Category Archives: Columns

It’s now-or-never time for our endorsement decisions

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON TUESDAY, New Hampshire votes. On Wednesday, presidential candidates will descend on South Carolina in such numbers as we’ve never seen, and stay for the duration — the Republicans until the 19th of this month, the Democrats through the 26th.
    Time for us to get busy on The State’s editorial board. Not that we’ve been slacking off, but our pace starting this week is likely to make the past year look like a nice, long nap.
    Watch for more columns than usual from me on this page or the facing one. And between columns, keep an eye on my blog. But the main work of the next two weeks will be interviewing the remaining viable candidates and writing our endorsements. Our plan, from which we will deviate only under the most extreme circumstances, is to endorse in the GOP primary a week from today, Jan. 13, and to state our choice in the Democratic contest Jan. 20.
    But, asked regular gadfly Doug Ross on my blog last week, our endorsements have “already been written,” right? And as another writer, who goes by the pseudonym “weldon VII,” asked, “Why would Romney waste his time coming to see you, Brad?”
    Such are the pitfalls of blogging. Some folks mistake my passing observations for final conclusions and (an even greater mistake) my opinions for those of the whole editorial board.
    Right now — since I have not once asked any of my colleagues whom they currently prefer in the two primaries (I want that discussion to happen after the last interview — it makes for a more intense debate, but a much better-informed one), and since they haven’t hinted aloud or in print, I don’t know how near or far we are from our eventual consensus. (Ask me next week this time.)
    As for “weldon’s” comment — well, let’s be frank: He’s thinking of my oft-stated respect for John McCain. You don’t have to read the blog to know about that; it’s been stated here often enough.
    But I’ll say two things about that: First, I had good things to say about Mike Huckabee, too, after I met him for the first time on Sept. 20. He made a stronger impression than expected; he’s made a similar impression on a lot of other people since then.
    Secondly, I was a big admirer of Sen. McCain back in 2000, too — but we ended up endorsing George W. Bush.
    Let me tell you about that — and also answer another question Doug asked: Who breaks a tie on the editorial board?
    It generally doesn’t come to a tie, because we work really hard for a consensus. Some of us change our minds during the discussion, while others concede to a second choice, seeing that their first isn’t going to carry the day. It’s complicated.
    I can think of only two times when we had a “tie” to break, and one of them was in February 2000. Gov. Bush came in at 8 a.m. on the Wednesday before our endorsement; Sen. McCain joined us Thursday afternoon. (Alan Keyes had been in the previous week.) The moment Sen. McCain left, we began our final discussion.
    The previous weekend, I had written and e-mailed to my boss, the publisher, a 4,000-word memo explaining why I believed we should endorse Sen. McCain. I did so knowing that he (this was two publishers ago, I should add) was just as firmly for Gov. Bush. But he was leaving the question open until after the interviews.
    We went into those meetings with most of the group leaning toward McCain (based on comments volunteered to me). It’s amazing what a good meeting can do for a candidate, or what a bad one can do to a candidate. That Wednesday, George W. Bush had the most “on” hour of his life. I have never seen the man, before or since, present himself so well, or so articulately. (Maybe it was the time of day; maybe it was the two cups of coffee we watched him drink; most likely it was his firm knowledge that this was a make-or-break moment.)
    John McCain was in a funk on Thursday. I’ve never seen him so “off” as he was that day. In a downcast voice, he spoke of a young boy who’d come up to him that day and told him the senator had been his hero, but not any more, after what a caller had told the boy over the phone. (Neither he nor we fully appreciated yet the devastating impact that smear campaign would have.)
    The publisher had come prepared for our internal debate. He had a six-inch stack of documents he had gathered to support his position. When he was done, and I was done, we went around the table. Two people had changed their minds. It was a tie. And in a tie in which the publisher is on one side and the editorial page editor on the other, the publisher’s side wins.
    Do I make my decision solely on the basis of a single meeting? Of course not. But some of my colleagues don’t pay the kind of attention to these candidates that I do day after day; that’s not what they’re paid to do. They come in with relatively fresh perspectives.
    And while it doesn’t happen often, I’ve been known to change my mind in these meetings. I’m wary of this, and reluctant to give it too much weight. But if I don’t give it some weight, what indeed is the point of the interview?
    We’re working with the campaigns to firm up the appointments, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have spoken with Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson by the end of the day Thursday. Once those are out of the way, we hope to see Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — and John Edwards, if he’s still in it after Tuesday.
    I don’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but I know this is going to be interesting.

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — please

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Baker

Howard Baker and me — Des Moines, Iowa, January 1980

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said the great and powerful Oz. But I say it’s the guy voting in the privacy of a booth that we should heed. It’s the Iowa caucuses we should ignore.
    As I write this [we’re talking Thursday afternoon, folks], I don’t know who won last night, and don’t care. I’ve got my eye on New Hampshire — and, of course, South Carolina.
    The Washington Post’s David Broder had it right in his Thursday column when he called the caucuses a “double-distortion mirror” on the campaign. The turnout is tiny, consisting only of people who are willing to attend a two-hour night meeting during the week and declare their preference in front of the world.
    Forget what happened last night if you were watching to see which candidate has the strongest support among voters of either party. All the caucuses measure is who can most effectively corral the most highly committed, vocal partisans at a given moment. It tests organization — and a very specialized form of it at that. Organizational skill is important — but it’s hardly everything. [Note this amendment today to this opinion.]
    I used to believe in the Iowa mystique, but I learned my lesson. As a reporter for a Tennessee paper in January 1980, I spent a few days following Sen. Howard Baker as he campaigned among the frozen chosen of Des Moines and Dubuque. Ronald Reagan had made the “fatal mistake” of not contesting Iowa. My deadline story on a GOP candidates’ debate began with the solemn pronouncement that while it was difficult to determine the winner, it was clear that Gov. Reagan was the loser, because he had not shown up.
    I really felt vindicated when George H.W. Bush emerged as the caucus winner. (Remember the “Big Mo”?) Needless to say, my perceived political I.Q. dropped precipitously over the succeeding weeks.
    I witnessed the partial unraveling of my thesis up close and personal at another set of caucuses — in Arkansas. At a congressional district caucus in a motel in Jonesboro, I saw what a subversion of the popular will a caucus could be.
    A lot of people in the room favored Mr. Bush after his Iowa win. If the participants (a tiny subset of Republicans in that district) had stepped immediately into voting booths upon arrival, he likely would have come in a weak first or a strong second.
    But the Reagan people and the Baker people had done a deal. They voted for each other’s delegates, giving Mr. Reagan a huge win, boosting Sen. Baker (whose candidacy was essentially over at this point) to second, and giving Mr. Bush — in a gesture that seemed consciously intended to add insult to injury — exactly one delegate.
    The head of the Baker team on the scene smiled slyly in response to my questions and said golly, he couldn’t help it if his people and the Reagan people just happened to like each other’s delegates, could he? It was the first time I’d ever met Don Sundquist, but he was obviously headed for bigger things (Congress, and governor of Tennessee, to be precise).
    But you couldn’t fool George Herbert Walker Bush. He showed up at the caucus for what had been intended as a triumphal appearance. Instead, he kept it jarringly short, then tried to dodge the press. We had to do an impressive bit of broken-field running through the chairs and tables of an empty restaurant to head him off. Trapped, he answered a couple of questions, but he practically had smoke coming out of his ears as he did so.
    He was ticked, and who could blame him? He knew exactly what had been done to him — and it was something that no one could have done in a primary.
    I was peeved myself eight years later, when — having moved back home to South Carolina — I was shut out of the state Democratic Party’s process of choosing delegates to its 1988 national convention.
You may recall 1988 as the year South Carolina vaulted to a national significance that rivaled the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire. South Carolina gave the furious loser I had last seen fulminating in Jonesboro the momentum he needed to win the nomination and the presidency.
    That year’s primary also gave a boost to the state’s Republican Party as then-Gov. Carroll Campbell — who had helped engineer the Bush victory — built it into a force that would dominate South Carolina politics.
    Things were different in the other party. I’m not saying the fact that Democrats chose the insular, insider-oriented caucus path over the GOP’s successful “y’all come” primary caused its slide from relevance. But it didn’t help.
    Personally, I hated the caucus approach because I value my right to vote, and the caucuses disenfranchised me: The editor supervising The State’s political writers could not attend a party caucus and publicly declare for a candidate.
    But there’s a larger point here than my own predicament: Even if they weren’t professionally disqualified from participating, few independent voters will declare themselves at a caucus when they have the option of voting anonymously in a primary.
    Whatever happened last night in Iowa, it can hardly be seen as the collective will of that state’s voters.
    But, you say, the caucuses last night do matter because in such an absurdly compressed nomination process, Iowa can give one candidate a critical image boost on the eve of New Hampshire, and prove a fatal stumbling block to another, with no time to recover.
    Exactly. Iowa shouldn’t matter, in that it does not provide a fair contest of any candidate’s true electoral appeal. But to the extent that it does matter, it constitutes a disservice to the republic.

Lieberman endorsement strikes a blow for the rest of us

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Joe_mccain2

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

    “In this critical election, no one should let party lines be a barrier to choosing the person we believe is best qualified to lead our nation forward. The problems that confront us are too great… for us to play partisan politics with the Presidency.
    “We desperately need our next President to break through the reflexive partisanship that is poisoning our politics and stopping us from getting things done.”
            — Sen. Joe Lieberman,
            endorsing John McCain

JOHN McCAIN got an early Christmas present up in New Hampshire Monday. So did the UnParty.
    The UnParty, I should explain, is a product of my wishful imagination, an anti-partisan alternative to the foolish, vicious Punch and Judy show that the two parties play out daily on 24/7 TV “news” channels. It has no infrastructure, no declared candidates, and exists mainly on my blog and in gratuitous mentions here that probably mystify more than inform.
    John McCain, however, is far more substantial. He is an actual U.S. senator who is seeking the Republican nomination for president of the United States. You may have heard of him, in spite of what sometimes looks like a conspiracy on the part of major media and poll respondents to make him seem a marginal figure.
    The Christmas present to which I refer was the endorsement of Joe Lieberman, late of the Democratic Party, who strode triumphant over the yammering partisans of his own former faction in last year’s elections and is now perhaps the only major political figure in this country who is really and truly free to endorse whomever he honestly believes is the best candidate. And out of the crowds of candidates seeking the office, he chooses to endorse his friend and colleague John McCain, and parties be damned.
    This is not the only big present Sen. McCain has received early this week. On Sunday, he was endorsed by three newspapers, two of them being The Des Moines Register and The Boston Globe. (The third was the less-well-known Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire.) Between them, they eclipsed the earlier endorsement he had received from the storied New Hampshire Union Leader.
    (Santa wasn’t quite as generous to other boys and girls. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had to share the loot: Des Moines went for Sen. Clinton; Boston for Sen. Obama.)
    An excerpt from the Globe’s McCain endorsement:

    “Conventional wisdom among political handlers used to hold that a candidate needed to capture the political center. The last two presidential campaigns proved that wrong. The Republicans scraped out victories by pressing just enough buttons and mobilizing just enough voters. But such wins breed political polarization and deprive a president of the political capital needed to ask Americans to sacrifice in difficult times.
    “The antidote to such a toxic political approach is John McCain. The iconoclastic senator from Arizona has earned his reputation for straight talk by actually leveling with voters, even at significant political expense….
    “As a lawmaker and as a candidate, McCain has done more than his share to transcend partisanship and promote an honest discussion of the problems facing the United States….”

    You’ll note a certain resemblance to the quote above from Sen. Lieberman — the emphasis on getting outside the respective comfort zones of the partisans, and having the courage and conviction to make the hard choices that are necessary to further the good of the country. Echoing a John F. Kennedy speech I recently cited here, Sen. Lieberman said Sen. McCain can be trusted to do the right thing “not only when it is easy, but when it is hard.”
    That’s what appeals to me about the Lieberman endorsement. It’s not so much that he endorses McCain as the reasons he gives.
    At this point I should note that this column is not about boosting the candidacy of John McCain. I know better. The fact is, Sen. McCain’s biggest problem in the South Carolina primary may be the fact that he is not seen as “Republican enough” by some, and this endorsement hardly helps. He does work across the aisle — on campaign finance reform, on fighting corporate welfare and global warming, on promoting rational immigration policy. He does take stands on the basis of the greater good, with little regard for personal political consequences. And there are people who don’t like those facts.
    To the extent that there is electoral advantage to be derived, it’s in New Hampshire, where, as The Washington Post notes, the McCain campaign is once again “targeting independents more than it is establishment Republicans.” But even there, the benefit is debatable. It certainly doesn’t pull over any Democrats, to whom Mr. Lieberman is anathema.
    What is most exciting about this endorsement is less the hope it offers the McCain campaign, and more the hope it offers for American politics that something like this can even happen.
    Over here at the UnParty — where anything that confuses both partisan Democrats and partisan Republicans is welcome — the Lieberman endorsement is very encouraging news. Lord knows that these days, in the 16th year of the bloody Bush-Clinton Wars, we don’t get much of that.

Joe_mccain1

Single-payer position should be no surprise

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I continue to hear from folks who are:

a) pleased by my advocacy of a single-payer national health plan;
b) surprised by it.

This intrigues me, but I should know that it arises from the same in-the-rut thinking that I’m always ranting against here. Apparently, my position just doesn’t fit into the convenient left-vs.-right dichotomy that most folks have, unfortunately accepted as reflecting reality.

Most of the expressions of both a) and b) come from folks of the self-described "liberal" persuasion. I think this is because they have decided recently to divide the world into two portions — those who demand that our troops get out of Iraq by last year, and everybody else. Since I am definitely in the "everybody else" category, they are befuddled at my health-care position. But… he’s a warmonger, so how…?

If only they would try harder to grok the UnParty. I clearly stated my single-payer position in my very first UnParty column, the manifesto itself. Of course, the UnParty doesn’t demand adherence to that or any other fixed position. The most fundamental, non-negotiable tenet is"

First, unwavering opposition to fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets.
Within our party would be many ideas, and in each situation we would
sift through them to find the smartest possible approach to the
challenge at hand. Another day, a completely different approach might be best.

But I gave a list of particular positions that I, personally, would bring to the mix as an UnPartisan. Here are items 2 and 3:

  • Belief in just war theory, and in America’s obligation to use its strength for good. (Sort of like the Democrats before Vietnam.)
  • A single-payer national health care system — for the sake of business and
    the workers. If liberals and conservatives could stop driving a wedge
    between labor and capital for about five minutes, we could make this a
    reality.

So — no surprises here.

My handy, all-purpose endorsement of everybody (almost)

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    Yes, dear readers, you’ve read this one before — probably. I cannibalized a blog post to construct this column — almost word for word. You’ll probably see me doing that more than once before the holidays are over. That’s partly because I’ll be doing double- and triple-duty with folks out of the office. But it’s also in keeping with what I intended when I started this blog; I had always meant to use it as a lab for developing column ideas. I just usually forget to do that.

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
SINCE MY COLUMN advocating a “single-payer” national health plan ran in this space last week, I’ve received a good bit of feedback along these lines:

Dear Mr. Warthen,
    I think your article is right on target and has a very good insight of the realities of the inefficient American health system. However, it is my feeling that by mentioning that [Dennis] Kucinich is the only one talking about single payer, and in the same line that he is not viable and has seen a UFO you are delegitimizing him…. If you think that this country needs a health care reform, why not throw your support to Kucinich…?

Regards, Kethrin Johnson

    Then, my regular blog correspondent Doug Ross wrote:

    Again, I’ll ask you to put your proverbial money where your mouth is. If you think this is an important issue, don’t endorse candidates who don’t support single payer….

    I get this sort of thing a lot, and I think it’s worth pausing to address. Doug was literally right — I think a national health plan is “an important issue.” It’s not the important issue. If there were anything that I would designate as the important issue in a presidential race, it probably wouldn’t be a domestic one. And I’d rather not judge on the basis of any single issue in foreign affairs either, if I can avoid it. (We found ourselves unable to avoid it in 2004, which made for a most distasteful endorsement.)
    Health care is very important; so are other things. If I chose on the basis of one issue only, I would have to endorse everybody at least once. Just off the top of my head, it might go like this:

Health care — Dennis Kucinich in a walk.
Iraq (as a military operation) —John McCain, the only guy who stood up for the “surge,” which was based on the idea that he alone had been pushing for four years, which was that Donald Rumsfeld refused to send enough troops to get the job done.
Iraq (long-term strategy) — Joe Biden, who (along with erstwhile candidate Sam Brownback), has been pushing the federalist approach of transforming the nation into three semi-autonomous political regions with only a loose Baghdad government uniting them.
Immigration — Either Sen. McCain, who took all the heat on the recent failed comprehensive reform effort, or Hillary Clinton, who refused to demagogue on the driver’s license flap.
Afghanistan — Barack Obama, who had the nerve to say he’d go after the Taliban in Pakistan if necessary.
Pakistan — Sen. Biden, for articulating the fact that we needed a Pakistan strategy, not a Pervez Musharraf strategy.
Administrative ability — Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney or Bill Richardson, the only governors.
Most likely to be the UnParty nominee — Tough call, but I see three most able to lead us out of the vicious partisanship of the past 15 years: Mr. Huckabee, who seems to have governed Arkansas pretty effectively with a Democratic majority in the legislature; Sen. Obama, who has made his desire to be the president of all Americans a centerpiece of his campaign; or Sen. McCain, who, from confirming judges to campaign finance reform to immigration to fighting the use of torture, has demonstrated his willingness and ability to work with Democrats time and again. (See my blog for my UnParty Manifesto.)
Abortion — Either Mr. Huckabee or Sen. McCain. The Democrats walk in the door disqualifying themselves on this one (from my point of view; maybe someday a Democrat like Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania will have a shot), and none of the other leading Republicans can be trusted fully in this area.
Most likely to be the Energy Party nominee — Nobody. Sen. McCain has done some good stuff in the Senate (along with Joe Lieberman, who was my pick for the Democratic nomination four years ago), and I like some of the things Sen. Biden has said about a president’s role in leading on this critical strategic issue. But I don’t think anybody goes far enough. (You can also read about the “Energy Party” on the blog.)
Education — Ron Paul almost gets it by wanting to do away with the U.S. Department of Education; the federal government has no business trying to run our local schools. But then he blows it by wanting to give tax credits to pay people to attend private schools, which is none of the government’s business at any level.

    You get the idea. You may notice that I have no scenarios in which I endorse John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Dodd or Fred Thompson. That’s not to dismiss them completely. I suppose if I dug further into all their positions I’d find some single-issue excuse to endorse each.
    But that’s not how we endorse, and that’s not how voters vote (I hope). Since
we can only choose one candidate, practical reality demands that we accept some compromises. The candidate you end up favoring might get just “Bs” and “Cs” on your unique grading scale in most subjects, while someone you reject might be at the top of the class on one issue, but flunk everything else.
    On my own scale, for instance, Mr. Giuliani gets mostly Bs and Cs, with a couple of poor grades on personal deportment. He may not lead the class in anything that comes immediately to mind, but that doesn’t count him out entirely.
    One good thing about primaries is that they force people who might otherwise surrender their thinking to a party to understand that even within a party, there can be great diversity of thought. Such choices compel us to acknowledge the necessity to compromise on some things, unless we’re fooling ourselves. For any thinking voter to find a candidate with whom he agrees on everything would a minor miracle.
    Anyway, back to where we started: Rep. Kucinich gets an A-plus and a gold star on health care in my gradebook. But he flunks national security, which is a required subject.

Can anyone (any viable candidate, that is) say ‘single-payer?’: Column version

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
CAN ANYONE among those with a chance of becoming president say “single-payer?” If not, forget about serious reform of the way we pay for health care.
    It doesn’t even necessarily have to be “single-payer.” Any other words will do, as long as the plan they describe is equally bold, practical, understandable, and goes as far in uprooting our current impractical, wasteful and insanely complex “system.”
    And the operative word is “bold.” Why? Because unless we start the conversation there, all we might hope for is that a few more of the one out of seven Americans who don’t have insurance will be in the “system” with the rest of us — if that, after the inevitable watering-down by Congress. And that’s not “reform.” Actual reform would rescue all of us from a “system” that neither American workers nor American employers can afford to keep propping up.
    But the operative word to describe the health care plans put forward by the major, viable candidates is “timid.”
    “Single-payer” is definitely not that — at least, not within an American context. Seen from the perspective of most advanced nations — which accept medical care as just another part of a nation’s infrastructure, like roads and post offices — it’s no big deal.
    Not here, though — not by a long shot. Here, we have too many people preprogrammed to go ballistic at the mention of “single-payer.” That’s because of the identity of that payer.
    It’s… well, it’s the government!
    This column will now take a short break while libertarians run around shrieking until they turn blue and fall over… da-da-dum-dum, hmmm… readers might want to go look at the Sunday comics until we resume… da-dee-da-dahhh… Still screaming, so let’s get another cup of coffee… Ah, that’s good stuff…
    OK, we’re back, and they’re still screaming, but we’ll just have to accept that they’re going to do that, and proceed.
    “Government,” in America, is a word that we use for a free people banding together to do something that we can do far better working together than working separately. Some people don’t accept that fact. They seem to believe that “government” is some scary thing that intrudes on their lives from out there somewhere, like a spaceship full of aliens with ray guns that will turn us all into toads or something.
    Those people are one of the two big reasons why you don’t hear any presidential candidates saying “single-payer” except Dennis Kucinich. You may recall recent reports that Mr. Kucinich had a close encounter with a UFO, and it was a positive experience, so I guess he’s just not scared of the aliens any more.
    But the major candidates are. Or rather, they’re scared of being labeled as extremists. Also, they don’t want to offend the health insurance companies whose reason for being would disappear under “single-payer.”
    Last week, I got a press release from a labor union that complained “that no Republican candidate has a plan to ensure all Americans have access to health care.” That’s true. But the union, which represents blue- and pink-collar workers in health care, was missing the fact that the leading Democrats are little better.
    “Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been engaged in a bitter back-and-forth over whose health plan covers more people,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. “Former Sen. John Edwards has jumped in, saying his plan is the best of all.”
    But what they’re fighting over are plans that would pull varying numbers of the uninsured into the same overly expensive, wasteful, maddening system of private health insurance that the rest of us are caught in. Conveniently, they say their plans would be paid for by repealing the “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.”
    Maybe you could pay for a health plan that way — as long as it doesn’t provide real reform.
    Make no mistake: A single-payer national health plan would cost a lot of money, and you would pay for it in new taxes. The good news is that most of us would probably still pay less than we currently pay in premiums.
    According to the Web site of Physicians for a National Health Program, which promotes single-payer, “This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.”
    But when not even touchy-feely liberal Democrats have the guts to say it’s worth paying a new tax to make health care affordable for all, even when that’s the hottest domestic issue among voters (which would not be the case if the insured majority were happy), we’re in trouble.
    Little wonder that Dow Jones’ MarketWatch reported last week that “Those who hope the 2008 presidential election will finally bring about drastic health-care reform may well end up finding it’s a case of politics and business as usual, experts say.” The same article noted that Hillary Clinton has received $1.8 million in contributions from accident and health insurers, followed by Barack Obama with $1.45 million, Mitt Romney with $1.09 million and Rudy Giuliani with $1.08 million.
    That, by the way, is money that you and I and the guy down the street paid for health care that didn’t go to health care.
    Given the odds against substantive reform — betw
een the government haters, the insurance industry and Big Pharma, all of whom have a demonstrated willingness to outlast the rest of us in any protracted political fight — the only way we’re going to see significant change is if a president is elected with a mandate for bold reform. Only a president is elected by the whole nation, so only a president would ever have that kind of juice.
    Unfortunately, as previously noted, none of the viable candidates will say “single-payer.”
    But I will: Single-payer. Single-payer, single-payer! Now, do you have anything better to say?

Ron Paul and the MSM

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Paul

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LONESOME? Want to make a boatload of new friends, fast? I have a simple, surefire method.
    Step 1: Start a blog. You can do this in minutes, and for free, at a number of sites on the Web.
    Step 2: Post something on your blog with “Ron Paul” in the headline.
    Caveat: Make it something nice, or all those new people who come rushing to you will be something other than “friends.”
    As you may have heard, there is a whole alternative universe full of people who spend large amounts of time Googling their one and only, and eagerly reading anything they find. Many are political first-timers, either because they’re quite young or because they gave up on mainstream candidates long ago. They are the reason why Dr. Paul has raised great gobs of money, despite his support in polls tending toward the single digits.
Paul3
    This does not discourage or deter the libertarian’s following, but one thing does sort of cheese them off: What they perceive as a general lack of respect from the MSM, a.k.a. “mainstream media.” In stories about who might win this or that primary, their guy’s name doesn’t even come up.
    Last week on my blog (where I really must stop engaging in the cheap, traffic-boosting ploy of putting “Ron Paul” into random headlines), in the midst of a discussion among Paulistas, “Alex” earnestly asked me, “Brad — what do you think of the main media’s a) coverage and b) depiction of Ron Paul? Fair in both respects or less so?”
    A two-parter, as we might say in the MSM. My response got one encouraging comment, which is all I need to provoke me to reproduce it here. It went like this:
    I’d say, on both counts, it’s about par.
    On the whole, there is a shameful tendency of news media to try to oversimplify the race. The press, and the TV cowboys, like politics to be like sports, which means everything is couched in terms of winning, losing and whether the coach called the right play, and there are never, ever more than two teams on the field at a given time.
    This means anointing two people in each race as the “front-runners,” and giving everybody else short shrift. This, of course, is appalling, especially when the most qualified candidates don’t make the short list, and that’s at least as often the case as not.
    Look at the Democrats. It was decreed via the great colonial beast’s collective “mind” that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were it. Never mind that the experience and qualifications for the two of them combined fell short of that of Joe Biden or Bill Richardson — or Chris Dodd, if you’re hard-up…. This is not to say either Hillary or Obama is a bad candidate, mind you; there’s something to be said forPaul2
sheer electoral appeal. Hillary’s got the Clinton fan club in her pocket, and Obama’s got that certain something called “charisma.” I’m just saying it’s ridiculous that Biden and Richardson have never been given a chance.
    On the Republican side, the MSM have been confused. They’ve wanted in the worst way to have Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney be the anointed twosome, or maybe Fred Thompson. But the facts that John McCain is more experienced than any of them, and that Mike Huckabee actually has qualities that appeal to key portions of the base (unlike any of the chosen ones) have led to what you’ll sometimes see the MSM refer to as “confusion” or “a muddle.” And the MSM don’t like confusion. They like clarity, and polarization,Rudyrockette
and a good fight. Giuliani’s a scrapper (and just loaded with personal idiosyncracies that make great copy); and Romney can have a knock-down dragout just with himself.
    In light of these factors, Dr. Paul is far down the list of people who are likely to get major respect. As I say, the MSM like it simple. If they can’t keep the number down to two, then they assign simple, stock-character roles to other players. Dr. Paul has been assigned the role of Quirky Outsider Without a Prayer, a role filled with some gusto on the Democratic side by Dennis Kucinich.
    Except that Dr. Paul is even more of an outsider. Dennis the Menace, after all, is a sort of double-distilled version of a liberal Democrat. Dr. Paul is not seen by any of the major players as any kind of a Republican.
    While the MSM as a whole have the attention span of a goldfish — they find endless fascination in thePeople_lohan_wart
serial misbehavior of well-built young women with substance-abuse problems — the guys on the political beat can be like the sports guys. That is, they can have long memories, especially for electoral trivia.
    To political writers, Ron Paul is the 1988 Libertarian Party nominee for president, and he’ll never outgrow that role. To some extent, he doesn’t seem to want to outgrow that role. He’s the same guy, believing and espousing the same things. To his followers, this consistency, this adherence to principle, is admirable in the extreme. To the press, it makes him a dependable eccentric.
    Dr. Paul’s one hope to get Serious Attention lies in his other role, that of This Year’s Internet Phenom. You’ll remember that role was filled by another physician, Howard Dean, in 2004. Unfortunately for Dr. Paul, the role lacks the freshness that it had when Dr. Dean created it. For a moment there four years ago, the MSM thought it was on the cusp of a genuine Paradigm Shift, where a guy with a passionate cyber-following and impressive fund-raising capabilities would actually sweep aside the front-runners and win it all. But that didn’t happen, and the MSM is uninclined to get swept up in such enthusiasm a second time.
    I don’t know if any of that helped, but I did what I could to answer the question. Now, back to the front-runners…

Zyrtec update

6 Replies
Here’s an interesting twist on my Sunday column. As you’ll recall, I mentioned that my current group insurance has in recent years refused to cover Zyrtec, which I found to be effective in treating my allergies. So I got this message from Zyrtec’s PR firm:

Hi
Brad,

My name is Eric Tatro, and I’m with
Cohn & Wolfe public relations. Today I read your editorial about health
insurance that was posted on your blog, and noticed that you had some trouble
getting your insurance company to pay for prescription Zyrtec.

We are working with McNeil Consumer
Healthcare, who recently announced that the FDA approved Zyrtec and Zyrtec-D 12
Hour (which combines Zyrtec with a decongestant) for use without a prescription.
I thought you and your readers might find this interesting, since allergy
sufferers will soon be able to purchase Zyrtec anywhere over-the-counter
prescriptions are sold without first having to visit an allergist or health care
professional. Also, for many allergy sufferers, Zyrtec will cost up to one-third
less than prescription Zyrtec. Both medications will be available nationwide in
January 2008.

If you would like more information,
you can find a full press kit located at http://www.ZyrtecPressKit.com. The FDA
also issued a press release on the approval, which can be found at http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01750.html.
Of course, please let me know if you have any questions or if I can help in any
other way.

Sincere
thanks,

-Eric

I immediately wrote back to Eric as follows:

    Thanks.
Actually, I heard that last week, but it didn’t affect my column, since it
didn’t affect the fact that up to now, my insurance has refused to pay for
Zyrtec, and HAS paid for allergy shots, which was the point I was
making.
    Here’s an
irony for you, though: I had already learned that my NEW insurance (that for
which I’ll be paying $274.42 every two weeks) WILL pay for a Zyrtec
prescription. Now that it’s going over-the-counter, they might NOT cover the
prescription — I’ll have to check, but that’s my strong
suspicion.
    So if Zyrtec
is available to me only over the counter, and the price is only 30 percent less
than the amount that was so high my current insurance refused to pay (which had
to be really high, when you consider that they DID cover something that had a
co-pay — which would be no more than 50 percent of the total — of $81.95),
then I still won’t be able to afford it. With my high premiums, I will be very
much boxed into whatever my insurance will cover.
    The only
thing that might help me would be if a generic version came available. But from
what you’re telling me, this is one of those situations where the drug goes OTC,
but doesn’t go generic — at least, not yet. Am I right about that? I hope not,
but the fact that the company considers it cost-effective to hire a PR firm to
promote the brand seems to indicate that I’m right.
    Do you have
any idea of when the drug might be available in generic form? It would be very
helpful to know that.
I’ll let you know what he says back. I’ve also made a note to myself to find out at first opportunity whether I’m right about the insurance not helping if it goes OTC, but not generic. Finally, I’ve got a call in to the FDA to ask when Zyrtec will go generic. I realize those of you who don’t need Zyrtec might not care about this in the narrowest sense, but I believe this situation is what English majors (or sociologists or economists or somebody) call a microcosm. Anyway, I’ll be back to you as the plot sickens…

Could our politics actually get uglier? I’m afraid so

30 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LAST WEEK, a woman in Hilton Head asked John McCain a question that referred to Hillary Clinton by a five-letter word for a female dog.
    Sen. McCain reacted about the way many guys would: He tried to keep his composure, failed momentarily, then finally mastered himself enough to say, very soberly and sincerely, that he had the highest respect for his Senate colleague. And after a priggish CNN announcer’s failure to portray Sen. McCain as being to blame in the incident, and the McCain campaign’s lame attempt to parlay that into sympathy and campaign contributions, the whole thing sort of faded, making way for the next round of spin-cycle nonsense.
    But the incident still worries me, for reasons that have nothing to do with who called whom what, or how anybody responded.
    I worry that it never occurred to anyone to wonder to whom the obnoxious question referred. I worry that within 24 hours of the clip appearing on YouTube, there was a Web site up selling T-shirts emblazoned with that question. I worry that there are those who will buy such T-shirts, and that such people increasingly define the tone of political discourse.
    The same day that the “b-word” incident came to my attention, an op-ed piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The Insanity of Bush Hatred.” Those who call themselves “liberals” will now snort in derision and say, “That’s The Wall Street Journal for you!” But it was actually a pleasingly dispassionate treatment of the subject by a professor named Peter Berkowitz who looks about at some of his colleagues and worries about “the damage hatred inflicts on the intellect.” I worry more about the damage it inflicts on our republic.
    Mr. Berkowitz, after noting that “Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself… Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred,” and so forth, frets that “Bush hatred is different,” because of the way many intellectuals have not only embraced that impulse, but endorsed it as a virtue, and proclaimed “that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene.”
    I see it as something else — the next, more virulent stage of the political disease once known as “Clinton hatred,” which itself was qualitatively uglier than previous forms of political resentment, within my lifetime at least. I trace the onset of symptoms to the first days after the 1992 elections, when “Don’t blame me; I voted for Bush” started appearing on late-model cars.
    And things just got worse from there. Many Republicans never accepted that Bill Clinton was the president of their country, and for eight years treated him as though he were the illegitimate leader of some enemy nation. I thought things couldn’t get worse, and looked forward to the end of the Clinton era as a time when partisans could regain their sanity.
    Lord help me, I was so wrong. From Day One — nay, before Day One of the Bush presidency — there was a virulence aimed at the man like nothing I could have imagined. And no, it’s not about the Iraq War. I can recall asking colleagues, before Sept. 11, 2001, to help me get my mind around why so many Democrats hated the man so. This was actually qualitatively worse than what I’d seen aimed at Clinton, and that floored me.
    I wish I could believe that the Bush-haters are right, that there is something — or many things — about the man that make such passionate dislike rational. I would like to think that because the alternative possibility — that this is a degenerative national syndrome that feeds on itself, and gets worse with each shift of power — is just too awful.
    Except for a precious few days in the fall of 2001, this savage polarization of the electorate has crippled our national will in a time of great crisis, a time when we need to be taking difficult actions — from waging war to retooling our economy away from oil — that are unachievable without strong consensus.
    At this point some Democratic readers are getting steamed, thinking I’m blaming them. But I don’t care whether it’s their fault, or Mr. Bush’s. There’s plenty of blame to go around, much of it of the well-deserved variety.
    I’m more concerned about the effect. I’m worried that the most polarizing individual in the Democratic Party is, day by day, looking more certain to be that party’s nominee. And that is not to blame Mrs. Clinton — it’s just a fact that if she is the nominee, we’re on a downhill rush toward a general election of such bitterness that it may make us nostalgic for 2000. And I’m not sure there is anything that either she or the GOP nominee will be able to do or say to stop it. What do you do about a Zeitgeist in which a woman is unashamed to ask a candidate, publicly, the question that was asked of Sen. McCain last week?
    As I look upon the threats to our nation’s future — our dependence on tyrants’ oil, the rise of Islamofascism, the relentless rivalries of a booming China and an aggressive Russia descending again into authoritarianism — there is one menace that looms more urgently than others: the possibility that the partisan bitterness militating against rational discussion of policy in this country could get worse.

Soul-searching in the secular realm of politics

5 Replies

Hal1

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A reader recently told me she enjoys my columns because she likes to follow my “soul-searching” as I try to work through an issue. I suggested she keep reading — who knows; someday I might actually find something.
    But I knew what she meant, and took it kindly. That’s the kind of commentary I value, too. That’s why I called Hal Stevenson on Friday to talk about the upcoming presidential primaries.
    Hal is a political activist of the Christian conservative variety. He’s a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, which has its offices in a building he owns on Gervais Street. He’s also one of the most soberly thoughtful and fair-minded people I know, which to the national media probably constitutes an oxymoron: The thoughtful Christian conservative.
    When last I saw Hal, he had brought Sen. Sam Brownback in for an editorial board interview regarding his quest for the GOP presidential nomination.
    Since then, several things have happened:

    Of all those, the nod I would have valued the most was that of Sen. Brownback — like me, a convert to Catholicism. When he spoke of the impact of faith on his approach to leadership, it actually seemed to have something to do with Judeo-Christian beliefs: He spoke of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly.
    By contrast, Pat Robertson’s explanation as to why he was endorsing the one Republican least in tune with religious conservatives seemed to have little to do with spiritual matters, and everything to do with secular ideology and partisan strategy: He spoke of defeating terrorism, fiscal discipline and the selection of federal judges. The first two concerns are secular; the third seemed the least likely of reasons for him to back Mr. Giuliani.
    The ways in which “values voters” interact with the sin-stained realities of power politics have long mystified me, and I wondered: Does a guy like Pat Robertson, with all his baggage (wanting to whack Hugo Chavez, suggesting 9/11 happened because America had it coming), actually deliver more votes than he chases away?
    So I called Hal to help me sort it out. As of lunchtime Friday, when we spoke, he was up in the air about the presidential contest himself, now that his man Brownback was out of it. But he’s sorting through it, and has had face-to-face talks with the candidates he considers most likely.
    “My heart says Huckabee,” he said. “He’s much more like me, I suppose, than the other guys.” But that’s not his final answer. He said when he asked Sen. Brownback why he didn’t get behind Gov. Huckabee, he said “it’d be like endorsing himself, so he might as well stay in himself.” He was looking for someone who offered what he couldn’t, and chose McCain.
    As for Hal, “I did meet with McCain,” who is “certainly a real patriot,” but he’s trying to decide whether the Arizonan’s position on stem cell research — he charts a middle course — “is going to be a deal-killer for me.” (Brownback has told him that McCain says he wouldn’t make such research a high priority as president.)
    He hasn’t decided yet about Mitt Romney. He’s talked with him, and sees him as “a very capable executive… he’s proven that.” But he cites “Sam’s words” about the former Massachusetts governor: “He’s a technocrat, running as an ideologue.”
    While noting that “we don’t look to Bob Jones III for a lot of stuff,” there are “some very credible Christian activists out there supporting Romney.” He mentions state lawmakers Nathan Ballentine and Kevin Bryant, and cites his respect for U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint.
    He says he’s not bothered by Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion, since he “takes the right position now.” But he worries it could hurt him in the general election, when Democrats could use old video clips to great effect.
    “I am going through a methodical process,” he said, “and I have been impressed with McCain, Huckabee, Romney….”
    He has not, however, met with Fred Thompson, “and I probably wouldn’t waste Giuliani’s time.”
“I respect him for being straightforward and not trying to B.S. us,” he said of the former mayor, but he does not relish having to choose between two pro-choice candidates next November.
    As for the host of “The 700 Club,” “I really don’t much care what Pat Robertson does.”
    “Robertson lost credibility with most thinking evangelicals a long time ago.” Hal said he was turned off back during Mr. Robertson’s own run for the presidency in 1988: “It was all about acquiring political power in the Republican Party,” and that “wasn’t what many of us thought the Christian Coalition was about.”
    While Hal himself is still seeking the answer, “I’ve got good evangelical friends who are working for every campaign.”
    Every Republican campaign, that is. Nothing against Democrats per se, Hal says; it’s just that “A pro-life Democrat doesn’t have a chance in the Democratic primary,” and that is a deal-killer.
    Hal still doesn’t know which of the candidates that leaves please him the most, but in the end, that’s not the point: “The only person ultimately I’m trying to please is the Lord.”

Hal2

Why don’t candidates ask us for more than our votes?

21 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….”
       — John F. Kennedy, 1962

WHAT WOULD we do if one among the horde of candidates seeking to become president of the United States in 2009 challenged us as a nation to do something hard?
    Most Americans alive today can’t remember a president or would-be president doing anything remotely like that. The ones we’re used to are all about what they’re going to do for us, not what we should do for our country. Republicans want to cut our taxes; Democrats want to give us more programs and, to hear them all talk, at no cost to us.
    But I believe that if the cause were worthwhile and the proposal made sense, we’d rise to it. Maybe not all of us, but there’s a critical mass out here who would follow someone courageous enough to ask us to do our part.
    I, for one, am sick of being treated, by people who seek my vote, as some sort of “gimme-gimme” baby, lacking in any sense of responsibility for the world around me. Those of us who are grownups are used to accepting, in our personal lives, challenges that are by no means easy to meet — going to work day after day, paying our bills, raising children. Why would we not understand a president who said, “Here’s a challenge that concerns us all, and here’s what each of us needs to do to rise to it”?
    Young people among us want to pitch in and accomplish difficult things a lot more than we give them credit for. Part of Barack Obama’s appeal among the young is his call to service, his challenge to build a better nation. But unless I’ve missed it, he has not asked us, as a nation, to do anything hard.
    Don’t misunderstand me, as did a colleague who wrote:

    The feeling I get… is that you’re so frustrated that you just want the government to demand SOME SORT OF SACRIFICE, on something, anything. Whether it’s needed or not. Doesn’t really matter what.

    Well, yes and no. Sure, there’s a part of me that just wants to be asked for a change to do something, if only for the novelty: Buy bonds, save scrap metal, whatever.
    But there’s more to it than that. The truth is, our country faces a lot of challenges that demand something or other from all of us, but political “leaders” have a pathological fear of pointing it out to us.
    Back when JFK challenged us to go to the moon because it was hard, we did it — even though there was no practical reason why we needed to do so. Sure, it gave us the creeps to think of “going to sleep by the light of a communist moon,” but it was a symbolic competition, with only marginal applications to the true, deadly competition of the arms race. We couldn’t stand not to be No. 1.
    But today we have very real, very practical challenges that have tangible consequences if we fail to meet them.
    Take just one of them: our dependence on foreign oil.
    Sen. Joe Biden had a great speech a while back about how President Bush missed the golden opportunity to ask us, on Sept. 12, 2001, to do whatever it took to free us from this devil’s bargain whereby we are funding people who want to destroy us and all that we cherish. And yet, his own energy proposals are a tepid combination of expanding alternative fuels (good news to the farmer) and improving fuel efficiency (let’s put the onus on Detroit).
    A broad spectrum of thinkers who are not running for office — from Tom Friedman to Robert Samuelson to Charles Krauthammer — say we must jack up the price of gasoline with a tax increase, to cut demand and fund the search for alternatives. It makes sense. But the next candidate with the guts to ask us to pay more at the pump will be the first.
    My friend Samuel Tenenbaum is on a quixotic quest to build support for restoration of the 55-mph speed limit. It would be hard (for me, anyway), but the benefits are undeniable. It would conserve fuel dramatically, starving petrodictators from Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would save thousands of lives now lost to speed on our highways.
    Samuel pitches his idea to every candidate he can corner. They smile and move away from him as quickly as possible.
    But you know, when I wrote a column a while back proposing the creation of an Energy Party — that would among other things demand that we jack up the gas tax by $2 a gallon (to fund an Apollo-style project on alternatives), institute Samuel’s 55-mph limit, ban SUVs for anyone without a proven “life-or-death need to drive one” and build nuclear power plants as fast as we can — I got a surprising number of positive responses. I think that was less because my respondents thought those were all good ideas. I think they just liked the idea of being asked to do something for a change.
    Energy independence is just the start. Add to it the urgent needs to stop global warming, win the war on terror, make health care affordable while at the same time avoiding the coming entitlements train wreck, and you’ve got a list of things that require a lot more audience involvement — and yes, sacrifice — than our current candidates have been willing to ask us for.
    And while you may not feel the same, I’m dying to be asked. Not because it would be easy, and not even because it would be hard, but because these hard things actually need doing.

In South Carolina, we keep talking about the wrong things

12 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
We always seem to be having the wrong conversations in South Carolina. Sometimes, we don’t even talk at all about the things that cry out for focused, urgent debate.
    Look at this joke of a commission that was assigned to examine whether the city of Columbia should ditch its ineffective, unaccountable, “don’t ask me” form of government. It was supposed to report something two years ago. And here we are, still waiting, with a city that can’t even close its books at the end of the year. Whether its that fiscal fiasco, or the failure to justify what it did with millions in special tax revenues, or the rehiring of a cop who was said to be found drunk, naked and armed in public, there is no one who works directly for the voters who has control over those things.
    But as bad as it is to have no one to blame, there is no one to look to for a vision of positive action. A city that says it wants to leap forward into the knowledge economy with Innovista really, really needs somebody accountable driving the process.
    Columbia needed a strong-mayor form of government yesterday, and what have we done? Sat around two years waiting for a panel that didn’t want to reach that conclusion to start with to come back and tell us so.
    It’s worse on the state level.
    What does South Carolina need? It needs to get up and off its duff and start catching up with the rest of the country. There are many elements involved in doing that, but one that everybody knows must be included is bringing up the level of educational achievement throughout our population.
    There are all sorts of obvious reforms that should be enacted immediately to improve our public schools. Just to name one that no one can mount a credible argument against, and which the Legislature could enact at any time it chooses, we need to eliminate waste and channel expertise by drastically reducing the number of school districts in the state.
    So each time the Legislature meets, it debates how to get that done, right? No way. For the last several years, every time any suggestion of any kind for improving our public schools has come up, the General Assembly has been paralyzed by a minority of lawmakers who say no, instead of fixing the public schools, let’s take funding away from them and give it to private schools — you know, the only kind of schools that we can’t possibly hold accountable.
    As long as we’re talking about money, take a look at what the most powerful man in the Legislature, Sen. Glenn McConnell, had to say on our op-ed page Friday (to read the full piece, follow the link):

    South Carolina can only have an orderly, predictable and consistent growth rate in state spending by constitutionally mandating it. It cannot be accomplished on a reliable basis by hanging onto slim majorities in the Legislature and having the right governor. The political pressures are too great unless there is a constitutional bridle on the process.

    The people of South Carolina elect 170 people to the Legislature. In this most legislative of states, those 170 people have complete power to do whatever they want with regard to taxing and spending, with one caveat — they are already prevented by the constitution from spending more than they take in.
But they could raise taxes, right? Only in theory. The State House is filled with people who’d rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than ever raise our taxes, whether it would be a good idea to do so or not.
    All of this is true, and of all those 170 people, there is no one with more power to affect the general course of legislation than Glenn McConnell.
    And yet he tells us that it’s impossible for him and his colleagues to prevent spending from getting out of hand.
    What’s he saying here? He’s saying that he’s afraid that the people of South Carolina may someday elect a majority of legislators who think they need to spend more than Glenn McConnell thinks we ought to spend. Therefore, we should take away the Legislature’s power to make that most fundamental of legislative decisions. We should rig the rules so that spending never exceeds an amount that he and those who agree with him prefer, even if most South Carolinians (and that, by the way, is what “political pressures” means — the will of the voters) disagree.
    Is there a problem with how the Legislature spends our money? You betcha. We don’t spend nearly enough on state troopers, prisons, roads or mental health services. And we spend too much on festivals and museums and various other sorts of folderol that help lawmakers get re-elected, but do little for the state overall.
    So let’s talk about that. Let’s have a conversation about the fact that South Carolinians aren’t as safe or healthy or well-educated as folks in other parts of the country because lawmakers choose to spend on the wrong things.
    But that’s not the kind of conversation we have at our State House. Instead, the people with the bulliest pulpits, from the governor to the most powerful man in the Senate, want most of all to make sure lawmakers spend less than they otherwise might, whether they spend wisely or not.
    The McConnell proposal would make sure that approach always wins all future arguments.
    For Sen. McConnell, this thing we call representative democracy is just a little too risky. Elections might produce people who disagree with him. And he’s just not willing to put up with that.

The cognitive divide between black and white

14 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
    Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
    As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
    A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
    I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
    There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
    It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
    So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
    For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters…. I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
    He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
    He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred… and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
    Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
    “But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
    “Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
    We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
    Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
    The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
    It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
    Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
    I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?

Joe Biden on having the juice to get thing done

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Why should voters in South Carolina’s Democratic primary skip the front-runners to pick Joe Biden as their nominee for president?
    Because, he explained to our editorial board last week, he’s the guy with the juice. He’s got the experience to have the knowledge, he has sound ideas based on that knowledge, and he’s got the credibility to sell the ideas.
    Today, he says, there’s no juice in the White House.
    Take the immigration issue. Why, we asked, did the recent comprehensive bill fail?
    “Bush,” said Sen. Biden.
    “That’s not a criticism,” he added.
    “I think Bush was more right on immigration than he’s been on any other national issue. But he had noBiden_019
credibility. He could not carry any of his base.”
    He said it was a failure of presidential leadership. “You’ve got the lamest lame-duck president in modern history now. And it is actually a shame. No fooling. Because the few things where you could generate a consensus with him, he’s not of any help.”
    So who has the juice? Joe Biden does, as he had demonstrated a few days earlier.
    The previous week, he had pulled off the apparent miracle of getting 75 members of the U.S. Senate — which meant getting a bunch of Republican votes — to vote for the centerpiece of the Biden platform: A plan to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions under a loose federalist system.
    After all those pointless votes about timetables and such that other Democrats kept pushing, in full knowledge that they would not find their way into law, all of a sudden a consensus approach had emerged.
    How did that happen?
    First, “I don’t think there are 12 Republicans that support this president’s position,” which can be summed up in two sentences: “Stand up an Iraqi army so American troops can stand down. Two, strong central democratic government in Baghdad that will act as the first domino to fall through the middle east, generating the end  — if not the end, a fatal blow  — to terror.”
    Under that approach, the purpose of the surge was “to give the warring factions breathing room… to make a political accommodation.”
    Biden_007
But there’s no such accommodation. Sen. Biden says a lot of senators have been over to Iraq and talked to real people. And what have they learned?
    “Nobody  — nobody, nobody, nobody — thinks there’s a possibility of establishing a strong unity government that can gain the support of the Iraqi people and bring security and economic prosperity to Iraqis. Nobody.
    “Every success that exists in Iraq has been at the local level. That’s where the successes come.”
The only ways the surge has worked, he maintains, is where it has enabled local, homogenous authorities to run things their way, without interference from Baghdad.
    Last year, only 1,000 Sunnis stepped forward in Anbar province to join the national police force run by the Shi’a-led government in Baghdad. “The national police force is corrupt,” says Sen. Biden. “It is zero; it’s worse that zero. They’re death squads.”
    “Eliminate it.”
    The surge worked when Americans “said to the tribal leaders, look guys, you can patrol your own streets. You mean we don’t have to have the central government here? Absolutely. Good.” So “10,000 people show up from the tribes…. They’re patrolling the streets. They still haven’t gotten it under control. But it’s a lot further down the road, and no one’s talking about a national police force.”
    Look at Kurdistan, he says, which has had local autonomy for some time. “And so everyplace you look to, it comes down to devolving power, where there’s any possibility of it working.”
    How did he sell the Senate on this? First, “I’ve been working these guys and women for a year on it; I’m like a broken record on it.” He sold it on the merits, but it was also appealing because it didn’t involved the constitutional problem of trying to tell the commander in chief how many troops he can send where when.
    But it also came down to juice, to credibility: “I think if you ask Lindsey or you ask other Republicans, they trust me; I don’t ever play a game with them. I think that they think I know something about thisBiden_022
issue, and I have not been one who is saying things that they know is not rational.”
    As opposed to certain other people seeking the Democratic nomination: “How can you say on stage, almost to a person, that I will not withdraw troops; I’ll have to have troops there, combat troops there for X amount of years, maybe to 2013, and by the way, I’m voting to cut off funding for those troops, yesterday?”
    So unlike certain people named Clinton, Obama and Edwards, “I have some credibility with these guys that I’m not playing a political game with them.”
    What about bringing troops home? “What I don’t want to do is fly under false colors here. I don’t want to tell the American people that if this plan is adopted, all Americans come home,” he said.
    “If this plan were adopted, it’s the only way in which you could justify keeping American forces there.”
    But if it weren’t adopted, unlike his rivals, he’d get the troops out right away.
    “I would not withdraw from the region. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna continue to have my son’s generation stuck in a position where they’re on the fault line, and the only thing they’re there to do is keep things from getting worse,” without any prospect of them getting better.
    So that’s his deal: He’s the guy with the plan, and the juice to get it done. And last week, he had the cred to make folks believe it.

For video from this editorial board interview, click here.

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Time to get real in Iraq debate

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
NOW THAT we’ve put a fortnight and more between us and the Petraeus testimony, can we go ahead and have a realistic, honest, come-to-Jesus kind of discussion about Iraq?
    I think we can. The “surge” has created that opportunity.
    The idea behind Gen. David Petraeus’ strategy was this: Apply enough force in the right places, and you can create a secure space in which a political settlement can be achieved.
    The promised measure of security has been achieved. Just as importantly, there is broader acceptance in this country that significant U.S. forces will be staying in Iraq for some time. The consistently implied threat that we might yank our troops out at any moment contributed greatly to insecurity in that nation — encouraging terrorists, and discouraging would-be allies from working with us against the terrorists.
    For the moment, that threat is gone. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was certainly on display at a Democratic candidates’ debate at Dartmouth last week. The three candidates most likely to win their party’s presidential nomination moved beyond the fantasy that’s been offered too often to their base — that we could have the troops out of Iraq before George W. Bush leaves the White House. They acknowledged that in fact, we can’t even promise to be out by the time the next president’s first term is up in 2013.
    That was a significant step. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have walked a razor’s edge for some time, trying to say things that please the “pull ’em out now!” constituency, while at the same time leaving themselves room to be pragmatic and sensible later on, should they be so fortunate as to find themselves in a general election campaign.
    This can sometimes lead to dissonance. For instance, in the debate, Barack Obama repeated confusing assertions he made in an op-ed column in The State, in which he first said “all of our combat brigades should be out of Iraq by the end of next year.” But his very next words were “We will then need to retain some forces to strike at al-Qaida in Iraq.” OK, if all of the combat units are out, what will we “strike at” them with? Boy Scouts? Or will the units used to “strike” be smaller than brigade strength? If so, how effective do we think they’ll be? Isn’t this a return to the “less is more,” minimalist force approach that led to the failures of the thoroughly discredited Donald Rumsfeld? If we’re going to free up “combat brigades” from other, nonspecified tasks, why don’t we send them after al-Qaida too?
    But the magic number “2013” provides a measure of clarity. It says, We’re there. We’re going to be there. So what are we going to do now?
    The question works both ways. Once Democrats accept that we can’t bug out, they can start getting real about what maintaining a commitment means. One answer was offered last week. The Senate majority took a break from futile, please-the-base gestures long enough to join in a bipartisan resolution supporting the idea of dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions — a proposal long advocated by Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sam Brownback.
    But “What next?” applies with equal force to Republicans who backed the “surge” all along: Now that our soldiers have done their job, where’s the political settlement in Baghdad?
    Sen. Lindsey Graham surprised some last week when he told TIME magazine that he’s willing to give the Maliki government until Christmas to get its act together, and not much more than that.
    What? Is one of the biggest fans of the surge, as “never say die” as anyone, ready to throw in the towel? No. But with the U.S. military having done, and continuing to do, its job, no one can make excuses for an Iraqi government that doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity thus provided.
    “The challenges and the problem areas in Iraq are not lost on me as a big fan of the surge,” he told me over the phone Friday. “I’m trying to let people know that when you say the political is not moving at the appropriate pace, I agree with you, and I acknowledge” it.
    “I want people to acknowledge the security gains, because they’re real, and quit trying to minimalize them. That’s just not fair.” Nor would it be fair or reasonable, he suggested, for him or anybody else to make excuses for political stalemate.
    “I would be the first to say, 90 days from now, if they haven’t delivered anything… regarding the major political reconciliation benchmarks, that it would be clear to me they’ve gone from just being dysfunctional to a failure,” Sen. Graham said.
    At that point, “We need to look at a new model: Is it wise to give more money to the same people when it’s clear they don’t know what they’re doing, or are incapable of performing?”
    That does not, of course, mean pulling our troops out. It is the continued troop presence that gives us the options we have — and puts the onus on the Iraqi government.
    For his part, Sen. Graham was not among the three-fourths of the Senate that endorsed Sen. Biden’s partition. To him, giving in to the idea that Sunni and Shi’a can never live together is as objectionable as endorsing Apartheid as a way of keeping the peace in South Africa.
    Others disagree. But the wonderful thing is that we are now disagreeing about a way forward, rather than arguing about how quickly we can back out.
    With progress like that, I can actually believe that a political solution can be achieved — in Iraq and, yes, even in Washington.

Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THERE’S A PRINCIPLE that I long thought was a given in American politics. As long as it held true, it didn’t matter so much if the “wrong” candidate won an election. No matter what sort of nonsense he had spouted on the stump, this stark truth would take him in its unforgiving grip, set him down and moderate him.
    Mike Huckabee, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, made reference to this principle when he met with our editorial board Thursday:
    “One of the tough jobs of governing is, you actually have to do it.” That may sound so obvious that it’s foolish, like “One thing about water is, it’s wet.” But it can come as a cold shock.
    Think of the congressional class of 1994. Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwers were full of radical notions when they gained power. But once they had it, and used it, however briefly, to shut down the government, they quickly realized that was not what they were elected to do.
    Or some of them realized it. More about that in a moment. Back to Mr. Huckabee.
    Mr. Huckabee is a conservative — the old-fashioned kind that believes in traditional values, and wants strong, effective institutions in our society to support and promote those values.
    Many newfangled “conservatives” seem just as likely to want to tear down as build up.
    If Mr. Huckabee was ever that way, being the governor of Arkansas made him less so. “As a governor, I’ve seen a different level of human life, maybe, than the folks who live in the protected bubble of Washington see,” he said. And as a governor who believed he must govern, he was appalled when he saw government fail to do its job. He points to the aftermath of Katrina: “It was one of the more, to me, disgusting moments of American history…. It made my blood boil….”
   Perhaps I should pause again now to remind you that Gov. Huckabee is a conservative: “I’m 100 percent pure and orthodox when it comes to the issues that matter to the evangelical or faith voter, if you will,” he says.
    “But as a governor, I spent most of my time improving education, rebuilding the highway system, reforming health care in Arkansas” — things that are not inconsistent with conservatism.
    “And for that I had the right — had earned the right, if you will — to pass some pro-life legislation,Huckabee2
and strong pro-marriage and pro-family legislation. But I didn’t spend 90 percent of my time pushing that….”
    OK, let’s review: As a conservative, he has a certain set of ideals. But he knows that being governor isn’t just about promoting an ideology, whatever it might be. Being governor, if the job is properly understood, is the most pragmatic form of life in our solar system — except for being mayor.
    People expect certain things of you, and you’ve got to do them. Successful governors realize that, whether you’re promoting ideals or paving the roads, “The wrong thing to do is to go and to try to stick your fist in the face of the Legislature that you know is not necessarily with you, and create a fight.” (Gov. Huckabee had to deal with a Democratic assembly.)
    So what’s the right way?
    “You positively share your message, you communicate it… . If you can’t do that, I don’t think you can lead. Just… quite frankly, I don’t think you have a shot at it.”
    I know someone who needs to hear that. Remember the class of ’94? The only lesson Mark Sanford learned from shutting down the federal government was that it was worth trying again. So last year, he vetoed the entire state budget when lawmakers failed to hold spending to the artificial limits he had decreed.
    Of course, they overrode him. And he knew they would. For him, it was about the gesture, not about governing. It’s about ungoverning. It’s about the agenda of the Club for Growth.
    Gov. Huckabee, being conservative fiscally as well as otherwise, has been known to turn down taxes, but that’s an area where pragmatism can outweigh ideals:
“… We had a Supreme Court case where we were forced to deal with both equity and adequacy in education,” said Mr. Huckabee. “There was no way to do that without additional revenue.”
    Still, he refused to sign the tax bill Democrats gave him.
    “I didn’t think we were getting enough reform for the amount of money. It wasn’t that I didn’t support additional revenue, because I did, so I’ll be honest about that. But… we weren’t pushing for enough efficiency out of the system.” What sort of efficiency?
    “I wanted a greater level of school consolidation in order to fund the efficiency, which was a very unpopular thing.”
    Our governor has said he’s for school district consolidation (as am I), but he’s never done anything effective to achieve it. That would require building a constructive relationship with the Legislature.
    Another time, Gov. Huckabee actually opposed a tax cut. Why? That governing thing again: “Well, I supported the elimination of the grocery tax, but not the timing, and the timing would have meant we literally would have closed nursing homes, had to slash Medicaid. I mean, it’s one thing to trim the fat off the bone, it’s another thing, you know, to start going into the bone itself.”
    That wouldn’t worry the Club for Growth, about which Gov. Huckabee says, “They hate me. I call ’em the Club for Greed. That’s part of why they don’t like me… If people don’t have the courage to run for office, they can just give money to them and they’ll do the dirty work for you.”
    “I think it’s a sleazy way to do politics.”
    The Club for Growth loves Mark Sanford.
    I don’t know what sort of president Mike Huckabee would make, but I wonder whether he’d do another stint as governor….

For video, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

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Sunday column video preview

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This video is an amalgam of clips that contain pretty much all of the quotes from Mike Huckabee that you will find in my Sunday column, which is headlined "Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern." You’ll also find some context for the quotes — as much as I could jam into YouTube’s 5-minute limit.

Please excuse the spots where I didn’t have video, and had to use sound from my little digital recorder. The quality isn’t as good as what I have on the video footage, and the splicing is a little rough — OK, really rough.

Bear with me; I’m self-taught. As Ferris Bueller said about the clarinet — "Never had one lesson."

Long Tall Fred swaggers to the rescue, but of what?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
FOR MONTHS NOW, “conservative” Republicans have waited for their hounddog-faced Godot, Fred Thompson, to bring something to the presidential contest that was missing.
    So it was that quite a few of us left our cool offices and moseyed down to Doc’s Barbecue Monday with a mind to learning what that something was.
    The star of screen, lobby and courtroom swaggered onto the riser in the parking lot and launched into a hickory-smoked litany of what he had been talking about since his previous foray into electoral politics back in the ’90s. His delivery had a poetic — or perhaps “lyrical,” in a country-song-lyrics sense — quality:

… talkin’ about the val-yuh (that’s “value” to you pantywaist Easterners) of being pro-life;
talkin’ about the value of standing strong for the second amendment;
talkin’ about the rule of law;
talkin’ about the value and the rightness of lower taxes;
talkin’ about a market economy; talking about the ingenuity and the inventiveness of the American people and the value of competitiveness and how we would fare well in the international marketplace. We do more things better than anybody in the world, and it works for us….

    OK, so maybe it got a trifle less lyrical there for a moment, but he got his rhythm back right quick:

We’re talking about first principles, things this country was founded upon,
the idea that there’s some things in this changing world that don’t change.
Certain things,
certain things such as human nature,
and the wisdom of the Ages that led us to the Declaration of Independence
and led us to the Constitution of the United States,
and they are not outmoded documents to be cast aside….

    OK, Fred, all that’s great, but who said they were — documents to be cast aside, I mean? Who’s the bad guy here? Certainly not the men who’ve been running their fannies off seeking the GOP nomination while you were playing Hamlet all these months.
    Sure, Rudy Giuliani might have a bit of trouble on the abortion thing, and so might Mitt Romney — depending which Mitt Romney you chose to believe from the assortment available on “YouTube.”
    But that other stuff? Come, on, this is boilerplate, par for the course, warming-up exercises, the kind of stuff Republican babies cut their teeth on.
    So what sets you apart, aside from the fact that you are obviously way-up-yonder tall? (I would have said “Rocky-Top tall,” but Fred and I are both Memphis State grads — from back when they called it Memphis State — so I can’t hang a U.T. image on him).
    One thing, as far as I can see — and it goes back to the predicate in the first sentence of my third paragraph: swaggered.
    That ol’ boy’s got more swagger on him than John Wayne in a roomful of Maureen O’Haras. It’s in his voice, and in everything he chooses of his own by-God free will to say with it. It’s in his accent; it’s in those jowls sliding off his face like McMansions on a muddy California hillside.Fred_thompson3
    I’d say it was literally in his walk, if I could ever see how he walks, but he always has a crowd around
him, with his craggy head poking up above it.
    Those crowds respond to him: The ladies like a man who sounds like he durn-well knows what he’s talking ’bout and don’t mind saying so, and the men can tell right off that he’s one-a them — or what they like to think of themselves as, from the swagger itself right down to that hot-dang wife a-his that smiles so purty when he brags about sirin’ them babies on her.
    All of this can disguise the fact that this is a very smart man of rather broad-ranging sophistication (I mentioned he went to Memphis State, right?), but nobody holds that against him.
    And so it was that he came a-ridin’ into town on that bus a-his with Johnny Cash boomin’ out of it, ridin’ to the rescue of… of what?
    Once again, what was lacking? Who had to be saved from what?
    Last month, ol’ Fred told David Broder that he only considered getting into the race because his friend John McCain had stumbled along the way. Before that, “I expected to support John, just as I did in 2000,” he said.
    I remember him supporting McCain back then, because he came to see me at the time, and said we were wrong to have endorsed George W. Bush in the S.C. primary. And he was right.
    So I found myself puzzled last week, a week in which the biggest political news was the resurgence of John McCain. A few days after a well-reviewed debate performance in New Hampshire, the Arizonan was back in Washington to hear Gen. David Petraeus — who might as well have had a “McCain in ’08” button wedged among those rows of ribbons on his chest — tell the world that the strategy Sen. McCain had advocated for the last four years had succeeded. Suddenly the guy who was supposed to have fallen on his sword over Iraq looked “prescient and courageous on the campaign’s most vital issue,” according to The Associated Press.
    Sure, there are those Republicans who are still hot because Sen. McCain isn’t mean enough to Mexicans, whereas ol’ Fred leaves little doubt that he’d kick their Rio-moistened behinds clear back to Juarez.
    But while I grant you the man sure can swagger, I still find myself wondering: Why’s he swaggering into town now?

For video and more, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Six years on, adrift in a partisan sea

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
BACK IN the days of sailing ships, there arose a reassuring naval ritual: The captain would gather his midshipmen on the quarterdeck at the same time each day to “shoot the sun” with their sextants. The object was to establish the time — noon — and the ship’s location on the globe. It also fixed the positions of that captain and those aspiring officers in their societies and in history.
    At noon on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the attacks on America, I tried shooting The Associated Press for a fix on where we are as a nation. Searching for “9/11,” I got 23 hits within the past 24 hours. Here are a few of them:

  • Right here in Columbia, S.C., “First responders and relatives of victims of the 2001 terror attacks were to gather” for a ceremony in which they would sign a steel beam traveling the country. It would “be used in the construction of a museum at the site of the World Trade Center.”
  • Security improvements at the Pentagon have left it “less the office building it was and more a fortress. A burgeoning police force has been given state-of-the-art capabilities to protect against a chemical, biological or radiological attack. Stricter access is being imposed, with fewer vehicles able to drive or park close to the building. Structural improvements allow the building to better withstand blast and fire.”Afghanistan
  • Three photographs showed the wares of Afghan carpet sellers in Kabul who sell crudely woven woolen images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. The captions are wondrously vague, failing to make it clear whether the commemorations are sympathetic or celebratory: “An Afghan carpet seller chats with a friend, not seen, as a small hand-made carpet is seen on the ground featuring the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center….”
  • “Felicia Dunn-Jones, who died just five months” after she inhaled part of “the toxic dust cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan,” was for the first time about to be mourned officially as the 2,750th victim of the attacks. The story goes into the acrimony surrounding the treatment of those who fell ill after that day.

    There was also coverage of a commemorative march, a psychology feature on how survivors of theFreedom attacks have become more “decisive” in their daily lives, a story that speculated whether Rudy Giuliani’s mob-busting resume was as important as his 9/11 image to his political future (no, said one expert), and some baseball linescores that happened to contain the numbers “9” and “11.”
    A group of midshipmen trying to reconcile these varied readings would have trouble finding their way. So as captain of this column, I decided to point my sextant at one point, and call it noon:

    Some balance: “While 83 percent of Republicans say the U.S. campaign against terrorism is going well, only 37 percent of Democrats agree.”
    Finally, a solid, accurate reading. I know exactly where I am — drifting in the American homefront doldrums, where the state of the world is a matter of partisan interpretation, a place where “Just one-quarter say the nation is ‘much’ safer than six years ago, 15 percent express a ‘great deal’ of confidence in the government’s ability to prevent attacks, and 8 percent say the fight against terrorism is going ‘very’ well. By contrast, two-thirds worry ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat’ about major terrorist attacks.”
    I find I want to set all the canvas my masts and spars will bear, to sail this ship as far from this place as I can get, as quickly as it can go. And I’d like to take the rest of my country with me.
    When I contemplate the schizophrenic responses of my fellow Americans even on something so basic and simple and existential as whether they think they are “safe” or not, I think almost any point in time would be better than this noon in this place.
    For instance, I’d prefer to be in the United States of September 2001. At that time, with the shock of horrific events fresh, we were too wise to be partisan. We saw ourselves as having a shared destiny, which we did (and do). Then, the opportunities of the past six years had not yet been missed.
    We still had the chance to take our NATO allies up on a joint fight against terror. The president of the United States had a golden opportunity to enlist us all in changing our lives to meet this challenge, particularly with regard to our dependence on foreign oil. Osama bin Laden had not yet slipped away from us at Tora Bora.
    The various opportunities to secure Iraq quickly and early had not been blown. No one had stood before a “Mission Accomplished” banner. We had not heard of Abu Ghraib. The Golden Mosque was still intact.
    Most of all, Americans of both political parties were united with us independents in wanting our country to succeed on the foreign battlefields where our troops fight real battles, ones in which life and death are not metaphors, and are immune to political interpretation.
    Just above my search results I see a banner on The Associated Press Web site and I click on it:
    “Gen. David Petraeus went before a deeply divided Congress on Monday, the commander of 165,000 troops heckled and attacked by anti-war critics before he began to speak. ‘Tell the truth, general,’ shouted protesters as the four-star general made his way into the crowded hearing room.”
    My God. Check your sextants again, young gentlemen. How did we ever get this far off course?

Waitin’ at the train station, singin’ the ‘Airport Blues’

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
“NEWS IS whatever happens to, or interests, an editor,” a wise colleague named Jerry Ratts once said. Actually, he said it more than “once,” which is why I remember.
    I would insert a corollary: “… or to the editor’s wife….”
    For the past year, my wife has traveled a lot back and forth between here and Pennsylvania. So have I, for that matter. She and our youngest have been up there so that our daughter can study ballet with extreme intensity. My wife has worked up there as a pre-school teacher to help pay for keeping two households, not to mention all the travel.
    She’s spent a lot of time in airports — enough that when she comes home this week, it will be by train.
    A trip back up there in May was the last straw. She recounted her ordeal in an exclusive interview with this correspondent:
    She had to fly out of there early Mother’s Day afternoon, and given the airlines’ rule about early arrival, there was no chance to celebrate the day over lunch. She intended to have a nice dinner with my youngest up in the Keystone State, but that was not to be, either. She wouldn’t get home until after 1 a.m. Monday.
    Miraculously, she left Charleston on time. But she had to make two connections to get to Harrisburg. Things seemed fine when she arrived at the gate for the first connection. They still seemed fine — the sign at the gate still brightly proclaimed that her flight would be on time — when she and other passengers noticed that the flight after theirs was boarding, and they weren’t.
    Somebody had the temerity to ask, and was told, “Oh, we canceled yours.” No apology, and apparently no intention of making an announcement.
    It was either on that leg of the trip or the next (“Can’t remember… so exhausting…”) that she found herself wandering about a terminal after having received no helpful advice at the gate. She learned by chance that another passenger was going to Allentown, with a promised 75-mile bus ride to Harrisburg. She went back to the apathetic agent at the gate to ask about that, and was told yeah, we could get you there that way if that’s what you want.
    The alternative was a flight to Harrisburg at noon the next day, so yeah, she’d like a bus ride. She reached her bed about four hours before time to get up and go herd 4-year-olds all day.
    “So I’m not flying any more,” she said with that dangerous emphasis that I know not to contradict. “They don’t care how much they inconvenience you, or how much they lie to you. I’m just not doing it any more.”
    Of course not, dear. Especially since, between her experiences and my own, this was the third trip in a row that could have been completed more quickly by driving. That haul up interstates 77 and 81, passing through six states, is a stroll in the park compared to these aeronautic nightmares.
    I’ve been on the verge of writing this column a number of times in recent months, but have held back, remembering what Jerry Ratts (the Sage of Wichita, quoted above) said about editors and their sense of perspective.
    Besides, I wasn’t sure it was right for the opinion pages. It had happened to us several times, and the Sage was also known to say: “That’s twice. Once more and it’s a trend, and we can send it to Lifestyles.”
    Then I saw Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, which had a bona fide news story about how many passengers had become fed up with air travel and were taking Amtrak: “Airplanes are getting stuck in lots of traffic jams this summer, but Amtrak is on a roll.”
    Then I realized USA Today — the paper whose only “home town” is the nation’s airports — had been all over it: “By virtually every measure, this is shaping up as the worst year ever for air travel. (That is, if you’re a passenger. Some of the airlines are actually making profits for a change.)”
    Good thing my wife swore off air travel in May, because things have only gotten worse since:
“There’s really something different this summer,” said a frustrated traveler who blogs on the subject (at TakingtheKids.com), which is almost as authoritative as being an editor. “Not only can’t you count on the airlines giving you anything to eat, but you can’t count on a three-hour flight actually being a three-hour flight. It’s a whole new paradigm.” (Journalists find it soothing to describe their personal frustrations with words like “paradigm.”)
    And if you’re the old-fashioned sort who wants facts rather than anecdotes, USA Today supplies this: “In June, 462 aircraft sat for at least three hours awaiting takeoff after leaving the gate, more than tripling the 137 such delays during May. DOT says it’s the highest monthly number since at least 2000.”
    Why has all this happened? Disgruntled scribes differ on that. There’s an air traffic control system that isn’t using the latest technology. There’s the increased number of short-hop flights, taking up more gate time and creating more chances to get tangled up. There’s the cutbacks in airline personnel, who are getting cranky and increasingly unlikely to give you the time of day, much less fluff your pillow.
    But who cares about the why when the answer to when is, “Not any time soon, so sit down and shut up or we’ll call security”?
    In any case, it’s clear that my better half swore off air travel just in time. So I won’t mind a bit hauling myself out of bed at midnight to drive my pickup down to the railway station and wait for my woman to come home. I’ll take along a notepad and a harmonica, ’cause if that don’t get me halfway to a country song, I ain’t got one in me:

Well, I went down to the station;
I was feelin’ kinda sore…
Yeah, I went down to the station, mama;
I was feelin’ mighty sore…
Mah woman, she done tol’ me,
She ain’t gonna fly no more… (Honka wonka waw-waw-wahn)…

    For guitar chords and more, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.