How about that Glenn Beck “9/12 Movement” Tea Party Rally thing at the Washington Monument, where with Sarah Palin in tow he channeled the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr!

He “restored honor“, and his supporters bought up lots of trinkets and took lots of photographs with people in Abraham Lincoln costumes.

It is impossible to overstate Beck’s assessment of the importance of his events. Toward the beginning of Divine Destiny, he stated , “this is the beginning of the end of darkness. We have been in darkness a long time.”  Saturday’s rally, he said, would be a “defibrillator to the spiritual heart of America.” Near the end of the program, he emphatically declared, “We are 12 hours away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. It has nothing to do with this city or politics, it has everything to do with God Almighty.”

The things on my mind when looking about this event.  Let’s take it as a given, and it is an imprecise comparison, that Glenn Beck is at once the reincarnation of Father Charles Coughlin.  These are types of comparisons bandied about for various figures who use the intimate and emotionally driven nature of radio for certain messianicly delivered political courses.  I haven’t really heard a whole lot of Charles Coughlin — did he do that slow emptypause Drama filled delivery?

Coughlin held mass rallies for the faithful, with various allies of Popular Political Discontent.  Would this make Sarah Palin Huey Long?
To this day, Huey Long has his supporters — people who take his “Share the Wealth” program and argue that it spurred Roosevelt to Action.  It is propped alongside a favorable argument for Hugo Chavez.  It is sort of weird.  The concept of Huey Long’s “Every Man a King” and his brand of “wealth redistribution” essentially having him take $100 from the rich, dispense $50 of it to the poor, and pocketing the rest.  Now that’s Socialism!

Thinking about the “Union Party” effort which had been scearing Roosevelt in adance of his 1936 re-election.

The Union Party was a short-lived political party in the United States, formed in 1936 by a coalition of radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who had taken control of Huey Long‘s Share Our Wealth movement after Long’s assassination in 1935. Each of those people hoped to channel their wide followings into support for the Union Party, which proposed a populist alternative to the New Deal reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

A forgotten figure in that effort was the actual Presidential Candidate, North Dakota Representative William Lemke.  An electoral concept would have Coughlin a man with an impressive following amongst, in particular, urban Catholics, Huey Long with a following in the South, and Townsend an elderly contingent.  Lemke would bring in the “Farm Belt”.  His break with Roosevelt coming around here:

While in Congress, Lemke earned a reputation as a progressive populist and supporter of the New Deal, championing the causes of family farmers and co-sponsoring legislation to protect farmers against foreclosures during the Great Depression.
In 1934, Lemke co-sponsored the Frazier–Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act, which would have provided for government refinancing of farm mortgages. PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt refused to support Lemke on that issue and ultimately sank the bill.

Personality wise, this contraption fell apart before Election Day.  A lot of huge egos, all striving for their own personal fame and fortune.   There is something puzzling about this group, or at least with Long and Coughlin.  Upon Huey Long’s death, Gerald LK Smith looked around for a movement to jump in front of, and found Francis Townsend.  After his break with him, he went on to a long hate-filled public speaking career publishing newletters with a circulation in the thousands and saying his mission was to “Teach the People How to Hate”.   Various enterprises, jumped to the Isolationist Movement before World War 2.   He blasted away at the Jews and the Communists.  He also built an impressive bible theme park in Arkansas.  Coughlin, of course, came back to radio after the loss (he had promised that if this bid were unsuccessful, he’d quit radio) — whereupon he quit blaming the Bankers for everything and started blaming everything on the Jews.
Something that doesn’t follow with Smith in particular, but also Coughlin.  They blasted away at Communism, finding it under every rock — a Redistribution of Wealth.  The most public part of Gerald LK Smith’s career, when he was most important and influential, came under the tutelege of Huey Long — advancing a  “Share the Wealth” program — the goal of which is right there in the name — and then with Francis Townsend seeking a rather ludicrous pension program.

I guess these things have a way of tripping past left and right.  Consider this, tellingly un-specified reference to Barack Obama — an attack from his Left by a Adolph Reed, Jr. published in the Village Voice in late 1996.
In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway.

Today, the biggest named media figure spelling out a collection of “foundations” that Obama was “hatched” in is Glenn Beck, doing so at a chalk-board.  (The latest mocking tribute from Jon Stewart had him flip over the chalk-board to reveal, simply “News Corp. — $1 Million — Republican National Committee” — well, worth a gander, as is the more complicated earlier marathon performance).  Of course, Beck spells it out the “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” connections with the labels of Left Wing, Radical, or Communists.

There is something in first the Illinois Senate, and than the US Senate, that leads to an item of sympathy with Obama against the professional state Senators and US Senators observing and scoffing at the “Young Man in a Hurry”.  Consider first this exchange as Obama spoke on the floor of the Illinois Senate selling a low watt and entirely appropriate Community College booklet.

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I’m having a little trouble with it.
OBAMA: Obama.
HENDON: Is that Irish?
OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.
HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill’s still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?
OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn’t paying Senator Hendon any attention.
HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn’t pay it much attention either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?
OBAMA: Not—not—basically this idea comes out of the South Side community colleges. I don’t know what you’re doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won’t be including that in our directory for the students.
HENDON: . . . Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than Obama—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don’t have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And—and you don’t even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did. . . . I’m missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that makes absolutely no sense. I . . . I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

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