Oval Office Head to Head

Campaign watchers get a double-header of metaphors with reports that Barack Obama is eschewing a Rose Garden strategy and going head to head with Mitt Romney by name, along with a reminder of the President’s fondness for a three-year-old photo showing an African-American boy touching his hair in the Oval Office to compare it to his own.

As they were no doubt intended to be by White House aides, symbolism lovers may be wrenched by the distance between that early image of the breakthrough significance of Obama’s election and the bitter racially tinged battle for reelection now.

Yet the subtext is clearly there as the President and his supporters try to get their footing in these early days of the campaign, and the unspoken question is how far white-bread appeal will take Romney with voters who never accepted the idea of a black president and have compounded their racism by blaming him for the ills of the economy ever since.

The coming months will see a complex tangle of demographic struggles, as evidenced by early signs that Obama’s aggressive foreign policy has won him unlikely support among veterans and the military.

Some voters will believe anything in an election year, as we are reminded by a new photograph of Bill Clinton with his arms around porn stars in Monaco. Two decades ago, he got into the Oval Office by persuading Americans he could “feel your pain,” and the former President has apparently never stopped.

Now he is stumping and fund-raising for Obama ("Bill and I have plenty to talk about these days," he says in an e-mail),  but some things never change.  

A Lethal Epithet for Romney

Presidential campaigns need a pithy phrase to nail the opposition, and the President is edging toward a killer label for Mitt Romney.

In 1940, FDR won reelection against a likable corporate lawyer, Wendell Willkie, who was dubbed the Barefoot Boy from Wall Street and easily defeated.

Four years later, Thomas E. Dewey, a buttoned-down former prosecutor with a campaign strategy of not being "prematurely specific" on issues, was described as an opportunist who "changes his views from hour to hour.” Pictured by his own aide as "cold as a February iceberg," Dewey was dispatched as the Little Man on the Wedding Cake.

Now, Obama is running for reelection against a changeable Wall Street insider with current views that make Willkie and Dewey look like flaming radicals, one who claims that his experience as a venture capitalist qualifies him to be President.

Democrats have floated Vulture Capitalist and Vampire Capitalist, but the labels have not stuck. Now Obama is working on another, Clueless Capitalist.

On the stump, the President tells of Romney’s answer to a question about financial struggles, “right out of an economic textbook.  He said, ‘Our productivity equals our income.’  And the notion was that somehow the reason people can’t pay their bills is because they’re not working hard enough. 

“If they got more productive, suddenly their incomes would go up.  Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world (laughter) know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough. You’ve been working harder than ever.  The challenge...we’ve faced for over a decade is that harder work has not led to higher incomes, and bigger profits at the top haven’t led to better jobs.”

This argument is at the heart of Obama’s case against the GOP candidate who has nothing to offer but experience in making companies profitable for investors rather than the people who work in them.

After all the epithets that have been thrown at the President, this campaign is waiting for the right one to put Mitt Romney into history’s dustbin along with Willkie and Dewey.

Suggestions?

Romney's Biggest Bain Turnaround

Are Democrats swiftboating themselves?  Why are Obama supporters so defensive about challenging Mitt Romney’s main claim to the presidency?

It started three days ago with a “Meet the Press” gaffe(?), quickly recanted, by Obama supporter Newark Mayor Corey Booker labeling the attacks(?) as “nauseating.”  

The question marks are for skepticism about Booker’s motives. Those who remember Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, as the Mayor surely must, can testify to the selfish value of distancing oneself from ideological “extremism” on your own side.

But when and how did Romney’s Bain Capital claims become sacrosanct? How did what the President says “this campaign is all about” become so toxic to him?

His immediate answer to the Booker uproar was: “If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about.

“It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity. But that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some...Their priority is to maximize profits, and that’s not always going to be good for businesses or communities or workers.”

Joe Biden followed up about Bain in his usual unvarnished way, observing that “companies go under, everybody loses their job, the community is devastated but they make money.”

Such reasonable responses to Romney’s self-puffery have now morphed into attacks on Capitalism, Motherhood and Apple Pie, putting gun-shy Democrats on the defensive. Their reaction suggests a deeper anxiety.

That’s the most troubling aspect of all this, the sense that it’s more anti-Obama than pro-Romney, as the President struggles in primaries to hold his own against “Uncommitted.”

That could be Mitt Romney’s middle name.
 

Meanwhile, the President’s Press Secretary is suggesting that Barack Obama is more conservative than Herbert Hoover, citing “significant fiscal restraint” and a “balanced approach” to spending. Can voters bear months more of topsy-turvy talk?

Boehner's One-Trick Pony Act

The Speaker is back, trying to reprise his Greatest Hit—-last year’s manufactured debt-ceiling crisis that lowered the nation’s credit rating after nearly sending government over a cliff.

Like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, Boehner is ready, willing but fortunately unable to bring America to a standstill again this year to prevent reelection of a Democratic president, but he is eager to make the threat an issue in November.

What Boehner has in common with his predecessor, absent the glibness, is no guilt about gridlocking Congress for partisan purposes. With a  Tea Party class of 2010 breathing down his neck, the Speaker wants to play a shell game for voters now by getting them to follow the debt-ceiling pea rather than concentrating their attention on the urgent need to push the economy into higher gear and create jobs faster.

In the long run, the massive debt accumulated by two expensive wars and a bipartisan failure to slow it will have to be faced and resolved. But around the proverbial coffee table, it is not what Americans are worrying over this year.

Republicans, the prevailing wisdom says, “believe they win when talking about debt and borrowing, reinforcing their narrative that Democrats have irresponsibly maxed out the nation’s credit card...Boehner’s biggest asset in the upcoming negotiations is the need to raise the debt limit. And he must get it on the table because the game has changed since 2011.”

In the rush to do so, he may want to remember how Gingrich’s “Contract with (on?) America” ended. Bill Clinton was reelected; Newt was censured and fined by House colleagues and lost his job.

A one-trick pony can’t keep crowds enthralled forever.

Facebook Future: Clues from the Past

Media ghosts hover over Facebook’s I.P.O. with a valuation of $105 billion, raising old questions about how to turn the attention of millions into profit from advertisers.

The answers have never been clear, but for someone who spent decades in that search, the past suggests a rocky road to future profits for new bridegroom Mark Zuckerberg's enterprise.

In 1997, when stock of the Internet’s first phenomenon was soaring, in a New York Times OpEd piece, “AOL’s Bottom Line,”  I questioned how a dial-up service was eating up traditional journalism, eventually swallowing a chunk of it in what has been called the worst merger in media history.

I compared AOL then to mass magazines of my era which kept accruing ever higher circulations at cut rates while consumers needed them less and less in the hope that advertisers would provide revenue to save them.

The magazines died but AOL was bailed out, ironically, by a merger with Time Inc., the healthiest dead-tree dinosaur, which worked out so miserably that AOL had to be spun off before it sank the remains of Henry Luce's empire.

That history does not bode well for Facebook, in the light of almost a century’s media experience with the American information industry, the only big business in which customers don’t pay for the product. What has value is a byproduct, their attention, which is then resold to advertisers.

An ominous sign is the recent withdrawal of General Motors ads from Facebook, with observers noting the need to “convert that fan engagement into a business outcome for marketers.”

While users avidly share their vacation slides and other passing interests, how does a social network divert enough of their attention to pass it on profitably to people who want to sell them things?

No one has solved that problem on a large scale before. If Facebook can, it will turn out to be more than a lumbering giant like those of old. Until it does and/or uses its inflated stock to acquire entities that actually make money, it looks more like a highly overpriced stock market dream.

Political Love Stories

Barney Frank is getting married and Al Gore is going steady as Mitt Romney exchanges air kisses with George W. Bush behind closed doors. With the coming of Spring, not-so-young men’s fancies turn lightly to what passes for love in the body politic.

Frank, the retiring Congressman whose name is on Dodd-Frank, the President’s financial regulation law, nonetheless won’t be inviting Barack and Michelle Obama to his gay nuptials in July:

“We’re having this in the city I live in, in Newton, Massachusetts, on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t want to be accused of having shut down the entire region for a five-mile radius on a holiday weekend...it would ruin the party to have the Secret Service.”

On the left coast, the former Veep is surfacing with a new girlfriend, the first since his divorce from Tipper. Not surprisingly, she is “a well-heeled Democratic donor from Southern California in her 50s with a background in science and a devotion to environmental causes.” Birds of a feather?

GOP news is less romantic as George W. Bush admits to a closing elevator door “I’m for Romney,” followed by a furtive phone call from the candidate, but the next day on the stump, Romney doesn’t mention the former president’s name, even as he refers repeatedly to President Obama’s “predecessor.”

Republicans are so buttoned-up. They just refuse to wear their hearts on a sleeve.

SuperPAC Man in a Say-Anything Society

Faced with an unlikely quotation of his from the past, Norman Mailer denied it saying, “I couldn’t have said that, it’s not within the range of my character.”

That would be a quaint response in today’s political world where SuperPAC blowhards with barrels of money are unleashed by Citizens United to say anything they want without taking responsibility for it.

Meet Joe Ricketts, the latest candidate for that old Monty Python title of rich twit of the year. An “up-by-the bootstraps billionaire” who decided to become “a player in the 2012 election,” Ricketts has set a new speed record for public stupidity by agreeing to and then backing off a $10 million ad campaign “linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.,” which immediately drew “waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.”

Since the Supreme Court decided corporations are people, the parameters of America as a say-anything society have expanded to encompass some odd specimens. Describing Ricketts, an anonymous business associate says, “Half the time he’s a Libertarian and half the time he’s Rush Limbaugh.”

Ricketts’ public embarrassment was only accidental, following a leak of the Jeremiah Wright proposal, but how many more are in his pipeline and those of other anonymous would-be 2012 players?

Norman Mailer was famously the author of “Advertisements for Myself.” What would he make of this new crop of self-seekers bankrolling “Advertisements Against Obama” but refusing to take personal responsibility for them?

At least in his own first commercial, Mitt Romney lays out what he would do in office under his own name. 

Closing the Book on John Edwards

His rise and fall tell more about politics and politicians in the 21^st century—-and the rest of us--than they do about one imperfect man. John Edwards’ saga suggests where America is heading in an age of knowing everything and understanding practically nothing about people brought into our lives by 24/7 media.

Covering Edwards’ trial now is like “leafing through a catalogue of the sad and the sordid,” says a New Yorker writer, concluding that it “raises questions about campaign finance, the business of image-making, the pivotal role of a single large donor, and how much we really care about a candidate’s character.”

Yet, how much can we know when that “character” is largely a charade he constructs to hide even from himself?

In 2007, I wrote in defense of media probing the lives of candidates: “John Edwards and Mitt Romney are grown men who made a lot of money and now want the most powerful job in the world. All this attention goes with the process of trying to get it.”

Romney has no sexual skeletons but his parade of false selves is as daunting as those of Edwards, for whom millions voted as Vice President in 2004 and supported for the Democratic nomination four years later, only to learn that they knew nothing of his true self at all. (Venture capitalists and negligence lawyers don’t share their inner lives or even examine them much.)

Now, there would not be much point in throwing the book at John Edwards before we close it, but let voters who swooned over the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain before settling for Mitt Romney ask themselves how much they really know about their choice.

Time is running out.

Best President Money and Media Can Buy

Six months from now, the most highly educated Americans in history will have chosen someone to lead them through hard times. In my lifetime, that process has advanced from control by political bosses in smoke-filled rooms to one dominated by media and money across the spectrum.

Tammany Hall is gone, but now thanks to Citizens United, we are in the hands of the Koch brothers and George Clooney’s Hollywood friends. If that doesn’t make us feel warm and safe, it shouldn’t.

“Freedom of the press,” A. J. Libeling wrote back then, “is limited to those own one.” Now cable and the Internet have made publishers of us all, misinformation is spread more democratically by Rupert Murdoch and rabid bloggers, but do voters understand more than they did then?

To ensure they don’t, Democrats and Republicans will swamp them in a tide of money. The President’s campaign will try to match GOP Super PACs with a “Super-O-Rama” to offset Karl Rove’s Crossroads and the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity.

The TV commercials to be spewed out by such deformed spawn of the First Amendment will do nothing to further rational debate of issues, only becloud them with appeals to a national id of prejudice, political elitism and class hatred.

In contrast, the sound-bite circus of Obama-Romney debates will seem like Lincoln-Douglas. Yet they will only underscore the ugly atmosphere in which a President is being chosen, as “journalists” do little to clarify underlying issues and ramp up the bear-baiting, point-scoring involved.

There is, as any sane observer knows, an overriding clash of visions for America’s future at the heart of this election year, but its people may have a choice only of tendentious appeals to the worst in them.

The smoke-filled back rooms of the political bosses gave us a mixed bag of choices from FDR to Harry Truman. Is the enlightened era of their money-and-media counterparts doing any better?

"Bad Political Idea" Bombs Out

News flash: “Americans Elect, the deep-pocketed nonprofit group that set out to nominate a centrist third-party presidential ticket, admitted early Tuesday that its ballyhooed online nominating process had failed.

“The group had qualified for the general election ballot in 27 states, and had generated concern among Democrats and Republicans alike that it could wreak havoc on a close election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.”

Buzz Feed now seizes on “7 Very Bad Predictions About Americans Elect,” by such big-name pundits as Thomas Friedman, John Heilemann and John Avlon, all of whom enthused about bringing a new kind of digital democracy to American political gridlock.

One small-name pundit thought differently. From this blog (November 26, 2011):

“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.’”

No need for a victory lap over what I called the “Really Bad Idea of the Political Year.” Read it here and weep over wasted millions by well-intentioned people.
 

Update: Conservative columnist Ross Douthat quotes historian Richard Hofstadter half a century ago. “Third parties are like bees. Once they have stung, they die,’” noting that “populism has flowered over the last two years, but it’s mostly appeared on the right and left-wing fringes of the two parties rather than in the space between them.”

That’s not where most Americans want to go.

Obama in "The Truman Show"

It’s all a reality show now as the “First Gay President” invites himself to make a graduation speech in the neighborhood where he came of age half a lifetime ago.

“This recession has been more brutal, the job losses steeper, politics seems nastier, Congress is more gridlocked than ever, some folks in the financial sector have been less than model citizens,” Barack Obama tells the class of ’12 at Barnard College.

The words sound realistic, but are we all in the 1998 movie, “The Truman Show,” in which Jim Carrey does not realize his life is not authentic but a 24/7 TV series managed and manipulated by others behind the scenes?

 “We've become bored,” says the Godlike Producer, “with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine.”

Genuine, but under the control of forces with ulterior motives.

How much of today’s media world is “real” or just a production of the Obama and Romney campaigns with the contrivance of fake journalism machinery? Are we all watching a giant collaboration to persuade us this stuff is really happening?

Topic A now is gay marriage, which arose from Joe Biden’s Meet the Press “slip,” escalated into the President’s endorsement and ends now (perhaps) with Andrew Sullivan’s ode to Obama.  

Topic B, Wall Street arrogance, is working its way through the machinery, and our belief that it’s happening is a product of the process. After Obama and Romney have done their media dance, will anything have changed?

“The Truman Show” was a movie to challenge perceptions of what we all call reality. So far, “The Obama Show” is proving worthy of it and promises to take us into new territory as Mitt Romney courts the Religious Right with all the pre-tested protestations.

Media Feeding Frenzy

What would the founding father of Time have made of the magazine’s breast-feeding Mother’s Day cover?

The model for it, a 26-year-old woman, reacts to the uproar about the photo with her three-year-old son to observe that breast-feeding advocates “are actually upset” because it doesn’t “show the nurturing side to attachment parenting. This isn’t how we breastfeed at home.

“It’s more of a cradling, nurturing situation. And I understand what they’re saying, but I do understand why Time chose this picture because it...did create such a media craze.”

In 1923, Henry Luce started the magazine to save readers from being confused by “the million little chaoses of raw news” and give them a Voice from Above to explain what it all means. Now, in the Drudge age, journalism has gone downhill from fake omniscience to injecting a 24/7 stream of "news" on steroids into the public bloodstream.

Like Drudge, Luce pursued his own political agenda but had to recognize some bounds in pushing it.

“Isn’t good editing,” he once asked me, “figuring out what’s going to happen and then advocating it before it does?” I wish I could report that there was a mischievous gleam in Luce’s eye when he said it, but there wasn’t.

Being a practical man, Luce knew that getting attention is the media’s first requisite. The most compelling evidence is his answer to the question of why, despite his conservative political beliefs, he hired so many Democrats for his magazines’ staff.

“Because,” he replied, “those Republican bastards can’t write.”

For the most part, the man who named the American Century wouldn’t be shocked at seeing his magazine in this one embrace liberal writers, bare breasts and who-knows-what-else to stay alive in the competition.

Splat! Moby Dick Lays an Egg

No modesty for those who occupy Wall Street seats of power as JP Morgan’s “London Whale” harpoons himself with a $2 billion loss, while his bosses (and the SEC) try to figure out when a hedge becomes a bet.

We are back in the land of “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are,” annals of the clueless steering the mammoth (the captain of the “Titanic,” LBJ running the Vietnam war, W in Iraq) with Morgan CEO admitting the firm was “stupid” over “huge moves in the marketplace” that made its “positions more complex...and badly monitored.”

Well said, but only a month ago, Jamie Dimon was complaining about the Volcker rule, which limits banks' ability to make risky trades, and with rules that govern derivatives in the new Dodd-Frank regulations, which have not gone into effect yet.

“The enormous loss JPMorgan announced today is just the latest evidence that what banks call ‘hedges’ are often risky bets that so-called ‘too big to fail’ banks have no business making,” says Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, who co-wrote the language in the bill. “Today’s announcement is a stark reminder of the need for regulators to establish tough, effective standards.”

The Wall Street banks are still making deals so complex that they themselves don’t understand them, to say nothing of the rest of us, but still resist any fencing in of their gambles.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan’s Whale turns out to be no Moby Dick, just a clueless tub of sea lard floundering in the financial waves.

Moral Obesity in America

Americans are too fat, experts say. The debate on gay marriage suggests we may be growing fat-headed as well.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics predict 42 percent of the population will be obese by 2030, with 11 percent severely obese, at health care costs of $550 billion.

How do we set the price of moral obesity, as reflected in the uproar over the President’s conversion into a supporter of gay marriage?

Just as we have been stuffing our bodies with too much poor nourishment and exercising them too little, are we doing the same with our minds and hearts?

In this election year, opinions are as ubiquitous as fast food and most are just as nourishing. Political debate swerves from contraception to the sanctity of marriage in an eyeblink, although neither subject is on the legislative agenda after a meaningless North Carolina vote Tuesday.

Yet, a New York Times editorial asserts that the President “took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time” while other pundits calculate both the timing and political impact of his coming out on the issue.

Where is all this litmus-testing on issues great and small taking America? What was wrong with the President's previous “Yes, but” position on gay marriage? What’s next on the agenda for splitting us into “for” and “against” factions?

Human beings have doubts, ambivalence, uncertainties, zigzags, and, yes, prejudices on many questions. That’s what makes them human.

In his “evolving” on gay marriage, Barack Obama was being human but, in today’s political climate, that apparently is not enough. Someone who shares his previous position and is not ready to embrace his new one finds such an all-or-nothing imperative saddening.

I would vote for him in November against robotic Mitt Romney for many reasons, but it would be heartening to see the President less susceptible to being pushed into the political twilight zone in which his adversary lives.

In the long run, moral obesity is as big a threat to the body politic as diabetes is to individual Americans. A diet of more straight talk and less calculation is indicated.

Lugar Loses His Head, Paul Ryan Retreats

It's getting French Revolution-y out there. Mitt Romney is facing villagers with pitchforks, restless natives keep decapitating moderates like Dick Lugar and even new idols like Paul Ryan are being pushed toward the tumbrel.

Lugar’s downfall is more 2010 Tea Party guillotining of long-time Republicans, but a search for ideological purity is so intense that even Ryan is forced to disavow his political patron saint Ayn Rand for being "an outspoken atheist [who]... felt altruism was evil, supported abortion and condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor."

An irony of Ryan's retreat is the questioner who forced it could have been attacking him from the right or left, either representing Religious extremists or moderates not in harmony with Randian uber-selfishness. As in the unfortunate French unpleasantness of the past, the people’s tribunals are getting caught up more in the desire for blood than justice.

Ryan, who told voters in 2005 that “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” now backpedals to “Just because you like someone’s novels doesn’t mean you agree with their entire worldview philosophy. She has a worldview philosophy which is completely antithetical to mine because she has an atheist philosophy..."

So much for hero worship as the GOP keeps rushing Rightward so fast that two strains of revolutionary zeal are tripping over one another—-the Ryan-Ron Paul “intellectual” anti-government enthusiasts vs. the Madame Defarge theologically blood-thirsty of Santorum persuasion.

The guillotine will be busy until or unless Barack Obama rides in as the Scarlet Pimpernel to save us all from losing our heads. 
 

Update: Gail Collins has a final word on the Indiana scene: “Lugar got less than 40 percent of the votes in his primary Tuesday against Richard Mourdock, the 60-year-old state treasurer who tears up when he talks about the national deficit. One of the charming things about American politics is that it is still the one place in the country outside of opera audiences where a 60-year-old guy can count as a wild-eyed youngster.

“'It’s not like I just popped up like a morel mushroom in the spring of agitation,’ Mourdock said last month...

“Personally, I am prepared to give a few points to any politician who compares himself to a morel mushroom.”

The Revolution goes on.

  

Romney's Chickens Return to Roost

Did the winner of a year-long Obama bashathon in the Republican debates think it would go away once he won the nomination? Did Mitt Romney think he could swerve back from  high-volume hyperbole and turn his  rational attention to traditional GOP voters and Independents?
 
Not so easy .  He may no longer be battling the likes of those weird Ricks, Santorum and Perry, but he is discovering that  right wing crazies won't go away as a woman in Ohio gushes that President Obama "should be tried for treason,"  and the state auditor warms up the crowd with cackles such as  giving the President credit for the bin Laden raid is like "giving Ronald McDonald credit for the Big Mac you ate for lunch...the  the griddle deserved credit."
 
Clueless, Romney responds to the woman by waffling that the Constitution was "brilliant, probably inspired" but fails to distance himself from such rants as John McCain did in 2008. “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me," Romney tells reporters.  "Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.”
 
The Obama campaign calls him to account: “Today we saw Mitt Romney’s version of leadership: standing by silently as his chief surrogate attacked the President’s family at the event and another supporter alleged that the President should be tried for treason.
 
 "Time after time in this campaign, Mitt Romney has had the opportunity to show that he has the fortitude to stand up to hateful and over-the-line rhetoric and time after time, he has failed to do so. If this is the ‘leadership’ he has shown on the campaign trail, what can the American people expect of him as commander-in-chief?”
 
Eventually, Romney will find himself in the final scenes of Hitchcock's "Birds," being pecked over by rapacious loony birds of all descriptions.  Will he just keep smiling his salesman smile or stop for a moment to remind off-the-wall supporters they are talking about the country's leadership, not a barnyard barbecue gone wrong?
 
The birds will keep coming back to roost.

The Narcoleptic Barber

The other day I saw a man doze off in a high swivel chair, and the sight suddenly lifted my heart for the future.
 
He was a barber of Italian origins who, along with two others like him and a peppy Korean lady, runs an old-fashioned shop downtown in the zippy suburb where my grandkids live--nothing but haircuts and for cash.
 
I was there for bimonthly shearing after a farcical week in the hospital, emerging to find that living in my own home was in the past and I would be part of an "extended family" with my descendants whom I love but who have their own lives to lead without a decrepit grandfather  to keep tripping over.  That sleeping barber gave me some hope that,  even so,  the world of my own childhood and beyond still existed in some small corners of today.
 
That evening, I was in the high-school auditorium to watch my grandson take part in a futuristic debate about skills needed by a global 21st  century citizen and how to achieve them locally. Teams of students had prepared comprehensive plans for their own school and its infrastructure, teaching methods, technology and funding--and they were defending them with great skill against a questioning panel of town officials.
 
The future was here, and I was in it. To cushion the shock, I am  moving part-time to "Empire Falls," an America in Richard Russo's head with space for the past as well as ceaseless motion ahead.
 
I'll send postcards.

Young Barack's Carnal Composites

The magazine that puts Capital  Letters on everything and everyone, Vanity Fair, now enters Uncharted Territory in Obamanalysis...the President's delicacy about former girlfriends in his own two memoirs by conflating his experiences with them into "composites."
 
Obamographer David Maraniss teases out from the diaries and letters of one in New York and another in Chicago who is who.
 
"I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them," Obama tells Maraniss, helping break down the composites.
 
Beyond generational gaps,  all the soul-searching of young Obama and his Ivy League friends points up problem the President still has with voters who see him as elitist and out of touch with their values.
 
Gooey diary entries about identity and self-discovery will not reassure those who find Obama too intellectual and exotic, although who knows what they will make of Mitt Romney's straight-laced Mormonism? At the age the young Obama was trying to find out where in the world he belonged, Romney was working as a teen-aged missionary in Europe, coming back with a "death certificate" after a car crash.
 
One   of Obama's composites gushes: "The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges, and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me."
 
All this is marginally interesting, but it recalls what a much older friend  said about Audrey Hepburn movies half a century ago:  "I can't watch that stuff. It makes me feel coarse."
 
What we have in this election are no easy old-fashioned "American" choices, such as those McCain and Palin tried to offer four years ago.  Neither Obama nor Romney can drape the flag around himself culturally.
 
There won't be any "composite" old lovers in the GOP candidate's story, but neither will Obama have to explain Romney's only one year at  Stanford University,  working as a night security guard to fund trips home to see his future wife.
 
Both ended up with their true loves,  but what will voters make of how these strange birds got there?

Speakers

Newton Leroy Gingrich goes into history now to join Lyndon Baines Johnson, two men of outsized appetite for power who served as Speaker of the U.  S.  House of Representatives decades apart and in different worlds of heart, mind and spirit.
 
Johnson later passed a civil rights law to free a race from psychological chains after physical captivity and started an ambitious War on Poverty before losing his presidency over an unpopular distant war.
 
Gingrich takes with him  a government shutdown and a failed effort to unseat a President for lying about extramarital sex while he himself was committing  adultery and his own censorship by and resignation from the House, followed by a decade of self-enrichment and an ugly now-ending run for President.
 
The two figures share a media link in a review by that 42nd President,  Bill Clinton,  of the fourth volume of a massive  LBJ biography by Robert Caro.  Clinton cites an ally's advice "against using the political capital he’d inherited as a result of the assassination  on a hopeless cause" such as civil rights and Johnson's response ,  “Well, what the hell’s the presidency  for?”
 
Gingrich would find such an attitude puzzling as he and his third wife go back to a former life of Mediterranean cruises and Tiffany accounts, leaving his campaign to deal with massive debt. Yes, but what else is self-puffery for?
 
There is an answer in Johnson's final years that the shameless Gingrich and his admirers would find unfathomable.  During that time, I visited LBJ at his Texas ranch where he had withdrawn to write his memoirs but, with heavy heart, was not making progress--a proud man struggling with shame at what he saw as failure.
 
On January 22, 1973, two days after Nixon's second inaugural and the day after a cease-fire in Vietnam, the former President went up to his bedroom for an afternoon nap and had a massive heart attack. He was alone when he died.

King Lear. The Lion in Winter. Theatrical images come to mind for the most self-dramatizing of Presidents. Reagan, the professional actor who came later, was by comparison low-key, a supporting player trained never to chew up the scenery.

On the plane trip back from a visit to Austin, I recalled LBJ's assessment of his successor, Nixon.

"Not too much here," he had said, tapping his head. "Even less here," touching his chest. Then lowering his hand below the belt:  "But enough down there."

Lyndon Baines Johnson had enough heart and mind to have been a great President. His downfall was a war that obsessed him with the dark question of whether he had enough Down There. But he will be an important chapter in the American Story long after such nasty little footnotes as Newt Gingrich are gone.

Romney's War on Words

So soon after eight years of W circumlocution ("Mistakes were made"), could Americans bear as president another aging frat boy who instinctively mangles language into meaninglessness?
 
Mitt Romney provides a preview of his brand of highwire linguistics by torturing a five-year- old declaration by Obama that he would unilaterally pursue Osama bin Laden into Pakistan: "I thought it was a mistake of him as a candidate for the presidency of the United States to announce he would go in--rather than to say, as I did, we reserve the right to go wherever we feel is appropriate to secure the interests of the United States of America, and certainly to track Osama bin Laden anywhere he could be found.’’
 
Say what? For years now, critics have accused Romney of flipflops on  issues when the problem may actually run deeper, a  venture-capital pitchman's instinctive impulse to fuzz up promises and claims for self-protection.
 
What Obama actually said in 2007 was "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
 
A clear statement of intent of what President Obama actually did in 2011, not a boardroom salesman's slippery fine print on an investment.
 
On Romney's breathtaking joyride of issue-switching--about gays, abortion, etc.--sympathetic onlookers may have given him latitude for having to straddle a wide range of his party's social and political attitudes.
 
Now the question arises: Is there any there there? Or is it too much to expect real talk from an empty suit?
 
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is in a war zone, dealing with specifics, "Last year, we removed 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Another 23,000 will leave by the end of the summer. After that, reductions will continue at a steady pace, with more of our troops coming home. And as our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country."
 
Like it or not, Americans can understand what  the President is saying.  Do they really want to go back to the unintelligible world of another George W. Bush?