"The Hell with Red/Blue; People Want Out of Iraq and Solutions"

I'm out on the political trail, rambling back and forth across America in support of good grassroots groups, good issues, and a surprising number of good populist candidates. I spent practically all of September on the hustings, beginning with a two-day, five-city barnstorming tour across the Hawkeye State to support a savvy and scrappy coalition called Sensible Iowans (a redundancy if ever I heard one), and I ended the month at a spirited rally with a large crowd of feisty Democrats in (of all places) Kennebunkport, Maine -- yes, right in the home nest of the plutocratic Bush clan! No doubt Homeland Security upped the local color code to "Bright Red" for that one!

I'll be crisscrossing the country again this month through Election day, from New Hampshire to California and all sorts of places in between. Since I'm literally a rambling man these days, I offer some random political thoughts, observations, and tidbits from my travels.

The political climate

Among the political cognoscenti, it's fashionable these days to dis the body politic -- aka, you and me. We are disparaged as being a bunch of clueless and malleable rubes who care more about who wins the latest "Survivor" matchup than who wins Congress. Of course, these pundits, consultants, lobbyists, and politicos spend way too much of their time in cocktail chit-chat rooms inhaling each others' hot breath.

From my viewpoint out here in the hinterland, it's the cognoscenti who are the clueless ones. The people of America are soooooo much bigger than the politics that are being served up to us by the elites. I find that people everywhere are fed up with the red-state/blue-state hokum that passes for political discourse in our country, and they're in something of a purple rage about the system's abject failure to address the BIG matters that are on people's minds, particularly such populist issues as:

• Falling wages and falling middle-class opportunities.
• Lousy health care, or none at all.
• A collapsing national infrastructure, from water systems and roads to school buildings and parks.
• Corporate greed unleashed.
• Money-corrupted politics and government.
• The death of the Common Good.

Mainstream polls confirm that these are big worries for the majority of folks, and that the public is growing more and more alienated from the economic and political elites in charge. Sixty-three percent of Americans now say that our country is "off on the wrong track" (APIpsos poll), 67 percent are "dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S." (Gallup Poll), and 51 percent expect that the next generation will be worse off economically.

People are aching for a politics that matters to them and offers a path to an America in which they matter again. That would be Big Politics. But this year we're mostly getting another campaign of small-ball and low-ball politics, featuring such manipulative mindlessness as the Bushites trying to label all of their war critics "appeasers."

War whoops

Tony Snow, Bush's PR flak, tried to do a mini-McCarthy on the war issue by declaring in September that there are "some" in the Democratic party "who say that we shouldn't fight the [terrorists]; we shouldn't apprehend al Qaeda; we shouldn't detain al Qaeda, we shouldn't question al Qaeda; and we shouldn't listen to al Qaeda." Goodness gracious, Tony, give us the names of these traitorous Democrats so we can hunt them down like the filthy varmints they are!

Alas, poor Tony could not produce a single name.

And then Dick Cheney was unleashed. Snarling and snapping at Democrats who're calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Veep flashed his crooked sneer and barked that these dastardly Democrats are out to "validate the al Qaeda strategy and invite more terrorist attacks" on America. Thank you, Dick. Now go back to your dungeon.