If He Were Still Alive, Wayne Morse Would Endorse The Hopester

One of my favorite pols of all time was Wayne Morse (1900-1974) of Oregon. Morse began his political career in Oregon as a Dumbo for Senate in 1944 and again in 1950 and then, running for a third term, Morse switched parties(!) and was re-elected as Jackass in 1956. He was elected to a 4th term as U.S. Senator, running as a Democrat, in 1962. Morse won my heart with his vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965 that enabled the Johnson administration to waste nearly 60,000 lives in Viet Nam. Morse's vote against the military adventure was joined by a no vote from Ernest Gruening (D-AK). The vote had been 414-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate. Morse retired from the Senate in 1968 and lived for 6 more years in retirement in Oregon. Wayne Morse was a contrarian before it was fashionable and — if still living today — Morse would support The Hopester. If this is (fair & balanced) contrariety, so be it.


[NY Fishwrap]
New Math for November
By Timothy Egan

This state is known for many things — good wine, the imperial branding of the Nike swoosh, a political culture that produces contrarians of both parties — but ethnic diversity is not one of them. This state has an African-American population of less than 2 percent.

And yet on May 20, when voters here could finally end the Democratic presidential marathon by giving Senator Barack Obama an outright majority of pledged delegates, don’t expect to hear much about how a black man has broadened the playing field for his party by winning a heavily white state. Apparently, white people in Gore-Tex country don’t count as much as white people in Appalachia. Nor, if you look at Colorado, a Bush state that Obama won this year, do white people who sing “Rocky Mountain High” matter as much as white people who sing, “Almost heaven, West Virginia.”

It’s absurd, of course, to tout the implied superiority of “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” as Hillary Clinton said last week of her core supporters. And those other white Americans, in Iowa, Wisconsin, or here in Oregon — all heavy Obama supporters — are slackers? Not to mention black supporters.

In Oregon, in recent days, we’ve seen fresh themes for the general election presented by Obama and Senator John McCain — and they have very little to do with dated, tribal politics. The fruit trees in the Willamette Valley may be in full blossom, but in Oregon it’s November in May.

The map of counties that Hillary Clinton won big this year shows a broad swath of Appalachia and rural America, places where a Democrat is unlikely to prevail in the general election. The scab of racial animus can be thick in those counties, judging by exit polls of Clinton supporters who say they would never vote for a black man, and by anecdotal reporting.

The political math of the future lies with the new America — fast-growing communities in Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and elsewhere, where people are trying to step out of the cement shoes of race. Yes, race is still a factor there — it’s coded and complex — but not as raw as in other states. The transient nature of these places, where nearly everybody is from somewhere else, makes it difficult for old biases to harden.

McCain surely knows this, even if his party has yet to get the message. The speech that he gave here on climate change marked a big break with President Bush and the troglodyte wing of his party. Look for similar divorce announcements in coming months, even on race. In that speech, McCain envisioned a nightmare of runaway forest fires, heat waves stifling the cities, storms swamping the coasts, unless something is done. “The United States will lead,” he said, “and will lead with a different approach.” In every way, the speech was a slap at know-nothings like Rush Limbaugh, who tells his 20 million listeners almost every day that global warming is a massive hoax.

It is buried deep in the Republican family tree, but the environment used to be an issue that the party owned. And here in Oregon, the stunning ocean beaches are accessible to all, cities are livable and open space is plenty because of a sainted, long-ago Republican governor, Tom McCall.

Meanwhile, McCain’s party tried to hold onto a Republican Congressional seat in Mississippi this week by using racial scare-mongering from the Jim Crow era. There, a Democrat, Travis Childers, won a district that President Bush carried by 25 percentage points in 2004, the third red seat lost this year in special elections for the House. Republicans aimed for the deepest fears of white southerners by tying Childers to Obama’s nutty former preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

The preacher may be good ratings for Fox News. But as it happens, he’s not as much ballot box poison as is Bush. The president with the lowest approval ratings in 70 years is more damaging to McCain than Rev. Wright is to Obama, according to a recent Gallup poll. “By November,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, “every voter will know McCain is offering a third Bush term.” That’s the election fight, in a nutshell.

Obama’s themes in Oregon were future-directed — new energy policy, new foreign policy, new thinking on race. It goes without saying that he needs to carry blue collar whites, as Democrats have usually done. But Obama can lose Ohio and West Virginia — both fell to Republicans in 2004 — and make up for it with Colorado and Virginia, a combined 22 electoral votes from Bush states now trending Democratic.

When Obama spoke in the central Oregon city of Bend, the crowd at Summit High School was nearly all-white, and as enthusiastic as any gathering of Beavers and Ducks on a Saturday afternoon. In the sea of white faces, there was one person who stood out — the woman who introduced Obama, Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was shot in the back in Mississippi in 1963.

It turns out she lives in Bend, one of the tomorrow communities that will decide this year’s election. The county that includes Bend has grown by 30 percent since 2000. It is full of independents, an Oregonian trait, and people like Mrs. Evers-Williams, who see something here they never saw in the place they left behind.

[Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series. "How Race Is Lived in America." Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West. He lives in Seattle and has been an Op-Ed contributor to The Times since January 2008.

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Working Girl

The closest The Hillster ever came to hard work was the time she spent on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors. During her tenure with the giant retailer, based in (surprise, surprise) Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart was notorious for its labor practices, including the hiring of undocumented workers into peonage in terms of wages below the legal minimum, hours beyond the legal maximum, and a total absence of health insurance. Where was this heroine of "the working man (and woman)" at that time? Saying nothing, applauding profit reports, and collecting an annual director's fee for her "hard work" in behalf of Wal-Mart. In terms of "hard work," (as they say in Arkansas and other centers of redheck culture) that dog won't hunt. Today, The Krait sticks it to The Hillster. If this is (fair & balanced) facetiousness, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
A Victory Plan For Hillary
By Gail Collins

Hillary Clinton scored a whopping victory in West Virginia. Trounced Barack Obama, who is consistently described as the inevitable presidential nominee.

Hard to know exactly what to do with this information.

Ever since the North Carolina primary (which was only last week, although it does feel as though it happened around 1947) the Democratic establishment has been sending out word that Clinton has a perfect right to run out the rest of the election schedule as long as she doesn’t say anything mean about the Chosen One.

So she has to campaign on the theme of Barack is terrific — and he must be stopped! Not the easiest message in the world, but it’s been working out, more or less. Hillary and Bill and the rest of the gang have been behaving so beautifully in recent days that the party’s leaders have been tiptoeing around as if it was quiet time at the nursery.

(The correct response to her 67-to-26-percent victory in West Virginia, by the way, is supposed to be: “Well, isn’t it nice she’s having a good moment. And so close to Mother’s Day.”)

If she’s only going through the motions, it’s hard to tell. “I can win this nomination if you decide I should,” Hillary told her rapturous supporters at her victory party. She went on to congratulate Barack for “a hard-fought race” in West Virginia, even though Obama’s strategy seemed to involve pretending it was not actually a state. By primary night his campaign had been lowering expectations so energetically that coming in ahead of John Edwards might have been regarded as an exceptional achievement.

If Clinton wants to continue, there’s $11 million that says she has paid for the right to go the distance. But is it hopeless? Not entirely. Given the Democratic Party’s innovative method of doling out delegates, all that’s necessary for her to snatch the nomination is:

1. A big, big win in Kentucky next Tuesday. Ideally, Obama should be limited to no more than 100 votes.


2. Oregon, scheduled for the same day, inexplicably breaks off and sinks into the Pacific Ocean.


3. Puerto Rico, clocking in on June 1, not only gives Clinton a huge majority, but also manages to become a state in advance of the vote.


4. Finally, on June 3 as the South Dakota polls open, Thomas Jefferson’s head on Mount Rushmore comes to life and starts shouting, “You go, girl.”

An ambitious scenario, true. But nothing less than we’ve come to expect from the most hard-working political family in American history.

“Now, there are some who have wanted to cut this race short. They say, ‘Give up. It’s too hard,’ ” Hillary said Tuesday night. This is obviously a fiction. Nobody who wanted her to stop running would ever say, “It’s too hard.” Hillary loves impossible obstacles. If you were trying to be genuinely persuasive, you’d go with something like: “Look, keep spending like this and you and Bill will be down to your last 401(k) by July.”

Hillary’s tendency to describe herself and her supporters as “hard-working” is getting a little irritating. True, we are all in awe of her energy. True, Barack talks about how he’s been running for president for nearly a year and a half as if that was somehow an undesirable way to spend a considerable chunk of the human life span. But she’s making it sound as if the mere effort of pulling the lever for her instead of him is a demonstration of a superior work ethic. Her voters are “all of the hard-working men and women who defy the odds to build a better life for themselves and their children.” His, presumably, are living off their grandfathers’ trust funds and refusing to commit to their girlfriends.

If, as is projected, Hillary wins Kentucky and loses Oregon next week, are we supposed to think that it’s because people in Portland don’t work as hard as people in Louisville? Oregonians do have a reputation for being kind of laid back, but they do not put billboards on the highway saying, “Welcome to the State that Likes a Good Nap.”

On West Virginia primary night, Hillary listed the folks who need her to fight hard for them because “they’re fighting so hard every single day,” and she ticked off everybody from waitresses to coal miners to “the trucker, the soldier, the vet, the college student ...” While there are certainly college students working three jobs to get themselves through school, I guarantee you that when it comes to intensive labor, undergraduates as a group do not rank in the top 20.

Politicians, unless they are very cynical, tend to believe that their supporters are a lot like them. Barack probably feels his are sort of cool, and unusually smart.

Hillary’s folk, then, would be really, really, really driven. “We know people have to work hard,” she noted, somewhat unnecessarily.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.

Before joining the Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspaper chains.

Besides America's Women," which is about American women since 1960 and was published in 2003, Gail Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book," which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins.]
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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