During my lifetime, I’ve seen the U.S. retreat from being the leader in technology, production, science, education, medicine, and space exploration and turn into a twisted shadow of the nation I grew up to love. I kept hoping for that moment to come when we would realize that we had to resume our place in the world as a nation of adults. I would imagine us collectively straightening up, standing tall, and stepping forward to take on the problems we helped create – working with the other nations of the world as a partner, not as some presumptous bully. I hope that is what this election represents.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. I remember that a cross was burned in my middle-class neighborhood, in the yard of the first black family who tried to move in to the area. I remember listening to class-mates parrot their parents beliefs that the only real solution to the “black problem” was to ship them all back to Africa. That our nation has matured enough that we can elect a man of African descent to our highest office – that is more deeply satisfying to me than I would ever have dreamed possible. I think it says a lot about the true character of our nation.

This was a race about prejudice. Some of it was racial. Some was prejudice about ideology. Let’s not forget prejudice against Islam, and against African-American Christian churches. And, of course, prejudice over political party affiliation.

Prejudice came out in different ways. We saw prejudice on Obama’s part when it came to small-town America. That was echoed by Palin’s remarks intimating that New York City and other big cities weren’t part of “Real America.” We even had the press telling us that white voters couldn’t actually be trusted to vote for the person they said they’d vote for, if that person was black. (Surprisingly, I had no trouble at all casting my ballot for Obama. It seems others also over came the evil mind-controlling power of the Bradely Effect, as well.)

Fortunately, this was also a race about hope. I believe that fifty-two percent of Americans cast a vote for Obama because they felt he was their best hope for a better future.

We’ve taken a giant step forward. Let’s hope it’s just the first of many.

All the shopping was paid for by the RNC. I’ll bet that’s going to make for some angry conservatives. But it doesn’t end there, not wanting to take advantage of her gracious hosts too much, she had her home state pay for the airfare and hotel rooms for her kids. One hotel room was $770 per night. Then she cooked the books a bit to make it look legitimate. Not a smart thing to do when you are under so much scrutiny. Especially when, upon digging a bit deeper, reporters discovered that she’s been charging the State of Alaska a per diem to allow herself to live in her own home. I guess she figures she’s renting it out to herself. But hey, it’s another $17,000 per year out of the tax payer’s pockets and into her own.

I mean, how foolish do you have to be to run scams while you’ve got every reporter in the world looking into your life? Either you have to be so naive as to border on brain dead, or you have to be so much in the habit of cheating your way through life, that you can’t tell the difference between what is ethical behavior and what isn’t. Either way, I don’t want someone like that anywhere need our fiscal crisis.

This is someone who pretends she knows what it’s like to be middle-class. How many of you would have the audacity to try that kind of stunt on your employer? You wouldn’t. Why not? Because you can be fired. You aren’t elected to an office that you merely plan to use as a stepping stone to an even better gig. You don’t have a job where you can just leave your responsibilities behind and go on the campaign trail for a few months. I realize that’s the reality for politicians, but it’s nothing like the reality for the rest of America. Politicians know they are safe in their jobs until the end of their terms. No matter how bad the economy gets, they’ll be just fine until the voters have a chance to boot them out. The rest of you have to worry that your boss will walk in at any time and tell you that they’ve just decided to cut back and your name is on the list.

It is Palin’s desperate hope that you’ll vote for McCain/Palin on November 4th because she looks pretty and claims to be just like you. But saying it doesn’t make it so.

When you get into the polling booth, think about the kind of leader we need and what happened the last time we got fooled by someone who claimed he was just like us. Can we really afford Sarah Palin?

I’m pretty sure I’d wind up on her list of anti-American people, since I think that the U.S. has made some serious mistakes in the past and I am frankly and honestly ashamed of what we’ve done. What she doesn’t seem to understand is that having a realistic view of my country and the actions taken by the worst administration in our nations history, doesn’t mean I don’t love my country. Since I haven’t had the benefit of much travel outside the U.S., all my friends and all my family are here. The places that I love, like Red River Gorge in Kentucky, are here. My home is here. I love all of that. I am also proud of America at the same time that I am ashamed of our President. I am proud of the work being done by our brave soldiers at the same time that I feel they’ve been betrayed by their Commander-in-Chief.

I would guess, that even those of you who are very conservative still loved America when Bill Clinton was President. You loved America even if you believed that what he was doing was wrong.

Party affiliation and political leanings aren’t what determine patriotism.

What worries me, are those who love their political party more than they love this nation. I worry about those who love their political ideology more than they love this nation. Unfortunately, I think there have been far too many of those people, on both sides of the aisle, elected as our representatives.

This is the UNITED States of America. Those who seek to tear us apart in order to gain political power are the real anti-Americans. People who try to stir up racist, class, or ethnic hatred, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, Independents or members of any other political party, are doing anti-American things. They might justify them by claiming they are trying to “save” America, but what they are really trying to do is remake America into their own idea of what America should be.

John McCain has taken to running “robo-calls” that make it sound as if Barak Obama is somehow directly involved in terrorist attacks and that he somehow plans to enact “far leftist legistlation” once he is elected. It’s a pathetic attempt to scare people into voting for McCain. Two years ago, if you’d asked me if I would have believed McCain would stoop to such tactics, I would have said no. I’m very sad that I was wrong.

You can see a transcript of Powell’s remarks here: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/19/powell.transcript/

I applaud Colin Powell’s decision. I’m sure he’s well aware that he’ll be accused of making his decision on the basis of race and of being a traitor to his party, yet he’s had the strength of character to stay true to his own conscience. If only we had a few hundred more Colin Powells serving in our government.

I’ve always respected Colin Powell and had hoped he would run for President himself. He’s one of the few Republican leaders that I think I could have voted for. It appeared to me that he worked very hard to try to keep us from going to war with Iraq and was unflinching in saying what he believed. He’s served our country well, and does so again by speaking up for Obama and by taking the McCain campaign to task for their unconscionable attacks on Obama.

This week, the McCain smear machine is trying to label Obama a socialist. Perhaps they’ve chosen this tactic because people have started to realize we’ve always been a socialist nation. We provide socialism for the rich to protect their profits and capitalism for the rest of us. McCain has even fallen back on the tired old catch phrase “redistributing wealth.” As Powell points out, taxes are always a redistribution of wealth, with most of it going back to the people who paid the taxes in the form of roads, defense, police and fire protection, and other government services.

What bothers me the most about the McCain campaign is their willingness to incite hatred if they think it will help their candidate. When they fail to shutdown hate speech at their rallies, they are creating an environment where bad things can happen. Such a rally might be all some post-traumatic-shocked veteran needs to convince him that he’s got a mission to save the country by killing Obama. Can you imagine the terrible backlash of such an action? Can you imagine the sense of betrayal that would give to every African American in this country. It would set us back forty years.

It’s not just Obama they put at risk. When they incite hatred based on race and on religion, they attack the very foundations of this country. To me, trying to divide our nation along racial, ethnic, religious, or even sexual preference lines is about as unpatriotic as you can get. We are facing tough times. We are one nation with many different people, languages, skin tones, religions, ethnicities, sexual preferences, and favorite foods. We are the great melting pot of the world. THAT is what makes America the greatest nation. We should celebrate that diversity every day.

It’s time we stopped treating people who don’t share our exact ideologies as if they are pariahs. It’s time we decided that it’s alright to talk about politics and to have different opinions. We should all remember that the things that bind us together as a nation, such as the love of freedom, are far more important than the forces that try to tear us apart.

Now, a certain amount of rabble rousing happens in every campaign. But a line is crossed when people in the crowd start shouting out “Kill Obama” and shout racial epithets at a black cameraman, and the politician standing there on stage says nothing.

What does it say about Sarah Palin?

I don’t know if Sarah Palin is a bigot, and I won’t accuse her of being one on the basis of not shutting down that kind of stuff at her rally. What I think her behavior demonstrates is a lot more important than her racial attitudes. It shows that her instincts for political leadership are poor. If she can’t think on her feet, recognizing that the ugly remarks being made are going to hurt her rather than help her, than she isn’t ready to lead this country.

We’ve had enough clumsy leadership for a dozen administrations. We can’t survive any more. Even if I believed that John McCain were the better man for the job of President, I couldn’t vote for him, because he was foolish enough to accept Sarah Palin as a running mate. To me, that indicates that he doesn’t have enough control over his own party to show he can lead this nation, or that his judgment is badly flawed when it comes to political associations. I would have thought after the mess with Keating twenty years ago, that McCain would be a lot more careful about picking his political associates.

On the other hand, I continue to be impressed with Obama’s even-handedness and his coolness, even under the pressure of this campaign. In the town-hall meeting style debate, Obama appeared to be at ease, while McCain wandered around aimlessly, his face set in a kind of rigid smile that I suspect was intended to hide a man who is seething with anger.

We need a leader who can think on his feet, one who can reassure a frightened nation that there is someone who understands what it’s like to be in the middle-class, working for a living. We need someone who people respond to, that they trust. I think Barak Obama is that man. 

]]> http://www.raybenjamin.com/wordpress/2008/10/10/failure-of-leadership-sarah-palins-rallys/feed/ 1 http://www.raybenjamin.com/wordpress/2008/10/09/do-we-know-the-real-john-mccain/ http://www.raybenjamin.com/wordpress/2008/10/09/do-we-know-the-real-john-mccain/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:50:03 +0000 rben13 http://www.raybenjamin.com/wordpress/?p=31 Continue reading →]]> McCain’s favorite attack on Obama these days is to claim we don’t know the guy, even though Obama and his wife Michelle have been scrutinized more carefully over the last 20 months than any presidential candidate in history, except possibly Hillary Clinton. The punch line is one already used in the primary, that Obama is chummy with a former domestic terrorist, William Ayers. A man who has since been given the Model Citizen of the Year award by Chicago, and is recognized as a leader in his community.

Ayers sat on the same board with Obama and hosted one of the early meet and greets that helped Obama get started. The stuff Ayers did happened almost 40 years ago. People tend to mellow over time, and it doesn’t sound like the guy has a lot of influence over Obama.

Here’s my question, do you know the real John McCain? Remember Milken, Keating and the S&L disaster? Didn’t that all start in Arizona?

Senator John McCain was much closer friends with Charles Keating than Obama appears to be with Ayers.The S&L crisis started because Milken was a lousy real estate developer. He hated paying high interest rates on loans he got from Savings and Loans, so he got an idea. The idea that if he bought a bank, he could have the bank invest in his real estate deals, and then he only had to pay the low interest rates that the banks paid on savings accounts. He hired Keating to make that happenThe practice is called Direct Investment, and S&L’s are only allowed to make direct investments with a very small percentage of their capital. The reason is that when a S&L invests directly, it short circuits scrutiny and accounting checks, making it the perfect kind of a set up if you want to commit fraud. It’s a good rule. Every time a S&L has violated the rule, they’ve failed, costing the taxpayers lots of money.

Lincoln S&L had violated the direct investment rule by over 650,000,000 dollars, when regulators caught them.

This is where Keating came in handy. He had a reputation for buying politicians. He developed a close personal reputation with John McCain, flying the Senator and his family down to the Bahamas on numerous occasions, giving advice on banking regulations, and providing substantial donations to McCain’s campaign.

Keating persuaded McCain to fight against regulations that would have exposed the problems and the fraud behind Lincoln S&L. He got McCain to participate in a meeting with four other Senators in which Keating and the Senators applied pressure to the one and only regulator who was allowed to come. (The regulator was told he could not bring aides and could not take notes.) McCain sat silent while this regulator was pressured to allow this criminal enterprise to continue. In the end, McCain and the other politicians succeeded in putting off the regulator for two years. The cost of McCain’s failure of conscience, 3.4 billion dollars. He was in a unique position to keep it from happening, and he sat there silently.

So, you’d think the guy would have learned, but McCain has continued to fight for greater deregulation. His first speech on the current crisis was that we needed to remove even more regulations. McCain takes his economic advice from Phil Graham who makes fun of the people who are the victims of this fraud, calling them whiners. McCain’s V.P. candidate calls for both greater regulation and less regulation in the same sentence, something that I think would cause my brain to suffer from whiplash.

McCain, on Tuesday, said he knows how to fix our problems. (Apparently he’s been keeping it a secret from everyone, holding out until we elect him.) He claims he knows how to catch Bin Ladin. (Again, he won’t tell until he gets what he wants.)

I don’t think McCain understands economics and would be at the mercy of his advisors. I believe he’s done a bad job picking those advisors. He still seems to be a lot more worried about the rich people in this country than the middle class that pays all the taxes.

The video at the link has been checked out by CNN and declared to be true by them. The guy certainly sounds credible:

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/?source=sem-pm-google&gclid=CJqH-arjmpYCFQVfFQodXDiU5w 

To be fair, Biden, Obama’s VP candidate, is from Delaware, which led the way with permissive laws that have helped created the credit card traps that have been destroying people’s credit. I haven’t yet done enough research on him to understand how much involvement he had.

Bottom Line – I think we have a good choice in November, and it’s Obama. I think asking McCain to fix the current economic crisis would just put guys like Keating in charge. We’ve had enough of that already.