If you really want to be informed, you have to have multiple news sources. I have a lot of news sites on my devices, but I don’t access many of them very often. Gosh, when was the last time I accessed The Daily Star of Lebanon? That probably has a lot more news on Syria than we get in Minnesota.
I often access the Huffington Post and get some different views. But the HuffPost often borders on the sensational. I accessed Al Jazeera a lot during the Arab Spring and watched more online TV than I had in the previous two years.
In a moment of not knowing what I wanted to do, I accessed Al Jazeera again. One of the headlines was “Socialist in Seattle: City councilor expects not to be a rarity for long” at http://alj.am/1aLZUlH. What was interesting was how an “outsider” gained a seat on the city council.
Kshama Sawant, an immigrant from Mumbai and an economics professor, overturned many of the expectations of the establishment. She did it mostly with individual donations and an organization of people hungering for something different. Are voters who normally don’t show up desperately seeking candidates who are not the same old, same old? Apparently so, one of her volunteers said, "People who have never voted before not only voted but also volunteered for this campaign."
I have been unable to easily find final results, but what I’ve been able to figure out, Sawant’s win was extraordinary in that her party is Socialist Alternative. Otherwise, it was not really a spectacular win. Turnout was less than sixty percent and she won by about one thousand votes of the less than 170,000 votes cast for that seat.
She and her campaign project a Tea Party attitude with a different agenda, that is, we’re right and everyone else is wrong. It will be interesting to find out if she works with the other eight councilors to get things done or if she is marginalized or disruptive.
If you read only local papers you probably missed the story. The Star Tribune had two stories in mid-November. The Duluth News Tribune had no stories. And even that liberal rag, the Reader Weekly has no finds for Sawant. Oh, well, I do like writing “scoops”.
You can find two different editorial views of her in the Seattle Times and TruthDigger.
Thanh Tan of the Seattle Times asks “Can Kshama Sawant move past rhetoric, work with City Council?” See http://blogs.seattletimes.com/opinionnw/2013/11/22/kshama-sawant-seattle-city-council/. She thinks having “an immigrant woman of color join the Seattle City Council is a powerful, symbolic feat.” But she warns that Sawant’s partisanship may get in the way of making “policies work for Seattle.”
Alexander Reed Kelly of Truthdigger writes about Sawant as the “Truth digger of the week”. See
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_kshama_sawant_20131123. He writes, “Sawant’s victory over a 16-year Democratic incumbent by a difference of more than 1,000 votes provides evidence that their abandonment of common people has created opportunities for different political ideas to take hold.”
I am of two minds about this. One, it is about time that some change come to our “two-party system”. Two, will this election only be a minor disturbance of the status quo? Think back to Jesse Ventura’s upset for Minnesota governor in 1998. He made speeches that resonated with many who felt the state government wasn’t working in their interest. And the polls completed missed his appeal, predicting that he would come in last in a three-way race. Remember though, he did not get a majority of voters supporting him. Once he left the governorship, we went back to the “flip-flop” status quo.
Lori Sturdevant wonders pessimistically if “America’s alienated apoliticos, disgusted pragmatists and people-without-a-party moderates will find each other and turn themselves into a political force potent enough to compel politicians to compromise.” See “New politics won’t come easily, but come it must”, Star Tribune, 2013-12-08 at http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/234823611.html. She highlights the “No Labels” group whose issue is “make government work again.” I wonder if that slogan will catch on and get some candidates elected. All the anti-government slogans in the blather-o-sphere seem to have gotten more people to stay away from elections, leaving the field wide open to anti-government politicians.
I am reading a pessimistic book, “The PARTY Is OVER: How Republicans Went CRAZY, Democrats Became USELESS, and the Middle Class Got SHAFTED” by Mike Lofgren, a former Republican Party congressional staffer. An example of how the Republicans manipulate the voters that he points out is that Republicans know how to use emotional words, Democrats use bureaucratese. Think of PATRIOT Act versus Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Skipping ahead to the end of his book I found that he is optimistic that the Millennials will turn to a politics of “what will work.”
Maybe the next book on my list, “Electoral Dysfunction: a Survival Manual for American Voters” by Victoria Bassetti has some good ideas of getting “We, the People” to take our country back. She does have an afterword by Heather Smith, President of Rock the Vote.
BTW, you did vote in the last city election, didn’t you? And all the elections before that? If not, please don’t complain about the results. Who knows, if more people who shared your views showed up, the results might have been very different.
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
- Barack Obama
Well, maybe next time.
Also posted on the Reader Weekly website at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2013/12/12/2595_party_of_one-8.
