Several old friends have asked in their Christmas cards that I comment on what has been happening at Penn State from my vantage point. I will assume that you know the story in broad outline. Here goes:
Happy Valley is an idyllic place to live in many respects: beautiful, quiet but lively, progressive, affordable, neighborly, relatively safe. But no town is perfect. One T-shirt proclaims State College "A Drinking Town With A Football Problem". Sloshed students fall off balconies here. Football, which was the university's claim to fame and its mighty fundraising tool, has become equally problematic.
My chiropractor -- a short, muscular, ebullient young man with a large family to provide for -- bemoans what he sees approaching. The university, he thinks, will be sued by victims of child abuse and bled white. (It had already lost considerable funding thanks to the right-wing state administration.) Employees will be laid off. Local businesses will be impacted. And he will lose patients and income as a result.
Many citizens are likewise exercised by and talk endlessly about the scandal and its consequences. Some fear what will come, as the doctor does. Others are mainly outraged, because JoePa was booted out or because the school didn't stop Jerry Sandusky.
This had seemed a spot immune to time's ravages. Its institutions, not least of them Joe Paterno, continued all but unchanged through decade after decade. And suddenly things are in upheaval. People are disoriented and anxious.
Unless through some horrid twist of irony Sandusky committed none of the crimes he has been charged with, he should of course be locked away for life to keep people safe from him. He has a brilliant lawyer in Joseph Amendola. While other lawyers are shocked at the idea of putting a client in front of reporters lest what he says be used against him in court, Amendola has tried to humanize the reviled coach and raise questions about the certainty of his culpability. Nothing less than that, I believe, can begin to afford him a fair trial.
I am disturbed, as some also are, at the widespread readiness to declare Sandusky guilty. A jury is how we determine what happened, and the presumption of innocence should mean something if we take our system of justice seriously. Similarly, I was sorry to see Paterno, who for a lifetime served Penn State's interests wholeheartedly as much more than a mere football coach, fired over the phone at age 84 without so much as a chance to tell his side of the story. These are not things to be proud of. They bespeak an absence of the institutional wisdom, the ethical sensitivity, and the moral courage that should define a university and the town that reflects its influence.
Curley and Schultz, the university officials who have been charged with ignoring the activities of an exploiter of children and lying about it to the police, will also have their day in court. Should they be set free, the possibility of lawsuits against the university will erode if not evaporate. So a lot is at stake with their verdict.
The key witness against them, the youngish and plainly sincere Mike McQueary, has told what appear to be conflicting stories as to what he observed in a Penn State locker room. Going by what he testified to at the preliminary hearing, his squeamish unwillingness to use clear terms like "sodomy" and "sexual abuse" in recounting his experience to Paterno might have led the latter to downplay the importance of what he heard. Yet the response he attributes to Paterno, commencing with "I'm sorry you had to see something like that", suggests that he did grasp it.
Paterno, too, can hardly have been eager to talk about such a scene. He took it to his nominal superior, the athletic director Curley, who took it to president Graham Spanier. Spanier strikes me as being too bright and too ruthless to have put his position at risk by trying to cover up for a pederast. He maintained in his lone public statement that he was not told of a crime. (My chiropractor opines that the trustees may have ordered him to keep it quiet, but I doubt he would have told them about it before deciding for himself what to do.)
It looks to me as though there is a gray area around each of these successive communications that could open the way to an acquittal for Schultz and Curley.
Then there is the role played in all this by Pennsylvania's new governor, Tom Corbett. Earlier, as the state's elected attorney general who was running for his present office, he assigned but a single investigator to the Sandusky case. Not until he had moved up were seven additional investigators added to it. He did not warn the university or Sandusky's charity for young boys, The Second Mile, of what the coach was likely up to. He says that he could not have done so without alerting Sandusky and so compromising the investigation. Legal experts and other prosecutors dispute this, saying that such notifications are made routinely and that protecting the children should have come before anything else. A suspicion exists that Corbett did not want to upset his generous campaign donors from the greater Penn State community till after the election. If that is so, he is no better than those who have lost their jobs for what can plausibly be construed as callous indifference.
As for the university, how it handled the crisis previously may matter less than how it is handling it now. The main problem is the corporate culture of the place, which is closed-off and given to withholding information. There probably also is -- and it may be what brought down an omnipotent but not omniscient Spanier -- an element of "Papa don't want to hear no bad news." That would be a dangerous combination, inviting underlings to handle embarrassing situations according to their own discretion and from self-serving motives.
What is taking place? Ridding themselves of Spanier and Paterno as liabilities to the school's reputation and its money-raising, the trustees installed as temporary president the longtime vice president and provost, Rodney A. Erickson. Erickson looks like a university president and has issued such deft official utterances that they are being studied in one Penn State course!
The idea was at first that Rod would be only the interim chief. A nationwide search for an outstanding president was to be undertaken. Then, to my astonishment, the trustees announced that they were calling off the search and naming him to the position permanently! My first reaction was to wonder if he had something on someone? While that may be too cynical, I think they made a deplorable mistake. Erickson was the number two official in the discredited regime and its ways were not alien to him. He should nothave been entrusted with reforming the place unless he had shown a clear determination to do so. And that he has not done.
Now, I know nothing of what Erickson is like as a person. In exchanges with one old friend, I've kiddingly represented him as Rod the God, an empty suit and megalomaniac. I've invented for him regrettable deeds such as proclaiming The Erickson Era and ordering the dynamiting of the campus's JoePa shrine over fall break so that it could be replaced by a statue of himself in Napoleonic pose before the students returned.
Could he actually be that bad? Unfortunately, we will have to wait and see rather than dismiss the idea out of hand.
For under Rod's leadership, Penn State has already flunked the crucial test of whether it knows where it went wrong and is prepared to put matters right. When CNN requested the university's files pertaining to its awareness of the inconclusive 1998 investigation of Sandusky by the police and the district attorney's office, the reply was, in effect, "We do not have to give you that. We are a state-related school, not a state-owned one. We Are Penn State. Screw you. Have a nice day."
The use of pervasive secrecy for the sake of control, the top-down management style, and the implicit capacity to intimidate any employee who is not a "team player" are what made this disaster possible in the first place. Were a fully comparable situation to arise next week, there is no reason to suppose that it would be dealt with differently. Erickson speaks of "healing" when a reformer would speak of, and insist upon, the admitting of daylight and fresh air to locked corridors and privileged chambers.
For Penn State will not be adequate, let along exemplary, till it wants to reveal as much of its affairs as it reasonably can rather than as little. No one there should hesitate to call the police after witnessing a criminal act by a university honcho. When openness and accountability are the norms, the key lesson will have been learned. And, incidentally, only then can its level of support from alumni and Lions fans and the public be secure.
The hunt for a long-term president should take place after all. It should go on nation-wide and be highly demanding. That should be the prelude to a housecleaning and a new kind of administration. The prevailing spirit must not be one conducive to a cover-up but one that comprehends and establishes and cherishes and safeguards glasnost.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
WINNING WAYS
Winning an election may require the right person, not only the right issues in the right year. And personality traits may be what determines who the right person is.
What about prospective third-party progressive Rocky Anderson? Watching him on YouTube, my first impression was that he won't get far. He seemed strident and obsessive. He used abstractions like "militarism" and "corporatism", which most people don't use and may not grasp. He came across as talking to an in-group, not to all of us. He focused on impractical objectives such as impeaching Dubya. And he lacked the evidences of warmth, friendliness, and humility that could draw people to him who didn't agree with him, as Ronald Reagan excelled at doing.
Let's note in fairness, however, that in all that Rocky was being an activist, not a candidate. He must know how to get votes, as he nearly won a Congressional race in a conservative district without pulling in his horns and later was a very electable mayor of Salt Lake City (even receiving bi-partisan backing from the likes of Mitt Romney, then a personal friend). So not what he has said but what he will say and how he will say it -- and who he evidently is -- will let us figure what we can expect from him.
Even at his worst, Rocky could turn out to do far better than Ralph Nader did. In '00, '04, and '08 the Democratic nominee was not an incumbent and one could hope that he would do the right things if he got in office; but in '12 we know that we can expect nothing from the Democrat and that any reversal of our fortunes will require an outsider. And Rocky, facing Mr. Obama and the Republican, will have all the issues going for him, while they will be on the defensive in relation to him.
But does he have the natural assurance and easy authority to gain wide acceptance? Is he not only a fighter but a big enough person that people will want to follow him? I am skeptical about that but am willing to wait and see how he does when he declares his candidacy.
What should a candidate be like? It's said one mustn't be angry, as Rocky plainly is. I would amend that to say that one mustn't appear to be a congenitally wrathful person. I think that if one is mad about things that anyone ought to be mad about, the people will share the sentiment rather than being put off by it. I suspect that one reason so many Americans seem not to trust or understand President Obama is because he is unable or unwilling to display warranted and communicable anger.
If you want to see how to really get votes, look to the person I think could be the Dems' most effective '16 nominee. He is not New York's dour Andrew Cuomo or Maryland's smooth Martin O'Malley, who are the ones most discussed, but Montana's charismatic, larger-than-life Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is endlessly inventive and as far from Wall Street mentally as geographically.
Schweitzer is a rancher and scientist who has worked in the Middle East and knows how to negotiate with Bedouins (the one who reveals what he wants first is at a disadvantage). The first time he ran for office, he took elderly people to Canada by bus to buy prescription drugs there, where they are much cheaper, capturing the public's imagination; with that and similar tactics he nearly won a U.S. Senate seat despite long odds. Chasing the governorship, he came across as an unconventional and unpredictable common-sense liberal populist whose TV ads showed him hunting and who picked a moderate Republican, State Senator John Bohlinger, as his runningmate for lieutenant governor. But he is no sellout centrist. He boasts of having gotten through his legislature "the most progressive package in America", emphasizing the environment and education, and he has remained one of the nation's most popular governors while his party's fortunes have see-sawed.
If you want to see his style, check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr0Bkmq2oRE&feature=related.
What about prospective third-party progressive Rocky Anderson? Watching him on YouTube, my first impression was that he won't get far. He seemed strident and obsessive. He used abstractions like "militarism" and "corporatism", which most people don't use and may not grasp. He came across as talking to an in-group, not to all of us. He focused on impractical objectives such as impeaching Dubya. And he lacked the evidences of warmth, friendliness, and humility that could draw people to him who didn't agree with him, as Ronald Reagan excelled at doing.
Let's note in fairness, however, that in all that Rocky was being an activist, not a candidate. He must know how to get votes, as he nearly won a Congressional race in a conservative district without pulling in his horns and later was a very electable mayor of Salt Lake City (even receiving bi-partisan backing from the likes of Mitt Romney, then a personal friend). So not what he has said but what he will say and how he will say it -- and who he evidently is -- will let us figure what we can expect from him.
Even at his worst, Rocky could turn out to do far better than Ralph Nader did. In '00, '04, and '08 the Democratic nominee was not an incumbent and one could hope that he would do the right things if he got in office; but in '12 we know that we can expect nothing from the Democrat and that any reversal of our fortunes will require an outsider. And Rocky, facing Mr. Obama and the Republican, will have all the issues going for him, while they will be on the defensive in relation to him.
But does he have the natural assurance and easy authority to gain wide acceptance? Is he not only a fighter but a big enough person that people will want to follow him? I am skeptical about that but am willing to wait and see how he does when he declares his candidacy.
What should a candidate be like? It's said one mustn't be angry, as Rocky plainly is. I would amend that to say that one mustn't appear to be a congenitally wrathful person. I think that if one is mad about things that anyone ought to be mad about, the people will share the sentiment rather than being put off by it. I suspect that one reason so many Americans seem not to trust or understand President Obama is because he is unable or unwilling to display warranted and communicable anger.
If you want to see how to really get votes, look to the person I think could be the Dems' most effective '16 nominee. He is not New York's dour Andrew Cuomo or Maryland's smooth Martin O'Malley, who are the ones most discussed, but Montana's charismatic, larger-than-life Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is endlessly inventive and as far from Wall Street mentally as geographically.
Schweitzer is a rancher and scientist who has worked in the Middle East and knows how to negotiate with Bedouins (the one who reveals what he wants first is at a disadvantage). The first time he ran for office, he took elderly people to Canada by bus to buy prescription drugs there, where they are much cheaper, capturing the public's imagination; with that and similar tactics he nearly won a U.S. Senate seat despite long odds. Chasing the governorship, he came across as an unconventional and unpredictable common-sense liberal populist whose TV ads showed him hunting and who picked a moderate Republican, State Senator John Bohlinger, as his runningmate for lieutenant governor. But he is no sellout centrist. He boasts of having gotten through his legislature "the most progressive package in America", emphasizing the environment and education, and he has remained one of the nation's most popular governors while his party's fortunes have see-sawed.
If you want to see his style, check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr0Bkmq2oRE&feature=related.
In the case of Rocky Anderson, we can hope for the best: at least that he will make the case for what has to be done and may win many new adherents for it. In the case of Brian Schweitzer, well, 2016 will come eventually, and he has the kind of good energy that suggests to me that it may choose to carry him with it.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
ROCKY RUNS
Ross "Rocky" Anderson, a former two-term mayor of Salt Lake City and until this year a Democrat, will shortly announce a run for president of the United States as the candidate of what may be called the Justice party.
I like the way his name evokes Ross Perot, Nelson Rockefeller, and John Anderson, all of them against-the-grain fighters.
Anderson is 60. He has been active a long time and has gotten things done. Raised a Mormon, he is an independent thinker with an existentialist's vision of personal responsibility and so has been fearless and very consistent in advocating what he believes right and necessary. That embraces the convictions of the most liberal Democrats, the environmentalists, the exponents of human rights, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is a proven vote-getter as well as a prominent lawyer. His outspokennness has made him a minor national figure.
Getting on the ballot in all 50 states will not be easy but is not impossible.
I suppose the main question is whether Rocky has the vividness of personality and the forcefulness of mind and expression to dominate the discussion as opposed to only getting into it. Is he a protester or a leader? We will be finding out.
It appears that there will now indeed be a left alternative to the Obama regime, which Anderson has denounced as gutless and in some respects even more secretive and oppressive than the Bush one. For those of us who thought there was no chance of anything auspicious happening soon, this is heartening.
The worst possibility is that Anderson will do only well enough to elect the Republican. I would favor his offering Mr. Obama a deal whereby whichever of them was running behind the other a week before the election would withdraw and throw his backing to the other. I doubt we will see that, however.
We may now have at least the beginning of a new national politics consistent with the truly American vision of the Occupiers.
Here is what one prominent politician, who had worked with him on the Olympics, had to say about Rocky Anderson a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PQ95wokGlM&feature=related
I like the way his name evokes Ross Perot, Nelson Rockefeller, and John Anderson, all of them against-the-grain fighters.
Anderson is 60. He has been active a long time and has gotten things done. Raised a Mormon, he is an independent thinker with an existentialist's vision of personal responsibility and so has been fearless and very consistent in advocating what he believes right and necessary. That embraces the convictions of the most liberal Democrats, the environmentalists, the exponents of human rights, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is a proven vote-getter as well as a prominent lawyer. His outspokennness has made him a minor national figure.
Getting on the ballot in all 50 states will not be easy but is not impossible.
I suppose the main question is whether Rocky has the vividness of personality and the forcefulness of mind and expression to dominate the discussion as opposed to only getting into it. Is he a protester or a leader? We will be finding out.
It appears that there will now indeed be a left alternative to the Obama regime, which Anderson has denounced as gutless and in some respects even more secretive and oppressive than the Bush one. For those of us who thought there was no chance of anything auspicious happening soon, this is heartening.
The worst possibility is that Anderson will do only well enough to elect the Republican. I would favor his offering Mr. Obama a deal whereby whichever of them was running behind the other a week before the election would withdraw and throw his backing to the other. I doubt we will see that, however.
We may now have at least the beginning of a new national politics consistent with the truly American vision of the Occupiers.
Here is what one prominent politician, who had worked with him on the Olympics, had to say about Rocky Anderson a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PQ95wokGlM&feature=related
Saturday, November 12, 2011
POLITICS AT PENN STATE
All right, I'm back to blogging. I have something to say. Sue me.
Anyone aware enough to have accessed this essay knows what has happened at Penn State, so let me not rehash it. The callousness and hypocrisy exposed here are odious. But it's the political angle rather than the moral that I'd like to examine.
The trustees' Wednesday night massacre that unanimously took down local god Joe Paterno and the university's high-octane president Graham Spanier, both terminations "effective immediately", was fraught with hazard yet probably unavoidable. Firing the 84-year-old JoePa with a phone call after his 46 years as head coach may have been meant to seem as brutal as it was, an object lesson because he is thought to have hidden the rape of children.
So we have the emotional impact of that charge at war with due process not only in court but in how we live and treat people. Sticky situations make for questionable decisions.
There are scads of alumni and Lions fans out there who must resent the hell out of what was done and how. They are high on the clean sporting atmosphere of this uniformly attractive place and cannot shift smoothly from imbibing it to simple rejection of the man who to them has personified all that is best in it. They will withhold donations to the school. And they will do so at a time when the scandal will also cost it donations, while the reactionary state administration, which has already slashed its funding, will be able to do more of the same hereafter with far greater impunity. Applications here will dwindle because of all this and therefore so will the quality of the students, already fairly mediocre. This university and this community are truly in crisis.
The trustees wanted to signal a sharp break from a now-tainted order of things and wanted still more to save the university as far as they could from lawsuits by showing that they will not be complicit in evil after the fact.
As far as I can make out, the origin of the problem may have been Joseph Paterno's concern for appearances, said by a respected local sports columnist to have been of control freak dimensions and to have entailed secrecy and lies to spare the football program from bad publicity about such matters as player injuries. As a personality he exudes humility and a kind of wise crotchetiness - "I love you all. Now go home and study!" That he required his players to perform well academically as well as athletically is both commendable fact and part of his legend. As the keeper of the dream, perhaps he felt he had to keep the scene idyllic to the eye, whatever the reality. As he did a lot of good for Penn State and the town, such a propensity could be hard for people to recognize, let alone accept. One thinks of a kind of cross between Mother Teresa and J. Edgar Hoover.
The T-shirt that says "State College: A Drinking Town With A Football Problem" may have gotten it right.
I find it believable that Jerry Sandusky's retirement at age 55 in '99, the year after he was nearly prosecuted on a child abuse charge, was not voluntary and that his failure to pursue a coaching job elsewhere may have reflected a threat to take down his reputation if he did. Speculation is that it was "the university" that did this, but it could have been Paterno on his own, especially if he knew or suspected more than others did. I have read in a letter from a reader of the local paper that he did not attend Sandusky's retirement party, which might be revealing.
This brings us to President Spanier's role in this. Undoubtedly talented, he was rampant here for over a decade and a half, into everything and busily expanding the university and evolving its ways. But the protesting students and others did not mention his sacrifice; it was only JoePa's that they cared about. Spanier, as it happens, is not likeable and will not be missed. He seems to have surrounded himself with yes men, which may have been his downfall. When the boss doesn't want to hear bad news, "team players" will try to shield him from it.
In my estimation, Spanier is smart enough to know that you can't cover up the acts of a serial abuser, if only because they are sure to be repeated. And I think he is also ruthless enough to have cut the bad spot out of the apple at once. I would expect him to have had the police chief on speed dial in case anyone mentioned a sex crime to him.
He said in his brief farewell statement that he had no knowledge of criminal acts. The trustees had to get him out regardless, as damage control; but I have to wonder if he was blindsided by Paterno and Athletic Director Tim Curley? If Paterno's attitude was "I'll handle this", most likely Curley went along with it, as Joe's stature was such that his word was law. What exactly they told Spanier is so far not clear.
Or maybe he knew all about it and signed off on everything that was done. His statement of total support for the two university officials indicted for perjury could have been meant to keep them from trading up by ratting him out; having such a large institution behind one is an incentive to be good soldiers. We don't yet know what he had in mind or what, if anything, he had to lose from their being candid.
What now? The acting president is another fellow who has been at State for years, and that won't do. The trustees want a nationwide search for a replacement. They had better complete it fast, and they no doubt realize that. A major advertiser bailed on today's Lions game, and the school is going to be bleeding money from its smashed name. They will have to bring in a turn-around specialist from outside, someone at odds with the entrenched culture of Penn State, preferably someone high-profile and very reputable.
Former Pennsylvania governors Tom Ridge, a bland Republican moderate who was the first secretary of homeland security, and Ed Rendell, an ebullient Democrat, might be excellent choices. It's hard to visualize Rendell departing his urban habitat for the middle of nowhere, yet one supposes he might if offered a free hand. Ridge is known to like State College and has been here often; he might take to the idea of settling into this quiet and friendly setting and using his people skills. Rendell, who brought Philadelphia back from near death as mayor, might welcome the even bigger challenge of raising the Titanic while it's sinking.
Here's what I anticipate, anyway. Whoever it is will come in and throw open the windows to let the sunlight and fresh air in, proclaiming accountability and openness and transparency, rah rah. While the athletic program will get special scrutiny, the whole school will be pounced on. People will be fired and replaced in droves. The ways things are done will be shaken up, often just for the sake of shaking them up.
Many of the results may be counterproductive, but you can bet the trustees won't interfere. They know everything depends on an image of thorough, even violent renewal. They have to get the fund-raising restored or everything else is, well, academic.
So again, as in the scandal itself, the innocent may suffer so the institution can thrive. That's politics as usual. See if you can get away from it even in a locale known as Happy Valley.
Anyone aware enough to have accessed this essay knows what has happened at Penn State, so let me not rehash it. The callousness and hypocrisy exposed here are odious. But it's the political angle rather than the moral that I'd like to examine.
The trustees' Wednesday night massacre that unanimously took down local god Joe Paterno and the university's high-octane president Graham Spanier, both terminations "effective immediately", was fraught with hazard yet probably unavoidable. Firing the 84-year-old JoePa with a phone call after his 46 years as head coach may have been meant to seem as brutal as it was, an object lesson because he is thought to have hidden the rape of children.
So we have the emotional impact of that charge at war with due process not only in court but in how we live and treat people. Sticky situations make for questionable decisions.
There are scads of alumni and Lions fans out there who must resent the hell out of what was done and how. They are high on the clean sporting atmosphere of this uniformly attractive place and cannot shift smoothly from imbibing it to simple rejection of the man who to them has personified all that is best in it. They will withhold donations to the school. And they will do so at a time when the scandal will also cost it donations, while the reactionary state administration, which has already slashed its funding, will be able to do more of the same hereafter with far greater impunity. Applications here will dwindle because of all this and therefore so will the quality of the students, already fairly mediocre. This university and this community are truly in crisis.
The trustees wanted to signal a sharp break from a now-tainted order of things and wanted still more to save the university as far as they could from lawsuits by showing that they will not be complicit in evil after the fact.
As far as I can make out, the origin of the problem may have been Joseph Paterno's concern for appearances, said by a respected local sports columnist to have been of control freak dimensions and to have entailed secrecy and lies to spare the football program from bad publicity about such matters as player injuries. As a personality he exudes humility and a kind of wise crotchetiness - "I love you all. Now go home and study!" That he required his players to perform well academically as well as athletically is both commendable fact and part of his legend. As the keeper of the dream, perhaps he felt he had to keep the scene idyllic to the eye, whatever the reality. As he did a lot of good for Penn State and the town, such a propensity could be hard for people to recognize, let alone accept. One thinks of a kind of cross between Mother Teresa and J. Edgar Hoover.
The T-shirt that says "State College: A Drinking Town With A Football Problem" may have gotten it right.
I find it believable that Jerry Sandusky's retirement at age 55 in '99, the year after he was nearly prosecuted on a child abuse charge, was not voluntary and that his failure to pursue a coaching job elsewhere may have reflected a threat to take down his reputation if he did. Speculation is that it was "the university" that did this, but it could have been Paterno on his own, especially if he knew or suspected more than others did. I have read in a letter from a reader of the local paper that he did not attend Sandusky's retirement party, which might be revealing.
This brings us to President Spanier's role in this. Undoubtedly talented, he was rampant here for over a decade and a half, into everything and busily expanding the university and evolving its ways. But the protesting students and others did not mention his sacrifice; it was only JoePa's that they cared about. Spanier, as it happens, is not likeable and will not be missed. He seems to have surrounded himself with yes men, which may have been his downfall. When the boss doesn't want to hear bad news, "team players" will try to shield him from it.
In my estimation, Spanier is smart enough to know that you can't cover up the acts of a serial abuser, if only because they are sure to be repeated. And I think he is also ruthless enough to have cut the bad spot out of the apple at once. I would expect him to have had the police chief on speed dial in case anyone mentioned a sex crime to him.
He said in his brief farewell statement that he had no knowledge of criminal acts. The trustees had to get him out regardless, as damage control; but I have to wonder if he was blindsided by Paterno and Athletic Director Tim Curley? If Paterno's attitude was "I'll handle this", most likely Curley went along with it, as Joe's stature was such that his word was law. What exactly they told Spanier is so far not clear.
Or maybe he knew all about it and signed off on everything that was done. His statement of total support for the two university officials indicted for perjury could have been meant to keep them from trading up by ratting him out; having such a large institution behind one is an incentive to be good soldiers. We don't yet know what he had in mind or what, if anything, he had to lose from their being candid.
What now? The acting president is another fellow who has been at State for years, and that won't do. The trustees want a nationwide search for a replacement. They had better complete it fast, and they no doubt realize that. A major advertiser bailed on today's Lions game, and the school is going to be bleeding money from its smashed name. They will have to bring in a turn-around specialist from outside, someone at odds with the entrenched culture of Penn State, preferably someone high-profile and very reputable.
Former Pennsylvania governors Tom Ridge, a bland Republican moderate who was the first secretary of homeland security, and Ed Rendell, an ebullient Democrat, might be excellent choices. It's hard to visualize Rendell departing his urban habitat for the middle of nowhere, yet one supposes he might if offered a free hand. Ridge is known to like State College and has been here often; he might take to the idea of settling into this quiet and friendly setting and using his people skills. Rendell, who brought Philadelphia back from near death as mayor, might welcome the even bigger challenge of raising the Titanic while it's sinking.
Here's what I anticipate, anyway. Whoever it is will come in and throw open the windows to let the sunlight and fresh air in, proclaiming accountability and openness and transparency, rah rah. While the athletic program will get special scrutiny, the whole school will be pounced on. People will be fired and replaced in droves. The ways things are done will be shaken up, often just for the sake of shaking them up.
Many of the results may be counterproductive, but you can bet the trustees won't interfere. They know everything depends on an image of thorough, even violent renewal. They have to get the fund-raising restored or everything else is, well, academic.
So again, as in the scandal itself, the innocent may suffer so the institution can thrive. That's politics as usual. See if you can get away from it even in a locale known as Happy Valley.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
ONE NATION UNDER THE HAMMER
Our society rewards dividers and self-seekers and so encompasses its own disintegration.
It renders people unfree and poor in the name of freedom and creation of wealth. Some desire anarcho-fascism and many more submit to it because of a failure to spot connections.
Citizens don't vote. They insist that all politicians are scum, which is not true and which allows those who are to get away with it while undercutting the ones who want to mend things and who cannot do so without popular backing.
The deadline has passed for candidates to register for the New Hampshire primary. It is now improbable that there will be a Democratic challenger to President Obama. I was convinced that there would have to be one because the need for one is so blatantly obvious and because we have, or so I thought, several million potential national leaders of nerve and energy and imagination.
But no. Nobody says "Follow me." We are awash in learned helplessness. The right-wingers have taught us servility, as they meant to.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Ralph Nader, and others have planned, perhaps still plan, to introduce into six different presidential primaries six candidates, each concentrating on a distinct speciality, so as to make Mr. Obama compete with them and compel him to shift leftward or be embarrassed by a protest vote. While I understand the strategy, I see no felicity in backing six people who don't want to be nominated rather than one who does.
Whoever succeeds in the general election, the economy will most likely fall through all the way. The Republicans will continue to promote civil war and will demand or precipitate greater violence against protesters. They will ramp up their efforts to turn great sub-populations of us into second-class citizens and to render us passive and afraid while our prospects dwindle. Their mentality is such that they cannot feel secure unless making others insecure, strong unless making others weak, or prosperous unless making others into beggars.
There remains an outside chance, nothing more, that a persuasive third-party candidate will embrace the agenda of Occupy Wall Street. It would be cute if it were to be a Wall Street billionaire who could self-fund and follow Ross Perot's populist example. There is no shortage of ambitious billionaires out there today, and the polls say we're ready for a third option.
Such a candidate could stress necessity rather than liberal idealism, proposing to do only what must be done to save the country. Any businessperson should be able to recognize that unless Main Street capitalism displaces Wall Street feudalism there cannot be a functional economy; the people must have money to spend, and it must come from redistribution of our overwhelmingly concentrated national wealth. The wars and their devastating costs, human and financial, must be ended. Global warming must be taken seriously and addressed. Our government must be able to plan for the more remote future rather than being distracted constantly by crises of the moment and petty scandals hyped by partisans and a visionless press. An independent candidate could say all of that and be credible with most Americans.
It will be objected that such a candidate would only split the moderate and progressive voters with Mr. Obama and so assure the election of the Republican. But the candidate could offer the president a deal on these terms: "One week prior to the election, whichever of the two of us is running behind the other will withdraw from the race and campaign for the other." The president would concur because he would assume that he would be the one who was ahead.
No, none of that is at all apt to happen. We are barreling toward an abyss. Perhaps out of that will come a revolt that can issue in a government of, by, and for the people, instead of one of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations and the mega-rich. Or perhaps our time is just up and it will be countries we have looked down on like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Syria who will do what we say we believe in doing but don't do.
It renders people unfree and poor in the name of freedom and creation of wealth. Some desire anarcho-fascism and many more submit to it because of a failure to spot connections.
Citizens don't vote. They insist that all politicians are scum, which is not true and which allows those who are to get away with it while undercutting the ones who want to mend things and who cannot do so without popular backing.
The deadline has passed for candidates to register for the New Hampshire primary. It is now improbable that there will be a Democratic challenger to President Obama. I was convinced that there would have to be one because the need for one is so blatantly obvious and because we have, or so I thought, several million potential national leaders of nerve and energy and imagination.
But no. Nobody says "Follow me." We are awash in learned helplessness. The right-wingers have taught us servility, as they meant to.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Ralph Nader, and others have planned, perhaps still plan, to introduce into six different presidential primaries six candidates, each concentrating on a distinct speciality, so as to make Mr. Obama compete with them and compel him to shift leftward or be embarrassed by a protest vote. While I understand the strategy, I see no felicity in backing six people who don't want to be nominated rather than one who does.
Whoever succeeds in the general election, the economy will most likely fall through all the way. The Republicans will continue to promote civil war and will demand or precipitate greater violence against protesters. They will ramp up their efforts to turn great sub-populations of us into second-class citizens and to render us passive and afraid while our prospects dwindle. Their mentality is such that they cannot feel secure unless making others insecure, strong unless making others weak, or prosperous unless making others into beggars.
There remains an outside chance, nothing more, that a persuasive third-party candidate will embrace the agenda of Occupy Wall Street. It would be cute if it were to be a Wall Street billionaire who could self-fund and follow Ross Perot's populist example. There is no shortage of ambitious billionaires out there today, and the polls say we're ready for a third option.
Such a candidate could stress necessity rather than liberal idealism, proposing to do only what must be done to save the country. Any businessperson should be able to recognize that unless Main Street capitalism displaces Wall Street feudalism there cannot be a functional economy; the people must have money to spend, and it must come from redistribution of our overwhelmingly concentrated national wealth. The wars and their devastating costs, human and financial, must be ended. Global warming must be taken seriously and addressed. Our government must be able to plan for the more remote future rather than being distracted constantly by crises of the moment and petty scandals hyped by partisans and a visionless press. An independent candidate could say all of that and be credible with most Americans.
It will be objected that such a candidate would only split the moderate and progressive voters with Mr. Obama and so assure the election of the Republican. But the candidate could offer the president a deal on these terms: "One week prior to the election, whichever of the two of us is running behind the other will withdraw from the race and campaign for the other." The president would concur because he would assume that he would be the one who was ahead.
No, none of that is at all apt to happen. We are barreling toward an abyss. Perhaps out of that will come a revolt that can issue in a government of, by, and for the people, instead of one of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations and the mega-rich. Or perhaps our time is just up and it will be countries we have looked down on like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Syria who will do what we say we believe in doing but don't do.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
RESCUED THEN BUT NOT NOW?
In need, this republic has always found or generated truly outstanding leaders. Whether that has been owed to the inner genius of a democratic people or to providence, or to just what, one can speculate.
There was first of all that extraordinary collection of individually flawed but collectively wise thinkers and doers who led us to independence and managed to establish this nation despite all our differences. Recognizing how to consolidate and when to compromise, they bequeathed us a model of citizenship and a requirement that power be answerable, the right standards for a mass society that would result from the industrial revolution and the technological exploision.
George Washington was a figure of such recognized integrity and dignity that he was twice elected without opposition to our top office when lasting arrangements had to be put into place. While the Jeffersonian tea-partiers called him a tyrant, he gave us a firm and flexible central government and demonstrated that our institutions would function well if run intelligently and with humility.
Andrew Jackson took on the dislocations caused by rich business interests with a dose of populism while countering the fractiousness of a nation of sovereign states by leaving no doubt that there would be hangings and military action in response to attempts at nullification or secession. The frontiersmen who followed him had in them the toxic individualism that still afflicts us, but in those days it was offset by the now-depleted belief in equality that is one of our healthiest legacies.
The breaking up of the country into two competing camps with incompatible worldviews brought forward Abraham Lincoln with his determination to reunify it and his instinct for the reconciliation of estranged neighbors. Paired with him in odd synergy was Pennsylvania's radical Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who went farther than anyone then or later in enshrining in law the same rights and opportunities for all citizens, regardless of race or social standing. These two, working sometimes with and sometimes against one another, made modern America possible.
Social evils perpetrated by corporations protected by campaign contributions and outright bribes led to the emergence of a vigorous progressivism in the early twentieth century. Wisconsin's "Fighting Bob" La Follette, a governor and senator of rare effectiveness, and William Jennings Bryan, who merged the Populist party into the Democrats and spoke for a victimized and neglected rural America, boxed an essentially conservative and big-business-worshiping President Theodore Roosevelt into pushing reforms.
With too many abuses and insufficient regulation, Laissez-Faire America collapsed into a Depression that finally made possible some fundamental changes in policies and attitudes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wealthy squire and advocate for everyday people, evoked a degree of confidence that averted our slide into ill-considered social adventures while experimenting with forms of relief and public enterprise. He reduced these efforts during his second term, believing that they had succeeded, a mistake that brought back the Depression amidst skepticism that it could be ended. But his exceptionally knowledgeable and able leadership carried us to victory in a world war, and his plans for a postwar alliance of many nations that could adapt to conditions and head off further wars set us on a course that we have halfway maintained and halfway forsaken.
With World War II impending, the country was sharply divided between isolationists and internationalists, the latter headed by the president and eager to buttress our allies against Germany and Japan by means short of war lest their collapse leave us more exposed. Almost miraculously, the Republican party, largely a bastion of isolationist sentiment, nominated for president in 1940 the dark horse Wendell Willkie, a fervent internationalist and an outspoken liberal. Magnetic and persuasively sincere, Willkie wrought greater unification of opinion to ready the country to defend itself. His subsequent tour of nations on behalf of FDR and his visionary book One World contributed importantly to public appreciation of the equal worth of people everywhere and to acceptance of what a viable postwar order must entail.
Dwight David Eisenhower, hugely popular as a general, steered the Republican party away from the temptation to repeal the New Deal, using his authoritative and fatherly persona to displace that aim with sensibly centrist attitudes and moderate, flexible policies. Thus a showdown was postponed, buying the country time in which to see what approach would work best, demonstrating how it could profit from a high tax rate on the rich and the refusal to precipitate an arms race or engage in elective wars. While those lessons were not learned, they can still be looked to if we one day decide to have a rational opposition.
Steeped in postwar cynicism and corrupt arrangements, we were awakened to the prevalence and the political influence of organized crime and to the rapacity of the pharmaceutical industry by the labors of Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with an instinct for publicizing rottenness and an implacable refusal to be bought off or scared off or shunted off.
John F. Kennedy showed that the presence of a crisis is not necessary for our government to upgrade its ways and re-address how things are, invoking an ideal of excellence and peopling this work with business and academic eminences of realism and brilliance. A crisis did, however, soon arrive, with pressure for civil rights coming to a head amidst organized resistance. The advent of Lyndon Johnson enabled the Congress and the country to take the necessary steps to implement the equality we were long pledged to and also to begin a campaign against entrenched poverty that lifted a million Americans into the middle class, serving as the basis for the prosperity we enjoyed till recently. (Johnson's legacy was greatly impacted by the divisive and futile Vietnam war, which allowed right-wingers to often employ cultural "wedge" issues to win by turning Americans against one another, a condition that has endured to this hour and that may be the main factor in our present woes. )
Today our economy has come apart and we are in a new Depression (For what in the name of Denial is a "Great Recession"?), resulting from Congress's systematic imposition of an astonishingly unequal allocation of wealth, and from unjust "free trade" agreements, and from the turning over of regulatory functions to representatives of the industries regulated. The executive branch is paralyzed and the opposition is blindly refusing us the chief means of reversing this situation, which is large-scale income redistribution. Continuation of the existing trends promises a level of devastation likely to exceed that of the 1930s Depression and to sink the rest of the world along with us.
It seems that nothing can be done to halt this terrible denouement, although common sense is enough to tell us what we should be doing. Such leadership as exists is issuing not from our elected representatives but from the spontaneous mass movement Occupy Wall Street. There is probably a severe limit to what it can accomplish in the absence of another, complementary form of popular initiative.
When we have been saved so many times from so much, is it possible that no one with the instincts of a leader will offer us the democratic means of remedying our situation, one as ominous and as reparable as any of them? That question comprises the background from which I look for a presidential candidate who can rally us to do what we must to secure our future: another Washington or Jackson or Lincoln or La Follette or FDR or Willkie or Eisenhower or Kefauver or Johnson.
Well, maybe our luck has finally run out. Maybe we have outlived our capacity for tapping into something beyond self-deception and small-mindedness. Maybe we are due to suffer hideously and all of humankind with us because we have not appreciated what we should be and what options are always ours.
Nothing says that that can't be so. And the time is short for a new leadership to declare itself, if it is to come for the 2012 elections, after which will probably be too late.
Looking about us, one could despair. Looking back, one sees a heritage of great leadership and great hazards overcome. Looking ahead, one sees a question mark.
So we go on waiting and watching and wondering. And if you pray, praying for your country would be a good idea.
There was first of all that extraordinary collection of individually flawed but collectively wise thinkers and doers who led us to independence and managed to establish this nation despite all our differences. Recognizing how to consolidate and when to compromise, they bequeathed us a model of citizenship and a requirement that power be answerable, the right standards for a mass society that would result from the industrial revolution and the technological exploision.
George Washington was a figure of such recognized integrity and dignity that he was twice elected without opposition to our top office when lasting arrangements had to be put into place. While the Jeffersonian tea-partiers called him a tyrant, he gave us a firm and flexible central government and demonstrated that our institutions would function well if run intelligently and with humility.
Andrew Jackson took on the dislocations caused by rich business interests with a dose of populism while countering the fractiousness of a nation of sovereign states by leaving no doubt that there would be hangings and military action in response to attempts at nullification or secession. The frontiersmen who followed him had in them the toxic individualism that still afflicts us, but in those days it was offset by the now-depleted belief in equality that is one of our healthiest legacies.
The breaking up of the country into two competing camps with incompatible worldviews brought forward Abraham Lincoln with his determination to reunify it and his instinct for the reconciliation of estranged neighbors. Paired with him in odd synergy was Pennsylvania's radical Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who went farther than anyone then or later in enshrining in law the same rights and opportunities for all citizens, regardless of race or social standing. These two, working sometimes with and sometimes against one another, made modern America possible.
Social evils perpetrated by corporations protected by campaign contributions and outright bribes led to the emergence of a vigorous progressivism in the early twentieth century. Wisconsin's "Fighting Bob" La Follette, a governor and senator of rare effectiveness, and William Jennings Bryan, who merged the Populist party into the Democrats and spoke for a victimized and neglected rural America, boxed an essentially conservative and big-business-worshiping President Theodore Roosevelt into pushing reforms.
With too many abuses and insufficient regulation, Laissez-Faire America collapsed into a Depression that finally made possible some fundamental changes in policies and attitudes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wealthy squire and advocate for everyday people, evoked a degree of confidence that averted our slide into ill-considered social adventures while experimenting with forms of relief and public enterprise. He reduced these efforts during his second term, believing that they had succeeded, a mistake that brought back the Depression amidst skepticism that it could be ended. But his exceptionally knowledgeable and able leadership carried us to victory in a world war, and his plans for a postwar alliance of many nations that could adapt to conditions and head off further wars set us on a course that we have halfway maintained and halfway forsaken.
With World War II impending, the country was sharply divided between isolationists and internationalists, the latter headed by the president and eager to buttress our allies against Germany and Japan by means short of war lest their collapse leave us more exposed. Almost miraculously, the Republican party, largely a bastion of isolationist sentiment, nominated for president in 1940 the dark horse Wendell Willkie, a fervent internationalist and an outspoken liberal. Magnetic and persuasively sincere, Willkie wrought greater unification of opinion to ready the country to defend itself. His subsequent tour of nations on behalf of FDR and his visionary book One World contributed importantly to public appreciation of the equal worth of people everywhere and to acceptance of what a viable postwar order must entail.
Dwight David Eisenhower, hugely popular as a general, steered the Republican party away from the temptation to repeal the New Deal, using his authoritative and fatherly persona to displace that aim with sensibly centrist attitudes and moderate, flexible policies. Thus a showdown was postponed, buying the country time in which to see what approach would work best, demonstrating how it could profit from a high tax rate on the rich and the refusal to precipitate an arms race or engage in elective wars. While those lessons were not learned, they can still be looked to if we one day decide to have a rational opposition.
Steeped in postwar cynicism and corrupt arrangements, we were awakened to the prevalence and the political influence of organized crime and to the rapacity of the pharmaceutical industry by the labors of Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with an instinct for publicizing rottenness and an implacable refusal to be bought off or scared off or shunted off.
John F. Kennedy showed that the presence of a crisis is not necessary for our government to upgrade its ways and re-address how things are, invoking an ideal of excellence and peopling this work with business and academic eminences of realism and brilliance. A crisis did, however, soon arrive, with pressure for civil rights coming to a head amidst organized resistance. The advent of Lyndon Johnson enabled the Congress and the country to take the necessary steps to implement the equality we were long pledged to and also to begin a campaign against entrenched poverty that lifted a million Americans into the middle class, serving as the basis for the prosperity we enjoyed till recently. (Johnson's legacy was greatly impacted by the divisive and futile Vietnam war, which allowed right-wingers to often employ cultural "wedge" issues to win by turning Americans against one another, a condition that has endured to this hour and that may be the main factor in our present woes. )
Today our economy has come apart and we are in a new Depression (For what in the name of Denial is a "Great Recession"?), resulting from Congress's systematic imposition of an astonishingly unequal allocation of wealth, and from unjust "free trade" agreements, and from the turning over of regulatory functions to representatives of the industries regulated. The executive branch is paralyzed and the opposition is blindly refusing us the chief means of reversing this situation, which is large-scale income redistribution. Continuation of the existing trends promises a level of devastation likely to exceed that of the 1930s Depression and to sink the rest of the world along with us.
It seems that nothing can be done to halt this terrible denouement, although common sense is enough to tell us what we should be doing. Such leadership as exists is issuing not from our elected representatives but from the spontaneous mass movement Occupy Wall Street. There is probably a severe limit to what it can accomplish in the absence of another, complementary form of popular initiative.
When we have been saved so many times from so much, is it possible that no one with the instincts of a leader will offer us the democratic means of remedying our situation, one as ominous and as reparable as any of them? That question comprises the background from which I look for a presidential candidate who can rally us to do what we must to secure our future: another Washington or Jackson or Lincoln or La Follette or FDR or Willkie or Eisenhower or Kefauver or Johnson.
Well, maybe our luck has finally run out. Maybe we have outlived our capacity for tapping into something beyond self-deception and small-mindedness. Maybe we are due to suffer hideously and all of humankind with us because we have not appreciated what we should be and what options are always ours.
Nothing says that that can't be so. And the time is short for a new leadership to declare itself, if it is to come for the 2012 elections, after which will probably be too late.
Looking about us, one could despair. Looking back, one sees a heritage of great leadership and great hazards overcome. Looking ahead, one sees a question mark.
So we go on waiting and watching and wondering. And if you pray, praying for your country would be a good idea.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
A SORRY LOT
At one time there were self-styled "ten percenters" among the black population. They believed that 90% of their kind were inferior human material but that they themselves were the exceptions. He won't admit to it, but one of these vainglorious souls is currently the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
Tea partiers whose obsessive hatred of the president is partly grounded in racism are embracing Herman Cain. While that may appear incongruous, doing it likely makes them feel better about themselves and affords them protective coloration. And they aren't giving up anything by it. He is as contemptuous of blacks as they are and is equally bigoted across the board, refusing to consider naming a Muslim to his cabinet and telling those who are protesting the absence of jobs to quit bitching and go find work.
You have to wonder where Cain has been, whether he follows the news. He didn't know what a neoconservative was although that tribe got us into two wars recently. He comes up with gimmicks and stunts and jokes and is otherwise shallow and prone to winging it and to the offhand denial of facts when confronted with them.
I told you months ago that Sarah Palin would not run. I told you more recently that "a Marginal Melvin" like Rick Perry, who wants people to give up Social Security and Medicare in exhange for nothing, would not be the GOP nominee. I tell you now that Cain will suffer embarrassments and a fall from which he will not rise. The enthusiasm for him won't endure. Blackness and ignorance are a combination he can't surmount.
As for Mitt Romney, his best trait may be the plasticity and hypocrisy that make it hard to guess what he would actually do if elected, especially if he saw that he would be a one-termer regardless of what stance he took.
As the obvious compromise choice in a very flawed field, the smooth and plausible Romney should have been able to close the deal long since. Instead, we find Bachmann, then Perry, then Christie, and now Cain popping up as preferred alternatives to him. He is being denounced as unconservative by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. And the anti-Mormon fanatics are after him openly now. In his swim to the fair shore he is dragging heavy anchors.
Newly in third place is Gingrich, who looks like no bargain and sets no souls afire. He told his inner circle months ago that the summer was for hanging on and the fall for breaking through. If Cain and Romney go down and additional entries don't take place, there will be no one other than Gingrich left who is conceivably electable. My suspicion is that most of the party faithful would rather settle for him than for Romney, if only because Newt is more viscerally and angrily conservative. What he says alternates between sensible (good for courting the general public) and embittered and unreasonable (good for courting the base).
On the other side of the fence, Occupy Wall Street is telling us what a Democratic candidate ought to be proposing answers to. Among other predictions, I have said that there will be such a candidate. I continue to think so, though the hour grows late and the money factor may be
daunting to those who consider a run.
Scientist Harry Braun, who once ran against John McCain for Congress, is in the race as a progressive Dem and is pushing a hydrogen economy and a Constitutional convention. You can see him on YouTube if interested. His Constitutional convention idea is terrible, as right-wingers would spend limitless amounts to get control of it and would put through pet abominations like a flat tax, a balanced budget requirement, and voting restrictions. Changes should be made by means of specific amendments that can lose if they must without pulling down the house that our fathers built.
Otherwise, Braun has more brains than braun. Elderly and scholarly-looking, he gets no recognition. Though articulate and impassioned, he lacks the implicit forcefulness and the air of invincible confidence that a viable outsider candidate must have.
One barn-burner of a speech can do the trick, I believe, provided the right kind of personality delivers it. For that, one goes on waiting in the hope that this year what can be also must be.
Tea partiers whose obsessive hatred of the president is partly grounded in racism are embracing Herman Cain. While that may appear incongruous, doing it likely makes them feel better about themselves and affords them protective coloration. And they aren't giving up anything by it. He is as contemptuous of blacks as they are and is equally bigoted across the board, refusing to consider naming a Muslim to his cabinet and telling those who are protesting the absence of jobs to quit bitching and go find work.
You have to wonder where Cain has been, whether he follows the news. He didn't know what a neoconservative was although that tribe got us into two wars recently. He comes up with gimmicks and stunts and jokes and is otherwise shallow and prone to winging it and to the offhand denial of facts when confronted with them.
I told you months ago that Sarah Palin would not run. I told you more recently that "a Marginal Melvin" like Rick Perry, who wants people to give up Social Security and Medicare in exhange for nothing, would not be the GOP nominee. I tell you now that Cain will suffer embarrassments and a fall from which he will not rise. The enthusiasm for him won't endure. Blackness and ignorance are a combination he can't surmount.
As for Mitt Romney, his best trait may be the plasticity and hypocrisy that make it hard to guess what he would actually do if elected, especially if he saw that he would be a one-termer regardless of what stance he took.
As the obvious compromise choice in a very flawed field, the smooth and plausible Romney should have been able to close the deal long since. Instead, we find Bachmann, then Perry, then Christie, and now Cain popping up as preferred alternatives to him. He is being denounced as unconservative by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. And the anti-Mormon fanatics are after him openly now. In his swim to the fair shore he is dragging heavy anchors.
Newly in third place is Gingrich, who looks like no bargain and sets no souls afire. He told his inner circle months ago that the summer was for hanging on and the fall for breaking through. If Cain and Romney go down and additional entries don't take place, there will be no one other than Gingrich left who is conceivably electable. My suspicion is that most of the party faithful would rather settle for him than for Romney, if only because Newt is more viscerally and angrily conservative. What he says alternates between sensible (good for courting the general public) and embittered and unreasonable (good for courting the base).
On the other side of the fence, Occupy Wall Street is telling us what a Democratic candidate ought to be proposing answers to. Among other predictions, I have said that there will be such a candidate. I continue to think so, though the hour grows late and the money factor may be
daunting to those who consider a run.
Scientist Harry Braun, who once ran against John McCain for Congress, is in the race as a progressive Dem and is pushing a hydrogen economy and a Constitutional convention. You can see him on YouTube if interested. His Constitutional convention idea is terrible, as right-wingers would spend limitless amounts to get control of it and would put through pet abominations like a flat tax, a balanced budget requirement, and voting restrictions. Changes should be made by means of specific amendments that can lose if they must without pulling down the house that our fathers built.
Otherwise, Braun has more brains than braun. Elderly and scholarly-looking, he gets no recognition. Though articulate and impassioned, he lacks the implicit forcefulness and the air of invincible confidence that a viable outsider candidate must have.
One barn-burner of a speech can do the trick, I believe, provided the right kind of personality delivers it. For that, one goes on waiting in the hope that this year what can be also must be.
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