps that’s why I practiced this rebellion against the system, always walking on the edge,” McCain said.

At the Academy, McCain’s insubordinate behavior with superior officers would have gotten any other cadet expelled. But he was a McCain. Ironically - an irony probably not lost on McCain - he could get away with such cheekiness precisely because of his father and the family history he was rebelling against. This irony would later organize his experience as a prisoner in North Vietnam.

The public doesn’t know much about what is in the psychiatric reports drawn up on McCain after he returned from Vietnam, but we do know that one psychiatrist concluded McCain had been in a long struggle to escape “the shadow of his father.” The emotional force of this “shadow” shows up poignantly in a story McCain tells in “Faith of My Fathers.” McCain writes he had particularly bad exchanges with a fellow midshipman, whose real name McCain changes to “Witt” for the purposes of the narrative. Witt (a play on wit?) had tormented McCain about McCain’s privileged status as the son and grandson of commanding officers and the special leeway he received at Annapolis as a result. Midshipman Witt, McCain tells us, was himself the son of a noncommissioned officer, the Navy’s “working” class leaders. McCain admits that his great feeling of animosity toward Witt changed when Witt died. Witt, McCain learned, “was serving as a flight instructor at a naval air station in the south and had flown his T-28 to the town where his father had retired from the navy. As he flew in front of his parents’ home and unwisely attempted a dangerous maneuver, he lost control of his plane and crashed while his parents watched. Considering all the adversaries that a human being confronts in a lifetime, what had passed between Witt and me was nothing. I was embarrassed that I had taken his abuse so seriously. Animosity dissolved into regret after I learned of his death. I assumed his death had been caused by an impulse to impress his father.” In describing Witt’s motivation for the risky maneuver, McCain was also, of course, describing his own.

The struggle between identifying with the authority of his father versus rebelling against him became acute during McCain’s wartime captivity. In a heavily researched article on McCain’s role in shrouding details of POWs who may have been left behind in North Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sydney H. Schanberg writes:

“McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value … McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. ‘I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair … ‘ Tellingly, he says he lived in ‘dread’ that his father would find out about the confession. ‘I still wince,’ he writes, ‘when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.’”

In an article in Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson points out that despite McCain’s urgent desire to conform to the code of military conduct (the rules that govern the behavior of troops taken prisoner), McCain violated it. Dickinson writes, “Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. ‘I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,’ he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them.” McCain says he knew “my father’s identity was directly related to my survival.” Following his torture ordeal and forced “confession,” McCain was returned to the general prison population and immediately became defiant and verbally abusive to his warders. (Timberg 99) He pushed the line as he had in the Academy, but he also knew he had the protection of being “the crown prince,” as he was called, Admiral McCain’s son.

The point of repeating this well-documented account is not to impugn in any way McCain’s courage or his service. From a psychiatric perspective - now more generally recognized - the military code of conduct is unrealistic in its demands on individuals undergoing extreme stress and torture where they are faced with resolving, in moments of atrocious mental and physical agony, the impossible choice of abstract “honor” against the very survival of life, dignity or sanity. Our point is that McCain’s ambivalent theme of conformity versus rebellion seems to have become entangled in his POW experience. That experience now added twists and turns to the anguish of guilt and rationalization for what he perceived was his own failure to live up to the honor of his father and grandfather.

The entanglement was on display while he was a member of the Senate POW Committee responding to families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. As Schanberg reports, McCain was “far from calm” on the committee. “He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: how dare you question my patriotism?” Project Censored winner Elliot D. Cohen reported one case of POW/MIA family members who came to petition Senator McCain. “When he [McCain] realized who we were, his face turned red and he became enraged. He would not accept the letters we had brought, he burst through our group assaulting the niece of Jane Duke Gaylor, mother of a MIA. I followed Senator McCain down the hall asking that he leave the legislation alone and all the while he is denying that he knew anything about the Missing Personnel Act … [patently untrue] As we reached the elevator, he said to me that I didn’t know what he had been through … “In the context of McCain’s unresolved ambivalence going back to his early opposition to his father, it makes psychological sense that he could display the apparent contradiction of tender affection for the troops at the same time that he votes against expanded medical and other GI benefits for them.

A recent word slip during the campaign in October suggests that McCain’s POW ambivalences (including rebellion versus conformity) has become linked in his psyche with the stress of the presidential campaign. McCain has rebelled against his own principles of running a “respectful campaign” by going into smear mode against Obama. Speaking to supporters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he made the slip that hearkens back to his agonized state of mind at the Hanoi Hilton. “Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners and the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent.” His prepared remarks called for him to say “fellow citizens” not “fellow prisoners.” The content of his Allentown remarks covers the question of honesty and honor, the same issue he confronted as a POW.

There may also be psychological meaning to the fact that he was standing with Sarah Palin when he made this slip. McCain appears to be feeling as he felt when a prisoner. That’s what this slip suggests. He’s a prisoner of his own rebellion against himself. The Palin candidacy came from this self-rebellion. Effectively prevented by his advisers from choosing his friend Joe Lieberman for vice president, McCain made a “maverick” choice “to shake things up” with the little-known governor. He clearly felt forced to conform to the authority of the evangelical Republican “base&#