Occupy What Next? A Geezer Take

As powers-that-be sweep away the Occupy movement, where does the animating spirit go now?

With apologies to generations who have lodged “99 percent” into the American vocabulary, this will come as unwanted advice for those whose have made visible hidden rage against a financial system that brought the economy to its knees and still keeps profiting while the rest of us suffer.

Even so, as a retiree, I can add my own victimhood credentials—-a return of near-zero on savings that used to supplement Social Security while banks fatten by holding the money without risk. (Ron Paul cited this injustice in the last GOP debate.)

Yet, if they are to effect change rather than just demonstrate for it, the Occupy generations would do well to study the protests of the 1960s.

Then as now, street theater provided great images for TV news but was soon coopted into a sideshow in which the larger population lost interest, while the real financial power and politics ground on unchanged.

Loathsome though it may sound, the Tea Party could provide a model for finding focus, converting free-floating anger into political muscle. As satisfying as denouncing those in power may be, without traction in the real world, it changes nothing.

At this transitional point, the alternative is the kind of increasingly radical rhetoric and disruptive behavior that is surfacing now and, ultimately, irrelevance.

Anarchy has fortunately never taken hold in American life, and there are issues to which the Occupy energy could usefully attach itself. Putting pressure on Congress not to gut new Dodd-Frank regulation of financial institutions and even expand them is clearly one. Helping a consumer champion like Elizabeth Warren get elected to the Senate is another.

None of this will be as exciting as camping out with signs and slogans, but that’s the way real world works. If Occupy enthusiasts want to change it, they can start by pushing back politically against the damage the Tea Party has done.

The geezer will now fold his tent and retreat into silence on the subject.

Rick Perry, Meet Tom Coburn

Two Southwestern stars of the GOP, the Governor of Texas and the Senator from Oklahoma, are riding off in opposite ideological directions.

Rick Perry, who keeps falling off his horse in the Republican debates, has now mounted a bucking bull by proposing a radical and, in some respects, clearly unconstitutional tearing down of the federal government, which includes making Congress work part-time with half pay and ending lifetime tenure of federal judges. (Lots of luck with those!)

The Perry plan would give him less to remember in answering questions publicly but is not likely to pull him out of the pits of the nomination polls, where he now resides. It could, however, provide a good stepping-off point for someone like John Huntsman Jr., if he decides to distance himself from Tea Party nuttiness.

At the same time, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn affirms his maverick conservatism by issuing a report titled “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous” to illustrate how, “under the current tax code, the federal government is giving billions of dollars to individuals with an Annual Gross Income (AGI) of at least $1 million, subsidizing their lavish lifestyles with the taxes of the less fortunate.”

Dr. Coburn’s indictment even outdoes what his sometime friend Barack Obama has been saying for months:

“All Americans are facing tough times, with many working two jobs just to make ends meet and more families turning to the government for financial assistance. From tax write-offs for gambling losses, vacation homes, and luxury yachts to subsidies for their ranches and estates, the government is subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Multi-millionaires are even receiving government checks for not working.

“This welfare for the well-off--costing billions of dollars a year--is being paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate, many who are working two jobs just to make ends meet, and IOUs to be paid off by future generations. We should never demonize those who are successful. Nor should we pamper them with unnecessary welfare to create an appearance everyone is benefiting from federal programs.”

Perry will disappear from the national scene, but Coburn’s conversion to at least one tenet of tax sanity augurs well for the deficit reduction impasse. How do you say “strange bedfellows” in Spanish?

Huntsman Heresy: GOP's Last Chance

For a long-time Democrat who loves his country much more than his party, it may seem like an agonizing choice: a sane Republican to oppose Barack Obama or one of the revolving front-running clowns who would be easier to beat next November.

The question is brought on by the serial implosions of Bachmann, Perry, Cain et al with Newt being teed up for next 15 minutes of fame on the dog-and-pony debate circuit.

The answer is easy. No American wants to play Russian roulette with the country’s future so, in that spirit, a political strategy for Jon Huntsman Jr., whom I would not support in the general election but who, free of the Tea Party’s yoke, might restore some sanity to the campaign:

Right now, Huntsman has practically fallen out of the polls—-and for good reason. His contortions to fit the crazy contest have made him invisible, and his efforts to slip the bonds of Obama-bashing orthodoxy look lame and wishy-washy.

Yet he is poised to separate himself from the pack, if he can muster the courage to do it. In the next debate in Washington on November 22nd, he could break through and give the country something to be thankful for by embracing a heresy that so far has dared not speak its name—-renouncing the GOP’s rush toward an extremist cliff and offering an aggressive alternative to bringing back traditional Republicans and Independents next year.

What does he have to lose? His 3 percent in the national polls? Huntsman has been working hard in New Hampshire, and a super PAC is now running ads there, supporting him as “someone we can trust as a conservative.”

Yesterday, he was at the liberal Brookings Institution, criticizing loopy proposals of Romney, Perry and Cain, noting that “you’ve got to at least pass the straight-face test in terms of what can be done with Congress so it’s not laughed out on day one.”

If he shows the guts to say that forcefully to Republicans, he can in one stroke stake out a position and give what may be their silent majority a voice. Setting off a Tea Party firestorm is a much better choice than being left for dead in the snows of New Hampshire.

Huntsman was willing to put his country first by serving as Obama’s ambassador to China. Now he has an opening to serve both his country and his own presidential chances in another dicey setting.

Leadership Failure? Try Decency

The time for euphemisms is running out. What we are seeing is more like a social meltdown.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning economic journalist writes about “The epic global leadership fail,” but the symptoms he cites, along with so many others, add up to a loss of the moral responsibility that used to be taken for granted as common decency:

“The global financial system teeters on the edge of collapse because European politicians refused to tell citizens of their crumbling economies that they could no longer guarantee them ‘la dolce vita’-- the sweet life--they had come to expect.

“Top executives at Olympus, one of Japan’s leading companies, resign in shame after acknowledging that for nearly 20 years they used a complex accounting scheme to hide billions of dollars in speculative trading losses.

“A revered coach and a respected president at Penn State are fired because they were more concerned about protecting their own reputations, and that of their school, than protecting young boys from an alleged sexual predator.

“And a former governor, senator and head of Goldman Sachs resigns as chief executive of MF Global after bankrupting the broker-dealer with overleveraged bets on European sovereign bonds.”

Yet this is only the tip of a moral iceberg as traditional values sink below what the late sociologist turned Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed two decades ago:

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” he wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

This weekend, we see a new low in the Republican race to the bottom with contenders condoning torture, attacking Iran, waging economic warfare with China (which could crash our economy by dumping our debt), anything to appeal to a primitive Tea Party minority that hates Barack Obama with religious fervor.

In this moral mess, Newt Gingrich, who cheated on two wives, tried to impeach Bill Clinton for sexual misbehavior and was the only House Speaker ever censured for corruption, now takes the lead in the polls while Herman Cain parades his family for Fox News to prove his moral probity in the face of evidence that points otherwise.

If Gingrich and Cain are the answers to America’s problems, what are the questions?

We learn about “honest graft” in Congress’ insider trading as its debt reduction panel begins to duck out from a Thanksgiving deadline and invite more economic chaos in an election year.

Deviancy has been redefined out of sight, taking decency along with it. Leadership may be failing, but shouldn't we be taking a closer look at our followership as well?

The President Makes a Point Before GOP Debate

On his way to an eight-day trip to discuss trade and security in the Pacific rim, Barack Obama watches a basketball game on an aircraft carrier and broadens the meaning of the Penn State scandal.

Asked about it, he says, “People have to step forward. They have to be tapping into just their core decency. When kids are being mistreated-— when anybody is being mistreated--all of us have to step up. We don’t leave it to somebody else to take responsibility.”

Will we hear an echo of that at tonight’s GOP debate?

Update: No. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain want to bring back waterboarding, even as others point out that such torture is illegal under U.S. and international law.

Luckily, no asked about drawing and quartering.

A Memory of Sports, Sex and Shame

The Penn State Scandal has many losers—-not the only the legendary coach who lost his job, his reputation and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the university that fed on football and is now disgraced by it, a student body in shock and, beyond the campus, millions who have lost some of their innocence about an “amateur” game that, as years of covering up the crimes of a pedophile coach show, has more in common with corporate rather than academic ethics.

Yet there is nothing new in the use of sports to prey on children, perhaps only the fact that prosecutors and the public are less willing to be accomplices in overlooking such behavior.

It all brings back a pre-teen memory of 75 years ago when my friends and I tried to play ball on a scraggly Bronx diamond but never had enough equipment to field two full teams.

We got help from a man everyone called Unk. He was short and muscular, his tan round face punctuated by a pencil mustache and small steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He acted like an uncle, bringing a canvas bag filled with softballs, bats and gloves, running the games we played until darkness dimmed the batting cage and base paths.

His manner was brisk and impersonal, like a teacher or coach. We were awed by his skills and took to heart his sharp comments on our fumbling efforts.

So it came as a pleasant surprise when he invited another 11-year-old boy and me to a Saturday afternoon movie. Half an hour after we were seated on either side of him in the dark, I was startled to find Unk’s hand in my lap. I took hold and politely pushed it away. But the hand came back and began groping. I got up and ran out of the theater. Confused and ashamed, I never told anyone. After that, I stayed away from Unk’s games.

Now, amid all the gabble about Penn State, even the fatuous need by some to identify themselves as parents (as if that were a requirement to be outraged), I don’t begrudge the pleasure of the more than 100,000 who will fill the stadium Saturday, but they may want to realize that there is a social surcharge on the price of their tickets.

Piling on Rick Perry

I know just how Rick Perry felt during his “brain freeze” last night.

As other GOP candidates were spewing out new versions of their non-sequiturs about Barack Obama and the economy, my eyes were drawn to the Texas governor every time the cameras showed him in a shot.

A curious combination of expressions fleeted across his face, some of earnest determination to follow what another candidate was saying, at other times a kind of glazed look as if he were watching a foreign movie without subtitles.

I was having the same kinds of reactions to the point of turning down the sound and settling for a kind of pantomime display of the looniness we had all heard dozens of times before.

At one point, I was startled into wakefulness when Ron Paul made a valid point about retirees subsidizing the big banks, by getting no returns on their savings while the institutions kept profiting on them with no risk.

But that moment was an aberration. None of the other candidates wanted to talk about the real world, only the theme park called Obama World they have been constructing on Cable TV all year.

Little wonder that Perry would lose the thread of his prepared sound bites and forget the third federal agency he was promising to eliminate.

The Gaffe Police have now decided that the Texas governor has exceeded the speed limit and are now flagging him down from the race, but my sympathy is with him.

Update: The fallout from Perry’s howler goes on as Matt Bai points out that it undermines the all-important question of authenticity:

“We know, of course, that presidential candidates don’t actually write their own speeches or stay up late at night tinkering with their own proposals...

“But we do expect them to really believe in the things they propose—- to have the requisite conviction to know and recite with passion the basic policies that someone on their team stayed up nights to craft...

“There’s nothing more central to Mr. Perry’s campaign than the idea of scaling back the government in Washington--that’s pretty much the whole tamale right there--and what he proved last night, in 60 or so agonizing seconds, is that he hasn’t thought deeply enough about it to even master the basics of his own agenda.”

In this game, you have to be able to fake sincerity from the heart. Take lessons from Herman Cain.

J. Edgar

Memo to Clint Eastwood: This admirer of your mature work is going to pass on the new Hoover movie. Even public monsters have inner lives, but some are beyond my capacity to care about.

Just as Hitler’s personal demons are beside the point, so are those of a man who built a self-glorifying empire by blackmail in Washington, D.C., ruining reputations, holding Presidents hostage in a personal police state and relentlessly hounding the century’s greatest exemplar of human decency, Martin Luther King.

J. Edgar Hoover invented and promoted the image of tommy-gun toting G-men in the 1930s, with the help of compliant Hollywood producers, and went on to keep files after the war on anyone who might be “soft on Communism,” right up to and including the White House.

From the 1950s on, his hatred was directed at Dr. King. He had agents bug his hotel rooms and send him anonymous threatening letters, urging him to commit suicide.

"King," read one of them, "there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is...You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

In Hoover's files, there were angry scrawls on Dr. King's press clippings. On a story about King receiving the St. Francis peace medal from the Catholic Church, he wrote "this is disgusting." On King being expected to win the Nobel Prize, he wrote "King could well qualify for the 'top alley cat' prize!"

No president, not even JFK, could get rid of Hoover who knew where all the bodies were buried or inconveniently bared.

J. Edgar may have loved his mother, his secretary and his live-in partner Clyde Tolson, but he was a menace to the American freedoms that Clint Eastwood has been obsessed with all these years, and I wish he had left him in the past, like Dirty Harry.

Cain's Assembly Line Lechery

From evidence so far, the Pizza Man’s skirt-chasing seems as random as his economic studies, making casual passes at objectives but cheerfully taking nein-nein-nein as a final answer and moving on to keep selling.

After yesterday’s lurid testimony by Woman #4, which led the PBS NewsHour, #5 comes as a letdown, with Cain, after a speech in Egypt, asking to be set up with a woman in the audience, then trying to settle for a USAID worker and finally dining with a group, stiffing them (and ultimately taxpayers) for two $400 bottles of wine.

Such assembly-line lechery recalls Bill Clinton, of course, but not to make light of any sexual harassment, without passion or panache, but more of a reflexive response.

In his press conference today, Cain says he can't remember his Monday accuser. If the emerging pattern is accurate, he may be telling the truth about that.

With a trickle of women who said no, the question is how many, under persistent pressure to get or keep their jobs, said yes and would now be too ashamed to come forward?

If all this takes him down, the irony would be that Herman Cain’s sexual disrespect for women would have to serve as a metaphor for the intellectual emptiness that has brought him this far but never should have.

What is coming to light about his approach to women is no different from what he has been doing to voters in plain view for months now. When he drops out, they will no longer have a choice between Cain and the other Disabled GOP contenders.

The former President is scheduled for the Daily Show tonight. Will Jon Stewart find a sly way to ask Bill Clinton about Cain and the Question?

Invitation to the Tea Party Congress

I’ve just spent a week in that earlier America you love so much and, while the absence of politicians was a blessing, I would not recommend living in cold semi-darkness, feebly powered by an emergency generator that eats $100 a day of propane and engine oil (if you can get a delivery) without providing Internet, cable or phone service and, in many cases, enough juice to run an electric range.

Even this weekend, well over 100,000 homes of my neighbors in the Northeast are still that way, evoking questions about the role of private utilities with monopoly power and what government does and doesn’t do to regulate them and even larger questions about investing in the crumbling infrastructure of 21st century America to ease unemployment.

As the emergency dribbles away, there is huffing and puffing from elected officials, but when the power goes out again in this winter’s heavy snows, nothing will have changed.

Throughout this enforced visit to the past, questions swirl about investing in America’s infrastructure as a way of jump-starting the economy.

While we pour so much money into the Middle East, why must millions back home depend for their health, let alone comfort, on poles and wires decades old with connections that break at the fall of a tree limb? Isn’t better technology available and why don’t we, as a government in partnership with those who will profit from it, invest in that over the coming years and create jobs?

Meanwhile, as the Tea Party Congress blocks Obama’s jobs bill, here is a blanket invitation for the next power outage to visit an octogenarian who depends on auxiliary power for oxygen and enjoy the 19th century ambience.

We could sit by the fire and have a spirited discussion of the important news of the day—-whether or not Herman Cain hit on women who worked for him decades ago.

Wifely Wisdom of Michelle Obama

A year from today, Americans vote for a president again.

Three years after the last ballot, even ardent Democrats and entranced Independents no longer have stars in their eyes. With no time for a honeymoon back then, how can voters be enthusiastic about renewing their vows with Barack Obama?

For some, “consider the alternative” may be answer enough, but in fairness to the President—-and ourselves—-he deserves better than that.

Campaigning back in 2007, Michelle Obama 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.”

And so, we know now, are political unions, particularly in hard times when angry opponents keep pounding on the door, doing nothing to help and turning off the fire hoses as the neighborhood burns down.

If his wife worried about deifying him, who could have foreseen so much effort to demonize Barack Obama, no matter what he does or fails to do? Who can parse the hidden racism and the bitterness of an over-entitled generation of aging Baby Boomers against his failure to perform miracles in a global meltdown?

American should choose Obama again, not because he has been a savior but a decent, talented, serious man whose mistakes pale against the kind of rabid obstruction unknown in my lifetime under 13 presidents with the privilege of seeing most of them up close as a journalist.

As a teenager during the Great Depression, I witnessed widespread support for FDR. But there were also newspapers owned by Hearst (the Rupert Murdoch of his time) and, in the New Yorker and elsewhere, cartoons of bankers in overstuffed chairs, fulminating against the President, but no one had to Occupy Wall Street to tell the majority of Americans how to feel about them.

Now, in a 24/7 information era, Tea Party venom is stronger and more easily spread, but the most striking change in American attitudes, after almost a century of better education and a multiplication of media, is the flood of unreason and downright stupidity now besieging an American President.

Those who hesitate to renew their vows with Barack Obama will want to think hard about his successes in the War on Terror and back home his Detroit rescue and new Wall Street regulations, among other accomplishments, in staving off a global economic crisis back here.

The question for 2012 is not Ronald Reagan’s, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The question is where would we have been after four years of John McCain and Sarah Palin, and where might we be after four with Mitt Romney, Rick Perry or the winner of the Herman Cain-Newt Gingrich “Lincoln-Douglas debate.”

Barack Obama has learned the political equivalent of picking up his socks and putting back the butter in the refrigerator. Can any of the others tie their shoelaces in a dangerous and demanding world?

Obama 43, Congress 9

On Halloween weekend, Americans apparently are tired of all-tricks, no-treats on Capitol Hill, sending approval ratings down to the GOP’s favorite single digit while the President sees a slight gain in public favor.

Gallup attributes the Obama bump to Iraq troop withdrawal, a rising stock market and that golden oldie, the death of a Mideast tyrant, reflecting Gadhafi’s demise as it did that of Osama bin Laden.

Congress’ near-death experience requires little explanation as lawmakers stumble toward a Thanksgiving deadline for debt reduction looking like the one-trick turkeys they have been all year since Tea Party freshman took over the House, gabbling no to everything but spending cuts.

It’s been so long since even a slight spurt of good news that we may have trouble digesting it all, like too much Halloween candy—-a Brussels bailout for European economies and a good third quarter for own—-and even some relief from Republican 2012 presidential puffery as Rick Perry decides to skip some future debates and let all the money he has raised do the talking for him.

Meanwhile, as an extra bonus to all this good cheer, the Occupy Wall Street movement keeps going and puzzling the pundits as a new survey shows they don't approve of anyone in Washington.

With all these signs that there may be an American future after all, let’s give the kids some healthful fruit and nuts along with the sweets Monday night.

Supercommittee in the Sandbox

Democrats are offering a $3 trillion debt reduction of tax increases and spending cuts, including as much as $500 billion in savings from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs to revive the Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain on the debt ceiling that Eric Cantor and his Tea Party House cohorts torpedoed last summer.

The proposal would include as much as $300 billion to stimulate the economy, but this would require Republicans to stop acting like spoiled Baby Boomers in a sandbox, clutching their favorite toys and refusing to share anything with anybody.

For someone of an older generation, such behavior recalls an early childhood memory in the Great Depression. Walking down the street, my mother grips one hand and in the other is some small object. I ask for something but she refuses. In a wailing rage, I fling what I am holding to the ground and, as my mother keeps pulling me along, I see another child pick it up. Now I want it back with all my heart. I learn that, if you ask for too much, you can lose what you have.

In post-World War II affluence, later generations grew up never having to realize that you can’t have everything, and their overblown sense of entitlement has now hardened into an adamant refusal to face the reality of not enough to go around.

All this is perfectly captured in an Esquire blog post by Charles Pierce, quoting a recent Paul Ryan speech:

"We're coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition. Because what we will end up doing is we will convert our safety net system...to help people who are down on their luck get back onto their feet into a hammock that ends up lulling people into lives of dependency and complacency which drains them of their incentive and the will to make the most of their lives."

Pierce calls this “pure Ayn Rand. ‘Makers vs. takers.’ Moochers and leeches. You and Them. But especially Them. But not in a divisive way. Oh, no. The Congressman doesn't believe in divisive class rhetoric. He said so...And he is not engaging in the politics of division himself. Oh, no. He's just sad--mournful, even--that the ‘conceits of liberalism’ are on their way to dividing the country into ‘makers versus takers.’ And you know who you are, don't you? And who They are. And what They are taking...from You.”

Well said and sad. If nothing can get Ryan, Cantor et al out of the Ayn Rand sandbox, there will be fewer and fewer toys to go around for all.

Sandbox Update: Reflexively John Boehner rejects the Democratic proposal—-for one thing, not enough Medicaid cuts for those people down on their luck with their feet up on the hammock.

Back-to-the-Future Political Movies

Hard times in the 1930s produced a golden age in Hollywood as Americans, helpless in real life, sought escape at neighborhood movie houses. Today, those Depression classics are being remade and brought into our living rooms to be sold as reality.

The GOP is doing the horror films. Frankenstein has morphed into mad scientists working feverishly in the lab to animate a new Rick Perry from old political body parts but, even as the Creature starts to look plausible, it unexpectedly starts to bolt from the lab to run loose and babble about Birtherism .

Herman Cain is the new Dracula, bouncing out of his coffin after dark to suck the blood out of government, all the while smiling fiendishly in weird commercials.

Mitt Romney, of course, is the Invisible Man, mostly unseen but striking nameless fear in the hearts of the natives.

As time goes on, however, the Republican debates are getting less scary and beginning to look more like the zany efforts of the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields.

Over at Poverty Row, there are the Frank Capra films, with Occupy Wall Street recreating “Meet John Doe” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” good-heartedness looking for populist heroes to pull out a last-minute happy ending without jumping off a tall building or collapsing from exhaustion.

The Tea Party is reliving all those “white telephone movies,” in which the over-privileged babbled about taxes and servant problems over cocktails, went on scavenger hunts and generally acted like horse’s asses for the amusement of the 99 percent who could afford a quarter for the price of admission to shake their heads over such antics.

Where does this leave Barack Obama? He’s been spending much of his time redoing old John Wayne movies by taking out bad guys before the final reel, but such heroics are not selling well with what Variety used to call the Hix in the Stix. (Even Michelle Bachmann can’t keep the cowboy hero straight in her mind from John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer).

If business doesn’t pick up, Washington may have to reinvent Bank Nights and Bingo to sell tickets at the box office. For this movie lover, there was more creativity back then—-and sanity.

Mother of All Scare Commercials

It ran only once 47 years ago, but a one-minute effort for LBJ’s 1964 reelection campaign was still being parsed yesterday at a college symposium as “the most negative political ad in American history.”

During the network airing of a Hollywood biblical epic back then, amid cheery product pitches, suddenly there was the image of a little girl pulling petals from a daisy and counting erratically, to be replaced by a nuclear countdown as the camera zoomed in on her eye, froze and cut to a mushroom cloud explosion with Lyndon Johnson intoning the warning that the election stakes are “we must love each other or die.”

The commercial played off Barry Goldwater’s defense of extremism and offhand suggestion about defoliating Vietnam with nuclear weapons but never mentioned his name. Yet the message was clear: Vote for LBJ or die.

It never ran again but didn’t have to. Coming two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, American voters were highly sensitive to the dangers of nuclear war and susceptible to the suggestion that a steady hand in the White House was crucial.

The campaign commercials are starting again now, and they doubtlessly will be tough and bitter, but there is no way to raise the stakes any higher. This is a time of fear and outrage, but no one can claim our physical survival is at stake.

The daisy commercial was produced by Doyle Dane Bernbach, an upstart agency back then, and I was on a committee with Bill Bernbach as he created an ad two years earlier to support a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, was on the committee, too. He hated ads and had threatened to sue his publisher for trying to put them in his paperback child-care book. Nonetheless, he posed for a Bernbach ad that showed him towering over a little girl with the headline “Dr. Spock is Worried” about the dangers of nuclear fallout that ran in 700 newspapers.

The treaty was signed and approved by the Senate but, after JFK’s assassination, there was still enough American anxiety for the once-seen daisy commercial to become a classic.

Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign will no doubt emphasize hope and renewal again but, especially with all the new media available, there will still be a big role for the use of fear on both sides. Let the little horror movies begin.

What Herman Cain Has Won

Second prize in the GOP presidential contest is a lucrative stint as a commentator for Fox News, and the Pizza Man has a lock on that, which makes it surprising that Karl Rove is the first to count him out as the nominee.

Holding up a list of Cain flip-flops and walkbacks, his future colleague decrees that it “has created an image of him as not being up to this task. That’s really deadly."

But in the Fox alternate-reality stable, that’s no disqualification—-check out Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Rove himself. Going off half-cocked is part of the job.

Actually, Cain started his gaffefest on Fox earlier in the year telling the pundit he is most likely to replace, Glenn Beck, that his statements about not having a Muslim in his cabinet do not reflect a long record of being a non-discriminatory employer.

A new height in bi-partisan affirmation action could be reached by programming Cain against MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, another failed presidential candidate who just became a cable host after a long career as an activist minister subsisting on “love offerings.”

For Cain, this new career would be a step up from being on the payroll of the Koch brothers. Rupert Murdoch pays better and offers job security as well as exposure for lecturing and selling pseudo-books.

Winning the GOP nomination, as Palin explained in bowing out, would be settling for second best.

Update: Now Rove and Cain are playing verbal beanball, with the latter accusing the former of try to help Romney and Bush’s Brain retorting that Cain is providing material for Democratic attack ads.

Looks like a good format for a new Fox show next year.

Smart End to a Dumb War

This week Barack Obama answered a question David Petraeus posed eight years ago. A division commander as the Iraq invasion began in 2003, the General was troubled about what a young Illinois legislator would call a dumb war, asking “Tell me how this ends.”

Over 4400 American lives and more than a trillion dollars later, President Obama has replied to Petraeus by withdrawing all troops from Iraq by year’s end.

In his Weekly Address, the President notes, “As we remove the last of our troops from Iraq, we’re beginning to bring our troops home from Afghanistan...(W)hen I took office, roughly 180,000 troops were deployed in these wars. By the end of this year that number will be cut in half, and an increasing number of our troops will continue to come home.”

So ends the most needless war in American history, not with a bang of victory, but a whimper of hope that what the U.S. leaves behind will honor all those lost lives and the damaged souls who came back with psychic scars. Even as we leave, sectarian strife is stirring again.

Like a footnote to all this folly, Condoleeza Rice’s memoir emerges to narrate the 2006 turmoil in the Bush Administration when Iraq seemed to be breaking apart.

“So what’s your plan, Condi?” Bush asked at one point. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”

Angered by the accusation, she responded that “if they want to have a civil war we’re going to have to let them.”

All along, the former Secretary of States recounts, Vice President Dick Cheney (whose staff was “very much of one ultra-hawkish mind”) and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld (who resigned after the 2006 election) kept pushing for deeper involvement in Iraq.

The ultimate irony of this tragic war is that Petraeus himself helped provide a less-than-humiliating end with the Surge. A combination of anti-insurgent strategy and a buying-off of Sunni leaders in the Awakening, the General, by now in military charge, pacified the country enough so that the U.S. did not have to leave Iraq as ignominiously as we did Vietnam by flying diplomats off an embassy roof.

Decades later, Vietnam is no threat to the U.S. Will Iraq be as tranquil after the passage of that much time?

Yet for now, most of our troops there will be heading home for the holidays as Barack Obama smartly ends what he once called a dumb war.

New Chapter for "Profiles in Courage"

Eric Cantor is a rising Washington star, as JFK was when he published his 1955 best seller about political fortitude. But sadly Cantor doesn’t have a stylish collaborator like Ted Sorensen, and his turgid essay on American success was scheduled for more turbulent times, producing a chapter to qualify for “Profiles in Caution.”

At the Wharton School of Business yesterday, the House Majority Leader was to enlighten future tycoons about income inequality when his staff made the discovery that the lecture would be open to the public, which could include a few Wall Street protesters.

Cantor was a no-show.

The Wharton students missed his family story: “My grandmother and her family fled religious persecution to come here at the turn of the last century...

“But our country isn’t like that. America offered opportunity. My grandmother eventually made her home in a working class section of my hometown of Richmond. As you can imagine, in the early 20th century, the South wasn’t often the most accepting place for a young Jewish woman. Widowed by age 30, she raised my father and uncle in a tight apartment above a tiny grocery store...She worked day and night and sacrificed tremendously...

“All she wanted was a chance--a fair shot at making a better life for her two sons. And if she were still alive today, I know she would be blown away to know that her grandson is not only a Member of the U.S. Congress, but now the Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

An inspiring, albeit familiar American story, from which Cantor draws an odd lesson about a generation that produced scientists, scholars, Supreme Court justices, statesmen and philanthropists who gave back so much to their country.

His father made a ton of money in real estate, and now Cantor is protecting his version of the American dream by sabotaging even tiny tax increases for billionaires that might ease the pain of the poor and helpless while backing Tea Party proposals that, according to economists, "“would quickly destroy millions of jobs while creating enormous economic and social upheaval.”

“There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society,” Cantor’s screed says.

“They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.”

Profiles in Cowardice? JFK would have wept.

End of What's-His-Name

News from Libya provokes reactions as weird as the man himself: “CBS: Qaddafi. ABC: Gadhafi. NBC: Khaddafy," tweets a White House correspondent. A satellite radio reporter adds: “Gadhafi is dead--someone reach into his wallet and look at his driver’s license so we finally know how to spell his last name!"

Along with death jokes, a tyrant’s last minutes are on prime-time in a cellphone cinéma vérité montage for family viewing, a long way from early days of TV when Abraham Zapruder’s home movies later emerged as the only record of JFK’s assassination.

The Libyan dictator’s bloody end is telescoped into only a few hours of a Thursday by 21st century technology—-from rumors to confirmation by mobile phone video, TV viewing, cable commentary and even a blog prediction of punditry to come.

The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan said half a century ago, and today’s messages are multiple and immediate. Even Hillary Clinton’s unguarded first reaction to the news is on the screen.

By late evening, Jon Stewart’s take on GOP partisan puffery is available with the carping of ancient John McCain and Tea Party neophyte Marco Rubio, who had earlier in the day been busy refuting charges of retouching his family’s history as Cuban refugees.

To round it all out, the Daily Beast provides an excerpt from Condoleeza Rice’s memoir of her uneasy encounter with the Libyan loony who had a fixation on her as “my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders...Leezza, Leezza, Leezza...I love her very much.”

It all ends with a glimpse of the future as the new Libyan government offers up its first official lie—-that the dictator was killed in “a crossfire” when pictures clearly show him bloodied, captured and being menaced with his own golden gun.

As Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of his nightly newscasts, “And that’s the way it is” on October 20, 2011.

The Case for Hillary as VP

A year ago, Washington rumors had Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton switching jobs for 2012, and that was before the Tea Party wrecking crew came in, brought government to a standstill and created an anti-Obama climate that threatens a hostile takeover of the White House next year. (President Perry? Cain? A compliant Romney?)

The idea was dismissed out of hand back then, even though Bob Woodward, after months researching an Obama book, said, “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.”

For an election that will define America for decades ahead, it’s no comfort that the President is still ahead of Congress in the approval race to the bottom and raising tons of money from Wall Street (even Romney’s old firm). Disillusioned Democrats and Independents will need every bit of reassurance they can get that the crazies won’t take over the country.

Such a switch in running mates would be seen by cynics as a “Dump Biden” movement, but the potential positives far outweigh such carping. For a start, Hillary Clinton’s presence on the ticket would point up Obama’s foreign policy successes—-taking out bin Laden and drawing down troops, however slowly, from Iraq and Afghanistan—-and point up GOP empty rhetoric on the subject. And Biden’s long Senate experience would serve him well at the State Department.

As Secretary, Mrs. Clinton has been reassuringly firm and resolute, qualities not overabundant in the Obama era, and as a running mate, she could help restore whatever hope and confidence remain from 2008.

In an era of total disarray in traditional politics across the spectrum, an Obama-Clinton ticket would be a reassuring reminder that “Now is the time for all good men [and women] to come to the aid of their party.”

If they don’t, Heaven help us.

Update: An analysis in the Caucus observes: “The challenge for the president and his advisers in the coming year is to figure out how use his success in foreign policy and war-fighting to offset his difficulties elsewhere.”

How better than to put his foreign-policy commander on the ticket with him?