My Favorite Super Bowl Ad: Good Old Clint’s Call for an American Resurrection

No, I’d rather not discuss the outcome of the Super Bowl, thank you very much. Instead, this New Englander would much prefer to discuss the most surprising and evocative ad of the evening: Clint Eastwood’s pro-Detroit, pro-America ad.

While some are calling it a subtle pro-Obama/pro-auto bailout spot (Chrysler was a bailout recipient), I like to look at it as an apolitical inspirational, pro-America spot. As the airwaves and political discourse is currently swarming with disingenuous politicians who seem like snake oil salesmen who haven’t been able to offer voters a reason to embrace them, as opposed to arguing why voters shouldn't embrace the other guys, this is the kind of ad, the kind of sentiment that people are looking for. “We’re all scared . . . because this isn’t a game,” Dirty Harry said.

Yes, we know that Detroit, which was held up as an example, isn’t a shining city on a hill. It has serious, serious woes that can’t be overlooked or shunted aside simply because some of the car manufacturers are making cars again (some of ‘em thanks to big bucks from Uncle Sam). But the guts of this ad, the meat of it, is hope. It doesn’t talk down to us and tell us the economy’s robust and happy and that there’s a chicken in every pot. It doesn’t prescribe nonsense answers that, when parsed by experts will be proven to be meaningless or unable to execute in the real world. It offers American grit from one of the living symbols of it.

“That’s what we do, find our way through tough times,” Eastwood said in a way that’s more believable coming out of his mouth than the mouths of all the candidates for president including the current officeholder, who used to be able to talk the labels off of tin cans.

While I was on Twitter during the Super Bowl, my Twitter feed was overflowing with plaudits for this spot because it offered something we all want to believe in: An American resurrection. Yes, we do want to make Dirty Harry’s day.

Notes from the Political Middle: Cracker Barrel vs Whole Foods; Protesters of the Year & Newt Leading GOP Pack

Cracker Barrel vs Whole Foods

Quick, which one do you prefer: The restaurant/gift shop chain Cracker Barrel or the supermarket chain Whole Foods?

If you selected Cracker Barrel, you must be a Republican. If you picked Whole Foods, you’re obviously a Democrat. It makes sense that if you buy the $7.39 Chicken n’ Dumplins from Cracker Barrel, where they play country music in the background, you must be a conservative, right? And if you’re in the market for anything organic or for fare like arugula, man, you’re a liberal, just count up them Priuses in the parking lot.

Wait . . . what? Well that’s what the Washington Post asserted in a recent story saying that there’s a cultural divide between the two venues which can serve as easy proxies for patrons’ political choices.

“In 2008, candidate Barack Obama carried 81 percent of counties with a Whole Foods and just 36 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel – a record 45-point gap,” the Post reported. “. . . This growing divide signals shifts in the electorate. In the 2008 primary, Obama was able to overcome Hillary Rodham Clinton partly because the Democratic Party had become more Whole Foods than Cracker Barrel.” Hillary Clinton is a Cracker Barrel most valuable patron? Since when?

An author/journalist from Texas told the paper: “Politics is aligned with lifestyle right now, not policy. Food used to be political because it represented a class of farmers or workers. Now it represents certain tastes.”

While I’ll concede that there may be some discernible lifestyle correlation between an organic/free-range/Whole Foods-type lifestyle and voting Democratic, this type of false dichotomy makes my hair stand on end. It’s a lazy, simplistic shortcut which ideologically paints folks with one, broad brush. Even here in liberal, blue state Massachusetts, I know folks who defy this simplistic either-or stereotype. I know Republican Whole Foods shoppers and Democratic Cracker Barrel patrons. Scott Brown, in case you’ve forgotten, is from here, and we’ve had many Republican governors who likely never went to a Cracker Barrel but I'd wager they've set foot inside a Whole Foods, or a similar market because they can afford to do so.

Now picture Mitt Romney for a second. Which seems more likely to you, that Romney would be shopping at a Whole Foods or dining at Cracker Barrel? What about Jon Huntsman? Hillary Clinton? Chris Christie? The comparisons don’t always work as cleanly as people would like to make them seem. When you have such a growing body of independents in the electorate who could vote blue or red depending on the candidate – and regardless of where they buy their groceries, which is more related to income than a political culture – it seems more than a little insulting to try to pigeon-hole voters by grocery stores, restaurants or by what sport their kids play, as pundits are wont to do. (I’m a soccer mom AND a hockey mom AND a basketball mom . . . and none of that has anything to do with how I vote, rather it has to do with my kids’ interests.)

Protesters of the Year

Every year Time Magazine’s selection for “Person of the Year” creates controversy. That’s by design. At around Christmas, Time gins up some robust watercooler buzz as people debate their choice.

This year the magazine’s editors went out of their way to make an outside of the box selection by annointing “The Protester” -- whether it’s an Occupy Wall Streeter or an Egyptian woman or Tunisian street vendor, all of those who rose up in protest of their government, their economy, the elite class or all of the above -- was given the props.
“Protests have now occurred in countries whose populations total at least 3 billion people, and the word protest has appeared in newspapers and online exponentially more this past year than at any other time in history,” explained Time’s managing editor Rick Stengel. “. . . Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough. They dissented; they demanded; they did not despair, even when the answers came back in a cloud of tear gas or a hail of bullets. They literally embodied the idea that individual action can bring collective, colossal change.”

I, for one, think it was an inspired choice. What say you?

Seriously, Newt’s Leading the Pack?

As I noted in this post in September (where I wrote about becoming a voter who’s unaffiliated with a political party), I don’t and never have towed any kind of a party line in the voting booth. I vote the person, not the party. Being of the moderate ilk, I tend to cotton to people who are not fire breathers and are apt to feed big, bloody slabs of red meat to their base. As Pollyanna/Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as it may seem, I like the person who doesn’t demonize his or her competitors and who is willing to work for the compromise that’s best for the most people, and who'll do so by collaborating with politicians with whom you don’t necessarily agree, as opposed to thwarting everything in order to just make a stand or prevent someone’s re-election.

Which brings me to my Newt Gingrich question: How is it possible that the GOP primary voters would think that the voters in what’s called the “mushy middle” (Independents and the like) would ever, in a million years, vote for a President Gingrich? I remain stunned by the phoenix-like rise of the former House Speaker as primary voters are scrambling to try to find anyone other than Romney to be their presidential nominee. Certainly there are more appealing candidates who do not have such steep negative ratings as Gingrich.

As I’ve perused the commentary from various political pundits about Gingrich's sudden surge in the polls, the piece that resonated most with me was from conservative Peggy Noonan who, in a blistering Wall Street Journal op/ed likened Gingrich to “a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, ‘Watch this!’”

“What is striking is the extraordinary divide in opinion between those who know Gingrich and those who don’t,” Noonan wrote, after calling him “ethically dubious,” “erratic and unreliable," "impulsive” and “egomaniacal.” “Those who do are mostly not for him, and they were burning up the phone lines this week in Washington.”

Once we hit 2012, I have to believe that the primary voters will go in a different direction, unless, of course, they’re just looking to cede the election to President Obama.

Image credits: Cracker Barrel, Whole Foods, Peter Hapak/Time, Charlie Neibergall/Christian Science Monitor.

Notes on Politics: Seeing Sexual Harassment Allegations Through a Partisan Lens

Here’s my bottom line when it come to allegations that someone used his office and his power to attempt to intimidate/persuade female underlings/employees to engage in sexual conduct and/or to subject them to sexually harassing language or behavior because they’re women and you’re feeling a bit randy:

If the allegations have merit and the denials don’t hold water (because the stories/explanations vacillate all over the place or because the individual has been deemed to have evaded truth on many occasions) it doesn’t matter what party affiliation comes after their name. Party is irrelevant. I don’t care if you’re U.S. Senator Robert Packwood or President Bill Clinton or GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain. If you have indeed harassed a woman (or women) sexually in the workplace, you should be held accountable for it. If you’re a public figure, you’ve made it difficult if not impossible for the female half of your constituency to believe that you can or will respect them and their rights if you treat your female underlings/employees so shabbily.

But that’s not the approach people always take when it comes to accusations of sexual harassment involving political figures. Some people’s reactions are shaped by their partisan affiliation and they just can’t see past it. If you’re a Democrat and party is more important to you than, say, taking a stand against sexual harassment and abuse of power, you’re going to stand by your man no matter what lip service the politician and the party provide to supporting women in the workplace -- a la Bill Clinton and those groups who continued to support him in the wake of his sex scandals and his administration's trashing of Monica Lewinsky's reputation to try to discredit her. Yet these folks also wanted Sen. Packwood, who’d voted “correctly” on women’s issues, booted from the Senate because he was a Republican, and conservative Clarence Thomas' nomination not to be confirmed to the Supreme Court in light of Anita Hill's testimony.

On the flip side, conservatives who vigorously went after Clinton on issues of character after the Monica Lewinsky scandal (and the Paula Jones one and the Juanita Broaddrick one came to light) are defending GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain and calling the allegations nothing more than a sleazy smear. This sure sounds familiar.

I don’t know whether the allegations against Cain are true. I do know that the organization which he used to run handed two women who claimed he’d sexually harassed them some nice walking away money (one woman got a year’s salary, according to the New York Times). There are now rumblings about a third woman who was allegedly harassed by Cain as well.

Cain has denied the charges. (As, you might note, so did Clinton when it came to Lewinsky and as did former Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards when confronted with stories that he got a campaign consultant pregnant and persuaded another staffer to pretend to be the father of the child.) Cain has said he didn’t remember what happened. He said he didn’t really recall if a “settlement” had been paid to the women.

But then we learned that he had allegedly spoken about these allegations with campaign aides in 2004 when he ran for U.S. Senate. Clearly he didn’t really “forget” and was not unaware of a “settlement.” As one political pundit suggested, Cain’s sounding awfully Clintonian. I’m just waiting for him to say it all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Notes on Politics: Cain's Odd Smoke-Filled Campaign Ad, Rich Getting Super-Rich & Gotta See 'Margin Call'

What are We to Make of This . . . Cain’s Campaign Blowin’ Smoke?

There has been a lot of buzz about GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain’s sudden rise in the polls, in at least one of them he has, shockingly, topped front runner Mitt Romney.

And while we’re trying to figure out when the Herman Cain 9-9-9 apples and oranges bubble is going to burst – I will be utterly astonished if it doesn’t – I’d like to know what in the heck is up with this latest Cain ad featuring his chief of staff literally blowing cigarette smoke at the camera. Seriously, anyone care to venture forth an explanation for the cigarette followed by Cain's Cheshire cat grin? It's baffling. I don't know what it means and it's been bugging me.

Top 1 Percent Saw 275 Percent Increase in Income, CBO Says

A new Congressional Budget Office report says that the top 1 percent of U.S. wage earners have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent over the past 30 years, Politico reported. Politico continued:

“The after-tax income for the highest-income households grew the most out of any group form 1979-2007, the CBO reported. The richest 1 percent of Americans saw a 275 percent growth in household income, while the poorest 20 percent experienced just 18 percent growth . . . The 60 percent in the middle of the income scale saw just under 40 percent growth in after-tax income.”

This provides the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy [Everywhere] protesters with fresh ammo in their objections to the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

Go See ‘Margin Call’

Over the weekend I caught the new “inspired by a true story” film Margin Call, an insiders’ look at what happens when a Wall Street investment firm realizes it has taken on more financial risk than the total worth of the company and decides to sell off investments which they know have no value to unwitting customers in order for the firm to survive. It mixes a little bit of the aura from The Company Men and Up in the Air, as it starts off with mass layoffs at the firm, and also has the intelligent tension of the HBO drama Too Big To Fail.

It provides an unflinching look at the 2008 financial meltdown from the perspective of folks from inside one firm who are making decisions which they know will have a wide-reaching impact only most of them only care about what happens to themselves. While moral questions are raised, many immoral, greedy answers are provided, as some folks who aspire to do the “right” thing – which isn’t always clear – find themselves trapped within the confines of the framework of today’s financial world and believe they have no good choices. This whole financial mess, it’s complicated and ugly. But, then again, we already knew that.

Meet Me in the Political Middle: Commentary on the 2012 Race

When it comes to politics, I can be found all over the map depending on the issue.

On some matters, I lean toward the left, on others toward the right. I’ve voted for Democrats and for Republicans. I vote the person, not the party. I vote on character and policies, not on partisan litmus tests. I don’t believe that one of the two main political parties is entirely evil and hell bent on wrecking the nation while the other has only the noblest, best intentions for the United States in mind. No one party corners the market on the most ethical, intelligent, reasonable and pragmatic solutions to the nation’s problems. They’ve both got gigantic flaws and lunatics in their ranks.

There are some politicians who are Democrats and some who are Republicans whom I admire and have enormous respect. There are crazies on both ends of the political spectrum – on the far left and far right of both parties – who try to push their presidential (gubernatorial) candidates and legislative leaders to the outer wings during primaries, rendering the candidates, in the end, looking like unbalanced hypocrites when they turn around and seek to claim the middle, moderate ground during the general election because that’s where the undecided voters reside. (Those folks on either ends of the extremes are likely going to vote party line in the general election, while those who are more moderate could go either way.)

The tactics of our political parties make our candidates behave worse, not better. The parties pressure well intentioned officials to support bills in which they actually don’t believe, to give lip service to issues with which they don’t agree. If an elected official dares to go rogue on his or her party and defy the demands of the party leaders, the fierce partisans and political establishment mete out punishment in the form of party-funded opponents in the primary, of being stripped of one’s seat on legislative committees and of one’s district suddenly seeing public monies evaporate, all as a penalty for not towing the party line. Politicians in our system have a very difficult time remaining true to themselves because not only are they expected to do what the establishment and the party leaders want them to do, but because there are also powerful, wealthy lobbying groups who wield tremendous influence and power over the process (by not making hefty campaign contributions or by throwing support behind a rival candidate, etc.) if they’re dissatisfied.

This makes those of us who find ourselves in the political middle disillusioned with politics and the political process. Watching the primary candidates reach out to the extremists, moderates frequently feel alienated. It’s only when the general election rolls around and the candidates stop staking out positions on the far left or right and try to say, “Hey, I’m in the middle with you guys too” that people who might be a little liberal and a little conservative depending on the issue feel as though the politicians are finally speaking their language. But once that person is elected, he or she is forced to become partisan again because partisanship seems to be the only way of doing business these days.

A confession: I used to hold pretty partisan positions when I was in college. I did not take the time to listen to the other side. I saw the world as fairly black-and-white and invoked lazy caricatures of those folks who lived on the politically polar opposite plain than I did at the time. Then I gradually started to let go of the angry partisanship which marked my college years and actually began listening to the whole spectrum of ideas. Then, after an incident made me feel as though I’d been sold out by the political party to which I was registered, I angrily switched sides (my husband was stunned). In the last few years, however, I’ve started to realize that maybe I’m not a one side of the aisle type of gal after all. I am, indeed, somewhere in the middle.

Just this week, for the first time since I was 18 years old, I unenrolled from all political parties because I’ve had enough. I’m hardly alone (despite the fact that those who reside on the sanctimonious, narrow-minded edges of both political parties say that being an independent moderate means you’re wishy-washy). Earlier this month, pollsters from Rasmussen Reports found that, “The numbers of Americans who are not affiliated with either major political party has reached the highest level ever, as the number of Democrats has reached an all-time low.” In fact, the American electorate is roughly divided into thirds when it comes to party registration, according to Rasmussen:

• 33.5 percent are Republicans
• 33 percent are Democrats
• 33.5 percent are not enrolled in a political party

But even among those who are registered with a party, which I was until this week, they aren’t necessarily dogmatic about their party affiliation. Why else was the term “Reagan Democrat” invented?

This is why a group like No Labels, which calls upon us to ditch the “hyper-partisanship” which “dominates today’s political debates” and seek out moderate solutions, is so appealing to me. Yes, the organization seems very Mr. Smith Goes to Washington idealistic as it aspires to prompt elected officials to be reasonable, given that reasonableness is anathema to partisans and pols who are posturing themselves for re-election and want to look “tough.” But at least it doesn’t represent unthinking, unbending lockstep partisanship that sacrifices the common good at the altar of party unity.

So for the duration of the 2012 presidential election season, I will be periodically weighing in on events from my new post, smack dab in the unenrolled middle, where at least a third of the rest of you reside. I’ll continue to listen to both conservative and liberal radio shows and watch conservative and liberal TV talk shows. (All the better if they’re combined in one like Morning Joe, which features conservative Joe Scarborough and liberal Mika Brzezinski and doesn’t demonize all Democrats or all Republicans.) I will continue to cast a skeptical eye on all politicians’ assertions and assignments of blame for this crisis or that one. And I’ll do my best to try to look at the issues from here in the political middle. I hope you’ll join me.

Image credit: No Labels.

Notes on Politics: With the First REAL GOP Debate, Election 2012 Kicks Off

In my house, the first well attended Republican debate on CNN got short shrift because we were all watching the Boston Bruins playoff game, though I watched highlights of the debate later. (It did indeed pain this political junkie to miss watching the debate live.)

Didn't think this was CNN's John King's most shining moment, but with the debate I think we can safely say that the 2012 presidential election is finally under way. Which of course means that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart has to take aim and satirize the crap out of it. And man, did he have some fat targets. This is going to be one weird election.