Posted on 09/08/2009 5:43:24 PM PDT by GOPGuide
What do the liberal Jones and conservative Virginia statehouse candidate Bob McDonnell have in common? Ideas—and that's costing them their careers. Plus, Glenn Beck's next targets.
My guess is that Van Jones and Bob McDonnell aren't the closest of friends. One is an African-American activist from the progressive left, who's spent much of his adult life in inner-city Oakland fighting The Man; the other is a white middle-aged pro-life Catholic Republican, who has long represented The Man in the deep-red Sunbelt suburbs of Virginia. But I'd recommend that Jones and McDonnell get in touch. Over the past few weeks, both men have run into a media buzz-saw for the crime of daring to have had actual thoughts at some point in the distant past, rather than filling the space between their ears with poll-tested nothings. And while liberals are outraged about the right's jihad against Jones and conservatives insist that McDonnell is being crucified by the left-wing media elite, hardly anyone appreciates the pervasive—and nauseating—hypocrisy that has left American democracy at the mercy of a gang of self-policing, sanctimonious nerds.
Until his resignation on Saturday, Van Jones served as a special advisor for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a little-known office that, as the name suggests, helps coordinate environmental policymaking efforts in the Executive Branch. At the CEQ, Jones answered to Nancy Sutley, who in turn answers to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. In the White House pecking order, Jones was a small fry, who wasn't exactly sitting in on cabinet meetings. Yet Jones is also the best-selling author of The Green Collar Economy and a charismatic veteran of the environmental and civil rights movements, who tried to build alliances between white and black progressive activists in the name of a pro-growth, pro-jobs urban agenda. Indeed, Jones's gift for creating quirky coalitions led at least some to see him as a younger, more culturally-savvy version of the president himself. But while many on the left doubt whether Barack Obama is truly one of them, Jones has always made it clear that he is "down for the cause." And for conservative provocateur Glenn Beck, that was precisely the problem.
Late last month, Beck's Fox News program featured a beautifully produced segment, complete with haunting strains of piano music that drew heavily on a 2005 profile of Jones written by Eliza Strickland for the East Bay Express, an alternative city weekly. When you watch the Beck segment, you get the overwhelming impression that Jones is a gifted public performer, one who may well have been wasted in an obscure White House role. The segment is full of wild and strangely entertaining exaggerations, and it all but accuses Jones of being a secret Maoist radical. The truth, as Strickland reports, is rather more prosaic. Like Beck, Jones is a raconteur with a penchant for dramatizing things to comic effect. His early flirtation with extreme left-wing politics suggests the mild insecurity of a geeky youth who wanted to be taken seriously by his tougher, more formidable peers. Jones is in no sense a thug; even in his radical phase, he was at best "an internet thug," the kind who'd never hurt a fly but who talked a big game. Given his extraordinary intellect, Jones shrewdly decided that macho bluster about fighting The System was far less constructive than using his wit and charm to become part of and ultimately to reform The System. One can imagine an authentic Maoist radical condemning Jones as a sellout. It's easy to see how this might pose a problem for Jones; he seems to value the opinion of the most militant and thus most authentic voices, yet he sees their path as a dead end. And so he tries to win over all comers, from matronly white Republican Meg Whitman, who found him persuasively pro-business, as well as kids in the Oakland neighborhoods he's left behind, who want him to stay true to his roots. In the age of saturation news coverage, it's very hard for public personalities to carefully tailor their self-presentation to different audiences, which the rest of us do constantly. It's unfair. But unfortunately it's a fact of life.
Which leads me to Bob McDonnell, the GOP's gubernatorial candidate in Virginia. As you may have heard, McDonnell was cruising to victory over his lackluster Democratic opponent Creigh Deeds when the Washington Post unearthed his 1989 master's thesis. It turns out that McDonnell, a devout Catholic conservative, was, twenty years ago, a devout Catholic conservative, one who believed that mothers of young children should work in the home, that no-fault divorce was a danger to society, and that abortion should be strictly forbidden. The most explosive revelations, if you can call them that, relate to McDonnell's views on working mothers, views that McDonnell has since strongly repudiated. The tone of McDonnell's thesis suggests that he was a committed ideologue when he wrote it, not unlike Jones. And just as Jones moderated his views as he tried to build coalitions, McDonnell found that voters in suburban Virginia were not interested in his take on contraception and the right to privacy. Recognizing that the state’s voters have moved steadily to the left on social issues, McDonnell has focused his campaign on job creation. But Deeds, a dismal campaigner who's struggled to gain traction in a place that seemed to be heading in a strongly Democratic direction, has tried to keep the focus on McDonnell's social conservatism. Thanks to the thesis, Deeds now has a decent shot at doing just that. I'm reminded of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, in which the author argued that conservatives whip up furor over abortion in an effort to dupe working class voters into ignoring bread-and-butter issues. Deeds seems to be doing something like that to the more gullible members of Virginia's suburban middle class.
Notice that the liberals defending Van Jones aren't also rushing to defend Bob McDonnell. Meanwhile, Beck and his allies aren't accusing McDonnell of secretly harboring a sinister papist agenda that he'll impose on Virginians as soon as he comes to power. That's to be expected. What's depressing is that these tactics keep interesting oddballs out of elected office. Yes, Bob McDonnell's social views might be at odds with most suburbanites. But unlike George W. Bush, McDonnell clearly spent a great deal of time thinking seriously about these issues. While conservatives might object to Van Jones's love of government-driven green industrial policy, surely his work with inner-city communities should give him credibility that your typical affluent liberal lacks. By railroading the McDonnells and Joneses of the world out of public life, we're left with colorless numbskulls. Frankly, I resent it.
Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the co-author of Grand New Party.
He also has an important blog, somewhere.
I am missing something. Is Bob McDonnell a self-acknowledged communist?
Another useless idiot. Analogizing McDonnell and Jones is the same as comparing worms and grapefruit. Useless, but that’s what useless idiots do.
Agree. Definitely a hand wringer.
For those who don’t already know, the good guys in the Virginia race (Republican slate):
http://www.bobmcdonnell.com/ for Governor
http://www.billbolling.com/ for Lieutenant Governor
http://www.cuccinelli.com/ for Attorney General
Exactly......as if there’s a moral equivalency between devout Catholicism and Communism????
I said I was through with the Republican party a couple of years ago. When McCain picked Palin to be his running mate, I held my nose and voted Republican.
Never again unless they have a total remake of the party.
I fail to see anything “republican” about this Mr. Salam.
Posted on Sunday, September 06, 2009 10:19:07 AM by ETL
"Jones was arrested during the L.A. riots and spent a short time in jail. "I met all these young radical people of color," he recalls, 'I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, "This is what I need to be a part of." I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.'..."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2333342/posts
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From David Horowitz's FrontpageMag.com /DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
"Throughout its history, one of RCP's [Revolutionary Communist Party] principal objectives has been to foment civil unrest in the United States. The most notable example of such efforts occurred on April 29, 1992, when RCP members looted and trashed the downtown and government districts of Los Angeles, triggering the infamous Rodney King riots. During the days immediately preceding the violence, RCP -- which maintained close ties to the L.A. gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods -- had circulated throughout South Central Los Angeles a leaflet featuring a statement by RCP National Spokesman Carl Dix, titled 'It's Right To Rebel' -- a quote popularized by Mao Zedong.
Encouraged by Dix, RCP activists helped lead the riots that would leave 58 people dead, more than 2,300 people injured, some 5,300 buildings burned, and $1 billion in property damaged or destroyed. On the ten-year anniversary of the rioting, RCP member Joseph Veale fondly recalled the violence as 'the most beautiful, the most heroic civil action in the history of the United States.'"
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6197
The coward wing of the so-called republican party....
Call Reihan Salam a whambulance.
Does the author, whoever the hack is, ever mention Jones being a “Truther?” I could only stomach a paragraph of this drivel.
This kind of thinking is exactly what cost the republicans the last two elections.
Be nice, wear the right suit, be sure the shirt is right for the suit and that the tie is whatever is in style. Comb your hair and be very nice and polite.
And get your but whipped.
We are entering an era of gut cutting, blood letting politics. The same tactics that work in the board of director's session will not work in that political environment.
Some photos from McDonnell’s Labor Day weekend
http://www.bobmcdonnell.com/index.php/blog/comments/labor_day_weekend_photos
Something different!
Salam is obviously a reader of the NY Times because otherwise he might have known to write his ‘leave Van alone’ column sooner.
The difference is that people can choose whether or not to put McDonnel in office. With Jones, he was NOT elected, and should not be advising the POTUS.
“I had a professor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard and Yale [for law school], which was almost unheard of for students coming from the kind of public schools that I was coming from in the rural South. I was accepted to both places, and decided to go to Yale because Yale didn’t have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enroll I’m guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hell raiser student, and they can’t do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.” ~Van Jones
That describes most of the members of the administration.
There's alot of republican in this clown. Just no conservatism.
Stupid article. It assumes that the content of their respective ideas are unimportant.
I’ll be happy to make the case to the american people on their respective sets of ideas. What makes it hard is that, in the case of Jones, almost all media is doing their best to cover up for a very scary, very radical man. OTOH, they are all over O’Donnel.
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