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.
Friday, October 7, 2011
THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION
Suddenly, unlooked for, there is the leaderless mass movement called Occupy Wall Street, with its encampments, its street theater, its "Occupied Wall Street Journal", its humor in the face of outrage, its offshoots in various places.
It is represented as made up of young people and neo-hippies but is in truth diverse; there are many in it who are "square" and long unemployed or newly broke, who otherwise might be relatively conservative. There are traditional liberals in it and socialists and right-wing libertarians and even some tea partiers, as well as grannies and businessmen and others.
Right now, they are what is happening in this country, as everyone else seems frozen in fear and bile.
The news media, that fervent guardian of the status quo, at first ignored or downplayed what some are calling the American Spring (after the Prague and Arab "springs"). But the movement is too big, too colorful, too assertive, too prone to growing and morphing, for them to continue that.
Those who love privilege and hate equality are complaining as though aggrieved that the Occupiers have no manifesto and no list of unconditional demands. Anything specific that they published would of course become a target as well as weakening their unity. Their genius is in their maintaining the diffuseness of their overlapping objectives.
Yet what they basically stand for is evident to anyone who will pay attention: accountability of economic power to the government, accountability of the government to the people (and not to economic power), and accountaility of the people to our now-compromised ideals: equality, personal freedom, and human rights. These and not the tea party Tories are our real patriots.
The massive anti-war and civil rights movements of the tumultuous 'sixties eventually succeeded in shutting down the Vietnam war and racial segregation. They were a hard sell to most Americans because they seemed to embody socialism, drugs, revolution, scruffiness, free love, and distaste for the work ethic. Occupy Wall Street is quite different, as it represents "the 99%" of us who have gotten hurt by this economy, by the criminals of finance who created it, and by the implicitly bought politicians who are protecting accumulated wealth and not us.
Politicians have sized up this new force differently. That some profess to be more-or-less favorable to it hints at their fear of its potential.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg, hitherto supposedly a good guy, is surly toward it and says it will cost jobs. (What will cost jobs, Mr. Mayor?) And Herman Cain (who also says that blacks are brainwashed, that he would not consider putting a Muslim in his cabinet, and that it's your own damn fault if you're unemployed) alleges that it is unAmerican, a term better applied to himself. Mitt Romney says it is scary class warfare.
Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, spins it as a justified anti-Obama display (though in truth it seems indifferent to the president, probably regarding him as irrelevant). Rick Santorum sees it as righteous in demanding that crimes be punished but is against government "intrusiveness" to set the economy right. Another GOP aspirant, Buddy Roemer, endorses it outright, saying that Main Street stands for jobs and Wall Street for greed.
The sincerity of the movement's political admirers will be established by whether they are now ready to tax the rich. I don't see many takers.
Mr. Obama is calling for that, but he waited to do so till he had lost the clout to make it happen. Though he says what most people believe according to polls, his popularity keeps declining; he is probably seen as maneuvering for political advantage rather than as sincerely a populist. He is out of options, while the economy remains stalled or in decline.
Tea party types are calling the movement anti-capitalist. But I would bet that most of its members would welcome the return of a taxed and regulated and competing capitalism, as feudalism isn't working out so well. Capitalism is possible only where large groups of people are not kept artificially in poverty by bigotry and economic royalism.
Soon it will be too cold for camping out in parks and public squares. What will Occupy Wall Street do then? Getting behind a Democratic nomination fight could be an option. The candidate would have to be as free from the rigid going assumptions as the movement is yet fairly believable as a possible president -- unconventional but not marginal.
In the previous Great Depression there was no leveraging of events by mass movements. Struck down by conditions, Americans looked to the New Deal for hope. This time it will be the people who will directly drive events and cause the government to do right. Continuing public vigilance will be the necessity and is the essence of democracy.
For the longer term there will have to be larger innovations. Climate change, peak oil, peak coal, and other grave problems may be upon us. Even apart from that, there will never again be jobs enough; but there will always be more than enough work that will have to be done.
Under a far-sighted and responsive president, our options should be laid out for us and discussed democratically in every community throughout this land.
The time is coming to occupy the White House!
It is represented as made up of young people and neo-hippies but is in truth diverse; there are many in it who are "square" and long unemployed or newly broke, who otherwise might be relatively conservative. There are traditional liberals in it and socialists and right-wing libertarians and even some tea partiers, as well as grannies and businessmen and others.
Right now, they are what is happening in this country, as everyone else seems frozen in fear and bile.
The news media, that fervent guardian of the status quo, at first ignored or downplayed what some are calling the American Spring (after the Prague and Arab "springs"). But the movement is too big, too colorful, too assertive, too prone to growing and morphing, for them to continue that.
Those who love privilege and hate equality are complaining as though aggrieved that the Occupiers have no manifesto and no list of unconditional demands. Anything specific that they published would of course become a target as well as weakening their unity. Their genius is in their maintaining the diffuseness of their overlapping objectives.
Yet what they basically stand for is evident to anyone who will pay attention: accountability of economic power to the government, accountability of the government to the people (and not to economic power), and accountaility of the people to our now-compromised ideals: equality, personal freedom, and human rights. These and not the tea party Tories are our real patriots.
The massive anti-war and civil rights movements of the tumultuous 'sixties eventually succeeded in shutting down the Vietnam war and racial segregation. They were a hard sell to most Americans because they seemed to embody socialism, drugs, revolution, scruffiness, free love, and distaste for the work ethic. Occupy Wall Street is quite different, as it represents "the 99%" of us who have gotten hurt by this economy, by the criminals of finance who created it, and by the implicitly bought politicians who are protecting accumulated wealth and not us.
Politicians have sized up this new force differently. That some profess to be more-or-less favorable to it hints at their fear of its potential.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg, hitherto supposedly a good guy, is surly toward it and says it will cost jobs. (What will cost jobs, Mr. Mayor?) And Herman Cain (who also says that blacks are brainwashed, that he would not consider putting a Muslim in his cabinet, and that it's your own damn fault if you're unemployed) alleges that it is unAmerican, a term better applied to himself. Mitt Romney says it is scary class warfare.
Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, spins it as a justified anti-Obama display (though in truth it seems indifferent to the president, probably regarding him as irrelevant). Rick Santorum sees it as righteous in demanding that crimes be punished but is against government "intrusiveness" to set the economy right. Another GOP aspirant, Buddy Roemer, endorses it outright, saying that Main Street stands for jobs and Wall Street for greed.
The sincerity of the movement's political admirers will be established by whether they are now ready to tax the rich. I don't see many takers.
Mr. Obama is calling for that, but he waited to do so till he had lost the clout to make it happen. Though he says what most people believe according to polls, his popularity keeps declining; he is probably seen as maneuvering for political advantage rather than as sincerely a populist. He is out of options, while the economy remains stalled or in decline.
Tea party types are calling the movement anti-capitalist. But I would bet that most of its members would welcome the return of a taxed and regulated and competing capitalism, as feudalism isn't working out so well. Capitalism is possible only where large groups of people are not kept artificially in poverty by bigotry and economic royalism.
Soon it will be too cold for camping out in parks and public squares. What will Occupy Wall Street do then? Getting behind a Democratic nomination fight could be an option. The candidate would have to be as free from the rigid going assumptions as the movement is yet fairly believable as a possible president -- unconventional but not marginal.
In the previous Great Depression there was no leveraging of events by mass movements. Struck down by conditions, Americans looked to the New Deal for hope. This time it will be the people who will directly drive events and cause the government to do right. Continuing public vigilance will be the necessity and is the essence of democracy.
For the longer term there will have to be larger innovations. Climate change, peak oil, peak coal, and other grave problems may be upon us. Even apart from that, there will never again be jobs enough; but there will always be more than enough work that will have to be done.
Under a far-sighted and responsive president, our options should be laid out for us and discussed democratically in every community throughout this land.
The time is coming to occupy the White House!
Saturday, September 17, 2011
MARCHIN' SHOES
Maxine Waters of California seems ambivalent. She is a black Congresswoman who is in the habit of declaring that she loves the president and wants to help him be a successful candidate, then poking him smartly in the eye. Most recently she responded to his speech before the Congressional Black Caucus by intimating that it was puzzling, condescending, and insulting.
You can see what she was getting at. There was the lingo -- the dropping of final "g"s, as in workin', trying', complainin' --affected to make him sound either black or like George W. Bush. Then there was his admonition to quit bitchin' and get out of their bedroom slippers and into their marchin' shoes. As though they were a bunch of slackers who were letting him down.
He had better have them with him; if he's the Democratic nominee and blacks stay home, his chances of re-election go from diminished to demolished.
But what would they be voting for? The unemployment rate among blacks was at 11.5% when this administration took office. It is now at 16.7%. The president has not proposed any measure to alleviate unemployment specifically in the black community, where it is worse than anywhere else. He is fearful that any "favoring of his own" (over whites) would worsen his lot. This calculated neglect is part of the price blacks are paying for him, and who can blame them if they aren't convinced he's worth it?
After failing to initially demand a tax hike for the rich because of other priorities and then trading away any chance for one, Mr. Obama has made that his issue of the moment -- now that he has no leverage and it won't happen. This is what his forsaken base always wanted to hear, but today who could trust him to follow through? Despite this new "combativeness", his approval rating goes down and down. He is out of options.
The cynicism of this administration is probably less evident to him than to his apparatus. The money from Wall Street pours in and is heralded as a tribute to his pragmatism and his ability to get along with all crucial elements of our diverse polity. No one says that one pleases the lamb by patting it on the head and the lion by doing nothing while it eats the lamb; this sophistication is the sine qua non of the contemporary statecraft that's all about money.
Part of me would love to see a black candidate enter the Democratic nomination race as an uncompromising truth-teller and fearless reformer. Meanwhile, in Madison and on Wall Street a movement takes shape that will sooner or later go national.
Politics is finally not about money but about support, not about rhetoric but about issues, not about being all things to all people but about being the right person for one's hour. It is time to march -- not with the Barack Obamas and Mitt Romneys but over them to a future that is not theirs but ours.
You can see what she was getting at. There was the lingo -- the dropping of final "g"s, as in workin', trying', complainin' --affected to make him sound either black or like George W. Bush. Then there was his admonition to quit bitchin' and get out of their bedroom slippers and into their marchin' shoes. As though they were a bunch of slackers who were letting him down.
He had better have them with him; if he's the Democratic nominee and blacks stay home, his chances of re-election go from diminished to demolished.
But what would they be voting for? The unemployment rate among blacks was at 11.5% when this administration took office. It is now at 16.7%. The president has not proposed any measure to alleviate unemployment specifically in the black community, where it is worse than anywhere else. He is fearful that any "favoring of his own" (over whites) would worsen his lot. This calculated neglect is part of the price blacks are paying for him, and who can blame them if they aren't convinced he's worth it?
After failing to initially demand a tax hike for the rich because of other priorities and then trading away any chance for one, Mr. Obama has made that his issue of the moment -- now that he has no leverage and it won't happen. This is what his forsaken base always wanted to hear, but today who could trust him to follow through? Despite this new "combativeness", his approval rating goes down and down. He is out of options.
The cynicism of this administration is probably less evident to him than to his apparatus. The money from Wall Street pours in and is heralded as a tribute to his pragmatism and his ability to get along with all crucial elements of our diverse polity. No one says that one pleases the lamb by patting it on the head and the lion by doing nothing while it eats the lamb; this sophistication is the sine qua non of the contemporary statecraft that's all about money.
Part of me would love to see a black candidate enter the Democratic nomination race as an uncompromising truth-teller and fearless reformer. Meanwhile, in Madison and on Wall Street a movement takes shape that will sooner or later go national.
Politics is finally not about money but about support, not about rhetoric but about issues, not about being all things to all people but about being the right person for one's hour. It is time to march -- not with the Barack Obamas and Mitt Romneys but over them to a future that is not theirs but ours.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
MOVING RIGHT ALONG....
Now the Congressional seat of the fiery and phony Anthony Weiner, which had been in Democratic hands since 1923, has been claimed by a 70-year-old GOP buffoon who originally opposed having the Federal government help those sickened in the 9/11 attacks and who told a Jewish district that this is a Christian country -- which means, if it means anything, that Jews are second-class citizens. Jews voted for him anyway, dramatizing their discontent with the administration and in the knowledge that this turkey won't be in office long enough to cause them much tsuris.
Dem angst will reach new highs. But the pols won't do anything, as they're constitutionally incapable of it.
In recent days I exchanged emails several times with Rabbi Michael Lerner, humanitarian and social activist, who months ago proposed the formation of a Dump Obama movement patterned on the Dump LBJ movement of 1968. Rabbi Lerner has a strategy that I take it he doesn't want discussed publicly yet, so I'll say only that I don't believe anything will avail us but the arrival of a hard-hitting Dem candidate who's in it for nothing less than to take the nomination and the election. Nor do I think that any organization can generate such a candidate. It has to be someone self-motivated and undeferential toward what others have in mind.
Optimally, I believe, such a candidate would come from the military, for a combination of forcefulness, patriotism, authority, and bravery. Someone with military credentials could safely propose pulling out of the Dubya wars. The risk would be that he or she would manifest the wrong kind of outspokenness, as political amateurs are prone to do; so the candidate would have
to be very bright, with a shrewd sense of just how far to go.
Best of all I'd wish for some crusty old general, perhaps from a pro-union working class family, who doesn't suffer fools at all but is engaging and pointedly funny and a natural leader able to stir conviction and build confidence.
The campaign should stress necessity rather than idealism and should both sound alarms and offer inspiration and a call to tackle our situation with high spirits. As for the Republicans, it should show them no quarter whatever. The candidate should call them anti-American sons of bitches and should demand their complete and permanent marginalization and their replacement as the opposition party by something patriotic and socially tolerable; this is war, not just politics.
Picture our general telling a rally that the Republicans want to wreck the country so their clients can sell it for scrap. While another kind of Dem wouldn't dare do that, I think someone who was recognized as a realist and a fighter could get away with such hyperbole and make it work. To be willing to raise eyebrows can be to win admiration for having guts. Imagine a minor version of Dwight Eisenhower or Doug MacArthur who channels Harry Truman.
Dem angst will reach new highs. But the pols won't do anything, as they're constitutionally incapable of it.
In recent days I exchanged emails several times with Rabbi Michael Lerner, humanitarian and social activist, who months ago proposed the formation of a Dump Obama movement patterned on the Dump LBJ movement of 1968. Rabbi Lerner has a strategy that I take it he doesn't want discussed publicly yet, so I'll say only that I don't believe anything will avail us but the arrival of a hard-hitting Dem candidate who's in it for nothing less than to take the nomination and the election. Nor do I think that any organization can generate such a candidate. It has to be someone self-motivated and undeferential toward what others have in mind.
Optimally, I believe, such a candidate would come from the military, for a combination of forcefulness, patriotism, authority, and bravery. Someone with military credentials could safely propose pulling out of the Dubya wars. The risk would be that he or she would manifest the wrong kind of outspokenness, as political amateurs are prone to do; so the candidate would have
to be very bright, with a shrewd sense of just how far to go.
Best of all I'd wish for some crusty old general, perhaps from a pro-union working class family, who doesn't suffer fools at all but is engaging and pointedly funny and a natural leader able to stir conviction and build confidence.
The campaign should stress necessity rather than idealism and should both sound alarms and offer inspiration and a call to tackle our situation with high spirits. As for the Republicans, it should show them no quarter whatever. The candidate should call them anti-American sons of bitches and should demand their complete and permanent marginalization and their replacement as the opposition party by something patriotic and socially tolerable; this is war, not just politics.
Picture our general telling a rally that the Republicans want to wreck the country so their clients can sell it for scrap. While another kind of Dem wouldn't dare do that, I think someone who was recognized as a realist and a fighter could get away with such hyperbole and make it work. To be willing to raise eyebrows can be to win admiration for having guts. Imagine a minor version of Dwight Eisenhower or Doug MacArthur who channels Harry Truman.
In the media, that bulwark of the status quo, we have a paper tiger, disliked and mistrusted. The candidate should answer only what he or she wishes to answer and field the rest with good-humored quips and cool firmness. I would have him or her propose that corporations be required to divest themselves of media holdings and that the news business be owned by a guild of reporters and journalists with a charter that forbids editorializing and one-sided coverage.
You never hear a politician mention the population explosion, and they say little about climate change, though these are headed for us and are enormously dangerous. This candidate could incorporate those issues, not by emphasizing them but by indicating that when there is leadership it will be possible to discuss and evaluate them democratically and plan ahead for the sake of our long-term security. People know that we're adrift and want reassurance.
Will we see a new Andrew Jackson come forward? I suppose not. But I continue to believe that we will see an alternative to what we have now. How much of one? Fingers crossed!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
TO STOP THE BLEEDING
Self-sabotage. We in this society believe in competition, even to the exclusion of self-interest. The bosses have wielded their money advantage to win a pyrrhic victory over their own workers, making them underbid each other for diminishing rewards. When workers have little to spend, how can they buy the goods and services that the bosses are offering?
Self-sabotage. The congressional Republicans' chosen weapons -- blind obstruction, appeals to irrational fears, and lying vilification -- would snap back on them if they were to gain the White House. A Dem opposition can play the game of no-quarter-given with as much angry joy as a Repub one can. The precedent is set: If you can't govern, you can't win the next election.
Self-sabotage. Defeatism and complacency abound. For example, Tom Hayden, that old paladin of participatory democracy, is making excuses for Mr. Obama. He says that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. all were likewise faulted for being too moderate. Well, not quite. JFK had a Congress that was immobilized by a coalition of Repubs and Southern Dems. Bobby Kennedy was advancing, bidding to unite and organize white workers and blacks (who conservatives pitted against one another) when he was killed. Death overtook Dr. King as he was preparing to summon forth a new populism to push for peace and the abolition of poverty. They were striving to go somewhere. What Mr. Obama has done is, for the most part, to lie down.
Self-sabotage. On the Internet now are early ads for the Obama campaign, to rally the forsaken base. Featured are pictures of the president grinning dazzlingly, alive with that old flair. The contrast between the promise of '08 and the reality of '11 may be making those pictures counterproductive, I'd imagine. Most who see them must be asking, "What do you -- or we -- have to be so upbeat about?"
Self-sabotage. A recent column says that the reason no one has come forward to take on the prez for the Dem nomination is that campaigns these days are forbiddingly expensive, so that a candidate would have to enjoy backing from the pols, who are too cowardly to risk extending it. (That may be the case, but see below.)
Self-sabotage. Britain's former chancelor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, says he regrets that he and the other Labour ministers didn't take down the hopelessly unpopular and inept Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That possibility was discussed, but they never pulled the trigger. I wondered at the time how they could stand by frozen in indecision while a reckoning at the polls came at them apace? There is something in the psychology of it, the sheer passivity, that not only shocks but mystifies. We are seeing the same thing in this country now.
Well, then --
What would NOT be self-sabotage? First, waking up. At present there are two ways to get the rightists' program for the country -- by voting for the Republicans and by voting for Mr. Obama -- and no way of getting anything else. That has to be seen for what it is.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Someone must personify the great reversal that is urgent. In the absence of a nationwide movement, there must be a candidate who has what it takes to precipitate one. That candidate must be the anti-Obama: liberal, tough, loud, unyielding, ferociously bent on not only getting elected but putting the Repub minority permanently on the defensive and, to the fullest extent possible, driving it from public life so that the pragmatic moderate majority can again have a say. Polls repeatedly show that most Americans agree with the Dems, not the Repubs. What is required to rally the voters is a battling spirit in place of the traditional excessive caution and shrinking defensiveness.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? The recognition that the political scene has changed dramatically just lately. YouTube is the greatest instrument of democracy since the secret ballot. Overnight a believable candidate who made a combative speech would be talked about obsessively in Riyadh, Kinshasa, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Paris, etc., with analysts asking, "What if this person caught on and won?" Here, reporters and journalists would be entranced. The funds would roll in. The volunteers would come cheering, as happened in Madison. It will be ideas, not concentrations of money, that decide the politics of the future. That is the new, more fluid reality.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Opting for survival over fatalism. Daunting prospects await us from the environment, energy, and overpopulation, among other hazards. The one essential factor in getting atop that is the combination of local and centralized leadership. Given it, the forces of divide-and-wreck can be beaten and we can work together with intelligence and have a future.
Anyone can see that that is true. So now what we have to ask ourselves is, What is it that we want: to live as responsible citizens of a democratic society or to die sucking our thumbs?
Self-sabotage. The congressional Republicans' chosen weapons -- blind obstruction, appeals to irrational fears, and lying vilification -- would snap back on them if they were to gain the White House. A Dem opposition can play the game of no-quarter-given with as much angry joy as a Repub one can. The precedent is set: If you can't govern, you can't win the next election.
Self-sabotage. Defeatism and complacency abound. For example, Tom Hayden, that old paladin of participatory democracy, is making excuses for Mr. Obama. He says that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. all were likewise faulted for being too moderate. Well, not quite. JFK had a Congress that was immobilized by a coalition of Repubs and Southern Dems. Bobby Kennedy was advancing, bidding to unite and organize white workers and blacks (who conservatives pitted against one another) when he was killed. Death overtook Dr. King as he was preparing to summon forth a new populism to push for peace and the abolition of poverty. They were striving to go somewhere. What Mr. Obama has done is, for the most part, to lie down.
Self-sabotage. On the Internet now are early ads for the Obama campaign, to rally the forsaken base. Featured are pictures of the president grinning dazzlingly, alive with that old flair. The contrast between the promise of '08 and the reality of '11 may be making those pictures counterproductive, I'd imagine. Most who see them must be asking, "What do you -- or we -- have to be so upbeat about?"
Self-sabotage. A recent column says that the reason no one has come forward to take on the prez for the Dem nomination is that campaigns these days are forbiddingly expensive, so that a candidate would have to enjoy backing from the pols, who are too cowardly to risk extending it. (That may be the case, but see below.)
Self-sabotage. Britain's former chancelor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, says he regrets that he and the other Labour ministers didn't take down the hopelessly unpopular and inept Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That possibility was discussed, but they never pulled the trigger. I wondered at the time how they could stand by frozen in indecision while a reckoning at the polls came at them apace? There is something in the psychology of it, the sheer passivity, that not only shocks but mystifies. We are seeing the same thing in this country now.
Well, then --
What would NOT be self-sabotage? First, waking up. At present there are two ways to get the rightists' program for the country -- by voting for the Republicans and by voting for Mr. Obama -- and no way of getting anything else. That has to be seen for what it is.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Someone must personify the great reversal that is urgent. In the absence of a nationwide movement, there must be a candidate who has what it takes to precipitate one. That candidate must be the anti-Obama: liberal, tough, loud, unyielding, ferociously bent on not only getting elected but putting the Repub minority permanently on the defensive and, to the fullest extent possible, driving it from public life so that the pragmatic moderate majority can again have a say. Polls repeatedly show that most Americans agree with the Dems, not the Repubs. What is required to rally the voters is a battling spirit in place of the traditional excessive caution and shrinking defensiveness.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? The recognition that the political scene has changed dramatically just lately. YouTube is the greatest instrument of democracy since the secret ballot. Overnight a believable candidate who made a combative speech would be talked about obsessively in Riyadh, Kinshasa, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Paris, etc., with analysts asking, "What if this person caught on and won?" Here, reporters and journalists would be entranced. The funds would roll in. The volunteers would come cheering, as happened in Madison. It will be ideas, not concentrations of money, that decide the politics of the future. That is the new, more fluid reality.
What would NOT be self-sabotage? Opting for survival over fatalism. Daunting prospects await us from the environment, energy, and overpopulation, among other hazards. The one essential factor in getting atop that is the combination of local and centralized leadership. Given it, the forces of divide-and-wreck can be beaten and we can work together with intelligence and have a future.
Anyone can see that that is true. So now what we have to ask ourselves is, What is it that we want: to live as responsible citizens of a democratic society or to die sucking our thumbs?
Saturday, September 3, 2011
DEAFENING RUMBLINGS
President Obama, who since the midterms has been assiduously defining himself as ineffectual and eager to capitulate, is now carrying that to the point of self-parody. Notice the fate of the ozone standards in consequence of business pressure, for example. Environmentalists were already giving this Democratic president a grade of "F".
Meanwhile, one Huffington Post columnist reports that if you talk with elected officials about Mr. Obama, you hear "unprintable rage", while another opines that it is getting impossible to take the man seriously. There have been no calls for him to step aside, I reckon because the pols assume they're stuck with him and don't want to be seen as further lessening his dwindling prospects.
But not everyone is so guarded. Ernie Chambers is a black man who served as a state senator in Nebraska for 38 years with an outspokenness and a legislative mastery that made him both a state treasure and a holy terror. He got national headlines a few years ago when he lampooned a certain kind of lawsuit by suing the Biblical deity for making terroristic threats against some of his constituents. While recently announcing his candidacy for resumption of the legislative career from which term limits sidelined him, he was asked his thoughts on our first black president. His reply was that the latter should not be in office and that he was "pathetic", "a milquetoast", and "a weak, scaredy man". So much for that monolithic racial support that was touted as the incumbent's ace in the hole.
And members of the Congressional Black Caucus, notably Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, have become thunderous in their exasperation, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver notoriously referring to the president's budget deal with the Republicans as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich". They say they're supporting Mr. Obama, but you get the impression that that support is eroding fast. Unemployment among blacks is at a 27-year high, and that isn't being addressed.
To be fair, Mr. Obama would face the charge of helping "his own" at the expense of everyone else if he did something about black unemployment in particular. But another kind of personality in the White House, white or black, could win respect for having the guts and the fairness to do it. The rationale would be, "We're going to act where the need is greatest, and race be damned."
This White House has apparently decided that Democrats have nowhere else to go. Well, they stayed home in the midterms, and you know how that worked out. The notion that they and independents will be terrified of the Republican nominee and therefore will drag themselves to the polls is ill-founded. You're dreaming if you think the GOP is going to nominate some Marginal Melvin who preaches that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Americans will not vote themselves out of those "socialist" benefits, especially in a sagging and threatened economy.
As for that overnight phee-nom Rick Perry, he has spoken and written enough to guarantee that the Repub establishment will bump off his candidacy if the journalists and rival candidates can't. The nominee will be someone superficially unscary but acceptable to the tea-partiers, such as a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie.
The assumption lingers that there will be no Dem challenger to Mr. Obama. When nothing keeps happening, it's human nature to think that nothing will go right on happening. But ask the people of Vermont: A well-groomed landscape one day, a hurricane's devastation the next.
A credible opponent could count on being photographed with hand held aloft not only by Ernie Chambers but by Al Gore and a number of vigorous Dem activists and celebrities. And that would be before establishing viability. The prospect has gone from inviting to irresistible.
Right now either no one is running yet or someone is being quiet and cagy while laying plans. Whichever it is, you can bank on this: You will see a mightily contested race.
Meanwhile, one Huffington Post columnist reports that if you talk with elected officials about Mr. Obama, you hear "unprintable rage", while another opines that it is getting impossible to take the man seriously. There have been no calls for him to step aside, I reckon because the pols assume they're stuck with him and don't want to be seen as further lessening his dwindling prospects.
But not everyone is so guarded. Ernie Chambers is a black man who served as a state senator in Nebraska for 38 years with an outspokenness and a legislative mastery that made him both a state treasure and a holy terror. He got national headlines a few years ago when he lampooned a certain kind of lawsuit by suing the Biblical deity for making terroristic threats against some of his constituents. While recently announcing his candidacy for resumption of the legislative career from which term limits sidelined him, he was asked his thoughts on our first black president. His reply was that the latter should not be in office and that he was "pathetic", "a milquetoast", and "a weak, scaredy man". So much for that monolithic racial support that was touted as the incumbent's ace in the hole.
And members of the Congressional Black Caucus, notably Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, have become thunderous in their exasperation, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver notoriously referring to the president's budget deal with the Republicans as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich". They say they're supporting Mr. Obama, but you get the impression that that support is eroding fast. Unemployment among blacks is at a 27-year high, and that isn't being addressed.
To be fair, Mr. Obama would face the charge of helping "his own" at the expense of everyone else if he did something about black unemployment in particular. But another kind of personality in the White House, white or black, could win respect for having the guts and the fairness to do it. The rationale would be, "We're going to act where the need is greatest, and race be damned."
This White House has apparently decided that Democrats have nowhere else to go. Well, they stayed home in the midterms, and you know how that worked out. The notion that they and independents will be terrified of the Republican nominee and therefore will drag themselves to the polls is ill-founded. You're dreaming if you think the GOP is going to nominate some Marginal Melvin who preaches that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Americans will not vote themselves out of those "socialist" benefits, especially in a sagging and threatened economy.
As for that overnight phee-nom Rick Perry, he has spoken and written enough to guarantee that the Repub establishment will bump off his candidacy if the journalists and rival candidates can't. The nominee will be someone superficially unscary but acceptable to the tea-partiers, such as a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie.
The assumption lingers that there will be no Dem challenger to Mr. Obama. When nothing keeps happening, it's human nature to think that nothing will go right on happening. But ask the people of Vermont: A well-groomed landscape one day, a hurricane's devastation the next.
A credible opponent could count on being photographed with hand held aloft not only by Ernie Chambers but by Al Gore and a number of vigorous Dem activists and celebrities. And that would be before establishing viability. The prospect has gone from inviting to irresistible.
Right now either no one is running yet or someone is being quiet and cagy while laying plans. Whichever it is, you can bank on this: You will see a mightily contested race.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
GARY HART
Watching and waiting to see if someone takes on President Obama in the primaries makes for impatience. One taps one's fingers and speculates and daydreams, itching to get out there and help make history happen. What follows is one take on what could be, though the odds on it are difficult to compute.
A superb source of info on political trends is the Huffington Post. One of its regular bloggers is Gary Hart, onetime United States senator and presidential candidate. Hart, like most of the other Huffington bloggers, is temperately but substantively critical of the Obama administration and its defeatist mindset and weak will.
As Hart has always been very much a political striver, I have to wonder if the ongoing search for a liberal opponent to the prez has reached his door? As recently as the early 2000s he was looking into the possibility of another presidential run. The longer nobody else tries for it, the more inclined he may be to begin taking such a task seriously despite all that weighs into the scale against it.
If you watch Hart on YouTube from last year and the immediately previous years, you will find that he is very articulate and clear-headed, though not a compelling personality. He still looks good for an oldtimer: thick dark gray hair, firm features, a strong and slender body that is unbent and without stiffness. There even remains something boyish in his demeanor.
He has baggage, of course. His presidential quest of '88, when he was the frontrunner for the Dem nomination following a strong showing four years earlier, was done to death by the news media. Replacing without advance notice their policy of respecting the privacy of candidates' private lives, reporters exposed his tendency to affairs with women. After JFK and Bill Clinton, and after the passage of decades, that tendency, which one hopes is in the past, might no longer count for much in a campaign. It helps that he is still with the wife, Lee, who put up with his shenanigans.
Well, why Gary Hart, of all people? Few are as qualified for the presidency. As a young lawyer he was prominent in the effort to make the Democratic party more democratic and deliver it from control by the old party bosses after the '68 election. In '72 he was George McGovern's campaign manager, and a keen one. He then served two terms in the Senate from Colorado, 1975-87, where he was a doer and was seen as a comer. Seeking the presidency, he was an "Atari Democrat" or "neoliberal", emphasizing the economic advantages of emerging technologies and running on non-ideological "new ideas". He was a centrist in a time when the center was still midway across the ideological spectrum rather than far into the right outfield; in today's terms he is a liberal.
Crucially, Hart has long been a thoroughgoing and much-respected authority on national security and defense issues, advocating a lighter and smarter military and getting listened to. Administrations have repeatedly drawn on his expertise. Five days before 9/11, he publicly warned that terrorists could and would strike and that thousands of lives would be lost; he and a few others had urgently advocated the creation of a department of homeland security while our leaders were dozing.
Were Hart to have a go at it, his age would be a factor. He will turn 76 within a month after the '12 election. Considering that he seems in excellent shape, my guess is that he could finesse that. He might want to (1) immediately pick a consistently progressive young runningmate who would be ready to step in at once if need be; (2) pledge that he would not run for re-election and might resign at some propitious time after setting things in motion; and (3) state that upon taking office he would give his cabinet an undated letter of resignation which it could activate if it felt that he was not totally up to the day-to-day requirements of the position. Together with such measures, his brainpower and energy level might suffice to see him through.
Would Hart be the ideal Obama challenger? One can dream of an inspired leader, which he presumably would not be. But he could probably do ably what a challenger should do: communicate his reasoning to the American people in vigorous language with candor and a command of hard fact; carry the fight to the Republicans, hitting hard rhetorically, as he does in his blog; and invoke moral authority on social questions and on the kind of society we want to be.
If he ran, he should firmly refuse to be put on the defensive by anyone, whether reporters or politicians, and should stay on message with detailed critiques and specific proposals, doing a significant part of his campaigning online so as to conserve his native vitality.
Walter Mondale once famously asked Gary Hart during a debate, "Where's the beef?" Today the beef is with whoever goes after the Obama administration. If Hart wants to assume that role, he can probably do so, at least if no one else of standing applies for the job first.
It's pretty iffy, yes; but it's worth mulling over.
A superb source of info on political trends is the Huffington Post. One of its regular bloggers is Gary Hart, onetime United States senator and presidential candidate. Hart, like most of the other Huffington bloggers, is temperately but substantively critical of the Obama administration and its defeatist mindset and weak will.
As Hart has always been very much a political striver, I have to wonder if the ongoing search for a liberal opponent to the prez has reached his door? As recently as the early 2000s he was looking into the possibility of another presidential run. The longer nobody else tries for it, the more inclined he may be to begin taking such a task seriously despite all that weighs into the scale against it.
If you watch Hart on YouTube from last year and the immediately previous years, you will find that he is very articulate and clear-headed, though not a compelling personality. He still looks good for an oldtimer: thick dark gray hair, firm features, a strong and slender body that is unbent and without stiffness. There even remains something boyish in his demeanor.
He has baggage, of course. His presidential quest of '88, when he was the frontrunner for the Dem nomination following a strong showing four years earlier, was done to death by the news media. Replacing without advance notice their policy of respecting the privacy of candidates' private lives, reporters exposed his tendency to affairs with women. After JFK and Bill Clinton, and after the passage of decades, that tendency, which one hopes is in the past, might no longer count for much in a campaign. It helps that he is still with the wife, Lee, who put up with his shenanigans.
Well, why Gary Hart, of all people? Few are as qualified for the presidency. As a young lawyer he was prominent in the effort to make the Democratic party more democratic and deliver it from control by the old party bosses after the '68 election. In '72 he was George McGovern's campaign manager, and a keen one. He then served two terms in the Senate from Colorado, 1975-87, where he was a doer and was seen as a comer. Seeking the presidency, he was an "Atari Democrat" or "neoliberal", emphasizing the economic advantages of emerging technologies and running on non-ideological "new ideas". He was a centrist in a time when the center was still midway across the ideological spectrum rather than far into the right outfield; in today's terms he is a liberal.
Crucially, Hart has long been a thoroughgoing and much-respected authority on national security and defense issues, advocating a lighter and smarter military and getting listened to. Administrations have repeatedly drawn on his expertise. Five days before 9/11, he publicly warned that terrorists could and would strike and that thousands of lives would be lost; he and a few others had urgently advocated the creation of a department of homeland security while our leaders were dozing.
Were Hart to have a go at it, his age would be a factor. He will turn 76 within a month after the '12 election. Considering that he seems in excellent shape, my guess is that he could finesse that. He might want to (1) immediately pick a consistently progressive young runningmate who would be ready to step in at once if need be; (2) pledge that he would not run for re-election and might resign at some propitious time after setting things in motion; and (3) state that upon taking office he would give his cabinet an undated letter of resignation which it could activate if it felt that he was not totally up to the day-to-day requirements of the position. Together with such measures, his brainpower and energy level might suffice to see him through.
Would Hart be the ideal Obama challenger? One can dream of an inspired leader, which he presumably would not be. But he could probably do ably what a challenger should do: communicate his reasoning to the American people in vigorous language with candor and a command of hard fact; carry the fight to the Republicans, hitting hard rhetorically, as he does in his blog; and invoke moral authority on social questions and on the kind of society we want to be.
If he ran, he should firmly refuse to be put on the defensive by anyone, whether reporters or politicians, and should stay on message with detailed critiques and specific proposals, doing a significant part of his campaigning online so as to conserve his native vitality.
Walter Mondale once famously asked Gary Hart during a debate, "Where's the beef?" Today the beef is with whoever goes after the Obama administration. If Hart wants to assume that role, he can probably do so, at least if no one else of standing applies for the job first.
It's pretty iffy, yes; but it's worth mulling over.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
CONVENTIONAL THINKING
If I'm not fooling myself -- which is always a possibility, of course -- the coming forward of a meaningful Democratic rival to President Obama is right on top of us.
Lately veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield gave us a lengthy rendition of the familiar incumbents-can't-be-dumped chant, which ended on the incongruous note that if things don't improve for him Mr. Obama may be the first chief exec since Chester Alan Arthur to be denied renomination. (Well, which is it?)
Another veteran journalist, Eleanor Clift, wrote that the Dems are too terrified of the Repubs to risk weakening their man and that as a result nothing is going to be done despite the liberals' discontent and outrage. She added that anyone who went after the first black president would be viewed as an enemy by the black community and so would be left without political prospects.
Let's consider that last point. Nobody has been hurt as badly by the failed economy as blacks have, and nobody will suffer more from the assistance cutbacks that Mr. Obama has just agreed to. To say that blacks will vote their race rather than their vital interests strikes me as cynical and even racist. Were I a white candidate opposing the president, I would make Harlem one of my first stops and would expect to make hay there.
Yes, polls right now -- when there is no challenger -- say that most Dems and a high percentage of blacks want the prez again. But give us another option with a name and a face and a stirring message and I think that paradigm will quickly be replaced. A little shaking up and something that has been held on the surface only by inertia will sink to the bottom, while something unforeseen rises to the top.
Clift talked to Ralph Nader, who has sent out letters to 150 people he sees as prospective candidates. He told her that nobody thinks any of them could pull an upset in the primaries but that they could prod Mr. Obama to the left. I am glad that he is active, but the kind of candidacy he envisions would be a wasted effort. Someone who means to fight for what we stand for without winning is not an alternative to Mr. Obama but is Mr. Obama. Nothing is going to make a difference except with a person of the type who can and will lead and do joyous battle and make every effort to seize the nomination and go after a specific mandate.
Political realists "know" that nothing can be that hasn't been before. If they were right, no novelties would have come along. No one from the Deep South and no movie actor and no black aspirant would have gotten to the White House, because these things were unprecedented.
Let's look at the cases we keep reading about in which a party lost after its president met with a serious challenge, which are cited to "prove" that the same thing would happen again:
>Could the GOP have held on had the pols renominated Chet Arthur? I'd say no. It was entrenched and it stank of corruption. The opaque accidental president was both a champion spoilsman and a recent foe of the spoils system; that turn-about left him with few friends in either camp. Grover Cleveland had reform credentials ("We love him for the enemies he has made"), and the Democrats' hour had come.
>Could William Howard Taft have been favored again if Teddy Roosevelt hadn't sought to deny him a second term? I'd judge not. Progressivism was at its high water mark and Taft was a conservative and had disappointed the people's expectations.
>Would Harry Truman have gotten another nod if he had run and Estes Kefauver hadn't? Not conceivably. Harry was flagrantly unpopular; Ike would have plowed him under.
>Could Lyndon Johnson have made it if he hadn't bowed out and if Gene McCarthy had stayed home? No, I'm convinced the Dems were better off with Hubert Humphrey, who in part succeeded in distancing himself from LBJ's base-dividing war policy, something that the top guy himself couldn't have done.
>Would Jerry Ford have beaten Jimmy Carter had Ronald Reagan not tried to unhorse him? That's dubious. The Nixon pardon had slackened public trust in him. More importantly, his was a stalled administration in a time of widespread dissatisfaction over a weak economy, so that people felt they had nothing to lose by switching.
>The latter evaluation applies also to Mr. Carter, in opposition to whom Ted Kennedy had vainly struggled to overcome the legacy of Chappaquiddick, without which he might have been victorious.
>It applies as well to George H.W. Bush, who was beset, albeit weakly, by Pat Buchanan.
Those are the relevant instances. It seems to me that in every one of them the party was up against it regardless of whether an alternative candidate emerged. Contrary to the experts, I think anxiety over impending defeat did much to produce the challenge, rather than the challenge being what produced the defeat.
And now is different from those times, anyway. It has gotten steadily easier to mount a real revolt against a displeasing chief executive. YouTube and Facebook have rendered organizing and fund-raising not only easy but potentially even spontaneous!
We are told that we must have either the Republicans or a president who will not stand up to them. Are we really such chumps as to settle for that? I continue to predict that we won't. Barry Goldwater's old slogan, "A Choice, Not An Echo", recommends itself to us.
There has to be somebody credible in this huge and oh-so-varied country, who will make a bid, even at the sacrifice of comfort and privacy, to revive our economy and restore our democratic heritage. (There are only about a quarter million energetic lawyers who could do it.)
Pray that I'm right about what's going to happen, now on the cusp of a potentially momentous moment in our history.
Lately veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield gave us a lengthy rendition of the familiar incumbents-can't-be-dumped chant, which ended on the incongruous note that if things don't improve for him Mr. Obama may be the first chief exec since Chester Alan Arthur to be denied renomination. (Well, which is it?)
Another veteran journalist, Eleanor Clift, wrote that the Dems are too terrified of the Repubs to risk weakening their man and that as a result nothing is going to be done despite the liberals' discontent and outrage. She added that anyone who went after the first black president would be viewed as an enemy by the black community and so would be left without political prospects.
Let's consider that last point. Nobody has been hurt as badly by the failed economy as blacks have, and nobody will suffer more from the assistance cutbacks that Mr. Obama has just agreed to. To say that blacks will vote their race rather than their vital interests strikes me as cynical and even racist. Were I a white candidate opposing the president, I would make Harlem one of my first stops and would expect to make hay there.
Yes, polls right now -- when there is no challenger -- say that most Dems and a high percentage of blacks want the prez again. But give us another option with a name and a face and a stirring message and I think that paradigm will quickly be replaced. A little shaking up and something that has been held on the surface only by inertia will sink to the bottom, while something unforeseen rises to the top.
Clift talked to Ralph Nader, who has sent out letters to 150 people he sees as prospective candidates. He told her that nobody thinks any of them could pull an upset in the primaries but that they could prod Mr. Obama to the left. I am glad that he is active, but the kind of candidacy he envisions would be a wasted effort. Someone who means to fight for what we stand for without winning is not an alternative to Mr. Obama but is Mr. Obama. Nothing is going to make a difference except with a person of the type who can and will lead and do joyous battle and make every effort to seize the nomination and go after a specific mandate.
Political realists "know" that nothing can be that hasn't been before. If they were right, no novelties would have come along. No one from the Deep South and no movie actor and no black aspirant would have gotten to the White House, because these things were unprecedented.
Let's look at the cases we keep reading about in which a party lost after its president met with a serious challenge, which are cited to "prove" that the same thing would happen again:
>Could the GOP have held on had the pols renominated Chet Arthur? I'd say no. It was entrenched and it stank of corruption. The opaque accidental president was both a champion spoilsman and a recent foe of the spoils system; that turn-about left him with few friends in either camp. Grover Cleveland had reform credentials ("We love him for the enemies he has made"), and the Democrats' hour had come.
>Could William Howard Taft have been favored again if Teddy Roosevelt hadn't sought to deny him a second term? I'd judge not. Progressivism was at its high water mark and Taft was a conservative and had disappointed the people's expectations.
>Would Harry Truman have gotten another nod if he had run and Estes Kefauver hadn't? Not conceivably. Harry was flagrantly unpopular; Ike would have plowed him under.
>Could Lyndon Johnson have made it if he hadn't bowed out and if Gene McCarthy had stayed home? No, I'm convinced the Dems were better off with Hubert Humphrey, who in part succeeded in distancing himself from LBJ's base-dividing war policy, something that the top guy himself couldn't have done.
>Would Jerry Ford have beaten Jimmy Carter had Ronald Reagan not tried to unhorse him? That's dubious. The Nixon pardon had slackened public trust in him. More importantly, his was a stalled administration in a time of widespread dissatisfaction over a weak economy, so that people felt they had nothing to lose by switching.
>The latter evaluation applies also to Mr. Carter, in opposition to whom Ted Kennedy had vainly struggled to overcome the legacy of Chappaquiddick, without which he might have been victorious.
>It applies as well to George H.W. Bush, who was beset, albeit weakly, by Pat Buchanan.
Those are the relevant instances. It seems to me that in every one of them the party was up against it regardless of whether an alternative candidate emerged. Contrary to the experts, I think anxiety over impending defeat did much to produce the challenge, rather than the challenge being what produced the defeat.
And now is different from those times, anyway. It has gotten steadily easier to mount a real revolt against a displeasing chief executive. YouTube and Facebook have rendered organizing and fund-raising not only easy but potentially even spontaneous!
We are told that we must have either the Republicans or a president who will not stand up to them. Are we really such chumps as to settle for that? I continue to predict that we won't. Barry Goldwater's old slogan, "A Choice, Not An Echo", recommends itself to us.
There has to be somebody credible in this huge and oh-so-varied country, who will make a bid, even at the sacrifice of comfort and privacy, to revive our economy and restore our democratic heritage. (There are only about a quarter million energetic lawyers who could do it.)
Pray that I'm right about what's going to happen, now on the cusp of a potentially momentous moment in our history.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
HERE COMES?
I can taste it.
What is it? A viable, free-wheeling populist candidacy in the Democratic presidential primaries.
The latest and biggest sellout by the Obama administration has probably sealed its fate. I used to think that the president could win the election if renominated, in which case we'd have another four years of pain and stultification, probably to be followed by a Republican regime and the completed wrecking of every social advance of the past century. But Obama is now looking like Carter: a one-termer who will lose, not because he's a liberal but because he's viewed as not up to the demands of the job in trying times.
Most recently we have Ralph Nader stating in an interview that there is a near-100% chance that a Dem will take on the president. That fits with my own assessment. With this much disaffection and frustration, I'd say it can't not happen. A challenger will have all the issues, together with all the emotional fire-power.
So far the situation in the Dem camp has been discouragement, fear, and passivity. Those unhappy with the president -- as who isn't by this time? -- have been afraid to disunite the party lest it lose and we end up with fanatics running the country.
But fear can be turned into anger, and anger can be turned into resolution and energy that can be harnessed for a cause. What that takes is called "leadership". (I realize that to the Democrats that's an alien concept; but the phenomenon does exist out there.)
Nader had pledged earlier that he would help find a Dem alternative, so I think we can figure that he has been taking soundings and offering suggestions. The concern had to be that he would come up with someone who would split the party but couldn't win: some avowed socialist or some testosterone-deprived professor of ecological science. So I am encouraged that he is talking in terms of a former senator or former governor. A veteran pol running as an outsider could have an advantage, having been vetted and knowing how to campaign effectively and how to avoid typical beginner's missteps.
Nader doesn't seem to have any particular individual in mind. That could mean that no one has taken his bait, or it could mean that several people are considering it. The absence of gossip about anyone at all seems to imply that the "community" of politicians isn't hearing anything, as it would leak from every pore if it did. This contrasts with Nader's confidence. Yet I don't read the latter as a bluff.
He says the only question is the candidate's level of stature. But the issue isn't stature. It's ability to generate conviction and support. Some obscure lawyer who is smart and aggressive and clean enough to withstand scrutiny could do that.
In our system we have seen candidates come out of nowhere and get nominated. William Jennings Bryan, a Congressman and activist, was new to most people when the Dems picked him at age 36. Wendell Willkie was devoid of electoral experience and had been a Dem until not long before when the Repub convention surprised itself by yielding to the carefully packed galleries' chant of "We Want Willkie!".
Either I'm way wrong or we will have ourselves a candidate within days or weeks. It feels as if it's on its way and tremendously close.
What is it? A viable, free-wheeling populist candidacy in the Democratic presidential primaries.
The latest and biggest sellout by the Obama administration has probably sealed its fate. I used to think that the president could win the election if renominated, in which case we'd have another four years of pain and stultification, probably to be followed by a Republican regime and the completed wrecking of every social advance of the past century. But Obama is now looking like Carter: a one-termer who will lose, not because he's a liberal but because he's viewed as not up to the demands of the job in trying times.
Most recently we have Ralph Nader stating in an interview that there is a near-100% chance that a Dem will take on the president. That fits with my own assessment. With this much disaffection and frustration, I'd say it can't not happen. A challenger will have all the issues, together with all the emotional fire-power.
So far the situation in the Dem camp has been discouragement, fear, and passivity. Those unhappy with the president -- as who isn't by this time? -- have been afraid to disunite the party lest it lose and we end up with fanatics running the country.
But fear can be turned into anger, and anger can be turned into resolution and energy that can be harnessed for a cause. What that takes is called "leadership". (I realize that to the Democrats that's an alien concept; but the phenomenon does exist out there.)
Nader had pledged earlier that he would help find a Dem alternative, so I think we can figure that he has been taking soundings and offering suggestions. The concern had to be that he would come up with someone who would split the party but couldn't win: some avowed socialist or some testosterone-deprived professor of ecological science. So I am encouraged that he is talking in terms of a former senator or former governor. A veteran pol running as an outsider could have an advantage, having been vetted and knowing how to campaign effectively and how to avoid typical beginner's missteps.
Nader doesn't seem to have any particular individual in mind. That could mean that no one has taken his bait, or it could mean that several people are considering it. The absence of gossip about anyone at all seems to imply that the "community" of politicians isn't hearing anything, as it would leak from every pore if it did. This contrasts with Nader's confidence. Yet I don't read the latter as a bluff.
He says the only question is the candidate's level of stature. But the issue isn't stature. It's ability to generate conviction and support. Some obscure lawyer who is smart and aggressive and clean enough to withstand scrutiny could do that.
In our system we have seen candidates come out of nowhere and get nominated. William Jennings Bryan, a Congressman and activist, was new to most people when the Dems picked him at age 36. Wendell Willkie was devoid of electoral experience and had been a Dem until not long before when the Repub convention surprised itself by yielding to the carefully packed galleries' chant of "We Want Willkie!".
Either I'm way wrong or we will have ourselves a candidate within days or weeks. It feels as if it's on its way and tremendously close.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
WHAT'S NEW AND WHAT'S NEXT
Large things are happening. And other things aren't but may. To sum up:
~The Tea Party movement is losing its once razor-like edge. Several reasons. One is a mixed success ratio. The GOP leadership has given way to it in some matters, chiefly the Paul Ryan budget, while quietly defying it in others. The movement is simple-minded, has to run on either triumph or outrage, can't process a combination of winning and losing. And what Tea Partiers
fail to comprehend is civic responsibility, not self-interest; many are able to recognize that replacing Medicare with puny vouchers could bankrupt them. It's the poor, not themselves, that they want to see die on the hospital steps.
~The Supreme Court having virtually removed limits on what corporations and unions can donate to campaigns, the Repubs have declared war on public employee unions, both because they hate them anyway for their advocacy of equality and because they're a major source of Democratic funding.
~That battle has been joined. It's now liberal, pro-labor populists who have the initiative. And it's now Repub Congressmen whose town hall meetings are exploding in dissident pyrotechnics.
~The GOP presidential field is generally conceded to be fatally weak. I continue to think that Jeb Bush will be shanghaied into the race. He'd be able to unite the three components of the Republicult: the Tea Partiers, the Religious Right, and the Country Clubbers. He also has a rep as a very successful governor of a major state. He's fluent in Spanish and married to a Latina. And his brother's infamy is no longer as consequential as formerly, as memories and attention spans are short these days.
~A consensus of the punditocracy has it that Obama will inevitably win re-election. I think it fails to realize how much can go wrong for him, such as a sinking economy and climbing oil prices.
~What hasn't occurred is the emergence of the Dump Obama insurgency that Rabbi Michael Lerner and others called for months ago. The Madison (and Madisonian: i.e. dedicated to redistribution of malapportioned wealth, as James Madison advocated) uprising has not broadened into a populist alternative that could make the Tea Party revolt look like, well, a tea party. Sometimes these things take time to develop. But there isn't much time before an effort to replace Mr. Obama on the ticket will have to be launched if it's to have a chance.
Why, then, has the president gotten a free ride so far? The true liberals have by far the more dramatic and compelling story to tell: The middle class has been robbed of 40 trillion dollars and we intend to take it back! Who wouldn't welcome a tax cut? Who wouldn't relish seeing the richest freeloaders forced to pay taxes? And nothing else is going to provide everyday Americans with the money to spend and invest and save that can revive the economy.
So why no action? Now I must speculate. Part of it, I think, is that politicians are ultra-cautious and wedded to the supposed safety of the status quo. They're gregarious, too, so that liberal Dems and sellout-centrist Dems are buddies personally, have recourse to the same fund-raising and activist groups, and fear that a divided party can only lose.
And part of it is probably that public recognition of the magnitude of the injustice and the possibilities for redress hasn't yet taken hold. People are dissatisfied but haven't grasped what can be done about it. As David Stockman says, retribution will come. But how quickly?
What must bring it about soon, if anything can, is a Dem candidacy that will serve as a spearhead for it. Dems aren't good at producing militant candidates, at least not serious ones with valid issues. That kind of bold, almost reckless leadership makes Dem pols shudder because its implication is that the crowd, and not they themselves, will be in control of what happens. And the crowd is notoriously volatile and fickle, especially when conditions shift unexpectedly.
So an established pol -- even a very liberal one like Russ Feingold or John Garamendi -- will probably grumble but go along in order to get along rather than rolling the dice.
Therefore the best bet is someone from outside the office-holding tribe. There are smart, articulate lawyers, outspoken journalists, ambitious billionaires, and others, even people from the entertainment world, who qualify. Today, given YouTube and Facebook, a contender who says the right things forcefully can get known worldwide instantly. Accompanying that, a million small-to-moderate contributions can be generated to provide instant viability.
I've no doubt at all that someone will get in, and it can't wait much longer. Again, everything depends on how solid and decisive and nervy that person is. I think of what Bob Herbert said: that the American people will follow strong leadership in almost any direction.
We know the direction it has to be. Keep an eye peeled for the emergence of the leadership!
~The Tea Party movement is losing its once razor-like edge. Several reasons. One is a mixed success ratio. The GOP leadership has given way to it in some matters, chiefly the Paul Ryan budget, while quietly defying it in others. The movement is simple-minded, has to run on either triumph or outrage, can't process a combination of winning and losing. And what Tea Partiers
fail to comprehend is civic responsibility, not self-interest; many are able to recognize that replacing Medicare with puny vouchers could bankrupt them. It's the poor, not themselves, that they want to see die on the hospital steps.
~The Supreme Court having virtually removed limits on what corporations and unions can donate to campaigns, the Repubs have declared war on public employee unions, both because they hate them anyway for their advocacy of equality and because they're a major source of Democratic funding.
~That battle has been joined. It's now liberal, pro-labor populists who have the initiative. And it's now Repub Congressmen whose town hall meetings are exploding in dissident pyrotechnics.
~The GOP presidential field is generally conceded to be fatally weak. I continue to think that Jeb Bush will be shanghaied into the race. He'd be able to unite the three components of the Republicult: the Tea Partiers, the Religious Right, and the Country Clubbers. He also has a rep as a very successful governor of a major state. He's fluent in Spanish and married to a Latina. And his brother's infamy is no longer as consequential as formerly, as memories and attention spans are short these days.
~A consensus of the punditocracy has it that Obama will inevitably win re-election. I think it fails to realize how much can go wrong for him, such as a sinking economy and climbing oil prices.
~What hasn't occurred is the emergence of the Dump Obama insurgency that Rabbi Michael Lerner and others called for months ago. The Madison (and Madisonian: i.e. dedicated to redistribution of malapportioned wealth, as James Madison advocated) uprising has not broadened into a populist alternative that could make the Tea Party revolt look like, well, a tea party. Sometimes these things take time to develop. But there isn't much time before an effort to replace Mr. Obama on the ticket will have to be launched if it's to have a chance.
Why, then, has the president gotten a free ride so far? The true liberals have by far the more dramatic and compelling story to tell: The middle class has been robbed of 40 trillion dollars and we intend to take it back! Who wouldn't welcome a tax cut? Who wouldn't relish seeing the richest freeloaders forced to pay taxes? And nothing else is going to provide everyday Americans with the money to spend and invest and save that can revive the economy.
So why no action? Now I must speculate. Part of it, I think, is that politicians are ultra-cautious and wedded to the supposed safety of the status quo. They're gregarious, too, so that liberal Dems and sellout-centrist Dems are buddies personally, have recourse to the same fund-raising and activist groups, and fear that a divided party can only lose.
And part of it is probably that public recognition of the magnitude of the injustice and the possibilities for redress hasn't yet taken hold. People are dissatisfied but haven't grasped what can be done about it. As David Stockman says, retribution will come. But how quickly?
What must bring it about soon, if anything can, is a Dem candidacy that will serve as a spearhead for it. Dems aren't good at producing militant candidates, at least not serious ones with valid issues. That kind of bold, almost reckless leadership makes Dem pols shudder because its implication is that the crowd, and not they themselves, will be in control of what happens. And the crowd is notoriously volatile and fickle, especially when conditions shift unexpectedly.
So an established pol -- even a very liberal one like Russ Feingold or John Garamendi -- will probably grumble but go along in order to get along rather than rolling the dice.
Therefore the best bet is someone from outside the office-holding tribe. There are smart, articulate lawyers, outspoken journalists, ambitious billionaires, and others, even people from the entertainment world, who qualify. Today, given YouTube and Facebook, a contender who says the right things forcefully can get known worldwide instantly. Accompanying that, a million small-to-moderate contributions can be generated to provide instant viability.
I've no doubt at all that someone will get in, and it can't wait much longer. Again, everything depends on how solid and decisive and nervy that person is. I think of what Bob Herbert said: that the American people will follow strong leadership in almost any direction.
We know the direction it has to be. Keep an eye peeled for the emergence of the leadership!
Saturday, March 26, 2011
JUST THINKIN'
Bob Herbert, for these past 18 years a New York Times columnist, has just retired to write a book and put across his thinking in more depth. He has been an outspoken yet thoughtful advocate for economic justice, who writes clearly and can present an idea in different ways over time so as to underscore it without making readers restless.
His background is as a reporter and journalist. He is TV-savvy but not slick; you can watch him speak on YouTube. At 66, he is a trim, fit-looking man with a weathered, intelligent, interesting face and an unaccented voice. An interviewer describes his persona as easygoing and decent.
I am sure there are restless, well-connected people who would like to see President Obama's renomination short-circuited. I wonder if the news that Herbert is free has piqued curiosity about running him? I have zero reason to think he would do it, and there could be a dozen reasons why he shouldn't. But he knows how to deliver a message, and he has the right one. In an America where the few at the top of the economic pyramid own 40 trillion dollars while the middle class is vanishing and the poor have to choose between food and heat, a popular rebellion can and should be incited.
Oh, and did I mention that Herbert is black? This could alter the dynamic of the challenge, as it has been assumed (I think not altogether rightly) that Mr. Obama "owns" the black vote. The open question is whether African-Americans will feel they must preserve the gain they made with his election by voting for him again, or whether they think their equal place at the starting line is now established so that they can vote their interests rather than their identity. If the alternative is also black, that could move the needle a long way toward the latter possibility.
And while I don't know who Herbert's middle class Northeastern parents were, it is likely that they were both African-American; that plus his more liberal views could make him seem "more black" than Mr. Obama to black voters while making no difference to white voters since both are highly intelligent and wholly comfortable in multiracial contexts.
By boldly standing for something concrete -- not for "change" and "hope"- - Herbert might be in a position to generate the mandate that a president will have to have if he is to tackle the real and urgent issues ahead of us. It is dead certain that Mr. Obama can't do that. Both his re-election strategy and his persona compel him to hug the center-line. He has assumed that the left wing of the party, which is his base, has nowhere else to go.
Increasingly Mr. Obama has appeared wishywashy, pro-Wall Street, and too eager to get along with the Republicans. On top of that, he has damaged himself with an inexplicable failure to communicate. He should have been holding fireside chats right along, explaining why what he wants to do has to be done. His sheer elusiveness has provided a blank slate that partisans and cranks have written hateful lies on with impunity. And his apparent incapacity for righteous anger has weakened his credibility and lessened confidence in his character in a time when anger is, as a matter of visible fact, the chief mode in which conviction and courage are registered.
And Bob Herbert? Who knows! That he will run is a very long shot. But it is worth contemplating because of what it raises to view.
Mr. Obama has been studying Ronald Reagan but has not learned what he should have from him. Herbert would not have to learn it. The Barack Obama-Dwight Eisenhower-Gerald Ford way of winning the voters in the middle is to straddle. Reagan stayed hard-right but got out in front and led; because people liked him and felt that his self-assurance and determination were assets for the country, they let him do what he wanted to do with their blessing although poll after poll showed that they did not agree with it.
Herbert: "The public will follow strong leadership in almost any direction."
If there is to be a Reagan of the left in the near future, it will be not Mr. Obama but someone like Bob Herbert.
His background is as a reporter and journalist. He is TV-savvy but not slick; you can watch him speak on YouTube. At 66, he is a trim, fit-looking man with a weathered, intelligent, interesting face and an unaccented voice. An interviewer describes his persona as easygoing and decent.
I am sure there are restless, well-connected people who would like to see President Obama's renomination short-circuited. I wonder if the news that Herbert is free has piqued curiosity about running him? I have zero reason to think he would do it, and there could be a dozen reasons why he shouldn't. But he knows how to deliver a message, and he has the right one. In an America where the few at the top of the economic pyramid own 40 trillion dollars while the middle class is vanishing and the poor have to choose between food and heat, a popular rebellion can and should be incited.
Oh, and did I mention that Herbert is black? This could alter the dynamic of the challenge, as it has been assumed (I think not altogether rightly) that Mr. Obama "owns" the black vote. The open question is whether African-Americans will feel they must preserve the gain they made with his election by voting for him again, or whether they think their equal place at the starting line is now established so that they can vote their interests rather than their identity. If the alternative is also black, that could move the needle a long way toward the latter possibility.
And while I don't know who Herbert's middle class Northeastern parents were, it is likely that they were both African-American; that plus his more liberal views could make him seem "more black" than Mr. Obama to black voters while making no difference to white voters since both are highly intelligent and wholly comfortable in multiracial contexts.
By boldly standing for something concrete -- not for "change" and "hope"- - Herbert might be in a position to generate the mandate that a president will have to have if he is to tackle the real and urgent issues ahead of us. It is dead certain that Mr. Obama can't do that. Both his re-election strategy and his persona compel him to hug the center-line. He has assumed that the left wing of the party, which is his base, has nowhere else to go.
Increasingly Mr. Obama has appeared wishywashy, pro-Wall Street, and too eager to get along with the Republicans. On top of that, he has damaged himself with an inexplicable failure to communicate. He should have been holding fireside chats right along, explaining why what he wants to do has to be done. His sheer elusiveness has provided a blank slate that partisans and cranks have written hateful lies on with impunity. And his apparent incapacity for righteous anger has weakened his credibility and lessened confidence in his character in a time when anger is, as a matter of visible fact, the chief mode in which conviction and courage are registered.
And Bob Herbert? Who knows! That he will run is a very long shot. But it is worth contemplating because of what it raises to view.
Mr. Obama has been studying Ronald Reagan but has not learned what he should have from him. Herbert would not have to learn it. The Barack Obama-Dwight Eisenhower-Gerald Ford way of winning the voters in the middle is to straddle. Reagan stayed hard-right but got out in front and led; because people liked him and felt that his self-assurance and determination were assets for the country, they let him do what he wanted to do with their blessing although poll after poll showed that they did not agree with it.
Herbert: "The public will follow strong leadership in almost any direction."
If there is to be a Reagan of the left in the near future, it will be not Mr. Obama but someone like Bob Herbert.
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