Talk/Talk: Colin Powell, Bronx Guy

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Below are excerpts from this week's Talk Talk, Colin Powell, Bronx Guy. Every Sunday CUIP's president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogue on Sunday, October 19, 2008 after watching "The Chris Matthews Show", "Meet the Press", "The McLaughlin Group" and "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

Newman: I thought it was powerful. I like Powell. He's a Bronx guy.

Salit: Yes, he's a Bronx guy.

Newman: It was thoughtful, well considered and well presented. It will have some impact. There are a lot of liberal moderate Republicans who have felt very left out during these last eight years, who share Powell's sentiments. If they weren't already going to go with Obama, this will certainly influence them. I thought it was well put and thoughtful. And I thought that Brokaw's response to it was truly biased.

Salit: Indeed.

Newman: I don't think Brokaw followed even the limited rules that exist for television moderators. All of his questions were based on 'some people are not going to like this.' There was not a positive question on the list. I didn't think very much of that.

Read Talk Talk in its entirety here.

Talk/Talk: Hillary Gets Real(ity)

Salit: Here's one thing that I take away from Hillary Clinton's presentation on "Meet the Press." She frames the campaign between herself and Barack Obama as a choice between "rhetoric and reality." Her message, just below the surface, is you can only do so much, and you have to accept the limitations of reality. If you accept the limitations of reality, she's the better choice because she knows how to navigate (i.e. triangulate) reality. Obama knows how to put forth rhetoric, but doesn't really have a grasp of reality. And her unstated conclusion is: Don't think that you can make any kind of dramatic changes of the sort that Obama is envisioning in his rhetoric. This is the way things are and, consequently, I'm your best bet.

Newman: I think what you're saying is surely one valid way of putting it. I might be inclined to put it a little differently. I think she's also articulating a distinction between realities and possibilities.

Read more

Conversations on Radicals in the 2008 Presidential Campaign

As an independent residing in New York, I won't be huddling with fellow citizens to show my support for any of the major party candidates on January 3 in the Iowa caucuses. (btw -- the word caucus, Iowa Caucus 2008 tells us, is a North American Indian word, thought to be of Algonquin origin, meaning a gathering of the ruling tribal chiefs.....)

But I'll probably be glued to the tv by 9:30 to see what the first voters have to say about these guys and gal. One of them will most likely be our next president....

Last week Fred Newman and Jackie Salit talked about Ron Paul's appearance on Meet the Press. [msnbc transcript and video] Newman pointed out that Paul is a longtime independent, and a "left-wing conservative".... Kucinich, says Newman, is the most radical voice in the Dem primary.... See Talk/Talk: Ron Paul and America's Sea Change.

The Hankster interview with Iowa voter and founder of Rock the Debates.org Larry Reinsch drew a favorable review from Ron Paul supporter boratFAN999 .... Larry interviewed Ron Paul and is one of the few major party candidates who gave an immediate and unequivocable YES to debating an independent candidate should he win his party's nomination-- see the RockTheDebates.org video here.

Likewise, the Hankster interview with New Hampshire Committee for an Independent Voice activist Betty Ward was applauded by Dennis Kucinich supporter clearchoice2008 -- personally I think this ad by clearchoice is very clever!

And here's what Newman had to say about Hillary Clinton's campaign:
In some ways, Hillary has to deal with the fact that she should have been able to articulate a message of “take a risk, put a woman in the presidency.” But she couldn’t because she chose to shape the campaign around the idea of being the inevitable nominee, as it were. Those two don’t fit together. You can’t put those together. I think that Howard Wolfson and Bill Clinton and the people who put her campaign together put her in a bad spot because they didn’t position her as part of the sea change. She was actually anti-sea change. And that’s turned out to be a tough spot. I know the official line is that her biggest chance of winning is being the most experienced. But I don’t see yet that’s been proven right.....

Obama made note of the rock and a hard place that Hillary is in when he said in his so-called Closing Argument speech that "you can’t at once argue that you’re the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it."

The speculation over whether Mike Bloomberg is going to run as an independent will end sometime in March when the requirements for ballot access for independent candidates raise their ugly heads. I don't think he's going to run. I think he's doing what he wanted to do--being influential without running.

There are any number of Draft Mike ploys out there that seem to want to capitalize on the speculation. Maybe they actually think Bloomberg will run and give them all big jobs with bigger salaries, who knows? Political hacks can be found under every rock. But the black and independent alliance that got the Mayor re-elected in 2005 with a landslide knows what it takes to go up against the Dem and Repub machines and win. It takes an electorate organized to act on its own behalf. That's radical.

Conversations on Conversations about Politics

Just as The Hankster readership is on vacation, so are we! Which allow the additional posts....

Today's Talk/Talk with Fred Newman and Jacqueline Salit (which comes out usually on Tuesdays and you can subscribe like I do to the email by signing up on the Analysis tab at independentvoting.org on the upper right corner... I've also linked Talk/Talk to The Hankster blog roll) is entitled "It's Not About Me".

I love this weekly column, not only because Newman and Salit have some very cutting-edge things to say about the whole two-party system thing that rules American politics, but also I just really appreciate the free-wheeling and intimate dialogue. Here are two people who have a lot to say about politics in America. Newman, somewhat of an "elder" in progressive independent politics in the US, having spent the past 40 years trying to create some alternatives to the current political alignment, and Salit, who has built an activist base of hundreds of top-notch indepenendent activists across the country, speak their hearts and minds.

Some of their dialogue from last Sunday:
Newman: ...But the issue is not me. The issue is the American people. If [Hillary] can make that stick, she wins the argument. But can she pull that off when a lot of other people are persisting in saying 'The issue is Hillary, the issue is Hillary?' I don't know. That's the opening for her. But, it's also a trap for her if she doesn't succeed in going through that opening.

Salit: And how does Obama handle this?

Newman: He could say: The issue isn't Hillary Clinton. The issue is the failure of Washington to impact positively on the people of America. Now, that's a little hard for him to say since he's participating in the process of making Hillary Clinton the issue.

Salit: I was struck by Gwen Ifill on the "Meet the Press" panel when she summarized the Democratic race as being about "what do you think about Hillary?" When she first said that, I thought 'What happened to the issues?' But then I realized it was a fairly accurate description. I'm not looking to create an evenly balanced template here, but to what extent do you think that's operative for Rudy Giuliani? .......

Newman: But it is about issues, because [Giuliani's] personal projection translates into a position on national security. Those are the Republican issues. In fact, the Democrats, as some commentators now say, don't even talk about these issues very much anymore. Today's Daily News featured an Op Ed arguing that the Democrats have stopped talking about security and about terrorism. Meanwhile, Giuliani can only talk about that. He doesn't talk about any other issues. He says: I stop crime. I react to terrorism. That's my record. That's what I do. Those are the issues that Americans really care about. Now, that's a pretty big gamble because it's not at all clear that those are the issues that a majority of Americans care most about. The huge drop in Bush's popularity would seem to suggest otherwise.

Salit: Then, what's driving the race on the Democratic side? On "Meet the Press" E.J. Dionne talked about the trade issue. Russert played a clip of the exchange between himself and Hillary on the NAFTA question and his effort to get her to admit that NAFTA was a mistake.

Newman: Wait a second. They don't talk about the trade issue. What you're reporting on is the talk about who was right on NAFTA and who was wrong on NAFTA. That has nothing to do with the trade issue. The trade issue is a totally separate matter. The issue that they're discussing was who was right and who was wrong. .....

Salit: I see what you're saying. But, putting the campaigns aside for the moment, Dionne gave a fairly detailed description of the split within the Democratic Party on the trade question, the split between the old liberal union-based coalition which is anti-NAFTA and anti-free trade and the more middle class, white collar, Information Age base which is pro-free trade.

Newman: ....Wait a second. They don't talk about the trade issue. What you're reporting on is the talk about who was right on NAFTA and who was wrong on NAFTA. That has nothing to do with the trade issue.....

Eventually, the people will vote.... We will vote in an election where we're not happy with the choices. We'll do the best we can.....

2008: John Edward -- "I was wrong."

Edwards Again Says He Was Wrong to Vote for War, By Matthew Mosk (Washington Post) .....Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, appearing on "Meet the Press," again expressed regret for his vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq. (By Alex Wong -- "Meet The Press" Via Associated Press) -- Edwards began drawing attention to his vote in fall 2005, writing an op-ed piece in The Washington Post that began with: "I was wrong."
The soul-searching continued yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press."....

Edwards might be picking up on a desire by the American people for "transparency" in our elected officials. The capacity to say "I was wrong." That's the stuff that successful relationships are built on.