Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Is Rwanda a bigger problem for Rice?

I was intrigued by this argument over at Foreign Policy, saying that there are big problems in Susan Rice’s record, and they have nothing to do with Benghazi:

GOMA, Democratic Republic of the Congo — Televised comments made by Amb. Susan Rice shortly after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi have dominated the debate over her probable nomination for secretary of state. This is a bit surprising, since it’s clear that she played only a marginal role in the affair and appears to have just been reading from the briefing notes provided. It’s also unfortunate that the “scandal” has crowded out a healthy discussion of her two-decade record as U.S. diplomat and policymaker prior to Sept. 2012 — and drawn attention away from actions for which she bears far greater responsibility than Benghazi.

Her role in shaping U.S. policy toward Central Africa should feature high on this list. Between 1993 and 2001, she helped form U.S. responses to the Rwandan genocide, events in post-genocide Rwanda, mass violence in Burundi, and two ruinous wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

She did not get off to an auspicious start. During her first year in government, there was a vigorous debate within the Clinton administration over whether to describe the killing in Rwanda as a “genocide,” a designation that would necessitate an international response under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. In a now infamous incident from that April, which was reported in her now State Department colleague Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell,Rice — at the time still a junior official at the National Security Council — stunned her colleagues by asking during a meeting, “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional midterm] election?” She later regretted this language,telling Power, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.” And she has indeed emerged as one of the more forceful advocates for humanitarian intervention in U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, she has also often seemed to overcompensate for her earlier misstep on Rwanda with an uncritical embrace of the the country’s new leaders…

I didn’t realize any of that. Nor did I know about this:

Perhaps the most damning anecdote — told by French academic Gérard Prunier and confirmed by New York Times journalist Howard French — was of a private converation Rice had after her first trip to Central Africa around this time: “Museveni [of Uganda] and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we [i.e., the United States] have to do is look the other way.”…

The hole DeMint’s been digging to bury his party in (and how that affects our OTHER senator)

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Juan Williams (isn’t he a TV guy?) wrote a piece that appeared in The Wall Street Journal today about what has led to the irrelevance of Republicans in the U.S. Senate. After noting that John McCain and Lindsey Graham can huff and puff all they like, but won’t be able to blow Susan Rice down, Williams says of Senate Republicans in general:

They have only themselves to blame. Six months ago, a GOP takeover of the Senate was plausible. Yet in the Nov. 6 elections, Democrats expanded their hold, to 55-45, from 53-47. (Two independents caucus with the Democrats.) By any pre-election reckoning, Democrats should have lost seats. They had to defend 23 seats while the GOP had to defend only 10.

In the aftermath of the vote, there is no better place than in the U.S. Senate to observe the current war over the future of the Republican Party.

The 2012 vote was the second cycle in a row when the GOP had a clear shot at winning control of the Senate but blew the chance by nominating ideologues. Conservative activists who dominate the GOP primaries selected hard-line, right-wing candidates without any regard for their ability to win the general election and increase the number of Republicans in the Senate…

This, of course, is what Jim DeMint and his ilk have wrought, running about the country pushing extremists.

And as we all know, one of the prime targets of such efforts is our other U.S. senator:

And now conservative and tea party activists look to be doubling down for 2014. They are already talking about primary challenges to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican; to Maine Sen. Susan Collins; and to Mr. Graham in South Carolina…

Mr. McConnell is far from alone in this fight for the future of Senate Republicans. Sen. Graham is known in Washington for his battles with Mr. Obama over everything from budgets to Benghazi. But the head of the conservative group Club for Growth, Chris Chocola, said in September that his group “has a lot of interest” in finding a more conservative candidate to take the Senate seat for South Carolina. “Our first focus is open, safe Republican seats,” Mr. Chocola said. “Our second focus is incumbents behaving badly. Regardless of whether you win or lose, you scare the heck out of the rest of them.”

Scaring incumbent Republicans from the right wing of the political spectrum is proving to be effective at keeping them in line. GOP senators know the danger of moderating their views—there is a political penalty attached to any political compromise with Democrats…

That seems to be a major pastime for extremists on the right — scaring people. Nikki Haley has referred to making mainstream pols afraid as “a beautiful thing.”

The column doesn’t mention Tom Davis. I guess he’s not quite on the national radar yet.

One wonders what they think they are accomplishing. It must be a terrible thing for one’s mind to be in the grip of an ideology. Sort of like the fable about the scorpion and the frog. That’s just what scorpions do, even if it means drowning themselves.

‘Lincoln’ is one of those rare films you really must see

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The nitty-gritty of greatness.

Over the weekend, I experienced the polar opposites of cinematic achievement: First, AT&T was having a free weekend for premium channels, and while I recorded a number of films I expect to enjoy, one of those channels also showed David Lynch’s execrable “Dune.” I had not watched it since that bitterly disappointing night in 1984 in a Jackson, TN, theater when it first came out. Those few minutes I watched over the weekend convinced me that it wasn’t just that my expectations had been so high at the time. This actually was the worst film I’ve ever seen in my life. Every line of dialogue, every visual touch, every gratuitous plot change from the book (“weirding modules”? Are you kidding me?), was so bad it had to be as intentional as those revolting pustules the make-up people put all over the Baron Harkonnen’s face (something else that wasn’t in the book). Every aspect of it was horrible.

So it was very nice, Sunday evening, to wipe that away by seeing one of the finest new motion pictures I’ve seen in years: “Lincoln.”

Everyone should see this. Every American should, anyway, because it tells so much about who we are and what led to our being what we are. And it tells us something I think we’ve forgotten, which is that great things can be accomplished through our system of representative democracy, even when the barriers and stakes are far greater than anything we face in Washington today.

I could go on and on about the way Daniel Day Lewis inhabits Abraham Lincoln and eerily embodies everything I’ve read about him, or how Spielberg has honed his craft to the very limits of film’s ability to tell a coherent story, while simultaneously making you feel like you’re looking through a time portal at the actual events.

But I’ll just zero in on one thing that contributed to making it so good: The political realism. Most specifically, the way the film not only avoids the temptation to make everything appear to be morally black or white, but rubs your nose in the messiness of real decisions made in a real world.

The main narrative has to do with Lincoln, after his second inauguration, pulling out all the stops to get the House to pass the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. To get the two-thirds, he needs at least 20 more votes even if every Republican supports the measure. This means not only peeling off some Democrats, each defection like pulling teeth out of a dragon, but somehow keeping the peace among the radicals (such as Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones) and conservatives (such as Preston Blair, played by Hal Holbrook) in his own party.

Every stratagem is used, starting with the hiring of some sleazy political operatives (I was amazed to realize after I saw the film that that was James Spader playing lobbyist W.N. Bilbo) to employ every trick they can come up with, starting with raw political patronage and moving on from there. (A key part of the strategy involved offering jobs in the second Lincoln administration to lame-duck members of the other party who had just lost their bids for re-election, but not left office yet.) The Lincoln team even stoops to a half-truth — told by Honest Abe himself — at a critical moment to keep the coalition from blowing up.

It’s very, very messy. No plaster saints here, and feet of clay all over the place. Yet through it all, the ultimate nobility of what is being done, in spite of all the odds, shines through irresistibly. We see how politics, with all its warts, can accomplish magnificent things. At a moment when Democrats and Republicans can’t even seem to do a simple thing like keep from going over a “fiscal cliff” with their hands around each others’ throats, we see how politicians (and they evince all of the worst things we think of when we use that term) can accomplish something great, even when (or perhaps, because?) the stakes are so much greater.

This film not only doesn’t flinch at moral complexity; it wallows in it, to wonderful effect. An excellent example is the scene in which Lincoln muses aloud before his team about all the convoluted, mutually contradictory, logical and constitutional boxes he put himself and the nation in when he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. And the tension builds as we come to fully understand why the Amendment — which would fulfill the dream of freedom that the Proclamation could not — must be passed NOW, before the war ended. And we share Lincoln’s intense, focused urgency.

No significant aspect of Lincoln’s public character is missing from this portrait, including the delight that both he and his audiences took in his jokes. (But not all the people all of the time — Secretary of War Edwin Stanton storms out rather than listen to a funny story at a tense moment.) And at the end, after all the deal-making and maneuvering and fiddling and pushing and pulling and playing to venality and petty egos — one is left believing that Abraham Lincoln was a greater man than any marble statue could ever convey. I don’t know how to explain to you how the film achieves that; it just does.

I suppose there will be some people who just don’t get it — black-and-white, concrete thinkers who will be disturbed at the honest portayal of the messiness of politics as it was practiced in 1865. The neo-Confederates who think the Lincoln would originally have kept slavery if he could preserve the Union is some sort of great “gotcha” won’t get it. Nor will those like the local political activist who, a few days ago, said on Facebook that “Lincoln was not a good man” because his attitudes about racial equality weren’t a perfect match for those of a 21st-century “progressive.”

But seeing “Lincoln” may be among the best chances they’ll ever have to see that reality is broader, and often more inspiring, than their narrow perspectives on it.

No-holds-barred 19th-century lobbying in all its grubby glory.

Pride and Prejudice and Scandal

Is Gov. Nikki Haley growing in face of crisis?

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Cindi Scoppe first raised the question in her column yesterday headlined, “Is SC computer breach transforming Gov. Nikki Haley?” The column was made possible by one of the first signs of new maturity in our governor — a phone conversation with editorial writers (as opposed to her usual pep rally with her admirers on her Facebook page), to engage in actual dialogue about the Department of Revenue hacking mess:

… (F)rom her first public utterances, Gov. Nikki Haley insisted that there was nothing anyone in state government could have done to prevent the breach.

Even more troubling were her assurances that weren’t so absurd on their face. She said that hacking experts told her thieves usually use stolen data within six to eight months and that “Usually after a year, they don’t see anything,” but security experts say that while that’s true with credit card numbers, just the opposite is true with Social Security numbers. She insisted that leaving Social Security numbers unencrypted was an “industry standard” in the banking industry, but some banking officials disputed that. She said other states didn’t encrypt their data, but failed to mention that our go-to comparison neighbors, North Carolina and Georgia, do.

I’ve never been comfortable with the governor’s tendency to speak in absolutes, of her black-and-white sense of certainty. But there’s a world of difference between being careless or misleading when defending yourself from political attacks or engaging in policy debates and doing the same thing when what you say affects how 4.25 million current and former South Carolinians make potentially life-changing decisions about their personal financial security.

So it was a relief earlier this month when, confronted by comments to the contrary by an investigator hired by the state, the governor told reporters that she didn’t yet know enough to say whether anyone could have prevented the breach. Of course, she also insisted that she had never said otherwise. Still it was a start.

Then during a conference call with editorial writers on Friday, Ms. Haley gave an uncharacteristically tentative answer to a question about the hacking and added: “Understand that I can’t speak in absolutes because I feel like I learn something new every day.”

“I hesitate on saying whether there was something internal or external, because the one thing I think I’ve learned in this is you can’t talk in absolutes,” she said a few minutes later, noting that after she thought she knew everything about the hacking, “the second day they added more, the third day they added more … .”

Yes, as Cindi noted, the governor still doesn’t know how to acknowledge her mistakes. She follows more the Orwellian approach of adopting a new line and insisting it has always been her line. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia…

But let’s embrace the encouraging new signs. This is a major development, for Nikki Haley to base her perceptions of the world on actual facts and experience, rather than her ideological, self-affirming preconceptions. For an unsullied ideologue like our governor, for whom truth has been whatever aphorisms help to get her elected, to start learning a little more each day, and recognize she’s doing so, and actually apply the lessons she’s learning, makes for a great day in South Carolina, compared to what we’ve known.

After trying out her new approach on editorialists, our governor has gone public with it:

Columbia, SC — As more South Carolinians learned that hackers hold their tax return data, Gov. Nikki Haley admitted Tuesday that the state did not do enough to protect their sensitive financial information and accepted the resignation of the agency director in the middle of the controversy.

“Could South Carolina have done a better job? Absolutely, or we would not be standing here,” said Haley, who had insisted in the first days after revealing the cyber attack that nothing could have prevented the breach.

Hackers possess Social Security and other data belonging to 5.7 million people – 3.8 million taxpayers and their 1.9 million dependents, Haley said. The number of businesses affected has risen slightly to nearly 700,000. All of the stolen tax data dating back to 1998 was unencrypted.

The theft at the S.C. Department of Revenue is the largest known hacking at a state agency nationwide…

Note how she can’t resist using the word “absolutely,” even in connection with an assertion that is the opposite of what she’d said earlier (which means either it’s not absolute, or she was absolutely wrong earlier).

But hey, when your child starts to speak, do you castigate her for immature pronunciation? This is a start, and I’m inclined to celebrate it, and hope our governor continues her journey out of her hothouse bubble and keeps engaging the world as it actually is.

Was Romney better than the GOP deserved?

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Just read Kathleen Parker’s column from over the weekend about how the GOP doesn’t need focus groups to figure out why it lost the presidential election; it just needs to look in a mirror.

I liked this part:

Some Republicans stubbornly insist, of course, that the problem was that Romney wasn’t conservative enough. Really? In his heart, this may be true. I never believed Romney was passionate about social issues. He embraced them because he had to, but he had no intention of pursuing a socially conservative agenda.

But the real problem is the Republican Party, which would not be recognizable to its patron saint, Ronald Reagan. The party doesn’t need a poll or a focus group. It needs a mirror.

The truth is, Romney was better than the GOP deserved…

I agree. While Romney wouldn’t have topped my list of candidates (if I were allowed to choose the field, rather than having that crowd of undesirables that actually ran for the GOP nomination this time), he’s a relatively decent sort of guy, and no sort of nut. And the traumatized party that has been spinning off into irrelevance since the rise of the Tea Party did not deserve him.

Of course, I don’t agree with her that it was the gross missteps by a couple of GOP candidates (who were not running for president or vice president) on Culture War issues that best illustrated what was wrong. As she put it, in her most colorful passage:

Party nitwits undermined him, and the self-righteous tried to bring him down. The nitwits are well-enough known at this point — those farthest-right social conservatives who couldn’t find it in their hearts to keep their traps shut. No abortion for rape or incest? Sit down.Legitimate rape? Put on your clown suit and go play in the street.

No, the GOP has long been on the right on social issues — although perhaps not as given to such bizarre ways of expressing itself — and remained a mainstream party, for a long, long time. That’s nothing new. What’s new is the way it’s gone off the deep end on fiscal issues, and other attendant weirdness such as refusal to be reasonable on immigration (which is WAY far away from being the party of Ronald “Amnesty” Reagan) that distinguishes the spin-off into irrelevance in the last handful of years.

The pre-2010 GOP might have deserved Romney. The post-2010 party, not so much…

Rachel Maddow’s take on Reality, and the Right

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I said something less than flattering about Elizabeth Warren on another thread a few minutes ago, so by way of making it up to my friends of the liberal persuasion, I thought I’d give them this to enjoy.

Someone over at YouTube even kindly provided a transcript:

Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States. Again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing! And Benghazi was an attack ON us, it was not a scandal BY us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as Communism.

Listen. Last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats for very obvious reasons. But it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country we have a two party system, in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas, from both sides, about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived, as a nation, of the constructive debate between competing, feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the Republicans got shellacked. And they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them, in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it even as it was happening to them. And unless they’re going to secede, they’re going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside, if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I’m sure, but it will be good for the whole country – left, right, and center. You guys, we’re counting on you. Wake up.

There’s real problems in the world. There are real knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there. If the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations everybody. Big night.

We knew this was coming, didn’t we?

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After the 2008 election, Jim DeMint and others cried that the reason Republicans lost is that they just weren’t right-wing enough, and they should never have nominated an iconoclast like John McCain.

It was patent nonsense, but the GOP listened, and so we got the Tea Party madness, and Nikki Haley, and Sarah Palin as a national celebrity, and a presidential nominating process that a year ago was letting the flake of the week take turns leading the pack.

It was inevitable, of course, that someone would say after Tuesday that despite all that saturation in ideology, Romney’s problem was that he just wasn’t right-wing enough (and remember, four years ago, Romney was the preferred candidate of people like DeMint). And in this release, someone did:

The Real Reason Romney Lost

Now that Mitt Romney lost to one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, the question many are asking is why?

Political pundits on the Left and Right are claiming that Romney appealed too much to the “extreme Right fringe” and was not “moderate enough.” The truth is that the exact opposite is true.

It is virtually impossible to win a national presidential election without your base on election day as 1976, 1992, 1996, and 2008 all demonstrated. Unfortunately, the GOP elites thought the pro-family/pro-life Christian base would hold their proverbial noses and vote for their candidate regardless. They were wrong!

Fast forward to 2012 and many of us warned that if the GOP once again nominated an establishment approved liberal like Romney that it would assure 4 more years of the Obama in the White House since, again, it’s virtually impossible to win without your base on election day.

But once again, the elites who run the GOP (Reince Priebus, Karl Rove, The Bushies, the folks over at Fox News, the Weekly Standard and National Review) rammed yet another establishment liberal RINO down our throats who was, from the very beginning, destined for defeat.

Obama’s base turned out Tuesday night. Romney’s didn’t. And why should they have? After all, in just the past few months, Romney did virtually everything possible to snub the very same Evangelical conservative GOP “Values Voters” base ( whose support he would need in every one of the key swing states he lost last night) by:

Refusing to sign the Susan B. Anthony and Personhood U.S.A pro-life pledges.

Reaffirming his opposition to bans on homosexual scoutmasters.

Opposing 100% pro-life, pro-family, across the board conservative Senatorial candidate, Todd Akin.

Running pro-abortion ads in key pro-life swing states.

Stating that “abortion legislation” and Chick Fill-A was not “part of his agenda.”

Santorum was right when he said that Romney was the “worst Republican in the country to run against Obama.”

Having lost his own senate re-election bid by 18 points in 2006 by snubbing his own base (by supporting uber-liberal Arlen Specter over conservative primary challenger Pat Toomey), Santorum was all too familiar with what happens when your base stays home on election day.

The GOP elites should have listened to Santorum.

So, how do we stop perpetually repeating this mistake every 4 years you ask? Simple.

Christian and conservative leaders and grassroots citizens must make it clear that we will, under no circumstances, compromise our core moral and spiritual beliefs. We will not support godless liberals like Romney for public office no matter how many time the liberal GOP inside-the-beltway elites tell us our 100% pro-life, pro-marriage, pro- rule of law Constitutional conservative Christian candidate isn’t “electable.”

When we set the standard based on God’s authoritative Word and tell those running to represent us that if they don’t meet that standard that they will not get our support, I believe we will get candidates who truly represent us.

There are obviously millions of Christians and conservatives who don’t subscribe to the utilitarian-secular-humanist and anti-Biblical “lesser of two evils” construct and they refused to cast a vote for the most radically pro-abortion, pro-homosexual governor in the history of the Republic regardless of who his opponent was.

If the GOP is serious about reversing course in the next election they may want to run actual candidates whom the base will actually turn out for on election day.

Because, as Romney proved, you don’t win without your base on election day…

That email, by the way, came from one Annie Fischer, who appeared to be writing on behalf of one Gregg Jackson, author of a book entitled We Won’t Get Fooled Again.

But despite that title, there appear to be certain people who will keep getting fooled over and over, continuing to believe unlikely propositions despite evidence to the contrary.

Peggy Noonan is going with her gut on this

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Last night was the annual Cardinal Bernardin lecture over at USC, and on my way in to hear Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Atlanta speak, Florence attorney and longtime USC Trustee Mark Buyck asked me what was going to happen in the presidential race. I told him what I said in this post, that it looked like Obama, at least in the Electoral College.

He said I should go read what Peggy Noonan had posted on her blog.

So I did. And in what Business Insider called “The Most Anti-Nate Silver Column Imaginable,” she basically argued that we should ignore the numbers and go with our gut. And her gut was telling her that Mitt Romney is going to win:

But to the election. Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

Something old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him. A former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning something is moving with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and religious Catholics. He said what’s happening with them is quiet, unreported and spreading: They really want Romney now, they’ll go out and vote, the election has taken on a new importance to them.

There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.

Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us…

Now, on a certain level I have to sympathize with Peggy on this. After all, I’m the intuitive type, and have no great love of numbers. And more often than not, my own gut has been right when it comes to knowing who will win an election. It’s been right ever since the first statewide race I covered in Tennessee, the gubernatorial contest between Lamar Alexander and Jake Butcher in 1978. All the top political writers at the big papers were saying it was a dead heat, too close to call.

But I had accomplanied each of both candidates, practically 24/7 (we used to really cover campaigns in those days), for a week each late in the race, and Alexander acted like a winner, and crowds reacted to him that way. And Jake Butcher was pathetic. I remember Speaker Ned Ray McWherter walking him around his district to introduce him to constituents, and he looked like a lost child.

I was right. And I was right that day Sarah Palin campaigned with Nikki Haley, and I saw how Nikki had hit her stride at just the right moment, and was convinced she had the nomination.

I have also been very wrong. In the primaries early in that same gubernatorial campaign, I traveled with Roger Murray, a Democrat who was getting tremendous positive reactions everywhere he went. Voters kept telling him he had done the best job in the multi-candidate debate just before this tour, and I believed that meant he was going to win. He wasn’t even in the top two.

But I was just a kid then — even months later, in the general, I had gained a lot of savvy I lacked during the primaries — and it was a valuable lesson, learning to discount the effect of being in the bubble. I haven’t been that spectacularly wrong since.

All that said, while I may not love numbers, I respect them, while Peggy Noonan seems to be wishing them away. “The vibrations are right.” Really? We’ll see, very soon.

The firing of Keven Cohen

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Somehow I missed this this morning, until Silence brought it to my attention on a previous thread:

Keven Cohen, the longtime afternoon drive host on WVOC-FM 100.1, was fired Thursday afternoon before he went on the air.

Cohen had been hosting the 3-6 p.m. slot since 1999.

“I had a great run at WVOC,” Cohen, sounding gracious, said when reached at his home Thursday evening. “It will always have a special place in my heart.”

Removing Cohen, who peppered his talk show with news and opinion, is a curious decision by the Clear Channel-owned station, especially with a momentous presidential election just four days away. Cohen also anchored the station’s pre- and post-game coverage of USC Gamecock football.

“It’s a scary and confusing time,” Cohen said. “It’s a very challenging time for me emotionally to not know what I’m going to do when I wake up tomorrow morning.”…

From what I’ve seen, radio is more abrupt than print is about these things. I had a couple of weeks to clear my stuff out of the editorial suite; this seemed to hit more suddenly.

For my part, I always thought Keven did a good job. I didn’t hear his show much because of the time of day, but I was a guest on it a few times, and always thought he was a considerate host and a thorough professional. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. I recall walking around Madison Square Garden with Lindsey Graham during the 2004 Republican National Convention (I was doing a column on the way he was working the media), and between chatting with Tim Russert and Biff Henderson of the Letterman show, he paused to take a call from Keven.

There was no one else like him in this market, to my knowledge. He will be missed in that role. I hope he finds another one, just as fulfilling, as soon as possible.

Thomas Jefferson as unrepentant slaveholder

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The usual take on the man best known for writing that “All men are created equal” has been that he owned slaves, but… after which you choose your excuse:

He was really conflicted about it.
He just didn’t think freeing them would be practical.
He was a particularly benevolent master.
It’s not fair to judge someone who was born into that system, and knew no other, by modern ethical standards.

The excuses may bear revisiting in light of a new book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, byHenry Wiencek. Here’s an excerpt from a review of the book this morning in The Wall Street Journal:

The strongest sections of the book track Mr. Wiencek’s close reading of Jefferson’s estate records, where he found a coldblooded taskmaster who ruthlessly exploited child labor and overworked his slaves as a matter of course. Jefferson sometimes countenanced brutal punishment, including the whipping of boys as young as 10 or 11 in his highly profitable nail factory, “whose profits paid the mansion’s grocery bills,” Mr. Wiencek writes. Despite Jefferson’s occasional assertions that slavery would one day wither away, he never lifted a finger to weaken it as an institution, even when implored to do so by friends and allies who regarded slavery as an affront to the values for which patriots had fought the Revolutionary War.

In his youth, Jefferson did hold antislavery convictions. And in his earliest draft of the Declaration of Independence, he may well have had slaves in mind when he declared that all men were created equal.(Southerners were sufficiently worried that they tried unsuccessfully to have the word “men” changed to “freemen.”) By 1784, however, in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he expressed in graceful but cringe-inducing prose a deep personal distaste for blacks, who, he asserted, smelled wrong, copulated with apes in Africa, and were incapable of intellectual achievement.

Whatever moral ambivalence he may have felt toward the institution of slavery he overcame when he sat down and did the numbers for Monticello. In 1792, he calculated precisely what his slaves were worth. Mr. Wiencek writes: “What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved children were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.” To intimates, Jefferson described slavery matter-of-factly as a good investment strategy, advising one friend that if his family had cash to spare, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes.”…

Actually, I was a bit surprised that Jefferson even handled the books for his estate. I supposed he followed the practice of the landed gentry of having a “man of business” deal with all that. I had supposed he was detached from the enterprises that gave him his wealth, devoting all his time to politics, science and music. I had read that he was a terrible money manager, embodying the Southern planter’s typical indifference to debt, spending above his means on books, scientific instruments and other things that scratched his intellectual itch.

I supposed that, to paraphrase John Travolta (on being a loan shark) in “Get Shorty,” he was never that into it. But supposing he remained above the details of running his estate was just my way of offering him another excuse, I guess.

Mr. Wiencek’s premise seems to be that he was not only his own man of business, but a particularly hard-eyed one, especially on the subject of slavery.

Not that I was ever prepared to give him a pass on that. There are a number of reasons why, among the Founders, I have always preferred John Adams to Jefferson, and have resented that Jefferson was in their day, and still is, more celebrated and revered. One of those reasons was that Adams was adamantly opposed to slavery, while Jefferson, high-minded words aside, was a major practitioner of that evil.

This book should give us all, including those of you who admire Mr. Jefferson more than I do, something new to consider.

Trust: My Theory of Everything, from 1995

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The recent talk about “trust” with regard to the transportation sales tax referendum reminds me of one of my earliest columns for The State‘s editorial page. This ran on Feb. 7, 1995. I had only been on the editorial board a year at the time. Back then, board members rarely wrote columns; I was the only one to do so on a regular basis — I just couldn’t hold back. (Fellow Associate Editor Kent Krell called me “the Energizer Bunny” behind my back.) When I became editorial page editor two years later, I started requiring associate editors to write at least a column a week.

Anyway, while the headline was amazingly boring, I still like the column, and wouldn’t change a word of it:

Shortage of trust underlies most current problems

BRAD WARTHEN
Associate Editor

British Prime Minister John Major says the Irish peace process is threatened by a lack of trust among the Protestants of Ulster.

Well, we can’t help him with that one. American citizens have been pretty good about supplying weapons to Irish killers over the years, but we can’t spare any trust just now. We’re fresh out.

In fact, I am increasingly convinced that virtually every social problem we have in America arises from a shortage of that commodity.

The more I think about this, the more it seems like a universal principle: When mutual trust is high, society runs smoothly; when trust is low, it doesn’t. That sounds simple, but when it first occurred to me, I was startled to realize how much it explained. It seemed the sociopolitical equivalent of the unified field theory that physicists seek.

Look around. Depending on who we are, we don’t trust : the rich, the poor, the congressman, the congresswoman, the teacher, the student, older people, younger people, TV, newspapers, the courts, the police, the boss, the employees, liberals, conservatives, the guy next door, the guy across town, the guy walking down the sidewalk toward us, feminists, preachers, lawyers, doctors, businesses or customers.

A lack of basic trust of each other explains why:

We have so many laws, and so many lawyers. We trust nothing to common sense.
Thirty years after the Civil Rights Act, black and white Americans still seem to be at odds on so many fronts. So we have affirmative action and racially gerrymandered legislative districts.
Feminists continue to believe that a “glass ceiling” keeps women down.
Political discourse has gotten ugly. We no longer trust people who disagree with us to speak in good faith.
We want term limits, spending caps and other ways of putting government on autopilot. (We don’t trust either elected representatives or our fellow voters.)
We buy so many guns and build so many prisons.
We call the cops rather than tell those kids on the corner to “cut that out!”

It’s why we form taxpayer advocacy groups. We don’t trust government with our money.

Government! Why, we don’t trust government to do anything right, and we almost never think of the government as us anymore, as though the great American experiment in self-government were over. Now, government seems to many of us like this menacing thing out there, an intruder to be cast out of our lives. Yet what is “government” but the means by which we come together to decide, as a people, how we will live with one another?

Basically, we’ve lost faith in most of the institutions, large and small, through which our public life once found meaning.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time, just a generation or two ago, when people sort of took it for granted that the rest of the world wasn’t out to get them. Back during the Depression, people were poor, but they didn’t resent it too much because they looked around and saw other people were poor, too. Then we beat Hitler and imperial Japan, and our greatest weapon was our ability to pull together in trusting teamwork. The government asked us not only to pay our taxes but place further trust in it by buying war bonds, and we did. The government told us that the boys at the front needed rubber and steel more than we did, and we went without and conducted drives.

After the war, we found even more reasons to trust government and the larger society. Government policies, paired with an exponentially expanding economy, helped create the affluent middle class of the ’50s and ’60s through enactment of bold policies in the late ’40s, such as the GI bill and subsidized low-interest mortgages.

Citizens who had been left out of what prosperity had existed before in America were given a fair shot at the American dream for the first time — partly because of court and congressional action, but mostly because the majority of Americans were convinced that it was wrong to treat people differently because of skin color.

So what happened? A lot. We fought a war that, instead of pulling us together, pulled us apart. Leveling the playing field between black and white didn’t level social and economic inequities, and we’re still fighting over why. A President was brought low, and people started looking at their leaders in a different way. Women sought equity with men at the same time that a shifting economy forced them into the workplace whether they wanted to be there or not. And yes, the press has had a lot to do with the decline of trust and sense of community in our society. For too long, we saw our job as being largely to tell you what was wrong with government and society so you, the voter, could fix it. We’ve focused on failures and conflict, and then we sit back and wonder why everybody seems to think society’s gone rotten. Our friends in the electronic media have done their bit, too, of course. You’d think from watching TV news that there’s nothing going on outside your door but random murders, rapes, robberies and lousy weather. So why go out and get involved?

And yet that is precisely what we must do if we’re going to fix this problem. We’ve got to unlock the door, go outside and encounter each other. We’ve got to take chances.

We have to engage — pay attention, think, run for office, circulate petitions, vote.

But first we have to believe that we can make a difference, that we can form communities rooted in good faith, that we can govern ourselves with civility. It may seem like a long shot, but it can be done. Trust me.

I would have liked Ike, JFK, maybe even Nixon

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I was at first drawn in by this book review in The Wall Street Journal this morning, because at the outset it addressed a big concern I’ve had since the start of this election year:

Even as we tremble at the edge of a fiscal cliff, the culture war insists on our attention. Abortion, contraception, gay and women’s rights, and welfare have all returned to shake up an election season that was supposed to be a simple economy slugfest. Robert O. Self’s “All in the Family” could help explain why. Mr. Self, a professor of history at Brown University, has heroically researched the history of the culture wars from the early 1960s to the present. He offers a provocative analysis that accounts for today’s alliance between small-government and social conservatives, on the one hand, and welfare-state and social liberals, on the other….

However, I was less enchanted by what followed:

Mr. Self begins his history by describing “breadwinner liberalism” as the status quo of the early and mid-1960s. The architects of the Great Society assumed the primacy of male-earner and female-homemaker families. Labor unions fought for a family wage for their predominantly male membership, the Moynihan Report (1965) raised alarms about black male unemployment, and the first efforts at affirmative action took the form of quotas in municipal contracts for male construction workers. In all these cases “women were largely an afterthought,” Mr. Self writes. Breadwinner liberalism, he argues, was based on a model of “masculine individualism”: hardworking, striving, self-reliant….

The review goes on to recount the book’s take on the Kulturkampf that has plagued our politics since the 1960s. Apparently, the author of the book thinks the changes that have come are all to the good; the reviewer demurs.

All I know is this: In 1960, I could have been comfortable as a liberal. For that matter, in 1960, I could have been comfortable as a conservative. I can see myself having voted for Ike. I think I would have been torn between Nixon and Kennedy. (At the time, I favored Nixon, but I was only 7 years old. I don’t know what I would have done as an adult.)

Whatever happened, and however you define it, I can’t be at home in either camp today. And the Kulturkampf stuff is a big part of the reason why.

Words from another time, another universe

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Back in the days of typewriters, dictionaries were a great obstacle to my developing what my detractors call “time-management skills.” I couldn’t look up one word without running across another that fascinated me, which in turn caused me to look up another, then three more, and one and on, each word opening the floodgates of dopamine in my brain as I utterly forgot what I had set out to do.

The Web is a dictionary taken to the nth power.

Today, I stuck up for our Founders’ vision of a republic rather than a democracy, which caused Bud to say fine, if that’s what you want, then let’s return to precisely their vision. That caused me to say that I was for repealing the 17th Amendment. Then, when I went for a link to explain to readers which amendment that was, I started reading about the debate at the time over this “reform.” I saw that William Jennings Bryan (you know, the guy Clarence Darrow took apart at the Monkey Trial) was for the change, and Elihu Root opposed it. Thinking Mr. Root was perhaps a man after my own mind, I went and looked him up.

And I read on Wikipedia this excerpt from a letter he wrote to The New York Times in 1910, while serving as a U.S. senator from New York:

It is said that a very large part of any income tax under the amendment would be paid by citizens of New York….

Elihu Root

The reason why the citizens of New York will pay so large a part of the tax is New York City is the chief financial and commercial centre of a great country with vast resources and industrial activity. For many years Americans engaged in developing the wealth of all parts of the country have been going to New York to secure capital and market their securities and to buy their supplies. Thousands of men who have amassed fortunes in all sorts of enterprises in other states have gone to New York to live because they like the life of the city or because their distant enterprises require representation at the financial centre. The incomes of New York are in a great measure derived from the country at large. A continual stream of wealth sets toward the great city from the mines and manufactories and railroads outside of New York.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Imagine that. A serving politician who actually wrote not only in favor of an income tax when there wasn’t one, but told his own constituents why they should shoulder a particularly large portion of that burden. Now there’s a man of principle for you.

You will ask now whether he was re-elected. Well, he didn’t run again.

But it’s not like he retired. He went on to serve in several prominent capacities. In 1912, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for “his work to bring nations together through arbitration and cooperation.” Nevertheless, he would later oppose Woodrow Wilson’s initial position of neutrality as WWI broke out. He believed German militarism must be opposed.

He was a reluctant candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1916. Charles Evans Hughes won the nomination, and went on to lose to Wilson.

I think I might have voted for Root, given the chance.

‘I’ve seen the village:’ the most anti-communitarian bumper sticker I’ve ever seen

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I couldn't find the sticker, but I found a similar T-shirt...

Sometimes, at a red light, I have time to whip out my phone and get a shot of a bumper sticker or something in front of me that I want to share. Over the weekend, I’m sorry to say, I never got the chance. I wish I could have.

I found myself in traffic behind an SUV with a large variety of bumper stickers on it, positing the kinds of juxtapositions of attitudes that leave me scratching my head. There was a Romney/Ryan sticker, which is pretty generic. Then there were the Confederate flag stickers, combined with a couple of different Christian symbols.

And I found myself wondering for the thousandth time at least why those particular things go together in some people’s minds.

Then there was the below sticker, which starkly displays one of the unpleasant characteristics of modern political argument: the assumption that if your adversary hold attitude A, he also embraces completely unrelated attitude B.

My own answer to the question, apparently posed by this website, would be “no.” First, I couldn’t be any more opposed to abortion on demand than I am already. And second — well, clinical killing makes my blood run cold more than gun violence does. I’ve written in the past that if I were to be executed and were given a choice — two things not likely to happen (I hope), but bear with me — I would opt for firing squad. That would not be nearly as horrifying to me as lethal injection, the most cold-blooded manner of killing humanity has ever devised, because it is so clean and clinical and dispassionate (and also because it perverts procedures that should be about saving lives).

Finally, there was the bumper sticker I really want to write about. Unfortunately, although I was able to find the abortion sticker online, I can’t find this one — although I’ve found some similar ones. (Fortunately, after I wrote this, alert reader Scout found the one at right, which I think is the one I saw. If not, it’s very close.)

It had far too many words jammed into way to small a space (maybe 6-8 inches wide by 4 or 5 deep). And even though, at an intersection, I managed to get within about 10 feet, I only got to see the biggest words. There were as follows: Near the top, it said “I’ve seen the village.” Near the bottom, with a bunch of tiny words in between, it said “Homeschool.”

Since nothing else on the sticker was legible at a pretty close distance, one is left to assume that to its author, and to the person who chose to put this on the back of his or her vehicle, the words I quote were sufficient as a message. (The similar stickers and T-shirts I’ve found simply say, “I homeschool because… I’ve seen the village and I don’t want it raising my children!”)

And of course, in their minimalist way, those few words speak volumes.

Hemingway has been quoted as saying the key to great writing is knowing what to leave out. And that’s where the power lies here. The village is not described. The speaker doesn’t bother to tell us what his objection is to the village. We are left to assume that the objection is something fundamental, something that lies on a lowest-common-denominator sort of plain. Something you could tell at a glance, and know you don’t want to have anything to do with it.

There’s an implication of “‘Nuff said.” You, the reader, are supposed to know exactly what the sticker’s writer means. And of course, if you are “right-minded,” you are expected to respond with some family-friendly version of “Damn’ straight.”

There is an assumption here that certain things are just to be understood, things that fully explain why this African proverb is being so categorically rejected. One is invited to speculate that this parent only had to walk into a public classroom once, and then walked out knowing he didn’t want his children being a part of that.

We all know what that sounds like, don’t we?

But aside from the assumption to which we are invited to leap, the thing that really gets me is the extent to which this utterly and absolutely rejects the very notion of a community, a place where we share our lives and share some responsibility for the environment in which all of our children grow up. In other words, another way to read it is that the parent didn’t even bother checking out the public school, but simply looked around at society — at all of us reading the bumper sticker — and rejected us all.

I’m very, very accustomed to the fact that in this world, in this village, the libertarian messages — those that reinforce I, me, mine -outnumber the communitarian ones a million to one. In fact, “It takes a village to raise a child” is just about the only communitarian message that nearly everyone has heard. (Probably the only one better known would be “We’re all in this together.” Which, as you’ll recall, I was pleased to hear Bill Clinton say in his speech at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte last month. It’s one of those truisms we don’t hear nearly often enough.)

So that puts this sticker in a very special category. Most statements in support of radical individualism tend to ignore that such a thing as a community even exists. This is the only sticker I think I’ve ever seen that specifically says, I’ve seen the community, and I am categorically, absolutely rejecting it.

So it was my very first truly anti-communitarian bumper sticker, to the best of my recollection.

... but this isn't the bumper sticker I wanted to talk to you about.

Sheheen thinks it’s time for a state constitutional convention. I’m still not there yet.

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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.

‘It’s a word. That’s it. That’s all…’

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Speaking of words, I need to warn you of the use of offensive language in this video. Which, like the one I posted earlier, I cannot embed. (All together now: I. Hate. Facebook.)

But since all sorts of strong opinions are being expressed back and forth on the violence in Five Points, I thought I’d share this one, which is… very passionate, to say the least.

I’d not agreeing with this guy, and I’m not disagreeing with him. I just thought this was one of the most interesting comments I’d heard so far. I like it because it’s idiosyncratic. It doesn’t fit into any boxes, at all. Just a man with a very strong opinion.

I apologize again, in advance, for his language, which is of a sort that I don’t normally allow here. But I thought I’d point you to a part of the dialogue you might have missed…

‘Conservative History,’ from that other Hitt

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There’s a rather brutal piece of satire on the website of The New Yorker this week headlined “A Conservative History of the United States.” Brutal because it uses actual historical malapropisms by actual latter-day “conservatives.” An excerpt:

1500s: The American Revolutionary War begins: “The reason we fought the revolution in the sixteenth century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown.”—Rick Perry

1607: First welfare state collapses: “Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.”—Dick Armey

1619-1808: Africans set sail for America in search of freedom: “Other than Native Americans, who were here, all of us have the same story.”—Michele Bachmann

1775: Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he was riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”—Sarah Palin.

1775: New Hampshire starts the American Revolution: “What I love about New Hampshire… You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world.”—Michele Bachmann

1776: The Founding Synod signs the Declaration of Independence: “…those fifty-six brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.”—Mike Huckabee…

And so forth.

This will no doubt delight much of the magazine’s readership, as it plays to the beloved liberal theme that conservatives are conservatives because they are, well, stupid.

And it’s true that in recent years, there have been certain strains in politics that call themselves “conservative” that tap into a rich American tradition of anti-intellectualism. But of course, there is also a rather respected conservative intelligentsia, and you’ll notice that none of these quotes come from George Will or William F. Buckley or William Kristol or Charles Krauthammer.

And it should also be said that one or two of the most absurd-sounding assertions aren’t completely inaccurate. There were a few black soldiers in the Confederacy. What’s wrong is how some on the extreme fringes of latter-day “conservatism” — OK, let’s be blunt, neo-Confederates — try to use that odd historical footnote: To excuse secession over slavery, and to argue that there’s nothing racist about flying that flag in black folks’ faces. That there were a few black soldiers in the Confederacy simply illustrates how wildly complex and idiosyncratic human experience and motivations can be. There was also a tiny handful of soldiers of Chinese ethnicity in Confederate gray, but one would be a fool to draw broad political points from the fact. (Another such anomaly comes to mind — among the troops in Wehrmacht gray that Allied invaders encountered in Normandy in 1944, alongside the East Europeans forced into German service, was a small group of Koreans. How they got there was a wild and strange saga. There are chapters in this world’s history that read as though they were imagined by the writers of “Lost.”)

But such quibbles aside, there’s a lot here for admirers of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and others to wince at.

I initially just glanced at this and was going to move on. But what grabbed me was the byline on the piece: Jack Hitt. I’m assuming that’s the writer from Charleston, whose brother happens to be Gov. Nikki Haley’s commerce secretary, Bobby. Given the connections between Nikki and ex-Gov. Palin, I thought that was of passing interest…

Mitt Romney, peering deep into the abyss

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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.

A dangerously simplistic view of foreign affairs

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Just got a very strange release, considering that it comes from a state senator (albeit one with national ambitions):

BEAUFORT, S.C. – South Carolina State Senator Tom Davis today released the following statement regarding the vote tomorrow in the United States Senate on Sen. Rand Paul’s amendment to end U.S. aid to Pakistan, Egypt and Libya, pending the satisfaction of certain conditions.

“Today I call on South Carolina’s senators, Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham, to cast their vote in support of Sen. Paul’s amendment,” Davis said. “If these countries want to be our allies and receive our money, then they should act like it.”

“The conditions to receiving foreign aid set forth in Sen. Paul’s amendment are reasonable: the Libyan police must hand over to U.S. officials the suspects in the recent attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi; the Egyptian government must vow to protect our embassy; and the Pakistani government must release from custody Dr. Shakil Afridi, a man who risked his life to provide us with information that confirmed the location of Osama bin Laden.

“Simply put, bad behavior should not be rewarded. America currently gives approximately $4 billion a year to Pakistan, Libya and Egypt, and all we get in return is disrespect and violence. Sen. Paul put it exactly right: ‘American taxpayer dollars should not go to Libya until the murderers are delivered to justice. Nor should they go to Egypt until the Egyptians prove that they are willing and able to protect our embassy. Finally, not one more penny of American taxpayer dollars should go to Pakistan until the doctor who helped us get bin Laden is freed.’”

Really? That’s your view of it? That “all we get in return is disrespect and violence”? Do you really suppose that we have close ties to Pakistan just because Pakistan wants it? We have that relationship because, despite all the godawful aggravation we get out of the relationship, we need it. As maddening as the many factions of that nation, many of them openly hostile, can be, that’s a door we need propped open, at least a little. Just whom are punishing if we cut off that relationship entirely? Is that what it’s actually about to you — the lousy $4 billion?

And you’re going to blame the new, Libyan government, a thing largely of our creation, for what some bad actors — people they have arrested — did? Do we so little value the fact that we have a friendly regime there after more than a generation of Gaddafi (a cause to which ambassador Stevens devoted the end of his life) that we’ll just throw it away because Sen. Paul is peeved and wants to save the money?

And Egypt — is it your plan to say, now that Mubarak is gone, we don’t want to be close to you anymore, Egypt? Is that our response to the Arab Spring? Sure, it’s problematic the role the Muslim Brotherhood is playing, but isn’t that a reason to hold the new regime closer, rather than pushing it away? Do you want to return to the days of Nasser? You sure about that?

Of all of these, the one I’d like to get tough with is Pakistan, because I’ve had it with their playing footsie with terrorists. But I know that’s an emotional, rather than a coldly rational, response. And that adolescent emotional urge on my part was quite satisfied for the time being by the raid on Abbottabad, and the many strikes in the lawless northwest before that.

This isn’t a foreign policy proposal; it’s domestic posturing. And I’m sorry to see my friend Tom Davis reaching outside the purview of his office to engage in it.

bradwarthen.com

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