Obama is Better Than Mitt

The 99 percent Wednesday, Oct 31, 2012 06:45 AM CDT


Why progressives should vote for Obama: He’s better than Mitt

With a second-term Obama, doors to progress -- however incremental -- remain open. With Romney, they slam shut

By Todd Gitlin

Progressives who found ourselves inconveniently placed when Sandy collided with two other storms and overwhelmed us are probably in a mood to view with particular seriousness that the Romney-Ryan budget would slash down FEMA while Obama’s barely trims it; and that not so long ago Mitt Romney was denouncing federal disaster relief as “immoral” (“Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”)



Still, we are at that point in the election cycle when some progressives have been busily listing what they despise about Democrats, going on to remind us how tired they are of lesser evils and how weary their hands grow from holding their noses. In 2000 we were told how bad a campaign Al Gore ran, how soft he was on corporations, how little he did about climate change when he had the chance, and how pure of heart Ralph Nader was. This year we are reminded that Barack Obama failed to close Guantánamo, kept the stimulus too smile, hired Tim Geithner, dispatched drones, made up a kill list, and, like Mitt Romney, supports oil drilling and collects corporate dollars.



It remains a grave error to take your marbles and go home or vote Green. That’s a mood, not a strategy, based as it is on a grave misunderstanding of what it means to vote for a presidential candidate. Voting for a candidate is not like choosing a life partner. “Liking” and “hating” are the wrong categories. Voting is more like buying insurance. Or choosing a hiking trail.



Allegory Time



You find yourself at the foot of an immense mountain. You’ve heard there’s a wonderful view from the summit. People say it’s “drop-dead gorgeous,” “not to be missed,” “once in a lifetime.” They say “awesome,” “amazing.” You think, What isn’t ”awesome” or “amazing” nowadays? If isn’t amazing, it must suck. But you pay attention because the tone of these raves doesn’t suggest “nice” or “fairly cool,” but actually sounds AWESOME and AMAZING.



You know you don’t have forever to live. You long to climb to the top of this thing. You’ve got to climb to the top of this thing. You’ve been waiting for this forever. You crane upward. You measure the distance to go. Time to get going.



But how and where to start? Your map tells you that there’s a cabin a day’s hike up from here. It’s said that other pilgrims have stored provisions there. You know it gets cold up there on the heights, cold and bare, and you know that when you’re out in the wilderness, without well-lit, well-marked trails, every moment of warmth counts. But some travelers, having returned, report that this cabin has a leaky roof. What do you do?



It gets worse. Some say that the cabin actually takes you to the wrong side of the mountain. Some say there are pitfalls along the way. Some say there are mines. If you head for this particular cabin, even if you skirt the pitfalls and the mines, you might miss shelters to be found along other routes. So if you head for this cabin, you might miss a better one, without leaks, better insulated. Some hikers report that they’ve stopped at this particular cabin and found no provisions there. (Others say that the provisions were stolen; others, that their timing was unfortunate.) Some say that if you get to the cabin and stop there overnight, you’ll wake up deluded. You’ll have been, in effect, co-opted by the cabin. You’ll hallucinate that the summit is just over the next little hill. You’ll get giddy with overconfidence. You’ll stagger out the door, whooping, and the next thing you know, you’ll have stepped off a cliff.



Open Doors Are Preferable to Slammed Ones



The cabin, obviously, is Barack Obama’s second term. It offers a prospect of shelter. It promises nothing certain — except that there’s nothing millennial on offer in this election. How could it be otherwise? But voting is one thing you do in a political life, not the only thing. If you like, think of it as a chore. If you prefer, think of it as a duty. It’s not an epiphany moment. It’s not necessarily fun. You don’t have to believe in it, or in the candidate. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to drink a beer with him, let alone share his bed. You only have to recognize a necessity.



Suppose you don’t like drone attacks, don’t like Guantánamo, don’t like oil drilling or fracking. You don’t know who will replace Tim Geithner at Treasury — there are mixed signals. Suppose you don’t think much of Obamacare — you wanted single payer — and you wonder what, really, push comes to shove, Obama did learn from playing at bipartisanship during his first term. Shouldn’t it have been obvious from the start that bipartisanship is a dead letter one of the parties (the one that owns the House and filibusters the Senate to a standstill) is purely and simply plutocratic, a brain-killing, climate-change-denying, deficit-freak, Confederate-based, neocon-infused enterprise? Yes. But despite what Obama told Douglas Brinkley about strengthening Dodd-Frank and promoting energy efficiency in the Rolling Stone interview, it’s still possible that he didn’t learn, or at least not enough; or that he will be swayed back toward the blah center. Will he lift his voice — and not just a single time — to explain himself to Americans who’ve heard so much about “gridlock” of indeterminate provenance; who don’t understand that too-big-to-fail banks are too big to exist; who don’t get deregulation; who don’t pay much attention to current affairs at all? Yes, it would be nice to deprive Mitt Romney of the chance to appoint two more Supreme Court judges. But is Obama the best we can do?



Yes, in the White House. Not because he walks on water, not because he is always right, not because he is impervious to pressures from bad elements, not because he offers, or can deliver, guarantees. Because the politics that matters over the long haul can be mightily helped or hindered by many forces, and one of them — not a small one — is the identity of the president of the United States. (Another is the makeup of the houses of Congress, where the equivalent argument applies, pari passu.) In a second Obama term, some doors open. There’s an agenda to be shaped. Provisions will be readied. There is a roof. It may be leaky. It’s better than no roof at all — especially for the famous 47 percent you care about. If you’re serious about a climb to the summit, you’ll avail yourself of the roof that exists, collect the leaks that get through the roof, keep them from flooding the whole floor, and keep going.



All too many of Obama’s supporters in 2008 thought that what politics required of them was a vote for the hopey-changey thing and then — nothing: a return to America’s baseline normal, where you go on about your business and leave politics to politicians. Retirement. Griping. Some conducted their gripes in revolutionary lingo, some just griped. Meanwhile, the Tea Party gathered, the Roberts court ruled in favor of Citizens United, Karl Rove & Co. spun their webs, the Koch brothers got out their checkbooks.



For the left, the game changed when Occupy erupted in all its inventiveness and audacity, but not because Occupy’s camps were sufficient. They were necessary but not sufficient. The camps animated just about all the anarchists and full-time radicals in America, but of these there are not nearly enough to transform the country. Occupy also mobilized, for special occasions, tens and hundreds of thousands of union members, MoveOn-niks, and such — an outer movement, or 99 percent movement, that has a live prospect of achieving important reforms over coming years, and sustaining a shift leftward in the national balance of power. Not because these reforms would be millennial in their import either, but because by actually improving people’s lives, they encourage a growing movement that can endure, win more support, make tangible improvements in people’s threatened lives. Now that Wall Street has deserted Obama — Dodd-Frank is flawed, as Obama himself admits, through it goes way too far for the too-big-to-fail banks — the chance of a 99 percent movement’s decisive influence on Democrats swells.



The ability to tell the difference between movable and immovable presidents is indispensable. With Obama in the White House for a second term, victories are possible — with a Democratic Senate, even more possible. With Romney, doors slam shut.



Obama Encourages a Progressive Agenda, Romney Kills It



National politics isn’t the only politics, but it’s indispensable politics. Local groups are necessary — so are anti-foreclosure and debt-forgiveness campaigns — but not sufficient. With Obama in office, criticism might count; with Romney, it turns rancid. With Obama in office, a national reform agenda becomes more feasible. This could include the robinhoodtax.org campaign, led by the National Nurses United, one of the more committed unions at work for serious financial reform, to load a trading surcharge onto the biggest, fastest investor-speculators, a proposal with much support in Europe. Space opens for a push to break up too-big-to-fail banks and separate commercial from investment banking. Statewide initiatives for public financing of elections would be encouraged. In Maine, adult population 1 million, there’s already a 32,000 member organization, with a paid staff of 39, running a campaign for free higher education, government job creation, and shored-up healthcare for the poor. It’s time to work out agreement across state lines on a common program. The core of the Occupy movement rejected common programs. So be it. But that doesn’t mean that a 99 percent movement has to do the same.



For the left to be election-averse, disdainful of demands on mainstream politicians, amounts to a suicide gesture — while our 18th-century political system then, for years, grants a hammerlock to the Tea Party and its friends.



The landscape in which we operate is not the landscape we desire. To think that we design our landscape just as we please is delusion. To think that a Romney victory would do more to inspire opposition than slam doors on it is fantasy. To understand that an Obama victory opens doors is to make room for ideals to breathe.

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Todd Gitlin teaches at Columbia University and is the author, most recently, of "The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election" (co-authored with Liel Leibovitz), and a novel, "Undying."

The Past Isn't over for Woody Allen

October 26, 2012, 11:02 am 39 Comments

The Past Is Never Dead: A Faulkner Quote in ‘Midnight in Paris’ Results in a Lawsuit

By DAVE ITZKOFF



When settling previous intellectual disputes, Woody Allen has been able to produce esteemed men of letters to come to his defense (at least when Marshall McLuhan is hiding just off camera). But there is not much chance that William Faulkner will be able to speak up for him in this latest disagreement: Faulkner Literary Rights, the company that controls works by that Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Sound and the Fury” and “As I Lay Dying,” has filed a lawsuit over Mr. Allen’s 2011 film “Midnight in Paris” and what it says is that movie’s unauthorized use of a line from Faulkner’s book “Requiem for a Nun.”



The suit was filed on Thursday in Federal District Court in Oxford, Miss., against Sony Pictures Classics, which released “Midnight in Paris,” and reported by Variety (registration required). It hinges on a single scene in the film, when its time-traveling protagonist, played by Owen Wilson, states: “The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party.”



Faulkner’s original formulation of the line in “Requiem for a Nun,” which was published in 1950, is: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Even so, Faulkner Literary Rights says that the film, for which Mr. Allen won the Academy Award for original screenplay, is violating its copyrights.



On Friday, Sony said in a statement: “This is a frivolous lawsuit and we are confident we will prevail in defending it. There is no question this brief reference (10 words) to a quote from a public speech Faulkner gave constitutes fair use and any claim to the contrary is without merit.”



A press representative for Mr. Allen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The State of the Presidential Race (9)

With hurricane Sandy ripping the East coast there's speculation on how this storm will affect the election.  Some say it will help Obama; some say it will Romney.  The truth is that nobody knows.  I am going to ignore the speculation from here on out and likewise ignore the daily polls which will surely be affected by the weather.  We are 8 days away from the most important Presidential election in my lifetime.

Medicaid on the Chopping Block

Medicaid on the BallotBy PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 28, 2012


There’s a lot we don’t know about what Mitt Romney would do if he won. He refuses to say which tax loopholes he would close to make up for $5 trillion in tax cuts; his economic “plan” is an empty shell.

But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.



So this election is, to an important degree, really about Medicaid. And this, in turn, means that you need to know something more about the program.



For while Medicaid is generally viewed as health care for the nonelderly poor, that’s only part of the story. And focusing solely on who Medicaid covers can obscure an equally important fact: Medicaid has been more successful at controlling costs than any other major part of the nation’s health care system.



So, about coverage: most Medicaid beneficiaries are indeed relatively young (because older people are covered by Medicare) and relatively poor (because eligibility for Medicaid, unlike Medicare, is determined by need). But more than nine million Americans benefit from both Medicare and Medicaid, and elderly or disabled beneficiaries account for the majority of Medicaid’s costs. And contrary to what you may have heard, the great majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are in working families.



For those who get coverage through the program, Medicaid is a much-needed form of financial aid. It is also, quite literally, a lifesaver. Mr. Romney has said that a lack of health insurance doesn’t kill people in America; oh yes, it does, and states that expand Medicaid coverage show striking drops in mortality.



So Medicaid does a vast amount of good. But at what cost? There’s a widespread perception, gleefully fed by right-wing politicians and propagandists, that Medicaid has “runaway” costs. But the truth is just the opposite. While costs grew rapidly in 2009-10, as a depressed economy made more Americans eligible for the program, the longer-term reality is that Medicaid is significantly better at controlling costs than the rest of our health care system.



How much better? According to the best available estimates, the average cost of health care for adult Medicaid recipients is about 20 percent less than it would be if they had private insurance. The gap for children is even larger.



And the gap has been widening over time: Medicaid costs have consistently risen a bit less rapidly than Medicare costs, and much less rapidly than premiums on private insurance.



How does Medicaid achieve these lower costs? Partly by having much lower administrative costs than private insurers. It’s always worth remembering that when it comes to health care, it’s the private sector, not government programs, that suffers from stifling, costly bureaucracy.



Also, Medicaid is much more effective at bargaining with the medical-industrial complex.



Consider, for example, drug prices. Last year a government study compared the prices that Medicaid paid for brand-name drugs with those paid by Medicare Part D — also a government program, but one run through private insurance companies, and explicitly forbidden from using its power in the market to bargain for lower prices. The conclusion: Medicaid pays almost a third less on average. That’s a lot of money.



Is Medicaid perfect? Of course not. Most notably, the hard bargain it drives with health providers means that quite a few doctors are reluctant to see Medicaid patients. Yet given the problems facing American health care — sharply rising costs and declining private-sector coverage — Medicaid has to be regarded as a highly successful program. It provides good if not great coverage to tens of millions of people who would otherwise be left out in the cold, and as I said, it does much right to keep costs down.



By any reasonable standard, this is a program that should be expanded, not slashed — and a major expansion of Medicaid is part of the Affordable Care Act.



Why, then, are Republicans so determined to do the reverse, and kill this success story? You know the answers. Partly it’s their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance. Partly it’s the fact that Medicaid’s success is a reproach to their antigovernment ideology.



The question — and it’s a question the American people will answer very soon — is whether they’ll get to indulge these prejudices at the expense of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

The War on Reality

October 28, 2012, 3:44 pm13 Comments

The War on Objectivity
by Paul Krugman

Brad DeLong points me to this National Review attack on Nate Silver, which I think of as illustrating an important aspect of what’s really happening in America.



For those new to this, Nate is a sports statistician turned political statistician, who has been maintaining a model that takes lots and lots of polling data — most of it at the state level, which is where the presidency gets decided — and converts it into election odds. Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.



This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.



Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.



This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.



This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.



It’s almost besides the point to notice that the whole notion that Nate Silver is somehow serving Obama’s interests by skewing the results is bizarre. This race is going to be decided by actual votes, not perceptions of “momentum”. But then posturing and bragging seems to be central to the right’s theory, for reasons I don’t get.



Anyway, it’s another disgraceful episode. And the fact that the National Review ran with this tells you all you need to know about the publication.



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The Upcoming Lincoln Movie

Steven Spielberg, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Tony Kushner talk about what it takes to wrestle an epic presidency into a feature film

By Roy Blount Jr.

In Lincoln, the Steven Spielberg movie opening this month, President Abraham Lincoln has a talk with U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens that should be studied in civics classes today. The scene goes down easy, thanks to the moviemakers’ art, but the point Lincoln makes is tough.



Stevens, as Tommy Lee Jones plays him, is the meanest man in Congress, but also that body’s fiercest opponent of slavery. Because Lincoln’s primary purpose has been to hold the Union together, and he has been approaching abolition in a roundabout, politic way, Stevens by 1865 has come to regard him as “the capitulating compromiser, the dawdler.”



The congressman wore with aplomb, and wears in the movie, a ridiculous black hairpiece—it’s round, so he doesn’t have to worry about which part goes in front. A contemporary said of Stevens and Lincoln that “no two men, perhaps, so entirely different in character, ever threw off more spontaneous jokes.”



Stevens’ wit, however, was biting. “He could convulse the House,” wrote biographer Fawn M. Brodie, “by saying, ‘I yield to the gentleman for a few feeble remarks.’” Many of his declarations were too funky for the Congressional Globe (predecessor of the Congressional Record), which did, however, preserve this one: “There was a gentleman from the far West sitting next to me, but he went away and the seat seems just as clean as it was before.”



Lincoln’s wit was indirect, friendly—Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes him as describing laughter as “the joyous, universal evergreen of life” in her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, on which the movie is partly based. But it was also purposeful. Stevens was a man of unmitigated principle. Lincoln got some great things done. What Lincoln, played most convincingly by Daniel Day-Lewis, says to Stevens in the movie, in effect, is this: A compass will point you true north. But it won’t show you the swamps between you and there. If you don’t avoid the swamps, what’s the use of knowing true north?



That’s a key moment in the movie. It is also something that I wish more people would take to heart—people I talk with about politics, especially people I agree with. Today, as in 1865, people tend to be sure they are right, and maybe they are—Stevens was, courageously. What people don’t always want to take on board is that people who disagree with them may be just as resolutely sure they are right. That’s one reason the road to progress, or regression, in a democracy is seldom straight, entirely open or, strictly speaking, democratic. If Lincoln’s truth is marching on, it should inspire people to acknowledge that doing right is a tricky proposition. “I did not want to make a movie about a monument,” Spielberg told me. “I wanted the audience to get into the working process of the president.”



Lincoln came out against slavery in a speech in 1854, but in that same speech he declared that denouncing slaveholders wouldn’t convert them. He compared them to drunkards, writes Goodwin:



Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel” [Lincoln said], the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.”



As it happened, the fight for and against slave-owning would take the lowest of roads: four years of insanely wasteful war, which killed (by the most recent reliable estimate) some 750,000 people, almost 2.5 percent of the U.S. population at the time, or the equivalent of 7.5 million people today. But winning the war wasn’t enough to end slavery. Lincoln, the movie, shows how Lincoln went about avoiding swamps and reaching people’s hearts, or anyway their interests, so all the bloodshed would not be in vain.



***



When Goodwin saw the movie, she says, “I felt like I was watching Lincoln!” She speaks with authority, because for eight years, “I awakened with Lincoln every morning and thought about him every night,” while working on Team of Rivals. “I still miss him,” she adds. “He’s the most interesting person I know.”



Goodwin points to a whole 20-foot-long wall of books about Lincoln, in one of the four book-lined libraries in her home in Concord, Massachusetts, which she shares with husband Richard Goodwin, and his mementos from his days as speechwriter and adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—he wrote the “We Shall Overcome” speech that Johnson delivered on national television, in 1965, in heartfelt support of the Voting Rights Act. She worked with Johnson, too, and wrote a book about him. “Lincoln’s ethical and human side still outranks all the other presidents,” she says. “I had always thought of him as a statesman—but I came to realize he was our greatest politician.”



The movie project began with Goodwin’s book, before she had written much of it. When she and Spielberg met, in 1999, he asked her what she was working on, and she said Lincoln. “At that moment,” says Spielberg, “I was impulsively seized with the chutzpah to ask her to let me reserve the motion-picture rights.” To which effrontery she responded, in so many words: Cool. Her original plan had been to write about Mary and Abe Lincoln, as she had about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. “But I realized that he spent more time with members of his cabinet,” she says.



And so Goodwin’s book became an infectiously loving portrait of Lincoln’s empathy, his magnanimity and his shrewdness, as shown in his bringing together a cabinet of political enemies, some more conservative than he, others more radical, and maneuvering them into doing what needed to be done.



Prominent among those worthies was Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase. Goodwin notes that when that august-looking widower and his daughter Kate, the willowy belle of Washington society, “made an entrance, a hush invariably fell over the room, as if a king and his queen stood in the doorway.” And yet, wrote Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Chase was “destitute of wit.” He could be funny inadvertently. Goodwin cites his confiding to a friend that he “was tormented by his own name. He fervently wished to change its ‘awkward, fishy’ sound to something more elegant. ‘How wd. this name do (Spencer de Cheyce or Spencer Payne Cheyce,)’ he inquired.”



Not only was Chase fatuous, but like Stevens he regarded Lincoln as too conservative, too sympathetic to the South, too cautious about pressing abolition. But Chase was capable, so Lincoln gave him the dead-serious job of keeping the Union and its war effort financially afloat. Chase did so, earnestly and admirably. He also put his own picture on the upper left-hand corner of the first federally issued paper money. Chase was so sure he should have been president, he kept trying—even though Lincoln bypassed loyal supporters to appoint him chief justice of the United States—to undermine Lincoln politically so he could succeed him after one term.



Lincoln was aware of Chase’s treachery, but he didn’t take it personally, because the country needed Chase where he was.



Lincoln’s lack of self-importance extended even further with that pluperfect horse’s ass Gen. George B. McClellan. In 1861, McClellan was using his command of the Army of the Potomac to enhance his self-esteem (“You have no idea how the men brighten up now, when I go among them”) rather than to engage the enemy. In letters home he was mocking Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” Lincoln kept urging McClellan to fight. In reading Goodwin’s book, I tried to identify which of its many lively scenes would be in the movie. Of a night when Lincoln, Secretary of State William Seward and Lincoln’s secretary John Hay went to McClellan’s house, she writes:



Told that the general was at a wedding, the three waited in the parlor for an hour. When McClellan arrived home, the porter told him the president was waiting, but McClellan passed by the parlor room and climbed the stairs to his private quarters. After another half hour, Lincoln again sent word that he was waiting, only to be informed that the general had gone to sleep. Young John Hay was enraged....To Hay’s surprise, Lincoln “seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.” He would hold McClellan’s horse, he once said, if a victory could be achieved.



Finally relieved of his command in November 1862, McClellan ran against Lincoln in the 1864 election, on a platform of ending the war on terms congenial to the Confederacy, and lost handily.



It’s too bad Lincoln could not have snatched McClellan’s horse from under him, so to speak. But after the election, notes Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay, “Lincoln knew that unless slavery was gone, the war wasn’t really going to end.” So although the movie is based in part on Goodwin’s book, Kushner says, Lincoln didn’t begin to coalesce until Spielberg said, “Why don’t we make a movie about passing the 13th Amendment?”



***



Kushner’s own most prominent work is the greatly acclaimed play Angels in America: angels, Mormons, Valium, Roy Cohn, people dying of AIDS. So it’s not as though he sticks to the tried and true. But he says his first reaction to Spielberg’s amendment notion was: This is the first serious movie about Lincoln in seventy-odd years! We can’t base it on that!



In January 1865, Lincoln has just been re-elected and the war is nearly won. The Emancipation Proclamation, laid down by the president under what he claimed to be special wartime powers, abolishes slavery only within areas “in rebellion” against the Union and perhaps not permanently even there. So while Lincoln’s administration has got a harpoon into slavery, the monster could still, “with one ‘flop’ of his tail, send us all into eternity.”



That turn of metaphor is quoted in Goodwin’s book. But the battle for the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery nationwide and permanently, is confined to 5 of her 754 pages. “I don't like biopics that trot you through years and years of a very rich and complicated life,” Kushner says. “I had thought I would go from September 1863 to the assassination, focusing on the relationship of Lincoln and Salmon Chase. Three times I started, got to a hundred or so pages, and never got farther than January 1864. You could make a very long miniseries out of any week Lincoln occupied the White House.”



He sent Goodwin draft after draft of the script, which at one point was up to 500 pages. “Tony originally had Kate in,” says Goodwin, “and if the film had been 25 hours long....” Then Spielberg brought up the 13th Amendment, which the Chases had nothing to do with.



In the course of six years working on the script, Kushner did a great deal of original research, which kept spreading. For example: “I was looking for a play Lincoln might have seen in early March of ’65...[and] I found a Romeo and Juliet starring Avonia Jones, from Richmond, who was rumored to be a Confederate sympathizer—she left the country immediately after the war, went to England and became an acting teacher, and one of her pupils was Belle Boyd, a famous Confederate spy. And the guy who was supposed to be in Romeo and Juliet with her was replaced at the last moment by John Wilkes Booth—who was plotting then to kidnap Lincoln. I thought, ‘I’ve discovered another member of the conspiracy!’”



Avonia didn’t fit in Lincoln, so she too had to go—but the Nashville lawyer W.N. Bilbo, another one of the obscure figures Kushner found, survived. And as played by James Spader, Bilbo, who appears nowhere in Team of Rivals, nearly steals the show as a political operative who helps round up votes for the amendment, offering jobs and flashing greenbacks to conceivably swayable Democrats and border-state Republicans.



If another director went to a major studio with a drama of legislation, he’d be told to run it over to PBS. Even there, it might be greeted with tight smiles. But although “people accuse Steven of going for the lowest common denominator and that kind of thing,” says Kushner, “he is willing to take big chances.” And nobody has ever accused Spielberg of not knowing where the story is, or how to move it along.



Spielberg had talked to Liam Neeson, who starred in his Schindler’s List, about playing Lincoln. Neeson had the height. “But this is Daniel’s role,” Spielberg says. “This is not one of my absent-father movies. But Lincoln could be in the same room with you, and he would go absent on you, he would not be there, he would be in process, working something out. I don’t know anybody who could have shown that except Daniel.”



On the set everyone addressed Day-Lewis as “Mr. Lincoln” or “Mr. President.” “That was my idea,” Spielberg says. “I addressed all the actors pretty much by the roles they were playing. When actors stepped off the set they could be whoever they felt they needed to be, but physically on the set I wanted everybody to be in an authentic mood.” He never did that in any of his 49 other directorial efforts. (“I couldn’t address Daniel at all,” says Kushner. “I would send him texts. I called myself ‘Your metaphysical conundrum,’ because as the writer of the movie, I shouldn’t exist.”)



Henry Fonda in Young Mister Lincoln (1939) might as well be a youngish Henry Fonda, or perhaps Mister Roberts, with nose enhancement. Walter Huston in Abraham Lincoln (1930) wears a startling amount of lipstick in the early scenes, and later when waxing either witty or profound he sounds a little like W.C. Fields. Day-Lewis is made to resemble Lincoln more than enough for a good poster shot, but the character’s consistency is beyond verisimilitude.



Lincoln, 6-foot-4, was taller than everyone around him by a greater degree than is Day-Lewis, who is 6-foot-1 1/2. I can’t help thinking that Lincoln’s voice was even less mellow (it was described as high-pitched and thin, and his singing was more recitational than melodious) than the workable, vaguely accented tenor that Day-Lewis has devised. At first acquaintance Lincoln came off gawkier, goofier, uglier than Day-Lewis could very well emulate. If we could reconstitute Lincoln himself, like the T. Rex in Jurassic Park, his looks and carriage might put us off.



Day-Lewis gives us a Lincoln with layers, angles, depths and sparks. He tosses in some authentic-looking flat-footed strides, and at one point stretches unpresidentially across the floor he’s lying on to stoke the fire. More crucially, he conveys Lincoln’s ability to lead not by logic or force but by such devices as timing (knowing when a time is ripe), amusement (he not only got away with laughing at his own stories, sometimes for reasons unclear, but also improved his hold on the audience thereby) and at least making people think he was getting into where they were coming from.



We know that Lincoln was a great writer and highly quotable in conversation, but Lincoln captures him as a verbal tactician. Seward (ably played by David Straithairn) is outraged. He’s yelling at Lincoln for doing something he swore he wouldn’t, something Seward is convinced will be disastrous. Lincoln, unruffled, muses about looking into the seeds of time and seeing which grains will grow, and then says something else that I, and quite possibly Seward, didn’t catch, and then something about time being a great thickener of things. There’s a beat. Seward says he supposes. Another beat. Then he says he has no idea what Lincoln’s talking about.



Here’s a more complicated and masterly example. The whole cabinet is yelling at Lincoln. The Confederacy is about to fall, he’s already proclaimed emancipation, why risk his popularity now by pushing for this amendment? Well, he says affably, he’s not so sure the Emancipation Proclamation will still be binding after the war. He doesn’t recall his attorney general at the time being too excited about it being legal, only that it wasn’t criminal. His tone becomes subtly more backwoodsy, and he makes a squeezy motion with his hands. Then his eyes light up as he recalls defending, back in Illinois, a Mrs. Goings, charged with murdering her violent husband in a heated moment.



Melissa Goings is another figure who doesn’t appear in Team of Rivals, but her case is on the record. In 1857, the newly widowed 70-year-old stood accused of bludgeoning her 77-year-old husband with a piece of firewood. In the most common version of the story, Lincoln, sensing hostility in the judge but sympathy among the townspeople, called for a recess, during which his client disappeared. Back in court, the bailiff accused Lincoln of encouraging her to bolt, and he professed his innocence: “I did not run her off. She wanted to know where she could get a good drink of water, and I told her there was mighty good water in Tennessee.” She was never found, and her bail—$1,000—was forgiven.



In the movie, the cabinet members start laughing as Lincoln reminisces, even though they may be trying to parse precisely what the story has to do with the 13th Amendment. Then he shifts into a crisp, logical explication of the proclamation’s insufficiency. In summary he strikes a personal note; he felt the war demanded it, therefore his oath demanded it, and he hoped it was legal. Shifting gears without a hitch, he tells them what he wants from them: to stand behind him. He gives them another laugh—he compares himself to the windy preacher who, once embarked on a sermon, is too lazy to stop—then he puts his foot down: He’s going to sign the 13th Amendment. His lips press so firmly together they tremble just slightly.



Lincoln’s telling of the Goings case varies slightly from the historical record, but in fact there is an account of Lincoln departing from the record himself, in telling the story differently from the way he does in the movie. “The rule was,” says Kushner, “that we wouldn’t alter anything in a meaningful way from what happened.” Conversations are clearly invented, but I haven’t found anything in the movie that is contradicted by history, except that Grant looks too dressy at Appomattox. (Lee does, for a change, look authentically corpulent at that point in his life.)



Lincoln provides no golden interracial glow. The n-word crops up often enough to help establish the crudeness, acceptedness and breadth of anti-black sentiment in those days. A couple of incidental pop-ups aside, there are three African-American characters, all of them based reliably on history. One is a White House servant and another one, in a nice twist involving Stevens, comes in almost at the end. The third is Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidante. Before the amendment comes to a vote, after much lobbying and palm-greasing, there’s an astringent little scene in which she asks Lincoln whether he will accept her people as equals. He doesn’t know her, or her people, he replies. But since they are presumably “bare, forked animals” like everyone else, he says, he will get used to them.



Lincoln was certainly acquainted with Keckley (and presumably with King Lear, whence “bare, forked animals” comes), but in the context of the times, he may have thought of black people as unknowable. At any rate the climate of opinion in 1865, even among progressive people in the North, was not such as to make racial equality an easy sell.



In fact, if the public got the notion the 13th Amendment was a step toward establishing black people as social equals, or even toward giving them the vote, the measure would have been doomed. That’s where Lincoln’s scene with Thaddeus Stevens comes in.



***



Stevens is the only white character in the movie who expressly holds it self-evident that every man is created equal. In debate, he vituperates with relish—You fatuous nincompoop, you unnatural noise!—at foes of the amendment. But one of those, Rep. Fernando Wood of New York, thinks he has outslicked Stevens. He has pressed him to state whether he believes the amendment’s true purpose is to establish black people as just as good as whites in all respects.



You can see Stevens itching to say, “Why yes, of course,” and then to snicker at the anti-amendment forces’ unrighteous outrage. But that would be playing into their hands; borderline yea-votes would be scared off. Instead he says, well, the purpose of the amendment—



And looks up into the gallery, where Mrs. Lincoln sits with Mrs. Keckley. The first lady has become a fan of the amendment, but not of literal equality, nor certainly of Stevens, whom she sees as a demented radical.



The purpose of the amendment, he says again, is—equality before the law. And nowhere else.



Mary is delighted; Keckley stiffens and goes outside. (She may be Mary’s confidante, but that doesn’t mean Mary is hers.) Stevens looks up and sees Mary alone. Mary smiles down at him. He smiles back, thinly. No “joyous, universal evergreen” in that exchange, but it will have to do.



Stevens has evidently taken Lincoln’s point about avoiding swamps. His radical allies are appalled. One asks whether he’s lost his soul; Stevens replies, mildly, that he just wants the amendment to pass. And to the accusation that there’s nothing he won’t say toward that end, he says: Seems not.



Later, after the amendment passes, Stevens pays semi-sardonic tribute to Lincoln, along the lines of something the congressman actually once said: that the greatest measure of the century “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”



That is the kind of purity we “bare, forked animals” can demand of political leaders today, assuming they’re good enough at it.



Of course, Lincoln got shot for it (I won’t spoil for you the movie’s masterstroke, its handling of the assassination), and with that erasure of Lincoln’s genuine adherence to “malice toward none,” Stevens and the other radical Republicans helped make Reconstruction as humiliating as possible for the white South. For instance, Kushner notes, a true-north Congress declined to give Southern burial societies any assistance in finding or identifying remains of the Confederate dead, thereby contributing to a swamp in which equality even before the law bogged down for a century, until nonviolent tricksters worthy of Lincoln provoked President Johnson, nearly as good a politician as Lincoln, to push through the civil rights acts of the 1960s.



How about the present? Goodwin points out that the 13th Amendment was passed during a post-election rump session of Congress, when a number of representatives, knowing they weren't coming back anyway, could be prevailed upon to vote their consciences. "We have a rump session coming up now," she observes.





Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Mr-Lincoln-Goes-to-Hollywood-174944931.html#ixzz2AcxzE0vc

By Comparison

Howard Fineman.Editorial director, Huffington Post Media Group

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 This Is Obama vs. Romney: Countdown Day 9

Posted: 10/28/2012 9:00 am React Important



 WASHINGTON -- It's hard to believe that any voter in any swing state hasn't already decided whom to vote for. But it's also hard to believe that any undecided voter isn't terminally confused and depressed by all the TV ads, fact-free spin, and invective.



To cut through the noise, here's an undecided-voters guide to 10 topics that President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are arguing about (though not always in so many words):



1. How full is the economic glass? The central question, of course. The president's record as economic commander in chief is hardly stellar. He's fallen short on several of his promises: on employment, on deficits, on growth. But how much credit does he deserve -- and how much more time should he get -- for digging the country out of the Republican-created hole in which we found ourselves and for putting us on a steady if undramatic upward trajectory (by many indicators)? And what's the better policy path now: Obama's, which looks to the role of government in advancing education, infrastructure, investment in new technologies, worker safety and financial oversight? Or Romney's, which would amplify the Reagan-Bush reliance on lower tax rates and less regulation in the name of the entrepreneurial spirit?



2. Who will be tougher on China? The answer is neither candidate. Romney vows to name China as a "currency manipulator" on Day One, but it is something he can't legally do and it's unrealistic in any case, according to Jon Huntsman, the former U.S. ambassador to China. As for Obama, he has filed some non-earthshaking fair trade cases, but nothing more.



3. Should tax rates be cut for the wealthiest and for capital gains? A stark, simple contrast. Romney says yes, Obama says no. Romney says he'll pay for his rate cuts by closing loopholes and ending deductions. Most experts say there aren't enough of either to make up for the lost revenue. Obama wants to raise taxes on households making more than $250,000 a year -- and is vowing (again) to veto any tax bill or budget compromise in Congress that does not do so.



4. Should responsibility for Medicaid and other programs be turned over entirely to the states? Another clear contrast. Romney says yes, on the theory that states can more efficiently administer them. Obama says no, on the theory that states, most of which must balance their budgets annually by law, will do so on the backs of the poor.



5. Should Medicare offer a voucher option? While the details of the argument are complex, the essence is simple: Are the elderly best served by a universal, government-based program or by defined cash stipends to spend in the private market? The latter would force seniors to pay larger amounts out of their own pockets over time, but it's either that or pay more in taxes, Romney answers.



6. Should Obamacare be abolished? The name of the program is anathema to many voters, but several of its features are well liked, among them the ban on denial of health coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Romney claims that his own plan would keep this feature, but it would do so only for people who already have insurance, not for those seeking it.



7. Should Social Security be converted into a private-investment program? This once was, and presumably still is, a pet idea of Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, and other conservative Republicans. The crown jewel of the social welfare state would earn better returns if people could invest the payroll tax money on their own, Ryan has argued. But Social Security is not really an "investment" program; it is a generational-transfer program. And as the president has asked, what would have happened under Ryan's plan to Social Security payments and balance sheets -- and confidence in the program -- at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008?



8. Who is best (for you) on the social issues of abortion, contraception and gay rights? In recent decades, these have been the starkest contrast points between the parties, and remain so. The president has made it clear that he supports same-sex marriage, federal funding for contraception services and the Roe v. Wade formulation of abortion rights. Romney took a hard line on all three as a self-advertised "severely conservative" candidate in the Republican primaries. He has tried to tack back since then and, to some extent, may have succeeded politically: He's doing better in the polls now among women voters than other recent GOP presidential candidates.



9. Was the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler a good idea? Obama extended federal loans and guarantees to the two companies as part of a plan to take them through bankruptcy while keeping them largely intact. Romney would not have advanced loans and guarantees to the companies, which most analysts say would have meant their collapse and dismemberment in a court-supervised fire sale. Some pieces might have survived in a new form.



10. Who can end the gridlock in Washington? This is a matter of faith as much as reason. Romney argues that he worked well with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in Massachusetts, which is true in some cases -- though he would have accomplished nothing if he and the Massachusetts Democrats hadn't been willing to deal. Obama aides say that their man, if returned to the White House, will be freed of the burdens of seeking reelection and open for business. Romney, they contend, would have to immediately pick a fight with his own Tea Party right wing (embodied by Paul Ryan). "You think Romney wants to make fighting with his own his first act?" asked one White House aide. "Don't think so."

On Curiosity

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.


Albert Einstein

Jeffrey Toobin - The Oath

This is one of the two or three best books I've read this year.  Jeffrey Toobin is my favorite legal nonfiction writer.  He is squarely on the progressive side of the political ledger.

The book is a history of the Roberts Court and its conservative agenda to remake American law.  Specifically, that agenda is to embellish the rights of corporations and the 1% at the expense of the average American.  Their agenda is sinister.  Progessive forces led by President Obama are opposed by not only an obstructionist Congress but by a 5 to 4 Supreme Court.  Roberts gained his reputation litigating the rights of big corporations against the rights of individuals.  Roberts and his right-way justices stand forthrightly for the rights of the strong vs. the rights of the weak.

The Citizens United decision opening the floodgates to unlimited political constributions by coporations under the guise of declaring corporations as "persons" is the most conspicuous example of the Roberts court's agenda.  But there are also restrictions on women's rights, the speeding up of capital punishment, lowering the barrier between church and state, and according to Toobin, a new interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.

Toobing says that the Second Amendment until recently was interpretated as protecting only state militias.  Now a recently minted right-wing reinterpretation interpreters the amendment as an unlimited right for citizens to bear arms.  That this is a new interpretation of the Second Amendment is something I learned in this book.

The most dangerous people in this country are not Republican poltiticans like Romney and Ryan.  The most dangerous are the five conversatives sitting on the Supreme Court.  This is why the relection of President Obama is so important, for the next President could appoint one or two justices.  The future of this country for the next 40 or 50 years is at stake.

Mourdock's Dilemna

October 26, 2012

Mourdock’s Dilemma

Posted by James Wood

The latest Republican spin seems to be that when Richard Mourdock, the senatorial candidate for Indiana, said that if a child is conceived by an act of rape, “it is something that God intended to happen,” he was bumbling his way toward a less controversial proposition—that “life is precious, regardless of the circumstances,” as Rob Jesmer, the executive director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, told the New York Times. Jesmer added that Mourdock “didn’t say it in a particularly articulate way.” Mourdock may be both idiotic and vile, but I don’t think he was especially inarticulate, and I don’t think he was merely alleging that life is cherishable, whatever the conditions of its conception. He was more pointed: he said that life is a “gift from God,” and that even “if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” Obviously, it all depends on the meaning of “it.” For an air-brusher like Rob Jesmer, “it” means life, and not rape. But the force of Mourdock’s claim, the shock of its haplessly radical transparency, lies in the fact that by “it” he clearly meant both the rape and the life that might come from it. Since God intends life to happen, God also intends all the various ways, good and horrible, in which life comes about. That is the commonsensical reading of Mourdock’s words.



This may be unpalatable, and for many non-believers it is a profound reason not to believe in the traditional God of monotheism, but there is nothing theologically peculiar about Mourdock’s position. (He is an evangelical Christian.) First of all, he was doing nothing more than offering the familiar weak defense of God in relation to evil and pain, the silver-lining defense: out of the unavoidable abundance of great suffering and hardship that exists in the world, God produces redemptive teaching. New life is born, or we learn something important about ourselves, or we come anew to God or Christ, etc., etc. As Bart Ehrman pointed out in his book “God’s Problem,” the Bible is full of such stories. When Joseph confronts his murderous brothers in Egypt, he lectures them about how (in Ehrman’s words) “even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” The Job story ends in the suffering faithful man restored to happiness and prosperity, as reward for his hardship. And, of course, the story of Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection is the ultimate version of the redemption idea: God suffers with us on the cross, dies, and is born to new life in heaven, a place where God wipes away all tears from our faces, and where there is no more death or sorrow. In her essay on affliction, the philosopher Simone Weil essentially argued that suffering is good for us; that we are like apprentices who must learn on the job, by making painful mistakes.



A second, stronger claim was lying within Mourdock’s first claim: not just that good may emerge from bad things, but that since God intends the good to emerge, he must also intend the bad things. This is a hard idea, and people naturally flee from it, but its logic is implicit in the Biblical stories that Ehrman mentions. God knew in advance everything that was going to happen to Job—indeed, it was a little game he hatched with Satan. If the great good of the resurrection was a result of the crucifixion, then it makes no sense to separate the one from the other: both events were divinely intended, divinely anticipated. I give the reprehensible Mourdock some credit, at least, for spelling out the implacable and pitiless logic of divine foreknowledge. Most believers refuse to face the implications of their own beliefs in this regard, except when it suits them: that is, when they think they have been “saved” by God from some terrible calamity. Climbing out of the wreckage of the bus accident or the gas explosion or the terrorist bomb, the relieved survivor easily praises God for “the miracle” of his survival, and sometimes even adds that “God must be looking out for me,” apparently unaware that the same God must therefore have approved the demise of the person who didn’t make it out. If God is the author of “miracles,” he is also the author of death. (And it might be added that Mitt Romney, and all those who argue that life begins at conception but who allow an abortion exception in the case of rape and incest, are also refusing to face the implications of their hesitations: for if abortion is murder but abortion is permissible in certain circumstances, then either it must follow that murderous abortion is permissible when an adult life is more important than a fetus’; or it must follow that a fetus conceived by rape or incest is simply not a human life. Again, Mourdock is coherent where Romney and others are incoherent.)



This is an ancient dilemma. The gods of Genesis and an early Mesopotamian poem like the “Atrahasis” are violent, punitive creators, and these texts seem unashamed by the idea of a deity that produces both good and evil. Why would we be shocked by a God who intends a rape, but not shocked by a God who floods the world, kills most of the life on it, and starts all over again? Or who orders a man to kill his son? In the Book of Isaiah, the Lord announces: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” When Abraham pleads with God to spare the inhabitants of Sodom, it is Abraham who seems to be the ethicist, and God who seems to be the murderous hothead, in need of Abraham’s wise counsel. And this is the same God who knowingly hardens Pharaoh’s heart whenever Moses asks him to “let my people go,” even though the cost of this divine control is a series of devastating plagues for the Egyptians, culminating in the slaughter of every first-born. Note the Mourdockian emphasis: it is not Pharaoh who hardens his heart against the Israelites; it is God who does so. It’s all part of the plan of Exodus: life comes out of death, good comes out of evil.



Sure enough, this kind of thing has made theologians and annotators very anxious: we have two thousand years of awkward and justifying commentary, in both the Judaic and Christian traditions. The Protestant and Catholic churches struggled for centuries with the implications of God’s foreknowledge of sin and suffering. You can try to wriggle out of these implications by arguing that we humans must have freedom to do good and evil or we would just be automata, remotely controlled by God. But this returns us to Mourdock’s dilemma. Because if God knows in advance what we will do, he knows that we will misuse our freedom, as he surely knew that Adam and Eve would. As Pierre Bayle, the seventeenth-century skeptic, sardonically puts it in his “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” divine foreknowledge of this kind is a bit like a mother who lets her daughter go to a ball, knowing in advance that she will be violated. What mother would do that? Why would God, Bayle says, bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused? And abused in such a way that—as in the case of Adam and Eve—it will bring about our eternal damnation?



In his book, “What I Believe,” the English philosopher Anthony Kenny, who was ordained a priest in 1955, but who left the priesthood and his Catholic faith in the nineteen-sixties, says that it was precisely the issue of divine omniscience that determined the course of his subsequent unbelief. It is not possible, he argues, to “reconcile the freedom of the will with the attributes that Christians traditionally ascribe to God.” He quotes the following prayer of confession, from the Calvinist Belgic Confession: “We believe that the same good God, after He had created all things, did not forsake them or give them up to fortune or chance, but that He rules and governs them according to His holy will, so that nothing happens in this world without His appointment; nevertheless God is neither the Author of nor can be charged with the sins that are committed.” Notice again the theological wriggle: God ordains all things, but can’t be charged with the sins that are committed. He knew the Holocaust would happen, but he didn’t intend it to happen. Kenny comments that though this is a Protestant statement of belief, “orthodox Catholics would agree with every word of it.” Kenny goes on to appraise the dilemma with admirable clarity:



I have argued in several places that there cannot be any such thing as the God so described. If determinism is false, and free actions are contingent [i.e. accidental and truly free], then there can be no infallible knowledge of future free actions, since as long as they are future there is no necessity about their happening, and any prediction of them must have an element of conjecture. On the other hand, if determinism is true, then God is indeed the author of sin, because if an agent knowingly sets in motion a deterministic process with a certain upshot, then the agent is responsible for that upshot.



Philosophers might quibble with Kenny’s lucid either/or. But religiously speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

.



Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/mourdocks-dilemma.html#ixzz2Ab1fxkgA

Of Bookstores and Libraries

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Posted by Sam Sacks

If you could create a bookstore, what would you put in it? What would you exclude? Would you specialize in any particular genre? Would your organizing principle be quantity or quality, or would you devise a way to have both?



Nearly all bibliophiles—that peculiar breed of people who feel more at home in bookstores than in their actual homes—have at some point posed such questions and daydreamed about the utopian store they would construct in answer to them, the store that would smoothly combine expertise and aesthetic preference with comfort and commercial viability.



Except for the quixotically determined few who actually open a store, most book lovers must be content to tend to the garden of their own libraries. But for a few years, I had the chance to put speculation into practice. I worked at Housing Works Bookstore, one of the retail arms of the venerable New York H.I.V./AIDS nonprofit that was started in the nineteen-eighties by members of ACT UP. Like the organization’s thrift stores, the bookstore is run largely by volunteers and receives its stock entirely from donations. So at any given time, crowded under the steam pipes of the store’s basement and sub-basement, are scores of boxes of books—from publishers or magazines getting rid of their overflow, from the apartments of lifelong readers who have died, or simply from the shelves of New Yorkers who need to clear space. In those boxes is the raw material to make a bookstore. My job was to sift their contents, relying on my tastes and book-floor experience to select the stock. And influenced by the same fond madness that allows booksellers to continue to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the book-buying public still wants their guidance, I am certain that you will be interested in reading an essay about book sorting.



Interested in part, I hope, because it may shed some light on the doings of a strange and ancient guild. Last year, the novelist Nicole Krauss wrote an essay for The New Republic extolling booksellers and lamenting their approaching extinction. Krauss contended that the value of the bookseller is specifically in his role as a “curator”: “one who selects, edits, and presents a collection that reflects his tastes.” He thus stands in stark contrast—and, Krauss thinks, doomed subordinacy—to the infinite catalogue at Amazon.com, which purports to impose no judgments on its listings, except inasmuch as it tailors its suggestions to the user’s own recorded preferences.



Krauss came in for some criticism from readers who felt she was romanticizing the bookseller’s role. In reality, many pointed out, people are far more likely to take the recommendations of a friend, or a twitter feed, or an Amazon reader review than from a random bookstore employee. Cruel gibes were made about the book clerk who told a customer to find “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in Home Reference, or to the one who could never locate the Divine Comedies because the database said it was written by someone named Alighieri.



As a longtime book clerk, I object—I’ve hand-sold hundreds of books, after all—while also admitting that elements of these complaints are undeniably true. Unlike online catalogues, booksellers are both fallible and limited; they not only make mistakes but also prioritize according to predisposition. A certain tension has always existed between what bookstores deign to stock and what book-buyers think they want to get. Even if a shopper doesn’t ask a clerk for suggestions, the very selection on the shelves conspires to tell him what he ought to be reading. Bookstores require a sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes even annoying amount of humility from their patrons. As a veteran bookstore owner once indiscreetly confided to me: “We do this for the books, not for the customers.”



Why do we put up with this? Why, indeed, do we cherish it? The reason is that bookstores are human places—they are extensions of the personalities of the men and women who operate them. This is the point of Krauss’s essay that still very much obtains: bookstores are, in her word, “thoughtful.” Thoughtful may mean wise, but it doesn’t have to; it doesn’t even have to mean rational (everyone has been in bookstores that were clearly run by crazy people—often they’re the best ones). It simply means organized by individual minds. And to the extent that we believe we can learn from other people—a belief fundamental to the very practice of reading—bookstores will have something to give us.



It’s good to remember this as brick-and-mortar stores fall deeper into a crisis that is both economic and existential (store owners are compelled to sell their books online in order to keep open their financially untenable physical shop; Barnes & Noble has been forced to sink its resources into e-readers, thereby speeding its own obsolescence). If they are going to survive, it may be crucial for us to have some understanding, and some appreciation, of the minds behind them.



I have worked at four bookstores. Two were Barnes & Nobles, the unjustly maligned chain megastore. It’s true that the mind governing these stores is corporate, but the staff tends to be far better read and more informed than detractors allow, and the selection is large and egalitarian.



I worked, too, at the Strand bookstore, the Manhattan institution that boasts the impossible-to-verify claim of having eighteen miles of books. The Strand’s most distinctive characteristic is its lupine voracity. It opened on Book Row in the nineteen-twenties among dozens of other bookshops, but like some apex predator, it is the only one that has survived. It is hungry for your books—it wants to buy them cheap and sell them slightly less cheap. Watching the process is mesmerizing: A potential seller will appear and present the carefully culled fruits of his library. His books are instantly snatched up and spread like entrails over the counter. The grizzled buyers, who have worked at the store for decades, claw at them for a moment and then shout out a non-negotiable offer. Seconds later the man staggers away with two wrinkled tens and a kick in the behind. It’s rough handling, but the visitor benefits, because the sheer volume of the stock makes the browsing otherworldly.



But my favorite job was at Housing Works, where I stood at the sluice gates of the incoming book donations and was tasked with judging which ones would be elevated to the shelves on the book floor. Housing Works is a fascinating case study, because its floor inventory and its online inventory (also housed in the building’s basements) are separate entities. It’s almost like two bookstores in one—the first for browsing and surfing the serendipity of the stacks, the second for title-searched Internet ordering. On average there, thirty per cent of book sales are made in person and the remainder are made online. A book sorter needs to keep this ratio in mind when determining whether a book should go to the book floor or to the online division. Apart from that consideration, he follows his own lights. Here, for the curious, are some of the precepts that guided me.



I have always thought that the backbone of a good used-book store is formed by its fiction and history sections, so whenever possible I separated these books for the floor. Naturally, there were exceptions. Specialized histories with a narrow scholarly focus are better sold online—so a history of the Punic Wars makes it to the store; a study of urinals during the reign of Hadrian doesn’t. In fiction, forgotten midlist titles from the nineteen-eighties and nineties tend to molder on the shelves, while, oddly, forgotten midlist titles from the seventies or earlier exert a kind of retro fascination and are more likely to sell to someone off the street.



My most significant exception concerned the edition: I do not like hardcover books. They are needlessly bulky and cumbersome, far less attractive or readable than their svelte paperback siblings. Unless the hardcover was of a perennial seller (your Doris Kearns Goodwins or John Irvings), I didn’t allow them to eat up the limited shelf space.



As a rule, a store should always showcase the current fad author (today’s is E. L. James) and, to be safe, have copies of yesterday’s (Stieg Larsson); but the fad from two days ago is as dead as the dodo (that’s you, Dan Brown). Similarly, a store should always be redundantly supplied with classics. Even now, the prospect of a customer hoping to buy Edith Wharton or E. M. Forster and finding nothing on the shelves fills me with profound philosophical sadness.



There are many categories of books that I treated with extreme prejudice. Self-help, get-rich-quick books, test-prep guides, computer reference, diet and fitness books, travel guides, wedding planners, books on pregnancy and child care, business how-to manuals, true crime—these sell quickly on the Internet and need only nominal representation in the store itself. On the other hand, I have a predilection for nature writing, travelogues, essay collections, and literary criticism, and I tried to keep those sections plentifully stocked for browsers.



The chance of discovery is vital to the act of book-browsing, so I always tried to fill the categories that attract different kinds of truth-seekers—religion, new age, and philosophy. The habitués of these sections (along with those of classics, children’s books, and cookbooks) compose a bookstore’s most enthusiastic patrons, and they add to its sense of magic.



A few more rules of thumb. Biographies and memoirs are badly oversaturated genres, and I sorted them according to personal bias (Twain biographies reached the store, addiction memoirs usually did not). Cookbooks are aesthetically appealing and, even though recipes can be quickly found on line, people like buying them—keep a big, diverse mix, but avoid books by celebrity chefs, who quickly go the way of Dan Brown. Parents buy children’s picture books by the bushel—you can never have too many. In art, as in poetry, my tastes were conservative, and I favored displaying the tried-and-true classics (contemporary art books tend to fetishize their obscurity—printed in small numbers, they are expensive because of scarcity rather than demand, and I preferred to let the Internet sales algorithm figure out their going price). Finally, I always sprinkled the dollar- and fifty-cent-book shelves with gems of higher value to cultivate the feeling of treasure hunting that draws so many people to bookstores in the first place.



Today, I’m a volunteer at Housing Works, and I only sort books for a couple hours each week. The store is under the influence of different minds and different affinities. (I’ve noticed far more contemporary poetry as well as a perverse toleration of hardcover editions.) What hasn’t changed is that each sorter is still trying to find the proper balance between individual taste and popular demand, and leaning, based on temperament, toward one or the other.



We have probably passed the point where there can be any credible objections to the existence and use of electronic readers. (I like the feel and smell of books as much as anybody, but come now: you can keep all of Montaigne and Tolstoy on a phone in your pocket. That’s amazing.) And booksellers have wholeheartedly embraced the online selling that keeps them in business. Yet bookstores provide something irreplaceable that we shouldn’t easily relinquish. Their knowing charms and surprises (even, admittedly, their parochialism and occasional cluelessness) spring from the people who run them and who decide what they will carry. Bookstores are, in essence, personal libraries. In this way, they are macrocosms of the books they contain—there is life inside them.



Sam Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for the Wall Street Journal and is an editor at Open Letters Monthly. Get more information about donating books to Housing Works, or becoming a book-sorting volunteer.

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It's Tough Being a Republican Moderate These Days

Today in Moderate Republican Denial By Jonathan Chait   

The trouble with moderate Republicans isn’t that they have terrible ideas about what government should do; it’s that they can’t seem to acknowledge the reality of what the two parties actually stand for. Two of the more prominent moderate Republicans, David Brooks and Michael Gerson, today offer up useful displays of the crippling denial that afflicts them.



Brooks devotes his column to a sensible, if utterly vague, definition of moderation. He then goes off the rails when he tries to argue that both parties have forsaken it:



For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.



It is true that, after Ronald Reagan enacted a huge, regressive tax cut and ushered in massive deficits, liberals favored an increase in taxes on the rich to help close the deficit. But after Bill Clinton passed that tax hike on the rich in 1993, they stopped trying to increase taxes on the rich. In fact, Clinton (unwisely) agreed to cut taxes on the rich 1997, in return for a new children’s health-care program.



Republicans, on the other hand, insisted we needed a big tax cut in 2001, despite no evidence that Clinton’s tax hike had discouraged innovation or productivity. After they passed it, they then used their win in the 2002 midterm elections to pass another, even more regressive tax cut. And then, despite no evidence that these policies succeeded in any way, and in the face of the total collapse of the fiscal justifications used to sell them, they just kept pushing for more tax cuts and continue pushing to this day.



I suppose you could argue that Brooks was only describing “a certain sort of liberal” and “a certain sort of conservative.” Probably some liberal somewhere still wanted more tax hikes on the rich after 1993. But the “certain sort of conservative” Brooks describes is, you know, the entire Republican party.



Meanwhile, Gerson tries yet again to reconcile his deep affection for Paul Ryan with his abhorrence of Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randian–inspired ideology. (Gerson helped formulate the “compassionate conservative” theme and naturally despises Rand). Gerson seizes on the occasion of Paul Ryan’s speech about poverty to delude himself that Ryan shares some approximation of his own thinking.



Gerson, hilariously, swats aside Ryan’s Randianism by calling it “an embarrassing past flirtation.” Past? How past? Well, way back in 2005, Ryan called Rand “the reason I got involved in public service,” the continued inspiration for his career, and boasted that her work was “required reading” for his staff. In 2009, he praised her as a prophet:



Rand has since become politically embarrassing, forcing Ryan to distance himself. But he has done so carefully, renouncing her atheism without renouncing her moral teachings about capitalism, which of course is where she has influenced him.



Having dispatched the pesky problem of Ryan’s entire philosophical worldview, Gerson turns to his poverty speech. He praises Ryan fulsomely for saying that he wishes the poor well. Near the end of his column, Gerson arrives at this comic footnote:



The speech had gaps. I would have preferred a more specific assurance that government retrenchment will not come at the expense of the poor and vulnerable.



He wants a specific assurance that Ryan doesn’t plan to roll back government at the expense of the poor and vulnerable? We already have a specific, written assurance that it will come at the expense of the poor and vulnerable. That assurance is called “the Ryan plan.” It details absolutely enormous cuts to programs for the poor. And it’s not like Ryan was backing away from those cuts in his speech. The Ryan poverty speech was about how throwing poor people off their government-funded nutritional assistance and health care would force them off their lazy butts and make them go get a job, plus private charity something something.



It is remarkable how Republicans have managed to hold together a coalition of not only voters but leading public intellectuals who simply refuse to face up to what their party actually stands for.

Young People and Libraries

October 22, 2012, 8:18 pm16 Comments

Young People Frequent Libraries, Study Finds

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

In a digital world where many younger readers feel increasingly comfortable downloading novels and textbooks onto their computers or e-readers, a majority of Americans from the ages of 16 through 29 still frequent libraries.



According to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center, 60 percent of Americans surveyed in this age group said they still visited the library. They use libraries to conduct research, borrow print, audio and electronic books and, in some cases, read magazines and newspapers.



That finding would seem to clash with the popular notion that young readers have turned away from libraries and print books as the source of their reading material, said Kathryn Zickuhr, research analyst with the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “A lot of people think that young people aren’t reading, they aren’t using libraries,” Ms. Zickuhr said. “That they’re just turning to Google for everything.”



The Pew Center has been researching the use of the nation’s libraries for more than two years, with financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The latest study involved a telephone survey, conducted last November and December, of nearly 3,000 people 16 and older talking about their reading habits, and data from two telephone polls conducted in January. While young people clearly do not read newspapers as regularly as their parents and grandparents did, their consumption of magazines is more closely aligned. The study showed that 40 percent of surveyed Americans under 30 regularly read newspapers, compared with 62 percent of older Americans. Seventy-one percent of those under 30 who do read news regularly said they viewed all of their news through hand-held devices.



While 42 percent of Americans under 30 read magazines, 50 percent of older adults read magazines.



But in troubling news for tablet makers, the study also found that the subjects under 30 who read electronically were more likely to read books on a cellphone or a computer.



In fact, the study found that 41 percent of readers under 30 view books using a cellphone and 55 percent read from a computer. Only 23 percent of Americans under 30 used an e-reader and 16 percent used a tablet.



“That’s definitely something we will keep an eye on,” Ms. Zickuhr said.

Joseph Epstein

“Essays in biography” by Joseph Epstein


By Jonathan Yardley, Published: October 20

Over a writing career of nearly four decades, Joseph Epstein has published various collections of what he likes to call “familiar essays,” usually on literary subjects. His agreeably approachable and fluid prose no doubt is the result of invisible but careful labor, his opinions are tart and confidently expressed, he seems to have read just about everything and quotes from that reading with daunting authority. On the other hand, he affects modesty but appears to possess little of it; he dances a fine line between amiability and smugness and occasionally lands on the wrong side of it.



“Essays in Biography,” which by my count is his 12th essay collection (as well as his 23rd book), is typical of his work in that each of its 40 pieces is smart, witty and a pleasure to read. It also is a rather strange book that only intermittently lives up to the promise in its title. Since no foreword or afterword is provided, only a list (without dates) of the seven publications in which the essays originally appeared, it is left to the reader to guess as to the provenance of the pieces, but many of them appear to be book reviews — of biographies, memoirs or other books about the lives of mostly notable people. But his present publisher has tried to inflate them into studies in biography, which they simply are not.



That Epstein has allowed himself to be published by Axios is, in and of itself, not a little strange. Axios is the publishing wing of the Axios Institute, which gives every evidence of being a feel-good think tank or research institute, and which in its “Mission Statement” rattles on at modest length about “values” — “Values refers to objects, states of being, ideas, ways of thinking, or people that we value or do not value and related beliefs, assumptions or attitudes about what is valuable or not valuable” — in ways that strike me as almost diametrically opposite to the skeptical, sardonic view that Epstein is inclined to take toward human self-improvement schemes. Indeed, Axios has recently published “Desires, Right & Wrong: The Ethics of Enough,” by Mortimer J. Adler, the late pop philosopher and “Great Books” propagandist whom Epstein kissed off in a memorable obituary for the Weekly Standard as “The Great Bookie.” Now, under the aegis of Axios, the two are bedfellows, albeit mighty strange ones.



Oh well, these are tough times for books and the people who write them, so any port in a storm. I do hope, though, that Epstein is privately embarrassed by the over-hyped jacket copy with which his new book is festooned: “Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Unquestionably, it is Joseph Epstein. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard-to-define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. . . . How easy it is, in today’s digital age, drowning in e-mails and other ephemera, to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose!” So be sure to have no purpose in mind when you sit down with “Essays in Biography.”



Internal evidence suggests that what seems to be the earliest of these pieces, about Henry Luce, was originally published in the late 1960s. The essay is fine as far as it goes in discussing the journalistic empire that brought forth Time, Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, People and other contributions to the general weal, but those magazines have changed enormously (or, in the case of Life, simply died except for occasional special issues) since Epstein’s piece first appeared, and no effort has been made to bring the essay up to date and take those changes into consideration. I am old enough to remember all too well Time in the glory years about which Epstein writes, and even to have done a number of book reviews for Sports Illustrated during the 1970s, but younger readers will be more puzzled than enlightened by the well-aimed darts that Epstein sticks into Time’s ghastly prose style and Luce’s preoccupation with what he liked to call “the American Century.”



Epstein serves the reader (and himself) far better when he turns to subjects that have more staying power than does a journalist-editor-publisher who, no matter how famous and powerful during his lifetime, is now almost completely forgotten. Epstein’s remarkable capacity to fetch from his memory the exactly appropriate quotation is on view, for example, in a piece about Henry James and Henry Adams, contemporaries who had to acknowledge each other’s existence but fundamentally did not like each other. Adams’s wife, Clover, Epstein reminds us, “said of Henry James that, as a novelist, he ‘chews more than he bites off,’ ” which is literary sniping at its most deliciously malicious, while James “said of the Adamses that they preferred Washington to London because ‘they are, vulgarly speaking, “someone” here and . . . they are nothing’ in England.” In a piece about George Santayana (who is probably now forgotten outside university philosophy departments), Epstein lays low almost an entire breed:



“What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world’s evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of the philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.”



Epstein goes in a similar direction when writing about Irving Howe, who as a young man wrote that World War II was “between two great imperialist camps,” a truly preposterous view that reminds Epstein “of George Orwell’s famous crack that there are certain things one has to be an intellectual to believe, since no ordinary man could be so stupid.” He takes the phenomenally overrated Susan Sontag to the woodshed, correctly pointing out that “all her political views were left-wing commonplace, noteworthy only because of her extreme statement of them.” As this indicates, Epstein takes a dim view of leftist ideological orthodoxy, as well he should, but it would be interesting to hear him on the subject of the rightist ideological orthodoxy that is now playing havoc with the American political system. His own conservatism appears to be rooted in conviction and experience rather than self-interested anger, and indeed he is capable of generosity toward some on the other side of the divide whom the tea party doubtless would revile:



“A special feeling continues to surround [Adlai] Stevenson’s name even after his death. His claim to be remembered as more than a period politician surely rests on the striking effect he has had on a large segment of the American electorate. Stevenson is inextricably tied up with the aspirations of a great many Americans for a better world in which America will have an honorable place — and rightly so, for these were also Adlai Stevenson’s aspirations. He was a fundamentally decent man in a political climate where decency was a rare commodity. Yet these same qualities, because unalloyed with any strong political vision or original political program, finally ended in crippling him.”



All of which is true, as is Epstein’s considerably less-generous judgment of another gentleman of the left, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose posthumously published journals give painful evidence of his “infatuation — adoration is a more precise word” — with the Kennedy family: “First Jack, then Bobby, ultimately the entire clan — Schlesinger seems never to have met a Kennedy he did not adore. The result, as even he seems vaguely to grasp, would be the ruin of his reputation as a serious historian.”



Apart from politicians, Epstein has admiring things to say about some of his fellow writers, perhaps most notably in an acutely perceptive essay about Ralph Ellison, and rather less admiring things about others, among them Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal. He has a keen nose for anti-Semitism and brings it to light whenever he finds it, at times to the detriment of otherwise admirable people. It does not seem to me that he is consistently at the top of his form in this collection, as some of these pieces are rather perfunctory and some are dated, but it gives pleasure all the same.

The State of the Presidential Race (8)

We are less than 2 weeks away from the most inportant day of the year.  We are less than 2 weeks away from one of the most important days in the history of the country.  I am trying not to think about it.  It gets me too stressed to think about it.

For Somebody Who Loves Books As Much As I Do

Perlstein on McGovern

.George McGovern, 1922-2012: Is Decency in Politics Always Doomed?

Rick Perlstein October 21, 2012
9:46 am

To understand how deeply the moment of George McGovern's efflorescence differs from our own, pick up the biography McGovern authorized a young Time magazine staffer to write as he began his 1972 presidential campaign. The author, Robert Sam Anson, had been taken prisoner in 1970 by Communists guerrillas in Cambodia who put a gun to his head and made him dig his own grave. Anson dedicated the book to these guards! Then, in his preface, he wrote of their profound admiration for George McGovern as a reason why he should be President of the United States.



The logic was a relic of the time. With the lying Richard Nixon following the lying Lyndon Johnson in the White House, the call for open, honest government associated with ascendent Baby Boomers -- and those same voters' longing for a quick end to the Vietnam War, even their suspicion we had picked the wrong side in that War -- seemed to suggest a candidate like McGovern, who had overseen the process of opening the Democratic Party's ossified boss-ridden nominating system, and pledged as president to remove all American forces from Southeast Asia within sixty days, was the Democratic future.



Hindsight has been cruel to that syllogism. McGovern lost the presidency in just about the greatest landslide in history—in a campaign that ended up with much of Middle America judging liberalism itself as alien and obtuse. In fact, after 2012, a year in which a majority of Republicans voters believe another decent-seeming Democrat is so alien and obtuse he could not have been born in America, maybe McGovern's moment isn't so different from our own after all. The passing of George Stanley McGovern at the age of 90 on Sunday reminds us of this space between the longing for unapologetic good-government liberalism and its decimation in a fallen political world—in which the decent and honorable simply get crushed.



Born in a tiny farming hamlet in South Dakota with a fundamentalist Methodist pastor for a father (surely a source of his intense moralism) and raised on the edge of poverty, McGovern flourished as a youngster, like Richard Nixon, in competitive debate. He was a star student at the local Wesleyan college, where he learned to fly a plane; after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army Corps and became a heroic bomber pilot. He came away with a sense of war's madness seared deeply into his soul—which helped make him a Cold War sketpic and a backer of Henry Wallace's left-wing 1948 presidential bid. The example of Adlai Stevenson made him a Democrat: the Illinoisan seemed to teach that a politician could still prosper while remaining above the nasty political fray.



Now a college history professor (his dissertation was on the deadly labor wars in the Colorado coalfields in 1913 and '14), in an overwhelmingly conservative state he practically organized South Dakotan Democratic Party single-handedly. In 1956, when asked why someone as far left as he thought he could win a congressional seat there, he answered, "I can present liberal values in a conservative, restrained way. I see myself as a politician of reconciliation."



Wouldn't you know it, he won—which instilled in him that believe so ubiquitous in the most ambitious politicians: that the ordinary rules of political gravity did not apply to him.



It survived his defeat for Senate in 1960. John F. Kennedy tapped him to run the new Food for Peace program, which strengthened Cold War alliances by distributing agricultural surplus, and for the rest of his life he would distinguish himself as an advocate against hunger. In 1962, he finally won his Senate seat—by 527 votes. He was only back on Capitol Hill eight months when he discovered his defining issue—calling America's escalating commitment in Southeast Asia "a policy of moral debacle and political defeat." The Gulf of Tonkin attacks, which put Vietnam on the map for the rest of America, was a long year away.



In 1968 he repaid the Kennedy family's favor by standing in for the slain Robert F. Kenendy as a candidate at the 1968 Democratic Nation Convention. The remarkable thing: alone among Democrats, he took his pseudo-run seriously. Asked why delegates should vote for him against fellow anti-Vietnam War aspirant Eugene McCarthy, he responded, "Well—Gene really doesn't want to be President, and I do." Incredibly, little more than sixteen months later, he made the earliest presidential candidacy announcement in history. Las Vegas oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek gave him a 50 to one shot for the 1972 Democratic nomination.



But he won that nomination. And the unlikely victory seemed to vindicate an abiding liberal fantasy, which President Obama sometimes seems to share: that if you just show yourself to be decent enough, the skeptics cannot help but come around. The Nixon campaign against him was merciless, demolishing his old claim to wrap liberalism inside a conciliatory conservative rhetoric. One surrogate, Bob Dole, called him "as close as anyone has yet come to urging outright surrender"; another, Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, tabbed him the candidate of "acid, abortion, and amnesty"; a "Democrats for Nixon" commercial, portending Mitt Romney's infamous remarks in Boca Raton, said his proposal for a guaranteed minimum income -- which was not much more generous than Nixon's own proposal for a guaranteed minimum income -- would make 53 percent of the country vassals to the other 47. The last Gallup Poll had him down 59 percent to 36. And yet the abiding liberal fantasy survived even that.



James Reston, in his column the Sunday before Election Day, said "the thought that the American people are going to give Mr. Nixon and his policies and anonymous hucksters and twisters in the White House a landslide popular victory ... is a little hard to imagine." McGovern's idealistic young aides predicted victory outright. (Said one: "There's no way we can lose Texas.") Even after the landslide a novel called President McGovern's First Term held fast to the fantasy—imagining that had McGovern only run a last-minute ad inviting voters to ask, "Do I really trust Richard Nixon? ... Do I want to contribute to giving him a blank check, a license to do what he pleases for four long years?" he would have eked out a victory.



The fact that in real-life McGovern had run exactly that sort of campaign didn't deter the novelist. One of his TV commercials displayed all the headlines correctly laying the Watergate scandal on the Oval Office's doorstep—and when reporters ignored Watergate as an election issue, in an astonishing speech to a conference of UPI editors, McGovern yelled at them, calling Nixon's "the most corrupt administration in history...and every one of you in this room knows it." In another astonishing speech—well, it wasn't really a speech at all: instead, the candidate just played a recording of a Vietnam veteran saying, "I don't think the people really, really understand war and what's going on. We went into villages after they dropped napalm, and the human beings were fused together like pieces of metal that had been soldered."



If only elections could be framed as referenda on decency. If only someone shooting straight from the hip could call Americans to their better selves. If only ... then the world would change. This, more than any alleged policy extremism, was the soul of McGovernism. But Americans were not prepared to be called back to decency like that.



McGovern likely never suspected what Nixon aide Pat Buchanan revealed in testimony to the Senate Watergate hearing: that one of the of the goals of the Nixon reelection campaign's dirty tricks was to manipulate all the other viable Democrats except for McGovern into destroying one another, because they thought McGovern would be easiest to beat. Indeed, political aggression from his opponents seemed to baffle him; he simply never saw it coming. He was a good man in politics, perhaps too good; Mr. Christian, an aide entitled his memoir about him. Although he was a funny sort of Christian. He never seemed to accept that we live in a fallen world.