N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , SEPTOBER 2004
PAGE
once considered the ‘Party of Traitors’, the party of secession),
of disenfranchised workers and immigrants in the early years
of the 20th century, the Democrats have in their campaigns the
past century favored such liberal causes as labor reform, busing
to achieve racial integration in public schools, abortion on
demand, gay rights, abolishing capital punishment, gun control,
greater representation in politics by women, blacks and young
people (the 18 year old vote), and though Democrats were in
power in most of the last century’s wars in which the U.S. partici
pated, dissenting Democrats have been in the forefront of the
demands that war be abolished as the nation’s major instrument
of world power.
Paradoxically, the only times Republicans were in
accord with Democrat policies were during these wars; the
power to make war is for them the essential leverage for rule
over world affairs. In this the GOP shares the view of FDR and
all Presidents since World War 2 that the immense wealth and
power of the U.S. makes it “responsible for world leadership.”
Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the latter-day
Bush have been particularly tenacious that the U.S. be “Number
One."
This more than any other dispute has split the Demo
cratic Party the past half century — the ineffable question about
the coexistence of raw power with civil rights. When in 1972 the
Democratic platform said in part that “All Americans should be
free to make their own choice of lifestyles and private habits
without being subject to discrimination or persecution," not only
Republicans declared that the Democrats “had been seized by
a radical clique which scorns our nation’s past and would blight
our future." That year more Democrats defected from the Party
than in 1948 when two factions split off from the central party,
Progressives" and “Dixiecrats” that orbited outside Truman’s
axis.
The next great defection was in 1980: “Reagan Demo
crats" they were called, primarily white males fleeing, as in
1972, the increasing influence of women, people of color,
McGovemiks and other riffraff drawn to the Democratic Party.
The response was to abandon the Party’s traditional base. Since
then the Democratic Party has been in pursuit of its primarily
conservative defectors instead of shoring up its immense base
of working people, racial minorities and women. The Democratic
leadership signaled runaways that it was safe to return to the
Party because, a Party strategist said, “poor black, Hispanic,
urban homeless, hungry and other people and problems out of
favor in Middle America will no longer get the favored treatment
they got from mushy 1960s and 1970s liberals.”
White voters switched from the Democratic Party to the
Republicans because they perceived it as a party of minorities
while Party leaders and candidates regarded such a perspective
to be a liability. The political swerve to the reactionary right was
precipitated by the gains of the Civil Rights Movement which set
off a fullscale backlash revolt against minority rights as infringe
ments against “traditional rights." White flight was also because
of the Party’s sympathies for the mushrooming population of
Hispanics and the flood of newer arrivals from Asia and other
parts of what until recently was regarded as the Third World.
The Democratic Party leadership chased its fleeing
whites into the conservative vice of the Republicans and left
behind the mass majority of its rank and file. As a result the
two parties appear to converge into a single interest group with
a symbiotic sameness and respond to an increasingly narrow,
affluent and conservative constituency. The real question is not
about a third party but creating a truly second party.
The degeneration of the Democratic Party intensifies
the problem and leaves a black hole at the center of American
politics. A kinder assessment might be that it is second rate, and
that it must acknowledge it has failed as an alternative to the
GOP since Nixon transfigured southern Democrats into Repub
licans. The response of the Democrats has been to imitate the
Republicans, which characterizes the Clinton years. The
Democrats are a dying party this centennial of the birth of the
Republican Party from the corpse of the Whig Party in 1854.
DAVID HORSEY
The Democratic revival this year is based less on a
vigorous platform that embodies its old traditions than on the
surge to elect anybody but Bush. If 1964 was the "founding
defeat” of the Republicans, 2004 might prove to be a shallow
resurrection for the Democrats, their “kismet“ instead.
Perhaps the Southern white (male) flight that mangled
the Democratic Party can be traced back to the 1948 election
when Strom Thurmond split his ‘Dixiecrats’ from the Party to
KERRY
I
For the first and most likely only time in my life I person
ally know a Presidential candidate. John Kerry and I were in the
I Vietnam Veterans Against the War together. He spoke to the
' Senate; I spoke to the House. We both threw our war medals at
I Congress in open protest of the war we fought in that killed and ‘
, maimed our friends for no good purpose history has been able
i to sort out a generation later, even though we are considered
| traitors for having opposed it. He did not join 20 of us vets a
week after the visit to Congress when we festooned the Penta
gon with several pounds of freshly gathered chicken defecation,
which I consider the last major attack upon it prior to 9/11.
I
Most of us in VVAW knew from the start Kerry was
< politically ambitious and had his eye on the Presidency. It is
difficult to assess what sort of person might make a plausible
President, in particular someone familiar whose faults are as
known as his(her) virtues. Kerry’s political record is not quite as
dramatic as his war record, which has been unfairly maligned
by hired mercenaries who claim to be veterans. His Senatorial
!
accomplishments are not much advertised, yet he is greatly
I
responsible for the country’s rapprochement with Vietnam
(with fellow Senator and war veteran John McCain), and he
helped smoke out the internationally corrupt BCCI bank that
many of his colleagues attempted to protect.
Bush ads are calling Kerry a traitor, a most vile form
of campaigning: the people who highjacked the Republican
t
Party the past four years have seized the low ground and intend
to keep it, accusing anyone who opposes them as betraying the
country. If indeed the word traitor is to be used it would more
|
likely be on target to accuse those who are dismantling the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and desecrating the culture
of democracy.
The contention over Kerry’s Vietnam war record and
subsequent public opposition to that war has, I think, served
j
mainly as a smokescreen to obscure Bush's choice to avoid
war service and the fact that our self-described 'War President’
|
can justifiably be classified as a deserter (more than a year
I
AWOL) from his National Guard unit in wartime.
I
Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on what
i
Kerry and Bush did in a long ago war that never quite leaves
I
the American conscience. But how they responded personally
i
to that war has much to do with of the type of character develop-
ment necessary for the war we are now engaged in.
Bush pretends to be a bold President by making war,
I
but he takes little risk — young American men and women as
j
well as countless innocents are paying the costs of warfare that
I
he refused to pay when it was his chance. Kerry, who staked his J
life at war has far more clarity about the costs and consequen-
I
ces of war. We are, after all, choosing a War President'.
Both Kerry and Bush are sons of privilege: Kerry seems I
to have accepted his as a debt and attempted to provide some
payment; Bush primarily manipulated his privilege as a way to
dodge obligation and make money.
It is necessary to replace Bush if we wish to retain our
|
chances at democracy, at best an unfinished business that will
I
never be fully realized The question is if Kerry is the right
’
person to supplant Bush. There would be greater choice with
j
more political parties but all we have is Kerry opposing Bush.
I
Kerry is generally liberal minded (though the ’L’ word is
anathema to the far-right, its root is “liberty’), and he is not a
zealot of any discernible dogma; he is not, in short, a frenzied
millenarian.
“Politics is about policy, not about passion," Howard
j
Dean has said endorsing Kerry.
I
I am critical of Kerry. I am not sure if in ordinary times
I
I would choose him for President. But I have to say, in the
manner of George Orwell who wrote a very critical epitaph
{
of Gandhi after his 1948 assassination, that in comparison
I
oppose Harry Truman’s nomination as the Democratic candidate
for President (as did Henry Wallace and his ‘Progressive’ wing),
the office he inherited after FDR's death in 1945
George W Bush is diametrical to Harry Truman who
proclaimed the “Buck stops here." He might wish to be thought
of as a person of honesty and candidness as Truman was, and
he might admire some of Truman's policies. Truman is blamed
for the “loss of the American republic" when he imposed “the
national security state."
Bush should heed the 33rd President’s opinion of the
Republican Party rendered after his long-sho, triumph for
reelection in 1948. The reason Truman won against long odds,
bad polls and a hostile press, he said, was because “the people
know the Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Repub
lican Party is the party of special interests, and it always has
been and always will be.”
How would Bush answer Truman when he asked, “Is
the United States going to run in the interest of the people as a
whole, or in the interest of a small group of privileged business
men” (whom he called “gluttons of privilege" and “bloodsuckers
with offices in Wall Street”)?
Can Bush claim with candor as did the feisty Truman,
“We told the people the truth. And the people are going to win
this election."
When asked about his 1948 victory, Truman said,
“Labor did it." But so did farmers, blacks, ethnic minorities and
a then as yet unacknowledged voting bloc, women — a coalition
Reagan and Father Bush broke in the 1980s but whose disrepair
was noted as early as 1964 and which was capitalized on by
Nixon and his successful Presidential campaign of 1968
Garry Wills, writing in the New York Review o f Books, suggest
ed that Barry Goldwater's 1964 loss to incumbent Lyndon
Johnson (like Truman, an inherited President) was the Repub
lican Party’s “founding defeat” and that Nixon in 1968 “profited
from insights...(that) even running against a southerner, Gold-
water had won five southern states.” The formerly Democratic
'Solid South’ was falling apart under pressure of the Civil Rights
movement, the backlash of white supremacists and defecting
white Democrats to traditionally Jim Crow Republican Party
locals.
George McGovern, who lost to Nixon in 1972, said his
humiliating defeat was the result of a “so-called Southern
strategy" welding Republicans with white-flight Democrats.
Nixon, McGovern said, “really tapped the seeds of racism, the
fear of change, the fear of the young, the fear of the black.”
A 'Confederate Bloc’ contained in 1968 nearly 40%
of the electoral votes necessary for the Republicans to win the
Presidency. Nixon built on that base in 1968 and 1972, as did
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the 1980s.
Jimmy Carter, whose single term Democratic
Presidency was squeezed between fourteen years of GOP
control of the White House, lost his 1980 attempt at re-election
to the senior Bush’s predecessor and mentor, Reagan. Carter,
former governor of Georgia, accused Reagan of being both
a warmonger and a racist. Under Reagan, Carter warned,
“Americans might be separated, black from white, Jew from
Christian, North from South, rural from urban.” Buzz words such
as “states rights,” he said, really meant segregation.
Reagan made it clear from the start that he intended to
be an “FDR of the right," and he immediately began dismantling
“the welfare state" built during the Great Depression of the
1930s by Roosevelt's New Deal. He reduced federal spending
for social services while drastically increasing defense spending
and stepping up the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union,
and lowered taxes especially for the wealthy. He rolled back civil
CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
j
I
ASTORI A
0#
?4in,
to his disingenuous opponent, Kerry smells so much cleaner.
'■MICHAEL M cCUSKER
13
ORGANIC PIANO SERVICE
THE n/N ER A iO N E PRESERVES THE TONE’
TUNING ^REGULATION ^REPAIR
RECONDITIONING
177 NW ADAMS AVE., HILLSBORO, OREGON
(503) 846-1467
K IR T LE Y
W. BURGGRAF,
P IA N O TUNFR/TECHNICIAN
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
757 27TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Y
T