Get on board the Change Train!

On Saturday, Barach Obama took the train west from Philadelphia, stopping in a number of small towns along the way. Crowds of up to 6,000 people waited for him and heard his message.

The day ended in a rally in Harrisburg, where the unofficial estimate of one participant was 10,000.

Here's a great fast slide show of one stop, with a summary of other Obama campaign activities Saturday. Videos from other stops are here and here. I've taken this train route many times--it's beautiful and a lot of fun. Although I never got to pull the train whistle!



Over the past two weeks, every major newspaper in the Commonwealth has endorsed Obama. So has Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers; Bruce Springsteen, former Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sam Nunn and former Senate Intelligence Committee chair David Boren, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group co-chair Lee Hamilton, former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, as well as a number of PA office holders who joined PA Senator Bob Casey (who was on that train today, together with his family) in bucking the Rendell machine, in declaring their independence from the old politics.

Hey, Pennsylvania, your time is now.

The Pennsylvania primary is Tuesday.

Update: Barack Obama closed his Saturday in Harrisburg. This video clip
from that event is one of the better brief
summaries of the core of Obama's message in two and a half minutes.

Obama in Philadelphia

On Friday night, Barack Obama spoke to a crowd officially estimated at 35,000 which may have been tens of thousands more. It was in any case the biggest crowd of the campaign.

These photos show the crowd gathering, and then the event itself.
Obama unveiled a new speech, which has become the template for his closing speeches across PA today.

After the event, some 5,000 participants
went on a spontaneous march through
downtown Philadelphia. One reporter
saw them still at it a mile away. Here's an eyewitness account by a participant.

And I finally figured out what that t-shirt says, worn by the young woman in the middle in the first photo: Muggles for Obama.

Two American Presidents

One was an actor playing a fictional American President in a 1995 movie. The other is running for President for real in 2008. But something that Barack Obama said in that abominable excuse for a debate Wednesday reminded me of the climactic speech in that movie, called The American President--one of my favorite movie moments.

Michael Douglas plays a President towards the end of his first term, looking towards re-election but being attacked by his opponent, Bob Rumson, on the right wing "character" issues familiar in the late 1990s: flag-burning, membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as the main plot point, his girl friend. (He's widowed.) If you substitute wearing a flag-pin, knowing a former 60s radical and a former pastor who made inflammatory statements, you'll see the relevance to Wednesday's debate. Michael Douglas as that fictional President makes his statement towards the end of the movie, when he shows up unexpectedly at a press briefing. I've edited what he said for relevance, and matched it with something Obama said during the debate, both in the post below. You can see the movie speech in full here.

For Serious People

President Andrew Shepherd in An American President (written by Aaron Sorkin, who went on to create The West Wing:)

"Being President of this country is entirely about character...America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You got to want it bad because it's going to put up a fight...

We have serious problems to solve and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson isn't the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who to blame for it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character...

We've got serious problems and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, you better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card. If you want to debate character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when and I'll show up. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up."

Senator Barack Obama, in the Philadelphia debate Wednesday, from the transcript:

I think what's important is to make sure that we don't get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history. We are going to be tackling some of the biggest issues that any president has dealt with in the last 40 years. Our economy is teetering not just on the edge of recession, but potentially worse. Our foreign policy is in a shambles. We are involved in two wars. People's incomes have not gone up, and their costs have. And we're seeing greater income inequality now than any time since the 1920s.

In those circumstances, for us to be obsessed with this -- these kinds of errors I think is a mistake. And that's not what our campaign has been about. What our campaign has been about is offering some specific solutions to how we move these issues forward and identifying the need to change the culture in Washington, which we haven't talked at all about, but that has blocked real reform decade after decade after decade. That, I think, is the job of the next president of the United States. That's what I intend to do. That's why I'm running.

The Earth Does Not Belong To Us

It is a deep difference, expressed in
the saying "The Earth does not belong
to us--we belong to the Earth." This is
a mask by noted Native artist Duane
Pasco, honoring the Tsimshian story
"The Prince and the Salmon People,"
about the adventure of a boy who ultimately
returned to his fellow humans and taught
them how to respect the salmon, and ensure
their return in the future.

What we clearly are not doing is ensuring
the return of the salmon. Here in northern
California, the ban on salmon fishing because
of an acute shortage caused by thoughtless
actions, greed, arrogance and disrespect, and yes--
the Climate Crisis-- is a spiritual as well as
economic disaster. It is only one of many,
and they are happening more and more.
We cannot live without respecting life.
That is one fundamental lesson to remember
on Earth Day.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"It was a question of which way to be useful. It's not useful to be a critic of what is over and done. I was a critic of the future."

A character in Rock N Roll
by Tom Stoppard

The Fierce Urgency of the Climate Crisis

Talk about your fierce urgency of now. We've got no more time to waste. The Climate Crisis is here, and it's causing serious problems. And new studies says it could get a lot worse than previously believed, requiring not a gradual drop in greenhouse gas emissions, but something much closer to an end to them. Soon.

Two studies released last month came to the conclusion that only a goal of near zero carbon emissions would be enough. Then a few days ago came another by scientists that included one of the most prominent and respected climate scientists on the planet, NASA's James Hansen. He called for greater cuts than previously proposed: He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed." His study found that warming would be twice as severe under the old targets than previously estimated.

According to the Guardian story: The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls "slow feedback" mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, the effects of global heating already underway are becoming more critically damaging. On Monday, the World Health Organization warned that millions of people could face poverty, disease and hunger as a result of rising temperatures and changing rainfall expected to hit poor countries the hardest. Right now some long-predicted changes have begun. According to a WHO official: Malaria-carrying mosquitoes represent the clearest sign that global warming has begun to impact human health, he said, adding they are now found in cooler climates such as South Korea and the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

In the Marshall Islands and South Pacific island nations, rising sea levels have already penetrated low-lying areas, submerging arable land and causing migrations to New Zealand or Australia, he added. If it continues, global heating will affect the rest of the world in similar ways. "Without urgent action through changes in human lifestyle, the effects of this phenomenon on the global climate system could be abrupt or even irreversible, sparing no country and causing more frequent and more intense heat waves, rain storms, tropical cyclones and surges in sea level," he said.

Right now a doubling of food prices in many parts of the world is causing riots as well as widespread suffering. The media may report only the "economic" causes of these crises, but the Climate Crisis already contributes to the problems. Right now, according to the UN's emergency relief coordinator the biggest challenge to humanitarian work is climate change, which has doubled the number of disasters from an average of 200 a year to 400 a year in the past two decades.

This will only get worse. Thursday more scientists predicted that droughts and flooding will be more intense and widespread, and could have the greatest impact of any single effect of global heating. All of these effects can cause great political and social chaos, which in turn make matters much, much worse. Drought in Africa is already a major factor in warfare in Darfur and elsewhere. And like direct effects of the Climate Crisis, war can destroy well beyond where it is fought. Especially when so many nations have nuclear weapons, and (as a new study shows) even a regional nuclear war would "cause worldwide havoc for at least a decade" because of what massive fires would do to the ozone layer.

So what can be done? The Climate Crisis future can be addressed with various carbon cap mechanisms, the swift deployment of already developed energy technology to slash greenhouse gases and the development of new technologies, including ways of dealing directly with those gases. No one method or category of action will suffice. Not everything will be successful, and perhaps nothing will. But the test of humanity will be whether or not it dedicates itself to this work.

But besides working to stop ultimate catastrophe in the next century, we must work to fix problems caused by the Climate Crisis in the present and inevitably in the near future, or human civilization will find itself overwhelmed by tragedies, conflicts and chaos. Again, the Climate Crisis in our own time is the test of human civilization and of humanity itself.

But at the moment we are not sufficiently aware and we are not focused. We are a little aware, and efforts such as Al Gore's "We Campaign" may be a start, although so far sympathetic analysts find it wanting.

Fortunately, we have the opportunity to jump-start both awareness and focus. In Barack Obama, we have a candidate we couldn't even dream of a year or two ago. Though he doesn't talk about the Climate Crisis all that much in his campaign (and no one else does either), he says enough--and says it often enough--to inspire my confidence. Plus he's said that his guide and perhaps his right hand man on this issue will be Al Gore, who has done more to bring the issue to the prominence it now has than any other American.

More than that, Obama's intelligence and communication skills are superior--he could well become the FDR of the Climate Crisis. And even more than that, he has identified the only way this can work politically: through the power of the people. In Indiana Thursday, Obama said: “The reason that I talk the way I do is not just because I like to hear myself talk.... “But the reason I want to reach people and move them,” Mr. Obama said, “is because the only way we’re going to be able to bring about change is if the American people get involved and are motivated enough to hold Congress accountable, to hold the White House accountable.”

This is the cornerstone of his campaign, which pundits and other politicians don't seem to understand, but which his audiences understand. It is his definition of hope, and it is in fact our hope: the hope of the world. And that's how Obama ends his speeches: we can change the world.

But it's not only a matter of yes, we can. It's yes, we must. If we don't, the plain fact is this: human civilization has no future much beyond this century, and probably the world of life on Earth as we know it will be irrevocably over. And between now and then, we will be in for increasing hardship and suffering.

Not much of it will be my future. Once I lose my current good health, my future is likely to be pretty grim anyway, and relatively short. But it will be the future of younger people, of those babies we cherish, and the future generations of our dreams. There are no guarantees that addressing this crisis beginning in 2009 will work. There is increasing likelihood that not addressing it beginning in 2009 will lead to disaster that, unfortunately, many can't even imagine.

So the differences between when I started writing about the Climate Crisis on this site and now are these: the problem is seen a bit more clearly but as being a great deal more threatening; there are more ideas and more good possibilities for solutions, and most importantly, there is a way, there is one hope, that America will focus on what needs to be done in time to give us a fighting chance. That way, that hope, is electing Barack Obama as President of the U.S. I don't see another.

The Torch

It would have been comic if it wasn't so serious:
neither supporters or protestors could find the
Olympic Torch in San Francisco yesterday because
they kept changing and shortening the route. But
protestors disrupted it anyway, and they had more
obviously in London and Paris. China's behavior in
Tibet and its attitude towards Tibet is the proximate
cause for the protests, but many have added China's
support of genocidal violence in Darfur and Burma.

China has tried to use its new wealth and power earned
from its capitalist surge to change its image, but this
situation has revealed the naked totalitarianism underneath.
For example, the Chinese people aren't allowed to see these
images of protest, and China's ongoing program to "re-educate"
Tibetans on the Dalai Lama that was a spark for the violence
there is only set to get bigger.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi called for peaceful protest in SF but
also commended the protestors in a cause she supports. Hillary
Clinton called for Pres. Bush to not attend opening ceremonies, and
the White House is suggesting he might not, as several European leaders have already said they won't. Barack Obama said: " "If the Chinese do not take steps to help stop the genocide in Darfur and to respect the dignity, security, and human rights of the Tibetan people, then the President should boycott the opening ceremonies" but he said the actual decision to boycott the opening ceremonies should be made "closer to the Games," which has the political effect of giving the Chinese the opportunity to make progress on these issues in the interim.

Two Weeks to PA

One respected poll has him closing the gap, another doesn't, in the Pennsylvania primary that happens two weeks from today. (That's Michelle Obama being welcomed to Carnegie Mellon University by Pittsburgh's finest, Teresa Heinz Kerry.)

But one guy who has no doubts has this great country rock song on YouTube. Obama partisans in PA, it should fire you up, and get you ready to go!

Obamarama

Photos from the past week or so in North Carolina, Montana and North Dakota... That's a line waiting to get into an Obama event in Missoula.

For the Songbirds

On this site I may give the impression to some people
that I follow certain ideological or behavioral fashions,
which make me easy to categorize. But people who
actually know me know that I'm often a skeptic, a
contrarian, and that's putting it mildly sometimes. So
I don't necessarily follow trends, not even good ones, unless
I've got good reason. I know buying and eating
"organic" is a good thing, but I'm used to shopping for good
prices, too, and maybe sometimes that's a better reason. Now
however I've got something else to think about besides my own
health and virtue: songbirds. Pesticides are killing them, and
other migratory birds, especially in Mexico and South America.
Like this barn swallow. Some species have been depleted
by half. I love bird song. That's one of the things I miss most
about my apartment in Pittsburgh--which oddly enough, had many
more songbirds around it than this house in CA. So I already buy
organic shade-grown coffee, and now I'll stop trying to save a few
pennies on bananas--that's another big one--and always go organic.
Peppers, too. And strawberries. For the songbirds. I'll remember.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

My sense memory of April 4, 1968 is of the
amber light in the college coffee shop after
a rehearsal of my play, when I heard the news.
I didn't want to hear it, to think about it--how
could the possibilities opened by LBJ's withdrawing
from the election be hammered shut so fast? Or
even the possibility that we would get a moment to
catch our breaths, and think of something else. Oddly,
I'd just cast the daughter of a minister in a small part,
a high school girl who would be the first African American
on our college stage in at least my years there. Some of us
had marched with her father through the Galesburg streets,
just as I'd marched behind Dr. King in 1963. She was shy,
but she was reaching out to a different world represented by
that strange campus in her own hometown. All of us had
a long way to go. But he would not get there with us. Not
everybody then thought of him as a great American. But
he was.

Gore to the Fore

Al Gore announced "one of the most ambitious
and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history"
the other day, to bring the climate crisis to the forefront
of American political consciousness---just in time to
influence the 2008 election campaign and provide a
backdrop of awareness and commitment to the next
President who will need to face this challenge head on.
(Gore was also being touted as either a Democratic
Party broker in settling the nomination, or the nominee
himself of a deadlocked convention--neither of which is
gonna happen.) In addition to media efforts, this We
campaign aims to enlist 10 million activists through
the Alliance for Climate Protection.

The Cruelty of Hope

In 1968, this was a happy day. There weren't many that year. But the night before, on March 31, President Johnson ended a TV address with the words we thought we would never hear, "I will not seek, and I will not accept" the Democratic nomination for reelection to the presidency.

I watched it on the nearest TV set, which was several doors down First Street in Galesburg, Illinois, at the home of my writing professor (who was married, with two young daughters, and not more than 5 years older than me.) It was literally shocking, the kind of statement that displaces time: you feel you started to hear the words before he said them, and then afterwards you can't believe that he actually said them.

LBJ was stubbornly expanding and prosecuting the Vietnam War, and the demonstrations that were growing in size and emotion routinely included the chant, "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" But now, in an instant, he was not going to be there, and the only two declared Democratic candidates were running to end the war: Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. We were really going to end the war!

Of course, I knew that in some ways it wasn't going to be soon enough for me. I'd already had my pre-induction draft physical, and despite total deafness in one ear, and to the complete shock of several sets of draft counsellors I saw in Chicago, I'd passed. (They were already telling me about how to appeal.) I was a senior in college, and in a few months, my student deferment would end, and with draft calls still very high, I'd probably be drafted. I still hadn't decided what to do, except I knew what I wasn't going to do--I wasn't going to kill any Vietnamese. There was a lot of talk about options, but in the end no one else could really understand this decision--not parents or teachers, friends or certainly girlfriends. You were alone on this one.

But that was a couple of months away at least. I was about to direct a play I'd written, with its own statement about all this, and after that I could probably tie up the draft process long enough to somehow work for Robert Kennedy's campaign. And it was April--spring was short but intensely beautiful in Galesburg--and the barrier of LBJ was gone. There'd been dancing in the streets on campuses across America the night before. There hadn't been anything that public on our small campus, but we'd probably celebrated enough to be seeing the first April morning through a slight fuzz. There was hope now-- the war might end, and that immense burden on every single hour of every day.

April 1--April Fool's Day. Before the week was out, Martin Luther King would be assassinated, and eight weeks after that, I would spend my graduation day watching Robert Kennedy's funeral. Then would come the hot shambles of the Chicago convention, Humphrey, Nixon, and more war--much more war. "April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot wrote, as we students of literature well knew.

Forty years later, there are a couple of lessons I take from this. First, cruel disappointment is always possible if you dare to hope, but nothing changes unless you take that dare, and do your best to change what's wrong. Even if it means personal sacrifice, and even if it means that people close to you don't understand.

Second, if John McCain had his way, we'd still have troops in Vietnam. The reality is that Nixon and the Republicans continued to expand and prosecute that war for another half decade, and they had to get out under worse circumstances than the U.S. faced in 1968. Still, southeast Asia did not fall like dominoes to Soviet or Chinese communism, and today we're buying stuff made in Vietnam.

Let's not make the same bloody and tragic mistakes in 2008. Let's unite behind Barack Obama, end this war in Iraqnam in 2009 and start meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

Obama in Western PA: the 'burgh

Indulge me. I'm fascinated with Barack Obama's bus tour through my old haunts of western PA. He started out in Pittsburgh, where I lived and worked in the late 80s to mid 90s, and where I spent time from childhood to last spring.

He spoke at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Pittsburgh...










and visited a steel mill with Steelers greats Franco Harris and Jerome Bettis--that's him apparently getting bussed by The Bus.

Obama in Western PA: the 'burg

A day or two before the bus tour was scheduled to start, U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Jr. told the campaign he was going to endorse Obama. After Casey made his endorsement speech in Pittsburgh, suddenly the tour became a double act, as Casey came along.

Then they headed to Hempfield Area High School (home of the Spartans, the first high school team I saw play) for the Greensburg town meeting.
To get there from Pittsburgh his car probably took the same exit off Route 30 I did when I lived in Hempfield. I would have been able to see the car from the house where I grew up. I don't know how to explain it but there's some mystery of place that's engaged here. I know so much about that place, and experienced so much there, that this means something to me.


And at Hempfield he encountered a type I remember all too well from the local bar culture--the very educated crank. He took a question from a man who introduced himself as a PhD in Economics (a discipline that churns out cranks by the hundreds.) Who then asked Obama what he was going to do about the penny.
"The penny?" Obama repeated.

Yes, the obsolete penny--and the dollar bill--what about getting rid of that, too, and starting with the two dollar bill?

"The two dollar bill?"

Yeah, and another thing, what about island prisons for sex offenders?

I think maybe that photo with his finger on his eyebrow was taken about then.

Obama dealt with him better than I might have at the Court Jester bar, or Mr. Toad's. He said since Lincoln was on the penny, and Lincoln was an important guy in Illinois, he'd have to find another currency to put Lincoln on before he could get rid of the penny.

Obama in Western PA cont.

Obama continued east to Latrobe, where he visited a sports bar. I didn't recognize the name--may be a new one, or one that's changed its name. The bars I knew in that area were ones that Steelers frequented when they were in training camp at St. Vincent's College in late summer. I hoisted a few with Jack Lambert once. One of my sisters lives just outside Latrobe now, and my brother-in-law has been known to drop into a bar there. He coulda been there! One of my nieces teaches grade school in Latrobe. She coulda been there! Although probably they were both working.


These photos remind me of something somebody observed recently--
maybe Marc Armbinder at the Atlantic--that on the campaign trail,
Obama is having fun, and Hillary really is not. And even though Obama
looks serious in that photo, he is holding a Slinky. It's a tour of a Johnstown specialty steel plant that makes various wire products, including the Slinky. Apparently when they gave one to Obama he carried it with him and played with it for the rest of the tour.

Then another town hall meeting in Johnstown. It was one of the first place names I learned, because one of our two and then three television channels was WJAC Johnstown, "serving millions from atop the Alleghenies."

I've only been there a couple of times, though I've driven through a few more. Way back in the 30s, when the Bonus Army of World War I vets was driven out of Washington where they were encamped to try to get some of the money the government had promised them, some of them reorganized in the only town that would host them, and that was Johnstown, PA.

Obama in Western PA: Altoona

Altoona is kind of Johnstown's little brother or sister. Doesn't get much respect. It wasn't on the schedule, and the Altoona media had been complaining that their town was always bypassed--no presidential candidate had EVER visited Altoona.

Well, Obama did. Apparently on the spur of the moment, he and Senator Casey went bowling.

Obama's got decent form, as you can see, but he hadn't bowled since Jimmy Carter was President, and he didn't do real well. He and Casey both lost to their main competitor, a local woman named Roxanne Hart.

"My economic plan's better than my bowling," Obama said at one point. Said a man in a nearby lane, "It'd have to be."

Some kids came over to bowl a frame or two, while everybody took pictures and called their friends. Obama completed a spare, and picked up the chant: "Yes, I can!"

Either before or after the bowling alley, they stopped in at a hot dog place nearby. Obama was buying.