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May 21, 2004Why I Would Vote for Bush If the Vote Were TodayRobert David STEELE Vivas Why I Would Vote for Bush If the Vote Were Today Robert David STEELE Vivas I wanted Dean, but Dean’s staff isolated him from all of us calling for strategy, policy, balanced budget mathematics, and big tent electoral reform. So, I, and the other 15-20% of the moderate Republicans fed up with the impeachable offenses of the Bush-Cheney regime, had to settle for Edwards, good conservative Southern Democrat that he is. But his staff had the same problems, and he was not able to expand the message or the tent fast enough. Now we have Senator John Kerry. Boffo haircut, French accent, Jewish sidelines, questionable Viet-Nam record, and the same crummy staff and narrow perspective with a rotten disjointed incoherent largely off-center irritatingly down in the weeds collection of mis-fit sound bites. You get the idea. Senator John, I have news for you: you are toast as things now stand. Not only are you toast, but even if Senator John McCain agrees to help you—he would be an idiot to do so as you are now untrained, unequipped, and unorganized to be a real President—I don’t think you can win because you and your last-gasp staff are missing the core realities. I will be blunt: four more years of Bush-Cheney radicalizing America and the world are likely to be better for America, in the long run, than four years of you and McCain as Bush Lite with a half-baked message. I have simple guidance for you, if you want to win, win big, and win good. First, understand that the center of gravity in this election is not left versus right, but corrupt elitists against working class new progressives. Norman Cousins had it right in The Pathology of Power (Norton, 1987) when he said: Government is not built to perceive great truths; only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths. And the particular truth in which they need instruction today is that new means for meeting the largest problems on earth have to be created. Senator John, if you are not helping us devise those new means, you are part of the problem. If you are not helping to level the playing field for all Americans, and helping set the stage for a massive redirection of American power toward solving the great problems of the world, for harnessing the distributed intelligence of every American, not just the ones that contribute to your campaign, then you are nothing more than a yip-yapping small dog chasing after the big dog. Make no mistake about it, Bush is a big dog So here is my guidance, and it is quite simple. 1) A commitment to electoral reform is the only dog-catcher issue on the table. You will definitely not beat Bush with a Democratic base against Republican base strategy, and you will probably not beat Bush with a McCain face lift strategy absent substantive policy and improved budget math. You have to mobilize the third of America that is either engaged but disenfranchised (Independents, Greens, Reforms, Libertarians) or completely dropped out (Joe and Jane Six-Pack, Couch Potatoes, Working Poor of all races and ethnicity). You do this in three ways: a) You take Ralph Nader’s recommendations for electoral reform and go him one better. Here they are, as I have improved them. You made this the centerpiece of your campaign and you swear on all that hold dear that your primary purpose in life is not to displace Bush-Cheney, not to restore America’s alliances, not to reduce the deficit, but rather to restore power to the people. This is the dog-catcher issue. Power to all of the people. Change law to do voting on week-ends (Sundays for Orthodox Jews); Restore League of Women Voters as the presidential debate manager, and open the debates to third, fourth, and fifth parties. Announce non-partisan Cabinet in advance of election and in time to enable the League of Women voters to change the voter evaluation paradigm by interspersing Cabinet candidate debates with Presidential and Vice Presidential debates. Implement the “instant run-off” concept, where the first choice counts toward future Federal funding for minority or losing parties, but the second choice, if first choice does not win, counts toward the election of a winner elected by a majority. End physical gerrymandering, and move instead toward virtual representation in which citizens can self-identify as belonging to a specific party, and then vote for Governors, Congress, and other key positions as a member of that virtual community within each state—this will achieve true representation; and End corporate and association contributions to political candidates—simply make them illegal, while doubling salaries of elected officials over ten years, coincident with a push for major increases in salaries for those engaged in homeland nation-building—teachers, cops, firemen, and public health professionals. b) You promise America that you will strive to make these reforms effective in time for the 2006 elections, with a view to making every Republican now in Congress subject to honest challenge and where appropriate, to recall. c) You demonstrate your commitment to this Holy Communion with America by holding a national referendum, immediately, in time to announce on the 4th of July the provisional members of your Coalition Cabinet. You work harder than you have ever worked in your life—you break sweat and get down on your damn knees and dig in the dirt—and you come up with a Coalition Cabinet that includes great Democrats like Sam Nunn on defense, and systematically brings in the great Independent, the great moderate Republican, the great Green, etcetera. You not only do this in time for the 4th of July and then the Presidential debates, but you challenge the incumbent to send his Cabinet incumbents to debate your Cabinet selections on the 4th. 2) A balanced budget in support of an Innovation Agenda is the real-world foundation for the above commitment. It will prove to America, and the world, that you are not only innovative in ideas, but capable of implementing those ideas responsibly. So far, your math sucks. You not only don’t have a balanced budget, you do not have any budget at all. A responsible budget for a challenger would at a minimum carefully identify the $500 billion in added revenue available for domestic programs through restoring the corporate tax contribution to federal revenue, ending unwarranted subsidies, and going after the $50 billion or more in import-export pricing fraud and tax avoidance. A balanced budget would allow you to reconcile, in an intelligent and progressive manner, the competing interests of the working poor, the middle class, the labor unions, the progressive pension funds, and the small businesses of America, all of which are vastly more important to the future of this country than are Wall Street and the crooked corporate cronies of Dick Cheney who give George Bush the occasional hand-out. 3) You get Howard Dean, the Deaniacs, and MeetUp back in the game. Sponsor a MeetUp topic on the national budget (www.budget.meetup.com) and make the budget, not politics, the catalyst for engaging every American in a monthly MeetUp. We have the software to allow every MeetUp team, as well as individual Americans, to enter their policy preferences across the thirty-one discretionary budget lines, sorted by zip code and current party affiliation. You will know you have won when you have two things: an equal number of non-Democrats participating, and a balanced budget (inclusive of the new revenue) that a majority of those engaged in the online exercise can support. While you’re at it, tell MoveOn to stop pissing away their political capital on little issues, and join you in focusing on this one big issue. Senator John, you can be the dog-catcher, or you can be the little dog that couldn’t. Think big. Think co-intelligence, Think power to the people. Get over the Washington bullshit and stop paying attention to the media. You have one shot and if you don’t make a decision along these lines by 1 June, and announce your commitment and your provisional Cabinet by 4 July, I think George Bush is the better man for four more years—not because he will do good, but because he will set the stage for someone who is a better man than you, four years from today. There is a God. He is testing us with George Bush, and so far we are failing that test. I am a citizen in search of a leader. Right now, you are not winning my vote. St. Posted by Jock Gill at May 21, 2004 8:49 AM | TrackBackComments
If there is sufficient interest, I would be glad to propose a MeetUp topic on the budget (would appear as www.budget.meetup.com). Posted by: Robert David STEELE Vivas at May 21, 2004 9:56 AMAnyone who would vote for George W. Bush after seein what he has inflicted on this nation is a morally bankrupt dickhead. A person who once considered Dean, and then defected to Bush? That's just unspeakable. Sorry to be harsh, but if the shoe fits... Posted by: Kim at May 21, 2004 12:38 PMFor the feeble-minded and the impatient: I have not defected to Bush. I am making the point that Kerry is a placebo at this point, that Nader has a point, that America still does not get it, and that "anybody but Bush" is an unintelligent and unsustainable and unsatisfactory approach to what really ails us: the decrepitude of BOTH the Republican AND the Democratic parties, their active suppression of alternative third, fourth, and fifth parties, and the likelihood that if Kerry is elected AS THINGS NOW STAND WITHIN HIS CAMPAIGN, then he will take a little pressure off the system but HE WILL NOT SOLVE THE MAJOR PROBLEM: the disenfranchisement and disengagement of at least a third of the Nation from what is supposed to be informed participatory democracy. As my URL, insteead of my own web site (www.oss.net) I have inserted the page for my 450+ book reviews at Amazon--I am the #1 reviewer of non-fiction about national security and global issues, not because I am smart and read a lot, but because a lot of Americans seem to feel that what I have to say about these books is useful to them. Might be useful to you too--the problems we face cannot be solved by a traditional party trying to win alone, they cannot be solved by one man putting himself forth as an alternative to Bush. They must be solved by a COALTION GOVENMENT that embraces ALL OF THE PEOPLE, and has as its SOLE OBJECTIVE the restoration of participatory democracy. Below for your information is the text of my letter to John McCain, which did reach President Clinton, among others: Dear Senator McCain, I am, like Michael Cudahy, a moderate Republican who wanted to elect you in 2000 and who is ready to vote for the right non-extremist Republican in 2004, but as that is not an option, I have been following with interest the possibilities of a truly bi-partisan ticket that might crush the box and re-engage all Americans in managing their political fortunes. I hope you find the attached interesting. In my view, you would diminish yourself as Colin Powell has been diminished, if you agreed to anything Senator Kerry proposes in his present circumstances. He has not found his voice yet, in part because his staff is the last gasp of the earlier era, and not ready to stage a break-out that mobilizes the New Progressives, bankrupts the two party machines that serve their respective elites rather than the people, and establishes electoral, intelligence, national security, and governance reform in a manner than only a peaceful revolution can bring about. We need a dog-catcher, not another dog. The attached is intended to be helpful to America, not to any particular candidate. I would gladly serve any of you, if you were all able to work together to get us out of this mess. There is only one issue that matters: restoring common sense full-participatory democracy in America. If we do that, everything else will fall into place. Best wishes, Attached: I would like to make clear that I am not saying that I support Bush or what he is doing, but rather that Kerry, *as he is now situated*, is nothing more than a plecebo. Posted by: Robert David STEELE Vivas at May 21, 2004 7:03 PMI will be blunt: four more years of Bush-Cheney radicalizing America and the world are likely to be better for America, in the long run, than four years of you and McCain as Bush Lite with a half-baked message. Uh, Robert? Better for America and the world ? Sounds like supporting Bush to me. Don't blame me for reading your words as you wrote them on the page. Change them if you want to. Oh and quit your pompous blow-hard about your "knowledge" of national security. Votes for popular reviews on Amazon.com mean bubkas as far as actual mastery of the subject. Posted by: Kim at May 21, 2004 7:18 PMI don't believe in this Steele character. Idon't believe he was ever for Dean and I don't believe he is a moderate Republican. He is a wingnut in sheep's clothing. Only a wacko would say Kerry's VietNam record is questionable (gee, what about Bush?) Only a nutcase would care about the candidate's hair or imagine a French accent. And Edwards isn't a conservative Democrat. His voting record is indistinguishable from Kerry's. Posted by: laura at May 22, 2004 3:55 PMI have often criticized Robert for aspects of his presentation. As he has done other times, he has started off his message with an extremely provocative title. Some would argue that by starting off this way, he is grabbing the attention of people that would otherwise not read his entries. Others would argue that by starting off so provocatively, he has set peoples minds against the more important points of his message. It would seem as if Kim’s response may fall in the later category. Yet the purpose of this comment is not to critique Robert’s writing style. Instead, it is to focus on the real meat of his message. As I read it, he is saying that part of Dean’s failure was in not focusing enough on strategy, policy, balanced budget mathematics, and big tent electoral reform and on not inviting in some of the brilliant minds in our country, regardless of their level of political activism or party affiliation to join the discussion. He goes on to point out that this failure was not only a failure of the Dean campaign, but is also evident in the Kerry campaign. To that, I would respond that it isn’t just the Kerry campaign. I worry that it might be an intrinsic flaw to the Democratic Party as a whole right now. Robert has provided some brilliant proposals on what could be done. For those of us who have not spent a lot of time thinking about some of these issues, it may take us a bit of time to get up to speed and really understand them. Nor, am I sure if Meetups would be a good venue for it. However, we should try whatever we can as soon as we can As most of you know, my wife is running for State Rep in a district that hasn’t had a Democrat run since 1998. Because of this, there has not been as much of a discussion about issues as there should be. Her race has gotten people talking about issues again. Whether or not Kerry can and will lead from the front of the ticket, we all need to do whatever we can, either as part of the ticket, or as supporters, to start taking on the sort of issues that Robert has raised here. I can try to wear a hair shirt. "Sorry 'bout that" was a popular phrase in the Viet-Nam era. First off, if the tone comes across as "I know better," sorry 'bout that. I am risking my business--my livelihood--the food I put on the table for my family--by being vocal at a time when this Administration could, if it desired to, crush me. Cut me a little slack. Second off, you probably have me on Edwards. I was crushed by Dean losing it, you are probably right on Edwards not being Sam Nunn, but I do believe there is room in America for a "Fiscal Conservative Party" that combines the moderate Republicans with the conservative Democrats to break out into a new party that is rock solid on a balanced budget and chopping the deficit and reducing the size of government. Third off, Marine Corps infantry officers and clandestine case officers who tend to be Republican by earlier nature have nothing to prove. I consider myself a moderate Republican who would like to see a COALITION GOVERNMENT emerge that guarantees the right of every party, however small, to be represented. How can you be against that? Fourth off, sorry about what appears to be bragging on Amazon standing. Whether you accept it or not, the point I was trying to make it that I have thought about this stuff a great deal more than most people, and the reviews are my way of trying to share with others and contribute to the information commons. Amazon has become quite relevant and powerful as a means of informing the adult public, and I do what I can. I'll try not to mention it again--I suspect you (my critic) don't have the patience to actually read my reviews, much less the books themselves, so I'll leave it at that. Fifth off, on Kerry's Viet-Nam record, sorry 'bout that, but silver star, bronze star, three purple hearts for questionable wounds (bruise on the arm, no broken skin, from falling on the boat when it accelerated and turned), and in and out of Viet-Nam in under four months? Not quite the John McCain of our era, or any of thousands of guys that got their hearts and went back into the battle. The REALITY is that Kerry by himself, Kerry as a Democrat alone, is very vulnerable. Reality: if Kerry does not a) turn himself into a dog-catcher rather than just another dog, and b) harness the power of Independents, moderate Republicans, Greens, Reforms, and Libertarians, while attracting the Deaniacs and others new to the process including Hispanics and Muslims (Muslims, by the way, will out-number Jews as voters in this election....something to think about), then Bush wins by default. Reality (you have to have a strategic perspective about this, read my reviews of Will & Ariel Durant's Lessons of History, John Lewis Gaddis' Landscape of History, and Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now for a short-cut, if mentioning the ideas of others sounds like lecturing or pontification, sorry 'bout that) is that a placebo will not get us back on track, and Bush pissing off America and the rest of the world for four more years WOULD be better for America than Kerry is his current configuration, in that it would then lead to the outcome that I think is necessary, to wit, a better man and a better COALITION team than Kerry finally getting their act together and rescueing America. Politically speaking, we are back in Jamestown, and we need a COALITION leader with the balls to say "those that won't vote, won't eat." I only know one way to think and talk: straight up. I do this even when it risks my livelihood. If that upsets you, sorry 'bout that. Delighted to get some interest in the post. Thank you, Aldon, for being gracious, and best of luck to your spouse in her endeavor to contribute as an elected official. God Bless all--I do have things to atone for, I do confess my sins, and I do care about how all this turns out. Peace. Posted by: Robert David STEELE VIvas at May 22, 2004 6:43 PMwho would vote for a lefty like john kerry a turn coat aiding the other side radical demorat prediction bush 53 percent kerry 47 percent bush will when put in the bank the best of two one evil in ideas and the other true person with leadship gerge bush put thank in your pipe and smoke it andrew silvestrijr party in nov for george bush Posted by: andrew silvestrijr at September 2, 2004 10:31 PM Tikrit, Iraq Nine miles outside of Tikrit, hidden in a spider hole, the US Forces This new movie supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq makes the case that Before you cast your vote November 2nd, you must watch the heartbreaking View Footage at http://www.wmddvd.com Posted by: political at October 17, 2004 4:46 PM I have been frantically searching for some reasonable explanation of WHY I woke up yesterday morning with George W Bush STILL in office! I simply could not EVER bring myself, in good conscience, to vote for George W Bush under ANY circumstances, but I do agree with many points made in your article. As a registered Democrat, I knew John Kerry wasn't the strongest person for the job, but he didn't scare me the way George W Bush scares me, so he became the lesser of two evils. It seems as though the Democratic party has fallen in to some form of coma. There is no passion, there are no real platforms on which to stand and rally. A party that "once had a dream" has woken to a nightmare. I can't help but be stupified - do the American people REALLY understand the issues? Important issues like healthcare and the millions that have none. The environment-global warming is a reality, our air and water are polluted, and the ocean is dying. Constitutional ammendments the very rights on which AMERICA were founded. Legalized discrimination, lack of jobs, poor economy ... These are all BIG issues needing REAL resolution. The war in Iraq is not an issue - it's a crime. Our brave troops have been put in harms way at the will of a maniac. How do we ever recover from the hypocracy of committing an act of terrorism in the name of wiping out terrorism? As a parent, I do my very best to lead by example - perhaps the Administration should attend Parenting 101 classes and fix the issues at home before forcing a twisted version of "democracy" on others. I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person. I thank all that is good, every day, that I was lucky enough to be born in AMERICA. However, the beauty of my America has been tarnished by the ill acts of this Administration. Why is our society more interested in gossip and lies than real truth on real issues? ENOUGH is ENOUGH - it's time to leave the Republican party with the Religious Radicals, and the Democratic party those who just want to make excuses and the rest of us pull together to make AMERCIA BEAUTIFUL again!! Beauty comes with diversity - you are right - our government must be a good mix of all ideas to be successful: Greens, Independents, Reforms, Libertarians, Democrats and Republicans. Posted by: Cynthia at November 4, 2004 6:45 PMPost a comment
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