On the way into Rotary today, I stopped in the men’s room at Seawell’s, and ran into Henry McMaster. I congratulated Henry on the good turnout he and other McCainiacs had out at the smokehouse in Lexington last week. With this post fresh in my mind, I observed to Henry that I continue to find it hard to believe that Republicans would actually want either Giuliani or Romney as their candidate.
As I was saying that, Trip King (late of Fritz Hollings’ staff, now working for the Biden campaign) walked in, and both of them agreed (surprise) with the observation — McMaster saying if Giuliani gets it, it will be the first time he can remember a GOP nominee who flat didn’t believe in some core values of the party he’s known, and Trip just shaking his head over those whacky Republicans in general.
Both took advantage of the chance to push their respective teams. Trip noted that polls show Biden would run neck-and-neck with either Giuliani or Romney — that was news to me — and Henry noted a fact I’ve already heard a number of times (sort of a McCain talking point), that polls indicate McCain would have the best chance to beat Hillary. (Trip, and another correspondent I’ve heard from today, were also pretty pumped about Biden moving up to fourth place in Iowa at the expense of Bill Richardson, for what that’s worth.)
They were right, and I went into Rotary thinking yet again, what are the Republicans thinking this year?
By the way, the photos were not taken in the men’s room. The above shot, with Henry circled, is at the smokehouse event; Trip is seen posing with fellow Biden staff at the College Democrats confab back in July.
I continue to find it difficult to believe that Republicans will nominate either Mr. Romney or Rudy Giuliani, no matter how many times I’m told that they will; apparently some folks in Iowa are starting to think the same thing.
Oh, one more thing about Mr. Huckabee — second only to John McCain (who’s done it in a tougher league), nobody on the Republican side has a stronger record of reaching across the aisle and working with people from The Other Party. That means the Huckabee surge can also be seen as good news for the same reason as the Obama news is…
The good news is the reason that "conventional wisdom," as codified by the WSJ today, gives for his ascendance — his anti-partisan message:
DES MOINES, Iowa — A month before Iowa holds the
first contest of the 2008 presidential campaign, a newly energized Sen.
Barack Obama has opened a narrow lead here, but many Iowans in both
parties say they could change their minds in the next 30 days about
which candidate to support. Mr. Obama’s rising popularity was fueled by a fiery
speech three weeks ago in which he vowed to turn away from the partisan
battles of the Clinton-Bush years. That, plus the surprising strength
of his Iowa ground organization, is galvanizing his campaign.
The WSJ traces Mr. Obama’s rise to the above-mentioned speech:
The night of the dinner, he delivered a call for unity that tweaked Sen. Clinton as a polarizing figure, without naming her. "America, our moment is now," Sen. Obama thundered. "I don’t want to spend the next year or the next four years re-fighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be the president of the United States of America." Rival campaign operatives sat there stone-faced. But some attendees put down their signs and thunder sticks for other candidates, jumped to their feet to cheer him on and grabbed Obama campaign materials as they streamed out of the arena. "Barack found his voice" that night, says Gordon Fischer, a longtime Iowa Democratic leader who recently decided to support Sen. Obama. "That’s when the man and the moment met."
By BRAD WARTHEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR LONESOME? Want to make a boatload of new friends, fast? I have a simple, surefire method. Step 1: Start a blog. You can do this in minutes, and for free, at a number of sites on the Web. Step 2: Post something on your blog with “Ron Paul” in the headline. Caveat: Make it something nice, or all those new people who come rushing to you will be something other than “friends.” As you may have heard, there is a whole alternative universe full of people who spend large amounts of time Googling their one and only, and eagerly reading anything they find. Many are political first-timers, either because they’re quite young or because they gave up on mainstream candidates long ago. They are the reason why Dr. Paul has raised great gobs of money, despite his support in polls tending toward the single digits.
This does not discourage or deter the libertarian’s following, but one thing does sort of cheese them off: What they perceive as a general lack of respect from the MSM, a.k.a. “mainstream media.” In stories about who might win this or that primary, their guy’s name doesn’t even come up. Last week on my blog (where I really must stop engaging in the cheap, traffic-boosting ploy of putting “Ron Paul” into random headlines), in the midst of a discussion among Paulistas, “Alex” earnestly asked me, “Brad — what do you think of the main media’s a) coverage and b) depiction of Ron Paul? Fair in both respects or less so?” A two-parter, as we might say in the MSM. My response got one encouraging comment, which is all I need to provoke me to reproduce it here. It went like this: I’d say, on both counts, it’s about par. On the whole, there is a shameful tendency of news media to try to oversimplify the race. The press, and the TV cowboys, like politics to be like sports, which means everything is couched in terms of winning, losing and whether the coach called the right play, and there are never, ever more than two teams on the field at a given time. This means anointing two people in each race as the “front-runners,” and giving everybody else short shrift. This, of course, is appalling, especially when the most qualified candidates don’t make the short list, and that’s at least as often the case as not. Look at the Democrats. It was decreed via the great colonial beast’s collective “mind” that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were it. Never mind that the experience and qualifications for the two of them combined fell short of that of Joe Biden or Bill Richardson — or Chris Dodd, if you’re hard-up…. This is not to say either Hillary or Obama is a bad candidate, mind you; there’s something to be said for
sheer electoral appeal. Hillary’s got the Clinton fan club in her pocket, and Obama’s got that certain something called “charisma.” I’m just saying it’s ridiculous that Biden and Richardson have never been given a chance. On the Republican side, the MSM have been confused. They’ve wanted in the worst way to have Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney be the anointed twosome, or maybe Fred Thompson. But the facts that John McCain is more experienced than any of them, and that Mike Huckabee actually has qualities that appeal to key portions of the base (unlike any of the chosen ones) have led to what you’ll sometimes see the MSM refer to as “confusion” or “a muddle.” And the MSM don’t like confusion. They like clarity, and polarization,
and a good fight. Giuliani’s a scrapper (and just loaded with personal idiosyncracies that make great copy); and Romney can have a knock-down dragout just with himself. In light of these factors, Dr. Paul is far down the list of people who are likely to get major respect. As I say, the MSM like it simple. If they can’t keep the number down to two, then they assign simple, stock-character roles to other players. Dr. Paul has been assigned the role of Quirky Outsider Without a Prayer, a role filled with some gusto on the Democratic side by Dennis Kucinich. Except that Dr. Paul is even more of an outsider. Dennis the Menace, after all, is a sort of double-distilled version of a liberal Democrat. Dr. Paul is not seen by any of the major players as any kind of a Republican. While the MSM as a whole have the attention span of a goldfish — they find endless fascination in the
serial misbehavior of well-built young women with substance-abuse problems — the guys on the political beat can be like the sports guys. That is, they can have long memories, especially for electoral trivia. To political writers, Ron Paul is the 1988 Libertarian Party nominee for president, and he’ll never outgrow that role. To some extent, he doesn’t seem to want to outgrow that role. He’s the same guy, believing and espousing the same things. To his followers, this consistency, this adherence to principle, is admirable in the extreme. To the press, it makes him a dependable eccentric. Dr. Paul’s one hope to get Serious Attention lies in his other role, that of This Year’s Internet Phenom. You’ll remember that role was filled by another physician, Howard Dean, in 2004. Unfortunately for Dr. Paul, the role lacks the freshness that it had when Dr. Dean created it. For a moment there four years ago, the MSM thought it was on the cusp of a genuine Paradigm Shift, where a guy with a passionate cyber-following and impressive fund-raising capabilities would actually sweep aside the front-runners and win it all. But that didn’t happen, and the MSM is uninclined to get swept up in such enthusiasm a second time. I don’t know if any of that helped, but I did what I could to answer the question. Now, back to the front-runners…
More than at any other time over the past two decades, Americans are
hungering for the politics and freewheeling fun of libertarianism…
It really said that. Go look. "Freewheeling fun." Maybe that’s why I don’t get libertarianism. I look at it and see a gray, dull, monotonous, seething, dispiriting resentment. Gripe, bitch, moan, especially about taxes — that’s libertarianism to me. That is, if you don’t mind my using the "b-word" in its verb form.
I don’t go to politics looking for a good time, but if I did, I’d probably pick the liberal Democrats. If I were looking to start a business, I’d hang with the Republicans. If I were looking to be an ideologically rigid, antisocial grouch who constantly told the rest of the world to go (expletive) itself, I’d be a libertarian. Not to cast aspersions or anything, or deal in flat stereotypes. I’m sure there’s much more to libertarians than that, just as there is to everyone. But "freewheeling fun?" That cracked me up.
Yesterday at Rotary, one of the preliminary speakers told an anecdote, the punch line of which was one I’ve heard a number of times recently: "If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you’re reading it in English, thank a soldier."
I can assure you there was no ill intent toward anyone in the mind of the person who said that Monday. He simply meant to express the obligation that all of us owe to those who have worn the uniform of our country, and I agree with the sentiment. As for the actual words… well, as tends to happen during meetings, my mind starting riffing on what I’d heard, and it launched on two tracks. The first was that it seems that I started hearing that bit about "reading it in English" repeated more often about the time illegal immigration became such an emotional issue in this country. I suspect that I’m wrong; I’m sure I just started noticing the phrase, and hearing vague xenophobic echoes that weren’t really there, at about that time. After all, the two issues have no actual connection. Then I went down the second track: Is there any soldier alive today who fought in a war that prevented a situation in which we were likely to be speaking any language other than English? I started running through all the wars in my mind. Certainly we’d still speak English if we’d lost in 1783 or 1812. Maybe the Southwest was changed by the war with Mexico, but those guys have been dead a century and more. Certainly the world would be wildly different had we lost in 1919 or 1945, or the Cold War, but I suspect we’d still speak English — although maybe the REST of the world wouldn’t have switched to the English standard…
Anyway, all this nonsense was swept away when the main speaker stepped to the podium. It was Sgt. José Muñoz, United States Army. (That’s him in the video above. I apologize for the quality; I shot it with my phone.) The first words out of his mouth were to beg forgiveness for his strong accent. He had been born in Mexico. He became a U.S. citizen earlier this year. He has done two combat tours in Iraq, and is about to go to Afghanistan. He joked that he joined the Army hoping to see more of THIS, his adopted country, but has seen little outside of Fort Bragg, while he has been all over Iraq, first with artillery, and later with convoy security.
Sgt. Muñoz was visiting us as part of the Pentagon’s "Why We Serve" speakers program. (That’s his official portrait below at left, much better than my phone version.) He said he didn’t fully understand at first why he was going to the Pentagon. He had never been there
before. They just told him to show up in his Class A’s, so that’s what he did.
There was no particular political message other than the usual grousing about how "the media" always tell you the bad stuff that happens in Iraq. I just sat impassive through that, the way I always do (something that’s made easier by the fact that I know exactly what he means, and I know it has nothing to do with me). He had just come to tell why he, José Muñoz, is a United States soldier. He told of how, when he went into Iraq in the 2003 invasion, the Iraqi civilians treated him and his comrades like rock stars. Specifically, he said he felt like Ricky Martin. Later, it was more neutral, he said — they were looked upon just as a fact of life.
He also wanted to let everyone know that despite the fact that convoy security is extremely hazardous, his unit did not lose a single soldier during that deployment.
In response to a question that seemed to lead in this direction, Sgt. Muñoz volunteered the fact that his family came to this country legally. So that pretty much spoiled any pious little sermon I might offer on the immigration issue, seeing as how the angry people all insist that they don’t mind immigrants as long as they have their papers, and probably believe that if Sgt. Muñoz didn’t have his papers, he’d be essentially a different person (a sort of thinking I don’t follow, but that’s why I don’t get why this issue is as hot as it is).
In any case, suffice it to say that Sgt. Muñoz received a standing ovation. All present seemed to feel privileged to be in his presence.
Maybe we should add a corollary: "If you’re reading it in English as a second language, thank a soldier." I certainly made a point of thanking Sgt. Muñoz after the meeting. To me, and I believe to my fellow Rotarians, he’s a much bigger deal than Ricky Martin.
This video clip, poor as the quality is thanks to the dim lighting at Hudson’s Smokehouse in Lexington last night, reminds me of a discussion we had regarding the "b-word" clip a couple of weeks back.
Some, who are not inclined to think as highly of John McCain as I do, tended to think of the way he spoke of fellow Sen. Hillary Clinton — with sober, collegial respect — AFTER he regained his composure as the phony part of that earlier clip. I saw it as consistent with the way Sen. McCain talks about everybody. Respecting others, regardless of political differences, is an essential part of the man’s character.
Here we see another partisan gathering — a larger one this time — and another case in which an apparent supporter tees up an opportunity for the candidate to trash a political opponent. In this case, it was someone asking about John Murtha’s past comments with regard to the conduct of American troops in Iraq.
Without the flustering factor of the profane language in that earlier incident, McCain answers in a way typical of him: He soberly expresses his respect for Congressman Murtha (in the same tone in which he expressed his respect for Sen. Clinton, the same tone in which he generally speaks of other people), then expresses his strong disagreement with the congressman and other Democrats on policy.
This speaks to the essence of what I am always seeking in political discourse — the kind of civility in which ideas can be discuss, and even debated fiercely, without the distraction of ad hominem bashing.
You don’t normally see this sort of clip, and with good reason — it’s not an explosion or a pratfall, and it doesn’t break new ground. McCain says things he says all the time. But my point, is that day in and day out, this is the way he speaks of people with whom he disagrees.
By BRAD WARTHEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR EVERYWHERE YOU GO in South Carolina, if there is a presidential candidate nearby (and they do seem to be everywhere), you’ll see people in red T-shirts that say “Divided We Fail.” That’s the AARP’s way of drawing the candidates’, and everyone else’s, attention to the organization’s belief that “All Americans should have access to affordable health care, including prescription drugs, and these costs should not burden future generations.” You’ve heard about how one in seven Americans, or some such awful number, has no health insurance. But I’m not here to talk about that. Today, I’m talking about the other six of us who have coverage. If routine — not even catastrophic, but routine — health care is “affordable” for those of us with insurance, then somebody redefined the word while my brain was imploding from trying to figure out which health plan to pick for next year. As AARP’s Web site notes, “Whether we have good health benefits or not, it seems that insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-payments always seem to rise faster than our paychecks.” Not that I’m complaining! I love my benefits, and I love the job that provides me with them — love it love it love it. I’ll never, ever leave it, or even threaten to. I will pay no attention to that same AARP article when it moans that “Too many Americans are locked into jobs or stopped from opening their own businesses because of worries about affording or maintaining health insurance.” Hah! “Opening their own businesses?” I’ll let the saps who don’t have families and think they’ll never get sick engage in such crazy entrepreneurial tricks as that. To complain about our health insurance is to risk offending the Insurance Gods, and their ways are mysterious and terrifying. Just the other day I went to my allergist’s office to get the results of my first skin tests in 20 years. I’d been getting allergy shots based on the old tests all that time, and my allergist, being a highly trained professional, thought it might be a good idea to see if I was still allergic to the same stuff. Actually, I can’t tell you for sure that the shots ever helped. So why get them? Because my insurance pays for allergy shots, but won’t pay any more for me to take Zyrtec, which I know relieved my symptoms. The Insurance Gods say I don’t need Zyrtec. Anyway, at the end of my visit I went to pay my $50 copay, and the lady at the counter — one of those ladies who is neither a doctor nor a nurse, but one of the army of priestesses every doctor employs to perform arcane rituals all day aimed at appeasing the Insurance Gods — told me that I had a credit on my account, so today I only had to pay $17.45 cents. Timidly, I asked why I had a credit when I hadn’t paid anything lately. She shrugged and said she and her colleagues never ask, because no one understands why insurance does what it does. But … come a little closer so I can say this softly… there are times when the Insurance Gods are not so kind. For instance: Earlier this year, after surgery worked only briefly to relieve head-pounding sinus pain, my surgeon gave me a prescription for Allegra. I started to protest adding yet another drug to the 11 I was already taking, counting the prednisone he was putting me on, but then he said it was the generic version, so I said OK. My copay is only like $10 on generics; the Insurance Gods say generics are good. Then my pharmacy said my copay for my 30 generic pills would be $81.95. Stunned, I asked why? They shrugged and said no one knew; the Insurance Gods just said so. I shut up and paid it, even though it meant delaying paying on my mortgage or my electricity bill or some other frill. I think the pills helped, but I certainly wasn’t going to get a refill. I make more money than most people do here in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and I live paycheck to paycheck, in large part because of the cost of being an extremely allergic asthmatic, and needing to do what it takes to keep enough oxygen pumping to my brain to enable me to work so I can keep paying my premiums and copays. My premiums in the coming year — we’re going to a new plan — will be $274.42 on every biweekly check, not counting dental or vision care. And I’m lucky to have it. I know that, compared to most, I’ve got a sweet deal! I’m in the top income quintile in the U.S. population, and we can’t afford cable TV, we’ve never taken a European vacation or done anything crazy like that, we haven’t bought a new car since 1986, and aside from the 401(k) I can’t touch until I retire (if I can ever afford to retire), we have no savings. Yet I will pay my $274.42 gladly, and I will thank the one true God in whom I actually do believe that I have that insurance, and that I am in an upper-income bracket so that I can just barely pay those premiums, and that neither my wife (a cancer survivor) nor I nor either of the two children (out of five) the gods still let me cover is nearly as unhealthy as the people I see whenever I visit a hospital. Speaking of hospitals, I recently heard Mike Biediger, CEO of Lexington Medical Center, marveling that when he started in the business, health care soaked up 7 percent of the U.S. economy, and no one thought it could go higher. Now, he said, it’s 16 percent, and climbing. That’s why so many physicians and corporate CEOs who once would have bellowed in rage at the sound of “socialized medicine” now believe we’ve got to do something as a nation to get this mess under control. So we’re going to do something, right? Don’t bet on it. What I’ve seen from presidential candidates thus far seems very timid, and disturbingly deferential toward the Insurance Gods (who once got very angry at one of them), and the Big Pharma Gods as well. Mr. Biediger pointed me to a recent piece in the New England Journal of Medicine that explained that “no matter how much momentum it seems to have, no matter how many signs point to change, there is nothing inevitable about health care reform in the United States. In U.S. health policy, the status quo is deeply entrenched and, despite all its failings, the system is remarkably resistant to change, in part because many constituencies profit from it.” And there’s not a lot we can do about it — except maybe get one of those red T-shirts, and show up every time a presidential candidate comes to town. They’ve got boxes full of them at AARP headquarter
s, and they’ll give you one for free.
A bunch of stuff crossed quickly through my hands last week when I was too busy — either working on getting the week’s pages out while shorthanded, or traveling to Pennsylvania and New York and back — to take note of them, and a couple of them are blogworthy. Here’s one, which came in as e-mail all the way back last Tuesday.
Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson is a
tremendous encouragement to me. Maybe that’s because I have the sense that
he "gets it." By that I mean I think he has a deep understanding of the
connection between faith and public policy and he articulates it in a winsome
way. Because that is the whole idea behind family policy councils, I
was glad to see Hal return to the board of Palmetto Family
Council a few years ago and agree to serve as
Chairman of the Board from 2004 to 2006.
The column that follows was
the featured editorial in The
State [Columbia, SC] newspaper Sunday before last. I share it with you
not for Hal’s specific impressions of particular candidates for President (which
PFC does not necessarily endorse) or any other specific content or words he has
chosen, but to show how Christians can make a difference in the public square by
being accessible, fair, principled, and just plain interesting to talk
with.
I think you will appreciate the final sentence of the article
above all.
Happy Thanksgiving.
-OPS
Here’s what strikes me about this, and not for the first time: Traditionalist Christians are not accustomed to being written about by the MSM as actual folk — real, thinking, breathing human beings — when they interact with the political sphere. They are used to being categorized, caricatured, flattened out into two dimensions at best.
Another way of putting it is that they are not accustomed to seeing themselves written about in ways that they can recognize themselves. Hal said something about this to me in reacting to the column in a conversation I blogged about, and in thanking me for getting him straight.
I say this not to brag on myself — I know I have plenty of flaws as a journalist; one of my few virtues is that my subjects usually say I get the context of what they’re saying right, and this is an example of that.
I say it to marvel at yet another example of the ways we fail in this society to engage each other as we truly are, in the realm of politics. This is another of the many flaws in our partisan, conflict-oriented, anti-intellectual way of choosing up sides so that we won’t have to think.
It’s really a pity that something as simple as what I did — show a "conservative Christian" (which in itself is an inadequate term) as a thinking person instead of a Pat Robertson cartoon — should stand out so that a couple of people who’ve been burned in the past should see it as worth remarking upon.
In other words, it’s not that what I did was so good. It’s that so much else that you see is so bad.
By BRAD WARTHEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR LAST WEEK, a woman in Hilton Head asked John McCain a question that referred to Hillary Clinton by a five-letter word for a female dog. Sen. McCain reacted about the way many guys would: He tried to keep his composure, failed momentarily, then finally mastered himself enough to say, very soberly and sincerely, that he had the highest respect for his Senate colleague. And after a priggish CNN announcer’s failure to portray Sen. McCain as being to blame in the incident, and the McCain campaign’s lame attempt to parlay that into sympathy and campaign contributions, the whole thing sort of faded, making way for the next round of spin-cycle nonsense. But the incident still worries me, for reasons that have nothing to do with who called whom what, or how anybody responded. I worry that it never occurred to anyone to wonder to whom the obnoxious question referred. I worry that within 24 hours of the clip appearing on YouTube, there was a Web site up selling T-shirts emblazoned with that question. I worry that there are those who will buy such T-shirts, and that such people increasingly define the tone of political discourse. The same day that the “b-word” incident came to my attention, an op-ed piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The Insanity of Bush Hatred.” Those who call themselves “liberals” will now snort in derision and say, “That’s The Wall Street Journal for you!” But it was actually a pleasingly dispassionate treatment of the subject by a professor named Peter Berkowitz who looks about at some of his colleagues and worries about “the damage hatred inflicts on the intellect.” I worry more about the damage it inflicts on our republic. Mr. Berkowitz, after noting that “Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself… Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred,” and so forth, frets that “Bush hatred is different,” because of the way many intellectuals have not only embraced that impulse, but endorsed it as a virtue, and proclaimed “that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene.” I see it as something else — the next, more virulent stage of the political disease once known as “Clinton hatred,” which itself was qualitatively uglier than previous forms of political resentment, within my lifetime at least. I trace the onset of symptoms to the first days after the 1992 elections, when “Don’t blame me; I voted for Bush” started appearing on late-model cars. And things just got worse from there. Many Republicans never accepted that Bill Clinton was the president of their country, and for eight years treated him as though he were the illegitimate leader of some enemy nation. I thought things couldn’t get worse, and looked forward to the end of the Clinton era as a time when partisans could regain their sanity. Lord help me, I was so wrong. From Day One — nay, before Day One of the Bush presidency — there was a virulence aimed at the man like nothing I could have imagined. And no, it’s not about the Iraq War. I can recall asking colleagues, before Sept. 11, 2001, to help me get my mind around why so many Democrats hated the man so. This was actually qualitatively worse than what I’d seen aimed at Clinton, and that floored me. I wish I could believe that the Bush-haters are right, that there is something — or many things — about the man that make such passionate dislike rational. I would like to think that because the alternative possibility — that this is a degenerative national syndrome that feeds on itself, and gets worse with each shift of power — is just too awful. Except for a precious few days in the fall of 2001, this savage polarization of the electorate has crippled our national will in a time of great crisis, a time when we need to be taking difficult actions — from waging war to retooling our economy away from oil — that are unachievable without strong consensus. At this point some Democratic readers are getting steamed, thinking I’m blaming them. But I don’t care whether it’s their fault, or Mr. Bush’s. There’s plenty of blame to go around, much of it of the well-deserved variety. I’m more concerned about the effect. I’m worried that the most polarizing individual in the Democratic Party is, day by day, looking more certain to be that party’s nominee. And that is not to blame Mrs. Clinton — it’s just a fact that if she is the nominee, we’re on a downhill rush toward a general election of such bitterness that it may make us nostalgic for 2000. And I’m not sure there is anything that either she or the GOP nominee will be able to do or say to stop it. What do you do about a Zeitgeist in which a woman is unashamed to ask a candidate, publicly, the question that was asked of Sen. McCain last week? As I look upon the threats to our nation’s future — our dependence on tyrants’ oil, the rise of Islamofascism, the relentless rivalries of a booming China and an aggressive Russia descending again into authoritarianism — there is one menace that looms more urgently than others: the possibility that the partisan bitterness militating against rational discussion of policy in this country could get worse.
Normally, I just delete comment-spam and notify Typepad — there’s a button to click on that does both at the same time, not that it does any good in the long run, because the stuff keeps coming.
But this one is so timely, so relevant, so enterprising, so egregious, so offensive that I just have to take note of it.
Someone reacted to this post with a comment steering us to this site — to save you from clicking on it, I’ll just tell you that the site features T-shirts in various styles, all bearing the offensive question spoken by the woman (the obnoxious woman, the woman that I struggle to find a word to describe) in the video.
This is a specimen of the disease eating away at our body politic. This slimeball might actually make some money off of this. Meanwhile, people who care about this country worry that if Mrs. Clinton (or anyone else with the name "Clinton" or "Bush") is elected, we might actually see an escalation of the virulent partisanship of the past 15 years, if that is possible — all because of the kind of people who would ask this question, or have such T-shirts printed up, or, worse, buy the damned things.
Looking at that Web site makes me want to reach through my laptop and give somebody a good slap up ‘side the head. I wanna go all ad hominem on ’em. But I don’t know how.
Just yesterday, the exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollars came up in conversation, and I wondered aloud whether a book could now be purchased for fewer loonies.
Think about it: Where do you usually see the greenback and the loonie compared? Right — on the cover of books in the bookstore. For instance, the copy of Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day I just plucked off my shelf as an example retailed for $16 U.S., but $21.50 Canadian — in monetary terms, as far apart as Juno and Utah beaches.
Within an hour or so after wondering about that, lo and behold, The Economist explained the situation in just those terms. Seems folks in the Great White North are pretty ticked off now if they can’t get a book at a south-of-the-border price:
CHRIS SMITH, co-owner of a small bookshop in Ottawa called Collected Works, assumed his customers would remain loyal even as the rapid appreciation of the Canadian dollar against its American counterpart made a mockery of the gap between the twin prices printed on the covers of American books. But when Mr Smith asked a few regulars, he was shocked to find that they were going online to buy American books from retailers south of the border. In an effort to keep his existing trade, he now uses the much lower American figure as the Canadian price, even though this means selling American books at a loss. (In the case of Alan Greenspan’s book “The Age of Turbulence”, for example, the prices on the jacket are $35 and C$43.95.)
I sympathize with those shoppers. I’ve always felt a little bad for Canadians whenever I perused book prices: If you’re an American it costs this much, but if your a Canadian, you pay this much. It always seemed a little unfair, even when it wasn’t. Now that it is unfair, I don’t blame Canadian shoppers a bit for griping if they don’t get the lower price.
Just got this from B.J. over at the McCain campaign:
Hey Mr. Warthen – I think you might be interested in this. Here’s the deal: On Monday in Hilton Head at a Meet & Greet, some lady asked McCain, “How do we beat the bitch?” He responded. (See Video 1) Last night, CNN’s Rick Sanchez stooped to new levels of sensationalism in reporting the incident. (See Video 2). This morning, we released a statement from Buzz Jacobs, SC Campaign Manager. (See Below) Today at noon, McCain is holding a national blogger call and this is sure to be the hot topic. I thought you might want to get on that call, so if you’re interested, please let me know ASAP and I will send you the call info.
Thanks, BJ
I told him, yeah, I might want to listen in on that. Anything y’all want to share prior to that? Personally, my immediate reaction is that I have but one complaint about the way Sen. McCain handled it: he spoke of the nomination of the "Democrat Party," not the Democratic Party. And I think the guy on CNN talking about it makes an ass of himself.
Also, here’s the release to which B.J. referred:
STATEMENT FROM SC CAMPAIGN MANAGER ON CNN REPORT For Immediate Release Contact: SC Press Office Wednesday, November 14, 2007 COLUMBIA, SC — U.S. Senator John McCain’s South Carolina campaign manager Buzz Jacobs issued the following statement in response to a report aired last evening by CNN’s Rick Sanchez:
"It is disappointing that Mr. Sanchez would choose to engage in sensationalism in the hopes of generating a story. It not only reflects poorly on him, but on CNN. If Mr. Sanchez had even the faintest perspective on the race for the White House, he would know that Senator McCain has expressed his utmost respect for Senator Clinton numerous times on the campaign trail as he did at Monday’s event in Hilton Head."
Above you see what I put together for her. As it happens, I got almost every bit of what he said on health care, except for a view seconds when my camera automatically shut off recording (which it does after three minutes of video), and I had to restart it.
Look on it as a bit of show-and-tell to complement her column. The column itself is the third part of a three-part series. Here is part one, and here is part two.
Reading proofs for today’s op-ed page, I found myself quibbling with a word choice of Thomas Friedman’s. It’s not that I didn’t understand what he meant; I was just in a quibbling mood.
It was his simplistic, not-quite-right use of the word, "democracy:"
The very essence of democracy is peaceful rotations of power, no matter whose party or tribe is in or out. But that ethic does not apply in most of the Arab-Muslim world today, where the political ethos remains “Rule or Die.” Either my group is in power or I’m dead, in prison, in exile or lying very low. But democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities, but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy can’t take root.
As I say, I knew what he meant. We’ve all sort of agreed amongst ourselves that the thing the Bush administration says it wants to bring to Iraq and the rest of the region (whether one agrees with that goal or not, or believe that is the true motive) is called, for convenience, "democracy." Even though democracy is not what we have in this country — or rather, it’s not what we’re supposed to have, to the extent that we respect the wishes and wisdom of the Framers who bequeathed us a specific sort of republic, defined by a constitution.
What Friedman means to say is that "the very essence" of a system like ours is peaceful rotation of power — or at least it was a goal of the Framers, though it wasn’t achieved until the election of 1800. That year marked the real American revolution, seen from that perspective. A peaceful transition was by no means guaranteed before that.
The truth is that "democracy" can occur without such peaceful transitions, and certainly without respect for other factions or tribes. (I could also point out that "Rule or Die" sounds a lot like the rhetoric of political partisans in this country, although fortunately they have not yet backed it up with civil bloodshed.)
He’s also wrong when he says democracy "is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights." No, democracy IS about majority rule, which is why it is so messy in so many parts of the world, and why Madison, Jay, Hamilton and the rest rejected it in favor of a republic with minority rights guaranteed by way of a carefully balanced constitutional form of government. Those guys were very worried about the passions of the mob, which is why our government is composed of various parts with differing constituencies and loads of checks and balances.
Again, I knew what he meant; but sometimes it helps us to think more clearly about these things when we examine the terms more closely.
By BRAD WARTHEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR Areader recently told me she enjoys my columns because she likes to follow my “soul-searching” as I try to work through an issue. I suggested she keep reading — who knows; someday I might actually find something. But I knew what she meant, and took it kindly. That’s the kind of commentary I value, too. That’s why I called Hal Stevenson on Friday to talk about the upcoming presidential primaries. Hal is a political activist of the Christian conservative variety. He’s a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, which has its offices in a building he owns on Gervais Street. He’s also one of the most soberly thoughtful and fair-minded people I know, which to the national media probably constitutes an oxymoron: The thoughtful Christian conservative. When last I saw Hal, he had brought Sen. Sam Brownback in for an editorial board interview regarding his quest for the GOP presidential nomination. Since then, several things have happened:
Sen. Brownback dropped out.
Mitt Romney made a splash by lining up the support of Bob Jones III, he of the fundamentalist Upstate university of the same name (without the III, of course).
Of all those, the nod I would have valued the most was that of Sen. Brownback — like me, a convert to Catholicism. When he spoke of the impact of faith on his approach to leadership, it actually seemed to have something to do with Judeo-Christian beliefs: He spoke of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly. By contrast, Pat Robertson’s explanation as to why he was endorsing the one Republican least in tune with religious conservatives seemed to have little to do with spiritual matters, and everything to do with secular ideology and partisan strategy: He spoke of defeating terrorism, fiscal discipline and the selection of federal judges. The first two concerns are secular; the third seemed the least likely of reasons for him to back Mr. Giuliani. The ways in which “values voters” interact with the sin-stained realities of power politics have long mystified me, and I wondered: Does a guy like Pat Robertson, with all his baggage (wanting to whack Hugo Chavez, suggesting 9/11 happened because America had it coming), actually deliver more votes than he chases away? So I called Hal to help me sort it out. As of lunchtime Friday, when we spoke, he was up in the air about the presidential contest himself, now that his man Brownback was out of it. But he’s sorting through it, and has had face-to-face talks with the candidates he considers most likely. “My heart says Huckabee,” he said. “He’s much more like me, I suppose, than the other guys.” But that’s not his final answer. He said when he asked Sen. Brownback why he didn’t get behind Gov. Huckabee, he said “it’d be like endorsing himself, so he might as well stay in himself.” He was looking for someone who offered what he couldn’t, and chose McCain. As for Hal, “I did meet with McCain,” who is “certainly a real patriot,” but he’s trying to decide whether the Arizonan’s position on stem cell research — he charts a middle course — “is going to be a deal-killer for me.” (Brownback has told him that McCain says he wouldn’t make such research a high priority as president.) He hasn’t decided yet about Mitt Romney. He’s talked with him, and sees him as “a very capable executive… he’s proven that.” But he cites “Sam’s words” about the former Massachusetts governor: “He’s a technocrat, running as an ideologue.” While noting that “we don’t look to Bob Jones III for a lot of stuff,” there are “some very credible Christian activists out there supporting Romney.” He mentions state lawmakers Nathan Ballentine and Kevin Bryant, and cites his respect for U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint. He says he’s not bothered by Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion, since he “takes the right position now.” But he worries it could hurt him in the general election, when Democrats could use old video clips to great effect. “I am going through a methodical process,” he said, “and I have been impressed with McCain, Huckabee, Romney….” He has not, however, met with Fred Thompson, “and I probably wouldn’t waste Giuliani’s time.” “I respect him for being straightforward and not trying to B.S. us,” he said of the former mayor, but he does not relish having to choose between two pro-choice candidates next November. As for the host of “The 700 Club,” “I really don’t much care what Pat Robertson does.” “Robertson lost credibility with most thinking evangelicals a long time ago.” Hal said he was turned off back during Mr. Robertson’s own run for the presidency in 1988: “It was all about acquiring political power in the Republican Party,” and that “wasn’t what many of us thought the Christian Coalition was about.” While Hal himself is still seeking the answer, “I’ve got good evangelical friends who are working for every campaign.” Every Republican campaign, that is. Nothing against Democrats per se, Hal says; it’s just that “A pro-life Democrat doesn’t have a chance in the Democratic primary,” and that is a deal-killer. Hal still doesn’t know which of the candidates that leaves please him the most, but in the end, that’s not the point: “The only person ultimately I’m trying to please is the Lord.”
Here is something I meant to post yesterday, but didn’t have time after I finally got the info I needed.
Friday morning, I was reading up on Mukasey’s confirmation the night before, when I noticed that not one of the senators running for president had recorded a vote. Since I still needed a topic for my Sunday column, I thought this might be it. I decided to put each of their campaigns on the spot, and write on the basis of the responses I got.
So I e-mailed contacts at each of the five campaigns. Under the heading, "Where was Sen. (blank)?" I wrote:
(contact name),
Why was Sen. (blank) (along with all the other presidential contenders)
recorded as "not-voting" on the Mukasey nomination last night? What was
more important? And what was the senator’s position on the question of
whether he should have been nominated?
— Brad
Unfortunately, the replies were slow coming in. The first was from B.J. Boling with John McCain at 11:51 a.m.:
Hi Mr. Warthen-
Senator McCain’s policy is to be present when his vote would affect the
outcome. When Sen. Feinstein and Schumer decided to confirm Mukasey it
became clear McCain’s vote wouldn’t change the outcome. He has clearly
supported Mukasey’s nomination. (Please see Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham’s letter below.) Senator McCain was receiving the endorsement of
Sen. Brownback in IA.
Thanks
BJ
I think BJ was confused; the Brownback endorsement was the day before. Anyway, I didn’t hear from the next campaign — Joe Biden’s — until 2:47 p.m.:
Brad:
Tried to reach you by phone to discuss but got your voice mail so thought I would respond my e-mail.
Don’t know exactly where Senator Biden was late yesterday when the
Mukasey nomination came up on the Senate floor. However, Senator
Biden had expressed his strong opposition to Judge Mukasey’s
confirmation (link to his statement…) and voted against
reporting the nomination out of the Judiciary Committee. Further,
Senator Biden has previously indicated that he would not miss a vote in
which his vote would determine the outcome. Obviously, the Mukasey
vote was not close giving the fact that six Democrats had announced
their support for Judge Mukasey well in advance of the actual vote
taking place. Call me if you have any further questions.
Trip King
It should be noted that because I was swamped — it being Friday, and my having to switch gears and pursue a completely different column idea — I wasn’t answering my phone, which presented an obstacle to the campaigns. Amaya Smith kept trying to call me, mentioned that she was doing so in an e-mail. I explained that I’d rather have e-mail because I didn’t have time to talk, so she wrote:
That was at 3:06. At 3:50, I heard from Michelle Macrina with Chris Dodd. She wrote,
Brad, At a time when the confirmation seemed assured, Senator Dodd was the first Democrat to voice his opposition to Judge Mukasey’s nomination based on his position on the Rule of Law. He registered his opposition repeatedly and urged his colleagues to do the same.
Zac Wright with the Hillary Clinton campaign was apparently having a bad day, and missed my first e-mail. After I e-mail him again, he responded at 6:14 p.m. with:
She’s made every effort to make her votes, as evidenced by having the best attendance record of the candidates running. But she’s running for President and was campaigning in NH. Had this been a close vote, she would have been there.
She’s already spoken out about her views. This is her statement from the Senate yesterday.
So those are their stories, and I suppose they’re sticking to them. If I’d had time to chat, I would have pursued the matter further with each, but I was multitasking, and this was a lower priority than cranking out pages. I’m just getting to this now.
Have you heard about the refreshing alternative to the same old tired, porky approach to farm legislation?
Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., proposed a rebel farm bill called the Fresh Act that would replace billions of dollars in payments to farmers of a handful of crops with an insurance program that would be available free to all farmers — including the 91 percent of California farmers who receive no federal crop subsidies…. But it would come at the expense of the … cluster of seven states in the Midwest and South that get most of the $7.5 billion that will be spent this year on subsidies for corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans. The plan is expected to save so much money that it could finance a veritable liberal dream list. Billions of dollars would be diverted to food stamps and fruit and vegetable purchases in school food programs. Money would be freed for conservation easements to preserve farm land from suburban sprawl and a host of other environmental programs. Aid for organic farms and locally based food purchases, research for fruit, nut and vegetable crops, and rural development would rise. The changes would also bring farm programs into compliance with world trade treaties, and still trim $3 billion from the deficit.
Anybody think it’s got more than a snowball’s chance of overcoming the massive stone wall of interests stacked against it? It would be nice to think so.
Oh, and before you "conservatives" dismiss it on the basis of that "liberal" reference above, check out what The Washington Times said.
Judge Michael Mukasey seems uncertain on the point of whether "waterboarding" is torture. Others who have tried it seem a bit more decisive. (Both of the following links were brought to my attention by Samuel Tenenbaum, who in real life
thinks about lots of things besides his 55-mph proposal.)
Here’s a video of a guy undergoing the treatment. He gets through it OK — but remember, he knew the guys doing this to him were friendlies, and would eventually stop.
Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia — meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells. The lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again. Call it "Chinese water torture," "the barrel," or "the waterfall." It is all the same.
After reading that, and watching the video, I believe I’d agree with John McCain that this constitutes torture. (Of course, I would be loathe to argue the point in any case with the one presidential candidate who truly knows exactly what he’s talking about when it comes to torture.)
But here’s another question: If you were actually racing against the clock to prevent a terrorist attack that could kill hundreds or thousands, would you do it anyway? Or would you allow others to do it in your behalf? Or would you simply look the other way if they did?
I’ll tell you what got me thinking along those lines. It was the interview with Alan Dershowitz on the above-linked video. He didn’t seem to mind the use of the technique to stop terrorism, as long as there is "accountability." He would want the president of the United States to specifically permit it, in writing. That’s a lawyer for you. Strain at a gnat, miss the camel — or the beam, or whatever.
Personally, I wouldn’t want anybody I’d ever vote for to give permission for such a thing. Nor would I want him to give a nod and a wink, either. If some Jack Bauer-like subordinate did such a thing, without authorization, and did indeed save many lives doing so, I’d be inclined to thank him on behalf of a grateful nation, then prosecute him to the full extent of the law. Unlike Mr. Dershowitz, I think under the circumstances I could live with the inherent contradiction.
My man McCain keeps going on about this proposal Hillary had for a Woodstock museum, and I can’t help that the old dude’s missing the real problem here. I keep thinking: a museum? For Woodstock?
There’s something extremely uncool about that. Museums are where established, older-generation culture is stored and entombed in cold marble, right? It’s where the Man puts his stuff.
Wasn’t Woodstock — to the extent that it was about anything other than being a rip-roarin’, get-high-and-get-nekkid sort of party — sort of about the opposite of that?
Where was Hillary’s head at?
Oh — and in case you’re not digging where my headline is at, here’s a link.
