The Year 1968: Where Did the Time Go?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

What a different world it was in that spring and summer of 1968. I had begun a masters degree in political science at McGill University; my thesis topic was the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban-American relationship.

Castro was a young firebrand then, had only been in power nine years, and we all admired him.

The university was a hothouse of student activism and the student union was always crowded, full of people arguing passionately about politics.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed in Memphis on April 4, and riots had broken out almost immediately in more than 110 cities across the United States. I recall watching the TV coverage of the Liberal party's leadership convention - won by Pierre Trudeau - being interspersed with footage of the mayhem in American streets.

Thanks to the unpopular Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not be running for re-election. The two Democratic challengers on the left were Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president, and Eugene McCarthy, the idealistic Minnesotan senator.

But Kennedy was murdered on June 5, following his victory in the California Democratic Party primary. I have memories of hitchhiking down from Montreal to New York with a friend as Kennedy's body was being brought back from California to New York, to lie in state at St. Patrick's Cathedral, before burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

At the acrimonious Chicago convention that August, marred by street riots and mass arrests, the ineffectual Hubert Humphrey would win the Democratic nomination. Six years of Republican rule under Richard Nixon would follow.

In Canada, Trudeaumania broke out that spring. In the federal election that had been called for June 25, I worked for Professor Charles Taylor.

Then a young academic at McGill, Taylor was running for the NDP in a Montreal riding.

On the evening before the vote, I was at Parc Lafontaine in Montreal, when radical Quebec separatists clashed with police following the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade. Trudeau was there, and stood his ground on a balcony of the city's library across the street as he was pelted with bottles and rocks.

Many of the rioters were arrested - one of my friends was forced to run the gauntlet at a police station. Beaten with truncheons, he had a fat lip for months afterwards.

The next day, people flocked to the polls to vote Liberal, and Taylor lost. Maybe it was for the best, as he would go on to become a world-famous philosopher.

Right after the election, I was again hitchhiking down to the U.S. from Montreal with another friend who, in the sartorial style of the time, had unkempt long hair and a wild untrimmed beard. Despite that, we got rides all the way to Washington.

We went into a black neighbourhood to drop in, unannounced, at the offices (if such they could be called) of the radical Black Panthers.

There had been major urban violence in the city three months earlier, following King's assassination, and the area looked like a war zone.

Somehow, I managed to spend some time at the Library of Congress, researching my MA.

Later that summer, I became part of a cabal of McGill students - we called it a vanguard! - plotting a student strike against our political science department. We were all part of that amorphous entity known as the New Left.

We did indeed get our strike that fall, and shut down classes for about two weeks, until we won our demands for greater "student power." Most of us are today on the other side of the barricades.

In 1968, the entire social system seemed in flux, and we felt we were on the verge of creating a new and better world. As Peter, Paul and Mary sang, "Wasn't that a time!"

March 25, 2008

John McCain: A Political Resurrection?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer:

John McCain, last year given up as politically dead, has made a surprising comeback this spring. Not only has he defeated his Republican rivals for the nomination of his party, but he is getting plenty of help from an unexpected source: Democrats.

The American finance company LendingTree runs a TV ad that says “When banks compete, you win.” Well, when identity politics dominate the Democratic primaries, perhaps old white men win.

A recent editorial cartoon in the Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator Tom Toles depicts Hillary Clinton serving as an unpaid “volunteer” for McCain’s campaign. It’s not too far off the mark.

New York Times writer Frank Rich in his March 23 column remarked that Clinton is no longer trying to overcome Barack Obama’s lead “by making bold statements about Iraq or any other issue. Instead of enhancing her own case for the presidency, she’s going to tear him down.”

In the past few weeks, Clinton has stated that only she and McCain have the kind of foreign policy experience necessary to serve as commander-in-chief, while husband Bill has questioned Obama’s patriotism.

Clinton stated at a press conference in Washington on March 6 that only she and the Arizona senator have the credentials to be president. “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign; I will bring a lifetime of experience; and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002,”she declared.

“I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” she added. “I believe that I've done that. Certainly, Senator McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy.”

Among Clinton’s foreign policy accomplishments, apparently, were her visits to Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia while First Lady. She claims that she helped broker peace agreements there and gave comfort to refugees.

Her detractors have laughed this off as hyperbole. I’m inclined to agree: I’ve been teaching a course on power-sharing this term, and three chapters in our text deal with these very three entities. Her name, I’m afraid, appears nowhere in the book.

As for Bill Clinton, he called John McCain “an honorable man” and spoke of McCain’s friendship with his wife in a March 21 speech to voters in Charlotte, North Carolina. The state will hold its primary on May 6.

“It would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country,” added the former president. Obama’s camp in turn accused him of “McCarthyism.”

Never before has a Democratic presidential candidate suggested that his or her Democratic rival was less qualified to serve as president than a prospective Republican opponent.

So where is all this heading? An increasing number of Obama supporters say they will not vote for Clinton should she win the nomination, and vice versa.

Picture this scene as a metaphor: an older man opens his front door and sees, in the schoolyard across the street, two groups of unruly children fighting with each other, one gang composed mainly of girls, the other mainly of Black kids. The neighbours want him to do something to stop it.

See what I mean? That’s why, despite the war in Iraq and the recession, McCain might win in November.

A Caustic Look at the Never-Ending Primary War

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Having won the Ohio and Texas primaries, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has regained its momentum. She continues to pummel Barack Obama with her “kitchen sink” strategy, throwing everything from accusations of plagiarism to mendacity at him.

Though she held no elective office until winning a seat as a senator from New York in 2000, she insists she is “ready on day one” to be president. At a recent press conference, Clinton was flanked by some top American military brass, part of her campaign to demonstrate that she’d make a better commander-in-chief than Barack Obama.

Having recently marked International Women’s Day, we might wonder whether this is what feminism has come to – a woman making the case she can play with guns just as well as any of the boys.

Clinton also wants to change the rules to allow new primary elections in Florida and Michigan, two states whose delegates were disqualified by the Democratic National Committee, because they defied the party by holding their primaries too early. They account for 366 pledged delegates.

As it happens, she won both – indeed, in Michigan, Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot. She believes she can beat him in both.

Clinton also hopes to win over a majority of the 796 so-called superdelegates, Democratic Party officials who are free to vote for either contender. They account for approximately one fifth of all votes at the convention. (A candidate needs a total of 2,025 delegates to win the nomination.)

This is another reason she wants Florida and Michigan to count, as their 53 superdelegates, currently “frozen” too, would be back in play as well. Clinton thinks she would acquire a large number of those, because she stuck by the two states in their feud with the DNC.

But with Obama holding an advantage of about 140 pledged convention delegates over Clinton, his allies argue that the outcome of the contest should be determined by delegates awarded to winners of primaries or caucuses.

Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a co-chair of the Obama campaign, said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” that it would be a travesty if Obama maintains his lead among pledged delegates, but an advantage among superdelegates allows Clinton to win the nomination.

"I don't see how we could possibly do anything other than respect the will of the people who have voted in caucus and primary states all over the country,” he insisted.

Obama also finds it incredibly patronizing that the Clinton camp has sent out trial balloons suggesting he might become her vice-presidential running mate on a “dream ticket.” Calling it an example of “chutzpah,” or audacity, his camp noted that he is at the moment leading her in the race!

He has won 29 contests, including the recent victory in Mississippi, to her 17, and a larger share of the overall popular vote.

Clinton’s defenders in the women’s movement insist she has been treated more harshly than she deserves because of her gender. On the other hand, Obama’s allies felt offended when an icon of the women’s movement, Geraldine Ferraro, who has endorsed Clinton and raised money for her campaign, suggested that Obama has only achieved his status in the presidential race because he's African-American.

This is a rather strange statement to make in a country where within living memory many Blacks couldn’t even vote or run for office. Clinton called Ferraro’s remarks regrettable.

Ever since Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, stole the recent Kenyan presidential election from Raila Odinga, a member of the rival Luo ethnic group, a joke circulating in that African country has it that “it’s easier for a Luo to become president of the United States than of Kenya.” (Barack Obama’s father was a Kenyan Luo.)

However, this may no longer be the case.

Hillary Clinton’s mud sticks to Obama

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Can Hillary Clinton, despite trailing Barack Obama in pledged delegates, still win the Democratic Party nomination? Of course.

I think her attacks on him are bearing fruit. And her primary wins in the big states of Ohio and Texas last week prove it.

Ever since her “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” rant a few weeks ago, during a campaign stop in Cincinnati, in which she sounded like a schoolmarm disciplining a student who had disappointed her, Clinton’s negative campaigning has worked. (Would Mrs. Clinton give Barack a detention and make him stand in a corner, I wondered?)

The issue which so infuriated her involved their respective health-care proposals — although in reality there is not much difference between the two. Still, it made for good political theatre.

It amazes me how so many people can be misled by propaganda. Prior to the Ohio and Texas primaries, Clinton ran a television ad showing a telephone ringing at 3 a.m., while children slept nearby. It was meant to suggest that she, rather than Obama, would make a better president in the event of a national emergency.

Actually, she has no more foreign policy experience than Obama does.

Since when have ‘first ladies’ sat by the ‘hot line’ telephone? Clinton didn’t have security clearance while husband Bill served as president, nor did she attend National Security Council meetings. She wasn’t even given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

Insofar as she participated in shaping Bill Clinton’s agenda, it was on domestic matters such as health care, welfare reform, and other ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ issues. She has about as much credibility as a ‘commander-in-chief’ as I do, yet this TV ad apparently was very effective.

Clinton also slammed Obama on the North American Free Trade Agreement, especially in economically hard-hit Ohio, though it was ‘her’ administration — remember, she claims to have “35 years of experience” — that signed it into law. She now insists that she always opposed NAFTA — though we never heard a word about this until recently.

Obama, on the other hand, was portrayed as “two-faced” on the issue — a minor discussion between one of his economic policy advisers and a Canadian consular official in Chicago was blown up by Clinton into an earth-shattering event.

The Clinton campaign made very effective use of a memo obtained by the press, in which Canadian consulate staffer Joseph DeMora noted that Obama’s people said that the threat to withdraw from NAFTA should be viewed as simply “political positioning.”

Obama responded in a dignified manner, trying to set the record straight, by stating that this was blown out of all proportion. It didn’t work.

But wait — it gets worse. It turns out that Clinton’s camp tried to deliver the very same message about NAFTA to Canada, a report her campaign at the time denied.

Clearly, many voters are reluctant to cast their ballots for “nice guys” who aren’t “tough enough” to be as underhanded as Clinton appears to be. They have no respect for people who “fight fair.” A sad commentary on the American electorate.

Clinton and Obama: Who’s Been More Oppressed?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

I dislike the politics of “comparative victimology,” in which different ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual groups vie to demonstrate that they have been more oppressed than others.

The contest for the Democratic nomination for presidency of the United States has brought this to the fore. Supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama square off, each trying to make the case that a victory for their candidate would be a radical departure from the bad old days for America. Both groups are, of course, correct. But which has the better argument?

All discrimination and prejudice is abhorrent, be it against aboriginal peoples, blacks, gays, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, women, or any other groups that have been stigmatized for one or another reason. But if we really wish to compare the way African Americans and women have been treated, historically, in the U.S., it’s really no contest.

Clinton is indeed the first viable female candidate for president – forget for a moment that she’s been riding on her husband’s coat tails for decades – and women have had to fight hard to reach this point. Her victory would definitely transform American politics – but not as much as a win by Obama.

Yes, women have had to contend with career roadblocks and the “glass ceiling,” but how many have been lynched from actual ceilings, as were thousands of American blacks? How many white women were terrorized by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan? How many were not able to vote, in many American states, within living memory?

How many women were refused entry, not just to exclusive all-male clubs run by reactionary buffoons, but to ordinary hotels, restaurants, indeed entire neighbourhoods, because of their gender? How many were in the recent past not allowed to enroll in ordinary state colleges and universities? How many couldn’t even drink from a water fountain reserved for whites?

If Hillary Clinton were a man, her candidacy would elicit little more than a polite yawn – she’s a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, an upper middle class Chicagoan from an affluent suburb who attended elite colleges and had little trouble becoming a successful lawyer.

She is little different, in fact, from male Democratic counterparts such as former vice-president Al Gore, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia – or for that matter, George W. Bush. In fact she comes from a far more privileged background than does her own husband Bill.

If Clinton goes on to win, it would make history, sure – but many other places have already been there, done that.

We’ve seen women leaders elected in Germany (Angela Merkel), Great Britain (Margaret Thatcher), India (Indira Gandhi), Israel (Golda Meir), the Philippines (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo), and many other places. Our own PEI had premier Catherine Callbeck. But all of these people were products of their own majority cultures.

Obama, on the other hand, had a Kenyan father and a white mother. His parents were ostracized by many people, including some in their respective families, for the “sin” of intermarriage. He has had to chart his own remarkable path in America. No one has paved his way.

His spouse Michelle is an African American woman born in the black “ghetto” on the south side of Chicago. She comes from a working class home – her father was a blue-collar city water plant employee and her mother a secretary.

Unlike the privileged Hillary, she couldn’t count on the same sort of “cultural capital” when growing up. Yet she managed to graduate from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She too is a trail-blazer.

The United States had to suffer through a bloody civil war in order to abolish chattel slavery, and years of upheaval until blacks acquired full civil rights. If an African American is elected president, it will astound the world.