[Peace-discuss] Who bailed out...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It seems to me that entirely too much time is being spent on Palin (= a 
distraction from a distraction, if we think the question of whom we're killing 
is important).  But in fact Cockburn has some interesting things to say about 
her and her prospects, below.  --CGE]

...Our brave pwogs have spared Biden and savaged Palin. As Steve Conn, a retired 
professor at the University of Alaska, who  lived in the state from 1972 until 
2007, wrote on our site, about the probable boomerang effect from trashing Sarah 
Palin:

     "It’s amazing how quickly Alaskan liberals bought into the new Palin story, 
dismissing the recent past as if it had never happened.  If Palin had come to 
Juneau with an agenda crafted in her church basement, cultural lines would have 
been drawn and no attacks on the Big Oil hegemony would have occurred. And state 
Democrats, who may have looked down their noses at Valley Trash, just like Ben 
[Stevens], were smart enough to keep their mouths shut and find common ground 
while old-line Republicans leaders looked over their shoulders for subpoenas 
flowing from their overly cozy relations with VECO, the oil service company. To 
the dismay of oil company executives, she formed a working coalition with 
Democrats who represent West Anchorage’s well-paid liberals among unionized 
public employees and the professions."

And indeed, Palin spoke harshly of Exxon and Conoco Phillips in the Thursday 
debate.  Sarah Palin could still end up as a footnote to history, the same way 
way Geraldine Ferraro did, after the Mondale-Ferraro ticket plummeted to defeat 
in 1984 when Ronald Reagan won his second term. Or she could be back in the 
coming years as a major Republican player on the national scene.

As the pick of those betting on the latter proposition, Palin did herself a 
favor on Thursday night. After widely criticized interviews with Gibson of ABC 
and Couric of CBS she put up a spirited performance. She showed that just like 
Ronald Reagan she might be shaky on the fine print but knows how to write the 
headlines.

The giant issues in America today are the economy and the $700 billion bailout. 
No one outside the professional Commentariat really wants to know whether Sarah 
Palin is capable of waging nuclear war  or frying Afghan “terrorists”.  They 
want a sense that there’s someone in the political tier who sounds like a human 
being with the same concerns as them, starting with the fear that their local 
bank will lock its doors in the morning.

In their debate last week neither Obama nor McCain passed this simple test. 
Biden, a silver-haired denizen of Washington in his sixth, six-year term, tried 
to offer himself as worried Joe Sixpack from Scranton, PA, prowling around Home 
Depot,  but the act was thin. Palin, despite somewhat excessive folksiness, with 
“gosh-darneds” and the like, did sound  as though she and Todd really had spent 
some time at their kitchen table in the not-too-distant past figuring out how to 
pay the bills and deciding they couldn’t afford health insurance.

This was no faltering Palin unable to tell Katie Couric which newspaper she 
read. This was a Palin fiercely denouncing, at least half a dozen across 90 
minutes,  “the corruption on Wall Street”, about which  Biden remained  silent. 
Alone of the four candidates, she spoke to the fury and fear of Main St America 
about the bailout.

     Ifill: Now, let's talk about -- the next question is to talk about the 
subprime lending meltdown.

     Who do you think was at fault? I start with you, Gov. Palin. Was it the 
greedy lenders? Was it the risky home-buyers who shouldn't have been buying a 
home in the first place? And what should you be doing about it?

     Palin: Darn right it was the predator lenders, who tried to talk Americans 
into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford 
a $100,000 house. There was deception there, and there was greed and there is 
corruption on Wall Street.

If John McCain had issued similar denunciations in his debate, and campaigned 
against the bailout across the last ten days in Washington and voted No in the 
US senate, his campaign would not now be in a truly desperate situation. 
Americans are living through the last months of an awful 8-year Republican 
presidency and McCain has offered them nothing.  Crucial  “battleground states” 
like Pennsylvania are tilting decisively towards the Democrats. Only the unknown 
race factor could trip Obama now.

On present trends, the McCain-Palin ticket is doomed, just as the Republican 
presidential campaign of another Arizonan senator, Barry Goldwater,  was crushed 
by  Lyndon Johnson, in 1964. Yet that defeat was the making of Ronald Reagan, 
who stole every right-wing Republican heart with his speech for Goldwater in the 
party convention that year. Two years later, Reagan was governor of California. 
Twelve years later in 1976,  he was challenging an incumbent Republican 
president, Gerald Ford. In 1980 he won the presidency.

More than once, last night, I thought Palin must have been watching re-runs of 
Reagan’s speeches, though decades of deference to Hollywood tycoons made Reagan 
far more respectful of Wall Street than the Alaskan governor. Her first national 
political foray may have only a month to run, but on Thursday night she won 
herself a long-term political future. Populism comes in many different garments. 
The bailout, voted through this last week by Obama and Biden and the Democrats, 
showed the party has lost the capability even of deception, even of the pretense 
that it is the friend of the working people. (And yes, Palin is the only person 
on the campaign trail from whose lips I have heard the increasingly unfamiliar 
term “working class”.) Palin has a lot to learn, but in the years ahead, amid 
the bankruptcy of the liberal left, her strain of populism will have an eager 
audience.

As Brecht ... wrote, “What happens to the holes when the cheese is gone?” 
Byron's Mazeppa, quoted by [James] Connolly, gave an answer:

"But time at last makes all things even,
And if we do but watch the hour,
There never yet was human power
That could evade, if unforgiven,
The patient hate and vigil long,
Of those who treasure up a wrong."

[The rest of Cockburn's article is at <http://www.counterpunch.org/>.]

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> You should have quoted the whole article, which also considered the McCain
> women. And as an antidote to the "populist" Palin, I would suggest a look at
> what Bill Blum has to say. See http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer62.htm ...