2. Clinton gained New Hampshire and lost the race when she placed LBJ above MLK. She did that, and nobody can erase it.

3. Bill Clinton, like Karl Rove, is no genius, despite his obvious intelligence. All he showed was that a Democrat could win office when Ross Perot splits the vote.

4. Obama has a broad appeal because, like Khrushchev, he offers people a way forward without asking them to pay for their crimes.

Passing through Fruitvale station.

Most teachers deal with a lot of nonsense in their classrooms, but what is interesting is not that but rather how much of it they produce themselves, and what kind. To be sure conditions have deteriorated. Above all, support and alternative programs are not as robust as they once were. Students who will be the first to tell you that they should not be in a comprehensive high school are there for lack of space in a better placement. Again, the results are predictable.

A colleague observed that I don’t kick many students out of class.  The results are predictable.  There is more frustration and chaos of a certain type than there would otherwise be if the students in question, be they rude, “off-task”, talkative, or what have you had never shown up to class.  I open myself up to the charge that I “can’t control the class.”

That said, I choose the problems I create.  One charge I don’t get is that I don’t give a shit about my students.  My students take me much more seriously as a person than most of them do school.  This allows me to do things in class I could not do otherwise.  In particular, it puts me in a position where I can ask people to take intellectual risks they might otherwise avoid.  Some students avoid all intellectual risk no matter what is asked of them.  Others, many fewer in number, are very willing to take an intellectual risk.  But a huge number of people fall in the middle and are at something of a balancing point between risk averseness and a willingness to try something new if encouraged to do so.  By creating certain problems rather than others, I increase the number of students in this group.

I should say first that my old man strikes most people who meet him as an average white guy except nicer than most. The last president he had strong feelings about, at least positively, was kennedy. He grew up in rural kansas and has a sense of fairness one associates with rural people. He is one of the most unpretensiously unbigoted white people I have ever met, and not only in terms of race.

We rarely talk explicit politics not because we disagree but because he decided a long time ago that he was not going to approach the world that way. That said, we talked about how rotten things have been in the last years in this country. He had rough experiences with health care when my grandmother, still with us, needed a fairly major surgery, and he is furious about war profiteering and the corruption it entails.

He singled out oil money as the most damaging oligarchy we face. I said that as far as i am concerned, all inheritance is obscene. He said that, well, maybe some inheritance is ok.

I said i was not talking about leaving a child mementi of whatever sort or keeping heirlooms among one’s heirs. Would he feel a need to leave me a cent if we lived in a society where hunger and homelessness were only found in history books?

He replied without hesitation that if that were the case he would feel no such need. This is why I know that this is not a normal election. That is how completely bush has pulled back the curtain. My old man’s sense of fairness has become a critique of the system.

At Balboa Park.

Bill clinton is a brilliant hack. We have had no important presidents in my lifetime or at the very least no great ones. Bill clinton figured nothing out except that one can win an election in an era of reaction by passing reactionary policies at home and pursuing empire abroad. He had a firm grasp of the obvious of his day. Hillary follows his lead in broad policy strokes.

Unfortunately for the clintons, this election seems more like 1976 than 1992. It could well be more like 1960 or 1932, but time will tell he circumstances produce elections of that weight. But it is certain to me that hillary clinton has fought the last war and that even if she can use an outdated strategy to win the nomination it will not serve anyone i care about well in november.

The thing is that the right has a unifying force the left lacks insofar as the right seeks to maintain that which is, where the left seeks to bring into being something which is not. It’s easier to agree on something which is than is not, about which everyone has their own idea.