Cheryl Katz

Eight years ago today, I took the subway back from my then-boyfriend’s apartment in Manhattan, writing bitter poetry about Inauguration Day on my palm the whole way home.  I tuned in to the swearing-in of George W. Bush with tears fluctuating between standing in and pouring from my eyes.

This was way before I ever engaged in politics – I voted, and that was the extent of it – and yet even I knew that things were not going to be good.

Well, I’m sitting here tearing up into my coffee again for entirely different reasons, as I listen to the ceremony on NPR.

Yesterday I picked up my friend’s 5-year-old daughter from school, and she showed me a coloring project she’d done to commemorate Martin Luther King on his holiday.  She told me that she thought he was a very smart man, and that she was really sad that someone killed him – and that if he were alive, she would have let him in her house to protect him from the people who wanted to kill him.  She doesn’t care that he (or anyone, she was clear) is black.

I guess what’s bringing me to tears today is the hope that the inauguration of President Obama is a sign that you don’t have to be 5 years old to know that judging someone by skin color is dumb.

Well, this is it.  This is our moment of hope – a threshold between the reality of national politics that for some has been a continuous string of nightmares, and the future filled with all the hope and change we’ve been waiting for – and all the things that we don’t know yet.  I feel confident that things can only get better from here.

They are swearing him in now – and I’m crying again.  I know that 8 years from now I’ll laugh at my silly tears instead of seeing them as foreboding of what was to come.  Since I’m stuck for words in an emotional torrent right now, I will just say in the words of my daugter Sami, who is wise beyond her tiny years:  YAY BAMA!

When Barack Obama was born, in some places his parents’ relationship was illegal.

What a long way we have come in one man’s lifetime.

A first generation, mixed race black man will be the next President of the United States.  Truly, now every child can grow up knowing that anyone can grow up to be president.

Sami was at an election returns watching party with me, and she kept saying “YAY BAMA!” and clapping or shaking keys after the projected Obama victory was announced.  And I just think of how much better a world this is going to be for her.  And I’ve been teary ten times in the last hour.  I can hardly believe it.

This has been the best birthday ever.  Thank you to everyone who helped chip in for the only thing I really wanted for my birthday.

I wonder what it will be like one day, when Sami learns that there was a time when women weren’t allowed to vote, when black people were possessions of white people.  (I wonder what she’ll think when she learns that there are many people who don’t believe that gay people should have the right to marry under the law (regardless of what any individual faith believes.  I hope that by the time Sami is old enough to understand these issues that it won’t be an issue any more.)

We just elected a black man to be president, not because he is black but because he is better.  He won by enough of a margin that it’s clear his appeal goes beyond just the black American vote.  I couldn’t be prouder of my country than I am right now, that more of the same is not an acceptable choice, that race didn’t become the deciding factor, that (heaven forbid!) we need a president so much better educated, polished and smarter than we are that we believe he can lead this country better.

I told Sami that this is easily the best thing that’s happened in her short lifetime, possibly the best thing that will happen to her for a long time.  I have hope that President Obama will help to heal the wounds America had brought about in this world, and will restore America’s status as a positive force in the world.  It won’t be perfect and it won’t be easy, but I truly believe that, like Lincoln, he will fully consider the opinions of adversaries and make deep and studied decisions.

The icing on my perfect birthday cake would be a sound defeat of Proposition 8.  It boggles the mind that people aren’t happy with the rights of their institutions of faith to decide individually to refuse to marry gay people, but need there to be laws prohibiting it.  No matter what my views on gay marriage, I believe that every citizen should have equal rights under the law.  Prop 8 is a vile infusion of religious values into the California state constitution, and not religious values shared by everyone in the state.  I sincerely hope it fails so resoundingly that it never returns.

I want to give Sami a better world, And no matter the outcome of Prop 8, I know that I cast my vote to benefit her.  As I was putting her down to sleep, I couldn’t help choking up over tears of joy listening to President-elect Obama’s victory speech.

Sami hugged me tight and said, “It’s ok, Momma.”

I told her, “Yes, it is.”

BBC NEWS | Americas | 106-year-old voter chooses Obama.

This is as close as we’ll get to a confirmation of the divine endorsement Obama (“the One”) has seemed to have.

OK, well actually it just made me smile.  Yay voting!  (Especially for Obama.)

Last night Ben and I watched clips of Senators Obama and McCain roasting each other at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner.  Both of them were absolutely hilarious, but to be perfectly honest, McCain’s was funnier.  Maybe he’s just had more experience working in comedy, maybe he’s just a funnier guy (perhaps his whole calamity campaign was really a big misunderstood joke?)

What struck me about McCain’s roast was how genuine and good natured it seemed.  It was a tone I haven’t seen in his campaign, but wish I had.  He also spoke honestly and non-comedically about the accomplishments of Obama, a gesture that was so poignant that it made the comedic parts seem even funnier.  It was a nod to the very real possibility that he will lose, and a very graceful move.

It reminded me of the John McCain who got eaten by the Bush-Rove machine in 2000.  It gave me a glimpse of what people liked about the (more) moderate, decent-seeming guy who ran an honest campaign and got his ass handed to him by a dirty smear campaign.  And if we’d seen more grace like that in his campaign (or a different running mate), perhaps he wouldn’t be lagging so soundly in the polls right now.

But instead he ran a campaign that resorted really early in the game to tactics like this:

TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Latest McCain Robocall Alleges That Obama Denied Babies Medical Care.

It’s TPM, so clearly there’s a leftish bias behind the reporting, but they have audio of the call and it is appalling.  Even after the “campaign reboot” it’s the same old BS, a twisting of facts in attempt to smear Obama.

It doesn’t surprise me, exactly, but the juxtaposition of the two McCains is just really disturbing.

Oh well; on to Election Day!

Obama is leading in every national poll now by at least 8%.  FiveThirtyEight.com has his chance of victory at over 95%. I think many signs look optimistic for an Obama victory on November 4 (my birthday!  Guess what I would like for my birthday….)

So why am I (still) afraid to feel hopeful about this year’s presidential election?

Hate speech has become a scary but real part of the McCain-Palin rallies.  McCain made one reserved effort to set his supporters straight about Obama, saying he was “not someone to be afraid of as President.”  But supporters are still yelling, “Kill him!” at Palin speeches, and the incidents go unrebuked.

Race is clearly still a factor in this campaign.  I thought we had effectively moved on from it after the whole Reverend Wright saga of the summer, but it has come back, and uglier than ever.

I know that the people yelling slurs – hell, the people who attend rallies at all, especially to see Sarah Palin – are wingnuts who are coming out to see someone with views as extreme as their own.  Somehow, this doesn’t help me feel more settled about the whole thing.

I came across this idea of the Bradley Effect.  It hadn’t occurred to me, and yet makes some sense, that polls might not indicate the way people will actually vote, when race is a factor in a campaign, because who would want to admit out loud to a pollster that they are racist?  I really think that far more people have racist thoughts than are willing to admit to them – which in a sense is good; it’s good to have a filter on racist behaviour!  And yet, not so much at the polls.  However, a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post questions whether the Bradley Effect ever really existed at all.

Whether or not it is a real factor, it certainly does seem plausible.  People can be scary and unreasonable about issues like race.  And I am so scared that if enough people are lying, all the polls could be reversed.

I read a good piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s hard sell to working class white people.  It goes to show how far removed even I am from a working-class mentality that it would never occur to me to be suspicious of Barack Obama’s pledged policies because they seemed too good to be true.  The first case study featured is a woman who works two jobs to support herself and her nieces, for whom she is the primary caretaker.  She specifically was suspicious of his tax plan, saying that the $250,000 threshold for the higher tax rate seemed like “someone who had won the lottery” and that she thought eventually that threshold would be lowered.

At another section of the article, Packer quotes a lifelong Democrat and former Hillary supporter as saying, “I really don’t want an African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

I have never understood racism.  I wasn’t raised in a bubble, in a fantasy world with no biases, but I was raised to treat people with basic respect.  So I not only can’t fathom not wanting to vote for a qualified candidate who happens to be black, but I can’t fathom extending my fear to the possibility that he might seek retribution for previous generations’ grievances on behalf of an entire demographic of our country.

We don’t know anything for absolutely sure yet, I think, about the state of hatred in this country.  I want to believe, and I hope, that America is a country that can elect a black man to be President.  I’m a little petrified about what happens if we aren’t ready, and it’s McCain-Palin sworn in on 1-21-09.

So here’s hoping that the white working class can cast off any remaining doubts, if not that Obama is the perfect solution, then that he is by far more on their side than McCain is.  And here’s hoping that the polls outstandingly in Obama’s favor speak for real progress in American “race” relations.  (“Race” because… we are one human race.)

Come on, America – let’s do this one right.

I know I’m a card-carrying Liberal with a capital L and all that jazz, but when I try to keep up with top stories by using Digg’s politics page and Reddit, it really irks me that all the political stories appear to be left-leaning.

Specifically, I’m tired of weeding through piles of Huffington Post articles, which are generally opinion pieces posted as news.  I like my slanted liberal feeds as much as the next leftie, but for the love I would actually like to know how conservatives view the news as well.  (There has to be something out there besides Fox News.)

Is this because Internet users tend to lean left, and therefore to be expected of any user-driven content engine?

Where do you go when you want either balanced, or biased in a right-leaning way, news?

$700 billion…  and it’s not working….

I haven’t posted since the markets went to hell because, truthfully, I don’t really understand what is happening.  I understand only in basic basic terms, but I can’t take an 18% stock market crash and turn it into information about how my experience or anyone’s experience feels the impact.  Perhaps it’s too soon for the real effects to get to the individual level.

So, global economic crisis.  John McCain thinks more deregulation and more oversight are the correct response to this.  Obama thinks oversight is a good response.  I agree with Obama, but only to the extent that I really understand what’s going on.  Which is not much.  It seems that there should be checks in place to make sure that risk is being appropriately analyzed before banks do major things – but you’d think that the free market would actually encourage such a thing. It seems like any business enterprise would be well served to research its transactions, examine the credit of loan applicants, check out the security of the mountains of loans it wants to buy, BEFORE entering into these transactions.  Call me crazy.

Did government intervention really bring huge financial institutions to give risky loans to risky borrowers without concern for the risks involved?  And even if the government pushed for loans to be more widely and riskily available to credit-unworthy applicants, then did government make banks buy packages of risky loans from other lenders without fully examining the risks?  I don’t think so, but I really don’t know for sure.

It seems to me the answer is reasonable but not excessive government oversight of business?  My husband asks me, where is the line?  And that’s a good question.  I’ve been getting twisted and feeling ill trying to figure out how to answer that very question.  It seems like regulatory conditions are set as a reaction to past events, not in any kind of forward-looking way.  It also does seem like in some ways, regulations can be harmful because they allow businesses to stop thinking about what is safe, or what is best for consumers and instead to focus on what they CAN do within the scope of regulation.

*sigh*  I’m getting a headache and upset just trying to talk about this.  I have no vocabulary for economics.

It occurred to me, what if voting for Obama IS the wrong answer for the economy?  I don’t know, but I don’t think this is the case.  It’s possible that he will attempt to implement too much regulation, but this seems like a better answer than McCain’s “deregulate!” response.

Take the economy out of the picture (this takes a big imagination, but anyway…) and of course I’ll vote for Obama.  (This is not seriously in question, but the subject of the economy is so abstract for me that I had to examine the possibility that Obama might not have the answer.)  I agree with most of Obama’s policies, and on the one area I really don’t understand, I think his solution sounds more reasonable.  So… I rest on my previous decision.

And that’s about all I can write on the subject.  I will now return to my previous state of confused silence.  Good day!

If John McCain really knows how to get Osama bin Laden, then why doesn’t he share this info with the people who can go do it RIGHT NOW?

“Country First” is some BS when you have this great and valuable information and will only share it if and when elected.

That is all.