Hillary's Lively Hibernation

The former First Lady/Secretary of State may be out of the news, but she’s not lolling around on a hammock to catch up on summer reading.

Hillary Clinton’s hibernation includes time in New York and Washington offices, working on Obama-years memoirs and traveling around the country giving speeches at $200,000 each, arranged by the same agent who wheels out Dick Cheney at $75,000 a pop.

Clinton, who turns 66 in October, is politically at an awkward age, not officially running for anything in 2016 but doing just what she would if she were.

Her $8 million book deal with Simon and Schuster will be a platform next year for setting the record straight on Benghazi and other Issa smears, while taking a victory lap on 60 Minutes et al to remind supporters why they admire her just as GOP presidential hopefuls turn up the volume for their nasty primary fights.

This tome will have no Monica Lewinsky bombshells like its predecessor, but there will be enough inside stuff about nailing bin Laden and other Obama foreign policy goodies to remind voters of Clinton’s crucial role in all of them while maintaining her distance from any new embarrassments like Eric Snowden that arise between now and then.

Meanwhile the GOP smear machine is tuning up just in case. A spokesman for a “politically conservative action committee” says it’s too early to send operatives to Mrs. Clinton’s speeches, but they are watching from a distance “to monitor whether she’s hobnobbing with investment bankers in New York City that might seem like favoritism down the line.”

It won’t be long before the Koch brothers spring for the price of tickets, but meanwhile Hillary Clinton will be smiling all the way to the banks to deposit her speech gratuities and book royalty checks. She may even run into her husband on the way.

The Trial of Treyvon Martin

The umpteen hours of cable TV courtroom melodrama are finally over, and the reaction of an intermittent viewer is to recall the old cliché that used to pervade rape trials: “She asked for it.”

An unarmed teenager is shot dead, but like the sexually assaulted victim with her “provocative” clothing and behavior, the issue has been contorted into whether Treyvon Martin somehow provoked George Zimmerman into killing him.

Technically Zimmerman has been facing charges, but his victim has been on trial to justify what he did.

This is being written as the jury starts to deliberate, but whatever the verdict, American life has been damaged by both the crime and its aftermath.

Price Tag for Taking Back the Country

Bill Clinton’s “arithmetic” lesson at their 2012 convention should be on the front burner again as Democrats parse the price of wresting Congress—-and the nation—-from Tea Party control.

A new report by the Campaign Finance Institute shows that winning a House seat last year cost the victor twice as much as it did a quarter of a century ago: $1.6 million, compared with $753,000 in 1986.

Such an increase comes when most races are not as competitive as they once were. The heavy spending was in a small number of battlegrounds that allowed the GOP to retain its majority and offers a road map for Democrats who want to win back the House next year.

This month backers of immigration reform are spending $1 million dollars in the districts of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Darrell Issa and eight other Republicans to blast them for refusing to deal on the issue. What would it take to get Democrats on offense again in the 2014 contests to raise and spend whatever it takes to retake full control of the House?

As Cantor announces new obstruction for next month, it should be a wakeup call for those who really want to get the country unstuck. How much would it cost to yank Tea Party naysayers out of enough seats to end their stranglehold on the American future?

Fifty million? A hundred? More? There must be millions of frustrated Americans willing to pay the price.

If someone will organize the means for letting them put their money where their minds and mouths are, they can make the difference.

Which Egypt?

The post-revolt revolt in the land of the Pharoahs is presenting a problem for American response that would elude the wisdom of the Sphinx.

Confusion abounds. Now John McCain is denouncing the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, calling it a “coup” and urging the President to suspend all aid to the country. When our leading hawk rails at Egypt’s military and pushes against a policy that might end with a more pro-American regime, something is askew.

Obama calls for a “more inclusive” resolution, and John Kerry insists that “we firmly reject the unfounded and false claims by some in Egypt that the United States supports the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or any specific Egyptian political party or movement.” Does it get any more scrambled than that?

For non-Egyptologists, which likely includes us all, making sense of this is daunting. George W. Bush, traveling in Africa, urges patience, opining that the Arab Spring was “a good thing because people are demanding their rightful place.”

Sane voices are few. “It would have been far more preferable,” Thomas Friedman observes, “if President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s party had been voted out of office in three years. This would have forced the party to confront its own incompetence and popular repudiation. I wish the Egyptian army, which has its own interests, had not been involved. But perfect is not on the menu anymore in Egypt.”

So we are in another no-win in the Middle East, as we have been so many times before in the past decade, trying to influence or moderate the playing out of ancient hatreds that express themselves in body counts.

Lest we forget, it was only two years ago that CBS’ Lara Logan was brutally sexually attacked in Cairo’s Tahrir Square by “liberators” urging the overthrow of Mubarak. 


To add further confusion, stream Netflix for a 2009 film “Cairo Time” which, while otherwise a love poem to the beauty of Egypt, shows a fair-skinned middle-aged American woman unable to walk the streets without being constantly molested and offhand cruelty to local women and girls.

As the US keeps getting pummeled by the turmoil there now, which Egypt are we trying to preserve and protect—-the one struggling toward democracy or the one still caught up in a savage past?

And how do we tell the difference?

Darrella Issa's Horny Toad

If you want to know exactly what’s wrong with politicians today and have a high threshold for disgust, skim the bloated “How to Win in Washington” in the New York Times Magazine.

Written by chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich and culled from his insider Beltway book, the piece is an acrobatic feat of journalistic tap-dancing, revealing the sliminess of Darrell Issa’s hatchet man Kurt Bardella while at the same time recounting with a straight face his subject’s illegal behavior (and Leibovich’s own) in violating privacy that makes Eric Snowden look like a Sunday School teacher.

Talk about reading other people’s mail: Self-proclaimed opportunist Bardella copied the reporter, without their knowledge, of e-mail to and from US senators and media people on a regular basis.

Leibovich offers his coziness with Issa’s gnome to support his thesis that “an economic and information boom in recent years has transformed the city...To say that today’s Washington is too partisan and out of touch is to miss a much more important truth--that rather than being hopelessly divided, it is hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has both democratized the political conversation and accentuated Washington’s myopic, self-loving tendencies. And it misses, most of all, how an operator like Kurt Bardella can land in a culture of beautifully busy people and, by trading on all the self-interest and egomania that knows no political affiliation, rewrite the story of his own life.”

The ins and outs, and ups and downs, of Bardella’s symbiosis with Issa has led to his mentor “firing” him over revelations of his ruthless illegality and then re-hiring him as “senior adviser” to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which guess-who is chairman.

Issa has been lying low since he overreached on a Sunday talk show by calling White House spokesman Jay Carney a “paid liar,” but he will be back with new hearings and new Obama smears soon and, right there with him will be his Issa-Uber-Alles henchman, Kurt Bardella.

No Day for Downton Abbey

Fellow fans of the Crawleys, forgive me, but in middle age, I fell in love with my country all over again during a tour of England's stately homes. The sight of all that grandeur reserved for a hereditary few to live in mansions at the expense of miserable lives for so many was a reminder of what Jefferson, Adams and the rest resisted translating to America in 1776.

Today, as we celebrate what they gave us--"a republic, if you can keep it" in Benjamin Franklin's words--with flags, parades, fireworks and speeches, it may help to remember he was answering an anxious question at the close of the Constitutional Convention, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

America was not inevitable. As children, we drink in our freedoms like mother's milk and, except on the Fourth of July, may forget what it took, and still takes, to give us such nourishment.

At the age of 81, Franklin told the Convention that "when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views."

In this year of political turmoil, as men and women bring all that and more to the continuing American debate, it may help if we remember how we got here and what we avoided along the way.

 

As we anguish over government reading of our mail and other affronts to liberty, the debate continues.

“No transition to democracy,” President Obama tells Egypt and the world, “comes without difficulty, but in the end it must stay true to the will of the people.”

Even after 237 years.

Stinging Tea Party Scorpions

An old fable gets a new twist: House Tea Party diehards face retribution from the immigration tortoises they are trying to drown.

Backers of reform will spend $1 million dollars in the districts of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Darrell Issa and eight others to blast them for refusing to deal on the issue that Republicans only a few months ago recognized as crucial to their future chances to win the White House.

But now, just as a GOP scorpion stings the tortoise carrying him to safety because “it’s in my nature,” immigration proponents are striking preemptively to hit the Tea Party where it hurts.

As House leaders stall on the bill passed by the Senate last week, a huge coalition supporting reform says it will launch an “all-in throw-down” this month to force a vote. “We need a vote on citizenship,” says a labor union spokesperson. “The immigrants deserve that, and our country deserves that.”

As the Obama Administration disappoints ardent supporters by announcing a one-year delay in implementing health care reform, the immigration pushback is a heartening sign that Democrats may be gathering their forces to solve the President’s overriding problem: cutting down the Tea Party faction that is blocking everything he is trying to do by unseating some of them in next fall’s elections.

If Boehner. Cantor and their recalcitrant cohorts start to feel the heat of voter wrath, there could be a start to loosening the Congressional logjam on other issues. Somewhere, at long last, even scorpions must have a survival instinct.

Another Ms. Match for Mitch McConnell

Only months after bulldozing Ashley Judd out of running against him, the Senate GOP charmer is facing another young woman who could send him back to Kentucky next year to enjoy his recently found wealth and out of Barack Obama’s hair.   

The new challenger is 34-year-old Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, scion of a politically powerful family with strong ties to Hillary and Bill Clinton, who won’t be as easily deterred as Judd was by a preemptive campaign to smear her for nude scenes as an actress and openness about her personal history.

Grimes’ announcement follows weeks of deliberation in the face of $300,000 in SuperPAC ads attacking her, but McConnell’s warn-off strike has not worked this time. “I’m no stranger to being an underdog,” she says. “His ads are based out of fear of losing his 30-year grip on power.”

Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr., on government payrolls all his life, is now the tenth richest Senate member, with a reported fortune somewhere between $9,839,049 and $44,587,000 in 2010, much of it apparently from his second wife, Elaine Chao, who comes from a wealthy Taiwanese shipping family and served as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Labor.

McConnell failed in his promise to make Barack Obama a one-term president but hopes to keep leading Senate naysaying past the end of the President’s second, but Democrats seem intent on showing their anti-Tea Party muscle by thwarting his bid for another term.

It will be a nationally watched contest to see which group has the will and muscle to prevail and set the tone for Obama’s lame duck years.

McConnell’s defeat would be good news, but in their hearts, political connoisseurs will miss his startled owl face on the Sunday morning talk shows.

How Long Can American Dysfunction Last?

Barack Obama and John Boehner are stars of today’s Washington’s mess, but John Roberts is the game’s Mariano Rivera. The President will be gone in four years, the Speaker likely sooner but the Chief Justice has an actuarial chance of presiding for another quarter of a century.

In “The Real John Roberts Emerges,” Court watcher Linda Greenhouse reports that his distrust of all government runs bone-deep, not only the other two branches but “the modern administrative state with its ‘hundreds of federal agencies poking into every nook and cranny of daily life.’

“Congress can’t be trusted. The executive branch is out of control. What’s left? The Supreme Court.”

In 2014, voters could shrink the House’s Tea Party contingent and oust the beleaguered Boehner in favor of his Iago, Eric Cantor, who is edging toward the center on minority voting rights. In 2016, a new president will be unhobbled by racism; even sexism would be an improvement.

But Roberts will remain, bequeathed to us by George W. Bush in 2005. At his confirmation hearings, Roberts assured senators that on the bench it would be “my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat."

Sen. Barack Obama voted against him then despite the nominee’s promises that he would try to level the playing field, saying “it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”

Obama was prescient, but how many Presidents and Congresses will come and go as the Chief Justice goes through his lifetime appointment, seeing balls and strikes from his ever-hardening perspective? How much intelligence and determination will it take from the other two branches to balance the damage to basic American values from a bench that has now become the heart of the playing field?

Is the longevity of Roberts' rule crucial to America’s destiny?

Saving the Planet is So Boring

Now that the Supreme Court has shut down the big tent, the news carnival is back to telling us more than we want to know about the trivial and ephemeral.

Killjoy that he is, however, Barack Obama devotes his Weekly Address to explaining plans to (snooze alert) reduce carbon pollution and protect our country from the effects of climate change such as “more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.”

How? “We’ll need scientists to design new fuels, and farmers to grow them. We’ll need engineers to devise new technologies, and businesses to make and sell them. We’ll need workers to man assembly lines that hum with high-tech, zero-carbon components, and builders to hammer into place the foundations for a new clean energy age. We’ll need to give special care to people and communities unsettled by this transition. And those of us in positions of responsibility will need to be less concerned with the judgment of special interests and well-connected donors, and more concerned with the judgment of our children.”

In his acceptance speech at the GOP convention last summer, Mitt Romney drew laughs by mocking his opponent: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”

Nobody’s laughing now, but the problems are complex and daunting. On an issue such as disposing of nuclear waste, politicians are still grappling with a plan that has been on the table since 1987 while public watchdogs insist that “billions of dollars are being wasted on a specialized nuclear plant that was supposed to produce fuel for nuclear energy and reduce weapons grade plutonium.”

If we shy away from being bored to death by all this stuff, disregarding it will ensure that future generations have to face uglier and more literal forms of demise.

Two Cheers for Gay Marriage

For me, the new New Yorker cover of Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie cuddling before a TV image of the Supreme Court is the last straw. There is a difference between approving of gay marriage and celebrating it.

At advanced age, I can’t cheer whole-heartedly the head-swiveling social change from 2008 when both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton championed gay rights but not marriage to President Obama’s abrupt change last year and the Supreme Court’s sudden conversion now.

When the New Yorker appeared in 1925, Harold Ross said it would not be edited for “the little old lady in Dubuque,” but even with the effetely self-mocking Eustace Tilley on the first issue that kept reappearing every year, neither was it aiming at couples of married little old ladies anywhere.

During the glory days of William Shawn from 1951 to 1987, the magazine relentlessly respected freedom of all kinds and was open-minded on every issue including homosexuality. In 1957, when Truman Capote seduced (physically he always claimed, though few believed it) Marlon Brando into an all-night boozy self-revelation for a piece titled “The Duke in His Domain,” Shawn called it “a masterpiece” and gave almost an entire issue to it, as Ross had to John Hersey’s Hiroshima report.

But neither Ross nor Shawn went in for advocacy, as the current editors do with their retrospective of pro-gay marriage covers over the past 15 years.

Call it old-fogeyism of advanced age, but such sudden lurches in what Americans believe make me queasy about a future when all of them may not be as benign as giving legal equality to an oppressed minority.

You don’t have to be a religious bigot not to join in the general applause or to be unhappy about enlisting Sesame Street in the celebration of what was once deemed deviant because it sanctioned behavior that runs counter to the biological process that brought the children who are watching into this world.

Can’t Bert and Ernie just be good friends without being dragged out of somebody’s closet?

  

Vampire TV: "Crossfire" Comes Back

Six years ago Jon Stewart nailed the “partisan hacks” of CNN’s weeknight food fight by telling them on camera, “You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great.”

Soon afterward, Crossfire disappeared but now CNN is starved for ratings, Stewart is temporarily away, and the program is rising from the undead with, appropriately enough, Newt Gingrich as one of the regular ghouls, along with conservative cutie S.E. Cupp vs. two former Obama fringe dwellers, Stephanie Cutter and Van Jones.

“We look forward to the opportunity to host passionate conversation from all sides of the political spectrum,” says CNN’s president. “Crossfire will be the forum where America holds its great debates.”

Uh-huh. The show aired on weeknights from 1982 to 2005, featuring such mouths as Rupert Murdoch, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Rush Limbaugh, Arianna Huffington and Howard Cosell before ending up with Tucker Carlson, Paul Begala, Robert Novak and James Carville.

At the 1997 White House Correspondents’ Dinner Bill Clinton joshed about the “very first Crossfire–-from the left, Alexander Hamilton, from the right, Aaron Burr, topic, gun control.”

Jon Stewart, come back soon. We’ll need you to drive another stake through this resurrected bloodsucker.

Do-Nothing Congress Spawns Do-It-All Court

Was yesterday’s decision a tipping point? The Supreme Court’s casual 5-4 butchering of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has awakened the entire political spectrum to the bald fact that, in the face of a President neutered by Congress, John Roberts is running the country.

Suddenly everyone in the House from John Lewis to Eric Cantor sounds the alarm on the Chief Justice’s usurping.

"My experience with John Lewis in Selma earlier this year,” says Cantor, “was a profound experience that demonstrated the fortitude it took to advance civil rights and ensure equal protection for all. I'm hopeful Congress will put politics aside, as we did on that trip, and find a responsible path forward that ensures that the sacred obligation of voting in this country remains protected."

Translation: The Tea Party may love the Roberts Court but isn’t ready to roll over and play dead for the judicial posse.

"Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition of the VRA," Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes in her dissent.

The universal outrage arouses hope that the Justices’ hubris may do more to break Congress’ logjam than any amount of Presidential pleading and sidestepping with executive orders.

A New York Times editorial notes: “The future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 now lies in the hands of President Obama and Congress. If we had a federal government that was not paralyzed by partisanship, this ruling would serve as an inspiration to take action. Congressional Democrats would quickly prepare a more expansive formula, and the Republicans who voted for the old formula just seven years ago would support the new one.”

If the other two branches respond to such “inspiration,” it could mark a step away from the Roberts Court takeover of the government.

Update: In its ruling striking down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the Court shows its only alternative to Roberts’ one-man rule: Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote with the liberal (and women’s) minority of Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayer and Kagan.

On issues of race, the Chief Justice has a lock but gender is something else as long as Kennedy retains his ability to enrage Scalia.

Race Matters

Skin color in America is still destiny, as the Supreme Court and the George Zimmerman trial remind us this week, but how far have we come in a lifetime and how far do we still have to go?

Below these visible eruptions over race and even more important for the future is the double-edged story of Barack Obama. Yes, we have elected and reelected an African-American president, but how much of the hatred and bitterness directed at him comes, not from his policies and persona, but his race?

Nearing 90, I can’t erase memories of racism when I was a young editor—-the murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and Andrew Goodman; Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus strike; the Supreme Court school desegregation of 1954; the persistence of laws against interracial marriage until the 1960s; the steady but very slow progress of integration in the North and South in the ensuing decades.

Through all of that, I was a journalist with strong feelings about what Dr. King called the arc of the universe bending toward justice. And if we still argue today about college quotas and the bizarre murder of a black teenager in Florida, have we not nevertheless progressed from those benighted days? 

Yes, but...

Whatever the outcomes of this week’s legal tests, the important issue that plagues current generations is facing our true feelings about Barack Obama.

As his adversaries, with the reflexive complicity of the media, fail to engage in “nuanced debate” over policy issues, real and trumped-up of his second term, do we do ourselves any service by not asking: How much of the GOP vitriol and Tea Party longing for the supposedly good old days is rooted in racism?

We have come a long way from the days of separate-but-equal and lynching, but under the surface of the polite legal arguments this week in courts high and low, how far are we from those days in our hearts?

If we don’t answer that now, we’ll keep paying a high price for our failure in the future.