Lustgarten had a lot to say about politics and the election and I was eager to hear a candidate’s point of view. He told me the major newspaper in the state, the Omaha World-Herald, “would not admit I was running. They wouldn’t acknowledge anyone was running against Kerrey. Some of the TV stations were more helpful,” but he had a dim view of some reporters. He told me about one young TV reporter who interviewed him did not understand why there was a primary election. He said to Lustgarten, “’I thought the election was in November, why are we having it now?’”
“People are completely disconnected. I ran into aggressive apathy. It was sort of like ‘I don’t care,’” he said. One woman he met didn’t know what the Democratic Party was. “Their lives are constrained and they don’t have a serious news source any more,” Lustgarten said. “A lot of them watch Fox and get their news from Facebook. Their basic attitude about Social Security and Medicare is that if it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it. The younger people will have to deal with it.”
I asked the former candidate the same question I had been asking others. Were the presidential candidates speaking to their concerns? “That would be stupid” strategy, Lustgarten shot back. “They are trying to persuade only eight percent of the swing state voters and skew their messages to bring them in.” As a result, he said said, the candidates shout platitudes rather than alienate one group of voters or another. “There’s no reason to discuss other issues,” he said. “The special interests control the dialogue.”
Lustgarten said he was disappointed with Obama. “I don’t like GITMO, the predatory drones. It seems like Bush 2.0 to me. I’m disappointed with his foreign policy.” Nevertheless, Lustgarten said he would probably vote for him.
What’s really bothering voters? “They are very angry,” Lustgarten said, and “They believe that if you throw out the people you are unhappy with, someone else will come in and change things. But it never happens. Their frustration becomes anger. They don’t vote as an active way of expressing their frustrations. If they do vote, it’s like they sold out.”
Correction: In the section about Carl Burrows, he did not have to cross the Missouri to get to Omaha. His hometown of Carter Lake, IA, is on the same side of the river. CJR regrets the error.
Interesting interviews. Very sad that most of the people interviewed would benefit significantly from the Affordable Care Act but are either uninformed or misinformed about it.
#1 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Tue 12 Jun 2012 at 12:48 PM
Harris gives us Iteration #5893 of the standard liberal "The Average Slob Is Too Stupid To Know What's Good For Him" elitist, anti-democratic nonsense.
Some pigs are always more equal than other pigs in Liberal La La Land.
#2 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 12 Jun 2012 at 11:28 PM
"Harris gives us Iteration #5893 of the standard liberal "The Average Slob Is Too Stupid To Know What's Good For Him" elitist, anti-democratic nonsense."
What Padi actually believes liberals believe:
"Can you perform the surgery required to excise a brain tumor? If not, you must be stupid."
Implication? Padi believes we don't need expertise to understand complicated systems or perform complicated tasks. The "average slob" should be able to perform your brain surgery.
Of course, when you use his arguement to claim executives and lawyers don't merit their high compensation, especially when their understanding of complexity is so low in quality you could hardly imagine how the "average slob" could cause more catastrophic damage, he gets a tad upset.
The fact is that Romney care does solve relatively well some major healthcare problems:
http://m.npr.org/story/146701343?url=/blogs/health/2012/02/13/146701343/health-care-in-massachusetts-abject-failure-or-work-in-progress
And in the state that it was first implemented, people have high rates of satisfaction. The problem it avoids solving is:
"That doesn't mean everything about Massachusetts health care is wonderful. The 2006 law didn't do anything about controlling health costs, which were already among the nation's highest. Dreyfuss says that's at the top of the agenda now.
DREYFUSS: When suddenly every employer is offering insurance, everyone is paying for it and the government is subsidizing it, and it's growing at 8 or 10 percent per year - year over year - suddenly, there's a lot more interest in doing something about it."
So that is the problem which needs dealing with in future. However, we can't focus on that problem because republicans want to nulify everything.
""The president's plan assumes an endless expansion of government, with rising costs and, of course, with the spread of Obamacare," Romney says. "I will halt the expansion of government, and I will repeal Obamacare."..
"I will not go back to the days when insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, or deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men," Obama says. "We're not going back there. We're going forward."
There is no overlap at all in the two men's current approaches to health care. If Romney is elected, he'll work to get rid of the law that was based on his own plan. If the president wins a second term, he will fight to keep what he can."
We're not going to face the problems to come because republicans have defined the president and his party as their problem. And when they are in power, under Bush or Romney, they will continue to avoid looking at solutions to problems because, in their minds, they have the solutions - it's just the problems which need redefining. It will be a return to bush style government based on pr campaign, not knowledge or expertise. "invade Iran + tax cuts for the rich, that will solve everything!"
And fox news will run with that story, everybody else will be "balanced". When the "average slob" is uninformed or misinformed by his institutions, that isn't because he's stupid and "liberals are elitists", that's because institutions are failing to inform the public in a meaningful way.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 03:22 PM
You want elitism? Here's conservative David Brooks;
"Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.
I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else...
To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. "
Shorter David Brooks:
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003626.html
"DAVID BROOKS: Okay, so our act starts with us inflating a giant internet bubble. Then that collapses, taking the country's economy with it, just as we massively cut taxes on millionaires because, we say, if we don't the government will have too much money. Right after that we blow off warnings about terrorism and let 3,000 Americans get slaughtered. We use that as a chance to lie the U.S. into invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack, killing hundreds of thousands of people and turning millions into refugees. In the middle of all that we borrow torture techniques from the Inquisition and use them on people in secret sites around the planet. Then we make billions off another financial bubble, the biggest in human history, and do nothing as it collapses, plunging the world into the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. To fix that we open up the national bank vault and shovel out money as fast as possible to all the criminals who made it happen in the first place. Then—as the amazing finale—we refuse to prosecute anyone for that, for the war, or for torture, and we start killing U.S. citizens with flying death robots.
[LONG PAUSE]
AGENT: ...That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?
DAVID BROOKS: The Aristocrats!"
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 03:29 PM