The Greater Evil

It’s human nature for people of a political persuasion to hope that the least electable candidate represents the opposition. A graphic example is the Nixon campaign in 1972. The “dirty tricks” against his moderate opponents, Muskie and Humphrey, were well chronicled in the Senate Watergate hearings. Few people seemed to notice that George McGovern’s name was not among the victims. The fact may be forgotten or not even known by many. But during the primary season when he was unopposed, Nixon donors were instructed to send their donations to George McGovern.*  By this standard, as a Democrat I should be hoping for the nomination of Rick Perry, now that the GOP field seems to be distilling to two candidates. This is not the case.
 
I’m not an admirer of “Mitt” Romney and will not vote for him in the general election. Like all Republicans he is a candidate of money, although the same can be said of most prominent politicians including, to a lesser extent, Barack Obama. Unfortunately that’s the way our system works. But in Rick Perry I see more than avarice. I sense meanness.
 
“Sense” is by definition subjective. Mine is based in part on his answer to a question by the moderator in a recent candidate debate, as to his feelings about the disproportionally high number of executions in his state. His answer, that anyone who killed someone in Texas deserved to pay with his or her life, was followed by wildly enthusiastic audience response. It ignored the point of the question which didn’t concern the death penalty itself, but the justice of the convictions.  
 
I’ve referred several times to Barry Goldwater and what a majority of voters considered his off the wall ideas. But most of us who voted against him didn’t feel he was mean, only wrong. Perry, in promoting his recent Jesus fest on TV, blubbered like Jimmy Swaggart every time he mentioned “Jesus.” Having heard him speak on non religious issues, and looking at his eyes as he spoke, I consider this man incapable of any kind of humility.
 
If cross party voting in primaries were possible in the state in which I vote I’d be a Republican for a day and cast an enthusiastic vote for Romney. Given the quality of candidates generally, for many of us voting is a question of the lesser of evils. In my judgment no serious candidate, or even some of the frivolous ones, is as great an evil as Rick Perry, who just might become President of the United States of America.
 
 
 
 
*I heard this point confirmed, voluntarily and defiantly by Pat Buchanan, a minor player in the saga, late in the Senate Watergate hearings. During that primary season I was hired to provide a band for three McGovern rallies, after which I was assured of the same job in the fall before the general election. You might guess what happened, actually didn’t happen, and why.
 
 

The Song Is Ended

I am a card carrying Democrat who has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since Adlai Stevenson. I intend to vote for Barack Obama, despite being disappointed with his presidency. One reason can be summed up by five names; Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Roberts and Alito. Another is the caliber of the current potential opponents. All are certifiable fruitcakes with the exception of a former Utah Governor whose GPS appears to have malfunctioned and a former Massachusetts Governor who has yet to locate the center of gravity.   

Barack Obama has some accomplishments to his credit, such as resuscitating the auto industry and changing the military’s policy on gays. But these are fringe issues compared to the more important ones on which he has attempted little if anything. On the environment the flat earth types still hold sway and our unbalanced tax code is fundamentally unchanged.

The capitulation to raise the debt ceiling is was inexcusable. To give in to the legislative demands of a political party threatening the solvency of the nation was a craven concession to blackmail.  Common sense should tell us that this same tactic will be repeated the next time the ceiling needs to be raised, unless the president at the time happens to be a Republican. Obama declined the preferable options of calling the blackmailers’ bluff or invoking the part of the 14^th Amendment that says that the validity of the public debt “shall not be questioned.”  

Many of his former supporters complain that Obama should be more like Truman. The short answer is that he’s not Truman, nor was any intervening president. It can be added that no person of color could have become president behaving as Truman, who even his critics never claimed to be anything other than “true blue” in ethnicity and religion. Barack Obama may be more articulate than any president my lifetime, a gift that has value in explaining issues to the electorate. Yet some of his most important decisions have been a major disappointment to those of us who had such hopes when we voted for him. Facility with words is an important quality for the presidency. But to paraphrase an Irving Berlin lyric, when the song is ended it’s the melody that lingers on.

Bring Us Together

“Bring us together.” This was a major theme in Richard Nixon’s l968 election campaign.* It said as much about his presidency as “compassionate conservative” did about George Bush’s. Still the principle is inarguably worthy. By this yardstick, it can be said that we haven’t done well the intervening forty three years. Of course peoples’ political opinions will always differ. It’s just that they used to differ more politely.

Whatever Barack Obama has done to his credit or discredit, he is our president. Yes, past presidents have been vilified at times in unforgivable ways, but not with this much breadth and intensity. The incivility is not limited to slapstick performers at Tea Party rallies. Titled leaders of the opposition in both Houses of Congress have refused specific presidential requests for their time. I believe this is a first and, make no mistake, it is very personal.

Within Congress itself, there is a diminished pretense of courtesy. All administration appointees are now routinely filibustered. The comity that used to exist among Senators has all but disappeared. Will Rogers spoke of Senators addressing a colleague they didn’t like as “the honorable gentleman” really meaning “the rotten polecat.” At least they observed the formalities. Late on election night 1972 I saw both local opposing party chairmen in East Rutherford, New Jersey sharing a few cordial rounds of drinks in a jazz club where I was working. Does this sort of non partisan conviviality still exist at this level, and if so, to what extent?

In the public sector, where these divisions are the most harmful, my evidence is entirely anecdotal. A friend wrote me about a 77 year old companion who was physically attacked at a Florida bar over a political argument with a younger man whose ultimate bone of contention was being addressed as “young man,” a poor choice of words perhaps, but nothing demanding physical retaliation.  

Tea Party types, and consequently the entire Republican Party, are clearly moving sharply to the right. If one accepts the premise, my premise at least, that the political left is fundamentally the same old left, it’s easy to see where this new divisiveness and the rancor accompanying it come from.

I believe that religion has no place in politics, to which I’d add that politics should have no place in religion. For far too many people their politics has become their religion.

*Nixon claimed that the idea came from a sign carried during the campaign by a young girl in Deshler, Ohio. A 13 year old girl named Vicki Cole claimed to be the sign carrier and achieved a “Joe the Plumber” celebrity status. This ended with Watergate and suspicions within the Nixon campaign, by staffers who were on the train at the time, that she was a phony.

Cause and Effect

There isn’t much argument these days over the importance of jobs. To openly oppose job creation is the rough equivalent of advocating corruption. Declaring their importance is merely stating the obvious. But to call this an issue muddies the water. Underemployment does exacerbate hard times. But it is to a much greater extent a symptom rather than a cause. The cause by itself is indeed an issue.
 
Sufficient jobs for a healthy economy cannot be created by government fiat. FDR did what he could with WPA and other federally funded programs that added a glimmer of hope. But the Great Depression didn’t end until the fall of France in 1940, when industrialists, with a nudge from the president, saw armament in their future.
 
What is at issue is how best to create jobs. The president and most Democrats see the solution as increased investment in an economy now in deficit. Republicans, who are in effect running the show, advocate fiscal austerity, which as I see it has two major flaws, one relating to the Great Depression. Despite all the hardship during the pump priming phase of FDR’s stewardship, the nation was in somewhat better financial condition, and considerably better spirit than it had been under three years of Hoover’s fiscal prudence. The other is that at this time Republicans are intentionally working against the national interest, expecting to pick up the pieces with a new president. Their Senate leader McConnell’s publicly stated plans on the length of Barack Obama’s tenure should pretty well set the matter straight. I’m certain that if Republicans retake the presidency next year their concerns over a balanced budget would evaporate in a hurry.
 
The need for a sound fiscal policy can’t be denied. But in the general course of events it is more a long term matter than the current hard times which, by their nature, necessitate a quicker response. If we continue to move in the direction in which Republicans are now leading us we’re more than likely to make long term problems out of both. 

Who's On First

On a recent TV talk show a poll of Tea Party voters was cited in which a substantial majority, in excess of two thirds, consisted of traditional Republican voters who shared the social values associated with that party’s right wing.  One of the panelists pointed out that, by any name, this was essentially the Republican base. Both major parties have bases that almost always vote for their candidates. The difference is in the right wingers’ excess enthusiasm, fanaticism to this admittedly jaundiced eye. This gives the Republicans a big edge.

It is most evident in mid-term elections in which the turnout is lighter than when the presidency is at stake. Congressional elections in 1946, 1994 and recently in 2010, which resulted in Republican landslides, are cases in point. True, the reverse happened in 2006. But that was after six years of the George W. Bush presidency. Truman and Clinton had only been in office for two years and were reelected two years later.  Obama’s test is yet to come.

My thinking is that this enthusiasm gap has something to do with diversified interests on the left contrasted with those on the relatively homogenized right. People whose interests involve the environment, reproductive choice, financial regulations, labor rights and civil liberties may see eye to eye on most of these issues. But not to the degree of those who are indifferent to civil liberties, advocate religion in public life and hate gun control, gays, abortion and government in any form, unless they need it.  Throw in a president who isn’t “one of them” and it’s no contest.

The extreme right tends to be better focused on its benefit to Republicans than the left is to Democrats. Tea Party influence clearly led to the current GOP super House majority. On the other hand the actions of Civil Rights and Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s resulted in the election of Richard Nixon.

  

People on the far right seem to have more adrenalin than their adversaries on the left. This may lead to what can charitably be called more adventuresome actions which, on occasion, can become a bit chancy. If worst comes to worst they can always fall back on what has become a Republican battle cry since Watergate. It has no place in a court of law, but has worked with some success in the court of public opinion. “They all do it.”

Defense of Liberty

“I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Many of us recognize these words as spoken by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. It played a big part in the size of his defeat by Lyndon Johnson in the general election. Yet about two out of five Americans voted for him. Their ideological descendants comprise what is now called the Tea Party. However one regards these people, it’s quite a stretch to call them moderate, they have taken control of the Republican Party by the legitimate process of voting heavily in party primaries.
 
Goldwater’s statement, with which they evidently concur, sounds alright on paper. The problem is in agreeing on what constitutes defense of liberty. Many of us applauded, as we still do, the non violent civil disobedience inspired by Martin Luther King. The meaning, if not the words of the Goldwater dictum fit. These words could also have been used by the most violent Black Panther during the ghetto riots later in the decade, with an opposite historical verdict.
 
The Tea Party began making news in the days preceding tax filing on April 15, 2009. The taxes due then were at a slightly lower rate than those of the previous year, during the administration of a Caucasian Republican president. Somehow paying taxes under a Democratic president of color became un-American.
 
Most of us, including and particularly Tea Partiers, agree that the actions of the colonists leading to the War of Independence, while extreme, were taken in defense of liberty. “Taxation without Representation” was the valid battle cry of the instigators of the Boston Tea Party from which today’s enthusiasts have taken their name. But unlike the taxes imposed by the British that the colonists found so objectionable, today’s taxes have been set by the will of a majority of our own democratically elected representatives.
 
The folks appearing publicly in colonial garb carrying signs reading “Don’t Tread on Me” provide evidence of at least one major failure of our public education, specifically adult knowledge of American history.

OMG

Over the years there have been several times when I just didn’t want to hear the news or, worse yet, commentary on it. One of them was the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The most recent was last week, a consequence of the conclusion of the national debt crisis. There’s much more to be said about what’s wrong than what isn’t. That’s too much territory for me to take on now. 

The one aspect in particular that sticks in my craw is the presidential decision not to invoke the 14^th Amendment, with its sanctification of the national debt. Reasoned legal opinion that was initially mixed on this subject seemed to have become more positive as the hour drew nigh.

From the commentary I’ve heard, the president opposed this course because of a reluctance to expand the authority of the executive branch. Hogwash! I can’t remember a president who didn’t want to retain and acquire as much executive power as possible. Some were just better at this sort of thing than others. 

Preserving dubious executive prerogative occupied by the Bush Administration was the reason the Obama Justice Department chose not to prosecute the known civil rights crimes of his predecessor. These were crimes he condemned vehemently while campaigning for the presidency. Beyond that it seems a milestone in naivety to expect the next Republican president not to try to set a new standard in this field.

Another argument I’ve heard is that it would create a “Constitutional crisis.” I’m not certain what the term means, but I remember hearing it used during Watergate and Bush v Gore. The ensuing adjudications resulted sequentially in proper and atrocious judicial decisions.  But while these crises were being settled life went on pretty much as usual, without anything as tumultuous as what’s now taking place on Wall Street; an unintended consequence of “playing it safe.”

I plan to vote for Barack Obama next year. Future composition of the Supreme Court, by itself, is reason enough. But like many who voted for him with passion, I am deeply disappointed with major critical parts of his performance as president.