Like all NYS political parties aiming to keep or attain ballot status for the next four years by obtaining the necessary 50,000 votes cast on its line for Governor, the Working Families Party continues its efforts to sell the public on the idea that a vote cast on its line for Governor will “Send a Message.”
In the last few days, I’ve documented efforts by the Party to sell the public that a vote for WFP will “Send a Message” to stop the Brooklyn Bridge Park plan and stop the sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village; doubtless there are other local causes as well (“a vote for WFP will send a message that we need a new backstop on the baseball diamond at Orienta Point Park”). More globally we are told that a vote for WFP will send a message for “real campaign finance reform” (so the WFP can score more of what its blog calls “first amendment victories” when they get court rulings which gut the enforcement of such laws), “universal health care”, “fair funding for our schools” and “living wage jobs”. However, if the WFP’s mail is any indication, their primary pitch is that a vote on the WFP line for Governor will send a message to “Start Bringing the Troops Home”.
Will someone explain to me how voting for any candidate for “Governor” sends such a message? Especially, when the candidate for Governor in question has categorically stated in a televised debate that he does not favor “Bringing the Troops Home” now. It takes a special kind of contempt for the intellegence of your targetted voters to use a hot-button issue to get them to vote for a candidate who not only can't do anything about it, but doesn't even share their position. It's as if they are asking voters to "Send a Message" to the politicians that they are easy marks for any scam artist who's willing to strum a few choruses of "Joe Hill".
The WFP seems to understand these problems, as its mailing urges that the voter “Vote on the Working Families Party Line” PERIOD, rather than just using the line to vote for Governor. How this affords voters looking to “Send a Message” to “Start Bringing the Troops Home” is also puzzling, since in the one statewide race for an office where the winner might actually have a say on the issue, the WFP, when given the opportunity to support a candidate who wanted to “Start Bringing the Troops Home”, chose instead to endorse a candidate who does not yet hold that position.
Obviously the WFP has found this so problematic that it has had to obfuscate the truth. Thus the piece urging a “Vote on the Working Families Party Line” contains a picture and quote from Cindy Sheehan, who on October 24, 2006 endorsed, for United States Senate, Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins, suggesting that Ms. Sheehan is not quite down with urging the straight WFP vote the piece implies she supports. Moreover, the WFP blog itself reprints, with approval, a piece with this helpful advice, “With…real and justified disappointment among progressives about Clinton's position on the war…for those committed to ending this war, and sending that message loud and clear to Clinton and her fellow-Democrats – show up for this election and vote for Spitzer and WFP candidates in down ballot races.”
I’ll be gentle with Ms. Sheehan, since she’s suffered a tragic loss, but her urging a vote for the Green Party for any office suggests that she has politics many being seduced by the WFP would find problematic. Let’s just remember that the Green Party’s very existence directly lead to the George W. Bush presidency, and thus to the war we now seek to end.
Along with Ms. Sheehan, the WFP piece features pictures of, and quotes from, two more “heroic” figures, Pete Seeger and Michael Moore. Since I had a grandmother who was a fellow traveler, "Pink bleeding Red”, I don’t care to redbait romantic 30s Communists. During the 30s, the Communist Party was often one of the few courageous voices willing to stand up for causes like racial justice. But that romance ended for most decent people in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler collaborated on the invasion of Poland. However, Seeger drank his Stalinist Kool-Aid lock, stock and barrel, so that, in 1941, he was still busy serving Hitler’s useful idiot “Uncle Joe” by recording Stalinist pro-Isolationist propaganda like “Songs for John Doe”, which features a song in FDR's voice where he sings "I hate war and so does Eleanor, and we won't be safe till everybody's dead", which I'm sure had em rolling in the aisles at meetings of the German-American Bund. Seeger is a decent man, who served in the forefront of many good causes, but I think I’ll get my political advice from those who didn’t make common cause with facist fellow travellers like Charles Lindbergh.
As to Michael Moore, let me reprint some of his greatest hits:
MICHAEL MOORE ON GORE:
"The equation is, a vote for Bush is a vote for Bush. Right. A vote for Gore, who supports the death penalty, and NAFTA, and WTO, and won't support universal healthcare immediately, that is a vote for Bush. A vote for Gore is a vote for Bush; that is the new equation. A vote for Nader is a political Molotov that we need to throw into a corrupt and bankrupt system filled with its dirty money. We need to do this right now folks. We need to do this. It is a wasted vote if you vote for more of the same, which is what you get with Gore or Bush."
"I want Ralph Nader to get millions of votes on Tuesday. I have seen the response to Ralph at numerous huge rallies across the country. There is a progressive movement afoot in America and it needs to explode into a majority movement — beginning now, not four years from now."
“I will not feel one iota of guilt should you screw up and lose on Tuesday. The blame I do share is that I voted for you and Bill in 1992. And I have spent the last 8 years doing what I could, in my own small ways, to try and stop the hemorrhaging that your administration caused."
MICHAEL MOORE ON ISRAEL:
“Of course many Israeli children had died too, at the hands of the Palestinians. You would think that would make every Israeli want to wipe out the Arab world, but the average Israeli does not have that response. Why? Because IN THEIR HEARTS, THEY KNOW THEY ARE WRONG, AND THEY KNOW THEY WOULD BE DOING JUST WHAT THE PALESTINIANS ARE DOING IF THE SANDAL WERE ON THE OTHER FOOT.”
“Hey, here’s a way to stop suicide bombings – give the Palestinians a bunch of missile-firing Apache helicopters and let them and the Israelis go at each other head to head. Four billion dollars a year to Israel – four billion dollars a year to the Palestinians – they can just blow each other up and leave the rest of us the hell alone.”
“Now I’m not just talking about your everyday anti-Semites. No, I’m talking about a perceived notion that we Americans are supporting Israel in its oppression of the Palestinian people. Now where did those Arabs come up with an idea like that? Maybe it was when the Palestinian child looked up in the air and saw and American Apache helicopter firing a missile into his baby sister’s bedroom just before she was blown into a hundred bits.”
“It’s all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton.”
MICHAEL MOORE ON TERRORISM:
“there is no terrorist threat in this country. This is a lie. This is the biggest lie we’ve been told.”
MICHAEL MOORE ON KOSOVO:
“We know Clinton is lying to us. We know there is no "Holocaust" taking place”
“What a sad, pathetic man Bill Clinton is. Though many have criticized him for dodging the draft, I actually admired the fact that he refused to go and kill Vietnamese. Not all of us from the working class had that luxury, and tens of thousands of our brothers died for absolutely no damn reason. For this "anti-war" President to order such a misguided, ruthless — and, yes, cowardly — attack from the air is a disappointment of massive proportions.”
"Now is the time for all of us to stop Clinton and his disgusting, hypocritical fellow democrats who support him in the war. It is amazing to watch all these "liberal" congress members line up behind the President. In a way, I'm glad it's happening; if only to show the American people there is little difference between the Democrats and the usually war-loving Republicans. aren't you getting a kick watching the Pat Buchanans and the Henry Hydes sounding like pacifists. These politicians can change stripes at the drop of a hat (or bomb) because, ultimately, they are the same animal, participants in a one-party system that tries to foll the people by going by two names ("Democrat" and "Republican")"
MICHAEL MOORE ON AFGHANISTAN:
"Declare war?" War against whom? One guy in the desert whom we can never seem to find? Are our leaders telling us that the most powerful country on earth cannot dispose of one sick evil f—wad of a guy? Because if that is what you are telling us, then we are truly screwed. If you are unable to take out this lone ZZ Top wannabe, what on earth would you do for us if we were attacked by a nation of millions? For chrissakes, call the Israelis and have them do that thing they do when they want to get their man! We pay them enough billions each year, I am SURE they would be happy to accommodate your request…."
MEMO TO DAN CANTOR: Is this a man you really want to rely on for quotes?
Meanwhile, another candidate on the WFP line has also been sending some pretty amazing mail. When we last saw Ken Diamondstone, he was losing a race for State Senate with a very respectable 45% of the vote after spending close to a million dollars, most of it his own money. After the election, Ken went around and was publicly quoted complaining he had had to tap into his retirement funds, a serious issue when one is 66.
So imagine voters’ surprise when Ken, still running on the WFP line, sent out a expensive, full color, six page flyer. It is one thing to bet the retirement funds on a race that appears to be winnable. But spending what must be a copious amount of dough in a high turnout general election on an unwinnable race is clearly an act of selfless principal, monumental egomania or a combination of both.
Given how few races in the City are seriously contested in general elections, Ken is to be congratulated for offering the voter’s a real choice, even though I suspect that many of Ken’s supporters are the sort of folks who’ve been complaining that Joe Lieberman did not respect the results of the primary (hell, I’m the sort of folk who’s been complaining that Joe Lieberman did not respect the results of the primary). Maybe we can call Ken “Ned Lamont’s Revenge”.
I have just one complaint about the piece. It says that, in the primary, Diamondstone “defeated Connor throughout most of the Brooklyn portion of the district by an astounding 62% to 38%”.In actuality, Connor carried Brooklyn 3864 to 3,806, with two write-in votes going to Tracy Boyland. This is not 62%, it is 49%.
How does Diamondstone get from 49 to 62? Well, one of the neighborhoods of the district is Hasidic Williamsburg; if one subtracts the votes from that area from the total Brooklyn vote, Diamondstone does indeed win 62% of the remaining votes.
And why should those people’s votes count anyway?
NOTE: In response to complaints, I feel compelled to correct my statement that there is only one objectionable assertion made by Diamondstone in the piece in question; in actuality it is full of inaccuracies. I further note for the record that, after the election, Diamondstone campaign consultant Lonnie Paris admitted in front of at least one witness that he and his team had made up outright lies and printed them in Diamondstone's literature as if they were facts.