Ballot Petitions, Impeachment, Debates
Syracuse City Eagle
Walt Shepperd
July 31st, 2008
Arts and Crafts good on paper
Numbers were down at the Arts and Crafts Festival last weekend, but the vendors on Montgomery Street, although not coming close to last year’s record-breaking sales, did well. The Media Unit Monster Book Sale did set a record, an ironic twist of less is more in the recessive economy. If people couldn’t afford both food and gas, they were probably happy to find they could buy a book for a buck. The most recent corporate entity to abandon downtown cast a brief shadow on the Friday walk-throughs, as the emotional count felt almost exactly down 822 bodies. One person who did extremely well with numbers for the weekend, however, was Green and Populist congressional candidate Howie Hawkins, who spent the weekend back in his familiar jeans and T-shirt garb gathering signatures on his nominating petitions.
The wide sheath of sheets filled with signatures he carried showed the festival as especially successful for Hawkins, although he noted that while it seemed relatively easy for him to fill his petitions at the event, those he carried for Populist presidential candidate Ralph Nader proved a harder sell. Hawkins was finding a sympathetic response to his campaign flyer calling for bringing ALL the troops home now, Medicare for all, solar powered sustainability and an Economic Bill of Rights. But the mythology that Nader was the reason Gore lost to Bush in 2000 remains strong, and it took the flashing of a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll to shake undecideds into a whole new day.
What a difference the fray makes
While finding that a majority of Americans think Barack Obama is a riskier choice for the presidency, the poll, conducted during his trip overseas, found that he maintained the 47-41 head to head advantage over John McCain he had established last month. But his lead expanded to 13 points when the poll added Nader and Libertarian candidate Bob Barr to the mix, with Obama at 48 percent, McCain at 35, Nader at 5 and Barr at 2. Only one in seven supporters of McCain in the poll registered being excited over voting for him. Enthusiasm for Bush also hit low points in the poll, with only 30 percent approving of his job and a record low believing the country is on the right track.
On Saturday Hawkins called on Congress to take up the issue of impeaching Bush and other administration officials, even though their term of office will end next year. The day before, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on an impeachment resolution introduced by Representative Dennis Kucinich. “If the House thought that President Clinton’s perjury for an evasive definition of what constitutes sex was worthy of impeachment,” Hawkins noted, “certainly the felonies committed by Bush, Cheney, and other officials, including illegal wiretapping and domestic spying, torture, exposing a covert CIA agent, and lying to Congress to launch a war are impeachable offenses.” Nader’s offer to testify at the hearing was rejected by the committee, but they did allow Barr to testify.
Who debates and why
While pleased with the results of the weekend’s petition gathering, Hawkins expressed concern over his prospects for inclusion in debates in the coming congressional race. Democrat Dan Maffei recently issued a challenge to Republican Dale Sweetland for a serious of five debates. Maffei staffer Mike Whyland noted that topics had been proposed: economic development including jobs and energy, the Iraq war and terrorism, and health care, with two of the debates left open for more general discussion. Locations were not suggested, he said, although LeMoyne College, Syracuse University, the Jewish Community Center, Thursday Morning Roundtable and MACNY had all expressed interest in hosting. Regarding Hawkins’ inclusion in the debates, Whyland said they would deal with that question when and if Hawkins qualifies for the ballot.
“I don’t want to deal with hypotheticals,” he said. “He’s got a long way to go.”
Sweetland noted that some debates were already in the works with civic organizations and television stations before Maffei issued his challenge, with one date established for September. “We’d be happy to accommodate as many as time permits,” he said, listing energy, the economy, foreign policy, immigration, and taxes and government spending as the key issues to be debated. Sweetland maintained that any candidate on the ballot should be included in all debates.
“If Maffei declines to participate in a debate in which Howie Hawkins is included,” he said, “then Howie Hawkins and I will have our own debate.”
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