By H.N. Burdett
In terms of candidates in the race for the 2012 presidential nomination, Republicans now find themselves in a spot not unlike the one they occupied four years ago: firmly wedged between a rock and a hard place.
Back in 2007, the conservative faithful were less than delighted with the front-runner, Rudy Guiliani. Yes, it was impressive that a Republican had got himself elected mayor of New York, an urban bastion of liberalism. And, yes, he had national recognition as a tough guy committed to the fight against terrorism in the wake of 9/11. But deeper right-wing thinkers wondered how much he had to bend and bow to progressivism to win the office. While he might know plenty about winning over liberal-leaning undecided voters, how would this transfer into national governance?
As it turned out, the Guiliani boom fizzled into ballot box bust once the state primary elections began. At that time, Arizona Senator John McCain was entrenched at around 15 percent in the polls. He was also having problems patching and re-wiring his faltering campaign. He fired some of his campaign staff and others were on their cell phones trying to learn what other campaigns might have a spot for them.
It is understatement to recall that McCain was hardly the darling of either the GOP hierarchy or its rank-and-file. Nor is it exaggeration to suggest that no elected official at that time raised the hackles of his party brethren more than he did.
His positions that ran against the grain of the party included support for gun control, liberalizing immigration policy and, most particularly, co-sponsoring campaign finance reform that would limit corporate contributions, thereby plugging the mother's milk of GOP candidates. Compounding his plight, McCain was viewed as a mite too friendly with the Senate's liberal poster twins Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Uttering McCain's name was, to put it mildly, enough to make avowed conservatives gag.
Then the Republican primaries got underway and a funny thing happened on the way to the Republican National Convention. McCain was winning. He won in Maine, which had been considered low-hanging fruit for either Guilani, an easterner, or Mitt Romney, a New Englander. McCain won in South Carolina, defeating Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Tennesse Senator Fred Thompson, though it was suspected that the latter two canceled out one another and opened the path for a McCain victory. And McCain won in Florida over Guiliani, the last hurrah for the New York mayor who turned around and endorsed the Arizona maverick.
What McCain had going for him was name recognition, by way of a compelling narrative as an American prisoner during the Vietnam war. He was repeatedly beaten when he refused his captors' offers to be released from the notorious Hanoi Hilton, recognizing that it would be used to both encourage United States anti-war sentiment and suggest that the son of a prominent U.S. admiral was treated in a manner different from other prisoners.
Moreover, McCain was a prominent supporter of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose endorsement was seen as validation of the misguided foreign policy of the Bush administration. The drumbeat of war overpowered all other objections to his candidacy.
What remained of the anybody-but-McCain mantra among GOP conservatives was silenced by his victories in the Pine Tree, Palmetto and Sunshine states. If McCain's detractors had not been metamorphosed into cheerleaders, their objections at least receded at the unlikely prospect of a southwest senator showing clout at the polls both in the northeast and, even more significantly, below the Mason-Dixon Line, where the southern strategy had been a winning formula for the GOP since it was shaped nearly 40 years earlier by Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond.
Today an anybody-but-Romney mentality persists among the dominant conservative element of the Republican party. Though Mitt Romney polls consistently high in the field of eight contenders for the GOP nomination, his numbers are more reflective of the 25 percent of Republicans who remain moderate. For this vanishing breed, the only alternative can hardly be mistaken for viable: former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who most recently plunged to a measly 1 percent in the polls and can in no way be considered a serious obstacle to Romney's race for the nomination.
Though Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to be the most logical choice of conservative Republicans, there's little evidence of pushing and shoving to board his sputtering bandwagon. They are not so much bothered by the fact that Perry was once a Democrat, or even that he headed the 2000 Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. Fundamentalists and born-agains, who still carry substantial weight in the Republican party, are known to embrace rather than revile converts.
Besides, Perry has offered the startling revelation that the last Democratic presidential contender for whom he voted was Jimmy Carter. It was an admission that he failed to vote for Gore, a candidate whose statewide campaign he led. In the Lone Star state, it is well known that there is no love lost between Perry and his predecessor as governor, George W. Bush. So it is indeed possible that Perry just did not vote for either Bush 43 or Gore in the controversial 2000 election.
Perry's feud with Bush can both hurt and help him. Revisionist history may credit Bush's preemptive war policy with initiating the democratization of the Arab world, should that actually happen. At the same time, Bush's borrow and spend policy to pay for the war and his requesting and receiving higher and higher debt limits are precursors to today's global economic woes.
Furthermore, Perry has been less than a rousing success in the series of Republican campaign debates, to say the least. He compounds the fact that he is rhetorically challenged by announcing that he will be more selective in the future about the debates in which he will participate. By so doing, he could better use the time required to prepare for debates by capitalizing on his flesh-pressing forte. While this may be a wise move by a candidate who thrives on shaking hands, slapping backs and throwing red meat to a like-minded crowd, it also begs the question that if he is unable to tangle with the likes of Mitt Romney, how would he fare against Barack Obama? A chicken wearing a 10-gallon hat and genuine leather boots is less than an inspiring vision.
Meanwhile, conservative Republicans would still prefer not to be left with a choice between Romney, whose philosophical credentials they are unlikely to ever approve, and Perry, who gets slam-dunked routinely by Republican strategists all the way up to W.'s "brain," Karl Rove.
Even when the Texas governor leaves the debate podium, he is known to put his foot in do-do up to his boot tops. After Herman Cain's 9-9-9 abomination brought him back from the campaign exit door and atop the polls alongside Romney, Perry's attempt to roll out his own flat-tax proposal was pushed out of the headlines by his dunderheaded resurrection of the phony baloney about where Barack Obama, three years into his presidency, was born. Thinking Republicans, conservative and moderate, groaned in unison.
Conservative minions had earlier tried unsuccessfully to push New Jersey Governor Chris Christie into the race for their party's presidential nomination. Spurned there, they turned to Cain, who was already in the race. He is personable, a businessman and a motivational speaker adept at both kowtowing to deep-pocketed corporate interests and chiding African Americans for remaining on the "plantation" of the Democratic party. But Cain's staying power remains cloaked in genuine doubt.
There are now rumblings that the next GOP flavor-of-the-month will be Newt Gingrich. While Romney cannot seem to get traction beyond the one-quarter of his own party's rank-and-file, Gingrich has to dig out of a much deeper hole. He has been mired as a single-digit wonder. But Cain's unlikely skyrocketing gives hope to the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yet, despite his loyalty to the memory of Ronald Reagan, whose name he invokes at each and every opportunity while conveniently bypassing the two Bushes; despite his authorship of the Reagan era Contract with America; despite his probable authorship of the Reagan re-election slogan about Americans being better off than they were four years earlier, Newt Gingrich is yesterday's news.
Now that might not be all that bad for a party that still worships Reagan, conveniently forgetting that the Great Communicator's supply-side "voodoo" economics jump-started our current economic catastrophe. But the atmosphere is very different from what it was when Reagan was at the helm.
From the diminishing Tea Party to the emerging Occupy Wall Street movement, the vox populi screams, "We're mad as hell and we're not taking it any longer!" By the grace of a Constitution mandating a nation ruled by law, if there is a revolution it is likely to be bloodless.
At another time, in another place, Gingrich, a former high-profile member of the ruling elite, would be less likely to be seeking to lead his country than he would be frog-marching to the guillotine.
###
Monday, October 31, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
THE REPUBLICANS' CAIN MUTINY
by H. N. Burdett
"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." H. L. Mencken
When your competitor or opponent in business or across the chess board or tennis net is self-destructing, the wisest counsel is to not get in the way. The same logic applies to Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's too dangerous to be considered goofy 9-9-9 tax plan.
Democrats do not have to waste their time or breath on denouncing the former Godfather Pizza CEO's astoundingly regressive notion of tax reform. Other GOP presidential hopefuls are doing the job quite well, thank you very much.
First in line was Jon Huntsman. In the recent debate on economic policy between the eight aspirants for the GOP nomination, the former Utah governor and U.S. Ambassador to China said he thought 9-9-9 was something that appears on a pizza box. Huntsman's evaluation gets my vote for the best intentionally humorous line of the debate cycle (which is short-changing the viewing audience in that respect) to be uttered thus far.
Michele Bachmann, no stranger to looking at the world upside down, noted that from her vantage point Cain's tax proposal translates into the satanic 6-6-6. Everyone understands that Mrs. Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry have been lured into the race for the White House by a Higher Authority. But who knew that personable Cain, the self-made business executive, motivational speaker, tea party favorite and current darling of rank-and-file Republicans who shot up in the polls with rocket thrust, was sent to us by the nether world?
Credited with elevating Cain from an expected early primary campaign dropout into an overnight serious contender, his brainstorm calls for what on the surface seems to be simplicity itself: a 9 percent tax rate on personal income, 9 percent on businesses and a 9 percent federal sales tax.
Political back and forth aside, Bruce Bartlett, former U.S. Treasury official and economic adviser to Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as Texas congressman and current presidential nomination candidate Ron Paul and former New York Rep. Jack Kemp, has examined the 9-9-9 travesty more closely. And he has found it to be a nightmare.
"At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distribution monstrosity," Bartlett posited. "The poor would pay more, while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase. Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain's tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill-conceived."
As an example, the 9 percent rate would apply to personal gross income with deductions only for charitable donations, and no mention of personal exemptions. Thus, those who now pay no federal income taxes - 47 percent of all taxpayers - would now pay 9 percent of their total income. The earned income credit would be eliminated, offsetting both their income tax liability and their payroll payment.
Crafted by a Cleveland accountant rather than egghead economists, Cain's plan would have everyone pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases - food, rent, health care, automobiles, even pizzas. No exemptions. The result would increase the cost of living by 9 percent, Bartlett reminds us.
The appeal of the 9-9-9 formula is that at first blush it seems so eminently fair: everyone pays the same rate. But just as simplistic campaign rhetoric has been in the past and will be in the future, the devil - and I categorically refute the innuendo that the affable Mr. Cain was coaxed into this race by the prince of darkness - is in the details.
When the smoke has cleared, and the flat-tax scuttled or at very least revised, there is something quite wonderful about the prospect, unlikely as it may be, of two African Americans squaring off next November for the highest office in the land - 144 years after the passage of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution that recognized persons of color as human beings rather than property. Only a dyed-in-the-wool bigot could fail to appreciate the delicious irony.
Such a face-off could well be the tipping point that will lead Americans to once and for all judge fellow citizens as individuals rather than by the color of their skin. The ghosts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be delighted.
# # #
"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." H. L. Mencken
When your competitor or opponent in business or across the chess board or tennis net is self-destructing, the wisest counsel is to not get in the way. The same logic applies to Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's too dangerous to be considered goofy 9-9-9 tax plan.
Democrats do not have to waste their time or breath on denouncing the former Godfather Pizza CEO's astoundingly regressive notion of tax reform. Other GOP presidential hopefuls are doing the job quite well, thank you very much.
First in line was Jon Huntsman. In the recent debate on economic policy between the eight aspirants for the GOP nomination, the former Utah governor and U.S. Ambassador to China said he thought 9-9-9 was something that appears on a pizza box. Huntsman's evaluation gets my vote for the best intentionally humorous line of the debate cycle (which is short-changing the viewing audience in that respect) to be uttered thus far.
Michele Bachmann, no stranger to looking at the world upside down, noted that from her vantage point Cain's tax proposal translates into the satanic 6-6-6. Everyone understands that Mrs. Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry have been lured into the race for the White House by a Higher Authority. But who knew that personable Cain, the self-made business executive, motivational speaker, tea party favorite and current darling of rank-and-file Republicans who shot up in the polls with rocket thrust, was sent to us by the nether world?
Credited with elevating Cain from an expected early primary campaign dropout into an overnight serious contender, his brainstorm calls for what on the surface seems to be simplicity itself: a 9 percent tax rate on personal income, 9 percent on businesses and a 9 percent federal sales tax.
Political back and forth aside, Bruce Bartlett, former U.S. Treasury official and economic adviser to Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as Texas congressman and current presidential nomination candidate Ron Paul and former New York Rep. Jack Kemp, has examined the 9-9-9 travesty more closely. And he has found it to be a nightmare.
"At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distribution monstrosity," Bartlett posited. "The poor would pay more, while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase. Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain's tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill-conceived."
As an example, the 9 percent rate would apply to personal gross income with deductions only for charitable donations, and no mention of personal exemptions. Thus, those who now pay no federal income taxes - 47 percent of all taxpayers - would now pay 9 percent of their total income. The earned income credit would be eliminated, offsetting both their income tax liability and their payroll payment.
Crafted by a Cleveland accountant rather than egghead economists, Cain's plan would have everyone pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases - food, rent, health care, automobiles, even pizzas. No exemptions. The result would increase the cost of living by 9 percent, Bartlett reminds us.
The appeal of the 9-9-9 formula is that at first blush it seems so eminently fair: everyone pays the same rate. But just as simplistic campaign rhetoric has been in the past and will be in the future, the devil - and I categorically refute the innuendo that the affable Mr. Cain was coaxed into this race by the prince of darkness - is in the details.
When the smoke has cleared, and the flat-tax scuttled or at very least revised, there is something quite wonderful about the prospect, unlikely as it may be, of two African Americans squaring off next November for the highest office in the land - 144 years after the passage of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution that recognized persons of color as human beings rather than property. Only a dyed-in-the-wool bigot could fail to appreciate the delicious irony.
Such a face-off could well be the tipping point that will lead Americans to once and for all judge fellow citizens as individuals rather than by the color of their skin. The ghosts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be delighted.
# # #
Friday, October 14, 2011
ROMNEY'S AUTHENTICITY DEFICIT
By H. N. Burdett
In a presidential campaign, a month is a lifetime, a year an era. With little less than 13 months remaining before the 2012 election, we now know perhaps more than anyone ever wanted to know about the Republican candidates. But which one will be anointed is still anything but a sure thing.
First it was Bachman. Then it was Romney. Then it was Perry. Then it was Romney again. Now it is Herman Cain. Tomorrow, who knows? Paul? Santorum? Huntsman? Gingrich? Republican voters have an apparent equal opportunity policy when it comes to selecting their nominee in this flavor-of-the-moment farcical sitcom that the party's presidential debates have become.
The one constant is Mitt Romney. The good news for him is that he is solidly entrenched. Well, sort of. He is either at the very top or near the very top of the post-debate polling. The not-so-good news is that he has been unable to rise above 23% in these ratings.
Former Godfather pizza CEO Herman Cain, until recently mired in a single-digit rut and expected to be headed for the nearest exit, is now a full five points in front of second-place Romney.
But during this Cinderella phase of the primary season, the smart money is on the slipper not fitting the purveyor of the 9-9-9 tax policy. It is a reasonable assumption considering that Cain frankly admits he knows nothing of the nitty-gritty, the small print beneath the tax plan that has elevated him into the magnet of the moment for the GOP tried-and-true. And one can hardly wait to learn the pizza guy's thoughts on foreign policy.
The volatile trajectory of the Republican primary at this juncture still favors Romney. With the perpetual yo-yoing of his opponents, consistent support from nearly one quarter of his party's voters is a position to be envied rather than scorned. It is sufficient to bring into his camp a few of the hesitant high rollers who have been persuaded that an eleventh hour entry of a perhaps more acceptable alternative such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush or current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is about as likely as a snowball fight in Key West. To say nothing of Romney's winning the coveted endorsements of such astute practitioners of the political arts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, himself fresh from spurning fervent invitations to the Big Dance, and Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. (Favorite sons of the Magnolia State keep popping up in this narrative with frightening regulatory.)
But really now, it is not over until it is over. And Texas Governor Rick Perry's sudden long and loud energy policy pitch is crudely crafted to bar the door and prevent his arsenal of oil industry cash cows from stampeding off and into Mitt's corral.
More evidence of precarious fissures in the solid ground under the boots of the pride of the Lone Star state became even more obvious when his wife was moved to deliver her soul-stirring confession that hubby wanted no part of going to Washington until she got a personal message from You-Know-Who that the presidency was his destiny.
The rift between the Bushes and the Perrys has not prevented the latter from pilfering a few pages from the former's well-worn playbook. When the Word comes from Upstairs, one simply doesn't mess with Texas - not with all those bible thumpers spread throughout the South and beyond. So far not much cowboy shows under the Perry 10-gallon hat, but in this wacky campaign season don't be too hasty to kick in with long odds that he's strictly yesterday's news.
Indeed the smart money is sharply divided in what may well boil down to an apocalyptic showdown for the heart and soul of the Republican party. There are still untold numbers of Republicans preferring to identify with their only two standard-bearers enshrined on Mt. Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, neither of whom might find himself entirely comfortable in today's incarnation of the GOP. There are many more Republicans who view Romney as a pseudo-conservative.
Romney earned the distrust of the right as the pro-gun control, pro-gay marriage, pro-choice governor of the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Intractable right-wingers can be excused for their skepticism regarding Romney having seen so much light that he has been moved to reverse all three of these positions and for good measure even backtracked a mite on his 'socialized medicine' state health plan.
Romney now finds himself in a position not unlike that occupied by the once moderate George H. W. Bush in 1980 after he was clobbered by Ronald Reagan in the GOP primary. To mollify remnants of Republican centrism, Reagan chose the elder Bush to be his vice president. Eight years later, Bush 41, previously a dedicated advocate of government-supported family planning and opponent of "voodoo economics," as he labeled Reagan's supply side agenda, rolled over and embraced conservative philosophy in a manner that would have embarrassed the fiercest of grizzlies.
But during the four years of his own presidency, Bush the Elder first taunted the electorate and the press to "read my lips: no new taxes," and later raised taxes. Furthermore, after soaring in popularity with his Desert Storm operation to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi onslaught, he pulled up short of the gates of Baghdad allowing Saddam Hussein to continue his madness. Consequently, H. W. justified his conservative doubters and for him it was four years and out.
Presidential candidates are all about convincing voters that they will transform their stump rhetoric into Oval Office action. To paraphrase that sage for the ages, George Burns, authenticity is the key and a candidate who can fake that has it made.
Therein lies the rub for Citizen Romney. His most challenging task is to mesmerize Republican voters into believing that when they peel back his layers of liberalism - his previous stands on gun control, gay marriage, abortion and state-sponsored health care - at the core he actually is one of them.
It is not an easy sell. Maybe right-wingers could give Romney a Mulligan for going off course on an issue or two, reasoning that a couple of compromises were a fair trade-off for getting himself elected governor of a hardcore blue state. But opposition to an entire package of Republican anathema begged the question of whether he, as Bush 41 did earlier, would at some point during his presidency revert to his old lefty ways.
Romney is doing his doggonedest to show that his chameleon tactics are over and done with, that he will toe the line and do their bidding. He is at very least a far different candidate today than he was when he sought his party's nomination four years ago.
Maeve Reston of the Tribune Newspapers recently caught up with the erstwhile Bay State governor in New Hampshire, where he has a commanding lead in state polls, 38% to 20%, over Herman Cain. Reston recalled that in 2007, Romney was not only defensive about his switches on all of those aforementioned conservative issues but that he had "irritated voters by spending lavishly on television commercials long before anyone cast ballots" and that "some dismissed him as scripted and robotic."
By contrast, the reporter described him as "loose and confident" and "rather than rush out the door after events, he now often mingles with voters until just a few stragglers remain." Reston concluded that Romney is running a more financially prudent campaign with a smaller entourage, even boasting of flying budget airlines.
This time around Romney has apparently taken seriously Coco Chanel's observation that "hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity."
The extent and validity of his transformation may be problematic, but his heretofore inability to push his poll numbers northward and the difficulty in determining the true strength of moderate Republicans make it all but impossible to judge how well he might do as his party's candidate to upend President Obama, whose favorability rating has slipped below 45% - a position from which no incumbent president has been re-elected.
In the end, Republicans, who are getting a whiff of the enticing aroma of victory, might just be in a mood to cast their ballots for a feline carcass if it were the party nominee.
###
In a presidential campaign, a month is a lifetime, a year an era. With little less than 13 months remaining before the 2012 election, we now know perhaps more than anyone ever wanted to know about the Republican candidates. But which one will be anointed is still anything but a sure thing.
First it was Bachman. Then it was Romney. Then it was Perry. Then it was Romney again. Now it is Herman Cain. Tomorrow, who knows? Paul? Santorum? Huntsman? Gingrich? Republican voters have an apparent equal opportunity policy when it comes to selecting their nominee in this flavor-of-the-moment farcical sitcom that the party's presidential debates have become.
The one constant is Mitt Romney. The good news for him is that he is solidly entrenched. Well, sort of. He is either at the very top or near the very top of the post-debate polling. The not-so-good news is that he has been unable to rise above 23% in these ratings.
Former Godfather pizza CEO Herman Cain, until recently mired in a single-digit rut and expected to be headed for the nearest exit, is now a full five points in front of second-place Romney.
But during this Cinderella phase of the primary season, the smart money is on the slipper not fitting the purveyor of the 9-9-9 tax policy. It is a reasonable assumption considering that Cain frankly admits he knows nothing of the nitty-gritty, the small print beneath the tax plan that has elevated him into the magnet of the moment for the GOP tried-and-true. And one can hardly wait to learn the pizza guy's thoughts on foreign policy.
The volatile trajectory of the Republican primary at this juncture still favors Romney. With the perpetual yo-yoing of his opponents, consistent support from nearly one quarter of his party's voters is a position to be envied rather than scorned. It is sufficient to bring into his camp a few of the hesitant high rollers who have been persuaded that an eleventh hour entry of a perhaps more acceptable alternative such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush or current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is about as likely as a snowball fight in Key West. To say nothing of Romney's winning the coveted endorsements of such astute practitioners of the political arts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, himself fresh from spurning fervent invitations to the Big Dance, and Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. (Favorite sons of the Magnolia State keep popping up in this narrative with frightening regulatory.)
But really now, it is not over until it is over. And Texas Governor Rick Perry's sudden long and loud energy policy pitch is crudely crafted to bar the door and prevent his arsenal of oil industry cash cows from stampeding off and into Mitt's corral.
More evidence of precarious fissures in the solid ground under the boots of the pride of the Lone Star state became even more obvious when his wife was moved to deliver her soul-stirring confession that hubby wanted no part of going to Washington until she got a personal message from You-Know-Who that the presidency was his destiny.
The rift between the Bushes and the Perrys has not prevented the latter from pilfering a few pages from the former's well-worn playbook. When the Word comes from Upstairs, one simply doesn't mess with Texas - not with all those bible thumpers spread throughout the South and beyond. So far not much cowboy shows under the Perry 10-gallon hat, but in this wacky campaign season don't be too hasty to kick in with long odds that he's strictly yesterday's news.
Indeed the smart money is sharply divided in what may well boil down to an apocalyptic showdown for the heart and soul of the Republican party. There are still untold numbers of Republicans preferring to identify with their only two standard-bearers enshrined on Mt. Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, neither of whom might find himself entirely comfortable in today's incarnation of the GOP. There are many more Republicans who view Romney as a pseudo-conservative.
Romney earned the distrust of the right as the pro-gun control, pro-gay marriage, pro-choice governor of the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Intractable right-wingers can be excused for their skepticism regarding Romney having seen so much light that he has been moved to reverse all three of these positions and for good measure even backtracked a mite on his 'socialized medicine' state health plan.
Romney now finds himself in a position not unlike that occupied by the once moderate George H. W. Bush in 1980 after he was clobbered by Ronald Reagan in the GOP primary. To mollify remnants of Republican centrism, Reagan chose the elder Bush to be his vice president. Eight years later, Bush 41, previously a dedicated advocate of government-supported family planning and opponent of "voodoo economics," as he labeled Reagan's supply side agenda, rolled over and embraced conservative philosophy in a manner that would have embarrassed the fiercest of grizzlies.
But during the four years of his own presidency, Bush the Elder first taunted the electorate and the press to "read my lips: no new taxes," and later raised taxes. Furthermore, after soaring in popularity with his Desert Storm operation to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi onslaught, he pulled up short of the gates of Baghdad allowing Saddam Hussein to continue his madness. Consequently, H. W. justified his conservative doubters and for him it was four years and out.
Presidential candidates are all about convincing voters that they will transform their stump rhetoric into Oval Office action. To paraphrase that sage for the ages, George Burns, authenticity is the key and a candidate who can fake that has it made.
Therein lies the rub for Citizen Romney. His most challenging task is to mesmerize Republican voters into believing that when they peel back his layers of liberalism - his previous stands on gun control, gay marriage, abortion and state-sponsored health care - at the core he actually is one of them.
It is not an easy sell. Maybe right-wingers could give Romney a Mulligan for going off course on an issue or two, reasoning that a couple of compromises were a fair trade-off for getting himself elected governor of a hardcore blue state. But opposition to an entire package of Republican anathema begged the question of whether he, as Bush 41 did earlier, would at some point during his presidency revert to his old lefty ways.
Romney is doing his doggonedest to show that his chameleon tactics are over and done with, that he will toe the line and do their bidding. He is at very least a far different candidate today than he was when he sought his party's nomination four years ago.
Maeve Reston of the Tribune Newspapers recently caught up with the erstwhile Bay State governor in New Hampshire, where he has a commanding lead in state polls, 38% to 20%, over Herman Cain. Reston recalled that in 2007, Romney was not only defensive about his switches on all of those aforementioned conservative issues but that he had "irritated voters by spending lavishly on television commercials long before anyone cast ballots" and that "some dismissed him as scripted and robotic."
By contrast, the reporter described him as "loose and confident" and "rather than rush out the door after events, he now often mingles with voters until just a few stragglers remain." Reston concluded that Romney is running a more financially prudent campaign with a smaller entourage, even boasting of flying budget airlines.
This time around Romney has apparently taken seriously Coco Chanel's observation that "hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity."
The extent and validity of his transformation may be problematic, but his heretofore inability to push his poll numbers northward and the difficulty in determining the true strength of moderate Republicans make it all but impossible to judge how well he might do as his party's candidate to upend President Obama, whose favorability rating has slipped below 45% - a position from which no incumbent president has been re-elected.
In the end, Republicans, who are getting a whiff of the enticing aroma of victory, might just be in a mood to cast their ballots for a feline carcass if it were the party nominee.
###
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
THE EERIE POLITICS OF SURREALITY
By H. N. Burdett
Not too many moons ago I blew off political conspiracy theories as extensions of delusional tendencies fostered by all governments, even democracies. A bright young colleague from my newspaper days once gravely confided: "It's not paranoia if it's true."
When coincidences pile up, as they often enough do - for example, in the bizarre and well-publicized procession of sudden violent deaths of persons of interest, as they did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it has to give pause to those who would like to think of themselves as rational adults.
Forgive this perhaps overwrought introduction to a friend of a friend - a disarmingly charming and obviously intelligent woman known to me only as a telephone voice. To protect the guilty, she will be hereafter referred to as Penny Forthought. You'll have to accept as blind faith that Penny exists. She really does.
Penny was on the phone only minutes after a recent debate between the Seven Dwarfs (I keep forgetting to count the number of Republican presidential nominee hopefuls who line up on the stage during these intriguing forums). She insisted that this sad collection of unworthies for what is repeatedly called the highest office in the free world are all Democrats in disguise. Or else, she continued, how could they possibly be expected to be taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States? Nope. Penny is confident that they are incognito Democrats pulling off an elaborate political dirty trick.
Here we must pause to remind faithful readers that, at this writing, it is nearly 14 months before the next quadrennial presidential election - a time when mischief, deliberate or not, and confusion, readily comprehensible, run rampant across the length and breadth of this great nation. And while the incumbent occupant of the White House sinks in the polls, vilified by the formidable GOP propaganda machine as lacking any semblance of leadership whatsoever, and dismaying hand-wringing liberal Democrats as the very pillar of appeasement, Republicans find themselves vacillating weekly if not hourly between the nonentities who have thus far offered themselves up as their most probable challenger in the 2012 presidential election.
A strong sign of the depth of Republican desperation is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was the early favorite to be the party's last candidate standing. Viewed by hard-core conservatives as far too moderate for their taste, his viability seemed predicated on the premise that virtually anyone professing to be a Republican would be preferable to a second term for Barack Obama.
Then again, was not the laboratory for that GOP anathema, health insurance reform, the People's Republic of Massachusetts under the governorship of none other than Comrade Mitt?
Romney has begged to differ with that too-obvious-to-be-true assessment. In one debate with his fellow aspirants, he claimed to be just itching to cast Romneycare as nothing even close to Obamacare. The erstwhile governor suggested that the overriding difference is that the Bay State model would be best adopted state-by-state rather than imposed by the federal government. The plausibility of this contention is, in fact, secondary to the conventional wisdom that in politics the explanations seldom catch up with the allegations.
And even if Romney's conception of Romney-care were to be miraculously accepted by that portion of the electorate that gets the heebie-jeebies about "socialized medicine" and "the European model of socialism," the former New England governor would be squandering his advantages of telegenic countenance and articulate argumentation on fighting from a defensive posture. No less an authority than that master military theorist Karl von Clausewitz told us back in the early 19th century that the most ruinous losses are suffered by the retreating army.
No sooner would Romney make his case for Romneycare, than he would have to come up with acceptable explanations for his turnabout from a pro-choice governor of liberal Massachusetts to an anti-choice candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. With even more inconsistencies between his gubernatorial performance and issues he espouses on the presidential campaign trail, hapless Mitt would be destined to the fate of a counter-puncher throughout the campaign season. Political prizes are seldom awarded to those battling from a defensive stance. Of course, conventional wisdom does not always hold up, but backroom strategists would certainly roll eyes and shake heads at the prospect of running a horse weighed down by such a hefty handicap.
Not that political pinwheeling necessarily disqualifies Romney as GOP presidential material. George Herbert Walker Bush, the successful party nominee in 1988, and John McCain, the party's standard-bearer in 2008, were both believed to be too moderate to satisfy decidedly more conservative Republicans. To win their respective nominations, each eased away from his less than conservative legislative record.
Decent church-going Republicans, who believe in the redemption of sinners, were not overly concerned about the discrepancies between the relatively moderate performances of Bush and McCain as legislators contrasted with the conservatism to which they gave lip service as presidential candidates. Had not some of the most powerful contemporary preachers confessed to having found their salvation after Perdition-bound lives devoted to draining whiskey bottles and scandalous wenching? Indeed a few televangelists have been shown in recent years to have more of a fixation on their respective collection plates than on the souls of their parishioners.
Hard-nosed Republican political observers were less certain that Bush 41 and McCain's changes of heart were indicative of actually seeing the errors of their old ways or merely transitions of convenience. In the end, of course, Bush 41 was ousted after only one term and McCain never got to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Valiant fighter that he was, McCain's presidential aspirations became an all but hopeless quest when he had the audacity as a U.S. senator to co-author campaign finance reform, a notion that still sends shivers down the Republican party's corporate spine. Unsurprisingly, during McCain's presidential campaign, he refused to support strengthening his own campaign finance reform bill lest he sew up his party's deepest pockets. Still, his presidential race seemed more like running in place on a treadmill against a spirited sprinter daring to dream that he could be the first African American president of the United States.
After one term, Bush 41's presidency went down the tubes for violating two tenets of contemporary Republicanism. He raised taxes after challenging America to read his lips as he solemnly pledged that he would never stoop to such a dastardly deed. And he was perceived to be no better than just another liberal jellyfish when he allowed Saddam Hussein to bounce off the ropes and live to fight another day by halting our troops at the gates of Baghdad with the plea that there was no exit strategy.
Then, of course, there was George W. Bush, who indeed defied all logic by getting elected to two terms. In retrospect, maybe Bush the Younger gets a Mulligan for his alleged theft of the 2000 presidential election against Al Gore. If historians choose to make that contest the exemplar of contemporary stolen presidential elections, for the sake of objectivity they cannot simply overlook those suspiciously tardy Cook County ballots in Illinois that gave John F. Kennedy his victory margin over Richard M. Nixon 40 years earlier.
Nonetheless, Bush 43 no sooner signed his White House lease than the nation was shocked and stunned by the heinous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush the Younger famously responded by launching his vengeance tour - the good son finishing the job Poppy was too timid to carry through and never mind that his counter-attack was against a country never proven to have anything to do with the suicide air attacks that horrified the world.
The brilliantly crafted rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the United States was declaring "war on terrorism" - a dazzling non sequitur that resonated seamlessly with angry Americans eager to barrage anyone or any country with lethal retribution for the unprecedented attacks on continental U.S. soil. Never mind that wars are hostilities between nations and cannot be waged against "isms," where there are no white flags to wave much less swords to surrender.
Thus with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush 43 administration had stumbled upon a possible formula for the continuity of GOP executive and legislative power, considering the unlikelihood that the electorate would be much up for changing presidents or shifting political party power in the middle of a war. The reasonable assumption was that perpetual war, as a war against an "ism" dictates, would translate into longevity of power for the incumbent Republican administration.
Riding the unbridled steed of patriotism - in which testosterone invariably trumps reason - the reckless Bush 43 had the solid backing of his wisest counsels, a preposterous pair of flag wavers, Vice President Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who never made a mistake he couldn't pin on someone else.
Basking in all of this glory, Karl Rove, Bush 43's one-man braintrust whose audacity might cause the Florentine sage to turn emerald with envy, wagered that there was no way Americans would switch national administrations in the middle of a war. Rove felt that World War II rather than the infusion of New Deal socialism, in the guise of recovery programs from the Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, held the real key to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three terms as president. The fantasy of perpetual war was a dream come true for Rove, whose stated life goal is a generation of GOP domination of both the White House and Capitol Hill.
But, alas, Rove, a proud American history buff, unforgivably forgot or chose to ignore Abe Lincoln's dictum that some of the people can be fooled all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thus, while at least part of Rove's high stakes wager held up, Bush 43 having been re-elected, blood continued to spill on the two selected battlefields of the purposefully misnamed war on terrorism, even as a novice Democratic party politician trounced a combat-tested, genuine Republican war hero in the 2008 election.
Compounding the long-standing smoke-and-mirrors myth that the GOP is both the party of fiscal responsibility and far tougher than weak-kneed Democrats in dealing with enemies foreign and domestic, Bush the Younger left the White House destined to be remembered as easily the worst president ever to hold that office. Not only was the confessed perpetrator of 9/11 still at large, presumably hopping through the treacherous terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with the apparent agility of a mountain goat hooked up to a dialysis dispenser, the U.S. economy was left in shambles with global markets following closely behind.
That Bin Laden was finally shot, killed and dumped at sea on Obama's watch is an inconvenient truth Republicans would prefer to expunge from recent memory, if not the history books. To accomplish this seemingly improbable feat, they pile more and more garbage at the President's doorstep, all the while shouting through talk radio megaphones that the incumbent in the White House has, in less than four years, not wiped up the malodorous mess and all of its indelible stains that over eight years was created, packaged and distributed by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al.
Not Penny Forthought, nor anyone else can make much sense of this nightmare narrative. But Penny watches the contingent of prospective Republican presidential nominees straining and struggling to have the electorate believe utter nonsense: the lunacy that two wars can be fought for 10 years financed by maybe the Tooth Fairy, but not, by golly, by taxing upstanding, patriotic wealthy Americans; that, though the nation is suffering from near double-digit unemployment after 10 years of Bush the Younger's corporate welfare, that two-percent of the nation's wealthiest individuals deserve tax breaks because they somehow qualify as "job creators," knowing full well that more often than not they are job-killers and job-outsourcers.
So Penny watches the Republican debates and the only possible sense she can make of them is that they are behaving as caricatures of politicians that would be far too off-the-wall for any respectable editorial cartoonist to draw. In fact, the appeal of onetime front-runner Mitt Romney, on all sides of virtually every issue, was so flimsy that whispers that none of the candidates was cutting it rose to prayers that were not muttered but screamed.
All of which prompted yet another sheriff to saddle up and lift the hopes of the born-agains and flat-earthers, the lunatic fringe believed by more than a few Democrats to be the very heart and soul of the GOP.
Prior to Rick Perry's one-man stampede, imbecilically devout Republicans had only Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims a Higher Authority as her personal political guru, as the only star who was worthy of hitching their wagons that remain filled with skepticism about science, evolution and anything else they are unable to find in the holy scriptures.
That Governor Perry more truly represents the wishes of the Supreme Province than Ms. Bachmann is a decision more likely to emanate from his home state's considerable oil and defense industry interests than by righteous bible thumpers, who can be trusted to fall into the beat of the all-too-familiar corporate cadence.
Anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to use this narrative as an outline for a a novel or even a slapstick movie comedy would not only be rejected by agents far and wide but declared candidates for rubber rooms in the nearest funny farm. So, as I was starting to say up front, I no longer shrug off the conspiracy theorists as pitiful creatures gone bonkers in a weird and crazy world they never made.
These days I tend to sympathize with those who find imagination, illusion and fantasy a preferable alternative to confronting today's realities in a forthright and serious manner. Then, too, it is absolutely true that during the last 10 years or so of my professional life in Washington, I toiled from an office that had previously been occupied by none other than JFK conspiracy weaver extraordinaire Mark Lane. When my telephone pal, Penny Forthought, learns of this, we'll have much more to discuss.
Not too many moons ago I blew off political conspiracy theories as extensions of delusional tendencies fostered by all governments, even democracies. A bright young colleague from my newspaper days once gravely confided: "It's not paranoia if it's true."
When coincidences pile up, as they often enough do - for example, in the bizarre and well-publicized procession of sudden violent deaths of persons of interest, as they did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it has to give pause to those who would like to think of themselves as rational adults.
Forgive this perhaps overwrought introduction to a friend of a friend - a disarmingly charming and obviously intelligent woman known to me only as a telephone voice. To protect the guilty, she will be hereafter referred to as Penny Forthought. You'll have to accept as blind faith that Penny exists. She really does.
Penny was on the phone only minutes after a recent debate between the Seven Dwarfs (I keep forgetting to count the number of Republican presidential nominee hopefuls who line up on the stage during these intriguing forums). She insisted that this sad collection of unworthies for what is repeatedly called the highest office in the free world are all Democrats in disguise. Or else, she continued, how could they possibly be expected to be taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States? Nope. Penny is confident that they are incognito Democrats pulling off an elaborate political dirty trick.
Here we must pause to remind faithful readers that, at this writing, it is nearly 14 months before the next quadrennial presidential election - a time when mischief, deliberate or not, and confusion, readily comprehensible, run rampant across the length and breadth of this great nation. And while the incumbent occupant of the White House sinks in the polls, vilified by the formidable GOP propaganda machine as lacking any semblance of leadership whatsoever, and dismaying hand-wringing liberal Democrats as the very pillar of appeasement, Republicans find themselves vacillating weekly if not hourly between the nonentities who have thus far offered themselves up as their most probable challenger in the 2012 presidential election.
A strong sign of the depth of Republican desperation is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was the early favorite to be the party's last candidate standing. Viewed by hard-core conservatives as far too moderate for their taste, his viability seemed predicated on the premise that virtually anyone professing to be a Republican would be preferable to a second term for Barack Obama.
Then again, was not the laboratory for that GOP anathema, health insurance reform, the People's Republic of Massachusetts under the governorship of none other than Comrade Mitt?
Romney has begged to differ with that too-obvious-to-be-true assessment. In one debate with his fellow aspirants, he claimed to be just itching to cast Romneycare as nothing even close to Obamacare. The erstwhile governor suggested that the overriding difference is that the Bay State model would be best adopted state-by-state rather than imposed by the federal government. The plausibility of this contention is, in fact, secondary to the conventional wisdom that in politics the explanations seldom catch up with the allegations.
And even if Romney's conception of Romney-care were to be miraculously accepted by that portion of the electorate that gets the heebie-jeebies about "socialized medicine" and "the European model of socialism," the former New England governor would be squandering his advantages of telegenic countenance and articulate argumentation on fighting from a defensive posture. No less an authority than that master military theorist Karl von Clausewitz told us back in the early 19th century that the most ruinous losses are suffered by the retreating army.
No sooner would Romney make his case for Romneycare, than he would have to come up with acceptable explanations for his turnabout from a pro-choice governor of liberal Massachusetts to an anti-choice candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. With even more inconsistencies between his gubernatorial performance and issues he espouses on the presidential campaign trail, hapless Mitt would be destined to the fate of a counter-puncher throughout the campaign season. Political prizes are seldom awarded to those battling from a defensive stance. Of course, conventional wisdom does not always hold up, but backroom strategists would certainly roll eyes and shake heads at the prospect of running a horse weighed down by such a hefty handicap.
Not that political pinwheeling necessarily disqualifies Romney as GOP presidential material. George Herbert Walker Bush, the successful party nominee in 1988, and John McCain, the party's standard-bearer in 2008, were both believed to be too moderate to satisfy decidedly more conservative Republicans. To win their respective nominations, each eased away from his less than conservative legislative record.
Decent church-going Republicans, who believe in the redemption of sinners, were not overly concerned about the discrepancies between the relatively moderate performances of Bush and McCain as legislators contrasted with the conservatism to which they gave lip service as presidential candidates. Had not some of the most powerful contemporary preachers confessed to having found their salvation after Perdition-bound lives devoted to draining whiskey bottles and scandalous wenching? Indeed a few televangelists have been shown in recent years to have more of a fixation on their respective collection plates than on the souls of their parishioners.
Hard-nosed Republican political observers were less certain that Bush 41 and McCain's changes of heart were indicative of actually seeing the errors of their old ways or merely transitions of convenience. In the end, of course, Bush 41 was ousted after only one term and McCain never got to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Valiant fighter that he was, McCain's presidential aspirations became an all but hopeless quest when he had the audacity as a U.S. senator to co-author campaign finance reform, a notion that still sends shivers down the Republican party's corporate spine. Unsurprisingly, during McCain's presidential campaign, he refused to support strengthening his own campaign finance reform bill lest he sew up his party's deepest pockets. Still, his presidential race seemed more like running in place on a treadmill against a spirited sprinter daring to dream that he could be the first African American president of the United States.
After one term, Bush 41's presidency went down the tubes for violating two tenets of contemporary Republicanism. He raised taxes after challenging America to read his lips as he solemnly pledged that he would never stoop to such a dastardly deed. And he was perceived to be no better than just another liberal jellyfish when he allowed Saddam Hussein to bounce off the ropes and live to fight another day by halting our troops at the gates of Baghdad with the plea that there was no exit strategy.
Then, of course, there was George W. Bush, who indeed defied all logic by getting elected to two terms. In retrospect, maybe Bush the Younger gets a Mulligan for his alleged theft of the 2000 presidential election against Al Gore. If historians choose to make that contest the exemplar of contemporary stolen presidential elections, for the sake of objectivity they cannot simply overlook those suspiciously tardy Cook County ballots in Illinois that gave John F. Kennedy his victory margin over Richard M. Nixon 40 years earlier.
Nonetheless, Bush 43 no sooner signed his White House lease than the nation was shocked and stunned by the heinous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush the Younger famously responded by launching his vengeance tour - the good son finishing the job Poppy was too timid to carry through and never mind that his counter-attack was against a country never proven to have anything to do with the suicide air attacks that horrified the world.
The brilliantly crafted rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the United States was declaring "war on terrorism" - a dazzling non sequitur that resonated seamlessly with angry Americans eager to barrage anyone or any country with lethal retribution for the unprecedented attacks on continental U.S. soil. Never mind that wars are hostilities between nations and cannot be waged against "isms," where there are no white flags to wave much less swords to surrender.
Thus with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush 43 administration had stumbled upon a possible formula for the continuity of GOP executive and legislative power, considering the unlikelihood that the electorate would be much up for changing presidents or shifting political party power in the middle of a war. The reasonable assumption was that perpetual war, as a war against an "ism" dictates, would translate into longevity of power for the incumbent Republican administration.
Riding the unbridled steed of patriotism - in which testosterone invariably trumps reason - the reckless Bush 43 had the solid backing of his wisest counsels, a preposterous pair of flag wavers, Vice President Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who never made a mistake he couldn't pin on someone else.
Basking in all of this glory, Karl Rove, Bush 43's one-man braintrust whose audacity might cause the Florentine sage to turn emerald with envy, wagered that there was no way Americans would switch national administrations in the middle of a war. Rove felt that World War II rather than the infusion of New Deal socialism, in the guise of recovery programs from the Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, held the real key to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three terms as president. The fantasy of perpetual war was a dream come true for Rove, whose stated life goal is a generation of GOP domination of both the White House and Capitol Hill.
But, alas, Rove, a proud American history buff, unforgivably forgot or chose to ignore Abe Lincoln's dictum that some of the people can be fooled all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thus, while at least part of Rove's high stakes wager held up, Bush 43 having been re-elected, blood continued to spill on the two selected battlefields of the purposefully misnamed war on terrorism, even as a novice Democratic party politician trounced a combat-tested, genuine Republican war hero in the 2008 election.
Compounding the long-standing smoke-and-mirrors myth that the GOP is both the party of fiscal responsibility and far tougher than weak-kneed Democrats in dealing with enemies foreign and domestic, Bush the Younger left the White House destined to be remembered as easily the worst president ever to hold that office. Not only was the confessed perpetrator of 9/11 still at large, presumably hopping through the treacherous terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with the apparent agility of a mountain goat hooked up to a dialysis dispenser, the U.S. economy was left in shambles with global markets following closely behind.
That Bin Laden was finally shot, killed and dumped at sea on Obama's watch is an inconvenient truth Republicans would prefer to expunge from recent memory, if not the history books. To accomplish this seemingly improbable feat, they pile more and more garbage at the President's doorstep, all the while shouting through talk radio megaphones that the incumbent in the White House has, in less than four years, not wiped up the malodorous mess and all of its indelible stains that over eight years was created, packaged and distributed by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al.
Not Penny Forthought, nor anyone else can make much sense of this nightmare narrative. But Penny watches the contingent of prospective Republican presidential nominees straining and struggling to have the electorate believe utter nonsense: the lunacy that two wars can be fought for 10 years financed by maybe the Tooth Fairy, but not, by golly, by taxing upstanding, patriotic wealthy Americans; that, though the nation is suffering from near double-digit unemployment after 10 years of Bush the Younger's corporate welfare, that two-percent of the nation's wealthiest individuals deserve tax breaks because they somehow qualify as "job creators," knowing full well that more often than not they are job-killers and job-outsourcers.
So Penny watches the Republican debates and the only possible sense she can make of them is that they are behaving as caricatures of politicians that would be far too off-the-wall for any respectable editorial cartoonist to draw. In fact, the appeal of onetime front-runner Mitt Romney, on all sides of virtually every issue, was so flimsy that whispers that none of the candidates was cutting it rose to prayers that were not muttered but screamed.
All of which prompted yet another sheriff to saddle up and lift the hopes of the born-agains and flat-earthers, the lunatic fringe believed by more than a few Democrats to be the very heart and soul of the GOP.
Prior to Rick Perry's one-man stampede, imbecilically devout Republicans had only Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims a Higher Authority as her personal political guru, as the only star who was worthy of hitching their wagons that remain filled with skepticism about science, evolution and anything else they are unable to find in the holy scriptures.
That Governor Perry more truly represents the wishes of the Supreme Province than Ms. Bachmann is a decision more likely to emanate from his home state's considerable oil and defense industry interests than by righteous bible thumpers, who can be trusted to fall into the beat of the all-too-familiar corporate cadence.
Anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to use this narrative as an outline for a a novel or even a slapstick movie comedy would not only be rejected by agents far and wide but declared candidates for rubber rooms in the nearest funny farm. So, as I was starting to say up front, I no longer shrug off the conspiracy theorists as pitiful creatures gone bonkers in a weird and crazy world they never made.
These days I tend to sympathize with those who find imagination, illusion and fantasy a preferable alternative to confronting today's realities in a forthright and serious manner. Then, too, it is absolutely true that during the last 10 years or so of my professional life in Washington, I toiled from an office that had previously been occupied by none other than JFK conspiracy weaver extraordinaire Mark Lane. When my telephone pal, Penny Forthought, learns of this, we'll have much more to discuss.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
A TIME FOR REFLECTION
By H. N. Burdett
With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.
The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.
If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.
So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.
In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.
Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence
That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.
At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.
The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.
Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.
This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.
For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.
Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.
So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?
It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.
Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.
On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.
The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.
The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.
If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.
With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.
The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.
When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.
For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.
As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?
From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."
###
With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.
The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.
If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.
So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.
In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.
Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence
That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.
At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.
The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.
Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.
This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.
For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.
Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.
So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?
It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.
Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.
On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.
The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.
The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.
If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.
With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.
The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.
When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.
For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.
As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?
From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."
###
Thursday, August 18, 2011
TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY: LBJ, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE COMPETENCE
By H. N. Burdett
The other day I sent a Houston Chronicle article to a number of Potomac Digest recipients. The piece detailed the creative manner in which Texas Governor Rick Perry balances his state's budget. In response, a former international news agency bureau chief wrote:
"Disciple Perry did not invent the Texas hold 'em game. I really think we should let Texas go back to being a Republic. It has given us some of the worst Presidents (LBJ and one and one-half Bushes), is fat on bloated defense contractors and so on. . ."
To which a retired attorney and onetime alternate delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention committed to anti-Vietnam war candidate Eugene McCarthy, responded:
"Not to quibble, but I think that -- setting aside his failure to bring the Vietnam war to a close (or even reduce it in any meaningful way) there was actually escalation during [Lyndon Johnson's] administration and I don't forgive that -- he was surely one of the greatest presidents on the domestic scene this country has ever had. So let's not throw him out with the Bush Bathwater."
Impressive domestic achievements during Lyndon Johnson's presidency are undeniable.
Among these were his leadership in pushing through Congress such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation in schools and public places; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, prohibiting malodorous restrictions such as literacy tests that had previously disenfranchised untold numbers of United States citizens; the Equal Opportunity Act, which declared "war on poverty," and the Medical Care Act, which enables senior citizens -- most especially those living on fixed incomes -- and others to obtain medical treatment they previously simply could not afford.
For all the Camelot hype, had it not been for LBJ the all-too-brief Kennedy years might have been remembered for little else than the Cuban missile crisis and hordes of beautiful people sailing, playing touch football, and pushing one another into swimming pools.
Through his personal dedication and perhaps unequaled political acumen and ability, Johnson burnished the Kennedy legacy -- a feat it is doubtful Kennedy, had he lived, would have been able to accomplish.
Moreover, Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the legislative process and his legendary persistence and powers of persuasion were perhaps unequaled in the entire history of the Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson may have been at times a crude and rude, a larger-than-life bully. Who can forget LBJ unbuttoning his shirt to show the press a scar on his belly? There may have been times when he was tempted to turn his back on a White House news conference, drop his trousers and reveal another part of his anatomy.
There is a wonderful story about LBJ being confronted by an old friend who had been the incumbent sheriff of a Texas county. During one particularly difficult election campaign, the worried sheriff pulled Johnson aside and told him he was truly concerned that for the first time in years he might be beaten. Johnson said, "Get the word out that he fucks pigs." The sheriff laughed and said no one would believe it. Johnson countered, "Make that sonofabitch deny it."
Whatever else he may have been, Lyndon Johnson was the consummate political animal. He understood the great game of politics for what it is: the art of the possible. And, when it came to domestic policy, the nation benefited from LBJ's skill at that art as much as it did from any President in United States history.
To place Lyndon Johnson in the category of worst American Presidents is so far off base it is not even in the ballpark. In fact, in many respects Johnson may be the most effective President the country has ever had.
But then we have Johnson's 1964 campaign pledge to not send "American boys to fight Asia's wars." The United States was committed to the defense of South Vietnam by earlier administrations. But Johnson intervened massively in that beleagured country to demonstrate American credibility to allies and enemies alike.
Johnson's call for extraordinary war powers which came to fruition with Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, opened the floodgates.
The vast widening of the so-called Vietnam "conflict" concluded with the combat deaths of 47,355 U.S. service personnel -- exceeding by 5,181 the combined total of those killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Korean Conflict -- as well as 53,303 wounds classified by the U.S. Department of Defense as "not mortal." Allow me to refresh memories.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was adopted by Congress on August 7, 1964. The measure moved swiftly through both houses of Congress in the wake of an August 2 confrontation between a North Vietnamese Navy torpedo squadron and the American destroyer USS Maddox, followed by an alleged second engagement two days later. The latter incident supposedly involved another attack by North Vietnamese vessels on the Maddox, as well as the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
The August 2 and the questionable August 4 engagements together are known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
In 2006, The New York Times reported that a de-classified internal National Security Agency historical study revealed that during the reported August 4 engagement there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present.
The document states: "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. . .in truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two boats damaged on Aug. 2. . ."
Only hours following the disputed second attack on the two U.S. destroyers, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes -- Operation Pierce Arrow -- on North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases .
In a television address that same evening, President Johnson contended that "the United States. . .seeks no wider war."
Nonetheless, he called for a Congressional resolution "expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and protecting peace in southeast Asia." He said the resolution should express support "for all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces."
Johnson flat out knew better than any President whose name was not Teddy Roosevelt how to use the bully pulpit of the presidency for getting precisely what he wanted: first line up the American people behind you and Congress will have little recourse but to follow.
The result of Johnson's call to arms was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
During the final months of his 1964 election campaign, the President claimed that the resolution would help "hostile nations. . .understand" that the United States was unified in the determination "to protects its national interests."
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives and with only two votes in opposition by the Senate. The only "nay" votes in the upper house were cast by Senators Wayne Morse, D-Oregon, and Ernest H. Gruening, D-Alaska.
Senator Gruening, a former newspaper and magazine editor, eloquently objected to sending U.S. troops "into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is being steadily escalated."
Indeed, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a blank check to vastly increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam, as well as open warfare between the United States and North Vietnam.
Johnson was later reported to have privately commented about the probably bogus August 4 North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack perpetrated on not one but two U.S. destroyers: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting whales out there."
The historical significance of the resolution is that it provided the President with authorization to do whatever he deemed necessary to assist "any member of a protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty" -- including military force.
In her 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize historian Barbara W. Tuchman recounted a meeting within 48 hours after John F. Kennedy's death between Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., then the United States Ambassador to South Vietnam.
Lodge briefed the new President on the dire situation in Vietnam that showed no promise of improving. Following the ambassador's clearly stated assessment that hard decisions had to be faced, President Johnson's reaction was, according to Lodge, instant and personal: "I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war." The ambassador said Johnson then added: "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
Tuchman enumerated several offers by the North Vietnamese over the next four years to negotiate an end to the carnage. President Johnson declined each and every one of them.
Her book recalls that on March 31, 1968, the President finally delivered a public address to announce: "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. . .and doing so unilaterally and at once."
Before finishing his speech, Johnson stunned listeners with his surprise announcement that he would not "permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year," concluding with: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Lyndon Johnson not only vastly scaled up and prolonged the Vietnam war, his obstinate refusal to negotiate a settlement with the North Vietnamese established an indelible stain on his presidency.
Secondarily, his stubborn and wrongheaded decisions, aided and abetted by poor advice from his kowtowing top subordinates, led him to remove himself from consideration for a second term in the office he so coveted.
But there are times when more than a few supporters of President Obama fervently hope and pray that he will somehow acquire at least a smidgen of Lyndon Baines Johnson's skill at the art of the possible.
The current President is known to be a "quick study." He would be well served by studying both how Johnson got things done and the mistakes that denied the 36th United States President a second term.
Every President who has ever served knows that the position is a perpetual learning process in which they are confronted with a new challenge virtually every day, if not every hour. Those who absorb the lessons of their predecessors and have the instincts and intelligence to use this knowledge position themselves for greatness.
The other day I sent a Houston Chronicle article to a number of Potomac Digest recipients. The piece detailed the creative manner in which Texas Governor Rick Perry balances his state's budget. In response, a former international news agency bureau chief wrote:
"Disciple Perry did not invent the Texas hold 'em game. I really think we should let Texas go back to being a Republic. It has given us some of the worst Presidents (LBJ and one and one-half Bushes), is fat on bloated defense contractors and so on. . ."
To which a retired attorney and onetime alternate delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention committed to anti-Vietnam war candidate Eugene McCarthy, responded:
"Not to quibble, but I think that -- setting aside his failure to bring the Vietnam war to a close (or even reduce it in any meaningful way) there was actually escalation during [Lyndon Johnson's] administration and I don't forgive that -- he was surely one of the greatest presidents on the domestic scene this country has ever had. So let's not throw him out with the Bush Bathwater."
Impressive domestic achievements during Lyndon Johnson's presidency are undeniable.
Among these were his leadership in pushing through Congress such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation in schools and public places; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, prohibiting malodorous restrictions such as literacy tests that had previously disenfranchised untold numbers of United States citizens; the Equal Opportunity Act, which declared "war on poverty," and the Medical Care Act, which enables senior citizens -- most especially those living on fixed incomes -- and others to obtain medical treatment they previously simply could not afford.
For all the Camelot hype, had it not been for LBJ the all-too-brief Kennedy years might have been remembered for little else than the Cuban missile crisis and hordes of beautiful people sailing, playing touch football, and pushing one another into swimming pools.
Through his personal dedication and perhaps unequaled political acumen and ability, Johnson burnished the Kennedy legacy -- a feat it is doubtful Kennedy, had he lived, would have been able to accomplish.
Moreover, Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the legislative process and his legendary persistence and powers of persuasion were perhaps unequaled in the entire history of the Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson may have been at times a crude and rude, a larger-than-life bully. Who can forget LBJ unbuttoning his shirt to show the press a scar on his belly? There may have been times when he was tempted to turn his back on a White House news conference, drop his trousers and reveal another part of his anatomy.
There is a wonderful story about LBJ being confronted by an old friend who had been the incumbent sheriff of a Texas county. During one particularly difficult election campaign, the worried sheriff pulled Johnson aside and told him he was truly concerned that for the first time in years he might be beaten. Johnson said, "Get the word out that he fucks pigs." The sheriff laughed and said no one would believe it. Johnson countered, "Make that sonofabitch deny it."
Whatever else he may have been, Lyndon Johnson was the consummate political animal. He understood the great game of politics for what it is: the art of the possible. And, when it came to domestic policy, the nation benefited from LBJ's skill at that art as much as it did from any President in United States history.
To place Lyndon Johnson in the category of worst American Presidents is so far off base it is not even in the ballpark. In fact, in many respects Johnson may be the most effective President the country has ever had.
But then we have Johnson's 1964 campaign pledge to not send "American boys to fight Asia's wars." The United States was committed to the defense of South Vietnam by earlier administrations. But Johnson intervened massively in that beleagured country to demonstrate American credibility to allies and enemies alike.
Johnson's call for extraordinary war powers which came to fruition with Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, opened the floodgates.
The vast widening of the so-called Vietnam "conflict" concluded with the combat deaths of 47,355 U.S. service personnel -- exceeding by 5,181 the combined total of those killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Korean Conflict -- as well as 53,303 wounds classified by the U.S. Department of Defense as "not mortal." Allow me to refresh memories.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was adopted by Congress on August 7, 1964. The measure moved swiftly through both houses of Congress in the wake of an August 2 confrontation between a North Vietnamese Navy torpedo squadron and the American destroyer USS Maddox, followed by an alleged second engagement two days later. The latter incident supposedly involved another attack by North Vietnamese vessels on the Maddox, as well as the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
The August 2 and the questionable August 4 engagements together are known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
In 2006, The New York Times reported that a de-classified internal National Security Agency historical study revealed that during the reported August 4 engagement there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present.
The document states: "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. . .in truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two boats damaged on Aug. 2. . ."
Only hours following the disputed second attack on the two U.S. destroyers, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes -- Operation Pierce Arrow -- on North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases .
In a television address that same evening, President Johnson contended that "the United States. . .seeks no wider war."
Nonetheless, he called for a Congressional resolution "expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and protecting peace in southeast Asia." He said the resolution should express support "for all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces."
Johnson flat out knew better than any President whose name was not Teddy Roosevelt how to use the bully pulpit of the presidency for getting precisely what he wanted: first line up the American people behind you and Congress will have little recourse but to follow.
The result of Johnson's call to arms was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
During the final months of his 1964 election campaign, the President claimed that the resolution would help "hostile nations. . .understand" that the United States was unified in the determination "to protects its national interests."
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives and with only two votes in opposition by the Senate. The only "nay" votes in the upper house were cast by Senators Wayne Morse, D-Oregon, and Ernest H. Gruening, D-Alaska.
Senator Gruening, a former newspaper and magazine editor, eloquently objected to sending U.S. troops "into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is being steadily escalated."
Indeed, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a blank check to vastly increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam, as well as open warfare between the United States and North Vietnam.
Johnson was later reported to have privately commented about the probably bogus August 4 North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack perpetrated on not one but two U.S. destroyers: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting whales out there."
The historical significance of the resolution is that it provided the President with authorization to do whatever he deemed necessary to assist "any member of a protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty" -- including military force.
In her 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize historian Barbara W. Tuchman recounted a meeting within 48 hours after John F. Kennedy's death between Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., then the United States Ambassador to South Vietnam.
Lodge briefed the new President on the dire situation in Vietnam that showed no promise of improving. Following the ambassador's clearly stated assessment that hard decisions had to be faced, President Johnson's reaction was, according to Lodge, instant and personal: "I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war." The ambassador said Johnson then added: "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
Tuchman enumerated several offers by the North Vietnamese over the next four years to negotiate an end to the carnage. President Johnson declined each and every one of them.
Her book recalls that on March 31, 1968, the President finally delivered a public address to announce: "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. . .and doing so unilaterally and at once."
Before finishing his speech, Johnson stunned listeners with his surprise announcement that he would not "permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year," concluding with: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Lyndon Johnson not only vastly scaled up and prolonged the Vietnam war, his obstinate refusal to negotiate a settlement with the North Vietnamese established an indelible stain on his presidency.
Secondarily, his stubborn and wrongheaded decisions, aided and abetted by poor advice from his kowtowing top subordinates, led him to remove himself from consideration for a second term in the office he so coveted.
But there are times when more than a few supporters of President Obama fervently hope and pray that he will somehow acquire at least a smidgen of Lyndon Baines Johnson's skill at the art of the possible.
The current President is known to be a "quick study." He would be well served by studying both how Johnson got things done and the mistakes that denied the 36th United States President a second term.
Every President who has ever served knows that the position is a perpetual learning process in which they are confronted with a new challenge virtually every day, if not every hour. Those who absorb the lessons of their predecessors and have the instincts and intelligence to use this knowledge position themselves for greatness.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
CALMING THE WINDS OF UNREASON
By H. N. Burdett
"There's just too much noise," my old friend and onetime colleague Bill Thompson confided in a brief exchange during a gathering of aging news reporters in the bowels of Annapolis' Maryland Inn several months back.
Skip Isaacs and Peter Jay, who earned their spurs covering the state legislature and went on to become Vietnam war corresondents, were there.
As was Gene Oishi, who covered Spiro Agnew's vice presidential campaign among numerous other achievements.
As was Jim Keat, former deputy editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun and who, in another life when I was employed by a competing daily, 'scooped' me with monotonous regularity.
As was Don Hymes, whom I first met a half century ago when he was toiling for a courageous St. Mary's County weekly that had the cajones to crusade against malodorous slot machine politics, the fumes of which wafted from Southern Maryland and could be inhaled in the State House; he later became Maryland editor of The Washington Post, and, later still, communications director for the Montgomery County school system.
As was Don's wife, Valerie, once the Capitol Hill voice of Westinghouse television and today a tireless activist on behalf of combating recidivism.
To name but a few.
At an even earlier meeting of the Vintage Press Irregulars, Frank DeFilippo told me, "Just look around this room. You have here what could have been one of the greatest newsrooms ever." If there is a Heaven, I would be honored to have a small desk in the farthest corner of such a newsroom. Hell, I'd be honored to serve as a copy boy.
Frank knew whereof he spoke. In the 1960s, he abandoned his Underwood at the Baltimore News American, where he tapped out some of the more colorful political prose of his era, to become Governor Marvin Mandel's head flack and, later, the guv's chief of administration before the fall. He later headed the Rosenbush public relations firm, generously favored by the Democratic state political machine, and now bangs out readable commentary online with his same familiar flair.
The "noise" to which Bill Thompson had referred was not the boisterousness of that estimable company (in point of fact, they were a curiously quiet group), but rather the resounding cacophony that pervades the local and national airwaves and blogosphere, even as newspaper after newspaper vanishes into the ether. If a newspaper shuts down in any American city, does anyone hear it fall? The sound would be easily quelled by turning up the volume on Limbaugh, Maddow, O'Reilly and Olbermann preaching to their respective choirs.
Political discourse has degenerated from the sobriety and solidity of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, from Walter Lippmann and Murray Kempton to bloviators and bloggers shouting back and forth -- each convinced that victories in the wars to win hearts and minds are won by the loudest rather than by sanity and reason.
Bill Thompson and Frank DeFilippo have written self-published novels. Thompson's "The Waterbusher" focuses on the last lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore; DeFilippo's "Hooked" is a roman a clef on the Baltimore city political jungle of the 1960s and '70s with a protagonist who remotely resembles the author. I wholeheartedly recommend both.
I'm not above plugging these works even if I felt they were other than damn good reads because both of these long-time friends can flat out write circles around most news reporters, past and present, I've known and read. But I categorically do not feel otherwise. And, for the record, I've also known and read both Gerald Johnson and Murray Kempton, who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us, as Colossus stands above the least visible anthills.
A native of western Maryland, Thompson now resides on the state's Eastern Shore, content to spend his days and nights with the three great loves of his life -- Susan, the Chesapeake Bay and his boat. He indicates that writing these days interests him less than it once did and to drown out "the noise" he has contemplated turning to quieter endeavors, like welding.
All of which brings to mind Duff Badgely. A colleague of many years back, Duff was a terrific young reporter who had both superior instincts as a "truffle sniffer," as DeFilippo likes to call reporters, and the ability to transfer what he'd dug up into formidable prose.
I'm not ready to elevate Duff to a pedestal alongside the likes of Flaubert, Dickens and Twain, but then I doubt that the latter were writing their venerated opuses under daily deadline pressure. Badgely was, and I assume still is, a Quaker -- a man of peace who, as they say, walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Another kind of noise -- that of a protracted bitter union election campaign (are there any other kind?) -- drove him from the newsroom and into, of all things, carpentry.
Duff did not view sawing and planing pine and hammering penny nails as exile, but as contributing more usefully to society than he felt he could by pounding a city room typewriter. To my mind, at least, carpentry's gain was journalism's loss.
I'd run into Duff and we'd have a pleasant chat now and again at Buddy Levy's drugstore of fact and opinion on West Street in Annapolis, a treasured haunt of yore to which I frequently repaired to calm the echoes of dissent and discontent from both left and right, that threatened to push me to the very edge of the abyss. I have since developed numerous guilty pleasures to avoid that fate.
I watch wonderful old movies. I listen to music of various genres. I read a little. Most of all, I spend as much time as I can with friends, reuniting with old ones and luxuriating in meeting new ones. As a young man, I was privileged to have enjoyed the company of wise older folks, who provided the best post-graduate education possible. Now, entering my own twilight years, I am privileged to be tolerated by wise younger people.
If I've learned anything over the years, it is merely what I've managed to retain from listening to and reading those I admire for one reason or another. If I occasionally impart a morsel of wisdom to my younger friends, full credit goes to those giants who kindly stooped down and lifted me to their broad shoulders.
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"There's just too much noise," my old friend and onetime colleague Bill Thompson confided in a brief exchange during a gathering of aging news reporters in the bowels of Annapolis' Maryland Inn several months back.
Skip Isaacs and Peter Jay, who earned their spurs covering the state legislature and went on to become Vietnam war corresondents, were there.
As was Gene Oishi, who covered Spiro Agnew's vice presidential campaign among numerous other achievements.
As was Jim Keat, former deputy editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun and who, in another life when I was employed by a competing daily, 'scooped' me with monotonous regularity.
As was Don Hymes, whom I first met a half century ago when he was toiling for a courageous St. Mary's County weekly that had the cajones to crusade against malodorous slot machine politics, the fumes of which wafted from Southern Maryland and could be inhaled in the State House; he later became Maryland editor of The Washington Post, and, later still, communications director for the Montgomery County school system.
As was Don's wife, Valerie, once the Capitol Hill voice of Westinghouse television and today a tireless activist on behalf of combating recidivism.
To name but a few.
At an even earlier meeting of the Vintage Press Irregulars, Frank DeFilippo told me, "Just look around this room. You have here what could have been one of the greatest newsrooms ever." If there is a Heaven, I would be honored to have a small desk in the farthest corner of such a newsroom. Hell, I'd be honored to serve as a copy boy.
Frank knew whereof he spoke. In the 1960s, he abandoned his Underwood at the Baltimore News American, where he tapped out some of the more colorful political prose of his era, to become Governor Marvin Mandel's head flack and, later, the guv's chief of administration before the fall. He later headed the Rosenbush public relations firm, generously favored by the Democratic state political machine, and now bangs out readable commentary online with his same familiar flair.
The "noise" to which Bill Thompson had referred was not the boisterousness of that estimable company (in point of fact, they were a curiously quiet group), but rather the resounding cacophony that pervades the local and national airwaves and blogosphere, even as newspaper after newspaper vanishes into the ether. If a newspaper shuts down in any American city, does anyone hear it fall? The sound would be easily quelled by turning up the volume on Limbaugh, Maddow, O'Reilly and Olbermann preaching to their respective choirs.
Political discourse has degenerated from the sobriety and solidity of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, from Walter Lippmann and Murray Kempton to bloviators and bloggers shouting back and forth -- each convinced that victories in the wars to win hearts and minds are won by the loudest rather than by sanity and reason.
Bill Thompson and Frank DeFilippo have written self-published novels. Thompson's "The Waterbusher" focuses on the last lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore; DeFilippo's "Hooked" is a roman a clef on the Baltimore city political jungle of the 1960s and '70s with a protagonist who remotely resembles the author. I wholeheartedly recommend both.
I'm not above plugging these works even if I felt they were other than damn good reads because both of these long-time friends can flat out write circles around most news reporters, past and present, I've known and read. But I categorically do not feel otherwise. And, for the record, I've also known and read both Gerald Johnson and Murray Kempton, who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us, as Colossus stands above the least visible anthills.
A native of western Maryland, Thompson now resides on the state's Eastern Shore, content to spend his days and nights with the three great loves of his life -- Susan, the Chesapeake Bay and his boat. He indicates that writing these days interests him less than it once did and to drown out "the noise" he has contemplated turning to quieter endeavors, like welding.
All of which brings to mind Duff Badgely. A colleague of many years back, Duff was a terrific young reporter who had both superior instincts as a "truffle sniffer," as DeFilippo likes to call reporters, and the ability to transfer what he'd dug up into formidable prose.
I'm not ready to elevate Duff to a pedestal alongside the likes of Flaubert, Dickens and Twain, but then I doubt that the latter were writing their venerated opuses under daily deadline pressure. Badgely was, and I assume still is, a Quaker -- a man of peace who, as they say, walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Another kind of noise -- that of a protracted bitter union election campaign (are there any other kind?) -- drove him from the newsroom and into, of all things, carpentry.
Duff did not view sawing and planing pine and hammering penny nails as exile, but as contributing more usefully to society than he felt he could by pounding a city room typewriter. To my mind, at least, carpentry's gain was journalism's loss.
I'd run into Duff and we'd have a pleasant chat now and again at Buddy Levy's drugstore of fact and opinion on West Street in Annapolis, a treasured haunt of yore to which I frequently repaired to calm the echoes of dissent and discontent from both left and right, that threatened to push me to the very edge of the abyss. I have since developed numerous guilty pleasures to avoid that fate.
I watch wonderful old movies. I listen to music of various genres. I read a little. Most of all, I spend as much time as I can with friends, reuniting with old ones and luxuriating in meeting new ones. As a young man, I was privileged to have enjoyed the company of wise older folks, who provided the best post-graduate education possible. Now, entering my own twilight years, I am privileged to be tolerated by wise younger people.
If I've learned anything over the years, it is merely what I've managed to retain from listening to and reading those I admire for one reason or another. If I occasionally impart a morsel of wisdom to my younger friends, full credit goes to those giants who kindly stooped down and lifted me to their broad shoulders.
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