Discovery, Democracy and Devotion

2012-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

SUPER BRAWL

It's Super Bowl Sunday and everyone here in New York is gaga over the Giants.

As I write this, they haven't won yet, may not, and are actually a slight underdog. But between New England fans and New York fans, the bounds of arrogance are more or less limitless. Hence, the utter certainty with which each set of loyalists confidently anticipates a favorable outcome.

Regardless of the fact that both cannot -- logically -- be right, and one, therefore, will be demonstrably wrong.

It is in fact amazing how sport can generate so much irrationality. It appears to be the consequence of its not unique but nevertheless potent ability to combine utter contempt with sheer hatred. A number of years ago, I was leaving Yankee Stadium with my son after a Yankee-Red Sox game. We were at the old Yankee Stadium where one exited for the most part by gradually walking down a dozen or so ramps, and this naturally took a bit of time.

As we did so, the crescendo of expletives was deafening. A native New Yorker, I pride myself on the fact that there probably are not any forms of the f-word I have not heard at one time or another in my 55 years. Nor have the grammatical or syntactical constructions surrounding its use been limited. It has come packaged as a noun, verb, adjective and gerund. As a stand alone sentence . . . or in an expletive laced string. But leaving Yankee Stadium that day was an education in the hatred behind this linguistic creativity.

One, in fact, that I had forgotten.

Until I started following this year's Republican presidential primary campaign.

Somewhere between the comical and the incredulous, the GOP has simply channeled its inner hatred. There is, literally, nothing they will give Obama credit for and a whole host of fictive evils the responsibility for which they regularly lay at his feet. If, as the saying goes, a lie rounds the world before truth can even get its boots on, the Republican onslaught this year has been multi-orbital by an order of magnitude.

Obama is not a socialist, a Kenyan, or a foreigner. But he has been tagged as all three at one time or another in the current campaign. The Health Care Reform Act, which took some tentative steps in the direction of regulating insurance companies (so as to insure that they actually pay for medical care rather than invent new exclusions), creating competition (via state based exchanges that, it hopes, will end the monopolies or oligopolies which now describe the 50 state insurance markets), and eliminating free riders (by mandating that everyone have insurance, as is already the case for anyone who wants to operate a motor vehicle), is neither a job killer nor some sort of European style seed designed to replace our rugged individualism with their wussy communitarianism.

But Obamacare has been called all that as well. Even in the face of the fact that it adopts as its central tenet the mandate that Romney passed in Massachusetts and Gingrich proposed as Speaker.

On the economy, their mendacity knows no bounds. On the one hand, they abhor TARP and the later stimulus, ignoring that the GOP itself was a party to the first (in the last months of W's Administration) and claiming, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that the second was an utter failure. (In fact, the only problem with the stimulus is that it was too small, as smart economists -- in particular, Paul Krugman -- presciently warned at the time; given its modest size, it made things significantly better than they otherwise would have been and in any case was not remotely the failure the GOP makes it out to be.)

On the other, they claim that more tax cuts for the wealthy and repeal of our recent anemic regulatory reforms (Dodd-Frank last year and Sarbanes-Oxley a few years back) will magically restore economic growth when, in fact, it was the absence (or, in the case of Glass-Steagall, repeal) of regulation that allowed Wall Street to create the 2008 financial downturn that nearly destroyed us in the first place, and the only thing now standing between us, and the full throttled recovery that Keynesian spending could provide, is lack of demand.

Not a socialist President.

In a rational world, these sorts of charges would be roundly derided. In fact, there wouldn't be a nickel (let alone millions) spent advertising and repeating them. But, as my walk down those old Yankee Stadium ramps a few years ago, and the pre-game hype of today's football extravaganza, reminds me . . .

We do not necessarily live in a rational world.

2011-11-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

PRE-OCCUPIED

For two months, protesters have occupied a square block in lower Manhattan known as Zuccotti Park.

The park, named for the citizen who contributed to its creation more or less as a condition for developing other profitable property in the same neighborhood, is itself a misnomer. Most of it is made up of faux marble "benches" affixed to granite slabs. There are a few rows of thin trees that run diagonally across the venue and a couple of small roundabout flower gardens. But other than that, the "park" is hardly a green space.

It is also very small. It is sandwiched between one modern high rise office building on the north and a twenty-one story landmark built in 1905 on the south. To its immediate east is another modern office building and to its immediate west lies a Burger King and a hamburger cum pizzeria joint.

So, all things considered, calling it a park is the rough equivalent of calling Herman Cain a presidential candidate -- accurate perhaps as a technical matter but not particularly serious if one is interested in apt descriptions.

At somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 or 3 am today, the New York City Police Department cleared the "park" of those who had decided to sleep there. The ostensible reasons for this police action were that (1) the "occupiers" were somehow creating health and safety risks for themselves and others in the surrounding community and (2) the "occupiers" were effectively precluding others from "using" the park as the publicly accessible space it was intended to be.

I work about a half a block from the park and walk by it to and from my office and during lunch approximately half a dozen times a day. During the two months I have been observing the "occupation," I never noticed any "health and safety" problems. Virtually to a man and woman, the protesters were disciplined in respecting police instructions not to impede pedestrians and other passers-by, myself included. I never witnessed a fight or any violence. And the "occupiers" apparently understood the need to leave the park for other more appropriate facilities when mother nature called or personal hygiene demanded.

Nor were the protesters, by New York City standards at least, particularly loud. For some portion of every afternoon, a group on the western edge banged on ersatz drums, accompanied by an occasional saxophonist who tried to inject some harmony (musically, that is) into the drum beat. And late at night -- I am a lawyer who has occasional late nights -- the place was placid. If, as the Mayor says, businesses in the area were complaining, they could not have been the ubiquitous fast food and push cart vendors, who never had it so good. And, for the record, my firm never complained.

As for interfering with "others" who wanted to use the park, this too is a stretch. From about 11 pm to 6 am on a daily basis, the park was never used by anyone other than the occasional drunk stumbling through or couple making out. At other times, but really only in the good weather, it served as a venue for al fresco lunch goers and the occasional skateboarder, the latter of whom were risking far more as a matter of safety and health than any of the occupiers and presumably can begin doing so again.

In any case, it would have been far easier to suggest alternative neighborhood venues for those pre-occupation occasional users who sometimes showed up before Zuccotti became famous. In fact, if public use is the park's purpose, Zuccotti and Mayor Bloomberg should send the "occupiers" a thank you note for having finally brought some reality to what had previously been mere pretense. Because, put simply, for the first time in its lifetime, Zuccotti Park finally lived up to its billing and got a real workout.

Of course, Bloomberg and the Police Commissioner and the editorialists at the right wing New York Post are really just pulling our leg. They didn't clear the park out of concern for health, safety, skateboarders, neckers or the seasonal lunch crowd. They cleared it because, in the belly of the high finance beast that is Wall Street and from which this park sits mere blocks away, the occupiers were making a point.

In fact, they were making a number of them.

The gap between the rich and the rest has grown way too large. The dream of working hard and getting ahead is dying. Corporations are not people. They are creatures of the state. They have no inherent or natural rights. In fact they are not "natural" in any sense of that word. The government, which for years levelled the playing field and enforced some regulatory constraints on a culture of high finance that would literally create a depression before it sacrificed an opportunity for quick profit, has been captured and rendered powerless.

This is the "message" of "occupy Wall Street" or OWS. It has spread throughout the world. And it is not going away.

Because the kids and the hippies and the unemployed and the angry who camped out for two months on a city block in New York -- beating drums, annoying Mayors, and telling the truth -- didn't just occupy a park.

They occupied our mind.

2011-10-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

BIG BOB

My Dad died this week.

He loved martinis, women named Joan, a breaking news story, and books. In 1975, he had to give up the martinis, because, as it turned out, he loved them too much. Then, he loved God.

Which, I have discovered, can be just as intoxicating.

He was an over the top guy and made sure you knew it. He was not cool. He was hot. And like most non-cool, hot, over the top guys in this "too school for cool" era of phony understatement, he was teased for it.

Relentlessly.

Too bad.

We could use a little hot today. From a President, who is way too cool. And from a culture, which has turned cool into a synonym for smart.

Which it decidedly is not.

He had a high school education and about a year of college. He was what the old timers call a "newspaperman". Not a "journalist" or "broadcaster" or "personality" or, God forbid, "talking head." He worked for the Daily News, one of New York City's two remaining tabloid newspapers, for twelve years, from 1950 to 1962. And then for WNBC-TV in New York and NBC News for the next twenty-five.

He loved the news business. And it loved him back. He was the first newspaperman in NYC to report that Mafia kingpin Frank Costello had been killed. In the "if it bleeds, it leads" tabloids, this was a big deal. Most of us remember "Houston, we have a problem" because Tom Hanks said it in the movie "Apollo 13". Daddy actually heard it late one night over the Mission Control radio as he covered that space shot from the Johnson Space Center outside Houston.

He never won a Pulitzer. In fact, he probably gave one up. He crossed a police line at a murder scene in the '50s one day because, as a beefy Irish guy, everyone at that time thought he was a cop. When the real cops kicked him out, he grabbed the wrong trench coat. It belonged to one of the Chiefs at the NYPD's Division of Internal Affairs. In the pocket was a list of all the corrupt cops the NYPD was then investigating.

He gave the list back.

So long Pulitzer.

He was also over the top in his imperfections. Because he loved those martinis for too long, he missed Cub Scouts, Little League, most of his first marriage (to my Mom), and a good chunk of his pay check.

But he conquered that demon as well.

And then was passionate about the conquest.

To a defrocked, alcoholic priest who he sponsored to recovery in "the program", as all the AA guys and gals affectionately call it, he was that guy's Jesus.

Which, all teasing aside, is pretty amazing when you consider the source.

In my teens, long before Tim Russert wrote any books, he was "Big Bob". Not because he was all that big. He just couldn't be missed. He wouldn't let you.

Thank God.

Because . . .

Now he is.

2011-08-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

WHAT BARACK SHOULD SAY

The market is tanking. The unemployment rate is still north of 9% and much higher when you count those who have stopped looking. It is almost a given that we are on the verge of a second recession. Corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, waiting for demand to re-emerge. And governments here and in Europe are fixated on lowering deficits and debt in what has turned into an undisguised contest between creditors who insist on being paid and debtors who can't do it.

We are in big trouble.

And, better late than never, the President has to come out swinging.

Here is what he should say:

"Fellow Americans --

On a crisp fall day in November almost three years ago, you and I made history. We proved the naysayers wrong and the optimists right. Instead of just talking about American exceptionalism, we demonstrated it.

We relegated our two centuries plus compromise on Jefferson's promise that "all men are created equal" to the proverbial dustbin of history, elected the son of a Kenyan immigrant and Kansas student to our highest office, and reignited the American dream for many across the globe who wondered if it still truly existed.

Today, it is time to call on that exceptionalism once again.

Our nation and our world is hurting.

Close to one fifth of our fellow citizens are unemployed or underemployed. Economic growth across much of the world is now anemic as demand in developed countries -- our own included -- has stagnated. Home values have plummeted. And so have the retirement nest eggs in our 401k's. The vast majority of you think the nation is on the wrong track. And you are right.

The reasons for this downward spiral are not all that mysterious.

From 2001 to 2008, we turned a federal surplus into our largest federal deficit. We gave the rich and super rich tax breaks they didn't need and that many of them did not even want. We fought two wars but paid for neither of them. And we continued our now thirty year love affair with deregulation, allowing Wall Street to create worthless mortgage backed securities that it peddled the world over, armed with nothing more than Standard & Poor's phony assurances that these securities would never go under.

Well, and not for the first time, Wall Street was wrong.

And so was S & P.

The result was the financial crisis of September 2008, two months before I was elected and four months before I took the oath of office.

That crisis drove America and the world to the brink of Depression. Huge financial houses collapsed or had to be substantially reorganized. Their names are familiar to all of us -- Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. Much to the chagrin of many of you, the government was forced to bail out the banks, those same irresponsible parties who had brought the world to the brink in the first place. But if we had not done that, all most assuredly would have been lost. And we would have suffered the first Depression in almost eighty years.

There are not many of us alive who remember the 1930s. And none of them seem to be in Congress. But those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it. So it behooves us to take a look back at that grim decade -- an America of 25-30% unemployment, whole families living in shanty towns in our public parks, children going to bed hungry at night, poverty on the rise, especially among the aged, and business at a standstill. And it also behooves us to understand how we were able to end that Depression.

Because the answer may surprise many of us living in today's America. And it will certainly surprise my opponents in Congress and on the Presidential campaign trail. The answer is simple --

The Government did it.

We called it the New Deal then, crafted and guided by a President -- Franklin Roosevelt -- who lifted himself from a wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees. Roosevelt's New Deal put people to work, stimulated demand, regulated finance capital to end the abuses that had caused the Depression, and ended poverty among the aged with Social Security.

And today we need to do much of that again.

So tonight I am proposing, and tomorrow I will send to Congress, a New Deal for the 21st Century. Call it New Deal, 2.1.

Instead of ignoring the weapons at our disposal in the current fight against unemployment and recession, it will enlist them. Instead of pretending the private sector will magically renew itself, it will create the demand business needs to spend the money it is now sitting on and generate the growth and jobs we so desperately need. Instead of trusting Wall Street and the multi-nationals to behave themselves and pay their taxes, it will use the long arm of the regulatory state and the law to make them do it. And instead of assuming Government is the problem, it will use Government to solve the problem.

The centerpiece of today's New Deal will be a stimulus sufficient to the size of the problem at hand. It is time to stop playing politics with our economy. Without consumer spending, there can be no recovery. And at this point, the only way to get consumers to spend is to lower their debt burdens and get them the jobs that will give them the money necessary to do so. To do so, I will ask Congress to fund an additional $200 billion stimulus for this fiscal year and the next. The only strings attached will be requirements that the money increase consumer demand. It will not be used to shore up banks or enrich those who were so heavily favored over the past ten years. It will be used to permit states to fund the projects now suspended due to their own budget crises, and to put money in the pockets of America's working class.

Wall Street, of course, did not just nearly cripple the American economy in the last quarter of 2008. It also left us with a very painful hangover in the form of a housing market where values are going down, foreclosures are going up, and even willing buyers and sellers face difficult and often insurmountable barriers to completing their deals. The central reason for this problem in the housing market is the glut of foreclosed properties. In the past, I have proposed programs that were designed to incentivize private lenders to renegotiate existing loans in an effort to alleviate and ultimately resolve the foreclosure problem. Those efforts have not been sufficient. So tonight I am proposing the creation of a new Federal Housing Authority. This FHA will have the power to write new mortgages with lengthened terms and lower interest rates so that properties in foreclosure can be re-financed and the housing market can recover.

And here too it is helpful to remember some history. The 30-year mortgage Michele and I used to buy our home in Chicago was not some vehicle given to us by the ancients. In fact, at the start of the Depression in the 1930s, it did not even exist. Most of the properties foreclosed upon then were under mortgages containing much stricter terms -- typically five years of interest only payments with principal due in the form of a balloon payment at the end. It was no wonder that those without jobs lost their homes and farms as the Depression continued.

President Roosevelt more or less invented the 30-year mortgage to fix that problem in the '30s. And today we should imitate his creativity and fashion a mortgage instrument sufficient to the challenges of today's housing market.

I know my opponents will oppose this New Deal for the 21st Century. They will say we cannot afford it. They will claim it is Government run amok and that I am a Socialist or worse. They will embrace the rhetoric of our founders while they demonize the very Government those founders gave us. In truth, as with the sorry recent spectacle in which necessary debt ceiling legislation was held hostage to the extreme views of the irresponsible and the uninformed, they will try to create a new crisis rather than solve any existing problems.

They, however, are not new to America or unique to this era. They are merely the heirs to the plutocrats who denounced President Roosevelt in the 1930s. They have spent much of the last three years worrying more about my birth certificate than your jobs. And they have spent all of the last Congress avoiding the problems that you and I hired them to work on and solve. Almost all their ideas -- from continued tax cuts for the rich to deregulation of the financial sector -- have been tried and have failed. So, unable or unwilling to confront the reality of their own failures, they have simply taken to repeatedly, and often viciously, denouncing me.

This too, however, is an old song sung by deniers throughout our history. Indeed, in the 1930s, those same sorts denounced President Roosevelt. He knew it and so did everyone else. As he put it then: "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred."

Tonight, I join my predecessor, FDR.

I welcome their hatred as well.

It's time to put America to work again. There is not a family among us that faces a problem by denying itself the tools necessary to solve that problem. And neither will we. A friend of mine once counselled that we should pray as if everything depends upon God but act as if everything depends upon us. And so we will --

Beseeching the Almighty to give us the strength and wisdom necessary to reject outworn shibboleths.

Thanking our God for the plenty with which we still are blessed.

But in the end echoing President Kennedy's understanding that, on this earth, God's work must truly be our own. "

2011-07-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

INDEBTED

Whatever happens next week as we approach our current rendezvous with destiny, also known as the debt ceiling crisis, one thing is certain.

Wall Street is getting what it wished for.

And apparently does not like it.

The stock market just closed for the day, suffering its worst weekly loss of the year. This was apparently caused by the double news whammy visited upon us in the last twenty-four hours -- a report on GDP which measured the growth rate in the last quarter at an anemic 1.3% for the year, and the continuing debt ceiling debacle in Washington.

The former came on top of revised figures for the first quarter, lowering the growth rate from a previously reported 1.9% to an actual 0.4%, which now makes the current "recovery" the weakest on record and puts us more or less on the brink of another recession. The latter is a consequence of Tea Party madness, that uniquely dysfunctional blend of ideological extremism made possible by the political ennui that kept large chunks of the 2008 electorate on their couches in 2010, thus allowing the patients to now run the asylum.

The current Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is by no means a happy camper. Even his proverbial deep tan has begun to fade as he scurries to convince his caucus to support his plan to raise the debt limit. It apparently does not matter, either to him or his caucus, that the plan for which he still has not gotten a vote will be dead on arrival in the Senate. The idea here is to get the right wing offering on the table so that the Senate and the Administration are forced to negotiate against it.

Be that as it may, however, the plan itself is laughably inept. It would "solve" the crisis for a few months so that it is timed to arise anew in the upcoming 2012 election year. And it will weaken the economy by cutting spending and pulling demand down.

Boehner et al. do not care.

It is now an article of faith in their party that spending must be cut regardless of the consequences. Though this intransigence ignores a solid century of economic data and history, no one in the current Congress actually remembers the Depression of the 1930s, even if the few octogenarians still serving might actually have been alive during some part of it. Instead, the mantra that deficits will kill us rules the political roost. The Tea Partiers universally assert that the 2009 stimulus package did no good and that TARP in 2008 was a failure as well.

The facts belie both assertions. TARP rescued the financial system from certain implosion and the stimulus forestalled a second Great Depression where unemployment would have exceeded 20%. Indeed, the only problem with the stimulus is that it was not large enough, and the only problem with TARP is that it did not exact nearly enough concessions from Wall Street in exchange for the bail out. More to the (immediate) point, today's debt ceiling crisis is an entirely manufactured one. We have repeatedly raised the debt limit over the last thirty years of conservative ascendancy, and we have done so for one and only one reason.

The alternative to doing so is stupid.

Even their hero, Ronald Reagan, said as much in an earlier version of this same movie. During his Presidency, the limit was raised seventeen times. On one such occasion, Reagan betrayed an uncommon impatience with all the political bluster. "Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility," he said. "This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility – two things that set us apart from much of the world."

Though Reagan's right wing heirs embrace their man, they ignore his words.

And not just on the debt ceiling.

Reagan also raised taxes eleven times while he was President, and he never submitted a balanced budget. To ease the rhetorical pain, he called those tax hikes "revenue enhancers," but today's GOP would have none of that. In their world, if a tax cut is allowed to expire or sunset, those who do nothing to stop the eventuality are raising taxes nonetheless.

In the current debt ceiling debate, some commentators claim that Reagan would endorse the Boehner plan. If, however, Reagan's actual conduct in office is the measure of what he would now do, the far greater likelihood is that he would endorse Obama's plan. The latter cuts more over a longer period of time, contains some "revenue enhancers" in the form of closed loopholes, and eliminates the repeated near term "brinkmanship" that the Boehner plan guarantees and that Reagan himself wearied of.

As noted, Wall Street's vote is already in, and while the Street liberally funded the GOP's mid-term ascendancy, it is in no mood for a replay of this sorry spectacle six months from now.

So, Mr. Speaker, here's some advice.

Cut your losses.

Can the Tea Party.

Win one for the Gipper.

2011-06-09T08:15:00.001-07:00

ON THE ART OF BEING DUMB

Some very smart people do some very stupid things.

Exhibit A this week is Anthony Weiner, the talented and pugnacious New York Congressman whose triple-X twitter messages (and pictures) to on-line "fans" have now been plastered all over the tabloids. An emotional apology has not kept the vultures from hovering over the carcass, even as Weiner himself claims not to be dead yet.

NY pols are already angling for his job, and inasmuch as the state itself is slated to lose two Congressional seats to redistricting in 2012, his is now the downstate seat most likely to be eliminated by the politicians who get to draw the lines. The same thing happened to New York's scandal-plagued Rep. Stephen Solarz in the early 1990s. Before the voters get a chance to kick you out, your erstwhile friends do.

Weiner's idiocy, of course, didn't kill anyone. He hasn't started a war, destroyed a career (other, perhaps, than his own), or polluted the planet (non-metaphorically, that is). The tweets were supposedly consensual (though I am not sure all his "friends" knew what coming before it got there). And they were meant to be private (a big stretch in the Internet Age but one in which my kids' generation swears it still believes; their facebook accounts are all private, at least insofar as access by the parents is concerned) .

So why do we care?

Everyone I ask tells me "it's not about the sex."

This reminded me of those famous lines from Sen. Dale Bumpers' impassioned defense of President Clinton during the latter's impeachment trial -- "When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about the money -- it's about money'. And when you hear somebody say, This is not about sex -- it's about sex." So maybe, probably, that's exactly what it's about.

But maybe not.

Sen. Bumpers was quoting H.L. Mencken when he made those comments. And the famous Mencken also famously said that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Mencken, of course, was talking about us. He was noticing our repeated penchant for stupidity. When the "thems" of the world mess up, we like to think they are not "us." But in a democracy, we lose that cover. Because the "thems" we elect are "us."

Sometimes stupid is endearing, even not so stupid.

The whole point of Forrest Gump was that the bright guys didn't get it. Not the bright guys in the White House who started an unnecessary war. Or the smart Lieutenant Dan, tied to a war hero's needless destiny of death passed down through a familial psychosis that the "dumb" guy first saved him from but was only later thanked for. Or the liberal counter-cultural Jenny, who finally accepted the love that had been there from the beginning.

The mindless runner turned out to be not so mindless after all. While everyone else was trying to figure him out, he was noticing a sunrise. And couldn't tell "where earth stopped and heaven began." That sort of poetry is hardly stupid.

Unfortunately, Anthony Weiner is no Forrest Gump.

He's just one of us.

2011-04-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

GOOD FRIDAY

It is overcast and cold on April 22 in New York.

After a brutal winter, the lawn sports large blotches of patted down straw, a sort of sub-Arctic permafrost in a region that is supposed to have none. The heavy coats still hang in the pantry ready to be called into action yet again, unable to retire to their seasonal cedar closet. Even the dog is confused by it all. She can't catch the necessary whiff, blown away as it is by the unseasonable chill breezes that never allow spring to come.

There is just nothing good about this particular Friday.

Earlier in the week, the markets were roiled by a ratings agency report from Standard & Poors (or S&P, as they are known in the trade) that it was not at all confident that America's pols would get their act together and tackle the deficit. This has been widely reported as an initial shot across the bow by the credit markets, a warning to the borrower that the bill will come due and the lenders were worried they might not get paid. The borrower is the US government. The lender is the rest of the world but at this point largely China.

My first reaction was to say "What gall!" S&P, after all , was one of the three ratings musketeers who told us not more than five years ago that all those mortgage backed securities, three-tiered collateralized debt obligations, and insurance like credit default swaps were triple-A investments. Perfectly safe. About as likely a risk to default as the US itself.

Namely, none at all.

They were not even close to being right.

Now we are all supposed to believe that the US deficit, which is largely a problem that would go away if the Bush era tax cuts were allowed to expire and we were careful about not starting any more unpaid for wars, has for the first time attracted S&P's attention because it is unsustainably large.

This is pure rubbish. As a percentage of GDP, the deficit is nowhere nearly as high as it has been at times in our past. There is no danger of default, at least not one uninduced by right wing politicians in Washington refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And, to top it off, the real problem now is an anemic recovery that DC's deficit hawks threaten to kill with their hypocritical zeal to stop all non-discretionary spending. A recovery, by the way, necessitated by that near-death, near-Depression we experienced in 2008, for which S&P (along with the other ratings agencies who failed to do their job, and the then GOP government in love with deregulation, which had for eight years failed to do its) was among those responsible.

But I have now calmed down.

Because I realize that, in some sort of feat of cosmic consistency, the ratings agency's hypocrisy and gall has at least come at the right time in the liturgical calendar.

We are in what we Christians call Holy Week. As a matter of history, the week had a lot of ups and downs. It started off well enough. A triumphant entry into Jerusalem from the non-Roman east, on a donkey no less, that inspired some of the poor masses. But that entrance sent the authorities into fits of worry that a city exploding with Passover pilgrims might throw off the Roman yoke. Which more or less explains the rest of the week -- a banquet of sorts with twelve very close friends, and then an arrest, show trial and killing by those same worried authorities.

Through it all the watch word was hypocrisy. Whether it was the hypocrisy of Roman authorities trumping up charges . . . or of crowds choosing to save a felon and kill a saint . . . or of friends denying they even knew you.

There was, in truth, not much good about that Friday either.

We need a lot more honesty from the institutions that nearly killed us in 2008, which includes Standard & Poors. And they should at least start with the notion that, having been fatally wrong and egregiously self-interested in 2008, they ought not repeat the act in 2011.

The creditor class in this country and in the world is worried about their money. In particular, they are worried about the value of their assets, which happen in large part to be the loans they have made to all the debtors, most of whom are now having trouble paying them back. The creditors succeeded earlier in the decade in making it much more difficult for debtors to be discharged in bankruptcy. And they now do not want the governments of the world easing that debt burden by spending or inflating, which effectively devalues the debts and, consequently, their wealth. Standard & Poors is in glorious hock to the creditor class. The banks pay S&P and, as we saw in 2008, S&P does their bidding.

What we need most at this point is to finally hold the hypocrites to account and to start calling a spade a spade.

And what we need in our politics right now is a little . . .

Easter.

PS In my last post I talked about a lecture I was going to give at the end of March. I did so, at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania. For any who are interested, here is the you tube link -- http://youtu.be/ByKsGr6NF8k

2011-02-18T11:10:00.000-08:00

THE PROFESSOR IN ME

I am teaching a college class at the end of March. The class will be at a small Catholic liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania.

What will I say to them?

I have already spoken to the President of the college, a friend from law school. I told him I wanted to say something taking off on the theme that "those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." I told him that this was a point made by the philosopher George Santayana in the early part of the last century. But in beginning to prepare the presentation, two problems have emerged.

The first is that the theme creates an enormous number of possible discussion topics. One would think a theme might narrow things down a bit, sort of like a topic sentence in a paragraph. But this theme is a "no-go" on that score. In fact, it does the opposite, creating an almost infinite number of emblematic moments.

Some are fairly self-evident to any of us over fifty. It is, for example, fairly obvious that, in the run up to Iraq, W and Cheney and Rumsfeld never read Robert McNamara's mea culpa account of US hubris in Vietnam. McNamara, a former chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, was JFK's and LBJ's Secretary of Defense in the '60s and substituted statistics (body counts, bomb tonnage, numbers of bombing runs or "sorties") for any real knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam. Though warned by the French, victims of their own ill-fated effort at Dien Bien Phu in the early '50s to preserve their influence on what had previously been a French colony, the so-called "best and brightest" (McNamara was among the famous "whiz kids" or proverbial geniuses at Ford when Kennedy tapped him for Defense)doubled down in Vietnam, claiming (erroneously) that if Vietnam went communist Thailand and the Philippines were sure to follow, and that (again erroneously) if they just dropped more bombs and deployed more troops, all would be well.

It didn't turn out that way.

For years now, the revisionist conservative history on Vietnam is that we "cut and run" just as things were getting better. According to this view, a new commanding general, Creighton Abrams, and a new strategy, counter-insurgency, was beginning to take hold and create success in the early '70s, just as the overwhelming majority of Americans turned against the War. I have my doubts. Counter-insurgency was not going to end corruption in the South Vietnamese government, nor was it going to tip control in the north. Unlike in Korea, a stalemate was not really possible because there were too many ways into the south (many through Cambodia and the famous Ho Chi Minh trail) and too many indigenous fighters (the famous, or infamous, Viet Cong) living in the south's villages.

But let's for a moment assume the revisionists on Vietnam are right. One would think that W and Cheney and Rumsfeld would have embraced that revisionism and learned from it before decamping into Iraq. Here, however, is the bad news.

They ignored that "history" as well.

The failure in Iraq was a failure to both accurately anticipate how the the country would look once Hussein's regime fell and to deploy sufficient resources to maintain and rebuild the nation at that point. Neo-conservatives hate nation building and spent all of the 1990s condemning Bill Clinton for it. Nevertheless, when General Petraeus finally came to them with the counter-insurgency surge strategy in 2007, they were just embracing nation building by another name. For that is what Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy was and is -- a studied effort to deploy troops as ambassadors of de-centralized security and service so as to give locals the space to rebuild their lives and their economy and create stakeholders in that new reality. It basically sucks the oxygen right out of the local bad guys. But it takes resources. Lots of them. And for four years W's Administration never committed the necessary resources to that effort. They weren't nation builders.

Whew!

That's just one topic. I could also tell the students I'll be talking to that the run up to the financial collapse in 2008 was just a replay of what went on in the 1920s before the Great Depression -- speculative stock buying and selling run amok with little or no underlying value and a corresponding absence of regulatory oversight. Or that the thirty year period of conservative emergence and governance that began in the mid-1970s was a lot like the 19th century's Gilded Age -- the economic returns from enormous productivity gains (owing to nationalization of the American market thanks to railroads in the Gilded Age, and computerization of the home and workplace in our own time) migrated almost exclusively to the top. Or that Abu Ghraib was not really a "unique" event -- just ask the Native Americans.

Too much to say. I'll have to make choices.

And then there's that second problem. It turns out that George Santayana did not say that "those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." What he said, in his book Life of Reason I, is that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". More importantly, as his students have noted, his point was really more a part of his theory of knowledge rather than any sort of exhortation to learn from history so as to avoid colossal errors. Apparently, however, the notices have been sent out and my appearance has been tied to the wrong quote. And the wrong context. And it's all on me, because I gave them the wrong quote. And context.

I hope the students don't catch me.

If they do, I'll be forced to tell them the truth.

Which is this . . .

Even their professors make mistakes.

2010-12-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

SILENT NIGHT

"And so this is Christmas. And what have we done?"

John Lennon's question hangs in the air this frustrating year.

For liberals, the answer is "Not nearly enough." For the conservatives, it is "Way too much." For the putative guy or gal on the street, it is "Would the both of you please get a life."

Bemoaning the supposedly never satisfied "professional left," the Obama Administration has trotted out its litany of accomplishments as the year closes -- health care reform, financial regulatory reform, a wind down in Iraq, analysis (at least) on Afghanistan, a second stimulus, the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," Elena Kagan and the soon to be passed START Treaty. This has been book ended by a number of ostensibly conservative columnists like David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer praising the President for compromising on extending W's tax cuts and governing "to the center," the always touted sweet spot of American politics.

This is a more than fair list.

American federalism requires any would be reformer to navigate his way through a minefield of competing regional and ideological interests. The consequence is that progress is generally incremental and always messy. The attacks on Obama, from the nutty birthers to the angrier Tea Partiers, are not particularly different from what was visited upon FDR in the '30s, the civil rights activists in the '50s, or LBJ's attempts at a Great Society in the '60s. Put simply, going to a rally (or tuning into Limbaugh) and calling this reasonably progressive President a socialist or a communist is obviously the screamer's right and may make him (or her) feel good.

But it is not remotely original.

Nor is it particularly accurate.

Whatever else may be said of the reforms wrought by Obama, socialism they are not. The health care reform jettisoned a proposed public option in favor of an individual mandate and delayed the advent of state based insurance exchanges and the elimination of exclusions for pre-existing conditions until 2014. This will allow the insurance companies to pare their rolls and raise their rates long before these de facto monopolists ever have to worry about the competition exchanges are supposed to create. Similarly, on the financial front, the elimination of proprietary trading by Wall Street's enormously conflicted investment bankers carries with it six loopholes through which creative lawyers will easily steer the Goldman Saches of the world. My favorite is that the ban does not extend to foreign entities, more or less inviting the creation of off shore repositories for all that proprietary money.

The problem, therefore, is not socialism.

It is ineffectiveness.

And that is what has the progressives worried.

The fact that Obama was able to wrestle a second stimulus from the GOP by agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years is a testament to his political abilities. Whether that second stimulus comes to pass, however, is an entirely separate question for which the answer is in serious doubt. To stimulate, the payroll tax cuts, small business tax breaks and extended unemployment compensation payments must actually create a net increase in demand (there will be no increase whatsoever from preserving the Bush era tax rates, which are the rates everyone is already paying). Once the GOP takes over in the House, however, they will beat the drum on deficit reduction and the conservatives in the Senate will help them along. If they cut enough elsewhere. and they certainly want to, they can suck any of the incremental gains created by Obama's eleventh hour tax compromise right out of the economy. The only thing that could stop them then would be an Obama veto.

Which Brooks and Krauthammer won't report as governing "to the center."

So, we have a health care reform that gives insurance companies two years to stack the deck, a financial regulatory reform that invites investment banks back to business as usual, and a tax cut compromise that continues to explode the deficit with no real guarantee that its good parts will create their intended results. It is great that we are ending the unmitigated hypocrisy that allowed gays and lesbians to die for their country so long as they never told us who they slept with. And I am counting on Elena Kagan.

But I still do not have a good answer for John Lennon.

2010-10-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

THE TESTOSTERONE GAP

Maybe it was just a matter of time.

For the past week,Sharron Angle has been garnering national headlines with her sexist challenge that Harry Reid "man up." The Nevada GOP Senate nominee has told enthralled crowds that her opponent Harry Reid's problem is an accountability one. She blames him for failing to take responsibility for the anemic recovery, an insufficiently patriotic appreciation of the success of the surge in Iraq, and whatever problems may befall the Social Security trust fund some years down the road. When he quite properly demurs, she'll have none of that.

"Man up, Harry Reid," cries the Tea Party temptress.

"Shut up, Ms. Angle," say I.

Roughly a quarter century since the beginning of the modern equal rights movement for women, and two years after Hillary Clinton put those 18 million cracks in the ultimate glass ceiling, it has come to this. The powerful Senate majority leader, whose unsung expertise in herding cats created the only sixty vote Senate majority on the only system wide health care reform bill ever to pass the US Congress, suffers from . . .

How else to put it . . .

A testosterone gap.

This would be silly and somewhat amusing if it weren't so fundamentally sad.

The economic challenges we now face are daunting. And the policies that led to those challenges have hardly been kept secret. The Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath was the product of the combined effects of deregulation on Wall Street and shrinking incomes on Main Street. Finance capital ran amok as (conservative) government let Wall Street seize the productivity gains of the computer age with products that gave alchemy new meaning -- securitized sub-prime mortgages backed up by derivative instruments that allowed the inevitable crash to course like a rampant virus through the entire economy.

At the same time, Main Street's incomes shrank given the unmitigated wage arbitrage practiced by corporate behemoths who outsourced our manufacturing base to poorly paid day laborers in Asia, while tepid (conservative) laws made it virtually impossible to organize wage laborers into collective bargaining units to do for them what unions did for workers in the wake of the New Deal.

Before that New Deal began, those who suffered the highest rate of poverty in America were the aged. Social Security ended that problem. And had Sharron Angle's predecessors in the Grand Old Party listened to Bill Clinton in the late '90s, and used that Democratic President's surplus to "save Social Security first," the trust fund would have no long term solvency problem today.

They, of course, didn't.

Instead, led by Newt Gingrich, who was also out in Nevada this week stumping for Sharron Angle, the GOP gave the bulk of the surplus to the rich and then proceeded to run up record deficits with unpaid for wars and unfinanced benefits to Big Pharma. Meanwhile, Wall Street's greed-is-good-guys created two finance bubbles -- first in internet stocks and then in the real estate market -- and now want us all to forgive them for the very painful hangover.

None of this matters in Sharron Angle's invented world of Tea Party anger and extreme right wing denial. Her party is responsible for about 7/8ths of the existing deficit and all of the current recession. Neither she nor it have proposed a single new idea designed to combat the anemic recovery. Their mantra of tax cuts for the rich and government spending cuts for the rest is as old as it is useless. The rich don't need and won't spend the marginal taxes they will otherwise pay once W's tax break albatross is partially lifted from America's neck. And spending cuts in recessions and depressions are ludicrous. They make things worse, not better.

Bereft of ideas, Sharron Angle has been reduced to a mirror image of that sexist male who for years substituted his own prejudicial fantasy for fact. We all know him. Girls couldn't play with the boys. Women couldn't work with the men. Separate, and never equal, the boys who traded size jokes in schoolyards became the CEOs who reinforced that glass ceiling with steel. As Sharron Angle would no doubt understand, those guys really knew how to "man up."

Harry Reid doesn't need another ounce of testosterone.

Just six more years in the Senate.

For our sake.

Not his.

2010-09-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

IT'S THEIR PARTY

The big news this week is the multiple victories wrought by so-called Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries in Delaware and New York.

In the former the GOP stole general election defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory by casting aside Rep. Mike Castle in favor of Christine O'Donnell as their nominee to run for the US Senate, and in the latter the nomination of Carl Paladino virtually guaranteed the election of Andrew Cuomo as New York's next Governor.

In both states the fortunes of the Democrats were sagging. Castle was favored to win fairly easily in Delaware and was central to any GOP takeover of the Senate. And though New York's endorsed Republican Party candidate, former Rep. Rick Lazio, was not remotely favored to beat Cuomo this fall, Paladino's nomination makes that more or less impossible and may substantially damage GOP under ticket prospects as well. This, moreover, is a bit of a political hat trick here in New York inasmuch as the under ticket of state Senate and Assembly incumbents -- the substantial majority of which are Democrats -- is almost universally despised.

As a Democrat, of course, I should be happy.

Perhaps even send the Tea Party a thank you note.

But I am not.

And I won't.

And here's why.

The country is in desperate need of moderate Republicans, nowhere more so than here in New York. As was made clear in this year's debates on health care and financial reform, the GOP's steady drift to the far and fringe right has made progress on policy virtually impossible. Though the 2010 health care bill was almost a carbon copy of what Republicans themselves proposed as an alternative to HillaryCare in 1994, the GOP en masse opposed the 2010 version. There was no prospect for any public option so long as Democrats attempted to fashion a filibuster proof margin on the bill. And once the public option was eliminated, there really was no prospect for cost control, a private insurance based model having been made the base line for any bill and the competitive pricing pressure that would have been created by the public option having been eliminated.

The GOP similarly opposed the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act even though the Democrats had jettisoned from it a host of measures to which Wall Street objected. Left on the cutting room floor, for example, was the resurrection of some form of Glass-Steagall (separating commercial and investment banks, or, as it were, investors from speculators), as well as any outright ban on proprietary trading by banks for their own accounts (which creates enormous conflicts of interest, with large houses like Goldman ultimately on both sides of ostensibly arms length market bets).

Financial reform, therefore, much like health care reform, has turned out to be largely an effort in shoring up the very entities which led us to near economic death in the first place. We now require banks to have far larger capital reserves (a good thing). But we have done very little to stop them from engaging in some of the practices that helped generate the financial collapse in the first place. And we did nothing to free up credit now, reduce the on going risk of foreclosure (which is real for many), or grant real relief to those now underwater.

My somewhat counter-intuitive view is that a House with 20-30 GOP moderates and a Senate with 10 of the same would have made these results impossible, essentially because there would have been a group of truly swing voters in play that would have changed both the Democrats' initial "asks" and the final form of any compromise.

On health care, although you wouldn't know it from the rhetoric that turns any Democratic legislative proposal into this era's version of Marxist dialectic, the public option was a compromise. True lefties favored some form of single payer or Medicare for all, and the right wing's plan was essentially limited to killing suits for medical malpractice (either by capping damages awards or creating specialized health care courts where medical experts determine liability and damages). The middle ground between these poles was the public option, offering the choice of enrollment in a public Medicare-like plan to any who wanted it, which in turn would have created real competition with the private insurers and thus helped keep a lid on costs.

If there had been real GOP moderates in play, the Democrats might have started with single payer and then fallen back on the public option. Instead, they made the public option their starting point. Unfortunately, however, you can't sell the public option as the compromise it was meant to be if as a practical matter there is nothing on the table to the left of it. There wasn't. And so what we got was health care reform circa the pre-Gingrich 1994 Republican revolution, and none of the post-Gingrich Republicans voted for it anyway.

Something similar happened on Dodd-Frank. Wall Streeters sharpened their knives and made sure that virtually nothing about the inherent structure of 2008 finance was changed in 2010, and in response Democrats in Congress kept compromising the regulatory measures that would have changed that structure by taking them off the table. At the end, what you got was some mild regulatory oversight coupled with capital reserve reform, but nothing more. Speculative trading will be curbed a bit. But the major players will still be on both sides of the market, and "too big to fail" will have been rejected only until the next implosion requires a reprise of the measures taken in late 2008.

In contrast, a Democratic bill that started with separating the commercial and investment banks a la the New Deal, in a Congress with 20 GOP House members and 10 GOP Senators in play, could easily have led to a compromise that ended the heavily conflicted practice of proprietary trading and took the wind out of the speculative sails fueling Wall Street's greatest abuses.

Alas, it was not to be.

Instead, the Grand Old Party has morped into the Tea Party, an amalgam of the very angry and the apparently inept. Paladino in New York tells us he is "mad as hell" and I believe him. In fact, his madness may be clinical as he proposes to "seize" Ground Zero so as to prevent the (non) Ground Zero Mosque, a trick that uses the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to gut the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Welcome to Carl's Constitution.

Where the Bill of Rights is at war with itself.

For her part, O'Donnell in Delaware parades as a lower 48 version of Sarah Palin, oblivious to her obvious deficiencies (e.g., non-payment of taxes) as she promises to cut spending and "take back the country." Given that spending cuts in a near Depression are the last thing any sound economist advocates, her plan can only make it more difficult to pay the mortgage on which she has apparently defaulted.

Or refund the campaign contributions she used in a prior race to pay her personal expenses.

It's their party.

You can cry if you want to.

2010-08-18T14:35:00.000-07:00

ON MOSQUES AND MADISON

St. Peter's is the oldest Catholic Church in New York City. It is located on Barclay Street in lower Manhattan, a block from Ground Zero.

The church was founded in 1840 and is iconic for New York Catholics as the place where Mother (now St.) Elizabeth Seton converted to Catholicism. The church property includes a narrow strip on its western border, fronting the appropriately named Church Street. And here stands another iconic memorial, the steel cross which was among the remnants of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The cross was "consecrated" shortly after it was discovered and now awaits its final resting place at Ground Zero alongside the Church located a block away.

Though there were Muslim victims among the thousands of innocents slaughtered on 9/11, none of their families or friends complained when the cross went up at St.Peter's. It was not perceived as insensitive to them or their fellow believers, nor was it said to inappropriately inject an element of division into the planned memorial.

No politicians complained either.

Now, some New Yorkers want to build an Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place in lower Manhattan. The owners bought the land and have obtained zoning approval for the Center. The site is between West Broadway and Church Street, about equidistant from City Hall and Ground Zero. It is not, however, being labeled the "City Hall Mosque." Though even closer to the lower boundary of Tribeca, it is also not being called the "Tribeca Mosque." Rather, in a fit of geographic invention, it is now lampooned as the "Ground Zero Mosque."

Lots of politicians are complaining. Lest any side seize the moral high ground, the complaining is unfortunately bipartisan. For the GOP, the yellers are led by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and a host of Congressman and candidates. For the Democrats, the Senate Majority Leader has weighed in against the so-called mosque, saying it should be built elsewhere, as has New York's Democratic Governor. The President appeared to initially favor the Center but now has equivocated, claiming that his defense of the "right" to build it did not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the "wisdom" in building it.

Many of the families of the victims of 9/11 are also apoplectic with anger, indeed rage.

Where to begin?

Let's start with the families. In my book, they get a pass. They are victims themselves. And entitled to be as angry as they want at whoever and whatever appears to them to be insensitive. They are not ipso facto racists or intolerant, anymore than the legion of South Boston Irish protesting busing in the '70s were racists. The Irish cared about their kids and did not want them going to lousy schools. The 9/11 families care about their memories, which is all the terrorists left them with after slaughtering their loved ones.

So the families get a pass.

But no one else does.

Not Newt . . . or Sarah . . . or Sen. Harry Reid . . . or New York Governor David Paterson. Not even Barack.

They all should know better.

To begin, this is America, not Saudi Arabia. When Newt Gingrich bellowed that a mosque should be built at Ground Zero when a church is built in Saudi Arabia, my jaw dropped. The whole idea behind our "shining City on the Hill," to quote Ronald Reagan, is that we are different. The values of religious tolerance and pluralism that inform our First Amendment in particular and our entire culture in general obviously fall on deaf ears in Riyadh.

And I do not want to be "like them."

So, Newt, no thanks. I'd rather see a thousand mosques in lower Manhattan if the price I have to pay to keep one out is waiting for a church to be built in Saudi Arabia. And curiously, until Newt made his comment, I thought he agreed. He is, after all, of the party that decidedly rejects the notion that any of our constitutional liberties should be informed by foreign practices or customs. The right wing loudly decries any attempts to pour content into the notion of American due process by embracing the European Convention on Human Rights or the progressive social mores of our western brethren. But they now appear to have lost their analytic nerve. Or at least Newt has.

Because he wants to read our First Amendment through the prism of Saudi intolerance.

Newt's constitutional ignorance, however, may be trumped by the Democrats' transparent political cowardice. So many are running for cover, it is now taking on the look of a stampede. Granted, the right wing has done what it has always been very good at doing -- finding and exploiting a wedge issue shortly before the season of electioneering kicks off in earnest. The "Ground Zero Mosque," which for the (irrelevant) record is not at Ground Zero and is not just or even primarily a mosque, is simply this year's version of the Willie Horton ad -- designed to divide and conquer as it appeals to both our basest fears and our sometimes visceral intolerance for "the other."

The Democratic defense, echoing the President's apparent volte face, is that a Constitutional right to undertake any course of action is distinct from the utility or propriety of doing so. This distinction between rights and wisdom, however, is too cute by half. Religious freedom in America is fundamental. And it is paramount. Well intentioned sensitivity to the feelings of those offended by another's practice, or place of practice, is never a sufficient basis for limiting that freedom.

Among America's elites, the only profile in courage last week was Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He did not insist that we compromise basic rights. Or that we ignore all we have hitherto held sacred. He eschewed any phony distinction between rights and wisdom because he knew that the rights bequeathed by James Madison, among them religious freedom, are our wisest inheritance.

He came out four square for the Islamic Cultural Center.

"This is America," said Mayor Bloomberg.

Case closed.

2010-07-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

DEPRESSION . . . AND THE NEW MATH

We have avoided the fate now for more than eighty years.

Back then, when my parents were infants and my grandmother a wannabe flapper (she loved to party a Friday and Saturday night away), before Keynes was a soothsayer and the government went counter cyclical, before unions and the Democrats were powerful, and before the words "secure" and "middle class" could be mentioned in the same sentence, we called it by its proper name -- depression.

Now it's just a disease.

Which is a shame.

Because, for want of a little honesty, we are framing the national debate in ways that can only make things worse. We are on the verge of turning our euphemistically named "Great Recession" into a depression. And we are doing it with an alarming amount of historical and empirical ignorance.

Start with the facts. The government tells us unemployment has been running at between 9 and 10% for the last year or so. This is flatly wrong. The real rate is between 15 and 20%. In the '30s, before government statistics became an exercise in spin, the rate was north of 25%. We are not quite there today. But we are far closer to that than we admit.

There really is no basis for this statistical fiction. For some reason, the government counts you as unemployed once you lose your job but stops counting you as unemployed once, having lost your job, you stop looking for the next one. This can occur six months out or a year out. But, generally speaking, it does occur. People in their mid-40s or 50s tend to give up after a thousand resumes have been sent out and rejected. This, of course, is no reason to stop counting them as unemployed.

They have no jobs.

Other than mailing resumes out by the dozens.

The government apparently assumes that if you have stopped looking for a job, you either do not want one or do not need one. Though silly (indeed, somewhat stupid), it's predictable given our prejudices. We live in a country where every individual is presumed to go as far as his or her innate ability will take them. You just have to try. In a transparently phony syllogism, the government reasons that, if you are unemployed for too long, you must not be trying very hard. Or at least not hard enough to be counted anymore.

So, a real 15 to 20% unemployment rate becomes a 9% rate.

And the worse things are, the better they look.

If it all stopped there, we might be able to survive this type of scoring error. Maybe it would even be . . . useful. Sort of like the weekend golfer (this is not autobiographical) who turns an atrocious 8 into a 7 or a 6, maybe because his friend turned that missed five foot putt into the gift of a "gimme." Indeed, in the handicapping system used throughout the world of golf, designed to allow players at all levels to compete with each other, there is an upper limit placed on the strokes that can be taken on any one hole, regardless of how many times the weekend hacker flails away. Everyone feels better and enjoys the game.

But this is not golf. Or a game. And the uncounted don't feel any better for having been told they can no longer be deemed what in fact they are.

Which is unemployed.

Nor are we doing the scorekeepers (i.e., the government) any good either. In fact, to the contrary. For in assuming away roughly a third to half of the real unemployed on the basis of questionable assumptions about human behavior, we are allowing ourselves to pursue flawed "solutions" based on equally questionable assumptions. And the current obsession with deficits must be Exhibit A on any list of those flaws.

Right now, deficits are not the problem, pace the world's bondholders and credit markets. You cannot combat a Great Recession or would be Depression by cutting spending. It did not work in 1937, when conservatives made Roosevelt lose his New Deal nerve in trying to balance the budget; in fact, it just led to a second mini-Depression in 1938. It would not have worked in 2008. And it probably will not work today. Anemic recoveries (which is what we are in right now) can turn into recessions, and ultimately into depressions, when consumer spending plummets (usually because of joblessness) and products go wanting for buyers. Everyone loses, including prior lenders whose notes are rendered worthless (or much less). Governments borrow and spend at these times to staunch any hemorrhage.

Given our real 15 plus percent unemployment rate, we are by no means out of the recessionary woods into which we sank in 2008. And we won't get out by listening to the deficit hawks. Obama's current approach is measured. It concedes that deficits have to be tackled in the future, properly excoriates the prior Administration for having needlessly run them up on unpaid-for wars, tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit to Big Pharma, but continues to favor stimulus in the short term.

The only people singing a different song are Republicans. In state houses, where no one has a choice because states can't deficit spend, this makes for easy political virtue as the GOP Governors Christie (New Jersey) and McDonnell (Virginia), along with various GOP gubernatorial candidates like Whitman (California)and Lazio (New York), rail against spending what we do not have (usually on teachers, never on overpaid right fielders; and if you think the government or we taxpayers are not subsidizing those right fielders, think again, 'cause there's a whole lot of tax subsidy built into all those new ball parks that have sprung up over the last twenty years).

But, in truth, it's a false virtue.

Because things could have been and still can be worse.

To the extent the states have a problem, and they do, we should bring back revenue sharing. We should also stop criticizing the first stimulus bill for having included all those so-called "one shots" that states used to keep cops and teachers on the job in 2008 and much of 2009. Those "one shots" helped improve things in the short term.

The GOP should also stop attacking public sector unions. If their wages go down, that exacerbates the problem as well. It's no answer to point out that public sector employees in unions have better wage, health or pension benefits than their private sector counterparts. They do, but this is because we have allowed the private sector to savage employees for thirty years with low wages and enormous de facto cuts in pension and health benefits, a phenomenon properly labelled the "Great Risk Shift" by Jacob Hacker. The fact is, had that not occurred, a portion of the enormous productivity gains of the last thirty years would have gone into the pockets of the middle class, making them far more prepared to weather the storm of 2008.

As for the larger national economy, we should continue Obama's measured approach. If we get out of Iraq, start to grow the economy, and avoid a double dip for the rest of 2010 and into 2011, we can survive and then set the stage to prosper. With health care reform on the books and financial reform coming, we may even begin to redress the terrible imbalances that have threatened salaried workers in the private sector, helping them regain the purchasing power lost in those risk shifting years.

The bondholders and credit markets will still complain.

But at least they are being counted.

2010-04-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, THEN AND NOW

Marco Rubio is a first generation son of Cuban immigrants running for the US Senate in Florida. He is mounting a conservative primary challenge to Republican Charlie Crist, the current Governor also now running for the Senate, and spoke earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention in Washington, D.C. According to reports, he brought the (conservative) house down with an impassioned defense of "American exceptionalism" and a stiletto like assault on the Obama Administration's ostensible refusal to honor it.

Too bad.

Because "exceptionalism" is pretty dangerous when rendered, as it often is, in a maelstrom of historical inaccuracy.

And also because, if there is such an animal and it is valid, Barack Obama -- not Marco Rubio, the latest poster child for CPAC -- is its best current manifestation.

There is a school of history that travels under the name of American exceptionalism. One of its biggest proponents was John Patrick Diggins, now deceased but formerly a History Professor at the CUNY Graduate school here in New York City. Years ago, Diggins wrote a book entitled On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundation of American History. In it, Diggins carefully laid out the foundational claims of the school of exceptionalism. It is, put simply, a laudatory version of the well settled notion that the United States was a set of ideas before it became a nation or a culture, and that the founding ideas of equality, representative democracy and individual rights were unique as a matter of government in the annals of history.

So far, so good.

There is nothing wrong with the notion that we created something fundamentally different from what hitherto existed or that our experiment in self-governance was and remains a noble undertaking. There is a problem, however, or at least the beginnings of one, when you turn that fundamental difference into one of kind as opposed to degree. It takes a lot of ignorance, or hubris (which is often the same thing), to forget Magna Carta, or the steady development of English common law in the centuries prior to 1776, or for that matter the Enlightenment, as one marches to the tune of American exceptionalism. Yet, as an indisputable matter of historical fact, it is impossible to envision the American experiment without those necessary precursors.

Monarchy only became unfashionable after knowledge was deemed a product of human experiment and investigation rather than divine right or inspiration, and you can't get there without Newton, Bacon, Descartes, Berkeley and Hume -- pre-1776 Europeans all. When Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence that certain truths were "self-evident," he was reflecting the fundamental sea change in philosophy that had occurred earlier, a change from the notion that we had to look beyond ourselves and our world to discover what we were about. The "Creator" may have "endowed" us with certain inalienable rights, but it was in the final analysis an endowment that was deemed inherent, not a gift that was reclaimable by the Almighty on a moment's notice.

In short, the world became about us, not Him.

The same was true with Lincoln. He changed our understanding of the American Constitution by reading it through the prism of the Declaration of Independence and that self evident truth of equality. He did not get that truth from a church or a theology. He got it from the same Enlightenment Jefferson himself had fashioned it out of. And then, as the experiment moved forward, millions flocked to our shores to share in that truth.

Marco Rubio is a child of today's flockers. His parents escaped Cuba, a nation built on a system that embraces the precise opposite of what the Enlightenment discovered. Marxism always was as ignorant of human nature and as absolutist in its teleological world view as the medievalists who insisted that man was bound to follow the dictates of divinely created monarchies.

Unfortunately, however, the right wing today often touts its own claims to divine right. Just listen to them talk about gays or abortion or immigrants who do not speak English. They treat the first two as divinely forbidden and the last with a contempt that ignores the fact that the vast majority of immigrants in the 19th century were not any more fluent in our supposed native tongue than those who show up today.

Language may not appear to be the vehicle through which divine right keeps the quotidian masses at bay, but it often is. For centuries prior to Vatican II, the Catholic Church spoke only in Latin in part to insure that its "truths" could only be transmitted through the insights of a special class and were not generally available to the people as a whole, there to be discussed, debated and perhaps refuted. America rejected that notion in principle. Jefferson's endowed man had inalienable rights. To be heard was one of them. To be heard only in English was not.

Rubio is one of the screamers now claiming that Obama denies American exceptionalism. That is flatly false. Obama does not deny exceptionalism, he properly understands it. And Rubio does not. Exceptionalism never denied the notion that policy should be based on empirical evidence rather than divinely asserted faith. In fact, it was founded on that notion. We cannot truly know what God intends about health care or taxes or national defense. So we might want to either leave God out of those debates, or at the very least admit that there is no Moses coming down from the mountain with ten point plans on these issues.

Exceptionalism also was never at odds with government regulation or social largesse. In fact, the economic opportunity Americans have steadily sought and often found in their aggressive "pursuit" of Jeffersonian "happiness" -- another founding idea that is part of American exceptionalism -- was regularly facilitated by government, whether via the land grants of the Homestead Act in the 1860s, the management of the railroads by the ICC at the turn of the last century, the regulation of securities markets in the 1930s, or the high tech product spin offs made possible by research done by NASA and the Defense Department in the last half century.

Obama's current effort to refashion the regulatory architecture in order to save finance capital from its worst self is in that tradition. So was his successful effort at reforming the health care system, which had become as irrational circa 2010 as America's railroads (with their different grades of track depending on who owned what and who built them) were in the 1890s.

The Rubios and right wingers appear not to accept that tradition.

Maybe some day they will.

If so . . .

That will be exceptional.

2010-02-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

JUST SAY NO

Nancy Reagan is apparently being channelled throughout the nation's capital, especially among the Republicans.

As you may recall, during her time in the White House, the former first lady made one of her signature initiatives the "Just Say No" campaign to combat the nation's drug problem. Mrs. Reagan claimed that the best anti-drug program was refusal by the would be user. So, when America's teens walked into their various Friday and Saturday night soirees and were offered a hit off the proverbial but ever present joint, they were supposed to rise up in unison with a two letter response -- No.

The campaign did not work very well. Teens being . . . well, teens . . . couldn't quite get to "No" en masse. Either peer pressure, or existing addiction, or the more widespread "maybe I'll try it just once" approach left "No", if not dead in the water, at least on life support. The crack cocaine epidemic still swept through the cities and cocaine itself was featured at the hippest parties among the so-called cooler (and richer) set. There was that famous scene in Crocodile Dundee where the Australian back countryman, Mick Dundee, having rescued the yuppie reporter from certain death in the outback, returns to New York with the reporter to sample high society only to come upon a party animal in an upper East Side kitchen bent over a bowel of coke, snorting away. Thinking the poor fellow has a head cold and is only trying to inhale the steam from a bowel of boiled water, the ever-solicitous Mick puts a dish towel over the snorter's head just to improve the intake.

No one in the movie said "No."

And neither did America's kids.

Not even the then kid who is today President.

Nevertheless, though "No" does not seem to work very well, it is today making a massive comeback. Among the Grand Old Party -- which is neither "grand" nor "old" (historically at least) nor even much of a "party" these days, riven as it is by Tea-Party types insisting on right wing conformity -- "No" is the watchword on health care, the stimulus, deficit reduction and pretty much anything else proposed by the Obama Administration.

Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts who will serve the remaining two years of Ted Kennedy's term (you can't call it "Teddy's Senate seat," says Scott, "because it's the people's seat," says Scott again, even though the "people" now calling it "Teddy's seat" are all Fox commentators bragging about what an upset was wrought in wresting from the Democrats the seat "once held by Ted Kennedy"), said "Yes" to universal health care when Republican Mitt Romney proposed it for Massachusetts but now says "No". Apparently what was good enough for Massachusetts is not good enough for the rest of us.

Republicans who were enthusiastic about "pay-go" budget rules in the '90s as exactly the sort of legislative discipline needed to curb deficit spending are now opposed to them. Even that earmark killer John McCain now says it was a bad idea -- fewer earmarks to kill, I guess, if we can't borrow to fund those bridges to nowhere. Any new stimulus is, of course, a definite "No." In fact, even the one they all voted for when Bush was President is being re-cast as some sort of out of body experience no good Republican can even remember voting for.

It's just one big orgy of negativity in DC.

And now comes the news that "abstinence only" education will make a comeback itself in the war against teen pregnancy.

That's right. There is a new study out from a group at the University of Pennsylvania. According to news reports, the researchers found that, among the sixth and seventh graders -- basically 11 and 12 year olds -- studied, 33% who went through the abstinence program started having sex within two years, compared with 52% who were just taught safe sex. I can't figure out what happened with the other 15%.

The study is being trumpeted as a major breakthrough, though I have my doubts. In order to make sure they were testing the efficacy of abstinence education, the researchers made sure that only it could be taught to one control group and that only safe sex could be taught to another control group. Apparently when you combined the educative approaches and taught both, the rate of those who had sex during the next two years (42%) was in the middle of the two groups -- in other words, higher than the abstinence only group but lower than the safe sex group.

Here is the problem. The curriculum, apparently for all of the groups, included discussion about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. So the abstinence only kids were given a primer on AIDS, as were the safe sex kids and the combined approach kids. But, somewhat obviously I fear, if you tell a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds that they can die from having sex and then tell them that the "only" way to avoid that fate is to abstain, it's not surprising that 67% will get the message (the other 33% either were asleep or knew they were being lied to). If you tell them you can have safe sex and not die, less will obviously abstain.

This study will be catnip to the anti-condom crowd. And that is the really bad news. The objective in educating kids on the use of condoms is not to get them to avoid or delay having sex. It's to impress upon them the need to practice safe sex when they have sex, whenever that turns out to be. I am a father of a 21 year old boy and a 19 year old girl. I told them both to abstain, and from what I have been told by their stepmother(who is able to obtain the classified information to which I am never privy), they did not have sex at 13 or 14 nor even shortly thereafter. But I also told them that condoms were a must, which I am guessing may have more to do with their good health right now than my abstinence speech a decade ago.

Just Say No is not a substitute. It's not even a solution.

Not on health care.

Not on the deficit.

And not on teen pregnancy.

But the right wing won't get that message. With them, it's just . . .

Here we "No" again.

2009-11-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

MERCI

It's Thanksgiving . . . 2009.

This year, I have decided to thank the French.

Truth be told, the French in recent times have received precious little thanks. In the run up to and aftermath of the on going Iraq War, they were of course vilified. America's higher-ups treated them as the despicable denizens of Old Europe, unwilling and unable to roll up their sleeves on the side of democracy and the ubiquitous war on terror. When they stood their ground, refusing to be intimidated into capitulation, we unleashed the big guns.

We renamed french fries Freedom Fries.

And dusted off all those World War II jokes.

My guess is that the French let that whole culinary correction thing roll right off their collective back. In fact, they probably liked it. At its best, and even at its worst, France is a nation of fine food. It is very hard to get a bad meal at a half way decent restaurant in Paris. You can't get a cheap one. Especially now, with the dollar tanking. But it will usually be a good one.

So I bet they were pretty happy to be done with les Americain's "french fries."

In 1972, when I was an exchange student living in Paris, the whole city was in a twist over the fact that a McDonald's was opening on the Champs Elysees. There were street protests and ominous editorials bemoaning another unwanted invasion. For awhile, it looked like Le Big Mac was going to be une bust. Things, however, have settled down appreciably. Mickey Dees is packed every day of the week. President Sarkozy is asking his fellow citoyens to be a little less French and more American when it comes to labor markets. My French friends even brag these days about California wine.

The only thing they really oppose is our unnecessary wars.

And our right wing.

And I really can't argue with them on either count.

In 2005, I returned for my first visit to France in twenty nine years. Walking around Versailles with the same fellow I had lived with as a teen, he told me that 80% of the French had supported John Kerry in his bid for the Presidency. Over here, where he was being swift boated into an un-American coward, the nut case right said that Kerry "looked" French . . . and it wasn't a compliment. Over there, he was still a hero. Which of course is why he lost.

Thank God Barack doesn't look French.

France isn't just a country. It's closer to an intoxicating experience. I went to a three day conference in Paris last winter. Everyone had come to talk law and do business. These conferences typically make attendees participate in team building exercises. You know, the stuff that uproariously funny commercial lampoons as two guys who have had enough catch the first American Air Lines flight out of town. But ours was different. We painted a picture. On a ten foot square canvas made of mini-squares we could later disassemble and take home.

We did Picasso.

Instead of psychobabble.

At the last night dinner cruise on the Seine, I sat between a young Anglo-French lawyer and a Dutch-Israeli real estate investor. The City of Lights rolled by, gorgeous even in the chill of a cold winter night. Which is another thing you have to thank them for.

They'll always have Paris.

2009-11-05T12:21:00.000-08:00

WORLD SERIOUS

My daughter, a freshman in college, called earlier in the semester to report that she had gotten a high mark on an English essay. The Professor had even read part of it to the class. At home, this was greeted with cheers, coming as it had from a young adult whose early relationship with the English language at one point resembled hand to hand combat.

As a kid, when Courtney had an idea, it was an "ideal". Announcing she had apologized for any transgressions big or small came out as "I said my sorries." As a sort of liquid epiphany, apple juice regularly emerged as a request for "apple jews." Apple Catholics or Protestants were apparently not as sweet. The best baseball player ever to don a uniform was "Babe Ruth-ez". And early on, at a point when she still thought her older brother was cool, she promised that if she ever came into money, she would be sure to get him tickets to the "World Serious."

I say the hell with her brother for the time being.

The Republicans need those tickets.

Tuesday, as we all know, was Election Day. Turnout was low. Here in New York well less than 30% of the registered voters cast ballots, and the same was the case throughout the nation. The Republicans won the gubernatorial races in New Jersey (by a little) and Virgina (by a lot). New York City's now Independent (previously Republican and probably Democrat previous to that) Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- having spent $100 million of his own money to the other guy's five -- won reelection to a third term by a less than resounding five points. And suburbanites tossed out a three term incumbent County Executive in Westchester and nearly did the same to a two termer on Long Island. Both were Democrats.

This is hardly what the statisticians would call a "representative sample." Most of the races had decidedly local angles to them, all successfully exploited by the victors. And when 70% of those eligible to vote stay home, those who show up tend to be (1) motivated and (2) extreme. In Virginia, for example, those who voted this year had favored John McCain by 8 points a year ago. Clearly a lot of last year's Obama voters -- who had won the state by 12 points for Barack -- stayed home. Enough in fact to create a 20 point swing in starting points. It is not a surprise that a Republican won that race, and given the margin he probably would have won even if all those Obama voters had showed. But it would have been a lot closer.

For its part, New Jersey was close.

Even though it should not have been.

For most of the race, the now Governor-Elect Chris Christie was ahead by double digits. He explains his slide from inevitability to mere victory as the product of Governor Corzine's negative campaign ads. He doth, however, protest too much. Both of them ran negative ads, and as the children are wont to say, Christie started it. Jon Corzine did not invent political corruption in the Garden State and had nothing to do with the parade of hacks marching to their perp walks in this summer's political version of the Sopranos. But if all you knew came from Christie's commercials, you'd have thought that Corzine himself belonged in the slammer. It's easy to become Governor of New Jersey if you promise to end corruption and lower property taxes. Actually doing this, however, is the rough equivalent of a political hat trick.

Many have tried.

None have succeeded.

Not even Chris Christie when he was New Jersey's US Attorney. The bad guys he put in jail were just replaced by a new crop of bad guys for the current US Attorney to put in jail. When that group is replaced and Christie is in his fourth year as Governor, someone will run against him promising to end corruption. And that someone won't have to write new campaign ads. He can just dust off Christie's.

The Chairman of the national Republican Party, Michael Steele, wants none of this local angle stuff. For his money, Tuesday's elections were an indictment of an "incredibly arrogant" Democratic Party that is putting "our freedom and economy at risk." Of course, the economy was at risk long before January 20, 2009. In fact, it was more or less on life support. And it is very hard to talk about the loss of freedom these days without images of Dick Cheney's uber-state coming immediately to mind. Steele must think that a free and productive America is one where Wall Street is made safe for renewed financial bubbles and health care is provided at the whim of for profit insurance companies.

The rest of us know otherwise.

Even the rest of us in New Jersey and Virginia. We've already been to . . .

The World Serious.

In fact, we live there.

2009-10-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

BORING

I'm bored.

I know this is my problem and not yours.

Maybe you are very excited.

Barack is arguing with Fox over whether Fox is really a wing of the Republican Party or a straight news organization. The Republicans are arguing with Norway over who deserves to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Gen. McChrystal is arguing with the Administration (or, more particularly I guess, Joe Biden) over whether we need 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan. The American Medical Association is arguing for the public option. Americans are arguing with Wall Street about obscene bonuses. And Sarah Palin is . . .

Still arguing.

So maybe it's just me. A kind of inherent dullness borne of some deep genetic reality that says all this exciting stuff is all so . . .

Boring.

But maybe not.

Oh, I agree, the AMA thing is kind of a hoot. You could look far and wide for the last time the AMA has supported anything remotely akin to national health insurance and come up empty handed. But here they are, endorsing the public option, and proving once and for all that this whole current health care debate really is the insurance companies against everyone else. Too bad the insurance companies may win. Which, of course, would be exciting . . .

In that perverse sort of way those who have no business winning still manage to do so against all odds.

I mean, it's pretty hard to find a better opponent than insurance companies. I have never seen one of those favorable/unfavorable polls on them. Probably because you can't get anyone to say something favorable. So you'd think that, in a one-on-one against them on health care -- with the AMA on your side, no less -- the insurance boys would be toast.

But they're not.

Newt Gingrich has promised them that if a health care bill passes, his party will go to the country in 2010 and 2012, win, and then repeal the health care reform not yet passed today. In truth, this sounds more like a wish than a promise. A "been there, done that," so let's do it again boast. A bit of retro from the GOP's glory days of '94, when voters had no knowledge of what the Party of God would actually do if they ran the table and won it all. In a word . . .

Boring.

Then there's Wall Street.

The gloom and doom is over.

Or at least pretty aggressively abated.

Earlier in the year, the TARP money they got from us taxpayers made it possible for them to survive. Now they are reserving record level bonus pools for themselves, which gives new meaning to the words "Thank you." The real fear among reformers is that the Administration in general, and Geithner's Treasury Department in particular, is so larded with the authors of the last two financial bubbles that nothing will change. And as of now, it's hard to argue with that. Health care reform -- a long term driver of the deficit reduction needed to allow fiscal policy to work without crippling later inflation -- is stalled. And the financial sector is still largely deregulated.

It's deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra.

What a yawn.

I should be able to get excited about Barack's Nobel Prize. And I am. But the truth is that I am excited because it sends the right wing around the bend. So, in a reprise of my Catholic youth, excitement is tempered with guilt. I generally buy into the notion that Nobel Prizes should go to those who do something . . .

Other than give great speeches.

You know -- negotiate a treaty, end a war, cure AIDS, keep an eye on Russia from your backyard.

Even the President was embarrassed. There he was in the middle of trying to fashion a new war strategy for Afghanistan, refereeing internal disputes over troop levels between his Vice President and the Commander on the ground, wondering how in the world we managed to pick another ally who is not all that good at running his country and oh, by the way, may have stolen the recent election, keeping his eye on the other war he had nothing to do with but is committed to ending, and watching Iran pretend to negotiate on nukes (having stolen a recent election), none of which has led to much of anything yet, and the Norwegians wake us up one day with the news that he has been awarded the Peace Prize.

Maybe it was for next year.

Fox, of course, had a field day. They reported all the right wing chest thumpers feigning sincere outrage that so undeserving a recipient could have been picked. They gave plenty of time to all those who lamented (as they now do on an annual basis) how the whole Peace Prize thing is nothing more than Norway's exercise of political leverage in the service of appeasement and old Europe. They even reported calls from some that Barack refuse the prize or give it back (which, come to think of it, might not be a bad idea -- maybe he and Kissinger could work a "two-fer", albeit for different reasons).

All this, they call "straight news".

Wow.

Even the lies are . . .

Boring.

2009-08-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

THE DOG DAYS OF AUGUST

It is hot and humid in New York City. After an unseasonably cool summer, the natural order has reasserted itself.

So, too, it appears in the nation as a whole.

The Republicans have now pretty much embraced their alternative to Obama's politics of change. To "Yes, We Can" they shout "No, We Won't". The issues are more or less irrelevant. When the Administration proposed the stimulus package earlier in the year, the GOP rediscovered its hatred for deficits and opposed it. Never mind that the country was rapidly travelling down the slippery slope to Depression. Or that they themselves had inherited Clinton's trillion dollar plus surplus only to squander it on tax cuts for the top 1% and an off-budget war without rationale (at least one based on fact) in Iraq. The party of one and a half regions (the old Confederacy and some Plains states) would rather oppose than propose.

A few years ago, I wrote an email to to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post. I told him that Republicans and conservatives run on the platform that government can do no good, and once elected, try to prove it.

Now they are doing that even when they are out of power.

The issue du jour is health care. Progressives already have given up on their preferred reform -- Medicare for all, which is a form of single payer. Instead, as the Clintons did in the '90s, they have accepted the notion that health policy must be fashioned on the dysfunctional foundation created by insurance companies. I suppose there is some market based mechanism that might provide reasonable care for all at costs that do not bankrupt the country. Hillary certainly tried to craft one in 1993, only to be told that her combination of employer mandates, community based rating, and regulatory oversight was government run amok. Her proposal never even made it out of committee. It just became a battering ram for Gingrich's revolution.

Now, in this potential summer of his discontent, Obama is running into the same buzz saw that killed health care reform in the last Democratic Administration. The President, of course, did not march blindly down the path trod by his predecessor. Where the Clintons created first a task force and then an enormous legislative package, sent to the Hill on a wave of "You will pass and I will sign" inspiration from the Presidential bully pulpit, Obama has allowed the Congressional committees to do their work, proposing only broad principles that had to be respected for him to get on board. For him, in truth, there are only two sine qua nons -- all must have access to quality health care and costs must be contained.

So much, however, for differences that don't matter.

This GOP is no different from Gingrich's.

Which was no different from Goldwater's.

Which was no different from Herbert Hoover's.

They do not believe in health care reform. They believe in the profit motive and pretty much nothing else, at least when it comes to domestic economic policy. Applied to the current health care crisis, that results in what for them are a number of ostensibly fundamental principles.

First, for them, there is no crisis. They note that three quarters of the country claims it is satisfied with their current health coverage. What counts as "satisfied" in this context is, of course, more than somewhat loaded. People who have health insurance are "satisfied" only because they have it. If they lose their jobs (and hence their insurance), actually get a serious illness (which then becomes a pre-existing condition, precluding insurability in the future absent later employment based coverage), have a chronic condition like diabetes (in which case, they are forever hostage to being lucky enough to have continuous employment with firms that provide insurance lest they too become uninsurable), or run a small business where they actually have to pay the premiums for everyone else (in which case, they know that premium costs have skyrocketed by more than 80% over the past eight years), they aren't all that "satisfied."

Lucky to be insured, yes.

Satisfied?

Not on your life.

Second, conservatives believe that profit motivated competition actually works in the health sector. Though this is more an article of faith than an empirical reality, it is nevertheless a fundamental element of their economic religion. It ignores, however, a number of salient facts. One is that, for those 65 and older, Medicare already has lopped off the highest risk category of insured, i.e. , those most likely to get sick. Given that the largest proportion of our health care dollars are spent in the last days of life, this is no small point. Put bluntly, we already have socialized well more than half the health delivery system. There really should be nothing wrong in principle with socializing the other half.

The right wing's politics of loud, however, will have none of this. They have now transformed Medicare -- a program the Goldwater Republicans of the 1960s opposed and voted against -- into a government program that no one who has wants in any way to lose ("Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare" said the sign at one of those euphemistically named "Town Hall" meetings where the screamers wouldn't even let the legislators speak), but no one who doesn't have can in any way propose getting (which is what the screamers are saying when they yell about "socialism" or "communism" or anything remotely "European").

The rest of us are left to trust that the benighted insurance companies will take care of us as they run up their profits. This, unfortunately, is a non sequitur for two reasons -- (1) the surest way to higher profit for the insurance companies is less coverage for all of us, whether by exclusions or higher co-pays or the managed "denial" practiced by insurance company bureaucrats under the rubric of "managed care," and (2) in an unregulated environment, the insurance companies can and always will pass the (high) cost of gold-plated care, emergency room treatments for the uninsured, and their bloated administrative budgets (26% of every insurance dollar goes to administrative cost; the comparable amount under Medicare is about 3%) onto us consumers, which is why premium costs have skyrocketed in the last decade.

So much for competition working.

Obama and the Democrats have proposed a sensible solution to these basic problems. To rein in health care costs, they contend that a publicly funded insurance option should be available for those who want it. This is a form of Medicare-lite. If you can't get health care because it is either too expensive, your employer doesn't provide it, or the private sector will no longer give you it, you get to enroll in the public taxpayer financed plan.

Everyone will be legally obligated to have insurance (just as anyone who has a car is obliged to carry auto insurance), so the pool of available premium payers will increase by the 45 million who are now uninsured (minus those who can't afford to pay). Employers who don't insure will pay a small tax, so no one gets to be a financial free loader on the public option plan. (Like the Hoover Republicans who opposed Social Security in the '30s, the right wing today claims that this feature will cost us jobs in the small business sector. It won't, largely because employers who do not now insure are doing so not because they once couldn't, but rather because they no longer can given the quadrupling of insurance premium costs in the last decade.)

And the public plan will keep the insurance companies honest. They won't exclude, or deny, or bloat their administrative budgets because, if they do, they will lose policy holders to the public alternative and eventually go out of business. For the same reason, they won't increase their charges at rates five times that of inflation, which is what they are doing now. The GOP claims that the the public option will rapidly deteriorate into a form of rationing, though the basis for this charge is impossible to ascertain. The screamers who love their Medicare apparently aren't worried about rationing now, and the public option won't be any different. If consumers enrolled in the public option want to buy supplemental plans, they can, just as is the case with current Medicare recipients. In addition, the present system already rations. It gives gold plated care to those who can afford it, and something less to everyone else.

The right wing calls that market based competition.

The diabetic who can't pay for her insulin knows she is being rationed.

Back in the '90s, policy wonks proposed all sorts of competitive solutions to the problem of government waste in general and the assumed (but never proven) lack of productivity of union workers in particular. Osborne and Gaebler wrote a book about it called Reinventing Government. In it, they gave example after example of how competition could make government more efficient. They even pointed out how, in one example that refutes a whole host of conservative shibboleths, unionized sanitation workers in Phoenix agreed to compete with non-unionized waste haulers in that city. The winners were the citizens. Sanitation costs went down.

And, oh, by the way, the union delivered the less expensive product.

Lots of folks on the right embraced this formula when it gave them a perceived cudgel to use on organized labor. Now, however, that the tables have been turned, and public agency competition has been proposed to make health care affordable and accessible to all, the free marketeers are screaming about uneven playing fields and socialism.

They are even showing up at their health care rallies and Town Halls with guns strapped to their legs.

I hope one doesn't accidentally go off during one of their screaming fits.

The resulting injury . . .

Probably won't be covered by their insurance company.

2009-07-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

ON A SUNDAY IN SCOTLAND

It's only a game for the elite on this side of "the pond," as they say.

Over there, where golf began, it's played by everyone from the assembly line worker to the hedge fund manager. If you live in St. Andrews, you can buy an (affordable) annual pass that allows you to play each of the seven courses owned by the St. Andrews Trust. One of them is the fabled Old Course.

So golf is a national game in Scotland.

And yesterday, that nation held its collective breath as a legend just shy of his sixtieth birthday came within eight feet of winning The Open Championship, golf's oldest and most hallowed crown, on a weather beaten track call Turnberry, famous for prior great moments in the sport, a runway used by the RAF in World War II, and winds that blow off the Irish Sea in changing fifteen minute increments.

Now it is also famous for something else.

Tom Watson . . . 2.0

When he came to Ailes earlier in the week, he was just a relic. He had already won The Open five times. Once at this very course, in the now infamous "Duel in the Sun" in 1977 in a play off victory against Jack Nicklaus that both greats had made it into with enormous birdie putts on the final hole of regulation play. He had already won nine major tournaments and countless regular tour events. But because golf is the one sport where relics still get to play competitively, this five time winner of what we Americans, much to the consternation of the British, call the "British Open," was allowed to tee it up.

Nothing of the sort could ever happen in any of our home grown sports. Sure, Satchel Paige played for a minor league baseball team in his fifties, and the occasional forty something trots out onto one or more of our football (not soccer) fields every fifth autumn or so to steal a page from the past.

But you won't find any sixty year olds in the World Series . . . or the Super Bowl.

They'll be on the couch.

Watching.

Where I was for six hours on Sunday.

Only I was participating.

Of all the sports, the four hundred year old one we call golf is the most like life. Like life, it is very hard to get right. Winston Churchill once quipped that "Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose." Though also attributed to him, Churchill did not say "Golf consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” But he easily could have. And the point would have been the same.

It ain't easy.

Like life, it also ain't fair.

In one of his famous press conferences in the '60s, JFK was asked about the resentment reservists might feel on being called up to serve. He noted that inequity was inherent in the world. Some serve and die. Some are wounded. Some are never called up. "Life is unfair," said the then President. Today, that comment seems harsh. But Kennedy had the right to make it. His older brother had been killed in World War II and he himself had been seriously injured. Though some were never called, they both served. And one died.

Life is unfair . . . and so is golf. Kennedy knew that too. Unbeknownst to voters, he was one of the best golfers to be President -- a single digit handicap. He kept it a secret in 1960 because he was contrasting his youth to President Eisenhower's age, and did not want the country to think it was electing another golfer (Ike was an aficionado of the sport, regularly leaving spike marks on the floor of the Oval Office as he returned from the White House putting green he had installed).

The unfairness of it all was in abundant evidence in Scotland yesterday. For 71 holes, the near sixty year old had confounded all that the evil golf gods could throw at him. He carefully avoided the numerous pot bunkers designed to gobble balls and inflate scores. Like an ancient mariner, he assayed and navigated the variable winds (oddly, on Saturday, he was the only golfer who left the first tee box before he hit to get a sense of how the wind was blowing across the first fairway; age and experience sometimes amount to wisdom). He played within himself, never expecting or asking more than that of which his own aged frame was capable.

And he made putt after improbable putt.

One from sixty feet. Another from near eighty feet. Too many to count from between ten and twenty feet. And a whole host from five to ten feet.

Except that last one on the 72nd hole that would have won the tournament. The one eight feet from the hole. The one that should not have been there. The one left from that first putt from off the green that should not have been there. Because no sixty year old can hit an eight iron flush at the pin 150 plus yards away on the 72nd hole on Championship Sunday . . . without the damn ball staying on the green.

Except this time it didn't.

Life is unfair.

When it was over, he didn't complain or whine. He also didn't do that during the four hole play-off, when his age finally caught up with him and he could not right the ship of tired legs splaying shots left and right. He congratulated the winner (who himself was to be congratulated, not just for winning but also for the gracious way in which he acknowledged having spoiled our whole party). He owned the failure. He accepted the regret.

Before the final round began, his friend Jack Nicklaus had text messaged him to "Win one for the old folks. Make us proud, Make us cry again." And today, Tom Boswell had the best response to that message.

"Don't worry, Tom, you did."

2009-07-07T14:27:00.000-07:00

SARAH

Unknown in lower 48,
She took us by surprise.
A maverick from the tundra
Was her oft-stated disguise.

At first she tripped on Charlie
And blamed the hated left.
Who knew that Bush's doctrine
Carried such destructive heft?

Then Katie threw her softballs --
Pick one more you can hate!
Brown, Roe, Miranda?
She just stared, no talking straight.

So comics had a field day
With her winks and nods and betchas.
"He pals around with terrorists" --
Her false but favorite gotcha.

They lost, and rather handily,
Swept by history's tide.
But she was poised to marry up,
The right wing's favorite bride.

They'd wait four years, 2012,
Pit bull, lipstick, and betcha.
But now they'll have to wait some more,
'Cause she just up and quitcha.

2009-06-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

PASSAGES

We should probably celebrate New Years in June.

Not January.

June is a month of passages.

We move from buds to blooms. The rhythm of baseball season finally returns to its ritualistic predictability, rescuing itself from that unseasonably cold April beginning. Kids all over the world are graduating. Nowadays from everything. College. High school. Kindergarten. Day care. Lots of people get married this month. And vacations either begin . . . or fall within the time when they are reasonably foreseeable.

No one graduates in January. I did . . . from law school. But I had to wait until June to actually wear the cap and gown and celebrate with my family. There was no celebration in January. I went right to work for a newly appointed federal appellate judge. He was then afraid of his new job. And I was then afraid of him. So it was entirely appropriate that our relationship began in a January winter. More purgatory than passage.

Things seem to more or less end in January.

Football. That long holiday stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Presidential transitions.

But they begin in June.

My son was born in June. He turned 21 last week, which we have turned into a passage all its own. Mostly because that is when kids who three years earlier were old enough to vote and go to war become old enough to drink. In truth, it is really a false passage. All the college kids drink before they are 21. They all have fake id's. College Presidents of late have been complaining that they spend substantial amounts of institutional time running interference for students who get arrested in the we-know-they-all-drink-but-will-occasionally-enforce-the-law policing du jour. The kids themselves think it's a farce.

When I was 21, I had been able to buy liquor legally for three years. My son once asked why that was OK for me but not him. I tried to be honest. I told him my generation had just screwed it up for his. I told him that we all had at least one friend (and usually many more) we had buried because of some drunken or drug induced escapade.

I don't think he found the honesty refreshing.

Just annoying.

In that "yeah, sure" sort of way 21 year olds have at being annoyed when they know honesty is fronting for hypocrisy. Because he knew we didn't change the law to protect them. We did it to protect ourselves. We didn't want to become the parents crying at their child's funeral.

Fair enough.

But someday he'll thank me. He'll even probably want to really crack down on those fake id's. He'll want to bring in the Mormon missionaries to turn all those frat parties into latter day alcohol free "First Nights." He'll do this when he becomes a father. Trying to be honest, he'll settle for some selfishly functional hypocrisy. He'll want to avoid those funerals too.

And attend those graduations.

In some not so far away Junes.

2009-05-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

TORTURED

The current debate on the legality and morality of torture is . . .

Well, tortured.

We should start with first principles (or at least what everyone thought were first principles prior to 9/11). Torture has been illegal for some time. The ban on torture is clear in the Geneva Convention and in most state law, including our own, which either adopts that Convention or reflects it in domestic statutes. The prohibition is also something that has engendered near universal support in the civilized world. Our contemporary affection for it was born largely out of the Nuremberg trials, which claimed that civilized peoples had jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity wherever and by whomever they were perpetrated. At that time, the defense of superior orders, as well as the notion that any prosecution of these crimes was merely a case of "victor's justice," was soundly rejected.

Not for 'nuthin, moreover, the United States led the charge.

Herman Goering proudly marched into an American base at the end of World War II ready to surrender his sword in the quaint but time honored ritual of a defeated General recognizing the legitimate conquest of his victorious foe. He expected in the process to be treated with the respect all prior surrendering Generals had received, a sort of reciprocal noblesse oblige in which officers were deemed members of the same club and the surrendering losers were given reasonable quarters, hot food, good wine and continued respect. Instead, within a relatively short period, he was indicted and thrown in the dock. More or less the same thing occurred in Japan in the wake of their defeat.

Fast forward fifty five plus years or so, we now find ourselves debating whether our own "officers," including Bush and especially Cheney, must be indicted for their own crimes against humanity. Because it is an issue no sitting American politician truly wants to confront, both sides of the ideological divide are crafting their own unque avoidance strategies. For its part, the Obama Administration for the time being abjures any outright indictment of the former President and Vice President, embracing a kind of good faith procedural legalism in which Obama himself announces that any who violated the law will be held responsible . . .

By the US Department of Justice . . .

In due course . . .

Which presumably is on the case.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the trials to start.

On the other side, the avoidance strategy is quite explicit and embraces two tactical moves in order to reach the stated goal of no prosecutions, not now, not ever. On the one hand, there is absolutely no acknowledgment of the Nuremberg principle, let alone any reasoned effort to grapple with it. Try googling "Nuremberg" to see if it comes up in any articles on the current torture debate. I did and couldn't find any. Cheney hasn't mentioned it, nor has Charles Krauthammer, who is otherwise waxing eloquent in his defense of the morality of torture as practiced by the Bush Administration.

What Cheney and Krauthammer do say is the right wing's second tactical move, and is reducible at its core to two words. They are . . .

Torture works.

So, for a large part of the past month, we have witnessed an unprecedented display of public comment from a former Vice President insisting that the Bush Administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved "tens of thousands, if not hundred of thousands" of lives. And, for his part, Krauthammer is claiming that torture is justified in two situations -- the so called "ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives." In his first of two articles on the subject, he cited Bush Administration figures who claimed that information of both sorts was obtained via torture in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In his second article, he cited the success of the Israelis in getting information via torture as to the whereabouts of Cpl. Waxman when Palestinian terrorists had captured him in 1994. Both sources assert that, but for the interrogation techniques used, critical information would not have been gained.

There is, of course, a fairly short answer to both Cheney's and Krauthammer's claims. It is that . . .

We'll never know.

Which is exactly where the right wing wants to leave it.

And exactly where it cannot be left.

We now live in a world where the efficacy of torture is being tested on a grand scale. Unfortunately, however, empirical realities are being ignored in the face of asserted realities that, though unproven, would be catastrophic were they to be true. The essence of the right wing's claims, and the motive behind Obama's careful proceduralism which appears to put the issue on a permanent (or at least four or eight year) back burner, is not that torture works. Rather, it's that we can't take the risk of figuring out whether it does not. The answer, as George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were wont to say only a short time ago, "may come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Fairly confident that we will not take that risk, Cheney and Krauthammer simply assert -- with no evidence whatsoever -- that torture is efficacious.

In fact, however, it is not.

For at least two reasons.

First, no one can claim that catastrophes were averted in the wake of 9/11 owing to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. We do not know what else was tried or what else was gleaned from whatever was tied, and what we do know about the lengths of interrogations suggests that it often took months, not minutes, to get a lot of the information deemed so valuable. Both realities would tend to refute the notion that torture works, the first by demonstrating either that Bush and Co. simply ignored alternatives on the assumption they would not work or used torture even in the face of information being gleaned legitimately, the second by demonstrating that a months long torture regime more or less refutes the notion that what was learned was catastrophically time-sensitive. The whole point of Krauthammer's point is that we need to know now, not a year (and 100 plus episodes of water boarding) from now.

Second, there is at least some current evidence that, far from working, torture may have created false information. This has historically been proven to be the case and is one reason why John McCain, a torture victim himself, opposes it. Now, according to some reports surfacing, a high value Iraqi was tortured in order to get him to disclose a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in Iraq. This dovetailed nicely with the Administration's need to trump up an alternative justification for the war in Iraq once their WMD claims went up in smoke. And the Iraqi, of course, coughed up the necessary link. There was, however, only one problem with his information.

It was false.

Cheney (and presumably Krauthammer as well) wants all of the CIA's torture memos declassified and claims they will support his assertion that torture works. No doubt they will. Cheney, after all, was regularly parking himself at Langley to make sure that whatever the agency said comported with his views. Many contend the former Veep is a war criminal. But no one asserts he is stupid. So I have no doubt that those memos will help him spin his position in some way.

But I want to see them anyway.

For two reasons here, as well.

First, if the memos do not show that legitimate alternatives were tried and failed, or that the techniques were not used over long periods of time on particular detainees, or that the information gleaned was not in fact false, then the only thing tortured about Cheney's and Krauthammer's current position will be its logic.

And second, I'd like to see what the memos say about . . .

Nuremberg.

2009-04-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

SHE HAD A DREAM

Of those 100 million plus You Tube hits over the last ten days, at least twenty are from me. I just can't get enough of her. Every time I watch it, I wind up crying. A friend recently told my wife that she had a husband who wears his heart on his sleeve.

This time, however, it was lodged firmly in my throat.

We live in a world where appearance is reality. Or at least close enough to reality that it can by no means be safely ignored. We also live in a world of conventional wisdom. If a frumpy "plus size" woman pushing 50 has not fulfilled her "dream" of becoming a professional singer, chances are . . .

She can't sing.

We all knew that when she walked onto the stage. A slow, somewhat uncomfortable walk that we thought said "I have never been here before and do not expect to be back any time soon." Then she started answering questions.

And really convinced us her fifteen minutes of fame would either be funny for us . . . or embarrassing for her . . . or (we hoped) both.

Simon started with softballs. "What's your name, darling?" (He would never have tried that "darling" bit on Amanda; she would have clocked him). "Susan Boyle," she said, safely enough. "And where are you from?" "Blightman, near Bathgate, in West Lothian," she replied. That's a "big town," said Simon smoothly. Her puzzled look said "not really."

And then she stopped. For more than a moment. And we knew again she was cooked. TV pros don't stop. Silence is deadly. Pregnant pauses are decidedly for amateurs. We had an amateur and we knew it. She scratched her head. Which no one else on TV does either. Because their hair is very made up. Which was not her problem. Because her hair was barely made up.

"It's more a collection of . . ."

And then she stopped again. To find a word, for heaven's sake. Doesn't she understand she is on TV? We knew she didn't.

". . . villages, don't ya think?"

Simon doesn't get paid to think. At least not about the size of West Lothian "villages." So he plowed on.

"And how old are you Susan?" "I am 47," she said. Simon's eyes opened . . . wide. He couldn't say what he was thinking. Which was that she must be kiddin'.

She wasn't.

"And that's just one side of me," she added, suggestively rolling her decidedly non-Madonna like hips. Pierce frowned at the unvarnished tackiness of it all. Simon muttered a disgusted "Wow" sotto voce to Amanda. Even in Europe, this was still a family show. So tackiness approaches raunchiness only at a distance. Simon moved on.

Deftly.

"OK. What's the dream?" he asked.

"I'm tryin' to be a professional singer," said she. And then the camera panned to a woman in the audience. Whose look said either "Yikes" or "C'mon" depending on the continent. Simon moved in for the proverbial kill. "And why hasn't it worked out so far, Susan?" "I've not been given the chance before, but here's hoping it'll change" said Susan. We didn't believe her. And when she told us she wanted to be as successful as Elaine Paige, a theatrical superstar, we all laughed.

Pierce had had enough. "What are you going to sing tonight?" he asked, just to get it over with. "I'm going to sing I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables," she said, just to let us know how bad what was coming would be. "Big song," said Simon. Pierce chuckled. Amanda just stared.

Then Susan Boyle sang.

And right about that time, to quote Forrest Gump, "God showed up."

She didn't just sing. She overwhelmed. She was perfect. The audience was on its feet. Simon was simply fooled and couldn't wash that "I've been had" smile off his face. Amanda was in shock, and Pierce later admitted as much. In the evaluations which followed, Amanda apologized for all us "cynics," calling the performance "the biggest wake up call ever." Pierce confessed that when she had said she wanted to be "like Elaine Paige, everyone was laughing at you."

"No one is laughing now," he added.

Except God.

Who always knew she could sing.

Even when we were certain that this frumpy, slighty overweight, 50ish, not ready for prime time, spinster, with a silly dream, from a village in West Lothian . . .

Couldn't.

2009-04-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

SOUNDS OF SILENCE

I have not written a blogpost in almost two months.

A cousin in Colorado wondered if all was well. She was used to receiving my monthly (or, during the recent election, weekly) missives and thought something might be wrong. I told here everything was fine and filled her in on some family news.

Another friend mentioned that he too had gone to the blog recently and had seen nothing since early February. He was worried that I would "lose my audience." With his finger on the pulse of 21st century internet based media, he issued a dire warning. "If you want to get hits, you have to do it all the time. Good bloggers blog every day. And theirs are shorter than yours." Translated for my 20th century literary based mind, "get hits" is a synonym for having been "read," and "good bloggers" are those who, tautologically speaking, "get hits." On his view, reading appears to be more or less beside the point. A "hit", I have learned, is anyone who accesses the blog, whether or not they actually read it. Shorter appears to be better because it merely increases the chances that some of the "hitters", as it were, will also turn out to be readers.

What's a neophyte blogger to do?

I told my cousin I had not written anything lately because I was still trying to get a bead on what is going on in the economy. Said I: "The whole banking plan is very complicated and I am not quite sure I understand it yet." Said she (tongue firmly planted in cheek): "You mean you actually want to understand what is happening before you write about it?"

But this is not a laughing matter.

Bloggers (and others) are weighing in en masse on the Obama-Geithner plan to create a public-private partnership to begin purchasing the so-called toxic assets, largely mortgage backed securities which are not trading anymore (and thus can't really be priced) along with those killer credit default swaps and options that piled leverage on top of the way overly leveraged mortgage backed securities. No one really knows whether the plan will work (except Paul Krugman, who -- for reasons I do not understand -- pretty much says it won't, and Tim Geithner, who -- for reasons I very much understand -- does not promise it will but is officially reduced to the position that it has to).

I don't know either.

And so have been reduced to silence.

Which is another word for "thinking".

Along with the other "weigher-inners", I could break my studied silence and take a position. As far as I can tell, that would not really require "weighing in" on the actual economic effects of the plan. Instead, I would just need to make some aphoristically cute atmospheric point. Like . . .

Why is the President doing a town hall meeting in California when he should be 24/7 on the banking plan? Or . . .

Why is the President talking about universal health care, or universal pre-k, or -- frankly -- universal anything, when the universe's entire foundation (aka the banking system) is not functioning? Or . . .

Why didn't Geithner or Obama know about those AIG bonuses, and anyway how will we stop them, which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the banking plan will actually work but otherwise satisfies a "weigher-inner's" felt urge to say something that appears to be related even if it isn't? Or . . .

What's the point of passing a back to the '70s larded by liberals budget that raises taxes and refuses to delay on going green and a whole host of Democratic platform planks which will just balloon the deficit, when we are already committed to ballooning the deficit to bail out the bankers and hedge funders (and, just for edge and moral superiority, those AIG bonus babies)?

Or I could just say nothing.

And keep thinking.

I won't get any "hits" this way.

But my cousin in Colorado still loves me.

2009-02-06T07:59:00.000-08:00

FROGS

In the annals of counter intuitive reality, I thought nothing could top the frogs in the gradually warming water.

It seems that a frog, like you and me, will react immediately to the touch of boiling water, bolting from the offending hot stuff in a split second. Put the reptile in a bucket of gradually warming water, however, and it will literally sit there until it is boiled to death.

So, as I said, I thought nothing could top the frogs.

And then I heard the Republican position on the current economic crisis and the stimulus package winding its way through the halls of Congress.

And realized I was wrong.

In a Back to the Future moment that only true conservative believers can revel in, the GOP is telling us that the solution to our current problems is some combination of tax cuts, a spending freeze, reduction of the deficit, and the condemnation of anything else as that most hated of political beasts, the "earmark." Never mind that the first and second will not stimulate, the third would actually make things worse at this precise moment, and the fourth is merely a rhetorical sponge -- and a mostly inaccurate one at that -- there to absorb anything at odds with one through three.

It is very easy to pick apart the stimulus package, and this makes for great political theatre, however de minimis the actual dollars are when it comes to any particular nit. Whoever added the line for contraceptive funding to the House bill obviously had stimulus in mind, but not the sort we are looking for. Nevertheless, as Obama pointed out earlier this week, the specific spending now criticized amounts to about 1% of the overall package, a lot of money to be sure, but hardly more than a rounding error in the context of our multi-trillion dollar economy.

The real problem is that the President is being way too apologetic and should stop it. The bill is more than defensible in almost all its particulars.

But you do have to read the fine print.

And ignore the Rush Limbaugh echo chamber.

For example, among the items in the House bill criticized recently on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal were $6 billion to construct, alter and repair federal buildings, $325 million to repair trails and "remediate mines" on federal lands, $462 million to construct, renovate and repair laboratories leased by the CDC, $427 million to construct research facilities for the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $75 million for salaries and expenses at the FBI, and $6.2 billion for weatherization assistance.

All of this is directly stimulative. The vast majority is for new or retrofit construction projects which create local jobs with obvious economic multiplier effects. If you doubt this, just look for a construction project in any urban neighborhood and then ask the local deli owner what he thinks of it. Those sold pastrami sandwiches will tell you all you need to know. And whether they are swinging steel girders on high risers or weatherizing the suburban mansions of any remaining yuppies, the hard hats won't care. Both jobs will pay the bills. Equally stimulative are the much derided line items for "salaries," notwithstanding the fun had by those who play the conservative parlor game of bashing government employees as undeserving leeches sucking off the tit of their ostensibly more productive private sector brethren. What the parlor pundits miss is that, unlike the upper echelon taxpayers favored by conservatives and the GOP, those FBI agents and employees will actually spend whatever portion of the $75 million goes to salaries.

Even the more esoteric stuff is perfectly appropriate for these less than perfect times. Stealing a page from Franklin Roosevelt's book, the House bill provides hundreds of millions to repair trails on public lands. This is merely the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the 1930s come back to life. In the Depression, the CCC took tens of thousands off the streets and gave them work on federal lands. And the modest equivalent now proposed could today provide work for an army of college students and others.

In truth, conservatives are not bitching about whether the expenditures are sufficiently stimulative. Were they doing so, a credible claim could be made that too much of the spending extends into fiscal years 2010 and 2011 when it should instead be front loaded, and an even stronger claim could be made that the overall amount spent is way too low. My guess is that as the bills make their way through both chambers and then to conference, the first problem will be addressed. Nevertheless, the conservatives will not come along.

Because it's the second problem that really scares them.

In 1993 and 1994, as the Clinton Administration teed up universal health care and sought to craft legislation to make it a reality, conservative pundit William Kristol famously advised Republicans to say nothing but "No." Kristol thought that any universal health program would cement the middle class' allegiance to the Democratic Party for another generation or two and that, as a consequence, when it came to universal health care, Republicans couldn't bargain, negotiate or compromise. All they could do was oppose.

Something similar but much bigger is at work today. Conservatives cannot afford to let the government forestall this crisis. They cannot allow an insufficiently funded Round I stimulus package to lay the groundwork for more money later on. If that occurs and works, they will be out of business for quite some time, their laissez faire trickle down ideology in tatters, their second Gilded Age gone the way of the first.

The stakes, of course, are much higher now than they were in the '90s with health care. Then, it was about a program. Today, it is about the world's economy. Consumers aren't spending. Real estate developers are moth balling planned commercial investments. Businesses are not expanding capacity because they either can't sell what they have already produced or do not think they will sell what they could now produce. And Nobel economist Paul Krugman is warning of the "possibility" of a "prolonged deflationary trap," which is econo-talk for a Depression.

But in the face of all this, the party of W marches on.

Obliviously.

Just like the frogs.

2009-01-21T09:46:00.000-08:00

RIGHT HOOK

The ink is not yet dry on his Inaugural Address, and the sober but inspiring words breathed through the chill of a January afternoon and a collapsing economy have not yet entered the historic pantheon where they one day may reside. The afterglow of parties held long into the Inaugural night is not yet extinguished, as revellers recall their own celebratory dances with history and more than a few beers. And more or less as a bonus, we found out yesterday that The One can't just speak.

He can also dance.

Which is good.

Because he's going to need all the moves he has.

Lost in the banner headlines and generally favorable reviews on this post-Inaugural Wednesday is the right wing's game plan for return. It's not easy to find. George Will is today lauding President Obama's demure but no less direct admonition in his speech yesterday that we grow up as a nation and realize there are no free lunches. Put childish things aside, says the President quoting the Bible, and Will reads that as a not so subtle demand that everyone realize Washington cannot be all to all. Then Andrea Peyser of Murdoch's NY Post waxes positively eloquent from a bar stool in a working class part of New York City, telling erstwhile populist conservatives that, hey, the new guy gets it. With his praise for "the doers," a "graceful" and "humble" Obama won over the heart of a self professed "fierce skeptic" who, as she put it, "didn't vote for him . . . trust him . . . [or] support him."

Wow. Maybe this whole Red/Blue thing is about to go the way of the dinosaur.

Then I read Dick Morris.

And my post-partisan love affair with the new bi-partisan bubble was burst.

Morris is never subtle and today he did not disappoint. His headline had to be music to Sarah Palin's ears -- "The Obama Presidency: Here Comes Socialism." Underneath it, Morris catalogues the forced march to European style socialism he envisions us making over the course of the next four years. It starts with Obama's emulation of the last President who ostensibly took us on this trip -- FDR. According to Dick, Obama will rescue the banking system "by nationalizing it," with the government getting preferred stock in exchange for troubled assets, and then follow up with a wish list of spending programs running the gamut from alternative energy sources and technology enhancements to school renovations and infrastructure repairs. This will bust the budget at precisely that point in time when tax credits and other middle class tax relief measures have expanded the group of non-federal tax paying citizens to a "clear majority of the American population," leaving only the well off (or, as Morris puts it, Republicans) to shoulder the tax increases needed to replenish the treasury's deficit laden coffers.

Meanwhile, in the world of Obama created by Morris, the imbalance between our demand for health care and the supply of available doctors, nurses and facilities will lead to price controls and rationing, the inevitable result of the President's supposed unwillingness to let medical prices increase so that investments can be made to increase supply. On the political side, Morris asserts that illegal immigrants will be given a "path the citizenship" and labor will get a check off system, the combined effect of which will be to turn red states like Texas into bastions of blue while union households (and therefore Democrats) proliferate as membership rises. Morris imagines the consequence of this putative parade of horribles will be that "Obama's name will be mud by 2012 and probably 2010," following which the "Republican Party will . . . regain much of its lost power." But the socialist die will have been cast. And it will be "too late to reverse."

It's a shame this sort of stuff is advertised as non-fiction.

Because Morris's diatribe mixes in equal parts deceit and conceit. As well as the usual dollop of fear.

The deceit is both historic and contemporary. Like most conservative revisionists, Morris believes that Roosevelt's New Deal was an economic failure. Designed to cure the Great Depression, FDR's program lowered unemployment from 23% when he was inaugurated to about 13% in 1937. Then it went back up to 17% in 1938, a sort of second Depression, and never got below 15% before World War II. Morris claims that Roosevelt's "policies of over regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession." Hence, Q.E.D. (it is demonstrated, for all you non-Latin scholars who weren't educated by the Jesuits) say the conservatives. The New Deal failed.

There is only one problem with this account.

It is wrong.

The New Deal didn't fail to end the Depression. It just failed to continue and the Depression was made worse as a result. FDR wobbled and for a time threw away his Keynesian compass. In his heyday of New Deal spending and fiscal stimulus, Roosevelt brought the unemployment rate down by ten points (which we would take in a heartbeat today). Unfortunately, after being re-elected in 1936, rather than increasing the stimulus, he tried to balance the budget and raised taxes to do so. This triggered a new recession, the child of pandering to conservative shibboleths that budgets must be balanced at all costs. What could have continued was thus abbreviated, and the country did not fully recover until the mother of all fiscal stimulus and spending plans was passed, which we know today as World War II.

Nor did FDR's legislative accomplishments create the kind of business uncertainty that led to a renewed recession. There was nothing uncertain about what the politicians had wrought, unless the captains of industry and finance in the '30s saw uncertainty in a hoped for return to the halcyon days of dog eat dog laissez faire where the aged and widows were poor, workers were broke, and gains from any productivity always migrated to the top. In fact, after World War II ended, there was real fear that a new Depression would emerge. And that was stopped by the GI Bill (which put cash in the pockets of veterans, educated a generation, and laid the groundwork for the productivity gains of the '50s and '60s), as well as the unionization FDR had heralded and Morris seems to lament. There is a reason the middle class emerged in the wake of the war. It is because the previous post-industrial imbalance between labor and capital had been addressed to some extent and productivity gains were thus more evenly distributed across the population.

Having distorted history, Morris then tries to do the same to Obama's program. He begins with the claim that the President intends to "nationalize the banking system," which is an odd charge, especially in light of current realities. What Morris posits is that the government will finally get around to buying up (or insuring the banks against the losses from) toxic assets, principally bad mortgage loans and the paper created to securitize them. In exchange, the government will get preferred stock in the banks, which is just a fancy term for an IOU. Like any loan, it will bear interest. Because, however, the assets are so toxic and the debt will be so large, Morris claims that upon recovering their positions the banks will essentially be able only to pay back the government and the common shareholders will in effect get nothing. When the common stockholders realize this, they will flee. And voila, the government will in effect own the banks, which will then have been "nationalized."

"Nationalization," of course, is always a bad thing to true conservatives. It is basically their polite way of calling you a socialist . . . or communist. From time to time, conservatives in fact nationalize things. But usually they call it a national security emergency or a war of some sort. Back in the '50s, the conservatives helped "nationalize" American transportation by building the interstate highway system. But they called it the National Defense Highway Act and told us we needed the interstates so tanks could easily roll from Kansas to New York in case the Russians invaded.

In any case, my first reaction to the nationalization charge was "So what." Then I realized this is exactly what Morris wants us east coast liberal Obama lovers to say. So my second reaction was to wonder what he would propose as an alternative. The government could always take the toxic paper in exchange for nothing.

That would save the common shareholders.

But screw the American taxpayer.

Which is probably not a good idea.

Every other preferred stockholder gets a dividend on what amounts to a quasi-loan to the corporation whose stock he has purchased. Why should John Q. Public be any different? The answer is he shouldn't.

The other answer is that Morris is overwrought . . . by a long shot. The notion that common shareholders in banks with toxic assets will be wiped out is neither certain nor likely. The whole purpose of recovery is to allow the institutions to function while they work off the debt. It may take awhile, but if the banks recover, so will the common shareholders, sooner or later. As the debt is lowered, the common shares will become more valuable. Thus, far from the Obama plan (assuming Morris's version is the one ultimately adopted) resulting in an inevitable "nationalization" of the banking system, the contrary is likely to be the case.

Now to the conceit.

The assumption throughout Morris's piece is that Obama is incapable of making hard choices. He will ration health care because he will not permit medical inflation. He will legalize illegals and unionize the workforce merely to insure the success of Democratic Party candidates. The first charge, however, is simply the result of a false choice. And the second assumes there are no good reasons for the policies, in which case the motive must merely be political . . . and cynical.

Nothing about this President, however, justifies these claims.

The supply/demand imbalance in our health care system today is largely a function of three flaws. First, the present system disincentivizes participation. We have encouraged insurance companies to cherry pick, the result of having allowed health administrators to serve as gatekeepers in a system of managed care that saves money by denying coverage and excluding claimants. Whether we get to universal coverage via a single payer system or by mandating that everyone have insurance, either approach will pump more money into the system and allow more investment in doctors, nurses, hospitals, equipment and care.

The conservative approach -- which generally relies on tax deferred medical savings accounts (MSAs) coupled with provisions for catastrophic insurance -- would disincentivize participation on an even larger scale because it would decrease the pool of those who pay into the system on a regular basis. The key to a sound insurance system is to get as many healthy people as possible into the pool. MSAs are only as valuable as the incomes which fund them, which means that the young (and healthy) or middle aged but not very well off are likely either to opt out or participate at levels insufficient to generate sufficient cash to cover Morris's investment gap; at the same time, an insurance regime limited to catastrophic care creates a dangerous incentive to avoid preventive care in favor of later catastrophic care, which is neither good for America's health nor particularly helpful in reining in medical inflation.

Second, the health care "market" is not free and hasn't been since World War II, when wage controls forced employers to give employees health insurance (which was then cheap) in lieu of prohibited cash. When the health care market was free, people did not get care and died as a result. That is a policy we could return to, and without admitting it, Morris and his followers seem to get there by default. Nevertheless, assuming we believe minimal care is a right people enjoy, not a commodity they can avoid, the market in health care is like the market in electricity. It has to be organized efficiently on the assumption that everyone needs it, all should get it, and we need not go broke providing it. Part of the way to do that, and this is the third problem with the present system, is that we have to use technology effectively, computerizing record keeping and generating user friendly outcomes based data bases so that providers everywhere can have access to the best research and treatment protocols and administrators are not endlessly duplicating patient data and billing files.

Morris,of course, mentions none of this. Instead, he avoids the problems, flinging around words like rationing and price controls with an abandon that in the end reveals him for what he is -- a health policy Wizard of Oz. There is nothing behind his curtain.

Ditto on illegal immigrants and labor policy. With Morris, it's all fear and no fact. In his most responsible hour last year, John McCain recognized that the present immigration system is a joke. Our borders are porous; our outrage is hypocritical; and our policy is unfair (both to those who are here and those who want to be). One need not be in favor of rationalizing that system merely to increase the votes obtained in the next election. McCain certainly wasn't motivated by that, and it is unfair to assume Obama is either.

The same is true of labor reform. In the '30s and beyond, unions were critical to equalizing the economy's distribution of productivity gains and making the middle class possible. Since the conservative ascendancy of the late '70s, there have been enormous productivity gains but they have by and large gone to the top 10%. If labor is strengthened and collective bargaining re-emerges as a real economic force, the likelihood is that any future gains will be distributed as they were when the Greatest Generation came of age, not as they were when that generation began to die.

When I listened to him yesterday, I heard a President Obama inviting us to change, warning us that change would not be easy, advising us that old approaches and resentments would be dangerously counterproductive, and asking -- as had his 16th predecessor -- that we unleash the "better angels of our nature."

Dick Morris apparently missed that show.

Too bad.

'Cause this guy can dance.

2008-12-24T06:54:00.000-08:00

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

I have been thinking about Christmas this week.

Actually, I have been thinking about Christmas Eve, which is today. And which, it seems to me, captures more of the essence of Christmas than even the day itself.

Christmas is about anticipation. About what will happen, not what has occurred. It's about the future, whether that future is mere hours in the offing or a millenia away. And it unites, in perhaps a way that no other holiday can or does, the pedestrian with the profound. In fact, it makes the pedestrian profound.

Kids will go crazy tonight. Most won't be able to sleep. Those not afraid of some cosmic retribution will sneak a peak out the window or down the stairs in search of Santa Claus. Others will become inveterate Holmes-es (Sherlock, that is), carefully processing every errant sound from a squeaky baseboard to determine if he has come down the chimney, with care or otherwise, along with a satchel of goodies. A few years ago, a friend told me his son had come into his bedroom in the middle of the night, swearing to his father that "Rudolph was in the driveway."

Two thousand years ago, it was all about anticipation too. We have encrusted that day with layers of theological speculation, so much so that we are now almost in need of theo-archaeologists to carefully remove the layers without destroying the initial insight. It was, after all, about the future, about hope -- cosmic and otherwise. Lots of us call it salvation, and tonight or tomorrow, when many of us cross the church threshold (some for our biennial visit, others for the second time this week), we will hear the ancient story of the incarnate One and be told it was the day we were saved.

Which has, of late, got me to wondering.

What for?

And the best answer I can come up with is . . .

Tomorrow.

And so that's what Christmas is about for me. Tomorrow. All the endless tomorrows. With their hopes and dreams and disappointments. Their risings and fallings. And tears and laughter. Even on the day I die, when tomorrow will be unpredictably exciting. In fact, especially then.

A friend recommended a book earlier this year by a theologian named John Haught. In it, Haught talked about the need to square Christian theology with the fact of evolution. One point he made is that theology should never compete with science, that the truths of the latter are not to be denied by the former, and vice versa. So the earth and all its inhabitants weren't created in six days, the universe (or multi-verse, we really do not know) is billions of years old, the human story represents hardly a nanosecond in this evolutionary time line, and the possibility of intelligent life in spheres beyond our third rock from the sun is hardly remote. The one thing certain is that, whoever and whatever we and our world are, it will not be the same tomorrow.

In fact, in the deep time of our evolutionary tomorrow, it's gonna be very different.

Which brings me back to Christmas. Or more precisely Christmas Eve. The one day when we think about nothing but tomorrow. And really look forward to it.

I am ready this year. All the presents are wrapped. The house is clean (I vacuum). Charles Darwin and Jesus Christ have become bosom buddies in my mind, the former telling me that nothing is forever as the world and its inhabitants constantly morph into newer forms, the latter teaching me that this in itself is a good thing and that somewhere over this evolutionary rainbow there is still a tomorrow that embraces us all.

And I have a shovel ready.

In case Rudolph leaves something in the driveway besides a missing sleigh bell.

Merry Christmas.

2008-12-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

BLAGO AND ME

So now we have spent the better part of two weeks with the news that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevitch was trying to trade Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat for political contributions and some up front money.

All the usual suspects showed up. The earnest prosecutor professing shock at the sight of a sitting public servant arranging an apparent bribe. The editorialists bemoaning the state of a state where corruption appears endemic. The other politicians running for cover, with those caught on "the tapes" arranging hastily called press conferences to explain that they too were duped by Blago into thinking those "interviews" for the Senate seat were on the up and up. And the defense lawyer telling an incredulous world that his guy is innocent.

Hello!

Is any of this really news?

We live in a country where it costs, at a minimum, $500,000 to run for a seat in the House of Representatives. If the district is anywhere near a major media market, the cost rises into the multi-millions of dollars. If one wants to run for statewide office in a place like Illinois (or a dozen other big states like New York or California), the cost is in the tens of millions of dollars. If you win, more than half your time while in office must be spent raising money for the reelection.

Over time, this lunacy has produced three sorts of candidates and public servants.

The really rich.

The really famous.

And the really stretched.

The chances of any ordinary upstanding Joe -- even a very talented ordinary upstanding Joe who becomes, say, a Rhodes Scholar -- climbing this greasy pole have become exceedingly slim. For every Obama who works a miracle, there are dozens stymied in a lost Congressional district or a City Council seat from which they will never rise. And even the City Councilmen (and women) are spending all their time raising money in the hopes that lightning may strike.

In 2000, before Hillary Clinton came to New York and told us she wanted to be our Senator, the odds on favorite to run in a Democratic primary for Sen. Moynihan's soon to be vacant post was Westchester County Congresswoman Nita Lowey. That, of course, never happened. What did happen, however, is that, upon news of Lowey's interest in the Senate, three multi-zillionaires sought out the then chair of the Westchester County Democratic Party and told him they were each willing to put up $1 million of their own money to contest Lowey's seat. That could not have been music to the ears of the two dozen County Legislators, town Mayors, Assembly people and State Senators who might have credibly entertained the notion of running for the office, all of whom came from backgrounds that were decidedly modest relative to today's entry fee for a vacant Congressional contest in the New York City suburbs.

It also shouldn't be music to our ears. Because the present system costs us a lot more than money.

It costs us talent.

Harry Truman was a County Judge (the equivalent of a County Executive) in Independence, Missouri before he became a US Senator during the New Deal. The Prendergast political machine made him a Senator because they thought he was not smart enough to be the state tax assessor. In 1944, FDR made him Vice President and in 1945 be assumed the Presidency upon Roosevelt's death. In the '30s, a guy named Thomas P. O'Neill was elected to the Massachusetts General Court, where he served for almost two decades. In 1952, he ran for a Congressional seat in Cambridge, Massachusetts because the sitting Congressman (a guy named John F. Kennedy) had just been elected to the Senate. After serving for more than two decades there, O'Neill became Speaker of the House.

In their time, Truman and O'Neill were instrumental in creating and preserving the modern day middle class, not to mention saving the entire free world.

And neither of them could become President or Speaker of the House in the current political environment.

Today, New York City is being run by a billionaire. He's a nice guy and a very competent Mayor. But he isn't Fiorella La Guardia. Or Ed Koch. Neither of whom could win today either. Across the river in New Jersey, another billionaire is running that state. He is also a nice guy and appears to be a competent Governor. But he isn't Robert Meyner, New Jersey's Governor in the '50s and the guy who actually beat that era's millionaire candidate, Malcom Forbes. He isn't even Bob Torrecelli, who came up the hard way to become New Jersey's US Senator in the late 1990s. And resigned amidst a scandal involving illegal campaign contributions.

Which brings us back to Blago.

There are two basic problems with Rod. One is that he is broke. The other is that he can be corrupt. It is unclear which problem came first, though one suspects there are and have been many politicians over the years who have had their hands in the cookie jar in part because the bill collectors were knocking at the door. This is no excuse, and for every Bagojevich without scruples there is a Chuck Schumer (who is very middle class, rooms with two other Senators in DC, and has never attracted the hint of scandal even as he became a prodigious fundraiser)who proves that morality in the midst of temptation (and an unpaid mortgage) is still possible. As Warren Rudman famously remarked in another context to Oliver North, "Not all of us do it."

But, c'mon, do we have to make it so hard? Millions to win. Millions more to continue to serve. Multiple residences (which is not something your average middle class guy or gal can afford). A fundraising system that requires you to beg at the feet of the rich. And the de riguer perfect family, with of course the two kids, both of whom will have to go to college.

In New York today, we are being treated to the daily spectacle of Caroline Kennedy running to be the (appointive) US Senator once Hillary resigns. Some are huffing and puffing that she isn't "qualified." Others are claiming (correctly) that she would have no chance but for her last name and genealogy. Still others are rebutting the huffers and puffers, noting her philanthropic work, her authorship of multiple books on Constitutional law,and her expertise in education policy in the wake of service as a dollar a year employee of the new NYC educational system (where she has received high marks). But the real question is . . .

Who can raise $70 million for the 2010 election and the 2012 reelection effort, lest the Senate seat be lost to the Democrats?

And with that, Caroline is suddenly looking very "qualified."

In a strange way, Blago and Sweet Caroline are opposite sides of the absurd political coin we are constantly flipping. We want to avoid the rich and famous in favor of the modest but qualified. We make it impossible for anyone but the rich and famous to get the jobs and then keep them. And then when that rare modest man or woman of little means comes along, we expect him or her to turn political somersaults in the form of expert governance by day, fundraising shakedowns by night.

And, oh, by the way, don't neglect the wife (or husband) and the kids. Or the mortgage.

That there are Blago's out there should not be surprising.

That there aren't more of them should be.

In the '90s, I twice ran for Congress and lost. According to the reviews, I gave some great speeches and was very good on the retail side. The press loved me and I even have my "impressively knowledgeable attorney" accolade from the New York Times editorial that I will frame and someday give my kids. I am, however, not a Congressman principally because I couldn't come close to raising the money needed to be competitive, let alone win.

I'd like to think I am not Rod Blagojevich for reasons that have to do with character. But there is at least one other reason I am not Blago.

It's that . . .

I am not a Congressman.

2008-12-06T09:08:00.001-08:00

SENATOR "ANYONE"

New York needs a Senator.

Actually, if you listen to the politicians, it needs an Hispanic woman from somewhere north of the Bronx and east of Buffalo who can appeal to independents in the Adirondacks while still winning the boroughs. This ubermensch (or preferably womensch) must have what New Yorkers call "star" power, an asserted requirement in light of who she succeeds both immediately (Hillary Clinton) and historically (Bobby Kennedy). And she (or he, if we are still kidding ourselves) must also be able to raise gajillions of dollars, this the result of the specific need to run for election in both 2010 (to fill out the remainder of the Clinton term) and reelection in 2012 (because, unlike in Delaware, New Yorkers do not believe in caretakers).

This is a big decision for David Paterson, the state's current Democratic Governor.

For those of you who do not remember, and all you others who have chosen to forget, Paterson is the guy who replaced the state's prior Democratic Governor, Eliot Spitzer, who had to resign when his dating habits became public. Since then, running the show has been no can of beans. The state has no money, and it's biggest taxpayer is Wall Street, so right now it has no prospect of coming into money anytime soon. Consequently, Paterson has been running around the state explaining to anyone who will listen that cuts are coming. These audiences have praised him for his candor and marvelled at his performances (which are laced with funny asides and mind boggling budgetary detail, all committed to and delivered from memory because the Governor is more or less blind as a consequence of an early childhood disease). He is also asking Hank Paulson and Barack Obama for money, both of whom have promised to get back to him and are themselves working through a rather long list.

Now, David Paterson must find a Senator to replace Hillary Clinton.

In most places, this would be viewed as the rough political equivalent of being forced to play the fiddle while Rome burns. In other words, not such a big deal relative to what else is going on. Delaware has already picked Joe Biden's replacement, and Illinois is so overjoyed by Barack's ascension (and Chicago's place as the new western White House) that picking his Senate replacement appears to be a back pager at best.

But not here. In New York, finding a Senator is front page news. And so far, the mentionees include two Kennedys, one Cuomo, a County Executive, three Congresswomen . . .

And me.

I am not kidding.

A friend of mine on the Democratic National Committee (or "DNC" to the initiated) called me late one night a few weeks ago to ask whether I had seen the news that Hillary was slated to become Secretary of State. I had and said so. He had too. And was sitting in a bar in Washington talking to other political operatives, all of whom were out of work following the general election and desperately looking for something to do. So they decided to speculate on who David Paterson would appoint and -- being political consultants -- decided it would have to be someone who would otherwise primary Paterson for Governor. This narrowed the field appreciably, the consultants concluding that Andrew Cuomo would get the nod. Andrew, however, being Andrew, was not deemed particularly popular, and in any case, more drinks were being consumed. So the consultants decided that "anyone" who ran against Cuomo in a primary might beat him.

My friend then said he happened to know an "anyone."

In New York.

And that's how I made the list.

So I have been thinking seriously about this idea.

There are, of course, a number of negatives. I am not a woman, or Hispanic, or from upsate New York. I do not even speak Spanish. I do speak French but Quebec unfortunately is still part of Canada. I am an Irish Catholic male who lives in Westchester County, making me on the surface sound more or less like a Republican, which is a type that generally does not win a Democratic primary. Then, of course, my putative (and, I am instructed, desired) opponent, Andrew Cuomo, may not get the Paterson appointment. The women's groups in New York have been touting three Congresswomen. The Nassau County Executive was on the list because he too is interested in being Governor (but apparently not as interested as Andrew Cuomo, who the operatives say is "really" interested).

Caroline Kennedy is now a mentionee and Bobby Kennedy Jr. was until he took himself out of the running. For the record, I endorsed Barack months before Caroline. But no one came to my press conference. In fact, I didn't even hold one. This undoubtedly was bad planning on my part. But I wasn't a mentionee then. The Kennedys, of course, worry me, as they would any interested candidate. They are very good at producing two things.

Politicians . . .

And babies.

RFK, Jr. is saying that if Caroline is appointed and runs, the state will see more Kennedys than it ever knew existed. And I believe him. At a book signing party for one of his sisters last year, his mother told me that she had "thirty two grandchildren, and one on the way." All those Kennedy kids have been producing their own . . . Kennedy kids.

Lots of surrogates.

But I have two advantages that could put me over the top. One is that, contrary to popular belief, this is not the first time I have been a US Senate mentionee. Back in 1994, fresh from having lost a Congressional primary by 27 points (which followed the loss of an earlier general election by 20 points), a supporter of one of my opponents said I "should run for the Senate." We were in a bar having a drink (I am seeing a pattern here). I thought she meant the state Senate and noted that there already was a Democrat running for that seat. She said, "No. You should run against D'Amato for the US Senate." I asked if I should do this with the "$40,000 I had been able to raise in the last primary, or the $150,000 I had raised in that losing general election."

She kept drinking.

But it was a mention.

The other advantage is more significant. Given the list of mentionees, I think I can get Senator Schumer's endorsement. Schumer, who in 1998 did beat D'Amato, has been overshadowed here in New York ever since Hillary showed up in 2000. And he doesn't like it. Having run the Senate election arm of the DNC for the last two cycles, helping measurably in the process to turn a minority into an almost supermajority, the rumor is that this time Chuck Schumer wants to make sure New York's junior Senator is someone whose star power won't dull his own forever shining bright light. Someone who finally will let him give up those Sunday morning press conferences. In other words, he wants New York's junior Senator to truly be . . . a junior Senator.

Which more or less eliminates everyone on the list.

Except me.

Senator "Anyone".

2008-11-24T07:43:00.000-08:00

THANKSGIVING 2008

It's my favorite holiday. I love the colors, the food, the parade.

And the fact that it's always on a Thursday.

If a holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, you more or less feel ripped off, the victim of some sort of boss-led conspiracy to eliminate the extra day off. It can make you so mad you start flirting with the idea of moving to France . . . just to take off the whole month of August.

If a holiday falls on a Wednesday, you pretty much need a shrink. It creates a kind of downside schizophrenia. The work week stops just as it is about to start, so nothing gets done. And then it starts up again when it is supposed to have finished, so no one wants to do anything. Can anyone think of single thing the world has accomplished during a mid-week holiday week? Maybe we've created material for the next Woody Allen movie. But that's about it.

Tuesday, of course, creates a whole other set of problems. Tuesday is sort of a backwards Thursday. You get the four day weekend but everything goes in reverse. No one really likes eating a huge turkey with all the trimmings on the last day of a four day weekend. And no one can get to work the next day when they do so.

So Thursday it is. And this year Christmas falls on a Thursday too. It's 2008's version of a double mitzvah, as some of my ecumenically inclined friends would say. Two long weekends. Month to month. Holiday synchronicity at its best.

And the truth is, this year, we really need them. Let's face it. Though Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, we just do not have time this year for the requisite thank yous. The "to do" list is way too long. Wars to win. Credit markets to unfreeze. 401k's to cry over. A stock market to revive. A few banks to take over.

Washington DC itself is awash in job applications . . . and applicants. Apparently there are in the neighborhood of 35,000 plus jobs that can change hands now that a new Administration is coming to power. And at least 200,000 people who want them. In fact, there are now so many applicants that the Obama transition team may not even be able to take Thanksgiving off. And they can certainly forget about sleepin' in on the Friday after. That is a work day, which more or less refutes the notion that there is anything French about this crowd.

Of course, it must be said that the folks applying for these DC jobs clearly do not have houses to sell. Because, if they did, my real estate broker friend tells me there are no mortgages to be had and thus no buyers to beguile. So, the Washington political job pool this time around is comprised of the really rich . . . and the really young. In other words, pretty much like what it was the last time we changed Presidents.

How does a transition operation process 200,000 applicants? Not very well, it appears. The Obama team has a web site which tells anyone interested that they should send their application in on line, and that this is the best way to "insure" a response. This is not very encouraging. The President-elect is promising to get to you. But he's not giving you any deadline. Sort of like W's Iraq policy for the last five years.

My own view is that the whole process should be outsourced . . . to the nation's colleges and universities. Year in and year out, these institutions deal with millions of kids who apply for admission to their schools. Within a period of no more than six months, and as early as one if you want, they review the submissions, interview the candidates, and make the decisions. They are also pros at saying no, which the Government generally is not.

I will not be among the 200,000 applicants. Because I have a mortgage. And two children about to be in college at the same time. That, however, does not mean I will not be sending in an application. The way I see it, Barack may get to it mid-way through his second term.

By which time, my kids will be out of college . . .

And houses may again be selling.

Happy Thanksgiving.

2008-11-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

PARDON ME

I guess bailing out the banks was not enough. Because now he wants to bail out himself.

No kidding.

There are rumors flying around Washington that outgoing President Bush plans to issue "blanket pardons" to preclude the prosecution of anyone for crimes arising out of acts of torture (euphemistically, but falsely, called "enhanced interrogation techniques") authorized by his Administration. According to reports, the incoming Obama team, torn between the notion that violators should be prosecuted now to the fullest extent of the law on the one hand or that prosecutions should be deferred pending the creation of a Congressionally sanctioned non-partisan commission to investigate alleged abuses on the other, is now faced with the unpleasant prospect that any decision made by it might, as it were, be moot even before it is made.

But here's the beauty part. In issuing these blanket pardons, President Bush will even pardon himself.

Wow. I guess we were right to forgive the Supreme Court eight years ago. Counting on it (forgiveness, that is), they ignored two hundred plus years of precedent to give us the pardoned reality of an unelected President. And eight years later, he gets to ignore two hundred plus years of precedent to give us the unelected reality of a self-pardoned President. Move over Jerry Ford. You've just been usurped. You too Mr. Clinton (you pardon amateur).

In his 62 years, Bush's habit of "leaving messes for others to clean up" has been raised to an art form. As a college prankster and young adult, his family routinely intervened to save W from himself. As a would-be entrepreneur running businesses into the ground with other people's money, he regularly rang up enormous losses for his investors. As Governor of Texas, Bush left his state in a financial hole. And now as President, he leaves us despised abroad, and at home . . . broke.

This latest gambit, however, clearly takes the cake.

From the moment he assumed office, Bush II's was an in your face Presidency. I couldn't tell if it was inherent in his personality or just the predictable consequence of feared illegitimacy in the wake of having been shoehorned into the White House by five people who got to vote twice. Whatever the source, the Bushies regularly bulldozed their way to victory, from tax cuts for the rich that sank the surplus to a war of choice sold on false pretenses. Whether it was covering up the authorization of torture in the war on terror or moving the Supreme Court hard to the right, they literally never gave an inch.

And they are going out the same way they came in.

If he follows through on blanket pardons -- one for himself included -- President Bush won't be leaving a mess for Obama, he'll be sweeping that mess under the most impregnable of historic rugs. We will never know the full truth about torture . . . or WMD . . . or Gitmo. There will be no accountability. And Dick Cheney's dark side will remain forever hidden.

Can we do anything about this?

The short answer is (pace Sarah Palin) . . . You betcha'.

The President's power to pardon is plenary and unreviewable. There is no recourse against a chief executive who exercises that power, at least none if the goal is to reverse the pardon. But that doesn't mean there is no recourse against Bush himself. He is President for sixty seven more days. He can still be impeached. More importantly, the new Congress will be sworn in on January 1, 2009. For nineteen days, therefore, Bush will be President while the Democrats enjoy enormous majorities in the House of Representatives and numbers somewhere between six and eight votes short of a two-thirds majority in the Senate. As we know from recent history, it takes a simple majority for the House to impeach and a two thirds majority for the Senate to convict and remove a President following a bill of impeachment.

What would be the grounds for impeachment? The Constitutional standard is simple. Presidents are impeachable for "high crimes and misdemeanors." My guess is that the authorization of torture qualifies; at the very least it trumps lying about oral sex in the oval office. Between now and Inauguration Day, we obviously do not have enough time to subpoena witnesses and gather evidence sufficient to prove that Bush actually did this. But the reality is we need not do so.

Because President Bush will have admitted his guilt.

When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, Ford made much of the fact that acceptance of a pardon constitutes acknowledgment of guilt. When challenged, Ford regularly pulled from his pocket excerpts he kept from a Supreme Court decision which said exactly this. Let's test that proposition. If Bush pardons himself, we can impeach and convict him on the theory that the pardon is an admission. And we could literally do all this in hours.

As for the need for six to eight Republican Senators to get the two thirds needed to convict, 2010 is an election year as well, and of the thirty five seats up that year, a disproportionate number are again held by Republicans. Look for the votes in that group and start with Pennsylvania's Arlen Spector. Pennsylvania went hard blue last week and hates W. Spector knows torture is illegal and was rolled by the conservative right when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. When motivated by a grudge, one Senator can get a lot done; when motivated by a principled grudge, he or she can move mountains . . . or at least seven votes.

So, go ahead Mr. President.

Make our day.

2008-11-12T08:06:00.000-08:00

BAD ATTITUDE

I am starting to worry about the bailout. Or bailouts.

Not the economics of it, or them. I think I understand that as well as most Americans who don't run around with Ph.Ds in economics mounted to their walls.

Certain institutions are too big to fail in the sense that the consequences of failure for the rest of us are enormous and inequitable. Neither you nor I, for the most part, made the bad decisions at AIG or Fannie or Freddie, so it's not right that we should feel the potentially fatal pain of their incompetence. If, however, they fail, we will too. Because we shouldn't, the Government intervenes. In saving the big shots from their bad bets, we also save ourselves, which was the main idea in the first place. The big guys become what economists refer to as "free-riders," unintended (and undeserving) beneficiaries of the safety net erected to catch the rest of us.

All of this, I get.

What I am failing to understand is the sheer idiocy exhibited by many of those who now have become recipients of our forced largesse. And I am now worried about the fall out.

Here' s what I mean.

When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, there were really only two ways to get in trouble at home. At a minor level, my sister or I could blow off a chore or not make our bed or get a little too sassy for a ten year old. These usually resulted in, at best, a raised eyebrow (or a forced march back to the unmade bed). I call these minor infractions because they compared not a whit at the level of consequence to what was the only major infraction.

Which was Exhibiting a Bad Attitude.

The attitude offender was in big trouble in my Brooklyn. After notice, indictment, trial and conviction on the charge -- for which, I should add, I still received more due process than the detainees at Guantanamo -- the penalty was a sour look of despair, one that said you were still loved but for now not respected. This was a killer for me. Mostly because I really loved my mother. Who, I believe, pretty much wrote the book on Good Attitude. In truth, it wasn't all that hard to avoid the problem of bad attitude. Generally speaking, good attitude was more or less a subset of good manners and keeping one's ego in check. If you said please and thank you, shared the toys (or even better, gave one up), did the minimal chores with a smile on your face, and made sure there was desert left for someone else when you eyed your slice of the pie, you were pretty much home free.

That, it seems to me, is what is missing from all these bailouts.

We just gave Hank Paulson $700 billion in walkin' around money, his to dispense in an effort to unclog the artery known as credit which is threatening America and the world with an economic coronary. This followed an $85 billion infusion to AIG. We now know, however, that the banks aren't lending nearly enough of the $250 billion they already have mainlined, and that AIG is still showering its executives with overwrought compensation and other goodies, and charging us for the privilege.

This is bad attitude run amok. And it is catching.

Today, the newspapers announced that GM's CEO, Rich Wagoner, was demanding a federal bailout for that company. GM apparently does not have enough cash (or cash equivalents) left to meet its operating expenses through the end of the year. The right and the left have now assumed their regular positions, the former arguing it's all the unions' fault, the latter pinning the blame on a management that wasted its time lobbying Washington to kill higher fuel economy standards while Toyota and Nissan were designing and building hybrids. Ford and Chrysler can't be far behind. Neither is profitable. And both endorsed the same failed business plan (if you talk to the left) or entered into the same union contracts (if you talk to the right).

In truth, both sides have a point . . . and are missing one.

The business plans were stupid. They relied on the notion that oil would forever flow at $60/barrel or less, that climate change was a hoax, and that investing in a Congressman was better than investing in a plug-in. The labor contracts have now become unsustainable, but this is not because they are unfair. Rather, it is because the auto companies themselves have become so unprofitable. To lay that lack of profit at the feet of labor, moreover, is false. Toyota and Nissan aren't making more money just because they locate plants in right to work states and negotiate better deals with their workers. They often do neither of these things.

The truth is, Toyota and Nissan are making better cars.

They also are paying less in health care costs. When she was running for President, Hillary Clinton noted that GM was really a health care provider that happened to manufacture automobiles. And she was right. The solution, however, is not to blame the UAW for negotiating health care benefits for its members (or to praise Toyota and Nissan for having the foresight to avoid union contracts which could have required the same deal). It's to provide national health insurance. Unfortunately, when Hillary tried that in the mid-'90s, GM -- to use the language of my kids -- did not have her back.

Americans are pissed. They did not give AIG $85 billion so that it could continue to run a toga-party at the public's expense. They were not interested in sending $250 billion to the banks so their CEOs could dither on lending the money while worrying about pools for executive compensation. And they don't want to give GM whatever it says it needs so that Detroit can lobby Washington to kill health care for all while it builds another gas guzzler no one buys.

So here's my advice.

Before Rich Wagoner goes hat in hand to a lame duck Congress and a now-I-am-worried-about-moral-hazard lame duck President . . .

Before AIG spends another dime on an executive cruise . . .

And before the banks hoard (rather than lend) another penny they get from Paulson . . .

They need to talk to my Mom.

'Cause these guys have a bad case of bad attitude.

2008-11-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

REDEMPTION

For a good hour this afternoon, I walked around a grey, drizzled lower Manhattan, cluttered with commerce and the tense faces of brokers and others watching another stock market swoon. The sour looks of daily witnesses to three hundred point drops have these days become ordinary, and the diminishing light of a late November afternoon overcome by a steady windswept rain was of a piece.

But I was smiling.

Because yesterday, my country redeemed itself.

By birth (and a paradoxically loose but still abiding adult practice), I am a Catholic. So if slavery is America's original sin, we have spent much of the the past 232 years on our knees in the confessional.

Jefferson told the world that we believed "all men are created equal." But we were lying. And like all liars, we were crafting creative justifications. Blacks were slaves in 1776. Conveniently, when the Founders wrote a Constitution, those same slaves were turned into "three-fifths" persons just to give the slavocracy more seats in the House of Representatives and a lock on the Electoral College and therefore the Presidency. To salve our collective conscience, we had that same Constitution outlaw the slave trade. It turns out, of course, that our conscience was not all that troubled. We did not make the slave trade ban effective until 1808. And we certainly didn't end slavery.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, the great statesmen of our American republic -- Clay and Calhoun and Webster -- spent much of their time fashioning compromises with our original sin. In 1820, they drew a line across the country, outlawing slavery in territories to the north while enshrining it in those to the south. Fortunately for the cartographers, Massachusetts had enough left over land to create Maine (which became a newly admitted free state), permitting the admission of Missouri as a slave state. This, of course, didn't last, essentially because, when it comes to sin, line drawing is always a non-starter. Thirty eight years later, Kansas bled as slaveholders and free soilers battled for the soul of the nation in the territories of the west. And two years after that, we were at war with ourselves, often pretending the war was about everything -- states rights, property, traditions -- other than what it was really about.

That too is one of sin's solitary markers. We call it denial today. It makes smart folks dumb and dumb folks . . . dumber.

Lincoln became our great confessor. His journey from those great debates with Stephen Douglas to the tragic end of Booth's gun was preternaturally Biblical. In the first, he still played the racist we all were, laboring to assure Illinois that he did not want to marry a black or even hang with one. By April 1865, however, he had confessed that every drop of blood from the slave man's lash might have to be answered by one from the soldier's sword. Because, as he put it in his Second Inaugural, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

As it turned out, Lincoln was right. The Civil War didn't really end in 1865, it just morphed from an illusory Reconstruction of promised equality, where blacks for a time voted and were even elected as representatives in the newly readmitted Confederate states, to the savage reality of Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchings, disenfranchisement and the new slavery of sharecropper poverty. No lie was too egregious in the service of this continuing sin, from the Confederacy's decision to throw the Presidential election to the loser in 1876 in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the formerly rebellious states, to the Supreme Court's bastardization twenty years later of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection, legalizing institutionalized racism under the banner of segregation and the legal myth of "separate but equal".

If God works in strange ways, He seemed to be putting in overtime in the United States. We went through agrarian populism, the Progressive Era, World War I, the New Deal and World War II, each in its own way a triumph of the American ideals of freedom, equality and representative democracy. In the famous words of Mary Ellen Lease, our farmers raised "less corn and more hell." We rescued our children from robber barons, our productive capital from the trusts, our European ancestors from the killing fields of trench warfare, our economy from depression, and the world from Nazi tyranny. But we could not rescue ourselves from our past. The sons and daughters of former slaves couldn't vote in our elections, go to our schools, live in our neighborhoods, join our unions, eat at our lunch counters, stay in our hotels, or swim in our pools. When Al Gore's father was awakened one night in Washington by drunken revellers telling him we don't want to eat with them, or drink with them, or marry them or go to school with them, the senior Gore asked if they "wanted to go to heaven with them." To that rare Southerner who spurned the Southern Manifesto, they replied, "No, we'd just as soon go to hell with you and Kefauver."

Before Tuesday, the three most important black Americans in my lifetime were Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.

Robinson made America look in the mirror, exposing the hypocrisy of our fight against Nazism with black soldiers who could not drink from the same water fountain, or compete in the same league, as their white brothers once they returned home. He only asked for a chance. Not four strikes. Or three balls. And no one shortened the base paths when he ran them. After a ten year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers (begun later than most because of his war service and professional baseball's color line), he was a first ballot Hall of Famer. In retirement, he tirelessly worked to advance the economic fortunes of victims of prejudice and never let up in his demand that his own profession open its managerial and executive jobs to qualified people of color.

Today he remains America's most important athlete.

Thurgood Marshall made America look at its Constitution. At great risk to his own safety, he travelled far and wide representing (often without pay and always without much) the victims of America's original sin. He painstakingly shepherded more than a dozen cases through the courts, challenging segregation in a methodical attack that ultimately led to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of public schools. As the first black Justice on the Supreme Court, he never wavered in his commitment to equal protection and equal rights.

Today he remains America's most important lawyer.

Martin Luther King made America look at its soul. If racism was fundamentally wrong, Christ had taught him that people could be fundamentally good, and that redemption was possible. The dream inspired by his faith was not one from which sinners -- of which he was one -- were excluded. Rather, it was possible because, as sinners, we still could change. He took his promise of redemption to the bus depots, bridges, slums and churches of America. And then to the White House and Lincoln Memorial. All these venues were his altar. Goaded by Dr. King's efforts, President Johnson lived out his own extraordinary profile in courage -- demanding that Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which LBJ knew would (and has) cost his party the South for more than a generation.

Today Martin Luther King remains America's most important preacher.

Yesterday, America finally got off its knees. Its confession ended. Its sin was forgiven.

And today, somewhere in Islamabad . . . or Kabul . . . or Tel Aviv, there is a kid who will not strap a bomb to his body and blow up a bus full of innocents in part because we just elected as President a black guy whose middle name is Hussein, and have now practiced what for more than two centuries we have preached. All men are created equal.

We should thank Barack Obama for offering to serve.

And ourselves for having accepted.

And God, for Her infinite forgiveness.

2008-11-03T12:50:00.000-08:00

VOTE

If you want to complain
'Bout Barack or McCain,
Then please take note.
You first must vote.

'Fore the future is cast
And we throw off the past,
That day arrives.
We get to decide.

Whether Palin or Joe
Has the big mo,
They say no more.
We set the score.

From the east
To the west,
We grade the test.
Deciding who's best.

Churchill as PM
In what was his last gem,
Said our system's not best.
It just beats the rest.

So now we are there
And buyer beware,
You can't rock Wednesday's boat.
Unless you first go and vote.

2008-10-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

REDS

In the last week of this interminable Presidential campaign, the candidates are focusing entirely on seven erstwhile red states (Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia), all of which went for George W. Bush in 2004, and the red portions of one blue state (Pennsylvania). Ordinarily, this would be very good news for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. With the battle joined on territory the enemy must win to prevail, the odds are way too long that the GOP can come all the way back and steal victory from the jaws of defeat.

But there are dissenters.

The theory of the McCain campaign is that, at the eleventh hour and fifty ninth minute, the natural order will reassert itself; that most of these states will come home to the GOP; and that John McCain will be the nation's 44th president, albeit by a narrow margin and probably without a popular vote victory. The legion of pundits who thought otherwise will have serious egg on their face; the Democrats will psychologically implode given the enormity of their collapse; and a new corps of political consultants will take a bow, having demonstrated that the politics of fear and smear really works. You just have to believe.

This is John McCain's dream.

It would also be America's nightmare.

To avoid it, I end this missive to all in favor of a simple message for the REDS.

Don't do it.

You are much better than the party you have been voting for, and you deserve much better than they have given.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Ask yourself the same question today.

Is your job more secure? Is your country? Is your retirement assured? Is your 401(k) worth more now than it was then? Can you afford to get sick? Are you even insured? Can you afford to send your kids to college? Are they in a school good enough to get them into the best college to which they can gain admittance?

If your city or town is wracked or destroyed by a hurricane, will your government be there to help you? As your environment warms, is the government doing anything about it now? If you own a small business, or work for one, can the business get credit? If you declare bankruptcy, will it provide real relief, or will you still be saddled with that credit card debt, or those medical bills? Can you still afford the mortgage?

If you can't answer yes to way more than half these questions, there is no reason for you to elect John McCain and Sarah Palin. They call themselves mavericks. In fact, they are ventriloquists. And they think you are their dummies.

After you have answered all those economic questions (and the single national security one), don't stop.

Ask yourself if you know anyone who is pro-choice, or gay, or who lives in a "blue" state, or went to a good college? Do they go around praising the destruction of fetuses? Are they really anti-family? Just because they want their own? With someone they love? Are they all elitists? Have you ever seen a New Yorker get up and give his subway seat to a stranger who needed it? Did you know that all those elitists mobbed the hospitals on 9/11, donating so much blood that the hospitals had to stop accepting donations?

If your kid got into Yale, would you tell her not to go because you were worried she'd become one of them? If she got straight A's there, would you tell her not to come home? Not to run for office in her home town because she had lost touch with her roots while studying in New Haven?

Did you ever get a traffic ticket you knew was wrong? Did you fight it? In fighting it, did you think it wrong that the police had to actually prove you violated the law? Did you insist they do that? Were you a radical for doing so? Anti-American? Anti-cop?

I know you are not a "socialist" and that McCain and Palin have tried to make this election something of a referendum on your aversion to that ideology.

So here are a few more questions.

Do you believe in socialism for banks? Or hedge funds? Or investors who purchased mortgage backed securities written on sub-prime loans that now have no value? McCain and Palin believe in all of this. Oh, I know, they don't call it socialism. But it is. They are willing to use your dollars to bail out the banks. They want to redistribute your wealth to the hedge fund operators or stock issuers who made the lousy bets. They think this will make it better for all of us over the long haul, and it probably will. If you agree, then you too may be a socialist.

Just like McCain and Palin.

When all is said and done, ask yourself if you think America is on the right track. I know 90% of you think she is not. (I know this because it is what you tell the pollsters when they ask. You don't walk away. Or refuse to answer their question. Or hide your views. Which, by the way, is what the McCain campaign says lots of you do when you are asked who you intend to vote for.)

So . . . please . . . all of you out there in red America. All of you who know things are not going well. Who know we can do a lot better. Who know the whole promise of America is that tomorrow can be better than yesterday.

Vote for Barack Obama.

I promise you.

He doesn't bite.

2008-10-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

THE POPULIST MIRAGE

She praises the "pro-America" parts of America. He turns an unlicensed tax delinquent into "Joe the Plumber." She touts a "you betcha" "doggone it" anti-intellectualism decrying the putative snob who "pals around with terrorists." He recasts his opponent as a socialist who wants to "redistribute wealth." She disdains the "gotcha" media who never actually "get it" in the real America beyond the beltway. He claims she is "absolutely" qualified to be Commander in Chief on day one by lambasting those who disagree as liberals who can't abide a pro-life woman from the tough tundra.

Welcome to the Republican Presidential campaign, circa 2008.

All populism all the time.

If you are wondering what this has to do with the economy or Iraq, don't waste a lot of time working the question over. The answer is simple.

Nothing.

Back in law school, I read a book called "The Populist Moment". It was largely about the agrarian movement of the 1870s and 1880s. That movement was grass roots and creatively practical. With its democratic (small "d") participatory ethos and willingness to experiment with cooperatives and the inflationary bromide of free silver, it connected to people's lives. While it did not win a national following, and was fatally tainted in the old Confederacy by Jim Crow, it was in many respects a precursor to the first wave Progressivism of the early 20th century. In other words, it had some heft.

The McCain version is not even a pale imitation. Exhibiting a weird lack of verisimilitude, it pretends we are still fighting Communists (hence the "socialism" charge)or the Weathermen (hence the Ayers brouhaha)or some citadel of left wing anti-American thought alive and well in the Ivy League (hence the anti-intellectualism). It rails against the media in the age of Fox, the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, and right wing radio. It pretends to be under siege when its captains have been running the show for the last eight years and its ideology has been ascendant for the last thirty.

And now, even some of the old GOP warhorses are calling them on it.

Last week, Christopher Buckley endorsed Barack Obama and yesterday General Colin Powell did the same. Each endorsement was earth shattering for the GOP, albeit in different ways.

The Buckley flight from the right was largely a cri de coeur from the grave of his father. Whatever William F. Buckley was, anti-intellectual was not one of them. He was very smart, and really liked very smart people. He would never drop a g or lapse into some uncharacteristic slang, and there was never a multi-syllabic word he would not use when a simpler alternative was available. Generations of would-be students have improved their SAT scores merely by listening to Buckley's diatribes on "Firing Line". He founded "National Review" as a rigorous intellectual alternative to the then available liberal offerings in "The New Republic" or "Nation". He thought conservatives were smarter, not just snarkier, and he was willing to try to prove it. He did not avoid debates. He loved them.

Powell's endorsement was sadder. It had the feel of an apology. For the absence of WMD (without which, Powell candidly admitted, there would have been no Iraq war). For having given his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to a man who turned out to be a dangerous bumbler. Perhaps for not having spoken up sooner. But finally, and unmistakably, for what the Republican Party has become -- a citadel of extremist pablum. He wondered why McCain kept telling us the election should not be about a "washed up terrorist" even as his party made millions of robo-calls linking Obama to Ayers. He questioned McCain's "erratic" approach to policy and stated point blank that Palin was not qualified to be Commander in Chief. He also said later in the day that he was still a Republican, more or less serving notice on the right-wing that it does not get to determine membership .

Each in their own ways, the Buckley and Powell endorsements define the huge gulf between the GOP of today and . . . its past. Between the party of Palin and the party of not just Lincoln but also Reagan. In fact, perhaps the oddest feature of this years GOP spectacle is how much it does not have in common with the career of its putative hero. Like Bill Buckley, Reagan invariably thought it better to be governed by the first two hundred names in the Boston phone book rather than the Harvard faculty. But also like Bill Buckley, Reagan read voraciously, wrote large parts of his own speeches, and always debated (Bobby Kennedy called Reagan his toughest debate opponent ever). He was no dummy and did not pretend to be one or to appeal to one. In his America of individual responsibility and Horatio Alger possibility, the picture of progress was Lincoln under a tree reading a book.

But that's all gone from this year's candidates. They have largely substituted insult for analysis, sass for smarts, and Rove's base for Reagan's coalition. Despite unbridled appeals to average folks, their words ring hollow. Everyone knows Communism died in 1989 and the Weatherman a decade and a half earlier; that neither a son of William Buckley nor an ex-General named Powell would endorse a share the wealth socialist or a "pal" of terrorists; and that labelling opponents as effete won't create economic recovery, fix the health care system, or send the kids to college.

Here's another thing they know.

Joe the Plumber isn't making 250k.

This is not a moment.

It's a mirage.

2008-10-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

McCAIN FINDS HIS INNER JOE . . . McCARTHY, THAT IS

He can't talk about the economy. It is tanking. He can't talk about "victory" in Iraq. Even the Generals on the ground won't use the word. He can't talk about his running mate. On that subject, everyone is talking about Tina Fey . . . or Katie Couric . . . or the backyard theory of foreign policy experience (if you can see a foreign country from your backyard, you have foreign policy experience).

So now John McCain and his Veep to be have dusted off a leaf from Joe McCarthy's old playbook.

They are smearing Obama as someone who "pals around with terrorists," in this case the aged but erstwhile Weatherman from the days of rage, Bill Ayers.

The Weathermen were bad people and Bill Ayers, circa 1968, was a very bad guy. Bombs blew up. People died. Some, like Kathy Boudin, went to jail. And belonged there. Since then, Ayers has apparently reformed and become a professor of education, consulted by, of all people, the first Mayor Daley's (no friend of '60s radical's) son, the current Chicago Mayor. In that guise, Ayers happens to have been on a board on which Obama, for a time, also sat. The board helped distribute money donated by the Annenbergs, Reagan lovers to a man (and woman) who apparently had no trouble with the fact that this particular ex-Weatherman was on the board.

But all that is not good enough for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Apparently, Barack has consorted with a domestic terrorist and should therefore lose the election, now less than thirty days away.

The philosopher George Santayana once said that "Those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." Would that were true. John McCain has studied enough history to now know very well that he is repeating it. And the history he is repeating has an ugly name.

It is Joe McCarthy.

In the '50s, McCarthy terrorized America's political discourse and politicians with his wild charges that everyone from the Chief of Staff of the Army to unnamed State Department employees to General Marshall was either a closet Communist or was coddling those who were. He eventually blew himself up on television (both with Edward R. Murrow's assistance, and all on his own in the famous Army/McCarthy hearings, where a nebishy Boston lawyer appropriately asked whether he had any sense of decency; as it turned out, he didn't). Not, however, before he had ruined more than a few lives, on his way to ruining his inebriated own.

It is therefore more than a little sad that John McCain is now channeling his inner Joe McCarthy. And that his friends are not calling him on it.

McCain's charge is as ludicrous as were McCarthy's, in fact even more so. Barack Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were active. He has condemned their actions (as have we all). He did not put Ayers on any board. He doesn't "pal around" with Ayers. Whether Ayers is entitled to rehabilitate himself is a separate question, but it generally is the American way. Whether Ayers is still an extremist is also a separate question. But the answer is irrelevant to Obama's qualifications to be President, just as S & L swindler Charles Keating's subsequent rehabilitation is irrelevant to McCain's. In fact, the Keating case is more problematic for McCain than the Ayers case is for Obama. Unlike the eight year old Obama at school in Indonesia, McCain actually tried to help Keating by going to authorities and asking about their on-going investigation. The Arizona Senator was later reprimanded by the Senate for doing so and has said this was the low point of his career.

But here's the bad news.

McCain just went lower.

And so have his supporters.

I haven't heard anything from Joe Lieberman on this issue. One would think a "conscience of the Senate" quick to point out the moral failings of Bill Clinton in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal would have taken to the podium to upbraid his man on the illegitimacy of trotting out McCarthyesque smears. Maybe Lieberman will get around to saying something. But he should know that, when it comes to McCarthyism and the evil it creates, sooner is always better than later.

The silence of Bush and Cheney also has been deafening. Ditto, that of the right wing radio echo chamber. I do not expect any of them to criticize McCain. Bush himself was silent as his seconds smeared McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary with charges of fathering an illegitimate child. And Limbaugh et al. have been chomping at the bit for some time to smear Obama, and will gleefully do so from now until election day.

The old John McCain would never truck with this sort of despicable gutter politics. In fact, he viscerally and aggressively deplored it.

But that was then.

And this is now.

Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

2008-10-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

THE DAY AFTER

Here's the scary part.

Long after her "blame the media" campaign has ended . . . Long after everyone has forgotten her inarticulateness with Katie Couric and her "deer caught in the headlights" look with Charlie Gibson . . . Long after Russia's proximity to Alaska has ceased to be Exhibit A on the list of foreign policy credentials we seek in a chief executive . . . And long after Tiny Fey has stopped making us laugh with her spot on impersonations (some of which involve nothing more than repeating verbatim what was actually said) . . .

Sarah Palin may have to do the job.

In fact, in thirty-four days, she may have been voted into the job and two and a half months later, she may actually have it.

And right now, from everything we know, she can't do it.

Here's why.

Ethics

Governor Palin and Senator McCain have made wild charges that the questions posed to Palin and the manner of press inquiries have violated "journalistic ethics." In the last segment of her interview with Couric, Palin herself noted that she had a college degree in journalism and was surprised by the "ethics" of the profession's current members. McCain has reprised a version of this critique, accusing the media of lobbing "gotcha" questions at her, including Gibson's question on whether she agreed with the Bush doctrine and one oddly enough from a voter inquiring (the second time she was asked this) about her views on whether the US should cross the Pakistani border to attack terrorists without first clearing it with the government of Pakistan. Palin said we should, as has Obama. Because her answer is at odds with McCain's stated position, which appears to be that we shouldn't announce this as a policy beforehand, and McCain's criticism of Obama, who apparently has announced (along with Palin) that this will or should be the policy, Palin's answer means that either McCain and Palin are not on the same page or that Palin is unaware of the McCain position or disagrees with it (the latter of which she denies).

None of this is "gotcha" journalism nor does any of it cross any ethical line. The Bush Doctrine has been the central organizing principal of this Administration's foreign policy post- 9/11. It holds that the risks are now too great not to act preemptively and that the US reserves the absolute right to do so. Ron Suskind has even written a book about this -- The One Percent Doctrine -- in which he documents its consequences, from the reserved right to a preemptive response in which the imminent threat is defined radically downward relative to current international law and tradition, to Guantanamo and torture. To not know what the doctrine is, to not be able to articulate it, and to not discuss it in a Presidential campaign in 2008 is not just a sign of ignorance. It's a sign of negligence. And it is coming from the second spot on a ticket whose principal stated rational for believing it is better suited to be in the Oval Office is its supposed superior command of the threats we face and the muscular response we must embrace. Someone who wants to be a heartbeat away from being Commander in Chief should be more than conversant on this subject. She (or he) should be eating and breathing it. Not wondering what it means when it is brought up.

The Palin response on Pakistan highlights another (and greater) deficiency. Granted she was plucked from obscurity with neither the time nor apparently the inclination to learn all the nuances of her boss's views. But she has answered the same question the same way twice, and the second answer came well after McCain had clearly clarified his reason for opposing Obama on this issue, both earlier in the campaign and in their first debate. Was it too much to expect that Palin would be aware of this when the question was again posed to her? McCain excuses her answer because a voter asked the question in a pizza parlor, but if the press can't ask in a sit down interview and a voter can't ask whenever and wherever he gets the chance, and she can't get it right whoever asks, maybe the problem here is that McCain doesn't want questions asked of his Vice Presidential nominee.

The ethical lapse here is not the media's, or the voters'. It belongs entirely to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Both have decided that attacking the press helps them and will fashion artificial charges of media excess or error whenever they can and regardless of the truth of the charge. There are many problems with this approach, not the least of which is that there is nothing new about it. Bush and Cheney have spent eight years doing the same thing. And the results for America have been universally bad -- no WMD, no "greeted as liberators," no "Mission Accomplished," no permanent success in Afghanistan (in fact a return to status quo ante), and now, not even an economic rescue plan as voters and the Congress treat W and Cheney as the two boys always crying wolf. Put simply, the McCain/Palin/Rove/Bush/Cheney playbook is exceedingly dangerous.

One would have hoped that the "Country First" types recognized this.

Extremism

Lost in all the media bashing and SNL humor is the central fact that Palin is entirely out of touch with the vast majority of the country on a host of issues. She has been silent on all this but her record speaks volumes. She is anti-science and anti-choice. She is more pro-gun than Charlton Heston. She believes creationism and intelligent design deserve equal billing along with evolution in our country's classrooms. She thinks the "jury is still out" on global warming. And she thinks either that we can drill our way to energy self sufficiency or that an oil uber alles policy (with perhaps the trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline ten years hence) is the way to go when we think about alternatives.

If part of what America has to do in facing the serious challenges that lie ahead is bring down the partisan temperature of the last eight years, a woman in the Executive Branch might have been just the ticket. But not this woman (and as an aside, not Hillary either; through no fault of her own, she is to partisanship what gasoline is to fire). Almost on its own, Palin's well documented extremism kills what was perhaps McCain's best claim to the Presidency, his every so often attempts at bipartisanship. It is wrong to vote against McCain merely because of his age. It is not at all wrong to vote against him on the assumption that he may not last and has in the meantime bequeathed a successor whose positions are to the other side of a Cracker Jacks box.

Incompetence

Then there is the basic question -- is Sarah Palin qualified to be President? Even a lot of conservatives are now saying the answer is "No."

True Palin believers salivate at this claim, not knowing whether they should first trot out the rejoinder that those who hold it are inveterate sexists or table that for something more pedestrian, like "Bill Clinton was the Governor of a small state and that seems to have been fine for him." Neither works but that never stops them.

The charge of incompetence, coming from those who utter it, is entirely gender neutral. I think she seriously lacks command of national issues, substitutes decisiveness and bravado for knowledge, and will therefore not be a competent chief executive of the United States. I thought the same thing about George W. Bush. Sex has nothing to do with it. Had Hillary won the Democratic nomination, the last thing anyone would have questioned is her issue command or knowledge. Had Obama wound his ways through the Democratic primaries exhibiting a Palinesque insouciance on things like the Bush Doctrine, the last thing he'd be doing now is running for President. And by the way, Bill Clinton knew the issues, all of them. He wasn't trumpeting his executive experience in Arkansas as a substitute for knowledge of the federal budget.

Like I said above, Sarah Palin may get the job for which she is now campaigning.

Then there is the day after.

And none of us will be laughing.

2008-09-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

COUNTRY LAST

John McCain went to the podium early yesterday to claim credit for having convinced House Republicans to vote for the rescue (aka bailout) bill.

Oops!

Which about sums up the McCain candidacy, and why we must at all costs avoid a McCain Presidency.

He is the "Oops" candidate. Sarah Palin was supposed to rescue McCain from certain defeat but now seems to be doing everything she can to bring it about. McCain himself is supposed to be the adult voice of experience and command but instead turns out to be a car wreck in progress haphazardly moving from one side of the road to the other.

The reality is there are so many holes in the dyke we call John McCain's presidential campaign that they long ago ran out of fingers to plug them with. Two of McCain's top aides are this week holed up in Sedona, Arizona with Gov. Palin cramming her with information to prepare for Thursday's Vice-Presidential debate with Joe Biden. The bad news is she has so much to learn, there is no way she can do it by Thursday. The good news is expectations for her performance are so low that more or less standing at the podium for 90 minutes will be counted as a success. Meanwhile, back on the trail, the presidential candidate himself careens from one stated position to another (generally opposite) one, more or less in the space of a news cycle. He ludicrously blames Obama for the failure of the bailout and then says we must stop the partisanship. One day the economic fundamentals are good; the next we are in a crisis. In the morning he has saved the rescue plan by convincing House Republicans to vote for it; in the afternoon, Speaker Pelosi has convinced them otherwise apparently because she wasn't nice enough.

His campaign motto is "Country First" and everywhere he goes, his rallies are festooned with signs saying that and speeches lauding his patriotic bona fides. It seems that only John McCain sacrifices political ambition for patriotic duty. But in fact it's a lie. Every move this past week has been about politics. The faux campaign suspension that never occurred. The hands on leadership pose which was no more than some phone calls and a speech to the GOP caucus, neither of which pushed the ball over the goal line. The "I won't debate until this is solved", which then became the "enough progress has been made for me to debate". The debate itself, where the only thing repeated more than "Senator Obama does not understand" was McCain's visceral condescension. Finally, yesterday's premature claim of bail out success (gotta win the news cycle and beat the other guy to the punch).

Here's the worst part.

He is bad at this.

Nothing promised in the last week was even remotely delivered. Not the votes. Certainly not the economic rescue plan. Not the civil campaign he promised when this began (but has consistently abandoned as his numbers have tanked) or the bipartisanship he continues to demand of others while studiously avoiding himself. Not the judgment to pick lieutenants actually up to the jobs they might hold.

If McCain runs the country even half as badly as he is running his campaign, we are in big trouble. His first "Hail Mary" was Sarah Palin. The bloom was off that rose in about two weeks. His second one was the no debate pledge. That was punctured in about two days. What's the McCain plan here? A full Novena?

John McCain is a war hero who, from time to time, but far less than he or his supporters claim, reaches across the aisle. But he is tempermentally unsuited for the the job of President. He shoots from the hip. He is erratic. For all his courage, he lacks judgment, whether it's the judgment to know when a war should not be started or the judgment to know when a particular Governor should not be promoted or the judgment to know when all the votes have not been counted. And while he may not suffer from what we Catholics call the sin of pride, he suffers from its close cousin -- condescension. That's why he often loses it. It's not defensible passion. It's indefensible arrogance.

And it is not the arrogance of a George W. Bush or a Sarah Palin. They think they are always getting one over on you.

John McCain thinks he's better than you.

2008-09-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

FUNDAMENTALIST

For weeks, we were treated to the new McCain, a sort of pseudo-populist wrapping himself in a real one from Alaska.

As this unrecognizable imitation of his former honorable self, the senior Senator from Arizona threw caution (and conscience) to the wind, spinning out Rovian lies that Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergartners, increase everyone's taxes, and insult pols who wore lipstick. His running mate, who is much better at this, stood by his side, creating the crowds McCain could never get on his own while pretending (like George W.) that decisiveness is an effective substitute for knowledge.

Then they ran into reality.

Lehman Brothers went belly up, Merrill Lynch sold itself for a song to avoid the same fate, the DOW plunged, and in the space of forty eight hours, the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve redefined schizophrenia, first promising they would never bail out AIG and then proceeding to . . .bail out AIG. Indeed, in that peculiar form of Communism for the rich that seems to have been invented here, AIG (like Bear Stearns before it, but, alas, unlike Lehman) was deemed "too big to fail". So you and I will assume the risk, and write another chapter in the apparently endless American quest to privatize gains while we socialize losses.

McCain's reaction to this dizzying array of events was to appear . . . well, dizzy.

First he told us that the "fundamentals" of the American economy are sound, which refutes itself. Attacked, he then claimed that the "fundamentals" to which he was referring were America's workers, which refutes the English language. A little later, his spokesperson announced that McCain had (Gore-like) invented the Blackberry, which refutes reality (assuming one applies the same standard used with Gore).

Resuming command, John took a new approach, saying we need a "9/11-type commission" to investigate the causes of the current financial meltdown. Not for nothin', I guess this is because the Administration and McCain himself had listened so intently to that committee's recommendations that they think a reprise would be good. Around this time, Hewlitt-Packard's ex-CEO (and McCain supporter) Carli Fiorina weighed in with the announcment that neither McCain nor Palin were qualified to run HP (which makes it very clear why he did not chose her for VP). And finally, McCain bemoaned greed on Wall Street (a first for a conservative) and amended his past to come out for increased regulation as the solution to the problem.

In Congress, before members or Senators have their remarks printed in the Congressional Record, they get to submit new or different remarks under the guise of "revising and extending" what they actually said. McCain is now raising that to new heights, effectively asking us to "revise and extend" his entire anti-regulatory political career. Resembling a balloon losing air more than a politician engaged in the usual spin, the GOP's standard bearer has now variously staked his economic "plan" on ground occupied by denial, dissemblance, delusion, despair and dishonesty, roughly in that order.

The truth is he has no plan. That is why he has trumpeted a faux-populism, accented by Palin's scary but real version of the cultural variety. For years, the GOP has convinced voters that, in Ben Wattenberg's words, "values matter most." So long as life is protected, gays are excluded, evangelism is institutionalized and moral relativists are excoriated even as they are imitated, the old GOP of rich fat cats had their economic way with tax cuts and de-regulation. The GOP base may have seen its wages and benefits go down, but at least the party of God was keeping the San Francisco liberals in their place (which is roughly one California earthquake from falling off the country).

All that is now changing. What happens when you gut the regulatory state and invite more risk is that profiteers . . . take more risk. Sooner or later, however, risk matters, and later has now arrived. This, as we learned this week, is bad news for Bear and Lehman and Merrill and AIG.

But it is really bad news for the rest of us. Bear and AIG and Fannie and Freddie were too big to fail, so now they haven't.

As for you and me, it's a different story.

In the GOP world, we're too small to save.

2008-09-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

POLITICAL MAKE-UP

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Here they go again."

Late this past Spring, I wrote an email to a friend in Atlanta about the 2008 Presidential election. I said, and this is a direct quote, "McCain really cannot put lipstick on the pig they have created." Last November, I indicted the entire GOP in the same terms. In a blog titled "Back to the Future," I said, and again this is a direct quote, with "the current state of the union, they really have no story to tell, at least not one that can put lipstick on the pig they have created."

Wow! I have now learned that I was attacking Sarah Palin. That I "insulted" her. That my comments were "disgusting." It really can't be the "lipstick" part. Afterall, she has described herself, to accolades all around, as a "pit bull in lipstick." So, I guess it was the p-word that really was over the top.

In any case, thank God the Republcans have educated me.

Up 'til now, I was just another hopeless liberal wedded to the intolerant culture of political correctness, too much in thrall to the "fact based" elitist media to fight a war to its someday over the rainbow winning end, too taken by "the Golden One's" soaring rhetoric to recognize a real man when he is running for President. An Ivy League educated lawyer, I was a poster boy for all that was wrong with America, in love with jury trials (and Roe v. Wade, for God's sake), a guy who actually thought Bill Clinton might even . . . have done a good job.

But apparently, that wasn't the half of it. Now, I am also a sexist trafficing in "schoolyard insults."

All thanks to my love affair with a metaphor.

According to their latest putatively logical syllogism, since Governor Palin is "the only one of the Presidential or Vice Presidential candidates who wears lipstick," those who claim the GOP's all show and no go campaign is simply an attempt to put "lipstick on a pig" are by definition insulting her. I know they were attacking Obama, who yesterday embraced the "lipstick on a pig" metaphor in describing the McCain campaign, and I swear I didn't give him the line (I've never even met the guy). But these GOP spinmeisters are serious people, at least they tell me they are, so I assume they weren't simply launching a spurious ad hominem at Barack. They wouldn't do that. They must have a point. Sarah Palin must really have been insulted. And though I do not presume to believe that she ever read my November blog (I never met her either, and she was way too busy these last two years getting those earmarks for Alaska, and telling us to make sure our Iraq war policy was right with God, and defending creationism, to focus on the musings of a hopeless liberal), or that she ever saw the email to my Atlanta friend (unless, thanks to the Patriot Act, Bush has seen it and passed it on to her), the undeniable fact is that I uttered these insulting words . . . twice. And if she had been listening, she would have been insulted. And in any case, I was being insulting.

And now that I know how insulting I have been, and how insulting Barack has been, I realize there really is no end to this veritable plague of metaphorical sexism now sweeping the country.

We just didn't realize how bad things were. Or how many insults, over the years, have been levelled at this erstwhile hockey mom.

Take Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example. At the 2004 GOP Convention, he brought the house down with his defense of the Bush economic policy, telling those who would bemoan it not to be "economic girlie men." Of course, since Sarah Palin is the only current "Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate" who is a girl, the Terminator must have been insulting her. Maria better set Arnold straight, right away, or he'll be off the McCain Inaugural Ball list.

Then there was Richard Armitage, a former Deputy Secretary of State. Years ago, in defending the Iraq war before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, some of the Senators had the temerity to point out that Armitage had been among those in the '80s who befriended Saddam Hussein. Dick, however, was a stand up guy. He admitted it, saying that "his skirt" was not clean on Iraq. Uh oh! Last I checked, Palin is the only current "Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate" who wears skirts. Wasn't it pretty slimy of the Deputy Secretary to insult her for his mistakes? But who am I to talk. And Barack better not mention it either.

Of course, the news gets even worse for the Democrats. Guess who was the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Armitage levelled his insult at Wasilla, Alaska's then Mayor. You got it. None other than Joe Biden. And he did not take Armitage to task at all, didn't even so much as utter a "You don't really mean to say it that way, do you Dick?" friendly admonishment. Nope. Biden simply let the comment slide. Said nothing. And then, to add insult to injury, Biden actually complimented Armitage for his frankness, told him the country would be a lot better off if there were more honest folks like him, folks (I guess) willing to admit their skirts weren't clean either (even if they don't wear skirts, and Sarah Palin does).

Oh boy! This could really turn the election. I think Obama should apologize. Immediately. And he should do it with Michelle at his side, wearing one of those stern looks Michelle gets when Barack doesn't take out the garbage, or otherwise acts like the insulting, disgusting guy the GOP says he is.

And after he says he's sorry, he has to clarify what he meant by the "lipstick on a pig" comment. He needs to tell America that, from now on, "lipstick on a pig" is a clause that will never pass over his lips again. Not once.

Instead, from now on, he will tell America that McCain is simply trying to put lipstick on a war that should not have been started, or . . . lipstick on a recession that is killing the middle class, or. . . lipstick on a right wing Supreme Court that is one vote away from gutting the right to choose, or. . . lipstick on a government that can't deliver emergency aid to New Orleans, or . . . lipstick on a health insurance system that works only if you don't get sick.

There, that should do it.

And Governor Palin, once again, I'm sorry.

2008-09-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

CULTURE WARRIOR

I have enlisted in the culture war.

I resisted this choice for three decades. I thought politics was about issues more than personalities, about the economy and peace and war more than testosterone and ego and Rambo, about progress more than resentment, about community more than cultural combat. I thought the Civil War had made us one nation rather than a collection of individual states, that the great war between the states had turned the United States into an "is" when it had previously been an "are". I thought the almost century long struggle for civil rights would redeem the promise of both Jefferson's Declaration and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, that all could be equal and that, in the wake of the fight, the combatants might exhibit charity for all.

I was wrong.

John McCain went to St. Paul last week and thinks he bought a ticket to the White House named Sarah Palin. If he wins this election, it will be for the same reasons Nixon won in 1968, and Bush II was able to steal it in 2000. They call it organizing the base. That sounds better than organizing extremists. But it comes down to the same thing. Sarah Palin is just the new face, the new bottle into which the extreme right wingers have poured their old culture war wine, an anti-science, anti-choice, anti-gay, abstinence only, gun-toting "pit bull with lipstick" who rails against federal earmarks in a state that could not survive without them.

If you plopped down on the planet for the first time last week and watched the Republican Convention, you could never have guessed that they were the people running the show for the last eight years. Speaker after speaker sang the same song -- vote for McCain-Palin and throw the bums out. Someone forgot to remind them. They are the bums.

This was a convention at war with itself . . . and much of its party's past. Record federal deficets? Throw the bums out and cut spending. From the crowd that did the spending. Corruption in government? Throw the bums out and reform. From the party that gave birth to Jack Abramoff and turned K Street GOP only lobbyists into a fourth branch of government. A government that can't deliver basic services like emergency aid in a hurricane? Throw the bums out. From the same people who sold your government to private contractors, let New Orleans drown, and pretended they had fixed things during Hurrican Gustav when the real hero there was God (the storm was simply a lot weaker than predicted)and the levies are still not big enough to withstand anything worse.

They did this with a straight face. And no small amount of personal insult. Mocking Obama, Palin claimed that Mayors are like "community organizers", "only they have actual responsibilities". Some Mayors do. She, however, wasn't one of them. Her town of Wasilla, Alaska was run on a day to day basis by a manager. That allowed Sarah the time to go to Washington to get her federal earmarks. Or to study up on global warming, on which she says "the jury is still out".

The other former Mayor -- Rudy -- was, of course, even better at outright snottiness. That's because it is part of his DNA. One of Rudy's New York City predecessors wrote a book about him called "Nasty Man". And in St. Paul, Rudy did not disappoint. When he took to the podium and assumed his "I'm the Chairman of the Board and two guys have given me their resumes to be CEO" stance, he noted that Obama was a "community organizer" with that "are you kiddin' me" "fuhgeddaboutit" tone that only New Yorkers can pull off. Thus, to a guy raised by a single mom, who became the editor of the Harvard Law Review, navigated the shoals of Chicago politics to become a Senator at 43, and just wrested his party's Presidential nomination from a machine, Rudy gave the finger.

The Republicans in St. Paul never told us what they would do. They just told us who they are. Every speaker mentioned McCain's imprisonmment in Vietnam and lauded their war hero, which I guess is nice coming from a crowd that doesn't particularly respect war heroes if they come from the other party. Just ask John Kerry. Governor Palin told us she was just a "hockey mom" who turned down that bridge to nowhere. But we now know that "she was actually for the bridge before she was against it", which again is OK with them so long as you are not John Kerry.

Taxes and terrorism also took their (repeated) turns at the podium. In case anyone had forgotten 9/11, there was a long 9/11 video, not that they would ever politicize such a "We are all Americans" tragic day. The pit bull in lipstick told us Barack wants to "forfeit" in Iraq. Does this mean we declare the mission accomplished and radically draw down our troop strength immediately, even if the war has not been won and the enemy is reconstituting itself? Just like Bush and John McCain did in Afghanistan? I don't know. Sarah left that part out. On taxes, she claimed Barack would not "tax you" but would "tax business", which for the GOP is not a difference. Of course, what Obama said was that he would lower middle class taxes and raise the rates that the wealthy pay. Oh well.

I particularly liked Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. Romney claimed there must be change from a liberal government to a conservative one. Maybe he was talking about Norway or Sweden. Thompson sounded like he was forever trying to clear his throat. Which is what happens when the speech you are giving rails against the "Beltway insiders" club, of which you for many years were a card carrying member.

None of this bothered the guns, gays and God crowd. They have been saved. Sarah Palin is 44. Were she to run for President at McCain's age, she would be doing so in 2036. She will be around for awhile. She is their kind of extremist. Right down to trying to fire the town librarian who wouldn't get rid of the books she found offensive. Or the state public safety commissioner who wouldn't fire her ex-brother in law. Pit bull in lipstick? Perhaps. But what she really turns out to be is a my-way-or-the-highway culture warrior, a sort of Bush II in a skirt. An extremist on choice, gays and sex education who calls herself a reformer even as she abuses power, Sarah Palin will fit in perfectly with the peculiar family the GOP has now become, born of the marriage between intolerant evangelical fundamentalism on the one hand and a corporatist K street on the other. She has the same views on execitive power as George W. Bush -- it's hers to abuse, especially if she thinks God is on her side (and she always does). She is also getting quickly up to speed on the GOP art of hunkering down in the face of legislative investigation. In her case, these views and this apporach have caused problems only for a town librarian, a relative, and their various supporters. In Bush's? Well, we didn't hear anything about that at their convention either.

Some people think Sarah Palin was McCain's best decision. I think it was his worst. This self-proclaimed country-first maverick has catapaulted onto the national scene, perhaps for the next thirty years, an extreme right wing culture warrior. I have seen this movie before and it has a bad ending. Back alley abortions. Torture. Sky-rocketing teen pregnancy rates. International disdain. Crippling deficets. Anti-gay prejudice. Saturday night specials. Dead cops. Bad schools. No health care. And no security.

The right wing is right about one thing.

This is war.

Sign me up.

2008-07-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

SURGERY

The surge has succeeded, so we've been told
By the right wing brave and the steadfast bold.
While the libs were all packing, to cut and run,
With the promise of elections yet to be won,
Persistent George and his neo-con friends
Preached a new beginning of never ends.

And now, months later, as violence abates,
Though he bested Hillary through 20 debates,
Barack and his buddies take a newer tack
With trips to the center, and then to Iraq.
There to be told, our effort's succeeding,
Insurgency's down, Al Qaeda is bleeding.

McCain may be losing but still remains close,
As the Washington pundits give us a dose
Of told you so tributes to the don't leave so fast,
Who looked to the future and forgot the past.
They talked about winning and now claim we are,
So John and his friends have hitched to their star.

But even Iraqis have learned to demand
A non-neo-con end in this quixotic land.
We can stay for a bit, until they are able,
Then we must get out, on Iraq's own timetable.
Though longer than most, and shorter than some,
The result is the same -- we still cut and run.

Will George and his buddies accept this result?
End the insanity, stop the tumult?
Or will they just soldier on, content to remain
Uninformed spectators in this neo-con game?
Afghanistan burns, the enemy waits,
For a new President of the United States.

2008-06-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

FEELING OUR PAIN

It's 11 pm and I am still at the office, pounding out a brief for a client. I have a job so I am not in a recession. But people don't pay as quickly, and some not at all, so I am in one afterall.

The face of the American recession circa 2008 is not fear.

It is doubt.

This is bad for American rhetoric, not to mention American politics. FDR didn't win our hearts and minds all those years ago by proclaiming "We have nothing to fear but doubt itself." He went right for the recessionary jugular, then manifest -- naked, unbridled, stinging and crushing fear.

Life may have been simpler then. My grandmother's reaction to the challenges of the Depression was to buy a 10 pound sack of potatoes and feed her family on it for two weeks. Her children -- my mother and aunt -- have recounted the story ever since. The way they tell it, it was . . .like . . . fun. Potato pancakes, mashed potatoes, french fried potatoes (this was before the war in Iraq and "freedom fries"), potato soup, baked potatoes, boiled potatoes. Never mind tales from ancient relatives recounting the Irish potato famine of the 19th century with brogues we youngsters could not understand. In our house, there was no potato famine. It was the '30s and potatoes were fun.

My grandfather's reaction to the Depression was to get another job. He worked from 8 in the morning to 11 at night at least five days a week. Unlucky relatives who could not get one job, let alone two, slept on the living room floor, on mattresses rolled out each night especially for the occasion. I have never done that, at least not while I was sober, and I do not know anyone in the family these days who would willingly do it either. But then, that too was . . . fun. Again, the story telling experts -- mom and the aunt -- recount how there was always a contest among the kids to see who would get the living room mattress with the cousins. The unlucky losers had to go to sleep in . . .gasp(!). . . a bed.

So here I am am, back at the computer, fashioning my own contest with economic challenge. Is it 10 pounds of potatoes? Or two jobs? Or mattresses on the living room floor? No. I am reduced to dunning clients, for the twentieth time. The calls have become rather boring. Every month I send a bill. Every month they do not pay it. Every month I call to remind them that the bill has been sent but not paid. Everyone is perfectly polite. No one says anything obvious, like "I haven't paid in six months cause I can't. Why don't you stop wasting the stamp?" I am polite too. Though a lawyer, I do not threaten to sue (that would be a very expensive stamp). I do not proclaim the great work we have done, or the utter unfairness of having an Ivy league pedigree in the face of the pedestrian challenge of collection. I do not even point out that at law school (Yale Law School, mind you), there was no course on collecting bills, or even on sending them. Yale was into the big issues (as we stared at pictures of Presidents and Supreme Court justices and various and sundry other legal notables). Collecting bills wasn't one of them. (Wags think that if the issue wasn't about the Constitution, law wasn't taught at the Yale Law School, but that subject is for another day.)

Most of those to whom I speak are waiting for something big to happen. Like an easing up of the credit crunch. So they can borrow more money to pay the bills created with the money they previously borrowed.

I am waiting for something big too. Something I'll be able to share with my grandchildren. Something gripping. Or memorable. Or funny.

Like the 10 pound sack of potatoes.

Or the living room mattress.

But it's not there. It's just 11:30 pm now.

Tomorrow I'll make another call.

2008-05-02T11:20:00.000-07:00

CHANNELING NIXON

In his life, President Richard Nixon was an expert at reinventing himself and presenting various "new Nixons."

With an uncanny appreciation for the fact that politics in the media age had devolved in large part to brand management, and that consumers can always be persuaded to attach new meaning to old brands, Nixon regularly performed the political equivalent. In forty or so years, his personna moved from anti-Communist truth teller putting Alger Hiss behind bars; to domestic watchdog pointing out "pink ladies" as an inveterate red baiter; to press hater in 1962 leaving the scene with a contemptible "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference"; to calm statesmen promising to "bring us together" in 1968 with a secret plan to end the war; to the last liberal President, creating the EPA and OSHA, and proposing what today would easily pass for national health insurance but which then was not good enough for the Democrats in Congress; to lawbreaker covering-up the 1972 bugging of the opposition party and then resigning for it; to unapologetic ex-President marooned on the Elba he called Casa Pacifica (his San Clemente, California home, to which he recurred following his ignominious resignation); to slightly apologetic ex-President ("I screwed up," as he told the Oxford Union some years after his 1974 resignation); to elder statesmen writing books on foreign policy in the '80s and '90s and offering sage advice to political suitors who made the trek to Saddle River, NJ, his last home.

In his life, there were many Nixons. And in his death, we have been blessed (or cursed as the case may be) with another.

Her name is Hillary Clinton.

More than anyone else in politics these days, Hillary Clinton is the new Nixon. The reality is paradoxical -- her first job after law school was working as an aide in Congress to those who were trying to impeach old tricky Dick, earnest in her bell bottoms and granny glasses as the authentic representative of lefty baby boomers coming of age. But the reality is also undeniable. Her Presidential campaign has marched out different versions of HRC at a rate that not even Nixon could manage in the space of a lifetime. Indeed, by my count, we have at least six to date.

Here they are:

1. Inevitable Hillary. Her campaign began with the premise that no one could beat her. She was a financial and political juggernaut, heir to what Democrats (especially those who vote in primaries) think of as the halcyon days of her husband's presidency, collector of the IOUs on favors she and Bill had handed out with abandon in three decades of workaholic political glad handing (and of the one gigantic IOU she gets from him as he does penance for his peccadilloes).

And it was all working.

Until Iowa.

2. Experienced Hillary. When Inevitable Hillary tanked, we got experienced Hillary. She was the co-President consulted on "all major decisions" made by Bill, a sort of uber-First Lady who didn't let the ribbon cutting and library tours interfere with involvement in the heavy lifting of policy formation, an expert on health care cut up by those killer Harry and Louise ads but who knows where the bodies are buried and won't fail twice, the co-author of Clintonian success never responsible for any of its failures.

This wasn't working in the week after Iowa.

So we got . . .

3. Emotional Hillary. Faced with defeat in New Hampshire, the iron lady of American politics momentarily shed her Lady Thatcher visage and. . . cried. Well, she didn't quite cry, but she choked up a lot. Crying on the eve of the New Hampshire primary is a mixed blessing. When voters thought Ed Muskie did it (he really didn't, it was just melting snow, but political brand management then wasn't what it is now), they skewered him. So Hillary's wasn't an all out tear jerker, not even close. Just the welling up of emotion as she professed her consuming passion for the issues and the notion that the Presidency really matters (which W more or less proves by negative inference).

Some say this won her New Hampshire.

But it couldn't get her through Super Tuesday, which was a draw. Nor could it re-fill her political bank account, which by then was tapped.

So we got . . .

4. Ruthless Hillary. Close cousin to her Thatcheresque twin, Ruthless Hillary does what is necessary to win. She cans Patti Solis Doyle, her loyal campaign manager of umpteen years, and brings back Maggie Williams, who doesn't lose. She lets Bill demean Barack's win in South Carolina, as he becomes the first "black" President to. . . race bait. She tells us that the votes in Florida and Michigan should count after all, and after she previously said they couldn't and wouldn't. She tells us caucuses don't really count (actually, she more or less tells us that anyplace she loses doesn't count, and then gets the media to buy into this fantasy by making her "win states" Barack's "must win" states). She lends herself $5 million "of my money". Well, it's really hers and Bill's together, a part of the dowry we give ex-Presidents to, I guess, make up for the below market salaries we pay them, without worrying about conflicts of interest as the ex takes lots of cash from those who use to listen for free and others who claim with a straight face that he knows something about business.

But not even ruthless was enough. Barack trotted out that string of eleven straight victories.

So we got. . .

5. Combat Hillary. This is the Hillary who braved sniper fire in Bosnia, the Commander in Chief who'll be able to take that 3 am phone call and calm the waters of this turbulent world as we all sleep the sleep of the well protected relieved that we did not entrust such awesome responsibility to the skinny guy with a silk tongue; the only one who can go mano a mano with the war hero as voters compare her "experience" to his and not just to some well crafted oration for God's sake.

Alas, Combat Hillary was not enough either, mostly because all the other Hillarys together still have left her behind the skinny guy in the delegate count. So we get . . .

6. Boilermaker Hillary. This is the Hillary who downs the shot and a beer with gusto in a working class bar in Pennsylvania, the "I'm on your side and he's not" girl with guts (and a much better bowling score), ready to junk NAFTA (this is one of Bill's ideas she won't take credit for) while the other guy sends his surrogates to Canada to tell them he doesn't really mean it, the regular gal (never mind the $100 plus million over the last eight years) who would never admit to eating arugula (or to counting calories in a chocolate factory), the candidate who, with a straight face (this is critical in brand management), tells us that Obama should have disowned his nutty pastor sooner because, while we "don't get to choose our families" (apparently husbands don't count, but who's noticing), we do "get to choose our preachers".

Nixon was never this creative. He usually stuck to one persona for every half decade or so. But he also lost two campaigns, the Presidency in 1960 (to the then "orator du jour" JFK) and the California gubernatorial election in 1962. Maybe he just wasn't in Hillary's league.

It's no wonder Barack can't beat her yet.

So far, he's had to run against two Clintons and six Hillarys.

Nixon would be proud.

2008-04-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

GROUNDED IN QUAGMIRE

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker returned from Iraq this week to report that "progress is real" in the post-surge world. So real, in fact, that we can't go surge-free any time soon. For, although "progress is real," it is also "fragile" and "reversible." Armed with this fragule but reversible real progress, we are now advised to embrace a new policy of suspending troop withdrawals (part of what was promised post surge if only we agreed, pre-surge, to surge). The Washington surge gurus (McCain, Bush, the Washington Post editorial page, the GOP, and Joe Lieberman, among others) tell us that de-surging can only be embraced if "conditions on the ground" permit it

They don't.

So we must . . . surge forward, or on, or upward, or somewhere for the foreseeable future.

The Washington Post editors claimed today that "the reduction in violence [in Iraq] had been so great as to be undeniable," and then skewered Obama and Clinton for having been surge-resistent pessimists when W initially proposed the idea. This is like screaming at the coach whose team is down by three touchdowns because he fails to hand out "Attaboys" to his team when they go eight and out as opposed to their usual four and out. The progress was undeniable. It was also probably irrelevant.

Violence, for now, is down. Progress, however, is only undeniable because things were so bad to begin with. We are nowhere near the end state Bush and Cheney forecast in 2003, and we are never getting there. That is why they keep changing the goalposts. First it was to get rid of WMD. Then when we found none of that, it was freedom and democracy for Iraq. Now that neither of these is likely (at least not without the sort of pro-Iranian resuilts we cannot otherwise endorse), it's stability. Slowly, that is giving way to a Nixonian sort of "peace with honor," which is how politicians frame losing, and this will itself be followed by a Rambo-esque hunt for the felons who refused to let us win (because patriots like Bush and Cheney and McCain never lose, they just have victory taken from them by those who refuse to "stay the course").

I now realize that the politicians really did learn lessons from Vietnam, though not the ones we thought they had leaned. The first lesson is never predict victory. This is a precondition for ceaseless surging, otherwise known as all war all the time. But you have to be careful how you sell it, or you won't close the deal. You can't admit that you will have to be there "for 100 years" (as McCain found out the hard way). Rather, you have to embrace the second lesson, which is to predict "devastating consequences" in the event of troop pull outs. This, of course, is not a prediction of victory if we continue to fight. Rather, it is a prediction horrific chaos if we do not. Combined, the astute practitioner of these simple rules freezes the debate. He or she neither gets caught in a Westmorland-like "light at the end of the tunnel" expectation of success nor in a "hanging on the helicopters" picture of ignoble retreat. Instead, he or she gets to . . . surge.

Lesson three is never look back. This lesson is particularly useful to policy makers, especially those who (like McCain and Bush and Lieberman, and . . . Hillary) really blew it at the start of the game. By focusing, as Ambassador Crocker put it yesterday, on "what will happen [rather] than what has happened," those who fail get to keep on keepin' on.

And no one else gets to call them on their mistakes.

Lesson three is the holy grail for the ambitiously incompetent. It would be nice if even one of them -- McCain, Bush, Lieberman, anyone -- resigned given their utter failure in 2003 to vote for and implement the correct policy. In a parliamentary system, there would have been multiple no confidence votes. Here, however, we just get spin --about patriotism, or chaos, or quitting, or the future. Personal responsibility apparently is very important when it comes to sex or drugs. But totally irrelevant when it comes to war.

The truth is that no one knows when the so-called "conditions on the ground" will change and permit the troops to come home. So, whether we admit it or not, we are making an open ended committment to stay in Iraq. This is the latest lie we are being told by those we elect to tell us the truth, especially when it comes to national security. But they haven't and they won't, and maybe now they can't.

People who lie to themselves often enough end up believing the lies. This is why lying is a bad habit -- it's not just the mendacity, it's what the mendacity does to you after you repeat it enough. An erstwhile friend of mine (and graduate of Yale Law School) ruined his career and his life by lying. But long before he went to jail for his lies, he had already lost his self respect, and mine, along with any influence he might have had over his colleagues. The possession and exercise of power (political, financial, or emotional) can mask that loss for a time. But not forever. And not in a way that ever matters.

Here are the real "conditions on the ground" in Iraq:

1. We do not know when we will be able to get out. Positing what has to happen tells you nothing about when it will happen.

2. Our current President, and at least one of the individuals who may be our next President (McCain), have, as a matter of policy, refused to say when we will get out.

3. Most of the elites in our society are not calling them on it, or on their past failures.

4. Consequently, the failure continues.

The condition on the ground? Halberstam said it best forty years ago.

It is a quagmire.

2008-03-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

SPRING BREAK

It's spring in the northeast but it still feels like winter. Although the sun breaks through from time to time and reminds us of what is to come, the defining color is gray. Some birds are chirping but the vast majority are not here yet. So the mornings are still fairly quiet. When you take the dog out for a walk, the ground has the feel of a sponge rung once -- not entirely saturated but still wet. In Maine, they call this the mud season. It's a "tweener" time of year. We are caught between frost and fun, overcoats and jackets, long nights and long days.

So maybe it makes sense that the Democrats don't have a presidential nominee yet.

Barack can't win yet and Hillary won't quit yet. Some pundits lament the growing negativity of the campaigns, but I think they are playing with us. The pundits like this stuff. It fills air time. On the day after Easter, which is what today is, what would Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough have said if Carville hadn't compared Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot? What would they have said last week, and the week before last, if Reverand Wright's rhetoric was not out there to be noticed?

You pretty much know when campaigns have run out of issues to brief and town meetings to announce. It occurs when incendiary comments long a part of the public record are dusted off and You Tubed so as to appear to be new. The Wright comments which so engulfed the airwaves for the past weeks define that art. The Reverand made the comments shortly after 9/11, or a little less than seven years ago. Did they just become offensive? Or relevant to the kind of President Obama would be? Is it really the case that no one noticed them until now?

The Wright stuff is perfect for the "tweener" season. It's of a piece with President Clinton's faux plea for a presidential contest between two nominees who both "love their country" (guess who he had in mind). Or Carville's Judas comments (made on Good Friday, in case all the Catholics in Pennsylvania weren't previously listening). Bored by their own wonkiness and realizing that going negative works even as they deny doing it, hell hath no fury greater than a candidate in a tight race. In fact, political handlers are the only people who embrace hell before their bosses are officially spurned. And at the end, the bosses -- that is, the actual candidates -- are too tired to stop them.

That is where we are now. In between. East of our political Eden. Caught in a seasonal dust bowl where winners and losers both get dirty, but no one stops them. When this sort of thing goes on in school yards, adults intervene. But the political adults here are the remaining superdelegates, and their silence for the most part has been deafening.

The "tweener" season never lasts. Gray becomes green. Sooner or later, that one bird sings a song in which others join. It is inevitable. So, Barack, rising in his great speech on race, and Governor Richardson, rising as his fellows remain seated, will not be alone for long.

Even the Clintons will join them.

2008-02-23T18:11:00.000-08:00

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE

She has lost men. She has lost women, She has lost blacks. She has lost yuppies. She has lost the college vote and the high school vote. She is losing the union vote. She is in trouble.

But we now know that Hillary in fact does have a firewall.

It is the footnote vote!

For the past few weeks, Mrs. Clinton has repeated the charge that Barack Obama is something of a plagiarist. This is because he has repeated lines given him by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. The lines skewer those who claim Obama's speeches are "just words," with repeated invocations of some of the American republic's more famous bonne mots, followed by sarcastic questions that mockingly wonder whether these past clarion calls were just words as well. The riff works its magic as the audience hears Barack intone "'We hold those truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words? 'I have a dream'. Just words?" There is a kind of game, set and match quality to this oratory, as there is with most of what comes out of Obama's mouth, before crowds larger than anyone else's and more enthusiastic by an order of magnitude.

Alas, however, the "just words" riff was not original to Barack. It was Gov. Patrick's. To the Clintonistas, it is irrlevant that Patrick is one of Obama's national co-chairs, or that he specifically suggested that Obama use the lines, or that Obama admits he perhaps should have credited Patrick for them at some point along the way, however that is done on the campaign trail. No, Barack the policy neophyte now turns out to be, so they say, less than the Demosthenes we had all supposed him to be. And since, so the argument continues, words are so much a part of his appeal, perhaps he is less . . . appealing.

Obama has pilloried this contretemps as "silly" and he is right. But apart from being silly, the charges being levelled say a lot more about his critics than they do about him. Over the course of the past few decades, we have collectively allowed our politics to be reduced to a sort of least common denominator sport. In that arena, the subtext is that smart doesn't matter and eloquence is phony. The current President touted his regular guy quality and C+ college average as evidence that he was the better candidate in both 2000 and 2004, disqualifying in one pass anyone who excelled in school or gave a syntactically correct speech. Words were a currency to be debased, not embraced, as W winked and nodded his way through malaprops while the ostensibly effete Ivy Leaguers "misunderestimated" him. He didn't care whether "nuclear" came out as "nucular," so long as everyone knew the regular guy from Crawford would kill the SOBs and not worry much about the sensitivities intellectuals had about things like, say, torture.

There is a sense in which Hillary is stealing a page from this book. No one -- not even Hillary -- believes Obama is a plagiarist. He was given a line by a supporter and used it. From time to time, she has done the same thing, as has everyone else who has ever run for office. Plagiarists steal words and claim them as their own. No one stole anything here. Deval Patrick willingly gave them away; much like the legions of speechwriters who craft the eloquence most of our politicians claim as their own.

For Hillary, the Obama problem is not where the words come from, it's that the words are so good. She cannot attack them. So she has spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to undermine them. The "they are not his words" charge followed the "they are just words charge," and then was itself followed by her "why can't we be friends" caricature of a putatively naive Obama long on rhetoric and short on reality. The problem, however, is that Hillary is morphing into everyone she claims to oppose -- the master mocker himself is the current President Bush, who has made a career out of ranking out opponents (be they members of the media or suitors for the same job) for their brains and eloquence, and the GOP playbook this Fall, lacking a defensible record, will belittle Obama for his vocabulary and cadence because it won't be able to attack him for his plans and policies.

Et tu, Hillary?

Hillary Clinton is a lot better than this and should rise to that level rather than sink to Rove's. The Presidential race is a political campaign, not the defense of an honors thesis.

Footnotes don't matter.

2008-02-15T07:14:00.000-08:00

BARACK ATTACK

Now that Barack Obama has pushed ahead in his contest with Hillary Clinton and stands a reasonable chance of being the Democratic nominee for President, the fear is that he will not be able to take a punch. First, however, his opponents (all of them) have to throw one. And so far, either none are, or none are landing.

Whether it's Hillary, John McCain or right wing pundits like Charles Krauthammer, the attack on Obama thusfar is numbingly similar, surprisingly superficial and stunningly ineffective. It's some verson of the notion that he offers promises but not solutions (Hillary), rhetoric but not reality (McCain), or the snake oil of messianic hope that "dazzles" crowds even as it arouses "skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media" (Krauthammer). Victory after victory, eloquent speech after eloquent speech, Obama is now pilloried for a campaign that is supposedly becoming "dangerously self-referential" (Joe Klein).

Puh-leeze!

All of this is sheer rubbish. Not to mention disingenuous and false. Obama is winning because, for much of the past thirty years, the establishment hasn't delivered. His crowds are large and his rhetoric soars because he hasn't invested in the past and doesn't need to (and won't) apologize for it. Whether it's a war he opposed, a surge he knows is just a bandaid, or an economy that comes nowhere near delivering the kind of middle class created by FDR and his followers, Obama admits and tells the truths that the others either ignore or are partially (and sometimes wholly) responsible for. His rhetoric is compelling because it is real. The "solutions" Senator from New York cannot get traction because, in the Senate on the mother of all issues, she helped create the biggest problem we now have (in Iraq) rather than solve the one we already had (in Afghanistan). Ditto for Mr. Reality from Arizona. John McCain is consistent and has the courage of his convictions. But as George W. Bush has proved beyond any doubt, one can have consistent convictions that are consistently wrong.

There's also nothing "dangerously self-referential" or "messianic" about Obama's appeal. For starters, it's hard to get a grip on what, precisely, this charge means. The rugged individualists, rich entrepreneurs and devotees of Ronald Reagan (messiah, anyone?) who make up the Republican Party are self-referential to a man. They just call it individual responsibility. They also think that is a good thing, one that more or less ought to be the foundation of most public policies. Barack is just stealing their thunder, the first Democratic politician since JFK to "ask not." When Obama says "We are the change that we seek," he's offering Americans hard work and responsibility for their future, not salvation. When he tells crowds that he is relying on them more than they are on him, he is repeating an old lesson in democratic self-governance -- that change comes not from those in charge but from those who are charged; that we get the government we elect, not the government we deserve; that the people are more important than the President. None of this is self-referential. It's the precise opposite.

No candidate has yet issued a bill of particulars against Barack. Hillary allegedly refuses to "whoop it up" Barack-like in deference to her ostensibly more honest and humble devotion to tough choices and real solutions. And McCain denounces Obama's speeches as "platitudes" masking as policies. Neither sound bite has touched the Illinois Senator. Today, however, Charles Krauthammer tried a different (albeit related) tack. He wrote: Obama is "going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war". Krauthammer thinks this "spell" can last just past an Obama inauguration. Following that, he foresees a "rude awakening."

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Obama hasn't promised to heal the world with negotiation. He has simply made the unremarkable observation that the world has never moved down that road without it. As for entitlement reform, the solution has eluded Krauthammer's generation, not Obama's. The kids at his rallies don't think they're getting Social Security or Medicare, they do not much like that, and they know that, with two reforms (increasing the earnings subject to payroll tax and moving the retirement age up slightly) Social Security could be sound. The solutions do not elude them. Nor do the costs. They are willing to pay higher taxes once they become millionaires. And they know a war that is off budget and cost billions each week is a source of funds if only it can be stopped.

The gig may not yet be up for Hillary. She has an almost infinite capacity for survival, and she will fight to the last. It's also hardly up for McCain. He will be the GOP nominee and in November, he will be strong. But neither one of them will beat Barack if what we've seen to date from both is the sum and substance of their argument against him. Anyone who wants 10-point plans on everything from health care to entitlement reform to Iraq can get it from any of these candidates. Just go to their websites. It's all there. All the reality, all the solutions, all the policy you could want. Obama's is no less detailed than Hillary's or McCain's. And if the websites are not sufficient, just replay the debates -- 18 of them with Barack and Hillary on the stage, covering the policy waterfront, which is why everyone now knows that he's for universal access and she's for a universal mandate. It's as real as it gets.

But my wife -- who was the Legislative Director for a senior Congressman in the '80s and early '90s and has worked a half dozen campaigns -- says none of that will ultimately matter. And she may be right.

Because while they keep telling us what they will do, Barack Obama keeps telling us what we can do.

2008-01-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

CHEATER

Hillary Clinton just lost my vote.

Mrs. Clinton went to Florida last night to celebrate a victory that wasn't. More importantly, she went to Florida last night to proclaim a victory that she had no right to proclaim and should be embarrassed to assert. But that didn't stop her.

Hillary is a cheater, pure and simple. I grew up on the streets and neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Cheating was not tolerated, not even by six year olds. We had no umpires or referees in our choose up stickball, punchball and touch football games. So if you were out on a close play at second or clearly caught a pass out of bounds (which was the sidewalk), you admitted it. Maybe, just to save a little face, you argued the call a bit or on a close play sought a second opinion from the shortstop (especially if he was your best friend, or better, a relative). But you didn't just stand on second base and assert your claim oblvious to the rules we had all agreed upon. You didn't try to move the line of scrimmage up to the place where you caught the out of bounds pass.

But that's not Hillary. The rules for her apparently changed last Tuesday when Obama walloped her in the South Carolina primary. Desperation set in. She had to find a venue for victory to erase the sting of defeat. And she had to do it before Super Tuesday. So she chose Florida's faux primary and then imported an ersatz crowd to a ballroom off the interstate for a pseudo-victory speech.

Although Hillary's face was straight, that was all that was straight about her performance last night. Months ago, she and the other Democratic candidates agreed not to campaign in Florida after that state changed its scheduled primary election date in violation of the calendar set by the Democratic National Committee and agreed to by all the candidates. Because of this conduct, none of Florida's would be delegates will be counted in the presidential balloting at the national convention this coming summer in Denver. Thus, the voting that occurred yesterday was for naught. Not a single delegate was chosen.

There also was no campaign in Florida. No direct mail, no stump speeches, no debates, no rallies. No CNN, MSNBC, Fox, media hordes or other media big feet. And no delegates, the coin of the realm in nominating presidential candidates. Hell, the best evidence that there was absolutely no campaign in Florida is that Bill Clinton -- a human GPS when it comes to injecting himself into one of his wife's political contests -- was never anywhere near the place.

But Hillary appeared last night anyway, a sort of political Caesar crossing an ethical Rubicon. She claimed that she was not violating the rules because she showed up after the election had ended and thus had not "campaigned" in the state in violation of her agreement not to do so. So what? The point is not that she showed up at a rally in Florida. It's that she claims to have won a contest that never existed and that she promised not to undertake. It's also that she now plans to have Florida delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention, presumably to vote for her. If she thinks either of those boneheaded plays do not amount to a broken promise, maybe it's because she is being advised by the master hairsplitter himself, the conjugator-in-chief.

Given the obvious backdrop of dishonesty, Hillary's "victory" rally was itself a flop. The crowd was bussed in. The speech was flat. Even her thank you didn't cut it, probably because, as one voter remarked after the fact, the "vote" might well have come out differently had there been a real election campaign. She touts her four victories to date as evidence of strength going into next week's "national" primary. But two of them, Michigan and now Florida, were in contests that didn't count against either no-shows (in Florida) or uncommitted (in Michigan). Her answer to the politics of hope is the politics of hype.

Unfortunately, however, the fact that Hillary struck out last night is only part of her problem, and the far less important part. On the streets of my youth, cheaters suffered a fate worse than death.

They never got another game.

2008-01-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

BENAZIR AND BEYOND

Less than a week later, it is difficult to determine the full impact of the tragic assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

The list of those potentially responsible seems to grow by the day, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to her political opponents in the Pakistani military and the Musharraf administration. Initial reports that she was killed by an assassin's bullet now compete with a supposed medical finding that she died from a fractured skull as she fell back into her SUV from the force of either shrapnel or the suicide bomber's blast. We will probably never know. The motives of those who investigate political assassinations in Pakistan are, to a man, suspect; much of the forensic evidence has been destroyed as a consequence of the immediate clean up by local fire officials; and the Pakistani government has in the past refused foreign forensic help from qualified scientists. That Benazir Bhutto is the latest victim of terrorism cannot be questioned. But who or what groups or individuals are actually responsible will probably never be answered.

The tragedy of her untimely demise is matched only by the complexity of her courage. She was a conscious (and quite willful) paradox in action. Her western education (at Harvard and Oxford) was a counterpoint to her cultural moorings in a South Asian and thoroughly Islamic world. Her feminist commitment was as fervent as her commitment to an arranged marriage to a man she barley knew. Her inherited land based wealth stood in stark contrast to the poverty of her countrymen and women.

She preached on behalf of the rule of law in Pakistan but was held by a Swiss court to have violated the law on her own behalf. Though twice removed from office under questionable circumstances, the charge of corruption was not entirely without basis. She was imprisoned with her mother and father and in jail while authorities hanged her father. Her two brothers were themselves killed under questionable circumstances. And the day she returned from an eight year exile, she herself was nearly assassinated by a suicide bomber that killed over 100 of her supporters. That terrorist missed. Last week's, unfortunately, did not.

She did not plan a political career and did not want her children ever to have one at all. She wanted for them a safety she never demanded or expected for herself. She became a politician by accident and thus acquired that ineffable quality all non-accidental politicians covet -- what we, on this side of the world, in our media driven culture, call authenticity.

She would not have used that word. Her politics was complicated and complex. She truly respected the cultural and religious traditions of her land, which were her own as well, even as she led Pakistan through its own modernist emergence. On the occasion of her arranged marriage, she told reporters that she did not expect westerners to understand. I do not think she expected us to understand her politics either. It bridged the contradictions she lived and witnessed.

At the time of her death, the Bush administration was still trying to fashion an unlikely coalition, marrying her democratic bona fides to Musharraf's militaristic stability. The likelihood that such a marriage would ever work was probably always remote. It is now remoter still.

At some level, the US is still MIA in that part of the world. Our Iraqi mis-adventure poisons many wells, but none more than the well of democracy, such as it is, in a place called Pakistan. We had legitimacy, buckets of it, in the wake of 9/11. No one, not even the Pakistanis, questioned our right to go into Afghanistan and clean it out of AL Qaeda and Taliban, and had we remained focused there, we might have succeeded. We certainly might have captured bin Laden, and we would have been able to stop the Taliban from re-emerging and taking refuge in the remote tribal areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But we didn't. Instead, we fought a war that needed no fighting, against an enemy that did not exist, in a country that was neither attacking us nor funding those who would. We fought a war planned at the desks of a handful of neo-cons long ago, and long before 9/11. And we fought a war that those same neo-cons did an abysmal job of planning. It's usually a bad sign when you declare victory before it has been won, but that happened in Iraq too.

The list of mistakes in Mesopatamia is long and painful. Unilateralism. No WMD. A silly coalition of the willing that was always small and has grown even smaller still over time. Insufficient troops. An inept Coalition Provisional Authority. De-baathification, which destroyed Iraq's administrative apparatus, and torture, which destroyed our own integrity. Ignored or minimized sectarian conflict. Until recently, not even a reasonable counter-insurgency strategy . And even today, an unwillingness to level with the American people.

Now we can add Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto to the list. Our Iraqi mistake did not kill her. But it sure did not help either.

2007-12-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

I am writing to wish one and all "Happy Holidays" for 2007. This will annoy the right wing to some immeasurable degree. Anyone who wishes "Happy Holidays" is apparently part of some grand scheme to subvert Christmas. This class of happy holiday wishers is either run by, or at the very least includes in large numbers, the following -- secularists, atheists, agnostics, the lapsed of any faith, and -- of course -- liberals. The appointed protectors of Christmas have a number of spokesmen and women, but chief among them appear to be Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Every year at about this time, the protectors can be counted on to man the barricades and warn of the latest assault on Christmas perpetrated under the banner of "Happy Holidays. "

I always thought people wished each other "Happy Holidays" more or less to save words. It appears to me that the season is an incredibly busy and stressful one, with all the shopping, parties (planned and attended), decorating, cooking, etc. For those with young children, there are also the lists for Santa Claus and all the assuaging that has to be done as the kids wonder whether they have been naughty or nice; this sometimes extends to adults, who have a penchant for naughtiness. Invitations create a whole other source of potential stress -- who to invite to the party or the holiday (sorry, I meant "Christmas") dinner, who to exclude, how to explain you really didn't really mean to exclude the folks you really meant to exclude, etc. While all this is happening, the days are getting progressively shorter (and used to be getting progressively colder too), so the month is especially acute for the seasonally affected. Thus, I thought, what the hell (no doubt the beginning of my problem), if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" every time you greet people this time of year, the savings of four words per greeting starts to add up -- more breath as you run for the train or explain to the airline that your kid was supposed to be on that flight.

But Sean and Rush and Ann will have none of this. My effort at efficiency is nothing but a well orchestrated attack on Christmas. I have perverted a sacred day, turned it into some sort of secular celebration of the winter solstice. With all of this "Happy Holiday" gibberish, I am giving Hanukkah and Kwanzaa equal billing, equating a high holy day with supposedly low ones, turning the sacred into the profane as I swim in a sort of unholy existential soup of my own making. (For some reason, I am also accused of taking the "Christ" out of "Christmas", but I find this charge a bit strange because I am never accused at the same time of taking the "Happy" out of "New Year", and I wonder if they are missing the full extent of my otherwise pernicious conduct.)

I am now very nervous about this whole "Happy Holidays" thing. I am already on the outs with the higher ups in my religion -- the Pope, the Cardinals and the Bishops. This is because I do not believe that embryos are people, or that girls should only be nuns, or that Sunday Mass should be mandatory (either for me or some of the priests who say it), or that Cardinal Law is necessarily entitled to diplomatic immunity. I am also already on the outs with the Seans and Rushes and Ann C's. This is because I do not believe that all Republicans have good judgment, or that girls should not get equal pay, or that the Constitution is irrelevant, or that it doesn't matter that Gore got more votes in Florida in 2000. But now, in addition to all these transgressions, I have joined the list of apparently irreligious Happy Holidayers.

I am a lawyer and this predicament requires a plea. So here it is -- Guilty . . .With An Explanation. Actually, a few of them.

First, I agree that the word saving thing is a bit of a stretch. But it is not off the charts. My children and their friends have invented a whole new form of communication where abbreviation is the norm. (R u showing 4 the pty. LOL.) At least "Happy Holidays" is intelligible, in English, and uses two words actually found in the dictionary. Rush and Sean and Ann maybe should thank me for not succumbing. I bet the abbreviators are going to start saying "Merry Xmas"; maybe they already have. How will Rush and Co. feel about that? Not good, I bet, with the abbreviators putting the "X" back in . . . well, you get the problem. I say, "Rush, Ann, Sean, maybe we are on the same side on this one."

But we're not. Because I noticed that they really don't mean what they say. And this is the second explanation. I do not think the "Merry Christmas" protectors really want to protect "Merry Christmas." If they did, Jose Feliciano would be one of their patron saints. Jose is the singer and songwriter who gave us "Feliz Navidad," which is Spanish for "Merry Christmas." But I never see him on Hannity and Colmes, being grilled by Alan and fed softballs by Sean. And I bet he hasn't been mentioned in one of Ann's books or speeches (which, given the fact that he is blind, might have taken the edge off her gay bashing, or at least given MSNBC a reason to keep her on the air), or made an appearance with Rush (physically challenged in his own right, as we know, which explained all those prescription painkillers). What's up with that, I ask. Is "Merry Christmas" only sacred when it comes out in English? I guess so. Cause no one's ever accused me of taking Christ out of Feliz Navidad.

This, unfortunately, creates enormous problems for the Merry Christmas maniacs. The Savior came to save the whole world, as we Christians believe, and English wasn't even around when he arrived. The Pope speaks German, or Italian (and sometimes Latin) when he is on the job. Jesus spoke Aramaic and St. Paul spoke Greek, so whatever they would have said to celebrate Himself's birthday, it wasn't "Merry Christmas." It wasn't even "Feliz Navidad." Oh, I know, it wasn't "Happy Holidays" either. But that just gets me to explanation # 4 or 3 (depending on how you are counting).

Which is this -- if we are respecting original intent here, "Happy Holidays" has the better claim. Unfortunately for the protectors, historically speaking, the churches actually stole the "secular" celebration of the winter solstice; it wasn't the other way around. The First Christmas, which is afterall what we are celebrating, did not actually take place in December. The prelates put it there, and then seized the seasonal solstice festival that occurred at that time and made it their own. It was sort of a religious preemptive strike, and of course an act of marketing genius. The whole point of the winter solstice celebration is that we really need something to celebrate at exactly this time of year . . . and not just because Aunt Gertrude is off the Christmas list. Life for those pagan warriors was hard, and cold, and you couldn't sack Rome in the winter anyway. Life for us is hard too, and the Democrats apparently can't sack Bush in the winter either. So we celebrate the solstice. But call it Christmas.

None of this , of course, really matters. The commercial interests took "Christ" out of Christmas long before the much hated secularists ever got Hallmark to craft a line of Happy Holiday cards. The protectors do not complain about this, mostly because those interests are also their sponsors. The politicians say they have not taken "Christ"out of Christmas, and they are very careful about when, where and to whom they utter "Happy Holidays" (lest they lose the talk radio base or show up in Rush's sites). But the Iowa caucuses occur on January 3, and the two day "no call to voters" rule in force on December 24 and 25 looks more like a Flanders Field cease fire in World War I than it does a celebration of those who believe God was made Man.

What we are really forgetting about Christmas is not the greeting, it's the message. Jesus preached peace, love, generosity, and forgiveness; not war, hatred, the individual accumulation of wealth and the ability to hold a grudge. He wouldn't recognize the Christmas celebrated by Sean, Ann, Rush and the bevy of protectors screaming about sacrilege, nor the one celebrated by most of the rest of us either. He wouldn't be all that jazzed about the gifts, or the self-induced stress, or the baited breadth of prognosticators wondering whether retail will be up or down this season. He wouldn't be thinking about Presidential candidates or listening to talk shows. And He wouldn't care about whether seasonal greetings were correct or incorrect, politically or otherwise.

We shouldn't either. But we do.

So "Happy Holidays." Maybe some day we'll be worthy enough to say "Merry Christmas." But we're not there yet.

2007-12-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

DRUGGED

Just when you thought it was safe to assume that the Democrats would not self destruct, the Democrats prove they are more than capable of doing so.

The latest in their long list of invitations to implosion comes in the form of comments from Billy Shaheen. Unknown nationally, Billy is very much known in the state of New Hampshire, home to the first primary. He is the husband of former New Hampshire Governor (and current Senatorial candidate) Jeanne Shaheen, and also is the co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in that state. Today, under the guise of discussing the issue of electability, Billy told the press (and us) that Barack Obama's admissions of past drug use will haunt him in a general election campaign. Shaheen stated that Obama had "opened the door" to further questions from the GOP hit squad. According to Billy, "It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" This apparently worries Shaheen in spite of the GOP having assiduously guarded the past drug use of its own standard bearer from any disclosure whatsoever, full or otherwise. In 1999 and 2000, W effectively declared all talk of his rumored drug use out of bounds, inventing a political statute of limitations that precluded discussion of anything he did before he was 40 and sober. The GOP will now apparently ignore that precedent as it unloads on Barack.

Maybe I am missing something here, but at this point, I am worried less about the GOP hit squad than I am about the Hillary Hit Squad. No one will believe, nor should they, that Billy Shaheen went to the podium today with anything other than a green light from Hillary and her campaign. Nor will anyone believe, and again they should not, that Billy's ostensible concern reflects anything other than the fact that Obama is now neck and neck with Clinton in the polls not just in Iowa but also in New Hampshire. This has desperation written all over it.

It also has hypocrisy written all over it. In 1992, when Bill talked about not inhaling, no one in the Clinton camp thought admitted use invited questions about dealing that threatened his electability. Nor do they now. This is true for many reason. W's "I take the Fifth" on this is one reason. But there are others. Obama did not do anything millions of us have not done, and there's a good chance that among those millions are a number of current GOP candidates for President, Congress, and a whole host of other offices . Whatever the GOP asks about Barack will be asked about them. The Justice Department hires prosecutors who have to answer the "drug question". I was one of them, and I am betting that, if an honest "I tried it" answer to that question doesn't eliminate you from being an Assistant US Attorney, it won't derail Barack's presidential campaign.

But it may derail Hillary's. Her selling point is experience, but her campaign of late is looking like the gang that can't shoot straight. First there was the whole "he wrote that he wanted to be President in kindergarten" brouhaha, a comical attempt to claim that Obama was somehow inappropriately ambitious whereas Hillary was not. Wholly apart from the notion that Hillary attacking someone for having more ambition is about as credible as Bush announcing he has seen the light on global warming, the claim was silly and more than a little bit crazy. It used to be a good thing to want to be President, and it still is a great thing when you can write out any sentence at the age of five, especially if you could do that 40 years ago when most of us couldn't. Now, however, an overly ambitious five year old (who could write) is being turned into a twenty something Harvard educated potential drug dealer (just asking, mind you) because he didn't equivocate on the de riguer "did you inhale" question.

Sounds to me like someone in the Clinton campaign better exhale . . . fast!

2007-12-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

MITT'S MUDDLE

Mitt Romney went to Texas yesterday to allay voters' concerns about his religion. John F. Kennedy went to Texas forty-seven years ago to do the same thing. Kennedy succeeded. Romney failed.

Here's why.

JFK's speech was a clarion call for separation between church and state. He did not equivocate or temporize, and he annoyed many in the Catholic hierarchy by not doing so. He said that he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." This absolute separation meant that "no church or church school" would be "granted any public funds or political preference." It meant that "no prelate" or "minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." It provided a standard against which the consistency of his own votes "against an ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools" could be measured, a standard which -- in his public life -- Kennedy clearly met.

Now listen to Romney yesterday at Texas A&M. No absolutism there. He said "I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us . . . from God." On his conduct in public office, he proclaimed that he "tried to do the right as best" he knew it, and while offering that he had never "confuse[d] the particular teachings of [his]church with the obligations of [his] office," he also asserted that "in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It's as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America -- the religion of secularism. They are wrong." He proudly proclaimed his belief that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind." Finally, invoking our constitutional beginnings, he claimed, "The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square."

It is a speech JFK never would have given. In fact, it is a speech neither Lincoln nor the founders would have given either. It is also a bad speech. Not because it will not do what it was designed to do for his Presidential campaign, which is to allay the irrational fears evangelicals have of Mormons. And not because it also will not allay the fears of the dreaded "secularists," about whose fears Romney cares not a whit. Instead, it is a bad speech because it is false as a matter of history and dangerous as a matter of policy, matters of which Kennedy was clearly cognizant and Romney is not.

The history of church - state separation has been bastardized of late, and that is no accident. The evangelicals are intent on re-writing it to agree with their own views. On this re-writing, the founders become religious devotees when in fact they were nearly all deists who rejected trinitarian doctrine, came of age (as Garry Wills points out in his recent book, Head and Heart) during a fairly secular period in American history when religion was descendant rather than ascendant (a reality which changed shortly after their passing and which had emerged only shortly after their births), and actually succeeded is implementing disestablishment, a by no means certain outcome in a world where, at the founding, the states had established churches which received tax funds. It also took awhile. Massachusetts, for example, home to Mitt and JFK, did not disestablish the Congregational Church until the 1830s.

In truth, the founders were what Romney and today's religious right would call "secularists." So was Lincoln. They were all perfectly comfortable referring to God, and even contemplating the mystery of God (which Lincoln's Second Inaugural does in spades), but they never substituted an appeal to God's judgment (which is more or less unknowable, as a practical matter) for their own. In that, they followed the advice of the Jesuits who taught me in high school: "Pray as if everything depends on God, but act as if everything depends on you." So, as a practical matter, for Jefferson and Lincoln, God was "eliminated from" the "public square," or at least from that part of the public square which created laws and politics.

Romney and the religious right will truck with none of this. It is apostasy. JFK expressly said that religion -- "what kind of church he believed in" -- should be important "only to [him]," and refused to discuss the subject. Romney -- perhaps intending to out-paster Paster Huckabee -- proclaimed (and remember, this was a campaign speech by a guy running for President) Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of Mankind. JFK's point was that no one should care about this. Romney's is that everyone must. Romney also repeated the shopworn bromides the religious right now trots out every time it discusses the subject. So, the former Governor of Massachuseets claims that we are a nation "Under God", even though the anti-communists of the '50s -- not the founders -- were the authors of these words.

The "public square" is also a funny place in Mitt's world. A large chunk of the public appears not to be part of it (God must need a lot of room). Romney asserted that "Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs." And who, precisely, would that be? The dreaded secularists? Certainly. Pro-choice divorced Catholics like me? Who vote for Democrats? Gone. Perhaps not "removed" from the public square like the God we ostensibly refuse to invite to the party, but decidedly on the sidelines, like the boring kids in high school, just so . . . tiresome. Something of a blown dry hipster himself, Romney is a perfect incarnation of the populist religio-media age in which we now live. God is cool, with it, a ratings buster (for God's sake). Check out those Sunday morning televangelist broadcasts from "churches" larger than concert halls and louder than the Super Bowl at halftime, and then go ahead and try to talk yourself into the notion that more people are watching "Meet the Press." If you really think Tim is getting more action than the preachers, you must be among those belief-jettisoners with whom the hipsters have just grown tired.

Kennedy attacked the then sacred cows of 1960 Catholic politics. Aid to parochial schools? He was against it. (This was not a popular position in middle and working class Boston, Chicago or New York, where thousands of kids like me were going to Catholic schools. ) An ambassador to and diplomatic status for the Vatican? He was against that too, to the consternation of many of my co-religionists.

Mitt said he'd never take orders from the Mormon bishops, but he didn't name one policy favored by the religious right that he would oppose. How about President Bush's faith based inititatives, which funnel taxpayer money to religious groups engaged in ostensibly non-religious projects (like drug counseling), which are nothing but subsidies for religious organizations (the money they would have spent on counseling, now provided by the fed, can be re-directed to proselytizing)? Kennedy would never have been for this, or for the open electioneering which now goes on as religious leaders tell their followers how to vote. Romney was silent on both counts. And he has already flip-flopped on the mother of all quasi-religious issues, abortion. Formerly pro-choice, Romney is now avowedly pro-life. Kennedy's policies were opposed in many instances to his religious interests. Romney seems intent on demonstrating that his are compelled by those interests.

In Texas forty seven years ago, on the subject of religion, Kennedy was principled, unyielding, and right. In Texas yesterday, on the same subject, Romney showed a lot of profile but not much courage. And he was wrong.

2007-12-04T07:59:00.000-08:00

PERSIAN PASSION

So, they do not have a nuclear weapons program after all.

What to make of the just released National Intelligence Estimate ("NIE" for the acronym-meisters) -- which states, with "high confidence", that Iran four years ago abandoned its plans to build a nuclear bomb and, with "moderate confidence," that the Iranian program remains "suspended" -- is the buzz in Washington (and elsewhere) today.

Here's my take.

I have "no confidence" that the Bush administration cares much about the new NIE. Upon its release, the Bushies engaged in their usual double talk and denial. The National Security Adviser said the NIE proves that the pressure of economic sanctions worked, which is odd, since the Iranian program ended in 2003, or before the sanctions were really ratcheted up. The Secretary of Defense said, in effect, so what, they (Iran) had one (a nuke weapons program) before and can start one again, especially given the program they now have in place for the development of nuclear energy. He neglected to note that the administration approves of the Iranian nuclear energy program -- bombs bother them but nuclear waste is just fine.

Not to be outdone, however, the President eclipsed his aides with the type of assessment of which only he is capable. He said "the NIE provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community . . . to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program"; he followed that up with the statement that the NIE means "nothing's changed."

Sometimes I think this guy is not living on the same planet as the rest of us. Unfortunately, however, he is the President and we already have a bomb (which he can launch), so we have to take him seriously, despite the ever present need this creates to engage in hand to hand combat with logic, the English language and empirical reality.

But enough about us. Really . . . what's up with this guy? And how dangerous is he? To begin, assuming the NIE is right, whatever it means we have to do, it cannot mean that we have to pressure Iran to suspend its nuclear weapons program. Because this, apparently, is what they already have done. If I were the Iranians, however, I'd be worried. Bush has a lot of trouble accepting "Yes " for an answer. No nukes! You'd think we won and Bush would graciously accept the victory. But "nothing's changed," according to W. This is crazy talk -- illogical, un-empirical, ill advised, and just plain stupid.

But it's also Bush's m.o. In the run up to the war in Iraq, as the weapons inspectors found no wmd and as the Iraquis issued their required report to the UN stating (quite accurately) that they then had no wmd, the President did not care. He said, in effect, that the Iraquis were lying (they weren't) and that he did not care what Hans Blix found (or did not find).

And he's doing it again. The NIE means "nothing's changed" because for him, it hasn't. We still must do today what we were doing yesterday, or pressure the Iranians to suspend their nuclear weapons program, even though there is no such program to suspend. Question: how precisely could Iran demonstrate future compliance with this latest demand? Answer: it can't, any more than Iraq could demonstrate compliance with the UN wmd mandates in late 2002 and early 2003. At least not to this guy.

Joe Biden recently said that if Bush bombs or goes to war against Iran, he (Biden) would move for impeachment. If I were Biden, I'd get the resolution ready. Because, "nothing's changed."

2007-11-28T16:11:00.000-08:00

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The French have a saying, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose -- the more things change, the more they remain the same. Presidential politics has that character these days, with a vengeance.

Bill Clinton said yesterday that he opposed the Iraq war "from the beginning." I guess that depends on what the meaning of the word "beginning" is. The New York Times said the statement "was more absolute than his comments before the invasion in March 2003," and President Clinton's aides characterized his Delphic utterances from that period -- namely, that he would have given the weapons inspectors more time -- as the sort of modified limited hang out an ex-President owes a sitting President. It turns out, of course, that his opposition was very modified and very limited, because at the same time, the former President also spoke approvingly of the Senate's 2002 resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq. This is the resolution Senator Clinton voted for, which the Republicans will wrap her in come the Fall of 2008 if she is the Democratic nominee.

The scary part of Bill Clinton is that he can offer these kind of John Kerry-ish "I was for it before I was against it" encomiums without sounding nuts, which unfortunately (for the country) is how Kerry sounded when he tried it. Some people hate this about Bill Clinton (Sen. Bob Kerrey once said that Clinton was "very good" at lying, which wasn't a compliment). Others think it is a sign of genius (F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that "The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function"). Bill Clinton is, shall we say, very functional.

Functionality aside, however, this sort of stuff stokes the fires of Clinton fatigue that are, at this point, only a few Santa Ana winds from blowing out of control. The problem is that, by January 2001, the country was tired of Clinton, his great economy, general state of peace and hands on governing style to the contrary notwithstanding. We have now totally forgotten that sense of ennui because, today, we are really tired of Bush, the only guy capable of reminding us how much we miss Clinton. But we miss the economy and our place in the world during Clinton's eight years. We miss his competence. We do not miss his tortured efforts to conjugate the verb "is". And unfortunately, this "from the beginning" remark on Iraq reminds us more of the latter than the former.

I am writing this post before the Republican You Tube debate tonight and will venture a hardly bold prediction. They will give Hillary Clinton a lot of "face" time in their debate. They have been doing this in all their debates so this hardly counts as an insight. But the point is that they are doing this not merely because they oppose her, which is not news, but rather (and mostly) because they all really want to run against her, which is news. Politicians stuck in the volatile world that is the GOP Presidential primary campaign do not typically hype the opposition's potential standard bearer to the degree Hillary has been and will be mentioned. Usually, they are trying to increase their own numbers and nail down their own nomination before taking on the other side. Not this time, however. Despite the fact that none of them can really be called the front runner at this point (pace the national polls which boost, slightly, the former Mayor), Rudy and Mitt and Huckabee and McCain and Thompson collectively can't get enough of Senator Clinton. The question is: Why?

The answer is: Clinton fatigue. They want her back. They want them back. The disquisitions on present tense, the health care debacle, the '94 rout, Monica, the pardons, the whole thing, which for them carries with it the potential for (1) reminding Americans how tired we were by the time we got to January 20, 2001, and (2) forgetting how angry we are today. By any reasonable standard, the period 1992 - 2000 was a reasonably good one for the average American (who, after twenty years of stasis, finally saw his wages rise at least a bit) and a great one for the better off. But not the way the GOP tells it now (in fact, Rudy recently gave a speech warning of a return to the 1990s, a proposition he treated -- without explanation -- as the Q.E.D. on why Hillary should not be President), and not the way they positioned it then either (Monica, the pardons, and on and on). Similarly, by any reasonable standard, we are collectively in much worse shape today (the Bush administration long ago abandoned trickle down -- in favor of gush up --as an economic policy, and on the war, the Bushies have given the super majority which opposes it nothing but a three fingered salute). But that's not the way they tell that part of the story either.

Now, here, they have a big problem. Because, on the current state of the union, they really have no story to tell, at least not one that can put lipstick on the pig they have created. So they have decided not to bother. Instead, here's their answer to today's sad state of affairs -- the Clintons. You got it. They can't defend the economy, or the war, or the Court, at least not to the 70% who are not part of their base. So they do not plan to. Instead, they plan to remind us of -- and win based on -- . . . Clinton fatigue.

Here's my counter to their strategy. Let's borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Let's get a little "functional." We were tired of Bill and Hil on January 20, 2001. We were also a lot better off with him (or them) in charge. I recently wrote a politically despondent friend in Atlanta that any Democrat with a chance at the nomination will be better than any Republican similarly situated. I love Obama. He'd be a good President, much better than anything the other side now has on offer. So would Edwards, or Biden or Dodd or Richardson or Kucinich (who my son loves).

And so would Hillary. Even if what's his name is still conjugating verbs.

2007-11-21T13:03:00.000-08:00

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

The Dow is down. . .a lot. We are still in Iraq notwithstanding an election a year ago that made it pretty clear 70% of us do not want to be. Lawyers are being arrested in Pakistan while Taliban are being set free. The home run king has been indicted. Global warming proceeds apace as the US bides its (and the world's) time, which we now know is rapidly running out. Broadway is black, as effectively are Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, SNL and a whole host of other shows (OK, this very last reality -- namely, the other shows -- may not be so bad). And the only Republican making any sense is the libertarian, Ron Paul.

So what precisely are we thankful for this Thanksgiving?

Those of spiritual bent, myself included, thank God for the bounty, fortune, and sheer good luck which many of us enjoy. To that should be added thanks for our friends, family and good health. But let's be honest here. After the usual suspects, the candidate list for thanks this year is a little thin. Absent the annual turkey whose life he just saved, very few outside his family and the GOP base are thanking W for his performance this year; I bet Cheney has even lost some members of his family. And Rudy never had a lot of his family to begin with, so he doesn't make the cut. The Dems are not getting thanks because they have not done what we elected them to do. Their only excuse -- the GOP minority threat of filibuster -- shows you cannot even be thankful for our system of government. After all, 60 votes are needed in the Senate to do anything, making majority rule somewhat beside the point (and therefore perhaps not worthy of the thanks we give it. . . or the Founding Fathers). As a lawyer, I would always like to be able to at least thank the Supreme Court. But they entered a semi-permanent realm of no thank you after Bush v. Gore. Perhaps one day they will be entitled to forgiveness. . .but never thanks.

I thank my wife. . .for marrying me and for being a great stepmother. But that's not unique in any way to 2007, and I thanked her last year as well. There's of course no harm in repeating the thanks. But the holiday is an annual one, so I think good form at least requires some additions to the list that constitute a basis for thanks au courant as it were. For the same reason, thanking my parents and sister is fine but doesn't really save 2007. Ditto, my children, although my soon not to be teenage son is back among the living (after a very short, but typical, adolescence). So I thank him (and Colorado College, which seems to have been more responsible for this certainly than me) for that. And I thank his friend Max, who is one of the inspirations for my blogging (though others may not thank Max, for the same reason).

I thank my dog, who is cute and always friendly (albeit blind). But not my cat, who is often mean and wakes me up at 6 am every day in ways that I do not find amusing. I thank my mother-in-law (obviously for my wife, but also for refusing to allow me to do the cleaning and for the cookies she sneaks into the house). I even thank my erstwhile right wing (he says he is now an "Independent") radio talk show host cousin, who has me on his show from time to time, to the consternation of the right wing.

OK, I admit it. I do have reasons to celebrate this holiday. And can now eat turkey, mashed potatoes and apple pie in abundance, having given due thanks.

But c'mon people. Let's improve the list for 2008. My cat is not going to get any better.

2007-11-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

PSYCH-OPS

The Repubican Party in my lifetime has routinely touted itself as tougher and more competent than its Democratic competitor in matters of foreign policy. From the (false) claim that President Reagan won the Cold War via his military build-up and unwillingness to compromise on Star Wars (false because the build-up began in his predecessor's administration and was only marginally increased in his own, because Star Wars was ignored by the Soviets once Gorbachev was convinced that it was chimerical, and because the Cold War ended only after Reagan reversed his years of neo-con rhetoric to sign back on to the bipartisan policy of arms reduction that untimately allowed Gorbachev to sell internal reform to his own generals), to the beating Dukakis took over that goofy Alfred E Newman picture of him in the tank, the drumbeat of criticism that Clinton was weak on terrorism (when in fact he did more and came closer to beating our adversaries than the current administration), and the manic refrain of the current set of GOP candidates that they can be counted on to stay in Iraq and/or bomb the Persians into a no-nuke Iran, the party of Lincoln in its decidedly post-Lincoln phase has never ceased to remind voters of its claimed toughness.

Unfortunately, however, in the war on terror, this testosterone politics is not only shallow, it is positively dangerous. At the outset, certain facts cannot be disputed. They are these. Neither Iran (with an economy roughly the size of Connecticut), Al Qaeda (a remnant in Afghanistan and a marketing arm with some IEDs in Iraq), Syria (with an economy smaller than Iran's), Hamas and Hezbollah (political operations with guns) or the leftover Afghani Taliban (now holed up in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan) can beat the United States militarily, economically, culturally or politically. In fact, the war on terror against these various "enemies" is not really lose-able, at least not in the sense that our enemies have any realistic chance of winning as a consequence of their own initiative. They simply do not have the military or financial wherewithal to mount an effective campaign, nor can they obtain effective power (i.e., durable control) in any particular region of the world. The ease with which the Afghani Taliban was routed demonstrated as much, as does the inability of groups like Hamas or Hezbollah to actually govern the areas where their writ (legal or de facto) runs. Thus, wherever they rule or even pretend to effective power, the hold exercised by these groups is unsteady at best and often transitory, roughly the equivalent of a gang's ability to "control" an extended urban neighborhood in America. So, in fact, they can't beat us. (Repeat that to yourself every time you hear someone mention the war on terror as the consuming generational struggle of our time; it'll make going to work, taking out the garbage, and sundry other mundanae tasks seem much less dangerous than they might otherwise appear.)

The Administration accepts this "they can't beat us" reality, but responds by claiming "we can beat ourselves". And the Administration is right. But not for the reasons it thinks. And therein hangs the tale.

The terrorists know they cannot beat us militarily, but they do believe they can win a psychiological war. And in that effort, they have a not so secret weapon. That weapon is fear, and at this point its best delivery system is Rudy Guiliani. In his campaign for the Presidency, as Joe Biden has aptly noted, Guiliani's sentences contain three things -- a noun, a verb, and the word "9/11". Under his watch, we will (1) be in Iraq until whenever, (2) go to war with and/or inititate a non-stop bombing campaign against Iran, (3) forever troll the domestic and international communications networks without warrants, (4) continue to illegally hold detainees at Guantanamo, and (5) torture those we think have information while denying we do so with double-talk. Indeed, though a lawyer by training and well publicized professional experience, Guiliani (along with his cohorts, with the notable, courageous, and useful exception of Sen. McCain, who happens to be the only Presidential candidate in either party who actually has been tortured) has baldly pretended that he cannot categorically preclude waterboarding because he does not know the specific circumstances in which it has been or will be used or the precise details of the actual technique. As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, prosecutor Guiliani routinely laughed at defendants who made similar claims about the nature of racketeering in an effort to avoid prosecution. As a candidate, it is now the height of mendacity that he recurs to such falsehoods in his non-stop effort to sound tough. (Memo to Rudy: waterboarding has been illegal for decades, much like loansharking, murder, theft and a host of other crimes that you regularly prosecuted during your stints at the Justice Department and in New York.)

Only the terrorists are cheering (and the 30% who still think W is a good President, but for a different reason). The terrorists know that a President Guiliani will replace FDR's famous nostrum -- "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" -- with the reality that "our only policy is fear itself". And they also know that the consequences will be precisely those Franklin Roosevelt warned against -- an irrational hatred that saps our energy for any productive enterprise, a series of mindless but expensive and largely ineffective escalations against third rate nuisances, the alienation of our friends, and a pyschological xenophobia that walls off the larger world as it locates recurrent threats of 9/11 in anyone who disagrees.

FDR and Harry Truman taught us that it is entirely possbile to fight an enemy without becoming the enemy or sacrificing the freedoms that make America what it is. FDR did it in World War II and Truman gave us the game plan of containment that led to the successful conclusion of the Cold War (and the demise of Communism) decades later. All this, moreoever, was done without repealing the bill of rights; in fact, it was done while the nation began to redeem its promise of equal rights to minorities and women, and while it educated a new class of ex-GIs who themselves gave a fuller meaning to Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" as they created a large, vital and vibrant middle class. Guiliani is a child of that progress. Shame on him for not respecting the values that made it possible, even (indeed especially) in the face of the the then global threats that made it by no means certain.

The terrorists do not have to launch a nuke or deploy a chemical or biological weapon to win their war. They just have to root for Guiliani. And my bet is that this is what they are doing.

2007-10-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

TEXAS TEA AND TEHERAN

Finally, we now have a credible reason why the Bush administration will not start a war in Iran. Not because the administration believes in diplomacy, let alone can practice it effectively. Not because there is no factually identified casus belli, despite the administration's repeated claims that Iran is attacking US troops in Iraq. Not because Iran has stopped aiding Iraqui Shiites. And not because Iran's faith based and fact denying President without portfolio, Ahmadinejad, a somewhat rhetorical mirror image of our own faith based and fact denying chief executive, has started to make any sense. No, the reason Bush will not go to war with Iran is that oil experts are now predicting the price of oil will skyrocket if such an attack is launched.

A president so committed to freedom and democracy as Bush claims he is would, of course, not be deterred by such proletarian concerns. Afterall, if freedom is not America's gift to the world but rather God's gift to humanity, as Bush claimed in one of his first term State of the Union speeches, the devil's gold of oil (or, as Jed Clampett called it, "Texas tea") could hardly constitute a sound basis for stopping freedom's march at the Persian border. But, as Mr. Dooley either said or should have said, with this administration, things get "curiouser and curiouser."

Despite his pretended support for the troops, Bush is the first president in American history to actually send American forces into combat without all the tools they needed for success. Check the record. When has any American commander in chief fired (that's what it was) generals who told him they needed more troops to succeed. Even LBJ and Nixon put 500,000 soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. And there were drafts for the Korean War, World Wars II and I, and the Civil War. Similarly, despite his constant refrain that he intends to follow the advice of his generals, Bush certainly makes certain that the advice will never go where he is loathe to venture. America's premier expert in counter-insurgency warfare is General Petreas. Having studied the Vietnam war thoroughly, and armed with his advance degrees, Petreas wrote the book on counter-insurgency. Bush should read it. If he did, he'd know that a successful counter-insurgency takes at least a decade to succeed (and often longer), and requires a force to citizen ratio far higher than the one we have in place in Iraq, surge or no surge. Petreas hasn't told us this because the administration has not asked him, and because he knows that the only way he can preserve his own credibility is by radically narrowing the questions on Iraq that he is willing to answer. Notice that General Petraes has never told us that we actually will win in Iraq or that the surge will do it. Either statement would be refuted by his own writing.

Which brings us back to oil. Facts, as the above makes clear, have never stopped the Bushies from mindlessly plunging ahead. So why should this one? For three reasons, actually. First, although Bush is not running again, the rest of the GOP is. For them, Iraq is an electoral ball and chain, and they do not need another. The economy at present is a jump ball, with high tech staving off the recession that the sub-prime induced credit crunch would otherwise invite. It won't take much to cross that line, and with oil at 90 plus bucks a barrel, another round of oil inflation would probably push us into the recession we are for now avoiding. A mismanaged war combined with a tanking economy is not a record that any Rove-like magician could spin the GOP's way out of.

Second, Rudy and the rest of the GOP presidential candidates do not really need a war with Iran; they just need a rhetorical battering ram to ceaselessly hammer and appear tough (now that Saddam is gone and the Chinese have cabined North Korea). This lesson was made crystal clear during the the cold war. Part of the reason both Reagan and Bush I could regularly play the national security card was that war with the Soviet Union during their tenure was so entirely remote, unlike, for example, during the Berlin crisis of the late '40s and or the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, where the real possbility of war was met with far less bellicose rhetoric and far more diplomatic effort -- remember, JFK secretly traded the Soviet missiles in Cuba for ours in Turkey, in stark contrast to his present successor's refusal to even speak to our adversaries. It's easy to talk tough when you do not need to act tough, and right now, the Republicans are far more interested in tough talk because they are betting this is the best way to avert electoral disaster. So, avoiding an oil spiked recession fits very neatly into the rhetorical war on terrorism the GOP thinks it can use to win elections.

Finally, right now, the electorate hates Congress as much as it hates the White House, and the administration is not going to do anything to change that perception. Imagine the demand for a windfall profits tax -- and the price gouging investigations -- if oil climbs to over $100 a barrel as the administration tries to slay the would be Iranian dragon between now and election day, 2008. Nancy Pelosi will look like an avenging angel as her erstwhile San Francisco liberalism dissolves as a voting issue. The Democrats will add thirty seats to their House majority, as well as a veto proof (or close to veto proof) Senate. No more filibusters when President Clinton (or Obama or Edwards) proposes a timetable for an exit from Iraq or (what is worse for the right wing) puts two new Justices on the Supreme Court.

This oil story so constrains the administration and its neocons that they are probably wishing they had long ago followed the advice of the Gore-acle. Think how many more options they'd have if we were truly energy independent. So keep on driving America. It's what stands between you and Thanksgiving in Teheran.