Barack's Brolly And Other Scandals

Barack’s Brolly And Other Scandals

In case you were otherwise distracted this past week, another major scandal wracked the scandal wracked Obama Administration.

No, not Benghazi, nor the IRS.  Not even the AP wiretapping.  This one was so profound, so consequential, and so troubling that I urge people not to read the rest of this post before bedtime.  More particularly, pregnant women and nursing mothers may be advised to step back from the computer screen.

I refer, of course, to the spreading stain of OBI, the Obama Brolly Incident.

What is OBI?  Well, this shameful episode occurred during a joint press conference held in the Rose Garden with Mr. Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  During their remarks, some rain began to fall (no doubt, a heavenly reproach to the President) and Mr. Obama asked the Marines standing guard if they could hold a brolly over Mr. Erdogan’s head.

OBI did not go unnoticed.  Conservatives everywhere were scandalized at this breach of Marine protocol.  Marines don’t hold umbrellas outside.  At least, male Marines don’t.  Female marines are permitted a small discrete black umbrella, but the pair standing guard were clearly male. 

Fortunately for the honor of the service, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller was right on it “Obama breaches Marine umbrella protocol.”  The New York Post ran a picture of OBI on the front cover.  Lou Dobbs was properly outraged, tweeting “Obama expects our troops to hold damn umbrellas rather than go inside: It’s disrespectful, inconsiderate, classless.”

Even worse for Mr. Obama, a Marines spokesman, approached after the tawdry affair concluded,  referred to Title 10 of the US Code; Marines shall “perform other duties as the President may direct.”  Clearly, this was not just another Obama overreach, but an abuse of power.  I would add my own aside that Mr. Erdogan is a Muslim, so, naturally, Mr. Obama would be especially concerned that he not get wet.  Very typical Obama, I think we would all agree.

I think I’ve given Barack’s Brolly as much attention as is medically prudent for the adult reader, so it’s time to pivot to more conventional political news.   Back to Benghazi, where new committees spring up faster than Charlemagne baptized the Saxons (by platoons) and the frenzy continues to build towards an apotheosis.  It’s big.  How big? Steve King, the distinguished Congressman from Iowa, described it as “ten times bigger than Watergate and Iran Contra combined.”  And Senator Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) went on right wing talk radio to opine “Of all the great cover-ups in history — the Pentagon papers, the Iran-Contra, Watergate and all the rest of them — this … is going to go down as the most serious, the most egregious cover-up in American history……People may be starting to use the I-word before too long,”

So, we are going to impeach this President because American lives were lost abroad?  Well, there’s a first time for everything, and since Mr. Obama seems to be a person with a lot of firsts, why not this?

In a nutshell, here is what we (the rational among us) think we know about Benghazi: a) the State Department didn't give Ambassador Stevens enough money for security, b) Mr. Obama didn't send in troops during attack, apparently because there was concern over the possible success of the operation and addition loss of life, c) the State Department and the CIA got into what we can gently describe as a pissing match over what statements to put out and, d) Susan Rice in specific and the Administration in general made a series of confused and muddied presentations afterwards.  In short, errors in judgment, bureaucratic infighting, and a little spin. 

If those are impeachable offenses, we better not waste our time on things like swearings-in.  Let’s just go straight to the Inaugural Ball so people can trot out their finery, and by February 1, the new Administration, Democratic or Republican, will have surely committed all three sins.

Of course, what we really need, on Benghazi (and on the IRS probes) are serious people conducting serious investigations to determine what errors were made and how to correct them the next time.  There is nothing wrong with naming names, including Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton, if the evidence leads in that direction (and we are willing to apply the same standards to all future Administrations.) 

But, we aren’t going to get that, because circuses and scandal mongering and show trials are just too much fun.  One moves seamlessly from four dead Americans to Barack’s Brolly; it’s all part of a great continuum. Once again, we are indebted to Sarah Palin, who posted on Facebook, “Mr. President, when it rains it pours, but most Americans hold their own umbrellas.”

This is the lady who was going to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.  And a party that holds itself out as the serious one. 

Still, not all of last week’s news was bad.  The House voted for the 37^th time to repeal Obamacare. And, the FT reported that Titan Arum, perhaps the world’s stinkiest plant, was in bloom at the Chelsea Flower Show.  This little gem, indigenous to Sumatra, just hangs out quietly for years.  It then suddenly begins to grow several inches per day to a height of up to nine feet, flowering for 72 hours and producing umbrella-sized petals (not making that up) that open to a diameter of three to four feet.  To pollinate itself, it has developed the delectable bouquet of rotting flesh (hence, the “corpse flower” nickname) to attract the carrion-eating beetles and flies that pollinate it. Then, having achieved its destiny, it apparently falls over and dies.

Now, that’s an impressive metaphor, don’t you think?

MM

Comments or questions?  Contact the Moderator 

What Texas and South Carolina Should Teach Us

What Texas and South Carolina Should Teach Us

My father liked Country Western music.  Not the sleek and glamorous Nashville product, but the old fashioned hard-core stuff: fiddling, picking and twanging.

Now, to understand how incongruous that was, you would have to know the man.  It’s not as if he had deep Southern roots.  And, he was the kind of guy who would sing opera in the shower (not so well) and later grill you on what aria he had just sung, including the act and scene. So,  how does a child of Ellis Island immigrants come to like what was sometimes called in those days “hillbilly music”?  Basic training in WWII, where college-bound boys from New York and Boston were thrown together with sometimes-illiterate  men from the Ozarks.  My father liked Jazz, he like Boogie Woogie, he liked Swing. He liked Beethoven and Puccini.  And he liked music that used a jug for the bass line. 

Dad was an old fashioned New Deal Democrat.  His guys were FDR, Truman and Kennedy  (Clinton amused and exasperated him.) He thought like a New Deal Democrat, in fairly binary terms.  I have a vivid memory of him asking, during the debate over NAFTA, why it was a good idea.  True, Clinton supported it, but if all those Republicans liked it, something had to be wrong.  If he had lived to see the 2012 election he would have looked at the tax-cutting rich businessman and his eagerly hard-right theocratic younger sidekick, shook his head and said “what do you expect”?

It is fascinating to see just how much, and how little, has changed during the period that spanned  Dad’s adult life.  The world he returned to after his discharge in 1946 seems almost quaint.  The population of the United States was less than half what it is today, we still had only 48 states, and there were still large swaths of land that were basically open range, open prairie.  Just as importantly, news was local, written in local newspapers, heard over local radio stations.  In 1948 there about 100,000 TV sets in the entire United States, and about 2/3 of those were in the New York area.  In the early fifties, if you traveled more than 75 miles from a large urban center like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston or St. Louis, it was pointless to own a TV, because there was no signal.  Culture was local as well.  You came back to the old neighborhood, you worked locally, you found a job or opened a business, started a family, and put down roots not all that dissimilar to the ones your parents laid down.

But the post-war era brought huge changes.  Culturally, the growth of television tied people together; they watched many of the same shows and the same news programs. The development of the national highway system fostered a car culture that put people on the road and helped fuel the explosive growth of the suburbs. Air-conditioning opened up the South and Southwest to more than purely rural living. In the 60 years from the 1950 census to the 2010 census, of the states presently with populations of over 5,000,000, California’s population is up over 3 ½ times,  Texas has more than trebled, Colorado quadrupled, Florida’s has grown by a factor of seven, Arizona by eight.  Just three states, dead-red Texas, blue California, and swing-state Florida, have accounted for nearly 40% of the total national population growth.

The media explosion has had several effects.  On the one hand, it has helped to create a common language defined by popular programs.  But on the other, by (often superficially) touching on a range of social behaviors including sex and violence, or even positive portrayals of things like single parenting or gay relationships, it has reaffirmed to Conservatives, particularly in the South, that Hollywood (and liberals) are corrupted by sin.  Sin is at the gates of their communities, luring their children with the pleasures of permissiveness.  They feel a cultural assault on their virtue, just as they feel one at their borders, with hordes of Mexicans poised to change the very nature of the society they feel comfortable with.  Their fears are amplified by a conservative media who tells them every day that they are the victims of a secular humanist attack on the things they hold most essential to their way of life.

It’s easy for us who are more center and center left to scratch our heads at this, but we would be better off if we acknowledged it and learned to give it a wide berth.  Let’s not be so arrogant as to try to save people from what we think is their foolishness. It is obviously not foolish to them.

Two recent events demonstrated this quite acutely.  In South Carolina, disgraced former Governor Mark Sanford (who, 2009, left the state without his IPhone to commune with nature and his mistress) has just been elected to Congress, convincingly winning over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch. 

In Texas, just a few days after the horrific explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled much of a town and killed more than a dozen people,  Gov. Rick Perry pitched relocation to Illinois business officials by talking not just low taxes but limited regulations.  In Texas, they know how to do business, and in Perry’s opinion, more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the most destructive industrial accidents in recent times. Move to Texas, he said.  No new regulations. 

What about the old regulations?  The better question is “what old regulations?”  Texas has no state fire code, and in fact prohibits smaller counties from enacting their own.  Businesses don’t have to contribute to workman’s compensation pools and workplace safety rules are basically nonexistent.  Is that prudent?  Not really.  According a story in the New York Times this last week, Texas has the highest number of industrial fatalities, and (since property is more important than people, apparently) “(f)ires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012.”  But profits are really good, and you get to keep all of them, so businesses shop for Ten Gallon hats.

Does all this loss of life and property lead the people of Texas to demand more restrictions?  No more than the people of South Carolina’s First Congressional District demanded a Congressman who isn’t a cad.

So, are Texans daredevil idiots and South Carolina’s Republicans just hypocrites?  And, why should this matter to me in my Blue New York redoubt?

They aren’t, and it shouldn’t.  This is what Democracy (with a big “D”) is all about.  People should vote for the people they want to represent them, and the policies they support.  I may not agree with their choices, but I don’t have to live in Texas or South Carolina. 

But, is it possible to go back to a live and let live ethos? I have doubts, because what we have going on right now is akin to a domestic cultural war.

Part of the problem is that media creates the mechanism for instant nationalization of any issue. There is an insatiable desire for news of any type; everyone needs content.  And even the smallest events become big. A child is suspended for bringing a toy gun to school, and the entire blogosphere is lit up for a week.  An obscure candidate utters a few yah-yah lines to like-minded constituents and now it’s viral.

Secondly, elected officials now see their roles very differently.  It’s no longer “respect the institution and take care of your constituents.”  Instead, they all want to go to Washington to shake it up and tear it down, then to “share” the blessings of their local customs and mores with the rest of the nation.  The “Gentleman from Texas” is no longer one of one hundred gray-haired guys who sit on a few powerful committees and bring home the bacon.  Now he’s a Ted Cruz, a neutron bomb with a Messianic desire to purge ideas he finds impure and bring the entire country to heel.  

And, that’s a huge difference.  What we should be saying is, “Hey, I won’t tell you who to vote for and you won’t lecture me on my supposed lack of moral virtue.”  But what everyone is saying is “just wait until we are in charge…”

I don’t think my Dad would have liked that.  When he came back from the Philippines, he had a scraggly beard, an abiding dislike for troop ships (and sea-sickness) and some new and strange tastes in music.  That was about as “South” as he was going to get, but that was enough.  Respect other people, take what you like from them, but otherwise don’t bother them and they won’t bother you. 

He might have been on to something. I was poking around on Youtube and found Red Murrell and His Ozark Playboys 1947 recording of “Get That Chip Off Your Shoulder.” Give it a try.

MM

Kierkegaard, Agassiz, and Rational Choice

Kierkegaard, Agassiz, and Rational Choice

This last weekend, I attended a celebration of Kierkegaard’s 200th Birthday.  Think of it as a rich pastry cooked in a foreign land: dense, flavorful, but a little unfamiliar to the tongue. Given the extraordinary level of accomplishment on the panel and in the audience, I suspect that I was invited so that they could demonstrate a little I.Q. diversity.

So, what does an entire day with the thoughts of a morose Dane get me? I’m not a philosopher--my orientation in entirely political.  I am interested in why people make the choices they do; what motivates them to act, or spend, or vote as they do?

Economists sometimes use the concept of Rational Choice; people are motivated by profits and filter economic choices by projecting what their potential gain or loss will be on a given transaction.  Sociologists also apply Rational Choice to help clarify why humans interact the way they do; instead of cash, it is prestige, influence, approval and time that are the currency being exchanged. Economically, socially, and politically, rational individuals (and rational groups) should act in a way that maximizes returns.  Win friends, win money, win elections.

But they don’t always engage in Rational Choice, a point vividly illustrated to me by three people at the conference

The first was Richard Robb, an economist, who asked a very simple, almost throwaway, question.  Why do people ignore portfolio theory and try to invest on their own when history shows that the vast majority of them will substantially underperform? More starkly, why ignore the data in front of you and take a chance on an uncertain future in which the odds are you will choose poorly and negatively impact your economic future?

The second was Kimerer Lamothe, a former professor of philosophy and theology at Harvard and Brown.  In remarks at the conference (and at lunch) she said that Christianity drove Kierkegaard’s philosophy, not merely as an ethical code, but more broadly as a mooring for all other choices.  I always saw a clear distinction between the secular world and the religious, but what happens if there isn’t?  How does a person, or group, decide rationally when religion (or any other unshakable point of reference) is the primary channel for decision-making?

The third came up in a conversation I had with a seatmate who identified himself as an entrepreneur.  He was disgusted with the political process. It wasn’t clear what side of the aisle he was on (and I didn’t ask) but he expressed dismay that something like background checks for gun purchases, almost universally supported by the public, couldn’t get through the Senate.  And he was deeply concerned that the State and Federal governments aren’t taking their public pension obligations seriously.  This would inevitably end up in eliminating basic services in order to pay for public pensions (stop picking up the garbage so you can send checks to retired sanitation workers.)  In short, the political system was failing to engage in Rational Choice.

But why?  We have been at this for more than 200 years, and with the notable exception of the Civil War, we haven’t had this type of extended deadlock before.  It appears that part of what is happening is that the world is growing exponentially more complex and more interconnected.  You would think that more knowledge would optimize political Rational Choice, but in fact, it seems to induce fear and passion more than cooperation.  Instead of thinking more broadly, people are retreating behind a set of preconceived notions and anxiety, amplified by those who profit from it.

That’s why Professor Robb’s question on portfolio management was such a terrific one, since the answer seems so obvious.  If you were given the choice to pick between two envelopes, one highly likely to have $100 in it, the other highly likely to have $200, you would almost certainly pick the $200 one.  But many people don’t.  Why they don’t could be ignorance, it could be (an often misplaced) sense of personal stock-picking talent.  Or, it could be something purely emotional: either a mistrust of Wall Street, or a willingness to accept the possibility of a lower return in return for the satisfaction of doing it on his or her own (a desire to play by one’s own rules, regardless of the cost.)

I think that last one relates to Professor Lamothe’s defined channel of thought, or What Would Kierkegaard Do.   People who engage in WWKD don’t necessarily have to be driven by a particular type of religious virtue.  One can be just as fervent about civic goals, or political ones.  What WWKD does is tilt the balance from an economic or social or even political rationale to a type of passion for discreet, and exclusive ideas or credos.  While faith and a strong moral code may lead to a more civil society, that type of an approach, grounded in absolute certitude, can be the enemy of nuance, and Democracy is all about nuance.  So, someone who cares, for example, about guns, or abortion, or immigration, might no longer be concerned about an optimal result in the rest of the political economy. He just needs to win on his point of theology. And he might see those on the opposite side of that one issue to be the enemy, even if he might agree with them on a host of other issues.

 To illustrate this, yesterday I read an on line argument between an NRA member and someone who advocated only for “Heller” type gun restrictions.  It quickly got nasty, until it ended with “the only civil liberty that Liberals care about is baby-killing.”  That’s a big leap and huge assumption, and to be blunt, a kiss-off. Those folk will never work on anything together.  As Kierkegaard himself said, “Once you label me, you negate me.”

In normal times, the political process would absorb these things, ignore the outliers, and engage in its own form of Rational Choice, an imperfect compromise that would have a positive, if not optimal result.  It would, in my seatmate’s words, enact both universal background checks and public employee pension reform because they both made sense.

But we aren’t in normal times.  We are just too dug in to our respective positions. We seem to have forgotten that political opinions are not the equivalent of the Revealed Word, and that disagreement is not the equivalent of heresy.  Too many of us have stopped thinking, and are no longer engaging in rational choice.

Louis Menand, in The Metaphysical Club, wrote about the brilliant and charismatic Swiss-born paleontologist, geologist, and natural historian Louis Agassiz.  Agassiz came to Boston in 1846 for the Lowell Lectures, and he stayed.  The series was a huge success, drawing as many 5000 people at a time, and spurred, in 1847, the establishment of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, with Agassiz as head. Agassiz wasn’t just a mesmerizing speaker; he was the world’s foremost ichthyologist and is credited as one of the discoverers of the Ice Age.  But he had a weak spot, his monumental self-esteem, and when he coupled that with his embrace of “scientific racism” and polygenism (species, and races, were individually created by God and did not evolve) he left himself open to ridicule.  His ideas on racial inferiority were widely quoted, and used as a justification for slavery in the South.  He spent the last years of his professional life in an endless and fruitless quest to disprove Darwin, “finding” evidence that did not exist, systematically excluding facts and observations that didn’t meet his world-view, and largely abandoning the scientific method.  In Menand’s words “Agassiz simply could not recognize Darwinian thinking as science.”

Are we doomed to follow Agassiz, so dug in to either a religious or secular theology that we simply can’t get our heads out of the box and come up with good solutions? 

I still have hope.  As Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

MM

  

GE Decides To Take The Heat

GE Decides To Take The Heat

General Electric did something interesting last week.  It decided to stop lending to gun shop owners to finance consumer gun purchases. 

As you might have imagined, the decision did not meet with universal acclaim.  Gun owners were outraged; lawsuits were considered, and editorials thundered.  There are countless websites for gun owners, and suffice to say GE was not showered with love.

But, beyond the noise, GE’s move goes to the very heart of something that businesses, large and small, have to deal with in this intensely polarizing time: just how do their economic interests intersect with social and political issues?

From one perspective, which is maximizing profit by trying to gain every advantage in the political marketplace, it is quite easy; you lobby, you spread around campaign contributions, you join trade organizations, etc.  Let’s not be naïve: that Texas plant that exploded hadn’t had an inspection in decades, and that didn’t happen by accident.  Regulators in many industries are chronically underfunded and there is often a revolving door between the two.  The same is true with coalmines with inadequate safety measures, meat processing plants with repetitive motion (and more gruesome) injuries, drug “compounders” with contaminated facilities, and overseas sweatshops.  The point is that safety cuts profits, and business is in the business of making profits.  It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to buy political influence than it is to be state of the art. 

Should we accept this?  Well, in all honesty, we don’t have much of a choice.  Teddy Roosevelt is long gone and so is Progressivism.  Now Conservatives use the word as an insult.  Google “progressive” and the conservative columnist George Will you get 48 Million hits, and they aren’t 48 Million moments of praise. And it’s not just the pundits and professional talkers; the politicians are firmly on board.  There isn’t a single health or safety regulation that you won’t have a cadre from Congress fearlessly flinging themselves in front of, claiming the virtue of protecting us from being protected.  Picture Clint Eastwood and “In The Line of Fire” except the menace is a proposal to reduce E. coli in ground beef. 

In the end, businesses exist to make profits and businessmen allocate capital to the areas that bring them the highest leverage.  That is why GE’s decision to exit the gun shop lending business is so fascinating.  Because what GE did was make a statement for absolutely everyone to see.

You could be cynical and say GE’s gesture doesn’t really impact their bottom line; the action affects only about 75 shops across the country, not larger companies like Wal-Mart or Dicks, which also sell guns as part of a broader array of merchandise.   In fact, the opposite is true.  In exiting this tiny little segment of their business, which they could have ignored, and taking what is perceived to be a political stand, they put a big bulls-eye on their back.  They knowingly accepted the fact that there will be collateral damage, perhaps significant damage.

GE isn’t the only business that is taking a step back from the gun business; the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP is shopping its subsidiary Freedom Group, which makes brands like Remington and Bushmaster.  But Cerberus operates quietly, while GE is one of the mostly widely known brand names in the world.

I like it.  Not because I care so much about whether GE lends to gun shops (it’s none of my business) but because GE has come out of the weeds and exposed itself on an issue that it knows is controversial.  It has walked away from the anonymity that many businesses crave. 

That anonymity has been given new force with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United, which allows businesses to spend unlimited sums on “issue-oriented” advertisements; ads that don’t directly urge a vote for or against a particular candidate.  In the parallel world that is political speech, J&J, or McDonalds, or the Koch Brothers, or Chick-Fil-A can’t say “don’t vote for Congressman Y, he is in favor of amnesty for people like the Boston Marathon Bombers.”  But they can say “did you know Congressman Y favors open borders and amnesty for terrorists?”  

As Tom Donlan, in this week’s Barron’s, points out, businesses don’t necessarily see this as an unadulterated blessing. “It seems that CEOs don't want to get down in the arena if they will be seen throwing political dirt. They are well aware that their investors and customers include people of both parties holding widely different views on many issues, which means that some hold views that the executives believe to be antithetical to their corporation's interests.”  

Donlan frames the argument in terms of investors or customers who might support policies that would cut into businesses profits (such as labor laws, or use of natural resources) but the same logic applies to issues that are more political or social.  Smart businesses don’t want to anger their market.  Voter A might be very annoyed to hear that his local department store chain sponsored that nasty ad about Congressman Y, and might be inclined to shop elsewhere.  

Fortunately, at least for those businesses that want to weigh in politically, but don’t want to pay the price at the cash register, there is also something called a 501(c)(4) status “social welfare” group.  They can take contributions anonymously, as can trade and “educational” organizations, and those groups can trash Congressman Y to their heart’s content.  It should not be a surprise that Karl Rove has a “social welfare” group (Crossroads GPS), as do the Koch Brothers (Americans for Prosperity) as do some more liberal groups, like the Obama-affiliated Priorities USA.

But anonymity may breed corruption, and certainly can defile the political landscape.  Donlan nails the point home.  “Money that funds public speech should be subject to the same constraint as any speech was in the agora of Athens or the forum of Rome: The speaker should be identifiable. He may lie his head off, but he must be responsible for what he says.

It should not matter whether the giver of the money directly funded campaign ads or gave to a political action committee, a social welfare group, or a trade association. It should not matter whether the giver of the money be a single person or a collective such as a corporation, a church, or a labor union. When such a collective makes an expenditure that ends up as expression, it should identify itself so its shareholders, suppliers, and customers, its parishioners and neighbors, its employees, members and employers can know about its speech and judge it.”

That is exactly what GE did this past week, when they decided to end lending to gun shops.  They engaged in a form of public speech.  Now, they can take the economic consequences of that speech.  Capital, seeing a good rate of return, may flow in.  Customers may pull orders.  Gun-friendly state legislatures may review their contracts with GE, and perhaps decide to not to renew them. 

In my ideal world, I would prefer that businesses be completely apolitical and get out of the lobbying business.  That is, of course, wildly and foolishly utopian.  But, in the absence of that, capitalism, and advocacy, practiced out in the open, is the next best thing.  Free markets, free expression of ideas, openly made and for attribution.   Under those conditions, as Donlan notes, “If shareholders and customers want corporations to stay out of politics, that's information executives ought to have and information they ought not to ignore.”

Kudos, GE, for deciding to take the heat of the spotlight, commercially and politically.  The market will judge the choice, and it can adapt accordingly. 

Now, if we can only convince Congress that “for attribution” is a very good thing…

MM

Questions or comments?  Contact the Moderator

A Tough Week

A Tough Week

“All in all, it’s been a tough week.”  Those words from Barack Obama as he mentally toted up the damage from the Boston Marathon bombing and its afterwards, the horrific explosion in Texas, and the latest scalp collected by the National Rifle Association.

Mr. Obama showed a gift for understatement.  It was a very tough week.  The loss of life and home, and the sense of vulnerability it brought was a shock to the system.  And, as the painful collapse of the Manchin-Toomey compromise made clear, even something supported by 90% of the electorate can’t get past the piranhas.

It was a week where chaos seemed to rule, where ugliness bubbled out of every crevasse.  The giant sigh of relief we all let out after Friday’s capture of Dzhokar Tsarnaev was a little like the end of a particularly potent horror movie. You were glad that it was over, but that didn’t mean you weren’t shaken.

I took Boston a little personally.  I love to run, although I must admit I use the word “run” generously.  It’s the simplest thing to do.  A pair of shoes, shorts, and a top and you are off.  You don’t need to be fast or graceful.  Running alone takes you away from cellphones and emails, opens up your mind, gives you a sense well-being.  Running with others is like a mutual admiration society; you go faster, you fall into rhythm, you pull each other along.  I plan to run in a four-mile race next weekend; do that and you can understand the simple beauty of the experience, the feeling of oneness with your fellow racers, the sense of community. The New York Road Runner races group people into corrals, based on past times, so standing together before the starting gun goes off, you are surrounded by people who are a bit like you in ability.  You compete, but in a good-natured way.  It’s politics at the micro level; you feign tightness or fatigue, make jokes about your age or weight, and do everything possible to reduce expectations.  Once you are off, you make your way around the course and find people cheering, small children waving to their racing parents, volunteers handing out water and encouragement.  The last mile is half dread and half expectation; have you paced yourself well enough, do you have anything left for a final sprint?  As you approach the finish more people are clapping, you push to beat the clock, the other runners are straining around you.  Then, it’s over, and in between the gasps and gulps you see big sloppy grins and sloppier hugs.

But, last Monday, two murderous lunatics came to that incredibly simple event, and, in the cruelest possible way, they tore into people lives and legs and innocence.  I found that hard to take.

That the people of Boston acted so magnificently, with such acts of courage and even more extraordinary presence of mind, is a tribute to them, their police force, and their leadership.  Not a false note, just one community working together, everyone contributing in their own way. 

Unfortunately, their selflessness was not matched by others.  The media was filled with self-serving articles and criticism dressed up as analysis.  The on-line forums outdid themselves in repugnant comments.  Most of the spittle came from the Right, with a healthy dollop of Obama-hating, wild accusations of secret favors being given to the Saudis (Obama being a secret Muslim) crass jokes about banning pressure-cookers as assault weapons, and an avalanche of anti-immigrant commentary. 

And, not surprisingly, some of the leadership followed.  Senator Grassley of Iowa, his taste for blood whetted by his victory on the gun bill,  leapt for the opportunity to deep-six the immigration bill.  In Grassley’s construct, since these two murderers were legal immigrants, all immigration must be stopped.  Others, like Senators Graham, McCain, and Ayotte, with the ever vocal Congressman Peter King, demanded Mr. Obama declare Tsarnaev, who was a naturalized citizen, an Enemy Combatant (and, what, send him to Gitmo or Putin for questioning?)

Usually, I’m a junkie for this.  I love the politics, I love reading even the columnists that I disagree with, I love the give and take.  But the contrast of the public-spirited citizens of Massachusetts and the mean-spirited posters and devotedly amoral politicians just turned me off and I found, by the end of the week, that I needed to take a break.

So, on Saturday, I went up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent a few hours in the American Wing. I thought that walking around the paintings of the Founders would purge my mind of the pettiness.  And there were plenty in attendance, including Leuze’s heroic “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”   But I found myself looking for the smaller pictures, the everyday genre works, the portraits that weren’t just stiff headshots.  There is a wonderful charm about American painting which differs from a lot of the European.  It is generally not heroic and not over-ornamented.  To the extent it is epic, such as the works of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, it comes more from the land itself (the Hudson Valley, the Rocky Mountains) and not from aristocrats placed in classical poses.  America was a world of doing things, and living life, and amongst the stern-looking bankers and shipping magnates and lawyers, there was the movement and energy of ordinary people.   So, here was Bingham’s “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” with the mysterious black cat on the bow.  Winslow Homer’s eight boys outside a school house in “Snap the Whip”, and John Weir’s “Forging the Staff” and William Sidney Mount’s “Cider Making.” 

My mood improved and, as I turned to leave, I came across a favorite, Thomas Eakins’s terrific “The Writing Master.”  The subject was his father, Benjamin Eakins, in old age.  His hair is grey and thin, the lines in his face and hands are deep, but he pours over the document with great devotion to his craft.

There is a bloodline that runs in Americans, regardless of their age and where they come from, and you could see it in those paintings.  All these people are alive and vibrant.  They aren’t stuffed talking heads looking for talking points, and they aren’t narrow-minded posters getting their daily ration of venom. They are all just people, doing things, I would think, as the Founders intended, because that is how you build a nation.   

The most remarkable image of Boston was that when the bombs went off, countless people ran towards the danger.  They applied tourniquets, and tore off shirts, and comforted, and kept pressure on wounds.  They didn’t ask the victim’s party identification or political philosophy or place of origin.  They just helped.

To me, that is the essential challenge of contemporary politics.  Do you want to go with the skeptics and the doubters, the peddlers of discord and hate, or do you want to take chances and solve problems and move forward?

I think I’ll go with the people of Boston, who ran towards the danger.  Mr. Obama was right; the bombers “picked the wrong city to do it.”

MM

Comments or questions?  Contact the Moderator

After Thatcher And Obama

After Thatcher And Obama

Here is a fun fact: following this past week’s death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the second most popular song in England was apparently “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”

And, a second one: there is going to be a Presidential election in November of 2016, and Barack Obama is not going to be on the ballot.  We will have to wait to see what runs up the pop charts.

The first fact is a testament to the enduring, and controversial legacy the Iron Lady left.  She is both revered and reviled, despite the more than twenty years that have passed since her own party showed her the door.

The second fact, the end of Mr. Obama’s Presidency, is one that has to be a sobering thought for the brain trusts of both parties.  Because, for four years and a few months, the Obama Presidency has been solely about Barack Obama. It hasn’t been about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it hasn’t been about guns, or immigrants, or abortion, or prayer in schools, or taxing and spending.  Nor about who built it, who was a taker or a maker, the 47%, the 1%, class warfare, education, climate change, socialism, drones, Gitmo, gays, or entitlements.  It hasn’t even been about Obamacare.  It has been about Barack Obama.  We have, collectively, poured all of our hopes, our apprehensions, our ambitions and our paranoia into one man.  He has been the lens through which every policy issue is seen and he is the boogieman under the bed.  Barack Obama is the physical embodiment of the atomization of our political culture.

Why Obama?  A friend, economically conservative but socially moderate, may have said it best.  Obama was a man he felt he had nothing in common with.  Not just racially, but where he came from, his friends and associates, the time he spent abroad, the exposure to Islamic cultures, the influence of socialist and even communist-leaning people in his formative years.

My friend is not an irrational kook or some partisan zealot, but he can’t help but feeling that if Obama does it, there is a secret hidden agenda, something subversive and totalitarian and freedom-destroying.  There is nothing in Obama he recognizes; Obama is an alien who cannot be trusted. 

In 2017, Obama will be gone.  He will give speeches, travel, write books, and build a library.   The media will do retrospectives, and historians will write appraisals, but he will still be gone.  One thing we know about Barack Obama is that he is no Bill Clinton, for good or bad. He may feel white-hot on the inside, but he’s a politician for a media age; on the outside, he burns cool.

When he is gone, the pall that his person casts over every policy debate will fade, and all the rest of us will be stuck with each other, and a host of unresolved issues, without the luxury of his personal lightening rod.   And, chances are, none of us are going to recognize the landscape.

The fact is that the country is changing, and it is changing rapidly.  It is not necessarily becoming more conservative or more liberal, because those labels have become little more than slogans or pejoratives. It is becoming different, as the population changes and moves.  Much has been made of the growth of immigrant (particularly Latino and Asian) populations, but that is only part of the story. What is also going on is generational, a passage from Depression-Era/WWII types to Boomers, to Gen X, and so on.  These are not merely age groups, they are attitude groups, and becoming a certain age does not necessarily transform one into a New Deal Democrat of Reagan Republican. 

So, too, has population movement, land development and suburbanization changed attitudes of the voting electorate. We all know the conventional story; how the South is a conservative Republican redoubt and how Northeastern Republicans are becoming an endangered species. But that is only a piece of it.  There is a fascinating story in the Washington Post by Philip Rucker and Paul Kane.  How did two conservative Senators (Manchin and Toomey) with A ratings from the NRA come to be the possible dealmakers on gun legislation?  “The rapid growth of suburbs in historically gun-friendly states is forcing politicians to cater to the more centrist and pragmatic views of voters in subdivisions and cul-de-sacs as well as to constituents in shrinking rural hamlets where gun ownership is more of a way of life.”  Rucker and Kane looked outside Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and found similar trends in Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, and Virginia. 

What about those suburbanites?  They may best reflect where the center of the country is actually going: neither fish nor fowl when it comes to party identification.  They don’t like taxes, but they want their kids to go to good schools and have the garbage picked up.  They think government is too large and intrusive in the economic sector, but don’t care for the noisy scolding that emanates from the Right on social issues.  While the two parties hunker down in their ideological (and geographic) bunkers, a large segment of the population wonders why if you are for lower taxes, you must also be for burning books, and gays, at the stake.  Why can’t Washington just fix the things that don’t work, and leave us all alone for the rest of it?

Where does Obama fit in all this?  He is an accelerant, just like Thatcher was, but in an emotional rather than policy way.  Thatcher, in Barron’s Tom Donlan’s words in Barron’s “Before Margaret Thatcher pushed her way into 10 Downing Street, the United Kingdom had two major political parties, both engaged in the country's longstanding class war. The Labour Party courted and served the lower class, the people who worked with their muscles. The Conservative Party represented the interests of the upper class, the people whose inheritances allowed them not to work. After Margaret Thatcher finished reorganizing the politics of her country, both major parties more closely represented and courted the middle class, the people who work with their brains to make money.”

Donlan is an economic conservative and an admirer of Thatcher; he skips over the collateral damage of Thatcher’s radical reforms.

Obama, by contrast, is a moderate draped in the radical costume others put on him. Witness what just happened when he introduced his budget.  For many months, he has been urged to put on the table, in writing, a credible compromise position.  Something that includes revenues and entitlement cuts.  Go big, he’s been told.  Show leadership!  Take risks! This he did.  Liberals all over the country let out a collective groan.  Labor was unhappy.  Seniors were unhappy.  Criticism flew in from all directions, much of it from the very same people who told him to go big in the first place. Naturally, the Republicans, displeased with a proposal that didn’t give them everything they would have received with a Mitt Romney Presidency, denounced it.  But, in the most appalling (typical, but appalling) moment, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) went on CNN to slam it “I thought it’s very intriguing in that his budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors, if you will.”

Think about that for a second.  The head of the NRCC plans to win Congressional seats in 2014 by criticizing Mr. Obama for doing the one thing Republicans (and even many non-partisan) commentators, have urged him to do; put entitlement reform in the discussion. 

What are these folks going to do when Obama’s not in office any more?  They can’t always think with their glands, can they?

Maybe they can.  Steve Stockman, Republican Congressman from Texas (you remember him, he’s the chap who invited Ted Nugent to be his guest at the State of the Union) tweeted the following: “The best way to honor Baroness Thatcher is to crush liberalism and sweep it into the dustbin of history. What are you doing this morning?”

There’s a fun guy to invite to breakfast.

MM

Codgers, Cooties, and Legacies

Codgers, Cooties, and Legacies

As every good baseball fan will tell you, time doesn’t start until Opening Day.

Politics, on the other hand, is a different sport.  It never stops.  Whether it was the ancient Romans scheming away in their Senate, or Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid scheming in ours, it is a game best played by people who don’t faint at the sight of blood.

Opening Day came and went for my beloved Yankees.  It is a 162 games season, but things don’t look all that good.  Time and injuries have taken a brutal toll, and they now field a roster that has so many retreads, has-beens, and never-weres that it’s hard to look.  A parade of the old and infirm marches to the plate and flails haplessly.  

They are back in Washington as well. The Nationals look great, but with everyone else, it is pretty much the same roster; old and infirm politicians with old and infirm ideas.  To the extent they are able to flail, they flail at each other.  There have been a flurry of articles about all this flailing: in the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza’s “The Senate Has Lost Its Luster” and Dan Balz’s “Can Washington Govern?” and Jackie Calmes in The New York Times,  “Obama Walks Fine Line As Congress Takes Up his Agenda.”

All three are well worth reading, albeit pretty grim.  But nothing caught my eye more than a little post in The Hill this morning; “Obama running short of time to burnish legacy.”

Gee, I thought the season had just begun?  I know the Yankees are done, but Obama is barely ten weeks into his second term.  Legacy?  Whatever happened to 162 games and four years? I read the Cillizza, Balz and Calmes articles a second time.

Balz and Cillizza get into the governance weeds: Washington doesn’t work because it’s too partisan, because too many people lack institutional respect and memory, because short-term political gain is more important than doing good for the country.  All true, and unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Calmes, however, goes to a place that should make us all a little uncomfortable.  Republicans don’t like the President, and it is not merely policy, it is deeply personal.  From the codgers to the rookies, the contempt runs deep.  Barack Obama has cooties, and they don’t want to play with him.

So, how do you build a “legacy” when your opponents would rather have you fail, regardless of the cost to the country?  Well, we can start with the two big issues that have enormous symbolism: gun control and immigration reform.

The gun control debate is all but over, and the NRA has won.  The best that can be done is a compromise being brokered by West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin with the possible cooperation of Pat Toomey, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania. It is a watered-down and toothless version of universal background checks. Nothing substantive beyond that.  The fruits of Newtown will be yet another notch in the NRA’s belt, as they have already managed to insert pro-gun riders into funding bills that carry far more weight with far less symbolism.  What this whole incident shows, in excruciating detail, is that gun control is a loser for both Mr. Obama in particular, and the Democrats in general.  I would be willing to bet that there are any number of Democrats who secretly hope that the Manchin compromise either gets 75 votes or is filibustered by the hard Right. 75 votes gives them bipartisan cover while not enraging gun owners, and the filibuster is even better, since nothing happens and they can go back to their more moderate and liberal supporters and say, in effect, “we tried, we just couldn’t get there.”  The fact is, and we all know it, that the NRA runs Congress with an iron hand. The Democrats aren’t just sending up the white flag, they are handing out chocolates and candy corn to the scary monsters at their doors.  

Immigration is worth watching, because a bipartisan Gang of Eight  (Republicans McCain, Graham, Jeff Flake, and Marco Rubio, and Democrats Schumer, Menendez, Dick Durban and Michael Bennett) is working to come up with compromise legislation that can pass both the Senate and House.  It’s an interesting and eclectic group.  Menendez (New Jersey) and Rubio (Florida) are both children of Cuban immigrants, McCain and Flake both from Jan Brewer and Sherriff Joe’s Arizona.  Bennett is from key swing state of Colorado, Schumer from New York, and Durban (Illinois) is an author of the Dream Act.  Those cover the states that have 3^rd, 4^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th and 10^th largest percentage of Hispanic voters.  Notably, but understandably, missing is Texas (the radical Ted Cruz and the deeply conservative-but-worried-about-his-right-flank John Coryn.)

It is easy to cast stones here, but this is a very tough issue. As the grandchild of immigrants, I am extremely sympathetic to a system that is welcoming to those who want to come here.  But if guns are a landmine for the Democrats, immigration is an electoral math nightmare for Republicans.  Latinos (and Asians) were hugely importantly in Mr. Obama’s electoral success in 2012, and, even if you put an electrified fence on every inch of the border, stocked a moat with crocodiles, and lined it wall to wall with armed militia, the Latino population already legally here in the United States would continue to grow in size and influence, most notably, and alarmingly for the Republicans, could soon turn Texas Blue. The GOP and the Tea Party ran hard anti-Latino in the 2012 campaign (there isn’t a similar analogy to such an overtly personal and negative campaign since George Wallace’s 1968 third party candidacy) and they simply cannot do it again. Is there a racial component to this?  Of course there is, but it’s also unfair to characterize everyone who opposes the Dream Act, or anything that approximates amnesty for illegals, as racially motivated.  This is a very complicated issue that has generational overtones, a serious business/labor component, and economic aspects (such as when immigrants would qualify for social programs) and in different times would be the subject of careful lawmaking.  But, right now, it cuts against the Republicans. They need a way to defuse things, but they are afraid to approach the explosive device.  Mostly, they are afraid of being fragged.

At the very center of this web is the personal ambition of one man, Marco Rubio.  In Rubio’s hands probably lay the success or failure of the Gang of Eight.  The other three Republicans, even McCain, would be hard-pressed to sign on to anything he didn’t bless.  Rubio has to thread the needle.  He is smart enough to know that there is no compromise possible that would satisfy the most rabid anti-immigration folk from his side of the aisle. They can’t be coopted, so they have to be given lip service while ultimately being ignored. What he has to calibrate is the percentage they are of primary voters.  If it’s 25-30% he looks like a statesman.  If it’s 40% or above, he may likely will be committing short-term electoral suicide. 

So, what should we expect an ambitious young conservative do?  It depends on how Machiavellian we think he is.  Paul Ryan, in an analogous situation on a budget committee considering a Simpson-Bowles-like compromise, walked away to enhance his conservative street cred.  Can Rubio do the same thing?  He may be trying right now to do just that, under the guise  of calling for a calm, measured approach.  He’s slowing down the process, calling for more hearings, looking for opportunities to throw things back to the Senate where the virulently anti-immigrant Ted Cruz and Alabama’s Jeff Sessions excel at obstruction.  But, if he chooses not to go down that road, and really wants a compromise, a great many people will be hanging on his every word, pause, and gesture.  Rubio can take his party towards a less confrontational approach with Latinos, and become a true national leader at the same time.  It’s a power that he has openly sought, but it’s a little reminiscent of the Indiana Jones movie where everyone searches for the Holy Grail.  Should he choose poorly, he may also scream, shrivel, and turn to dust. 

Depressing?  Chances are, it’s going to be a bleh baseball season for the Bronx Bombers and a bleh political season for Mr. Obama. They might both be struggling to break .500.

.500 doesn’t get you in the playoffs, much less win the World Series.  It definitely doesn’t build a legacy.

Still, it is only Spring.  Stranger things have happened.

MM

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