Tea Party Factions Prepare for 2010 Vote and Beyond

Revival and Revolt:

Inside the Tea Party

National Convention

By Devin Burghart
Huffington Post

Feb. 10, 2010, Nashville - The rancor and division among Tea Partiers that erupted in the weeks leading up to the first Tea Party National Convention was nowhere to be found inside the expansive biosphere-like confines of the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. Squabbles set aside, at least for the moment, the real business of the February 4-7 convention was three-fold: culture warring, movement building, and campaign winning.

Organized by Judson Phillips, a Nashville attorney, and his wife Sherry, Tea Party Nation (or TPN) is one of several different Tea Party factions vying to be the voice of those angry white voters wanting to “take America back!”

TPN describes itself as a “user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers. We believe in Limited Government, Free Speech, the 2nd Amendment, our Military, Secure Borders and our Country!” These threads ran through the convention.

The crowd of roughly six hundred came to Nashville from across the country. Among the TPN conventioneers was an attorney from Virginia, an IT professional from Atlanta, a retired executive from Lansing, a veterinarian from rural Pennsylvania, a power plant engineer from Houston, a teacher from rural Idaho, and snowbirds from Arizona.  The crowd skewed slightly older, primarily from the 55+ demographic range, and was split almost evenly between men and women.

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This is How Fascism Comes

Photo: Protest Against Palin Rally Vitriol

Reflections
on The Cost
of Silence

By Tim Wise
RedRoom.com

Oct. 11, 2008 - For those who have seen the ugliness and heard the vitriol emanating from the mouths of persons attending McCain/Palin rallies this past week--what with their demands to kill Barack Obama, slurs that he is a terrorist and a traitor, and paranoid delusions about his crypto-Muslim designs on America--please know this: This is how fascism comes to an ostensible democracy.

If it comes--and if those whose poisonous, unhinged verbiage has been so ubiquitous this week have any say over it, it surely will--this is how it will happen: not with tanks and jackbooted storm troopers, but carried in the hearts of men and women dressed in comfortable shoes, with baseball caps, and What Would Jesus Do? wristbands. It will be heralded by up-dos, designer glasses, you-betcha folksiness and a disdain for big words or hard consonants.


If fascism comes, it will spring from the soil of middle America, from people known as values voters but whose values are toxic, from simple folk whose simplicity, far from being admirable, is better labeled ignorance, from "all-American" types whose patriotism is a dagger pointed at the very heart of the national interest, for it so forsakes all the best principles upon which the republic was founded, choosing instead to elevate and ratify the narrow-mindedness, the bigotry, and the intolerance that also marked our country's origins.

If fascism comes, it will be ushered in by tailgaters at the big football game, by Joe Six Pack, who, upon finishing his sixth beer and belching forth the stench of a mediocre life lived, will gladly announce its arrival, so long as it comes with a steady supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon and hot dogs on the grill, and giant foam hands with a "We're Number 1" finger, some Mardi Gras beads and a good titty bar.

If fascism comes it will dress like a hockey mom, or a NASCAR dad. It will believe Toby Keith to be an artist, Larry the Cable Guy to be a comic, and that the world was made in six literal days less than 6000 years ago.

If fascism comes it will come from the small towns; the ones Sarah Palin, quoting a famous racist and Jew-hater, said "grow good people," and which occasionally do, but which, just as often grow provincial, isolated, fearful and superstitious ones.

If fascism comes it will come from faux populism, from anti-immigrant hysteria, from persons who have more guns in their homes than books, or whose books, when they have them, are principally volumes of the Left Behind series, several different copies of the Bible, and a plethora of romance novels.

If fascism comes it will be welcomed, lock stock and barrel by persons who pray at every meal to a God they visualize as white, whose son they also think was white, and who they believe is going to rapture them all into the sky upon the blowing of some heavenly trumpet, after which point all those who don't think as they think will be burned in an eternal lake of fire. Their vision and version of God is itself fascistic--to love a God who would do such a thing is to love an abusive, sadistic and evil deity after all--so it should come as little surprise that their conception of the state would be equally authoritarian or worse.

If fascism comes it will be at the behest of those who hold a contempt for what they call "book learnin," who prefer Presidents who mispronounce basic words because they make them feel smarter, and who are looking for nothing so much as a commander-in- chief with whom they would enjoy having a beer, or two, or twelve at some backyard barbecue.

If fascism comes it will be interviewed, lovingly, on talk radio, by hosts whose cerebral inadequacies are more than made up for by their bellicosity, their bombast, their willingness to shout down those with whom they cannot argue, for argument requires knowledge, and this is a commodity with which they have not even a passing familiarity.

If fascism comes it will come wrapped in red,white and blue, carrying a crucifix and a shotgun, projecting its own sexual confusion and insecurity onto others, substituting volume for veracity and rage for reason, and landing on the New York Times best-seller list as a result.

If fascism comes it will have a pajama party at Ann Coulter's house, pop pills with Rush Limbaugh, and go gay-bashing with Michael Savage, all in the same weekend. And it will refuse to learn another language or get a passport, because doing either of those would make one cosmopolitan- -which is just another word for "faggot."

If fascism comes it will come because a lot of people who aren't like the folks I'm talking about here, won't stand up to the ones who are. Because we're too busy, don't want to make waves, don't want to lose friends, or alienate family. It will come, in other words, because those who know better are cowards, more concerned with getting along, making nice, and being liked than with telling the truth, calling out evil and saving their country.

If fascism comes it will come because of the silence, and thus, collaboration of those who think themselves good, and certainly superior to the knuckle-draggers they can see on YouTube at the McCain rallies, but who in the end are no better and in some ways worse than they: after all, at least fascists stand up for what they believe in. They are telling us, in no uncertain terms what kind of United States they want and are willing to fight for, and maybe even to kill for. But many "progressives," many liberals, many of the so-called enlightened are doing nothing at all.

If fascism comes it will come because those liberals thought voting for Barack Obama was all they needed to do; it will come because they allowed themselves to believe that politics is what a person does every four years, but not at work, and not in the neighborhood, and not at the dinner table. Meanwhile, know-nothings filled with hate, nurtured on racial and religious bigotry and who have overdosed on the kind of hypernationalism that has always proved fatal to those places foolish or craven enough to allow it a foothold, talk of their visions for America at every opportunity. They raise their kids on that sickness, they build churches whose very foundation is rooted in that cancerous rot, and they will think nothing of steamrolling those who get in their way.

So when, exactly, do we fight back? When do we say enough? When do we stand up to our relative or friend who sends us the e-mail about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate or al-Qaeda sympathizer, or the one about the decency of Midwestern flood victims as opposed to those stranded after Katrina, or about how God was punishing New Orleans because of its tolerance of homosexuality, and tell them what we think: namely, that they are a bunch of racist, heterosexist loons, whose friendship or familial connection we neither want nor intend to pursue unless they get help. When do we decide that we love our country and humanity too much to allow these people one more day of decent sleep, one more day of self-assured confidence in their craziness and the willingness of the rest of us to just take it? When do we decide that every irrational, Jeezoid, racist thing that comes from their mouths will be attacked, will be rebutted, until they can no longer take for granted the ability to say any of it in mixed company without being called out?

Why, in the face of the fascism they would surely introduce if given the chance, are we intent on being so nice? Why are we not more offended? Offended not merely at what such persons say about others--like Obama, or Latino immigrants, or whatever--but even about we who look like them? After all, their open exhortations of racism presuppose that they are speaking for us, and that this kind of brain-dead ventilation is something to which all white folks should aspire as though it were virtually the essence of enlightenment.

If fascism comes it will come because we did not see in their actions a sufficient threat, or because we allowed ourselves to believe that it couldn't come, that our institutions were too strong, our people too good, for that to happen. If it comes it will come because we allowed ourselves to believe the rosy and optimistic version of America spun by Obama, without tempering that optimism with a clear-headed appraisal of the way that (sadly) a still huge number of Americans actually think: because we allowed the vehicle of our hopes to outrun the headlights of truth; because we convinced ourselves that we actually lived in the country of our aspirations, rather than the nation we have at present.

And if fascism doesn't come--if, rather, democracy does--it will come because good people said no. It will come because we saw in this moment the opportunity to demand the full measure of our humanity and to pour it forth upon the national soil. It will be because we understood that democracy isn't what you have, it's what you do. But if we are to issue that demand, if we are to stand straight and fulfill the potential we possess to do justice, we had best exercise the option quickly, for the opponents of justice are on the move. They are preparing to enter on the winds of our silence and indifference, and complacency. Let them find no quarter here.

http://www.redroom. com/blog/ tim-wise/ this-how- fascism-comes- reflections- cost-silence

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Key Task: Isolate and Divide the Right

Progressives and
Antiwar Movement
Must Weigh in
Independently

By Tom Hayden
Progressives for Obama

September 13, 2008 - A principle reason for Progressives For Obama is so that we can say things that the Obama campaign cannot or will not say.

This is one of those times.

1.Sarah Palin is a mortal threat to the possibility of Obama winning. The reason is simple: if she can add a couple of points to McCain from defecting white women and the newly-energized right wing religious base without losing more independent votes, McCain pulls ahead in some key states.


The dangerous tendency of the Obama campaign and its Democratic surrogates is to not fight back, but treat Palin as a “distraction” from McCain, the economy, the issues they feel familiar with, etc.

If they assume that the Palin bubble will return to earth naturally, or that the mainstream media and Saturday Night Live will do the job for them, the Obama campaign is mistaken.

There needs to be a controlled message that treats Palin as an extension of McCain, not a bobble-head to be laughed at.

The message has to cut off independent and women’s support for McCain-Palin and, if possible, divide some of the right-wingers. Not an easy task.

Perhaps the point is that we’ve already suffered eight years under a president Bush and vice-president Cheney who were, in Palin’s words, so “wired in a way to be committed to the mission” that they could neither blink nor think.

An excellent editorial in Sunday’s NY Times makes the connection from McCain to Palin in terms that will reach independent and moderate voters. It should be quoted and widely circulated. The choice of an unqualified candidate to be a heartbeat from the presidency of a 72 year old man with four melanomas “was shockingly irresponsible”, the Times said.

I think we can see in McCain-Palin a kind of faith-based extremism that reminds us of Bush and, even more, the persona of Gen. Custer.

We have seen where righteous faith-based politics goes in the Supreme Court decisions, corruption scandals, the official lies, and the unnecessary wars of the past eight years, all carried out in the name of what both McCain and Palin now call “God’s plan.”

We should say, In the name of God, stop them!

2. The McCain-Palin foreign policy is a mortal threat from the same neoconservatives who brought us Iraq wrapped in lies. We cannot give the Republicans an advantage with their false clams of “victory in sight.” We have to emphasize the three-trillion dollar cost of the war, and we have to connect the war to the price of oil. Democratic consultants should stop compartmentalizing the economy like it was 1992 all over again.

This is apparently not the advice of the biggest Democratic heavyweights like Bill Clinton and James Carville who tend to revert to “it’s the economy, stupid.” But it’s not 1992. It’s the 9/11 era, the Iraq War era, the War on Terrorism era – and also the middle of the worse economic and energy crisis in memory. The issues are tied together. Not enough people will vote on “lunch bucket” issues if they think McCain-Palin will protect them from terrorists, but they might vote against McCain-Palin if they think they are being lied to again.

The war is not being won. That’s why Petraeus wants to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq. We are paying 100,000 Iraqis not to shoot and bomb us – for now. Iraq is a time bomb with a timer set to go off next year after the November election. It costs $324 million a day, three trillion in the long run, that could be spent on public works, health care and education now. It deepens our dependency on oil when we should be spending the money to weatherize our buildings, conserve our energy and throw ourselves into a new clean energy economy with the same focus it took to get to the moon. That’s the mission we need to be wired into…

Under McCain-Palin, the same neo-conservatives who fabricated the pretext for invading Iraq will only take us into more quagmires – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia, maybe Iran - that will bleed our troops and our economy without an end in sight.

Palin's brazen neocon advisers repeated the original Iraq lie – that Saddam was behind 9/11 - in the scripted speech she gave to her son’s troops as they departed for the war zone: “You’ll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans.” [NYT, Sept. 14]

Bush-Cheney obviously are trying to scare enough voters into supporting McCain-Palin amidst a rising national security crisis. The Democrats and the media are helping them by accepting Georgia’s triggering attack on Russia as legitimate, which surely was orchestrated with the knowledge of McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, the same neo-con who directed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq from Washington lobby to actual invasion force. They further hope to bring back bin Ladin’s head from Pakistan before November. Bush-McCain may get the scalp of bin Ladin but they are on Custer’s path to Little Big Horn.

So the clear promise of McCain-Palin is there will be blood. The fact that they scoff at Obama at the mere mention of diplomacy [despite their own talking to Russia, Iran, etc] presents an opening to describe them as what they are: extremists in the tradition of Bush-Cheney for whom war seems to be a first option. McCain was there on an aircraft carrier screaming “Next stop, Baghdad!” in 2002 as if it was Vietnam in 1967. Palin says she’s wired to win the war without blinking. That’s also why McCain on two occasions this year has spoken favorably of resuming the compulsory military draft. Independents and young first-time voters should pay attention to these issues.

The peace movement which provided the platform that made Obama’s candidacy possible in 2002 cannot afford to let that advantage be squandered by Democrats this fall. The upcoming September 20 Million Doors for Peace campaign is a good way to begin spreading the word.

[ See http://www.milliondoorsforpeace.org ]

['Progressives for Obama' is moving. It's new and more secure site is http://progressivesforobama.net It's old site, here, is http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com Both will be functional for a while, by save the new one as a favorite, and pass the word. ]

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'God's Plan' To Wipe Them Out?

Does Palin Care
If Alaska's Ice
Melts and Polar
Bears Vanish?


By Tom Hayden

Every child in America should know that Sarah Palin is against saving polar bears from extinction. Then every child should ask their parents, teachers and ministers what the adults are going to do about it.

The first step is to watch the attached 20-second video of a polar bear family searching for ice in Alaska.

http://net4dem.org/cdhome/Polar_Bear_01.mov


Then for a scientific report go to

http://alaska.fws.gov/fisheries/mmm/polarbear/issues.htm

Here's the story....

A petition to list the polar bear was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in February 2005, nearly four years ago. A very cautious Bush Administration agency, the US Fish and Wildlife Agency released a "final rule" recommending that the polar bear be listed as "threatened", which means "likely to become extinct in the foreseeable future." The "primary threat to the polar bear is the decrease of ice coverage", the agency concluded. The report was too timid to recommend any habitat restoration for the bears.

Alaska is shrinking. Polar bears are drowning as they swim in search of distant ice flows. The polar icecap itself now is 700,000 square miles smaller than 20 years ago. The melting this year "may well surpass last year's - the furthest retreat of Arctic ice in a single year since it was first measured", according to the New York Times this week.

Sarah Palin refuses to believe that our oil, gas and chemical-based economy is causing global warming. She doesn't believe in evolution either. So as her state's coastal areas melt away and polar bear habitat disappears, she opposes the "endangered" listing, even suing the Bush Administration.

"Palin's administrration relied in part on research from scientists funded by the oil industry to fight against the polar bear's listing", even overriding Alaska's own polar bear experts.

Adult voters, politicians, lobbyists and consultants seem confused about "trade offs" between maintaining our oil-based lifestyle versus letting polar bears go extinct. [Palin also opposes listing for beluga whales, protections of salmon streams from mining runoff, and shooting wolf pups from helicopters.] Polar bears, whales, salmon and wolves apparently were once part of "God's plan" but now stand in the way of the oil companies. Like the Iraq War, Palin thinks her plan is God's plan too.

Our children are not confused about this. They will have to stand up to the adults before the dimming and darkening of their world.

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Rightist Populism: Hard Right, Culture, Real War

Photo: Palin in Kuwait

Palin's Tactics:
Cultural Symbols
Vs. Actual Policies

By Robert Kuttner
AlterNet.org

Sept. 4, 2008 - So now we understand what John McCain's handlers were up to: Intensify the culture wars, and once again use cultural symbols as substitutes for policies. In particular, use Hockey Mom Sarah Palin to change the subject from why regular Americans are hurting in the pocketbook to why Palin is a more regular American than Barack Obama. Will the Democrats change it back? Whether they do will decide the election.

Last night, we learned once again how Republicans keep managing to turn seemingly weak candidates and weaker economic circumstances into instruments of political victory: They are superb at creating master narratives that make Democrats, liberals, and "the media" into the cultural enemies of ordinary people.

Those who view this as an overly narrow and outmoded Rovian tactic of throwing raw (moose) meat at the conservative base miss the point. The strategy of energizing the base is leveraged into using cultural symbols to reach out to everyone else who is frustrated with how little they get back from the economy and the government--not just hard core right-to-life women in Missouri and Oklahoma, but downwardly mobile white men in Ohio and Pennsylvania.


In this strategy, every little Democratic misstep is inflated into a cultural parable, while gaping holes in the Republican story are neatly sidestepped. The master narrative of Obama as an unqualified elitist will be reinforced again and again this fall, as it was last night with Palin lines like these: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." "I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening. We prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco." (If you think that Palin came up with these zingers herself, I have a bridge-to-nowhere to sell you.)

Republicans consistently play this kind of hardball. And, as effective as the Democratic convention was, it did not quite have as consistent a master narrative. Only at peak moments did the Democrats rise the necessary shaming of McCain, as in John Kerry's superbly indignant speech, Biden's talk of the kitchen-table frustrations of regular Americans, and a few of Obama's better lines.

If the Republican master strategists can use Sarah Palin as Everywoman, just as they successfully used George W. Bush as the aw-shucks champion of regular people, they could turn the trick with a trained monkey.

Will they succeed yet again? That depends on two factors.

One is whether Sarah Palin's faux-feminist machismo, Alaska style, is just a little too weird for the lower-48. Can she and her handlers succeed in using purely symbolic appeals to camouflage her actual record and the plain contradictions in her story? Only time will tell. As Tim Egan, who has covered Alaska for the Times, has observed, she may be the only vice presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt who "knows how to field dress a moose," in Fred Thompson's memorable words (note to SNL, how about a moose in a party dress), but how many other Americans have actually dressed a moose-or care?

In defending Palin, Republican spokesmen (emphasis on men) charmingly discovered a new word-"sexist." Rightwingers who have long urged a traditional division of labor in the family found it sexist that some bloggers and talking heads were wondering why a "traditional values" mother of a newborn special needs baby and a pregnant 17-year old would abruptly jump into national politics. One Republican mouthpiece indignantly asked an NPR interviewer why she wasn't criticizing Barack Obama for leaving his daughters at home. Rudy Giuliani, of all people, asked: "How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be vice president. How dare they do that? When do they ever ask a man that question?"

But isn't the family-values story that moms are supposed to stay home (and that high school girls are supposed to be abstinent?) They question is whether the broad, non-base public notices the plain hypocrisy. Somehow, it's hard to imagine Hillary voters being impressed.

The more important factor, of course, is economic. For nearly a week, the Palin drama has diverted attention from the real issue in the campaign-the weak economy and its effect on regular Americans. This was the Republican gamble. McCain's handlers were willing to take the messy Palin details in exchange for the distraction. Indeed, the rich details served to amplify the distraction.

It's understandable that McCain and Palin want to change the subject, for they have so little to offer voters. Bloggers and talking heads have taken the bait. And it's legitimate that they should expose the holes in Palin's story. But the responsibility for changing the subject back to pocketbook issues belongs to the Democrats.

This morning in my emailbox, was a point by point rebuttal of Palin's speech, sent by Obama economic spokesman Jason Furman, in mind-numbing detail. (Palin as mayor increased the Wasilla sales tax from 2.0 to 2.5 percent, etc., etc.)

This will endear the Obama campaign to liberal policy wonks everywhere, but it is no substitute for a master narrative. Unless Obama and Biden use every opportunity to hammer home how the right has played working Americans for suckers, culture will trump economics yet again.

[Robert Kuttner is the author of Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, just released by Chelsea Green. He is the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos.]

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/97593/

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Needed: Frontal Attack on Radical Right

Photo: Palin's Creationism in Schools

The Palin Choice
and the Reality
of the Political Mind

By George Lakoff
Huffington Post

Sept. 1, 2008 - This election matters because of realities -- the realities of global warming, the economy, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, civil liberties, species extinction, poverty here and around the world, and on and on. Such realities are what make this election so very crucial, and how to deal with them is the substance of the Democratic platform (PDF).

Election campaigns matter because who gets elected can change reality. But election campaigns are primarily about the realities of voters' minds, which depend on how the candidates and the external realities are cognitively framed. They can be framed honestly or deceptively, effectively or clumsily. And they are always framed from the perspective of a worldview.

The Obama campaign has learned this. The Republicans have long known it, and the choice of Sarah Palin as their vice presidential candidate reflects their expert understanding of the political mind and political marketing. Democrats who simply belittle the Palin choice are courting disaster. It must be taken with the utmost seriousness.


The Democratic responses so far reflect external realities: she is inexperienced, knowing little or nothing about foreign policy or national issues; she is really an anti-feminist, wanting the government to enter women's lives to block abortion, but not wanting the government to guarantee equal pay for equal work, or provide adequate child health coverage, or child care, or early childhood education; she shills for the oil and gas industry on drilling; she denies the scientific truths of global warming and evolution; she misuses her political authority; she opposes sex education and her daughter is pregnant; and, rather than being a maverick, she is on the whole a radical right-wing ideologue.

All true, so far as we can tell.

But such truths may nonetheless be largely irrelevant to this campaign. That is the lesson Democrats must learn. They must learn the reality of the political mind.

The Obama campaign has done this very well so far. The convention events and speeches were orchestrated both to cast light on external realities, traditional political themes, and to focus on values at once classically American and progressive: empathy, responsibility both for oneself and others, and aspiration to make things better both for oneself and the world. Obama did all this masterfully in his nomination speech, while replying to, and undercutting, the main Republican attacks.

But the Palin nomination changes the game. The initial response has been to try to keep the focus on external realities, the "issues," and differences on the issues. But the Palin nomination is not basically about external realities and what Democrats call "issues," but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind -- the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes. The Republicans can't win on realities. Her job is to speak the language of conservatism, activate the conservative view of the world, and use the advantages that conservatives have in dominating political discourse.

Our national political dialogue is fundamentally metaphorical, with family values at the center of our discourse. There is a reason why Obama and Biden spoke so much about the family, the nurturant family, with caring fathers and the family values that Obama put front and center in his Father's day speech: empathy, responsibility and aspiration. Obama's reference in the nomination speech to "The American Family" was hardly accidental, nor were the references to the Obama and Biden families as living and fulfilling the American Dream. Real nurturance requires strength and toughness, which Obama displayed in body language and voice in his responses to McCain. The strength of the Obama campaign has been the seamless marriage of reality and symbolic thought.

The Republican strength has been mostly symbolic. The McCain campaign is well aware of how Reagan and W won -- running on character: values, communication, (apparent) authenticity, trust, and identity -- not issues and policies. That is how campaigns work, and symbolism is central.

Conservative family values are strict and apply via metaphorical thought to the nation: good vs. evil, authority, the use of force, toughness and discipline, individual (versus social) responsibility, and tough love. Hence, social programs are immoral because they violate discipline and individual responsibility. Guns and the military show force and discipline. Man is above nature; hence no serious environmentalism. The market is the ultimate financial authority, requiring market discipline. In foreign policy, strength is use of the force. In fundamentalist religion, the Bible is the ultimate authority; hence no gay marriage. Such values are at the heart of radical conservatism. This is how John McCain was raised and how he plans to govern. And it is what he shares with Sarah Palin.

Palin is the mom in the strict father family, upholding conservative values. Palin is tough: she shoots, skins, and eats caribou. She is disciplined: raising five kids with a major career. She lives her values: she has a Downs-syndrome baby that she refused to abort. She has the image of the ideal conservative mom: pretty, perky, feminine, Bible-toting, and fitting into the ideal conservative family. And she fits the stereotype of America as small-town America. It is Reagan's morning-in-America image. Where Obama thought of capturing the West, she is running for Sweetheart of the West.

And Palin, a member of Feminism for Life, is at the heart of the conservative feminist movement, which Ronee Schreiber has written about in her recent book, Righting Feminism. It is a powerful and growing movement that Democrats have barely paid attention to.

At the same time, Palin is masterful at the Republican game of taking the Democrats' language and reframing it -- putting conservative frames to progressive words: Reform, prosperity, peace. She is also masterful at using the progressive narratives: she's from the working class, working her way up from hockey mom and the PTA to mayor, governor, and VP candidate. Her husband is a union member. She can say to the conservative populists that she is one of them -- all the things that Obama and Biden have been saying. Bottom-up, not top-down.

Yes, the McCain-Palin ticket is weak on the major realities. But it is strong on the symbolic dimension of politics that Republicans are so good at marketing. Just arguing the realities, the issues, the hard truths should be enough in times this bad, but the political mind and its response to symbolism cannot be ignored. The initial Democratic response to Palin -- the response based on realities alone -- indicates that many Democrats have not learned the lessons of the Reagan and Bush years.

They have not learned the nature of conservative populism. A great many working-class folks are what I call "bi-conceptual," that is, they are split between conservative and progressive modes of thought. Conservative on patriotism and certain social and family issues, which they have been led to see as "moral," progressive in loving the land, living in communities of care, and practical kitchen table issues like mortgages, health care, wages, retirement, and so on.

Conservative theorists won them over in two ways: inventing and promulgating the idea of "liberal elite" and focusing campaigns on social and family issues. They have been doing this for many years and have changed a lot of brains through repetition. Palin will appeal strongly to conservative populists, attacking Obama and Biden as pointy-headed, tax-and-spend, latte liberals. The tactic is to divert attention from difficult realities to powerful symbolism.

What Democrats have shied away from is a frontal attack on radical conservatism itself as an un-American and harmful ideology. I think Obama is right when he says that America is based on people caring about each other and working together for a better future -- empathy, responsibility (both personal and social), and aspiration. These lead to a concept of government based on protection (environmental, consumer, worker, health care, and retirement protection) and empowerment (through infrastructure, public education, the banking system, the stock market, and the courts). Nobody can achieve the American Dream or live an American lifestyle without protection and empowerment by the government. The alternative, as Obama said in his nomination speech, is being on your own, with no one caring for anybody else, with force as a first resort in foreign affairs, with threatened civil liberties and a right-wing government making your most important decisions for you. That is not what American democracy has ever been about.

What is at stake in this election are our ideals and our view of the future, as well as current realities. The Palin choice brings both front and center. Democrats, being Democrats, will mostly talk about the realities nonstop without paying attention to the dimensions of values and symbolism. Democrats, in addition, need to call an extremist an extremist: to shine a light on the shared anti-democratic ideology of McCain and Palin, the same ideology shared by Bush and Cheney. They share values antithetical to our democracy. That needs to be said loud and clear, if not by the Obama campaign itself, then by the rest of us who share democratic American values.

Our job is to bring external realities together with the reality of the political mind. Don't ignore the cognitive dimension. It is through cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames that we understand and express our ideals.

[George Lakoff is the author of The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 20th Century Politics With and 18th Century Brain.]

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Obama-Palin: Narrative and Counter-Narrative

Photo: Gov. Sarah Palin, Alaska

Game Over?
We’ll See...

By Tom Hayden
Progressives for Obama

Behind the façade of spin, the McCain campaign must be trying frantically to reverse a death spiral. One would think this is the time for Democrats to strike hard. But the Obama campaign has chosen to back off, perhaps taking a page from Sun Tsu.

Once again the blogosphere is the driving force.

No one in the mainstream media has noticed that Gov. Palin, introducing her family in Ohio, failed to disclose that her daughter Bristol was pregnant. Only when rumors swept the internet about the governor herself did she release the news that Bristol was pregnant. That raised two key questions: Is the governor holding back anything else?, and Did the governor tell John McCain and the vetting team that her daughter was pregnant?

Republican strategists like Karl Rove are spinning backward.

Rove et al, with masks of sincerity, are appealing to American sympathy for the Palin’s plight as they face the “private” issues that “so many American families go through.” These are the same Republicans that crusaded through past decades against teenage pregnancy as a horrible outcome of “Sixties permissiveness.” These are the same Republicans, like Dan Quayle, who crucified the character “Murphy Brown”, played by Candace Bergen, for being a single mother. These same Republicans, like CNN commentator William Bennett, today embrace a newfound liberal tolerance for the Palin family.

The problem for the Democrats now is that they too excoriated teenage pregnant girls as a symbol of moral decay and “a plague on the nation” in the Nineties decade. The consensus, as often expressed by Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, was that teen-age mothers are responsible for their own poverty. [Michael Males, Framing Youth, p. 182] This was part of a bipartisan crusade, launched by the neoconservatives, to demonize teenagers for “moral poverty” as an alternative to addressing root causes like poverty and school dropouts.

Now the Democrats find themselves unable to attack Republican hypocrisy because it would reveal their own. The drama rolls on and on, with nothing but negative fallout for the McCain campaign.

The problem with Sarah Palin is not about her daughter. The problem is that she is an extremist who once favored secession of Alaska from the United States, supports the right-wing evangelical agenda, wants polar bears taken off the [Republican administration’s] endangered species list, denies global warming, wants drilling in the Alaska wilderness, and knows nothing about national security and foreign policy. She is a disgraceful example of how little the Republicans care about America’s core national interests when power is their only goal.

The fact that Obama and McCain remain in a dead heat should be very troubling for Democrats. Without referring to the race issue, the McCain-Palin ticket represents a powerful conservative narrative in American history: protecting the stalwart, pioneering frontier woman against a threatening world of black people and foreigners, through endless wars for land and resources.

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