Debating the Campaign

I've been having a very civil debate with my friend Charlie about the Presidential campaign. We are on opposite sides of the partisan and ideological fences, but I respect his opinions, and, most of all, his sense of fairness and his devotion to the truth.

Recently, Charlie sent me the following email. Actually, it was in response to my forwarding him a rather barbed YouTube compilation of John McCain's flip-flops:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c&eurl=http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/

Here's Charlie's reaction:

Ouch. It's interesting that the Kerry goof (I voted for before I voted against) seems to have become an established political ploy. I've seen plenty from both sides, and I think that most people have become fatigued by the same old same old.

I have to admit that I am not a big McCain fan, but as I told you, I don't see any attributes from Obama that indicate he would be a good president. All I know about hiim is that "he is a rock star", "he's beautifully educated", and "he's a great politician". So I decided to vote my pocketbook (lower taxes) and against having all three branches controlled by one party. But basically I didn't like any of the options.

In an earlier email I told you that I thought that McCain's VP pick was an act of genius (not to infer that his pick is the best qualified, only that she is a game breaker). There is an editorial by Peggy Noonan in todays Wall Street Journal that sums up the Palin impact pretty well. There is also an article in last weeks "The Economist" that sums up Obama's problems pretty clearly. But here is my perception as to why the pick was brilliant (unless, of course, Governor Palin turns out to be Jennifer Flowers, which she might). So, if you will forebear it, I will outline what I think has just happened.

What the Democratic leadership did not realize (as evidenced by their disdain and belittling of Ms. Palin) is that for the first time in 40 years, a significant number of good ol' boys, people who went to school at the University of Oklahoma, Boise State or Jefferson State Junior College now have someone on a ticket who is like them. In fact, this probably saved the GOP, because even the Good Ol Boys in the red states have become just as fed up with Republicans in congress as you have. I believe that they have continued to vote Republican only because they don't care much for the perceived snobbishness ("we know what is best for the flyover states because they are just stupid hicks") of the left.

In fact, before Governor Palin neither side liked McCain much. No one takes Biden seriously, with his hair plugs, face lift, diarrhea of the mouth and missteps as head of Defense. Obama comes across as a snob. And all of a sudden, here's this lady that hunts and fishes (professionially!), has 5 kids, loves the Lord and has occasionally kicked some ass. And she has a likable personality (unless her commonness scares the hell out of you). And then, when the bloggers, the media and even Sally Quinn (ultimate Washington insider) dismissed her, or insulted her, or implied that she was trailer trash - which made them look bad! In fact, she may be trailer trash, which will probably give the election to Obama, but the way the Dem machine went after her was so mean spirited that she probably has a pass whatever she has done. And it makes any type of mean spirited email or Soros attack ad just look like more of the same Democrat style. Mean.

to top it off, the Democratic candidate called this person, who 50% of America felt was just like them, "the most extreme candidate in 40 years", immediately branding himself extreme to that 50%.

I think that the extremely poor reaction to Sarah Palin, who is the most "common" (according to the dictionary this means that she is like most people) candidate we've seen in a long time branded the Democrat Party as elite (not common). The other impact from Governor Palin is that now the Republicans looks like the party of the common man, while the Dems look like the party of the professors and movie stars - not common at all. I never would have believed that it could be done. Sarah Palin has told the American population that the Democrats don't think they are smart enough to govern themselves, that only the illiterati knows what is best. The Republicans are sayings - we are you and respect you. That's going to be a tough way to win their votes.

I don't believe that Oprah, Baldwin and Streisand can save this one unless Governor Palin has some serious flaws.

And my response:

This is a very thoughtful analysis, and I can't say I disagree with some of the points you make. I do have to be on guard against my own elitism, and ask myself periodically whether I support Obama purely out of my own hyper-intellectual response to him (and a disdain for hoi polloi, who after all governed Athens in the Golden Age), or whether I truly believe he is what this poor beleaguered republic needs at this historical juncture. I waffle!

Nonetheless, while I will concede that Palin represents the Wal-Mart Nation, and affords a figure that many white Americans, men as well as women, can identify with, she represents to me a real outlier, from an outlier State, where "pork" is part of the political culture, and where the government is a big cash dispensing machine. I simply cannot bring myself to the cynical view that anyone, no matter how humble their experience in affairs of state, can be President. And to compare her with Harry Truman, as I have heard in some quarters, betrays an ignorance of history and of President #33. Unlike Harry, Sarah is totally unqualified.

By the way, we are only just beginning to look at her record on the job in Alaska, and the New Yawk Times just published a piece on their findings: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all

Now, I'm not sure I am a big fan of the Great Bloviator, but a former Morgan colleague of mine, now sadly deceased, was his roommate at U. of Delaware, and attested to his good character. And for me, character carries a lot of weight. I believe Barack Obama, rock star though he may be, is a man of exceptional character. And I am willing to pay somewhat higher personal taxes to get this country back on track.

Let's keep the debate rolling!

On the subject of Harry Truman, Frank Rich, that "cosmopolitan urbanite" from the New Yawk Times, drew attention to the fact that Palin's comments on Harry Truman's "rise" to the the Vice Presidency came from Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing McCarthyite Hearst columnist. Actually, Rich got his lowdown on this from Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal.

But I think in the final analysis this is all distraction. Obama has to keep his focus, and in the last few weeks he has been in real danger of losing it. Let's see what the next few days brings.

Ecuador and Chevron

I just gleaned some interesting insights into the attitude some Americans – at least those associated with Big Oil (and probably Big Extractive Industries generally) – have about the so-called Third World and environmental concerns. This from a recent report of the Episcopal Church New Jersey Diocese "Companion Diocese Committee." It is really quite outrageous, but it reflects the Administration's attitudes toward the rest of the world for the last eight sad years.

Here is what they report:

There is currently a very significant trial going on in the Ecuadorian Amazon against Chevron by groups who have been affected by petroleum contamination. Vanity Fair has a lengthy article about it with excellent information (though not all will appreciate the way that the writer expresses it): http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/texaco200705

 

Regardless of how the trial ends, the fact remains that environmental contamination (such as babies with cancer and cesspools of oil runoff) and societal disintegration (especially within indigenous people groups) are true costs of our petroleum use, much greater than the price-per-gallon.

 

………………..

 

Pablo Fajardo, lawyer representing Ecuadorian Amazonian settlers and indigenous groups: "One of the problems with modern society is that it places more importance on things that have a price than on things that have a value. Breathing clean air, for instance, or having clean water in the rivers, or having legal rights—these are things that don't have a price but have a huge value. Oil does have a price, but its value is much less. And sometimes we make the mistake."

 

Chevron lobbyist: "The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company. We can't let little countries screw around with big companies like this - companies that have made big investments around the world." http://www.newsweek.com/id/149090

 

 

…………….....

 

David Brooks on Leadership

I thought David Brooks was particularly perceptive today. I have felt strongly in recent years the lack of leadership in this country. As Brooks points out, leadership often requires an acknowledgment of one's shortcomings.

The Art of Growing Up

By DAVID BROOKS

In January 1841, Abraham Lincoln seems to have at least vaguely thought of suicide. His friend Joshua Speed found him one day thrashing about in his room. “Lincoln went Crazy,” Speed wrote. “I had to remove razors from his room — take away all Knives and other such dangerous things — it was terrible.”

Lincoln was taking three mercury pills a day, the remedy in those days for people who either suffered from syphilis or feared contracting it. “Lincoln could not eat or sleep,” Daniel Mark Epstein writes in his new book, “The Lincolns.” “He appeared at the statehouse irregularly, hollow-eyed, unshaven, emaciated — an object of pity to his friends and of derision to others.”

Later, Lincoln wrote of that period with shame, saying that he had lost the “gem of my character.” He would withdraw morosely from the world into a sort of catatonic state. Early in his marriage, Epstein writes, “Lincoln had night terrors. He woke in the middle of the night trembling, talking gibberish.”

He would, of course, climb out of it. He would come to terms with his weaknesses, control his passions and achieve what we now call maturity.

The concept of maturity has undergone several mutations over the course of American history. In Lincoln’s day, to achieve maturity was to succeed in the conquest of the self. Human beings were born with sin, infected with dark passions and satanic temptations. The transition to adulthood consisted of achieving mastery over them.

You can read commencement addresses from the 19th and early 20th centuries in which the speakers would talk about the beast within and the need for iron character to subdue it. Schoolhouse readers emphasized self-discipline. The whole character-building model was sin-centric. So the young Lincoln had been encouraged by the culture around him to identify his own flaws — and, in any case, he had no trouble finding them. He knew he was ferociously ambitious and blessed with superior talents — the sort of person who could easily turn into a dictator or monster.

Over the course of his young adulthood, Lincoln built structures around his inner nature. He joined a traditional bourgeois marriage. He called his wife “mother” and lived in a genteel middle-class home. He engaged in feverish bouts of self-improvement, studying Euclid and grammar at all hours. He distrusted passionate politics. In the Lyceum speech that he delivered as a young man, he attacked emotionalism in politics and talked about the need for law, order and cool reason.

This concept of maturity as self-conquest didn’t survive long into the 20th century. Progressive educators emphasized students’ inner goodness and curiosity, not inner depravity. More emphasis was put on individual freedom, authenticity and values clarification. Self-discovery replaced self-mastery as the primary path to maturity, and we got a thousand novels and memoirs about young peoples’ search for identity.

In the last few years, we may be shifting toward another vision of maturity, one that is impatient with boomer narcissism. Young people today put service at the center of young adulthood. A child is served, but maturity means serving others.

And yet, though we’re never going back to the 19th-century, sin-centric character-building model, for breeding leaders, it has its uses. Over the past decades, we’ve seen president after president confident of his own talents but then undone by underappreciated flaws. It’s as if they get elected for their virtues and then get defined in office by the vices — Clinton’s narcissism, Bush’s intellectual insecurity — they’ve never really faced.

It would be nice to have a president who had gone to school on his own failings. It would be comforting to see a president who’d looked into the abyss, or suffered some sort of ordeal that put him on a first-name basis with his own gravest weaknesses, and who had found ways to combat them.

Obviously, it’s not fair to compare anybody to Lincoln, but he does illustrate the repertoire of skills we look for in a leader. The central illusion of modern politics is that if only people as virtuous as “us” had power, then things would be better. Candidates get elected by telling people what they want to hear, leading them by using the sugar of their own fantasies.

Somehow a leader conversant with his own failings wouldn’t be as affected by the moral self-approval that afflicts most political movements. He’d be detached from his most fervid followers and merciful and understanding toward foes. He’d have a sense of his own smallness in the sweep of events. He or she would contravene Lord Acton’s dictum and grow sadder and wiser with more power.

All this suggests a maxim for us voters: Don’t only look to see which candidate has the most talent. Look for the one most emotionally gripped by his own failings.

Eric Hoffer

George Packer, in The Fall of Conservatism, reminds us of the great wisdom of ex-longshoreman Eric Hoffer, who said:

"Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation."

Ice Cream Cones

Leon Kass was chairman of George W's Council on Bioethics from 2002-2005. Recently an NPR broadcast made reference to a report of Dr. Kass in which he took issue with the civility of eating ice cream cones. Somehow, I found this shockingly trivial in the face of the uncivilized behavior we have had to endure under the Bush Regime, and it set me off to find the quote. I was surprised to learn that it appeared in a publication of Dr. Kass dating from 1999, and had been originally picked up on Classicalvalues.com in July 2003.

Dr. Kass is described in Wikipedia as vigorously opposed to progress in the fields of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research, and finds wisdom in the Book of Genesis. Kass makes the claim that reason or science cannot provide "moral and political standards sufficient for governing civic life and of guiding the proper use of power and technique." Kass expresses a strong belief that the potential of biological science is limited and will never provide answers to certain questions. 

This has apparently not stood in the way of Dr. Kass expressing his strongly held views on the ingestion of ice cream, so I thought it was worth repeating his cone pronouncement. 

"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.
I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior." – Kass, Leon: The Hungry Soul at 148-149. (University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999)

All this being said, he could have spent a little more time considering the ethics of enhanced interrogation techniques or invasions of privacy in the name of the so-called "War on Terror," which has had the perverse effect of terrorizing this observer.

Bert and Ernie

Has this thing gone to far?

Hillary Deathwatch

Just to give Slate some more web time.