CatherineRhodes.com

Site of next Winter Olympics

One of my readers watched video from a former post where I referred to people as stupid when the proper word should have been ignorant. Sure there’s a semantic difference but in some ways the two are interchangeable. In my experience, people who are stupid don’t care that they’re ignorant. In fact, they’re gleeful about it, like the teabaggers who are proud to be anti-academic. People who are smart want to educate themselves and fill their brains with knowledge. Just as an athlete is compelled to move, a smart person is driven to feed her intellect, to express ideas.

As for people who are ignorant and/or stupid, the examples abound. Stuck in traffic, I flicked through the radio dials and came upon a major Los Angeles station doing a quiz show segment. The question was “What country has hosted the winter Olympics that is not in North America or Europe?” One of the disc jockeys rang his buzzer and said, “Canada.” That was obviously wrong. Then the guest participant, a listener, buzzed in. Her answer: Bangladesh. I am not making this up. (PS: The answer they were looking for was Japan.)

A real insider

Great roundtable on This Week, George Stepanopholous’s old Sunday morning news show. Terry Moran is doing a great job as moderator. Whereas G.S. had a command over the conversation, he was a neutral observer whereas T.M. inserts himself a little more into the fray. Moran has my vote for replacement, although nobody will ever fill the shoes of Tim Russert over at Meet the Press. I digress. The table was discussing the CPAC convention, where the tea party crazies lead by lunatics Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck got riled up about the government. This exchange too place.

MORAN: The president’s loyalists seem to be disheartened.

BRAZILE: No, I don’t think they’re disheartened. They’re just asleep, and at some point, they’ll wake up. I’m an optimist.

It would have been hard to imagine that things could go so wrong in one year. Remember the inauguration? People standing hours in the snow, tears streaming down their faces? I remember thinking that this president’s agenda would be unstoppable. Majorities in both house and senate on the legislative side —and all those volunteers creating pressure and movement at the grassroots level.

Proud to be a community organizer

A terrific article in the new Rolling Stone (Lil Wayne on the cover) gets it: “Obama had millions of followers eager to fight for his agenda. But the president muzzled them —and he’s paying the price.”

Every Sunday morning during the last months of the election I woke up early and dragged a folding table, chairs and boxes of materials to Larchmont to set up an Obama booth. The goal was to recruit volunteers, sell t-shirts, register voters, talk about issues. There were millions of volunteers like me. According to the RS article, 2.5 million activists connected through the website, 13 million email supporters and 4 million donors.

After the election, all of us had the same thought — What now? We weren’t just a soldier without a mission, we were a lover who had been scorned. This was personal. During the tea parties, I kept thinking, where is the counterbalance on the left? We were the ones with the organizational juggernaut. The good news is that I believe the movement can be revived. Barack, Barack, where art thou, Barack?