A Moment of Global Joy. Let's Not Blow It This Time.

The nice thing about televised images is that they sometimes convey the truth. What I saw Wednesday morning was genuine— pictures from around the world of people in other countries and other cultures as they celebrated the election of Barack Obama. I had seen this once before, in July of 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. The moon landing, like the presidential election earlier this week, was an event undertaken by the United States—purely in its own self interest— that, nevertheless, transcended the moment and the motive, and inspired the rest of the world with the example of what we could do when we were at our best. Both events came at a time when our national image had been badly degraded by our own hand, in poorly conceived wars undertaken for all the wrong reasons. But then, after a long period of much-publicized preparation, in the space of a single day, America proved that it could do almost anything. Maybe any country is capable of going to the moon or changing its culture 180 degrees in less than half a century, but so far, no other country has done it, and this— more than anything else— explains why the world could see Tuesday night as victory for the human spirit, and something more than a simple American political outcome.

Following the momentary global celebration in July of 1969, Richard Nixon responded to that reservoir of potential good will by doing three things. He canceled the last three planned moon landings. He ramped-up the war in Southeast Asia by extending the bombing from Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos. And he began recruiting the team of burglars that would be arrested three years later in the Watergate.

Sometimes, the world sees us better than we see ourselves. Let’s hope that this time we use our momentary global good will to better purpose than we did in 1969.

Payback For Payback

Dixiecrat was a term you heard a lot 40 years ago, and then it went away. In the 1968 presidential election, Nixon embarked on what he called his, “Southern strategy,” to woo away disgruntled Democrats and turn them into Republicans. Prior to that time, the Deep South had been solidly Democratic. Following Tet in February of 1968, the Vietnam Nam War was being recognized as a losing effort, and Nixon promised to turn that around by painting the Democratic liberal administration of Lyndon Johnson as the reason for the military failure. Sometime later, in the 1970s, Roe V. Wade gave the Republicans yet another liberal millstone to hang around the neck of the Democrats. The underlying reality, however, is that national defense and abortion were the polite and acceptable issues, but not the only issues, that one could talk about when discussing the switch in the South from Democrat to Republican, and from liberal to conservative. The dirty little secret was— and has always been— that Republicanism and conservatism flourished in the Deep South as a payback for the Civil Rights Movement, led by liberal Democrats.

Last night’s election was revealing. White voters of all ages, and of both sexes, gave the majority of their votes to Obama— everywhere but in the Deep South. But down in the belly of the old Confederacy, white voters went more than 2 to 1against Obama. The Republican party, now in shambles, has been reduced to mostly a regional institution rooted in the Deep South, with nothing to sustain it but vitriolic anti-liberalism. It may be another generation or more before that Republican bastion puts the Civil Rights Movement behind it, but meanwhile the rest of the country has moved on. If Nixon’s Southern strategy exploited the urge to see a payback for Civil Rights, then Obama’s victory can be seen as a payback for the payback.

No Experience Necessary

I’ll admit one thing, Sarah Palin gives a good speech, certainly better than anything that ever came out of the mouth of George W. Bush or John McCain. The Dems continue to hammer her about her lack of experience, and she gives it right back to Obama with the same indictment. So here’s my question, “Who the hell made up the rules and decided that experience was the main qualifier for the job of President?”

Based on the backgrounds of the men who’ve held the nation’s highest office, and looking at their performance, the historical evidence would show that experience counts for nothing in this particular job. NOTHING. The man in government right now with the deepest and broadest experience is Dick Cheney. Before he became V.P. he had gained experience at the governmental department level, the cabinet level within a previous administration, and the congressional level. In addition, he had broad experience in high-level business outside government. On paper, he had it all, and then he became Darth Vader once he got elected on a presidential ticket. Close behind Cheney with their impressive “experience-based ” resumes would be Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, and neither of these two Vietnam-era honchos are being considered for inclusion on Mount Rushmore.

On the other end of the spectrum would fall two men with very little experience, Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. Their experience (or lack of experience) would be comparable to what we see in Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, but that didn’t stop Lincoln from ending slavery in the country, and Truman from ending racial discrimination in the military. Lincoln and Truman had good intellect, character, and temperament, and these are the qualities that the founding fathers hoped would be the criteria for selecting Presidents down through the history of the country. If the founding fathers had believed that the future of the nation depended on one man at the top with lifetime experience, they would have given us a king. Dick Cheney actually believes that’s what happened.

There simply is no kind of experience that can prepare a President for something like the American Civil War, or Pearl Harbor, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or 9/11. The first three of those crises were faced by men with good intellect and temperament. Not so much with 9/11, and we can see what a lack of intellect has produced there. As American voters, we really do need to look beyond the “experience” baloney, or we’ll keep getting mediocre leaders with fluff-padded resumes and lame brains.

DNC Update, Hobnobbing With George McGovern

Yesterday evening, my wife and I were invited to a very private (50 people) cocktail and dinner reception given at the Denver Country Club for George McGovern. It had been over five years (see my blog 4/19) since we last saw McGovern in person, and when he gave his speech, I was reminded once again how honestly decent and intelligent he is. It’s downright disheartening to imagine how different the United States would look today if he had been elected president in 1972. For one thing, there would be 25,000 fewer names on the black wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

George McGovern was one of the few candidates for the nation’s highest office who held a Ph.D. degree, and his lopsided loss in the 1972 election was a clear demonstration of the fact that voters hold intellect and decency in very low esteem when choosing their president. For those who’ve forgotten their history, McGovern was trounced by Nixon, and we all know how that eventually turned out. Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton are exceptions to what I’m about to say, but for the most part, when a candidate possessing intellect and vision runs against a candidate possessing belligerence and truculent aggressiveness, the candidate of intellect and vision will lose the election. Americans are not great thinkers. They’re not even good thinkers. That’s why, when it comes time to pick a fight with some foreign country in the name of “peacekeeping,” Americans can’t wait to wade into battle. If you ask the average American to describe the role of the President, the majority of Americans will say, “Commander in Chief,” and voter selection for the role of President most often follows that guideline. The low public opinion of Bush at this time is not based on the fact that he took us to war. It’s based on the fact that he lost that war.

I write about this now, because 2008 is shaping up to be 1972 all over again. A man who might think first before acting is in a contest with a man who loves to pick a fight. Based on history, the thinker will probably lose to the fighter. It’s the American way.

Also see: Iraq- How It Will End

John Edwards Guilty of Bad Timing

Here’s my beef with John Edwards. He chose to come clean about his sexual affair during a tight and full news cycle, with a high profile American tourist murdered in China right after the utterly amazing and fantastic Olympic opening ceremony, followed the next day by full all-out war between Russia and Georgia. All of this breaking news left the networks with little time to cover Edwards in more than a superficial way. I wanted to see a repeat of the Elliott Spitzer affair coverage, when the networks expanded the air time devoted to sex by doing “filler” pieces. For example, one network filled out their Spitzer programming with a twenty minute segment about the difference between a prostitute and a call girl. That kind of added material makes high profile affairs more interesting.

By themselves, these “indiscretions” aren’t terribly newsworthy, and they’re certainly not new. Even FDR played the game. If Mt. Rushmore added a fifth iconic face, many Americans would vote for the image to be Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even some Republicans consider him in the “great” category, but throughout his life he cheated on Eleanor with her personal secretary, Lucy Mercer, and he did it with steel braces on his crippled legs, so you know that there was some kinky stuff going on there.

Leveraging high-profile pedigree in order to obtain casual sex, JFK managed to do more breeding than Secretariat. Many Americans still think JFK was a good president. On the other hand, there are two presidents who are generally acknowledged to be squeaky clean in the marital indiscretion category, and their sexual conduct is above reproach. They are Richard Nixon and George W. Bush—arguably the two worst presidents who have ever held the office. Based on that, I’m not sure that marital infidelity is a deal breaker for presidential greatness. I will grant you, however, that it’s hard on the little Missus and the kiddos.

If It Was Fair and Balanced, It Wouldn't Be Essential

Ask the average person to describe the New York Times with one word, and most people will say, “Liberal.” Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. That’s not the word I would use, however. For me, the New York Times is “essential.”

There’s a legend in the folklore of politics about Karl Rove in his early days in Texas. He wanted a direct mail list of Conservative Republicans in the state, and because such a thing did not exist at the time, Rove bought himself a list of the subscribers to Field and Stream Magazine. He knew that such a list would be overwhelmingly comprised of Conservative Republicans, and he was comfortable in the knowledge that Field and Stream would not begin opposing the NRA just to broaden its appeal to a wider audience. Rove knew that publications all have their own identifiable and predictable constituencies, and this is true of newspapers as well as magazines.

The constituency of the New York Times is primarily composed of East Coast, urban intellectuals, and such a group tends to be politically liberal. News is a product, and a newspaper is a business, and the reader is the customer. And the first rule of business is to give the customer what they want. The New York Times does this well. To become more balanced and nonjudgmental, the newspaper could reach out to a broader audience of Conservatives by printing the daily diatribes of Rush Limbaugh, or quoting the rants of Bill O’Reilly, but decision makers at the Times are smart enough to know that red-meat, Right-wingers like to get their venom directly from the source by tuning in to the EIB Network or the FOX News Channel. The Times appeals to Liberals because Liberals are the ones who read the paper.

For me, the important question is not whether the Times is liberal, but is the Times essential? I believe that it is, and here’s why. About five years ago, I had the privilege of being part of a group discussion with Daniel Ellsberg, and Ellsberg told us, personally, why he gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. He said that the Times, in his opinion, was the only institution with the clout and the courage to withstand the predictable onslaught from the Nixon administration. Ellsberg confided that, prior to turning over the papers to the Times, he had experienced an “All-The-President’s-Men” moment when he genuinely feared for his life. The New York Times, for Ellsberg, was not just an outlet to expose the lies of the Pentagon about Vietnam, but it was also an ally to help guarantee his personal safety.

Here’s the essential thing about why such a liberal bastion is necessary. When power on the Left goes off the track, it tends toward the silly and the pathetic, and maybe even the tragic. I would cite LBJ, Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton as examples, annoying, but not really threatening. But when power on the Right gets out of control, it is downright destructive. Both ends of the political spectrum are not above punishing their enemies, but whereas the Lefties do it with some temerity, those on the Right do it with a kind of evil enthusiasm. Joe McCarthy, the Nixon administration, and Bush-Cheney are examples of this. Even an institution as strong as the U.S. Congress doesn’t seem up to the task of speaking truth to that kind of power. I don’t mean to imply that the New York Times is the only thing standing between us and outright fascism, but it does seem to have a good track record in helping keep the Right under control. If this offends some Conservatives, it seems like a fair trade-off.