For my part, I missed it. Rehearsal.
But I recorded it, and hope to watch it tomorrow. (Actually, I’m watching the first few minutes now. It certainly starts out civilly enough…)
But in the meantime, I thought I’d provide a place for a discussion. What did y’all think?
Actually, he’s not the only one who thinks so. But Vincent is the one I had lunch with yesterday, and the one who told me about this article that he and Tom Davis co-wrote for the Charleston Law Review (starts on page 439).
By the way, in case you wonder: He doesn’t know whether he’s running for governor again yet. Nor does he have a firm idea who else will be running. There was a fund-raiser held for him recently in Shandon. He says he told the guys who wanted to host it that he hadn’t made a decision. They said they wanted to have the event anyway, and all he had to do was show up. So he did. (I suspect either he or James Smith will run, but not both of them.)
We talked extensively about the 2010 race, and what might or might not be different in 2014. He pointed out that last time around he got more votes than any other gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina history (630,000) — except of course Nikki Haley, who got more. But only slightly more, and that as a result of the one-time Tea Party surge. So while he hasn’t made up his mind, you can see how he’d be considering another run.
Back to the constitutional convention idea… It came up because we were talking about how Tom Davis, who has always been among the most reasonable of men to speak with one-on-one, has been going off the deep end lately in his bid to run to the right of Lindsey Graham and everybody else in the known universe. That got Vincent to mention an area of agreement, which brought up the article, which begins:
South Carolina’s citizenry last met in a constitutional convention in 1895. Prior to the Convention of 1895, the people of South Carolina saw it fit to meet together to perfect their form of government on multiple occasions—1776, 1778, 1790, 1861, 1865, and 1868. When our last convention occurred in 1895, of the 162 members present, only six were black. The convention was in part called so that newly re-ascendant whites could undo work that the Reconstruction government had created. The convention also had a goal of re-centralizing power in the state government away from the emerging local governments.
I fully appreciate all of the reasons why Tom and Vincent see the need for a convention. As I’ve written so often for more than two decades, our state government needs to be rebuilt from the top down (or the bottom up, if you prefer — just as long as the result is the same).
In fact, the initial idea for the Power Failure series I conceived and directed in 1991 came from a series of three op-ed pieces written for The State by Walter Edgar and Blease Graham in 1990, which argued for a constitutional convention.
While not being prepared to leap to that conclusion, I was fascinated by the analysis of what was wrong with our state government (some of which I had glimpsed, but imperfectly, as governmental affairs editor), and how it had always been thus, stretching back to before South Carolina was even a state, back to the Lords Proprietors. In fact, all of those constitutions Tom and Vincent mention in the lede of their article essentially preserved the same flaw of investing power almost exclusively in the Legislature, to the exclusion of the other branches, and of local government. There might have been odd little innovations here and there, such as the direct election of a strange array of state officials (which served the purpose of fragmenting what little power was vested in the executive branch), but the core ill was the same. It was a system created to serve the landed (and before 1865, slaveholding) elites of the state, not the people at large.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t trust our elected leadership to appoint people to a constitutional convention who would go into it with a thorough understanding of the problems, and a commitment to making it better. I felt about it the way Huck Finn felt about telling the truth: “it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.”
Today… well, today, our state government is worse than it was. I can’t remember the last time anything significant came out of our State House that made good sense and that was designed to move our state forward rather than backward. So on the one hand, I’m tempted to say things couldn’t be worse, so let’s set off that “kag” and see which way we’ll go.
But on the other hand… In the years since “Power Failure,” the quality of elected leadership in this state has declined precipitously. Back then, as bad as the structure was, there were people in charge who understood this state’s challenges and were sincerely committed to make things better. Carroll Campbell was governor, and Vincent’s uncle was speaker of the House. And even though he had his doubts about the very limited restructuring Campbell managed to push through in 1993, Bob Sheheen was a smart guy who could be reasoned with, and he did his part to make it happen.
Back then, we had our share of chuckleheads in office, but it was nothing like today. Back then, government wasn’t in the hands of nihilistic populists who not only oppose the very idea of government, they don’t understand the first thing about how it works.
Would you trust the folks in charge now to set up a constitutional convention that would leave us better off than before? The office-holders who understand the things that Vincent and Tom understand about our system are few and far between.
I must admit, I’d have to go back and research what it would take to set up a constitutional convention. At this point, I’m not familiar with the procedures. Maybe there are ways to do it that I would find reassuring. But before I could say I favored having one, I’d have to hear a lot of assurances as to who would attend such a convention, and what they’d be likely to do.
Slatest devoted plenty of virtual ink this morning to indications that the-late-and-unlamented Todd Akin campaign is alive again (cue the “Young Frankenstein” clip”):
FOR REAL THIS TIME: After COB today, Todd Akin’s name is more or less set in stone on the Missouri ballot and will remain there even in the event of his death. But what only a month ago appeared to turn into an unwinnable Senate race for Republicans, now looks likely to go down to the wire.
THE NUMBERS: The latest polling from the Show Me State is about two weeks old, so there is no clear picture of the state of the race. But the last two major surveys (taken the last week of August and the second week of September, respectively) show Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill with less-than-comfortable leads of 1 percent and 6 percent respectively.
AND THAT WAS BEFORE: A handful of GOP heavyweights jumped back aboard the Akin train. Mike Huckabee is sticking with Akin. Phyllis Schlafly is doing a bus tour for him. The Senate Conservatives Fund, headed by Sen. Jim DeMint, is seeking support from its donors to help Akin. And yesterday, Newt Gingrich went to Missouri to headline a fund-raiser for him. “What’s the moral case for not backing the Republican nominee picked by the people of Missouri?” Gingrich said at the $500-a-plate event…
Now, I’ll add something to that. As you read here earlier, Wesley Donehue was brought on After the Fall to raise money for Akin, a fact that Wesley’s been touting in promotional materials for Donehue Direct (see the image below from an eblast).
I checked this morning, and he says the effort has raised $700,000 and counting.
Have to agree, in part, with this release from Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy:
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy (SC-4) today sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting documents pertaining to the Department of Justice’s opposition to South Carolina’s Voter ID law.
Graham and Gowdy expressed concerns that an approval recommendation by career Voting Section experts was ignored and overruled by Obama appointees at the Justice Department…
Oh, it’s a waste all right — the whole mess. Starting with the GOP’s completely unnecessary imposition of this “solution” to a nonexistent “problem,” and ending with Democrats’ hyperventilating over it. As I’ve said over and over again for years, a huge waste all around — and we all know that it’s about each party trying to gain or protect every ounce of leverage it can get at the ballot box. Which has an unbecoming intensity in this very close election.
But gentlemen, as much as one might find in “waste” on both sides — and if the DOJ leadership ignored its own staff recommendation, that does raise one’s eyebrows — the truth is that your own side started this unnecessary fight.
Today at the Columbia Rotary Club, our speaker was Darrell Scott, lobbyist for the S.C. Chamber of Commerce.
He talked about what he does for the Chamber over at the State House, and told some sea stories about his experiences (some people say “war stories;” I’m from a Navy family). The least convincing part of his presentation? A couple of times in explaining a close vote, he referred to the experience giving him “gray hairs.” Sorry, kid — I don’t see ’em.
Two things interested me in particular. One was the report card on the 2012 legislative session, which included grades for all of the lawmakers. You can see the full report here. I’ve reproduced the scorecard on the senators above. It’s interesting to see who stands well with the Chamber, and who does not. Some observations on that chart:
The other highlight of the meeting, I thought, was the exchange that came when attorney Reece Williams got up to ask young Mr. Scott a question. After explaining that he was a veteran of more than 200 jury trials, he asked the speaker how he would define that bete noir of the Chamber, a “frivolous lawsuit.” I enjoyed the way he asked the question — aside from the fact that he presented it in a civil, gentlemanly, even courtly manner (Reece is as nice a lawyer as you’d ever want to meet), as he spoke, he turned way and that to address the “jury” of fellow Rotarians, thereby gently suggesting that he was challenging each of us with the question as well.
The speaker answered him, but his answer wasn’t as memorable to me as what Realtor Jimmy Derrick got up to say in response. After explaining he and Reece are old friends, Jimmy said that he reckoned he had been sued about 200 times himself, and he pretty much considered those actions to be frivolous.
Afterward, I asked Reece what he thought of the answers he’d gotten. He said they pretty much confirmed what he’d thought before: “A ‘frivolous lawsuit’ is one that’s brought against me…”
Catching up here…
Friday night, on my way home, I stopped by a fund-raiser for Attorney General Alan Wilson. The promotion for the event said that George Rogers would be there (with his Heisman Trophy, as it turned out), and Todd Ellis as well. I was curious to see what sort of crowd that would turn out.
The crowd wasn’t as big as I’d anticipated, but it was politically diverse, which would seem to indicate that the AG is in a pretty strong position halfway through his term.
I saw plenty of usual suspects, but then a few less-likely attendees as well. A partial list of folks I saw and/or spoke with:
Notice how I sort of kept Cameron and James — particularly James — until the end there, to keep you hanging…
At one point when I was talking to someone else, Todd Ellis came up and introduced himself, and I introduced myself, and he remarked that it had been a long time. Indeed it had. I don’t think I’d met him before, although I could be wrong…
And she’s saying that to the Republicans who are getting on her husband’s case, according to Slatest:
During an interview with Radio Iowa last night, Ann Romney had a message for the growing ranks of Republicans who have criticized her husband in recent days.
“Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring,” she said. “This is hard and, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now and it’s an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.”
I find myself wondering whether that was spontaneous on her part — which it could well be — or whether someone in the campaign decided, Let’s have Ann say this. Being a woman and being the spouse and not the candidate, she can get away with it — whereas Mitt would be labeled a whiner.
I could see someone in the campaign thinking that, but I prefer to think it was spontaneous.
Beyond that, I have two reactions:
Should have posted about this yesterday and didn’t get to it. Of course, the advantage to waiting is that I can save myself a lot of typing by quoting from the news stories. From Columbia Regional Business Report:
Supporters of a one-penny increase in the sales tax in Richland County kicked off a campaign this week to win voter approval of a plan they said would raise $1 billion over 22 years, address critical transportation needs and create an estimated 17,000 new jobs.
The issue will be on the Nov. 6 general election ballot for all Richland County voters.
The transportation penny, according to the county’s proposal, would increase sales tax in Richland County to 8 cents on the dollar on proceeds of sales, with the funds going to improve roads, support the bus system and increase bike and pedestrian greenways. The transportation penny would increase the sales tax to 2 cents on the dollar on groceries, except for purchases made with food stamps, which are exempt from the transportation penny.
The transportation plan that would be funded by the penny sales tax has a major economic development component, supporters say. One of the projects that it would fund is the Shop Road extension, a new section of road in southern Richland County that could open up large new industrial sites that are attractive to manufacturers and allow water and sewer utilities to be extended into the area…
And from The State:
Touting “more jobs, safer roads, local control,” about 80 people gathered Wednesday to roll out a campaign for a Richland County sales tax for transportation.
Citizens for a Greater Midlands, organized by business leaders making a second effort to pass the penny-on-the-dollar tax, were countered by a dozen sign-carrying protesters on the sidewalk along Gervais Street, outside the Clarion Hotel Downtown. Voters rejected the referendum by about 2,200 votes two years ago.
Richland County Councilman Paul Livingston said the tax to fund roads, buses, sidewalks and bike lanes was the single most important issue to arise in his 22-year tenure in county government.
“Some say we can wait on the state and federal governments,” Livingston said. “Folks, we’ve got to do it ourselves.”
He said there were “no viable alternatives” to a local sales tax to address what he characterized as a crisis in the county’s transportation system. Major roads are congested and in poor repair, funding for the bus system is tenuous and pedestrian and bicycle accidents are common, he said later…
I’m going to take Dawn’s word for it that there were a dozen protesters outside, although when I walked through them on my way in and out — the kickoff was conveniently right around the corner from my ADCO office — it didn’t seem like that many. Of course, I would imagine that relatively few people who will vote “no” are so passionate about it that they want to stand on a curb with a sign. One of them who did was longtime antitax activist Don Weaver, who greeted me pleasantly when he saw me come out.
What I do know is that the room with the supporters inside was fairly packed, and consisted largely of people who devote themselves to working for the advancement of the community, from business leaders to elected officials.
Aside from Councilman Livingston (who, like other elected officials, stressed he was there as a private citizen), we heard from a Midlands Tech student who depends on the bus to get her to school so that someday she can have a job that will enable her to afford a car, two or three other bus riders, my good friend Jennifer Harding (former ad director for The State, now in real estate), Steve Benjamin, Brian DeQuincey Newman, and Cameron Runyan. Rival adman Lee Bussell spoke for the Chamber — he was the one who stressed how the Shop Road extension would help open up prime locations for industrial recruitment.
The most compelling argument for this plan came from Mr. Livingston. He charted the path of this process, from the 39-member citizens group six years ago that drafted the plan that has changed little since then, and made the salient point — this is it, the only viable vehicle for both saving our bus system and funding other transportation priorities.
People who don’t want these things for our community will of course vote against it, which is their right. But people who do want any of these things, and vote against this plan because everything about it isn’t perfect, are fooling themselves and doing their community a disservice. Because this is it. It took a long time to get to this point with a lot of people working hard to do so, and there has been NO effort by anyone I’ve seen to put an alternative plan on the tracks.
How bad has the past week been for Romney, between the Libya remarks and the “47 percent” video? Bad enough that this bit from The Onion is just barely funny:
DALLAS—With his campaign still reeling from a series of miscues, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney asked a group of top advisers Wednesday whether it would be worth going after Obama by questioning the nation of his birth. “What about that whole deal with his birth certificate, or him being born in Kenya or wherever—you think that might stick?” said Romney, adding he was “just spitballing here.” “Also, wasn’t he connected to that terrorist guy, what’s-his-name? Ayers? Bill Ayers? That might have legs, right? Let’s look into that.” After agreeing that the situations should be investigated, Romney and his aides then reportedly sat in silence for 10 whole minutes.
And somewhere out there, some second-guessing Republicans are thinking, “The Donald is tanned, rested and ready…”
Meanwhile, over in a quarter where none of this is funny, one WSJ columnist is lecturing the nominee that his loyalty should be to the country, not his hapless campaign staff, and Karl Rove is saying yes, the situation is bad, but it’s not over — after all, Jimmy Carter was leading Ronald Reagan at this point in 1980.
Speaking of Reagan, Peggy Noonan is writing that it’s “Time for an Intervention:”
What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.
And then he needs to snap out of it, and move…
The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.
My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.
This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.
We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.
You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated…
And this is what Mitt Romney is hearing from what should be his cheering section.
When I saw that Randy Newman had written a song titled “I’m Dreaming (of a White President),” I thought, this is going to be good.
When I read on Twitter that it was “Not a radio hit,” I expected the kind of dead-on, slashing, too-sharp-for-prime-time brilliance that he displayed in “Rednecks,” which we’ll never hear on the radio if we live a thousand years (OK, it’s theoretically possible that we’d hear it — after an hour’s worth of explanation, apology and disclaimer). Oh, and a warning, in case you don’t know that song and innocently follow the link — it uses “N” word eight times. Among other things.
But no. This effort also tries to mine America’s race complexes for profundity, but fails utterly. The lyrics are entirely predictable and trite, the music utterly unappealing.
Either Randy Newman’s lost it — which would mean the loss of a national treasure — or he was just trying too hard on this one.
But since I spent the time listening to it, I pass it on.
Over at Bloomberg Businessweek, Joshua Green insists that the chaos in Mitt Romney’s campaign does NOT mean that he’s a bad CEO:
Romney’s problem is not that he’s brought too little executive rigor to the job of running for president. It’s that he’s brought too much. He’s behaved too much like a businessman (or a consultant) and not enough like a politician. His campaign has all the hallmarks of being run by someone looking only at the numbers, someone who lacks a true politician’s appreciation for the other dimensions of a race—a feel for the electorate, a convincing long-term plan for the country. Were he forced to defend himself before a board of directors, Romney would actually have a pretty solid case for doing what he has done….
… Romney has scrupulously avoided committing to anything that is remotely unpopular, such as naming which tax loopholes he’d close to pay for his agenda. That is to say, he is doing just about everything a close reading of the polls says you should do, and he’s trying hard not to do anything the polls say you shouldn’t do. If a team of Bain consultants were hustled in to pore over the data and devise a strategy, I doubt they would have devised a meaningfully different campaign.
The problem is that politics is about much more than a tactical, short-term reading of the numbers. Candidate skills matter, and the audience in a presidential election is much more variegated than a board of directors. There isn’t much, frankly, that a stiff guy can do to make himself warm and approachable. (Earth tones, anyone?) The glaring weaknesses in Romney’s campaign—the fuzzy details, the inability to convincingly articulate plan for growth, and above all the weird tics and gaffes—are not ones that a businessman’s skills can rectify.
In other words, he’s more a bad politician than a bad CEO. We are left to conclude what we like about what sort of president he would be.
Something to consider, for all those who still think the silly phrase “run government like a business” makes sense.
The WashPost brings my attention to the above video, which was put out by Mother Jones (and of course, if it were just Mother Jones, I wouldn’t be paying as much attention — but the Post seems to regard it as legit, so…) From the Post report:
Bits and pieces of a private fundraiser held by Mitt Romney have been leaked to Mother Jones magazine, exposing some blunt talk from the Republican candidate on voters, his campaign and American society.
In one video, Romney argues that it’s not “my job” to win over the 47 percent of voters committed to President Obama, because they are “dependent on government” and he will “never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
What Romney says in the video will perhaps endear him to some of the base that have thus far been cold to him, because that’s exactly what they think of Obama voters.
But personally, I would have thought Mr. Romney had a somewhat more respectful, and open-minded, attitude toward this nearly half of the American electorate. It’s a bit disturbing to think that, if elected, he’d come into office holding 47 percent of Americans in contempt to this degree.
This morning, I attended a meeting over at the Greater Columbia Chamber of the group campaigning for the referendum to fund local buses and other transportation needs.
That is to say, the group preparing to campaign for the referendum. The official launch is next Wednesday. The website just went live, with additional content to come, and the Twitter feed is just getting started — I was only the seventh follower.
But of course, the effort goes back quite a ways. At the meeting I was sitting next to former Columbia College President (and local F.O.B.) Caroline Whitson, who led the initial communitywide effort — more than six years ago now — to identify, and push for funding for, local transportation priorities.
That effort would have likely led to passage of the one-cent sales tax increase in 2008, except that it failed to get on the ballot for lack of a vote on Richland County Council (I want to say it was because Kit Smith was out of town, but it’s been awhile, so I forget the exact details). Instead, it went on the ballot in 2010, the most anti-government, anti-tax election year in my memory — and fell less than a percentage point short.
Backers, among whom you can continue to count me, are optimistic that this is the year. I think there are a number of reasons to think so, in spite of the continued vehemence of the opposition.
I’ll have more on the subject as the effort launches.
As we were discussing yesterday, the advantage in this election belongs to the president. But things can happen to change that. The teacher’s union in Chicago, his old stomping grounds, is doing what it can in that regard.
Not that I think it will hurt him that much, but they’re doing their best.
Why would the rest of us care about a labor dispute in Chicago, of course, except for its potential impact on a national conversation.
This is one of those moments in which Democrats and their constituencies do their best to live down to the very worst portraits that Republicans paint of them.
The Republican (or Viable Libertarian) Party dislikes public education, because it costs money, for which taxes must be paid. So it paints public education as a vast patronage machine, run by people who care little about actually educating our society, but only about their own prerogatives and self-interest. The legitimate interest of the public in an educated populace, this argument goes, is held hostage to public employee unions.
This, of course, is a grossly unfair characterization (and grossly inaccurate in SC, where we do not have collective bargaining for public employees, and therefore have no teachers’ union), except for when it is dead on.
Argue all you like about any supposedly legitimate grievances these union members have. It really doesn’t matter. When I Google “chica” — that’s all I have to type — I get a Chicago Tribune story that is encapsulated on the search page with these words: “More than 350,000 children will be locked out of Chicago public schools for a second day as striking teachers and the school board remain at…”
News stories out of Chicago are replete with the disruption to the lives of children who ought to be in school learning something. Here’s how it plays, from the Tribune story. This is in reference to the city’s effort to provide the parks as safe places for working parents to drop off their kids during the strike:
But Rachelle Cirrintano, who works at the University of Illinois at Chicago, still worried about her 8-year-old son Rocco. The boy has a hard time adjusting to change, she explained. When she dropped him off this morning, he sat on a bench alone because he didn’t know anyone.
She focused her frustration at the teachers.
“There was no reason to do this when they just got situated,” Cirrintano said. “All the teachers should be let go for their irresponsibility to the children and their families.”
And who is the wicked boss the union is striking against, as far as the world can see? Why, Rahm Emanuel, the president’s former chief of staff. The mayor’s sin was to try to implement some basic education reforms. The union claims the mayor “disrespected” it.
Republican critics of public education couldn’t have written a better script for illustrating their argument that the greatest barrier to education reform is the very people who work in public education.
This is bound to create mixed feelings in people who care about South Carolina:
Gov. Nikki Haley will balance her time between governing South Carolina and stumping for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney over the next two months.
Haley’s target audience? Women voters, a critical voting bloc for Romney because of polls that show women favor incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama by a double-digit margin.
“Governor Haley has a very full schedule of job creation and economic development meetings and events in the next two months,” said Rob Godfrey, Haley’s spokesman. “But as much as her schedule permits, she does plan on helping the Romney-Ryan ticket. …
“Mixed feelings” in that our state could use some leadership in trying to pull out of, not only a recession, but our historic near-last ranking in by so many measures. On the other hand, if the only governor we’ve got is Nikki Haley, well… maybe she might as well run off and have her picture made some more, and leave us alone.
I find myself torn between the two ways of looking at it.
It appears that the Democrats got a modest bounce from last week’s convention, but the opposition refuses to be impressed, according to the WashPost:
BOSTON — Acknowledging Monday that President Obama has seen a surge in voter support since last week’s Democratic National Convention, the Romney campaign’s pollster likened the bounce to a “sugar high” and argued that the Republican challenger has a long-term advantage over the president.
Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney’s pollster and senior strategist, wrote a memorandum released to reporters to rebut the conventional wisdom that Romney has fallen behind in the presidential race and to calm any panic among supporters. In the memo, Newhouse wrote that Obama “has seen a bounce from his convention” but contended that the president’s approval ratings are likely to recede in the weeks ahead.
“Don’t get too worked up about the latest polling,” Newhouse wrote. “While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly. The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race.”
According to several new national polls, after months of deadlock, Obama opened a lead over Romney after last week’s Democratic convention in Charlotte. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday, 47 percent of likely voters supported Obama and 43 percent Romney. In a Gallup tracking poll, Obama leads Romney 49 percent to 44 percent, while an automated Rasmussen poll released Monday put Obama at 50 percent and Romney at 45 percent….
“Ultimate downfall?” Really. It looks like maybe Jim DeMint is acting as scriptwriter for Mr. Newhouse. Here I thought we were just facing an election. The Romney team seems to be planning something more on the order of Götterdämmerung. I can see Mitt in his helicopter now, cranking up the Wagner and explaining, “It scares the hell out of the libs… but our boys love it!“
GEORGE: Oh! You mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong?SIMON: Excuse me?GEORGE: Oh, yeah. The lads frequently sit around the telly and watch her for a giggle. One time, we actually sat down and wrote these letters saying how gear she was and all that rubbish.SIMON: She’s a trendsetter. It’s her profession.GEORGE: She’s a drag. A well known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things.
Many of the speakers at the two political conventions brought out the George Harrison in me. When they came on, I’d only be able to listen for a moment. Then I’d turn the sound down on them and say rude things.
Peggy Noonan apparently kept listening, and then when it was done, wrote down the rude things she was thinking. For my part, sometimes I only went so far as to turn the sound down. That was the case, near as I can recall, with Sandra Fluke. She came on, I listened a bit, then turned the sound down and went back to reading Wolf Hall. So next time I see her, I might confuse her with Anne or Mary Boleyn.
I learned later about what she had to say from reading Ms. Noonan, who characterized it thusly in her column this weekend:
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I’ve never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
“Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception,” Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim?
What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Unusually harsh language, coming from Peggy “Thousand Points of Light” Noonan.
I didn’t watch Ms. Fluke long enough to form the same impression Ms. Noonan did. But her description of why she found the young woman so off-putting is very familiar to me — it’s very like what I thought listening to non-headliner speakers at both conventions (sorry I’m not remembering any names; I wouldn’t have remembered this one had Ms. Noonan not made such a thing of her). So much of what they talked about just seemed… off-topic. Something they were going on about just to divide their partisans from the other partisans.
What’s interesting about this is that the parties apparently know this. They know the difference between these wedge issues and the central ones that should decide elections. The central issues, the ones that are not non sequiturs, are the ones the nominees themselves, and to some extent their running mates and other top surrogates talk about. There seemed to be a fairly strict line between the pre-10 p.m. speakers and topics, and the ones we heard from and about post-10 — the hour at which the parties got serious about trying to reach beyond their bases to try to win an election.
Back when he was elected governor in 2002, Mark Sanford was an outlier in the Republican Party. He called himself a “conservative,” but his words and actions in his first months in office made it increasingly clear that he was not that at all, but was a rather extreme libertarian — which is to say, a classical liberal.
For years, this put him at odds with most elected Republicans, who were more conventionally conservative. Among people who knew and understood him, his fan base was generally limited to the Club for Growth, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, and such anti-public education activists as Howard Rich.
Then came the Republican defeats of 2008. After that, the party went through paroxysms of self-accusation, and the loudest voices were those that said the party’s problem was that it was not extreme enough (especially in nominating iconoclast John McCain), in particular that didn’t hate government enough. And those voices, belonging to Jim DeMint and others, started to gain traction quite rapidly. While they were still calling themselves “conservative” and still do, they were defining the term away from the more traditional meaning that I have long embraced.
Then came the election of 2010, which brought together the elite theorists of the Club for Growth and the lowest-common-denominator populists of the Tea Party, united only by the fact that they deeply despised the idea that citizens can ban together to address their common challenges as a community — that is to say, despised the very idea of government in a free society.
In spite of all that, the Republicans in 2012 chose as their standard-bearer a relative nonideologue. But he only got the nod by the skin of his teeth, after the extremists failed to unite, for more than a few days or weeks at a time, behind a candidate they liked better. And in order to make sure the muscular, energized libertarian elements of the party turn out in November, he chose the most vocal and articulate exponent of their worldview as his running mate.
And so the picture was complete: The GOP ticket was fully onboard with the libertarian agenda. (Economic libertarianism, anyway. Cultural libertarianism has generally been left to the Democrats.)
But who, if anyone, was out there to champion what I see as the viable alternative to that view — communitarianism?
Well, to my great interest, key Democrats started saying some very communitarian things this week. Bill Clinton put it as strongly as anyone:
We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think “we’re all in this together” is a better philosophy than “you’re on your own.”
The former president accomplished two things there: He shoved aside so much of the divisive class-warfare rhetoric we had heard from other DNC speakers (such as the one just before him), and said the one thing that is the simplest possible assertion of the communitarian worldview — that “we’re all in this together.”
At least — and here’s a huge disclaimer — I think of that as being a purely communitarian statement. Truth be told, there is so little discussion of communitarianism out there that I’m not always entirely sure I understand it, which is why I say I think I have communitarian tendencies, rather than “I am a communitarian.”
But to me at least, “we’re all in this together” isn’t just a description of how the world should be. It is a simple description of the way the world is, and you can’t engage the world realistically and effectively if you don’t recognize it.
But if I liked that, I really liked the things the president had to say the next night. First, there was his use of the word “citizenship.” That probably doesn’t sound like much to you, just another Civics 101 kind of term that you would expect to hear in a political speech. But actually, we haven’t heard it all that much since JFK’s “ask what you can do for your country” speech. You won’t find it, for instance, in the speeches of Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney at the RNC the week before.
“Citizenship” jumps out at me because of something I noticed several years ago — that the radical libertarian wing of the GOP, which now so dominates the party, doesn’t really believe in it. Or at least, doesn’t believe in it in any way I would recognize it.
I wrote about this several years back, in the context of the “school choice” debate. I had noticed something fundamental about the thinking of the people who advocated for tax credits and vouchers: They saw themselves as consumers, rather than as citizens. A citizen understands that he pays taxes to support public schools because they are a public good that benefits the whole society, not just the children who attend the schools or their families. Because he wants to live in a society in which everyone has some education and some ability to support themselves and contribute to the community, rather than having vast swaths of the society being incapable of constructive engagement. By contrast, the “school choice” advocates saw themselves as consumers. They saw themselves as paying for a service with those taxes — and if they, personally, had no one in their families attending those schools (ifthey were childless, or if their children attended private school or were homeschooled), then they shouldn’t be paying for the service. To them, this was irresistible logic — because they related to the world as consumers rather than as citizens.
So the word got my attention. Here’s how the president used it:
But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.
Exactly. But Mr. Obama went beyond that. He went on to use language that seemed directly lifted from a communitarian website or something:
We don’t think the government can solve all of our problems, but we don’t think the government is the source of all of our problems — any more than our welfare recipients or corporations or unions or immigrants or gays or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles — because — because America, we understand that this democracy is ours.We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together — through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.
“Rights and Responsibilities” is essentially the tagline of The Communitarian Network.
But use whatever words you want to describe it — communitarianism, citizenship, civic-mindedness, or Donne’s “no man is an island” — the fact is that the president, and Bill Clinton before him, were offering a powerful alternative to the radical individualism that the GOP ticket is offering.
There is still much I find terribly off-putting about the Democrats, all of which was on display this week — the Identity Politics, the unquestioning embrace of abortion on demand, the unrealistic way so many of them still speak of national security (for that matter, their general lack of concern about it, as so many of them prefer to dwell on domestic issues).
But this notion of citizenship, set against a very different view of reality being set forth by the GOP ticket, to me rather powerfully recommends President Obama going forward. Now that he has framed the choice in this manner, I will listen with great interest for the GOP response. At this point, I fear that it is sadly predictable.
My favorite moment in either convention came late last night, when one of the commentators on PBS used the word “exegesis” in describing what he’d just heard.
He was referring to Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s benediction right after President Obama’s speech. I had not heard it, whether because PBS didn’t show it or I was out of the room, I can’t recall. But C-SPAN had it, as you see above.
The commenter — I think it was Ray Suarez — was saying that the Cardinal had delivered “a riff” on something. Then he corrected himself, saying perhaps the word “exegesis” was more appropriate. His colleagues were impressed.
I very much appreciate that the Democrats gave the cardinal this forum, only about an hour after ostensible Catholic Joe Biden had roared out his approval of the party’s embrace of abortion. The cardinal said, among other things:
Thus do we praise you for the gift of life. Grant us to defend it. Life, without which no other rights are secure. We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected…
At the end of his prayer, the assembled Democrats responded with a strong “amen,” which was a settler for all those Republicans who think they’re just a bunch of heathens. To what extent all had been listening carefully, I don’t know. But the fact is that as with most public prayers, most of the words were ones they would most likely have agreed with.
The coverage came later, after the assembled media caught their breath.
The cardinal was the one person who spoke at both conventions, by the way.
Oh, what did I mean by my headline above? Well, this morning I saw a Tweet from the Charleston paper that said, “Bishop England beats Porter-Gaud. Story:http://bit.ly/NYyg6j .” So I couldn’t resist responding, “… And Cardinal Dolan thrashes the Democrats. Big night for the Catholics…”
Mackerel-snappers had a big one the night before, too. Among the non-headliners, I thought the speech by Sister Simone of “Nuns on the Bus” probably the most uplifting, least off-putting of the two weeks. Her delivery was beatific, but pulled no punches: After taking apart the budget of another dubious Catholic, Paul Ryan, she said to fervent cheers, “This is part of my pro-life stance, and the right thing to do.”
Both of them expressed what I believe. Which is a big reason why I’m so uncomfortable with both parties.
OK, the quick, overall assessment: However this election turns out, in the short term the Democrats will likely get the bigger convention bounce. They earned it these last two nights.
Yes, there was just as much irritating nonsense at this convention as at the one last week — I turned down the sound and picked up a book to spare myself the aggravation just as many times. But the headliners were stronger. They showed greater conviction, presented more compelling ideas (and, alas, emotions), and I believe did a better job of engaging not only the true believers in the room, but the more important audience at home.
Doubt me? Honestly, now, whatever your political persuasion — do you really think Mitt Romney truly believes all the things he said as much as Barack Obama does, whether you agree with the president or not? And sincerity sells; it connects.
Of course, it didn’t hurt the president a bit that veteran Bill Clinton left him a five-run lead going into the last inning. He just had to hold on to it, and he actually did better than that.
But I’m just repeating what I already said on Twitter. So here are my Tweets as they came to me, starting at 9:02 p.m.:
