Will Students Get Out the Vote for President Obama?

This was one of the articles I saved from my New York Times news feed for comment:

Students Lose Enthusiasm to Fight For Obama Again

This may be true but only a problem if students don’t vote, but I think they will.  Many students and recent graduates are involved in the various Occupy Movements.  They may have lost their enthusiasm for the President, but who else would they vote for?  Certainly not any of the front running Republican candidates.  The corporate pizza guy, Herman Cain, said of the Occupy participants: “they are trying to destroy the greatest nation in the world.”  Gingrich declared them “destructive, hostile and anti-civilization”.  Mitt Romney argues that corporations are people, with rights, and presumably feelings too, a stance that will surely not garner many Occupy Movement votes.  I don’t think Ron Paul cares a thing in the world about income inequality, but he has gone on record as supporting the protesters if they are against “crony capitalism”.  While the Occupy Movement would like to dismantle practices that have led to the growing disparity of wealth in this country, Ron Paul would like to dismantle the government.  I don’t think this is what Occupy folk have in mind.

As Laura Flanders asserted on Up with Chris Hayes today, if the Occupy Movement is going to be as successful as the Tea Party, they need to start backing political candidates to take the fight to Congress.  And I assert that otherwise, all that youthful energy, the camping out, the sign making, the demonstrations, proclamations and organized chants, the arrests, the occupations, will have all been for naught.

 

Near, not at Ground Zero

I was watching the CBS Early show this morning.  One of the stories they led with was President Obama’s comments on the mosque controversy at Ground Zero and top democrat Harry Reid’s break with the President on the issue.  Bay Buchanan was one of the guests and argued that Ground Zero is hallowed ground and that most Americans don’t want a mall or a casino built there.   She really said that.

What’s being lost in the discussion  is that this planned Islamic cultural center is actually not at Ground Zero, but near it.  It couldn’t be at Ground Zero anyway because the 911 Memorial and Museum is currently under construction there.

The last I checked, the first amendment to the U.S. constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religion.  But the controversy is not really about religion, it is about fear, and misplaced blame and at its extreme, discrimination and racism.  And it is being politicized on both sides – Harry Reid on the left and the Republicans who have weighed in and will try to make it a divisive cultural issue.  And the birthers will use Obama’s support of the proposal as proof that he is a Muslim.

911 was a tragic event.  The national psyche was damaged and has not yet healed and may never.  And while I am not blaming anyone, I am surprised that it has taken so long to build a proper 911 memorial at Ground Zero.  I think had one been built already, there wouldn’t be much of a controversy over a development project such as the Islamic cultural center.

Hugo Wants Press Not Peace

President Obama and Hugo Chavez, the photo hungry egomaniacal former Lieutenant Colonel and current President of Venezuela (for life it seems) met twice at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad.  According to the Newsweek Blog The Gaggle, President Obama introduced himself to Chavez and reportedly said “¿Como estas?” Later as a meeting of the Union of South American nations was about to begin, Chavez presented President Obama a book highly critical of the history of  U.S. and European foreign policy and colonialism in the region in a obvious ploy for press attention.  Obama later said jokingly that he thought the book was one that Chavez had written himself and that he should have given him his own book in return.  The history book entitled Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, or the Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano has been translated into English.  If Chavez had really intended Obama to read the book, he would have presented the translated version.  Obama neither reads nor speaks Spanish.  What is clear is that President Chavez was simply grandstanding.  The book itself does not bother me.  In fact, it is probably a good read and contains a Latin American perspective on the history of colonial domination that American policy makers and diplomats should understand.   It is a book that I would like to read.

If I could present a book to Obama, it would be Howard Zinn‘s classic work,  A People’s History of the United States.

An interesting side note:  The host country of the Summit is Trinidad and Tobago, the birthplace of Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul who writes of the damaging effects of colonial domination on the colonized.

In retrospect, I think Obama should not have accepted the book because it was clearly intended to embarrass him and the U.S.  Back in the early stages of the presidential debates, then Senator Hillary Clinton said that she did not want to be used as propaganda by enemy leaders and would not just sit down with Hugo Chavez or the Iranian President without some preconditions.   Maybe the preconditions for President Obama’s attendance at the Summit should have been “no gifts”.