Cheerleader-in-Chief

Over the weekend it was hard, if you watch television, to miss the commotion and excitement about the coming inauguration of Barack Obama as the new president of the United States. Seemed that people are just beside themselves in anticipation, and it occurred to me that the coming collective sigh of relief might just be enough to drive up global warming.

On a Sunday news show even Pat Buchanan — he of the impeccable conservative Republican credentials — seemed caught up in it, saying “It’s a great day, and I think the whole country, frankly, is feelin’ pretty good about it!”

My own emotions, as I checked in from time to time on the progress of the train trip bringing the Obamas and Bidens to Washington were open-the-faucet sentimental. The car in which they traveled was a 1930-vintage lovely dark blue observation car, veteran of many a presidential whistle-stop tour. It was the last car in an otherwise silvery length of modern Amtrak carriages, bearing lucky reporters and staff.

If you’re a railroad buff like me, and old enough to remember, you can picture the rich wood paneling and overstuffed chairs flanked by elegant ashtray stands and pleasant conversation, and wish that somehow you could be there, being served drinks and cigars — well, skip the cigars — and occasionally venturing out onto the platform to watch the tracks disappear into the distance as you roll through America.

Back in the day, the train attendants — waiters, porters, everyone except the conductor, as was the custom — were all black. The work was considered too menial for whites. There’s a lovely irony here.

* * *

The Onion, a satirical newspaper, in a story just after the election headlined “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” wrote:

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.

As I tried to decide what to make of George W. Bush’s farewell address to the nation, it suddenly occurred to me: If I worked for The Onion and was told to write George W. Bush’s parting message to the country as a satire, here's what I would have written:

“Tonight I am filled with gratitude — to Vice President Cheney and members of the Administration . . .”

“This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house — September 11, 2001.”

“As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before Nine-Eleven. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our Nation.”

“Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror . . .”

“Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship . . . to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States.”

“There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results.”

“America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.”

“Every taxpayer pays lower income taxes.”

“America’s air, water, and lands are measurably cleaner.”

“When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them.”

“Like all who have held this office before me, I have experienced setbacks. There are things I would do differently if given the chance. … You may not agree with some tough decisions I have made. But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

* * *

From the time he stood on the rubble at Ground Zero and shouted through a bullhorn, Bush, famously a cheerleader in college, has conducted his presidency as cheerleader-in-chief. Not to worry, big hoo-yah. He’s made some tough decisions.

Notwithstanding the revelations about Dick Cheney’s support of torture, not questioning why the president hadn’t addressed the nation before 9/11, ignoring the question as to why he hadn’t acted on the “bin Laden determined to strike” memo, not worrying about the fact that Afghanistan is in chaos, and discounting the reality that Iraq says it wants the U.S. out of their country ASAP, it is certainly true that there is legitimate debate about many of Bush’s decisions. And there is legitimate debate about the results. But not to worry. He's made decisions.

America has gone more than seven years without a terrorist attack on our soil. But what of the eight years before 9/11? In 1993 al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center, and the Clinton security apparatus warned Bush that al Qaeda was a real threat. But Bush didn’t want to be seen following any Clinton lead, so despite warnings from just about everyone who was in the know he ignored the August 2001 memo. Bottom line: Clinton kept us safe on our homeland for eight years. And then we got 2001.

Every taxpayer. Did you see your taxes go down?

The environment? Clean Air Act, Healthy Forests Initiative . . . and what happened in Tennessee?

As for challenges to our prosperity, we know how that turned out.

Bush said he "shared the optimism of President Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote, ‘I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.’”

Indeed.

Early Thanksgiving!

Election night was unbelievable. Literally. Down at Democratic Headquarters several dozen folks had gathered to watch the returns, yet the room was strangely quiet over an almost unbearable two hours, as the patient assembly tried to make sense out of the myriad maps and graphs displayed on TV news reports. Then, suddenly, the screen filled with the announcement that Barack Obama would be the 44th President of the United States.

The room erupted into noise and motion as people shouted and danced and hugged and cheered, the emotion of the moment even driving some of us to tears. How to believe that this moment in American history had arrived – and that we had been a part of it?

And yes, everything did change. The rest of the world celebrated right along with us; news flashed from all around the world, like the rolling reports of new years' celebrations, except it was all at once.

It was thrilling, no doubt about it. Especially for those of us who supported Barack Obama for the better part of two years, way too long by some standards, but that’s a problem for another time.

For those who are less than thrilled, but would welcome some good news, let me offer at least one thought.

The election is over.

And another: The winner was Obama, not Clinton.

And this: Rahm Emanuel, known as “Rahmbo,” is to be Chief of Staff at the White House. This appointment likely signals that the Obama administration will be disciplined, and that it will not be pulled to the left by the left-most members of the party. (That could be a whole separate column, so trust me for now.)

There was some collateral damage, too, in that the hapless campaign run by McCain and the Rove acolytes he listened to may have been the death of the Republican Party. And no, I don’t find that cause for celebration, because I believe in the usefulness of a loyal opposition.

But that opposition should be honorable and I think that the Republican Party, after it was hijacked by radicals, lost its moorings. Without those moorings, it will likely be a very, very long time before American politics regains its balance.

How is the Republican Party to become viable again? Certainly not by returning to the slash-and-burn tactics of Rove and Gingrich, now thoroughly discredited as party visionaries. These guys, along with Grover Norquist, are where the blame really should go once the dust settles.

How about revisiting the ideas of William F. Buckley, one of this country’s truly thoughtful intellectuals, about whom George W. Bush said, “Bill Buckley was one of the great founders of the modern conservative movement. He brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America's victory in the Cold War and for the conservative movement that continues to this day.”

Buckley often spoke out strongly against the “neoconservative” approach to government. In a conversation with George Will (no slouch in the matter of conservatism), speaking about the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy abroad as foreign policy, he said:

It's anything but conservative. It's not conservative at all, inasmuch as conservatism doesn't invite unnecessary challenges. It insists on coming to terms with the world as it is, and the notion that merely by affirming these high ideals we can affect highly entrenched systems.

The thoughtful conservatism of Buckley was overrun by radicals like Grover Norquist, head of the euphemistically named Americans for Tax Reform; Norquist once told NPR, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Starve the government of revenue and you can do away with foolish things like, oh, national defense, public education, Medicare, Social Security, and FEMA.

Norquist was co-author of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America,” and had a long association with Karl Rove. He was instrumental in securing early conservative support for George W. Bush in the lead-up to the 2000 race for the presidency.

In 2003 Paul Krugman, who this year won the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote:

Here's how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There's a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don't pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these "lucky duckies." (Yes, that's what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their "blood boiling with tax rage."

If I were trying to rebuild the Republican Party I’d get out a new broom and run these guys out of town.

The loveliness of the Obama victory is that it did not involve viciousness (pleas by some worried supporters notwithstanding) and remained calm and thoughtful throughout. And it paid off: Obama won in almost every identifiable constituency, including college graduates making more than $100,000.

Question for Karl Rove: Does this mean that to build a permanent Democratic majority all we have to do is provide college education for everyone that wants it?

Politics 2008

If it weren’t so infuriating I’d just shrug it off and call it silliness. But believe you me, this is deadly serious stuff and can make or break the success of Barack Obama’s quest for the Presidency. It all depends, frankly, on how much attention American voters are willing to commit to the selection process, and their capacity for critical thinking.

Come to think of it, this kind of stuff probably goes back to, oh, 1789 or so (yes, there were candidates other than George Washington for the signal honor of being Father of our Country), but my own experience is necessarily limited to the last 50-plus years.

You could liken it to the snake oil salesmen of the old West, or the fellow who offers a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge or perhaps some oceanfront property in Arizona, to Professor Harold Hill and his promise to build a boys’ band in River City, or the recent scammers right here in Waxahachie: What all these have in common is the ability to slick-talk folks into believing in something that is a lie.

Every one of their victims chose to buy into something they would never have believed if they had just been a little more skeptical, asked a few more questions, done a little fact-checking for themselves.

I like to think that you can attribute the willingness of some voters to believe the unbelievable to what I think is an American tendency to see the good in people, to give the benefit of the doubt, sort of the way we pride ourselves on the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.” But some outcomes suggest that at least a touch of cynicism is in order, at least when it comes to our money and our country.

Back in 1952, Richard Nixon lobbed non-fact grenades against his opponents, as in accusing Adlai Stevenson of being a “Commie-sympathizer” for suggesting that we talk to Red China. That would be the same Richard Nixon who famously opened the gate to Red China after he got elected some years later.

Leaping forward to our current situation, George W. Bush promised us that he was a “compassionate conservative,” and turned out to be neither.

A very clever fellow named Frank Luntz thought of a way to help the Republicans get rid of nettlesome taxes like the estate tax, which taxes the transfer of great wealth — defined nowadays as exceeding $2 million and excluding family farms — to other than a surviving spouse or a charity. I don’t know if anyone you know will have that much to leave to the kids, but now that it’s called the “death tax,” you’d be dumfounded to learn how many ordinary folks are dead-set opposed to it. Even though experts calculate that doing away with the estate tax would deprive the country of “tens of millions” of dollars every year.

You see, Luntz wanted plain folks to believe that just dying would bring a tax upon you. As Molly used to tell Fibber, “Tain’t so, McGee!” Check it out.

Speaking of taxes, John McCain is quite emphatic when he claims that “Barack Obama wants to raise your taxes!” What he fails to mention is that “your” in this case refers to people with incomes greater than $250,000, twice that for a married couple.
And of course it wouldn’t be helpful to him to add that Obama also wants to lower taxes for everyone earning less than that, and eliminate them altogether for folks earning under $50,000.

Nope. “Barack Obama wants to raise your taxes” is out there, low-hanging fruit dangling from the tree for people too hungry to question it.

And then there’s the not-exactly-a-lie: Speaking to the Congressional Democratic Caucus last week, Obama said, according to people who were there, as reported in The Atlantic:

“It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

So what does John McCain’s latest ad tell us about that? That Obama said, in a fit of vanity, that, “I have become a symbol of America returning to our best traditions.” Tain’t so, McCain.

Finally, the straight-out lie of the McCain campaign to bring down Barack Obama is manifested in his recent pop-culture ad costarring celebrity airheads Spears and Hilton, which claims that Obama is all speech and no substance, and in support of that claim McCain’s minions love to say that “we don’t know what he stands for.”

Well. Now, you can go to the library or to Google and find position speeches dating back through the entire campaign and read until your head spins, or you can go to his website and find them there, all neatly categorized.

When you think of it, it’s odd that McCain can attack Obama for what he stands for if we don’t know what that is, isn’t it?

My idealistic, optimistic hope is that THIS time, with what has been called the worst economy since the Great Depression, with America’s reputation in tatters around the world, with our troops committed to an occupation in Iraq while getting blown up in Afghanistan and Iran is making us nervous (but we don’t have any troops to spare right now), our infrastructure showing signs of distress, health care costs and the mortgage crisis driving more seniors into bankruptcy than ever before, that THIS time every single voter will pay attention like never before.

Else, it’s “fool me twice” for America.

Originally published August 3, 2008

Where to begin?

There is a certain amount of excitement in being a news junkie. Not only do you get your daily adrenaline rush from fear, fury or frustration as events unfold, secrets are revealed, prevarications are spun into tangled webs and once again the Emperor is seen strutting about naked, but you learn about some really interesting things you might never know if you weren’t an addict.

Of course, that begs the question: Now that I know all this stuff, what do I do with it? Do I even need to do anything with it? After all, it’s a very exciting hobby in and of itself, just knowing what’s going on in the world. But for some of us the need to share is irresistible.

Sometimes, like a joke, it’s because the pleasure grows with sharing. And sometimes “misery loves company” would explain it. But at other times it feels urgent, like spreading the alarm about a tornado watch, even though warning your neighbor doesn’t guarantee that he’ll seek shelter.

Molly Ivins looked at it this way:

I just think it helps, anything and everything, if the people know. Know what the hell is going on. What they do about it once they know is not my problem.

Last week we learned that 4,032 American troops have been killed in Iraq. We don’t hear as much about the estimated 50,327 who have suffered severe injuries, including amputations and brain damage, and of course there’s no way of knowing the eventual toll in psychological injuries including post-traumatic stress disorder.

But President Bush was pleased to announce that the surge in Iraq has “revived the prospect of success.” He announced there will be a troop reduction between now and July (the troops originally slated to be brought home by July; this isn’t because of the surge, it is because they will have been there 15 months and must be brought home).

Speaking of which, it was also Mr. Bush’s pleasure to announce that the length of deployment will be reduced to 12 months (which is where we were before the deployment increase back in April of 2007, by the way). And how many folks do you suppose noticed that this kindness will apply only to those troops deployed to Iraq after August? Any respite for troops presently in harm’s way? Forget it.

And as for the prospect of success, Gen. Petraeus told Congress last week that the progress in Iraq is fragile and reversible and he really can’t say when – indeed, if – any further troops will be coming home during Bush’s term in office. Just can’t speculate, sorry.

He also declined, though pressed, to define success, or even to describe the conditions that might make it possible to send more troops home.

By the way, the Iraqi government is expecting a $25 billion budget surplus this year, up from its surplus last year in excess of $13 billion. While the price of our gasoline surged, so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t blame the 6 o’clock newscasters for not talking about every item that I think we should know about. Truth to tell, there’s just too much out there for any one source to cover. You almost have to be a news junkie just to keep up with the important stuff.

It’s a function of the world we live in, a world much larger in many ways than the world of our youth. If you don’t believe me, take a look at today’s high school math textbook – why, kids are learning stuff you and I never dreamt of; what used to be taught in college is now a requirement to get into college.

Anyway, the least I can do is share.

As for spin: The proponents of the Bush/McCain plan to stay in Iraq for an indeterminate number of years insist upon contrasting their position with what they call the Democrats’ plan for “precipitous” withdrawal. So here’s my question, and I think it’s a fair one:

If wanting to begin drawing down the troop level in 2009 and be done with Iraq within 20 months or so after that is “precipitous,” what time frame would not be? Just curious.

Despite the fact that a new president will be sworn in on January 20, 2009, the Bush administration proposes to enter into an open-ended troop commitment with the Iraqi government, but claims it need not be approved by our Congress. The irony is that the government in Iraq insists that their congress should approve it and we have agreed to that condition.

Last but hardly least, it was revealed last week that, beginning back in 2002, the National Security Council's Principals Committee — a group including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft, among others — met in the White House to discuss torture, and specifically which kind to apply to which terrorism suspect.

Torture planning. In the White House.

In the words of John Ashcroft himself:

History will not judge this kindly.