Yes We Can!

If you don't have kids or friends with kids, you may not have heard of "Bob the Builder." Bob's a cartoon construction worker/handyman who works with his team of animated tools to, well, fix whatever needs fixing. Bob's theme song is called "Can we fix it?", and the song's chorus answers that question with an exuberant, "Yes we can!" (Click here to hear the song.)

I think of that song sometimes when I read transcripts of speeches by some of the Democratic presidential candidates, or when watching them respond to questions at various forums, such as the one that just finished tonight in Philadelphia. Listening to these Democrats fall over each other to demand universal health care and to condemn "right to work" laws as anti-union, "right to be exploited" laws is like taking deep breaths of fresh air after being under water for way too long. For the last three years Bush and Co. have made all kinds of noises, but most of them seem to have been either lies or attempts to scare their audience, or both. Now, instead of fear mongering and nothing but rhetoric designed to strengthen the corporate class, the Democrats are touring the country talking about ways to take care of all Americans, not just those who are already plenty taken care of. Democrats like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun, and even John Kerry have given me a great deal more hope in the Democratic party and also in the prospects for the future. Can we really do something about the problems in our world? These candidates are standing up and saying "Yes we can!"

For example, at this most recent forum, the candidates addressed the question of global trade justice, and most of them said something along the lines of: we need to have smart trade that puts workers first. Of course, this is what you'd expect them to say when speaking to the Sheet Metal Workers International. But some of them went beyond the empty rhetoric of "we need to take care of workers" to talk about specific ways to do that, and just hearing their ideas made me think for the first time about the possibility of making trade fair via treaties and governmental regulation rather than via grassroots activism. Sure, college students can get together to demand their schools buy only sweat-free products, but progress by such methods is slow, at best. In addition to such efforts, why not build social justice into our trade agreements? As one of the candidates said, we shouldn't allow any products to be sold in the U.S. that are made by child labor, or by any workers without basic human rights, such as a reasonable wage, health care, reasonable working hours, real and enforceable workplace safety, etc. Nor should we allow the importation of any goods made in countries where manufacturers do not use sustainable environmental protections. If the U.S. built these kinds of regulations into its trade policy, the rest of the world would quickly follow suit and the entire world—both humans and their environment—would reap the rewards for generations to come. Under the reign of Bush, the idea of building social justice into trade policy is a farce. Under one of these Democratic presidents, the issues will at least be on the table, and that's a start.

Can we live in a better world with less inequality, less human suffering, and a healthy environment? Keep listening to the Democratic candidates and remember what Bob the Builder says: "Yes we can!"

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Just a couple more random thoughts from the SMWI forum:

• Gephardt is not electable for one reason: He doesn't use active verbs. That may sound silly, but language matters and Gephardt's language is all half-measures. Listen to him and you'll hear "I tried," "I worked," "I think," etc. Those verbs don't show confidence or achievement, they only show effort. Do you want a president who can get things done, or one that tries hard? Gephardt would be more convincing if he used verbs like "I did," "I built," "I succeeded," "I know," etc. But he doesn't.
• Moseley Braun needs to address the audience and not the moderator at forums like these.
• Lieberman is all jowls. The poor man is like a poster-boy for a face lift.
• Dean may be the most electable simply because he's really the most handsome. L. thinks so. I think he also comes across as the most trustworthy straight-talker, but the handsome thing is probably more important.
• Kucinich would reach orders of magnitude more voters if he'd just relax a little and concentrate on sounding reasonable and measured. He's got beautiful ideas, but he seems unable to convey them at anything but a fever pitch. A fever pitch is great for emphasis, but it gets tiresome pretty quickly when it becomes your primary means of communication.
• Kerry looks and sounds presidential, but the way he loses me when he dances around the question of why he joined his fellow Senators in abdicating Congress' constitutional responsibility to decide whether to use military force. Kerry and Gephardt (and Lieberman, but he's not a serious contender) are compromised on this issue and the only way they could plausibly get around it is to make the case that they were mislead by the Bush administration, right along with the rest of us. Instead, both echo Bush and Co. about Saddam's history of being a bad man. Sorry, that's not good enough when soldiers are dying every day.


• Sharpton just rocks the house every time he speaks. He kicked off with a jab at Ah-nold: "Schwarzenegger is an impostor. I'm the real terminator: I want to terminate the Presidency of G. Bush, terminate John Ashcroft, and all the people who are taking away our democracy." (That's a paraphrase.) He also whipped out a great analogy to explain how Bush and Tony Blair convinced their countries to commit troops to go to war. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but Sharpton said something like, "What Bush told us about Iraq is like me telling you we have to get out of this building because it's on fire. So we all get outside and you say, 'Where's the fire?' And then I get my friend Tony Blair to come by and say, 'The fire doesn't matter; you needed some fresh air anyway.'" Sharpton's closing statement was priceless—you should be able to access it from a link here, but it involved a story about his grandmother telling him that the only way to get a donkey to move is to slap it, and ended with Sharpton saying "I'm going to slap this donkey all the way to the White House" (or something to that effect). Trust me, it was brilliant.

Posted August 11, 2003 09:15 PM | election 2004