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| Tulsi Gabbard |
Tulsi Gabbard, candidate for president, speaking in New Hampshire
Tulsi Gabbard has focus. She spoke quietly, hands folded. She presented her campaign around one organizing principal. War. Misdirected wars. Unnecessary wars. Expensive wars.
She tells her audience the United States is destroying itself by pursuing a counter-productive foreign policy. The wars we fight undermine American strength by gobbling up our resources, financial, political, and moral.
She said that as we attempt to address important issues that impact our everyday lives, including health care, education, teacher pay, infrastructure, the environment, climate change, and immigration reform, we confront "this central issue" that stops us cold.
"We continue to have trillions of dollars of taxpayer dollars taken out of our pockets to spend on counterproductive, regime-change wars in other countries, wars that do not serve the interests of the American people, wars that do not serve the interests of the people in the countries where we wage these wars, and wars that are counterproductive to our national security." Click: 2 minute video
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| Billboard outside Manchester |
This one.
Gabbard said the most important role played by the President is Commander in Chief, to keep our country safe. That isn't happening, she said. She said we currently have a government of, by, and for the special interests, who write laws to benefit themselves and against the interests of the people. They are driven by greed and their own profits.
She, like Sanders, is openly critical of Democrats, lumping both parties together in being blinded by American foreign policy arrogance. Congressional members from both parties are joining Trump in his policy toward Venezuela--a policy motivated by oil, and enabled by the hubris common of empires. She was sharply critical of Trump for his veto of the Congressional resolution against the "genocidal war" in Yemen. He is backing Saudi Arabia there, she said, and Saudi Arabia is arming al quaeda, which is an insult to American service people. She said she enlisted in the military to fight alqaeda after 911, and now we are helping them.
She spoke repeatedly about the insult to American soldiers when we carry out bad wars. It wastes their sacrifice. Click: "Our service members have been dishonored."
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| Click: Keep us safe. Two minute video |
She doesn't give off a military vibe. This isn't General Patton, barking out manly certitudes of rough talk aggression.
Instead, she is woeful. America is foolish, and corrupted. America is captured, she says, by the military industrial complex and by the hubris characteristic of great powers who think they can tell other countries what to do, and be welcomed by them. It is more a lament than a campaign speech, but here she was in New Hampshire, perhaps trying out new material for the first time, groping for words, asking for our votes.
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| Click: Gabbard on special interests. One minute |
Gabbard has unusual appeal to leftist activists who are supportive of Bernie Sanders. Sanders has a core following and they are quick to criticize alternatives to him. Gabbard is the exception. Gabbard openly supported Sanders in 2016, and Gabbard is a category-change from Bernie. She isn't a senator, she isn't male, she isn't old, she isn't white, she isn't Jewish, and she doesn't shake her fist.
Support for Gabbard is not an implied insult to Bernie Sanders.
If Sanders wins the nomination I think it is very plausible that Gabbard would be his vice presidential pick. She balances the ticket demographically, while simultaneously affirming it.
I think she is unlikely to win the nomination, but she may connect with a core base of support: the anti-war Democrat, that leftover group of Boomers from the 1960s who found issues of war and peace to be central. She speaks to them. She may have delegates at the convention.
But more likely, I suspect, if she is to become president in the next decade it will be through the back door of the Vice Presidency. Sanders is an old man.
4 comments:
This an excellent, engaging and useful profile that reaches for Tulsi's inner core. I am still undecided from among three or four favorite candidates, but what has grabbed my soul with Tulsi is how she quietly insinuates herself where she needs to be, without bombast, without grandiose speechifying, more with an intent for us all to lean in and scout the terrain.
The two bright red lines that moved Tulsi to the front row of my attention span were a visit to Syria (where I was born)for a firsthand look into the life and struggle of its society and people, and her joining ranks out front with Marci Kaptur and the late Walter Jones for reenacting the New Deal era banking law known as Glass-Steagall, under the guise of Return to Prudent Banking Act. Tulsi rings true. Even if I didn't agree with her, I would trust her. Tulsi is somebody I'd want in my corner.
This is an issue that has been at the heart of the Progressive movement since the '60s and Vietnam. The power of the military establishment holds both parties hostage to the point that only this candidate is voicing it, when they all should be. Defensive paranoia drives the conservative agenda and is very difficult to counter; ("How dangerous is the World...? You don't want to find out!") particularly with a military/intelligence community that is self-serving and politicians prone to exaggeration.
One thing is clear; US military dominance drives worldwide escalation and proliferation, as well as providing a target for foreign adversaries to use to fear monger in their own countries.
Rep. Gabbard is correct to raise the issue. However, I feel the question we should be debating is: "Given that US military budget is excessive, wasteful and a drain on the economy, what level of spending is appropriate to the real threats facing us and our allies?"
It's disappointing though, that this issue doesn't even make it on the list of voter concerns.
BTW, Kudos to you Peter, for your vision quest to the heartland and observations of the candidates. This reader, for one, appreciates it!
"Where's the beef?", Mondale quipped with historical resonance to Gary Hart's mantra of "new ideas" in the Spring of 1984. As I watched your videos, I imagined Elizabeth Warren bouncing around in the background with flailing jumping jacks over economic policies. If Gabbard is as myopic, dull and inanimate as you report and the videos show, then her 1% poll rating seems a real accomplishment. What a weird campaign focus war is given that thanks to Obama, Americans don't regard us as being at war now. Her campaign needs to first make Americans think we're at war or soon will be, and then persuade those voters she is the candidate to get us out of the newly discovered war. Since CNN, MSNBC, NYT and Washington Post have virtually no "America at war" coverage other than the war on Trump, Ganbard has a big uphill task ahead of her.
I've been following politicians ,politics for almost 5 decades and I have to say that Tulsi Gabbard, IMO, is the most politically forthright,ethical moral ,forward,selfless politician I have ever come across. In addition I cannot think of a policy she has wrong
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