A Justice for all

It will probably come as no surprise that I like poetry. I mean, really like it, often love it, especially poetry written back when it still rhymed, or had an irresistible rhythm, and definitely before the modern fad of breaking lines up into stairsteps on the page got to be all the rage.
I mean, who can follow

a thought when it

jumps around

like this?

But prose can also be poetic, so to speak, particularly when it is, as the dictionary suggests, “an imaginative or sensitively emotional style of expression.”

Just consider our Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Maybe the Founders just naturally wrote like that, or perhaps they deliberately waxed poetic out of emotion for the history they were making. Either way, it worked.

Soon after that, they produced our Constitution, another truly remarkable document, that has served its purpose well ever since.

There have been amendments from time to time, most notably the first ten, which comprised the Bill of Rights, but really not so many when you come to think of it. Fewer than 30, all told, suggesting that the Founders got it pretty much right in the first place.

Now, the tricky thing about our Constitution is figuring out how to comply with it more than two centuries later, and that is the debate at the heart of choosing a Supreme Court justice, as President Obama is about to do for the first time.

There are essentially two schools of thought here: whether every case before the Court must be decided strictly according to what is written in the Constitution, or whether that doesn’t make sense because so much has changed that circumstances impossible for the Founders to have foreseen demand interpretation for our times.

Barack Obama has told us he wants to appoint a justice who is not someone with “just ivory tower learning. I want somebody who has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and a practical sense of how the world works.”

And he added that one of the qualities he's looking for in a new Supreme Court justice is “empathy.”

Now, everyone take a deep breath here and understand that “empathy” is very different from “sympathy,” a distinction that seems to have eluded some of his determined opponents.

The way I understand it, “empathy” means you understand where someone is coming from; “sympathy” means you want to go where he’s going – you want what he wants. Big difference.

Obama explained why he believes empathy is a desirable quality in a justice:

You have to be able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes and get an idea of how the law might work or might not work for them.

He offered, as an example, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor:

You always had a sense that she was taking the law and seeing what are the practical applications of the law....She wasn't a grand theoretician but she ended up having enormous influence on the law as a whole.

Our Founders, wise as they were, would never have expected America, this amazing country, to forever remain an 18th century society. I believe they intended to give us a body of law that would serve to guide us for centuries ahead, through growth and changes they might have guessed at and those they could not.

Michele Norris, an NPR reporter, speaking in a Sunday round table on the matter, said it better than anyone. She suggested that whereas conservatives see the law as “set in stone” in demanding “strict construction” of the Constitution, Obama

. . . sees the law as something that is dynamic, that changes over time . . . almost as if [the law is] a river, something that flows through people’s lives, from the courtroom into the classroom, into the boardroom, through field and factory, past the kitchen table; and that the Constitution, this magnificent document, was written 200 years ago . . . and that you need to consider how the terrain of this country has changed. Because that will determine the ebb and the flow of this sort of dynamic force.

Sheer poetry.

Stirring the pot

President Barack Obama did something new the other day, though it should have been expected given what we know about him and his administration; he conducted a virtual town hall meeting with Americans.

Using the Internet, in other words, he took questions from just about everywhere. According to the White House, 92,927 people had submitted over 104,000 questions; in order to reduce them to the workable number of a dozen or so that he’d actually have time to address, the online participants were told to vote for the questions they thought most important. In the end, over 3.6 million votes had been cast.

In an array that included questions about the auto industry, universal health care, mortgages and education, the top vote-getting category was “jobs.” And the top vote-getter within that category asked “whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation.”

The President looked at the question for a moment. “I don't know what this says about the online audience,” he remarked with that grin.

“But, seriously,” he added, “no, I don't think this is a good strategy to grow our economy.”

But the question and ensuing buzz about it did stir discussion in some quarters, and that’s a good thing.

I could go on at some length about the advantages that might result were we to make an honest woman out of Mary Jane; the salient argument might be the predictable reduction in our prison populations.

But I want to narrow the focus here to the matter of medical marijuana, for it has special significance to me.

Back in the late 1980s my Dad was diagnosed with leukemia, in a form that mainly attacks the elderly.

Aside from fatigue, the most devastating effect of the illness was a devastating loss of appetite, and it’s hard to do well if you don’t eat.

This is when I learned to shuck oysters; I don’t do oysters myself, and found that prying them open is a real challenge. But he really went for Blue Points, so shucking got easy. He loved lamb chops, too. But that was about all that appealed.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t eat, you see; it was just that the appetite was gone.

Now, we knew somehow that ingesting marijuana in any form generates a keen, almost relentless, appetite, and we were certain that if we could bake some loaded-up brownies for him, for example, he would then eat great plates of food and bowls of soup and it would help. He liked brownies, too.

We talked about it some. I remember so clearly wishing, wondering if, we could get our hands on some. Not that we were afraid of breaking the law; we just didn’t know how to get it. Didn’t have the right connections, you could say.

Dad died in 1990. If he'd had an appetite maybe he could have made it through just a couple of years more, long enough to receive the new treatment discovered in 1992 that might well have worked for him.

It should not be surprising that I absolutely support making marijuana legal for medical purposes. In California and other states where the law now permits it, the Obama justice department has indicated that state law in the matter should be respected.

Hysteria over marijuana needs to be tamped down across the board, and not just in the minds of those who talk about how bad it is over their cocktails.

What's wrong with earmarks?

According to the politicians, the American kitchen table is the center of all family decision making, the place where matters of the economy – mortgage payments, medical bills, college tuition, the price of gasoline, and of course grocery and utility bills – are laid out to be dealt with by families feeling the stress.

It’s always stress, of course; have you ever heard about a family sitting around the kitchen table discussing how to spend an inheritance or lotto winnings?

No, it’s always something worrisome. And right now just about everything is worrisome.

While Mom and Dad and the kids are gathered ‘round the kitchen table, lingering over a delicious beef stew to put off as long as possible the after-supper discussion about household bills and how to pay them, we have banks failing, homes going into foreclosure, small businesses closing, the auto industry in a shambles, and folks losing their jobs; there’s also the matter of a couple of unfinished wars, a militant Iran, a pugnacious Russia, and near anarchy south of our border.

So what are the Republicans worried about most? Earmarks. “Pork.”

Terrible, wicked, close to sinful and very, very wrong. At least that’s what they seem to have become over the years; they’ve become almost as bad as taxes, if you listen to Republican rhetoric.

It’s time the American people sit up and think about this.

Earmarks are said to amount to less than two percent of the present budget being considered in Washington, but some members of Congress want to do away with them altogether. Most of those worthies have earmarks of their own in the bill, but those should be kept, of course.

What, exactly, is an earmark? According to the OMB,

At the broadest level, [it] is any additional funding provided by the Congress … for activities/projects/programs not requested by the Administration.

In other words, it gives any member of Congress the opportunity to amend the Administration’s budget to add funding for a specific purpose in his own district; after all, we elect our representatives to work for our State or congressional district, and that’s what he’s doing. Bringing home the bacon. “Pork.”

It’s called democracy, if you ask me. Or do you prefer that the budget submitted by the Administration and all its departments be the be-all and end-all, stop right there?

Earmarks got a bad rap in the past because of outrageous stuff like the “bridge to nowhere,” and earmarks slipped in at the last minute to escape review. And there’s some silly stuff in the current budget. But those things are fixable; getting rid of all of them is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Just doesn’t make sense.

If our government is going to assist with, say, the cost of rebuilding a falling-down school in South Carolina or repairing a bridge in Minnesota or rebuilding a portion of I-35, adding it to the current budget will make it happen a lot faster than the two years or so it could take for a bill to work its way through Congress all by itself.

Let’s go back to that kitchen table.

After the dishes are cleared the bills are laid out, and with the help of a small calculator it’s determined that they are going to have to prioritize. There’s not as much to work with since the economy started tanking. So they add up the necessities – mortgage, light bill, gasoline, health insurance, dog food, food.

They can save a little if Dad brown-bags his lunch most days, and new sneakers for the kids can wait another month (if they would just stop growing!). Mom will give up her gym membership for now.

But the car repair can’t wait, so it’s added in. (Earmark!) So are the textbook and school supply costs that are due. (Earmark!) It’s time for the dog’s trip to the vet for annual shots. (Earmark!)

The evening goes on, and money is earmarked for Buddy’s dental work, for Mom’s mammogram, for Sissy’s Girl Scout uniform. Non-essentials, you might think, but they are determined to find the money because these are important to the family. So they earmark part of the family budget for each of these expenses.

They will end up dipping into their savings to get by for now, but they are betting on the economy turning around eventually so they’ll be able to catch up. Meantime, they will get by, with the help of a little earmarking.

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?

Think positive — but think!

As tempting as it might be to engage in ad hominem attacks against the opposition in this Presidential election, I’m gambling on the notion that folks may be more likely to read what I have to say if I don’t, so I won’t.

There’s no doubt some satisfaction in going after the person rather than the idea, especially if we feel clever in doing so, seeking the cheap thrill of a zinger over the effort of a point finely made that might actually inform.

To this end, with the election just a week away, I’d like to offer information about developments in favor of electing Barack Obama.

Last Sunday, on Meet the Press, Gen. Colin Powell set forth his reasons for supporting Obama, ranging from his concerns about where the Republican Party is headed (he is a Republican) to the way the McCain campaign had been run in the preceding several weeks; from his concern about McCain’s lack of direction as the current economic crisis unfolded, and the selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate, to his trust in Obama’s “way of doing business” and judgment.

Gen. Powell said it came down to which of the two candidates would best serve the needs of the nation for the next period of time. He said,

I have come to the conclusion that, because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities – and you have to take that into account – as well as his substance, he has both style and substance, he has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president.

According to Editor & Publisher, a website that follows such things, editorial boards across the country have so far endorsed Obama by a margin of 3-to-1, contrasted with an almost even count in 2004. And before anyone hollers “liberal media,” let it be noted that, in addition to the usual suspects (the New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun), the Bryan-College Station Eagle made its first-ever presidential endorsement, for Obama. Furthermore, at least 38 papers that endorsed Bush in 2004 have switched this year to Obama, including our own Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The Chicago Tribune endorsed a Democrat for the first time ever, and while you may be tempted to think, “Well, of course a Chicago paper would endorse Barack Obama,” think about the fact that they probably know Obama better than most of the rest do.

And speaking of hometown perspectives, the Anchorage Daily News, in its endorsement of Obama — “Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand,” the paper had this to say about Sarah Palin:

Despite her formidable gifts, few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch the governor beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

Colin Powell may be the most recognized in what has begun to look like a Republican mass defection; other notables to endorse Obama recently include Scott McClellan, Ken Adelman, William Weld, Christopher Buckley, and Susan Eisenhower.

Ever since he was accused of being too famous, the attacks on Obama have been relentless and have ranged from truth through implication to out-and-out lie. No, he’s not a Muslim (and as Colin Powell said, What if he were? This is America!) and no, he’s not a terrorist, and no, he’s not in favor of turning murderers loose (the Republicans’ latest robocalls, recorded by Rudy Giuliani, are Willie Horton redux).

And no, Obama is not a socialist, unless you consider wanting to give a tax cut to folks in the middle class, tax credits to small businesses and tax incentives to companies who don’t send their jobs overseas to be socialism.

If you do, it’s well past time to get out the dictionary.

Throughout all the attacks a calm and imperturbable Barack Obama refused to reciprocate, despite urgings from some of his supporters and a slew of pundits to “get tougher.” According to conservative TV host Joe Scarborough, speaking to Newsweek recently, “He doesn't attack Republicans, he doesn't attack whites and he never seems to draw these dividing lines that Bill Clinton [does].”

Finally, and inexplicably, his opponents complain that Obama is an intellectual, an “elitist.” As if that were a defect.

Let me say this about that: When I fly, I want my pilot to be one of the elite that make up the best; I want my surgeon to be of the medical elite; I want my lawyer to be unbeatable; I want our troops and their generals to be the best of the best, and by golly, I want my President to be.

Short and sweet: Obama’s tax plan

Some days I just don’t understand how, this late in the game, there can be anyone left who is undecided about the Presidential race. I mean, it’s been going on for close to two years!

Other days, I remember to give the benefit of the doubt to folks who are not political junkies like me and so haven’t been paying attention as closely as I have.

But by now there’s a lot of information out there — the TV ads that have begun to show up in the last month or so, the 24/7 cable news, and of course the candidates’ web sites (and the Obama campaign even has its own TV channel, 5890 on Dish Network) — so
they’d better hop to it, for early voting starts NOW.

This space was dedicated a week ago to comparing the two candidates’ health care plans, followed on Friday by a comparison of their proposals for dealing with the economic crisis.

You could say the best was saved for last. Taxes.

Let’s talk about “Joe the plumber” for a minute.

Samuel Joseph Wurtzelbacher, a registered Republican who rocketed to fame in the third Presidential debate, told Obama, in a rope line, that he was poised to purchase his bosses’ plumbing business but that doing so would bring him income “in the $260,000 to $280,000 range” which he figured would increase his taxes under the Obama plan.

Whether or not he was a “plant,” as some suspect, it made a great talking point for the debate, so I’m glad this conversation took place right there in front of everyone, and I don’t agree with the media frenzy about his license or anything else personal.

It turned into a great hook for the candidates, and gave Obama the chance to point out that (a) based on what he is making at this point Joe would benefit from Obama’s proposed tax cut, and (b) that his tax rate would increase only on the amount of income above $250,000.

In other words, the first $250,000 would be tax-increase free! Still, if I ever get lucky enough to earn that kind of money, I don’t think I’ll mind at all paying another 3% or so on the $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 extra.

This being politics, of course, part of Obama’s answer on the rope line was morphed by the McCain folks into something vaguely sinister.

Obama said to Joe, “If the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you. And right now, everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody. And I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.”

This naturally became “Redistribution of wealth! Horrors! Welfare! Yuck!”

Obama went on to explain to Joe that he would also eliminate the capital gains tax for a small business like Joe’s, to encourage growth.

What’s amazing to me is that voters who would never in their wildest dreams reach a net income of $250,000 for a family, or $200,000 for a single taxpayer, are convinced that an Obama administration would raise their taxes.

According to a chart published by the Washington Post, citing the Tax Policy Center, Obama’s plan would actually not raise taxes significantly for anyone earning up to $603,402; the tax increase that would kick in at that point would be 8.7% and that would hold up to $2.87 million. Anyone you know going to be worried about that?

Y’know, we’re getting into the stratosphere here, what the Tax Policy Center identifies as the top 1% of Americans. But apparently this is who McCain is really, really worried about when he says that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes.

Warren Buffett, a man who knows a thing or two about making money, hasn’t got a problem with Obama’s tax plan, so I guess I don’t either.

Giuliani: Divorced again!

In his appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Truth he wanted out and took Honor along with him. Oh, and while he was at it, he completely abandoned Reality.

Why do I give a fig about this? I’ll tell you why.

Just as a person who has been attacked by a dog may thereafter fear all dogs, a person who has experienced McCarthyism may forever be vigilant lest we allow it into our society again.

I was in high school during the ascendancy of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his counterparts in the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and because my father worked at the U.N. I got a pretty good inside look at the tyranny of those people.

Dad, with the rest of the American employees of the U.N. Secretariat, had to complete a 13-page loyalty/security questionnaire; the final page was blank, with the instructions, approximately, to “use the space below to provide information that will prove your loyalty to the United States.”

Any historian will confirm that Joe McCarthy never unearthed a single enemy of the people, and he eventually got into some hot water for trying to play the U.S. Army for fools. But the inquisitorial process was numbing (“Were you aware that your friend Mr. Soandso was a member of the Communist party 20 years before you met him?” “Have you ever entertained the Soandso family in your home?”) — and the collateral damage was fierce.

Mr. Soandso — whose politics were pretty ordinary, it turned out — lost his job, and — the times being what they were — his children were harangued in school as “commies.” His wife went to work to support the family. He never recovered his job, his good name, or his dignity.

Meanwhile, back at the State Department, where Dad had worked before the U.N., a dear friend of our family was subpoenaed to appear in person, no attorney allowed; she was questioned over a period of hours about her loyalty and friendships. It was rough and it was traumatic, and she resigned because she just couldn’t take any more.

No charges were ever filed against either of the people I’ve described.

But I was impressed, and I was terrified. Even half a dozen years later, waiting at a bus stop I spied a newsstand that displayed the Daily Worker; I was afraid to cast a further glance at it lest I be seen by someone who might do that to me.

I finally got over it as the country seemed to get saner (and Joe McCarthy, who was laughed out of power by Judge Joseph G. Welch during the Army hearings, finally succumbed to the ravages of alcohol and hatred), but I’ll admit to being a wee bit paranoid still.

So Mr. Giuliani got my attention when he said, essentially, that Barack Obama’s community organizing was run by "a Saul Alinsky [Red flag!] group," in league with the Chicago machine politicians, and that the real purpose of that group was to use taxes for the redistribution of wealth rather than for the benefit of the country.

“Redistribution of wealth” — you know, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez; it’s quite a stretch to claim that trying to put people back to work after they've lost their jobs when the steel plants closed is trying to redistribute wealth.

Rudy said this was “socialist,” called Obama the most left-wing candidate ever, and the most liberal member of the Senate. He repeated the “redistribution of wealth” bit three times, pretty hefty for a few-minute comment.

Naturally, I can’t help but wonder how he would characterize Adlai Stevenson, famously called a “pinko” by Nixon back in the McCarthy era; for that matter how might Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern feel about giving up the “most left-wing” title? And as for the Senate liberals, did he just diss Ted Kennedy? And what about Bernie Sanders, for heaven’s sake, who calls himself a “socialist”?

And Saul Alinsky? Alinsky was in fact the father of “community organizing,” and he was very good at it. He fought AGAINST the Chicago machine because he saw that it wasn’t working for the working poor. Let alone the just plain poor. And he succeeded.
Here’s what the Washington Post said about him:

Alinsky was a bluff iconoclast who concluded that electoral politics offered few solutions to the have-nots marooned in working-class slums. … Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside.

Alinsky took action with an organizing campaign in 1939 in Back of the Yards, the desperate Chicago meatpacking district depicted in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." Fashioning an unlikely alliance of unions, the Catholic church and others to win concessions from industry and government, he said organizers must listen to people's desires, then find leaders to carry the fight.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

So it’s not surprising that when Obama, trained (and by the way, Rudy, having been very successful) in community organizing, talks about the fixing the economy he calls for building from the bottom up, putting people put back to work, rewarding employers for keeping jobs from going overseas, and paying women the same as men for the same work, for example. That’s part of the beginning.

But Giuliani wants you to think, “Commie pinko!”

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy: We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we? And there are a bunch of us who don’t want to go there again. Better take care, lest you be laughed off the stage like Joe McCarthy!

Originally published September 14, 2008

Witnessing history

Gaithersburg, with a population of 1,020, wasn’t much more than a crossroads in Maryland when we moved there in 1942. About 20 miles outside of D.C., it was a decent commute for someone working in Washington, like my dad.

A perfect family town. Looking back now, it was pretty rural; the “old folks’ home” at the end of our street had a field with cows and the occasional calf us kids loved to pet. Even into the third grade, some kids came to school barefoot. Our telephone number was 9W, though it had grown to 68R by the time we moved away five years later.
We all ran around loose, you might say; there weren’t privacy fences, and the street was for bike riding, softball, and hanging out after dark.

When the trash collectors came by they had to drive their truck all the way down our very long driveway to where the household garbage cans were kept. My little sister and I were just fascinated by that huge truck (though I can see now that it was quite ordinary). We pestered the trashmen for a ride and finally one day, with our mom’s consent, we got to ride in it, all the way back up the driveway!

In the somnolent days of small town life you can understand how little kids might consider this the high point of a week.

Not for long, as it turned out, because the guys who so cheerfully gave us little kids a few minutes of their time and a lot of fun were black.

The neighbors two houses over had 13 kids, and by the end of our ride it seems every doggone one of those kids was lined up along their wire fence to chant, “N----lover! N----lover!” Thus was I introduced to Jim Crow.

It didn’t help that our family were known to be damyankees, of course. We still played together, kids being kids and the town being small, but we were always considered outsiders.

I guess you could consider it an awakening, and as time went by I began to be aware of the signs in front of houses FOR SALE to WHITE ONLY. And at the Saturday movies, where we paid a quarter to sit in a smelly old theater I was told that the black kids sitting on the fire escape had paid their money (but only a dime) to watch the movie through the windows up there. Didn’t seem fair, but that was the way it was in Gaithersburg.

In 1947 we moved to damyankeeland, where discrimination seemed to be based on whether you liked the Yankees or the Dodgers, and life moved along fairly smoothly.

Television came along, though not so early to our house, but those without gathered in the homes of those with, so I got to see Milton Berle in black and white. Back then there was a show called “The $64 Question,” by the way.

In college in Ohio I found kindred souls in the jazz club, whose membership, not surprisingly, was biracial and about half the white members were Jewish, and it became the group I ran with. I learned about jazz, and I learned about race. And, as it turned out, I got another lesson.

I’d taken a job off campus, waiting tables in a local restaurant. The owner, a formidable woman anyway, one day called me to task for having been seen talking to a --- (black man) out in front of her restaurant. To be fair, she was an equal opportunity bigot: when I responded to her tirade by shrugging “What do you want me to do?” she finished with “Aha! A Jewish gesture!” And fired me on the spot.

After a year in Ohio I took a break from college and found a job as a “girl Friday,” eventually becoming quite accomplished on the manual Remington typewriter. (And later came the IBM electric, which evolved into the IBM executive with proportional spacing. Amazing! The Selectric was a wonder, but nowhere as miraculous as the self-correcting Selectric – you had to see it to believe it. Remember those round little erasers with brushy tails? Gone.)

Meantime, the computer came onto the scene. From punch cards to Macintosh: What an evolution! And, free at last, no more carbon paper!

In the late 1950’s I went back to college, supporting my education habit with a job serving cocktails at the Starlight Lounge (it was quite respectable, folks). A majority of the customers were young men from the nearby Air Force base, and by now the military was integrated. But it was still a while before there came an evening when a couple of black servicemen showed up and sat at a table, and my boss instructed me not to serve them.

Quitting a job with tray in hand can feel good; it gives you something to slam down on your way out the door.

But this was in California, and it was 1959, and we were supposed to have come further than this, weren’t we?

During the turbulent 1960’s we all watched and praised and were amazed by the Freedom Riders, young people who risked their very lives, as it turned out, because they believed that black folks were entitled to sit down at a lunch counter, to be treated as equals, and especially to vote. And they went down South to try to help make it happen.

James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – all in their early twenties -- went to Mississippi to register black citizens to vote. Not long after their arrival they were arrested, jailed, released, followed and rearrested by the police and turned over to the Klan. They were shot to death. We learned all this only after a six-week search, when they were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, MS.

I was devastated, as were so many Americans. The front-page photograph of their bodies being returned to their grieving parents is seared in my memory and tugs at me still.

There have been so many trials for the country, so many injustices, and also some sweet but hard-won triumphs – but you know these things. I’m just offering some personal recollections that inform my own attitudes and state of mind on race in America.

So when I watched and listened to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech the other night, before that audience of 84,000, I was personally affected, and thrilled to be witnessing what may be the end of the beginning of America’s quest for a perfect union.

And I said to myself, “James, Andrew and Michael, this one’s for you!”

Originally published September 1, 2008

And furthermore …

Even before finishing my last post I realized that there are quite a few more items that need to be said about the current campaign for the presidency. The idea that even one voter might make a choice based on bad information is anathema to everything our Founders intended for America.

Take (please!) this new ad from the McCain campaign:

"Life in the spotlight (the video shows crowds cheering Obama) must be grand, but for the rest of us times are tough."

Us? This from the guy who campaigns wearing $520 leather Ferragamo loafers, enjoys the use of his billion-heiress wife’s private plane to travel to campaign events, and owns at least half a dozen homes in pleasant locations?

The ad goes on: “Obama voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000,” while the text-over says Obama: RAISE TAXES ON MIDDLE CLASS.

The narrator claims that Obama “promises to raise taxes on small business, seniors, your life savings, your family.” Talk about hot buttons! Then, next to a photo of a smiling Barack Obama, “Painful taxes! Hard choices for your budget!”

What a heartless cad!

The ad concludes, of course, with “I’m John McCain and I approve this message.”

Some in the TV commentariat speculated aloud last week that they don’t believe McCain is really this kind of guy, that he must not really know what his minions are putting out there because he surely would not be comfortable running such ads.

Next to the ad described above, I could almost forgive the simple slander of using a remark out of context, as I described last week. Here we have an out-and-out lie. No other way to characterize it.

Obama has said for months that his tax proposals include REDUCING taxes for every family with less than $250,000 income, and eliminating them altogether for low-income families and seniors under $50,000.

I used to fantasize that whenever an election was won with a proven lie the person who won that way should have to give up the office. Fat chance.

From lies to too-clever-by-half: In an exchange about McCain’s fixation with off-shore drilling, Obama observed that, hey, if every driver got the car tuned up and its tires inflated to specification the fuel savings would be immediate, contrasted with the years before new wells could influence gasoline prices — if indeed they did more than a penny or three a gallon.

McCain promptly began a campaign to mock this as “Obama’s energy plan,” and handed out cute little pressure gauges to reporters. (Ordinary folks could get one for only $25.00 on McCain’s web site.)

But here’s what BusinessWeek.com wrote on August 1, 2008:

According to www.fueleconomy.gov, the gas savings of having a properly tuned car is 16 cents a gallon, compared with a car that’s not properly tuned. The savings from properly inflated tires versus improperly inflated tires is up to 40-cents a gallon.

Statistics vary, but more than half of the vehicles on the road today are believed, from periodic spot checking, to be under-inflated.

AAA and NASCAR agree, by the way.

Further, according to BusinessWeek.com,

The U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration says that removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn’t lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017, and that even at its peak the extra production would have an ‘insignificant’ impact on oil prices.

So it was reassuring to hear McCain endorse the idea a week or so later.

And none of these sources mentioned the fact that the savings realized by reducing driving speed to 55 mph is said to add about five miles per gallon, not an amount to be sneezed at with current prices where they are.

One thing for sure: McCain’s argument that if we only “Drill here! Drill now!” it will bring down the price of gasoline is, to say the least, misleading.

Ok, but let’s say it’s a reasonable argument that, assuming more oil will eventually be needed, whether or not it drives down prices, we should probably be starting now. Here’s a problem:

People who seem to know what they are talking about point out (a) that we are already operating our refineries at capacity, so to accommodate more oil we will need to build more refineries; and (b) that there are millions of acres of existing oil leases that have not been drilled upon.

According to the U.S. Minerals Management Service,

Currently 79 percent of America’s technically recoverable offshore oil reserves are open for leasing, while just 21 percent are closed to drilling. [Minerals Management Service, 2006]

Currently 82 percent of America’s technically recoverable offshore natural gas reserves are open for leasing, while just 18 percent are closed to drilling. [Minerals Management Service, 2006]”

It does seem to me that it would make sense to start drilling on lands that are already available, start building more refineries, all while continuing the quest for alternative solutions (after all, we’ll have at least a decade on our hands).

I remember how the Bush tax cuts for the very, very wealthy got through a distraught Congress while we were still reeling from the attacks of 9/11 — the President took advantage of the willingness of the nation to follow him just about anywhere, and the tax cuts were passed within days.

Could it be that the oil companies (who love the idea of more leases in juicy offshore locations, who gave McCain over $1 million to show that love) are hoping our present panic will help get them those leases?

All I can offer is a cautionary to Americans to pay close attention, check out the facts. Else, once again, it’s “fool me twice” time.

Originally published August 10, 2008

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

Slide talk

As she strove to justify her claim that she should continue to seek the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton got herself into a heap of trouble with almost everyone — Democrats, Republicans, undeclared delegates, print journalists, an array of columnists in print and on the internet, the expected TV talking heads, and of course bloggers — for what might be minimally characterized as an injudicious reference to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

At first reluctant to join the made-for-opinion pile-on because it would be too easy, I thought about it a little harder and soon realized how few of her critics seemed to have noticed that her argument was completely flawed.

Hillary had told the editorial board of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where one of the last two Democratic primaries was to take place June 3rd, that it was completely reasonable for the contest to go into June because, “You know my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June,” she said.

But it’s apples and bananas. It’s a false analogy. Back in the day we would have called it “slide talk.” Different from spinning — offering the best possible interpretation of something — or lying, slide talk is telling the truth in such a way designed to manipulate or give a false impression.

In 1992, California didn’t hold its presidential primary until June. In 1992 Bill Clinton held the lead, though not the lock, on delegates until the California primary voters clinched the nomination for him in June. In short, in 1992 the process wasn’t quite done until then.

In a December 2007 conversation with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Mrs. Clinton agreed with him that the process has become much more compressed since 1992, as various states moved their primaries up in the hope of wielding more influence.

One of those states was California; from 1996 through 2004, Californians voted in March, but then moved up again to February for the 2008 election.

In other words, the process Hillary Clinton has been talking about was really pretty much all over on this year’s Super Tuesday, February 5th, when 24 states including California held their primaries.

And in that December 2007 conversation, she had said, “We are competing everywhere through February 5th. … I’m in it for the long run. It’s not a very long run — it’ll be over by February 5th!”

No, ma’am, there is no valid comparison between where we’ll be in June this year with where we were in June of 1992, and I’m disappointed that this point has not been made in the general commotion about her remarks.

As for the part of her statement that drew most of the attention, it was her intent, she explained, simply to offer examples of campaigns that ran into June: “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Do we? I remember that it was California, where I lived at the time, and I remember where I was when the news broke, and I remember the despair that swept the country. But that it was June?

And can it be that an intelligent, well-informed person with 35 years of political experience really couldn’t think of any other such contest between 1968 and 1992? Or didn’t have the sense to stop with the 1992 example?

Remember: California’s primary this year was in February.

No, this is a woman who does not make an unplanned remark, who calculates every statement down to the punctuation marks. She said what she meant to say, and in true Clintonian fashion apologized — sort of — later.

“The jury will disregard that remark” popped into my mind. That’s shorthand in some circles for a trial lawyer’s tactic of eliciting inadmissible testimony that is certain to cause his opponent to object, after which the judge sternly informs the jury that it must pretend the remark was never heard. Right.

But if in fact Mrs. Clinton truly misspoke so grave an allusion, then she is clearly unqualified to serve in the one office in the land where such an error may bring disastrous consequences for the country.

Peace for our time?

A couple of weeks back, President Bush traveled to Israel to join that determined-to-survive and thriving little country in celebrating its 60th birthday. In a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Mr. Bush somehow found it appropriate to lash out at “some” who suggest that talking to one’s enemies may be a good beginning idea.

Whoever he meant by “some,” the perfect irony is where he said it, because the concept of the importance of talking not just to our friends but also to our enemies is old hat to Israelis. It was none other than Yitzhak Rabin, speaking as Prime Minister of Israel back in 1993, who said, “One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy.”

However Mr. Bush might choose to characterize the notion of talking to people whose behavior we don’t like, there is no arguing with the truth stated by one of Israel’s greatest statesmen —someone who was in a position to know whereof he spoke.

And just in case the reference to “some” went right over people’s heads, the ever-helpful John McCain tag-teamed with Mr. Bush to make sure everyone understood what Mr. Bush had said and then linked it to the campaign by first expounding on the idea of “talking = appeasement” and then cleverly declining to say whether he thought Barack Obama’s suggestion that we should talk to Iran would make him an appeaser.

But history is on the side of Rabin and Obama. Israel’s peace-making efforts since 1967 have succeeded with Egypt, an enemy they chose to talk to, and with Jordan, another enemy turned friend by talking. Not to mention the Palestinian Liberation Organization, now the Palestinian Authority, and Rabin’s willingness to talk to Yassir Arafat, because of which the old enemies began the long hard road to a two-state solution.

Mr. Bush himself apparently thought it was okay to talk to Muammar Qadaaffi, of Libya, notwithstanding that dictator’s support of terrorism (Pan Am 103), and he proudly says it was his administration’s negotiations that brought about Libya’s agreement to abandon pursuit of nuclear arms.

And don’t forget North Korea, where Mr. Bush’s emissaries have been engaged with a clearly dangerous despot, Kim Jong Il, in an effort to end his nuclear weapons program, an effort that seems on its way to paying off.

So it was puzzling when Mr. Bush veered away from the celebration at hand to suggest that anyone who even suggested talking to the enemy was pretty much in the same league as Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister whose actions in the run-up to WWII have established him, in the eyes of some, as the model for appeasement.

In his speech in Israel, Mr. Bush said, “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. … We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Never mind that Mr. Chamberlain talked to the enemy and gave the enemy what it wanted, namely, a big bite out of Czechoslovakia, in exchange for nothing more than a worthless promise by Hitler to behave himself.

And never mind that the American Heritage dictionary definition of appeasement is “to pacify or placate (someone) by acceding to their demands.”

Well, never mind the facts. Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain clearly intended to label as an appeaser and bad-as-Chamberlain anyone who dares suggest even talking to an enemy. After all, this is modern American politics, and the faster you can paste a nasty label onto your opponent, the better.

Well, Mr. Obama jumped on it “like a duck on a June-bug,” as Ernie Ford used to say:

“George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists,” said Obama, “and the president's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel. …

“Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power — including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy — to pressure countries like Iran and Syria.”

“I am happy to have a debate with John McCain and George Bush about foreign policy,” Obama said. “I believe that there is no separation between George Bush and John McCain when it comes to our Middle East policy, and I think their policy has failed.”

Somewhat inconveniently, it was only the day before all this that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had said, "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage . . . and then sit down and talk with them." Oops! Another appeaser, right there in Mr. Bush’s cabinet.

And the day after was just as inconvenient. A new video hit YouTube and newscasts across the country: Here was John McCain, back in 2006, live and in color, interviewed by James Rubin for SkyNews:

RUBIN: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCAIN: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another… it's a new reality in the Middle East.”

Beautiful.

Is a sore loser inevitable?

It was only a couple of months ago that I suggested in this space that the primary season would soon be upon us, but I never imagined that it might be Texas that would determine the winners!

On the Democratic side, the race is so far too close to call and our primary on March 4th will be significant — when’s the last time you had a chance to vote in a Presidential primary knowing that your vote would actually matter?

I wrote then:

We haven’t seen a lot of the candidates here in Texas, of course, because Texas doesn’t get to vote in a primary until next March, by which time it may be all over.

Wrong!

And then:

What I’d give for the old days of “brokered” conventions!

Maybe wrong again: I should have remembered that old admonition, to be careful what you wish for! It certainly looks like that’s where we are headed, and it’s not pretty.

On the one hand, events have — I believe happily — proven the pundits’ assessment of Clinton “inevitability” to be dead wrong!

On the other, there could be a destructive battle to decide who will seek the presidency on behalf of the Democratic party.

There is already anger and bitterness in the air, mostly, it seems to me, flowing from the Clinton campaign and certain of its supporters demanding, each time they perceive a setback, that some rule or other be changed to their benefit.

The anger is on display when Bill shakes his finger at his audience, when his wife attacks the press for treating her unfairly, and most recently in the form of a screed written by Robin Morgan, a prominent feminist, blaming “sociopathic woman-hating” for what’s going on.

These activities are disturbing because of what they tell us about the candidate. And whether you believe it or not, as tempting as it is to have a candidate who will do anything, change every rule, to defeat the Republican candidate in the fall, it is already settled in the minds of many Democrats that they really, truly, want an end to this kind of politicking.

Clinton’s decision to portray herself as inevitable from the get-go did not work, though it seemed at first it might. It didn’t work for two reasons: The voters turned out not to appreciate the arrogance and sense of entitlement that seemed to underlie it; and Barack Obama turned out to be, as even Bill Clinton acknowledged the other day, the more exciting candidate.

But, she argues, Obama hasn’t been truly “vetted” so no one knows what his opponents might dredge up to throw at him, whereas everyone already knows everything there is to know about her.

Well not quite: There is still the unresolved request for her White House records and tax returns to be disclosed, and the influence of Bill’s rather eclectic business dealings.

In any event, as Barack Obama himself somewhat amusedly pointed out, there is no doubt that whatever can be dug up against him would most likely have been uncovered by the Clintons by now.

Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she will be “ready from Day One in the Oval Office” has always struck me as somewhat peculiar, given that the first day in the Oval Office doesn’t arrive until almost three months after the election — a space in time designed by our better-angel forbears to allow for the smooth transfer of power and plenty of preparation, Cabinet building and the like.

And then there’s Bill. What can I say?

Now, there were some fine accomplishments during the Bill Clinton presidency, most notably a healthy economy, but there were also more some not-so-wonderful events — most notably the failed health care plan and the passage of NAFTA — and more problems than you could shake a stick at, problems no one wants to take on again, not to mention a level of inter-party rancor that does not appear to have faded.

That in mind, Hillary Clinton argues that she is the best qualified to withstand attacks from Republicans because of all that she has endured; what folks need to consider is that those attacks were leveled at the Clintons!

Which means one thing does seem inevitable: If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, and if she were to win the White House — certainly not a certainty — we’d be right back where we left off in 2000, rancor and all.

I don’t see what I believe America needs, and I do see what I believe America most assuredly does not need.

Beginning with early voting on February 19th, Texas now has the rare and remarkable opportunity to change the course of American politics for a good long while. The calculation even by folks in her own campaign is that if Hillary Clinton does not win Texas — and win it big — the race will be over and Barack Obama will secure the nomination.

You can talk all day long about “superdelegates” but the consensus continues to be that Texas can decide the outcome and maybe even help to save the world!

The Clintons constantly deride Barack Obama’s rhetoric as “poetry” contrasted with the “prose” she offers. So a little spin here is irresistible:

“Prose” is the root of “prosaic,” and if Obama is the opposite of prosaic, then, according to the thesaurus, he is extraordinary, imaginative, inspired and inspiring — just what we need in a leader!

Bring it on!

Sometime during the snows of Iowa, the Clintons realized that the upstart fellow who was challenging Hillary’s entitlement to the presidency was making great gains and might actually win the nomination.

While Barack Obama was drawing larger and more dynamic crowds, electrifying them with his optimism and his conviction that America can actually find a different and better way in the world, the Clintons were drawing large crowds too, but there was something missing.

It would be cheap to simply call it hope.

Never daunted by the worst of times, the Clintons set about to improve Hillary’s chances, taking on the very delicate task of making sure the contest became about race.

Bill Clinton charged into the spotlight to characterize Obama’s record of opposition to our invasion of Iraq as “a fairy tale.”

He insisted that a vote for this graduate of Harvard Law School and constitutional law professor, veteran of effective community organizing on the mean streets of Chicago, eight years in the Illinois state senate and now two in the US Senate, would just be “rolling the dice.”

The way voting for Abraham Lincoln was, I guess.

Clinton surrogates spread out to remind us that their opponent, as a teenager, had experimented with drugs. Not only that, he has a middle name that is very popular within the Muslim communities around the world and identifies the ruling family of the Kingdom of Jordan!

Truth became innuendo: according to Robert Johnson (known for heading up BET, a purveyor of “gangsta rap”), Obama was “doing something – I won’t say what, but he wrote about it in his book” back in the neighborhoods of Chicago. He went on to liken Obama to Sidney Poitier playing the movie role of a very educated and “mannered” black man who was finally found acceptable by his white in-laws to be, in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

Andrew Young, veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, declared that Obama is “too young” -- notwithstanding that he is 11 years older than the age of qualification set forth in the Constitution, three years older than JFK was when he became president, and a whole year older than Bill Clinton was at the time of his inauguration!

Young said Obama should “wait,” that “his time will come and the world will be ready for visionary leadership.”

Isn’t the world ready now?

All the while this was going on, the Clintons chided and tsk-tsked; this remark or that email may have been regrettable, or even “out of bounds,” but they would NEVER, EVER engage in race-baiting, and if there had been any injection of race into the campaign, well, then, “He started it!

True, the Clintons were not technically race-baiting; they were merely making sure that every single voter in South Carolina (a) remembered that Barack Obama is African-American and (b) had a chance to wonder whether he can win. Their intention is to do the one thing that Barack Obama had just about overcome: They want voters to see him as “the black candidate,” with the almost inescapable corollary that he would concern himself most with “black” issues.

I heard a commentator remark that the Clintons have a history of leaving a trail of damage believing they can always fix it later. Will it work this time? And is the country really not ready?

Maybe elders in the black leadership like John Lewis, Andrew Young and Charlie Rangel, bearing the scars of literal and figurative batons and dogs in the long and dreadful struggle for equality, are accustomed to think like this; they believe that a Democratic victory will almost certainly move the country forward again, yet are still, 50 years on, afraid to believe in their own successes.

But all around America, the younger generation, black and white, north and south, are turning out in droves to hear and see Obama, to register to vote, and to participate – many for the first time -- in the greatest democracy in the world.

The topic of race in America has become an undercurrent of the campaign, to the apparent satisfaction of some Clinton supporters and to the dismay of others. The former believe that it will drive not only more white voters to Clinton but also blacks who are fearful that Obama must lose because they dare not believe anything has changed in all these years.

Some of those whose reaction is dismay are tempted to want to make it go away by not discussing it at all: “Let’s get back to the issues, to the candidates’ differences, their likely style of governing; we don’t want this to be about race!”

There are pundits and politicians who like to describe what’s going on as “bickering” between the candidates.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a truth: It’s not bickering, it’s deadly serious, and it’s not going to go away. Unless we haul it out into the sunlight and challenge it, we will be gone another generation before anyone tries again.

To those who say “Americans will not elect a black man, so there’s no point in trying, it isn’t time yet,” I say: How do you know that? Just when will the right time be? Why can’t we find out?

I’m not sure we’ll ever have this opportunity again.

I challenge the black and white and brown Americans who want to make the leap into a new place, to once again pass the torch to a new generation, to tell the doubters and the timid and the cynics:

“Bring it on!” Let’s get this over with and go forward.

I believe that this movement of hope has caught hold, that hundreds of thousands will emulate the past by marching, this time to the polls.

Now that Barack Obama has won the South Carolina primary by two to one over Clinton, agreed by all pundits to far exceed even the most generous predictions, I dare to believe that, just maybe, America has overcome, after all.

All over America voters have come to believe, because of the Obama campaign, that we may finally realize the American dream together.

For if not now, when?

Political Spin

Let’s just talk about political spin for a moment. And why I hate it.

To “spin” a comment or event is to, literally, twirl it about to make it sound the way you want, so you can use it to win the argument, the day, the election. In some cases, it is a way to turn truth into a convenient lie.

Barack Obama said, last week, in an in-depth interview with the Reno Journal-Gazette editorial board, that the coming election was similar to 1980, when President Ronald Reagan “changed the trajectory” of the country. He explained that in 1980 the voters:

. . . felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think [Reagan] tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

I think most folks would agree with that simple observation.

Obama went on to say that he thought that, for “large chunks of time” over the last 10-15 years, the Republican Party had actually been more a party of ideas than the Democrats, “in that they were challenging conventional wisdom.” He included in this observation that he did not necessarily agree with those ideas.

SPIN TIME: The Clinton campaign immediately trotted out the notion that Barack Obama had spoken “very favorably” of Ronald Reagan, and that Obama had said the Republicans had better ideas. Hillary went on to suggest that Obama must therefore be in favor of privatizing social security, eliminating the minimum wage, cutting healthcare benefits and giving goodies to the pharmaceutical companies. Bill Clinton made it clear he was not happy.

Anyone see a problem with this?

If you agree with the Clinton spin, then I had better not tell you that Mussolini made the trains run on time, or you would think I was a fan of his. And, of course, it I told you that Hugo Chavez has brought radical changes to Venezuela it has to mean I just LOVE what he’s doing to his people.

One of the difficulties in running for office is divining just how your most thoughtful remark might be understood — or misunderstood.

Now, sometimes a little spin is warranted, can be done without lying, and doesn’t really offend anyone.

Take the results of the Nevada caucuses this past weekend.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney did such a walkaway there was nothing left to spin, unless you cared to say it was just because of a huge Mormon turnout, which would not necessarily be the case as he moves along.

And on the Democratic side:

It was a great victory for the Clintons, for whom 51% of the voters declared.

It was a great victory for Barack Obama, who came from behind to win 13 delegates to Hillary’s 12!

All true. Quite spinnable. No harm, no foul. No lies.

And no clear winner, apparently, since the State party chairman has pointed out that everything could change at their county and state conventions!

Golly, those people get to have all the fun!

The Clintons don't make mistakes, do they?

Thinking about the Obama-Clinton race, it occurs to me that the more folks become familiar with Clinton, the less they think of her as a woman, and the more they get to know Obama, the less they think of him as black. Voters are getting past the novelty and into the serious business of character and issues.

And with this development has come, just in the last few weeks, a drip, drip, drip of remarks by one or the other Clinton or Clinton aide that cannot fail to remind us that Obama is black, even as other seemingly random events and behavior cannot fail to remind us that Hillary Clinton is a woman.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that the Clintons (yes, there are two of them running) would be so calculating as to make this happen, but it’s hard to dismiss, given what we know of them. Consider this:

If I’m right and the voters are beginning to look past race and gender, and the Clintons worry about that because they want to be sure (a) women vote for a woman and (b) primary voters go back to worrying about whether a black man can win in the general election, they sure don’t want them to forget her gender and his race, right?

Tell you the truth, from the ambiguity of Bill’s calling some of Obama’s campaign statements a “fairy tale,” and Hillary’s assertion that President Johnson was the only reason Martin Luther King, Jr. accomplished anything, to the scurrilous remarks by Robert Johnson, whose gifts to the black community have included bringing "gangsta rap" to his BET audiences, the inevitable criticism and reaction from the African-American community further serves to remind voters that Barack Obama is, indeed, black. Unintended consequences? I think not.

Now, I don’t think for a minute that either of the Clintons is a racist, and I’ll defend them on that point forever.

But I am easily persuadable that a scheme to remind voters to worry about Obama’s race is, well — Clintonian.

Nothing wrong with the polls!

I am perfectly satisfied with the analysis offered on Keith Olbermann's Countdown a couple of days after the election. He and Craig Crawford, of Congressional Quarterly, went through the numbers, and if I recall them more or less correctly, it came out that the percentage of the vote predicted for Obama (between 34 and 38) was just about right — he landed at 36%.

The number that was wrong, that had been forecast for Clinton, was 28%, obviously low. But then the number of UNDECIDED or MIGHT CHANGE votes was over 40% or so.

Looks like the majority of those broke for Clinton, maybe because of tears, maybe because of sympathy, etc., or maybe just because a lot of Clinton voters held back until the last minute. And it's reported that lots of those were women over 45 who (anecdotally) felt HRC had been mistreated.

Some independents who voted for McCain did so, they said, to stop Romney, but only after they were assured by the polls that Obama had it nailed. That would explain McCain's unexpectedly high numbers.

In the end, the POLLS weren’t to blame — the interpreters were.

On the Clinton candidacy

There is some buzz among the blogs that negative comments about her campaign by talking heads in print and on TV may have driven voters to Clinton, because she may have been perceived as badly treated.

Speaking as a devoted activist and admittedly an Obama supporter (full disclosure), I do think that folks who feel driven to vote in a particular way by the comments of others do the country a disservice. Yes, we wish that this commentator or that op-ed writer spoke with more restraint, said different things, but we all know -- or should know -- that they are in the opinion business.

We are responsible for how we vote, and it is our responsibility to assess events for ourselves.

I am a woman, and I was a strong supporter of the Clintons (both of them) during his presidency. But not this time.

I would love to see a woman president. But the Clintons don't really comprise a woman candidate; they are a team and that's what is running, and that's what we'll get if they win.

It's time to move on.

Authenticity 2, Money 0

Indeed, the events in Iowa last week must bring joy to the heart of every American who has despaired at the increasing influence of money and power in our politics, lamented the prevalence of sound-bite speechifying, all but succumbed to the feeling that too many seeking office see us, the voters, as dopes.

Whatever else the pundits may make of the outcome of the Iowa caucuses, it is abundantly clear that Americans really want change, but even more, we want authenticity.

Barack Obama, the only Democratic candidate who is not old news, has captivated his audiences (which have been huge and continue to grow) with his Kennedyesque ideas, coolly intelligent speaking style and wit, talking to his listeners as “you” instead of talking about “I.” He handily won the Iowa caucuses, thrilling supporters and cynics alike.

Obama, a youngish “skinny man with a funny name” with roots in Africa, won the first vote of the 2008 election for president of the United States! Can you imagine how that will play around the world?

Hillary Clinton, much to everyone’s surprise (most notably hers and her advisers’) came in third, 9 points behind Obama. Writing in this space a few weeks ago, I suggested that her claim to “strength and experience” was mostly myth and manufacture, and I do think that is part of what hurt her in Iowa; also hurting her was the omnipresence of her husband, which had the effect of reminding people that he was her only real qualification for the job.

For reasons probably having to do with what I call the “re-run factor,” John Edwards, notwithstanding a popular populist message, managed to eke out only slightly more support than Clinton. But that’s not the story here.

Now, some folks claim there is very little difference in what the two leading Democratic candidates offer; I disagree with that, but that’s another discussion. The difference is in how they offer it: One candidate appears completely comfortable speaking without a script, the other seems to need one; the former seems to speak from the heart, the other from calculation.

Over on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, despite a slightly oddball outlook on some matters and absolutely no national or international experience, routed Mitt Romney, described by many in the media as the “perfect” presidential candidate.
Interestingly, the difference was almost exactly the same 9% as Obama’s lead over Clinton.

Huckabee exudes a genuine, unpretentious affability with a down-home flavor; you could call him the real McCoy. He, too, despite a wariness of his strong evangelical support, has charmed the media — though not, apparently, much of the Republican establishment.

Republican stalwarts from the Club for Growth and the Weekly Standard to Rush Limbaugh have attacked him on issues from taxes to immigration (“We shouldn’t punish the children of illegal immigrants for their parents’ acts,” he once said.) It’s panic in the streets as the Republican Party tears itself apart to keep a true compassionate conservative from winning.

Huckabee is unfailingly described as sincere and “authentic,” whereas Romney, described by wags as the “Stepford” candidate, has won rare-if-ever anti-endorsements from two conservative New Hampshire newspapers.

According to the Concord Monitor, “If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we'll know it. Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.

And the Union Leader, which had endorsed McCain, chimed in: “Romney has all the advantages: money, organization, geographic proximity, statesman-like hair, etc. But he lacks something John McCain has in spades: conviction….He has spoken his lines well, but the people can sense that the words are memorized, not heartfelt.”

According to the folks who like arithmetic, the legendary amounts of his own money that Romney, a multimillionaire, invested in the Iowa campaign amounted to more than half his total; his overall expenditure in Iowa worked out to about $250 per vote when the final count was in, contrasted with Huckabee’s $35 or so.

Does this mean you can’t buy an election? Time will tell, but for now we know with certainty that you can’t buy Iowa.

Now, unless the New Hampshire primaries blow away my theory, we’re on a roll. It looks like America may finally be on the verge of something big, something positive, something authentic, and above all, something new.

Freedom From Misinformation

The proliferation of blogs — do-it-yourself “journalism” on the internet, by anyone with the wit to use a computer (and some with only that) — and the ability to generate a flood of emails at the drop of a “SEND” button have brought the art of whisper campaign to a new level. Everyone gets to play, but the game afoot is not fun or funny and can be devastating.

When John Kennedy ran for President in 1960 an anonymous telephone call was making the rounds: “Here’s to the three K’s — Kennedy, Catholicism and Communism!” Lovely KKK subtext, right? Or perhaps the caller’s spelling skills were to blame, but the message was clear.

In the early spring of 2000, John McCain, an altogether honorable person considered by some to be a hero, was doing very well in the Republican primaries. Most respectable journalists and political operatives agree that it was Karl Rove who arranged for a telephone campaign of gossip against McCain that most of said journalists and politically savvy folks blame for his loss to George Bush in South Carolina, an event that may well have affected the history of America.

Now it is much easier, takes very little time, and costs nothing to whisper dirt to prospective voters, and someone opposed to Barack Obama’s run for the presidency began a while back to do just that. It’s not clear which came first, the emails or the article in Insight Magazine, a Washington Times (think Reverend Moon) publication, but that’s all it took to permeate the internet and leap onto Fox News.

Last week, the Washington Post published a story about it all.

Now, even though the rumors the Post chose to publish may not have warranted publication as news, it can be argued that sometimes the truth isn’t as evident as we would like, and if a reporter feels obliged to dig deep into a rumor in search of truth he may well find something interesting. (On the other hand, if we examine our tap water with a microscope we might forswear the drink forever rather than ingest the wildlife therein.) In any case, the reporter must likewise feel obliged to use judgment, or at least some common sense, in deciding whether it has value.

Given the easy fact-checking available to just about anyone, especially a reporter for a major newspaper with access to Lexis-Nexis, it is hard to justify the perpetuation of any rumor. Heck, even snopes.com had the Obama lies nailed a year ago.

I won’t deny it might be newsworthy to say “there’s this falsehood being spread by so-and-so, and we have checked and determined its origin and the apparent reason behind it,” but the Washington Post made it a front-page story, spending some 1500 words to tell us it about a rumor promulgated by Obama’s enemies.

(In fact, it turned into a two-fer for the political right, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was behind it!)

Rumor and innuendo have become too influential in our lives, notwithstanding the amusement provided by misbehaving glamour-girls whose function in society seems to be just that. The line between news we need and innuendo is hard to fathom, just when it is so important that we get it right — as in a presidential campaign — and I believe it is the responsibility of every reporter to unblur that line.

That includes getting rid of “gotcha” journalism on televised interviews, usually starring the famous-journalist-as-Perry Mason, more interested in demonstrating how cleverly and in how many ways he can posit a question that still won’t be answered if the subject chooses not to. There is no discovery here, no illumination for the viewer, just the impression that information has been gleaned when in fact only inferences may be drawn from nothing more than implications. It has been reported that if we ask you whether you’ve stopped beating your wife, sir, you’ll deny that you ever did. Do you care to comment?

The question of how to approach and report news is as old as the business itself. A cigar-chomping old-school city editor, under whose tutelage I suffered awhile, insisted on the importance of the right “lede” — the opening sentence of a story — to insure that the reader will be interested enough to read the whole story. He was right. But a lede, or a headline for that matter, can also set the stage, or mood, or predisposition of the reader/viewer to interpret the whole story in a certain way.

In the Washington Post report, the headline was: Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him. Later in the piece, the reporter wrote: “Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a ‘Muslim plant’ in a conspiracy against America,” and then, still later, “The rumors about Obama have been echoed on Internet message boards and chain e-mails.”

Conspicuously missing: Even one sentence stating that the reporter had checked the story and determined it to be completely unfounded. It wasn’t until a post-publication exchange with critics that he used the word “falsehood.” Rumor 1, Truth 0.

Another tough question: When shall we report the news in an historical context that may well leave the reader/viewer with a different impression than if we had reported just the facts of a given event?

If, for example, when reporting that in 2003 Rudy Giuliani married his longtime girlfriend, it would not be appropriate to dig up and publish information about his previous marriage or even marriages, unless it is information clearly related to his qualifications to be president. Knowing that Judi Nathan was his girlfriend a long time before Rudy told his wife, indirectly by way of press conference, that he wanted a divorce, might provide relevant information about his character.

Finally, an issue that still drives me wild: Shall the interviewer let stand a comment by his subject that he knows or suspects to be untrue?

Leaving unchallenged some assertion that the reporter knows to be based on misinformation or, in some cases, an outright lie, allows the statement to live on in the final publication or broadcast, there to become part of the information passed on to the public. It seems to me that in these cases the reporter has at least a responsibility to ask, “Can you prove that? Please tell me where our viewers/readers can confirm that.”

If all else fails, then the reporter, interviewer or editor may still employ the time-honored tradition of the editorial comment, to foil mendacious mischief-makers. Wild accusations should never be allowed to stand.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed by our Constitution, and is critical to the preservation of our democracy. It seems self-evident to me that journalists or editors who recognize an item incorrectly offered as “fact” — whether simply mistaken or mean-spirited in origin — have an obligation to prevent its dissemination or perpetuation and to intercept and reveal untruths.

It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak, and another to hear. - Thoreau