Now that I'm teaching at Columbia, surrounded by so many foreign students, I'm reminded how special, how particular, Thanksgiving is to us Americans. Our Halloween has successfully been imported to most of Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and the Phillippines, but Thanksgiving remains peculiar to us (and the Canadians who copied us in 1879 and who now celebrate it on the second Monday in October).

I remember when I was living in Florence, Italy, in my twenties I ate fish sticks and pasta with butter alone in my apartment that third Thursday in November. The foreign students I've polled have banded together to create a great ad hoc family of over-eaters.

Thanksgiving, like Valentine's Day, can be hell on us singles of small or diminishing families. It's always this frantic game of musical chairs to see who will take us in. In other years the kids and I have been invited to friends' houses and brought pies and champagne to make up for not knowing how to roast a turkey. Two years ago my then Italian girlfriend, the Martha's Stewart of Milan, flew in and exploded my kitchen with traditional and Italian stuffing (salami, chestnuts and I don't know what else added to it), her first roast turkey and all the traditional sides but all done in a way that was so exquisite it would have made Mario Batali throw himself into the East River.

This year I've sent the kids down to Georgia to be with their mom and their grandparents for the long weekend. In these pages I've recommended "Divorce for Healthy Child Rearing," if the parents are absolutely positive that they can no longer live together. Better to surround the child with love, when the mother is with them and when the father is with them, than to stew the child in twenty years of icy disdain and contempt. Sure, in a perfect world two loving people with some very hands-on and nearby grandparents around is the preferred way to raise a child. Lacking that, a doubly dedicated single can do a damn fine job.

That said, holidays are hard.

I've been divorced going on six years now and I still have spent every Christmas day except one with my kids, their mom and her family. It's important to me, while my kids are still so young (nine and six), to preserve the magic of that day for them.

So this year, knowing that I will see them all in a month, I decided to stay in New York. This is only my second year as a single, single father and it is hard. Back when we were living in LA their mother lived around the corner fro us and I had a live-in babysitter. Here in New York it's all Trey, all the time. Of course I love my kids to pieces. They are absolutely the centers of my universe, but I guess what I'm most thankful for until Sunday night is that I'm off the clock. I can stay out and sleep in. For four days I don't have to worry about them on the subway platform or crossing Broadway. For four days I am free and p.k. (pre-kids).

That way, when I pick them up at the gate at La Guardia Sunday afternoon I will not only be ready but I'll be eager to resume my roll as 24/7 daddy.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

When I saw the headline, “Noose Found on Office Door of Black Professor at Columbia U,” I assumed it was my door and wondered why the campus police had not bothered to inform me. A few weeks ago on I had written about the Jena 6 case that began with a noose hung by white high school students in Louisiana and was proud that I had evidently ruffled some racist feathers.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t me they tried to menace but an African-American Professor at Columbia’s Teacher’s College. A noose was also recently hung in front of the black student center at the University of Maryland and one was found in a black cadet’s bag at the Coast Guard academy in New London, Connecticut.

I wasn’t the only one who had thought the noose had my name on it. Before the professor was identified as Madonna Constantine several worried friends called to see if I was o.k.

O.K. ?

I’m a writer. I need my words to effect people. I was perversely disappointed that it wasn’t me who had flushed out the cowardly creep. And although I have not yet met my colleague, Professor Constantine, I feel protective of any person menaced in any way.

This message is for you, deranged knot-maker: You threaten that prof, you threaten me and all of my
friends.

See, a noose is an oddly powerful symbol, much more than a mere prank. A noose is a much more charged symbol than, let’s say, a Confederate flag, because the noose not only represents white racism but a very explicit threat to publicly and violently murder you.

That is what Reed Walters, the supremely biased white district attorney in Jena still fails to understand. Sadly, Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, a black man, could not understand it either and failed to press charges against the boys who hung that symbol in Jena. I wonder if those boys, who were largely unpunished for their actions, are proud to have set off this latest noose craze.

I grew up in the Midwest first, and then the Northeast and have lived in the South and in the West. There are no people on the planet more friendly than Southerners and Midwesterners. However many white Southerners today act more invested in what happened to them in the 1860s, than the liberation of black Southerners in the 1960s. Unlike most Germans who seem to feel the burden of guilt for their country’s atrocities, many white American Southerners seem to see themselves more as victims of northern federal oppression and condescension than descendants and beneficiaries of some of the most vicious and effective terrorists the world has ever seen.

That said, the only times that I personally have been menaced because of the color of my skin have been in and around my hometown of Hamden, Connecticut, by some of the Irish and Italian-American kids who were my neighbors.

Though they never said that they wanted to hang me from a tree or cut off my testicles, they did suggest that I return back to Africa, chasing me out off their block as if they expected me to run all the way there.
Life is unquestionably better now for my kids, just as racism was so much worse for my parents’ generation than for me. As both a student and a prime beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement I had often lamented the fact that I had been born too late to be a freedom rider or a Panther. For a brief moment, when I thought that that noose had been for me, I had been transported back to the time of my heroes: Malcolm, Martin and the freedom riders.

I just wrote this line in my first play and what happened on campus the other day makes me think that there might actually be some truth to it: “History isn’t just what’s written in a book. History is the river we stand in.” May the ugliness of that noose remind us of the beauty of the fight for justice.

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I loved washing out Chet's underpants today. I did. We'd just come from seeing Meet the Robinsons in 3D with two hot moms and three kids. At first the film was putting me to sleep, reminding me, unfavorably, of how many times I’ve been tortured to sit through crap like that remake of Flicka and Aquamarine. By the end of this new film, however, I was swallowing hard not to cry on myself while Ava snuggled into my bicep. When the lights came up Chet rushed over, his eyes huge, fighting not to cry himself.

"I wet myself."

"That's o.k." I said, and I felt his pants but they weren't wet in the front.

"I wet myself a lot. Poop."

Now Chet is five and three quarters and potty trained himself when he was just two, a full two years earlier than his big sister. This wasn't like him at all. I could smell him and instantly realized that my plan with the moms to go out for ice cream after the film was just horribly kaboshed. Waiting for the cab I asked him, gently, how this could have happened.

"I was just trying to fart. A really big humongous one and..."

"EEEEW!"

"Now Ava,” I told her. “It's no big deal.” Chet and I then reminded her of the time not so long ago that she didn't make it to the bathroom back in our apartment. As I fumbled with the key she peed on herself in the hallway howling and wailiung like blood-soaked Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Once inside I rinsed her off and calmed her down. This time at home I did the same with Chet, rinsing out his Superman underwear in the toilet and hosing him off in the shower. It wasn't all that messy and he didn't even cry.

I loved the moment not for itself but for what it reminded me of. The first thing I think of when I think of my own mother is not how she died young but the image of her hunched over a medieval stone public washroom, rinsing out my underwear in Florence, Italy, on one of the first days of our grand European vacation. I was maybe eight and had eaten something that had run right through me. Somehow I had gotten my pants off in public while she washed out my underwear in the ancient trough flanked by a half-dozen round Italian widows. She had studied Latin for years and as she and they washed she had tried, largely unsuccessfully, to communicate with them.

This Mother's Day the kids' mother is a thousand miles away, living with her own mother but promising to come up to New York soon. I'm forty-four and a half. This is my fifth Mother's Day without their mother, my thirty-sixth without my own. Every year since I've been single and with them it's been embarrassing for me. On Mother’s Day we eat out at any restaurant where we can find an open table and the other families look at the three of us like they want to write us a check instead of saving Sally Struthers’ children in Africa . I want to scream at them, "We're fine, damnit. Just finish your cheesecake and leave us alone."

To quote Rumsfeld, “You go out to dinner on Mother’s Day with the family you have…”

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It was so cowardly of both of you not to scream, yell and push back with every fiber of your souls against the Cheney-orchestrated, trumped up run up to war. It is almost as cowardly now to claim that you knew all along that it was a bad idea and that you had wished that the administration had found another way of insuring that Saddam was defanged.

Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent making us less safe, more hated and the region even more destabilized.

And you write a book to clear your name?

Watching the excellent Bill Moyers report on the lack of opposition to the trail of lies that lead us to war I was again struck by the number of people who knew better but stayed silent. Or, much worse, knew better but parroted the administration’s lies. When Colin Powell spoke before the U.N. and accused Saddam of harboring al-Zarqawi in northern Iraq I remember screaming at the television, “Liar! Northern Iraq is Kurdish controlled and in our no-fly zone. There are already more U.S. Special Forces there on the ground than Iraqi troops.” And yet General Powell has the balls to leak to Bob Woodward that he lobbied to avoid this madness.

Tenet and Powell should worry more about the lives that they helped ruin than their precious reputations. They should march over to Walter Reed and empty bedpans for now legless soldiers, read Tom Clancy novels to now sightless marines. If they were Japanese they would have long ago fallen on their swords.

I do not want that for them, or for anyone. However if these two men truly want to restore honor to their reputations they need to dedicate the rest of their days to atoning for the pointless misery that they helped unleash on our country, on Iraq and the world.

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The need for most Americans to own a firearm passed around a century ago. However in 2007 we Americans are all still held hostage to the rabid whims of the National Rifle Association.

Sandy Froman, pistol-packing president of the NRA, smiles at me from above my desk every day this month. She’s the April pin-up for my Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute “Great American Conservative Women” 2007 calendar. Besides seeing this as a public-relations nightmare, I wonder how she feels knowing that her organization is directly responsible for this country’s insanely lax gun laws which have led to the senseless misery of thousands.

Listen, I respect hunters. Bow hunters, especially, but hunters in general spend hours out in nature and have the courage to actually kill what they eat. I can also understand the allure of firing a weapon. I’ve played paintball a few times and loved it. And I once sprayed an Uzi at a gun range in Vegas and it was a blast.

Handguns, however, are so easy to conceal and as almost extensions of our index fingers they allow the owner to almost magically point and zap away the problem immediately at hand. It is their very ease and efficiency makes them such a danger to every single person within their radius – including their owner.

We have needed sane gun laws for decades. Each of us is less safe because of the NRA and if the rest of us and our leaders don’t stand up to them now we never will. The NRA leadership are a lunatic fringe that even their (overwhelmingly Republican-voting) membership have little in common with. They are like the Bushies who overran the Republican party and turned it into a base of operations for extreme-right-wing nutjobs.

The NRA rabidly lobbies against even the most minimal laws that would enhance gun safety: serious, vigorous background checks on a nationwide database, mandatory safety lessons for every single person who purchases such a ridiculously easy way to take a life, the banning of assault rifles.

If you’re not hunting Al Qaeda you shouldn’t be hunting with an assault rifle.

The fact is, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used for a criminal assault, homicide, unintentional shooting or suicide than it is to kill or injure in self-defense.

Pin-up woman Froman, I’d like to tell you about my own personal history with a handgun. It is actually one that I never laid eyes on. When I was sixteen my mother didn’t tell anyone that she had bought one, then one night drove off and parked in Yale’s Payne Whitney gym parking lot. The police cleaned the blood out of our Audi and delivered it back to us a week or so later. When the police returned the gun to my father he immediately went back to the gun store where my mom had bought it, handed the manager back the gun and told him that his wife had used it to shoot herself in the heart.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Did I really have to just see Paula Zahn interviewing the author of “Nappily Ever After” about the degree of offensiveness of the word “nappy”? Did I really need Ms. Zahn’s Upper East Side lockjaw pronunciation of the word “ho’” forever seared into the deepest recesses of my brain? Isn’t there a war going on out there someplace? Isn’t there a medium-slow-motion genocide of Africans happening somewhere that starts with a D?

I haven’t written earlier because I was praying that the news sharks would have long since had their fill feasting on this story. It was the story of my life and a very boring one so I had absolutely no desire to revisit it. I imagine Obama feels the same way. Those that chastise him for not jumping out early and hard on this incident don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Folks like Sharpton and other African-Americans who rarely left their all-black enclaves can be outraged and shocked. For those of us blacks who grew up in white neighborhoods condemning Imus is like condemning a wife beater, a child molester. We don’t stop to consider the motivation, the level of gravity, the anything. He’s just another of the countless racist pricks we’ve met in our lives and may he rot in hell. Move on. Next. We’ve got real work to do.

As a kid growing up in all-white neighborhoods in the Northeast in the 1970s I know a little something about name-calling. I will never forget when I was in middle school frantically sprinting through the backyards of Italian East Haven, Connecticut, with a half-dozen beefy Italian stallion high schoolers chasing me and shouting, “Go back to the Congo!” I wanted to stop and correct them, informing them that I in fact hailed from nearby Hamden, Connecticut, but they didn’t seem in the mood for a geography lesson.

The last time I was called “nigger” I was a junior at boarding school (we were called “Uppers” there and it’s the same school the Bush boys attended). I was crossing the street after having just aced a Latin exam when a public school bus drove by and a tiny little boy, he couldn’t have been more than ten, yelled that to me out his window.

He ruined my day and a few days after. I was sixteen and that’s the last time I allowed the knuckle-dragging ignorance of somebody else to so alter my mood.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of course as a nation this Thanksgiving we can all give thanks that the reckless reign of King George is coming to an end. It still doesn’t seem all that real to me. I’m hoping that it will sink in after the first of the year when Madame Speaker is sworn in and the balances finally start to get checked and the checks finally start to get balanced. Just imagine if those guys had actually won the midterm? Who knows where their magical thinking would have led the nation? Like the nutjob revolutionaries in Woody Allen’s Bananas I could imagine shadow President Cheney decreeing that all Democrats had to wear their underwear on the outside so he could keep track of how often we changed them.

I still feel anxious for the long-term survival of the planet but I am a little less sure that Cheney is going to nuke everything southeast of the Mediterranean before his term is out.

So, for the Democratic Miracle in the year 2006 I will forever be thankful.

However personally, Thanksgiving has always been a hard one for me. Like most of us I have the platonic ideal of Thanksgiving in my head and yet the reality almost always disappoints. Ever since my mom died when I was sixteen my little family of my sister, my father and me wandered the earth every November, adopted, for the evening, by various friends. When I was married we had a couple of good ones, where all our single friends and friends with smaller kitchens descended on our house for a day-long feast. Now that it’s just the kids and me, a single dad like my dad, we again get invited to eat with gracious, loving friends. I appreciate it. I appreciate it more than they know. But a part of me also wishes that I could a fill my own long table, just for one night, with people who shared my blood.

Maybe I should start making more babies. That way, by the time I’m 70, I’d finally be able to populate a banquet.

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There must be some job we can find for the Juice. Something, anything that will keep him away from the subject of the ex-wife that he enjoys joking about having killed. As nimble as he once was he’d be a knockout on Dancing with the Stars. As surreal as the entire arrest, pre-trial, trial and post-trial have been he’d be a natural for The Surreal Life. If millions tuned in to watch Flava Flav’s Flavor of Love think how many eyeballs would tune in to watch O.J.’s Love Juice.

People say crack is addictive. Crack is bubble gum next to the addictive power of fame. Orenthal James Simpson was one of the very most famous, most revered athletes of the 1970s. Stadiums overflowing with adoring fans chanted his name. Most superstar athletes retire from fame by their mid-thirties, pop up on sports shows now and again, maybe open a sports bar/car dealership/shrine to their past glory.

Not Mr. Simpson. He became almost better known as a stunt-casted actor and rent-a-car pitch man than for his past on the field. Did you know that he was seriously considered for Schwarzenegger’s role in The Terminator? (Hey, maybe that should be the plot of T4? O.J. goes back in time, books the job, doesn’t kill anyone and Schatzi, another fame junkie, ends up emceeing body building contests on Venice Beach.)

By the early Nineties O.J. was pretty much forgotten. Were it not for the murders he never would have gotten such a strong hit of the fame drug ever again. Now it rules him. Whether it’s trying to cheat his satellite TV provider or now his Hannibal Lecter impersonation for Reagan Books, O.J. will do whatever it takes for another hit of that fifteen minutes.

I just wish he’d finally learn to kick his fame habit and get a job with regular hours. He should follow the lead of another fallen athlete, Mike Tyson. The former champ has reportedly signed up to be a male escort on Heidi Fleiss’s new Nevada “Stud Farm.”

Posted by Trey Ellis at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

He was cool and real and smart. He didn’t have the menace of Mike Wallace nor the avuncular safety of Morley Safer so he pried open hard truths in his very own way. He always seemed accessible and authentic, never bothering to hide his disgust or surprise when, say, Michael Jackson crowed about sharing beds with young boys. The only time I ever saw him lose his cool was when interviewing Lena Horne. He was so excited that he was wobbling. If she had leaned over and kissed him he would have spontaneously combusted.

As a black journalist I consider him a dad and mourn his loss.

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Phew. It doesn’t seem quite real. I’m so proud of Nancy Pelosi. Not as a Democrat, but as an agent for change. Forget about traditional notions of left and right, Dem and Repub. There will be plenty of time to squabble over specific social issues later, but our nation is on fire and all of us: left, right, Democrats of all stripes and moderate Republicans, need to roll up our sleeves and stop this lunatic administration. All of us as Americans are sailing together in this ship of state and until about midnight (E.S.T) last night the madmen of the current administration were drunkenly at the helm. Bearing us right towards a waterfall. At full speed.

The growing legion of famous conservatives coming out with books slamming the Bushies is proof that we of the traditional left and right had a common enemy.

That enemy was vanquished last night and all of us have the opportunity of our lifetimes to redirect our nation.

As in almost all things, Bill O’Reilly is both underinformed and just plain wrong. He calls progressives, “America haters.” Having recently moved to Manhattan I took my kids to the Statue of Liberty last week. We were about the only Americans out of hundreds of tourists. It was the first time for all of us and seeing such an iconic image for the first time up close and live stole my breath. As the boat sailed right under her chin I looked up in her face and was surprised by my own tears. An instant later this thought sprang to my brain: “How dare those bastards turn the land of freedom into the land of torture.”

Americans across the political spectrum can agree that our safety is precious, but so is our liberty. The Foxian Bushbots have forgotten what being American really means.

Last night’s great win also reminded me of the last scene in the film, The Candidate. Robert Redford wins, and asks his Karl Rove, “Now what?” His Karl Rove just walks out the room without saying a word.

“Now what?”

Speaker-designate Pelosi’s first hundred hours platform is a thrilling start. But the larger issue is how to knit together the older more liberal Democrats with the gang of more conservative freshmen. Yes, the answer does come from racing to the center, as CNN’s pundits repeated all last night. But the center must be defined by the victors. Old and new Democrats cannot allow themselves to be wedged apart by wedge issues, though if I were Republican strategist I would spend my every waking hour scheming to do just that. The netroots progressives, Howard Dean and the DLC centrists all have so much more in common than not. We need to do what we are not been very good good at at all: coming together. Liberal is not a dirty word and neither is conservative. We need to move beyond labels and focus on values. I think we’d all be surprised by how the values from the left to the right are virtually indistinguishable.

For example, everyone except the Bush Corporation is in favor of aggressively going after the war profiteers. Let’s turn Henry Waxman loose and throw those evil vampires under the jail.

Everyone agrees that the Iraq War is headed only for more failure and misery if we do not radically change course. Most everyone except BuschCo. is now ready to compel the Iraqi government to stand up faster by establishing timetables for U.S. troop redeployment. Centrists who had long opposed such timetables like Barack Obama and Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria have finally come around. I think Zakaria’s plan for the war makes the best out of this waking nightmare and anyone who cares about Iraq and the safety of our soldiers there should study it.

So yes, now comes the hard part. But the hard part is also the fun part.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My five-year-old son graduated to taking a shower instead of a bath four times a week at the start of the school year. It’s faster for me than a bath. Weekday evenings are already hectic. I pick him and his eight-year-old sister up from afterschool, feed them, play with them and then get them bathed and off to bed by eight so I can keep writing my new book (which is about them and me and the women in between and which is due at year’s end).

Last night he decided that taking a shower instead of bath would literally kill him. “I don’t want to take a shower! Nooooo! I want to take a bath!” I allowed this sirening to go on for longer than it should have because I was trying to watch “Broken Government,” a surprisingly excellent CNN special report. Then, in a calm voice I told him to either get in the shower or go to bed, an hour earlier than normal. He threw himself in front of the TV and shrieked, “Get me President Kerry’s phone number! Get me President Kerry’s phone number!”

That got my attention.

“Why?”
“Because I’m gonna call him and he’s gonna put you in jail for making me take a shower.”

His big sister started to explain that Kerry wasn’t the President but I shushed her. She likes to think of herself as the first mate on our battleship, repeating verbatim every order issued by me, the captain (“Bearing one-seven-niner,” “Aye-aye captain. Bearing one-seven-niner.”) So when I bark an order to both of them, “Clean your room,” she immediately turns to Chet and shouts, “Clean your room.”

“Chetty.” I told him, “Kerry isn’t the President. And Presidents usually don’t meddle in the bathing rituals of citizens. However if any administration were ever inclined to so meddle you couldn’t pick one more enthused to do so than the present one, lead by President George Bush.”

This quieted him for a moment. Then he again shrieked, “I don’t want to take a shower!” and spun himself on his side on the floor like one of the Three Stooges.

I understood his anxiety and his confusion over the presidential persona. These midterms are driving me nuts too.

Like so many others I worked so hard on the Kerry campaign, hellbent on winning this country back from the anti-democratic corporate interests that had stolen it. A friend and I drove to Las Vegas from LA to canvas on election day to help push Nevada blue. Going door to door through endless, soulless subdivisions, I walked dozens of miles and was even chased down the street by a hungry, snarling pitbull. But the celebration that night would have made it all worth while. Everyone was talking about the Zogby poll that assured everyone that Kerry had already won.
The morning after, heartbroken and hungover, I instantly went from inhaling every political blog on the web to a cold turkey abandonment of anything even reeking of news. It took me months for the cloud to lift.

I am sure that the frenzied vitriol that accompanied Kerry’s recent flubbed joke from Democrats was really about latent resentment at his not having fought hard enough to win last time.

These midterms are different. Not since Watergate have citizens had a better chance to take back their government. I think a lot of us haven’t jumped on those moveon.org call parties because we’re afraid of having our heart’s broken yet again.

I say, go to moveon.org and make some calls. Do whatever you can to get out the vote for change.

This is it. Our last stand to rescue the Republic.

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All of us want to be safe. All of us want our families to be safe. If the seven young men arrested in Miami truly did plan to blow up the Sears tower than we should all rejoice in their interception.

I just want us to have our eyes open to not only the potential for abuse and entrapment from the use of confidential informants, but the F.B.I.’s mixed, troubling record on the use of informants in the past. During the 60s, 70s and 80s the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terrorism organization with a well-known penchant for murder and bomb making, was so successfully infiltrated that today seeing their white hoods makes you laugh instead of fear for your life. The F.B.I. has flipped so many wiseguys in La Cosa Nostra that they now make more money being extras on The Sopranos than in racketeering.

And yet the F.B.I.’s history of infiltrating civil rights groups, the Black Panther Party and peaceful anti-war groups, along with its “ghetto information project,” represents the most scary, most Orwellian aspects of our federal government. In all of the high-profile Black nationalist cases I’m aware of it was the F.B.I. informant themselves that suggested and lead the planning of the violent action that landed the rest of the group in jail.

This administration, with its active, aggressive contempt for the civil rights of its citizenry needs to be watched very, very carefully. Though this case in Miami doesn’t involve Muslims, if we want to still be able to recognize the America that we live in we cannot allow the war on terror to become a war on Arab-Americans the way the F.B.I. waged war on African-Americans in the 60s.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever since the Kerry campaign dozens of pundits and bloggers (including myself) have been begging Democrats to define themselves forcefully, yet simply. Last week Pelosi and Reid rolled out their “New Directions” platform. A few months ago they rolled out something else, I forget exactly what. A few months from now I’m sure they’ll roll out another list.

The problem is that Republicans have already written and mercilessly repeated a narrative that the lazy MSM has eagerly swallowed and now parrots: “Democrats are weak on defense, so guilty about their own personal wealth that they want to give it all away to the lazy poor, too intellectual for their own good, and when more than three of them get together they bicker for forty-five minutes about where they’ll go for an hour-long lunch.”

A laundry list of modest ideas won’t re-write that story.

Don’t worry about the MSM habitually harping on Democratic ideas as lacking in specifics. The MSM never asks Republicans for specifics. The GOP is too busy spouting catch phrases like, “cut and run” to let themselves be bogged down by specifics. Rove et al. figured out long ago that voters don’t give a damn about specifics. They care about feelings. The specifics of a piece of legislation are quite complicated. A guiding moral compass is not.

The Democratic message needs to be short, decisive and strong. It needs to be a worldview, a code to live by. Not a list of greatest hits.

Rarely in our history have Americans been so cynical about the political process. Democrats need to win them back by being everything the Republicans have not been: Progressives and Reformers. “Progress and Reform” need to be the Democratic mantra. “Progress and Reform” need to be the two words that Americans associate with the opposition party if the opposition party ever hopes to get another turn at the wheel. Progress on Iraq, on energy independence, on opportunities for the middle class. Reform of the way lobbyists write bills for themselves and against the interests of the American people; reform in the form of hearings to discover how the nation was rushed into a pointless war; reform so that Americans can once again feel that ours is a government of, by and for the people.

The Republican message thrives on fear. Fear has served them well. Yet Americans are now burnt out on fears of things that never materialized. In fact, increasingly, that fear is being replaced by anger at the ones always sounding the false alarm. That’s why the fuel to the Democratic message needs to be hope. Hope is the antidote to fear. Hope is a feeling. Hope is not a list.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)