Tin ears of the Romney-bot

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George H.W. Bush (i.e, 41) professed amazement at supermarket scanners during a trip to a food store to attempt to show how much of a regular guy he was. The fallout badly damaged what little credibility he had left, proving to an electorate weary of recession that he was tone deaf on economic matters. End result: Bill Clinton wins the presidency.

Examples of presidential candidates failing to understand the tenor of the times are legion — Nixon on the beach in dress pants, Dukakis in the tank, Kerry windsurfing, McCain suspending his campaign — and they almost always end badly for the candidate.

Enter Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor already had credibility problems due to his every evolving positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and he has on more than one occasion proven that he has a tin ear worthy of the first President Bush (offering to make a $10,000 wager as though that were normal behavior, chanting “Who Let the Dogs Out” at a Martin Luther King Day parade in Florida).

And yet, he somehow found a way to top himself Monday:

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney stumbled down the homestretch of the New Hampshire primary on Monday, declaring, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” as his rivals intensified already fierce criticism.

Romney has attempted to defend himself, saying the full context of the comment would show that he did not mean he likes to fire people but that he likes having the ability to jettison service workers who do a bad job. And while everyone of us takes this ability for granted — fire the plumber if he can’t fix the leak — it’s not like we enjoy doing it. It was a foolish comment, a tone deaf one that underscores that Romney is the scion of a very wealthy family and has little in common with the average voter — and everything in common with the 1 percent at the top of the economic heap.

Romney is the elite the Tea Party and Occupy movements have warned you about, and it is going to be difficult for him to portray himself as anything else.

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A progressive push in the Legislature

New Jersey Democrats are flexing their more progressive muscles. The party is making two important progressive goals their top priorities — an increased minimum wage and marriage equality.

Sheila Oliver, the Assembly speaker, announced today that bumping the minimum wage to $8.50 from $7.25 an hour would be a top priority of the Assembly legislative session that starts tomorrow. She called it an “economic stimulus that doesn’t come in the form of more debt or increased spending” and “is a recognition that thousands of households in New Jersey are struggling to subsist on minimum wage jobs that do not allow them to support their families.”

The speaker’s announcement, which was endorsed by the liberal think tank, New Jersey Policy Perspective, came on the same day that state Democrats held a press conference to announce that they would introduce marriage-equality legislation when it convenes a new session tomorrow.

And yet, the Democrats are closing out a session in which they allowed business concerns to trump environmental ones — passing a bill delaying implementation of new sewer restrictions — and  approving privatization of school construction and management.

So, how exactly progressive is the New Jersey Legislature? More progressive than it has been during the first two years of the Christie administration — and just in time for a presidential election year.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Ron Paul is not a progressive

Ron Paul was right on both wars, on the bailout of the banks and continues to be right about the need for transparency at the fed. He is right about gay marriage and he is right on most civil liberties issues and the drug war.

Ron Paul, in a photo on his web site: http://www.ronpaul2012.com

But Ron Paul is not a progressive. Ron Paul is not anti-corporate. He believes that empowering business is the best way to accomplish all good things and that government has no role to play in ensuring a level playing field. It was Paul’s dismissal of a government role in health care that elicited the shout of “let him die” during the Republican debates.

He is hardcore on immigration, opposing “amnesty” and “birthright citizenship”; seeks the end to the welfare state; and wants to approve offshore oil drilling.

Forget the ugly racism of his newsletters — which do reflect either his own past racism or a remarkable willingness to allow racists to speak in his name — his opposition to crony capitalism (which the otherwise sane Robert Scheer lauds) is more about freeing capital than addressing the widening chasm of inequality or aiding those in need.

Pat Buchanan’s opposition to free trade comes to mind here, because it was an issue on which the rabid social conservative was able to make common cause with the left. The same thing is happening here. Paul is a libertarian conservative who happens to be right on a couple of issues and not a legitimate standard-bearer for progressives.

It would be better for the left to sit out the 2012 election than vote for Paul.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The emptiness of presidential politics

From Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, a post that Glenn Greenwald described as “one of the most succinct and accurate summaries of the 2012 presidential election and the state of American politics generally that has been written in awhile.” Call it the quote of the day, Iowa edition:

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/iowa-the-meaningless-sideshow-begins-20120103#ixzz1iSEHuHDU

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  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Another bad loss for reeling Knicks

Is it too early to panic?

The Knicks are 2-3 and look disjointed and unfocused. They lack aggressiveness — they are last in the league in rebounds and, while they are getting to the line more than just about any other team, they are taking more three pointers as a percentage of their shots than the rest of the league.

Tim Legler gets at one of the team’s problems — a seeming unwillingness to do the dirty work — and Stephen A. Smith has remarked on the guard play. But I think this goes deeper. The team has one of the top low-post players — Amar’e Stoudamire — in the league and has not consistently run the office through the post. The team has been thinking outside first and not running it inside-out.

Yes, Toney Douglas is a primary culprit and management should have known it before opening he season without a real point guard. Baron Davis is going to help — how can he not? Landry Fields needs to get back to doing what he did last year — hitting the boards from the backcourt (to help Tyson Chandler, who’s necessarily aggressive defense takes him out of position for defensive rebounds) and moving without the ball. Stat also needs to rebound more and the team, aside from Chandler, needs to be better on the defensive end (though, to be fair, had the Knicks held opponents to 95 points a game last year, they would have won 50-plus games).

Ultimately, though, the key is refocusing the offense to make Stat and Carmelo Anthony equal partners.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.