"Change You Can See"

[Universe Prince]

Excerpted from http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10312008.html:

The disadvantages of the McCain-Pailin ticket don't need much explication. McCain has never risen to the challenge of the world financial crisis and this failure has shrivelled his chances to near invisibility. Though Sarah  Pailin has enough horse sense to attack Wall Street greed, it's a brave and foolish soul who would argue that she will ever be ready to run the country, which in the unlikely event  of Republican victory she might well have to do. So we're left with Obama-Biden. Biden need not detain us. In his single person is  combined everything that is loathsome about the Democratic Party. He’s a phony through and through, serf of the credit companies and virtually incapable of opening his mouth without unleashing a falsehood, a plagiarism or an absurdity. On his criminal record are the bankruptcy bill, many horrible statutes prosecuting the war on drugs, the crime bill. And Obama? Here are some excerpts from what I wrote about him recently in The Nation. [...] "In substantive terms Obama’s run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful." I suggested that for a souvenir of what a progressive platform might look like people might consult Ralph’s website, or – at least for those portions about foreign policy and constitutional rights, Bob Barr. Listening to my complaints about Obama, a friend of mine in New York asked what alternative I had to recommend her. Since in New York  the split for Obama-Biden  is roughly 65-29 I told her it didn't matter. She could write in the straight Wiccan ticket if she felt so inclined. (Not a bad platform either, as she duly reminded me: "Do as you will, as long as it harms none.") It wouldn't make any difference, any more than it would in California, where you can vote for Nader or Barr or McKinney and Obama is going to win regardless. In most states in the Union you can write in the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves ticket, and even without your vote Obama-Biden will canter home. So get out there and have fun and don’t feel excessively  burdened by responsibility to History – always a left-wing failing. And wouldn't Barr be the first mustachioed occupant of the White House since Teddy Roosevelt?   Even if you don’t like the man, vote the mustache! This would be change we can see. Does that phrase have a vaguely familiar ring? It was what LBJ used to advise his staff during the Great Society build-up: "You've gotta give them change they can see." Meaning bridges, roads, new parks. Apparently the Obama pre-transition team is studying the early days of the New Deal and Great Society programs as thematic precursors for their initial two years -- before they lose one house of Congress, I suppose. I like freshman Montana Senator John Tester’s notion of change we’d like to see. Tester said people "want to see the executives that drove Wall Street into the ground in orange suits picking up cans along the side of the road." He’s got a hugely popular reception for that thought.

It's an interesting opinion piece. Check it out.

[Plane]

the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves ticket...

Excellent!