( – promoted by hotflash)

Many on the Republican side are propagating the lie that government is the enemy. If so, we are on a path of self destruction because the government is us.

Ask the good citizens of devastated Joplin or flooded northwestern Missouri: Do they want the federal government to be inconsequential in rebuilding their lives? Or do they want any relief money they receive be off set by cutting needed aid to others, as Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) cruelly wants to do?

Ask the over 10,000 construction workers hired in Missouri, as a result of the $500 million of Obama stimulus money: Are they against big government doing big things?

Stimulus funds paid for construction on Hwy, 364 in St. Charles

Ask the 600 thousand senior citizens of Missouri: Do they believe Congressman Todd Akin is right that Medicare is unconstitutional or agree with Texas Governor Rick Perry that Social Security is a ‘Ponzi scheme’?

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”

Hypocritical words from a man who grew up in rural Illinois, where most of the farm community around him operated on government rural electrification programs. In addition, in Reagan’s youth, many of the nearby farmers lost their land to the cruel fluctuation of the commodities market. Today, small farmers are kept alive during hard times by the market calming effects of agricultural price supports put in place by the same government Reagan and Republicans rail against.

Even though Texas has over 3,200 miles of federally funded interstate highways, 16 major military bases, the Houston Manned Space Center, a 1000 mile border and coast line manned by federal forces, and need for federal assistance during drought and disasters,  Governor Ricky Perry wants to make the federal government “as inconsequential in our lives as possible”.

If we eliminated the hundreds of thousands of “inconsequential” government jobs added to Texas’s economy, Perry’s bragging about Texas job growth would ring hollow.

What Americans want is not an inconsequential government. What Americans want is an efficient, caring government. Let’s not forget: Only government can truly do big things. We here in St. Charles realize this since the interstate highway system started right here.

Why are Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl, of Arizona, ripping government interference while they drink water and light their homes from Hoover and Glenn Canyon dams? Much of the Southwest would be home only to Saguaro cactus and rattlesnakes if it weren’t for the federal government.

The same is true of all the Southern ‘states rights’ advocates who get their water, electric and flood control from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Sara Palin’s hateful speech against the federal government is completely two-faced because no state takes a bigger federal handout than Alaska.  The federal government spends over $15,000 per person yearly to keep Alaska afloat. Remember the “bridge to nowhere”?

Or what about government bashing politicians from the lightly populated arid  Western states? If it wasn’t for the federal government, there would be no interstate highway system traveling thousands of miles though states where jack rabbits out number people 100 to 1. Nor would there be farming in their almost desert-like land, if it weren’t for federal water reclamation and irrigation projects.

In addition, no American is safe from tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, massive fires, and other calamities. Whether in Joplin, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or  Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, Americans look to the federal government for help in times of crisis.

The truth is: Government is us. It is our son or daughter defending us in a far-off land. It is our brother-in-law, the fireman, our brethren in church, the policeman, and our neighbor, the teacher. It is the mailman delivering a letter to us for only $.44 that the ‘man in brown’ wouldn’t touch for less than $7.00. It is the Boeing employee machining a part for an F-18 fighter, and the construction worker building our bridges, highways, and schools. All of them deserve more respect than the unwarranted criticism Republicans heap on them.

It is too easy for us to just blame someone else, like the Tea Party does. No personal responsibility on the behalf of Tea Party folks. Can it be Tea Partiers were deceived by George Bush and brought this recession on with their vote for the wrong man?

Americans need to take responsibility for the government they created.  In a nation that was born of compromise, it is our fault if we elect those who are completely unwilling to yield, even on the smallest point.

It is time we all became informed, active, and accountable. What America needs is good competent government – not a stubborn, my way or the highway Tea Party’s simplistic “no government”.

Carl Peterson

Originally posted on St. Charles Democrats site. For more Talking Points for Democrats go to http://www.stcdems.org  

The Tea Party contingent struck again last Friday.  A group that the local Fox news affiliate estimated to be between 1000-2000 assembled in Frontier Park in St. Charles for the usual whinging and raging. You may take that estimate with a pinch of salt, given the tendency of teapartiers to exaggerate their numbers (see here, here, and here), but by all accounts there was definitely a fair-sized crowd. While I did not attend, I did come across several descriptions of the festivities, often accompanied by YouTube videos that I found highly suggestive.

At the Saint Charles event, the militant “don’t tread on me” placards, the martial drum-and fife music provided young men dressed in what I assume to be revolutionary army uniforms, all combined to suggest a fantasy camp for true believers, would-be heroes of the status quo who gather to fight the changes that they fear will leave them behind. The dazed-looking man who can be seen in this video rambling through the crowd, beating his little drum “for freedom” seems emblematic of some unreal and fantastical alternative world that teapartiers have collectively invented.

What strikes one most forcefully about Tea Party atmospherics here is the degree to which the participants’  rhetoric  magnifies the objects and individuals they oppose. It isn’t just health care reform these stalwarts are fighting against, but the downfall of Western civilization. The standard bearer for the other side is not just a mildly centrist Democratic president, but a Muslim terrorist, Hitler, Stalin, and the Anti-Christ rolled into one, not even the legitimate, born-in-America president, but a cuckoo planted in our nest by some inexplicable conspiracy. One can only ask, why such excess?  

To answer that question, it’s useful to look at the origins of the Tea Parties. By now it has been well-documented that the movement is the brain-child and financial beneficiary of several wealthy conservatives who have funded a maze of Astroturf organizations, and who have been aided and abetted  by numerous Republican politicians.  These relationships are discussed in detail by Michael Tomasky in “Something New on the Mall,” Oct. 22, 2009, New York Review of Books, as well as in an article by Tim Dickinson, “The Lie Machine,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1088.

Given the financial motives and murky ideological underpinnings of the funders, it is safe to say that the goal has never been to generate informed opposition, but rather to inflame the emotions of those Americans who feel the greatest sense of anomie and alienation. Ramping up this discontent and fear deflects attention from inconvenient facts about our abysmal health care delivery system, environmental threats, our economic malaise, and all the other problems we face, while creating an appearance of substantive opposition that, because of its decibel level, captures media attention.

The effect, as manifested in the Tea Party movement, are chaotic expressions of intense, paranoid emotion, totally divorced from reality.  Michael Tomasky, in the article referred to above, notes the irrational aspect of the entire Tea Party zeitgeist, observing that:

Instead of elected officials acting as a sort of restraining ego to the activists, everyone here shares one big id.

Judging by the invective spewed by the speakers at the St. Charles event, that id seems to have been on steroids last Friday.

For a case in point, consider one St. Charles speaker, Kevin Jackson, seemingly a regular on the Tea Party circuit, a blogger and author of The Big Black Lie. Mr. Jackson wasted no time getting down to the business of raising the emotional temperature.  He delighted the crowd by declaring all liberals to be racists, and boasting about his role in the ACORN stormlet, that, in his words, “exposes the left as the cockroaches they are.” Liberals, he claimed “will plant criminals in your neighborhood and ask you for money to fight crime,” and “kill babies in the womb and if they survive, then serve them up to pedophiles.” This bubba-esque rhetoric from an African-American seemed to create a palpable sense of vindication for the nearly all-white group in attendance, who are clearly uncomfortable with the imputation of racism,  if not always with the substance.

Another of the speakers last Friday, ex-marine Paul Curtman, has made quite a name for himself in Tea Party circles with mock-heroic displays of defiance and ersatz constitutional erudition. He initially attained his celebrity status earlier this year when he struck a pose and demanded that Senator Claire McCaskill apologize for failing to defend the same right-wing interpretation of the constitution that he has so uncritically swallowed. Apart from the young man’s obvious pleasure in being lionized, one gets the distinct impression that he may be using these Tea Parties to audition for a future role in Missouri politics.

After observing the robust response to this rhetoric, it is hard not to conclude that teapartiers are correct when they insist that they are sincere; but progressives are also correct that Tea Party events are classic astroturf.  The dynamic is that of applying a match to dry brush.  The brush was already dessicated, diseased and ready to burn, but somebody had to come along with a match to get the conflagration going and continue to feed it to keep it going strong. As Michael Tomasky notes in the article cited above:

This conservative protest movement, though, has three powerful forces supporting it: bottomless amounts of corporate money; an ideologically dedicated press, radio, and cable television apparatus eager to tout its existence; and elected officials who are willing to embrace it publicly and whose votes in support of the movement’s positions can be absolutely relied upon. … the left-leaning protest movements with which we’ve been familiar over the years-and that serve in our minds as the models for street protests and political rallies-have typically had none of this kind of support. For the foreseeable future, what we witnessed on September 12, and over the summer at the town-hall events, is likely to be a permanent feature of the political landscape.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author:

WHAT IF THEY THREW A STATE GOVERNMENT

AND NOBODY CAME?

by Rory Riddler

A Tale Of Two Cities

Every year thousands of Missouri school children travel to Missouri’s State Capitol on field trips.  One of the highlights is to meet their State Representative and have a photo taken to remember the visit.  Representatives are keen to spend time with these future voters, so eager to learn just what goes on in Jefferson City, beneath that imposing dome of Missouri’s State Capitol.

But children from the 18th State Representative District (comprised mostly of the older portions St. Charles North of Interstate 70) can stay home.  You see we don’t have a State Representative.  There is no one there to show these young people around, let alone represent the over 27,000 people who live in the 18th District.

So a small desk and chair, on the floor of the Missouri General Assembly, sits empty.  No green or red light goes up on the electronic voting board to indicate how our representative voted.  We don’t have a vote.  Laws are being passed, vital issues debated and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, without the voters and taxpayers of this portion of St. Charles having one word to say about it.

The fact is that two seats became vacant in St. Charles County last year.  But only ours remains unfilled.

One seat opened up in the City of St. Peters when State Representative Carl Beardan resigned to pursue other interests.  At the same time, a vacancy was created in the City of St. Charles when former State Representative Tom Dempsey was elected to the State Senate.

When such vacancies occur, it is the responsibility of Missouri’s Governor to call a Special Election to fill the unexpired term.  That is exactly what happened in the City of St. Peters.  The Governor called a Special Election, the Democratic and Republican District Committees selected their respective candidates and an election was held the first Tuesday of [February].

The voters of that district elected a new State Representative who was promptly sworn into office.  But no notice came from the Governor’s Office about the 18th District.  No explanation was ever forthcoming as to just WHY we weren’t entitled to the same treatment as the voters and taxpayers of St. Peters.

It wasn’t as if we weren’t going to the polls that day anyway.  The Special Election in St. Peters was held on Super Tuesday, the Presidential Primary in Missouri.  A record 40% of voters turned out on a cold day to make their voice heard.  It would have cost the State of Missouri next to nothing to have held a Special Election in the 18th District to fill Tom Dempsey’s vacant seat.

Yet money is the only half-way excuse anyone ever offered.  The Republican Party Chairman in St. Charles County was quoted in an area newspaper as saying that if the Democrats were complaining about the cost of running these special elections then maybe the seats would just sit empty till the next regular election.  But, of course, that isn’t what happened in St. Peters or elsewhere around the State.  To his credit, behind the scenes, I heard that he had urged the Governor’s Office to do the right thing and call the election, knowing the Republican Party would be blamed for seemingly punishing the voters of St. Charles.

But what exactly did we do to deserve punishment?  In every really good mystery there is a motive that is revealed in time.  Now seems to be as good a time as any.

What great sin did we commit to be stripped of our representation?  It seems the Missouri Republican Party didn’t trust us to elect another Republican State Representative.

Demographically the 18th District is becoming slightly more Democratic in its voting patterns.  It has been that way for a while.  It explains why former Representative (now State Senator) Tom Dempsey had to outspend challenger Joe Koester four to one to hold on to his seat in November 2006, just to get 54% of the vote.

The Republican Party has been able to hold on to this vital swing seat with old familiar family names and big money for the last few elections.  But they didn’t have a similar candidate waiting in the wings this time and they knew the Democratic Party had two good candidates to choose from with lots of name identification.

So knowing they might lose the 18th District, the Republican Governor was “advised” to leave the seat vacant.  I use the word advised, because I can’t fathom that a Governor from Southwest Missouri, would know anything about the lay of the political landscape here, and make the critical decision to deny us representation without depending on some expert local advice.

Which begs the question, why didn’t our newly elected State Senator Tom Dempsey insist that the Governor call an election to fill this vacancy?

I will leave it to your own imaginations.

So there you have our tale of two cities.  St. Peters voters have a brand new State Representative and St. Charles voters can have their school age children take a picture standing next to an empty desk on their next field trip to Jefferson City.  At least they will learn something about how government truly functions in a State where politicians put partisan interests ahead of the public interest.

Eleven seats. Jake Zimmerman told the West County Dems that that’s the magic number to take back the House in Missouri. Eleven is a lot of seats to take, so Dems will be looking to expand the playing field from the obvious chances.

Of the close-to-thirty Republican-held seats that might possibly be vulnerable next year, it’s easy to identify the top ten. Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb, is a great example of an obvious chance for us. Last year, Jim Trout, a relatively unknown candidate, didn’t have big bucks but he knocked on a lot of doors and came within 150 votes of toppling a three term incumbent Republican. That’s three terms the Republican had.  So Trout’s opponent is termed out next year, and you’d better believe that we’ll be targeting that race like crazy and so will the Rs.

Jim Trout and Jeanne Kirkton, who made a run for that seat in ’04, are vying for the nomination, so Jake figures that one way or another, we’re going to have a good candidate there. And if the Dems have a good year with high turnout, in a district with that DPI and no incumbent, we ought to win that sucker.

We’ve got a bunch of opportunities like that around the state, for instance several in suburban Kansas City.  Another top spot we’ll be targeting is in south St. Louis County:

Perhaps you’ll remember Jim Lembke, the diabolical, despicable Jim Lembke, who’s now running for the state Senate, and who must be stopped at all costs. But for purposes of the House, the diabolical, despicable Jim Lembke leaves that seat open. And suddenly you don’t have the hard-working creature of Satan, who’s been there for, like, six years, you’ll have some new creature of Satan, who nobody really knows who they are yet. And that’s potentially four or five percentage points of difference with a good Democratic candidate. Thank god we have a good Democratic candidate, whose name is Vicki (Englund), and she’s been working hard and raising money early. I like that district. Republicans’ll probably invest some money there because they’ll try and force us to work for it.  But, you know what, I think the odds are very good we’re going to win it.

Jake could mention other great opportunites like that one, but where it really gets interesting is in the second and third tier opportunities. Those races are what give us a chance to get to that magic number of eleven–and to give Jake a chance to be called Mr. Chairman instead of Hey Dumbo. There are so many Nancy Boyda opportunities. Deb Lavender is just one of a crowd of Boyda-type candidates.

The seat that Judi Parker ran for last time, for example. That seat has the potential to be open because Jim Avery’s been expressing no interest in running again as the incumbent. And there are multiple open seats in St. Charles.  Nobody thinks of St. Charles as a hotbed of Democratic territory:

But make no mistake.  Claire McCaskill is a U.S. senator today because of St. Charles and Springfield. Think about that. You know, lots of people like to pat themselves on the back about how, you know, St. Louis came out great for Claire. But it came out for Claire about the way it’s supposed to come out for any Democratic candidate. Ditto Kansas City and the area of eastern Jackson County.  But St. Chuck! St. Chuck turned out to the tune of 30,000 more than she was supposed to get there, than those old DPI numbers said. Springfield showed up in the neighborhood of about 18,000 votes more than the DPI numbers said Claire was supposed to get there.

Now that tells you a couple of things.  First of all, it tells you that demographics change, that the DPI numbers reflect past elections. And, what it really tells you is that there is a shift going on.

It’s like the shift that’s taken place in St. Louis County.  In the seventies, that was a Republican bastion. Democrats couldn’t dream of winning there.  And most intelligent observers of the process would have said it was going to stay that way.  

But it didn’t stay that way. Part of the change was about white flight to suburbs like St. Charles and part of it was just about political maturation. But whatever the reason, St. Louis County is now overwhelmingly Democratic and elects an African-American County Executive, Charlie Dooley.

St. Charles, too, is facing many of the same pressures that turned St. Louis County Democratic.  It’s no longer just acres on acres of new developments, mixed with a few farmhouses, filled with people who moved out there to get away from people with a different skin color.

It’s maturing. Some of the people there have already raised their kids. Local issues are developing as the communities solidify, and land use is becoming an issue. There’s conflict between the Adolphus Busch camp, people who want to protect their duck hunting rights, and the developers. The fights on city councils and the recalls of councilmen over whether to protect land or doom it to strip malls are signs that this community is maturing and that we have a more competitive chance there.

It’s not an accident that Dems have three good opportunities in St. Charles next year.  The first of those chances will come as a special election on primary day, Feb. 5th. Tom Fann is running for the seat that Republican Carl Bearden resigned from. It’s not the closest shot of the three districts, but it’s a real chance. And if any you want to contribute time and shoe leather, you could do a lot of good because in a special election anything can happen. And if Fann wins, whammo, we have the power of incumbency in that district.

So, between now and next November, Jake Zimmerman and Rachel Storch will be huddling behind closed doors, deciding where to put their resources, asking themselves: “Where can we win? Where can’t we win? Where have we got a shot? And where should we get involved on the ground just to make life miserable for the Republicans?  

And, of course–as always–they’re at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to money. They’re sitting on about $200,000 right now, whereas the Republican HDCCC has about $800,000. What’s interesting about the gap is that both sides are getting about the same amounts from institutional sources–from the sort of people who just want to back a winner. They’ve been writing checks in about the same amounts to both sides, which is a pretty good gauge of what those folks think is coming.

The difference in funding is that individual Republicans can put the arm on individual wealthy contributors and get money from sources like the local Chamber of Commerce. Those candidates raise more money than our candidates do and turn a lot of it over to their HDCCC.

One way to put a dent in the funding difference is to urge Democratic legislators in safe districts to contribute to the HDCCC. Any of you who are regular readers of the national blogs will remember that sites like Kos, MyDD, and others put pressure in the last election cycle on Democrats in safe districts to contribute from their campaign war chests so that the DCCC could help out candidates in close districts. That’s a project we need to undertake in Missouri this cycle.

Jake suggested that those of us living in safe Democratic districts make it a project of ours to find out whether our reps have contributed to the HDCCC. If they haven’t, we need to urge them to do so. Let me take it a step further.  As the campaign season progresses, this blog site will collect that sort of data and put pressure on Democratic reps in safe districts to invest some of their money for the good of the party.

But, at the end of the day, how our party does in an election is less about how much money we have and about how Jake and Rachel strategize than it is about having good candidates. It is the job of all activists to keep an eye out for the people who’d make good candidates.  

In Chesterfield, for example, that Republican affluent bastion, with a DPI of 42, the right candidate could pull it off.  Jane Cunningham, the wingnut who’s held that seat, is more interested in censoring people’s crotch activities than in good governance.  But she’s popular. And she’s gone. Okay, not gone. She’s running for the state senate, and as such presents a threat that, like Lembke, must be stopped at all costs. But her House seat is empty, and that means that you can take away five DPI points from the Republican candidate. It means that, with no incumbent to face, the right Democrat might able to take that seat.  

Maybe a strong D candidate wouldn’t win there, but, if not, we’ll win somewhere else, we’ll take some of those second and third tier races. And the more good candidates we field, the more we’ll spread the other side’s resources thin, increasing our chances of taking those eleven magic seats.