American Past: Going, Going...

An encounter with an antiques appraiser brings an epiphany about what may be happening to us all now.

Downsizing life for very old age has brought not only inevitable scaling back of inner expectations but the physical world that can no longer be managed with effortless ease.

Parting piece by piece with what gave comfort over a lifetime is saddening, but there was anticipation of passing on and even profiting from their increased value with age, just as earlier generations had when I sought them out at auctions and from antique dealers—-handing forward the sensual satisfaction of being surrounded by a burnished past of hand-crafted desks, tables, cupboards, chests, linen presses of fine pine, cherry, tiger maple and oriental rugs, paintings and prints—-the reassurance of being part of something solid and lasting.

It came as a shock to find a sudden discontinuity in that process, although the precipitous drop in recent years in the market price of traditional American ideas, beliefs and values should have prepared me.

The patina of age has plummeted in worth even more than that of houses furnished with it. “Do you have any silver or gold?” my would-be auctioneer wanted to know.

Ironically, for all the Tea Party longing for the past, the attempt to wrench 21st century life back into that era has damaged the value of both.

Looking around now, how will future generations appraise a damaged Romney, a retooled Santorum, a refinished Gingrich?

Or will they all wind up on history’s pile of bargain ephemera?

Corporations Are People, Nasty People

Barack Obama takes a step back on campaign finance.

“We will not play by two sets of rules,” say his managers, announcing a superPAC to offset Republican money to defeat the President, despite his denunciation of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed tons of hard-to-identify funds for negative ads.

As Mitt (“Corporations are people”) Romney edges closer to the GOP nomination, an Obama official explains the reversal: “We’ve been watching...the Republican primary process, the most recent filing deadline and the Koch brothers conference and what’s been coming out of that: a half billion dollars to defeat the president.”

If corporations are indeed people, they are the most greedy, selfish and ruthless in the society. During years of sitting on boards of directors, I was always astonished by what happened to individuals (including myself) when they sat around a corporate table.

Institutional roles acted simultaneously as a narcotic that suppressed conscience and a stimulant to bring out every bit of low cunning to profit the organization. I have seen religious leaders, academics and business statesmen propose solutions to problems that would make a carnival pitchman blush.

If corporations bear any resemblance to individual human beings, they are people who have been lobotomized of all social instincts except their need to protect themselves, profit and grow.

In this context the Koch brothers, who have reportedly earmarked $100 million to defeat the President, respond with indignation at being singled out by his campaign

A spokesman for their lobbying firm says the billionaire brothers will not be "intimidated or silenced by the President's aides and his allies."

Now, with both sides committed to massive negative warfare, voters will have to fasten their seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy year.

Rise of the Self-Righteous Right

Faced with the threat that a slowly improving economy may buoy the President’s reelection chances, Republican campaign strategy is tilting toward the Religious Right.

After winning a tiny sliver of voters in three states, Rick Santorum is in Texas talking to pastors: “There's not a management problem in Washington, all right. There's a more foundational problem there that goes to the basic concepts of who we are as a people. And those are deeply moral questions...

"I have seen the interaction with faith and public life and to me...there are not boundaries at all. I can't and I won't check my faith at the door because it motivates me to do things that I believe are best for our country.”

In 1960, a candidate named John Fitzgerald Kennedy told an assembly of ministers in Texas: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him...

"I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

The GOP is moving toward demonizing Barack Obama, not only as the advance agent of European socialism but a devil’s disciple of the “secular left.”

Back in Washington, a Congress with 10 percent approval is hammering the President on a White House decision that health plans of faith-based organizations must cover contraception if they serve people of multiple religious backgrounds.

But the attacks may have dubious traction, as the Washington Post reports that “while Catholic leadership has blasted the new regulation, polls show that a majority of Catholics are actually more supportive of the provision than the rest of the country.

“A poll out Tuesday from the Public Religion Research Institute finds 52 percent of Catholic voters agreed with the statement, ‘employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.’ That’s pretty much in line with overall support for the provision, which hovers at 55 percent--likely because Catholics use contraceptives at rates similar to the rest of Americans.”

All this GOP movement backward will remind older Americans that it was less than two years ago that New York State, finally loosening the grip of the Catholic Church, became the last in the Union to allow no-fault divorce. Until then, couples had to commit perjury to get an “annulment” on the grounds that the husband refused to have children or some such other lie.

Now, Mitt Romney will have to fight off Santorum in the Republican drift back to theocracy and whoever wins, in the general election, the President will have to test how firmly most Americans still believe in the separation of church and state.

Update: Parodying himself, Santorum is now warning that Obama is becoming Madame Defarge: "They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine."

Roll out the tumbrels.

If Santorum's the Answer, What's the Question?

When you find yourself agreeing with Donald Trump, it’s time for a sanity check. Still, The Donald knows about beauty contests (pace Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado), so he may be qualified to comment on yesterday’s results:

“Rick Santorum was a sitting senator who in re-election lost by 19 points, to my knowledge the most in the history of this country for a sitting senator to lose by 19 points. It’s unheard of. Then he goes out and says oh ‘okay’ I just lost by the biggest margin in history and now I’m going to run for president.

“Tell me, how does that work? That’s like me saying I just failed a test. Now I’m going to apply for admission to the Wharton School of Finance. Okay? He just failed a test...And now he’s going to run for president. So, I don’t get Rick Santorum. I don’t get that whole thing.”

No matter how pointless the exercise, grownup Americans actually voted not only to put a one-dimensional religious zealot into the world’s most powerful institution but let him run it—-with his finger on the nuclear button, to nominate Supreme Court justices and devastate the whole nine yards of their lives.

To “get the whole thing” is to glimpse how clueless the American electorate is now and how the ubiquitous media is reporting it all with a straight face. (See Piers Morgan’s one-hour CNN infomercial with Santorum last month, in which he failed to ask substantive questions, and trotted out his photogenic family for a finale.)

While “journalists” continue to flog the horse-race, the election year keeps getting more and more bizarre.

Touchdown and Downton

Did our beloved Masterpiece Classic jump a small shark the other night?

Watching a new episode after seeing Eli Manning pull out a victory in the Super Bowl may have set a high dramatic standard, but what was all that hugger-mugger about a lost heir with makeup like Quasimdo showing up at the end of World War I?

Picky, picky maybe, but the Giants have their critics,too. As they prepare for their march through Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes, a chorus of complaints arises about the failure to hold a similar parade for homecoming Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Even victory has its dark side. The best answer may be to watch the Giant homecoming with guilt and take another look at Downton Abbey online. Maybe we missed something.

Reagan and Obama Without Airbrushing

Reinventing yourself is a promise of the American Dream. Barack Obama, once a community organizer, is now in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan, a movie actor, transformed himself into the same role.

But evolution stops short of fantasy and now, as the GOP demonizes our 44th President and deifies the 40th, come reminders of the limits.

Speaking near Reagan’s grave, Haley Barbour, a conservative, tells colleagues:

“In the 2012 campaign every candidate for the Republican nomination has invoked Reagan...But Reagan did not demand or expect everyone to agree with him on every issue. He wasn’t a purist...

“Some candidates are vying to be the most conservative candidate, and some voters are seeking purity in their choice...Well, in politics purity is a dead-dog loser. You need unity. And purity is the enemy of unity.”

Before taking office, Barack Obama worried publicly about trying to hold onto his authentic self, telling Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” with a worried smile that his wife and friends thought he was still there behind all the hype but admitting on 60 Minutes that the “attempt to airbrush your life...is exhausting.”

In this campaign, airbrushing has escalated to fictionalizing as Newt Gingrich’s minions are caught trying to rewrite his Wikipedia entry to alter the self-professed historian’s own history, making 60 “adjustments” about his three marriages and the ethics charges against him while he was Speaker of the House.

Fact and fiction are getting so entwined that even Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl ad is an issue, with an “offended” Karl Rove seeing it as “using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

The usually taciturn Eastwood explains: “It was meant to be a message about job growth and the spirit of America. I think all politicians will agree with it. I thought the spirit was OK. I am not supporting any politician at this time. Chrysler to their credit didn’t even have cars in the ad.

“Anything they gave me for it went for charity. If Obama or any other politician wants to run with the spirit of that ad, go for it."

And that’s that. Read his lips, and keep it real.

Hail to the Stiff?

As Mitt Romney takes another step to the nomination and gains momentum, the question of personal chemistry comes to the fore. Would Americans elect a president they viscerally dislike?

In a Slate piece titled “Romney is Kerry. Maybe Gore,” Jacob Weisberg argues:

“Romney strongly resembles two similarly unloved Democratic nominees from the recent past, Al Gore and John Kerry. Gore and Kerry both suffered from the same characterizations that get applied to Romney-—too wooden in person while too flexible in their views. Their supporters often argued that qualifications were what mattered. But ominously for Romney, both Gore and Kerry lost winnable races because of their flawed personalities.

“George W. Bush, on the other hand, got elected and re-elected, despite his enormous, substantive shortcomings, because ordinary people found it easy to relate to him at a personal level. They felt he wasn’t trying to be someone different from who he was.”

We are back to the “Would you want to have a beer with him?” argument, which in an era when TV debates keep flip-flopping frontrunners (remember Rick Perry until GOP voters realized he might dribble the brew on his manly chest?) is not as frivolous as it sounds.

The likability issue dates back three decades to Ronald Reagan, who beat Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, both of whom projected higher IQs but couldn’t match the Gipper’s Hollywood-trained talent to appear folksy and accessible.

Even Bush I (with no “vision thing”) seemed more comfortable in his skin than Michael Dukakis but then ran into Bill Clinton who charmed the electorate into overlooking his bimbo eruptions on the way to the Oval Office and stained-dress impeachment.

After the South Carolina debacle, Mitt Romney took on an attack coach and developed pugnacity. Can he hire someone who will teach him to be likable?

Although he should have no fears about outcharming Gingrich, Santorum and Paul, Barack Obama and his killer smile are waiting in the wings.

Playing Politics with Women's Bodies

An ugly uproar can turn positive if you go back far enough to remember when things were worse, much worse.

For a women’s magazine editor of that time, the Planned Parenthood-Komen Foundation furor recalls half a century from introduction of the Pill when women, no matter what their circumstances, were without safe, reliable birth control and, before Roe v. Wade, had the choice of bearing unwanted children or being butchered by back-alley abortions.

From the start, those new alternatives, sanctioned by both science and government, were fiercely opposed by those of strong religious beliefs, who were not above using scare tactics to discourage their use. Ever since, women’s bodies have been a political battleground

By 1965, with five million women on the Pill after five years on the market, there was no reliable research about side effects and possible long-term dangers. As editor of McCalls, I put up $15,000 to find out what members of the American Academy of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were seeing in their practices. They distributed a detailed questionnaire and analyzed the results.

Almost 7,000 gynecologists answered, and the overwhelming majority found oral contraceptives safe and effective. There were a few doubts that would become subjects of later study, but the clear result was to allay women’s fears about the Pill that were being spread by whispers.

In the early 1970s, Betty Ford was in the White House. Undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer, she spoke about it in public and wrote an article for me to encourage women to go for early screening.

Back then, a generalized fear of the unknown bound both surgeons and patients into accepting radical breast removal as the only acceptable choice. But Dr. William Nolen, a surgeon who wrote a monthly column for the magazine, reported on the effectiveness of less drastic lumpectomies, combined with radiation and chemotherapy.

This was followed by the account of a writer who tracked down the surgeon pioneering the treatment: “I said 'No' to a group of doctors who told me, 'You must sign this paper, you don't have to know what it's all about'" Her article brought an overwhelming response, although it took decades to turn around the medical profession to where it is now, saving untold numbers of women from automatic loss of parts of their bodies.

This week’s flurry of outrage, which has resulted in a rapid reversal, will leave behind not only bruised feelings but a spike in awareness of the need for cancer screening, contributions to both organizations involved and a heightened sensitivity about keeping zealots out of potential life-and-death decisions.

For someone who has seen it all, that’s some progress, although it does not answer the underlying question of how people who claim to be pro-life can be so fierce in protecting fetuses, while giving their support to politicians who “don’t care about the poor” and rail against a “a food-stamp president” in stigmatizing the needs of those children after they are born.

The Cross and Double-Cross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

...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

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

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

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.