[Peace-discuss] FW: Signs of a Gathering Storm: Iowa Caucus Report

[David Johnson]

Something left and radically democratic is up with young folks and others
and it's not going to disappear with the eventual fading of Bernie. Consider
it an approaching left storm, bigger than the electoral major party Sanders
sensation.

 

Signs of a Gathering Storm: Iowa Caucus Report
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/03/signs-of-a-gathering-storm-iowa-cauc
us-report/> 

by Paul Street <http://www.counterpunch.org/author/paul-street/>  

Description: shutterstock_352127324

This is a quick, morning after reflection from Iowa City. The Iowa Caucus
results were exactly as I expected. Donald Trump got bested by Ted Cruz
despite his somewhat higher poll ratings. Of course: The Donald did not have
a ground game to match his opinion numbers (gee, imagine that). Cruz was
obviously more popular with the Evangelical "Christians" who are prominent
in the Iowa Republican Party.

Rubio creamed everyone else in the so-called "moderate" GOP camp. Naturally:
Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are pathetic.

Bernie and Hillary fought to a virtual coin-toss tie, replete with literal
coin-tosses in some Iowa precincts. This was just as the last Des Moines
Register poll indicated.

No surprises.

I had written off any chance of being able to report on the Iowa Caucus from
Iowa City, ground zero for Berniemania. I was working an evening shift (2 to
10 pm) at Iowa City's local giant corporate monopoly-capitalist factory (and
no, I am not referring to the University of Iowa, though I could be),
filling hoppers with small plastic bottles destined to be filled with North
America's favorite shampoo.

And it was alright. The line was going down a lot and there was plenty of
time to talk to some of my fellow workers. One of them was from Guinea and
speaks four languages: French, English, Arabic, and his local African
dialect. He plans to attend medical school.

Another was a woman from Haiti who also (imagine) speaks four languages:
French, Spanish, English, and Creole. She was asking me for advice on how to
publish a book on her life.

Another co-worker was a young white kid who is doing graphic artwork for an
e-comic book. He showed me some of his (very impressive) sketch-work.

I enjoy these people. It struck me once again that a lot of very interesting
and brilliant people are doing some very devalued and alienating wage-work
in America.

Another co-worker is a young and somewhat awkward, endearing bi-lingual
Latino college student who wants to teach high school someday. He was in the
break-room at 6:15, hoping to caucus for Sanders. I informed that he had
exactly 45 minutes to sign in. Did he know where his caucus site was? "Holy
shit, dude," I told him, "you better find out." He ran out of there.

I had been joking around with folks, telling them that the company's CEO was
a close friend of Donald Trump and that at 6 pm we would all be bussed to an
Iowa caucus site and told to caucus for The Donald or be fired. I think two
workers actually believed me.

Then came my pleasant surprise. The word came down at 7 pm: we were all
being sent home because of a product changeover. "Sorry. Hope you weren't
counting on eight paid hours." There were no apologies necessary for me.
(I've never been a big fan of wage labor).

Reflecting that a leading caucus site was right in the middle of my bike
ride home, I figured "what the hell. This is political history." By 7:25,
steel-tipped work-boots and all, I was standing at the back of Iowa City
High School's cafeteria, watching the Democratic presidential Caucus
spectacle unfold. There were 600 caucusers in the room, almost evenly split
between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

I had an interesting discussion about the unmitigated evil that is Hillary
Clinton (more on that below) with a middle-aged couple in from New York to
observe the curious Midwestern proceedings. We traded notes on ugly Clinton
history. We laughed about the comparative absence of any actual contestation
around the presidential election by the time the spectacle reaches Chicago
and New York. I didn't tell them I was Left of Bernie.

The first thing that struck me was how completely white this crowd was
compared to my co-workers. At least 80 percent of the temporary production
workers at the aforementioned factory are Black, most from Africa. Among the
600-plus people in the cafeteria, there could not have more than five people
of color. It seemed appropriate to me that the words "caucus" and
"Caucasian" share the same first four letters!

I saw two Black men in the cafeteria. One stood with the Hillary folks. He
wore a T-shirt depicting Barack Obama as Superman: "Super-O." The other
black guy sat with the Sanders people. I heard him tell the Clinton crowd
that they were "a bunch of Republicans."

The second thing that struck me was the differences in age and affluence
between the 300 Hillary supporters standing to the right side of the
cafeteria (wearing the little Hillary sticker with an arrow pointing, well,
to the right) and the 300 Sanders supporters standing on the left. The
Hillary people were considerably more white-haired. They wore more expensive
clothes. They were older and richer. A bunch of them looked like, well, like
Republicans.

The Bernie people on the whole were younger, less well-dressed, and more,
shall we say, countercultural in appearance. Which is not to say that there
weren't plenty of white-haired folks on the Sanders side, including a number
of 60-something gentleman with pony tails. One of these guys looked just
liked David Crosby!

There were plenty of women on the Sanders side. As far as I could tell, it
was a 50-50 gender split over there.

The third thing struck me was the sheer and despicable ignorance, stupidity,
and/or disingenuousness of the people who spoke on behalf of Hillary Clinton
right before the 20-minute period of time in which the Hillary and the
Bernie supporters sought to "persuade" uncommitted caucusers over to their
side. Hillary's Precinct One captain was a bouncy, middle-aged brown-haired
woman who wanted everyone to know that Hillary is a "true progressive"
because Mrs. Clinton graduated from Yale Law School and could have walked
into a top corporate position but "chose instead to work for poor and
minority children at the Children's Defense Fund (CDF).All this talk about
Hillary being 'pro-business' and 'right wing' is nonsense," because, the
precinct captain claimed, "more than 90 percent of Hillary's campaign
contributions have come from ordinary middle-class donors, not from big
corporations."

The New York couple and I shuddered. Like me, they know some Clinton history
and have a capacity for detecting populism-manipulating bullshit. They know
that in Arkansas during the 1970s and 1980s Bill and Hillary helped pioneer
the pro-Big Business, right-wing, neoliberal wing of the contemporary
Republican-lite Democratic Party. They know that Bill and Hillary made their
early mark in Arkansas by attacking public education and teachers' unions.
They know that the Clintons passed the pro-Big Business, investor rights
North American Free Trade Agreement and the disastrous deregulation of
finance during the 1990s. They know that Hillary personally oversaw the
killing of hopes for real (single-payer, Canadian-style) national health
insurance in 1993 and 1994.

They know that Hillary heartily approved Bill and New Gingrich's vicious and
punitive neoliberal elimination of AFDC - of poor women and children's prior
entitlement of federal family cash assistance - in the Orwellian name of
"personal responsibility" two decades ago. They know that that terrible
action cost the Clintons the public loss of their prior friendship with the
CDF's founders Marian and Peter Wright Edelman. They know that the Clintons'
pernicious "welfare reform" has proven to be a disaster for poor families.
They know that campaign finance's malignant "free speech" influence is
weighted in dollars and that Wall Street and other wealthy sectors have far
outspent "ordinary" people when it comes filling "Hillary Inc.'s" war chest.

They know that corporate and financial America hasn't provided Hillary with
lucrative backing without capitalist strings attached and that the backing
has come with full knowledge that her populist- and progressive-sounding
campaign rhetoric is nothing more than cynical marketing necessity. And they
know that Hillary's is a bellicose and imperial militarist who voted for
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and promises to inflict considerable
bloodshed on the global stage. (We had some time to talk during the
"persuasion" period!)

Another Hillary speaker was a 30-something white man who told us that he has
a daughter and that this was "our chance to make history by putting a woman
in the White House." He didn't even attempt to suggest that there was
anything more to it than pure-and-simple identity politics. He said nothing
about policy, nothing about ideology or values or Hillary's commitment (real
or fake) to the common good. He related nothing, of course, about the
Clinton's numerous and many-sided assaults on poor and working class women
at home and abroad. He just mentioned gender, in and of itself. So, Margaret
Thatcher for president? Condoleezza Rice? How about Eva Braun?

After "persuasion" (the 20-minute period when the "viable" camps compete for
un-decided caucusers), Hillary eked out a narrow delegate victory (6 to 5)
in Precinct One. I left slightly dejected only to happen the younger and
less affluent Precinct Seventeen in City High's auditorium. An old
acquaintance of mine showed me the numbers there: (a) the biggest precinct
turnout in history (900, more than 200 above the prior record from the year
of Obama) (b) a crushing 2 to 1 victory for Sanders.

Wow, I thought to myself, what a difference a little bit of college town
geography makes. Precinct 17, it appears has more college students, young
people who will be entering the miserable labor market in the stinking,
"elite"-rigged New Gilded Age of savage inequality, rampant economic
precarity, and environmental collapse brought to us by global neoliberal
capitalism and its many political agents, including Ronald Reagan, Barack
Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

"Bigger than Obama," I said to my acquaintance. "Damn. And this time it's
for an actual progressive, not a fake one." A young lady, a college student,
gave me a big smile when she heard that.

I left the high school and found that the back tire on my bike was flat. I
had a half-mile walk home in the cool and misty silence. There were rumors
of an approaching winter storm. It gave me time for reflection. I've been
quite critical from the anti-capitalist and anti-imperial Left of Sanders,
of the Iowa Caucus (which I was able to observe only because of a fluke of a
production-line shutdown), and the quadrennial candidate-centered
presidential electoral extravaganza. I stand by my criticisms.

Still, I can't lie. It felt good to see that vicious neoliberal sociopath
Hillary take a black eye at City High. And it felt good to see hundreds of
people ready to stand up for a politician who calls himself a "democratic
socialist," even if he's really just a social-democratically included New
Deal liberal at best - and a sadly imperial one at that.

There's something to work with in all that, not to be taken lightly. I see a
lot of the people who stood on the left side of the cafeteria refusing to
line up dutifully behind the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party in coming
months and years.

Something left and radically democratic is up with young folks and others
and it's not going to disappear with the eventual fading of Bernie. Consider
it an approaching left storm, bigger than the electoral major party Sanders
sensation. We may well be moving into a good time to talk about revolution
and socialism, the real things.

 

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