Democracy for Vancouver

I’d very much like to give him a piece of my mind.

I was born on Long Island, just a few train stops from Hofstra University. If all you know of Long Island comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald (or Paris Hilton), that strip of expensive real estate may seem like a giant McMansion tract. But when I was born in Garden City in 1965, Long Island was home to the kind of skilled blue-collar workers that used to be the meat of the middle class in this country. Small, neat homes on 40′x100′ lots in neighborhoods clustered around the 1920s answer to the strip mall: a Main Street of mom & pop butcher shops, pharmacies, hair salons, and family-owned gas station-garages.

John McCain has been instrumental in not only destroying those kind of good, skilled, middle-class jobs, but also in the deregulation that has made Long Island and every other near-in New York City suburb completely unaffordable for those making working-class or even middle-class incomes at jobs in the City that are now rapidly disappearing.

And now, at the tail end of a month of economic turbulence not seen since my grandparents were first getting their little piece of the American dream in a sweet little brick bungalow in Garden City, with its niche on the landing for the Virgin Mary and the bottle of Lourdes Holy Water (which I once took a sip of in a fit of 5-year-old mischievous curiosity - sorry, Mum), John McCain comes to Long Island to “whip” Barack Obama not with cogent plans to get us disentangled from Iraq or this economic mess, or deal with health care or unemployment.

This is what John McCain brings to the table: an anti-war activist whose crimes - never prosecuted, by the way - are 40 years in the past, and a Mickey Mouse voter registration form.

Today in Portland, 1,000 Freightliner employees, white-collar number crunchers and blue-collar truckbuilders alike, learned that parent-company Daimler will be moving their jobs to Mexico in 2010 - thanks, John McCain, to NAFTA and all the other free-trade garbage you have unquestioningly supported during your Senate tenure. You also supported tax breaks for corporations like Daimler that moved jobs out of the country. Now, not only will one more manufacturing plant shut its doors, but all of the businesses around Freightliner that depended on those workers for their livelihood - restaurants, shops, barbers - will lose more than half their customer base, and may close, too.

Do you regret the damage that your rampant free-traderism, tax-cutting and deregulation has done to the middle class in this country?

Not at all. Your economic plan: more of the same, with a poisonous cherry on top - more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, reducing capital gains on investment income to just 7.5%.

And as you eviscerate the middle class in this country, how do you explain it to those who you have most hurt, the ones who come to your rallies hoping you are the one to make America great again, to make them feel like the strongest people in the strongest nation on earth? Do you offer them new green economy jobs, or better education for their kids, or relief from the crushing mortgage and credit card debt that eats more and more of their paychecks every month?

No. Instead you point to “That One,” you call your opponent a terrorist, and display only that rictus grin (and certainly no honor) as those desperate to believe in white American exceptionalism - defined perfectly by your substance-less, purely entitlement-based campaign - shout out “traitor” and “kill him.”

You heap scorn on a thirty-year-old community organization, ACORN, whose only goal is to make manifest the Voting Rights Act for those whom your Republican party has disenfranchised at every opportunity, and whose “crime,” you contest, is following federal law by turning over to the rightful authorities each and every voter registration form they receive, dutifully marking those that may be fraudulent.

This country does not need any more of your cynicism, your race-baiting, your voter caging, your desperation, or your lies.

And the only words I want or need to hear out of Barack Obama tonight are those spoken once before in the face of a washed-up politican, without honor, for whom fear-baiting was his last, and only, resort:

“Enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”