Twice I have seen America on the brink of losing the boundaries of political reason that have kept us stable and free for well over two centuries—-during the McCarthy uproar of the 1950s and in the Nixon era leading to the resignation of a lawless president before he could be impeached.
Rick Santorum is no McCarthy or Nixon (yet) but he has the same wild disregard for truth and rational discourse and, like his predecessors, is being abetted by a compliant media giving “equal-handed” treatment to fear-mongering and traditional standards of sanity.
Sarah Palin elicited outrage by positing death panels for the old, but Santorum goes further by claiming that, under new health care laws, doctors are doing the same with newborns:
“Let’s take a child who is high cost and who...the medical profession increasingly is looking at as less utility, less value than others in society: ‘I don’t want to see this patient. This is going to be a real cost for me. I’m going to get nailed on this one, so let’s minimally treat, let’s not treat all because it’s going to be such a cost to the system.’ That’s happening now.”
Evidence for infanticide? None, except in Santorum’s imagination, but horse-race journalism is too interested in primary polls to “nail” him on such wild charges.
Instead, the GOP nomination contest is now not about the economy but a holier-than-thou zealot’s prescriptions for a diverse nation, as superPACs, including one funded by a firearms manufacturer, line up to support Santorum.
While approving of his theological bent, the Wall Street Journal advises him to lie low while campaigning: “Mr. Santorum must resist the temptation to run for president on ‘Humanae Vitae,’ the 1968 papal encyclical prohibiting artificial contraception...A presidential debate...is simply not the vehicle for clarifying the coherence of the Catholic Church's view of human sexuality.” But once he gets into the White House, separation of church and state would be a memory.
Neither Joe McCarthy nor Nixon was this far off the American track before being derailed by majority opinion. In tomorrow night’s debate, hapless Mitt Romney will be prepped to attack Santorum’s far-out views but may only succeed in eliciting sympathy for him.
Among media questioners, will there be even a pale version of Edward R. Murrow or Woodward and Bernstein to bring out the essence of what the nation is facing now?
Update: Payback for Santorum’s loony past starts with unearthing a 2008 speech at Florida’s Ave Maria University in which he warned, “Satan has his sights on the United States of America!”
In the speech, he warned, “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”
For those who believe in Satan, the question arises: Could Santorum be a double agent?
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Downton Abbey, Past and Future
Mary and Matthew are finally engaged, Sybil has had an off-screen baby, but Bates is in prison.
The sublime soap opera leaves us bereft for a year, with only deconstruction of the past and surmise for the future as consolation after taking us through World War I and the Spanish flu to the 1920s.
It’s a sign of Downton Abbey’s hold on our imaginations that the critical mind, while wallowing in its pleasures, can’t resist nagging at inconsistencies.
Time, for example. When in Season 2, Mary and Edith rescue Sybil from running away with the chauffeur, they remind her she is 21 and can choose her life openly. That’s in 1918, which would have made her 15 at the start of Season 1, not the shapely young woman of the first episodes.
During the war, the troublemaker Branson is barely restrained by Carson the butler from dumping a silver bowl of sludge on a British general. Why, then, is he still in the garage two years later, tinkering with the cars and seducing the youngest daughter of the house?
In an interview, creator Julian Fellowes reveals his admiration for American serialized TV from “Mad Men” and “Sex and the City” back to “NYPD Blue” and “West Wing.”
Asked if Downton will lose some of its sexual tension (as “Cheers” did when Diane and Sam finally got it on), Fellowes admits worrying about the alternative for Mary and Matthew, choosing to “go on with it too long. There is a moment when the audience just thinks, ‘Oh, for [goodness'] sake.’ You somehow have to pre-empt that.”
Trying to predict what he will do in Season 3 is dicey, but Fellowes has shown a penchant for borrowing from old movies, as he did lifting the flower show segment from “Mrs. Miniver” and temporarily putting Matthew into the position of characters from “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Barefoot Contessa.”
He may have to resort to the resolution of “Rebecca” to get Bates out of the slammer. In that classic movie, a vengeful wife stricken with cancer stages her own death to convict her innocent husband of murdering her. Start checking out the first Mrs. Bates’ physicians.
Next year, the arrival of Shirley MacLaine as Cora’s mother brings up delicious possibilities of a worthy foil for Maggie Smith’s dowager. With MacLaine as Martha Levinson, Lord Grantham will be in a special hell between his doughty mum and a Jewish-American mother-in-law.
All this brings to mind a fantasy scene from one of Elizabeth McGovern’s early movies, the 1983 “Lovesick,” in which Dudley Moore imagines himself as an aged loser tottering after her and a rival in a carriage in period costume driving off happily from a manor house very much like Downton Abbey.
Until next January, we will all have to totter after reruns and what we can imagine comes next.
The sublime soap opera leaves us bereft for a year, with only deconstruction of the past and surmise for the future as consolation after taking us through World War I and the Spanish flu to the 1920s.
It’s a sign of Downton Abbey’s hold on our imaginations that the critical mind, while wallowing in its pleasures, can’t resist nagging at inconsistencies.
Time, for example. When in Season 2, Mary and Edith rescue Sybil from running away with the chauffeur, they remind her she is 21 and can choose her life openly. That’s in 1918, which would have made her 15 at the start of Season 1, not the shapely young woman of the first episodes.
During the war, the troublemaker Branson is barely restrained by Carson the butler from dumping a silver bowl of sludge on a British general. Why, then, is he still in the garage two years later, tinkering with the cars and seducing the youngest daughter of the house?
In an interview, creator Julian Fellowes reveals his admiration for American serialized TV from “Mad Men” and “Sex and the City” back to “NYPD Blue” and “West Wing.”
Asked if Downton will lose some of its sexual tension (as “Cheers” did when Diane and Sam finally got it on), Fellowes admits worrying about the alternative for Mary and Matthew, choosing to “go on with it too long. There is a moment when the audience just thinks, ‘Oh, for [goodness'] sake.’ You somehow have to pre-empt that.”
Trying to predict what he will do in Season 3 is dicey, but Fellowes has shown a penchant for borrowing from old movies, as he did lifting the flower show segment from “Mrs. Miniver” and temporarily putting Matthew into the position of characters from “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Barefoot Contessa.”
He may have to resort to the resolution of “Rebecca” to get Bates out of the slammer. In that classic movie, a vengeful wife stricken with cancer stages her own death to convict her innocent husband of murdering her. Start checking out the first Mrs. Bates’ physicians.
Next year, the arrival of Shirley MacLaine as Cora’s mother brings up delicious possibilities of a worthy foil for Maggie Smith’s dowager. With MacLaine as Martha Levinson, Lord Grantham will be in a special hell between his doughty mum and a Jewish-American mother-in-law.
All this brings to mind a fantasy scene from one of Elizabeth McGovern’s early movies, the 1983 “Lovesick,” in which Dudley Moore imagines himself as an aged loser tottering after her and a rival in a carriage in period costume driving off happily from a manor house very much like Downton Abbey.
Until next January, we will all have to totter after reruns and what we can imagine comes next.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Political Season of Spite
The most mundane man in Washington puts his finger on the prevailing mood. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, fed up with the Republicans blocking judicial nominees, says they are being “being held up out of spite.”
Spite, malice, resentment increasingly pervade the American landscape in an election year that promises to be uglier than any in living memory.
It recalls the farmer who, upon being told he will be granted a wish but that his hated neighbor will be given twice as much, replies “Pluck out one of my eyes.”
As Reid asks the President to unilaterally appoint scores of judges during Congressional recess, the White House agrees that “Republican obstructionism is an overtly political maneuver to thwart the president’s agenda” while waffling on whether to follow his lead.
Venom spreads across the country in GOP primaries.
In Georgia, Newt Gingrich tells former neighbors, “Let’s be clear what this election is all about. We believe in the right to bear arms, and we like to bear the arms in our trucks.”
Clean-cut Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC sugar daddy keeps suing media critics for pointing out that his wealth comes from a company selling dietary supplements and cleaning products in what Michigan regulators have called “the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid.”
On the stump, Rick Santorum says public schools are “anachronistic” and that Barack Obama is guided by “some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.”
The American political landscape is unreeling backward at warp speed, and philosophical Harry Reid has identified a key element.
Will voters reverse the momentum? Or spite themselves by putting one of these bozos in the White House?
Update: On Sunday TV, Santorum is still holding his medieval fort. “I wasn’t suggesting that the president’s not a Christian,” he says, but linking him to what “radical environmentalist” believe:
“The earth is not the objective. Man is the objective, and I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down.”
Not backing down from his criticism of education, the candidate who home-schooled his own kids insists, “I think the parent should be in charge.”
So much for the votes of environmentalists and teachers.
Spite, malice, resentment increasingly pervade the American landscape in an election year that promises to be uglier than any in living memory.
It recalls the farmer who, upon being told he will be granted a wish but that his hated neighbor will be given twice as much, replies “Pluck out one of my eyes.”
As Reid asks the President to unilaterally appoint scores of judges during Congressional recess, the White House agrees that “Republican obstructionism is an overtly political maneuver to thwart the president’s agenda” while waffling on whether to follow his lead.
Venom spreads across the country in GOP primaries.
In Georgia, Newt Gingrich tells former neighbors, “Let’s be clear what this election is all about. We believe in the right to bear arms, and we like to bear the arms in our trucks.”
Clean-cut Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC sugar daddy keeps suing media critics for pointing out that his wealth comes from a company selling dietary supplements and cleaning products in what Michigan regulators have called “the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid.”
On the stump, Rick Santorum says public schools are “anachronistic” and that Barack Obama is guided by “some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.”
The American political landscape is unreeling backward at warp speed, and philosophical Harry Reid has identified a key element.
Will voters reverse the momentum? Or spite themselves by putting one of these bozos in the White House?
Update: On Sunday TV, Santorum is still holding his medieval fort. “I wasn’t suggesting that the president’s not a Christian,” he says, but linking him to what “radical environmentalist” believe:
“The earth is not the objective. Man is the objective, and I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down.”
Not backing down from his criticism of education, the candidate who home-schooled his own kids insists, “I think the parent should be in charge.”
So much for the votes of environmentalists and teachers.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Passions of the GOP Good Ole Boys
After months of complaints about unseen money men unleashing SuperPAC attack ads under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, one of them steps forward to show us what we’ve been missing in not hearing directly from them.
Rick Santorum’s backer, born-again billionaire Foster Freiss, shows up on MSNBC to tell Andrea Mitchell his views on the Pill, “Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”
Har-de-har-har!
In a time when GOP candidates and their good-ole-boy backers should put aspirin between their teeth to control babbling about what is right for half of the population whose views none of them represents, women legislators in Washington are walking out on male counterparts dominating Congressional hearings on contraception.
No one expects the GOP final four to button their lips, but the good news is that a scheduled TV debate before Super Tuesday won’t take place because Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have backed out. It may finally have dawned on them that Santorum won his frontrunner status with all that free exposure in umpteen talkathons.
Meanwhile, post-Valentine Day, Romney is in Michigan trying to make voters forget he was against the bailout that led to General Motors’ biggest profit ever by waxing poetic about the landscape:
“I was born and raised here. I love this state. It seems right here. The trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes...I love American cars, and long may they rule the world.”
As always, Republicans are channeling their passion into the inanimate rather than people.
Rick Santorum’s backer, born-again billionaire Foster Freiss, shows up on MSNBC to tell Andrea Mitchell his views on the Pill, “Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”
Har-de-har-har!
In a time when GOP candidates and their good-ole-boy backers should put aspirin between their teeth to control babbling about what is right for half of the population whose views none of them represents, women legislators in Washington are walking out on male counterparts dominating Congressional hearings on contraception.
No one expects the GOP final four to button their lips, but the good news is that a scheduled TV debate before Super Tuesday won’t take place because Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have backed out. It may finally have dawned on them that Santorum won his frontrunner status with all that free exposure in umpteen talkathons.
Meanwhile, post-Valentine Day, Romney is in Michigan trying to make voters forget he was against the bailout that led to General Motors’ biggest profit ever by waxing poetic about the landscape:
“I was born and raised here. I love this state. It seems right here. The trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes...I love American cars, and long may they rule the world.”
As always, Republicans are channeling their passion into the inanimate rather than people.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Broadening Obama's Coattails
As the GOP wannabe dogfight gets uglier, the actual President is on a winning streak that parallels Linsanity in the sports world.
In eye-to-eye confrontation, John Boehner has just blinked after more than a year of being held hostage by his Tea Party caucus, backing not only a bill to extend a $100 billion payroll tax rollback without spending cuts to pay for it but agreeing to extend unemployment benefits and prevent a large slash in reimbursements to doctors who accept Medicare.
In addition, the Speaker is backpedaling on a crucial $260 billion highway bill, sending it to the House floor in three pieces to avoid defeat by using a procedural maneuver that would allow it to be recombined after each segment passes. Such a bypass might overcome intra-party wrangling over GOP legislation estimated to leave a $78 billion hole in the highway trust fund.
In the context of last year’s temper tantrum leading to a national credit downgrade, this signals a turning point for responsible Republicans who finally recognize that, if they don’t find a way to legislate, they may be hammered at the ballot box in November for wall-to-wall obstruction in Congress.
Such anxiety will only be heightened by a new poll showing President Obama with a solid lead over each of his potential GOP opponents, including 48 percent to 42 over Romney, who was even with him last month, and 49 percent to 41 over Rick Santorum, even before he undergoes a barrage of negative ads from Mitt’s SuperPACS, and 54-36 over Newt Gingrich, who throws a Hail Mary pass by sending his third wife out on the hustings.
It’s a long, long time between now and November, but the President’s coattails are beginning to look broad enough and strong enough to carry Democrats back into control of both houses of Congress.
That would be the equivalent of the New York Knicks, with their new superhero from nowhere, getting into the playoffs.
In eye-to-eye confrontation, John Boehner has just blinked after more than a year of being held hostage by his Tea Party caucus, backing not only a bill to extend a $100 billion payroll tax rollback without spending cuts to pay for it but agreeing to extend unemployment benefits and prevent a large slash in reimbursements to doctors who accept Medicare.
In addition, the Speaker is backpedaling on a crucial $260 billion highway bill, sending it to the House floor in three pieces to avoid defeat by using a procedural maneuver that would allow it to be recombined after each segment passes. Such a bypass might overcome intra-party wrangling over GOP legislation estimated to leave a $78 billion hole in the highway trust fund.
In the context of last year’s temper tantrum leading to a national credit downgrade, this signals a turning point for responsible Republicans who finally recognize that, if they don’t find a way to legislate, they may be hammered at the ballot box in November for wall-to-wall obstruction in Congress.
Such anxiety will only be heightened by a new poll showing President Obama with a solid lead over each of his potential GOP opponents, including 48 percent to 42 over Romney, who was even with him last month, and 49 percent to 41 over Rick Santorum, even before he undergoes a barrage of negative ads from Mitt’s SuperPACS, and 54-36 over Newt Gingrich, who throws a Hail Mary pass by sending his third wife out on the hustings.
It’s a long, long time between now and November, but the President’s coattails are beginning to look broad enough and strong enough to carry Democrats back into control of both houses of Congress.
That would be the equivalent of the New York Knicks, with their new superhero from nowhere, getting into the playoffs.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
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?
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?
Sunday, February 12, 2012
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.
“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.
Thursday, February 09, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
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.
“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.
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, February 04, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, February 02, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
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.
“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.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, January 30, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
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?
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?
Saturday, January 28, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, January 27, 2012
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?
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?
Thursday, January 26, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Monday, January 23, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Media Backlash Against Newt?
In South Carolina, Prof. Gingrich has combined theology with science: When a snake, i.e. the media, drops a bitten apple on you, deflect it back and reverse the momentum of your campaign.
Not quite Sir Isaac’s formulation, but Dr. Karl Rove, Newt’s former colleague at Fox University, validates the theory, “John King couldn’t have set up the question in a more positive way for Gingrich to just nail it and haul it right out of the park.”
Credit this new formulation to a series of earlier debate experiments, starting with his attack on Chris Wallace for a “gotchya” question and “playing Mickey Mouse games” about the disarray of his campaign last summer, followed by jousting with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo about health care in November and a racially charged encounter with another Fox questioner Juan Williams earlier this week.
Gingrich’s war against the press recalls the final year of Nixon’s presidency and his conflict with CBS’ White House correspondent Dan Rather after Watergate. At a news conference during the reelection campaign, when Rather stood up to ask a question, there were boos from Nixon supporters and cheers from fellow correspondents.
At the noise, Nixon looked down at him and asked sarcastically, “Are you running for something?” Rather snapped back, “No, sir, are you?”
The question now is how journalists respond at future debates. Few of today’s are as feisty as Dan Rather, but then again, Gingrich is not a president but an aspirant clearly bent on using media questioners as whipping boys.
They may not be as highly motivated as Woodward and Bernstein, along with Rather, were back then but, as the Romney campaign starts to hit Gingrich on details of his rosy picture as House Speaker, which actually ended with a cloud of ethics violations and a $300,000 fine, the media will be highly motivated to join in with pointed questions at the debates and, outside the halls, by reporting with gusto on exactly what happened.
If Gingrich is confident about beating back attacks from former wives, wait until he has to deal with the bruised feelings of platoons of media people. Unlike ex-spouses, they never retreat into silence.
Not quite Sir Isaac’s formulation, but Dr. Karl Rove, Newt’s former colleague at Fox University, validates the theory, “John King couldn’t have set up the question in a more positive way for Gingrich to just nail it and haul it right out of the park.”
Credit this new formulation to a series of earlier debate experiments, starting with his attack on Chris Wallace for a “gotchya” question and “playing Mickey Mouse games” about the disarray of his campaign last summer, followed by jousting with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo about health care in November and a racially charged encounter with another Fox questioner Juan Williams earlier this week.
Gingrich’s war against the press recalls the final year of Nixon’s presidency and his conflict with CBS’ White House correspondent Dan Rather after Watergate. At a news conference during the reelection campaign, when Rather stood up to ask a question, there were boos from Nixon supporters and cheers from fellow correspondents.
At the noise, Nixon looked down at him and asked sarcastically, “Are you running for something?” Rather snapped back, “No, sir, are you?”
The question now is how journalists respond at future debates. Few of today’s are as feisty as Dan Rather, but then again, Gingrich is not a president but an aspirant clearly bent on using media questioners as whipping boys.
They may not be as highly motivated as Woodward and Bernstein, along with Rather, were back then but, as the Romney campaign starts to hit Gingrich on details of his rosy picture as House Speaker, which actually ended with a cloud of ethics violations and a $300,000 fine, the media will be highly motivated to join in with pointed questions at the debates and, outside the halls, by reporting with gusto on exactly what happened.
If Gingrich is confident about beating back attacks from former wives, wait until he has to deal with the bruised feelings of platoons of media people. Unlike ex-spouses, they never retreat into silence.
Friday, January 20, 2012
How Live Audiences Kill Debates
The tone of last night’s GOP séance was set in the first minute, not by the candidates or moderator, but whooping and applause of hand-picked partisans in the hall when Newt Gingrich attacked CNN’s John King and all the media as “despicable” for asking about his second wife’s character charges against him that had dominated the news cycle all day.
In contrast, for 1960’s first presidential debate ever between JFK and Nixon, the only people in the studio, besides a panel of four journalists asking questions, were television crewmen, two wire service reporters, three photographers and an aide to each candidate.
“For the most part,” the New York Times reported, “the exchanges were distinguished by a suavity, earnestness and courtesy that suggested that the two men were more concerned about ‘image projection’ to their huge television audience than about scoring debating points.”
How did we get from there to today’s atmosphere of bear-baiting, bull-fighting and Roman gladiators, and was it worth the trip?
The process has been transformed from a relatively civilized exchange of views on issues, with the usual political posturing of course, into an ugly spectacle of candidates under pressure to tear down one another (and the President of the United States) with unchecked (until the next day, when TV viewers are gone) exaggerations, distortions and lies—-anything to stir up the partisan blood.
Saturday night, South Carolina will provide a partial answer to how well this kind of demagoguery works, with the likelihood that Mitt Romney’s big lead in the polls will dwindle or perhaps disappear altogether.
Meanwhile, one of the nation’s leading social critics has already weighed in. “The liberal media,” Sarah Palin observes, “and some of that GOP holier-than-thou machine overplayed their hand this time...I call them ‘dumb arses.’”
For those who want to rinse their minds of all this swill, recommended reading is Fareed Zakaria’s Time interview with President Obama on the changing nature of American power in the world, a thoughtful discussion that presumably was done without an audience cheering them on.
In contrast, for 1960’s first presidential debate ever between JFK and Nixon, the only people in the studio, besides a panel of four journalists asking questions, were television crewmen, two wire service reporters, three photographers and an aide to each candidate.
“For the most part,” the New York Times reported, “the exchanges were distinguished by a suavity, earnestness and courtesy that suggested that the two men were more concerned about ‘image projection’ to their huge television audience than about scoring debating points.”
How did we get from there to today’s atmosphere of bear-baiting, bull-fighting and Roman gladiators, and was it worth the trip?
The process has been transformed from a relatively civilized exchange of views on issues, with the usual political posturing of course, into an ugly spectacle of candidates under pressure to tear down one another (and the President of the United States) with unchecked (until the next day, when TV viewers are gone) exaggerations, distortions and lies—-anything to stir up the partisan blood.
Saturday night, South Carolina will provide a partial answer to how well this kind of demagoguery works, with the likelihood that Mitt Romney’s big lead in the polls will dwindle or perhaps disappear altogether.
Meanwhile, one of the nation’s leading social critics has already weighed in. “The liberal media,” Sarah Palin observes, “and some of that GOP holier-than-thou machine overplayed their hand this time...I call them ‘dumb arses.’”
For those who want to rinse their minds of all this swill, recommended reading is Fareed Zakaria’s Time interview with President Obama on the changing nature of American power in the world, a thoughtful discussion that presumably was done without an audience cheering them on.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
"Blazing Saddles" in S.C.
Is Mel Brooks directing this movie?
Tonight’s final South Carolina debate will no doubt start as usual with the gang sitting under the palmettos full of Tea Party beans, competing to exude the loudest brain farts about Barack Obama and one another, but where do they go from there?
Will Rick Perry, who almost started a war with Turkey last time, punch another horse? (Nope, late news is that he's doing a "Shane" and riding off into the sunset.)
Can Ron Paul, booed for preaching the Golden Rule about foreign wars, escape being strung up by local Pentagon contractors?
What about Rick Santorum, who began debate season by constantly kissing his former Speaker’s ring? Now that they are neck and neck, will he roll up a sleeveless sweater to hurl at Gingrich’s head?
Will Newt himself, who insulted black sheriff Juan Williams last time to delight the crowd, show up in sheets to belabor Mitt Romney, who still has tax-return cream pie on his face. (“I fully expect the Romney campaign to be unendingly dirty and dishonest for the next days because they are desperate,” Gingrich declaims with a straight face.)
Or will it all end like “Blazing Saddles,” with a giant brawl breaking through studio walls and spilling from one movie set to another?
At least one such scene is at hand as the second Mrs. Speaker is scheduled to be interviewed on ABC's “Nightline” after the debate.
Odds are it won’t be a Gingrich endorsement but a detailed account of how Newt, who believes marriage is for one man and one woman, proposed adding Mrs 3 to the menage without divorcing Mrs. 2.
Mel Brooks, where are you now that we need you?
Tonight’s final South Carolina debate will no doubt start as usual with the gang sitting under the palmettos full of Tea Party beans, competing to exude the loudest brain farts about Barack Obama and one another, but where do they go from there?
Will Rick Perry, who almost started a war with Turkey last time, punch another horse? (Nope, late news is that he's doing a "Shane" and riding off into the sunset.)
Can Ron Paul, booed for preaching the Golden Rule about foreign wars, escape being strung up by local Pentagon contractors?
What about Rick Santorum, who began debate season by constantly kissing his former Speaker’s ring? Now that they are neck and neck, will he roll up a sleeveless sweater to hurl at Gingrich’s head?
Will Newt himself, who insulted black sheriff Juan Williams last time to delight the crowd, show up in sheets to belabor Mitt Romney, who still has tax-return cream pie on his face. (“I fully expect the Romney campaign to be unendingly dirty and dishonest for the next days because they are desperate,” Gingrich declaims with a straight face.)
Or will it all end like “Blazing Saddles,” with a giant brawl breaking through studio walls and spilling from one movie set to another?
At least one such scene is at hand as the second Mrs. Speaker is scheduled to be interviewed on ABC's “Nightline” after the debate.
Odds are it won’t be a Gingrich endorsement but a detailed account of how Newt, who believes marriage is for one man and one woman, proposed adding Mrs 3 to the menage without divorcing Mrs. 2.
Mel Brooks, where are you now that we need you?
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Mitt: A Loser's Son Who Learned Too Well
Apology is overdue to George W. Romney for my remembering him only as an unsophisticated man whose remarks about being “brainwashed” in Vietnam cost him the 1968 GOP nomination.
In Rolling Stone, Rick Pearlstein summons up the elder Romney, with ancient videotape, to recall a time when some politicians still tried to tell the truth, even if it derailed their ambitions.
The lessons Mitt Romney drew from his father’s defeat were all the wrong ones.
Back then, George Romney was a successful auto manufacturer who campaigned against “gas guzzlers,” became governor of Michigan and had the silver-fox good looks of a president (Does Mitt dye his hair?) but, in that pre-everyday-debate era, frustrated the press corps with a salesman’s genial naivete on issues.
A fellow Republican governor observed, “Watching George Romney run for president is like watching a duck try to [George Carlin verb] a football.”
Yet Romney, as Pearlstein reminds us, had defied his Mormon church by leading a march for civil rights, advocated for them in the South in ’68 and, “after America's worst riot broke out in Detroit under his watch, the governor said that America could respond with a crackdown...‘but our system would become little better than a police state.’"
When the elder Romney turned against the Vietnam War (as the entire country was doing that year) with one unfortunate word, politicians and media jumped on him, and his frontrunner status was gone. Then LBJ stepped down, and we got Nixon, who prolonged the war for years, and gave us Watergate.
“Mitt learned at an impressionable age,” Pearlstein concludes, “that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”
George Romney made automobiles and gave back part of his salary and bonuses when he thought they were too high; Mitt has made only money, tons of it, and won’t say exactly how and how much.
George Romney and his wife supported Planned Parenthood; Mitt has flip-flopped into Right to Life.
George Romney was so much of a do-gooder that a critic described his political career as like “sending a Salvation Army lass into the chorus at a burlesque house.” Mitt Romney seems right at home in today’s GOP whorehouse.
Political patrimony in our time keeps producing disappointing results: Romney is following the footprints of George W. Bush. As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo looms on the 2016 horizon, we can only hope that Democrats have stronger bloodlines.
In Rolling Stone, Rick Pearlstein summons up the elder Romney, with ancient videotape, to recall a time when some politicians still tried to tell the truth, even if it derailed their ambitions.
The lessons Mitt Romney drew from his father’s defeat were all the wrong ones.
Back then, George Romney was a successful auto manufacturer who campaigned against “gas guzzlers,” became governor of Michigan and had the silver-fox good looks of a president (Does Mitt dye his hair?) but, in that pre-everyday-debate era, frustrated the press corps with a salesman’s genial naivete on issues.
A fellow Republican governor observed, “Watching George Romney run for president is like watching a duck try to [George Carlin verb] a football.”
Yet Romney, as Pearlstein reminds us, had defied his Mormon church by leading a march for civil rights, advocated for them in the South in ’68 and, “after America's worst riot broke out in Detroit under his watch, the governor said that America could respond with a crackdown...‘but our system would become little better than a police state.’"
When the elder Romney turned against the Vietnam War (as the entire country was doing that year) with one unfortunate word, politicians and media jumped on him, and his frontrunner status was gone. Then LBJ stepped down, and we got Nixon, who prolonged the war for years, and gave us Watergate.
“Mitt learned at an impressionable age,” Pearlstein concludes, “that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician.”
George Romney made automobiles and gave back part of his salary and bonuses when he thought they were too high; Mitt has made only money, tons of it, and won’t say exactly how and how much.
George Romney and his wife supported Planned Parenthood; Mitt has flip-flopped into Right to Life.
George Romney was so much of a do-gooder that a critic described his political career as like “sending a Salvation Army lass into the chorus at a burlesque house.” Mitt Romney seems right at home in today’s GOP whorehouse.
Political patrimony in our time keeps producing disappointing results: Romney is following the footprints of George W. Bush. As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo looms on the 2016 horizon, we can only hope that Democrats have stronger bloodlines.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Happy Birthday, Mrs. Obama, Wherever You Are
The First Lady turns 48 today. I know because an e-mail from the President last week reminded me with two links to a fund-raising site:
“The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception...
“This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we've experienced together, and I couldn't do it without her. I know she'd love to hear from you today.”
With this kind of robo-mail, the Obamas are a long way from 2007 when a campaigning Michelle talked about her husband’s domestic faults (not picking up his socks or putting butter back in the refrigerator) and offered a philosophical reason for doing so:
“Barack is very much human. So let’s not deify him, because what we do is we deify, and then we’re ready to chop it down. People have notions of what a wife’s role should be in this process, and it’s been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different--I think most real marriages are.”
Inevitably, the White House makes fictional characters out of its inhabitants with journalists like Bob Woodward and the like trying to get behind the façade. The latest, Jodi Kantor, was on the Daily Show last night, with Jon Stewart expressing surprise that her relatively mild book had drawn a counterattack from Mrs. Obama claiming it portrayed her as “some angry black woman.”
With Republicans demonizing her husband non-stop in debates, such touchiness is understandable, particularly since even Obama supporters like Arianna Huffington are blurting advice for her to be more like Eleanor Roosevelt who “at the same time that she's doing fundraisers in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, she should go to South Central [Los Angeles]...and seeing the places where there is pain, where there is struggle, where there is homelessness, where there is unemployment.”
The real person in the White House now did not sign on to be Eleanor Roosevelt or anyone since then, when most First Ladies had to do no more than stand behind their husbands, smiling for photo-ops.
So, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, Happy Birthday, Michelle Robinson Obama (no campaign contribution included).
“The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception...
“This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we've experienced together, and I couldn't do it without her. I know she'd love to hear from you today.”
With this kind of robo-mail, the Obamas are a long way from 2007 when a campaigning Michelle talked about her husband’s domestic faults (not picking up his socks or putting butter back in the refrigerator) and offered a philosophical reason for doing so:
“Barack is very much human. So let’s not deify him, because what we do is we deify, and then we’re ready to chop it down. People have notions of what a wife’s role should be in this process, and it’s been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different--I think most real marriages are.”
Inevitably, the White House makes fictional characters out of its inhabitants with journalists like Bob Woodward and the like trying to get behind the façade. The latest, Jodi Kantor, was on the Daily Show last night, with Jon Stewart expressing surprise that her relatively mild book had drawn a counterattack from Mrs. Obama claiming it portrayed her as “some angry black woman.”
With Republicans demonizing her husband non-stop in debates, such touchiness is understandable, particularly since even Obama supporters like Arianna Huffington are blurting advice for her to be more like Eleanor Roosevelt who “at the same time that she's doing fundraisers in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, she should go to South Central [Los Angeles]...and seeing the places where there is pain, where there is struggle, where there is homelessness, where there is unemployment.”
The real person in the White House now did not sign on to be Eleanor Roosevelt or anyone since then, when most First Ladies had to do no more than stand behind their husbands, smiling for photo-ops.
So, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, Happy Birthday, Michelle Robinson Obama (no campaign contribution included).
Monday, January 16, 2012
Hard Weekend for the Faithful
After pious Denver quarterback Tim Tebow is humiliated on the gridiron, there comes unsettling news for evangelicals who days ago met and decided to support Rick Santorum for President.
Even as ministers fall in line, the Daily Beast publishes a report (with photo) of Mrs. Santorum’s live-in relationship with a well-known abortion provider before she met her husband. (In a stranger-than-fiction turn, the doctor had delivered her 22 years before they got together when she was a nursing student and he was 63.)
Whether or not her past is germane to Santorum’s candidacy, Southern Carolina voters and beyond will have to think hard about how far religion, or religiosity, has been pushed into areas of American life where it did not predominate in the past.
Of all the damage George W. Bush did to our national character, not least is how his faith-based meanness obscured traditional admiration by Americans of all religions, or none, for figures like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, whose beliefs led to humility, self-sacrifice and good works rather than contempt for those who fail to share self-serving political certainties.
“Cheap grace,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a minister hanged by Hitler for denouncing the comfort his Church was conferring on believers while turning a blind eye to the inhumanity of the Nazis, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance...absolution without personal confession.”
This year the Super Bowl will be won by athletic skill, not prayer, while voters, the Religious Right notwithstanding, will be picking a President, not a pastor-in-chief.
Update: In its own bubble, the GOP debate Monday night, according to the Caucus, leaves two imponderables: “The endorsement of Rick Santorum by a group of evangelical leaders over the weekend has the potential to affect the race” and “a smear campaign...aimed at influencing evangelicals who view Mormonism as a cult.
“But the two rivals of Mr. Romney who seem to be vying most strongly for the evangelical vote--Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum--are both Catholic, a religion that has sometimes been viewed with skepticism by certain evangelical voters.”
Outside of that, let the best candidate win.
Even as ministers fall in line, the Daily Beast publishes a report (with photo) of Mrs. Santorum’s live-in relationship with a well-known abortion provider before she met her husband. (In a stranger-than-fiction turn, the doctor had delivered her 22 years before they got together when she was a nursing student and he was 63.)
Whether or not her past is germane to Santorum’s candidacy, Southern Carolina voters and beyond will have to think hard about how far religion, or religiosity, has been pushed into areas of American life where it did not predominate in the past.
Of all the damage George W. Bush did to our national character, not least is how his faith-based meanness obscured traditional admiration by Americans of all religions, or none, for figures like Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, whose beliefs led to humility, self-sacrifice and good works rather than contempt for those who fail to share self-serving political certainties.
“Cheap grace,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a minister hanged by Hitler for denouncing the comfort his Church was conferring on believers while turning a blind eye to the inhumanity of the Nazis, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance...absolution without personal confession.”
This year the Super Bowl will be won by athletic skill, not prayer, while voters, the Religious Right notwithstanding, will be picking a President, not a pastor-in-chief.
Update: In its own bubble, the GOP debate Monday night, according to the Caucus, leaves two imponderables: “The endorsement of Rick Santorum by a group of evangelical leaders over the weekend has the potential to affect the race” and “a smear campaign...aimed at influencing evangelicals who view Mormonism as a cult.
“But the two rivals of Mr. Romney who seem to be vying most strongly for the evangelical vote--Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum--are both Catholic, a religion that has sometimes been viewed with skepticism by certain evangelical voters.”
Outside of that, let the best candidate win.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
A Memory of Martin Luther King
Five years ago, in another political world when Barack Obama was getting ready to run for president, I wrote this:
West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow.
Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.
At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.
Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”
He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies…..
“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...
“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...
“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”
It is not hard to believe that some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves exercised their rights decades later in voting for Barack Obama.
I wouldn’t change a word as we celebrate Dr. King’s birthday five years later.
West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow.
Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.
At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.
Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”
He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies…..
“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...
“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...
“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”
It is not hard to believe that some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves exercised their rights decades later in voting for Barack Obama.
I wouldn’t change a word as we celebrate Dr. King’s birthday five years later.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
"Downton Abbey" Obsessions
The PBS series is becoming the “West Wing” and “Sopranos” of the century’s second decade, mirroring Americans’ longing for escape from the Obama and Tea Party era as surely as its predecessors reflected a desire for a more human society, high and low, during George W. Bush’s time.
As second season ratings soar, what is “Downton Abbey” telling us about ourselves?
In midlife, a dozen friends and I hired a small bus with a guide to tour England’s stately homes. After a week, the obscene grandeur of those palaces with huge tapestries of ancestors who had earned them by slaughtering enemies of royalty and passed them down to generations living in unearned luxury while countless others toiled away their lives below stairs made me homesick for America, where Adams, Franklin and Jefferson had resisted replicating such a society here, even as it took them a century and a war to stop enslaving a whole race.
Now “Downton Abbey” arrives to enchant an ambivalent Anglophile, who in the 1930s and 40s, grew up on Hollywood’s version of England in what John Updike called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”
The movie moguls brought over Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Madeleine Carroll, Leslie Howard, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, among a colony of British actors, to people our imaginations with role models of how civilized people behave.
Decades later, American are more sophisticated but, in hard economic and political times, apparently hunger again for a world of order where decent people (mostly) struggle with their humanity. At the time “Downton Abbey” starts, E. M. Forster had just published “Howard’s End,” a novel in which a 20th century middle class was changing his country with motor cars and commerce.
“Only connect” was Forster’s theme: “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
The world of “Downton Abbey” is certainly breaking apart in the days before World War I in a swirl of uncertainty above and below stairs about inheritance of the estate, intermingled with issues of love, marriage and ambition that affect everyone.
That Julian Fellowes has drawn us into their world so deeply is a tribute to his talent as “The Sopranos” was to David Chase and “The West Wing” to Aaron Sorkin—-the humane but outdated Lord Grantham in a losing struggle to hold his world together; his beautiful, headstrong and confused daughters; the almost masochistically noble valet Bates and the heartstrong housemaid Anna who loves him unconditionally; even the selfish schemers, O’Brian and Thomas, have dimension and complexity.
“Downton Abbey” is now assured of a third season next year, and one of the characters, Maggie Smith as the dowager countess, gives us some clues about where all these people may be heading.
In Fellowes’ script for Robert Altman’s "Gosford Park” (2001), Dame Maggie appeared, playing a similar role, but the mood of that manor house movie set in the 1930s, two decades later, is much darker than “Downton” with most of the characters upstairs and down self-seeking and dishonorable and, when the vile host is murdered, hardly anyone cares.
Meanwhile, we can all live at “Downton Abbey” now, and even newcomers can catch up with past episodes online and luxuriate.
As second season ratings soar, what is “Downton Abbey” telling us about ourselves?
In midlife, a dozen friends and I hired a small bus with a guide to tour England’s stately homes. After a week, the obscene grandeur of those palaces with huge tapestries of ancestors who had earned them by slaughtering enemies of royalty and passed them down to generations living in unearned luxury while countless others toiled away their lives below stairs made me homesick for America, where Adams, Franklin and Jefferson had resisted replicating such a society here, even as it took them a century and a war to stop enslaving a whole race.
Now “Downton Abbey” arrives to enchant an ambivalent Anglophile, who in the 1930s and 40s, grew up on Hollywood’s version of England in what John Updike called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”
The movie moguls brought over Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Madeleine Carroll, Leslie Howard, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, among a colony of British actors, to people our imaginations with role models of how civilized people behave.
Decades later, American are more sophisticated but, in hard economic and political times, apparently hunger again for a world of order where decent people (mostly) struggle with their humanity. At the time “Downton Abbey” starts, E. M. Forster had just published “Howard’s End,” a novel in which a 20th century middle class was changing his country with motor cars and commerce.
“Only connect” was Forster’s theme: “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
The world of “Downton Abbey” is certainly breaking apart in the days before World War I in a swirl of uncertainty above and below stairs about inheritance of the estate, intermingled with issues of love, marriage and ambition that affect everyone.
That Julian Fellowes has drawn us into their world so deeply is a tribute to his talent as “The Sopranos” was to David Chase and “The West Wing” to Aaron Sorkin—-the humane but outdated Lord Grantham in a losing struggle to hold his world together; his beautiful, headstrong and confused daughters; the almost masochistically noble valet Bates and the heartstrong housemaid Anna who loves him unconditionally; even the selfish schemers, O’Brian and Thomas, have dimension and complexity.
“Downton Abbey” is now assured of a third season next year, and one of the characters, Maggie Smith as the dowager countess, gives us some clues about where all these people may be heading.
In Fellowes’ script for Robert Altman’s "Gosford Park” (2001), Dame Maggie appeared, playing a similar role, but the mood of that manor house movie set in the 1930s, two decades later, is much darker than “Downton” with most of the characters upstairs and down self-seeking and dishonorable and, when the vile host is murdered, hardly anyone cares.
Meanwhile, we can all live at “Downton Abbey” now, and even newcomers can catch up with past episodes online and luxuriate.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Colbert Candidacy, the Put-On Perfected
The GOP debates could make a profit on Pay TV if they let Stephen Colbert join the panel. How much would it be worth to see him match wits with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry?
Sadly, like his other ventures, Colbert’s South Carolina candidacy is only fodder for his reality-blurring show, the perfection of a trend that began to emerge in the 1960s when TV made American life too complicated for Bob Hope-Milton Berle one-liners.
Rough sketches for the persona Colbert now presents were subjects back then for New Yorker critics such as Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp”) and Jacob Brackman in “The Put-On” to define a slippery comedy in which the audience is in the know as a figure feigns utter seriousness while subverting a subject’s defenses.
Brackman could have been describing today’s Colbert in parsing the put-on as “it disorients the interviewee, ridicules the interview process, communicates ‘real’ ideas and feelings yet deflates the seriousness of questions and replies.”
Only clueless Al Gore has breached this implicit agreement by referring to “your character” during an interview, shocking Colbert into a “My character?” reaction.
Susan Sontag in her ambivalent book-length essay on Camp quotes Oscar Wilde, "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art," linking it to a gay sensibility that emphasizes artifice but holding on to her own reservations about its ultimate value.
She would be in a minority today. For those who revel in being part of Colbert’s “in the know” audience, this week’s New York Times Magazine has a fascinating profile of how he came to be what is now an iconic 21st century figure.
He won’t be running for president, but he’s doing more than any of Obama’s challengers to help keep us sane.
Update: Colbert will be on ABC Sunday morning. Now that he’s turned his Super PAC over to Jon Stewart, the quasi-candidate is free to take his act beyond Comedy Central.
Sadly, like his other ventures, Colbert’s South Carolina candidacy is only fodder for his reality-blurring show, the perfection of a trend that began to emerge in the 1960s when TV made American life too complicated for Bob Hope-Milton Berle one-liners.
Rough sketches for the persona Colbert now presents were subjects back then for New Yorker critics such as Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp”) and Jacob Brackman in “The Put-On” to define a slippery comedy in which the audience is in the know as a figure feigns utter seriousness while subverting a subject’s defenses.
Brackman could have been describing today’s Colbert in parsing the put-on as “it disorients the interviewee, ridicules the interview process, communicates ‘real’ ideas and feelings yet deflates the seriousness of questions and replies.”
Only clueless Al Gore has breached this implicit agreement by referring to “your character” during an interview, shocking Colbert into a “My character?” reaction.
Susan Sontag in her ambivalent book-length essay on Camp quotes Oscar Wilde, "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art," linking it to a gay sensibility that emphasizes artifice but holding on to her own reservations about its ultimate value.
She would be in a minority today. For those who revel in being part of Colbert’s “in the know” audience, this week’s New York Times Magazine has a fascinating profile of how he came to be what is now an iconic 21st century figure.
He won’t be running for president, but he’s doing more than any of Obama’s challengers to help keep us sane.
Update: Colbert will be on ABC Sunday morning. Now that he’s turned his Super PAC over to Jon Stewart, the quasi-candidate is free to take his act beyond Comedy Central.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Yankee Acts in South Carolina
As Mitt Romney tries to seal the deal in the Palmetto state and falls in the polls, memories come back of a culture clash when I was in basic training there during World War II. How much has changed in seven decades?
The country boys in my company were excited by anything exotic and, given their lives before induction, it took little to tickle them. One day they were chortling over a guy in the next battalion named Zero.
He had been at City College a decade before me and in the 1940s was getting known in Manhattan night clubs for political satire that would later fail to amuse the House Un-American Activities Committee. The night I looked him up, Zero Mostel was on his way to becoming the pear-shaped presence that years later would charge around a Broadway stage and turn into a rhinoceros.
Sitting on his bunk, field jacket zipped to the throat, his big head seemed to be resting on a bulging bag of laundry. He was in his late twenties, but his eyes were a thousand years old. When I told him I was from the Bronx, he grabbed me as if I were a pastrami sandwich.
We went into town Saturday night to the Spartanburg USO, where local ladies entertained with doughnuts, coffee and Southern charm, and the troops entertained back however they could. When the hostesses heard Zero was a professional performer, they pushed him to the stage. I sat in the front row, happily awaiting my share of the attention he would be getting.
Zero slouched up to the microphone with a shy smile and a glint in his eye, gathered his bulk, fixed his face into a scowl and suddenly emitted the roar of a deep Southern demagogue. To this audience of dewy damsels and redneck recruits, he was offering his rendition of Senator Pellagra T. Polltax, a raging parody of the Mississippi racist, Theodore Bilbo.
As Zero flung his arms in all directions and turned up the angry rant about niggers and kikes, I slid down in my seat, looking for an exit.
By the time he finished, I was crouching near the floor. Through the startled silence, I heard the start of a low rumble, and I sprinted to the stage where Zero was beaming and bowing, grabbed his elbow and shoved him through a door toward the bus that would carry us, untarred and unfeathered, back to camp. On the ride Zero seemed relaxed, a small smile on his face. We never went to the USO again.
All these years later, Mitt Romney no doubt faces a different South Carolina, but the latest polls show him with only a slim lead there. If he can win, the nomination will undoubtedly be his but, somewhere in Comedy Heaven, I can picture Zero still smiling that knowing smile.
The country boys in my company were excited by anything exotic and, given their lives before induction, it took little to tickle them. One day they were chortling over a guy in the next battalion named Zero.
He had been at City College a decade before me and in the 1940s was getting known in Manhattan night clubs for political satire that would later fail to amuse the House Un-American Activities Committee. The night I looked him up, Zero Mostel was on his way to becoming the pear-shaped presence that years later would charge around a Broadway stage and turn into a rhinoceros.
Sitting on his bunk, field jacket zipped to the throat, his big head seemed to be resting on a bulging bag of laundry. He was in his late twenties, but his eyes were a thousand years old. When I told him I was from the Bronx, he grabbed me as if I were a pastrami sandwich.
We went into town Saturday night to the Spartanburg USO, where local ladies entertained with doughnuts, coffee and Southern charm, and the troops entertained back however they could. When the hostesses heard Zero was a professional performer, they pushed him to the stage. I sat in the front row, happily awaiting my share of the attention he would be getting.
Zero slouched up to the microphone with a shy smile and a glint in his eye, gathered his bulk, fixed his face into a scowl and suddenly emitted the roar of a deep Southern demagogue. To this audience of dewy damsels and redneck recruits, he was offering his rendition of Senator Pellagra T. Polltax, a raging parody of the Mississippi racist, Theodore Bilbo.
As Zero flung his arms in all directions and turned up the angry rant about niggers and kikes, I slid down in my seat, looking for an exit.
By the time he finished, I was crouching near the floor. Through the startled silence, I heard the start of a low rumble, and I sprinted to the stage where Zero was beaming and bowing, grabbed his elbow and shoved him through a door toward the bus that would carry us, untarred and unfeathered, back to camp. On the ride Zero seemed relaxed, a small smile on his face. We never went to the USO again.
All these years later, Mitt Romney no doubt faces a different South Carolina, but the latest polls show him with only a slim lead there. If he can win, the nomination will undoubtedly be his but, somewhere in Comedy Heaven, I can picture Zero still smiling that knowing smile.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Also-Rans' Anti-War Vote
After all the demographic slicing and dicing, the final primary figures disclose one New Hampshire result pundits are ignoring: The only two candidates who unequivocally want to take us of out of Afghanistan and most of the Middle East muddle now, Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, together received 39.8 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney’s 39.6 percent.
In contrast, Rick Perry, who advocates going back into Iraq, got one percent as superhawks Santorum and Gingrich drew single figures.
Granted, the contest was about the economy, but both Paul and Huntsman kept pointing out that trillions being wasted on nation-building in the Middle East, to say nothing of the continuing human toll, could be better spent back home rebuilding America.
In his victory lap, Mitt Romney, having it both ways as usual, promises jobs to veterans when they come home but avoids taking any position on bringing them back, settling for jingo clichés about American power.
In the GOP fantasy world of 2012, the horse race will go on, but won’t change, as a New York Times editorial points out:
”The candidates’ economic arguments were disturbingly disconnected from economic reality. They spoke of government spending as if it were the sole cause of the federal budget deficit and cutting it the sole solution. In reality, it was tax cuts for the wealthy, an assault on social programs and a deregulatory zeal that allowed a recklessness that led to near economic collapse.
“The solution is policies that promote growth and help the middle class, not what the Republican hopefuls want. Mr. Obama said it well on Monday night: ‘We can’t go back to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics.’ You couldn’t tell that by listening to Mr. Romney prattle about a merit-based economy and call for lowering taxes and cutting spending.”
To say nothing of completely ignoring the Middle East elephant in the room, unless Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman manages to get the Presidential nomination.
In contrast, Rick Perry, who advocates going back into Iraq, got one percent as superhawks Santorum and Gingrich drew single figures.
Granted, the contest was about the economy, but both Paul and Huntsman kept pointing out that trillions being wasted on nation-building in the Middle East, to say nothing of the continuing human toll, could be better spent back home rebuilding America.
In his victory lap, Mitt Romney, having it both ways as usual, promises jobs to veterans when they come home but avoids taking any position on bringing them back, settling for jingo clichés about American power.
In the GOP fantasy world of 2012, the horse race will go on, but won’t change, as a New York Times editorial points out:
”The candidates’ economic arguments were disturbingly disconnected from economic reality. They spoke of government spending as if it were the sole cause of the federal budget deficit and cutting it the sole solution. In reality, it was tax cuts for the wealthy, an assault on social programs and a deregulatory zeal that allowed a recklessness that led to near economic collapse.
“The solution is policies that promote growth and help the middle class, not what the Republican hopefuls want. Mr. Obama said it well on Monday night: ‘We can’t go back to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics.’ You couldn’t tell that by listening to Mr. Romney prattle about a merit-based economy and call for lowering taxes and cutting spending.”
To say nothing of completely ignoring the Middle East elephant in the room, unless Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman manages to get the Presidential nomination.
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