Joshua Mamis

  • Home
  • About Josh
  • Links
  • Resume
  • Contact
  • The Mamis Letter

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Talkin’ Bush at the Backyard Barbecue

It’s barbecue time. When you find yourself gathered with family and friends, sharing a glass of something cool and refreshing, someone is bound to proclaim that, as a moderate Republican, Jeb Bush is an acceptable alternative to the Democrats. After all, he supports the Common Core standards, and would like to pass some sort of immigration reform. They read that Bush is a moderate in the paper, or heard it on the news, so it must be true, right?

179120_421204541255166_762881055_n

Well, no. Here’s why:

Bush supported the Iraq War. Bush was in the news this week, back-pedaling from a statement he made on Fox News in which he said that had he been president in 2003, he would have invaded Iraq. But don’t be fooled by his claim of having misunderstood the question. Jeb Bush was and still is ideologically in line with his brother’s zealously hawkish foreign policy team (some of whom are on a list of his advisors for his presidential run). In the late ‘ 90s Jeb helped found the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) that called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Founding members included Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Remember them?

Jeb Bush is against raising the federal minimum wage, and has questioned the need for national standards at all. He argued at a campaign stop in South Carolina in March that “We need to leave it to the private sector. … I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn’t be doing this.” He went on, “The federal government doing this will make it harder and harder for the first rung of the ladder to be reached, particularly for young people, particularly for people that have less education.”

Bush doesn’t believe that mankind is responsible for global warming. Bush says he is a “skeptic” on the idea that global warming is caused by human activities, and says that the scientific assessment is not “unanimous.”

He opposes Obamacare. He calls the Affordable Care Act a “job killer.”

He would approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. He says that approving it is a “no-brainer.”

He is anti-abortion. As governor, he was proud of passing restrictions on abortion rights, including regulating abortion facilities, because he wanted “to create a culture of life in our state.” In early May, an advisor declared that Bush advocated de-funding Planned Parenthood.

Jeb “Stand Your Ground” Bush loves the NRA. “I will match my record against anyone else when it comes to support and defense of the Second Amendment,” Bush said at the National Rifle Association convention last April. According to a story in USA Today, Bush’s speech included a swipe at President Obama over gun rights: “Why don’t you focus more on keeping weapons out of the hands of Islamic terrorists and less on keeping them out of the hands of law abiding Americans?,” he said.

For Bush, education reform has been fueled by corporate profits. Bush’s much-hyped education record in Florida has had mixed results, according to this in-depth story in The New Yorker. It also reveals that it is deeply entwined with helping his corporate backers make lots and lots and lots of money. As Watergate taught us, the best way to assess a politician’s true colors is to follow the money.

new yorker

A good summary of Governor Bush’s record can be found in this Salon interview with University of Northern Florida professor Matthew Corrigan, who wrote a book on Governor Bush called “Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida.” Here’s a revealing quote from the Q and A:

“While he was governor, [Bush] called himself probably the most pro-life governor of modern times; he had the Terri Schiavo intervention. He was very strong on gun rights; ‘stand your ground’ was passed under his time as governor. He started a faith-based prison in which prisoners — who, I believe, volunteered and were put through religious counseling as a final step toward rehabilitation. Oh, and of course he ended affirmative action by executive order, in a very controversial way, on a state level. If you take all that, that’s a fairly robust social and cultural agenda.”

 

 

Watch This

Beer isn’t wine. Watches aren’t computers. Chamber music should be played in Volvos.

Three wonderfully creative ads have popped up this year, each lampooning pretension. Knocking  elites has always a good strategy for politicians looking to woo working class voters, so these ads from Budweiser, Shinola, and Dodge are very likely foreshadowing a major theme of the guaranteed to be interminable 2016 presidential campaign.

You don’t swish and sniff and sip and spit when you sample beer. And if you do, well, you’re not going to be drinking “macro-brewed” Bud anyway. Yes, Budweiser knows its brand well — that’s why its controversial “Brewed the Hard Way” Super Bowl ad is now running during baseball games.

Even more brilliant is this wonderful hijacking of the Apple watch rollout that ran in The New York Times. Shinola, a company at the epicenter of the Detroit renaissance, produces inspiring classic designs of watches, leather goods, and bicycles.

shinola-apple

Shinola is appealing because it makes things right here in the USA, simultaneously representing the heyday of American manufacturing, and a new, creative-class driven future. It’s a tomorrowland in which a $550 watch that doesn’t connect with your pocket-sized computer is more desirable than a $375 watch that does. At these prices, the target consumer here isn’t exactly blue collar, but the ad nevertheless joyfully thumbs its nose at elitist trend-followers.

Apple watches? We don’t need no stinking Apple Watches, the ad essentially proclaims. Our watch “can tell you the time just by looking at it.”

The ad is a masterstroke of anti-elitism elitism — poking fun at Apple’s design snobbery in order to attract people so hip they can afford to reject it, both culturally (it’s a badge signifying the wearer’s do-good bonafides) and economically. I’d take my hat off to them if only Shinola was also reinventing the Fedora.

I’ve been guilty of anti-snobbery snobbery on occasion, too, labeling someone or other as an NPR-listening liberal (somehow the worst kind).  Shinola clearly has someone with my taste and politics in mind (only with an extra digit or two in their bank account) when they design their retro-yet-modern product lines, and especially when they develop their marketing plan.

 

Finally, we come to the Dodge Challenger “Not So Fast and Furious”  TV spot, in which a hapless male driver confesses to a cop that he is listening to chamber music after being pulled over for driving too slow. This one could be an ad for Ted Cruz: you can almost hear the cop sneer, “I bet you support Hillary, too.”

Anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism are the common thread among the far-right populist uprisings, especially among those who are too glibly described as Fox-news-watching conservatives.  While to that crowd Obama is extra uppity because he is an unabashed egghead, the urge to thumb our collective noses at smart people doesn’t always recognize cultural divisions. Kids in all kinds of schools reportedly worry about being too bookish. And expertise is derided from both libertarian-leaners and the loony left: Climate change? What do those Ivy League scientists know anyway? Vaccines? Not for my kids.

But anti-intellectualsim and anti-elitism are not the same thing. George W. Bush is as elite as they come — son of a president, and Ivy League educated. But his, and Karl Rove’s, particular genius was that you can market these candidates any way you want. Bush, a smarter man than most on the left give him credit for, is no intellectual, which somehow made him immune to the charge of being elite.

Now come the politicians and their highly paid consultants  rushing prematurely to 2016.  Liberal smarty pants elites like me will be the point-blank target for both camps, either as an object of derision, or, where Hillary is concerned, as a would-be Shinola customer capable of bundling a few dollars toward her coronation. After all, I must confess:

  • I prefer local, micro-brewed beer, especially Thimble Island Brewery‘s American Ale. But I have never sniffed it.
  • I like Shinola’s watches. I’d probably buy one, too. If they were more affordable.
  • I’m a proud Mini Cooper driver — no Dodge Challenger for me.  And that’s not chamber music you hear when you pass me with my sun roof open, it’s Sondheim.

Just to rub it in, when the Mini  salesman was helping me set up the radio buttons, I asked him to set one to 90.5, the local NPR station. He looked at me knowingly.

“What,” I said. “Am I that obvious?”

His smirk said it all. He didn’t have to answer.

Memo to said salesman: I do not support Hillary Clinton.

There, I feel better.

 

Pages

  • About Josh
  • Links
  • Resume
  • Contact
  • The Mamis Letter

Archives

  • October 2019
  • September 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015

Categories

  • New Haven (2)
  • Other Thoughts (1)
  • Politics (3)
  • The Mamis Letter (1)
  • The Shoreline (1)
  • Uncategorized (7)

WordPress

  • Log in
  • WordPress

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)