Editorials

What’s nice about taking a midwinter break is that it provides an opportunity to poll the delegation: to inquire of the citizenry about what’s on their minds. Holiday parties are great for taking informal surveys, discretely of course. The best thing about residents of the urban East Bay is that they rarely agree on much, so when they do, it’s news. 

First, the local returns: nobody, no-where, likes the multi-story condos that are popping up everywhere. Some just don’t like them, period. Others, more judicious, would like to see more affordable housing, but think that market-rate units (translation: cheap construction, expensive price) are sucking up all the available building sites. This is the word on the street in Richmond, El Cerrito and Oakland, as well as in Berkeley, and it’s also true in San Francisco (check out the latest San Francisco Bay Guardian and Beyond Chron on the internet for documentation.)  

There’s a strong undercurrent of muttering among the chattering classes about what they perceive as the skewed relationship between taxes and services on the local level. Those who watch such things are aware that pay for municipal administrators is already high and continues to go up, and yet the level of services received by the taxpayers continues to go down. They see public employees with too much time on their hands getting embroiled in senseless neighbor disputes like so many nannies, and yet complainers note that their authentic crime reports are often shrugged off by the authorities, sometimes with excuses about understaffing.  

Berkeleyans are plenty mad at the University of California, as are residents of El Cerrito and Richmond, who also live near branches of the UC fiefdom. They’ve finally started to notice that the uglier aspects of the no-longer-lovely UC Berkeley campus are metastasizing into their pleasant urban neighborhoods. Some are threatened by the toxic legacy of years of the University of California’s devil-may-care experimentation. And many of these angry citizens are UC alumni, faculty and/or employees embarrassed by Alma Mater’s licentious behavior. Some are even football fans. They all pay taxes to support UC. 

When the talk turns to the world outside Lake Wobegon, the overwhelming consensus is that a Democrat really has to win the next presidential election. Where there’s no perceptible consensus is about which Democrat should win. Analysis splits along purist and pragmatist lines. The purists argue about which candidate is the best person to do the job of president; pragmatists try to figure out which one has the best chance of beating the Republicans.  

We encountered our old friend the pundit at one holiday gathering, and he’s still advancing his thesis that no one, even an intellectually pretentious Berkeleyan, really does a logical analysis of the positions espoused by the various contenders. He says that voter decision-making is more like a quick Gestalt (does anyone still use that word?)—an impression formed by the way the candidates frame their ideas and project their personalities. The package, he seems to be saying, is everything. 

Chats with the fraction of the local body politic who claim to have made up their minds bear this out. The professor who’s made her reputation since the seventies as an ardent and articulate feminist is staunchly behind Hillary Clinton, not to be distracted by the nitty-gritty details of health plans. Union activists are attracted by Edwards’ populist support for the needs of working people, as are those whose ultimate espousal of the Democratic party was preceded by romantic flings with other parties whose populist rhetoric was even more colorful than Edwards’. Obama supporters, at least the older ones, see him as the present embodiment of the future they’d envisioned when they worked for civil rights in the sixties and seventies. The younger Obama fans look on him as “one of us”—the kind of high-achieving guy they’d like to claim as a friend. Kucinich diehards (yes, there are quite a few of those around here) are the purest of the purists, with a high-minded disdain for any pragmatist’s analysis of electability 

None of these true believers has the slightest need for the kind of issues spreadsheet being proffered by everyone from the New York Times to Grandmothers Against the War. It’s clear that they’ve made their choice on the basis of their candidate’s public persona—with their hearts, not their heads. But advocates like these are still a distinct minority among the chattering classes of the urban East Bay.  

The pragmatic majority is ready to embrace all of these candidates. They would love to be able to combine them: to roll them all into one big ball of Democratic clay from which the sure winner could be sculpted by some party Pygmalion. The dream candidate—let’s just fantasize for a while here—would be a feminist like Clinton, transcend race like Obama, speak up for the little guy like Edwards and have the courage of convictions like Kucinich. But since the composite candidate is not on offer, most pragmatists will settle for any one of them (well, maybe not for Kucinich). Everyone we encountered hopes that the Republicans will continue down the path to self-destruction as per the script, so that whatever Democrat emerges as the official candidate can pick up the pieces. 

The last word on the health of the body politic goes to Ariel, artist and long-time activist extraordinaire. She quipped on New Year’s Day that Americans have two patron saints: Santa Claus and Horatio Alger. I offered her the opportunity to riff on this brilliant line in these pages, but when she didn’t immediately accept the offer, I said that I’d steal it instead.  

Here’s what I think it means: most of us seem to hope and believe that government is there to provide anything and everything we might need or want. That includes cheap mortgages, clean air and water, pure food and drugs, adequate health care—all for free, with no burdensome taxes or annoying regulations needed. And at the same time we want to believe that we’ve somehow earned all this by our own efforts: that’s the Horatio Alger part. (For younger readers, he was a guy who wrote books about earnest young men—always men—who became millionaires through hard work, back in the day when a million dollars represented more than a house in a middle-class part of North Berkeley. )  

This is certainly the vision Republicans have tried to sell to the voters. No American has ever consciously voted in favor of pollution, but many have voted against paying for the government oversight necessary to prevent it. Many poor working people have voted against taxes on the rich because they sincerely believe that some day they’ll be rich too and will want to pass their wealth along to their heirs.  

The challenge for whatever Democratic candidate emerges from the fray is to persuade today’s voters that there’s a reasonable way to use government to provide what they actually need. Polls, both official and informal, consistently show that Americans now think that the country needs and deserves an end to the war in Iraq, decent medical services for everyone and attention to the risks of climate change, but that they don’t have a clear vision of how to reach these goals through electoral politics.  

The ideal candidate for the Democrats would be the one whose public persona demonstrated that the way to meet our needs is to tackle them together, not to rely either on cost-free benefits distributed by an omnipotent government like Santa Claus or on individual bootstrapping a la Alger’s heros. 

It’s what used to be called leadership. 

Franklin Roosevelt was able to provide it, but has anyone since? Or can any one of the current crop of hopefuls pull it off? The upcoming round of primaries might tell the story.