October Topics
October 25th, 2006Tennessee, my favorite Southern state, is playing host to a Senate race that may control the balance of power in said body. Harold Ford, the black Democratic candidate, was leading quite thoroughly and still is, but in an attempt to cut into his lead, Republican groups are running a “racist ad”.
In the ad, a blond white woman brags, “I met Harold at the Playboy party.” At the end she looks into the camera, holds her hand like a telephone and says, “Harold, call me,” before winking. The line is an apparent reference to Ford’s attendance at a Playboy Super Bowl party in Jacksonville, Fla., last year. “I was there. I like football, and I like girls,” Ford said Tuesday. “I don’t think they’re doing it to talk about the goodness of me or the goodness of my opponent,” Ford said. “They want to scare people about me.”
Call me dumb, but I don’t quite get it. Is the message here that, “Hey, he might appeal to your political senses, but he has sex with White women. How could you vote for that?” If Ford loses (though I don’t believe he will), is that because voters figure that they can vote for a black man provided he has nothing to do with white women? Wow, this is a humdinger of a political move!
About a month ago (and I talked about it here), Karl Rove talked about an October Surprise waiting for Democrats, and I dismissed the idea. This week, and today, the President has dropped “stay the course” from his rhetoric. Bill Frist, meanwhile, is telling Republicans to avoid Iraq on the campaign trail and focus on domestic issues. Democrats, on the other side, are talking tough on terrorism and charging Bush with failure while calling for, well, nothing. Somehow, I don’t think Rove’s October Surprise is quite the Earthquake that Mark Foley’s was.
For those of you wondering what a Democratic Congress may look like, let me say that from my point of view, it won’t be too pretty in the House, at least, because Nancy Pelosi would head that, and I’m not fond of her. She reminds me of Jeanine Ferraro and that’s not a good thing. But, beside her, there are plenty of good characters in the Democratic House, and this is a good look at one of them.
But the House Energy and Commerce Committee has its fingers in nearly every nook and cranny of the American economy. And for those who complain that the Democrats lack a serious domestic agenda, Dingell, can be expected to single-handedly make up for the gap. Dingell, who has spent slightly more than 50 of his 80 years in Congress, has never been a shrinking violet when it came to the exercise of power - but neither is he a raving ideologue.
Thus in a recent interview he resisted the temptation to gloat over the current polls (or that Republicans in Michigan were unable to come up with a candidate to run against him). “There’s an old saying that before you sell a bear hide you’ve got to shoot the bear,” as he puts it. “The voters usually have their own ideas about these things.”
When pressed, however, he confesses to a lengthy list of initiatives that he has in mind should he once again run the committee that he chaired from 1981 to 1994. For starters, Dingell favors legislation to “reform” health care in incremental steps. His ultimate goal: universal health care along the lines of the Canadian system, an idea his congressman father first introduced in Congress in the late 1930s and that he has re-introduced at the start of each new Congress.
Dingell also supports the idea of a “Manhattan Project” for energy; higher levies on food and drug companies to finance a more active Food and Drug Administration; free access to broadband digital service; an end to “unfair currency manipulation” by Japan and China; and much, much else. Insofar as “oversight, oversight, oversight” is the Democratic mantra of the moment, Dingell makes clear he will provide plenty of that as well.
Who says there’s no hope for the future? Or the St. Louis Cardinals, for that matter.