There IS something to this. I have never listened to an audiobook nor have I ever had any interest in doing so. I am an eyes on print person totally.
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: November 25, 2011
When I talk with one friend or another about books we’ve both read, I often have to admit that I read the particular work in audio form. Although I’m not especially perceptive, it’s pretty easy to translate my interlocutor’s expression. It’s a blend of surprise, condescension and an unmistakable dash of “that’s cheating.”
So best to say this right away: For half a decade now, audiobooks have accompanied me during exercise and long drives. It began with an audio version of “Treasure Island” I grabbed to pass the time on a trip I made alone to pick my daughter up at college.
It turned out to be the shortest 10-hour drive in history. Since then, I’ve listened my way through classics like “Middlemarch” and ripping yarns like Patrick O’Brian’s 20 sea novels featuring Aubrey and Maturin, and the five volumes (so far) of George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series. I’ve also laughed along with readings of novels by Gary Shteyngart, wept with David Mitchell’s and vicariously inhabited the lives of John Adams and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Many books have been the kind that I used to read in college — serious, often demanding — but that I seldom find the time to sit down with these days. And yet, when I’m doing something else that would otherwise be tedious, audio versions of these books have become my ideal companions. But through it all, I keep getting the sense that other people think I’m settling for a kind of second-rate reading. I’m not exactly sure why this should be. Maybe they suspect I’m not working hard enough — devoting my undivided attention to serious books. Maybe absorbing literature in this way is like having the waiter cut up my food.
A prime skeptic is my wife, Jeanne, who also happens to be the principal recommender of the new books I read. She is not unalterably opposed to aural reading; in fact, she’s a fan of recorded lectures. But when it comes to fiction, she insists on holding the printed text in her hand. Also, she has a problem with that alien Other — the intervening reader who takes command of the entire text.
“I want the voices in my head for the characters,” she once said. “I don’t want that person in my ear.”
We developed a retronym: if I slipped a book — the kind with covers and pages — into my backpack for the train or to get started on at home, that meant I was reading a “book-book.” Of course the term itself reinforced her belief — I won’t call it a prejudice — against audio reading. It was firmest in the case of novels, which she thought I couldn’t possibly absorb, especially if they were complex narratives. Not that we argued or fought over this. I would never say such a thing. Out loud.
But the mood became a little tense when we were discussing Mitchell’s “Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” a many-layered novel we’d both read (in our different ways) and loved. The conversation turned to the story line concerning two 19th-century Japanese magistrates operating in Edo and Nagasaki. Jeanne said one of those two magistrates was a major character, Enomoto. I recalled the second magistrate as a marginal figure in the novel, wholly separate from the wicked Lord Abbot Enomoto.
Who was right? Amazon’s “search inside this book” function established that my memory was correct, and I delivered this news with mild triumph. Jeanne conceded — this was evidence “that you were listening as closely as I was reading,” she said — but also noted that she had read the passages months before I had. And, she added, “it was very confusing.”
At this point it occurred to me that what divides us on this issue may involve more than our preferred methods of reading. It may, in fact, be a matter of how we each best absorb difficult material. When I was in college I always got more out of lectures than out of the reading, and now I work in a trade, journalism, that is largely about listening to the spoken voice. And this, in turn, led me to wonder whether I’m wired in some way to listen rather than read.
And so I did what reporters are trained to do. I consulted an expert, in this case Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gardner is celebrated for his theory of multiple intelligences, which holds that there are many different kinds of smarts and learning. In his work, Gardner has parsed linguistic intelligence from logical-mathematical and musical intelligence, and has also described other kinds of intelligence linked to interpersonal relationships and the body.
In a recent e-mail, I asked Gardner whether his theory could apply to an affinity for audiobooks. “I get tremendous pleasure from audiobooks,” I wrote. “My wife gets none at all, and spends her evenings holding by-God books.”
Gardner responded quickly. “This is very funny,” he said. Reading approaches in his marriage were the exact opposite of those in mine: his wife “loves audiobooks and listens to them endlessly,” while “I never listen to audiobooks.” He is married to Ellen Winner, whose résumé resembles his. She is chairwoman of the psychology department at Boston College, and a senior associate at Project Zero, an arts-education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gardner suggested I speak with both of them that evening by phone.
When I called, Winner said she listens to books while exercising, grocery shopping or waiting in long lines at the airport. And what kinds of books? “Great literature, classics that I would not have the time or patience to read if they were in print.” She has happily worked the treadmill to “Bleak House” and “Daniel Deronda,” “Crime and Punishment” and “War and Peace.”
“I want to just sink into a fictional world,” she said. She could have been speaking for me.
Gardner, for his part, sounded a lot more like Jeanne. “I like to provide my own soundtracks in life,” he said, adding that he loves listening to classical music, and not as a means of escape. “I’m not trying to get away from anything,” he said.
As a practical matter, Gardner went on, he wants to read at his own pace, and to be able to flip back to earlier passages — no easy feat on an iPod. “To me, reading is something I do with my eyes,” he said.
At times during our conversation, the couple seemed to grow somewhat heated. Not that I would call it arguing.
The truth, it seems, is that the way we read, and our reasons for loving or disliking audiobooks, are deeply personal. They are expressions of self, so tied to who we are. If you belittle the way I read, you’re belittling me.
When I pressed Gardner on whether multiple-intelligence issues might enter into these differences, he said he had not heard of any research in the area.
“We don’t have enough of a sample to make a decision,” he said, “but there could be something in that.”
But I hadn’t wasted the couple’s time, Gardner assured me. At least not his wife’s. “You may have given her a research topic,” he said.
John Schwartz, The Times’s national legal correspondent
Sunday, November 27, 2011
The Enduring Kennedy Cult?
The Enduring Cult of Kennedy
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: November 26, 2011
THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.
It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.
In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.
At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.
The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.
In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)
The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden ...”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.
The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.
This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.
This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: November 26, 2011
THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.
It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.
In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.
At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.
The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.
In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)
The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden ...”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.
The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.
This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.
This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.
The Transcendence of the Book
A Book is a Vehicle for Transcendence
November 15th, 2011
By Julia Jackson
A response to a public conversation with Gary Shteyngart on November 10, 2011.
Gary Shteyngart, a self-described “standard kind of agnostic,” said that the most soulful activity he engages in is reading a book. It is one of the few ways in which a person can really “live in another person’s skin.”
Religion or spirituality (or whatever word you prefer) gives us another way to inhabit a person’s perspective. As much as religion is about connection to God (or whatever word you prefer), it is also about forging a connection to other human beings—how to act in a socially responsible way, how to discuss things that are Real or True, how to feel we are not doomed to die alone—which is why Shteyngart likened reading to a “quasi-spiritual experience.” What better way can we put aside our selfish, petty, insecure, hubristic selves and let our minds and our emotions inhabit those of someone completely unlike us than by reading a book?
At the talk, Shteyngart gave us such an example: He was reading a book told from the perspective of a Pakistani cab driver who had “abhorrent views,” and yet he was able to feel for this man. As he put it, “I am not him, and I am not me, but there is a connection, an empathy.” Setting aside one’s perspective and understanding another person’s condition, truly feeling what his lived existence is like, would normally require days, months, or years of close proximity and intimate conversation. A book delivers this experience to us ordinarily selfish jerks for the tiny investment of a few dollars and a few hours.
But can such a quasi-spiritual experience be achieved on a Kindle or iPad? Though I do read on an iPad and enjoy it, the satisfaction I get from reading on my iPad is far different from the kind I get from reading a “real” book. When I read on my iPad, I am impressed: impressed by the fact that I can prop it up on my bed when I’m tired and then turn the pages with the touch of a single finger, that I can look up any word in the dictionary with two taps, that I can seamlessly do research on any related topic with the Wikipedia app. I can also suddenly decide to play Spider Solitare or watch Netflix or buy that new eye shadow from Sephora. I can check my e-mail, get lost on Facebook, decide to craft a 140-character version of the thought that’s been going through my head. Reading on an iPad makes it all too easy for me to completely check out of reading the book itself. As Shteyngart said, a book is a small commodity, but a screen makes a commodity out of everything.
When I read a real book, on the other hand, I leave my cell phone and laptop in the other room and sit on the couch, and suddenly it’s just me and the book and the characters in it. I am truly alone yet truly connected. When I read a real book, I am forcing myself to follow one stream of thought—that which the author committed to paper. In today’s world, this simple act is meditative, even transcendent. I am able to do something that feels very futuristic—cross space and time and peer right into the author’s mind—with a technology that has been around for thousands of years.
Reading a book should be singularly absorbing, not impressive (no matter how impressive the author’s use of language or ability to shape plot may be). “Impressed” belongs to another world, one of instant check-outs, “like” buttons, and instant gratifications. While electronic devices certainly have their place and their strengths, we still need to recognize the act of reading on an iPad or a Kindle for what it is: a convenient but far less absorbing experience than reading a printed book. As impressive as these digital devices may be, we simply cannot abandon the book.
To Shteyngart, a single physical book is a more soulful creation than the hundred that can be stored in digital devices. His exaltation of the printed word reminded me of what Patti Smith said in her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, almost exactly one year ago: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
November 15th, 2011
By Julia Jackson
A response to a public conversation with Gary Shteyngart on November 10, 2011.
Gary Shteyngart, a self-described “standard kind of agnostic,” said that the most soulful activity he engages in is reading a book. It is one of the few ways in which a person can really “live in another person’s skin.”
Religion or spirituality (or whatever word you prefer) gives us another way to inhabit a person’s perspective. As much as religion is about connection to God (or whatever word you prefer), it is also about forging a connection to other human beings—how to act in a socially responsible way, how to discuss things that are Real or True, how to feel we are not doomed to die alone—which is why Shteyngart likened reading to a “quasi-spiritual experience.” What better way can we put aside our selfish, petty, insecure, hubristic selves and let our minds and our emotions inhabit those of someone completely unlike us than by reading a book?
At the talk, Shteyngart gave us such an example: He was reading a book told from the perspective of a Pakistani cab driver who had “abhorrent views,” and yet he was able to feel for this man. As he put it, “I am not him, and I am not me, but there is a connection, an empathy.” Setting aside one’s perspective and understanding another person’s condition, truly feeling what his lived existence is like, would normally require days, months, or years of close proximity and intimate conversation. A book delivers this experience to us ordinarily selfish jerks for the tiny investment of a few dollars and a few hours.
But can such a quasi-spiritual experience be achieved on a Kindle or iPad? Though I do read on an iPad and enjoy it, the satisfaction I get from reading on my iPad is far different from the kind I get from reading a “real” book. When I read on my iPad, I am impressed: impressed by the fact that I can prop it up on my bed when I’m tired and then turn the pages with the touch of a single finger, that I can look up any word in the dictionary with two taps, that I can seamlessly do research on any related topic with the Wikipedia app. I can also suddenly decide to play Spider Solitare or watch Netflix or buy that new eye shadow from Sephora. I can check my e-mail, get lost on Facebook, decide to craft a 140-character version of the thought that’s been going through my head. Reading on an iPad makes it all too easy for me to completely check out of reading the book itself. As Shteyngart said, a book is a small commodity, but a screen makes a commodity out of everything.
When I read a real book, on the other hand, I leave my cell phone and laptop in the other room and sit on the couch, and suddenly it’s just me and the book and the characters in it. I am truly alone yet truly connected. When I read a real book, I am forcing myself to follow one stream of thought—that which the author committed to paper. In today’s world, this simple act is meditative, even transcendent. I am able to do something that feels very futuristic—cross space and time and peer right into the author’s mind—with a technology that has been around for thousands of years.
Reading a book should be singularly absorbing, not impressive (no matter how impressive the author’s use of language or ability to shape plot may be). “Impressed” belongs to another world, one of instant check-outs, “like” buttons, and instant gratifications. While electronic devices certainly have their place and their strengths, we still need to recognize the act of reading on an iPad or a Kindle for what it is: a convenient but far less absorbing experience than reading a printed book. As impressive as these digital devices may be, we simply cannot abandon the book.
To Shteyngart, a single physical book is a more soulful creation than the hundred that can be stored in digital devices. His exaltation of the printed word reminded me of what Patti Smith said in her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, almost exactly one year ago: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Gene Chizik - All In (12)
I finish the Coach's book, and what a pleasure it was to read, reliving his coming to Auburn and the amazing 2010 season. We have a honest coach of integrity, and regardless of what happens in today's last regular season game of the 2011 season, this is one thing we can say.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Gene Chizik - All In (11)
I've been reading Coach Chizik's book all reason, a chapter or two at a time. I plan to finish it Saturday before the Alabama game.
I just read about the 2009 season. Two things stand out in the Coach's rehashing of his first season as Auburn's coach. The first thing was the selection of Chris Todd as the starting QB. Todd and Kodi Burns had split starting duty in the 2008 season. That didn't work out well. Chizik says the team was divided in 2008. The defense played well and was pointing fingers at the ineptitude of the offense. Some of the players favored Burns while other favored Todd.
Chizik and Malzahn picked Todd as the starter. The only criterion was which QB gave the team the best chance to win. Their answer was Todd. But that wasn't all of it. They asked Burns to move to wide receiver. Kodi took it hard that wouldn't be the quarterback, but he accepted his role as the best way for the team to win, and he addressed the team and said that thought he was disappointed the team would be as one and move forward. We all know that it all worked out well. Kodi wasn't a great receiver but he was a winner and helped the team just by being on the field.
Coach Chizik & his staff first had to earn the trust of the players, which they did. I hope they still trust him now in this difficult season.
The other thing was reading about the Ole Miss game. Auburn started 5 & 0 but lost two games in a row before the Ole Miss game. The Tigers beat the Rebels when Ole Miss was no doubt favored even at Jordan-Hare. If we had lost to Ole Miss, we certainly would not have finished 8 & 5. Then there was the injury to Zac Etheredge. That was a harrowing thing. If the Ole Miss player had not remained still on top of Zac, he might have been paralyzed for life. What a miracle.
I just read about the 2009 season. Two things stand out in the Coach's rehashing of his first season as Auburn's coach. The first thing was the selection of Chris Todd as the starting QB. Todd and Kodi Burns had split starting duty in the 2008 season. That didn't work out well. Chizik says the team was divided in 2008. The defense played well and was pointing fingers at the ineptitude of the offense. Some of the players favored Burns while other favored Todd.
Chizik and Malzahn picked Todd as the starter. The only criterion was which QB gave the team the best chance to win. Their answer was Todd. But that wasn't all of it. They asked Burns to move to wide receiver. Kodi took it hard that wouldn't be the quarterback, but he accepted his role as the best way for the team to win, and he addressed the team and said that thought he was disappointed the team would be as one and move forward. We all know that it all worked out well. Kodi wasn't a great receiver but he was a winner and helped the team just by being on the field.
Coach Chizik & his staff first had to earn the trust of the players, which they did. I hope they still trust him now in this difficult season.
The other thing was reading about the Ole Miss game. Auburn started 5 & 0 but lost two games in a row before the Ole Miss game. The Tigers beat the Rebels when Ole Miss was no doubt favored even at Jordan-Hare. If we had lost to Ole Miss, we certainly would not have finished 8 & 5. Then there was the injury to Zac Etheredge. That was a harrowing thing. If the Ole Miss player had not remained still on top of Zac, he might have been paralyzed for life. What a miracle.
Are We Getting Nicer?
Are We Getting Nicer?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 23, 2011
It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.
So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.
War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.
That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”
Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.
Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.
Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.
Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye.
Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2.
The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study.
Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away.
That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess.
In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”
The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”
The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others.
Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 23, 2011
It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.
So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.
War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.
That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”
Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.
Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.
Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.
Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye.
Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2.
The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study.
Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away.
That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess.
In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”
The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”
The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others.
Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Democrats vs. Republicans on Universal Health Care
Here is what Jonathan Cohn says:
But don’t be fooled. The primary reason Limbaugh and his listeners don't like universal health care is that they reject the basic concept. They simply don't believe in using government to make sure every American has access to affordable health care.
This IS the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
But don’t be fooled. The primary reason Limbaugh and his listeners don't like universal health care is that they reject the basic concept. They simply don't believe in using government to make sure every American has access to affordable health care.
This IS the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
What Killed JFK
What Killed JFK
The hate that ended his presidency is eerily familiar.
By Frank Rich Published Nov 20, 2011 ShareThis
Thanksgiving week is a milestone for Barack Obama, but not one that many are likely to commemorate. The president who seemed poised to inherit John F. Kennedy’s mantle—in the eyes of Kennedy’s last surviving child and brother as well as many optimistic onlookers (me included) in 2008—will now have served longer than his historical antecedent. Obama, surely, does not want to be judged against any JFK yardstick, longevity included. It’s his rotten luck that he incited such comparisons at the start by being a young and undistinguished legislator before seeking the presidency; by giving great speeches; by breaking a once-insurmountable barrier for African-Americans, as Kennedy did for Roman Catholics; and by arriving in the White House with his own glamorous wife and two adorable young children in tow. He has usually shrugged off these parallels gracefully. These days, with his honeymoon long over, it’s particularly in his interest to do so. But Obama can’t escape JFK’s long shadow, and neither can we. Another wave of Kennedyiana has arrived just in time for the holidays: three major new books, all three already best sellers. But in the second decade of the 21st century, what, exactly, are the customers buying?
Camelot would seem one of the last go-to articles of national faith for Americans at a time when three quarters of them believe the country is on the wrong track. The Kennedy enterprise still perennially engages the imaginations of high-end artists as various as Don DeLillo, James Ellroy and Stephen Sondheim—not to mention an irrepressible parade of television-mini-series hucksters who come up with such ideas as casting Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy. The assassination alone has generated more books than there were days in the Kennedy presidency. And the Kennedy cult, as Gore Vidal called it in 1967 when he waded through an early bumper crop of New Frontier memoirs, generally gets a waiver on reality checks.
But if the JFK story has resonance in our era, that is not because it triggers the vaguely noble sentiments of affection, loss, and nostalgia that keepers of the Kennedy flame would like to believe. Even the romantic Broadway musical that bequeathed Camelot its brand is not much revived anymore. What defines the Kennedy legacy today is less the fallen president’s short, often admirable life than the particular strain of virulent hatred that helped bring him down. After JFK was killed, that hate went into only temporary hiding. It has been a growth industry ever since and has been flourishing in the Obama years. There are plenty of comparisons to be made between the two men, but the most telling is the vitriol that engulfed both their presidencies.
The prime movers of the traditional, more uplifting take on the Kennedy legacy are boomers who were young and present in real time for JFK’s brief shining moment. This fast-aging generation accounts for all three books this fall—Caroline Kennedy’s belated release of her mother’s taped 1964 reminiscences with an obsequious Arthur Schlesinger Jr., of course, but also Chris Matthews’s man-crush of a biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, and Stephen King’s Moby-Dick-size novel 11/22/63. Of the three, King’s is the most provocative, as its title indicates: The assassination, not the life, is the Kennedy historical marker that matters most in his fictional tale of a present-day Maine schoolteacher who, through time-travel magic, tries to stop Lee Harvey Oswald. America’s contemporaneous love of JFK is vivid in its pages, but no less so is the equally American storm of gathering political anger that prefigured his murder.
The substance of Kennedy’s actual White House tenure is, as Matthews says, elusive. Though the jury is no longer out, the verdict is decidedly mixed. Matthews’s hagiography tries mightily to dramatize JFK’s greatness in office but focuses more convincingly on the refreshing vigor the stylish young president brought to a culture emerging from the buttoned-down conformity of the fifties. Echoing Norman Mailer’s influential 1960 Esquire valentine to JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Matthews sees his idol as a Technicolor movie star who supplanted the black-and-white politicians of the postwar Truman-Eisenhower era. “He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor” was the way Mailer put it a half-century ago, “and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards.” But as for what the star accomplished at center stage, Matthews mainly relies on one unassailable feat, Kennedy’s steely prevention of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “In the time of our greatest peril, at the moment of ultimate judgment,” Matthews concludes, JFK “kept the smile from being stricken from the planet.”
Another boomer, the historian Alan Brinkley, offers a less smiley-face portrait in John F. Kennedy, his contribution to the American Presidents Series, due next spring. Brinkley is sympathetic to his subject, but his appraisal is balanced and unsentimental, unlike that of the cultists. Like Matthews, he gives JFK high marks for his wit and charm (if not his reckless womanizing) and for his handling of the missile crisis (while noting that there might not have been a crisis without the prefatory fiasco at the Bay of Pigs). He commends Kennedy’s pursuit of a nuclear-test-ban treaty and his very powerful (if very tardy) speech endorsing Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission just two months before the March on Washington in 1963. Most of all, Brinkley admires that idealistic Kennedy spirit of public activism and volunteerism that inspired so many, especially the young, to heed his call to “get the country moving again.”
But Brinkley, like other historians, ranks the truncated administration’s actual record as middling—neither great nor a failure. Kennedy was more “comfortable giving speeches on behalf of civil rights,” he writes, than throwing himself into battle. He even avoided an Emancipation Proclamation centennial rather than risk offending white southern Democrats. He failed to pass most of his proposed legislation (including federal aid to education and health care for the aged), was “conservative in his embrace of Keynesianism” (he pushed business-friendly tax cuts rather than increased spending), and was “aloof and ineffective” dealing with his former colleagues in Congress. Many liberal Democrats, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt, did not trust a man who had missed the Senate vote to censure Joe McCarthy and as president kept J. Edgar Hoover on at the FBI. And then there’s the little matter of Vietnam. Given the administration’s modest list of tangible achievements, its slow but steady escalation of American troop levels, right up to Kennedy’s death, looms particularly large. Maybe he would have honored his professed intention of a reasonably fast exit. Nonetheless, it was the best-and-brightest hands he left behind, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, who enabled Lyndon Johnson to descend into the Southeast Asian quagmire once he ascended to the Oval Office.
Judged against this clear-eyed report card, the post-honeymoon Obama who has disappointed so many liberals looks a bit more Kennedyesque after all. JFK’s reviews back in the day also have a familiar ring. At the two-year mark of February 1963, the Times Washington bureau chief James Reston lamented that the “exuberant optimism of the first few months of the Kennedy administration” had given way “to doubt and drift” in a Washington nearing “the point of paralysis.” The president, Reston wrote, was “a moderate confronted by radical facts,” among them “a whopping budget deficit and an alarming army of the unemployed.” Kennedy was in “trouble both with the conservatives who think he has gone too far and the liberals who think he has not gone far enough.”
Unlike Obama, JFK enjoyed consistently high poll numbers, still hovering near a 60 percent approval rating in November 1963. But that fall, both Newsweek and Look speculated he could lose his bid for reelection in 1964. The hatred he aroused, while from a minority of voters, was heated and ominous. On Sunday, November 24, 1963, the Times was packed with elegiac coverage of the leader who had been slain that Friday. But the No. 1 book on the nonfiction best-seller list, as it had been for weeks, was JFK: The Man & the Myth, by Victor Lasky, a newspaperman who would years later enjoy a second vogue on the right as a die-hard Nixon defender after Watergate. Lasky’s thick slash-and-burn Kennedy book, which even questioned his World War II heroism as the skipper of PT-109, was a precursor of the Swift Boat hatchet job on John Kerry. After the assassination, Lasky declared that “Kennedy is no longer subject to criticism on my part,” and his publisher stopped promoting the book (but quickly resumed shipping it). It started to descend on the Times list. But as the New Year arrived, and post-assassination America got moving again, JFK: The Man & the Myth was still the top seller in Dallas.
In the decades to come, America would be riveted by the Warren Commission report, whose finding that Oswald was the lone assassin has been challenged by all manner of conspiracy theorists, amateur historians, ideologues, nuts, novelists, and provocateurs. In 11/22/63, Stephen King writes that he consulted much of the assassination literature, “reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am” before putting the probability that Oswald acted alone “at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine.” His fictional alter ego, the schoolteacher Jake Epping, is, mercifully, not on an Oliver Stone crusade to subvert that math.
But another controversy from the assassination—one that has never received remotely the attention generated by the endless “grassy knoll” and “second gunmen” debates—is forcefully revived by King: the role played in Oswald’s psyche by the torrid atmosphere of political rage in Dallas, where both Lady Bird Johnson and Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon by mobs of demonstrators in notorious incidents before Kennedy’s fateful 1963 trip. As the time-traveling Epping gets settled in that past, he describes an inferno of seething citizens, anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish storefronts, and angry billboards demanding the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and equating racial integration with communism. That last one, King’s protagonist observes, “had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society.”
That “Tea Party Society” is the novelist’s own mischievous invention, but the rest of his description is accurate. King’s touchstone is The Death of a President, by William Manchester, a meticulous biographer and historian who was chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy to write the authorized account of the assassination. Manchester received cooperation from almost every conceivable party, the Warren Commission included, but after the Kennedy camp read the manuscript and objected to the disparaging treatment of Lyndon Johnson, as well as some (G-rated) domestic details about the First Couple, Mrs. Kennedy filed a quixotic injunction to halt publication. Her brief, failed effort only enhanced the book’s blockbuster appeal; soon after its release in 1967, The Death of a President became arguably more prominent than the Bible in middle-class American households. In his afterword to 11/22/63, King says he was “deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken” when rereading it. It’s hard to disagree. But what also struck me in a rereading was Manchester’s stern rejection of one major Warren Commission finding. Though he was onboard for its conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin, he did not buy its verdict that there was “no evidence” of any connection between Oswald’s crime and Dallas’s “general atmosphere of hate.”
Manchester is uncharacteristically contentious about this point. He writes that “individual commissioners had strong reservations” about exonerating Dallas but decided to hedge rather than stir up any controversy that might detract from the report’s “widest possible acceptance.” While Manchester adds that “obviously, it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment,” he strongly rejected the universal description of Oswald as “a loner.” No man, he writes, is quarantined from his time and place. Dallas was toxic. The atmosphere was “something unrelated to conventional politics—a stridency, a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society.” Duly observing that even the greatest presidents have been vilified in their time—Lincoln as a baboon and Jefferson as “Mad Tom”—Manchester saw something “more than partisan zeal” at work in this case. He detected “a chiaroscuro that existed outside the two parties, a virulence which had infected members of both.” Dallas had become the gaudy big top for a growing national movement—“the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies.”
Immediately after the assassination and ever since, the right has tried to deflect any connection between its fevered Kennedy hatred and Oswald’s addled psyche with the fact that the assassin had briefly defected to the Soviet Union. But at the time even some Texans weren’t buying that defense. An editorial in the Dallas Times Herald chastised its own city for supplying “the seeds of hate” and “the atmosphere for tragedy.” The editor of the Austin American wrote that “hatred and fanaticism, the flabby spirit of complacency that has permitted the preachers of fanatical hatred to appear respectable, and the self-righteousness that labels all who disagree with us as traitors or dolts, provided the way for the vile deed that snuffed out John Kennedy’s life.”
That atmosphere doesn’t surface arbitrarily in 11/22/63. Though King had first considered writing the book in 1971, what inspired him to finally do so was the spectacle of that Republican backbencher shouting out “You lie!” when Obama addressed Congress in the fall of 2009. “One of the reasons to write the book was because there’s so much hate in the air now,” he told the filmmaker Errol Morris (also at work on a Kennedy-assassination project) in a recent interview for the Times website, and “a lot of it’s directed at Obama.”
Unlike Obama, JFK enjoyed consistently high poll numbers. But in the fall of 1963, both Newsweek and Look speculated that he could lose his bid for reelection.
Whatever the similarities between Obama and JFK, the differences are substantial. Kennedy devoted little attention to domestic affairs, and Obama has no interest in replicating JFK’s entertaining give-and-takes with the press. Obama has yet to show bravery to match JFK’s standoff with Khrushchev, but he can boast the legislative achievements that eluded Kennedy. But this much is certain: Both presidents were centrists in the Democratic parties of their respective eras. Neither could be remotely described as radical, let alone “socialist,” as critics of both have contended. Both are ardent capitalists largely content to leave corporate America to its own devices. Both are wary of the institutional left. Both are hawkish by their party’s standards. But for all this moderation, they, like the similarly centrist Bill Clinton, who was accused of enabling drug running and murder on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have inspired a hatred so nightmarishly disproportionate to their actual beliefs, actions, and policies that it’s worthy of Stephen King’s fiction.
The culture wars that Americans have been fighting since the sixties are generally thought to have begun in the late sixties—in the paroxysms of student revolt and urban riots sparked by the spiraling of Vietnam and the twin murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. At the start of 11/22/63, King’s schoolteacher hero is implored by his old buddy Al, a dying Maine diner proprietor, to go back in time to bend the arc of history away from the catastrophic fallout that Oswald’s crime would unleash. “If you ever wanted to change the world,” Al says, “this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe … Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
Or not. In truth, it was already too late. America’s violent culture wars had started before JFK was shot. They were all on display in Oswald’s Dallas. At least in 1963, polling showed that only 5 percent of the country—a fringe—subscribed to the radical anti-government views championed by the John Birch Society and other militants of the right. These days, that fringe, whether in the form of birthers or the tea party or the hosts of Fox & Friends, gives marching orders to a major political party.
As a boomer who grew up in Washington, D.C., I was an eyewitness to the JFK inaugural on that bone-chilling January morning. My adolescence ended with the unfathomable news of that Friday afternoon of 11/22/63. My family was not in politics or journalism, but I had seen the young president with his wife at the theater one night, dazzling a startled audience with that ski instructor’s tan and those amazingly white teeth. Like almost every other American, I spent four straight days after the assassination watching television, and getting up to speed on the noirish Dallas atmosphere that would soon be compounded by Jack Ruby’s assassination of the assassin, the only murder I have seen broadcast live on television.
I never stopped admiring JFK, and, like Stephen King and so many others, I often wondered if all the calamities of the late sixties might have somehow been avoided had he lived. But that was another century, and, like many of those of my generation and older who carried the Kennedy flame, I find Kennedy’s presidency a half-remembered dream now, beautiful, even erotic, but somewhat weightless in content. Even the core JFK message—ask what you can do for your country—seems in remission at a time when so much of the country, regardless of party, holds Washington and most everything it does in contempt.
What’s also clear is that, despite the ardent attempts of the Kennedy cult to keep his romantic image alive, it is fading among those Americans who are too young to have witnessed it firsthand, in Technicolor. They tend to see JFK now as the property of their parents and grandparents—a short, transitional chapter in the American story, gradually reverting to black-and-white. Listen to Jackie Kennedy in her conversations with Schlesinger—with her feathery voice and piquant observations bespeaking a vanished time and class—and it’s hard to imagine what any 21st-century American under 40 could possibly make of her patrician eccentricities. In retrospect, that exhilarating rally at American University in Washington, D.C., in January 2008—where Caroline Kennedy, her uncle Teddy, and her cousin Patrick, soon to end the family’s 64-year run in national office, passed the torch to Obama—was the dynasty’s last hurrah.
On the other hand, read Manchester or 11/22/63 or any other account of that time, and the vitriol that was aimed at Kennedy in life seems as immediate as today. It’s as startling as that “You lie!” piercing the solemnity of a presidential address like a gunshot—or the actual gunshots fired at the White House last week by another wretched waif. In the end, that political backdrop is what our 44th and 35th presidents may have most in common. The tragedy of the Kennedy cult is that even as it fades, the hothouse brand of American malice that stalked its hero stalks our country still.
The hate that ended his presidency is eerily familiar.
By Frank Rich Published Nov 20, 2011 ShareThis
Thanksgiving week is a milestone for Barack Obama, but not one that many are likely to commemorate. The president who seemed poised to inherit John F. Kennedy’s mantle—in the eyes of Kennedy’s last surviving child and brother as well as many optimistic onlookers (me included) in 2008—will now have served longer than his historical antecedent. Obama, surely, does not want to be judged against any JFK yardstick, longevity included. It’s his rotten luck that he incited such comparisons at the start by being a young and undistinguished legislator before seeking the presidency; by giving great speeches; by breaking a once-insurmountable barrier for African-Americans, as Kennedy did for Roman Catholics; and by arriving in the White House with his own glamorous wife and two adorable young children in tow. He has usually shrugged off these parallels gracefully. These days, with his honeymoon long over, it’s particularly in his interest to do so. But Obama can’t escape JFK’s long shadow, and neither can we. Another wave of Kennedyiana has arrived just in time for the holidays: three major new books, all three already best sellers. But in the second decade of the 21st century, what, exactly, are the customers buying?
Camelot would seem one of the last go-to articles of national faith for Americans at a time when three quarters of them believe the country is on the wrong track. The Kennedy enterprise still perennially engages the imaginations of high-end artists as various as Don DeLillo, James Ellroy and Stephen Sondheim—not to mention an irrepressible parade of television-mini-series hucksters who come up with such ideas as casting Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy. The assassination alone has generated more books than there were days in the Kennedy presidency. And the Kennedy cult, as Gore Vidal called it in 1967 when he waded through an early bumper crop of New Frontier memoirs, generally gets a waiver on reality checks.
But if the JFK story has resonance in our era, that is not because it triggers the vaguely noble sentiments of affection, loss, and nostalgia that keepers of the Kennedy flame would like to believe. Even the romantic Broadway musical that bequeathed Camelot its brand is not much revived anymore. What defines the Kennedy legacy today is less the fallen president’s short, often admirable life than the particular strain of virulent hatred that helped bring him down. After JFK was killed, that hate went into only temporary hiding. It has been a growth industry ever since and has been flourishing in the Obama years. There are plenty of comparisons to be made between the two men, but the most telling is the vitriol that engulfed both their presidencies.
The prime movers of the traditional, more uplifting take on the Kennedy legacy are boomers who were young and present in real time for JFK’s brief shining moment. This fast-aging generation accounts for all three books this fall—Caroline Kennedy’s belated release of her mother’s taped 1964 reminiscences with an obsequious Arthur Schlesinger Jr., of course, but also Chris Matthews’s man-crush of a biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, and Stephen King’s Moby-Dick-size novel 11/22/63. Of the three, King’s is the most provocative, as its title indicates: The assassination, not the life, is the Kennedy historical marker that matters most in his fictional tale of a present-day Maine schoolteacher who, through time-travel magic, tries to stop Lee Harvey Oswald. America’s contemporaneous love of JFK is vivid in its pages, but no less so is the equally American storm of gathering political anger that prefigured his murder.
The substance of Kennedy’s actual White House tenure is, as Matthews says, elusive. Though the jury is no longer out, the verdict is decidedly mixed. Matthews’s hagiography tries mightily to dramatize JFK’s greatness in office but focuses more convincingly on the refreshing vigor the stylish young president brought to a culture emerging from the buttoned-down conformity of the fifties. Echoing Norman Mailer’s influential 1960 Esquire valentine to JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Matthews sees his idol as a Technicolor movie star who supplanted the black-and-white politicians of the postwar Truman-Eisenhower era. “He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor” was the way Mailer put it a half-century ago, “and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards.” But as for what the star accomplished at center stage, Matthews mainly relies on one unassailable feat, Kennedy’s steely prevention of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “In the time of our greatest peril, at the moment of ultimate judgment,” Matthews concludes, JFK “kept the smile from being stricken from the planet.”
Another boomer, the historian Alan Brinkley, offers a less smiley-face portrait in John F. Kennedy, his contribution to the American Presidents Series, due next spring. Brinkley is sympathetic to his subject, but his appraisal is balanced and unsentimental, unlike that of the cultists. Like Matthews, he gives JFK high marks for his wit and charm (if not his reckless womanizing) and for his handling of the missile crisis (while noting that there might not have been a crisis without the prefatory fiasco at the Bay of Pigs). He commends Kennedy’s pursuit of a nuclear-test-ban treaty and his very powerful (if very tardy) speech endorsing Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission just two months before the March on Washington in 1963. Most of all, Brinkley admires that idealistic Kennedy spirit of public activism and volunteerism that inspired so many, especially the young, to heed his call to “get the country moving again.”
But Brinkley, like other historians, ranks the truncated administration’s actual record as middling—neither great nor a failure. Kennedy was more “comfortable giving speeches on behalf of civil rights,” he writes, than throwing himself into battle. He even avoided an Emancipation Proclamation centennial rather than risk offending white southern Democrats. He failed to pass most of his proposed legislation (including federal aid to education and health care for the aged), was “conservative in his embrace of Keynesianism” (he pushed business-friendly tax cuts rather than increased spending), and was “aloof and ineffective” dealing with his former colleagues in Congress. Many liberal Democrats, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt, did not trust a man who had missed the Senate vote to censure Joe McCarthy and as president kept J. Edgar Hoover on at the FBI. And then there’s the little matter of Vietnam. Given the administration’s modest list of tangible achievements, its slow but steady escalation of American troop levels, right up to Kennedy’s death, looms particularly large. Maybe he would have honored his professed intention of a reasonably fast exit. Nonetheless, it was the best-and-brightest hands he left behind, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, who enabled Lyndon Johnson to descend into the Southeast Asian quagmire once he ascended to the Oval Office.
Judged against this clear-eyed report card, the post-honeymoon Obama who has disappointed so many liberals looks a bit more Kennedyesque after all. JFK’s reviews back in the day also have a familiar ring. At the two-year mark of February 1963, the Times Washington bureau chief James Reston lamented that the “exuberant optimism of the first few months of the Kennedy administration” had given way “to doubt and drift” in a Washington nearing “the point of paralysis.” The president, Reston wrote, was “a moderate confronted by radical facts,” among them “a whopping budget deficit and an alarming army of the unemployed.” Kennedy was in “trouble both with the conservatives who think he has gone too far and the liberals who think he has not gone far enough.”
Unlike Obama, JFK enjoyed consistently high poll numbers, still hovering near a 60 percent approval rating in November 1963. But that fall, both Newsweek and Look speculated he could lose his bid for reelection in 1964. The hatred he aroused, while from a minority of voters, was heated and ominous. On Sunday, November 24, 1963, the Times was packed with elegiac coverage of the leader who had been slain that Friday. But the No. 1 book on the nonfiction best-seller list, as it had been for weeks, was JFK: The Man & the Myth, by Victor Lasky, a newspaperman who would years later enjoy a second vogue on the right as a die-hard Nixon defender after Watergate. Lasky’s thick slash-and-burn Kennedy book, which even questioned his World War II heroism as the skipper of PT-109, was a precursor of the Swift Boat hatchet job on John Kerry. After the assassination, Lasky declared that “Kennedy is no longer subject to criticism on my part,” and his publisher stopped promoting the book (but quickly resumed shipping it). It started to descend on the Times list. But as the New Year arrived, and post-assassination America got moving again, JFK: The Man & the Myth was still the top seller in Dallas.
In the decades to come, America would be riveted by the Warren Commission report, whose finding that Oswald was the lone assassin has been challenged by all manner of conspiracy theorists, amateur historians, ideologues, nuts, novelists, and provocateurs. In 11/22/63, Stephen King writes that he consulted much of the assassination literature, “reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am” before putting the probability that Oswald acted alone “at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine.” His fictional alter ego, the schoolteacher Jake Epping, is, mercifully, not on an Oliver Stone crusade to subvert that math.
But another controversy from the assassination—one that has never received remotely the attention generated by the endless “grassy knoll” and “second gunmen” debates—is forcefully revived by King: the role played in Oswald’s psyche by the torrid atmosphere of political rage in Dallas, where both Lady Bird Johnson and Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon by mobs of demonstrators in notorious incidents before Kennedy’s fateful 1963 trip. As the time-traveling Epping gets settled in that past, he describes an inferno of seething citizens, anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish storefronts, and angry billboards demanding the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and equating racial integration with communism. That last one, King’s protagonist observes, “had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society.”
That “Tea Party Society” is the novelist’s own mischievous invention, but the rest of his description is accurate. King’s touchstone is The Death of a President, by William Manchester, a meticulous biographer and historian who was chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy to write the authorized account of the assassination. Manchester received cooperation from almost every conceivable party, the Warren Commission included, but after the Kennedy camp read the manuscript and objected to the disparaging treatment of Lyndon Johnson, as well as some (G-rated) domestic details about the First Couple, Mrs. Kennedy filed a quixotic injunction to halt publication. Her brief, failed effort only enhanced the book’s blockbuster appeal; soon after its release in 1967, The Death of a President became arguably more prominent than the Bible in middle-class American households. In his afterword to 11/22/63, King says he was “deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken” when rereading it. It’s hard to disagree. But what also struck me in a rereading was Manchester’s stern rejection of one major Warren Commission finding. Though he was onboard for its conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin, he did not buy its verdict that there was “no evidence” of any connection between Oswald’s crime and Dallas’s “general atmosphere of hate.”
Manchester is uncharacteristically contentious about this point. He writes that “individual commissioners had strong reservations” about exonerating Dallas but decided to hedge rather than stir up any controversy that might detract from the report’s “widest possible acceptance.” While Manchester adds that “obviously, it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment,” he strongly rejected the universal description of Oswald as “a loner.” No man, he writes, is quarantined from his time and place. Dallas was toxic. The atmosphere was “something unrelated to conventional politics—a stridency, a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society.” Duly observing that even the greatest presidents have been vilified in their time—Lincoln as a baboon and Jefferson as “Mad Tom”—Manchester saw something “more than partisan zeal” at work in this case. He detected “a chiaroscuro that existed outside the two parties, a virulence which had infected members of both.” Dallas had become the gaudy big top for a growing national movement—“the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies.”
Immediately after the assassination and ever since, the right has tried to deflect any connection between its fevered Kennedy hatred and Oswald’s addled psyche with the fact that the assassin had briefly defected to the Soviet Union. But at the time even some Texans weren’t buying that defense. An editorial in the Dallas Times Herald chastised its own city for supplying “the seeds of hate” and “the atmosphere for tragedy.” The editor of the Austin American wrote that “hatred and fanaticism, the flabby spirit of complacency that has permitted the preachers of fanatical hatred to appear respectable, and the self-righteousness that labels all who disagree with us as traitors or dolts, provided the way for the vile deed that snuffed out John Kennedy’s life.”
That atmosphere doesn’t surface arbitrarily in 11/22/63. Though King had first considered writing the book in 1971, what inspired him to finally do so was the spectacle of that Republican backbencher shouting out “You lie!” when Obama addressed Congress in the fall of 2009. “One of the reasons to write the book was because there’s so much hate in the air now,” he told the filmmaker Errol Morris (also at work on a Kennedy-assassination project) in a recent interview for the Times website, and “a lot of it’s directed at Obama.”
Unlike Obama, JFK enjoyed consistently high poll numbers. But in the fall of 1963, both Newsweek and Look speculated that he could lose his bid for reelection.
Whatever the similarities between Obama and JFK, the differences are substantial. Kennedy devoted little attention to domestic affairs, and Obama has no interest in replicating JFK’s entertaining give-and-takes with the press. Obama has yet to show bravery to match JFK’s standoff with Khrushchev, but he can boast the legislative achievements that eluded Kennedy. But this much is certain: Both presidents were centrists in the Democratic parties of their respective eras. Neither could be remotely described as radical, let alone “socialist,” as critics of both have contended. Both are ardent capitalists largely content to leave corporate America to its own devices. Both are wary of the institutional left. Both are hawkish by their party’s standards. But for all this moderation, they, like the similarly centrist Bill Clinton, who was accused of enabling drug running and murder on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have inspired a hatred so nightmarishly disproportionate to their actual beliefs, actions, and policies that it’s worthy of Stephen King’s fiction.
The culture wars that Americans have been fighting since the sixties are generally thought to have begun in the late sixties—in the paroxysms of student revolt and urban riots sparked by the spiraling of Vietnam and the twin murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. At the start of 11/22/63, King’s schoolteacher hero is implored by his old buddy Al, a dying Maine diner proprietor, to go back in time to bend the arc of history away from the catastrophic fallout that Oswald’s crime would unleash. “If you ever wanted to change the world,” Al says, “this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe … Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
Or not. In truth, it was already too late. America’s violent culture wars had started before JFK was shot. They were all on display in Oswald’s Dallas. At least in 1963, polling showed that only 5 percent of the country—a fringe—subscribed to the radical anti-government views championed by the John Birch Society and other militants of the right. These days, that fringe, whether in the form of birthers or the tea party or the hosts of Fox & Friends, gives marching orders to a major political party.
As a boomer who grew up in Washington, D.C., I was an eyewitness to the JFK inaugural on that bone-chilling January morning. My adolescence ended with the unfathomable news of that Friday afternoon of 11/22/63. My family was not in politics or journalism, but I had seen the young president with his wife at the theater one night, dazzling a startled audience with that ski instructor’s tan and those amazingly white teeth. Like almost every other American, I spent four straight days after the assassination watching television, and getting up to speed on the noirish Dallas atmosphere that would soon be compounded by Jack Ruby’s assassination of the assassin, the only murder I have seen broadcast live on television.
I never stopped admiring JFK, and, like Stephen King and so many others, I often wondered if all the calamities of the late sixties might have somehow been avoided had he lived. But that was another century, and, like many of those of my generation and older who carried the Kennedy flame, I find Kennedy’s presidency a half-remembered dream now, beautiful, even erotic, but somewhat weightless in content. Even the core JFK message—ask what you can do for your country—seems in remission at a time when so much of the country, regardless of party, holds Washington and most everything it does in contempt.
What’s also clear is that, despite the ardent attempts of the Kennedy cult to keep his romantic image alive, it is fading among those Americans who are too young to have witnessed it firsthand, in Technicolor. They tend to see JFK now as the property of their parents and grandparents—a short, transitional chapter in the American story, gradually reverting to black-and-white. Listen to Jackie Kennedy in her conversations with Schlesinger—with her feathery voice and piquant observations bespeaking a vanished time and class—and it’s hard to imagine what any 21st-century American under 40 could possibly make of her patrician eccentricities. In retrospect, that exhilarating rally at American University in Washington, D.C., in January 2008—where Caroline Kennedy, her uncle Teddy, and her cousin Patrick, soon to end the family’s 64-year run in national office, passed the torch to Obama—was the dynasty’s last hurrah.
On the other hand, read Manchester or 11/22/63 or any other account of that time, and the vitriol that was aimed at Kennedy in life seems as immediate as today. It’s as startling as that “You lie!” piercing the solemnity of a presidential address like a gunshot—or the actual gunshots fired at the White House last week by another wretched waif. In the end, that political backdrop is what our 44th and 35th presidents may have most in common. The tragedy of the Kennedy cult is that even as it fades, the hothouse brand of American malice that stalked its hero stalks our country still.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Chris Matthews Biography of John F. Kennedy
Chris Matthews – Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero
Chris Matthews of CSNBC is enamored with Jack Kennedy. This book is a light biography written by a CNBC journalist. It borders on hagiography, but I like it.
JFK was rather wild and reckless as a youth, constantly plagued by medical problems, spent so much time reading in bed alone, went to the elite prep school Choate, and then on to Harvard.
His senior thesis at Harvard which turned into the book WHY ENGLAND SLEPT opposed his father's appeasement toward Hitler, which ultimately led to his father's downfall. P. 37
"Jack felt deeply the emotional weight of the valor, committment, and sacrifice demanded by war. Nothing makes this clearer than his beloved PILGRIM'S WAY, the autobiography of John Buchan, famous for writing THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS. Published, in 1940, it immediately became a favorite and would remain the best-loved book of his life. Most significant, in his pages he again encountered the widely mourned figure of Raymond Asquith, about whom Churchill had written so movingly." P. 38-39
JFK truly was heroic in the South Pacific in the PT-14 incident. Chapter 3
JFK attends the founding of the UN in San Francisco in April of 1945. P. 69
JFK was noted for his ironic detachment. It’s easy to be ironic and detached when you are protected by money. P. 73
It’s hard to believe, but Kennedy fashioned himself as a “fighting conservative” in his election to Congress in 1946. He took a hard line toward the Soviet Union and was hardened by what he considered FDR’s giveaway of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta. It seems to me that he was liberal on domestic matters but conservative vs. the liberal wing of the Democratic Party on foreign affairs at the time. P. 87
One of the amazing facts of Kennedy's life is that he was friends with Richard Nixon from the time both of them entered Congress in 1946. Apparently JFK thought Nixon was quite intelligent. Go figure. P. 89
In this book JFK comes across like a Republican & as a Cold War warrior. P. 112
The author reminds the reader of the debt the world owes to JFK as he defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Any other President might have launched an attack on those missle sites in Cuba leading to a catastrophic nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. JFK deserves to be called a great leader just because of that one heroic act.
It seems from this book that Democratic liberals of the time never fully trusted Jack Kennedy. One reason, good enough for Eleanor Roosevelt, is that he did not vote to censure Sen. Joe McCarthy. McCarthy was good friends with the Kennedy clan.
I think the main thing I gleaned from this view of Jack Kennedy is that coming into the presidency his main concern as a vaunted Cold Warrior stirred by war and the events that came after WWII was foreign relatsions; specifically, containing the Soviet Union and the spread of communism and seeking peace with the USSR. His focus was on foreign affirs and not so much on domestic affairs.
Chris Matthews of CSNBC is enamored with Jack Kennedy. This book is a light biography written by a CNBC journalist. It borders on hagiography, but I like it.
JFK was rather wild and reckless as a youth, constantly plagued by medical problems, spent so much time reading in bed alone, went to the elite prep school Choate, and then on to Harvard.
His senior thesis at Harvard which turned into the book WHY ENGLAND SLEPT opposed his father's appeasement toward Hitler, which ultimately led to his father's downfall. P. 37
"Jack felt deeply the emotional weight of the valor, committment, and sacrifice demanded by war. Nothing makes this clearer than his beloved PILGRIM'S WAY, the autobiography of John Buchan, famous for writing THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS. Published, in 1940, it immediately became a favorite and would remain the best-loved book of his life. Most significant, in his pages he again encountered the widely mourned figure of Raymond Asquith, about whom Churchill had written so movingly." P. 38-39
JFK truly was heroic in the South Pacific in the PT-14 incident. Chapter 3
JFK attends the founding of the UN in San Francisco in April of 1945. P. 69
JFK was noted for his ironic detachment. It’s easy to be ironic and detached when you are protected by money. P. 73
It’s hard to believe, but Kennedy fashioned himself as a “fighting conservative” in his election to Congress in 1946. He took a hard line toward the Soviet Union and was hardened by what he considered FDR’s giveaway of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta. It seems to me that he was liberal on domestic matters but conservative vs. the liberal wing of the Democratic Party on foreign affairs at the time. P. 87
One of the amazing facts of Kennedy's life is that he was friends with Richard Nixon from the time both of them entered Congress in 1946. Apparently JFK thought Nixon was quite intelligent. Go figure. P. 89
In this book JFK comes across like a Republican & as a Cold War warrior. P. 112
The author reminds the reader of the debt the world owes to JFK as he defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Any other President might have launched an attack on those missle sites in Cuba leading to a catastrophic nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. JFK deserves to be called a great leader just because of that one heroic act.
It seems from this book that Democratic liberals of the time never fully trusted Jack Kennedy. One reason, good enough for Eleanor Roosevelt, is that he did not vote to censure Sen. Joe McCarthy. McCarthy was good friends with the Kennedy clan.
I think the main thing I gleaned from this view of Jack Kennedy is that coming into the presidency his main concern as a vaunted Cold Warrior stirred by war and the events that came after WWII was foreign relatsions; specifically, containing the Soviet Union and the spread of communism and seeking peace with the USSR. His focus was on foreign affirs and not so much on domestic affairs.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Failure is Good
Here is another Krugman take on the differences between Democrats and Republicans.
Failure Is Good
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 17, 2011
Paul Krugman
By next Wednesday, the so-called supercommittee, a bipartisan group of legislators, is supposed to reach an agreement on how to reduce future deficits. Barring an evil miracle — I’ll explain the evil part later — the committee will fail to meet that deadline.
If this news surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. If it depresses you, cheer up: In this case, failure is good.
Why was the supercommittee doomed to fail? Mainly because the gulf between our two major political parties is so wide. Republicans and Democrats don’t just have different priorities; they live in different intellectual and moral universes.
In Democrat-world, up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue, and cutting spending while the economy is still depressed reduces employment. But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and slashing government spending is a job-creation strategy. Try getting a leading Republican to admit that the Bush tax cuts increased the deficit or that sharp cuts in government spending (except on the military) would hurt the economic recovery.
Moreover, the parties have sharply different views of what constitutes economic justice.
Democrats see social insurance programs, from Social Security to food stamps, as serving the moral imperative of providing basic security to our fellow citizens and helping those in need.
Republicans have a totally different view. They may soft-pedal that view in public — in last year’s elections, they even managed to pose as defenders of Medicare — but, in private, they view the welfare state as immoral, a matter of forcing citizens at gunpoint to hand their money over to other people. By creating Social Security, declared Rick Perry in his book “Fed Up!”, F.D.R. was “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” Does anyone doubt that he was speaking for many in his party?
So the supercommittee brought together legislators who disagree completely both about how the world works and about the proper role of government. Why did anyone think this would work?
Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.
Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”
You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.
So the supercommittee will fail — and that’s good.
For one thing, history tells us that the Republican Party would renege on its side of any deal as soon as it got the chance. Remember, the U.S. fiscal outlook was pretty good in 2000, but, as soon as Republicans gained control of the White House, they squandered the surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars. So any deal reached now would, in practice, be nothing more than a deal to slash Social Security and Medicare, with no lasting improvement in the deficit.
Also, any deal reached now would almost surely end up worsening the economic slump. Slashing spending while the economy is depressed destroys jobs, and it’s probably even counterproductive in terms of deficit reduction, since it leads to lower revenue both now and in the future. And current projections, like those of the Federal Reserve, suggest that the economy will remain depressed at least through 2014. Better to have no deal than a deal that imposes spending cuts in the next few years.
But don’t we eventually have to match spending and revenue? Yes, we do. But the decision about how to do that isn’t about accounting. It’s about fundamental values — and it’s a decision that should be made by voters, not by some committee that allegedly transcends the partisan divide.
Eventually, one side or the other of that divide will get the kind of popular mandate it needs to resolve our long-run budget issues. Until then, attempts to strike a Grand Bargain are fundamentally destructive. If the supercommittee fails, as expected, it will be time to celebrate.
Failure Is Good
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 17, 2011
Paul Krugman
By next Wednesday, the so-called supercommittee, a bipartisan group of legislators, is supposed to reach an agreement on how to reduce future deficits. Barring an evil miracle — I’ll explain the evil part later — the committee will fail to meet that deadline.
If this news surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. If it depresses you, cheer up: In this case, failure is good.
Why was the supercommittee doomed to fail? Mainly because the gulf between our two major political parties is so wide. Republicans and Democrats don’t just have different priorities; they live in different intellectual and moral universes.
In Democrat-world, up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue, and cutting spending while the economy is still depressed reduces employment. But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and slashing government spending is a job-creation strategy. Try getting a leading Republican to admit that the Bush tax cuts increased the deficit or that sharp cuts in government spending (except on the military) would hurt the economic recovery.
Moreover, the parties have sharply different views of what constitutes economic justice.
Democrats see social insurance programs, from Social Security to food stamps, as serving the moral imperative of providing basic security to our fellow citizens and helping those in need.
Republicans have a totally different view. They may soft-pedal that view in public — in last year’s elections, they even managed to pose as defenders of Medicare — but, in private, they view the welfare state as immoral, a matter of forcing citizens at gunpoint to hand their money over to other people. By creating Social Security, declared Rick Perry in his book “Fed Up!”, F.D.R. was “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” Does anyone doubt that he was speaking for many in his party?
So the supercommittee brought together legislators who disagree completely both about how the world works and about the proper role of government. Why did anyone think this would work?
Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.
Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”
You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.
So the supercommittee will fail — and that’s good.
For one thing, history tells us that the Republican Party would renege on its side of any deal as soon as it got the chance. Remember, the U.S. fiscal outlook was pretty good in 2000, but, as soon as Republicans gained control of the White House, they squandered the surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars. So any deal reached now would, in practice, be nothing more than a deal to slash Social Security and Medicare, with no lasting improvement in the deficit.
Also, any deal reached now would almost surely end up worsening the economic slump. Slashing spending while the economy is depressed destroys jobs, and it’s probably even counterproductive in terms of deficit reduction, since it leads to lower revenue both now and in the future. And current projections, like those of the Federal Reserve, suggest that the economy will remain depressed at least through 2014. Better to have no deal than a deal that imposes spending cuts in the next few years.
But don’t we eventually have to match spending and revenue? Yes, we do. But the decision about how to do that isn’t about accounting. It’s about fundamental values — and it’s a decision that should be made by voters, not by some committee that allegedly transcends the partisan divide.
Eventually, one side or the other of that divide will get the kind of popular mandate it needs to resolve our long-run budget issues. Until then, attempts to strike a Grand Bargain are fundamentally destructive. If the supercommittee fails, as expected, it will be time to celebrate.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Something Disintegrates At A Burger King
BY Dave Pell
NPR
12 November 2011
The other day, while sitting in our car with the windows down, my wife and I had a heated argument. Bad words. Yelling. A fist or two slammed into our Volvo's center console. Though we both received nominations, we never reached consensus on which one of us was wrong, and the whole thing blew over by time we pulled into the garage.
I tell you this story because I figure you'll probably hear about it anyway. So it might as well come from me.
That seems to be the lesson offered by Andy Boyle. Boyle was at a Burger King when a young married couple at a nearby table had an argument. The fight was loud enough for Boyle and other patrons to overhear. The fighting couple was certainly aware of that. They chose to argue in public. They, in effect, gave up their right to privacy among those at the restaurant. But should they have assumed their fight would be broadcast on Twitter and eventually featured on ABC News?
Thanks to one guy who decided to take a break from his Whopper and start tweeting, that's exactly what happened. Andy Boyle opened with this missive: "I am listening to a marriage disintegrate at a table next to me in this restaurant. Aaron Sorkin couldn't write this any better."
From there, he went on to live-tweet the fight, describing details of the argument, even going so far as to broadcast photos and videos of the couple.
Getting a large dose of overly personal details from someone's life on Twitter or Facebook is nothing new. Plenty of people broadcast the content of arguments, share intimate details about their marriages, and even mourn the death of a loved one online. But usually those experiences are shared voluntarily. Most people get to decide for themselves which parts of their lives they want to share on social media.
But maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and new technologies, coupled with a decreasing respect for boundaries, has changed the equation. You no longer get to decide when to share. You don't even get to decide whether you want to use Twitter or Facebook. If you leave the house, you're on social media.
Recently, a nude picture was stolen from celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and sold to gossip site TMZ. When Bourdain got wind of the sale, he decided to go pre-emptive and post the photo to his own Twitter account.
The whole incident doesn't paint a pretty picture of the state of our often obsessive culture. But I'm sure it didn't surprise Bourdain. He's a celebrity. He chooses to be in the public eye. He expects to occasionally have to deal with a violation like this because he knows the rules of being a celebrity.
But if Andy Boyle's actions are an indication of a broader trend, we are entering the age of the unintended celebrity, where the new rules state that we all run the risks associated with fame without necessarily enjoying any of its benefits. There's a new reality show and you're the star, whether you like it or not. Someone should follow you around all day yelling, "action!"
The one glimmer of hope I've found in this whole unfortunate mess is the immediate negative reactions others have had, not to the couple's decision to fight in a restaurant, but to Andy Boyle's decision to share the details. Almost everyone I've talked to is repulsed by what took place at Boyle's Burger King table. Some didn't even want to read the outtakes of the fight. The curiosity about someone else's life was outweighed by a disgust with the messenger.
In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple's marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can't stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgement disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.
If our disgust with this kind of secondhand sharing is widespread enough, maybe there's still a chance such invasions of privacy will be the exception and not the rule. But I wouldn't bet on it.
The only thing I know for sure is that the next time my wife and I have a fight, I'm rolling up the windows.
NPR
12 November 2011
The other day, while sitting in our car with the windows down, my wife and I had a heated argument. Bad words. Yelling. A fist or two slammed into our Volvo's center console. Though we both received nominations, we never reached consensus on which one of us was wrong, and the whole thing blew over by time we pulled into the garage.
I tell you this story because I figure you'll probably hear about it anyway. So it might as well come from me.
That seems to be the lesson offered by Andy Boyle. Boyle was at a Burger King when a young married couple at a nearby table had an argument. The fight was loud enough for Boyle and other patrons to overhear. The fighting couple was certainly aware of that. They chose to argue in public. They, in effect, gave up their right to privacy among those at the restaurant. But should they have assumed their fight would be broadcast on Twitter and eventually featured on ABC News?
Thanks to one guy who decided to take a break from his Whopper and start tweeting, that's exactly what happened. Andy Boyle opened with this missive: "I am listening to a marriage disintegrate at a table next to me in this restaurant. Aaron Sorkin couldn't write this any better."
From there, he went on to live-tweet the fight, describing details of the argument, even going so far as to broadcast photos and videos of the couple.
Getting a large dose of overly personal details from someone's life on Twitter or Facebook is nothing new. Plenty of people broadcast the content of arguments, share intimate details about their marriages, and even mourn the death of a loved one online. But usually those experiences are shared voluntarily. Most people get to decide for themselves which parts of their lives they want to share on social media.
But maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and new technologies, coupled with a decreasing respect for boundaries, has changed the equation. You no longer get to decide when to share. You don't even get to decide whether you want to use Twitter or Facebook. If you leave the house, you're on social media.
Recently, a nude picture was stolen from celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and sold to gossip site TMZ. When Bourdain got wind of the sale, he decided to go pre-emptive and post the photo to his own Twitter account.
The whole incident doesn't paint a pretty picture of the state of our often obsessive culture. But I'm sure it didn't surprise Bourdain. He's a celebrity. He chooses to be in the public eye. He expects to occasionally have to deal with a violation like this because he knows the rules of being a celebrity.
But if Andy Boyle's actions are an indication of a broader trend, we are entering the age of the unintended celebrity, where the new rules state that we all run the risks associated with fame without necessarily enjoying any of its benefits. There's a new reality show and you're the star, whether you like it or not. Someone should follow you around all day yelling, "action!"
The one glimmer of hope I've found in this whole unfortunate mess is the immediate negative reactions others have had, not to the couple's decision to fight in a restaurant, but to Andy Boyle's decision to share the details. Almost everyone I've talked to is repulsed by what took place at Boyle's Burger King table. Some didn't even want to read the outtakes of the fight. The curiosity about someone else's life was outweighed by a disgust with the messenger.
In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple's marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can't stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgement disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.
If our disgust with this kind of secondhand sharing is widespread enough, maybe there's still a chance such invasions of privacy will be the exception and not the rule. But I wouldn't bet on it.
The only thing I know for sure is that the next time my wife and I have a fight, I'm rolling up the windows.
Nation To Bring In Revenue By Offering Official United States Of America Franchise Opportunities
The Onion
15 November 2011
WASHINGTON—Amidst continued deadlock over how to rein in the federal deficit, government officials announced plans Tuesday to increase revenue by offering franchise opportunities to entrepreneurs who wish to start their own United States of America.
Banking on the popularity of its original location, the country hopes to make millions by partnering with franchisees around the world, to whom it would license the trademarked United States brand name as well as the nation's flag, motto, preserved landmarks, college sports programs, movie studios, and bicameral legislature.
"Now, anyone interested in starting a new nation can open an official United States," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. "America already has a brand everyone knows and responds to. Now the time has come for us to grow that asset and monetize it."
Meanwhile, it's a great deal for our franchise partners, who not only get to fly the red, white, and blue, but also have access to our unrivaled network of foreign oil suppliers." Murray continued. "With an initial capital investment of just $20,000, interested parties can begin building their own U.S.A. immediately."
According to sources, as soon as their check clears with the U.S. Treasury, new franchisees will receive an America Operations Manual and a welcome kit that includes a framed copy of the Constitution, a 1/16th-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, two cases of Budweiser beer, one's choice of a dream catcher or Native American hand drum, and an instructional pamphlet on how to print the nation's popular currency.
U.S. headquarters in Washington will reportedly collect a standard franchise royalty of 4.5 percent on each new location's gross domestic product, as well as residual fees stemming from any performance of the national anthem, reproduction of the presidential seal, or usage of proprietary place names such as New York or Texas.
In response to claims the new program could dilute the value of the United States brand, officials have stated that strict quality-control standards will be maintained across each American franchise.
"People can expect the same quality of life at any U.S.A. location," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters. "All will be provided with the First Amendment, free market economies, the Grand Canyon, trial by jury—everything you need to run your very own United States. We're even throwing in a few clear-eyed, apple-cheeked all-American youths to help them get started."
Proposed deals are already in motion for new United States of Americas to open in emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil by January 2013, Boehner said, and discussions are ongoing regarding a possible high-end underwater resort location in the United Arab Emirates.
A deal to open a flagship franchise on the Champs-Élysées in Paris has reportedly been quashed by the French government.
"It's intimidating to start any new business from scratch, let alone a fully functioning nation, so the franchise model really appealed to me," said Swiss entrepreneur Adrian Holm, who hopes to open multiple European United States locations if his first venture succeeds. "It took us a while to find a big enough spot for one, but it's on a reasonably busy highway, and I feel a U.S.A. is the sort of place that people will stop and see if it's convenient enough."
Several business experts have said America's recent credit-rating downgrade, rising levels of customer dissatisfaction, and high incarceration costs might end up proving a liability for franchisees, and few investors have been bullish on the United States since its failed attempts to extend its brand by opening wholly owned outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.
"It's definitely a gamble," 28-year-old Ahmad Nimeiri of Sudan said. "But the prospect of heading up my own United States of America sure as hell beats herding goats for my uncle for the rest of my life."
Added Nimeiri: "Hopefully I won't wind up regretting my decision not to just open up a China like my brother Samir did. He's doing great."
15 November 2011
WASHINGTON—Amidst continued deadlock over how to rein in the federal deficit, government officials announced plans Tuesday to increase revenue by offering franchise opportunities to entrepreneurs who wish to start their own United States of America.
Banking on the popularity of its original location, the country hopes to make millions by partnering with franchisees around the world, to whom it would license the trademarked United States brand name as well as the nation's flag, motto, preserved landmarks, college sports programs, movie studios, and bicameral legislature.
"Now, anyone interested in starting a new nation can open an official United States," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. "America already has a brand everyone knows and responds to. Now the time has come for us to grow that asset and monetize it."
Meanwhile, it's a great deal for our franchise partners, who not only get to fly the red, white, and blue, but also have access to our unrivaled network of foreign oil suppliers." Murray continued. "With an initial capital investment of just $20,000, interested parties can begin building their own U.S.A. immediately."
According to sources, as soon as their check clears with the U.S. Treasury, new franchisees will receive an America Operations Manual and a welcome kit that includes a framed copy of the Constitution, a 1/16th-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, two cases of Budweiser beer, one's choice of a dream catcher or Native American hand drum, and an instructional pamphlet on how to print the nation's popular currency.
U.S. headquarters in Washington will reportedly collect a standard franchise royalty of 4.5 percent on each new location's gross domestic product, as well as residual fees stemming from any performance of the national anthem, reproduction of the presidential seal, or usage of proprietary place names such as New York or Texas.
In response to claims the new program could dilute the value of the United States brand, officials have stated that strict quality-control standards will be maintained across each American franchise.
"People can expect the same quality of life at any U.S.A. location," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters. "All will be provided with the First Amendment, free market economies, the Grand Canyon, trial by jury—everything you need to run your very own United States. We're even throwing in a few clear-eyed, apple-cheeked all-American youths to help them get started."
Proposed deals are already in motion for new United States of Americas to open in emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil by January 2013, Boehner said, and discussions are ongoing regarding a possible high-end underwater resort location in the United Arab Emirates.
A deal to open a flagship franchise on the Champs-Élysées in Paris has reportedly been quashed by the French government.
"It's intimidating to start any new business from scratch, let alone a fully functioning nation, so the franchise model really appealed to me," said Swiss entrepreneur Adrian Holm, who hopes to open multiple European United States locations if his first venture succeeds. "It took us a while to find a big enough spot for one, but it's on a reasonably busy highway, and I feel a U.S.A. is the sort of place that people will stop and see if it's convenient enough."
Several business experts have said America's recent credit-rating downgrade, rising levels of customer dissatisfaction, and high incarceration costs might end up proving a liability for franchisees, and few investors have been bullish on the United States since its failed attempts to extend its brand by opening wholly owned outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.
"It's definitely a gamble," 28-year-old Ahmad Nimeiri of Sudan said. "But the prospect of heading up my own United States of America sure as hell beats herding goats for my uncle for the rest of my life."
Added Nimeiri: "Hopefully I won't wind up regretting my decision not to just open up a China like my brother Samir did. He's doing great."
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Supreme Court and the Affordable Health Care Act: Which Way is the Political Wind Blowing?
November 15, 2011
Power in the Court
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
The Supreme Court, as expected, announced Monday that it will review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care-reform law. A decision is likely by next June. In the intervening months, we will be informed many times that the issue in the case is whether the requirement that individuals buy health insurance from private companies violates the Commerce Clause of Article I.
Don’t believe it—at least not completely. In a case of this magnitude, a technical reading of the Constitution and laws is only one factor that goes into the Justices’ determination. More fundamentally, this case, like any big case, will be about power.
Two new books offer a timely reminder of how the interaction between the President and the Supreme Court work in the real world. Jeff Shesol’s “Supreme Power,” which was published last year, and James F. Simon’s “FDR and Chief Justice Hughes,” which will be released next February, both tell the story of the epic clash between Franklin Roosevelt and the Court over the New Deal. The books differ; Shesol is more sympathetic to F.D.R., while Simon takes Hughes’s side. But both books recognize the central role of Justice Owen Roberts, who was the swing vote of his day.
To review: In 1935 and 1936, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including Roberts, struck down a series of important New Deal initiatives, including the National Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. In response, following his landslide reëlection in 1936, Roosevelt proposed his court-packing plan, which would have expanded the number of Justices and thus given his appointees a clear majority on the Court. Around the time the plan was pending, Roberts started voting to uphold F.D.R.’s bills, and the court-packing plan died an unmourned death. It was, as the legend has it, “the switch in time that saved the nine.”
Shesol and Simon embroider the legend with fact. It’s clear, for example, that Roberts actually first voted with Roosevelt before the court-packing plan came to light. Still, the larger point remains true. Roberts saw how the country was changing—he saw that the New Deal had become a political and economic fact of life—and he decided to stay out of the way of history.
That’s a lesson for today. The current swing vote, of course, is Anthony Kennedy, and it is difficult to imagine health care being upheld without his support. Kennedy is an ethical and honorable man, but there’s no doubt that he, too, follows the news. All the Justices do. The case will be argued next February or March, when all of us will have a better idea of whether President Obama will be reëlected. If Obama looks like a lame duck at that point, it will be a lot easier for the Justices to dismantle his signal achievement; if Obama looks like a winner, some on the Court may think twice about picking this particular fight with him.
To a great extent, that’s what happened with George W. Bush in the Supreme Court, especially when it came to the central events of his Presidency, the war on terror and the Iraq war. The Court did make a series of measured rulings against Bush on the issue of the detainees at Guantánamo when he was facing reëlection in 2004, but the Justices, especially Kennedy, really turned on him when the war went south. The Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2007) and Boumediene (2008) cases clearly owe something of their contemptuous tone to the failed nature of the Bush Presidency. Like voters, the Justices smell weakness, and respect strength. No one likes a loser.
Recent auguries have looked promising for the fate of health care in the Supreme Court. As challenges to the law have worked their way through the lower courts, political form has mostly held; judges appointed by Democratic Presidents have tended to uphold the law, and judges named by Republicans have voted it down. But two recent exceptions to that rule have certainly drawn the attention of the Justices. Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, wrote the opinion upholding the law in the Sixth Circuit, and Laurence Silbermann, a widely respected conservative, wrote a powerful endorsement of its constitutionality in the D.C. Circuit.
It all goes to show that sometimes (often) you don’t need a law degree to know how the Supreme Court is going to vote—just know which way the wind is blowing.
Power in the Court
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
The Supreme Court, as expected, announced Monday that it will review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care-reform law. A decision is likely by next June. In the intervening months, we will be informed many times that the issue in the case is whether the requirement that individuals buy health insurance from private companies violates the Commerce Clause of Article I.
Don’t believe it—at least not completely. In a case of this magnitude, a technical reading of the Constitution and laws is only one factor that goes into the Justices’ determination. More fundamentally, this case, like any big case, will be about power.
Two new books offer a timely reminder of how the interaction between the President and the Supreme Court work in the real world. Jeff Shesol’s “Supreme Power,” which was published last year, and James F. Simon’s “FDR and Chief Justice Hughes,” which will be released next February, both tell the story of the epic clash between Franklin Roosevelt and the Court over the New Deal. The books differ; Shesol is more sympathetic to F.D.R., while Simon takes Hughes’s side. But both books recognize the central role of Justice Owen Roberts, who was the swing vote of his day.
To review: In 1935 and 1936, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including Roberts, struck down a series of important New Deal initiatives, including the National Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. In response, following his landslide reëlection in 1936, Roosevelt proposed his court-packing plan, which would have expanded the number of Justices and thus given his appointees a clear majority on the Court. Around the time the plan was pending, Roberts started voting to uphold F.D.R.’s bills, and the court-packing plan died an unmourned death. It was, as the legend has it, “the switch in time that saved the nine.”
Shesol and Simon embroider the legend with fact. It’s clear, for example, that Roberts actually first voted with Roosevelt before the court-packing plan came to light. Still, the larger point remains true. Roberts saw how the country was changing—he saw that the New Deal had become a political and economic fact of life—and he decided to stay out of the way of history.
That’s a lesson for today. The current swing vote, of course, is Anthony Kennedy, and it is difficult to imagine health care being upheld without his support. Kennedy is an ethical and honorable man, but there’s no doubt that he, too, follows the news. All the Justices do. The case will be argued next February or March, when all of us will have a better idea of whether President Obama will be reëlected. If Obama looks like a lame duck at that point, it will be a lot easier for the Justices to dismantle his signal achievement; if Obama looks like a winner, some on the Court may think twice about picking this particular fight with him.
To a great extent, that’s what happened with George W. Bush in the Supreme Court, especially when it came to the central events of his Presidency, the war on terror and the Iraq war. The Court did make a series of measured rulings against Bush on the issue of the detainees at Guantánamo when he was facing reëlection in 2004, but the Justices, especially Kennedy, really turned on him when the war went south. The Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2007) and Boumediene (2008) cases clearly owe something of their contemptuous tone to the failed nature of the Bush Presidency. Like voters, the Justices smell weakness, and respect strength. No one likes a loser.
Recent auguries have looked promising for the fate of health care in the Supreme Court. As challenges to the law have worked their way through the lower courts, political form has mostly held; judges appointed by Democratic Presidents have tended to uphold the law, and judges named by Republicans have voted it down. But two recent exceptions to that rule have certainly drawn the attention of the Justices. Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, wrote the opinion upholding the law in the Sixth Circuit, and Laurence Silbermann, a widely respected conservative, wrote a powerful endorsement of its constitutionality in the D.C. Circuit.
It all goes to show that sometimes (often) you don’t need a law degree to know how the Supreme Court is going to vote—just know which way the wind is blowing.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
What I Don't Like About Steve Jobs
From reading the biography only:
1) He fathered a child out of wedlock at age 23 and refused to recognize or support her for many years.
2) He was arrogant and cruel to his friends.
3) He apparently had no concern for the less fortunate.
4) He would adopt other people's ideas without giving them credit
5) He was certainly a marketing and business genius, but a sorry human being in many ways.
1) He fathered a child out of wedlock at age 23 and refused to recognize or support her for many years.
2) He was arrogant and cruel to his friends.
3) He apparently had no concern for the less fortunate.
4) He would adopt other people's ideas without giving them credit
5) He was certainly a marketing and business genius, but a sorry human being in many ways.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Conservative Judges Upholding the Affordable Health Care Act
Bruce Brown
How Conservative Judges Just Provided the Most Authoritative Legal Defense of Obamacare November 12, 2011 | 12:00 am 4 comments |MorePrint
As President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has wound its way through the justice system, courts have split on the issue of whether the Act passes constitutional muster and everyone agrees that the matter will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, probably before the 2012 election. In this light, the D.C. Circuit Court’s Tuesday decision to uphold the Act may not seem all that important; after all, it is just one of the many lower court opinions on the issue. And, even though the opinion’s author is a well-respected conservative judge, there have been other conservative scholars who are on record in support of the constitutionality of the Act, including Charles Fried, Solicitor General of the United States for President Reagan. But the D.C. Circuit opinion is in fact deeply significant and a genuine surprise to court watchers—and an extreme disappointment to those opposing the law—because it provides the most authoritative, truly conservative defense of the Act thus far, a defense that should buttress the legal position of the Obama administration before the Supreme Court next year.
The D.C. Circuit opinion upholding the Act rests on two fundamental conservative tenets: an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution and a restrained view of judicial power. Writing for the majority, Judge Laurence Silberman begins his substantive analysis by quoting the text of the Commerce Clause: “Congress shall have Power … To regulate commerce … among the several states.” The legal issue in the case is whether the words “regulate commerce” extend to the regulation of economic inactivity—to force people to take the action of purchasing health insurance. Employing a classically originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution, Judge Silberman does not consider what the words “regulate commerce” might mean today, but instead references Samuel Johnson’s 1773 dictionary to determine what those words meant to those who ratified the Constitution in 1789. Johnson defined “regulate” to mean “to prescribe certain measures,” or “to adjust by rule or method.” To “regulate,” Judge Silberman reasoned, “can mean to require action, and nothing in the definition appears to limit that power only to those already active in relation to an interstate market.” Judge Silberman concludes: “There is therefore no textual support for appellants’ argument.” To a true conservative, and to most everyone else, a constitutional argument that has no “textual support” in the language of the Constitution is an argument that will lose almost every time.
By grounding its defense of the individual mandate in the text of the Constitution itself, the D.C. Circuit’s opinion is far more difficult to attack than other opinions and commentaries that rely upon vulnerable Supreme Court decisions—such as the famous Wikard v. Filburn—which many conservatives believe should (and might be) overruled by the Roberts Court. For example, National Review’s Avik Roy wrote that Judge Silberman’s opinion shows how important it is “for conservatives to overturn Wickard v. Filburn.” In Wickard v. Filburn, which Roy calls “the original sin of left-wing jurisprudence,” the Supreme Court held that Congress had the Commerce Clause power to regulate the amount of wheat a farmer grew for his own family’s consumption because home-grown wheat competes with wheat in commerce and therefore affects its market price. The case is cited by the government in its defense of Obamacare as an example of Congress regulating economic inactivity that has an impact on the economy.
But it seems to me Roy has Judge Silberman’ opinion exactly wrong. Judge Silberman does not rely on Wickard v. Filburn, or suggest that the decision to uphold Obamacare depends upon the vitality of that case. To the contrary: Judge Silberman relies on the text of the Constitution itself to uphold the law, and an originalist interpretation of the Constitution at that. Even overturning Wickard v. Filburn, in other words, will not change the text of the Constitution, nor will it change Silberman’s interpretation.
The second fundamental conservative principle upon which Judge Silberman’s decision is grounded is that the judicial power to strike down laws passed by a democratic majority should be sparingly invoked. It would be an “activist” decision to strike down this law which was, after all, passed by a majority of democratically elected senators and representatives, and signed by a president whose electoral platform featured health care reform. In this opinion, Judge Silberman is joined by Judge Kavanaugh, another conservative judge who dissented on jurisdictional grounds but nonetheless wrote: “The elected Branches designed this law to help provide all Americans with access to affordable health insurance and quality health care, vital policy objectives. This legislation was enacted, moreover, after a high-profile and vigorous national debate. Courts must afford great respect to that legislative effort and should be wary of upending it.” As Judge Kavanaugh explained, the same argument that would strike down the individual mandate might also doom other reforms—conservative reforms—“on the leading edge of a shift in how the Federal Government goes about furnishing a social safety net for those who are old, poor, sick, or disabled and need help,” such as, for example, the partial privatization of social security.
Underscoring all of these conservative opinions—the majority opinion of Judge Silberman, the dissenting opinion of Judge Kavanaugh, and the opinions of conservative scholars like Charles Fried—is a common belief that this is just not a Commerce Clause case. The Commerce Clause regulates the division of power between the federal government and the states. None of the judges on the D.C. Circuit appeared to have any trouble concluding that regulation of health care—even heavy regulation of health care—is a legitimate objective of the federal government, even at the expense of the states. The expansion of federal government regulation over health care comes not at the expense of the states (a Commerce Clause concern), they argue, but at the expense of individual liberty, a concern of the Due Process Clause. Those challenging the Act have not made a Due Process challenge, however, and such a challenge would likely be unsuccessful. As Judge Silberman reasoned in his opinion: “[The individual mandate] certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty, but it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race … . The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local—or seemingly passive—their individual origins.”
How Conservative Judges Just Provided the Most Authoritative Legal Defense of Obamacare November 12, 2011 | 12:00 am 4 comments |MorePrint
As President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has wound its way through the justice system, courts have split on the issue of whether the Act passes constitutional muster and everyone agrees that the matter will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, probably before the 2012 election. In this light, the D.C. Circuit Court’s Tuesday decision to uphold the Act may not seem all that important; after all, it is just one of the many lower court opinions on the issue. And, even though the opinion’s author is a well-respected conservative judge, there have been other conservative scholars who are on record in support of the constitutionality of the Act, including Charles Fried, Solicitor General of the United States for President Reagan. But the D.C. Circuit opinion is in fact deeply significant and a genuine surprise to court watchers—and an extreme disappointment to those opposing the law—because it provides the most authoritative, truly conservative defense of the Act thus far, a defense that should buttress the legal position of the Obama administration before the Supreme Court next year.
The D.C. Circuit opinion upholding the Act rests on two fundamental conservative tenets: an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution and a restrained view of judicial power. Writing for the majority, Judge Laurence Silberman begins his substantive analysis by quoting the text of the Commerce Clause: “Congress shall have Power … To regulate commerce … among the several states.” The legal issue in the case is whether the words “regulate commerce” extend to the regulation of economic inactivity—to force people to take the action of purchasing health insurance. Employing a classically originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution, Judge Silberman does not consider what the words “regulate commerce” might mean today, but instead references Samuel Johnson’s 1773 dictionary to determine what those words meant to those who ratified the Constitution in 1789. Johnson defined “regulate” to mean “to prescribe certain measures,” or “to adjust by rule or method.” To “regulate,” Judge Silberman reasoned, “can mean to require action, and nothing in the definition appears to limit that power only to those already active in relation to an interstate market.” Judge Silberman concludes: “There is therefore no textual support for appellants’ argument.” To a true conservative, and to most everyone else, a constitutional argument that has no “textual support” in the language of the Constitution is an argument that will lose almost every time.
By grounding its defense of the individual mandate in the text of the Constitution itself, the D.C. Circuit’s opinion is far more difficult to attack than other opinions and commentaries that rely upon vulnerable Supreme Court decisions—such as the famous Wikard v. Filburn—which many conservatives believe should (and might be) overruled by the Roberts Court. For example, National Review’s Avik Roy wrote that Judge Silberman’s opinion shows how important it is “for conservatives to overturn Wickard v. Filburn.” In Wickard v. Filburn, which Roy calls “the original sin of left-wing jurisprudence,” the Supreme Court held that Congress had the Commerce Clause power to regulate the amount of wheat a farmer grew for his own family’s consumption because home-grown wheat competes with wheat in commerce and therefore affects its market price. The case is cited by the government in its defense of Obamacare as an example of Congress regulating economic inactivity that has an impact on the economy.
But it seems to me Roy has Judge Silberman’ opinion exactly wrong. Judge Silberman does not rely on Wickard v. Filburn, or suggest that the decision to uphold Obamacare depends upon the vitality of that case. To the contrary: Judge Silberman relies on the text of the Constitution itself to uphold the law, and an originalist interpretation of the Constitution at that. Even overturning Wickard v. Filburn, in other words, will not change the text of the Constitution, nor will it change Silberman’s interpretation.
The second fundamental conservative principle upon which Judge Silberman’s decision is grounded is that the judicial power to strike down laws passed by a democratic majority should be sparingly invoked. It would be an “activist” decision to strike down this law which was, after all, passed by a majority of democratically elected senators and representatives, and signed by a president whose electoral platform featured health care reform. In this opinion, Judge Silberman is joined by Judge Kavanaugh, another conservative judge who dissented on jurisdictional grounds but nonetheless wrote: “The elected Branches designed this law to help provide all Americans with access to affordable health insurance and quality health care, vital policy objectives. This legislation was enacted, moreover, after a high-profile and vigorous national debate. Courts must afford great respect to that legislative effort and should be wary of upending it.” As Judge Kavanaugh explained, the same argument that would strike down the individual mandate might also doom other reforms—conservative reforms—“on the leading edge of a shift in how the Federal Government goes about furnishing a social safety net for those who are old, poor, sick, or disabled and need help,” such as, for example, the partial privatization of social security.
Underscoring all of these conservative opinions—the majority opinion of Judge Silberman, the dissenting opinion of Judge Kavanaugh, and the opinions of conservative scholars like Charles Fried—is a common belief that this is just not a Commerce Clause case. The Commerce Clause regulates the division of power between the federal government and the states. None of the judges on the D.C. Circuit appeared to have any trouble concluding that regulation of health care—even heavy regulation of health care—is a legitimate objective of the federal government, even at the expense of the states. The expansion of federal government regulation over health care comes not at the expense of the states (a Commerce Clause concern), they argue, but at the expense of individual liberty, a concern of the Due Process Clause. Those challenging the Act have not made a Due Process challenge, however, and such a challenge would likely be unsuccessful. As Judge Silberman reasoned in his opinion: “[The individual mandate] certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty, but it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race … . The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local—or seemingly passive—their individual origins.”
Gene Chizik - All In (10)
When the Coach talks about family, he means it!
The Auburn players know the Chizik kids: Landry, Cally, & Kennedy. The football players see the Chizik children around the athletic complex and around practice. The players have relationships with them. They see how Coach Chizik is a role model for his children as well as for his players.
"It's all part of what we mean when we say family," the Coach says.
The Auburn players know the Chizik kids: Landry, Cally, & Kennedy. The football players see the Chizik children around the athletic complex and around practice. The players have relationships with them. They see how Coach Chizik is a role model for his children as well as for his players.
"It's all part of what we mean when we say family," the Coach says.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Bill Clinton for America
Books of The Times
Bill Clinton Lays Out His Prescription for America’s Future
The former president's new book shows him in two familiar modes: freewheeling policy wonk and genial politician.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: November 7, 2011
Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work,” is really several books in one slender volume. It’s a lucid one-man rebuttal of the Tea Party’s anti-government agenda. A series of shrewd talking points for Democrats trying to hold on to the White House and battling for control of Congress in the midst of a sour economy and growing voter discontent. A self-serving reminder of the prosperity the country enjoyed during Mr. Clinton’s tenure in the White House, meant to burnish his legacy. And a practical set of proposals — some borrowed and some new, some innovative and some highly sketchy — for restoring economic growth and creating jobs.
BACK TO WORK
Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy
By Bill Clinton
196 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.
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The book, which appears to be an expanded version of a Newsweek article by Mr. Clinton that appeared in June, shows the former president in two familiar modes: freewheeling policy wonk and genial retail politician.
At a time when anti-government ranting dominates the Republican debates and the Democrats often seem on the defensive, Mr. Clinton serves up a succinct common-sense argument for why America needs a strong national government, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem (which is going to get worse given the demographics of an aging baby-boomer population and the high costs of interest payments), and why that debt problem “can’t be solved unless the economy starts growing again.”
Although Mr. Clinton questions the Obama administration’s embrace of nuclear-power loan guarantees — he brings up the vulnerability of nuclear plants to natural disasters and contends that “nuclear isn’t much of a job creator compared with other clean fuel sources” — the bulk of this book underscores just how closely aligned Mr. Clinton is with President Obama on many policy issues. The book contrasts their shared economic approach to that of Republicans, from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush, who, Mr. Clinton writes, abandoned the idea of a balanced budget and instead chose “large tax cuts especially for higher income people like me, along with two wars and the senior citizens’ drug benefit,” which resulted in snowballing deficits.
At the same time, this book has a passive-aggressive subtext, which suggests that Mr. Clinton has stepped into a gap — has gone “back to work,” as it were — to sell Obama policies that have not been persuasively sold to the American people. Mr. Clinton writes that he started and stopped writing the book several times because he didn’t “want just to add another stone to the Democratic side of the partisan scale,” but “decided to go forward because I think it’s important that all Americans have a clear understanding of the basic economic facts and of the ideas driving the policy proposals under discussion.”
Mr. Clinton wonders why “the president and the Democratic Congress did not raise the debt ceiling after the election, in November or December 2010, when they still had a majority.” Such a move arguably would have averted the debilitating down-to-the-wire negotiations this summer, which Mr. Clinton says left the United States looking “weak and confused” to the outside world.
Among the reasons for the size of the Republican victories in 2010, Mr. Clinton argues, was the Democrats’ failure to “counter the national Republican message with one of their own.” The Republicans, in Mr. Clinton’s view, ran “a more effective, more aggressive campaign” that characterized the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid; and Mr. Obama “as extreme leftists who wanted to spend America into ruin, regulate the economy into extended recession, and tax individuals into poverty and businesses into bankruptcy.” The Democrats, he says, “ran individual races without a big message,” apparently because “they couldn’t agree on one.”
What sort of authority does Mr. Clinton bring to writing this book? His admirers will argue that he is the ideal author for a book about fixing the economy, and will point to his record as president — reducing the federal deficit, overhauling welfare, blunting his party’s reputation for profligate spending and presiding over the longest economic expansion on record with falling unemployment, rising incomes and improved competitiveness on the world stage. Moreover, as president and later as founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, he understands the politics and economics of globalization and the dynamics of the technological information age.
But critics will argue that the deregulatory policies promoted by Mr. Clinton’s administration — under the treasury secretaries Robert E. Rubin and later Lawrence H. Summers — contributed to conditions that led to the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent recession. In this book Mr. Clinton skims over these issues lightly. Of his signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing part of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in the investment business, he argues that it is not self-evident that “the mortgage crisis was hastened and enlarged by the end of the division between commercial and investment banks.”
On the matter of failing effectively to regulate financial derivatives, Mr. Clinton writes, “I can be fairly criticized for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate” them. But he adds the rationalization that he “couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations, going so far as to threaten to leave the S.E.C. with no budget because the commissioner, Arthur Levitt, was vigilant in doing his job.”
As reporters have frequently pointed out, Mr. Clinton has always been an omnivorous reader of books, journalism, academic and governmental studies, and adept at drawing useful connections among highly disparate subjects. His prescriptions here for creating jobs and addressing the debt problem reflect those habits, while hewing to a basically centrist outlook.
Mr. Clinton lays out various ideas for increasing bank lending and corporate investment, unwinding the mortgage mess and amending tax laws to give corporations incentives to bring more money back to the United States.
Some of his proposals simply ratify initiatives advanced by the Obama administration, including payroll tax cuts, infrastructure investment and student loan programs. Some — regarding, say, Social Security — are little more than assessments of recommendations made by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles debt commission. And some — like streamlining regulation, investing in job training and allowing gifted young immigrants to fill so-called STEM jobs (in science, technology, engineering and mathematics) that can’t be filled by Americans — echo proposals set forth by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York in a 2010 speech about promoting long-term economic growth.
As for Mr. Clinton’s more original-sounding ideas, a handful may seem intriguing on paper but are vague and not so easily achieved: for instance, “export more services,” or emulate Germany by concentrating “on high-end manufacturing and getting smaller companies into exports.”
Other proposals seem hard to imagine ever being effectively or enthusiastically implemented, among them working to make one or two states (like Nevada with its enormous solar and wind capacity) “completely energy independent” by “maximizing their capacity to produce and consume energy,” or imposing a “value-added tax” that would “help to increase our exports” and make “our products more affordable in other markets.”
Mr. Clinton makes it perfectly clear that some of the ideas he has thrown out in these pages are hastily jotted down thoughts that require further investigation. At one point he says he doesn’t know “if the Fed has legal authority to invest in an infrastructure bank that would pay back the investment plus interest, but if it is legal to do so, I think it’s a good idea.”
In the end this book seems meant less as a detailed blueprint for job creation than a catalyst for getting people to focus on the serious issues facing the United States — which Mr. Clinton says is “in a mess now” — and the necessity of doing so right away. Reviewing the alarming and by now familiar statistics that show America falling behind in high school and college graduation rates, science and math scores and income mobility, Mr. Clinton writes that “the troubling thing about all these rankings” is “not what they say about where we are but what they reveal about where we’re going.” He adds, “We simply are not doing what we have to do to stay ahead of the competition for good jobs, new businesses, and breakthrough innovations.”
Not facing up to such inconvenient facts, Mr. Clinton notes, is part of the problem. Or, “As my daughter and her friends used to say when they were younger, ‘Denial is not just a river in Egypt.’ ”
Bill Clinton Lays Out His Prescription for America’s Future
The former president's new book shows him in two familiar modes: freewheeling policy wonk and genial politician.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: November 7, 2011
Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work,” is really several books in one slender volume. It’s a lucid one-man rebuttal of the Tea Party’s anti-government agenda. A series of shrewd talking points for Democrats trying to hold on to the White House and battling for control of Congress in the midst of a sour economy and growing voter discontent. A self-serving reminder of the prosperity the country enjoyed during Mr. Clinton’s tenure in the White House, meant to burnish his legacy. And a practical set of proposals — some borrowed and some new, some innovative and some highly sketchy — for restoring economic growth and creating jobs.
BACK TO WORK
Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy
By Bill Clinton
196 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.
Enlarge This Image
The book, which appears to be an expanded version of a Newsweek article by Mr. Clinton that appeared in June, shows the former president in two familiar modes: freewheeling policy wonk and genial retail politician.
At a time when anti-government ranting dominates the Republican debates and the Democrats often seem on the defensive, Mr. Clinton serves up a succinct common-sense argument for why America needs a strong national government, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem (which is going to get worse given the demographics of an aging baby-boomer population and the high costs of interest payments), and why that debt problem “can’t be solved unless the economy starts growing again.”
Although Mr. Clinton questions the Obama administration’s embrace of nuclear-power loan guarantees — he brings up the vulnerability of nuclear plants to natural disasters and contends that “nuclear isn’t much of a job creator compared with other clean fuel sources” — the bulk of this book underscores just how closely aligned Mr. Clinton is with President Obama on many policy issues. The book contrasts their shared economic approach to that of Republicans, from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush, who, Mr. Clinton writes, abandoned the idea of a balanced budget and instead chose “large tax cuts especially for higher income people like me, along with two wars and the senior citizens’ drug benefit,” which resulted in snowballing deficits.
At the same time, this book has a passive-aggressive subtext, which suggests that Mr. Clinton has stepped into a gap — has gone “back to work,” as it were — to sell Obama policies that have not been persuasively sold to the American people. Mr. Clinton writes that he started and stopped writing the book several times because he didn’t “want just to add another stone to the Democratic side of the partisan scale,” but “decided to go forward because I think it’s important that all Americans have a clear understanding of the basic economic facts and of the ideas driving the policy proposals under discussion.”
Mr. Clinton wonders why “the president and the Democratic Congress did not raise the debt ceiling after the election, in November or December 2010, when they still had a majority.” Such a move arguably would have averted the debilitating down-to-the-wire negotiations this summer, which Mr. Clinton says left the United States looking “weak and confused” to the outside world.
Among the reasons for the size of the Republican victories in 2010, Mr. Clinton argues, was the Democrats’ failure to “counter the national Republican message with one of their own.” The Republicans, in Mr. Clinton’s view, ran “a more effective, more aggressive campaign” that characterized the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid; and Mr. Obama “as extreme leftists who wanted to spend America into ruin, regulate the economy into extended recession, and tax individuals into poverty and businesses into bankruptcy.” The Democrats, he says, “ran individual races without a big message,” apparently because “they couldn’t agree on one.”
What sort of authority does Mr. Clinton bring to writing this book? His admirers will argue that he is the ideal author for a book about fixing the economy, and will point to his record as president — reducing the federal deficit, overhauling welfare, blunting his party’s reputation for profligate spending and presiding over the longest economic expansion on record with falling unemployment, rising incomes and improved competitiveness on the world stage. Moreover, as president and later as founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, he understands the politics and economics of globalization and the dynamics of the technological information age.
But critics will argue that the deregulatory policies promoted by Mr. Clinton’s administration — under the treasury secretaries Robert E. Rubin and later Lawrence H. Summers — contributed to conditions that led to the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent recession. In this book Mr. Clinton skims over these issues lightly. Of his signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing part of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in the investment business, he argues that it is not self-evident that “the mortgage crisis was hastened and enlarged by the end of the division between commercial and investment banks.”
On the matter of failing effectively to regulate financial derivatives, Mr. Clinton writes, “I can be fairly criticized for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate” them. But he adds the rationalization that he “couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations, going so far as to threaten to leave the S.E.C. with no budget because the commissioner, Arthur Levitt, was vigilant in doing his job.”
As reporters have frequently pointed out, Mr. Clinton has always been an omnivorous reader of books, journalism, academic and governmental studies, and adept at drawing useful connections among highly disparate subjects. His prescriptions here for creating jobs and addressing the debt problem reflect those habits, while hewing to a basically centrist outlook.
Mr. Clinton lays out various ideas for increasing bank lending and corporate investment, unwinding the mortgage mess and amending tax laws to give corporations incentives to bring more money back to the United States.
Some of his proposals simply ratify initiatives advanced by the Obama administration, including payroll tax cuts, infrastructure investment and student loan programs. Some — regarding, say, Social Security — are little more than assessments of recommendations made by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles debt commission. And some — like streamlining regulation, investing in job training and allowing gifted young immigrants to fill so-called STEM jobs (in science, technology, engineering and mathematics) that can’t be filled by Americans — echo proposals set forth by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York in a 2010 speech about promoting long-term economic growth.
As for Mr. Clinton’s more original-sounding ideas, a handful may seem intriguing on paper but are vague and not so easily achieved: for instance, “export more services,” or emulate Germany by concentrating “on high-end manufacturing and getting smaller companies into exports.”
Other proposals seem hard to imagine ever being effectively or enthusiastically implemented, among them working to make one or two states (like Nevada with its enormous solar and wind capacity) “completely energy independent” by “maximizing their capacity to produce and consume energy,” or imposing a “value-added tax” that would “help to increase our exports” and make “our products more affordable in other markets.”
Mr. Clinton makes it perfectly clear that some of the ideas he has thrown out in these pages are hastily jotted down thoughts that require further investigation. At one point he says he doesn’t know “if the Fed has legal authority to invest in an infrastructure bank that would pay back the investment plus interest, but if it is legal to do so, I think it’s a good idea.”
In the end this book seems meant less as a detailed blueprint for job creation than a catalyst for getting people to focus on the serious issues facing the United States — which Mr. Clinton says is “in a mess now” — and the necessity of doing so right away. Reviewing the alarming and by now familiar statistics that show America falling behind in high school and college graduation rates, science and math scores and income mobility, Mr. Clinton writes that “the troubling thing about all these rankings” is “not what they say about where we are but what they reveal about where we’re going.” He adds, “We simply are not doing what we have to do to stay ahead of the competition for good jobs, new businesses, and breakthrough innovations.”
Not facing up to such inconvenient facts, Mr. Clinton notes, is part of the problem. Or, “As my daughter and her friends used to say when they were younger, ‘Denial is not just a river in Egypt.’ ”
How Republicans Protect the Rich (1)
How the GOP Became the Party of the RichThe inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent.
By Tim Dickinson
November 9, 2011 7:00 AM ET Party of the RichMatt MahurinThe nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."
Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.
"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."
The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."
The GOP campaign to aid the wealthy has left America unable to raise the money needed to pay its bills. "The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree," says Rhode Island governor and former GOP senator Lincoln Chafee, pointing to two deficit-financed wars and an unpaid-for prescription-drug entitlement. "It tanked the economy." Tax receipts as a percent of the total economy have fallen to levels not seen since before the Korean War – nearly 20 percent below the historical average. "Taxes are ridiculously low!" says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of Reagan's 1981 tax cut. "And yet the mantra of the Republican Party is 'Tax cuts raise growth.' So – where's the fucking growth?"
Republicans talk about job creation, about preserving family farms and defending small businesses, and reforming Medicare and Social Security. But almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans. And most of their plans, which are presented as common-sense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor. With 14 million Americans out of work, and with one in seven families turning to food stamps simply to feed their children, Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation's credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion – simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.
The intransigence over the debt ceiling enraged Republican stalwarts. George Voinovich, the former GOP senator from Ohio, likens his party's new guard to arsonists whose attitude is: "We're going to get what we want or the country can go to hell." Even an architect of the Bush tax cuts, economist Glenn Hubbard, tells Rolling Stone that there should have been a "revenue contribution" to the debt-ceiling deal, "structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do." Instead, the GOP strong-armed America into sacrificing $1 trillion in vital government services – including education, health care and defense – all to safeguard tax breaks for oil companies, yacht owners and hedge-fund managers. The party's leaders were triumphant: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even bragged that America's creditworthiness had been a "hostage that's worth ransoming."
It's the kind of thinking that only money can buy. "It's a vicious circle," says Stiglitz. "The rich are using their money to secure tax provisions to let them get richer still. Rather than investing in new technology or R&D, the rich get a better return by investing in Washington."
It's difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn't always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending – Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn't really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent – double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.
That only changed in the late 1970s, when high inflation drove up wages and pushed the middle class into higher tax brackets. Harnessing the widespread anger, Reagan put it to work on behalf of the rich. In a move that GOP Majority Leader Howard Baker called a "riverboat gamble," Reagan sold the country on an "across-the-board" tax cut that brought the top rate down to 50 percent. According to supply-side economists, the wealthy would use their tax break to spur investment, and the economy would boom. And if it didn't – well, to Reagan's cadre of small-government conservatives, the resulting red ink could be a win-win. "We started talking about just cutting taxes and saying, 'Screw the deficit,'" Bartlett recalls. "We had this idea that if you lowered revenues, the concern about the deficit would be channeled into spending cuts."
It was the birth of what is now known as "Starve the Beast" – a conscious strategy by conservatives to force cuts in federal spending by bankrupting the country. As conceived by the right-wing intellectual Irving Kristol in 1980, the plan called for Republicans to create a "fiscal problem" by slashing taxes – and then foist the pain of reimposing fiscal discipline onto future Democratic administrations who, in Kristol's words, would be forced to "tidy up afterward."
There was only one problem: The Reagan tax cuts spiked the federal deficit to a dangerous level, even as the country remained mired in a deep recession. Republican leaders in Congress immediately moved to reverse themselves and feed the beast. "It was not a Democrat who led the effort in 1982 to undo about a third of the Reagan tax cuts," recalls Robert Greenstein, president of the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "It was Bob Dole." Even Reagan embraced the tax hike, Stockman says, "because he believed that, at some point, you have to pay the bills."
For the remainder of his time in office, Reagan repeatedly raised taxes to bring down unwieldy deficits. In 1983, he hiked gas and payroll taxes. In 1984, he raised revenue by closing tax loopholes for businesses. The tax reform of 1986 lowered the top rate for the wealthy to just 28 percent – but that cut for high earners was paid for by closing tax loopholes that resulted in the largest corporate tax hike in history. Reagan also raised revenues by abolishing special favors for the investor class: He boosted taxes on capital gains by 40 percent to align them with the taxes paid on wages. Today, Reagan may be lionized as a tax abolitionist, says Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and friend of the president, but that's not true to his record. "Reagan raised taxes 11 times in eight years!"
But Reagan wound up sowing the seed of our current gridlock when he gave his blessing to what Simpson calls a "nefarious organization" – Americans for Tax Reform. Headed by Grover Norquist, a man Stockman blasts as a "fiscal terrorist," the group originally set out to prevent Congress from backsliding on the 1986 tax reforms. But Norquist's instrument for enforcement – an anti-tax pledge signed by GOP lawmakers – quickly evolved into a powerful weapon designed to shift the tax burden away from the rich. George H.W. Bush won the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 in large part because he signed Norquist's "no taxes" pledge. Once in office, however, Bush moved to bring down the soaring federal deficit by hiking the top tax rate to 31 percent and adding surtaxes for yachts, jets and luxury sedans. "He had courage to take action when we needed it," says Paul O'Neill, who served as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.
The tax hike helped the economy – and many credit it with setting up the great economic expansion of the 1990s. But it cost Bush his job in the 1992 election – a defeat that only served to strengthen Norquist's standing among GOP insurgents. "The story of Bush losing," Norquist says now, "is a reminder to politicians that this is a pledge you don't break." What was once just another campaign promise, rejected by a fiscal conservative like Bob Dole, was transformed into a political blood oath – a litmus test of true Republicanism that few candidates dare refuse.
After taking office, Clinton immediately seized the mantle of fiscal discipline from Republicans. Rather than simply trimming the federal deficit, as his GOP predecessors had done, he set out to balance the budget and begin paying down the national debt. To do so, he hiked the top tax bracket to nearly 40 percent and boosted the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. "It cost him both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections," says Chafee, the former GOP senator. "But taming the deficit led to the best economy America's ever had." Following the tax hikes of 1993, the economy grew at a brisk clip of 3.2 percent, creating more than 11 million jobs. Average wages ticked up, and stocks soared by 78 percent. By the spring of 1997, the federal budget was headed into the black.
But Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax revolutionaries who seized control of Congress in 1994 responded by going for the Full Norquist. In a stunning departure from America's long-standing tax policy, Republicans moved to eliminate taxes on investment income and to abolish the inheritance tax. Under the final plan they enacted, capital gains taxes were sliced to 20 percent. Far from creating an across-the-board benefit, 62 cents of every tax dollar cut went directly to the top one percent of income earners. "The capital gains cut alone gave the top 400 taxpayers a bigger tax cut than all the Bush tax cuts combined," says David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else.
By Tim Dickinson
November 9, 2011 7:00 AM ET Party of the RichMatt MahurinThe nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."
Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.
"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."
The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."
The GOP campaign to aid the wealthy has left America unable to raise the money needed to pay its bills. "The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree," says Rhode Island governor and former GOP senator Lincoln Chafee, pointing to two deficit-financed wars and an unpaid-for prescription-drug entitlement. "It tanked the economy." Tax receipts as a percent of the total economy have fallen to levels not seen since before the Korean War – nearly 20 percent below the historical average. "Taxes are ridiculously low!" says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of Reagan's 1981 tax cut. "And yet the mantra of the Republican Party is 'Tax cuts raise growth.' So – where's the fucking growth?"
Republicans talk about job creation, about preserving family farms and defending small businesses, and reforming Medicare and Social Security. But almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans. And most of their plans, which are presented as common-sense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor. With 14 million Americans out of work, and with one in seven families turning to food stamps simply to feed their children, Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation's credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion – simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.
The intransigence over the debt ceiling enraged Republican stalwarts. George Voinovich, the former GOP senator from Ohio, likens his party's new guard to arsonists whose attitude is: "We're going to get what we want or the country can go to hell." Even an architect of the Bush tax cuts, economist Glenn Hubbard, tells Rolling Stone that there should have been a "revenue contribution" to the debt-ceiling deal, "structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do." Instead, the GOP strong-armed America into sacrificing $1 trillion in vital government services – including education, health care and defense – all to safeguard tax breaks for oil companies, yacht owners and hedge-fund managers. The party's leaders were triumphant: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even bragged that America's creditworthiness had been a "hostage that's worth ransoming."
It's the kind of thinking that only money can buy. "It's a vicious circle," says Stiglitz. "The rich are using their money to secure tax provisions to let them get richer still. Rather than investing in new technology or R&D, the rich get a better return by investing in Washington."
It's difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn't always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending – Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn't really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent – double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.
That only changed in the late 1970s, when high inflation drove up wages and pushed the middle class into higher tax brackets. Harnessing the widespread anger, Reagan put it to work on behalf of the rich. In a move that GOP Majority Leader Howard Baker called a "riverboat gamble," Reagan sold the country on an "across-the-board" tax cut that brought the top rate down to 50 percent. According to supply-side economists, the wealthy would use their tax break to spur investment, and the economy would boom. And if it didn't – well, to Reagan's cadre of small-government conservatives, the resulting red ink could be a win-win. "We started talking about just cutting taxes and saying, 'Screw the deficit,'" Bartlett recalls. "We had this idea that if you lowered revenues, the concern about the deficit would be channeled into spending cuts."
It was the birth of what is now known as "Starve the Beast" – a conscious strategy by conservatives to force cuts in federal spending by bankrupting the country. As conceived by the right-wing intellectual Irving Kristol in 1980, the plan called for Republicans to create a "fiscal problem" by slashing taxes – and then foist the pain of reimposing fiscal discipline onto future Democratic administrations who, in Kristol's words, would be forced to "tidy up afterward."
There was only one problem: The Reagan tax cuts spiked the federal deficit to a dangerous level, even as the country remained mired in a deep recession. Republican leaders in Congress immediately moved to reverse themselves and feed the beast. "It was not a Democrat who led the effort in 1982 to undo about a third of the Reagan tax cuts," recalls Robert Greenstein, president of the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "It was Bob Dole." Even Reagan embraced the tax hike, Stockman says, "because he believed that, at some point, you have to pay the bills."
For the remainder of his time in office, Reagan repeatedly raised taxes to bring down unwieldy deficits. In 1983, he hiked gas and payroll taxes. In 1984, he raised revenue by closing tax loopholes for businesses. The tax reform of 1986 lowered the top rate for the wealthy to just 28 percent – but that cut for high earners was paid for by closing tax loopholes that resulted in the largest corporate tax hike in history. Reagan also raised revenues by abolishing special favors for the investor class: He boosted taxes on capital gains by 40 percent to align them with the taxes paid on wages. Today, Reagan may be lionized as a tax abolitionist, says Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and friend of the president, but that's not true to his record. "Reagan raised taxes 11 times in eight years!"
But Reagan wound up sowing the seed of our current gridlock when he gave his blessing to what Simpson calls a "nefarious organization" – Americans for Tax Reform. Headed by Grover Norquist, a man Stockman blasts as a "fiscal terrorist," the group originally set out to prevent Congress from backsliding on the 1986 tax reforms. But Norquist's instrument for enforcement – an anti-tax pledge signed by GOP lawmakers – quickly evolved into a powerful weapon designed to shift the tax burden away from the rich. George H.W. Bush won the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 in large part because he signed Norquist's "no taxes" pledge. Once in office, however, Bush moved to bring down the soaring federal deficit by hiking the top tax rate to 31 percent and adding surtaxes for yachts, jets and luxury sedans. "He had courage to take action when we needed it," says Paul O'Neill, who served as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.
The tax hike helped the economy – and many credit it with setting up the great economic expansion of the 1990s. But it cost Bush his job in the 1992 election – a defeat that only served to strengthen Norquist's standing among GOP insurgents. "The story of Bush losing," Norquist says now, "is a reminder to politicians that this is a pledge you don't break." What was once just another campaign promise, rejected by a fiscal conservative like Bob Dole, was transformed into a political blood oath – a litmus test of true Republicanism that few candidates dare refuse.
After taking office, Clinton immediately seized the mantle of fiscal discipline from Republicans. Rather than simply trimming the federal deficit, as his GOP predecessors had done, he set out to balance the budget and begin paying down the national debt. To do so, he hiked the top tax bracket to nearly 40 percent and boosted the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. "It cost him both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections," says Chafee, the former GOP senator. "But taming the deficit led to the best economy America's ever had." Following the tax hikes of 1993, the economy grew at a brisk clip of 3.2 percent, creating more than 11 million jobs. Average wages ticked up, and stocks soared by 78 percent. By the spring of 1997, the federal budget was headed into the black.
But Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax revolutionaries who seized control of Congress in 1994 responded by going for the Full Norquist. In a stunning departure from America's long-standing tax policy, Republicans moved to eliminate taxes on investment income and to abolish the inheritance tax. Under the final plan they enacted, capital gains taxes were sliced to 20 percent. Far from creating an across-the-board benefit, 62 cents of every tax dollar cut went directly to the top one percent of income earners. "The capital gains cut alone gave the top 400 taxpayers a bigger tax cut than all the Bush tax cuts combined," says David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else.
How Republicans Protect the Rich (2)
"Everybody for a good while accepted that the surpluses were real," insists Daniels, now the governor of Indiana. When pressed, however, he also concedes that by the time Bush took office, "the economy was already unraveling." Indeed, a wave of layoffs at the end of 2000 prompted Dick Cheney to warn, "We may well be on the front edge of a recession here."
The conflicting forecasts – one of sunshine and surplus, the other of gloom and contraction – should have set off alarm bells in the White House. But instead of rethinking the prudence of its massive giveaway to the rich, the Bush team dreamed up a new rationale for cutting taxes: to provide a needed jolt to the economy. "It's a fair thing to say that the stimulus argument was added in the spring of '01, when it had not been there before," Daniels says.
The stimulus argument was lousy economics. The previous two decades, after all, had demonstrated that "trickle-down" tax cuts don't juice the economy – they create bubbles and balloon deficits. Proponents pointed to Reagan's original tax cut in 1981, claiming it had spurred economic growth. But that is nothing more than "urban legend," Stockman says. The economy "did recover after 1982," he says, "but mainly because the Federal Reserve defeated inflation."
In fact, Stockman insists, Bush's tax cuts for the rich represent a bastardization of Reaganism. "The Republican Party originally said that prosperity comes from the private sector," he says. "But today's Republicans have become Chamber of Commerce Keynesians – using tax policy as a way of stimulating, boosting, prodding the economy." The Party of the Rich, in essence, was offering up a twisted version of New Deal policies that laissez-faire Republicans like Reagan had long opposed.
Spinning the tax giveaways as a stimulus plan did serve one useful function: It helped obscure the true purpose of the Bush tax plan. In an internal memo written just days after the inauguration, O'Neill advised Bush that he had a "great opportunity" for quick action on his tax cuts if he framed the choice for Congress as tax cut vs. recession. "We can get this argument on our ground," O'Neill wrote, "and stop the drumbeat about a tax cut for the rich."
With no patience for the specifics of tax policy, Bush deputized Vice President Dick Cheney to push through his tax cut for the rich. Once a deficit hawk who confessed that he was "not convinced that the Reagan tax cuts worked," Cheney had emerged from his tenure as CEO of Halliburton as a leading advocate for rewarding big corporations and their executives – even as GOP moderates warned that Bush's tax cut would foreclose needed investments in education and infrastructure. "The vice president had no interest in what I had to say," recalls Chafee. "He ran the show right from the beginning, and he suffered no compromise."
As the economy worsened, even the president's Treasury secretary grew concerned about the tax cuts. O'Neill pushed Bush to include a trigger mechanism that would rein in the cuts if the projected surpluses failed to materialize. "The trigger was a good idea – having the foresight that if things turned bad, we wouldn't have to reverse course in a difficult time," O'Neill says now. "But there was never any serious interest in it" from the Bush administration.
To Chafee, the opposition to a trigger mechanism seemed to offer a clue about the real goal of the tax cuts: They were designed not to boost the economy, but to force the kind of spending cuts championed by Grover Norquist and other small-government activists. His suspicion that the starve-the-beast crowd was driving the cuts was confirmed, he says, by a conversation he had while walking the Senate corridors with Trent Lott, then the GOP majority leader.
"What's going on here?" Chafee asked. Why not safeguard the economy by adopting a trigger mechanism?
Lott turned to Chafee. "We're going to strangle the spending," he said. On the stump, Bush hyped the benefits of his plan by emphasizing how much in taxes it would save a single waitress. But the real action was at the top rung of the income ladder. Over 10 years, the bottom fifth of income earners could expect to pocket an extra $744. That waitress might be left with enough cash to change out the clutch on her Corolla. The top one percent, meanwhile, would receive more than $340,000 on average – enough to buy his and hers Bentleys.
The conflicting forecasts – one of sunshine and surplus, the other of gloom and contraction – should have set off alarm bells in the White House. But instead of rethinking the prudence of its massive giveaway to the rich, the Bush team dreamed up a new rationale for cutting taxes: to provide a needed jolt to the economy. "It's a fair thing to say that the stimulus argument was added in the spring of '01, when it had not been there before," Daniels says.
The stimulus argument was lousy economics. The previous two decades, after all, had demonstrated that "trickle-down" tax cuts don't juice the economy – they create bubbles and balloon deficits. Proponents pointed to Reagan's original tax cut in 1981, claiming it had spurred economic growth. But that is nothing more than "urban legend," Stockman says. The economy "did recover after 1982," he says, "but mainly because the Federal Reserve defeated inflation."
In fact, Stockman insists, Bush's tax cuts for the rich represent a bastardization of Reaganism. "The Republican Party originally said that prosperity comes from the private sector," he says. "But today's Republicans have become Chamber of Commerce Keynesians – using tax policy as a way of stimulating, boosting, prodding the economy." The Party of the Rich, in essence, was offering up a twisted version of New Deal policies that laissez-faire Republicans like Reagan had long opposed.
Spinning the tax giveaways as a stimulus plan did serve one useful function: It helped obscure the true purpose of the Bush tax plan. In an internal memo written just days after the inauguration, O'Neill advised Bush that he had a "great opportunity" for quick action on his tax cuts if he framed the choice for Congress as tax cut vs. recession. "We can get this argument on our ground," O'Neill wrote, "and stop the drumbeat about a tax cut for the rich."
With no patience for the specifics of tax policy, Bush deputized Vice President Dick Cheney to push through his tax cut for the rich. Once a deficit hawk who confessed that he was "not convinced that the Reagan tax cuts worked," Cheney had emerged from his tenure as CEO of Halliburton as a leading advocate for rewarding big corporations and their executives – even as GOP moderates warned that Bush's tax cut would foreclose needed investments in education and infrastructure. "The vice president had no interest in what I had to say," recalls Chafee. "He ran the show right from the beginning, and he suffered no compromise."
As the economy worsened, even the president's Treasury secretary grew concerned about the tax cuts. O'Neill pushed Bush to include a trigger mechanism that would rein in the cuts if the projected surpluses failed to materialize. "The trigger was a good idea – having the foresight that if things turned bad, we wouldn't have to reverse course in a difficult time," O'Neill says now. "But there was never any serious interest in it" from the Bush administration.
To Chafee, the opposition to a trigger mechanism seemed to offer a clue about the real goal of the tax cuts: They were designed not to boost the economy, but to force the kind of spending cuts championed by Grover Norquist and other small-government activists. His suspicion that the starve-the-beast crowd was driving the cuts was confirmed, he says, by a conversation he had while walking the Senate corridors with Trent Lott, then the GOP majority leader.
"What's going on here?" Chafee asked. Why not safeguard the economy by adopting a trigger mechanism?
Lott turned to Chafee. "We're going to strangle the spending," he said. On the stump, Bush hyped the benefits of his plan by emphasizing how much in taxes it would save a single waitress. But the real action was at the top rung of the income ladder. Over 10 years, the bottom fifth of income earners could expect to pocket an extra $744. That waitress might be left with enough cash to change out the clutch on her Corolla. The top one percent, meanwhile, would receive more than $340,000 on average – enough to buy his and hers Bentleys.
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