What's Wrong With America?

The debate among Democratic candidates for President on Tuesday was especially interesting because it was held before a huge throng of union workers at an AFL-CIO convention, and they were responsible for some of the questions--including some of the best, and the one that is likely to be most remembered.

After standing patiently on his crutches waiting for the microphone, a man later identified as Steve Skavara asked this:

After thirty-four years with LTV Steel, I was forced to retire because of a disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of my pension, and my family lost their healthcare. Every day of my life I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted thirty-six years of her life to my family, and I can't afford to pay for her healthcare. What's wrong with America, and what will you do to change it? (This quote and excerpts from the debate can be found at Democracy Now.)

There are a lot of answers to that question, but if these candidates don't attempt to answer it--both about health care specifically and the larger question about the country--then another answer to what's wrong with America will be, our leaders aren't good enough.

The moment was fraught with the reality of one family's life, and how it is shaped by political decisions--in this case the decisions not to do what every other advanced nation in the West does and make getting medical care a right, and not to keep corporations from their outrageous robbing of workers, by not even keeping faith with their own obligations. When he finished his question, with tremulous voice, the stadium erupted in cheers--the shared pain of the non-rich super-majority, victimized by the faceless persons called corporations and their super-rich masters.

The moment was such that reporter Jonathan Alter turned to his sons with him in the stadium and said, "This is not sports." As he explained on Countdown, he meant that while the media likes to maintain one sports analogy or another--the horserace, or the boxing match (and everybody from the big dailies to the Huffington Post online glories in the conflict drama, saying "the gloves are off" when the candidates disagree with each other)--this was a reminder that what's going on here has real world consequences, for people who live but one brief life.

As for the debate itself, it was notable also an opportunity to see candidates try to appeal to the people there even more than the TV audience. Not too many people watch these debates, but the unions are important in Democratic politics and the AFL-CIO endorsement is worth a lot ( though none of them in the end got it, at least not yet.) Hillary had possibly the best (and perhaps most calculated line) when she told them that she'd been fighting the right wing for a long time and if they want a proven leader "I'm your girl." She also had the worst line, destined to haunt her, when she suggested that candidates should not say everything that they think. This will easily be twisted into having her say that candidates should not say what they really think.

Other impressions are just that, from those that agree with the babbleheads (that John Edwards may have lost his best chance to be a serious contender by not performing well--and being outperformed by Dennis Kucinich) and those that are perhaps more my own (I can't stand Hillary's hit man Wolfson, who Chris Matthews brought on in the so-called analysis afterwards, actually a pointless exercise of candidates' surrogates debating.)

The truth is that nothing means very much in terms of winners and losers until the first ballots are cast in Iowa (or wherever the first caucus or primary turns out being), and then they mean just about everything. Only Obama and Hillary can afford to lose even one of the early contests, but Obama must win several. If he does--if he starts with the first win and rolls on for awhile--then the big gap in the current national polls won't mean much. Probably unfortunately for the process, it looks like people will be so anxious, and so sick of this already long campaign, that the fate of the world may hinge on what happens in a few days or a couple of weeks with a relatively small number of votes. In this regard, it's worse than sports, where championships are decided in a more orderly way, with a series of playoffs and/or a series of final games. If only we would take elections as seriously.