Americans reinvented MLK after his assassination. Let’s remember what he really stood for
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
JANUARY 16, 2022 7:13 AM
Martin Luther King Jr. was not a well-liked man. He was one of the most polarizing figures in the United States during his final few years of life. He was not the cuddly creature we re-invent every King Day to lie to ourselves and our kids about how he only wanted us to get along. His approval rating began to rise only after he was no longer here to demand America live up to its ideals.
King wanted peace, but not at the expense of equality. He wanted little black girls and boys to play with little white girls and boys, but not if it meant pretending racism didn’t exist. He respected authority, but challenged those wearing badges and carrying batons and sitting in the Oval Office.
He wanted moral clarity, not cheap comfort. Were he alive today, he’d still be hated by those wedded to the status quo. Because he’d notice the poor still being vilified as lazy. He’d see large corporations, like Walmart, brag proudly about modest pay increases then quietly announce thousands of layoffs. The GOP would still have enacted a tax law skewed to the rich then pass work requirements for Medicaid benefits – something they have never required of wealthy Americans receiving government largesse. He’d know the government pays private collectors triple what they retrieve in back taxes from the low-income while high-income tax cheats skate.
That’s why we should shelve the “I Have a Dream” speech this King Day. It has been used too often as an excuse to not have to face hard truths or fight for the most vulnerable among us.
Let us instead remember when King refused to denounce protesters by saying “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
And when he critiqued capitalism: “Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.”
And when he demanded “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
And when he said, “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”
And when he was exasperated by those telling him to wait: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
He wanted justice and peace. If he could have only one, there’s no doubt which he’d choose.
Link to original article:
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article257338422.html
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2022
Monday, March 2, 2020
Mayor Pete Flew Sky High by Frank Bruni
I am a little heartsick about Pete dropping out, but this wonderful article by Frank Bruni at the NY Times sums it all up.
Mayor Pete Flew Sky High
The youngest of the Democratic candidates did the grown-up thing, and dropped out.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist
To Pete Buttigieg’s many other virtues, add these: He’s not delusional, and he can see beyond himself.
He looked at what happened in South Carolina on Saturday. He looked at what was likely to happen in the many states that will vote on Tuesday. And he recognized that he had no path to the Democratic presidential nomination and that staying in the race would probably help Bernie Sanders, the rival he had branded a dangerous nominee.
So on Sunday he got out. Just like that. No praying for a miracle. No waiting too long. No protracted melodrama or slow-building drum roll of hints. No, the youngest of the Democratic aspirants did the grown-up thing.
I can only imagine how bitter that felt, given how high he had flown. And I can only hope that he and the rest of us never minimize that altitude.
Some other Democrat will carry the party’s hopes in November. Some other Democrat — please, God — will replace Donald Trump in the White House and both dull the memory of him and clean up his mess.
But no other Democrat will be able to claim a more surprising, disarming showing in 2020 than Buttigieg can. After the first two contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire, he had more delegates than anyone. He finished in the top four in all of the first four states to vote.
That was despite the fact that his highest political office was mayor of South Bend, Ind., with only about 100,000 people. That was despite the fact that he’s 38 and would have been the youngest person ever elected to the presidency.
That was despite the fact that he’s married to another man. For many Democrats Buttigieg’s sexual orientation made him a trailblazer and was cause for excitement, but for others it made him a risk and was cause to turn away. The degree of success that he nonetheless enjoyed reflected his ability to rise above stereotypes, to soar above identity politics and to pull voters up with him.
Buttigieg was the first major openly gay presidential candidate, and he challenged and changed Americans’ preconceptions of what such a candidacy would look like, as I wrote in a column just before the Iowa caucuses. One of the wonders of his unprecedented campaign was how little his sexual orientation was talked about as his bid progressed. That spoke to the range of political talents he brought to the contest and the breadth of the issues he engaged. He was a novelty who resisted being just that, a symbol who wouldn’t be content with mere symbolism.
Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January, was more deviation than norm when he gawked at the hypothetical scenario of Buttigieg, as the Democratic nominee, “kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump.” Mr. Man? In a Buttigieg-Trump face-off, only one face would glow oddly orange, and only one head of hair would appear to be the work of a dozen tipsy sprites.
Of course Buttigieg, ever dexterous, had the perfect retort when asked about Limbaugh’s ugliness during a CNN town hall. “The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values, I mean, sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse,” he said. “They want to debate family values, let’s debate family values. I’m ready.” Was he ever.
While some of his critics on the left conducted an offensive discussion about whether he was gay enough, he performed an important balancing act, integrating his gayness into his candidacy without letting his candidacy be defined by it, seizing teachable moments without ever becoming tendentious or tedious, showing the world that being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or queer is an essential part of who we L.G.B.T.Q. people are but not all of who we are.
On Sunday night in South Bend, where he delivered a poignant valediction to his campaign before hundreds of cheering supporters, he noted that it had “sent a message to every kid out there wondering if whatever marks them out as different means they are somehow destined to be less than.” They could look at him, he added, “and see that someone who once felt that exact same way can become a leading American presidential candidate with his husband at his side.”
He was talking about the experience of being in a minority and being marginalized — about the sorrow and the fear — and one of the great disappointments of his candidacy was his inability to build a bridge between himself and others who have had that experience. He was getting better and better at it, though. He was ever more attentive to that crucial task — in his last debate, for example, and in his speech on Sunday night.
I listened to it and realized that what most impresses me about him isn’t his intellect per se — the fancy degrees he has, all the languages he speaks — or his crazy poise or the manner in which he handled the unconventional aspects of his candidacy.
It’s his thoughtfulness. I first met him in 2016, when I traveled to South Bend and spent half a dozen hours over two days in his company, and I remember being struck above all by how deeply he had examined and how carefully he spoke about issues like freedom, globalization, automation. He was a walking tutorial, and a sweetly earnest one at that. I wondered then if he could upsize that trait for a presidential campaign. Over the past year, I — and the rest of America — got the answer.
Sure, he turned prickly and even somewhat overbearing at times during the most recent debates, taunting Sanders, talking over him and trying to break through beyond Iowa and New Hampshire as the clock ticked down. But still he wrestled eloquently with the meanings of things.
I think that’s why my inbox was so crowded on Sunday night and Monday morning with emails from admirers of Buttigieg’s and by their expressions of regret. One email came from my friend Bob Kerrey, the former governor and senator from Nebraska and a onetime Democratic presidential candidate himself. He shared with me the daily reflection on events in the news that he writes to his teenage son. Monday’s was about Buttigieg.
“This morning I regret not throwing my support to Pete instead of Joe,” Kerrey wrote, referring to Joe Biden. “We need a generational change and with him out of the race, that is not going to happen. We need an outsider who knows that Washington must change, but now that is also not going to happen. We need a president who can speak the language of other nations, but now that is not going to happen.”
“I do not think my support of Pete would have enabled him to win,” he added. But, he wrote, “It would have made me feel a little better about his loss this morning. Americans have missed an opportunity to turn the page to a much different future. We should feel remorse at losing that future.”
On Sunday night Buttigieg said: “Politics at its worst is ugly. But at its best, politics can lift us up. It is not just policymaking. It is moral. It is soul craft.” At his best, Buttigieg demonstrated that.
He has an opportunity over the coming months to demonstrate it further. “I will do everything in my power,” he said, “to make sure we have a new Democratic president come January.”
Mayor Pete, I’m holding you to that. We all are. Because your power is remarkable.
Yes, I agree...his power is remarkable. And when I got on the Pete train, I vowed that I would ride it as far as we could make it go. But if it could not reach the White House, I always said that Pete is young, and he has a whole political career ahead of him. Governor, Senator, Congressman, and yes, another run at the White House! Potential and possibilities, that is all he has ahead of him.
I thank you too, Pete...now run for something else, because you will make a difference, even more than you already have!
Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/opinion/Pete-Buttigieg-speech.html
Mayor Pete Flew Sky High
The youngest of the Democratic candidates did the grown-up thing, and dropped out.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist
To Pete Buttigieg’s many other virtues, add these: He’s not delusional, and he can see beyond himself.
He looked at what happened in South Carolina on Saturday. He looked at what was likely to happen in the many states that will vote on Tuesday. And he recognized that he had no path to the Democratic presidential nomination and that staying in the race would probably help Bernie Sanders, the rival he had branded a dangerous nominee.
So on Sunday he got out. Just like that. No praying for a miracle. No waiting too long. No protracted melodrama or slow-building drum roll of hints. No, the youngest of the Democratic aspirants did the grown-up thing.
I can only imagine how bitter that felt, given how high he had flown. And I can only hope that he and the rest of us never minimize that altitude.
Some other Democrat will carry the party’s hopes in November. Some other Democrat — please, God — will replace Donald Trump in the White House and both dull the memory of him and clean up his mess.
But no other Democrat will be able to claim a more surprising, disarming showing in 2020 than Buttigieg can. After the first two contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire, he had more delegates than anyone. He finished in the top four in all of the first four states to vote.
That was despite the fact that his highest political office was mayor of South Bend, Ind., with only about 100,000 people. That was despite the fact that he’s 38 and would have been the youngest person ever elected to the presidency.
That was despite the fact that he’s married to another man. For many Democrats Buttigieg’s sexual orientation made him a trailblazer and was cause for excitement, but for others it made him a risk and was cause to turn away. The degree of success that he nonetheless enjoyed reflected his ability to rise above stereotypes, to soar above identity politics and to pull voters up with him.
Buttigieg was the first major openly gay presidential candidate, and he challenged and changed Americans’ preconceptions of what such a candidacy would look like, as I wrote in a column just before the Iowa caucuses. One of the wonders of his unprecedented campaign was how little his sexual orientation was talked about as his bid progressed. That spoke to the range of political talents he brought to the contest and the breadth of the issues he engaged. He was a novelty who resisted being just that, a symbol who wouldn’t be content with mere symbolism.
Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January, was more deviation than norm when he gawked at the hypothetical scenario of Buttigieg, as the Democratic nominee, “kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump.” Mr. Man? In a Buttigieg-Trump face-off, only one face would glow oddly orange, and only one head of hair would appear to be the work of a dozen tipsy sprites.
Of course Buttigieg, ever dexterous, had the perfect retort when asked about Limbaugh’s ugliness during a CNN town hall. “The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values, I mean, sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse,” he said. “They want to debate family values, let’s debate family values. I’m ready.” Was he ever.
While some of his critics on the left conducted an offensive discussion about whether he was gay enough, he performed an important balancing act, integrating his gayness into his candidacy without letting his candidacy be defined by it, seizing teachable moments without ever becoming tendentious or tedious, showing the world that being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or queer is an essential part of who we L.G.B.T.Q. people are but not all of who we are.
On Sunday night in South Bend, where he delivered a poignant valediction to his campaign before hundreds of cheering supporters, he noted that it had “sent a message to every kid out there wondering if whatever marks them out as different means they are somehow destined to be less than.” They could look at him, he added, “and see that someone who once felt that exact same way can become a leading American presidential candidate with his husband at his side.”
He was talking about the experience of being in a minority and being marginalized — about the sorrow and the fear — and one of the great disappointments of his candidacy was his inability to build a bridge between himself and others who have had that experience. He was getting better and better at it, though. He was ever more attentive to that crucial task — in his last debate, for example, and in his speech on Sunday night.
I listened to it and realized that what most impresses me about him isn’t his intellect per se — the fancy degrees he has, all the languages he speaks — or his crazy poise or the manner in which he handled the unconventional aspects of his candidacy.
It’s his thoughtfulness. I first met him in 2016, when I traveled to South Bend and spent half a dozen hours over two days in his company, and I remember being struck above all by how deeply he had examined and how carefully he spoke about issues like freedom, globalization, automation. He was a walking tutorial, and a sweetly earnest one at that. I wondered then if he could upsize that trait for a presidential campaign. Over the past year, I — and the rest of America — got the answer.
Sure, he turned prickly and even somewhat overbearing at times during the most recent debates, taunting Sanders, talking over him and trying to break through beyond Iowa and New Hampshire as the clock ticked down. But still he wrestled eloquently with the meanings of things.
I think that’s why my inbox was so crowded on Sunday night and Monday morning with emails from admirers of Buttigieg’s and by their expressions of regret. One email came from my friend Bob Kerrey, the former governor and senator from Nebraska and a onetime Democratic presidential candidate himself. He shared with me the daily reflection on events in the news that he writes to his teenage son. Monday’s was about Buttigieg.
“This morning I regret not throwing my support to Pete instead of Joe,” Kerrey wrote, referring to Joe Biden. “We need a generational change and with him out of the race, that is not going to happen. We need an outsider who knows that Washington must change, but now that is also not going to happen. We need a president who can speak the language of other nations, but now that is not going to happen.”
“I do not think my support of Pete would have enabled him to win,” he added. But, he wrote, “It would have made me feel a little better about his loss this morning. Americans have missed an opportunity to turn the page to a much different future. We should feel remorse at losing that future.”
On Sunday night Buttigieg said: “Politics at its worst is ugly. But at its best, politics can lift us up. It is not just policymaking. It is moral. It is soul craft.” At his best, Buttigieg demonstrated that.
He has an opportunity over the coming months to demonstrate it further. “I will do everything in my power,” he said, “to make sure we have a new Democratic president come January.”
Mayor Pete, I’m holding you to that. We all are. Because your power is remarkable.
Yes, I agree...his power is remarkable. And when I got on the Pete train, I vowed that I would ride it as far as we could make it go. But if it could not reach the White House, I always said that Pete is young, and he has a whole political career ahead of him. Governor, Senator, Congressman, and yes, another run at the White House! Potential and possibilities, that is all he has ahead of him.
I thank you too, Pete...now run for something else, because you will make a difference, even more than you already have!
Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/opinion/Pete-Buttigieg-speech.html
Friday, June 21, 2019
"Our Orlando Sentinel endorsement for president in 2020: Not Donald Trump | Editorial"
Our Orlando Sentinel endorsement for president in 2020: Not Donald Trump | Editorial
By ORLANDO SENTINEL EDITORIAL BOARD
| ORLANDO SENTINEL |
JUN 18, 2019
Donald Trump is in Orlando to announce the kickoff of his re-election campaign.
We’re here to announce our endorsement for president in 2020, or, at least, who we’re not endorsing: Donald Trump.
Some readers will wonder how we could possibly eliminate a candidate so far before an election, and before knowing the identity of his opponent.
Because there’s no point pretending we would ever recommend that readers vote for Trump.
After 2½ years we’ve seen enough.
Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.
So many lies — from white lies to whoppers — told out of ignorance, laziness, recklessness, expediency or opportunity.
Trump’s capacity for lying isn’t the surprise here, though the frequency is.
It’s the tolerance so many Americans have for it.
There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.
Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).
According to a Washington Post database, the president has tallied more than 10,000 lies since he took office.
Trump’s successful assault on truth is the great casualty of this presidency, followed closely by his war on decency.
Trump insults political opponents and national heroes alike with middle-school taunts. He demonstrates no capacity for empathy or remorse. He misuses his office to punish opponents, as when he recently called for a boycott of AT&T to get even with his least favorite media outlet, CNN. He tears down institutions, once airily suggesting the U.S. should try having a leader for life as China now allows. He seems incapable of learning a lesson, telling an ABC interviewer last week — just two months after Robert Mueller’s report on election interference was released — that he would accept dirt on an opponent from Russia or China.
Trump has diminished our standing in the world. He reneges on deals, attacks allies and embraces enemies.
This nation must never forget that humiliating public moment in Helsinki in 2018 when the president of the United States chose to accept Vladimir Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election over the unanimous assessment of the American intelligence community.
Such a betrayal by a U.S. president would have been the unforgivable political sin in normal times.
As if that’s not enough, Trump declares his love for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a genuine villain who starves and enslaves his people and executes his enemies with antiaircraft guns and flamethrowers.
But he wrote the president a “beautiful letter.” Flattery will get you everywhere with this president, and that’s dangerous.
Domestically, the president’s signature issue — immigration — has moved in fits and starts. Happily, he abandoned pursuing an outright — and unconstitutional — ban on Muslims entering the U.S., opting instead to restrict travel for people from a handful of nations, most of them majority Muslim.
He’s tried separating families, sending troops to the border and declaring a national emergency. For all of that, illegal border crossings are, as the president himself calls it, at crisis levels.
He blames House Democrats because casting blame is Trump’s forte. But Republicans controlled the House and the Senate for two full years. That seemed like an ideal time to fix what the president believes ails our immigration laws.
Even with Democrats now controlling the House, where is Trump’s much-touted deal-making mojo, an attribute he campaigned on?
“But the economy!”
Yes, the market has done well since Trump’s election.
The S&P 500 was up about 21% between Trump’s inauguration and May 31 of his third year in office. Under President Obama, it was up about 56% in that same period.
Unemployment is headed down, as it was during seven straight years under Obama.
Wages are up, and that’s a welcome change. But GDP increases so far are no better than some periods under Obama. Deficit spending under Obama was far too high, in part because of the stimulus needed to dig out of the Great Recession. Under Trump, it’s still headed in the wrong direction, once again pushing $1 trillion even though the economy is healthy.
Trump seems to care nothing about the deficit and the national debt, which once breathed life into the Tea Party.
Through all of this, Trump’s base remains loyal. Sadly, the truest words Trump might ever have spoken was when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters.
This non-endorsement isn’t defaulting to whomever the Democrats choose. This newspaper has a history of presidential appointments favoring Republicans starting in the mid-20th century. Except for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the Sentinel backed Republican presidential nominees from 1952 through 2004, when we recommended John Kerry over another four years of George W. Bush.
As recently as 2012 we recommended Republican Mitt Romney because of what seemed at the time to be Obama’s failure to adequately manage the nation’s finances.
If — however unlikely — a Republican like Romney, now a senator from Utah, or former Ohio Gov. John Kasich successfully primaried the president, we would eagerly give them a look. Same if an independent candidate mounted a legitimate campaign.
We’d even consider backing Trump if, say, he found the proverbial cure for cancer or — about as likely — changed the essence of who he is (he won’t).
The nation must endure another 1½ years of Trump. But it needn’t suffer another four beyond that.
We can do better. We have to do better.
Link to original article:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/editorials/os-op-sentinel-not-endorsing-donald-trump-2020-20190618-63ya7cyb5ngf3irllodwxnznui-story.html
By ORLANDO SENTINEL EDITORIAL BOARD
| ORLANDO SENTINEL |
JUN 18, 2019
Donald Trump is in Orlando to announce the kickoff of his re-election campaign.
We’re here to announce our endorsement for president in 2020, or, at least, who we’re not endorsing: Donald Trump.
Some readers will wonder how we could possibly eliminate a candidate so far before an election, and before knowing the identity of his opponent.
Because there’s no point pretending we would ever recommend that readers vote for Trump.
After 2½ years we’ve seen enough.
Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.
So many lies — from white lies to whoppers — told out of ignorance, laziness, recklessness, expediency or opportunity.
Trump’s capacity for lying isn’t the surprise here, though the frequency is.
It’s the tolerance so many Americans have for it.
There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.
Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).
According to a Washington Post database, the president has tallied more than 10,000 lies since he took office.
Trump’s successful assault on truth is the great casualty of this presidency, followed closely by his war on decency.
Trump insults political opponents and national heroes alike with middle-school taunts. He demonstrates no capacity for empathy or remorse. He misuses his office to punish opponents, as when he recently called for a boycott of AT&T to get even with his least favorite media outlet, CNN. He tears down institutions, once airily suggesting the U.S. should try having a leader for life as China now allows. He seems incapable of learning a lesson, telling an ABC interviewer last week — just two months after Robert Mueller’s report on election interference was released — that he would accept dirt on an opponent from Russia or China.
Trump has diminished our standing in the world. He reneges on deals, attacks allies and embraces enemies.
This nation must never forget that humiliating public moment in Helsinki in 2018 when the president of the United States chose to accept Vladimir Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election over the unanimous assessment of the American intelligence community.
Such a betrayal by a U.S. president would have been the unforgivable political sin in normal times.
As if that’s not enough, Trump declares his love for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a genuine villain who starves and enslaves his people and executes his enemies with antiaircraft guns and flamethrowers.
But he wrote the president a “beautiful letter.” Flattery will get you everywhere with this president, and that’s dangerous.
Domestically, the president’s signature issue — immigration — has moved in fits and starts. Happily, he abandoned pursuing an outright — and unconstitutional — ban on Muslims entering the U.S., opting instead to restrict travel for people from a handful of nations, most of them majority Muslim.
He’s tried separating families, sending troops to the border and declaring a national emergency. For all of that, illegal border crossings are, as the president himself calls it, at crisis levels.
He blames House Democrats because casting blame is Trump’s forte. But Republicans controlled the House and the Senate for two full years. That seemed like an ideal time to fix what the president believes ails our immigration laws.
Even with Democrats now controlling the House, where is Trump’s much-touted deal-making mojo, an attribute he campaigned on?
“But the economy!”
Yes, the market has done well since Trump’s election.
The S&P 500 was up about 21% between Trump’s inauguration and May 31 of his third year in office. Under President Obama, it was up about 56% in that same period.
Unemployment is headed down, as it was during seven straight years under Obama.
Wages are up, and that’s a welcome change. But GDP increases so far are no better than some periods under Obama. Deficit spending under Obama was far too high, in part because of the stimulus needed to dig out of the Great Recession. Under Trump, it’s still headed in the wrong direction, once again pushing $1 trillion even though the economy is healthy.
Trump seems to care nothing about the deficit and the national debt, which once breathed life into the Tea Party.
Through all of this, Trump’s base remains loyal. Sadly, the truest words Trump might ever have spoken was when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters.
This non-endorsement isn’t defaulting to whomever the Democrats choose. This newspaper has a history of presidential appointments favoring Republicans starting in the mid-20th century. Except for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the Sentinel backed Republican presidential nominees from 1952 through 2004, when we recommended John Kerry over another four years of George W. Bush.
As recently as 2012 we recommended Republican Mitt Romney because of what seemed at the time to be Obama’s failure to adequately manage the nation’s finances.
If — however unlikely — a Republican like Romney, now a senator from Utah, or former Ohio Gov. John Kasich successfully primaried the president, we would eagerly give them a look. Same if an independent candidate mounted a legitimate campaign.
We’d even consider backing Trump if, say, he found the proverbial cure for cancer or — about as likely — changed the essence of who he is (he won’t).
The nation must endure another 1½ years of Trump. But it needn’t suffer another four beyond that.
We can do better. We have to do better.
Link to original article:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/editorials/os-op-sentinel-not-endorsing-donald-trump-2020-20190618-63ya7cyb5ngf3irllodwxnznui-story.html
Monday, May 14, 2018
BEAUTY: Man--Tony Thornburg
Hawaiian-born Japanese/Swedish model Tony Thornburg is usually the face of Etro (previously here) but photographer Sølve Sundsbø just shot him for a beautiful editorial feature in the new Luncheon Magazine. I love how he or the clothing seems to be always blown about by wind, his hair random and wild...
https://luncheonmagazine.com/
Tony Thornburg is represented by Elite Paris.
http://elitemodel.fr
https://luncheonmagazine.com/
Tony Thornburg is represented by Elite Paris.
http://elitemodel.fr
Friday, December 1, 2017
Trump Stains Democratic Ideals by James Cook
Sorry to darken the holiday spirit, but we are living in dark times...
Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News
One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.
On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.
There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."
There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."
The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".
A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.
"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.
Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.
Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.
The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.
Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.
For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.
Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.
Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.
This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.
Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.
The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.
The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."
"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"
He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.
For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.
"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.
Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".
He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").
His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.
And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.
So much for the special relationship.
It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.
It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.
Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").
Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?
It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.
But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.
Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".
According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".
Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.
The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.
He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.
His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.
The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."
On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.
When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.
"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.
At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?
In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.
And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.
Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.
The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.
Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006
Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News
One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.
On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.
There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."
There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."
The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".
A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.
"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.
Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.
Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.
The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.
Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.
For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.
Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.
Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.
This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.
Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.
The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.
The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."
"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"
He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.
For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.
"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.
Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".
He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").
His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.
And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.
So much for the special relationship.
It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.
It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.
Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").
Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?
It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.
But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.
Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".
According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".
Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.
The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.
He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.
His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.
The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."
On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.
When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.
"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.
At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?
In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.
And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.
Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.
The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.
Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Amateur Hour At The White House: A Danger To The Nation
Republicans’ deal with the devil will cost them their soul
By David Brooks
New York Times
Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.
They don’t particularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media. Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.
But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.
In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration.
Trump insulted both parties equally in his Inaugural Address.
The Bannonites are utterly crushing the Republican regulars when it comes to actual policymaking.
The administration has swung sharply anti-trade.
Trump’s economic instincts are corporatist, not free market.
If Barack Obama tried to lead from behind, Trump’s foreign policy involves actively running away from global engagement.
Outspoken critics of Paul Ryan are being given White House jobs, and at the same time, if Reince Priebus has a pulse it is not externally evident.
Second, even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.
It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming.
Third, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.
The administration could have simply tightened up the refugee review process and capped the refugee intake at 50,000, but instead went out of its way to insult Islam. The administration could have simply tightened up immigration procedures, but Trump went out of his way to pick a fight with all of Mexico.
Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite. The racial club is always there.
Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty.
The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who’s been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart.
None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”
The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.
Trump exceeded expectations with his Cabinet picks, but his first 10 days in office have made clear this is not a normal administration. It is a problem that demands a response. It is a callous, bumbling group that demands either personal loyalty or the ax.
Already one sees John McCain and Lindsey Graham forming a bit of a Republican opposition. The other honorable senators will have to choose: Collins, Alexander, Portman, Corker, Cotton, Sasse and so on and so on.
With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.
Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/the-republican-fausts.html
By David Brooks
New York Times
Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.
They don’t particularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media. Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.
But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.
In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration.
Trump insulted both parties equally in his Inaugural Address.
The Bannonites are utterly crushing the Republican regulars when it comes to actual policymaking.
The administration has swung sharply anti-trade.
Trump’s economic instincts are corporatist, not free market.
If Barack Obama tried to lead from behind, Trump’s foreign policy involves actively running away from global engagement.
Outspoken critics of Paul Ryan are being given White House jobs, and at the same time, if Reince Priebus has a pulse it is not externally evident.
Second, even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.
It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming.
Third, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.
The administration could have simply tightened up the refugee review process and capped the refugee intake at 50,000, but instead went out of its way to insult Islam. The administration could have simply tightened up immigration procedures, but Trump went out of his way to pick a fight with all of Mexico.
Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite. The racial club is always there.
Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty.
The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who’s been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart.
None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”
The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.
Trump exceeded expectations with his Cabinet picks, but his first 10 days in office have made clear this is not a normal administration. It is a problem that demands a response. It is a callous, bumbling group that demands either personal loyalty or the ax.
Already one sees John McCain and Lindsey Graham forming a bit of a Republican opposition. The other honorable senators will have to choose: Collins, Alexander, Portman, Corker, Cotton, Sasse and so on and so on.
With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.
Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/the-republican-fausts.html
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
No, This Is NOT Normal--"The Tainted Election" by Paul Krugman
The Tainted Election
Paul Krugman DEC. 12, 2016
The C.I.A., according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This has actually been obvious for months, but the agency was reluctant to state that conclusion before the election out of fear that it would be seen as taking a political role.
Meanwhile, the F.B.I. went public 10 days before the election, dominating headlines and TV coverage across the country with a letter strongly implying that it might be about to find damning new evidence against Hillary Clinton — when it turned out, literally, to have found nothing at all.
Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?
And it wouldn’t have been seen as a marginal victory, either. Even as it was, Mrs. Clinton received almost three million more votes than her opponent, giving her a popular margin close to that of George W. Bush in 2004.
So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.
The question now is what to do with that horrifying knowledge in the months and years ahead.
One could, I suppose, appeal to the president-elect to act as a healer, to conduct himself in a way that respects the majority of Americans who voted against him and the fragility of his Electoral College victory. Yeah, right. What we’re actually getting are wild claims that millions of people voted illegally, false assertions of a landslide, and denigration of the intelligence agencies.
Another course of action, which you’ll see many in the news media taking, is to normalize the incoming administration, basically to pretend that everything is O.K. This might — might — be justified if there were any prospect of responsible, restrained behavior on the part of the next president. In reality, however, it’s clear that Mr. Trump — whose personal conflicts of interest are unprecedented, and quite possibly unconstitutional — intends to move U.S. policy radically away from the preferences of most Americans, including a pronounced pro-Russian shift in foreign policy.
In other words, nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic. This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
And when, as you know will happen, the administration begins treating criticism as unpatriotic, the answer should be: You have to be kidding. Mr. Trump is, by all indications, the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power. And his critics are the people who lack patriotism?
Will acknowledging the taint on the incoming administration do any good? Maybe it will stir the consciences of at least a few Republicans. Remember, many, though not all, of the things Mr. Trump will try to do can be blocked by just three Republican senators.
Politics being what it is, moral backbones on Capitol Hill will be stiffened if there are clear signs that the public is outraged by what is happening. And there will be a chance to make that outrage felt directly in two years — not just in congressional elections, but in votes that will determine control of many state governments.
Now, outrage over the tainted election past can’t be the whole of opposition politics. It will also be crucial to maintain the heat over actual policies. Everything we’ve seen so far says that Mr. Trump is going to utterly betray the interests of the white working-class voters who were his most enthusiastic supporters, stripping them of health care and retirement security, and this betrayal should be highlighted.
But we ought to be able to look both forward and back, to criticize both the way Mr. Trump gained power and the way he uses it. Personally, I’m still figuring out how to keep my anger simmering — letting it boil over won’t do any good, but it shouldn’t be allowed to cool. This election was an outrage, and we should never forget it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/opinion/the-tainted-election.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Paul Krugman DEC. 12, 2016
The C.I.A., according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This has actually been obvious for months, but the agency was reluctant to state that conclusion before the election out of fear that it would be seen as taking a political role.
Meanwhile, the F.B.I. went public 10 days before the election, dominating headlines and TV coverage across the country with a letter strongly implying that it might be about to find damning new evidence against Hillary Clinton — when it turned out, literally, to have found nothing at all.
Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?
And it wouldn’t have been seen as a marginal victory, either. Even as it was, Mrs. Clinton received almost three million more votes than her opponent, giving her a popular margin close to that of George W. Bush in 2004.
So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.
The question now is what to do with that horrifying knowledge in the months and years ahead.
One could, I suppose, appeal to the president-elect to act as a healer, to conduct himself in a way that respects the majority of Americans who voted against him and the fragility of his Electoral College victory. Yeah, right. What we’re actually getting are wild claims that millions of people voted illegally, false assertions of a landslide, and denigration of the intelligence agencies.
Another course of action, which you’ll see many in the news media taking, is to normalize the incoming administration, basically to pretend that everything is O.K. This might — might — be justified if there were any prospect of responsible, restrained behavior on the part of the next president. In reality, however, it’s clear that Mr. Trump — whose personal conflicts of interest are unprecedented, and quite possibly unconstitutional — intends to move U.S. policy radically away from the preferences of most Americans, including a pronounced pro-Russian shift in foreign policy.
In other words, nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic. This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
And when, as you know will happen, the administration begins treating criticism as unpatriotic, the answer should be: You have to be kidding. Mr. Trump is, by all indications, the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power. And his critics are the people who lack patriotism?
Will acknowledging the taint on the incoming administration do any good? Maybe it will stir the consciences of at least a few Republicans. Remember, many, though not all, of the things Mr. Trump will try to do can be blocked by just three Republican senators.
Politics being what it is, moral backbones on Capitol Hill will be stiffened if there are clear signs that the public is outraged by what is happening. And there will be a chance to make that outrage felt directly in two years — not just in congressional elections, but in votes that will determine control of many state governments.
Now, outrage over the tainted election past can’t be the whole of opposition politics. It will also be crucial to maintain the heat over actual policies. Everything we’ve seen so far says that Mr. Trump is going to utterly betray the interests of the white working-class voters who were his most enthusiastic supporters, stripping them of health care and retirement security, and this betrayal should be highlighted.
But we ought to be able to look both forward and back, to criticize both the way Mr. Trump gained power and the way he uses it. Personally, I’m still figuring out how to keep my anger simmering — letting it boil over won’t do any good, but it shouldn’t be allowed to cool. This election was an outrage, and we should never forget it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/opinion/the-tainted-election.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Sunday, December 11, 2016
From 9/11 To 11/9
FROM 9/11 TO 11/9--GRAYDON CARTER ON TRUMP’S “ONLY IN AMERICA” ELECTION WIN
BY GRAYDON CARTER
HOLIDAY 2016
"Only in America / Land of opportunity” —Jay & the Americans
God, I love this country.
Only in America could a serial bankrupt pass himself off as a successful businessman. (And almost none of those he bankrupted were even regular businesses. They were casinos—where people essentially come to lose their money.)
Only in America could a man who offended Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and African-Americans, as well as women, babies, and the handicapped, become the Republican nominee for president.
Only in America could a man for whom truth is an inconvenient concept feel comfortable referring to his opponent as “lying” and “crooked.”
Only in America, a nation built on a history of immigration, could a man who married two immigrants—one of whom is alleged to have worked illegally when she first arrived—run on an anti-immigration platform.
Only in America could a man with a legendary reputation for stiffing small-business owners and wage laborers be able to pass himself off as a champion of the little guy.
Only in America could a man run for the presidency with one of his heralded accomplishments being the fixing of a skating rink in New York’s Central Park, a job the city had bungled for years. (It’s a feat most backyard rink rats in Canada pull off before their 13th birthday.)
Only in America could a man who brags about groping and kissing women without their consent win 53 percent of the vote among white women.
Only in America could a man who avoided the draft—with a deferment for pesky bone spurs on his feet, which somehow did not hinder him from playing tennis—and who insulted war heroes and their families become the commander in chief of the greatest military power on earth.
Only in America could a man who lashed out over the flimsiest of slights become our chief negotiator with the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans.
Only in America could a man whose staff reportedly took away his Twitter account because he couldn’t control himself be given the nuclear codes. (Thank you, President Obama, for pointing out that one.)
Only in America could a man with a negligible record of charitable giving and not a single day’s experience in public life be raised to the highest public office in the land.
Only in America could a man who kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside rule over the second-largest Jewish population in the world.
Only in America could a man whose résumé of failed businesses and alleged sexual harassment is so miserable that he would have trouble finding work at a copy shop be named chief executive of the world’s largest economy.
Only in America could a man who has skirted the law for more than four decades be put in charge of choosing new justices for the nation’s highest court.
Only in America could a man whose foreign-affairs experience consists of negotiating deals for hotels and golf courses—and perhaps arranging for investments by Russians—become the most powerful man on the planet. (And at a very perilous time.)
Only in America could a man who has likely paid no federal taxes for nearly two decades, and who refused to release his tax returns, be put in charge of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service.
Only in America could a man who thinks climate change is a hoax, and something invented by the Chinese, be put in charge of not only the Environmental Protection Agency but also our negotiations with other nations—at the most calamitous environmental period in the earth’s modern history.
Only in America could a man who surrounded himself with political second-raters like Rudolph Giuliani and Chris Christie be put in charge of forming the team to run the next U.S. government.
Only in America could a man who earned the contempt of his Republican rivals for being a con man and a fraud—and who implicated the father of one of his rivals in John F. Kennedy’s assassination—ultimately reap the support of those very same rivals.
Only in America could a man who threatened to throw his opponent in jail and to sue the women who have accused him of sexual harassment, who denigrated the judge who will preside over the trial of his bogus university (because the judge is of Mexican heritage), and who has 75 outstanding lawsuits (including two for fraud) be put in charge of the Justice Department.
Only in America could a man who does not understand the separation of powers, and who has advocated for the use of torture regardless of national and international law, be thought prepared to swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Only in America could a man whose primary national exposure was appearing on a reality-TV show become the reality that so much of the world feared.
Do not tell me America is no longer a land of opportunity.
Link to original article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/graydon-carter-donald-trump-president
BY GRAYDON CARTER
HOLIDAY 2016
"Only in America / Land of opportunity” —Jay & the Americans
God, I love this country.
Only in America could a serial bankrupt pass himself off as a successful businessman. (And almost none of those he bankrupted were even regular businesses. They were casinos—where people essentially come to lose their money.)
Only in America could a man who offended Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and African-Americans, as well as women, babies, and the handicapped, become the Republican nominee for president.
Only in America could a man for whom truth is an inconvenient concept feel comfortable referring to his opponent as “lying” and “crooked.”
Only in America, a nation built on a history of immigration, could a man who married two immigrants—one of whom is alleged to have worked illegally when she first arrived—run on an anti-immigration platform.
Only in America could a man with a legendary reputation for stiffing small-business owners and wage laborers be able to pass himself off as a champion of the little guy.
Only in America could a man run for the presidency with one of his heralded accomplishments being the fixing of a skating rink in New York’s Central Park, a job the city had bungled for years. (It’s a feat most backyard rink rats in Canada pull off before their 13th birthday.)
Only in America could a man who brags about groping and kissing women without their consent win 53 percent of the vote among white women.
Only in America could a man who avoided the draft—with a deferment for pesky bone spurs on his feet, which somehow did not hinder him from playing tennis—and who insulted war heroes and their families become the commander in chief of the greatest military power on earth.
Only in America could a man who lashed out over the flimsiest of slights become our chief negotiator with the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans.
Only in America could a man whose staff reportedly took away his Twitter account because he couldn’t control himself be given the nuclear codes. (Thank you, President Obama, for pointing out that one.)
Only in America could a man with a negligible record of charitable giving and not a single day’s experience in public life be raised to the highest public office in the land.
Only in America could a man who kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside rule over the second-largest Jewish population in the world.
Only in America could a man whose résumé of failed businesses and alleged sexual harassment is so miserable that he would have trouble finding work at a copy shop be named chief executive of the world’s largest economy.
Only in America could a man who has skirted the law for more than four decades be put in charge of choosing new justices for the nation’s highest court.
Only in America could a man whose foreign-affairs experience consists of negotiating deals for hotels and golf courses—and perhaps arranging for investments by Russians—become the most powerful man on the planet. (And at a very perilous time.)
Only in America could a man who has likely paid no federal taxes for nearly two decades, and who refused to release his tax returns, be put in charge of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service.
Only in America could a man who thinks climate change is a hoax, and something invented by the Chinese, be put in charge of not only the Environmental Protection Agency but also our negotiations with other nations—at the most calamitous environmental period in the earth’s modern history.
Only in America could a man who surrounded himself with political second-raters like Rudolph Giuliani and Chris Christie be put in charge of forming the team to run the next U.S. government.
Only in America could a man who earned the contempt of his Republican rivals for being a con man and a fraud—and who implicated the father of one of his rivals in John F. Kennedy’s assassination—ultimately reap the support of those very same rivals.
Only in America could a man who threatened to throw his opponent in jail and to sue the women who have accused him of sexual harassment, who denigrated the judge who will preside over the trial of his bogus university (because the judge is of Mexican heritage), and who has 75 outstanding lawsuits (including two for fraud) be put in charge of the Justice Department.
Only in America could a man who does not understand the separation of powers, and who has advocated for the use of torture regardless of national and international law, be thought prepared to swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Only in America could a man whose primary national exposure was appearing on a reality-TV show become the reality that so much of the world feared.
Do not tell me America is no longer a land of opportunity.
Link to original article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/graydon-carter-donald-trump-president
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Prince and Bowie: Other Ways To Live, Other Ways To Be A Man
Two thoughtful, spot-on essays about Prince and Bowie.
Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man
By Alyssa Rosenberg April 21 at 3:47 PM for The Washington Post
When the news came this afternoon that Prince had died at 57 at his home in Minnesota, a chorus went up that it was the latest cruelty of 2016, a year that already feels merciless in those it’s claimed, four months along.
But if the deaths of Prince, and Bowie, and Chyna, and Harper Lee taken together feel like a moment of catastrophic generational turnover, the loss of Prince and Bowie represent a more specific calamity. We’re in a moment in American politics consumed by gender panic, from Donald Trump’s menstrual anxieties to the rise of and backlash to a movement for transgender rights. And now we’ve lost two men who had an expansive, almost luxuriant vision of what it meant to be a man and lived out that vision through decades when it was much less safe to do so.
Both Prince and Bowie often seemed more than merely human. Bowie was an ageless vampire in “The Hunger,” a human manifestation of an alien being as Ziggy Stardust, the rock star from “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Prince left language behind to adopt what became known as the “Love Symbol” as his moniker; his death prompted many people to remark that mortality seemed like the only garment that didn’t fit him, that he had transubstantiated or ascended rather than truly died.
But if conventional notions of gender were only one of the things that didn’t constrain Bowie and Prince, their transcendence of this particular category is still a particularly significant part of their legacies. In the clothes they wore, the lean bodies they lived in, the way they positioned themselves in their music and art, their relationships to LGBT communities and in so many other ways, Prince and Bowie were living arguments that there is no one way, and no correct way for a man to dress, to move, to decide what he values, to choose who he loves or where he stands in relation to that person.
And that transcendence and transgression weren’t just about what Prince and Bowie did in their own lives; it was in what they made other people want to do to them. Mick Jagger may have had an affair with David Bowie, but everyone wanted to sleep with Prince, even when they didn’t want to want him.
The critic Hilton Als began his 2012 essay in Prince in Harper’s with a long recounting of a 2002 stand-up comedy special from Jamie Foxx that gets at the sexual panic Prince inspired. In the joke, Foxx talks about going backstage at a Prince show, looking in the Artist’s eyes, and trying to manage his own reaction: first, denying that what he felt for Prince made him gay, then insisting that if they had sex that Foxx would be the active partner.
Fourteen years ago, when Foxx aired that routine, marriage equality wasn’t yet the law in a single state, much less the settled law of the land. Foxx’s special was just three years removed from the trial of Aaron McKinney for the killing of Matthew Shepard, where McKinney’s lawyers tried to use a so-called “gay panic” defense. And Prince had been inspiring that sort of unease for decades.
There are wry notes of regret in Als’s essay, about the choices Prince made to become famous and when he became famous, about the sacrifice of “the girl Prince had been before he stopped being a girl: outrageous and demanding.” But even when Prince stepped onto larger, more mainstream stages, his presence could still be radical.
It’s true that in recent years, the Super Bowl halftime show has often been a showcase for women in the midst of a clash between men. Madonna, trying to make what was once seem daring relevant in a changing culture; Katy Perry’s schlocky self-coronation; Beyoncé’s transition from packaged pop as part of Destiny’s Child to militant excellence as a solo artist. But if these performances act as an argument that men and women can each be powerful in their own spheres and on their own terms, Prince’s appearance on the Super Bowl stage in 2007 was an argument, at this particular worship service dedicated to traditional masculinity, for a vastly huger range of possible ways for a man to command the nation.
What other person could take that very particular stage in a head wrap and end his performance with his guitar posed as a symbol of male sexual virility — which, of course it was — silhouetted on a giant scale and make it all feel like an effortless, coherent whole, without a hint of overcompensation? I adore Bruce Springsteen, but his crotch-first slide into a television camera two years later felt decidedly less vital.
57 is awfully early for anyone to die, but it feels especially so for Prince; he never reminded us that he was growing older by trying to seem young. Now he’s gone before we could possess him as fully as he always invited us to. But we’ll continue on into the weirder, more beautiful world he seemed to be living in decades before the rest of us arrived there.
Originally in The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/04/21/mourning-prince-and-david-bowie-who-showed-theres-no-one-right-way-to-be-a-man/
Prince and David Bowie showed us another way to live
By Nate Scott April 21, 2016 3:29 pm for USAToday
David Bowie and Prince are dead.
If feels unreal. The feeling of denial abounded on Thursday, after the death of Prince was confirmed: No. This can’t be real. This is all a bad dream.
I felt it as strongly as anyone. It couldn’t be real because both Prince and Bowie never really felt real. People that talented, that beautiful, that unique … they couldn’t be of this earth, and thus, they couldn’t die. They were otherworldly. As I wrote of Bowie when he died in January, he “never felt like a person who was born … he simply appeared, materialized from the ether, a magical embodiment of everything creative and cool in the universe.”
It also felt unreal because of what the two artists meant to so many people. For anyone who ever felt strange, or like a misfit, Bowie and Prince were more than people. They were gods. They were two musicians who meant more than their music; they were meaningful because of who they were.
They showed us that there was another way to live.
Many of us believe we are special flowers. We are not. Very few people on earth can resist the urge to latch onto a movement, whatever that movement may be. We define ourselves by the people we admire, by the things we like, but we define ourselves by others. There is nothing wrong with this. We all do it. We do this because it’s easy, and we do it because we are all very desperate to not be alone.
Prince and Bowie didn’t do that. They had no interest in it, really. They did their own thing. Prince wore purple blouses and changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and rode around in light-up roller skates because he thought it was beautiful and interesting and it all made him happy. David Bowie dyed his hair pink and bleached his skin and imagined himself an alien sent from outer space. They checked no boxes. They adhered to no existing ideas about identity, or masculinity. They created it as they went.
This is terrifying, if you think about it, and sort of insane. Think about how genius you have to be, think about how confident you have to be to decide that you will not adhere to what anyone else on earth thinks is acceptable or cool. You will define what is cool. That is nuts, a little bit. You may think you look good, but what if everyone else just thinks you look like a crazy person? If you’re the only person alive doing it, how would you ever even know?
There is bravery in the way Prince and Bowie lived, and foolishness, but for people who grew up feeling like they didn’t fit in, it was liberating. When I first saw Prince wailing away on that paisley Telecaster, or saw Bowie, snowy white, singing Starman, it blew my mind. They were cool. They were the coolest. I knew that inherently, even as a kid. And yet they were unlike anyone I knew who was cool. How was that possible?
The loss of these two artists feels especially tragic because of the year in which we lose them. We like to curse 2016 for taking these two men, as if a year can be responsible, but at a time when political movements are built on anger and the ostracizing of others, when laws are being passed out of fear of those that are different, we need more people like Prince and Bowie. People who can show us it’s OK. It’s OK to define yourself however you want to.
And because this is 2016, and this is the internet, there will be backlash. Bowie was rightfully criticized for his relationships with underage women. I’m sure Prince has moments that will haunt him. Sinead O’Connor says she and Prince once got in a fist fight over the song Nothing Compares 2 U. It’s details like these that can break the spell around these men, and remind us that indeed that’s what they were — men. Living souls who were imperfect, and who are now gone.
We all must make our peace with Bowie and Prince, and all the other artists we adore who are flawed. Some people can’t do it. Others can. What’s more important, I think, is that now, even in death, these two men will continue to show other people that originality is real, that art is alive, that cool is what we make it.
In small towns across America, around the world, there are kids who feel like they don’t belong. They haven’t been to New York City yet, or London or Tokyo or Johannesburg or Berlin, haven’t seen the weirdos and the freaks, and they don’t know that there is something else out there. And then one day they’ll stumble across Prince, or Bowie, or maybe both, and they’ll see that there’s more, and they won’t feel so alone.
Originally in FTW!Culture USAToday
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/prince-death-dead-david-bowie-music-originality-art
Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man
By Alyssa Rosenberg April 21 at 3:47 PM for The Washington Post
When the news came this afternoon that Prince had died at 57 at his home in Minnesota, a chorus went up that it was the latest cruelty of 2016, a year that already feels merciless in those it’s claimed, four months along.
But if the deaths of Prince, and Bowie, and Chyna, and Harper Lee taken together feel like a moment of catastrophic generational turnover, the loss of Prince and Bowie represent a more specific calamity. We’re in a moment in American politics consumed by gender panic, from Donald Trump’s menstrual anxieties to the rise of and backlash to a movement for transgender rights. And now we’ve lost two men who had an expansive, almost luxuriant vision of what it meant to be a man and lived out that vision through decades when it was much less safe to do so.
Both Prince and Bowie often seemed more than merely human. Bowie was an ageless vampire in “The Hunger,” a human manifestation of an alien being as Ziggy Stardust, the rock star from “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Prince left language behind to adopt what became known as the “Love Symbol” as his moniker; his death prompted many people to remark that mortality seemed like the only garment that didn’t fit him, that he had transubstantiated or ascended rather than truly died.
But if conventional notions of gender were only one of the things that didn’t constrain Bowie and Prince, their transcendence of this particular category is still a particularly significant part of their legacies. In the clothes they wore, the lean bodies they lived in, the way they positioned themselves in their music and art, their relationships to LGBT communities and in so many other ways, Prince and Bowie were living arguments that there is no one way, and no correct way for a man to dress, to move, to decide what he values, to choose who he loves or where he stands in relation to that person.
And that transcendence and transgression weren’t just about what Prince and Bowie did in their own lives; it was in what they made other people want to do to them. Mick Jagger may have had an affair with David Bowie, but everyone wanted to sleep with Prince, even when they didn’t want to want him.
The critic Hilton Als began his 2012 essay in Prince in Harper’s with a long recounting of a 2002 stand-up comedy special from Jamie Foxx that gets at the sexual panic Prince inspired. In the joke, Foxx talks about going backstage at a Prince show, looking in the Artist’s eyes, and trying to manage his own reaction: first, denying that what he felt for Prince made him gay, then insisting that if they had sex that Foxx would be the active partner.
Fourteen years ago, when Foxx aired that routine, marriage equality wasn’t yet the law in a single state, much less the settled law of the land. Foxx’s special was just three years removed from the trial of Aaron McKinney for the killing of Matthew Shepard, where McKinney’s lawyers tried to use a so-called “gay panic” defense. And Prince had been inspiring that sort of unease for decades.
There are wry notes of regret in Als’s essay, about the choices Prince made to become famous and when he became famous, about the sacrifice of “the girl Prince had been before he stopped being a girl: outrageous and demanding.” But even when Prince stepped onto larger, more mainstream stages, his presence could still be radical.
It’s true that in recent years, the Super Bowl halftime show has often been a showcase for women in the midst of a clash between men. Madonna, trying to make what was once seem daring relevant in a changing culture; Katy Perry’s schlocky self-coronation; Beyoncé’s transition from packaged pop as part of Destiny’s Child to militant excellence as a solo artist. But if these performances act as an argument that men and women can each be powerful in their own spheres and on their own terms, Prince’s appearance on the Super Bowl stage in 2007 was an argument, at this particular worship service dedicated to traditional masculinity, for a vastly huger range of possible ways for a man to command the nation.
What other person could take that very particular stage in a head wrap and end his performance with his guitar posed as a symbol of male sexual virility — which, of course it was — silhouetted on a giant scale and make it all feel like an effortless, coherent whole, without a hint of overcompensation? I adore Bruce Springsteen, but his crotch-first slide into a television camera two years later felt decidedly less vital.
57 is awfully early for anyone to die, but it feels especially so for Prince; he never reminded us that he was growing older by trying to seem young. Now he’s gone before we could possess him as fully as he always invited us to. But we’ll continue on into the weirder, more beautiful world he seemed to be living in decades before the rest of us arrived there.
Originally in The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/04/21/mourning-prince-and-david-bowie-who-showed-theres-no-one-right-way-to-be-a-man/
Prince and David Bowie showed us another way to live
By Nate Scott April 21, 2016 3:29 pm for USAToday
David Bowie and Prince are dead.
If feels unreal. The feeling of denial abounded on Thursday, after the death of Prince was confirmed: No. This can’t be real. This is all a bad dream.
I felt it as strongly as anyone. It couldn’t be real because both Prince and Bowie never really felt real. People that talented, that beautiful, that unique … they couldn’t be of this earth, and thus, they couldn’t die. They were otherworldly. As I wrote of Bowie when he died in January, he “never felt like a person who was born … he simply appeared, materialized from the ether, a magical embodiment of everything creative and cool in the universe.”
It also felt unreal because of what the two artists meant to so many people. For anyone who ever felt strange, or like a misfit, Bowie and Prince were more than people. They were gods. They were two musicians who meant more than their music; they were meaningful because of who they were.
They showed us that there was another way to live.
Many of us believe we are special flowers. We are not. Very few people on earth can resist the urge to latch onto a movement, whatever that movement may be. We define ourselves by the people we admire, by the things we like, but we define ourselves by others. There is nothing wrong with this. We all do it. We do this because it’s easy, and we do it because we are all very desperate to not be alone.
Prince and Bowie didn’t do that. They had no interest in it, really. They did their own thing. Prince wore purple blouses and changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and rode around in light-up roller skates because he thought it was beautiful and interesting and it all made him happy. David Bowie dyed his hair pink and bleached his skin and imagined himself an alien sent from outer space. They checked no boxes. They adhered to no existing ideas about identity, or masculinity. They created it as they went.
This is terrifying, if you think about it, and sort of insane. Think about how genius you have to be, think about how confident you have to be to decide that you will not adhere to what anyone else on earth thinks is acceptable or cool. You will define what is cool. That is nuts, a little bit. You may think you look good, but what if everyone else just thinks you look like a crazy person? If you’re the only person alive doing it, how would you ever even know?
There is bravery in the way Prince and Bowie lived, and foolishness, but for people who grew up feeling like they didn’t fit in, it was liberating. When I first saw Prince wailing away on that paisley Telecaster, or saw Bowie, snowy white, singing Starman, it blew my mind. They were cool. They were the coolest. I knew that inherently, even as a kid. And yet they were unlike anyone I knew who was cool. How was that possible?
The loss of these two artists feels especially tragic because of the year in which we lose them. We like to curse 2016 for taking these two men, as if a year can be responsible, but at a time when political movements are built on anger and the ostracizing of others, when laws are being passed out of fear of those that are different, we need more people like Prince and Bowie. People who can show us it’s OK. It’s OK to define yourself however you want to.
And because this is 2016, and this is the internet, there will be backlash. Bowie was rightfully criticized for his relationships with underage women. I’m sure Prince has moments that will haunt him. Sinead O’Connor says she and Prince once got in a fist fight over the song Nothing Compares 2 U. It’s details like these that can break the spell around these men, and remind us that indeed that’s what they were — men. Living souls who were imperfect, and who are now gone.
We all must make our peace with Bowie and Prince, and all the other artists we adore who are flawed. Some people can’t do it. Others can. What’s more important, I think, is that now, even in death, these two men will continue to show other people that originality is real, that art is alive, that cool is what we make it.
In small towns across America, around the world, there are kids who feel like they don’t belong. They haven’t been to New York City yet, or London or Tokyo or Johannesburg or Berlin, haven’t seen the weirdos and the freaks, and they don’t know that there is something else out there. And then one day they’ll stumble across Prince, or Bowie, or maybe both, and they’ll see that there’s more, and they won’t feel so alone.
Originally in FTW!Culture USAToday
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/prince-death-dead-david-bowie-music-originality-art
Sunday, March 13, 2016
"A Point of View: When does borrowing from other cultures become 'appropriation'?" by Adam Gopnik
This is a great, thoughtful article by writer Adam Gopnik--a transcription of his regular Radio 4 show "A Point of View"--which appeared on the BBC website.
A Point of View: When does borrowing from other cultures become 'appropriation'?
You may have heard of the current kerfuffle here in America about the sin of what is being called "cultural appropriation". Some students at Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in chilly Maine, were punished recently for wearing Mexican sombreros at a Mexican theme party. They had appropriated Mexican culture as a white person's prerogative.
Then, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the practice of trying on a kimono for a selfie in front of a Monet painting of a French woman wearing a kimono was declared verboten for Boston, so to speak. It was a form of cultural appropriation of what belongs to Japan, while a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado" was closed down for the same reason. It showed only a racist stereotype of Japan, as imperially imagined by Victorians. There have been more incidents, many at liberal arts colleges, involving Chinese food and the art form we wrongly call "belly dancing" and even the hugely popular practice of yoga. They belong to Others, and we cannot have them, or take them, for ourselves.
Now, I am not about to launch into a tirade against the "politically correct". I am old enough to recall that political correctness actually began as a term of self-mockery used by the hyper-sensitive, ruefully, against themselves, lightly guying their own good efforts at eliminating the casual sadism of daily interactions. "I guess I'm just being a little politically correct here, but…" someone almost always a woman) would say in the 1980s, and then point out an instance of unconscious sexism somewhere in the room. And in truth, "politically correct" is almost always these days synonymous with "sensitively courteous". We know this because when someone says "I am not going to be politically correct!", what he - and it is always a he - really means is, "I am not going to be sensitively courteous to anyone's feelings except my own and that of my gang!" We have a demonstration of this principle every night on our screens over here these days, and it is a nightmare.
Nonetheless, I would be lying if I did not say that the practice we call PC has its absurd aspects. It is funny because it puts more weight on the words we use than the actions we take, always a mistake. My son's dormitory at his liberal arts college has a live-in resident of deliberately indeterminate gender who wants to be referred to neither as "he" nor "she" - they are imprisoning patriarchal categories - nor as "it "(that would be an objectifying put-down) but as "they" and " them". This is at least convivial. When he - no, she - no, they - are there, it's always a party.
There is something funny about this undue weight given to words, because we can't be endlessly sensitive and attentive and courteous in every interaction we have in life. People who try end up seeming insipid and exasperating rather than entirely admirable. My own wife, Martha, for instance, who does try to be so in every exchange, is, though much loved, also famous for the length of time it takes her to extricate herself from a social occasion, having first to be certain that she has been nice to everyone. This leads her, perversely, to avoid many social occasions for fear of wearing herself out from attentiveness - the price of such niceness can be very high. Prolonged punctiliousness is exhausting to all, particularly to husbands - er, mates - er, partners - er, co-habitating life colleagues.
But the idea that cultures - recipes or poses or even hats - belong to one group rather than another is something worse than a moment in a comedy of manners - or, rather, it misses the way that a larger comedy of manners has always shaped what we mean by culture. Cultural mixing - the hybridisation of hats, if you like - is the rule of civilisation, not some new intrusion within our own. Healthy civilisations have always been mongrelised, cosmopolitan, hybrid, corrupted and expropriated and mixed. Healthy societies seek out that kind of corruption because they know it is the secret of pleasure. They count their health in the number of imported spices on their shelves.
One of my favourite stories of how healthy cultural hybrids happen involves Japan and the West, though not, in this case, the Mikado. You know those beautiful 19th Century Japanese prints, by Hiroshige or Hokusai or their friends, poetically depicting everyday events, or favourite places, all in charming comic book colour, with Mount Fuji often delicately if secretively included in every view (like a kind of sublime Where's Wally). Those delicate black-edged figures and long almost cartoonish faces, those startling juxtapositions of foreground and distance, that informal and haiku-like lyricism - Japanese prints had, as everybody is taught in class, an enormous influence on French Impressionist art in the middle of the 19th Century. They were, exactly, an exotic appropriation.
Well, it turns out that they weren't really exotic at all. They were the product of the Japanese infatuation with Western perspective drawing and graphics, which had only recently arrived in Japan on ships and boats as part of the Japanese opening to the West. The Japanese artists saw them, and saw expressive possibilities in them that the Western artists were too habituated to the system to notice. The Japanese appropriated Western perspective in ways that Westerners would never have imagined. Then the Japanese pictures got sent back to Europe, where they looked wonderfully exotic, and re-made the Western art they originally hailed from. It's exactly the same process that happened in our own lifetime when Howlin' Wolf and Big Bill Broonzy records sailed over to Liverpool and the suburbs of London and were heard by boys who barely understood their context but loved their attitude. Ten years later you got Mick Jagger and John Lennon. Innocent imitation is always the engine of cultural innovation.
Nor is it just that the borrowings can be beautiful. The things we borrow show us the things we are. Having passed through Chuck Berry, The Beatles and the Stones could better claim their own distinctive Englishness. In the same way, distinctly English food - all those real beers and farmhouse cheddars - has only gotten better because restaurants that served real Italian food helped showed how wonderful a coherent seasonal market-based cuisine could be. If we want to be ourselves, we have to travel - and nowadays, we do much of our travelling internally.
If all you know is your provincial culture, you don't know enough to know if your culture is provincial or not. When it ceases to be, you're not wise enough to recognise it. Appropriation is far more often empowering than oppressing. There's no cheaper way to get the drop on a bad guy than to borrow his hymns and habits and make them your own. That's what diaspora Jews have done throughout their history. It's how German bred with Hebrew to become Yiddish and Yiddish became the great language of Jewish folk tale and protest.
So cultures cannot be corrupted enough, civilizations cannot be appropriated too often. Nor is this only seen in heroic acts of original innovation. It's a nightly act of healthy practice. Last night, for instance, I made a Burmese curry, which combines Indian spices - cumin and turmeric - with the Chinese technique of stir-frying. The ingredients came from our local New York City Greenmarket - and I always mix butter in with the cooking oil, a habit picked up in Paris. The recipe also calls for yogurt, but my wife, of Icelandic extraction, prefers skyr, and it's all put together by me, while I amuse no one but myself by doing my very bad international accents. So it's actually a Jewish-Icelandic-Chinese-Indian-Burmese -French emigre-New York state stir-fry. All in one pot, and five minutes.
That's the norm of cooking. That's the norm of life. Blurring the boundaries of culture is what cooking does. When we do the same thing in ways that last longer than dinner, we call it art. Done often enough, it makes what we call civilisation.
So wear sombreros and kimonos and Mormon underwear beneath, if you so like. Eat Chinese food with Indian spices and French butter and celebrate the range of being human. We are mixed in nature, many in our very essence. We can't help it. To be human is to be hybrid. It is as close to a rule of life as you can ever hope to find.
Original article here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35782855
A Point of View: When does borrowing from other cultures become 'appropriation'?
You may have heard of the current kerfuffle here in America about the sin of what is being called "cultural appropriation". Some students at Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in chilly Maine, were punished recently for wearing Mexican sombreros at a Mexican theme party. They had appropriated Mexican culture as a white person's prerogative.
Then, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the practice of trying on a kimono for a selfie in front of a Monet painting of a French woman wearing a kimono was declared verboten for Boston, so to speak. It was a form of cultural appropriation of what belongs to Japan, while a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado" was closed down for the same reason. It showed only a racist stereotype of Japan, as imperially imagined by Victorians. There have been more incidents, many at liberal arts colleges, involving Chinese food and the art form we wrongly call "belly dancing" and even the hugely popular practice of yoga. They belong to Others, and we cannot have them, or take them, for ourselves.
Now, I am not about to launch into a tirade against the "politically correct". I am old enough to recall that political correctness actually began as a term of self-mockery used by the hyper-sensitive, ruefully, against themselves, lightly guying their own good efforts at eliminating the casual sadism of daily interactions. "I guess I'm just being a little politically correct here, but…" someone almost always a woman) would say in the 1980s, and then point out an instance of unconscious sexism somewhere in the room. And in truth, "politically correct" is almost always these days synonymous with "sensitively courteous". We know this because when someone says "I am not going to be politically correct!", what he - and it is always a he - really means is, "I am not going to be sensitively courteous to anyone's feelings except my own and that of my gang!" We have a demonstration of this principle every night on our screens over here these days, and it is a nightmare.
Nonetheless, I would be lying if I did not say that the practice we call PC has its absurd aspects. It is funny because it puts more weight on the words we use than the actions we take, always a mistake. My son's dormitory at his liberal arts college has a live-in resident of deliberately indeterminate gender who wants to be referred to neither as "he" nor "she" - they are imprisoning patriarchal categories - nor as "it "(that would be an objectifying put-down) but as "they" and " them". This is at least convivial. When he - no, she - no, they - are there, it's always a party.
There is something funny about this undue weight given to words, because we can't be endlessly sensitive and attentive and courteous in every interaction we have in life. People who try end up seeming insipid and exasperating rather than entirely admirable. My own wife, Martha, for instance, who does try to be so in every exchange, is, though much loved, also famous for the length of time it takes her to extricate herself from a social occasion, having first to be certain that she has been nice to everyone. This leads her, perversely, to avoid many social occasions for fear of wearing herself out from attentiveness - the price of such niceness can be very high. Prolonged punctiliousness is exhausting to all, particularly to husbands - er, mates - er, partners - er, co-habitating life colleagues.
But the idea that cultures - recipes or poses or even hats - belong to one group rather than another is something worse than a moment in a comedy of manners - or, rather, it misses the way that a larger comedy of manners has always shaped what we mean by culture. Cultural mixing - the hybridisation of hats, if you like - is the rule of civilisation, not some new intrusion within our own. Healthy civilisations have always been mongrelised, cosmopolitan, hybrid, corrupted and expropriated and mixed. Healthy societies seek out that kind of corruption because they know it is the secret of pleasure. They count their health in the number of imported spices on their shelves.
One of my favourite stories of how healthy cultural hybrids happen involves Japan and the West, though not, in this case, the Mikado. You know those beautiful 19th Century Japanese prints, by Hiroshige or Hokusai or their friends, poetically depicting everyday events, or favourite places, all in charming comic book colour, with Mount Fuji often delicately if secretively included in every view (like a kind of sublime Where's Wally). Those delicate black-edged figures and long almost cartoonish faces, those startling juxtapositions of foreground and distance, that informal and haiku-like lyricism - Japanese prints had, as everybody is taught in class, an enormous influence on French Impressionist art in the middle of the 19th Century. They were, exactly, an exotic appropriation.
Well, it turns out that they weren't really exotic at all. They were the product of the Japanese infatuation with Western perspective drawing and graphics, which had only recently arrived in Japan on ships and boats as part of the Japanese opening to the West. The Japanese artists saw them, and saw expressive possibilities in them that the Western artists were too habituated to the system to notice. The Japanese appropriated Western perspective in ways that Westerners would never have imagined. Then the Japanese pictures got sent back to Europe, where they looked wonderfully exotic, and re-made the Western art they originally hailed from. It's exactly the same process that happened in our own lifetime when Howlin' Wolf and Big Bill Broonzy records sailed over to Liverpool and the suburbs of London and were heard by boys who barely understood their context but loved their attitude. Ten years later you got Mick Jagger and John Lennon. Innocent imitation is always the engine of cultural innovation.
Nor is it just that the borrowings can be beautiful. The things we borrow show us the things we are. Having passed through Chuck Berry, The Beatles and the Stones could better claim their own distinctive Englishness. In the same way, distinctly English food - all those real beers and farmhouse cheddars - has only gotten better because restaurants that served real Italian food helped showed how wonderful a coherent seasonal market-based cuisine could be. If we want to be ourselves, we have to travel - and nowadays, we do much of our travelling internally.
If all you know is your provincial culture, you don't know enough to know if your culture is provincial or not. When it ceases to be, you're not wise enough to recognise it. Appropriation is far more often empowering than oppressing. There's no cheaper way to get the drop on a bad guy than to borrow his hymns and habits and make them your own. That's what diaspora Jews have done throughout their history. It's how German bred with Hebrew to become Yiddish and Yiddish became the great language of Jewish folk tale and protest.
So cultures cannot be corrupted enough, civilizations cannot be appropriated too often. Nor is this only seen in heroic acts of original innovation. It's a nightly act of healthy practice. Last night, for instance, I made a Burmese curry, which combines Indian spices - cumin and turmeric - with the Chinese technique of stir-frying. The ingredients came from our local New York City Greenmarket - and I always mix butter in with the cooking oil, a habit picked up in Paris. The recipe also calls for yogurt, but my wife, of Icelandic extraction, prefers skyr, and it's all put together by me, while I amuse no one but myself by doing my very bad international accents. So it's actually a Jewish-Icelandic-Chinese-Indian-Burmese -French emigre-New York state stir-fry. All in one pot, and five minutes.
That's the norm of cooking. That's the norm of life. Blurring the boundaries of culture is what cooking does. When we do the same thing in ways that last longer than dinner, we call it art. Done often enough, it makes what we call civilisation.
So wear sombreros and kimonos and Mormon underwear beneath, if you so like. Eat Chinese food with Indian spices and French butter and celebrate the range of being human. We are mixed in nature, many in our very essence. We can't help it. To be human is to be hybrid. It is as close to a rule of life as you can ever hope to find.
Original article here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35782855
Monday, November 5, 2012
A Matter Of Great Urgency: The Choice Is CLEAR
"The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s, read a benediction that began with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the segregation-era lamentation of American realities and celebration of American ideals. On that day in Washington—Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009—the blustery chill penetrated every coat, yet the discomfort was no impediment to joy. The police estimated that more than a million and a half people had crowded onto the Mall, making this the largest public gathering in the history of the capital. Very few could see the speakers. It didn’t matter. People had come to be with other people, to mark an unusual thing: a historical event that was elective, not befallen.
Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage.
Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.
At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflict’s price in blood and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.
As if to intensify the sense of crisis, on Inauguration Day the national-security apparatus informed the President-elect that Al Shabaab, a Somali affiliate of the Al Qaeda network, had sent terrorists across the Canadian border and was planning an attack on the Mall, possibly on Obama himself. That danger proved illusory; the others proved to be more onerous than anyone had imagined. The satirical paper The Onion came up with a painfully apt inaugural headline: “BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB.”
Barack Obama began his Presidency devoted to the idea of post-partisanship. His rhetoric, starting with his “Red State, Blue State” Convention speech, in 2004, and his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” was imbued with that idea. Just as in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he had tried to reconcile the disparate pasts of his parents, Obama was determined to bring together warring tribes in Washington and beyond. He extended his hand to everyone from the increasingly radical leadership of the congressional Republicans to the ruling mullahs of the Iranian theocracy. The Republicans, however, showed no greater interest in working with Obama than did the ayatollahs. The Iranian regime went on enriching uranium and crushing its opposition, and the Republicans, led by Dickensian scolds, including the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, committed themselves to a single goal: to engineer the President’s political destruction by defeating his major initiatives. Obama, for his part, did not always prove particularly adept at, or engaged by, the arts of retail persuasion, and his dream of bipartisanship collided with the reality of obstructionism.
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantánamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the reëlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the $787-billion stimulus package—was well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. It reversed the job-loss trend—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6 million private-sector jobs have been created since June, 2009—and helped reset the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s interstate-highway program. From the start, though, Obama recognized that it would reap only modest political gain. “It’s very hard to prove a counterfactual,” he told the journalist Jonathan Alter, “where you say, ‘You know, things really could have been a lot worse.’ ” He was speaking of the bank and auto-industry bailouts, but the problem applies more broadly to the stimulus: harm averted is benefit unseen.
As for systemic reform, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in July, 2010, tightened capital requirements on banks, restricted predatory lending, and, in general, sought to prevent abuses of the sort that led to the crash of 2008. Against the counsel of some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the Obama Administration led the takeover, rescue, and revival of the automobile industry. The Administration transformed the country’s student-aid program, making it cheaper for students and saving the federal government sixty-two billion dollars—more than a third of which was put back into Pell grants. AmeriCorps, the country’s largest public-service program, has been tripled in size.
Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it.
Obama has passed no truly ambitious legislation related to climate change, shying from battle in the face of relentless opposition from congressional Republicans. Yet his environmental record is not as barren as it may seem. The stimulus bill provided for extensive investment in green energy, biofuels, and electric cars. In August, the Administration instituted new fuel-efficiency standards that should nearly double gas mileage; by 2025, new cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon.
President Obama’s commitment to civil rights has gone beyond rhetoric. During his first week in office, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which protects women, minorities, and the disabled against unfair wage discrimination. By ending the military’s ban on the service of those who are openly gay, and by endorsing marriage equality, Obama, more than any previous President, has been a strong advocate of the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. Finally, Obama appointed to the Supreme Court two highly competent women, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the Court’s first Hispanic. Kagan and Sotomayor are skilled and liberal-minded Justices who, abjuring dogmatism, represent a sober and sensible set of jurisprudential values.
In the realm of foreign policy, Obama came into office speaking the language of multilateralism and reconciliation—so much so that the Nobel Peace Prize committee, in an act as patronizing as it was premature, awarded him its laurels, in 2009. Obama was embarrassed by the award and recognized it for what it was: a rebuke to the Bush Administration. Still, the Norwegians were also getting at something more affirmative. Obama’s Cairo speech, that same year, tried to help heal some of the wounds not only of the Iraq War but, more generally, of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Speaking at Al Azhar University, Obama expressed regret that the West had used Muslim countries as pawns in the Cold War game of Risk. He spoke for the rights of women and against torture; he defended the legitimacy of the State of Israel while offering a straightforward assessment of the crucial issue of the Palestinians and their need for statehood, citing the “humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation.”
It was an edifying speech, but Obama was soon instructed in the limits of unilateral good will. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hu Jintao, and other autocrats hardened his spirit. Still, he proved a sophisticated and reliable diplomat and an effective Commander-in-Chief. He kept his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He forbade torture. And he waged a far more forceful campaign against Al Qaeda than Bush had—a campaign that included the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiated—and won Senate approval of—a crucial strategic-arms deal with the Russians, slashing warheads and launchers on both sides and increasing the transparency of mutual inspections. In Afghanistan, he has set a reasonable course in an impossible situation.
The unsettled situations in Egypt and Libya, following the Arab Spring of 2010, make plain that that region’s political trajectory is anything but fixed. Syria shames the world’s inaction and confounds its hopes of decisive intervention. This is where Obama’s respect for complexity is not an indulgence of intellectual vanity but a requirement for effective action. In the case of bin Laden, it was necessary to act alone and at once; in Libya, in concert with the Europeans; in Iran, cautiously but with decisive measures.
One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural élan, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy SEAL Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the country, well.
But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.
There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After running for the Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundred-million-dollar federal bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and, working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since.
In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.
Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical view—further evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican—has been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public life—the Massachusetts health-care law—because its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.
But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that”). The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.
If the keynote of Obama’s Administration has been public investment—whether in infrastructure, education, or health—the keynote of Romney’s candidacy has been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.
Private equity has served Romney well—he is said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a President, but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt—or Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy—Romney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see business success as a sure sign of moral virtue.
The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returns—a refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the tax code’s gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments.
But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre, ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order, to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the thorniest of foreign-policy problems—from Pakistan to Syria—his campaign has offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated faith in “American exceptionalism.”
In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents, and Romney’s adviser in judicial affairs is the embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to believe him.
The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.
The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves."
—The Editors of The New Yorker magazine
from the October 29, 2012 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/
Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage.
Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.
At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflict’s price in blood and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.
As if to intensify the sense of crisis, on Inauguration Day the national-security apparatus informed the President-elect that Al Shabaab, a Somali affiliate of the Al Qaeda network, had sent terrorists across the Canadian border and was planning an attack on the Mall, possibly on Obama himself. That danger proved illusory; the others proved to be more onerous than anyone had imagined. The satirical paper The Onion came up with a painfully apt inaugural headline: “BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB.”
Barack Obama began his Presidency devoted to the idea of post-partisanship. His rhetoric, starting with his “Red State, Blue State” Convention speech, in 2004, and his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” was imbued with that idea. Just as in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he had tried to reconcile the disparate pasts of his parents, Obama was determined to bring together warring tribes in Washington and beyond. He extended his hand to everyone from the increasingly radical leadership of the congressional Republicans to the ruling mullahs of the Iranian theocracy. The Republicans, however, showed no greater interest in working with Obama than did the ayatollahs. The Iranian regime went on enriching uranium and crushing its opposition, and the Republicans, led by Dickensian scolds, including the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, committed themselves to a single goal: to engineer the President’s political destruction by defeating his major initiatives. Obama, for his part, did not always prove particularly adept at, or engaged by, the arts of retail persuasion, and his dream of bipartisanship collided with the reality of obstructionism.
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantánamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the reëlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the $787-billion stimulus package—was well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. It reversed the job-loss trend—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6 million private-sector jobs have been created since June, 2009—and helped reset the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s interstate-highway program. From the start, though, Obama recognized that it would reap only modest political gain. “It’s very hard to prove a counterfactual,” he told the journalist Jonathan Alter, “where you say, ‘You know, things really could have been a lot worse.’ ” He was speaking of the bank and auto-industry bailouts, but the problem applies more broadly to the stimulus: harm averted is benefit unseen.
As for systemic reform, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in July, 2010, tightened capital requirements on banks, restricted predatory lending, and, in general, sought to prevent abuses of the sort that led to the crash of 2008. Against the counsel of some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the Obama Administration led the takeover, rescue, and revival of the automobile industry. The Administration transformed the country’s student-aid program, making it cheaper for students and saving the federal government sixty-two billion dollars—more than a third of which was put back into Pell grants. AmeriCorps, the country’s largest public-service program, has been tripled in size.
Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it.
Obama has passed no truly ambitious legislation related to climate change, shying from battle in the face of relentless opposition from congressional Republicans. Yet his environmental record is not as barren as it may seem. The stimulus bill provided for extensive investment in green energy, biofuels, and electric cars. In August, the Administration instituted new fuel-efficiency standards that should nearly double gas mileage; by 2025, new cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon.
President Obama’s commitment to civil rights has gone beyond rhetoric. During his first week in office, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which protects women, minorities, and the disabled against unfair wage discrimination. By ending the military’s ban on the service of those who are openly gay, and by endorsing marriage equality, Obama, more than any previous President, has been a strong advocate of the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. Finally, Obama appointed to the Supreme Court two highly competent women, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the Court’s first Hispanic. Kagan and Sotomayor are skilled and liberal-minded Justices who, abjuring dogmatism, represent a sober and sensible set of jurisprudential values.
In the realm of foreign policy, Obama came into office speaking the language of multilateralism and reconciliation—so much so that the Nobel Peace Prize committee, in an act as patronizing as it was premature, awarded him its laurels, in 2009. Obama was embarrassed by the award and recognized it for what it was: a rebuke to the Bush Administration. Still, the Norwegians were also getting at something more affirmative. Obama’s Cairo speech, that same year, tried to help heal some of the wounds not only of the Iraq War but, more generally, of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Speaking at Al Azhar University, Obama expressed regret that the West had used Muslim countries as pawns in the Cold War game of Risk. He spoke for the rights of women and against torture; he defended the legitimacy of the State of Israel while offering a straightforward assessment of the crucial issue of the Palestinians and their need for statehood, citing the “humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation.”
It was an edifying speech, but Obama was soon instructed in the limits of unilateral good will. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hu Jintao, and other autocrats hardened his spirit. Still, he proved a sophisticated and reliable diplomat and an effective Commander-in-Chief. He kept his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He forbade torture. And he waged a far more forceful campaign against Al Qaeda than Bush had—a campaign that included the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiated—and won Senate approval of—a crucial strategic-arms deal with the Russians, slashing warheads and launchers on both sides and increasing the transparency of mutual inspections. In Afghanistan, he has set a reasonable course in an impossible situation.
The unsettled situations in Egypt and Libya, following the Arab Spring of 2010, make plain that that region’s political trajectory is anything but fixed. Syria shames the world’s inaction and confounds its hopes of decisive intervention. This is where Obama’s respect for complexity is not an indulgence of intellectual vanity but a requirement for effective action. In the case of bin Laden, it was necessary to act alone and at once; in Libya, in concert with the Europeans; in Iran, cautiously but with decisive measures.
One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural élan, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy SEAL Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the country, well.
But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.
There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After running for the Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundred-million-dollar federal bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and, working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since.
In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.
Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical view—further evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican—has been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public life—the Massachusetts health-care law—because its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.
But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that”). The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.
If the keynote of Obama’s Administration has been public investment—whether in infrastructure, education, or health—the keynote of Romney’s candidacy has been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.
Private equity has served Romney well—he is said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a President, but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt—or Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy—Romney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see business success as a sure sign of moral virtue.
The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returns—a refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the tax code’s gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments.
But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre, ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order, to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the thorniest of foreign-policy problems—from Pakistan to Syria—his campaign has offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated faith in “American exceptionalism.”
In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents, and Romney’s adviser in judicial affairs is the embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to believe him.
The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.
The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves."
—The Editors of The New Yorker magazine
from the October 29, 2012 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/
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