GOP Plays the Trump Card

Now that conventions are TV miniseries with no suspense, politicians desperately need big-name cameos for ratings. On opening night Republicans reach for the master of hype,  the Donald himself.

Trump promises to be “really amazing,” but may, as usual, just grab attention and embarrass his hosts. Ann Romney is the featured speaker of the evening, but can she compete with shameless Trumpery?

The only suspense is over what direction Trump’s self-promotion will take. Suggestions that he may parody Celebrity Apprentice and fire Obama don’t do the man justice--much too tame and predictable.

As a public service for bored TV watchers, herewith a suggested stunt that would be more in character. To match his unending zeal over Presidential birth history, Trump could reveal results of tracking down Mitt Romney’s death certificate and proving that, counter to rumors, the GOP nominee is alive and well rather than a robotic Manchurian candidate.

That service to Romney would more than offset worry warts like ex-W speechwriter Michael Gerson that “Trump’s appearance at the Republican convention represents a disturbing tolerance for disturbing ideas...

“What does it say about the modern GOP that the leading advocate of the theory that Obama is Kenyan is on the convention schedule, while the leading advocate of, say, mainstream climate science would risk being booed off the stage?”

Climate science? Are we talking about 2012 Republicans?

Can Congress Get Any Crazier?

In a word, yes. A Tea Party wannabe for Senate, Todd Akin of Missouri, opines on abortion that in cases of “legitimate rape...the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

His pronouncement sets off a GOP scramble to distance Romney-Ryan and eventually even Akin himself from such loony tunes medicine but succeeds only in raising doubts about the national standard bearers themselves.

A campaign spokesperson says flatly that “a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape,” but the record shows Ryan publicly against all except those to save the life of the mother and co-sponsoring a House bill last year to define human life as beginning with fertilization and grant “personhood” rights to embryos, which zealots believe would outlaw all abortions and even some birth control.

Embarrassments for Romney-Ryan surface almost daily, but the focus here should be on the kind of crazy people competing relatively unnoticed for Congressional seats on the Republican down-ticket.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are out of the political spotlight and will likely hang back during the convention, but voters should understand what Tea Party control of both houses would mean with a veto-proof president in the White House.

In thrall to their zealots even now, Congressional leaders would have no way of setting limits for them then. As all the noise and passion of the season are focused on national nominees, more serious threats to the American future are relatively out of sight, inmates preparing to take over the asylum.

Who will stop them then?
 

Update: Even after the uproar, Akin is hanging on, leading in polls by a point and praying for rape victims in a repentance ad:

 "Rape is an evil act. I used the wrong words in the wrong way and for that I apologize. As the father of two daughters, I want tough justice for predators. I have a compassionate heart for the victims of sexual assault. I pray for them."

Prayer, yes. Abortion, no.

Politics and Paul Ryan's Mom

Long ago, after a particularly nasty legislative maneuver, I asked a political boss, “Does your mother know what you do for a living?” He tapped my elbow and smiled. “Politics, kid,” he explained.

Paul Ryan’s mother not only knows but helps him do it. At her Florida retirement village, she is his prop as the VP wannabe who wants to gut the program tells an ogling crowd,  “Medicare was there for our family, for my grandma, when we needed it then, and Medicare is there for my mom while she needs that now, and we need to keep that guaranteed.”

His whopper comes in the face of a New York Times editorial charging that Romney and Ryan have “twisted themselves into knots to distance themselves from previous positions, so that voters can no longer believe anything they say. Last week, both insisted that they would save Medicare by pumping a huge amount of money into the program, a bizarre turnaround for supposed fiscal conservatives out to rein in federal spending.

“The likelihood that they would stand by that irresponsible pledge after the election is close to zero.”

Romney and Ryan would give retirees vouchers to buy a private plan or current Medicare. Sounds good, but then Medicare would be left with the sickest patients, driving up premiums and making it unaffordable—-a version of the old saw about freedom of housing, that the poor have the same options as the rich, hotel rooms or sleeping under bridges.

The Times editorial generously concludes that “the choice is between a Democratic approach that wants to retain Medicare as a guaranteed set of benefits with the government paying its share of the costs even if costs rise, and a Republican approach that wants to limit the government’s spending to a defined level, relying on untested market forces to drive down insurance costs.”

Perhaps, but old people would be well-advised to get out blankets and prepare for slumber under bridges.  Needless to say, Paul Ryan’s mother won’t be one of them.

The Real Issue of Romney's Returns

“We don’t pay taxes,” sniffed Queen of Mean Leona Helmsley two decades ago before she went to jail for tax evasion. “Only the little people pay taxes.”

The Romney refusal to release returns has become an issue beyond their actual content, evoking an attitude that did not work out well for a real estate mogul who ran the Palace Hotel, let alone someone trying to take over the White House.

A whiff of noblesse oblige is in the air, a sense that the very rich play by different rules than the rest of us, never a vote-getter in national elections (see John Kerry wind-surfing on his wife’s fortune in 2004).

We are tantalized by Romney’s release of a 2010 return showing he paid 13.9 percent on $21.7 million in income but put off by the annoyance he and his wife express over questions about their estimated quarter of a billion dollar fortune.

“The more we get attacked, the more we get questioned, the more we get pushed,” Ann Romney tells an interviewer this week. “Mitt is honest. His integrity is just golden.”

Such umbrage is not attractive in the couple known for a car elevator in one of their many homes and breeding show horses to compete in the Olympics with a running mate who looks like a miniature version of themselves. Do they find it unthinkable that honesty is not the point but a lifestyle that keeps a potential President from understanding the plight of less privileged people?

The very rich are different, F. Scott Fitzgerald told Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s. Yes, they have more money, Hemingway replied. But Fitzgerald spent a brilliant career writing about the unusual state of mind of people who feel they have a right to eat the world and everyone in it.

He would have been fascinated by the Romneys. As are we. 
 

They see no irony in a campaign that hides their own wealth while pushing voter suppression in Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere to keep poor people from voting against their candidacy.

Class warfare, anyone?

Romney Game Change Going Awry

Palin all over again? Paul Ryan hasn’t made a Soccer Mom speech at the Convention yet, but GOP strategists are moving to repair damage by another Game Change candidate.

Their worries emerge in a decision to keep Romney and Ryan together until Tampa. The spin suggests a younger partner providing emotional Viagra for a standard bearer beaten down by a year of bashing in Republican debates.  

“They really like each other and they feed off of each other,” burbles campaign manager Matt Rhoades. “There’s an energy, there’s a chemistry.”

Yet, just as Palin provided zest last time, Ryan’s campaign refueling comes with distinct downsides. This week he is being pummeled by going-rogue questions about taxes and Medicare as Romney tells reporters, “We’ll take a look at the differences.”

Moreover, Ryan’s own inconsistencies lead to admission he was wrong in claiming he didn’t ask for Obama stimulus money for his district after voting against the 2009 bill. He did.

As Democrats start rehearsing for the post-Convention debates, we learn that John Kerry will be playing Romney, a sad reminder of how stiffs are more likely than fully rounded human beings to survive the presidential nominating process these days.

Campaigning in retirement villages, Romney and Ryan will no doubt paper over their differences on a safety net for the elderly, but the VP nominee’s long record of voting and speechifying in Congress will be a time bomb ticking away from now until November.

Palin brought ignorance to the fore last time, Ryan may provide too much savvy. Which will be worse? 

Swiftboating Obama, Giving Romney Cancer

It’s official. Like pork factories that use every part of a pig but the squeal, Romney and Obama supporters are scraping the bottom of the political trough.

A smear group headed by a former Bushie and Tea Party compatriots is running “educational” ads denouncing the President for “recklessly leaking information” about the raids that killed Osama bin Laden.

Swiftboat, anyone? The tactic that torpedoed John Kerry in 2004 now has Barack Obama in its crosshairs. If you have an opponent who served his country honorably, do what Karl Rove did then: trot out veterans to discredit him while your own man’s shortcomings go unnoticed.

Ironically, the commercials come right after an HBO “Newsroom” episode highlighting how tightly news of the bin Laden raid was controlled until the White House announced it that Sunday night. But in this kind of campaign warfare, facts don’t matter.

Respected Washington Post columnist Dan Balz observes that “all restraints are gone, the guardrails have disappeared and there is no incentive for anyone to hold back. The other guy does it, so we’re going to do it, too...

“Neither side has had to look far for an excuse to attack or cry foul. Obama’s allies took the campaign over the edge last week and his team did nothing to stop it. The most egregious example of a campaign out of bounds was an ad prepared by Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting the president.

“The ad linked Romney to the cancer death of the wife of Joe Soptic, who lost his job and health insurance when a steel company that Bain Capital took over while Romney was at the firm later went bankrupt, after Romney left Bain...

“Obama campaign advisers at first tried to distance themselves from it by saying they didn’t know the details of Soptic’s situation. In fact, they had used him in an ad earlier this year and put him on a conference call with reporters at the time.”

Cancer, bin Laden, whatever. Pick a subject and start improvising a narrative from it. Facts don’t matter. After Citizens United, anyone can get away with saying anything.

Meanwhile in the media slaughterhouse the pigs are squealing louder than ever.

Women Who Never Had Children

Helen Gurley Brown was the only person I ever knew who batted her eyes at me over the phone.

For the first meal we ever shared, Julia Child burned my breakfast toast.

The only time I was ever threatened with rejection for laughing out loud during a serious movie was while watching Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”

A confluence of events—-the death of the 90-year-old Cosmo girl, a hundredth anniversary celebration of the French Chef’s birth and the VP nomination of a Rand devotee—-conspires to recall those iconic women of the past century who made their mark in the world without leaving behind children of their own despite contentions at the time that they “could have it all.”

Add to the list the most famous feminist of all, Gloria Steinem, unless you count getting Christian Bale as a stepson late in life as motherhood.

Even now, in an era of pregnant CEOs, I am still haunted by such unfairness, which began to trouble me half a century ago when I was editing magazines for women and that, late in life, strikes home even more forcibly as I am literally sustained by children and grandchildren.

Life may be unfair, as JFK contended, but this kind of choice for an entire gender of human beings still seems unspeakable.

There is no social remedy on the horizon, but it is irresistible not to see meaning arising from this in women’s persistent political tendency to support liberal Democrats rather than conservative Republicans.  

Like any other disadvantaged group, no matter what their material circumstances, they are sensitive to others whom society has not treated well.

As a man, I am both pained and grateful. 

Cue In the Mock Outrage Stage

Never before in a modern presidential campaign have the clanking gears been so visible: Joe Biden comes up with a hoof-in-mouth metaphor and the Romney team winds up RoboMitt to fulminate about Obama:

"His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the Presidency...And the White House sinks a little bit lower.”

Romney claims the President is “intellectually exhausted, out of ideas, and out of energy. And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others.”

All this comes after Biden’s flip Iowa remark about GOP efforts to gut Dodd-Frank financial regulation: “Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

VP oratorical eloquence aside, Romney’s outburst is timed to energize supporters as a Reagan predecessor wonk David Stockman bashes Paul Ryan for “preaching the same empty conservative sermon,” making Biden look tame by comparison:

“The greatest regulatory problem...is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about ‘too big to fail.’ These banks are too big to exist...”

As the rhetorical cycle unwinds, little comfort comes from yesterday’s primary results.

In Florida 12-term Republican Rep. Cliff  Stearns loses to Tea Party-backed veterinarian Ted Yoho, who has never held public office.

Wrestling mogul Linda MacMahon’s cash overwhelms Republican veteran Chris Shays for the Connecticut Senatorial nomination, while her Tea Party supporters shake their heads to bewail his actual experience in legislating: “He’s a career politician. He’s been in government a long, long time.”

If they applied that kind of longevity-is-bad logic to airline pilots, we would all be in for some bumpy rides in the future.

As we probably are.

Romney Scrambles to Offset Ryan

In that alternate universe inhabited by the GOP standard bearer, the next move after taking a stand is to neutralize or reverse it. So it appears with the“bold” Paul Ryan choice.

At the Republican Convention,  featured roles are handed to non-Ryans who would have brought other qualities to Romney’s ticket: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with his street-fighter style, will deliver the keynote, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will introduce Romney.

Instead of scaring the elderly with Ryan Social Security and Medicare threats, Rubio would have appealed to Hispanic voters and helped carry his own state, which houses so many of both.

The question here is less whether Romney has politically suicidal instincts but whether, from his sheltered tax-haven life, he has any at all. He goes from one step to the next, with no apparent awareness that there is any connection.

Abortion? Gay rights? Ryan? Christie? Rubio? Romney sees politics as an endless Chinese menu. Order one now, and have the others later.

Or all at the same time. As he chooses Ryan, Romney takes on a new “senior adviser,” a Karl Rove protégé who denounced Ryan’s Social Security fixes during the Bush years:

“(A)small number of conservatives...prefer to push only for investment accounts and make no effort to adjust benefits--therefore making no effort to address this fundamental structural problem. In my judgment, that's a bad idea. We simply cannot solve the Social Security problem with Personal Retirement Accounts alone. If the goal is permanent solvency and sustainability...Personal Retirements Accounts, for all their virtues, are insufficient to that task.”

But not to worry. In Romneyworld, they will find others to go in the opposition direction and back Ryan.

It’s one approach to running a three-month political campaign, but it would be a hell of way to run a country for four years.

And Now the Ugly Olympics...

After so many hours of seeing young people compete with grace, beauty and strength in an atmosphere of human amity, Americans are back in the mean season of politicians scoring points by playing to the crowds.

The President welcomes Paul Ryan to the race telling Iowans the new VP nominee symbolizes “a vision I fundamentally disagree with” as his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack goes for the jugular: “Take a look at the Ryan budget. Take a look at what it does to farm families. It destroys the safety net.”

The sudden shift from Greek esthetics to Roman circuses will no doubt be taken in stride by voters, although some may regret losing sight of races in which runners are going all out toward the finish line without elbowing and throwing gobs of mud at one another.

Even in the first lap of the marathon, Mitt Romney cancels an Orlando campaign stop, pleading that he is "too exhausted to make the trip," suggesting that his choice of a younger, energetic running mate may pay off in staying power, if not popularity.

Is it too “old” to be remembering the time only decades ago when voters expected national leaders to offer something approximating truth, no matter how ideologically skewed? Is it too “out of touch” to lament the time when SuperPACs weren’t spreading lies that candidates themselves would be ashamed to utter?

Those who vividly remember such times will welcome Ryan’s entry into the Big Race. He won’t be half as nimble as Romney in evading his own history and vision for the future, he will drag the Tea Party Congress into the spotlight, and he will give ideologically impaired independents a good, long look at where the country has been heading in the past two years.

They may have second thoughts about where that finish line is taking them.

There will be another benefit as well. In 1960 JFK confided he felt sorry for Nixon having to get up every morning and decide who he is going to be that day. Romney, of course, has the same problem, but Ryan does not. It will be good to have someone on the ticket who knows who he is so voters can see exactly what they would be getting.  

Blowback: What Was Romney Thinking?

If he had settled for an attack puppy like Tim Pawlenty rather than controversial Paul Ryan, the GOP standard bearer would not be facing new questions about his wealth, taxes and social insensitivity.

“Instead of a referendum on his own performance,” political strategists point out, “the president has an opening to turn the election into a referendum on the vision that Mr. Ryan has advanced and Mitt Romney has adopted.”

What was the usually cautious contender thinking?

“Romney,  the turnaround artist, decided that he needed to turn around his own campaign,” suggests New York Times resident wonk Nate Silver, adding that the President “will no longer have to stretch to evoke the specter of Congress and its 15 percent approval rating...he will be running against a flesh-and-blood embodiment of it.”

Under a Ryan budget, another critic snipes, underscoring the tax release controversy, Romney would have owed only 0.82 percent of his $21 million income in 2010 rather than the 13.9 he paid.

This VP choice may excite the foot-dragging Tea Party base Romney has been courting, but what will be the ultimate price among independent and undecided voters?

Like John McCain’s “Game Change” choice in 2008, this year’s may also have surprisingly unintended consequences.

Paul Ryan: From Ayn Rand to Romney

The Republican ticket will consist of Two Suits, aptly enough for a party of wealth, privilege and social Darwinism.

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan will propel the word “wonk” into Google heaven, reflecting the poverty of ideas in a time of nasty attack ads and sound bites. His not-Palin qualities may elevate the tone of the campaign, if not the content.

The VP nominee could offer focus to the fuzzy figure President Obama has dubbed “Romney Hood” and allow serious analysis of their desire to take from the poor and give to the ultra-rich.

The changeable Romney must surely be attracted to Ryan’s consistency, but he should not count too much on his running mate’s steadfastness under fire.

In 2005, Ryan revealed “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,” the cult figure who in the turgid 1200-page novel “Atlas Shrugged” proclaimed money as “the root of all good” and labeled those who don’t agree as “moochers” and “looters.”

This May, under pressure in the primaries, Ryan backpedaled on his patron saint when a questioner called her "an outspoken atheist [who]... felt altruism was evil, supported abortion and condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor."

“Just because you like someone’s novels,” he weaseled, “doesn’t mean you agree with their entire worldview philosophy...which is completely antithetical to mine because she has an atheist philosophy."

The would-be VP may still subscribe to Randian uber-selfishness but, in debate with Joe Biden and elsewhere, he will no doubt find other language to justify it.

All in all, however, the choice of Paul Ryan should be welcomed by serious voters, who will want to be persuaded that castrating labor unions and dismantling Social Security and Medicare among other safety nets for the needy will strengthen American society.

They may admire Ryan’s verbal dexterity, but will they want to buy a badly used country from him?

Update: As he usually does, James Fallows of the Atlantic reacts cogently, calling the Ryan choice “a good one for the country. It makes the race ‘about’ something, beyond just being a negative referendum on how the economy is going under Obama...

“I hope that when reporters are writing or talking about Paul Ryan's budget plans and his overall approach, they will rig up some electro-shock device to zap themselves each time they say that Ryan and his thoughts are unusually ‘serious’ or ‘brave.’ Clear-edged they are, and useful in defining the issues in the campaign. But they have no edge in ‘seriousness’ over, say, proposals from Ryan's VP counterpart Joe Biden...

“As Jonathan Chait argued in a long and very-much-worth-reading New York magazine article this spring, the ‘brave and serious’ cliche largely reflected a successful positioning campaign, which many people who view themselves as ‘serious’ swallowed credulously.”

2012's Missing Issue

For the moment, all goes well on the Obama-Romney front as the President bumps upward in the polls amid the savagery of personal attacks by both sides.

Yet the main 2012 issue is being lost in the hate Olympics: Will the American people take back their government from a Congress that has brought it to a standstill and threatens four more years of deadlock if Barack Obama is reelected?

Despite head-to-head presidential intensity, little will change if Democrats keep the White House and lose the legislative branch to those who hold it hostage with debt-ceiling shootouts and mindless wall-to-wall naysaying. Even now, before he has their nomination, GOP zealots are looking past Romney to hobbling Obama for four more years if he wins.

Plans for the Democratic convention stress the President’s qualities but, in the urgency of swaying “independent” voters, there is no visible effort to break the Tea Party stranglehold in Washington.

As the only elder statesman available, Bill Clinton might take on that role, but will he? There are compelling reasons for him to do so, even beyond love of country. If there is any hope for Hillary in 2016, their party will have to regain political traction between now and then.

With prospects for Obama brightening, results of Republican primary contests and polling for November offer a bleak down-ticket prospect. If the President doesn’t strengthen his coattails, he could be taking the oath next January as the emperor with no clothes.  

The rest of us will still be out in the cold as well. 

Update: Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate would offer Democrats an opening to spotlight Tea Party Congressional resistance by putting their wonk up front, a gift that could keep on giving through the rest of the campaign.

Obama in the Newsroom

The President makes an involuntary cameo appearance in this week’s episode of HBO’s “Newsroom,” announcing the death of Osama bin Laden after an hour of journalistic jockeying over the propriety of reporting events before they are officially confirmed.

Press criticism flourishes in the real White House too. After eight years of Bush/Cheney feigned disdain, Barak Obama is openly engaged in debate over how journalists shape or distort reality.

The President, reports the New York Times, is “an avid consumer of political news and commentary. But in his informal role as news media critic in chief, he developed a detailed critique of modern news coverage that he regularly expresses to those around him.”

In doing so, Obama is taking traditional Oval Office grousing to its logical next step in the Internet era by not only complaining about coverage but trying to shape it with Twitter town halls, a Google “hangout” and discussion via LinkedIn as well as the usual sit-down interviews with columnists and electronic pundits.

Yet, despite all this, he has had little success in efforts “to tell a story to the American people.” The answer may lie less in Obama’s narrative skills than the vicissitudes of journalism today.

Half a century ago at the dawn of TV, Presidents were overwhelmed by the reality that they no could longer control the public’s sense of the world through the words that described distant events. War and disorder were now seen nightly in living rooms, tearing down the wall between political and private.

JFK took a speed-reading course to devour newspapers and magazines before televised press conferences. LBJ had three network news programs on simultaneously. Nixon made aides watch, read and boil down what was being reported so he could be “informed and aware but not consumed by the news.”

Now the 24/7 flood of information is at full tide, breaking down all barriers between public and private with hard if not impossible-to-separate facts, pseudo-facts and factoids.

The loudest and least disciplined figures assail our senses with babble and body rhetoric while the media are overwhelmed in their attempts to mediate, to separate sense from nonsense.

The 2012 campaign will be over in three months, ending this season’s Citizens United gusher of lies and distortions, but little will change to feed endless material  for satire to Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, Letterman and Leno.

It will only hurt when we laugh.

Why Romney Won't Be Reagan This Year

With the President leading in polls, GOP spinners are positing 2012 as 1980 again, when a late Reagan surge swept a Democrat from the White House. That lead balloon won’t float, for numerous reasons:

Obama is no Jimmy Carter. Despite all the venom from the Radical Right, today’s President is far more popular than the former peanut farmer ever was. In 1980, Democrats deserted him in droves—-among them, Leon Jaworski, the Watergate prosecutor, and Eugene McCarthy, who had challenged LBJ over Vietnam in 1968. He called Carter “the worst president we’ve ever had.”

Romney is no Reagan. Behind in the polls at the time, the former actor demolished a sitting President with folksy charm in the October debates, smiling and sighing at Carter’s attacks, “There you go again.” Can anyone picture Romney out-charming Obama that way? Has anyone ever used “charm” and “Romney” in the same sentence before?

Iran can’t control American voters. In the final weekend of the 1980 campaign, Iranians torpedoed Carter by announcing they wouldn’t release their American hostages, depriving him of an “October surprise.” They waited until Reagan took office to do so, but they have no such leverage today.

Looking back at 1980, the political landscape then would unrecognizable today. John Anderson ran as an Independent moderate Republican and pulled 6.6 percent of the national vote.

The Libertarians had their own slate, drawing one percent, with a vice-presidential candidate, David Koch of the Koch brothers, who now fund the Tea Party in its attempt to take down the U.S. government.

The Communist and Socialists were on the ballot as well.

Such rampant diversity is unthinkable today. With Citizens United, the Supreme Court has unleashed money that will wash away minority candidates, narrowing voters’ choice but hopefully not entirely clouding their vision.

In November, they will pull the levers either for Barack Obama, warts and all, or Mitt Romney, who presumably will still be hiding his tax returns and Bain history.

If nothing unforeseen happens between now and then, there won’t be a Reagan repeat this year.

Acts of Violence, Large and Small

The would-be President responds to the Sikh temple shootings by “mourning those who lost their lives” and with “prayer for healing.”

On another August 6, we are jolted into realizing that Mitt Romney wants his finger on the trigger that 67 years ago took more than a hundred thousand lives in the name of peace.

In Japan, the Mayor of Hiroshima cites efforts to provide health care for survivors, now almost 80, so they can continue to bear witness to what human beings can do to one another.

On that day back then, I was in Germany, one of untold thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade Japan. All we knew was that a mushroom cloud had ended our dread of going to the Pacific to storm beaches and fight through cities. For the first time in years, we could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on our lives, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.

It was weeks before we learned the moral price for our relief--that over 200,000 would die from that explosion in Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki three days later and that our country would forever bear the burden of being the first to use such weapons of mass destruction.

Almost two decades later, in August 1963, I was interviewing John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. "Since 1945," he said, "we have gone into an entirely new period of nuclear weapons. Most people have no conception of what it all means. A nuclear exchange lasting sixty minutes would mean over 300 million deaths. We have to prevent the end of the human race."

As voters consider Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on this day in August, those memories must be part of the equation. How much power of life and death will be in the hands of whoever they choose in November and what kind of judgment, character and human feeling will he need to make such choices for them in the future?

Update: Even with so much at stake and more, the latest Gallup Poll shows voters not budging much from their party-line voting in 2008.

If the planet blows up, those who are left in the rubble will still have their partisan campaign buttons.

Marilyn Monroe Memorial Weekend

She died 50 years ago today, but Marilyn Monroe is all over TV this weekend. Turner Classic Movies ended a 24-hour marathon of her movies this morning, and tonight PBS will revive a documentary about her with “ashen-faced talking heads” (including my own).

Everything meaningful, and so much more, has been said about her long ago but, for those too young to know all that and for those who can’t get enough of her, here is the full story of the weekend my friend Ed Feingersh and I spent with her in March 1955.

Fresh Faces for the Future

After soaring into our hearts, Gabby Douglas will soon be transported from gold medals to the pinnacle of sports success, her image on a box of breakfast cereal.

No reward is too great for a young American who, along with so many others, has taken our eyes and minds, however briefly, away from the faces of tired old men who dominate TV screens with vitriol and venom.

For a while we can switch channels from politicians bashing one another over Chick-Fil-A to the sight of an unspoiled generation with, in the words of the President’s weekly address, the “American spirit that says even though we may have very different stories to tell, even though we may not look alike or talk alike or be dealt the same hand in life--if we work hard, we can achieve our dreams.”

Working hard is not the Washington ethos this summer. The Olympic event there in an election year, on everything from lifting the economy to keeping government running, is “kicking the can down the road” to avoid “falling off the fiscal cliff.”

As Election Day nears, their exertions will no doubt set new records for distance and time, if not style.

Meanwhile, for a few more days, their constituents can watch the Olympics and lull themselves into believing that “the American spirit” is alive and well.  

Is it too soon to start campaigning for Gabby Douglas, Michael Phelps and their teammates to run for Congress?

Romney's Not-So-Sweet Sugar Daddy

Q. Who is Sheldon Adelson, and why is he trying to buy the Oval Office for Mitt Romney?

A. A 78-year-old gambling magnate with a shady history of international wheeling and dealing, hatred of labor unions, a fixation on Israel and, in the era of Citizens United, determination to spend whatever it takes to unseat Barack Obama.

Before the Supreme Court flooded obscene money into politics, Adelson was dismissed by George W. Bush as “some  crazy Jewish billionaire.” In 2012, he has morphed into the poster boy for corruption of the electoral process.

Until now, Romney’s new best friend might be seen as just another example of high-bracket arrogance and egomania who puts his money where his mouth is (pace Donald Trump), but as the malleable GOP contender bows and scrapes to him in Jerusalem, Adelson deserves a much closer look.

His clout became visible in Gingrich’s South Carolina primary victory fueled by a $16.5 million SuperPAC tip in return for the former Speaker’s past legislative favors but, as Newt faded, Adelson grudgingly turned to Romney, who leaped into his leash without so much as slipping Gingrich a finder’s fee.

In this era of news snippets and sound bites, researching Sheldon Adelson’s history is a headache-inducing experience, but the outlines of a dark HoratioAlger American success story are clear.      

A child of dirt-poor immigrants, he clawed his way to wealth with computer trade shows in the 1980s and, a decade later, invested in Las Vegas casinos, pivoting right politically after bruising battles with unions. In 1991, he married an Israeli-born MD specializing in drug addiction and, under her influence, became obsessed with Holy Land politics to the point of turning into a right-wing nuisance in Israel.

Adelson expanded into international intrigue by making deals with China to operate a casino in Macao, in a corrupt atmosphere reminiscent of old Robert Mitchum-Jane Russell movies.

A driven, visceral man whose public pronouncements betray limited intellectual content, Sheldon Adelson is on the brink of funneling untold millions into electing Mitt Romney.

He has a right to his opinions but, if he succeeds, the degradation of American politics under Citizens United will be complete.

Update: Adelson demonstrates his usual way of handling criticism by threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and bullying them into retracting accusations that he profits from prostitution at his Chinese resorts.

Pimping is not his style, unlike the candidates he supports.

People Power, Now and Then

As Barack Obama begs supporters for TV ad money and Mitt Romney returns from pandering to Catholics in Poland and Jews in Israel, the death of Gore Vidal is a reminder that politics was a literary enterprise as well half a century ago.

In those days, Vidal was labeled “a man of letters” who wrote novels, plays and essays and, in the emerging new medium, argued raucously on the tube with others of his ilk such as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley and Truman Capote.

In a 1960 play and later movie, “The Best Man,” Vidal signaled the new JFK era by having a former President recall the old days when politicians “had to pour God over everything like ketchup.” Knowing audiences laughed.

In 1968, Vidal was a network commentator paired with his conservative doppelganger, the elegant editor and novelist William F. Buckley. They escalated a dispute on some minor point into calling one another "a pro crypto Nazi" and "a queer." Buckley won the argument by warning Vidal, "Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face..."

The two descendants of patrician families (Vidal was distantly related to Jacqueline Kennedy) pursued their feud on magazine pages, in lawsuits and by running for public office to spread their ideas (unsuccessfully, of course).   

Today, ideas have been replaced by partisan sound bites and SuperPAC attacks funded anonymously by bilious billionaires. Politics is a mindless demolition derby.

Gore Vidal’s departure recalls a time when talented, full-blooded people with names, faces and deeply held convictions had their say and tried to persuade thinking voters to agree with them.    

It may have been messy, but it was human.