In my last blog, I expressed a number of concerns regarding the soon to be signed stimulus bill. It tried to do too much, i.e.; it was muddled with too many parts not directly related to stimulus. And, it didn't do enough, i.e.; Obama's failure to frame it within an overarching vision. A clear, decisive vision that said to our nation, hey, I have a long range plan here. We're not simply going deeper into debt.I haven't heard those signals, not to my satisfaction, but I know, I know. You cannot make all of the people happy all of the time, and there's no way all of us were going to be in agreement on every part of this baby. I even found myself siding with the Republicans on a couple of points, but let's not be confused. I am unshakably in support of President Obama. He has all my heartfelt hopes. Here's a quote from FDR in confronting the Great Depression.

 

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all else, try something.

 

So, to turn a phrase, what a difference an administration makes. At least Obama is doing something. And it is a mark of not only his considerable skills but of his significant political capital, that he got something so monumental passed in so little time.

 

More so, barely three weeks into his presidency and I have already been provided with ample opportunities to be proud of the man. One was when he stepped up to the plate over the Daschle issue. "I screwed up." How refreshing was that? And his shrewd decision to do an interview with Al-Arabiya, addressing a need for olive branches that was part of my personal shot at an inaugural addresses a few blogs back. To take a trip in the way back machine, at the time of 9/11, we had maybe five thousand Muslims who were pissed off enough at us to fly a plane into one of our buildings. Bush tragically turned two billion Muslims against us. Now, in one deft stroke, Obama has gotten us back to facing a relative small handful of religious zealots.

 

Another moment, which made my heart swell, came Tuesday afternoon in Florida, and here I will prove myself a sentimentalist, but if anyone saw Henrietta Hughes and was not moved to get a little something in their eye, you never had childhood. Or a mother who loved you. You were probably raised by crocodiles.

 

Visions of my own hard-pressed mother came to mind, God rest her soul. To hear Henrietta's quivering voice, "...I'm so thankful for ya. I'm praying for ya everyday," all the other meek and struggling souls who now find themselves staring down the gun sights of personal ruin came to mind. And watching Obama moved by that woman's heartfelt plea, enough so that he was compelled to go over and give her a hug, well, we were all witness to the beginnings of a profound and long awaited healing process in this country.

 

Holy Jesus, someone cares. And just maybe we're all in this together.

 

Of course, in reading an article the next day in that Ft. Myer's online rag, news-press.com, and the subsequent comments made by some of its bloggers, you'd think the offer of a home to Henrietta by the wife of State Representative Nick Thompson was just another handout to those who didn't need or deserve one. The despicable comments made about Henrietta "looking as if she eats well enough" were a reminder that, no matter how uplifted I might feel by the change of tone in this land, there are some hardened and embittered souls who will never view this revived spirit of compassion in our country as anything but another sham.

 

In response, I hearken back to my first anthropology primer in college, struck at that time by evidence then being gleaned from bone remains found in prehistoric caves. Bones that showed signs of severe trauma, trauma that would have completely debilitated an individual and probably led to death, had not those bones been given a chance to heal, a fact suggesting that a tribe had cared for the weakest among their members, in what was surely one of the very first acts of our humanity. When Obama hugged Henrietta Hughes on Tuesday afternoon, and when he promptly instructed his staff to talk with her after the meeting, he was reaffirming a fundamental bedrock of our species. Perhaps we cannot fix every little bit of human suffering in this country today, or in this world, but by God, we can try. When we hear about it, we can at least try. And we can take every little opportunity in our own lives to reaffirm the oft ignored spirit from which we derive. We can show in the face of any hardship, we are truly a worldwide tribe that works together.

 

The bedrock of a healthy democracy remains dissent and a vigorous level of national debate, and I simply take issue with some of the decisions Obama has made, but I am indeed nibbling around the edges. The truth is, a great sense of peace came over me last January 20^th,, and it only grows with the passing of time. At last, I think every morning upon arising. At long last we are headed in the right direction. My heart swells up to such a point, I'm even ready to hug a Republican.

 

Well, it's done and President Obama's stimulus package is finally a fait accompli, but in its current form, I'm none too happy about it. Yes, there's talk about coming back to take another bite at this apple soon enough, so some or all of my concerns may be rendered moot, but the fine print on this thing leaves something to be desired, at least in my estimation. For one, I think the infrastructure aspect of it is far too meager. I also believe a we choose to put a man on the moon in this decade sort of speech was in order. And in keeping with that, I think the President has failed to frame his goals within an overarching vision, one that says, as part of our long range economic goals, we intend to get this country out of debt. It took us twenty years to create this untenable debt burden, beginning ironically enough when Reagan cooked up his'86 Bush-like tax boondoggle for the rich. It is not unreasonable to think our society could extricate itself from this mess in a similar amount of time. It is unthinkable to me that we wouldn't try. It is unforgiveable that the rich wouldn't be willing to pay their fair share. Lopping the highest tax rate from 70% to 35% is about all you need to know about the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer over the last twenty years.

 

Back to the stimulus package, I would like to address my reasoning about the infrastructure issue first off. In 1991, the last time our economy tanked on this devastating level, I was forced through hard times to relocate from LA to Seattle. Everything in my life had fallen to pieces. I had lost two homes and arrived in Seattle the day before Halloween, only to be greeted by an eighty mile an hour wind storm. As I waited for the roof of my final piece of property to spin off into the Puget Sound, I thought, maybe I should have planned this out a little better. You know, show up in the spring, when the weather and general conditions are a bit more welcoming? Given the economic devastation I had just experienced in California, it seemed like a lousy idea to be pulling into town with winter bearing down. However, I soon learned the state of Washington had invested $4 billion dollars in an infrastructure stimulus plan and the effect on the state was nothing short of miraculous. Everywhere you went, there were huge public works in progress, bridges going up, water works, that sort of thing. The city of Seattle was a beehive of activity. In contrast, when I went down south for the holidays the following year, it was like a neutron bomb had gone off. An entire region seemed to have been abandoned. What people were left walking around had fear in their eyes.

 

To put the 1992 Washington state stimulus plan into perspective, it equated to roughly two thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the state. Extrapolate those figures onto a national level and we're talking $650 billion dollars for infrastructure alone. Oddly enough, I heard Paul Krugman making a point along these very lines on a talking head show a few weeks back, asserting that there were no magical powers ascribed to wars for ending depressions. Roosevelt could have easily ended the Great Depression before World War II. It was all a matter of scope and will. Once the federal government felt compelled to invest sufficient funds, the Great Depression disappeared. When queried how much Krugman thought was necessary in the present case for an infrastructure investment alone, he suggested somewhere between $600 and $800 billion. My point exactly.

 

Unfortunately, to my way of thinking, President Obama and his team have muddied the water by lumping together what are now those famous "shovel ready" infrastructure projects with a plethora of other budgetary concerns, opening their flank up to what would otherwise be shameless Republican archery fire. Consider the Republican's facing a straight $600, $700 billion infrastructure package, with a plan to build bridges, roads, schools and hospitals. It would have put the right wing's feet to the fire and forced them to show their true colors. Instead, Obama has given them a chance to frame his stimulus plan as just one more ho hum pork barrel bill, and the polls tell the story. The President remains enormously popular. His bill is not.

 

Again, part of the problem in my estimation is that President Obama has surrounded himself with men and women whose minds were baked in the same academic mold, in fact some of very Wall Street people who helped get us into this mess in the first place. No one doubts their smarts, but it would seem they are incapable of understanding the mindset of the average Joe and Jane on the street. Simply put, we're never going to fix this mess on paper. As I witnessed in Washington back in the early nineties, when people see public works going up everywhere, when they see the unemployed going to work on a massive scale, a sense of confidence sets in. They go ahead with that home remodel. They buy the new car. They buy the new washer and dryer. That was the difference between Washington and California during that period, and it was stark.

 

Fast forward to today. People are scared again, and they will not cut loose with their money as long as the fear of everything going south remains. And a $500 rebate check is not going to unlock those apprehensions. We need millions and millions of jobs, on a WPA scale, creating a sense in people's minds that everything's going to be okay. Of course, as Secretary Geithner so aptly pointed out in his news conference on Tuesday, the banks and lending institutions in general must be addressed, and the mortgage meltdown has to be a part of any long term strategy. I only wish Obama had made this first bite strictly about infrastructure investment. I think it would have been a much cleaner bill.

 

With all that said, I feel the greatest missed opportunity here is a failure to frame this enormous government expenditure within a broader vision. Where are we going with all this, President Obama, I want to ask? How about saying loud and clear, we're going to use this challenge to turn America green in ten years. According to all reliable scientific data, we have roughly that long before the entire world goes over a precipice. Again, this willingness to spend trillions of dollars is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and what better time to marshal our public will towards that end. This is no time to be nibbling around the edges. A great era of technological ingenuity is before us, which lends itself to a once in a lifetime opportunity to rebuild our manufacturing base, which lends itself to providing a viable framework from which to get this country out of debt. It seems to me it's President Obama's responsibility to stir the public's imagination and support on this sort of sweeping level. Rather than allowing this issue to be debated over condoms and sex education, rather than confronting the monumental problems our nation faces piecemeal, rather than erring on the side of caution, I, for one, want Obama to use this opportunity to galvanize our nation as Roosevelt did at the start of World War II. In that instance, the government had Detroit churning out tanks within three months. Why can't we have Detroit churning out 100 MPG vehicles within a year. It seems to me, once we frame the debate in these terms, the Republicans will be left to pitch in, shut up or eat their young.

I have long defined my generation as those old enough to recall exactly where they were and how they felt the day President Kennedy was assassinated, yet young enough to be swept up in Beatles' mania when they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show a few months later. Consider; that someone born five years later than me would have had a coloring book in their hands in that hour. Five years earlier, like my two older brothers, and you had weaned yourself on Beatniks, Summertime Blues and Jailhouse Rock. A very narrow band of time defined my precise generation. We came of age during the coffee-house/folk music idealism of the early sixties. I had early Dylan records in my LP collection, Peter, Paul & Mary. When Kennedy said in his 1961 inaugural speech, 'the torch has been passed to a new generation' and 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country' the hearts and minds of my generation were swept away by that call to national service. We were going to change the world. We felt quite certain of it. Peace and love were our guiding lights. Nothing could let us down.

 

The rest is history, as they say.

 

What seems utterly remarkable to me in this momentous hour is not only the way in which a whole new generation has been swept up by Barack Obama and his grace, but how the long dormant idealism of my own generation has been reawakened from its long slumber. I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon giving my time and energy to a food bank for the homeless, and minute after minute, another car would pull up, laden down by another load of canned food, dry goods and old clothes. The age of these people ranged from twenty-something all the way up to their seventies. Some had taken the time in the course of a busy day to drive ten, fifteen miles in order to say, hey, I am a part of this movement. Across the generations, people had heard Obama's call to service and had gathered themselves up to the task. It speaks to how undying that spark of goodness is in our hearts. Suppressed, trampled upon and seemingly extinguished over the last eight years, a feeling of hope and expectation has been reignited, like someone had placed a spark in the dry brush around my Southern California home.

 

Well, enough from me. It is time to let the pageantry of history takes its course. Like Vin Scully announcing a good ball game, silence says more than anything when someone has hit a winning home run. I can only wish Barack Obama the very best in this hour. If we all roll up our sleeves and chip in a bit of our time to help out going forward, it will be a much different, and a far better world four years hence.

 

Well, one more thing. Hallelujah. Our long national nightmare is finally over...

Members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow Americans, and let us not forget at this hour, our fellow citizens of this Earth...we stand here today, not only at a crossroads for our nation, but at a crossroads along the journey of mankind. For far too long, war has been upon the land. Economic hardship confronts us everywhere and rancor of the most destructive sort has risen up between people of differing faiths. The very future of our planet appears to be in peril. Whatever frail dreams of peace we yet retain now hang precariously in the balance. Only the foolish or the hardest of heart can look upon the world today and think we have much time remaining to dally or to spare.

 

Yet I believe as I stand before you today, that what confronts us is a singular opportunity, a turning point in the history of mankind, where the specter of unspeakable self-destruction now gathers our collective strengths towards common good. It is that or we may well perish from the face of the earth. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once told this nation, in another hour of seemingly insurmountable crisis, 'There is nothing to fear but fear itself'. We now restate and fulfill that declaration of courage, not only for the sake of this nation, but for the hearts of people everywhere, who listen with faint hope to this clarion call. There is no folly which cannot be undone, no wrong which cannot be made right, no joyful destiny beyond the reach of our most cherished dreams. Whatever challenges that stand before us today, we have the strength and determination to overcome them, if only we decide to face them hand in hand. So again I assert here today. The time is long past for us to confront these challenges in isolation. They can no longer be overcome by one nation alone. It is time for the entire world to work together and in concert as one.

 

From the first mariners who sailed the Seven Seas, to the swiftness of telegraphs and telephones, to the great distances erased by railways and airplanes, to the incredible speed of today's satellites and Internet connections, a once vast world of distant lands has been increasingly rendered into common neighborhoods. No longer are there any dark corners on this earth in which vile deeds and acts of aggression can be hidden from the light of day. What each of us does today can be made known instantly, to everyone everywhere. When rape and pillaging takes place in Darfur, and children are left to starve beneath the relentless sun, the hearts of all good people must suffer along with them. When tanks overrun helpless villagers in Georgia, and those images are flashed instantly across every television and computer screen in the world, humanity must rise up in collective outrage and indignation. When any sovereign nation invades another, even with the most well-intentioned purpose in mind, people from Berlin to Moscow to Islamabad will naturally rise up in protest over what has been done. No nation can hope to take comfort in its greatest glory, without also taking stock of its greatest folly.

 

Therefore we say in this hour, and upon this stage, and at this turning point in the history of mankind, and not out of weakness, but with the true courage stemming from humility before God and all people, my fellow citizens of this Earth, we ask for your forgiveness and understanding. We Americans are far from a perfect people. We have made our share of mistakes, and failing to acknowledge them has only undermined the destiny we were given to play in this world. The true legacy of enduring democracy is a free, enquiring and critical spirit, so let us welcome constructive criticism, from anywhere and anyone across the globe. Let us strive to make friends of our enemies, and not new enemies of our old and cherished friends. If all of us can set aside the pretense of righteousness, then differing opinions need never be wrong. And joined together in this manner, we might achieve our common goal, that of peace on earth, without which we cannot hope to confront and overcome the other and innumerable challenges now facing us.

 

For those who abhor peace and still resist this inexorable vision, let us be clear, you are the few and not the many. You are the past and not mankind's destiny and will find yourselves increasingly ostracized as the world comes together as one. There are those, too, who will resist this very candor of admitting our nation's flaws, but arrogance cannot be our guide as we travel forward. For only through shared humility can we hope to achieve our manifest goal. We do not expect perfection of other nations, anymore than you can expect perfection from us, but let America reclaim its rightful place as a beacon of liberty and hope to the rest of the world. Of the people, for the people and by the people was not uttered as a quaint abstraction, to be discussed by men wearing powdered wigs and in comfortable parlors. It was a cry arising from millenniums of tyranny and oppression on this earth, a declaration meant to stamp out that very tyranny, a declaration we are only now beginning to fulfill in its fullest measure in this hour.

 

The world may not long remember what we have said here, but it will never forget the course we as human beings take from this day in time going forward. For either we commit ourselves to living in peace, or accept war to be the dominion of this world. Either we unite as one people to heal the wounds upon the earth, or watch as that very earth grows no longer able to sustain us. From the Inuits eking out their ancient existence along the Arctic Sea, to the street merchant in Baghdad, to the farmer growing corn in Iowa, peace will mean nothing if we no longer have the good earth upon which to depend. We may stand at the brink of disaster, but let us vow to do everything we can. A whole new way of envisioning our lives may be necessary, but if our dreams of a more perfect union, and a more perfect world are to be translated from words into deeds, we must roll up our sleeves and proceed from here with collective courage, a sense of brotherhood and in enduring good cheer. In the weeks and months to come, let us rededicate ourselves to fulfilling this pledge. In place of anger and pettiness, let us make a little gesture of kindness each day, and especially to those we don't yet know or understand. In place of indifference, let us make some effort to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Yes we can. Those words have brought us forward to this day. Yes we will. Those words now travel forward with us towards our uncertain future. Tomorrow, let us return to this place and be able to say, through love and collective effort, and in peaceful satisfaction, yes we did, yes we did. Together, yes we can.

 

Thank you and may God bless everyone, everywhere, on the face of the Earth.

Barack Obama had displayed boundless grace and composure in winning the presidency, but the gravity he conveyed in his acceptance speech last night for me outdid all that came before it. It was indeed no time to gloat. Darkness has been upon the face of this earth. Our lives and the lives of any future generations lie in the balance and Barack set the perfect tone at this historic moment. How uplifting, how appropriate that as Barack reminded us our work has only begun, tears of joy filled the eyes of those in the crowd. How we have longed to be in this moment, where the crisis we are in and the recognition that we are in a crisis have all coalesced around a leader and our own willingness to do something about it.

 

For those of us who were sitting around our bedrooms in the early sixties, playing Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary albums, drunk with our coffee house idealism and certain that The Times, They Were A Changin', certain that the great tides of history had washed us up upon the shores of a better world, it is sobering to look back at our battlefield littered with lost dreams and wasted opportunities. Forty years. Not since Bobby Kennedy gave hope to our hearts in '68 has this measure of optimism and expectation been in the air. Not since those days have tears of joy been shed by the eager souls of this nation.

 

In deference of those on the right, there are no doubt many in their ranks who felt a great sense of victory and elation when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, but I dare say their elation was purely about victory, not about hope. It was about a nation in retrenchment and shameful over its defeat in the Vietnam War, rising up to reclaim some elusive and long lost glory. It was about nationalism and pride. It was about us versus them. It was about reliving the past, not about embracing mankind's true and evolving destiny.

 

Even for that Camelot dream a nation felt during the thousand days of John F. Kennedy's presidency, his election at the time was never viewed as an historic turning point in American politics. No one felt that we were destined to change the face of the world right then. There were no bloodied battlefields and distant wars. There was little sense of our impending environmental crisis. Setting aside the Cold War, Kennedy was elected at a rather complacent time in American politics. America was basically tired of a President who spent most of his time playing golf. But certainly we felt it eight years later. By 1968, the future of the world seemed to be in the balance.

 

For those who have endured the last eight years of George W. Bush's Presidency, but were not alive or aware in 1968, try to imagine going from the magic of Bobby Kennedy to Richard Nixon taking over the White House. Our dearest hopes were gunned down like a mob hit and we have endured every insult since, from McCarthy being shut out of the '68 convention, to the disaster of McGovern landslide loss to Gary Hart getting caught with his pants down in a speed boat to Dukakis with the helmet in the tank to the infamy of Gore 2000 and Kerry's ineptitude four years later, watching as every frail dream dissipated into the piss pot of American political cynicism. You think finally, oh hell, what's the point in trying. The world always turns to shit in the end.

 

So, how remarkable to see all those faces filled with tears of gladness in the streets of cities all over this country last night. There are those who are no doubt miserable today, but for me it is sweet. It took forty years, but the dream of a better world my generation once envisioned was fulfilled anew last night. And at the same time, America has made one giant leap towards Abraham Lincoln's more perfect union. It does seem that if you wait long enough, hope will always triumphs in the end. The world rejoices to see what we have done. We are a beacon of democracy to the rest of the world once again.

First off, allow me to congratulate the Republicans on their splashy “Hollywood” production last night. With Old Glory waving, and not one Greek Styrofoam column in sight, they thoroughly convinced me of Sarah Palin’s preparedness, at least on this score. From day one of a McCain administration, Sarah Palin will be ready to read from a teleprompter. Of what else I was to learn from her cynical speech last night, I remain unaware. That she can be snarkey and snide? Has there ever been doubt regarding that truth when it comes to the Republicans of our generation?

You know, it has always been part of the American myth to have our hero characters appear out the backwoods in whole cloth. Abe Lincoln splitting rails comes to mind, Paul Bunyan, Andrew Jackson as the unsullied defender of everyday folks. And now we have Sarah Palin appearing suddenly on the American political scene as if made from angelic robes and Lenscrafter glasses. Why, think of it. Just last week she was busy ‘raslin’ beaaars up in Skagit and locking up all those no good frontier rapscallions.

It brings to mind Christopher Lasch’s foreword to the ’73 edition of The American Political Tradition, where he addresses the progressive interpretation of American history popular at the time Hofstadter’s groundbreaking tome first appeared in print. As Lasch put it, a resurgent American cultural chauvinism had taken hold in American letters, a tiresome celebration of the American past, and quotes Hofstadter saying how this had helped bring into being a “literature of hero-worship and national self-congratulation.”

I am well aware of these delusionary notions about our founding fathers. I grew up having them spoon fed to me and have watched the Republican Party pawn off to the same myopic American mythology to public over the past thirty years, until I begin to feel like one of those hapless characters in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Always the flag waving with those folks, this longing to return to a once unsullied American past. It’s George Washington cutting down the cheery tree and Abe Lincoln splitting rails, and more recently, Ronald Reagan riding in on a white horse of conservative principles. Never mind that Reagan was once the head of the Actor’s Guild Union and one hair’s breadth removed from being a member of the Communist Party.

So it is with Sarah Palin. When she tells us adoringly of her sons and nephews going off to war, and speaks of that extra prayer she says for them every night, and gushes warmly about her three daughters, and notes how husband Todd is a lifelong commercial fisherman and a production operator in the oil fields of Alaska's North Slope and a proud member of the United Steel Workers' Union, just an everyday kind of guy, she conveniently leaves out Todd’s roughly decade long stint in Alaskan Independence Party  or her own fling with secession, or that when you peel away her cheap family veneer and their purported Christian values, Sarah Palin and the whole lot of them start to sound more like Desperate Housewives meets Northern Exposure than anything else.

Why is it, I wonder, that Republicans feel forever bound to disparage Democratic principles today, only to idolize one of our members who’s no longer around to defend himself? It wasn’t enough that Sarah Palin hearkened to the memory of her parents growing up in a small Missouri town, and how they had both worked at the local elementary school and how proud she was to be their daughter. No, that had to be a tie-in to a young farmer and habber-dasher from Missouri named Harry Truman, who happened to follow his own unlikely path from a small town to the vice presidency.

Well, to paraphrase the famous words of Lloyd Benson, you’re no Harry Truman, Sarah, and you can bet there was no love lost between our dear Harry and your beloved Republican Party. In case you have any doubts on that score, here’s a direct quote from his acceptance speech in 1948.

“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it — don't forget that! We will do that because they are wrong and we are right, and I will prove it to you in just a few minutes.”

Yes, Sarah, we’ve all heard how you’re just an average hockey mom, who signed up for the PTA because she wanted to make her kids' public education better, but your claims about running for city council and the mayor’s office and eventually for governor without any thought of focus groups and voter profiles just doesn’t wash. As noted recently online, in your campaign for mayor of Wasilla, you were found to be a “highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.” Yep, by dragging in the state GOP and bringing “big-time politics into a small-town local race" your career as a politician in Alaska got off a lot more like that “pit bull with lipstick” you described in your acceptance speech last night than your friendly community organizer. Even Vicki Naegele, the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, and a person who shared your Christian faith found your methods contemptible. As she recalled, the average friendly small-town race, "turned into something much different…" "I just thought,” Naegele said, “…she should concentrate on roads, not abortion."

And speaking of community organizers, they may not have actual responsibilities, as you suggest, but they do know the duties of a vice-president without asking, and I know one who’s not known for calling people dumbass behind their backs.

Yes, it all sounds very noble, this portrait you create of yourself not being a member of the permanent political establishment, and how you’ll head to Washington to serve the people of this country, not just mingle with the right people and to seek their good opinion. I heard your pledge to continue the same spirit you brought to the governor's office, where you took on the old politics as usual in Juneau and you stood up to the special interests, the lobbyists, big oil companies, and the good-ol' boys network. But in truth, your politics were just the same old game of clashing parties and competing interests. The integrity, good will, clear convictions you swore to uphold went right out the window when someone got in your way.

No, Sarah, there just wasn’t much of anything truthful in that venom you attempted to disguise with a smile last night. You spoke of your willingness to drill anywhere to get that oil, but dismissed your rival as an impediment to energy independence for our nation, when in fact Barack Obama stood up early with his support for a natural gas pipeline in your state, and when in fact you praised him for it. You said Barack Obama had never reached across the aisle and had not sponsored one piece of important legislation, when a simple Google of his legislative career would have proven you a liar.

To paraphrase your own invective, Sarah, you could give an entire speech about wars, and never use the word "humility". In fact, when the cloud of your rhetoric has passed, and the roar of the crowd fades away, and the stadium lights go out, and that Nazi like symbolism of flags waving behind your head is hauled back to some Third Reich studio lot, what exactly is your plan for this country’s future? You didn’t tell us one thing about what YOU plan to do to turn back the waters and heal the planet?

All we know for certain is this. While you’d like to make government smaller, you will without fail make the coffers of your fat cat donors bigger. You will raise the taxes on the poorest of us and lower the taxes on the rich. You will tell us victory in Iraq is finally in sight but never fail to leave the average American cowering in fear. You will make American weaker abroad by dismissing the importance of observing the constitutional rights of others around the world.

Yes, you are absolutely right, Sarah. There are those candidates who will change anything about their beliefs in order to get elected. Who will one day call the religious right “agents of intolerance” then go back and lick their boots the next year. Who will acknowledge the obscenity of giving the wealthiest people in this country a tax break in times of war and then come back and say it’s a great idea. As you so aptly said, there are those who will use their careers to promote change and those who put politics in front of leadership. There are those who have done great things, who are capable of great things and those who are simply in the hands of lobbyists and special interests.

It’s true that John McCain was once a man who did not run with the Washington herd, but that man is nowhere to be found today. He is a man who, unfortunately, lost his gift of "personal discovery" on his way to the American presidency.

The fact is, Sarah, in the cynical house of mirrors that is the Republican talking point machine, you and your minions have made a man’s ability to inspire others a liability. You have made hope an unwanted orphan. You have narrowed the criteria of worthy experience in life to only those who have so-called “executive experience”, thereby relegating to the trash bin half the men who have presided in the Oval Office.

Hey, come to think of it, in attempting to find some way, any way, to diminish the value of your Barack Obama’s life experience, you have left your own ticket open to an unthinkable charge. As the only with “executive experience” in this Presidential race, you’re more qualified than your own running mate.

Last night on the News Hour, and citing unnamed sources close to the McCain campaign, Mark Shields laid out this scenario for how the Palin nomination actually came down. It was Lieberman who was McCain’s first pick for Veep all along, but when the powers that be within the Republican Party learned McCain was actually daring to take that direction, he was told straight off. That’s not going to fly with us. So, ever the supposed maverick, McCain basically says, yeah? I can’t have Lieberman? Well try this one on for size.

 

Don't know if that's true or not, but one can rightfully ask, where was the maverick in McCain’s decision? Why didn’t he tell the party bosses to go ahead and shove it? Pick Lieberman like he wanted, or even Tom Ridge, a Republican with whom McCain is presumably cozy bedfellows? As with McCain’s pandering to the late Jerry Falwell, or his flip flop on the Bush tax cuts, wasn’t this Palin nomination one more display of a man who has no political courage? At the least it was some sort of Rovian ploy. After all, it’s certainly kept the Obama experience issue in play. That’s all you hear from the right wing anymore. You’re questioning Palin’s experience? Well, she’s got more executive experience than Barack Obama.

 

Still, the Palin choice is a gift that just keeps on giving…and giving…and giving. You got Troopergate, Preachergate, Bridgegate, Secessiongate, and lest we forget, Babygate in the oven. I love it. Don’t you? In the famous words of Lewis Carroll, things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser. Where will it stop? Who knows. I saw the betting line on recall was 18% this morning. It’s going to be hour by hour before the week is through.

 

But lost in all the kerfuffle, I suppose, is the question of what’s actually germane to our public discourse. Obama tells all his supporters on Monday. Just back off. Babygate is a private family matter, and under most circumstances I would tend to agree. Let’s take the high road. Certainly all the right wing pundits would gleefully go along. Yet a broader issue is at stake here that I suggest undercuts any attempt to dismiss this pregnancy out of hand.

 

Take Barack Obama’s genesis as an example. He was born out of wedlock to a white mother and African father, but as everyone generally agrees, a woman being pregnant out of wedlock is nobody’s business but her own. Also consider Barack Obama’s association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Rightly or wrongly, if Obama had ever espoused the same sort political views of America, he’d have been damned for saying it long ago. But apparently enough of the public could see through that ruse and decided it was not fair to hold a person accountable simply for sitting in the pews.

 

Conversely, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she not only embraces her personal pastor’s end of the world revelations, but has taken to the pulpit and espoused virtually the same apocalyptic visions. And just as the Republican Party has preached to us endlessly on the matter of moral issues, laying themselves open to public scrutiny on the subject of moral rectitude, Ms. Palin’s intolerance on personal morality has laid her and her family open to a public scrubbing. When the seemingly placid façade of Sarah Palin’s home life is peeled back and we find it more resembles Desperate Housewives than Ozzie and Harriet, we have a right to inquire more thoroughly. This isn’t a matter of sleaze. This is a matter of holding people accountable to their own standards. And it that’s not possible, we can rightfully ask them to shut up.

 

So, the cry comes from all quarters to leave Bristol Palin alone. Her pregnancy is a personal family matter. Okay. I find that to be admirable, and even appropriate as a political standard. Your teenage daughter got knocked up out of wedlock and you want to keep it from the public domain? You want to railroad this unfortunate young father into a shotgun marriage? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. It’s no one’s business but your own.

 

Conversely, Ms. Palin, I’ll assume you to apply that standard to all and every private decision. A woman gets pregnant and decides she wants an abortion? Don’t come around telling us a woman’s right to choose is any of your business. If one personal trial and tribulation warrants privacy, so does the other. And if you don’t agree, then don’t be surprised to see us go for the juggler on you. After all, we’re being gracious enough as a political body to allow you to set the standard. Now please obey your own rules.

You have to give John McCain credit. He won the news cycle on Friday. Unfortunately, he royally shot himself in the foot while doing it. There went the mother of all political trump cards. The so-called “experience” factor, which for the past two months he has never tired of reminding us.

It has been oft said that the choice of a vice-president is the first presidential decision each candidate will make, and I’m not even going to bother with links and footnotes here. Everyone already knows the story about Palin. McCain met her once. He subsequently spoke to her once on the phone, then made his choice. What does this say about McCain, that he was willing to put this relative novice one heartbeat away from the presidency? I am reminded of Bush’s early comment about Putin. He looked into the man's eyes and could see the man's soul. Well, the ability of John McCain to look into the soul of Sarah Palin has the same incredulous quality about it.

Just as a mind experiment, imagine Sarah Palin to be a man instead, but with the same lack of knowledge in  international affairs. Wouldn’t there be fireworks then? This may not represent the very first case of reverse discrimination in politics but it sure rates right up there. A guy could feel slighted. All women should, to have this sort of patronizing bone thrown in their direction.

But more on all that later…

I had been purposely sitting back this past week, allowing events at the Democratic convention to play themselves out and thinking it was probably best to hold my tongue. There were already enough talking heads picking at the “as yet to be born” carcass. The Clintons were sure to make mischief. That seemed to be the primary refrain, followed closely by is Obama ever going to punch back?

Of course, once the convention actually got under way, the ensuing laments were all too predictable. The whole thing was dull, uninspired. Where were all the balloons and waving flags for God’s sake? And as if to have their cake and eat it too, the pundits couldn’t help but note how the entire affair was short on substance.

Well, lo and behold, though the many hours of speechifying were indeed plodding at times, the seeming chaos slowly progressed towards a measured and well thought out crescendo. From the down to earth chutzpah of Montana’s Governor Schweitzer to the roar of elder statesmen Al Gore, from Hillary hitting it out of the park to former President Clinton’s ringing endorsement, you couldn’t have scripted a more thorough healing of the rift within the Democratic Party, or a more thorough staging for Barack Obama’s speech on Thursday night. And finally, there was Barack, standing astride the world’s stage, the fulfillment of the Martin Luther King’s “promised land” unfolding before our eyes, that more perfect union to which Abraham Lincoln had alluded finally coming to pass. I must confess, I got a little something in my eye.

In all that stunning imagery and historic pageantry, it was all too possible to overlook the most compelling aspect of Obama’s speech. That for the past several months, as the right wing droned on and on about his lack of experience, and everyone on the left wrung their hands over Barack’s unwillingness to fight back, he had been patiently waiting, knowing full well a dramatic moment  awaited him wherein to answer those attacks in an imcomparable fashion.

I marveled and thought. Now, isn’t that the sort of long range strategic thinking we’re looking for in a President?

To those in the center, and even those on the right, I would say, weigh Obama’s measured demeanor against McCain’s desperate Hail Mary in picking Sarah Palin for a running mate. In a sad attempt to shake up a moribund campaign and steal the fire from the Democrats’ thunder, McCain recklessly proposed to a political bride like a drunken sailor in a waterfront tavern. And for that, we got Harriet Myers with beauty pageant credentials, Gale Norton with a chirpy countenance, George Bush in high heels.

There is much giddiness in the air today on the part of the evangelicals, but they may want to stop their gushing long enough to hear the more sober voices in their own party. Gone is McCain’s most important political leg to stand on, that white-haired father figure role, which so comforted all those who trembled at the specter of another 9/11 and would rather their sacrifice constitutional rights than to embody the very ethos to which they hearken as a constituency. Home of the brave. Land of the free.

They might also want to consider, while allowing themselves to wax so giddy. The real possibility exists. After a few more unseemly revelations about Sarah Palin, McCain, the drunken sailor, may be forced to ask his new political bride for that five dollar ring back.

Consider me not surprised. I had been writing a post on that public vetting over at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church on Saturday afternoon when news of John McCain’s subterfuge came over the wire. Well, no wonder, I thought. McCain and his aides were in the limo on the way over and not under the backstage cone of silence, as was intended. They were picking up the particulars of Warren’s questions and Obama’s nuanced answers, allowing McCain to march in and play John Wayne to Obama’s George McGovern. McCain’s going to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell. He’s going to punch all those darned terrorists right in the nose. He’s throwing red meat to the crowd.

Setting aside for the moment Rick Warren’s failure to police these Republican weasels properly, and the fact that we’ve been listening to this same cocksure cowboy bluster about Iraq and foreign policy for the past eight years, I think a broader reverberation from this event may have taken place, the ignoring of which says volumes about what kind of campaign John McCain is running, what kind of President he’d make and confirms for me why I’m so fearful of seeing his finger anywhere near the proverbial red button. Even more to the point, John McCain’s decision to play to the three thousand church members in the audience provided a stunning contrast between Obama’s candidacy and his own and I think offers further hope for our prospects in November. While McCain was willing to gain an unfair advantage by gaming the rules, and was fixated on winning the battle of the pews, he imprudently lost the wider strategic war. Because, let’s face it. Both candidates are preaching to the choir for the most part, until it comes to that ten or twenty percent of swing voters in the middle, and those weren’t the people in the audience.

Understanding this, and displaying all the methodical, farsighted wisdom we witnessed in President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, Obama framed his answers carefully and to the millions of viewers out there in TV land. McCain was channeling General Jack D. Ripper for the front row.

As to the particulars, I found it especially telling when Warren asked “who were the three wisest people each candidate would rely on in their administrations” that Barack immediately mentioned Michelle Obama. Cyndi McCain’s name never came up. McCain instead lauded General Petraeus and mentioned a trip he had made to Iraq last year with Lindsey Graham, blathering on about all those brave soldiers reenlisting to fight for freedom, the same soldiers who happen to be donating to Barack over McCain at a rate of six to one.

McCain then inexplicably threw out Congressman John Lewis’ name as someone he’d seek for advice, I guess just to cover his civil rights’ bases, then went on to laud Meg Whitman, E-bay’s CEO, as a darling of the new economy. Again, McCain had attempted to hit all the high notes, but his thoughts, as always, lacked a coherent thesis, a thing at which he is depressingly like the current President. In contrast, Obama offered this humble but stirring conclusion, proving he remembered the question and actually understood it. The idea of having diverse opinions around you is to be apprised of any blind spots or predispositions a person might possess. Imagine that. Instead of riding out with the cavalry every time new and some unexpected international conflict gets a burr in your saddle, our President might take the time to consider the matter cautiously and make a sound judgment before loading his cannons.

Having downloaded a transcript of the Warren’s event, and pouring over the text the past two days, there are so many points at which I find McCain’s worldview utterly vexing. Where I’m ready to pull out my hair. Where I am reminded that the John McCain of 2000 would never vote for the John McCain of 2008. But more than anything, I found his answer to Warren’s question about evil in this world particularly alarming. Where I had to stop and think, what a jaded and narrow-minded demagogue this old man has become.

Warren had asked, “does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?” Obama answered the first part of the question to the affirmative, went on to explain evil’s many guises, from Darfur to ourselves and our own domestic policies, spoke in terms of “confronting” it but cautioned about the need for humility. A lot of evil has been perpetrated over the years in the name of good.

When asked the same question, McCain, who we now know was peeking from behind the curtain, channels Charlton Heston as Moses in contrast to Obama’s answer. “Defeat it,” he says to a raucous round of applause and with a look as stern as old prophets.

The fact is, McCain never even bothered to address the first part of the question, or to frame his answer in terms other than us against them. It is shocking to think this man can’t get beyond a paradigm in which we are forever at war in this world, today, tomorrow and always. After all, where there is good, there is evil. The fundamental nature of conscious reality is one of duality. Our only hope is to transcend this first cause and to view the world in a brand new way. For there to be any hope, we need to get past this foolish, playground nonsense of us against them, or at least to have a lot less of it.

McCain’s failure to see this or move beyond the worldview of another century is shocking enough, but what really set off my alarms, and should set off alarms in the minds of even so-called devout Christians during this campaign, is that McCain is deluded enough to play God upon the stage of this world.

I refer to the Bible.

See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil. Deuteronomy 30:15.

I don’t mean to be cute here and remain unsure whether or not one can possibly call upon logic in these circumstances, but if evil is God’s handiwork, who are we to think we can rid the universe of it? To take the Bible at face value, as I expect John McCain and most Christians do, isn’t it the worst form of demagoguery to suggest we can undo the very nature of the world as God created it? Better what Obama had to say when asked the same question. All we can do is be God’s humble soldiers in that ongoing struggle.

But what the hell. If John McCain’s going to play at God, why bother with channeling that old fire and brimstone God of the Old Testament. Didn’t Jesus say he had come to fulfill the old law? So let’s hearken to something on the subject that is closer to the true spirit of Christianity.

…Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7

How fitting it would be if a forum held at a Christian church in America today would lead us to love as the proper way to marginalize evil in this world. How miraculous it would be if John McCain could find that part of his Christian soul, instead of offering us more wars and destruction and bellicose words.

I’ve been searching high and low for a clip of Bush during one of his press conferences a few years back, but have been unable to find it, so if you don’t mind, please take my word on this one. It happened.

This was at a juncture when the Iraq War was not going so well at all, a lot worse than it is now, probably around late 2005, early 2006, in and around their second legislative elections. In an attempt to gin up the importance of what those elections meant, and to downplay the horrendous violence then afflicting the Iraqi nation, Bush had said, and I quote him this far with a measure of certainty, "You see, democratically elected people are peace loving people."

There was then this Alfred E. Neuman pause and obligatory dumb grin on his face, as if, in the cobwebby, abandoned attic spaces of his mind, a vague light had gone on.

Oh yeah, democratically elected people equals peace loving people doesn’t equal blowing the shit out of Iraq.

Logic problem, logic problem.

As he fumbled on with his ensuing bullshit and did his best to cover his tracks, I remember thinking, oh boy, are we ever screwed. Nothing could more aptly characterize our loss of moral leverage in this world. Who’s going to listen to us now? How are we ever going to dictate right and wrong to anyone else? People will laugh if we dare to open our mouths.

So it was in listening to Bush warn Putin about stopping the violence in Georgia the other day. It had all the import of a pillow dropping from eighteen stories.

One can argue who’s to blame for starting this whole mess. The answer is muddled at best, no matter whose side you happen to be on. But clearly Russia has invaded Georgia, an international crime that is now exacerbated by the fact that we have no moral grounds on which to demand their retreat. Who are we to demand a cessation of violence? Meanwhile, a breathtakingly beautiful country is being reduced to rubble by Russia’s version of shock and awe.

If you want to see what a lovely, lovely countryside their currently blowing to crap, rent the movie Chefs In Love. You’ll want to sell your house and buy a one way ticket to Tbilisi. Georgia stands as a bulwark against the madness of globalization. It is ancient, pastoral. Gross median income doesn’t mean a damned thing at all. When beauty surrounds you as you walk down a country lane to your home, who gives a damn about gross median income?

Just in the name of peace and sanity, and in the name of humanity itself, you want to throw your body on the ground and say, for God’s sake, please stop the killing. But here it is, one more way in which George Bush’s policies have royally screwed our international standing in the world. We are without an olive branch of peace to hold out with our hands.

This current conflict also demonstrates so well how an Obama Presidency would stand in stark contrast to one with John McCain: imperialism. Only when we have ceased our own invasion of sovereign nations will we have credibility to chastise a weasel like Putin for doing the same.

Well, it should come as no surprise. Give the mainstream media a sordid little story and their inner tabloid is bound to come out. I expect so little of that cast of talking heads, but was aghast yesterday no less to watch pundit after pundit carving poor John Edwards up.

I had been getting my usual afternoon exercise, and my usual dose of drivel from the MSM, but had hardly expected to witness a smut party. All the hand wringing over Edward’s affair drove me to switch back and forth from MSNBC to CNN. I even tried the dreaded Fox News, expecting sooner or later, someone would state the obvious. Let he who is perfect cast the first stone. It was not forthcoming.

There were the so-called liberal operatives getting themselves safely away from the scene of the crime, the right-wing apparatchiks waxing indignant, David Bonior throwing Edwards under the bus. Even the usually level-headed Jack Cafferty was beginning to foam at the mouth. Only Roger Simon of Politico could drag himself to admit that Edward’s statement, released while the shows were in progress, had been a sincere expression of remorse. Everyone else simply got more indignant over the “99%” clause. They’d have put poor Jesus on a cross. 

My heart goes out to you, John, on both accounts. You must suffer the wounds of your own infidelity, and then be dragged around in a form of public lynching.

I have committed many sins of my own, and will no doubt make more, but I come at this today as a man who loves a woman with all his heart. In such a way, that I have never once been tempted to betray her trust. I thank God everyday that I have been given to adore someone in that way. I thank God for these feelings of devotion. I wouldn’t know how to face my sweetheart if I fell from grace in a similar way. 

But that only makes me more compassionate of others, and but reminds me this is about choosing people for public office, and the absurdity of doing so on the basis of their private peccadilloes. If the measure of worthiness is whether or not someone has committed a sexual transgression, we would never have had Roosevelt, or Kennedy. The list goes on and on.

What we’ll always end up with instead is the milquetoast of a Coolidge, the moral rigidity of Reagan and Bush, or a scoundrel like Tricky Dick. People who don’t have to wear a red face during Sunday’s sermon, perhaps, but who will publicly admit they don’t possess that vision thing, who can’t form a proper sentence, who aren’t the best of the best. 

More so, we will forever find ourselves as a nation in this self-righteous Calvinistic, witch-hunting mode, the stones being passed around, preparing to punish the sinner, forgetting that we have, or are certainly capable of, doing the same damned thing ourselves.

As Barack Obama was starting his tour of the Middle East this past weekend, and the policy differences between Obama and John McCain were proclaimed by various pundits to be converging, I could not help but think of a charming, almost tongue-in-cheek scene from the movie, Lawrence of Arabia.

Peter O’Toole, as Lawrence, has just taken Aqaba from the rear, has crossed the Sinai Peninsula on camel and is there in Cairo, in full Bedouin garb, to inform the British Admiralty of this heretofore improbable triumph. Jack Hawkins, as General Allenby, and Claude Rains, as Mr. Dryden from the Arab Bureau, a menacingly benign presence always lurking in the shadows, have greeted Lawrence, congratulated him on his success and are now seated around a fountain in the Admiralty’s Cairo Office, trying to figure out how best to use Lawrence’s talents going forward against the Turks.

Lawrence, at General Allenby’s behest, and as the fatherly Mr. Dryden listens on, commences to explain what will be required to further the Arab revolt. “I’ll need five thousand rifles. And sovereigns. They don’t like paper money. And instructors for the Davis guns. And more money. Much more later on.”

“Right!” the unflappable Allenby says each time with a sidelong glance at Dryden.

“And two armored cars. And field artillery.”

 “Right! Right!”

Lawrence, in his Bedouin garb, is soon dismissed and swarmed by fellow officers, while Allenby and Dryden are seen marching off to more important business, with Dryden expressing his concerns about Lawrence’s requests. “If you give the Arabs artillery, you will have made them independent.”   “Well, then I can’t do it, can I?” Allenby concludes.

And there in a nutshell, you have the policy of the Western world towards the Middle East over the past hundred and fifty years or so; meddling, patronizing and driven by our economic and imperialistic ambitions hand in hand; acting as if we know better how to deal with someone’s sovereign territory than the owner’s of it do themselves.

What makes this scene so especially poignant is the backdrop of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was basically the French and British drawing up control of the Middle East on a napkin, and which one only learns about at the end of the movie.

So there you have Lawrence, playing the role of chivalrous knight in a battle for Arab independence while Allenby and Dryden use him and the Arab army like pieces on a chess board. Lawrence, an exceptionally well schooled man with a deep seated sense of morality, was so sickened by the experience, he spent the rest of his life serving in the British forces under various assumed names, in the hopes he and the whole contemptible episode could be forgotten.

You can bet on this. The people of the Middle East never forgot it. Their feuds and rivalries go all the way back to Saladin battling Richard the Lionhearted for control of Jerusalem. It may seem utterly absurd in our minds to go back a thousand years, but not to them, and it goes to the heart of why a McCain presidency and a Obama presidency would be so very different. As witnessed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s recent agreement with Obama’s troop withdrawal timetable, the Iraqis are not counting the months and years before we leave, as the press seems to be obsessed with here back in the States. The Iraqis are looking with a wary eye at our long term intentions.

In what was mostly skirted and ignored by the mainstream press over the last five years, the Bush Administration had every intention of keeping permanent military bases in Iraq from the start of its misguided war, a fact that fed in large part to the very insurgency we ended up fighting. It may not stick in the craw of someone on the right, who thinks dictating terms to the rest of the world seems like a grand idea, but you try having a couple thousand Iraqi soldiers parading around your home town, knowing full well they’re building a permanent just down the road. We all know goddamned well every gun toting NRA member would come crawling out the woodwork with his rifle and camouflage gear on. Why should anyone be surprised by the Iraqis’ resentments?

There is not much we can do now about having blundered into Iraq in the first place. And having done so, one can only hope to be, as Obama so aptly expressed, “as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” But the devil is not in the details, as one would normally expect. The devil is in how the Iraqis and the wider Muslim world perceive our long term intentions. And that is why, as a mere matter of perception, an Obama presidency will diffuse so much of the anger directed at us from the Muslim world.

If we finally retreat to the benign role we played between World War I and World War II in the Middle East, we can expect to be embraced once again as friend and honest broker, from Islamabad to Damascus. But if we continue the role of an imperial power, as we have done for the past sixty years, we can expect this “never ending war on terror” on which Bush and McCain’s foreign policies thrive, to go on as long as we all shall live.

First, allow me to confess, I’ve been reading my dog-eared copy of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition recently, and all due credit to Hofstadter, the publisher and any interested heirs. Hofstadter’s tome is without comparison in political writing and I have borrowed liberally here from his chapter on Abraham Lincoln. Though brief, Hofstadter’s treatment of Lincoln provides a searing account of that man’s life, that is equally compassionate and reverential. And unlike Doris Kearn Goodwin’s more recent, A Team Of Rivals, where Lincoln arrives to us almost fully formed, Hofstadter illuminates every step of Lincoln’s excruciating path to our nation’s highest office and fleshes out the sins of a man we now tend to view as pure as driven snow.

 

Also, and perhaps because Hofstadter’s tome had jogged my thoughts of late, I decided to throw my copy of The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart on the old turntable the other night. Surely someone out there still owns a copy? And remembers the Abraham Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue shtick?

 

“Abe, sweetie,” Newhart starts out on the phone. “How’s things in Gettysburg?” and you’re falling out of your chair. In reference to the infamous address, Newhart, the ostensible marketing guru grows abject. “Aw Abe, now why do you always go and change the speeches?” Then flustered, “You’re wondering why four score and seven years… It, it doesn’t make any sense to you... Abe, just trust me on this one. We test marketed that line in Peoria. They loved it.”

 

And if test marketing the Gettysburg Address isn’t funny, I don’t know what is…

 

But to my point, Newhart’s good-hearted jibing got me to thinking about the lofty way in which we venerate Lincoln in our society and to wonder how our 16th President would have held up in today’s world of endless media scrutiny. Not very well, I think. Abe didn’t do so well in his own time. Between the yoke of a civil war, the dragging of his feet on the issue of slavery and the general tendency of Lincoln’ enemies to portray him as a country oaf, you wonder how we ever arrived at a place where, as Hofstadter put it, “The Lincoln legend has come to have a hold on the American imagination that defies comparison with anything else in political mythology.” Simply stated, when we refer to the man in public discourse, we tend to do so in a way that is utterly devoid of analysis.

 

The truth about Lincoln is, whether or not he intended to run for President from the start, his entire adult life was guided by a singular ambition: that of securing public office. As William H. Herndon put it, a man who was familiar with Lincoln and apparently adored him greatly, “Politics were his life, newspapers his food, and his great ambition his motive power…His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

 

 

 

In keeping with this drive, Lincoln immersed himself at an early age in the Whig Party, the equivalent of today’s country club crowd, and made himself quite comfortable among its wealthiest members. It was not without expressed distaste that Lincoln frequented the finest parlors, but the object of securing office came before fighting for abolition. On that hard issue alone, Lincoln left something wanting when it comes to greatness. Consider two of Lincoln’s early quotes regarding Negroes, cited in Hofstadter’s book.

 

“I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, but I bite my lips and keep quiet.”  And  “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals. My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”

 

Yikes!

 

The Emancipation Proclamation itself had “all the grandeur of a bill of lading” as Hofstadter noted. William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State is quoted as saying in response to it, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

 

The instincts of compassion were there in Lincoln, to be sure, but it took him until 1854 to write these words. “As a nation we began by declaring, ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics’. When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

 

And thus Lincoln tiptoed through one of the greatest social and political minefields of all time; from a standpoint of political expedience, and with carefully suppressed passions. I think it is fair to say, the man we credit with freeing the slaves would be considered the ultimate flip-flopper in today’s parlance.

 

Yet for all that Lincoln spoke out of both sides of his mouth, hoping to get elected, and to maintain his office, and his endless prevarications publicly on the subject of slavery, does anyone doubt Lincoln’s lofty place in American history? I don’t. Here was a man, as Hofstadter put it, who bore the sins of an entire nation, gave his life for it, and did so with “malice towards none and charity for all.” As John Hay, another contemporary who knew Lincoln well, said of him, “he was the greatest character since Christ.”

 

It was against the backdrop that I was reading Bob Herbert’s lament on Barack Obama the other day.

 

My God, he’s tacking to the center. He’s abandoned his principles. He’s lost his compass.

 

That seemed to be the essence of Herbert’s abject lament, and one can only imagine how he would have fared had he been alive then and writing about Lincoln’s political masquerades instead.

 

For me, personally, during this current Presidential campaign, I’ve journeyed from being a staunch supporter of John Edwards to a wary admirer of Obama. And I will admit to casting a somewhat more skeptical eye towards Obama in recent weeks. It is not an easy political minefield he walks, but thus goes the dirty little business of getting elected. Lincoln understood it. Perhaps the straight shooting John Edwards did not. After all, the fact that Edwards was forced out of the nomination process early is damning of American politics, not of the man.

 

Sad as it is for this old hippie to accept, there’s an inescapable fan dance to attaining power, so don’t be surprised to see me holding my nose now and then during this election process, but I still put my faith in this simple belief. Like Lincoln, Obama will do the right thing when history affords him the chance. I don’t expect to like every decision he makes, but let’s not confuse the sordid game of politics with a man’s essential character, or with the stature he’ll bring to the Oval Office. To do so would be to say an imperfect man like Lincoln was never capable of greatness .

 

As with Lincoln, hopefully we are buying something deeper with Barack Obama, some inner metal that goes beyond what a focus group will dictate for today; a man who may not speak for all Americans, all of the time, but who will speak for most of us, most of the time. Above all, in Obama, one can sense the potential for greatness, and even more so, the potential to draw out the greatness in us. At the least, the very act of electing Barack Obama President will tell the world volumes about this nation’s character, more than a hundred years of apologies could ever say.

 

Again, I am only speaking for myself, but I fully expect on the day Obama steps up to the nation’s Capitol and gives his Inaugural Address, the tone and timber of this entire nation will change, along with the tone of this entire planet. It is the power we ascribe to Lincoln and other great characters of history, and I dare say, a thought that will never enter the mind when considering John McCain.

Well, as the old saying goes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s no longer funny.

There’s another well known axiom to humor. Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

Obviously, when it comes to the New Yorker’s latest cover featuring the Obamas as closet Al-Qaeda members and/or Black Panther era terrorists, an insufficient amount of time has passed between that elusive “now” and the whisper campaign that is ongoing against them. As to tragedy, the only tragedy in this episode seems to be the way in which the New Yorker has turned a subject matter that hungers for serious political discussion into a mangled, tone deaf and insensible gaffe.

To that point, another axiom of humor. It has to be based in fact. But Michelle Obama has never been seen sporting an Angela Davis style afro, or packing a Kalashnikov. And there are no long lost pictures of Barack wearing a Thaqib on secret weekend outings, never mind the Osama bin Laden portrait and the flag burning in the fireplace. Okay, there was that one picture of Barack adopting local Muslim attire as a courtesy to his African guests, but come on, that’s like mistaking George Bush for a member of the Kankouran West African dance troupe. There’s just no basis in fact for either assumption.

And when it comes to humor hitting the mark, or falling flat, let’s not forget another maxim. Play to your audience. You don’t start your standup routine at a Borscht Belt, Catskill summer retreat by saying, “And speaking of Jews…”

At every level of humor this satire failed. Not enough time has passed, nor cultural equanimity achieved, since the bruising Democratic primary campaign. There was no basis in fact for the joke, only cynicism and innuendo, and the New Yorker made the incredibly preposterous assumption that they were only appealing to their hip, chai chugging West Side audience. That, or it was an attempt at ramping up their circulation. I don’t know which conclusion would be considered the more disgraceful.

Yet, I still see the silver lining. As with the already well vetted attempts by some to portray Barack Obama as just another Jesse Jackson extremist, and the more recent and insidious Fox News attempt to portray the infamous fist bump as some sort of secret terrorist cipher. Barack Obama has survived, and I dare say even thrived under difficult circumstances.

Why? Well, in my opinion it is because, however unsavory these episodes may be, they force our society to face its inner struggle about electing a “black” candidate. The truth is on the table, and the public must fall one way or the other. Either you’re an unrelenting redneck, who will never vote for Obama anyway, or you watch the grace of the man under fire and realize none of this tripe warrants him being discredited. Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans fall into this latter category. Remarkably, resiliently, the public at large has seen through this current absurdity, as it has seen through everything else thrown at the man. And Obama simply becomes a more sympathetic character, the more he strides with grace through the political minefield around him.

In a nod to Richard Dreyfuss and his charming portrait of a lovable Latin American dictator, "People of Puerto Rico, I love you." What more has Hillary Clinton left to say?

 

Well, maybe I shouldn't have asked that question.

In the immediate wake of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, I had made this observation to my better half. "Well, there, it's finally over. Hillary has no path to the nomination now"

"Yeah," my better half had commented dryly in return. “If it weren't for zombie candidates who will not die."

Leave it to an artist to see things in such lovely and graphic terms...

Indeed, even in the wake of Hillary's undoing by the Rules Committee yesterday, the attrition of her own people, and the fact that both the Michigan and Florida Democratic Parties signed off on a compromise, making the math to Hillary’s nomination utterly impossible, and more so, making her ongoing fight on their behalf completely absurd, she's out there, fighting. Who knows to what bitter end.

By the way, when Harold Ickes made his ominous threat yesterday before the Rules Committee. "Mrs. Clinton has told me to reserve her right to take this to the Credentials Committee at the convention," did anyone else see a wide-eyed Barney Fife, tugging nervously at his holsters?

But I digress...

I've been wanting to say this for a long time, and in the spirit of fairness and truth, I'm going to say it right now. Hillary, I would really love to see a woman become President. Hell, women can run the world for the next five thousand years for all I care. Why not? Men have mostly made a mess of it. We'd all do well without all the pent up testosterone in the political mix.

No, it's not sexism, Hillary. My dislike for you has nothing to do with you being a woman. I'd be disgusted with you, whether you were a woman, or a man, or a transsexual, for that matter. You represent something I just can't stand; a lack of moral sincerity. You started out, willing to do anything to become President, and you've done just that, using tactics that resurrect Dick Morris and the reprehensible tactics of triangulation your husband adopted to survive. You know, come to think of it, a case could be made, your husband's use of triangulation is simply George W. Bush's perpetual political campaign machine in its incipient form.

So, here we are, the woman who put her finger to the wind going on six years ago now, and authorized Bush's rush to war, expecting she would have to look tough as a female candidate for President, and wanting to be on the right side of the issue, whether she believed in invading Iraq or not. Ironically enough, Hillary would have looked so much tougher had she voted with her conscience and not her political head. And even more ironically, her candidacy might not have become this bizarre, mirror image to Bush's reasons for going to war. Like Bush, when it was clear Hillary, that you couldn't win this nominating process in a fair and square manner, you were left to change the rules and mileposts. It's about winning the big states, you said, no, the swing states, no, the most popular votes, until finally, I guess, it’s about winning hearts and minds of Puerto Rico.

 

Well, congratulations. It’s over now. Get real.

 

In the end, history will simply record that you were beaten fair and square, and by somebody who played by the rules. Had you won it on those terms, I would have voted for you in November, out of respect for the country and the Democratic Party. Come this Tuesday, I only hope you and your supporters will come to that same graceful and compassionate decision.