PROFILE IN COURAGE

PROFILE IN COURAGE

It was a dramatic moment, a Hollywood moment, a moment about which movies will be made and books will be written.

A senior Republican Senator from a very red state walked bleary-eyed to the well of the Senate in the early hours of the morning.  The Senator voted "No" on the motion.  The "No" killed the GOP's Health Care Freedom Act, an eight page piece of legislation unveiled only hours before. The Act was a walking misnomer.  For the 15 million who would have lost their medical insurance as a consequence, it provided neither health nor freedom.  

The "No" saved Obamacare from the inevitable death it would have suffered at the hands of this misnomer.  Everyone -- even the GOP -- wants insurance companies to cover those with pre-existing conditions while keeping  premiums affordable. That can't be done if the pool of insured is either too small or too sick.  Costs soar in either case; the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted premium hikes of 20% had the misnomer become law. Hence, Obamacare's individual mandate, the requirement that everyone  have health insurance, and pay premiums,  so that the sick can be treated at prices we can all afford.

The "No" restored some common sense to the health care debate. Once it happened,  the Majority Leader, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell, was forced to concede that his party must now move on to other matters.  This probably means that health care returns to the Congressional committees within whose jurisdiction it rests; no more midnight votes on unknown bills where there have been no hearings, perhaps the end of legislating ignorance. 

The Senate, like the country, is exhausted.  It is tired of Trump and tweets and twilight sessions designed to fulfill  promises Republicans made but never thought they'd have to honor.  Repealing Obamacare was one of those promises.  Everyone sitting in the Senate last night thought Trump would lose last November . . .

And that Hillary would save them from the consequences of their vote.

Alas, Hillary was at home in Chappaqua and The Donald was at home in the White House.  

His Hairness, as he told us repeatedly throughout the week, had "pen in hand," ready to sign anything the Republican Congress sent him. The Health Care Freedom Act would do. He wanted a bill, any bill. He vigorously lobbied the Senator who would ultimately stop the GOP in its tracks and prevent Trump from claiming his obsessively sought "win". Though his campaign promise to insure that all have health insurance had become, as another failing President once famously said, "inoperative" . . . 

The "No" saved us from that as well.

When it was over, Republicans cried but Democrats did not gloat. They knew how close they had come to a GOP "Yes" that spelled disaster for 15 million and a lot of premium pain for the rest of us. 

Earlier in the week, a motion to repeal Obamacare and replace it with the Senate's amended version of the House's repeal and replace had failed by a fourteen vote margin, and on Wednesday a motion to just repeal Obamacare without any replacement had failed by ten votes. In both cases,  more than a half dozen GOP Senators had voted against. 

By Thursday night, however, the GOP had come up with a pared down version that became known as "skinny repeal."  It eliminated the individual mandate, funding for Planned Parenthood, and some taxes (over a period of years).  But it didn't  touch Medicaid, and because of that, it seemed to thread the needle, allowing GOP Senators from states that had accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare to satisfy their Governors while repealing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act Republicans hated most.  Nevertheless, the  CBO predicted that 15 million would lose insurance if skinny repeal became law.

At 2:00 a.m. today, those 15 million breathed a sigh of relief.  Skinny repeal was defeated . . .

By one vote.

In a rare profile in courage at a time when there's lots of the former but almost none of the latter,  the vote came from a senior Republican Senator from an implacably red state.

A state that Donald Trump easily carried last November.

I'm speaking, of course, of . . .

Alaska's Lisa Murkowski.

SUMMER OF '17

SUMMER OF '17

In the Summer of 1962, I was six years old.  

My father and mother took my sister and me to Cape Cod on vacation. We rented a small bungalow on the bay side, in Yarmouth Port.  In the late morning and early afternoon, we swam in the bay. At night we barbecued.  In the morning, my father went clamming.  

That was pretty much our daily schedule during this week long idyll.

Except on Sunday, when we had to go to Mass.  

And did.

But not just any Mass.  

This was 1962 and the most famous Catholic in America was hanging out only a few miles away.  So we packed into the Plymouth and drove to Mass in Hyannis Port.

It was hot and crowded.  

And in Latin.  

So I didn't understand a thing.  

Except at the end . . .  

When we stood outside the church and watched the President of the United States and his wife leave the church and hop into a car for their ride home.  

My father put me on his shoulders and there JFK was, distinctly red-headed, smiling at the crowd, elegant and, I knew,  important.

He wasn't important to me because of what he had said ("Ask not..."), or because of what he had done (become the youngest elected President in our history), or even because of the position he held. He wasn't important to me because he was taking us to the moon, or unleashing a new found enthusiasm among the young, or enlisting America's brightest to govern with vigor (or vig-ah, as he said it).

I was six and knew none of this.

He was important, someone to look up to,  because my parents told me he was, and then -- to prove it -- lifted me above a small sea of humanity for my bird's-eye view.

How many parents are doing that today?

President Trump thinks his wife is, as he has put it, "Jackie O. on steroids."  Perhaps so.  She is elegant and reserved and independent, with more than a hint of the Europe that produced her.  

But for all that Melania Trump might  resemble Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we can say with complete certainty that Donald Trump is no John F. Kennedy. 

Kennedy was measured.  Trump is impulsive.

Kennedy was active and engaged.  Trump is lazy and bored.  

Kennedy respected his advisers.  Trump makes his nervous.  

Kennedy was eloquent.  Trump is bombastic. 

Kennedy disarmed his critics.  Trump insults his. 

Kennedy tried to tear down walls that separated peoples.  Trump wants to build them.  

Kennedy called out the best in us.  Trump nourishes our resentments.

And, finally . . .

Kennedy confronted Russian dictators. Trump embraces them.

Both of them, as human beings, were (in JFK's case) and are (in Trump's) flawed.  In fact, they were both very flawed, neither paragons of virtue in their personal lives nor unwilling to throw sharp elbows in their professional ones.  

They also share a common denominator of having mastered before all others the new media of their time -- television in the case of JFK and social media in the case of Trump. 

And both of them are  victims of hagiography, by third parties post-November 1963 in Kennedy's case and by his own hand in Trump's. They thus exist in worlds where truth runs up against nostalgia for a world that wasn't (JFK)  or one that cannot be (Trump).  Put differently, the nation in the early '60s was not as great as Arthur Schlesinger's JFK would have us believe it was, and today it will not ever resemble Trump's grandiose fictions, no matter how often he mouths the words "win" or "great".

The difference, however, is that Kennedy was aware of his flaws, tried to confront and tame them, treated sycophants with disdain and popularity with suspicion, and used new media to embrace and include.  Trump either boasts about his flaws or lies about them, retreats to his twitter account where he insults and divides, demands praise, and deifies polls even as he distorts them.

In the Summer of '62, I was held above a crowd to witness a President held high.

If that happened today . . .

There'd be nothing to see.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

Happy Birthday America.

Now blow out the candles and make a wish.

Not so easy this year, is it?

In the past, your greatest dreams were your fondest wishes.  

In 1776, you wished for independence and wrote a manifesto on liberty rooted in the intellectual high ground of enlightened reason and natural rights.

In 1865, you wished for an end to fratricide, understanding that the end could come only by repudiating the hypocrisy that enslaved some in the service of a proclaimed equality for all.

In 1885,  you wished that the world would send you its "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," planted this wanted sign on liberty's statue in New York's harbor, and then welcomed untold millions in the greatest immigration wave the world has ever seen.

In 1918 and 1945,  you wished for world peace and sent millions of you own abroad in search of that goal.  In between, you wished for shared prosperity and deputized a government to make possible what greed had made unattainable.

In 1965, you wished for a color-blind society, and enlisted law in the service of that aim. Forty-three years later, in 2008, you came closer than ever to making that wish a reality.

What will you wish for this year?

You are in serious trouble.  You are being led, such as it is, by an insecure demagogue who demands loyalty instead of competence,  an unschooled and immature narcissist with neither the ability to do his job nor the willingness to learn.  He is a man-child permanently stuck at adolescence, all ego and little id, shallow, mean spirited and often just cruel.  Lacking impulse control, he is willing at every turn to insult and demean any who oppose or criticize.  His dishonesty is pathological.

In a family, this is  fatal, which is why he has had three of them. 

In a business, this can be fatal as well, which is why so many of his have failed.

In a country, however, these traits invite catastrophe.

Over the course of the last six months, he has spurned allies and empowered at least one enemy. Perhaps (we do not yet know and he denies it) complicit in -- and in any case incompetently silent on -- Russian interference in last year's election, he degrades a free  press, labeling fake what is true.  As he journeys to Hamburg this week to confront our enemy, but his apparent friend, the free world shudders at the prospect of what such an entente could entail.  

There are no immediate solutions.  

Time may provide an opportunity for correction.   But if provided, reason would still have to prevail.

It did not last year.

So Happy Birthday America.

Blow out the candles.

And wish wisely.