Connecting.the.Dots

The Cross and Double-Cross

2012-02-02T15:55:00.002-05:00

In Washington, the President affirms his humility at a National Prayer Breakfast to be followed by ego gone amok in Las Vegas as Donald Trump, after hinting for days he will endorse Gingrich, gets ready to bestow his grace on Romney.

Here is a contrast in current American culture between the place of the Cross and the Double-Cross as Barack Obama underscores “Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required’” as Trump, to whom much was given at birth, grabs for more attention with his childish hide-and-seek media antics.

The President, delivering his political message “that I am my brother’s keeper, and I am my sister’s keeper,” goes out of his way to embrace the previous speaker’s criticism of those who bask in “phony religiosity” while failing to care for the poor or respecting those with whom they disagree.

Obama echoes a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, saying, “We can all benefit from turning to our creator, listening to him, avoiding phony religiosity...Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical. It is God who is infallible, not us.”

The pastor and theologian Bonhoeffer, who was killed by Hitler in the waning days of World War II, had criticized the German Church for conferring comfort on believers while turning a blind eye to the inhumanity of the Nazis.

“Cheap grace,” he had written, “is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance...absolution without personal confession.”

In Las Vegas, where everything is cheapened and grace is sought only at the gaming tables, the question of Donald Trump’s endorsement matters only to those who are not offended by seeing a super-hustler use the U.S. presidency to promote the upcoming new season of his TV show.

A contest in Nevada between casino owner Sheldon Adelson’s SuperPAC money for Gingrich and Atlantic City casino namesake Trump’s mouth is as far from a religious experience as you can get.

Unless you have a taste for political purgatory from now until November.

Mitt's Silver Hoof-in-Mouth Math

2012-02-01T11:46:00.003-05:00

After spending all that money to win Florida big, the $21.7 million-a-year man takes a victory lap and disgorges a perfect line for attack ads on him in the future.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,” he tells CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Must be some kind of esoteric Bain math, where you add 95 and 1, leaving room for the U.S. Census latest estimate of 15.1 percent of Americans living in poverty.

Asked about the poor, Romney writes them off at the ballot box as Bain would a bad investment:

“The challenge right now--we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor. And there’s no question it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. . .we have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”

Obama’s people will be counting on Romney’s tin ear for income disparity to keep providing spontaneous proof that, despite all the pandering, he is more comfortable in a world of gated communities and tax avoidance.

In dirt-poor South Carolina, he kept saying “I’m concerned about the poor in this country,” but that didn’t go over too well even as he stuffed a wad of bills into the hand of a woman who told him she was broke.

For the rest of the year, Mitt Romney won’t be carrying cash, just promises of tax cuts for the Tea Party comfortable.

Update: A day later, Romney is still taking flak for being dismissive about "the safety net." The professional talkers just won't cut a rich guy any slack.

High Stakes of a Two-House Campaign

2012-01-31T14:37:00.001-05:00

Reelecting Barack Obama this year won’t be enough. Unless Democrats retake Congress, gridlock in Washington won’t end.

Now, a Democratic statistician reports that winning back the House of Representatives “is in the realm of possibility,” citing “a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, in which, when asked which party they prefer to control Congress, voters cited Democrats, 47 to 41 percent, as well as a recent National Journal poll that found 48 percent of voters prefer Democrats to take control of the House while 37 percent want Republicans to stay in control. In October, the same poll showed a statistical tie.”

Such a rising anti-Tea Party tide is even more crucial than whatever happens in the GOP primaries. Another four years of Obama won’t turn the country around without loosening the grip of John Boehner and Eric Cantor, as well as Mitch McConnell, in Congress.

As fund-raising for the President goes on at a high level, disheartened voters may want to funnel some of their dollars at the diehard freshman class of 2010 in the other House, reminding voters of how they are wrecking the economic recovery with legislative tantrums.

A recent Obama fund-raising email from Caroline Kennedy cites her departed uncle:

“In his speech four years ago today, Teddy reminded us all of that bright light of hope and possibility that shines even in the darkest hours...I don't think he would be surprised to know that four years later, this president would have ended the war in Iraq, repealed ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell,’ and guaranteed women the right to equal pay for equal work...

“The 2012 election will be harder than the last. As you think about what role you can play this time, I want you to remember that when Teddy joined this campaign, it wasn't just Barack Obama who drew him in.

“It was you. The possibility of a campaign run by ordinary people determined to change our country for the better and willing to work as hard as necessary inspired him then, and it's what inspires me today.”

Well said, but it’s vital to remember that 2012 is a two-front political war, and it has to be won on both fronts.

Debate Drought: Bad News for Newt

2012-01-30T07:52:00.002-05:00

No GOP slugfests for the next three weeks—-how will we get through the month?

Yesterday Gingrich gave us some venom to go, in the parking lot of a Florida mega-church with a Starbucks in the lobby, tagging Mitt as a "pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-tax-increase moderate from Massachusetts" with "money from Wall Street" to spread lies about him, "as big an outrage as I've had in my career.” (Aside from that, Mrs. Romney, did you enjoy the Sunday service?)

Nationally, a new poll shows Newt’s Southern strategy, which won South Carolina. is not only fading in Florida but destroying his candidacy nationally. Head to head, Romney leads Obama by a percentage point, 48-47, but the President hammers Gingrich, 54-40, a turnaround of 17 points since early December.

"Gingrich's efforts to win the Republican nomination,” says a political scientist, “have set back his efforts to win the general election." Appealing to Tea Party conservatives has "moved him out of the mainstream of American politics."

As a blowout loss looms in tomorrow’s Florida vote, the former Speaker is turning up the volume full blast in retirement complexes, touting Herman Cain’s endorsement and that of Michael Reagan, the Gipper’s son, but the hard-of-hearing may not be enough to save him.

For those of us elsewhere, February promises to be a restful month.

Update: On the last day of campaigning, Gingrich plays the Yiddish card, telling Florida retirees that Romney eliminated kosher food for Jewish residents of nursing homes in Massachusetts. (Mitt’s minions say he restored the cuts.)

Newt, who was Protestant and is now Catholic, is now an equal-opportunity bigot or, as his new friends might say, putz.

GOP "Stinky Feet" Stealing

2012-01-29T12:19:00.002-05:00

A Gail Collins admirer has to tell her she has been taken in by Republican plagiarism of Michelle Obama.

In her column, she writes about Gingrich’s marital history and conservative voters:

“When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. ‘I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,’ former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina.

“Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery, 2) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress, 3) Committing adultery, 4) Allegedly asking your wife to let you keep the mistress on the side and 5) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress... it’s pretty clear everybody doesn’t do it.

“But in a way, Watts is right. (And we do like that stinky feet line.)”

Flashback to the campaign in 2007 when Mrs. Obama told Glamour Magazine about her two little girls: “We have this ritual in the morning. They come in my bed, and Dad isn’t there--because he’s too snore-y and stinky, they don’t want to ever get into bed with him...

“He still has trouble...putting his socks actually in the dirty clothes.”

Of course, the irony of Watts’ translating the phrase from a close, happy family to defend a serial adulterer is, to say the least, piquant.

Rooting around in my five-year-old blog posts, there is one several days later about Newt Gingrich explaining why he won’t run for the White House:

“’(T)he presidency is a minor post on the scale of change I'm describing,’ Gingrich explained to the Washington Post...

“Instead he will follow the example of Benjamin Franklin. ‘He didn't think he was less than Washington or Jefferson,’ Gingrich the historian explains. ‘He was deliberately eclectic and deliberately complex, and happy to be so.

“He was pretty interesting. If you had told him, 'If you could have been simple, you could have been president,' he would have said, 'That's pretty stupid.'"

Does Gingrich wonder about what Benjamin Franklin would be telling him right about now?

Cancer Cures for the Body Politic

2012-01-28T10:36:00.003-05:00

After months of trying to ameliorate a disease ravaging the GOP, Jon Huntsman Jr. has moved into fighting cancers that afflict human beings rather than the body politic by taking over as chairman of a foundation that funds his family’s Institute, a research, education and treatment center with a full-time faculty and staff of 1300.

In his political hiatus, Huntsman worked hard but failed to offer Republicans the radical surgery that might have saved it from the coma in which it now seems to be sunk. Let’s hope he encourages scientists to be more aggressive in the labs.

In the Weekly Address today, the President reminds us again of how far the Tea Party virus has progressed by citing the case of Sen. Mike Lee, who unseated long-time conservative Robert Bennett last year:

“Just two days ago, a senator from Utah promised to obstruct every single American I appoint to a judgeship or public service position-- unless I fire the consumer watchdog I put in place to protect the American people from financial schemes or malpractice.

“For the most part, it’s not that this senator thinks these nominees are unqualified. In fact, all of the judicial nominees being blocked have bipartisan support. And almost 90 percent have unanimous support from the Judiciary Committee.

“Instead, one of his aides told reporters that the senator plans to, and I’m quoting here, ‘Delay and slow the process in order to get the President’s attention.’

“One senator gumming up the works for the whole country is certainly not what our founding fathers envisioned.”

This particular pustule will be on the Senate’s backside for five more years but, in November, voters can start surgically removing some of the others.

Good luck to Huntsman in his quest for cancer cures. We are going to have find our own.

Ganging Up on Gingrich

2012-01-27T06:50:00.002-05:00

Ghosts of GOP past are rising from political tombs to sound alarms about Newt in the White House even as the last Florida debate has him on the defensive about the past and future.

Gingrich fails in his attempt to use Wolf Blitzer as the kind of tackle dummy he made out of CNN colleague John King in South Carolina, while 1996 candidate Bob Dole is joined by Tom Delay, Ann Coulter, Elliott Abrams and other Conservatives in a Matt Drudge firing squad against the former Speaker.

“If Gingrich is the nominee,” writes Dole, “it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him...

“By 1997 a number of House Republican members wanted to throw him out as Speaker. But he hung on until after the 1998 elections...His mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999. I know whereof I speak as I helped establish a line of credit of $150,000 to help Newt pay off the fine for his ethics violations...

“Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with President Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics like shutting down the government helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

“In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year.”

Now, his rivals have National Review and the GOP establishment sounding the alarm for them about Gingrich’s “grandiose” plans, the latest of which is colonizing the moon and eventually making it a state.

In the debate, Rick Santorum looks comparatively sane even as he complains that the President stole his ideas about stimulating manufacturing in the State of the Union and blames Obama for the downgrade of U.S. credit without acknowledging the Tea Party temper tantrum that caused it.

Romney, who now has an “attack coach,” is getting better at giving as good as he gets from Gingrich, who had been treating him like a rich kid in the schoolyard, stealing his lunch money and making him look bad.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul is relaxed and making jokes, as he goes on with a plausible case against foreign wars coupled with loony Libertarian railing over domestic spending.

Where are the men with nets now that we need them?

Time and Other Shaky Dimensions

2012-01-26T13:52:00.000-05:00

For a while the other day, my life turned upside down—-literally. My computer screen inverted itself and would not return to normal no what matter what I did.

After numerous shutdowns, I adjusted to a world in which the cursor moved in the opposite direction from the mouse, managed to find a “restore point” and, clicking on it, brought the screen back to normal.

Curious about why the computer had turned on me, I Googled for an explanation and found it, but the experience has led me into wondering about other dimensions of life we take for granted and how much they change over time.

In the next week, two people dear to me have milestone birthdays—-one 85, the other 90—-and soon afterward, I will be 88. “Old age is a shipwreck,” a saying goes, and in many ways it is.

Even as friends and family gather to celebrate, the object of their love and warm feelings is, in many ways, physically and psychically, moving away from them. “We live in one universe,” Aldous Huxley wrote in a novel, “and die in another.”

We adjust in ways true to our nature. Most women I know are better than men at keeping up connections with one another in the real world. For someone who spent a working life as a writer and editor, transferring ideas and images from his head into those of unseen others, I spend much of my time now doing this, sending out notes in a bottle in the hope that other human beings will find them interesting enough to glance at occasionally.

In a sense, my blogging is an attempt to make connections between my own present and the past, when I was too busy coping with life to think about what it meant to me. Now I live in the past, because it keeps living in me.

All this is reinforced by release from the Kennedy Library of audio tapes that JFK had made, unknown to others, nobody knows why, of his last days on earth.

Listening to a fuzzy voice worrying aloud about his upcoming campaign for reelection would normally have led me to write a post connecting it to Barack Obama’s situation today, but instead it provokes a far different memory.

A friend who was a concert pianist had acquired a roomful of the most sensitive audio equipment available, and I brought a Louis Armstrong CD over to play on it.
The sounds were amazing, not only from his trumpet, but Louis’ breathing and mumbling, all that had been on those records unheard for half a century, waiting for future technology to give them to those who love his music.

That brought me back to the “restore point” of my computer adventure. If only we had such capacity to rewind our lives and find what lies hidden there and perhaps change what we then do...

Yet that recalls the warning of being careful about what you wish for. On the JFK tapes, there is an exchange on November 20, 1963, before he left for Dallas about his schedule for the following Monday.

“Well, that's a tough day," JFK says. "It's a hell of a day, Mr. President," an aide responds.

That turned out to be the date of John F. Kennedy’s funeral.

Obama's Elephant in the Room...

2012-01-25T05:06:00.002-05:00

...is the GOP Congress as the President does a deft job of trying to reboot his final year with small unilateral steps to get around the pachyderm squatting on the path to economic recovery, leading up to a plea for bipartisan cooperation on larger issues that hits a blank wall in the faces of McConnell, Boehner, Cantor and their Tea Party obstructionists.

Without explicit blame, Barack Obama (the man knows how to work a room) acts out a psychodrama of the leader who killed bin Laden and saved Detroit but could not overcome the intransigence of Republicans who say no to everything.

Only at the end, does he allude to the elephant in the room: “The greatest blow to our confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco? I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad--and it seems to get worse every year.”

For a rebuttal, Republicans send out smooth Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who asserts, “It’s not fair and it’s not true for the president to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down nearly time and again by the president and his Democrat Senate allies.

“No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others.”

Say what? Daniels, who would have been crushed in 18 Obama-bashing debates if he had sought the presidential nomination, offers no evidence for these bizarre claims but Mitt Romney, taking time out from explaining away his 14 percent tax rate on last year’s income of $21.7 million, reacts to the State of the Union with puzzlement.

“What he says and what he does are so dramatically different. Where was he during his first two years? Why didn’t he get these things done during his first two years?”

In watching the President’s speech, Romney was looking right at the reason, his own party’s elephant in the room. If he can get past Newt Gingrich in the primaries, the President no doubt will explain it all to him on the campaign trail later in the year.

Newt Wants His Claque Back

2012-01-24T11:29:00.001-05:00

In the wake of a relatively brisk, civilized debate, ringmaster Gingrich is complaining about losing his rabble-rousing rights.

Reacting to NBC’s control of the kind of whooping and cheering that went on in South Carolina, Newt’s morning-after regret is that “I wish in retrospect I’d protested when Brian Williams took them out of it because I think it’s wrong. And I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media.”

“We’re going to serve notice on future debates,” he tells Fox. “The media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to.”

For a historian, Gingrich has failed to recall that the Kennedy-Nixon debates took place in a closed studio with only a handful of press and that the New York Times reported the next day that “the exchanges were distinguished by a suavity, earnestness and courtesy that suggested that the two men were more concerned about ‘image projection’ to their huge television audience than about scoring debating points.”

The process has now been transformed from a relatively civilized exchange into an ugly spectacle of candidates under pressure to tear down one another with unchecked (until the next day, when TV viewers are gone) exaggerations, distortions and lies—-anything to stir up the partisan blood.

No wonder Gingrich is miffed. It’s not “free speech” when partisan claques are allowed to override moderators trying to conduct debates based on exchanges between candidates.

There’s another word for what he wants. It’s “demagoguery,” and even Fox News must know the difference.

Sticky State of Disunion

2012-01-24T06:35:00.000-05:00

Now that future Presidents Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have had their say, a person named Barack Obama, who claims to hold the office, will face TV cameras tonight with what purports to be a State of the Union address.

Fact-checking of Gingrich and Romney eliminates many of their more stimulating claims, reducing Mr. Obama to such boring proposals as refinancing for homeowners in trouble, tax breaks for companies that bring back jobs to the United States and clean energy incentives along with new education and job-training initiatives for high school graduates to get technical degrees.

All this will surely fail to excite the joint session of Congress, and one of them has announced he won’t be there. Staying away will be a Colorado House Republican, who last year told a reporter, “I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby, and you get it--you know, you’re stuck, and you’re part of the problem now, and you can’t get away.”

The problem for those with a serious interest in the sticky state of the union is that they will have to go beyond the sound bites to evaluate Obama’s handling of the economy and read Ryan Lizza’s “The Obama Memos” in the New Yorker, an account of the “post-post partisan Presidency,” and go to Bill Moyers’ website for his interview about “crony capitalism” with David Stockman, a former proponent for Reagan’s trickle-down theory.

All this will involve more time and thought than election-year punch lines and leave behind a sour taste about politicians of all flavors, but these days boredom goes along with eternal vigilance as the price of liberty.

Too Many Mitts

2012-01-23T09:13:00.003-05:00

During the 1960 campaign, JFK said he felt sorry for Nixon: “It must be hard getting up every morning and having to decide who you’re going to be that day.”

Now, Mitt Romney’s authenticity problem is front and center. Wobbling into a belated release of some tax returns for whenever, he is, like Nixon back then, still trying to create a real person Republican voters can believe in.

The obvious answer to Romney resistance is that he appears willing (flip-flops, anyone?) to be or do anything to get elected, and GOP voters are uneasy, not because he is too moderate, but because there are too many Mitts.

For better or worse, they have been gravitating to deeply flawed alternatives (Gingrich, anyone?) for almost a year (Bachmann, Cain, Perry) to channel the passion Romney can’t inspire. In this weird year, “electable” has become a synonym for “blah.”

At Bain, Romney was the “presenter” to sell vampire investments in vulnerable companies. That role required an affable pitchman who would not call attention to himself and distract buyers from the product.

Over two election cycles, he has been doing just that on the hustings, selling a product named Romney, when voters are looking for evidence of an actual person. Now that they are choosing a serial adulterer who has taken millions from agencies he now denounces, time is running out for a real Romney, however flawed, to come into focus.

His advisors can be seen tinkering with the robotic version, programming it to get aggressive and telling Florida hecklers to “take a hike,” while rolling out New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as an attack dog on “Meet the Press” to take bites out of Gingrich.

With a problem so deep, however, the candidate himself may want to give his version of Nixon’s Checkers speech, hopefully less hokey, to tell the American people who that man behind the curtain really is.

Anything would be an improvement over the blur of so many manufactured Mitts.

Media Backlash Against Newt?

2012-01-22T06:57:00.003-05:00

In South Carolina, Prof. Gingrich has combined theology with science: When a snake, i.e. the media, drops a bitten apple on you, deflect it back and reverse the momentum of your campaign.

Not quite Sir Isaac’s formulation, but Dr. Karl Rove, Newt’s former colleague at Fox University, validates the theory, “John King couldn’t have set up the question in a more positive way for Gingrich to just nail it and haul it right out of the park.”

Credit this new formulation to a series of earlier debate experiments, starting with his attack on Chris Wallace for a “gotchya” question and “playing Mickey Mouse games” about the disarray of his campaign last summer, followed by jousting with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo about health care in November and a racially charged encounter with another Fox questioner Juan Williams earlier this week.

Gingrich’s war against the press recalls the final year of Nixon’s presidency and his conflict with CBS’ White House correspondent Dan Rather after Watergate. At a news conference during the reelection campaign, when Rather stood up to ask a question, there were boos from Nixon supporters and cheers from fellow correspondents.

At the noise, Nixon looked down at him and asked sarcastically, “Are you running for something?” Rather snapped back, “No, sir, are you?”

The question now is how journalists respond at future debates. Few of today’s are as feisty as Dan Rather, but then again, Gingrich is not a president but an aspirant clearly bent on using media questioners as whipping boys.

They may not be as highly motivated as Woodward and Bernstein, along with Rather, were back then but, as the Romney campaign starts to hit Gingrich on details of his rosy picture as House Speaker, which actually ended with a cloud of ethics violations and a $300,000 fine, the media will be highly motivated to join in with pointed questions at the debates and, outside the halls, by reporting with gusto on exactly what happened.

If Gingrich is confident about beating back attacks from former wives, wait until he has to deal with the bruised feelings of platoons of media people. Unlike ex-spouses, they never retreat into silence.

How Live Audiences Kill Debates

2012-01-20T05:59:00.002-05:00

The tone of last night’s GOP séance was set in the first minute, not by the candidates or moderator, but whooping and applause of hand-picked partisans in the hall when Newt Gingrich attacked CNN’s John King and all the media as “despicable” for asking about his second wife’s character charges against him that had dominated the news cycle all day.

In contrast, for 1960’s first presidential debate ever between JFK and Nixon, the only people in the studio, besides a panel of four journalists asking questions, were television crewmen, two wire service reporters, three photographers and an aide to each candidate.

“For the most part,” the New York Times reported, “the exchanges were distinguished by a suavity, earnestness and courtesy that suggested that the two men were more concerned about ‘image projection’ to their huge television audience than about scoring debating points.”

How did we get from there to today’s atmosphere of bear-baiting, bull-fighting and Roman gladiators, and was it worth the trip?

The process has been transformed from a relatively civilized exchange of views on issues, with the usual political posturing of course, into an ugly spectacle of candidates under pressure to tear down one another (and the President of the United States) with unchecked (until the next day, when TV viewers are gone) exaggerations, distortions and lies—-anything to stir up the partisan blood.

Saturday night, South Carolina will provide a partial answer to how well this kind of demagoguery works, with the likelihood that Mitt Romney’s big lead in the polls will dwindle or perhaps disappear altogether.

Meanwhile, one of the nation’s leading social critics has already weighed in. “The liberal media,” Sarah Palin observes, “and some of that GOP holier-than-thou machine overplayed their hand this time...I call them ‘dumb arses.’”

For those who want to rinse their minds of all this swill, recommended reading is Fareed Zakaria’s Time interview with President Obama on the changing nature of American power in the world, a thoughtful discussion that presumably was done without an audience cheering them on.

"Blazing Saddles" in S.C.

2012-01-19T07:10:00.005-05:00

Is Mel Brooks directing this movie?

Tonight’s final South Carolina debate will no doubt start as usual with the gang sitting under the palmettos full of Tea Party beans, competing to exude the loudest brain farts about Barack Obama and one another, but where do they go from there?

Will Rick Perry, who almost started a war with Turkey last time, punch another horse? (Nope, late news is that he's doing a "Shane" and riding off into the sunset.)

Can Ron Paul, booed for preaching the Golden Rule about foreign wars, escape being strung up by local Pentagon contractors?

What about Rick Santorum, who began debate season by constantly kissing his former Speaker’s ring? Now that they are neck and neck, will he roll up a sleeveless sweater to hurl at Gingrich’s head?

Will Newt himself, who insulted black sheriff Juan Williams last time to delight the crowd, show up in sheets to belabor Mitt Romney, who still has tax-return cream pie on his face. (“I fully expect the Romney campaign to be unendingly dirty and dishonest for the next days because they are desperate,” Gingrich declaims with a straight face.)

Or will it all end like “Blazing Saddles,” with a giant brawl breaking through studio walls and spilling from one movie set to another?

At least one such scene is at hand as the second Mrs. Speaker is scheduled to be interviewed on ABC's “Nightline” after the debate.

Odds are it won’t be a Gingrich endorsement but a detailed account of how Newt, who believes marriage is for one man and one woman, proposed adding Mrs 3 to the menage without divorcing Mrs. 2.

Mel Brooks, where are you now that we need you?

Mitt: A Loser's Son Who Learned Too Well

2012-01-18T08:58:00.000-05:00

Apology is overdue to George W. Romney for my remembering him only as an unsophisticated man whose remarks about being “brainwashed” in Vietnam cost him the 1968 GOP nomination.

In Rolling Stone, Rick Pearlstein summons up the elder Romney, with ancient videotape, to recall a time when some politicians still tried to tell the truth, even if it derailed their ambitions.

The lessons Mitt Romney drew from his father’s defeat were all the wrong ones.

Back then, George Romney was a successful auto manufacturer who campaigned against “gas guzzlers,” became governor of Michigan and had the silver-fox good looks of a president (Does Mitt dye his hair?) but, in that pre-everyday-debate era, frustrated the press corps with a salesman’s genial naivete on issues.

A fellow Republican governor observed, “Watching George Romney run for president is like watching a duck try to [George Carlin verb] a football.”

Yet Romney, as Pearlstein reminds us, had defied his Mormon church by leading a march for civil rights, advocated for them in the South in ’68 and, “after America's worst riot broke out in Detroit under his watch, the governor said that America could respond with a crackdown...‘but our system would become little better than a police state.’"

When the elder Romney turned against the Vietnam War (as the entire country was doing that year) with one unfortunate word, politicians and media jumped on him, and his frontrunner status was gone. Then LBJ stepped down, and we got Nixon, who prolonged the war for years, and gave us Watergate.

“Mitt learned at an impressionable age,” Pearlstein concludes, “that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”

George Romney made automobiles and gave back part of his salary and bonuses when he thought they were too high; Mitt has made only money, tons of it, and won’t say exactly how and how much.

George Romney and his wife supported Planned Parenthood; Mitt has flip-flopped into Right to Life.

George Romney was so much of a do-gooder that a critic described his political career as like “sending a Salvation Army lass into the chorus at a burlesque house.” Mitt Romney seems right at home in today’s GOP whorehouse.

Political patrimony in our time keeps producing disappointing results: Romney is following the footprints of George W. Bush. As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo looms on the 2016 horizon, we can only hope that Democrats have stronger bloodlines.

Happy Birthday, Mrs. Obama, Wherever You Are

2012-01-17T07:22:00.000-05:00

The First Lady turns 48 today. I know because an e-mail from the President last week reminded me with two links to a fund-raising site:

“The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception...

“This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we've experienced together, and I couldn't do it without her. I know she'd love to hear from you today.”

With this kind of robo-mail, the Obamas are a long way from 2007 when a campaigning Michelle talked about her husband’s domestic faults (not picking up his socks or putting butter back in the refrigerator) and offered a philosophical reason for doing so:

“Barack is very much human. So let’s not deify him, because what we do is we deify, and then we’re ready to chop it down. People have notions of what a wife’s role should be in this process, and it’s been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different--I think most real marriages are.”

Inevitably, the White House makes fictional characters out of its inhabitants with journalists like Bob Woodward and the like trying to get behind the façade. The latest, Jodi Kantor, was on the Daily Show last night, with Jon Stewart expressing surprise that her relatively mild book had drawn a counterattack from Mrs. Obama claiming it portrayed her as “some angry black woman.”

With Republicans demonizing her husband non-stop in debates, such touchiness is understandable, particularly since even Obama supporters like Arianna Huffington are blurting advice for her to be more like Eleanor Roosevelt who “at the same time that she's doing fundraisers in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, she should go to South Central [Los Angeles]...and seeing the places where there is pain, where there is struggle, where there is homelessness, where there is unemployment.”

The real person in the White House now did not sign on to be Eleanor Roosevelt or anyone since then, when most First Ladies had to do no more than stand behind their husbands, smiling for photo-ops.

So, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, Happy Birthday, Michelle Robinson Obama (no campaign contribution included).

Hard Weekend for the Faithful

2012-01-16T14:22:00.002-05:00

After pious Denver quarterback Tim Tebow is humiliated on the gridiron, there comes unsettling news for evangelicals who days ago met and decided to support Rick Santorum for President.

Even as ministers fall in line, the Daily Beast publishes a report (with photo) of Mrs. Santorum’s live-in relationship with a well-known abortion provider before she met her husband. (In a stranger-than-fiction turn, the doctor had delivered her 22 years before they got together when she was a nursing student and he was 63.)

Whether or not her past is germane to Santorum’s candidacy, Southern Carolina voters and beyond will have to think hard about how far religion, or religiosity, has been pushed into areas of American life where it did not predominate in the past.

Of all the damage George W. Bush did to our national character, not least is how his faith-based meanness obscured traditional admiration by Americans of all religions, or none, for figures like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, whose beliefs led to humility, self-sacrifice and good works rather than contempt for those who fail to share self-serving political certainties.

“Cheap grace,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a minister hanged by Hitler for denouncing the comfort his Church was conferring on believers while turning a blind eye to the inhumanity of the Nazis, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance...absolution without personal confession.”

This year the Super Bowl will be won by athletic skill, not prayer, while voters, the Religious Right notwithstanding, will be picking a President, not a pastor-in-chief.

Update: In its own bubble, the GOP debate Monday night, according to the Caucus, leaves two imponderables: “The endorsement of Rick Santorum by a group of evangelical leaders over the weekend has the potential to affect the race” and “a smear campaign...aimed at influencing evangelicals who view Mormonism as a cult.

“But the two rivals of Mr. Romney who seem to be vying most strongly for the evangelical vote--Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum--are both Catholic, a religion that has sometimes been viewed with skepticism by certain evangelical voters.”

Outside of that, let the best candidate win.

A Memory of Martin Luther King

2012-01-15T15:26:00.001-05:00

Five years ago, in another political world when Barack Obama was getting ready to run for president, I wrote this:

West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow.
Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.

At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.

Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”

He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies…..

“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...

“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...

“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”

It is not hard to believe that some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves exercised their rights decades later in voting for Barack Obama.

I wouldn’t change a word as we celebrate Dr. King’s birthday five years later.

"Downton Abbey" Obsessions

2012-01-14T10:32:00.005-05:00

The PBS series is becoming the “West Wing” and “Sopranos” of the century’s second decade, mirroring Americans’ longing for escape from the Obama and Tea Party era as surely as its predecessors reflected a desire for a more human society, high and low, during George W. Bush’s time.

As second season ratings soar, what is “Downton Abbey” telling us about ourselves?

In midlife, a dozen friends and I hired a small bus with a guide to tour England’s stately homes. After a week, the obscene grandeur of those palaces with huge tapestries of ancestors who had earned them by slaughtering enemies of royalty and passed them down to generations living in unearned luxury while countless others toiled away their lives below stairs made me homesick for America, where Adams, Franklin and Jefferson had resisted replicating such a society here, even as it took them a century and a war to stop enslaving a whole race.

Now “Downton Abbey” arrives to enchant an ambivalent Anglophile, who in the 1930s and 40s, grew up on Hollywood’s version of England in what John Updike called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”

The movie moguls brought over Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Madeleine Carroll, Leslie Howard, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, among a colony of British actors, to people our imaginations with role models of how civilized people behave.

Decades later, American are more sophisticated but, in hard economic and political times, apparently hunger again for a world of order where decent people (mostly) struggle with their humanity. At the time “Downton Abbey” starts, E. M. Forster had just published “Howard’s End,” a novel in which a 20th century middle class was changing his country with motor cars and commerce.

“Only connect” was Forster’s theme: “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

The world of “Downton Abbey” is certainly breaking apart in the days before World War I in a swirl of uncertainty above and below stairs about inheritance of the estate, intermingled with issues of love, marriage and ambition that affect everyone.

That Julian Fellowes has drawn us into their world so deeply is a tribute to his talent as “The Sopranos” was to David Chase and “The West Wing” to Aaron Sorkin—-the humane but outdated Lord Grantham in a losing struggle to hold his world together; his beautiful, headstrong and confused daughters; the almost masochistically noble valet Bates and the heartstrong housemaid Anna who loves him unconditionally; even the selfish schemers, O’Brian and Thomas, have dimension and complexity.

“Downton Abbey” is now assured of a third season next year, and one of the characters, Maggie Smith as the dowager countess, gives us some clues about where all these people may be heading.

In Fellowes’ script for Robert Altman’s "Gosford Park” (2001), Dame Maggie appeared, playing a similar role, but the mood of that manor house movie set in the 1930s, two decades later, is much darker than “Downton” with most of the characters upstairs and down self-seeking and dishonorable and, when the vile host is murdered, hardly anyone cares.

Meanwhile, we can all live at “Downton Abbey” now, and even newcomers can catch up with past episodes online and luxuriate.

Colbert Candidacy, the Put-On Perfected

2012-01-13T12:02:00.002-05:00

The GOP debates could make a profit on Pay TV if they let Stephen Colbert join the panel. How much would it be worth to see him match wits with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry?

Sadly, like his other ventures, Colbert’s South Carolina candidacy is only fodder for his reality-blurring show, the perfection of a trend that began to emerge in the 1960s when TV made American life too complicated for Bob Hope-Milton Berle one-liners.

Rough sketches for the persona Colbert now presents were subjects back then for New Yorker critics such as Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp”) and Jacob Brackman in “The Put-On” to define a slippery comedy in which the audience is in the know as a figure feigns utter seriousness while subverting a subject’s defenses.

Brackman could have been describing today’s Colbert in parsing the put-on as “it disorients the interviewee, ridicules the interview process, communicates ‘real’ ideas and feelings yet deflates the seriousness of questions and replies.”

Only clueless Al Gore has breached this implicit agreement by referring to “your character” during an interview, shocking Colbert into a “My character?” reaction.

Susan Sontag in her ambivalent book-length essay on Camp quotes Oscar Wilde, "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art," linking it to a gay sensibility that emphasizes artifice but holding on to her own reservations about its ultimate value.

She would be in a minority today. For those who revel in being part of Colbert’s “in the know” audience, this week’s New York Times Magazine has a fascinating profile of how he came to be what is now an iconic 21st century figure.

He won’t be running for president, but he’s doing more than any of Obama’s challengers to help keep us sane.

Update: Colbert will be on ABC Sunday morning. Now that he’s turned his Super PAC over to Jon Stewart, the quasi-candidate is free to take his act beyond Comedy Central.

Yankee Acts in South Carolina

2012-01-12T14:08:00.001-05:00

As Mitt Romney tries to seal the deal in the Palmetto state and falls in the polls, memories come back of a culture clash when I was in basic training there during World War II. How much has changed in seven decades?

The country boys in my company were excited by anything exotic and, given their lives before induction, it took little to tickle them. One day they were chortling over a guy in the next battalion named Zero.

He had been at City College a decade before me and in the 1940s was getting known in Manhattan night clubs for political satire that would later fail to amuse the House Un-American Activities Committee. The night I looked him up, Zero Mostel was on his way to becoming the pear-shaped presence that years later would charge around a Broadway stage and turn into a rhinoceros.

Sitting on his bunk, field jacket zipped to the throat, his big head seemed to be resting on a bulging bag of laundry. He was in his late twenties, but his eyes were a thousand years old. When I told him I was from the Bronx, he grabbed me as if I were a pastrami sandwich.

We went into town Saturday night to the Spartanburg USO, where local ladies entertained with doughnuts, coffee and Southern charm, and the troops entertained back however they could. When the hostesses heard Zero was a professional performer, they pushed him to the stage. I sat in the front row, happily awaiting my share of the attention he would be getting.

Zero slouched up to the microphone with a shy smile and a glint in his eye, gathered his bulk, fixed his face into a scowl and suddenly emitted the roar of a deep Southern demagogue. To this audience of dewy damsels and redneck recruits, he was offering his rendition of Senator Pellagra T. Polltax, a raging parody of the Mississippi racist, Theodore Bilbo.

As Zero flung his arms in all directions and turned up the angry rant about niggers and kikes, I slid down in my seat, looking for an exit.

By the time he finished, I was crouching near the floor. Through the startled silence, I heard the start of a low rumble, and I sprinted to the stage where Zero was beaming and bowing, grabbed his elbow and shoved him through a door toward the bus that would carry us, untarred and unfeathered, back to camp. On the ride Zero seemed relaxed, a small smile on his face. We never went to the USO again.

All these years later, Mitt Romney no doubt faces a different South Carolina, but the latest polls show him with only a slim lead there. If he can win, the nomination will undoubtedly be his but, somewhere in Comedy Heaven, I can picture Zero still smiling that knowing smile.

The Also-Rans' Anti-War Vote

2012-01-11T04:53:00.003-05:00

After all the demographic slicing and dicing, the final primary figures disclose one New Hampshire result pundits are ignoring: The only two candidates who unequivocally want to take us of out of Afghanistan and most of the Middle East muddle now, Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, together received 39.8 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney’s 39.6 percent.

In contrast, Rick Perry, who advocates going back into Iraq, got one percent as superhawks Santorum and Gingrich drew single figures.

Granted, the contest was about the economy, but both Paul and Huntsman kept pointing out that trillions being wasted on nation-building in the Middle East, to say nothing of the continuing human toll, could be better spent back home rebuilding America.

In his victory lap, Mitt Romney, having it both ways as usual, promises jobs to veterans when they come home but avoids taking any position on bringing them back, settling for jingo clichés about American power.

In the GOP fantasy world of 2012, the horse race will go on, but won’t change, as a New York Times editorial points out:

”The candidates’ economic arguments were disturbingly disconnected from economic reality. They spoke of government spending as if it were the sole cause of the federal budget deficit and cutting it the sole solution. In reality, it was tax cuts for the wealthy, an assault on social programs and a deregulatory zeal that allowed a recklessness that led to near economic collapse.

“The solution is policies that promote growth and help the middle class, not what the Republican hopefuls want. Mr. Obama said it well on Monday night: ‘We can’t go back to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics.’ You couldn’t tell that by listening to Mr. Romney prattle about a merit-based economy and call for lowering taxes and cutting spending.”

To say nothing of completely ignoring the Middle East elephant in the room, unless Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman manages to get the Presidential nomination.

Trampling New Hampshire

2012-01-10T07:21:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow residents of the Granite State will be feeling like Roxie Hart after the verdict in her “Chicago” trial, abandoned and forgotten by hordes of reporters and camera crews who have besieged them over weeks for every detail of their decision-making, leanings and doubts about the candidates.

All that ends tonight when votes are counted, and as the crafty lawyer explains in the movie, the “journalists” will all be rushing off for “fresh blood on the streets” in Florida and South Carolina.

As New Hampshire loses all the attention (and money) that has washed over the state, what will we have learned? Not much beyond how crafty the candidates have been in smearing one another with one PAC hand behind their backs (as John McCain notes), while posturing to the heavens as noble statesmen with the other.

The change in this year’s tone from 2008, when McCain won, might be encapsulated by a crowd booing Rick Santorum’s mention of his name as the kind of centrist candidate of the past, like Bob Dole, they have mistakenly chosen in the past.

Meanwhile, another non-centrist, Ron Paul, cuts off CNN again as Dana Bash tries to ask him about “connecting with New Hampshire voters” who have been crowded out of a diner by reporters and cameras.

After tonight, New Hampshire streets will be back to normal, and there will be empty stools at the diners, but what we will have learned about the nation’s political mood beyond what a crush of well-heeled pols and their media counterparts can fabricate for the headlines and TV cameras?

Obama's Two Mates

2012-01-09T10:34:00.001-05:00

As Republicans loudly proclaim marriage as between one man and one woman, Democrats are quietly debating White House partnerships—-not only in a new insider book on the First Lady’s role but renewed discussion of Hillary Clinton joining the President on this year’s ticket.

In the book, a New York Times reporter describes Michelle Obama “as a woman who, despite her public face as ‘mom-in-chief’...has been a behind-the-scenes force helping shape her husband’s presidency as a steady reminder and custodian of the principles he touted as a candidate,” often in conflict with members of his staff.

Such speculation echoes the days when Nancy Reagan reportedly took on the same role and is less consequential to both the President’s chances for reelection and the nation’s future than the argument for Hillary Clinton running as Vice President this year.

The case for doing that is cogently made by Bill Keller, former executive editor of the Times and now an OpEd columnist:

“She would bring to this year’s campaign a missing warmth and some of the voltage that has dissipated as Obama moved from campaigning to governing. What excites is not just the prospect of having a woman a heartbeat--and four years--away from the presidency, although she certainly embodies the aspirations of many women. It’s the possibility that the first woman at the top would have qualifications so manifest that her first-ness was a secondary consideration.”

Two years ago, Bob Woodward, in another insider book, reported: “It's on the table. And some of Hillary Clinton's advisers see it as a real possibility in 2012. President Obama needs some of the women, Latinos, retirees that she did so well with during the 2008 primaries...The other interesting question is, Hillary Clinton could run in her own right in 2016 and be younger than Ronald Reagan when he was elected president.”

As GOP pygmies throw darts at the President’s foreign-policy successes, the presence on the ticket of a Secretary of State who helped implement them would be a constant reminder of how divorced from reality such blathering really is.

In private life, Barack Obama is the model for a one man-one woman union. Politically, he has the opportunity of blessing us all by taking his vows with a former adversary and worthy partner.

Update: As the President loses his ineffectual Chief of Staff William M. Daley, he takes on Jacob J. Lew, a longtime Washington hand from the Clinton days, one small sign that the White House may be moving Hillaryward.

Overdose of GOP Apocalypse

2012-01-08T14:51:00.005-05:00

Just in time, our frayed nerves can go back tonight to the quiet and calm of “Downton Abbey” in World War I after a weekend of Republicans crying havoc over Barack Obama, pausing only in sniping at one another for restful outbursts of road rage, blaming the President for everything wrong in the 21st century world.

Robotic Mitt Romney, as befits a frontrunner, leads the pack in letting “slip the dogs of war,” stabbing today’s Caesar with a Tiffany icepick at every possible turn, claiming that the nation needs to be saved by the kind of downsizing he did at Bain and starting a trade war with China.

Newt Gingrich, who came out of Iowa snarling at Romney, backs off his attacks with sneers at Obama and a fervent defense of marriage as between one man and one woman, reminding those who have been paying attention that he has done it three times under two religious faiths.

Rick Santorum, trying to sound normal, backs off his “man on dog” rhetoric about homosexuality and, when asked what he would do if his son told him he was gay, says piously, “I would love him as much as I did the second before he said it” and urge him to be celibate.

Only Ron Paul sounds relatively honest in defending his consistent views of an alternate universe, and Jon Huntsman's interjections of sanity seem too little too late.

How much of this can human minds take? The Republican campaign has gone well beyond unleashing the dogs of class warfare but poking at them with sharp sticks. When voters register with the Grand Old Party these days, do they get injections making them immune to truth?

The U.S. economy is improving, however slowly, and President Obama is winding down Middle East wars on George W. Bush’s schedule, but the GOP wannabes are picturing America as a burning Atlanta in “Gone With the Wind,” while debate moderators spent all their time trying to get them to pummel one another rather than acknowledging American reality toward the end of Obama’s first term.

Downton Abbey’s World War I will be a haven of human decency by comparison.

Update: Romney tries to have it both ways (what else is new?), declaring in the debate that his dad, who ran an auto company and became a governor, told him to “never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage.”

If that sounded elitist, he tells a crowd afterward, “I was just a high school kid like everybody else with skinny legs. And, you know, I imagined that I’d be in business all my career. And somehow I backed into the chance to do this.”

In Romneyworld, if your family is rich enough, you can back in all the way to the White House on skinny legs and a mouth only loosely connected to your brain.

Ron Paul, GOP's Satchel Paige?

2012-01-07T17:47:00.002-05:00

With a double-header debate this weekend, memories arise of the legendary Satchel Paige who, before baseball was integrated, was the greatest pitcher in America, often starting two games in a day and was considered by Joe DiMaggio et al the best they never had to face in the big leagues during his prime.

Satchel pitched well into his sixties, famously saying, “Never look back, something might be gaining on you.”

Ron Paul, who will turn 77 in August, like Paige, is an all-star in his own Libertarian league, and the question arises: Is it too late for him to make it in the Big Show?

Between Iowa and New Hampshire, Paul was the only major contender to go home for a few days rest and his son Rand has been out stumping for him since.

To an observer particularly conscious of age, the elder Paul has seemed a little slower recently in his usually snappy debate responses.

How will he do Sunday morning after a Saturday night outing?

Update: Ron Paul did senior citizens proud this weekend, slapping down Rick Santorum and showing up the rest of the field by exemplifying a couple of Satchel’s other rules for the aging: "Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move" and "Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society—-the social ramble ain't restful."

Paul can still throw those fastballs.

Learning to Love Santorum

2012-01-06T10:08:00.001-05:00

Three moderate GOP weathervanes—-George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks—-are being blown by Iowa winds in Rick Santorum’s direction, but in a wobbly way.

The usually dour Will starts out almost giddy, claiming Republicans “crave fun. Supporting Mitt Romney still seems to many like a duty...Suddenly, supporting Santorum seems like a lark, partly because a week or so ago he could quit complaining about media neglect and start having fun, which is infectious.”

Backing off quickly, Will notes that the new non-Mitt “can, of course, be tenaciously serious” and ends the column wistfully, “Even if Santorum is not nominated, he might galvanize a constituency that makes him a vice presidential choice.”

Brooks, as is his wont, is more global, admitting he himself is to the “left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion,” but comes up with one of his deep-think conclusions:

“America is creative because of its moral materialism--when social values and economic ambitions get down in the mosh pit and dance. Santorum is in the fray.”

Noonan is more listless: “Rick Santorum has a lot going for him, most especially a deep identification with and caring for the working class, for the displaced and unempowered people who once worked in steel mills and factories and have seen it all go away. He is a Catholic who sees society not as an agglomeration of random Randian individualists but as part of a community...

“But his weakest spot is foreign policy, where he is not thoughtful but reflexively hard-line. It is one thing to say, as all candidates do and must, that America must be strong...It is another to be aggressive, to be too burly, to be all George W. Bush and no George H.W. Bush.”

So New Hampshire Republicans can avoid boring Mitt Romney, according to their leading pundits, by getting on the bandwagon of a fun-loving but tenaciously serious advocate of moral materialism who can’t be trusted with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

Sounds like a choice.

Anyone-But-Romney Sweepstakes Survivors

2012-01-04T15:07:00.005-05:00

Parsing Iowa results is like trying to solve the old riddle of why French intellectuals loved screwball comic Jerry Lewis, critics gave “The Nutty Professor” their Oscar and the government showered him with honors.

In the world of slapstick, you never know which way the croissant will crumble and, post-Iowa, Michele Bachmann is gone, Rick Perry has his foot on a banana peel and Newt is revving up to pummel Mitt in a round of revenge debates.

In the Anyone-But-Romney Sweepstakes, the umpteenth frontrunner is now Rick Santorum, whose default facial expression is that of the kid in the big family who always got the smallest slice of pie, and he will do without help from previous nominee John McCain, who is endorsing Romney, at least in part as a result of Senate brawls over torture with Santorum accusing the former POW of “not understanding how advanced interrogation works.”

The next day on his Facebook page, a McCain aide wrote, “Ron Paul may be the wackiest candidate in the G.O.P. field. But for pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today.”

Back on the stump in New Hampshire, McCain is using former Governor John Sununu as a straight man, telling his old knee-slapper about “the two inmates in the chow line in the state prison and one of them turned to the other and said the food was a lot better in here when you were governor.”

Now, Santorum himself is facing advanced interrogation—-about his “man on dog” comments on gay sex, among other gems—-while Ron Paul’s best hope seems be a rich Conservatives’ “emergency meeting” in his native Texas to coalesce behind a single candidate.

The Obama White House, of course, is watching this with great interest, hoping the GOP will be French toast all year, and fervently praying over the two-party system, “Vive le difference!”

Iowa Caucuses Made Simple

2012-01-02T20:42:00.001-05:00

For those who may be confused by the sophisticated ritual to take place tomorrow night, explains the NY Times Caucus, “the process requires a commitment of several hours for a voter. And it encourages campaigns to have a level of organizational sophistication that often helps separate candidates who can go the distance from those who cannot...

“Once voters show up at their caucus location, it is not as simple as just making a quick decision. Representatives of each campaign are typically given the opportunity to make remarks in an attempt to sway some people at the last minute.

“The better-organized campaigns will have members of the community stand up for them at every caucus location. By contrast, the candidates with passionate, energized followings often receive more spontaneous expressions of support.

“It is a very different kind of democratic process than in primary states, where overt electioneering is kept at a distance from the actual voting. In Iowa, the campaigns are waged up close and personal, all the way until the end.”

Few people realize that the Iowa Caucuses are based on an ancient British tradition, which is perhaps best understood in the graphic illustration here.

Update: In a last-minute tweet, Rupert Murdoch calls Rick Santorum the “only candidate with genuine big vision” for the United States. Apparently, the Caucuses have their roots in the Australian culture as well.

Who knew?

Mission Impossible: Humanizing Eric Cantor

2012-01-02T12:00:00.001-05:00

No matter who faces him for the White House, Barack Obama starts 2012 with one advantage against the GOP—-the poster boy for intransigence, Eric Cantor, who proves again on 60 Minutes that there is no way to “humanize” him.

In an interview, the usually genial Lesley Stahl starts by saying flatly, “President Obama's nemesis throughout the year was 48-year-old Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader of the House, who played a major role in the Republican strategy.

“The White House blames Eric Cantor, more than anyone else, for disrupting the president's first term. Especially for scuttling one set of deficit reduction talks after another...the president's keying on him has taken its toll. He's been picketed and heckled.

“He has fallen in the polls and so has his party as, according to a CBS News poll, the public blames them more for the gridlock in Washington.”

Stahl presses the indictment: “Eric Cantor was the one who went out in 2010 and recruited most of the freshmen who are conservative and backed by the Tea Party.

“He meets with them regularly, and several of them told us Cantor is their inspirational leader and father figure. But Eric Cantor does not want to be seen as unreasonable.”

To that end, Cantor’s people obviously sought the 60 Minutes interview, inviting cameras into his home to meet his family. There Stahl found one point of agreement with Obama: Cantor’s mother-in-law lives with them as does the President’s. But his wife, a former Democrat, is pro-choice and for gay marriage.

As Cantor continues to “charm” Stahl, an aide is moved to yell out “That’s not true” off camera when she notes that his idol Ronald Reagan “raised taxes.” Mischievously, 60 Minutes inserts a clip of the Great Communicator doing just that.

Cantor concludes the séance by denying “personal animosity” between himself and the President, who recently told a crowd, “I'm going to keep on talking to Eric Cantor. Some day sooner or later he's going to say, 'Boy, Obama had a good idea.'”

But not before next November.

Heaven's Rap Sheet

2012-01-01T13:41:00.002-05:00

The new year brings news of a 16-year-old girl named Heaven Chamberlain, arrested with Occupy the Caucus protesters in Des Moines along with her mother.

Heaven, detained once before at an Occupy rally in October, says her rap sheet is like lines on a résumé (“It shows that I’m active with the community and that I care about people’s opinions”) and that she plans to run for president in 2036 after a stop brief in the Senate.

Ms. Chamberlain (no descendant of Neville, by all evidence) takes me back over seven decades when I was her age and preparing to become a foot soldier in World War II, but my teen-age rap sheet was different.

College had become unreal, unbearable, so I signed up for a summer in the Maine woods on a Federal Youth Project, an odd choice for a kid who had never been away from city streets or held a shovel or an ax.

It was a fiasco, of course. I rode all night on the Boston & Maine Railroad, drank coffee on an empty stomach, threw up at 3 A.M., arrived in camp for a checkup by a gaunt woman doctor who sent me into a panic by fingering my scrotum and, after a day in the woods that is now a merciful blank, I was put back on a southbound train. So much for a would-be Paul Bunyan from the Bronx and, all in all, no preparation for going into the Army a year later to train for hand-to-hand combat.

But if I was afraid, and I certainly was, I was also restless. I couldn't concentrate on classes so that fall, when the Daily News had lost enough Irish Catholic copy boys in the draft to start hiring Jews, I left school and took a job there in some blind urge to meet what was coming head-on, an eager lemming packing his bags for a seaside vacation. If I was going to be shoved into the world, I wanted to take some experience with me, even if it meant being drafted before my college exemption ran out.

In four months, I learned a few things. While waiting to run errands, I taught myself to touch-type. Each day I carried gallons of coffee in cardboard containers to rewrite men with headphones while their fingers flew across keyboards and copy editors who sat around a horseshoe-shaped table pushing thick pencils, smoking and gossiping. (One of them, a nasty man who never let a copy boy keep the change, was later charged with treason for failing to stop moonlighting as a flack for the Japanese government after Pearl Harbor.)

On Saturday afternoons I would meet a photographer at Madison Square Garden and rush back with film of high-school basketball for the back page of Sunday’s early edition. The first Monday I turned in my expense slip: ten cents for the round trip by streetcar. The head copy boy tossed it back, “Put in for taxis, like everybody else.”

At a four-alarm fire, again a photographer’s coolie, I was clutching film through heavy smoke when a fireman spotted me, shook his head at my knickers and the press card in my cap, took me firmly by the shoulders and turned me in the opposite direction, away from the fire.

I tell all this to Heaven Chamberlain, and generations between, not only to underscore the difference in expectations back then but to suggest that something may have been lost in an era of self-entitlement that equates carrying placards for TV cameras as “being active with the community.”

All my best to Heaven and her counterparts now reoccupying Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, but they may want to consider trying some scut work like those of us did back then, and try bringing coffee to campaign workers and getting closer to the electoral fires by ringing doorbells.

Not all presidents start out by being community organizers or Wall Street tycoons.

Romney's Death and Taxes

2011-12-30T15:08:00.000-05:00

The candidate’s son Matt steps into a brouhaha by answering a question about his father’s refusal to release tax returns by being flip about Obama’s birth certificate.

Bad move. The elder Romney has a valid Michigan birth certificate, but there is also the question of a death certificate, officially stamped on his passport ("He is dead") by the French police after a lethal auto accident while he was a missionary there in 1968.

If the Birthers can see a Manchurian candidate scenario in sunny Hawaii, how much more plausible is the substitution by the devious French of a 21-year-old imposter with plastic surgery, waiting to emerge decades later and moved into the White House to foist foreign ideas on America?

To make their case for a fake Romney today, Iowa Birthers could cite all those flipflops on major issues, proving that he is not a genuine Conservative but an undercover agent who will do anything to get elected in order to confuse and undermine America.

Bring on Donald Trump’s team of crack investigators and tell the Romney boys to cool it.

The Santorum Joke

2011-12-29T16:48:00.005-05:00

If Mitt Romney wins in Iowa next week, he could find nipping at his heels the runt of the 2011 litter.

Two weeks ago, in post-debate stupor, I woozily compared the GOP race to an action movie:

“If the Great Screenwriter in the Sky is following the...plotlines, after all the car chases, explosions and reversals, the eventual nominee is clear: Rick Santorum. He’s been a bit player who has never had a big scene and, by all conventions of the genre, has to be revealed as the powerful genius who has been pulling all the strings.”

Now, with Ron Paul finding there is no statute of limitations on racist rant, life is imitating my lame joke with Santorum running a close third in a new poll.

This is the same Santorum who, after making headlines for zany comments on subjects ranging from Catholic priests’ child abuse to the Middle East, lost his bid for reelection only five years ago by 41 percent to 59, the largest margin of defeat ever for an incumbent Republican Senator in Pennsylvania.

Yet, here is a serious analysis that gives him a rising chance of actually winning the Caucuses based on his current momentum as desperate Rick Perry runs ads accusing Santorum as “proud of feeding at the earmark trough in Congress.”

If the Joke candidate ends up close to the hard-charging Romney next week, it may prove that Iowans have a sense of humor after all. Or would it be desperation?

Notes From a Shipwreck Year

2011-12-28T10:55:00.000-05:00

Reading bloggers' own favorite posts of 2011 is a reminder of how much political and social sanity has been lost in this Tea Party world. Satire and rage abound.

Yet it’s cathartic to read these notes in a bottle from survivors and realize we are not alone in this shipwrecked world.

Such comfort is provided by keeping alive a tradition started by the late Al Weigel, who wrote brilliantly under the nom de plume of Jon Swift and was tireless in promoting the work of others, an effort now being maintained by Batocchio at the Vagabond Scholar.

There you can find what bloggers consider their year’s best posts, a fascinating mosaic of commentary on what we have been living through. GOP presidential candidates to the contrary, the human mind is still alive and well in America.

With a sense of inevitability, I chose a political post but was tempted by others on a range of subjects—-aftermath of Tuscon, the fragility of human life in the face of Nature, and a memoir of two friends, authentic public figures a world apart.

This comes with my best wishes to all for a saner 2012 and special thanks to Joe Gandelman, who allows me to be part of his civil community on The Moderate Voice, a tireless band of resisters to online vitriol and viciousness.

Happy New Year and good reading!

Gingrich, Mel Gibson Divorce News

2011-12-27T13:15:00.000-05:00

Breaking up is hard to do, but much more expensive in today’s Hollywood than rural Georgia of three decades ago.

Mel Gibson is finally divorced from his wife of more than 30 years and mother of seven children after turning over an estimated half of his $850 million in movie earnings.

At the same time, the nation’s other Lethal Mouth seems to have been lying about his first divorce three decades ago as CNN unearths Georgia court documents showing that his wife wanted to stay married.

Even worse, the first Mrs. Gingrich’s petition states: "Defendant shows that she has adequate and ample grounds for divorce, but that she does not desire one at this time."

Former friends say they took up collections for the family, because Gingrich "wouldn't give them a dime" in the first months of the separation, and there were "no lights, no heat, no water, no food” in the home. "We had a food drive at First Baptist Church," says a former fellow professor. "The deacons went down and stocked her pantry."

Before the advent of no-fault, divorces were admittedly messier than they are now, but as the husband of a lawyer-mediator and co-author of a book about how women are treated in marital breakups, I can testify that the first Gingrich divorce seems par for the course back then: Get a tough lawyer and starve out an unwilling wife, even if the kids go hungry, too.

It’s heartening to see the former Mrs. Mel Gibson get a just share of her loathsome former husband’s movie loot, but then again, he isn’t Newt Gingrich, who dumped two wives on the way to running for President on a platform of bringing back good old family values for us all.

Firing an Icon, Pauline Kael

2011-12-26T17:14:00.002-05:00

A mutual grandparent at holiday dinner confronts me with the accusation that I fired a cinema icon in the 1960s. Guilty. So I may as well share my confession with the whole world.

I brought out the worst in Pauline Kael. She started irritating me the minute we met and never stopped.

Looking for a movie reviewer with intelligence and style when I became editor of McCalls, I had read and admired Kael’s work in periodicals with small circulation. Another editor and I took her to lunch.

The ice in our drinks had barely melted when Kael went into a diatribe about the awfulness of mass magazines. When she paused for breath, I said, “I could tell you worse than that, but we’ve established how independent you are, so let me make a suggestion. When your friends accuse you of selling out, just admit you’re doing it for the money.”

We agreed on a year’s contract.

Kael’s first column was an essay on movie critics. It could have been titled, “Is There Anyone I Haven’t Offended?” She described readers as boobs who expected critics to like what they like and reviewers as venal enough to do that and went on to assail education (“academic dry rot”), art houses and film festivals (patrons are “afraid to say what they think or just don’t know what to think”) and good taste (what’s new and important is “in terrible taste”).

That took care of everybody but Kael and her groupies, as she savaged movies from “Zorba the Greek” and “The Pawnbroker” to the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.”

In the following months, it got so bad that even Kael seemed aware of what she was doing, pausing during a round of demolition to observe that “a reader may easily say, ‘She just doesn’t like movies’ and then start trying to figure out what’s the matter with me.”

“Dr. Zhivago,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Born Free” went under her scalpel and did not survive. After eviscerating movies, Kael went at the people who made them with nasty comments on the taste and motives of Paul Newman, among others.

After five columns, I had enough. To complete her self-directed drama of Life Among the Philistines, Kael told reporters I did not honor her contract (I paid her for the year) and that I fired her for attacking “The Sound of Music” as “The Sound of Money” (actually I agreed and had told her so). Years later, when she was established at the New Yorker, Kael finally admitted to an interviewer that I was right on both counts.

I got some insight into what went wrong between us when she wrote about Herman Mankiewicz, a bitter man who collaborated on “Citizen Kane.” Very drunk at a Hollywood party, he had vomited over the dinner table. “Don’t worry,” he reassured the hosts, “the white wine came up with the fish.”

Kael, who shared Mankiewicz’s contempt for the conventional, had to explain her firing by announcing “The Sound of Music” had come up with the sour grapes.

So I’m guilty, guilty, guilty. I didn’t lose it at the movies, but over the unearned contempt of a self-made icon-to-be.

A Year of Block-and-Blame: What Next?

2011-12-26T09:44:00.003-05:00

In the residue of Christmas spirit, a serious attempt to understand what’s behind a toxic cloud that the Tea Party has cast over American government all year:

Yes, the economy has been bad, and many of us have been hurting—-from young people without jobs to the retired with no increases in Social Security and no place to earn interest on their life savings.

Yes, bailouts and stimulus have been very costly yet still not enough to turn the recession around, creating huge deficits.

Yes, government has grown more intrusive with massive health care reform and new regulations for financial institutions that control so much of the national wealth.

Yes, Barack Obama has not been a perfect president in a time of trouble and turmoil.

Yes, but...

Why must all these challenges mean government is the problem and not part of the solution, as it was during the Great Depression?

Next year’s election will provide the answer. The contest, as E. J. Dionne puts it, is between “a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation’s economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages” and today’s Republicans who “cast the federal government as an oppressive force, a drag on the economy and an enemy of private initiative.”

Their most likely candidate, Mitt Romney, is now campaigning against the straw man of “an Entitlement Society,” in which “government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.”

In our 24/7 media world, these opposing arguments may be treated as if they were of equal weight, even though the second is palpable nonsense. Just measure Romney’s own rewards for financial juggling against those of any middle-class worker.

In these dark Washington days, however, there is a ray of hope. A full year of nothing more than block-and-blame by the Tea Party House minority has given voters a full picture of the consequences their continued dominance would have for the country.

An embattled six-term conservative, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, points out that in 2010 “people who claimed that they wanted somebody who was more of their tea party aspect...killed off the Republican chances for a majority" in the Senate.

Next year, as Dionne observes, Barack Obama may be running as “the conservative.”

Update: Upping the 2012 ante, Newt Gingrich fails to make the Virginia primary ballot and, ever the historian, compares the event to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“Block that metaphor!” The stakes are high enough without dragging World War II into it.

Romney's Rewrapped Gift

2011-12-24T10:09:00.001-05:00

We’ve all done it, and Mitt seems like someone who wouldn’t hesitate to pass on a second-hand present. He did it to a voter yesterday.

Asked by a New Hampshire man who was being foreclosed by Bank of America even though he had made all his mortgage payments, a problem Romney has clearly never faced, the candidate suggested he go to court or occupy bank headquarters until he gets satisfaction.

“That would get their attention,” Romney said.

Problem is, neither the Governor or his staff has been paying enough attention to the news, having missed a widely spread story of a Florida couple who did just that last summer and, accompanied by Sheriff's deputies and movers, went with court permission to remove desks, computers, copiers, filing cabinets and cash in the teller's drawers, before the bank finally anted up what it owed them.

Oh well, never mind, it’s the thought that counts. And a Merry Christmas to all!

Tea Party Goes to the Dogs

2011-12-23T10:38:00.002-05:00

Talk about misreading a mandate: The bitter enders give the President the best Christmas present of all—-pushing their block-and-blame strategy off a political cliff to make Barack Obama, previous evidence to the contrary, look like Harry Truman against “a do-nothing, good-for-nothing Congress.”

It wasn’t easy to get the President off his perch as “compromiser in chief,” requiring most of the Senate GOP, Karl Rove and the Murdoch media to stop Boehner’s gang from acting like a circular firing squad.

Even dour Eric Cantor is reduced to leaden levity: “I saw the president out yesterday doing his Christmas shopping. I saw he brought his dog with him. We’re here. He could bring his dog up here. We are pet friendly. It will not take a long time. We could probably resolve the differences within an hour.”

No sale. Nothing could stop this one from ending with the Tea Party going to the dogs. Happy New Year, guys, keep on woofing!

"Take Heaven, Take Peace, Take Joy"

2011-12-22T21:00:00.001-05:00

I can’t gift-wrap this, but it’s the closest thing to a Christmas treasure that I have to share. Decades ago, I published it twice in different magazines.

Eric Sevareid was a gifted writer who spent most of his life as a radio and TV journalist working with Edward R. Murrow during World War II as part of “a band of brothers” and later at CBS-TV in its glory days.

He was a hero and a role model to me and, in the light of the new Clint Eastwood movie, it’s noteworthy that J. Edgar Hoover considered this prototypical Midwestern farm boy a threat to his vision of America.

Herewith, excerpts from Sevareid’s essay:

"Christmas offers us peace in one hand but in the other it carries a sword. The peace it offers is the love we felt in childhood and may still feel again if we have lived our lives as we were instructed in our early days. The sword is our conscience, glittering as sharply as the icicles on the Christmas tree.

"Christmas is an anticipation for the children; it is memory for most adults. It fastens the grip of truth upon us and will not let us go. Implacably it demands of us that we regard our work and what we have made of our lives, our country and our world.

"By the glow of the soft lights, by the sound of child voices in song, piercing us with an almost unendurable purity, we are obliged to remember that our first and only commandment was to love, and we have not truly obeyed; that men were so commanded not to improve them, but to save them from themselves, and we have not truly understood.

"Of course, we say as the moment of truth approaches, 'Christmas is really for the children.' Suffer the little children to take this burden from us.

"Perhaps, were we to know the realities of our own deepest motivations, we would conclude that this is why we have made of the Christmas occasion an immensely complicated business. It is the sheer busyness of Christmas, not so much its commercialization, that has changed its forms and rituals. Perhaps we have lost not only the art of simplicity but the desire for it as well. But not, I think, in our deepest beings. And as long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, then Christmas is.

"The sophisticated may belittle the almost assembly-line transaction of the printed Christmas cards that swamp our parlors in piles and windows. It is impersonal, yes, as compared with the old-fashioned family trek down the street for greetings at the door. But each little square or rectangular printed card is a signal of human recognition, a reassurance that we live in part, at least, of their consciousness, however small a part, and so are not alone...

"We cannot live, in our families, in our nations or in the world, if we cannot open our hearts. I do not know how this compressed, elbowing and suspicious world is to go on in peace if this cannot be done. I see no ultimate security in any 'balance of power' or 'balance of terror' peace. We know instinctively that in the end only a peace through a balance of kindness will preserve us...

"There are a few words I read every time the Christmas season comes around...[perhaps] written by Fra Giovanni in the year 1513...which sometimes I think of as the most perfect passage in our language...

"'There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give you, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within reach, is joy. Take joy. And so, at this Christmastime, I greet you with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.'"

From Sevareid, long gone now, and me, wishes to all for a day of heaven, peace and joy.

Is Eric Cantor Running the Country?

2011-12-21T10:52:00.000-05:00

Washington’s new impasse could ironically lead to a gift of sanity as the House Tea Party is finally revealed for the berserk faction it has been all year, holding the nation hostage to a scorched-government ideology.

Senate Republicans, after passing a short-term payroll tax extension by 89 to 10, are outdoing the President in denouncing them for “harming the view, if it’s possible anymore, of the American people about Congress” (John McCain), “playing politics” (Scott Brown) and thinking of “political leverage, not about what’s good for the American people” (Dean Heller, who replaced John Ensign in Nevada).

Speaker John Boehner is the public face of GOP irrationality, but he is clearly trapped by his own deputy, Eric Cantor, the leader of what the No.2 House Democrat describes as a “walk-away caucus...walking away from 160 million Americans.”

For a long time, from the Health Care Summit last year to the debt-ceiling debacle that scuttled Boehner’s Grand Bargain with the President this summer, Cantor has been at the head of those holding the Speaker himself hostage.

Now, he attacks Senate Republicans by charging that “the people of this country are beginning to wonder about the body on the other side of this Capitol and are wondering what the leader over there has against the middle class of this country.”

Cantor has been picking fights with the President for two years now in his delusion that he will replace Boehner someday, but now he is taking on his own party as well.

As Obama approval rises and voters find Cantor’s coal in their Christmas stockings, it may eventually stoke the fires in next year’s electoral heat against his Tea Party followers.

“Enough is enough,” the President said when he walked out in disgust on Cantor this summer. Now that Senate Republicans agree, Washington will have to find ways to get back to business.

A Tale of Two Americas

2011-12-20T11:07:00.003-05:00

I am haunted by the opening lines of an old novel: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Lately, I have been watching hours of scratchy black-and-white film about my childhood years, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and seeing through very old eyes a different America, peopled in turmoil by those who don’t resemble their descendants today.

Instead of fighting for bargains on Black Friday, they stand patiently in breadlines with gaunt faces and hopeless eyes, waiting for food. Instead of blaming government for their poverty, with 25 percent unemployment, they look hopefully to it for salvation.

In FDR’s First Hundred Days, politicians work day and night, shuffling papers at warp speed to pass legislation in a frenzy to get the economy moving. Some of what they do will work, some will fail, some will be called unconstitutional, but there is little legislative in-fighting by politicians blaming one another.

Without 24/7 media chatter, there are parades supporting the National Recovery Act (NRA) but, behind the newsreel scenes, farm families are driven off their land by the Dust Bowl and city dwellers are sleeping in the streets.

In those days, my father worked in a Harlem pawn shop 60 hours a week for $16, a dark place where people sold their soles, trading dress shoes and suits or furs and jewels for cash.

When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent there. Tan-coated men behind cages squinted through jeweler’s loops and raised their heads to shake them side to side at hopeful smiles and hopeless eyes across the counter. The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras, binoculars, as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker’s cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy in that place of a sad business profiting from human misery that was almost universal.

In that different America, politics was more an expression of hope than a set of beliefs. Although my father worshipped FDR, his voting reflected a longing for something more.

In a 1960s hotel ballroom, I was on the dais at a dinner to honor Dr. Benjamin Spock for his efforts to avoid nuclear war. Sitting next to me, tall and thin and clear-eyed in his eighties, was Norman Thomas, the idealistic clergyman who became a perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party between the world wars.

As we bend over fruit cups, I tell him my father voted for him six times. Norman Thomas grins. “Ah,” he says in a dry midwestern voice. “So he was the one.”

In that other America, it was still possible for politicians to make self-deflating jokes.

Ron Paul in an Empty White House

2011-12-19T12:04:00.001-05:00

If the feisty Libertarian, who now leads in Iowa, should win the nomination, all of us who have qualms about 21st century government will be put to a test.

With Congress tied in knots and a narrowly divided Supreme Court, we have had a sneak preview of what may be coming—-total loss of faith in a flawed system that has more or less worked for centuries and, in an election between Barack Obama and Ron Paul, the choice of a continuing struggle to repair it or dismantle it completely and start over.

The positive outcome of Republican debates has been to weed out a series of frontrunners with little to offer beyond personal ambition and narrow the contest to Mitt Romney, the Zelig-like chameleon, and Paul, whose position on every issue is strong and predictable. Unless Jeb Bush makes a last-minute entry, that is the GOP choice.

In head-to-head confrontation, Romney will no doubt attack Paul as “zany,” but some Independents and flexible Democrats may be drawn to his foreign-policy stance against endless wars as opposed to other GOP aspirants who want to annihilate Iran, confront Pakistan and get into a trade war with China.

For a party that has veered from Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, Paul has the virtues of being consistent and scandal-free.

For a nation that is reeling from a sick economy and Washington gridlock, however, he would raise a different question: Are we better off with a vacant White House than we are now?

The closest we have come to that was clueless Jimmy Carter, elected by voters after disgust over Watergate, and we know how that worked out. Paul is far from clueless, but some of his certainties would put our current unhappiness with American governance to the severest test.

Anarchy, anyone?

American Manhood: Piety and Testosterone

2011-12-18T13:22:00.001-05:00

When scoring athletes look upward and thank God for His help, why don’t opponents ever shake their fists at the sky for being disfavored?

Debate over piety displays by Denver’s Tim Tebow and a Barry Bonds conviction of using testosterone enhancers prompt broader questions about the definition of manhood today and its manifestations.

We are a long way from the culture’s strong, silent heroes (Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Unitas, Clint Eastwood) to a generation of Dancing with the Stars on the diamond, gridiron, movie screens—-and everywhere else.

In politics, Mitt Romney is punished for trying to look presidential (i.e., dignified), while a cable mating show features an obnoxious dandy trying to impress a first date with condom wrappers bearing his name and likeness.

We are talking about the morphing of American manhood from what may have been idealized stereotypes (Atticus Finch and Shane) to id-driven child-men with no limits in their quest to score on the playing field, at the ballot box and in the bedroom.

That may be dismissed as a matter of style, but what has been lost in these equal-opportunity self-assertions is a component of the traditional ideal of manhood—-protecting not only those in your own family but, insofar as possible, the weak and helpless everywhere.

Men of my ancient generation may have exaggerated that masculine role in society, but in today’s culture only Barack Obama is trying to hold on to a shred of it and being pilloried as a result.

Do we really want our grandsons to take as role models the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Tea Party crybabies in Congress?

Goodbye Gingrich?

2011-12-17T10:07:00.006-05:00

His opponents sound like Occupy Wall Street protesters as the SEC files charges against six top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who seem not to have profited from Newt Gingrich’s $1.6 million of advice as a historian.

The indictments could be a harpoon to bring down the GOP’s white-haired whale, sharpening attacks on his self-enrichment with court cases rather than vague accusations.

Asked if those ties should disqualify Gingrich as a presidential contender, Rick Perry tells Iowans, “People are sick and tired of being ripped up by congressmen and senators who are in cahoots with Wall Street financiers, and that’s basically what we have here.”

This follows Ron Paul’s debate attack on Newt’s non-lobbying: “They went broke. We had to bail them out. So, indirectly, that was money that he ended up getting.”

When Mitt Romney mildly observed that “people go to serve the people and then they stay there to serve themselves” and suggested that he return the money, Gingrich slid off the hook by retorting that Romney should give back “all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over the years at Bain.”

That kind of slick evasion won’t wash now as the SEC’s chief enforcement officer proclaims in bringing the cases:

“All individuals, regardless of their rank or position, will be held accountable for perpetuating half-truths or misrepresentations about matters materially important to the interest of our country’s investors. Investors were robbed of the opportunity to make informed investment decisions.”

Newt Gingrich may not have been among the masked men holding the guns, but he was around helping them with the getaway cars. Will primary voters be able to blank that image out of their minds?

Update: Even the Wall Street Journal joins the chorus: "Newt Gingrich's opponents aren't letting up in their criticism of his lucrative ties to the failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac after he resigned as House Speaker in the late 1990s.

"More damaging to his Presidential candidacy is that Mr. Gingrich doesn't seem to understand why anyone is offended."

Bachmann Does Norma Desmond

2011-12-16T11:26:00.001-05:00

With the leaders underplaying conflict, Michele Bachmann takes center stage to give an over-the-top performance worthy of Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”

After Newt Gingrich twice accuses her of getting facts wrong, Bachmann harrumphs that “it’s outrageous to continue to say over and over through the debates that I don’t have my facts right when, as a matter of fact, I do. I am a serious candidate for president of the United States and my facts are accurate.”

(“You’re Norma Desmond, you used to be big in pictures.” “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.”)

The former frontrunner, with wide-eyed stare, by tangling not only with Gingrich but Ron Paul as well, is reprising the refusing-to-face-reality role that has marked her five years in Congress, starting with a bit part at her first State of the Union, when she groped George W. Bush and did not let go.

A Minneapolis TV station reported that Bachmann “put her hand on Bush's shoulder. However, it wasn't just a tap. After he signed an autograph for her, Bachmann grabbed the president...

“After signing the autograph for Bachmann, the president turns away, but Bachmann doesn't let go. In fact, the video shows her reaching out to get a better grip on him.

“Bush then leans over to kiss another congresswoman, but Bachmann is still holding on. Bachmann then gets more attention, a kiss and an embrace from the president. A few seconds later, Bachmann's hand finally comes off the presidential shoulder.”

With attention slipping away, the former star is trying to hold on by dragging down everyone else in camera range.

If I were Gingrich, Romney or Ron Paul, I would stay away from swimming pools in Iowa when Bachmann is around. She’s ready for her closeup, Mr. DeMille.

Update: From Politifact: “During the Sioux City debate, Bachmann said that ‘after the debate that we had last week, PolitiFact came out and said that everything I said was true.’ That’s simply not the case. We rated two statements by Bachmann from that debate and ruled one of them Mostly True and the other one Pants on Fire. So for claiming she had a perfect record, she earns another Pants on Fire.”

Slouching Out of Iraq

2011-12-15T17:57:00.001-05:00

Our departure, after nine years, almost 4500 deaths and trillions of dollars, comes not with a bang but a whimper of exhaustion and relief.

“Iraq will be tested in the days ahead,” says Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, “by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself.”

No senior Iraqi official attends the ceremony of departure, marked by muted wishful thinking that contrasts with U.S. arrival of “shock and awe” to find Saddam Hussein’s phantom nuclear arsenal.

What we leave behind is a dead tyrant and a fractured, fragile nation.

At this moment, it’s fitting to recall what Robert Byrd warned in 2002 before the Senate voted to authorize the invasion:

"We may not always be able to avoid war, particularly if it is thrust upon us, but Congress must not attempt to give away the authority to determine when war is to be declared. We must not allow any president to unleash the dogs of war at his own discretion and or an unlimited period of time.

"Yet that is what we are being asked to do. The judgment of history will not be kind to us if we take this step.”

In 2007, with the war seemingly lost, George W. launched a Surge of more troops and more money, under the counterinsurgency leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, which stabilized Iraq enough to make possible today’s departure if not in victory, at least without dishonor.

Most of us who opposed the war when it started, including Barack Obama, also resisted the Surge, but it worked well enough to make this day possible.

As we leave Iraq, there is enough sadness, guilt and regret to go around, but what’s important to remember is that “wars of choice” are costly in blood, treasure and American morality.

And the Winner Is...Rick Santorum

2011-12-14T10:51:00.001-05:00

I dozed off last night watching one of those Liam Neeson action movies in which he wrecks cities for reasons too complicated to explain and switched channels to find more of the same in the Republican demolition derby.

Ron Paul is surging in Iowa to bump the tailpipes of Gingrich and Romney while the first frontrunner Donald Trump has been waved off the track, canceling his debate and promising to “leave all of my options open because, above all else, we must make America great again!”

In the stands, superfan Christine O’Donnell is cheering for Mitt, who is “pleased to have her on my team,” with the witch-like logic that “he’s been consistent since he changed his mind.”

If the Great Screenwriter in the Sky is following the action movie plotlines, after all the car chases, explosions and reversals, the eventual nominee is clear: Rick Santorum. He’s been a bit player who has never had a big scene and, by all conventions of the genre, has to be revealed as the powerful genius who has been pulling all the strings.

If that doesn’t play well at future GOP screenings, they can always go for a vampire-flick resolution—-reviving the dead—-by bringing back Herman Cain or Jon Huntsman Jr.

And if desperation sets in, does anyone know if Liam Neeson is a registered Republican ?

Update: Romney tells New York Times editors that Gingrich is “zany.” As always, he is a master of understatement.

Democrats' Holiday Hardball

2011-12-13T12:08:00.001-05:00

After a year of being held hostage by Tea Party naysayers, the party that controls the White House and Senate is finally gift-wrapping a package of gotcha for their tormentors.

At the President’s urging, Senate Majority Leader Reid has told Speaker Boehner he will not hold a vote this week on government spending until there is agreement on the payroll tax and unemployment compensation issues, for which House Republicans have insisted on paying with cuts for federal workers and Medicare beneficiaries instead of taxing the income of the richest Americans, as Democrats propose.

A White House aide explains, “When the president said Congressional Republicans weren’t going on vacation until they passed this middle class tax cut, he meant it. They don’t get to finish their business until the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance are extended.”

In a reversal of the debt-ceiling crisis, Democrats can pass a stopgap government spending bill to go past this Friday’s deadline and hold Congress in Washington next week to hammer out an agreement on the other issues.

This time, instead of the prospect of downgrading the government’s credit rating, the penalty will be getting home late for the holidays. But for Americans, who now fear Big Government at record levels, that Grinch-like price for Congress may not be too troubling.

Update: Boehner holds his troops together to pass what Reid calls "a pointless partisan exercise. The bill is dead on arrival in the Senate. It was dead before it got to the Senate.”

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Obama Enigma

2011-12-12T11:33:00.000-05:00

Watching the President on 60 Minutes last night raises wonder at why more Americans aren’t rallying around this highly intelligent, energetic, fair-minded man.

The answer may be in the question itself. Contrasting Barack Obama’s demeanor with the rage and unearned self-regard of his would-be successors, Congressional critics and Murdoch media attack dogs—-and his low-key response to that rabid criticism--may tell us as much about low approval ratings as his own performance.

Informed of a new poll showing that “People like you. They respect you. They think that you're working hard. And they realize that you faced an enormous amount of trouble and problems, many of them inherited. And you're approval rating is four times higher than the Congress,” the President responds wryly, “That's a low bar.”

Then the bad news: “But they're not happy with the way you're doing your job. You've got 75 percent of the people in the country think it's headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-five percent. And 54 percent don't think that you deserve to be re-elected.”

Most politicians would respond defensively, but this President coolly observes, “We've gone through an incredibly difficult time in this country. And I would be surprised if the American people felt satisfied right now. They shouldn't feel satisfied. We've got a lot more work to do in order to get this country and the economy moving in a way that benefits everybody, as opposed to just a few.”

Even as he goes on the attack against Congressional stonewalling, Barack Obama is trapped not only by his even temperament but the reality that a 2012 opponent is still unchosen and that GOP debates demonizing him will go on for months to come.

Asked about them, the President once again wryly observes that Gingrich is “somebody that has been around a long time and is good on TV, is good in debates” and Romney has “shown himself to be somebody who is good at politics as well. He’s had a lot of practice at it.”

Noting that “they will be going at it a while,” Barack Obama is in the delicate position of calibrating how much and how long to allow himself to be tarred without directly responding or stepping up the counterattacks of his surrogates.

Will his wry be enough to contain all that GOP baloney?

Presidential Fidelity: History's Mixed Verdict

2011-12-11T14:22:00.004-05:00

The least passionate segment of last night’s debate was a brief round on personal family values.

Without glancing at Gingrich, his adversaries gave toneless answers, citing their own long marriages and “character” as an issue, with only Rick Perry, suave as always, expanding on the subject:

“Not only did I make a vow to my wife, but I made a vow to God. That’s pretty heavy lifting. That’s even stronger than a handshake in Texas...If you cheat on your wife, you'll cheat on your business partner."

Gingrich, with a straight face, agreed that people should know "that this is a person that they can trust with the level of power we give to the presidency...I've made mistakes at times--I'm also a 68-year-old grandfather and I think people have to measure what I do now."

Subject closed? Looking back at White House occupants since FDR, however, history suggest a more nuanced answer to the correlation between presidential performance and marital fidelity.

Truman, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the two Bushes (as far as we know) were faithful, although Carter during his campaign gratuitously told Playboy he had “looked at a lot of women with lust in my heart.”

Before and after being stricken by polio, Franklin D. Roosevelt was not. His romance with Lucy Mercer effectively ended the intimacy of his marriage to Eleanor and, in later years, Missy LeHand was his social secretary and “constant companion.”

When Eisenhower was president, there were rumors of an affair with his World War II driver, Kay Summersby, who after Ike’s death and shortly before her own, wrote a memoir about their relationship.

JFK and LBJ violated their vows early and often.

Sainted Ronald Reagan moved into the White House as the first divorced president, while Nancy worked tirelessly to remove all biographical references to his first Hollywood wife, Jane Wyman, who never spoke publicly about their marriage.

Bill Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions” and impeachment thereafter (by Gingrich) require no elaboration.

Now, after the death of privacy, Americans might likely take in stride the first First Lady to acquire the position through adultery, although evangelicals are divided about the question of whether or not Gingrich has "repented enough."

To offset such criticism, Gingrich has now endorsed their "Marriage Pledge," promising to “support sending a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the states for ratification. I will also oppose any judicial, bureaucratic, or legislative effort to define marriage in any manner other than as between one man and one woman.”

Looking back, such presidents as Truman (who slept well after dropping the first atomic bombs in history), Nixon and Carter may be seen as small, mean-spirited men without moral imagination or the humanity to be ensnared by uncontrolled passion.

Whether or not that applies to Newton Leroy Gingrich, there will be a lot of other evidence to consider.

Double Dose of Political Inertia

2011-12-10T11:08:00.000-05:00

Newton’s First Law tells us objects stay at rest or continue in motion if nothing changes, an apt description of this year in American politics: an inert Congress and a careening GOP presidential race that keeps dropping former frontrunners off the turnip truck.

This was not the kind of Change Barack Obama had in mind when he was elected, but he has now gone through three years of pushing legislation against wall-to-wall GOP resistance that hardened into stone after the 2010 Tea Party takeover of the House.

As he starts to campaign for reelection, the President will have to persuade voters that inertia in American life has always worked both ways, as a deterrent to progress, to be sure, but also as a brake to driving off a cliff in the passions of the moment, a delicate balancing act.

In John Boehner and Newt Gingrich, if nominated, he will have twin symbols of what’s wrong in American politics now, both kinds of inertia gone berserk.

Barack Obama will have to counter such ugly Newtonian mindlessness by going back to the wisdom of Emerson and Thoreau, with an ethos of American individualism that now seems like a message from another planet.

"All our progress is an unfolding," said Emerson, "like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit."

"How vain it is to sit down to write," Thoreau added, "when you have not stood up to live."

Telling Americans to stop and think may be a hard sell in the era of instant bloviating with a flood of 24/7 certainty on every subject, but it may be the only way to get the nation off a path to self-destruction.

Romney-Gingrich Mudfight

2011-12-09T10:59:00.001-05:00

The next two Republican debates, tomorrow night and Thursday, “are shaping up to be the most important--and nasty--yet.”

Both come only weeks before Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, with primaries soon after in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. These debates, predicts the Caucus, “are likely to be slugfests as desperate candidates search for a magic bullet to improve their political fortunes in the short time that is left.

“The best predictors for the tenor of a presidential debate are the hours and days that precede it...And the 2012 campaign for the Republican nomination has suddenly taken on a much harsher tone.”

In this mudfight, David Brooks observes, “we have one man, Romney, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1950s, and another, Gingrich, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1960s. He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance...

“It’s really too bad. We could have had a great debate about the progressive-conservative tradition. President Obama is now embracing Roosevelt. Gingrich has tried to modernize this tendency.

”But how you believe something is as important as what you believe. It doesn’t matter if a person shares your overall philosophy. If that person doesn’t have the right temperament and character, stay away.”

The Wall Street Journal is kinder to Gingrich as Peggy Noonan calls him “Inspiring—-and Disturbing,” noting that “He is compelling and unique, and, as Margaret Thatcher once said, he has ‘tons of guts.’ But this is a walk on the wild side.”

All this is capped by a Romney surrogate accusing Gingrich of being "not stable."

Does the GOP go with the buttoned-down stiff they could bring home to meet their parents or the wild guy on the motorbike who might run them off the road?

Let the games begin.

Romney, Gingrich and a Constipated Congress

2011-12-09T05:59:00.002-05:00

This is the week Barack Obama declared political war on an obstructionist GOP, invoking Theodore Roosevelt.

In Osawatomie, Kansas, the President cited TR who came there in 1910 and “was called a radical...a socialist—-even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women—-insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax...

“Just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. ‘The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and taxes—-especially for the wealthy—-our economy will grow stronger...

"Now, it’s a simple theory...one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government...And fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

Barack Obama is no Teddy Roosevelt or even a Harry Truman who slugged it out against a “do-nothing, good-for-nothing” Congress and won reelection in 1948. But, regardless of whether he faces Romney or Gingrich, the 2012 issue is the same, and the question is: Will he fire himself up enough to meet the challenge of rallying voters.

As Republicans treat the payroll tax cut extension as just another occasion to hack away at social programs, GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who supports taxing high earners to finance it, is discouraged about how a bill could appeal to enough members to pass.

“It’s going to be pointless if the House sends over bills that the Senate cannot or will not pass,” Sen. Collins says, assuming leaders are negotiating behind the scenes.

That’s a generous assumption, given her party’s constipated failure to move on any issue all year, bringing Congressional approval ratings to new lows.

If this President is going to be a Teddy or Truman next year, he has a long way to go in turning up the heat before year’s end and girding himself for even more of the same in an election year.

Newt's Kingmaker Murdoch

2011-12-07T11:59:00.003-05:00

Mitt Romney has an uphill battle as he gets into the Fox cockpit to contest Newt Gingrich, whose cozy ties with proprietor Rupert Murdoch go back almost two decades.

“I’ll be on Fox a lot because you guys matter when it comes to Republican primary voters,” Romney tells Neil Cavuto in an interview as polls show him far behind Gingrich among Fox-watching Iowa caucus-goers.

Until he started running for President, the former Speaker was on the Fox payroll, but his shady relationship with Murdoch goes back to the 1990s when he had to return a $4.5 million book advance under pressure after it was disclosed that at the same time he had been meeting with the media mogul on legislative relief for his empire during a whirlwind of ethics violations that eventually led to Gingrich’s downfall.

In 1997, the House voted overwhelmingly (395 to 28) to reprimand him with an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in its 208-year history that the body ever disciplined a Speaker for ethical wrongdoing.

Now, with his own empire itself under pressure for ethical lapses, particularly in Great Britain, Murdoch has lost none of his appetite for playing White House kingmaker with Fox lackeys giving Romney a hard time to advance Gingrich’s fortunes.

It will be the severest test yet of Romney’s blandness as he enters the Fox lion’s den to take them on in Murdoch’s last hurrah to get a pet poodle of his own into the White House.

Will Romney be able to roar?

Update: Gingrich is champing at the bit to line up a Fox team for the White House, promising to name a fellow contributor John Bolton as Secretary of State.

Bolton, who wants to bomb everybody, would match Newt’s hair-trigger temperament perfectly.

Pearl Harbor, 70 Years Ago Today

2011-12-07T02:08:00.002-05:00

We lived in a different America then. News of the Japanese attack came from bulletins that broke into radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the phone, on streets of cities and house to house in small towns.

That Sunday, I was a 17-year-old college student with a part-time job in a New York hospital, standing next to a young man with a dazed grin, staring through a picture window at a nurse in a white mask holding up a swaddled armful inches from our eyes. She gently shook the sleeping baby into a red-faced wail, then drew the curtain.

In those days, fear of germs kept newborns in a nursery while mothers spent a week in hospital beds. The babies were brought in to be breast-fed, then carried back to their cocoons. During that time, the new father would get only one quick look, and my job was to lead him to the window. The babies all looked alike. The real show was on our side of the glass: a man’s eyes flooding with pride, wonder and worry.

But on December 7, 1941, sudden death six thousand miles away shattered the tableaus of new life. Happy faces at mothers’ bedsides turned to stone, nurses and doctors looked lost behind their masks of composure. My stomach churned as I climbed to the Third Avenue El to go home. As the train hurtled over familiar streets, I felt cold and exposed.

The next day, I was in the Great Hall of City College, holding a half-eaten sandwich, my eyes on a huge glowing mural behind the stage, a black-robed graduate amid flying cherubs and, in togas, the figures of Wisdom, Discipline and Alma Mater pointing the way to a bright future.

From a loudspeaker the voice of the only President I could remember (FDR took office on my ninth birthday) was telling of a day that will live in infamy and announcing we were at war. I was suddenly wrenched into a world beyond my familiar slivers of the Bronx and Harlem connected by a subway ride.

The following days were a thrilling blur of rumor and fear. A history professor stopped a lecture on Victorian life. “You’ll hear the Japanese have poisoned the water and Nazi subs are off Staten Island,” he said, with a reassuring grimace. “Nothing will happen. Go home, do your homework.”

Every night at 8:55, breaking into the flow of radio comedy and dopey drama, the chilling voice of Elmer Davis told of battles in Europe and the Pacific. Older boys from my neighborhood were fighting in unimaginable places, and I would soon be with them.

World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read the next day's newspaper. Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about the Middle East, which now slide out of national consciousness?

World War II was everybody's war, fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the street. At 17 then, in little more than a year, I knew I would be among them. We were all in it together.

Today, a New York Times editorial observes, “The youngest of the survivors are in their late 80s now. Our direct connection to that day will soon flicker out. Yet we will still remember, to pay respect to sacrifice, to honor bravery, to note the dear price of peace...

“Just as Americans will do today with flowers tossed into the oil-speckled waters of a peaceful harbor outside Honolulu, and as they do each September in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, they are summoning the memory of people cherished and dearly missed--and strengthening the unity of a nation well loved and worth defending.”

If my friends and I had known we would be called "The Greatest Generation," we would have wondered what was so unusual about doing what we had to do. And it would have saddened us to know that our children and grandchildren would have to fight and die when the nation's survival was not so clearly at stake.

It would have broken our hearts then, and it still does.

Impeaching Gingrich, Right and Left

2011-12-05T03:58:00.003-05:00

Thinking about Newt is exhausting—-all those policy reversals, all that profiteering from disguised lobbying, all that adultery while impeaching Clinton, all those crackpot gimmicks posing as intellect. Yet, there are many hands on both sides of the political spectrum to do the heavy lifting of deconstructing him.

Maureen Dowd takes a whack at it: “His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.

“He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.”

From the other side, GOP Sen. Tom Coburn weighs in: “I am not inclined to be a supporter of Newt Gingrich’s having served under him for four years and experienced his leadership. Because I found it lacking often times...

“There’s all kind of leaders that have one standard for the people that they are leading and a different standard for themselves. I will have difficulty supporting him for president of the United States.”

Conservative columnist George Will hits harder, noting that Newt “embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything...

“There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a ‘historian’), to say, ‘If you want to put people in jail,’ look at ‘the politicians who profited from’ Washington’s environment.”

From the center, Times columnist Frank Bruni notes that “Romney seems newly shaken, Newt-ly spooked. It must be wearing on him to stand as long as he has with his chest thrust out, waiting for his corsage while the electorate casts around for some better date to the prom. No wonder his knees, to judge by his own Fox News appearance last week, have gone a little weak.

“Romney’s wobble gives Gingrich a window. Just watch him squeeze through it, pontificating all the while about the nature of portals and the history of glass. That Republicans don’t mind a lecture is reassuring. That they’re so open to this particular lecturer isn’t.”

Even with a Gingrich endorsement by the Union Leader, former GOP Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire writes an op-ed in the Boston Globe to downgrade him and endorse Romney

In the White House, just as Jon Stewart on The Daily Show did, they must be praying that Gingrich turns out to be The One. There will be an oversupply of political harpoons to spear this Great White-haired Whale.

Update: In another dazzling display of bad judgment, Gingrich visits New York to pay court to a former frontrunner, even as leading Republicans express dismay at the so-called Donald Trump “debate” as potentially damaging to the party.

With Newt’s talent for making the wrong friends, he doesn’t have to worry about enemies and critics.

Cain and the Death of Shame

2011-12-04T04:31:00.001-05:00

Shame is dead or at least comatose as two public figures refuse to retreat into embarrassment over mounting evidence of their sexual misconduct.

A would-be leader of the Free World, Herman Cain is surrounded by barbecue, bunting and bands in announcing “suspension” of his campaign after “continued hurt caused on me and my family” by numerous charges of harassing women as well as a long-term extramarital affair.

Cain’s positive spin on disaster recalls a press conference decades ago by two entrepreneurs who had bankrupt a venerable publication that started with a slide
presentation titled “Moving Ahead with the Saturday Review.”

Similarly, the former pizza mogul touts a “Plan B” that consists of denying everything while trying to hold on to media attention, as if his campaign wreck were the result of a natural disaster not of his own making.

Cain’s disconnection from reality is echoed by the central figure in the Penn State scandal, Jerry Sandusky. Faced with 40 charges of child molestation, the former coach is pursuing what may be the weirdest legal strategy ever by giving interviews everywhere.

In the latest, he tells the New York Times that, despite being caught in a public shower with a 10-year-old boy, that he was only “a father figure” to disadvantaged children and prosecutors “just twisted that all.”

Sandusky sums up the news cyclone that that ended the careers of legendary coach Joe Paterno and the university president with self-pity over the loss of his connection with kids, leaving only his dog Bo, “And I swear he understands...And you know I love him dearly for that.”

Psychiatrists may have clinical explanations for such narcissistic behavior by Cain and Sandusky, but what comes to the inexpert mind is musical comedy. In “Chicago,” after being caught in bed with two women, a two-timing lover asks, “Who are you going to believe? What you see or what I tell you?” His outraged companion pulls the trigger.

Would it be too much to ask the media to do the same about showering attention on the former candidate and the predator coach? Or have we all lost our sense of shame?

A Composite President: Chinese Menu

2011-12-02T05:20:00.007-05:00

If Americans could pick someone for the White House next year from a Chinese menu, what do opinion polls tell us about what they want?

The seesawing Republican race, along with Obama’s falling favorables, suggest that voters’ appetites are more jaded than they have been for decades. But if they could pick and choose traits, what kind of composite President would we get?

Resistance to Romney clearly shows a desire for something new, but if Gingrich is the answer, what’s the question? Newt’s surge suggests preference for a know-it-all sweet talker spiced with sudden surprises, like immigration compassion and Dickensian attacks on poor children, to a blandly predictable flip-flopper without Gingrich’s say-anything panache to cover a record of reversals that makes Mitt’s taste tame.

Yet thinking conservatives who want to win will hang on to Romney, immovable hair and all, as their best bet.

Ron Paul, who wants to wipe the table of almost everything, nonetheless offers a palate-clearing clarity on the follies of Newtness and continuing to pour trillions that might save the American economy into foreign wars.

Put Romney’s hair, Gingrich’s certainty and Paul’s staunchness on the table, and what would voters want of Obama?

One clue goes back to early in the 2008 campaign when Maureen Dowd challenged him on his "toughness," asking, "Do you worry that you might be putting yourself on a pedestal too much? Because people also want to see you mix it up a little.”

“When I get into a tussle,” he answered, “I want it to be over something real, not something manufactured.”

Bipartisanship was a noble goal, but this brilliant President has been slow to learn that you can't negotiate with nobody and the bully pulpit allows you to do the bullying, not the other way around.

Now that he is in campaign mode again, Barack Obama is going on the attack, and none too soon.

We don’t get to pick a President from a Chinese menu.

Update: It’s official. The presidential choice has dropped to the cheap takeout level as attention junkie Donald Trump returns to “moderate” a GOP “debate” after Christmas—-a late present for Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Jon Huntsman won't be there, another small step toward staking out his position as the only sane candidate in that race.

D.C's. Secret Santas

2011-11-30T16:31:00.002-05:00

Al Franken, who used to be a comic and perhaps still is, has created a holiday solution to the Senate’s civility shortage—-a “Secret Santa” exchange of gifts between the opposing parties.

Just as in grade school, 21 Republicans and 37 Democrats have drawn names from a Santa hat and will present each other with gifts worth $10 or less in mid-December. That won’t violate lobbying laws, and there is something to be said for handing one another gift-wrapped packages instead of verbal hand grenades.

In their real (?) work, Congress is inching toward a gift for voters as Republicans reluctantly prepare to back a small part of the President’s jobs plan by agreeing to extend a payroll-tax cut of $265 billion but without any ho-ho-hos, as they insist that the measure, as well as any extension of unemployment benefits, be offset by spending cuts.

Chief Grinch John Boehner assures followers that such a gesture would not mean abandoning Congress’ overall approach:

“There’s going to be $1.2 trillion of further cuts to meet our commitment, and I think having the sequester in place to ensure that we’re going to get our spending problem under control is a good thing. But I would prefer, and I think all of our members would prefer, that we do this in a more responsible way.”

If they decide to do Secret Santa in the House, somebody should gift-wrap a lump of coal for the Speaker.

Meanwhile, the President is in Scranton, telling voters he is filled with Christmas spirit and wants put $1500 under every family tree, if Republicans get on the sleigh this week. Warm up the reindeer.

Straight-Face Lies, Case Closed

2011-11-29T10:17:00.003-05:00

The final nail in the Cain campaign’s coffin is a disheartening reminder of how far Americans have come in being vulnerable to figures “telling public lies with the utmost sincerity.”

Four years ago, John Edwards gave us a preview of hypocrisy taking a candidate close to the White House, but his mendacity was hidden by six years in the U.S. Senate and a substantive campaign, however undercut by his personal enrichment, to highlight growing income disparity in the nation.

Herman Cain’s rise and fall shows how low the bar is now set—-a man with no elective experience, with no substantive proposals beyond an empty 9-9-9 slogan, with aggressive ignorance about foreign policy and no presidential qualifications whatsoever is brought down from the top of the opinion polls by what his lawyer accurately calls “private, alleged consensual conduct between adults.”

No matter how much bravado he shows in aggressively denying that affair, Cain is caught between clear evidence of more long-term sexual misbehavior and his insistence that all charges against him are false. The issue is not whether he is an adulterer but a chronic liar.

In 1992, Bill Clinton, with Hillary standing by her man, could go on 60 Minutes and weather the Gennifer Flowers story, the kind of behavior that would later stain his presidency with impeachment, but Clinton had been a governor and Oxford scholar who was running a substantive campaign.

Now, with Herman Cain being brought down for perhaps the wrong reasons from a position he never should have occupied in the first place, prurient attention may navigate to Newt Gingrich’s three marriages, two adulteries and financial misconduct during and after his tenure as Speaker of the House.

In the contest between Gingrich and squeaky clean Mitt Romney, voters may want to look at the character issue but only after making sure that the subjects are qualified to hold the office, nominate Supreme Court justices and send our young people to war.

Otherwise, what we get in the Oval Office will be our fault, not the those of the humanly imperfect candidates.

Update: Cain now tells supporters he is "assessing” whether or not to drop out, but the larger question is what on earth possessed him to enter the race and run it with so much ignorance and such blatant lies.

GOP Straight-Face Sweepstakes

2011-11-27T13:38:00.000-05:00

A tipping point in the Obama-bashing competition has now cost Mitt Romney endorsement by the only paper that counts in New Hampshire.

“Newt Gingrich is by no means the perfect candidate,” says the Union Leader, adding “We would rather back someone with whom we may sometimes disagree than one who tells us what he thinks we want to hear.”

This follows last week’s debate, where Ron Paul seemed beside himself at what others were saying, and even Michele Bachmann, Our Lady of the Ludicrous Claim, was moved to call Rick Perry “highly naïve.”

Gingrich is moving up in the straight-face sweepstakes, largely because he has the most experience in telling public lies with the utmost sincerity, or as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni puts it more politely:

“This presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mean and mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead, Romney and Newt Gingrich, have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation, starting with thorough revisions of their own positions on health care, climate change and such. They’re a limber duo, primed to teach classes on political yoga...

“But their specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole.”

When Republicans have finally settled on their least-worst option, the President’s campaign will kick in, undoubtedly under pressure to respond in kind. But Barack Obama, who has lost political battles with Congress by hesitating to go for the gut, will be facing a crucial character test in how he responds.

His opponent will have survived a contest for the hearts of a mean-spirited minority of primary voters, who represent a fraction of Americans. Will the President recognize the opportunity not only to win reelection but bring back some civility to the political landscape?

Politics ain’t beanbag, goes the old saying, but does it have to be mud-wrestling? We’ll find out next year.

Really Bad Idea of the Year

2011-11-26T11:48:00.003-05:00

If you enjoyed how Ralph Nader put George W. Bush into the White House in 2000, you may love what a group called Americans Elect is trying to do in 2012.

The well-financed effort wants a “wide-scale draft movement for presidential candidates,” but it looks more like hammering a “broken” political system and smashing it to smithereens.

Americans Elect aims, not to create a new party, but hold a “convention on the Internet,” to take the choice away from primary voters and turn it over to the wisdom of those who select “American Idol.”

Presumably, this would bring a process that has survived two centuries, including a civil war, into a new technological democracy that would truly reflect the will of the American people.

Loopier still, the group wants “a mixed-party ticket,” requiring its presidential candidate to pick a running mate from the other party.

All this overlooks the fact that technology can’t fix a mess that was created, depending on ideological bias, either in 2008 by the election of Barack Obama or in 2010 of Tea Party zealots who are holding government hostage in Congress or some combination of both—-or more likely still, a generation of voters that keeps throwing tantrums for instant gratification in hard economic times.

Americans Elect assumes only a minority of Republicans have gone mad, lurching from Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich in their search for a plausible candidate as some Democrats hold back enthusiasm for the reelection of their standard bearer. But there is no evidence that a Silent Majority out there knows better.

In all our free speech, including the Occupy movement, have the 99 percent proposed political solutions they are willing to support with the kind of sweat and hard work that created advances in the past?

Long ago, a social critic answered an audience complaining about those who produced a mass culture of low quality: “If you’re looking for blame, what about those who watch and read and buy this awful stuff? If they responded to better, they might get it.” (See Jon Huntsman.)

As Americans Elect proposes only more chaos, we may want to go back further to consider that "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Computers won’t fix that.

Late Update: A week before Christmas, Americans Elect is on the ballot in 11 states and close to adding California as well as gathering signatures by year’s end for ballot petitions in 30 states that allow the process to be completed this year and is confident of meeting requirements in the remaining states next year.

Chaos, here we come.

Best Leftover Turkey Recipe Ever

2011-11-25T08:14:00.000-05:00

From years of editing women's magazines and tasting test-kitchen results thereof, herewith a way with leftover turkey that will keep you from cursing the oversized bird you bought.

TURKEY TETRAZZINI

Ingredients: 3/4 cup butter or margarine, 3/4 cup flour, salt, 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 quart milk, 2 cups undiluted chicken broth, 4 egg yolks, 1 cup heavy cream, 1/2 cup sherry, 1 pound thin spaghetti, 6 cups leftover turkey cut into cubes, 1 cup fresh or canned sliced mushrooms, 8 oz sharp Cheddar grated (2 cups).

Sauce: Melt butter in large pan, remove from heat. Stir in flour, nutmeg and salt until smooth. Gradually add milk and broth, stirring constantly. Boil 2 minutes until slightly thick.

In small bowl, beat egg yolks and cream. Beat in a little of the sauce, pour back into pan over low heat, stirring until hot but not to a boil. Stir in sherry.

Boil spaghetti, drain and return to kettle. Add 2 cups sauce and toss together. Divide in half and put into two 12-by-8-by-2 baking dishes, push back toward edges. Add 2 cups sauce to turkey and mushrooms, mix well and spoon half into center of each dish.

Sprinkle grated cheese, cover with foil and refrigerate 1 hour or even overnight. Preheat oven to 350F and bake, covered, 45 minutes. Spoon reheated leftover sauce over each serving. You can refreeze and have leftover leftovers.

Somewhat calorific, but then again, so are the bread and mayonnaise for turkey sandwiches, which won't taste nearly this good.