25 February 2008

Global Village



I had been prepared to let the rest of the election go without comment, but you know me better than that. This is too cool, and too spread across the globe. Everyone has an opinion, and everything matters.

I don't know when the caucus in Kenya is going to happen, anymore than I understand how the delegates will be apportioned. Geraldine Ferrarro, former Democratic Party nominee for Vice president in 1984, and arguably the prototype for the idea of Change, has a nice piece this morning arguing that the delegates from Michigan and Florida, who were excluded from consideration due to shenanigans by their party bosses, should be included in the delegate count.

That is despite the fact that Senator Obama did not campaign in those states, since the elections didn't count, according to the people who are also the Superdelegates.

She then argues that the Superdelegates should decide the matter if it is close, and that they should pick Senator Clinton, since they know better. I do not know where the delegates from Kenya will be seated, or if they will. There is an issue with them, and I will get to that in a moment.

Still, the global implications will be profound and everyone really ought to have a vote.

Senator Clinton knows it, and time is growing short. This is the first week in a long time she has not lost a primary, and she is a game player if nothing else. She erupted from my radio yesterday morning in the pre-dawn:

"Shame on you, Barack Obama!" she said in Cincinnati, which is one of the Obama strongholds in the Buckeye state. She was responding to a pair of mailings being sent out critical of her health care plan, and mischaracterizing her position on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

She is against it, and was against it when her husband got it passed. It is part of the experience thing. And as to the health care matter, her plan is universal, which is what I think the pamphlet alleges. I am not smart enough to understand the difference between “universal” and “compulsory,” and the way things are going, it does not matter.

Please don't think I am coming down on Senator Clinton. She is a formidable intellect, a long-time master of policy, whether I like it or not, and it a comfort to know that there is still a little life out there in the winter chill in the Rust Belt.

“It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public. That's what I expect from you. She seemed angry, but I am getting inoculated to reaction to the production of emotion on queue.

“Meet me in Ohio, and let's have a debate about your tactics. Enough with the speeches and the big rallies and then using tactics that are right out of Karl Rove's playbook," she concluded, while her staff brought the limo around back to pick her up for the flight to Texas.

The candidates are scheduled to have an encounter in Cleveland Tuesday if my pocket Day-timer is accurate, so there is time for a little shuttle diplomacy between the two big Red-Blue states will be the final throw-down in the struggle.

There is something primal about this last hurrah, something that makes me uncomfortable, like I have been caught slacking and not doing my chores. Mimi Swartz caught the tone perfectly in the Times on Sunday. She was talking about something else, of course.

She was talking about a uTube phenomenon- a phenome-mom, if you will. She started out her appreciation of an internet event, which involves a female comic doing a bit called “The William Tell Mom,” The woman is named Anita Renfroe, and is a mid-aged Atlanta suburbanite. The hook to the story is that she is married to a Southern Baptist minister; and is an avowed Christian herself.

The hook to the article is peculiarity that such a person could have a sense of humor.

If I even began to imply that other Great Faiths of The Book lacked an intrinsic sense of humor, I would be rightly castigated as a bigot. Everyone has a sense of humor. In his marvelous book “God is not Great,” Christopher Hitchens points out the obvious point that our faiths can only be a palest reflection of the mind of the Godhead.

We have it all backwards: we have created the divinity in our image, not the other way around, out of the whole cloth of our backgrounds and cultures.

Ms Swartz is just reflecting another problem with revealed truth, though hers is of the secular kind with particularly advanced sensibilities that fails to make allowances for the belief systems that keep many of us from going mad.

My lack of that sort of faith is just my way of coping, and as Hitchens observes, I just want the secularists and the zealots to leave me alone to live my own life.

I guess that is just a mark of how deep and profound the gulf is becoming between us all in this time of the Balkanization of just about everything. New York looks out at the Red-Blue States like Ohio and Texas and marvels that they share any cultural values at all.

The funny thing is that the increasing schism between the democratic candidates is about precisely nothing, as far as policy goes.

Both of them want to put their hands in our wallets, all in a good cause of course, and it only a matter of how deep that divides them, and sparks the bitterness about describing what separates them.

But something must be done about health care, we all seem to agree on that, and thus, something or other will be.

So that is how Mimi gets around to the matter of the religious right, and the mystery of how they have a sense of humor.   The clip from uTube, has been uWatched and uForwarded over six million times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxT5NwQUtVM

It is pretty funny, and it must resonate someplace, since the reaction from the crowd is immediate and enthusiastic. It is neither political nor religious, but human. Which is why this is all so far beyond politics and really in the heart of something that makes us all tick.

Senator Clinton is telling us to clean up our room, and Senator Obama is telling us to just get in the car and he will drive. He knows a place we can go that will be really cool.

John McCain is the harried father who is going to show up later, and glower across the dinner table.

The universal nature of all this does not stop at the shoreline.

You might think that all Kenyans would be vigorously supporting Mr. Obama, but things are more complex. Nicholas Kristoff of The NY Times is contributing a valuable string of information from East Africa that could influence the election.

Kenya continues in a morass of ethnic tension, and support for the two candidates has fractured along community lines. Senator Obama has fierce partisans in the Luo population, from which he is descended, while the overwhelming majority of the Kikuyus are firmly in the Clinton Camp.

This is a global election, as if you hadn't noticed. Positively human.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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