How Would Clinton Fit on the Vice-Presidential Ticket?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Barack Obama has finally bested Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party. But no sooner had he won than her supporters began a campaign, on the internet, in newspapers, and on television, to force her onto the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee.

Right to the end, Clinton maintained that she, not Obama, deserved to win – she claimed she had more of the popular vote and had won most of the primaries in major states, including California, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

Indeed, earlier in the campaign, she had suggested that Obama become her running mate.

So why, despite the animosity between the two rivals during the long, drawn-out primary campaign, might Clinton accept the second spot?

Because it’s a win-win situation.

Obama, by allowing the party bosses to place her on the ticket, would show himself to be a weak person amenable to pressure.

If he managed to win the election, due in large part because of Clinton’s support from women, blue-collar whites, and others -- people who would otherwise not vote for Obama -- then she, not to mention former president Bill Clinton, would be in the driver’s seat.

The Clintons would be dictating policy from the vice-presidential mansion, much as Dick Cheney did with George W. Bush. And Bill Clinton’s rather questionable business dealings since 2001 would erode Obama’s squeaky-clean image and slogan of change.

It would become untenable. As commentator Chris Matthews observed on MSNBC, you can’t have three presidents in the White House.

If Obama lost, it would be because the millions of people who thought he represented change would sit home or even, to prevent a “third Clinton term,” cast their ballot for John McCain. So much of Obama’s vote would actually come from Hillary’s base.

She’d be able to say to the party, “had you reversed this, and selected me as the nominee, we would have won.” Obama, having lost the election, would disappear from the scene, the party would again be in the hands of the Clintons and their entourage – insiders like Harold Ickes and Terry McAuliffe -- and Hillary Clinton would make another run for the nomination in 2012.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have decided to portray Obama’s spouse Michelle as an angry and unpatriotic black woman. She has been referred to as Barack Obama’s “baby mama,” a colloquial term for an unwed mother (which of course she is not).

The Democrats seem to be retaliating by painting Cindy McCain as a woman with a troubled past, including drug use.

With the U.S. still mired in a war in Iraq and the economy in a terrible state, is this really what the election will be about? I hope all those who were so dedicated to Hillary Clinton, and angry at any instances of sexism against her, will come to the defence of these two women as well.

Will gender rivalries impact institution of marriage?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Given the “gender nationalism” that was unleashed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency of the United States, is the battle between the sexes becoming literal?

Women’s groups such as Emily’s List, the National Organization for Women, and the Women Count Political Action Committee(WCPAC) provided unconditional and uncritical support for Clinton, held rallies on her behalf, reviled women who supported other candidates as “traitors,” and considered any criticism of Clinton as being motivated by misogyny and sexism.

From Chaviva Hosek, Michele Landsberg and Judy Rebick in Canada, and Betty Friedan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Gloria Steinem in the US, Jewish women have had a very high profile in the modern women’s movement, as theoreticians and activists. Clinton was supported by political strategists such as Ann Lewis, her senior campaign advisor.

Clearly, feminism, which has now become a political movement in America and Canada, has produced a paradigm shift in our society. Has the primary conflict become that of gender, as opposed to class, ethnicity, religion, or any other division?

I used to think there would be a “self-correcting mechanism” that would not allow animosities between men and women to go beyond a certain point. True, relations between the sexes have always been problematic and fraught with a kind of danger: After all, romance and love may involve rejection and humiliation of a particularly intimate and psychologically damaging sort, which oftentimes has resulted in negative feelings towards the opposite sex. This has been the stuff of novels and poems from time immemorial.

Still, most men and women have always somehow managed to accommodate and show concern for each other. After all, racial, ethnic or even religious groups can live in physically segregated and homogenous territories, up to and including sovereign states, should it prove necessary, but most men and women inhabit households that usually include partners of the other sex, may have both male and female children, and have parents and other relatives of both genders.

This, I thought, made it impossible to carry gender hostility to the levels we have seen among rival ethnicities, nationalities or religions throughout history.

To belabour the obvious, Gentiles don’t have to care about the fate of Jews, Serbs about Croats, Hindus about Muslims, or whites about Blacks. Callousness and indifference do not have an immediate and personal impact. Those who harbour particularly deep prejudices and hostilities can avoid, if they wish, most personal ties with the objects of their hatred or bigotry. But such separatism has been almost “biologically” impossible between men and women.

Nowadays all that seems to be changing, and a lot of male-female relations are beginning to feel like religious or ethnic intermarriage, in which larger group divisions can overwhelm what might otherwise be a harmonious alliance between two individuals.

Social scientists tell us that our identities are socially constructed – even if they do sometimes build upon physical traits such as skin colour or sex. Religions, ethnicities and cultures are the products of human development, not “natural” phenomena. And they only too often acquire significance when they become markers by which people segregate themselves into competing groups.

For example, Catholics married to Protestants do not face personal dilemmas if they live in a society where religion is not a salient political issue – say, in secular and liberal countries such as Canada or the United States – or where both their respective faiths are marginal – Hindu India or Muslim Iran, for instance.

But their religious background would remain a constant problem and have an immense impact on their lives in Northern Ireland, where members of their two faiths form antagonistic communities and vie for political power.

In the same way, a Jew and an Arab would have an easier time of it as a married couple in Arizona than in either Israel or Iraq, and a Black married to a white might prefer Indonesia to Zimbabwe. All of this is surely self-evident.

But gender is now forming an ideological and political fault line and is becoming a socially significant means of differentiating between people; it is thus assuming a role not that dissimilar to those historically occupied by ethnicity, language, culture and religion.
If men and women will indeed come to see each other primarily in terms of conflict, as contenders for jobs, power, position and status in society, then, with increasing frequency, heterosexual relationships may in the future face strains similar to those that used to be confined to unions that crossed ethnic or racial or religious lines.

And a very large percentage of marriages may become subject to the types of stresses previously confined to intermarriage. (Statistics Canada tells us that almost 40 per cent of marriages in this country now end in divorce.)

Perhaps there’s a material basis for this change in society. Men and women in our society simply don’t need each other as much as they once did. Women can work, and they don’t need men to provide for them. And advanced technology makes even the most basic reason for male-female cohabitation – reproduction – unnecessary.

Most members of historically antagonistic ethnic groups have always understood that it is prudent to avoid intimate relations with people from the opposing camp. That way lies grief. Are men and women now moving in the same direction? This will not be good for anyone, including Jews.

Discourse and the end of the Clinton campaign

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hillary Clinton has finally left the building — and, though her loyal followers would disagree, none too soon.

Only now can the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, Barack Obama, begin challenging John McCain for the presidency.

Clinton’s campaign hit so many low points it’s hard to remember them all.

For the past 30 years, academics have led the way in changing the very way we talk. They have taught us that words have consequences, that our very discourse can insult and marginalize people.

This is why we now speak of ‘flight attendants’ rather than ‘stewardesses’, and ‘police officers’ instead of ‘policemen’. We are careful not to use terminology that reinforces sexism, racism, and homophobia.

So why, pray tell, did the Clinton campaign get a free pass when derogatory language rarely heard outside back rooms was used publicly by her surrogates in this election?

Clinton operative James Carville called New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson a “Judas” back in March, on Good Friday no less, for switching his support from Clinton to Barack Obama. As the man who, according to the Gospels, betrayed Jesus Christ to the Romans, Judas has been vilified for centuries by those propagating anti-Semitism and religious Judaeophobia.

In late April, Governor Mike Easley of North Carolina, during that state’s primary campaign, said Hillary Clinton “makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.” This is a nasty epithet often hurled by homophobes at gays.

Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Indiana, admired her “testicular fortitude” (as opposed to Barack Obama’s) as that campaign heated up during the same period.

Male chauvinists have made use of this and similar terms in their representations of women as being ‘weak’ and therefore ‘unfit’ for the serious, tough work of running companies — or countries. Was Clinton trying to show she was really ‘one of the guys’?

In none of these cases did the Clinton campaign apologize for such statements.

Hillary Clinton began this race with a political machine that was unequalled by any of her competitors. “She had virtually exclusive access to the chequebooks in the Democratic fundraising pool,” noted Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson.

“Her web of connections, oaths of fealty and debts owed spread throughout the Democratic Party, which she viewed as an extended family.”

In various national polls, Clinton was running ahead of Obama by at least 20 to 35 per cent as late as the fall of 2007.

As well, women’s groups such as Emily’s List, the National Organization for Women, and the Women Count Political Action Committee (WCPAC) provided unconditional and uncritical support for Clinton, held rallies on her behalf, reviled women who supported other candidates as “traitors,” and considered any criticism of Clinton as being motivated by misogyny and chauvinism.

Such ‘gender nationalism’ also provided her with advantages over Obama.

Women make up more than half the American population, blacks about 13.5 per cent.

Yet not only was Hillary Clinton not ready to be president on “day one,” it turned out that, despite her immense early lead over Obama in name recognition, money, and support from the party establishment, she wasn’t even ready to beat a rookie senator whom she initially dismissed as just another bump on the road to victory.

She now blames sexism for her loss. No doubt it was a factor, but it’s mainly hubris that did her in.

Clintons’ shady dealings have taken the shine off
Two-for-One Deal, Part 2

By HENRY SREBRNIK, for the [Halifax, Nova Scotia] Chronicle-Herald

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Letters/1057351.html

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is hugged by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as he introduces her during a campaign rally in Louisville, Ky. on Monday. Many Democrats are uneasy with the prospect of a second Clinton presidency. (Elise Amendola / AP)

BARACK OBAMA has again become the favourite to win the Democratic Party nomination – and that’s a good thing.

Because even when Hillary Clinton was beating Obama in primaries in states like Indiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, super-delegates continued to move towards him, many stating they didn’t like Clinton’s "negative" campaign.

This may have been their way of saying "we know the Clintons better than the public does, and we know what unethical operators they are."

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Often, when the well-known head of an institution – say, a CEO of a corporation, a president of a university, or a leader of a political party – leaves, the people on "the street" remember the "positive" things they have accomplished, but those working close to them may be glad to see a domineering, autocratic, aggressive boss depart.

As well, some Democrats were uncomfortable with the idea of having another Clinton in the White House, eight years after the previous one – who would himself be returning to the executive mansion as a spouse – left office.

Would this couple not in effect be circumventing the 22nd amendment to the U.S. constitution, which forbids more than two terms to a president?

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he and Hillary said people were getting a "two-for-one" deal.

Indeed, one could make the case that she was as much in charge as he was. Bill was useful to her, the advance guard, so to speak, for her own ambitions.

Now we would have seen the reverse. Bill would, at the very least, have been helping to formulate policy – and with no official legal standing, he would be far harder to control by the other branches of government. The system of checks and balances would not apply to him.

The former president has been involved in business dealings with shady characters around the globe, including government leaders, from Colombia and China to Kazakhstan and Dubai.

Would it be appropriate for the spouse of a sitting president to be in business with the leaders of foreign countries? Would some of these people have attempted to buy favours from Hillary through Bill?

Bill Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation in 1997 and it has raised $500 million since then, most of which has been spent on his presidential library in Arkansas. Donations soared to $135 million in 2006 alone, much of it from unsavoury foreign sources. Clinton has said he won’t violate the "privacy" of donors by disclosing their names.

An article by Greg Gordon that ran in the Miami Herald and other McClatchy newspapers on May 9 reported that special interests have paid millions of dollars to Bill Clinton for speeches and other work since he left the White House. "The ex-president has been crisscrossing the globe, speaking roughly 250 times on tours that brought him more than $40 million in six years."

By drawing on her husband’s earnings, Hillary Clinton was enabling sponsors, who have paid as much as $450,000 to hear Bill speak, to "funnel their funds through the Bill Clinton front," according to Lawrence Jacobs, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.

"It’s an ingenious method for fundraising" that bypasses campaign finance rules and the limits placed on those contributions, he added.

Clinton also granted some 140 last-minute pardons as he left office in 2000. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Bill.

Even Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton ally throughout the 1990s, called the pardons a "betrayal" and "contemptuous." Were there some quid pro quos involved?

These are important questions that were never adequately addressed.

In the latter days of her campaign, Hillary Clinton had adopted a populist stance, attacking the oil-producing nations and the energy industry as being responsible for the high price of gasoline.

Yet while she railed against the OPEC cartel, her husband was getting donations for his library from many Middle Eastern tycoons.

No wonder many voters couldn’t really believe anything she said.

The Delayed Reaction to the Holocaust

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Rafael Medoff’s article in the Jewish Tribune of April 24, on the impact of Robert Morse’s 1968 book, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, was a timely reminder of the indifference displayed even by the United States towards Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe during World War II.

As we well know, the same held true for Canada, as documented by Irving Abella and Harold Troper in their 1982 book None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948.

It took a long time even for Jews to come to terms with the enormity of the crime against our people. As Franklin Bialystok has recounted in his book Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community, published in 2000, few in Canada spoke about the genocide at first.

Indeed, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Holocaust memorial commemorations were confined mostly to survivors themselves.

I recall running across, by mere chance, Raul Hilberg’s massive study The Destruction of the European Jews, in the McGill University library stacks, in 1966. It had been published, after much difficulty, in 1961, by a minor American press, after many others had rejected it. I had never even heard of the book. In those days, McGill did not offer a single course in Jewish Studies.

Amazing as it may seem to us today, the two major Jewish advocacy organizations working as one in the Jewish Community Relations Committee – B’nai Brith Canada and the Canadian Jewish Congress – displayed little interest immediately after the war.

Following the end of hostilities, once the scale of the Holocaust had become apparent, a National Jewish Black Book Committee had been formed. It was a joint venture of the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists in the U.S.; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union; the Vaad Leumi, the Jewish National Council of Palestine; and the World Jewish Congress.

The committee gathered a stellar group of sponsors: Albert Einstein was honorary chairman, the journalist B. Z. Goldberg the chairman, and novelist Sholem Asch the president.

Also involved were academics, artists and writers like Eddie Cantor, Morris Carnovsky, Marc Chagall, Thomas Mann, Dr. Raphael Mahler, Yehudi Menuhin, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and Maurice Schwartz; and Jewish public servants and Zionist leaders such as Nahum Goldmann and Rabbi Stephen Wise.

The committee in 1946 published, in New York, The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, one of the earliest works documenting the enormity of the Nazi genocide. Yet the book went almost unnoticed in Canada.

Valia Hirsch, the executive secretary of the committee, voiced her concerns that no meetings had been held in the Jewish communities of Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, or Hamilton, to bring it to the attention to the Jewish community.

The Canadian Jewish Congress had ordered 100 copies of the book in the summer of 1946, but had never bothered, according to Hirsch, to obtain them from Canada Customs. The CJC indicated a year later that they were no longer interested and “cannot use them.”

Some Canadian Jews even remarked that enough had already been written.

Nathan Cohen, who would go on to become a major literary critic and television personality in Canada, in May of 1946 suggested that while the “incalculable cruelty” of the Nazi mass murders should be fully treated, “it is equally important that we should stress the rehabilitation of European Jewry” and the “healthy and constructive life of Jews in other countries.”

The CJC’s reticence was probably politically motivated. The problem for them, as the Cold War intensified, was that pro-Soviet Jews were the main force behind this book. After all, most of the Holocaust had taken place in what had become the east European “people’s republics” or the Soviet Union itself, so they had access to the sources and could make use of them for pro-Soviet ends.

Thankfully, things are different now. No longer are Jews divided by ideology when it comes to memorializing the six million who were murdered.

Indiana and North Carolina Vote . . . What Next?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The Indiana and North Carolina primaries take place today.

Hillary Clinton has proven remarkably successful in her “shape-shifting” during this long campaign, acting hurt one day, being tough another.

She was sniffling the night before the New Hampshire primary back in February, then turned into a barroom street-brawler, daring Barack Obama to come out and fight, before the Indiana and North Carolina contests.

MSNBC carried North Carolina Governor Mike Easley’s endorsement of Clinton a few days before the primary. He admired her for being so “determined” that she made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.” (Are homophobic remarks acceptable among North Carolina Democrats?)

A day later, the president of a steelworkers union local, when introducing Clinton at a rally in Indiana, said the nation needed a leader “that has testicular fortitude.”

To demonstrate how hawkish she is on foreign policy, Clinton had told ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.” on April 22 that she would be prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons if necessary – a statement that Iran has formally complained about at the UN.

Clinton is benefitting, whether she set out to do so intentionally or not, from the support of two groups that loom large in this election.

First, women. While most of them are enthused by the idea of finally being able to vote for a fellow female, some, having been the victims of emotional, physical or career-related slights from men, are vicariously “getting back” at them by voting for Clinton.

Clinton’s differences on policy with Obama are irrelevant. They don’t care what she says, as long as she doesn’t have a Y chromosome. For them, simply put, “it’s our turn.”

We heard not a word of protest about Clinton’s threat to Iran from the most influential women’s group in America, the National Organization for Women, which would have been outraged had a male “warmonger” Republican made such a statement.

Secondly, lower-income, poorly-educated whites (of both genders), in many cases outright racists. Remember the 1970s TV show “All in the Family?” We can call these the Edith and Archie Bunker voters.

In the 29 caucuses and primaries held before May 6, Clinton got more votes than Obama among white working-class voters, those making less than $50,000US a year, in all but four.

America remains a more racist than sexist society. The idealistic intellectual has been “ghettoized” in their minds as just another Black candidate.

“Racism is deep in the culture of this country,” said Roger Wilkins, a prominent Black author to the New York Times. “I’m surprised that it took the Wright business to put it out on the table.”

He was referring to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Black minister accused of making incendiary remarks about America. Obama was a member of his church for two decades.

But it was the Clintons who put racial politics back on the table. They may not be racists, but they opportunistically know how to benefit from it.

Here’s an apt comparison: Hitler was an ideological anti-Semite, pure and simple; Stalin used anti-Semitism when it helped him, and didn’t when it wasn’t necessary.

The Clintons have opened deep wounds within the Democratic Party which will take years to heal.

And Hillary Clinton’s constant 180 degree turns may yet exact a toll, should she end up as the nominee. Perhaps not too many people recall that she declared herself “absolutely honored” to be on the same stage as Obama at the end of their Austin, Texas debate back on Feb. 21.

Clinton’s Republican opponents, though, have longer memories than most voters. Should she emerge as the nominee, you can be sure that John McCain’s team will be showing clips of her love-in with Obama in their attack ads.

Hillary wins Pennsylvania - but why?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by a 10 per cent margin in the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, even though he outspent her massively in the state. Why?

An exit poll conducted at 40 precincts across Pennsylvania for the Associated Press on election day found 16 per cent of white voters said that race mattered in deciding whom they voted for, and just 54 per cent of those voters would support Obama in a general election were he the nominee.

In fact, 27 per cent of them said that in that case they would vote for John McCain, while 16 per cent said they would not vote at all.

It's also interesting to note that barely more than a third of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania said they would be happy with Obama atop the Democratic ticket, whereas more than half of those backing Obama said they would be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee.

This is another sign that racism trumps chauvinism and misogyny in this race. Much of this contest has had nothing to do with "message" or "personality"- it is simply the colour of Obama's skin.

Since almost all African Americans in Pennsylvania voted for Obama - he won black-majority Philadelphia 65-35 per cent - and two-thirds of white women supported Clinton, the 'swing' vote that decided the race came down to white men, who went strongly for Clinton.

Clinton did particularly well among rural whites, traditionally less receptive to black politicians. She also got 70 per cent of whites who never went to college and 72 per cent of Catholics, many of whom are blue-collar workers of Irish, Italian and east European descent.

These are all people who have competed with African-Americans for jobs and housing in the big cities and sometimes see them as rivals.

Of course there are many reasons why all these groups might prefer Clinton to Obama apart from ethnic and gender issues. But in actual fact little separates the two candidates in terms of their overall ideology and platforms.

So if we discount these minute differences, what can we conclude? That many voters were saying, in effect, "better the white woman than the black man."

This is, needless to say, an oversimplification, but it's probably the "Occam's razor" answer. (This is the famous principle that states that the simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated ones, as propounded by the fourteenth century English friar William of Occam.)

And Hillary Clinton, while certainly no racist herself, is nonetheless making sure the super-delegates, who in the end will decide who gets the nomination, are made aware of this. Not above demagoguery, and using code language, she whispers to them that, despite having more delegates and a lead in the popular vote, Obama will be "unelectable" in the general election.

How different is this from a shopkeeper, in the days before there were laws against discrimination in hiring, justifying not employing blacks because "the customers wouldn't come into my store?"

This contest reminds me of those elections that take place in deeply divided societies.

How many Albanians would have voted for Slobodan Milosevic, or Serbs for the Kosovo Liberation Army, in pre-war Kosovo, had such an election been held?

How many Kikuyu in Kenya voted for Raila Odinga, a Luo, in last December's presidential election? And how many Luo voted for Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu?

How many Turks on Cyprus voted for Greek parties, or vice versa, before that island was partitioned in 1974? How many Israeli Arabs vote for far-right Zionist parties, and how many Israeli Jews would vote for Hamas or the PLO (were that an option)?

We know the answer.

In other words, such elections are merely "census counts" - you pretty much know the result in advance simply by looking at the population breakdown. In Pennsylvania, all of Obama's money couldn't change that.

Has Running for the U.S. Presidency Become a Wrestling Match?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

As we know, Hillary Clinton has done just about everything to Barack Obama but physically assault him. And she’s proud of it. She is gleeful that he apparently can’t take a punch.

Clinton ridiculed Obama for lacking “toughness” as she campaigned in Pennsylvania in the days before that state’s April 22 primary contest. “Who do you think has what it takes?” asked one of her television ads.

Claiming the Obama was not up to the task of adequately protecting America, Clinton quoted the famous line from Harry Truman, “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Maybe that’s why an MSNBC poll taken a day before the vote showed hunters and gun owners favoring Clinton over Obama.

A few weeks earlier, the New York Times had quoted Bill Clinton telling listeners at a rally in West Virginia that “if a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.” He called politics “a contact sport.”

But wouldn’t Obama’s so-called lack of toughness also apply to kids being attacked by bullies in schoolyards? Is this what Senator Clinton meant when she asserted, years ago, that “it takes a village to raise a child?”

Pummeling Obama through innuendo and guilt-by-association – Obama has crossed paths with a Chicago professor who forty years ago was a New Left radical; his former pastor has made controversial statements about America – has become the Clintons’ version of “scrutiny” and “vetting.”

I’d be more inclined to call them the kinds of smears once employed by the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Though it worked in Pennsylvania, where she won the primary, many Democrats can’t stand these scorched-earth tactics anymore. Obama has now been endorsed by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labour. Reich became the fifth former Clinton cabinet member to endorse the Illinois senator.

“I did not plan to endorse. But my conscience wouldn’t let me stay silent after this latest round of mudslinging,” Reich told the Los Angeles Times on April 18.

“The negative ads coming out of the Clinton camp were just appalling at a time when our nation is facing such huge challenges,” he said. “Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. It’s old politics at its worst -- and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical.”

Anyhow, why has running for office become like boxing or wrestling? Do we really want politicians to be street-hardened thugs, or people with inspiring ideas and well-crafted political programs?

And shouldn’t feminists, who have long argued against such a macho approach to politics, be the first to criticize Clinton’s approach? Should a woman – any woman – be supported, no matter what she says and does? Why aren’t people like Gloria Steinem, who earlier this year came out in support of Clinton, speaking up?

The next major contests are in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6. They should post a “mud alert” in both states.

The Democratic Party Race: The Beat Goes On...and On...and On

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The next big primary in the ongoing Democratic Party race is on April 22. The Pennsylvania contest will apportion 158 delegates and is the biggest single state left in the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Though Obama has won the endorsement of Bob Casey, one of the state’s senators, Clinton has the support of Governor Ed Rendell and most of the party establishment there. She leads Obama in the polls and is predicted to win.

Despite that, many pundits and politicians think that Clinton’s fight to gain the Democratic Party nomination is all but hopeless. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said in an interview carried by National Public Radio March 27 that Clinton should quit the race because she has hurt Obama “more than anything John McCain has said.”

Of course this assumes she feels bound to play by the rules. But what if her sense of entitlement is so strong that she is willing to break them if necessary? In an e-mail she sent out at the end of March, and quoted by the Washington Post, Clinton declared she would not be “bullied out” of the race by the “big boys.”

In an interview with the same paper during a campaign stop in India on March 29, she declared that “I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests.”

In fact, she went further. Clinton told Time magazine that even pledged delegates are not legally bound to support the candidate to whom they are pledged: “Every delegate is expected to exercise independent judgment.” Which translates as, my delegates are mine, but his are mine to poach.

As well, 20 well-heeled backers of Clinton’s have sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, chastising Pelosi for declaring that the super-delegates should support the winner of the pledged delegate count. Clinton’s backers went so far as to threaten to cut off their financial contributions to the party.

Many of the extremely wealthy people who signed the letter benefitted from legislation passed during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and are happy in return to scratch the Clintons’ backs.

The Clintons’ 28 year old daughter Chelsea, for example, in 2006 took a job analyzing investments at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund run by banker Marc Lasry, a loyal donor to Clinton-related Democratic causes. Her salary is in the high six figure range. Lasry was one of the 20 signatories to the letter.

When another prominent Democrat, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, endorsed Obama, he was denounced as a “Judas” by one of Clinton’s political operatives, James Carville.

Carville told the New York Times on Good Friday that the endorsement was an “act of betrayal” that “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out (Jesus) for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.”

Carville seems to regard the Democratic Party as a Clinton family enterprise, much as the Pakistan Peoples Party belongs to the Bhuttos. No doubt he’ll be expecting loyalists to support Chelsea Clinton when she seeks office in the future.

If you compare Obama’s endorsements with Clinton’s, one thing becomes evident: one side consists primarily of people with integrity, while the other side is dominated by ethics-challenged hacks.

As she grows ever more frenzied in her pursuit of the nomination, Hillary Clinton is fast becoming the Mwai Kibaki of American politics. (Kibaki is the Kenyan leader who stole the presidential election from a rival last December.)

What’s next, a coup d’état if Barack Obama wins the nomination?

Carville and the J-Word

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Jewish defense organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the United States, and the Canadian Jewish Congress and the League for Human Rights here in Canada, are always on the alert for even the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. And rightly so.

To pick a somewhat minor example recently in the news, Congress wrote to the Kirkland Lake, Ontario, town council, inquiring as to why a street in the town was named Swastika Ave. It turns out this name dates back to 1911 and long predated Nazism -- the swastika was, after all, a Hindu symbol that Hitler appropriated as an “Aryan” emblem.

Frankly, I’d feel better were the street given some other name; after the Holocaust, the swastika, I’m afraid, can never lose its sinister connotations. Still, it turns out to have been an innocent misunderstanding.

We know that Jewish groups will sometimes censure people or groups for remarks that seem only tangentially to have anti-Jewish implications. So why has there been relative silence from American Jewish organizations when political operative and Hillary Clinton supporter James Carville called New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, once a member of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, a “Judas”?

Carville made the remark after Richardson endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the U.S. presidential race. Carville called it an “act of betrayal” that “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out (Jesus) for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.”

In much of western culture, Judas became the stereotype of the greedy, traitorous Jew, the man responsible for deicide. His very name and image has been used to incite violence against Jews over the centuries. How many of us have been murdered in pogroms due to this libel?

Hitler, among many others, certainly knew the power of the “J-word.”

No doubt Carville did not intend to malign Jews – but could he not have used a different example, one less offensive to Jewish ears? The traitor Benedict Arnold, the American general who switched sides and sold out to the British during the American Revolution, comes to mind.

Were an evangelical Protestant to have made a similar statement – say, while accusing some Republican of turning against John McCain – my guess is we’d have heard more of an outcry.

But most American Jews are fairly secular and a majority support the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton is a U.S. senator from New York state and has many Jewish supporters.

So is there a double standard at work here? Judge for yourself.

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.

Is Hillary Clinton a Democrat?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

You're the person who deserves - indeed, is absolutely entitled - to be the Democratic Party's nominee for president of the United States.

You've worked for decades to reach this point, kept your eyes on the prize, suffered through the travails of being married to a philanderer, and taken abuse from misogynists and "the great right-wing conspiracy."

Most importantly, America needs you to clean up the mess following eight years of George W. Bush!

Then along comes this young, charismatic African American, seemingly out of nowhere, and you're in danger of seeing it all slip away. You have run a rather uninspiring campaign and have now lost eight contests in a row. You are behind in both the popular vote and the pledged delegate count.

You've already forfeited the black vote, thanks in part to the rants of your husband, the ex-president, whom you've allowed to campaign on your behalf. And now even core support groups such as Latinos, working-class whites, and women are beginning to desert you.

What to do? Well, if you're Hillary Clinton, it's simple: just circumvent the democratic process.

It requires a total of 2,025 delegates out of 4,049 to win the nomination. But almost one-fifth of the delegates, 796 people, are "unpledged" so-called "superdelegates," ex officio Democrats who hold various elected offices or other positions within the party. They are not bound by any rules and can back whomever they choose.

Clinton has made it clear that, even if Barack Obama ends up with more pledged delegates going into the Denver convention in August, she sees nothing wrong with having this "back-room nomenklatura" make up the difference and crown her the victor.

Not everyone is happy with her tactics. Donna Brazile, a commentator and superdelegate herself, told CNN that "if 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party."

As well, Clinton is now shamelessly demanding that the results of the Michigan and Florida primaries, which were held in January in defiance of the party's rule, be counted and their delegates seated at the convention.

The Democratic National Committee stripped the two states of their delegates - 156 for Michigan and 210 for Florida - because they held their primaries prior to the "Super Tuesday" Feb. 5 schedule.

All of the candidates agreed to this and none of them campaigned in these two primaries. In the case of Michigan, Clinton's chief rivals, Obama and Jonathan Edwards, even removed their names from the ballot.

As the only major candidate on the Michigan ballot, she got 55 per cent of the vote. She also won in Florida, and thus would gain the lion's share of the delegates from these two states. In other words, Clinton is demanding that the party treat as legitimate, elections in which she had virtually no opposition.

The prospect of a fight over seating the two delegations will gravely wound the party. As the Rev. Al Sharpton, a prominent black activist, pointed out, this is like trying to change the rules of a football game when you're behind in the third quarter.

He also said that many people in those two states did not go the polls because they assumed their votes would not count.

Clinton's role models seem to be the old party bosses who used to run the big-city Democratic Party machines, dispensing favours and patronage.

They became known collectively as "Tammany Hall" politicians, named for the building in Manhattan out of which the New York politicos operated.

Hillary Clinton may be a Democrat, but it's clear she's no democrat.

Should she get away with these shenanigans, the party's left wing will argue that the nomination was "stolen from a black," many African Americans and other progressives will sit out the general election in November, and the nearly impossible may happen: the Republicans under John McCain might actually win the presidency.

“Banal” Nationalism: America, Canada and Quebec

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Why has the United States been able to inculcate a sense of nationhood in its citizenry in ways that Canadians can only envy?

I’d like to address this by comparing two songs, written at about the same time: “The City of New Orleans,” by Steve Goodman, and “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” by Gordon Lightfoot. Both deal with the important role railways have played in shaping the two countries.

The American song, composed in 1972, is about “the train they call The City of New Orleans,” as it travels down through the heart of the country from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico.

It is rather sad, because it laments the passing of passenger rail travel: “This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.” But this somewhat melancholy and nostalgic song resonates with Americans and reminds them of their history.

Lightfoot’s song, by contrast, is upbeat: written for Canada’s centennial in 1967, it describes the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the late 19th century.

“For there was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run,” sings Lightfoot. But those who would build “this mighty land” were not daunted: “For they looked in the future and what did they see. They saw an iron road running from sea to the sea.”

So why do Lightfoot’s lyrics not have the same ability as do Goodman’s to inculcate a spirit of nationhood? They are certainly just as well written, the melody just as beautiful.

The answer is simple. The song speaks only to English Canada, and might as well be a foreign tune to most francophone Québécois. And therein lies the problem.

Apropos Quebec nationalism: I drove from Charlottetown to Montreal and then on to Toronto last spring, taking the route through New Brunswick and then along the Saint Lawrence River.

Quebec is truly its own nation. Most highway numbers are distinct to the province. For example, the main east-west artery, route 20, becomes the 401 as it enters Ontario. (American interstates retain the same number from one end to the other.) As one nears Quebec City, one is informed that this is the “national capital region.”

Also interesting are the weather maps in many of the smaller provincial French-language newspapers: they show only Quebec, rather than Canada. In the rest of Canada, the illustrations are of the entire country, at the very least, and sometimes even all of North America.

Another thing that struck me: on downtown office buildings, hotels, and other major sites in Montreal, there are usually three flags flying side by side, with the Quebec one in the middle, and the Canadian and American ones on either side of it -- even though protocol dictates that a national flag, not that of a sub-jurisdiction, should be placed in the centre.

Also, by having the Canadian and American flags on each side of the fleur-de-lis, Quebec announces, in a subtle way, that these are two friendly (but equally foreign?) neighbours.

You would never see an Ontario flag on the middle pole, with a Canadian maple leaf and an American stars and stripes on either side, in Toronto.

Also, since to name is to claim, many streets that once honoured British officials now pay tribute to francophone politicians – for example, Dorchester Blvd., a main downtown artery, was renamed Blvd. René-Lévesque.

All of these things may seem unimportant on the surface, but they are “signifiers,” elements of what the British social psychologist Michael Billig refers to as “everyday” nationalism.

The thesis of his 1995 study “Banal Nationalism” is that there is a continual “flagging” of nationhood all around us that helps “locate” us politically. This is “so familiar, so continual,” he asserts, “that it is not consciously registered as reminding” and so often goes unnoticed.

The image of banal nationalism “is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building.”

It is such everyday symbols that socially construct a sense of collective identity – and in Quebec, they are mostly those of the Québécois “homeland,” rather than of the larger federation.

I drove back to Prince Edward Island via Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine – and of course the little towns along the way in most cases flew only the U.S. flag. If a state flag was present, it was on the same flagpole, but smaller and below the American one. The national flag always had pride of place.

No issues of nationhood there!

Back to the future in a consociational Palestine?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Imagine a country with two communities so deeply divided along ethnic or religious lines that it can only maintain democratic institutions within the framework of a unified state if the leaders of each ethnic group cooperate in power-sharing provisions to govern the country.

These arrangements, which political scientists refer to as consociationalism, often mandate a precise numerical ratio of parliamentary seats, governmental positions, and other offices, between the two groups. The groups often vote in separate, ethnically-based constituencies, rather than on a common electoral roll.

The very intricate constitution may also reserve certain important executive positions – say, the offices of president, vice-president, or prime minister – for one or the other community. It usually also specifies that the armed forces and police be composed of members of both groups. Finally, there are mutual vetoes in matters regarding the preservation of the culture and security of each community.

In such states, the groups in question are subject to both their internal ethnic leadership and that of the very weak state, and such dual authority politics, with overlapping fields of authority, creates a conflict between ethnic loyalty and state loyalty. The former almost invariably predominates. After all, the groups have little in common other than economic and political relationships, which tend to be antagonistic in nature.

Not surprisingly, such states are usually mere facades, the sovereign equivalents of Potemkin villages, often only held together due to pressure from outside forces who for one reason or another are unwilling to let such Humpty-Dumpty entities break into smaller pieces.

Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon, and perhaps Northern Ireland, are among many that spring immediately to mind. States such as Fiji, Nigeria and Sudan might join the list. And since there is no common sense of nationality, but rather competing nationalisms and jockeying for power, these artificial constructs often do finally splinter into partitioned entities: Cyprus after 1974 is a typical example, as were India and Palestine in 1947-48.

Today, though, we hear voices calling for the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state, to be replaced by a “secular” entity – Palestine? – of Arabs and Jews.

No doubt, given the decades of mistrust and strife, this state too would soon enough manifest a politics revolving around the competing demands of the two constituent communities.

Communal violence would be an almost certain outcome, with a de facto geographical separation of the two groups within the state, as has been the case with the examples cited above.

Sooner or later, assuming one group did not eliminate the other through expulsion or massacre, there would be calls to partition the country – and we’d have come full circle, right back to UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947, the original plan to partition Palestine.

So why rewind and replay the tape? Political realism requires the acknowledgment of a fact that might be inconvenient to maximalists on either side: the final recognition of Israeli and Palestinian states within mutually recognized boundaries between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The American Presidential Race – So Far

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The next presidential election in the United States is still more than 10 months away. Indeed, not a single primary or caucus has been held.

The Democrats and Republicans still have, between them, 17 hopefuls in the race.

But it really will boil down to these seven candidates: among the Republicans, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney; on the Democratic side, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards.

There are some truly history-making possibilities: should Clinton win, she would be the first female president; Obama would be the first African-American; Romney would become the first challenger to overcome the stigma that still attaches to Mormonism; and, though this has gone largely unnoticed in the media, Giuliani would become only the second Catholic, and the first person not of Anglo-Celtic stock, to become head of state. (Dwight Eisenhower’s mother was of British descent.)

The Republicans would be foolish to nominate anyone but Giuliani. Why?

McCain is a tired face and carries the weight of the Iraq war on his shoulders. Romney’s Mormonism would indeed turn off many evangelical Protestants, still a powerful voting block for the GOP; and Huckabee, while appealing to that very base, would drive away many neo-conservative voters who yearn for less religious fervor with their politics.

On the other hand, the former New York mayor, hawkish on foreign policy but very liberal on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights, would attract many independents and even some Democrats.

Now for the Democrats: As erudite, and well-versed in the art of politics as Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson are, they stand no chance to win the nomination. That leaves the two front-runners: Clinton and Obama.

Going into this campaign, Clinton, with the Democratic Party establishment behind her, seemed unbeatable. And, should she gain the nomination, she would be a formidable opponent for any Republican next November.

But she has many “negatives”: their names are Bill Clinton and his “friends” Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, and Linda Tripp (among many others). Hillary Clinton claims to have the experience Obama lacks, but what is she referring to exactly? Being “first lady” while her husband dallied with other women? Deciding not to divorce him because she felt she needed him for her own run for the top job?

Other woman chafe at the “glass ceiling,” but Hillary piggy-backed on Bill’s shoulders for decades. She then ran for, and won, a U.S. Senate seat from New York state – no working your way up from town councillor or school board trustee for her!

This calculated behavior makes her appear simply too power-hungry and amoral for the average American. Should she win the nomination, we might have to sit through endless Republican attack ads featuring the former president, husband Bill, along with the aforementioned women, and reruns of him lying on television about his behaviour.

Finally, Hillary Clinton would also succumb to the discomfort that many American have begun to share: that American politics are becoming too dynastic. Since 1988, either a Bush or a Clinton has occupied the White House. Do they need another eight years of that?

As well, they are uncomfortable with the idea of having a former president living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue alongside the newly-chosen one. How would that affect the governing of the country? How much influence would the unelected ex-president have on policy?

It’s not so much that Hillary Clinton is a woman that bothers them, it’s that she’s the spouse of a previous incumbent. Were the roles reversed – a man running for president who had been preceded by his wife – I think there would be the same level of unease.

Finally, we have Barack Obama. A young African-American who seems to have transcended issues of race and gender thus far, he is, at age 46, certainly the most appealing and cosmopolitan candidate in the Democratic field, and the only one among them who can inspire a newer generation of voters.

So here’s the bottom line: Rudy Giuliani would beat Hillary Clinton, but Barack Obama would defeat him. No other Republican would be able to win next year, no matter whom the Democrats nominate.

The Loonie versus the U.S. dollar

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Though Canadian retail prices are starting to reflect the impact of our stronger dollar, many economists think they will always remain higher than their American counterparts.

Why? It's due to the higher cost of doing business in this country. Our different tax structures, tariffs, higher wages, more regulations, plus some minor costs, such as bilingual packaging requirements, all make goods here more expensive.

Also, Canadian retailers pay more because the market is one-tenth the size of the United States, according to Diane Brisebois, president of the Retail Council of Canada.

"We don't suspect that the price differentiation will disappear ever, and that is simply based on economies of scale," she said recently. "If you buy a dozen doughnuts you get a better price than if you're buying a single."

Therefore, identical items are often priced at least 20 per cent higher in Canada than in the U.S. - and in many cases, a lot more than that.

So, ironically, our high-flying loonie, now trading at over US$1.03, can buy more in the U.S. than here, and Canadians have to cross the border to get a better price on the same products that are available at home.

That's because a Canadian dollar cannot buy as much in real goods and services in Canada as a U.S. dollar can in the United States. As opposed to the exchange rate, where the two currencies are now about equal, in terms of what is known as purchasing power parity (PPP), the loonie probably will buy only the equivalent of about 85 American cents.

In other words, we need to spend one Canadian dollar here to buy the same bundle of goods that cost Americans 85 cents in their country.

(By the way, when our dollar was in the low 70 cents US range, it was undervalued, because then, too, the two currencies were much closer in terms of PPP than was true of the exchange rate at that time.)

Also, not only are prices lower in the United States, but the typical Canadian does not earn as much income as the typical American, and gives more of it away in taxes. Canadian governments collect C$17,300 per capita from us, while American ones collect US$13,500 from theirs.

So why is the loonie 'punching above its weight'? The dramatic rise of the currency is due mainly to world commodity prices, in particular oil; our resource sector accounts for more than one-third of Canada's exports.

But the standard of living of average Canadians remains lower than that of our neighbours. Perhaps a new definition of a Canadian is someone who spends $10,000 more on a car than does an American, so they can wait two years for a hip replacement.