Thursday, May 30, 2019

Running Ransom Road by Caleb Daniloff

Caleb Daniloff used to be a drinker and troublemaker, a poor student and an unreliable person. Then, as an adult, he found running. Running helped save him. It gave him an identity and a purpose.

In this book, he details the first few marathons he ran. He chose races in locations where he used to live. By running the streets of his past, Caleb confronts his demons and the person he used to be. However, he ultimately discovers a valuable truth: He doesn't need to run away from or achieve victory over his drinking and mistakes. Rather, he should accept his past as part of who he was and look forward to the person he's becoming.

Here are a few observations Caleb makes about running:

- Running is the most democratic of sports, open to anyone and any age. Anybody can do it.
- When running, your mind is loosed from your brain, free to think or feel anything.
- Running taught him to “put one foot in front of the other” and not look back at his past mistakes; by moving forward, he can forge a new life for himself.
- When he was younger, and a drunk, his life was about incompletions: failing classes, getting fired, etc. Now, running is about experiencing that sense of completing, of getting to the finish line.
- He abhors walking or stopping for the bathroom because it interrupts the flow of the run. “Continuous flow was the reminder that I was no longer that fragmented, damaged person who blew off work, family, and friends.”
- A marathon reveals who you really are. You can’t fake something that strenuous and challenging.
- “Running is a state of being more than a sport, a way of life.”
- Through running, he learned to accept things that are beyond his control.

Edmund Morris and Reagan

Edmund Morris in front of a shelf of "Dutch" copies — MARTY LEDERHANDLER / AP

I often think of Edmund Morris, the master biographer who died this weekend at the age of 78, as the man whom Ronald Reagan, the subject of his most famous biography, drove crazy.

Reagan drove a lot of people crazy. Anyone who spent time in the faculty lounges and graduate seminars of the 1980s, as I did, can tell you all about it. You had to see it to believe it, the intensity of it, especially now that Reagan has been declawed into the kindly, unexpectedly shrewd, avuncular master of misdirection that we know from pop biographies and second-rate TV documentaries. Back then, though, the mere mention of his name could send professional eggheads, especially the ideological kind, into a scarlet fury. The dunce! Ignoramus! He’s gonna get us all killed!

The fury was unique for its time, but I suppose we’ve all gotten used to it, after the revulsion most Republicans felt toward Barack Obama, and the revulsion everyone else felt toward Donald Trump.

Read: So you want to write a presidential biography

Reagan didn’t drive Morris crazy in that way, even metaphorically. Before and after his years with Reagan, Morris remained soft-spoken, cerebral, amused—only mildly eccentric. And unlike the Reagan-era eggheads, or the Obama- and Trump-haters of our own day, he didn’t have an ideological bone in his body.

He was more an artist than a historian or biographer. If you can get your hand on it, take a half hour to read the first chapter of the first volume of his biography of Theodore (never Teddy) Roosevelt, in which Morris follows the new president as he makes his rounds on Inauguration Day. There, as in all his work, he gives you sights and sounds, the glow of lamplight and the clop of horses in the street, and even, in a great feat of literary imagination, the rhythm of the thoughts that pulse through the heads of his subjects. In his Reagan biography, Morris’s descriptions of the settings of Reagan’s life—from the Illinois prairie of his boyhood, woebegone and terrifying, to the crisp, carpeted, air-cooled efficiency of the White House West Wing in the 1980s—are precise, accurate, and full of meaning. They are nearly perfect.

What Morris the biographer never gave you was politics, or ideas. This is strange, to put it mildly, in a writer who became famous as a biographer of politicians. T. S. Eliot wrote of Henry James, “He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” Eliot meant it as a compliment. Morris, to a lesser degree, deserves the same praise. Ideas, especially political ideas, are usually blunt and cumbersome things, large and crude enough to be expressed in quick strokes and grasped by masses of people, and they preoccupy those of us whose intellectual taste seldom runs to the delicate and subtle. Morris’s taste tended in the other direction, and so did his powers of observation. He watched or imagined the interplay between souls, the effect of power on personality, the subterranean drives of emotion and belief.

His account of Roosevelt’s reaction to the death of his first wife, for example, is at once clinically detached and deeply felt, and no biographer I know of could have recreated those moments with such sensitivity. Politics, though, is another matter. In the same volume, Morris has a rounded account of the political career of Roosevelt’s rival William Jennings Bryan, and somehow scarcely mentions the debate over free silver, the issue that defined Bryan’s career. This is the difference between the historian and the artist: The historian will sit still for monetary policy.

Read: The myth of the “Reagan democrat”

Reagan, his wife, and his advisers were so impressed with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt that they didn’t notice this defect—if that’s what it was—in the biographer. They were in the market for a reputable historian to write a semi-authorized biography of the sitting president. They weren’t having much luck, given that so many “reputable” historians (see above) weren’t cut out for the job. All they knew was that Morris had written admiringly of a Republican, and they’d heard rumors that the historian himself had Republican leanings. A Republican with a Pulitzer Prize! When Morris, after some back-and-forth, agreed to tail Reagan around through his second term and use the material to shape a biography as he saw fit, the Reaganites were rather proud of their catch.

The result, Dutch: A Memoir of Reagan, is a famous, a legendary, an epochal disaster. This should have been entirely predictable. No one, before Morris or after, had ever been able to penetrate Reagan’s lacquered shell of geniality. Beyond his wife, he had no intimates. Those who worked most closely with him resorted to oxymoron when describing him. Reagan, said James Baker, was “the kindest and most impersonal man” he’d ever met. Another subordinate who idolized him, Martin Anderson, called him a “warmly ruthless man.”

“People who had worked for him much of their lives,” wrote his most dutiful biographer, Lou Cannon, “suspected that there was something beneath the surface they had never seen, but they did not know what the something was.”

Morris took it on himself to find the something—it was, he felt, his duty as a biographer and (though he wouldn’t have said it aloud) an artist. After all, the only journalist who could be said to have gotten close to Reagan—through his wife, Nancy—was George Will, who had said, “On the first nine levels, Reagan is the least interesting of men. But if you postulate a tenth level, then he’s suddenly fascinating.”

Read: Looking at Reagan

Ready to be fascinated, Morris took advantage of unprecedented access to his subject. He sat as a fly on the wall during momentous White House meetings, taking notes with his Montblanc in a tiny, elegant script, and interviewed his subject for hundreds of hours as the second half of the Reagan tenure unfolded—a more consequential four years than the presidency had seen in a generation. Everyone he wanted to talk to, talked to him.

And he came up … empty. Well, not empty. Dutch is full of beautiful writing and insight about nearly everything Reagan encountered in a long and eventful life. (Reagan was 75 when Morris, then in his mid-forties, began to tag along.) But about the man himself—the lacquer never cracked, the Reagan twinkle never dimmed to reveal what, if anything, was behind it. Reagan, Morris said years later, “is the strangest man who ever lived.”

From a biographer, from an artist, this is a cry of the heart. It means: I give up! I can’t figure him out! There was no tenth level. Reagan was a purely political creature, all the way down, and to his biographer, with no ear for politics and in search of depths to plumb, he remained incomprehensible to the end.

As a way around the wall he’d been butting his head against, Morris invented a now notorious literary device. Note the word memoir in the subtitle. Instead of postulating that tenth level, he imagined himself, Edmund Morris, as a contemporary of Reagan’s, and wove himself in and out of his account of Reagan’s life, from small-town Illinois to Hollywood to the West Wing. In flashbacks, it transpires that Reagan, as a young lifeguard, had once saved young Edmund from drowning. That heroic act then becomes a metaphor for Reagan’s rescuing of the West from the swirling eddies of Communism in the Cold War.

Read: The perils of Reagan Republicanism

The metaphor is strained enough. Morris never publicly worried that his fictional passages—he even invented footnotes for them!—rendered the rest of his work worthless as serious biography. The reputable historians were outraged over the squandering of priceless access and resources, and Reagan’s legions of fans seethed over what they saw as an exercise in triviality. These never bothered him either, at least not publicly. The artist won out over the biographer.

Morris entrusted a mutual friend with the privilege of reading the manuscript of Dutch as he finished it, chapter by chapter. As the final crazy pages unspooled from his fax machine late one night, my friend later told me, “I realized it had to be one of two things. Either Edmund had reached new heights of literary genius, or Reagan had driven him nuts.”

Both things could be true, of course. In the years after Dutch, Morris continued to produce work of high literary and historical merit, including dozens of essays, the final two volumes of his biography of Roosevelt, and a book-length appreciation of Beethoven. A biography of Thomas Edison, the obituaries tell us, is due this fall. The insanity was only temporary.

Trump Tax Cut was a Scam All Along

Study Finds Trump Tax Cuts Failed to Do Anything But Give Rich People Money

By Jonathan Chait

Congratulations to President Trump and other beneficiaries of the Trump tax cuts. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The biggest effect of the Trump tax cuts is obvious: People who own businesses and other sources of concentrated wealth will have a lot more money, and the federal budget will have less. But the advocates of the tax cuts insisted it wasn’t about letting the makers keep their hard-earned money rather than handing it over to the takers. It was about incentivizing business to repatriate funds and ramp up its investments, thereby increasing growth and wages.

The Congressional Research Service, a kind of in-house think tank for Congress, has a new paper analyzing the effects of the Trump tax cuts. It finds that none of those secondary effects have materialized. Growth has not increased above the pre-tax-cut trend. Neither have wages. After a brief and much smaller than expected bump, repatriated corporate cash from abroad has leveled off.

It’s of course possible that the growth in wages would take longer than the year or so that has passed since the tax cut to show up. If the Trump tax cut had encouraged new business investment, it might take years for the new investment to bear fruit. But the study looks directly at business investment and finds … nothing:

Supporters of the Trump tax cuts insisted not only that they would promote growth, but that they would promote so much growth the measure would pay for itself. Even moderates like Susan Collins repeated assurances by the party’s pseudo-economists that the plan would not increase the deficit. So far, the growth feedback from the tax cuts has made up about 5 percent of the plan’s revenue loss, a mere 95 percent shy of the predictions.

The passage of the plan was met with a coordinated wave of corporate public-relations announcements of worker bonuses. But the paper finds no widespread increase in bonuses or worker compensation.

When assessing these arguments, keep a close eye on the number of Republican officials or conservative policy-makers who revise their position on the Trump tax cuts in light of the data. If their true primary goal was to increase business investment, then the complete failure of a highly expensive program to achieve its stated goal would lead them to question their support. Why not cancel the Trump tax cuts and use the couple trillion dollars in lost revenue to fund a more effective growth-promoting policy?

So far, the number of Republicans reassessing their support for the Trump tax cuts is, give or take, zero. What this suggests is that the alleged growth-incentivizing secondary effects of the plan were rationales, and the primary effect — giving business owners more money — was the hidden main goal all along.

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Thursday, May 30, 2019

Running Ransom Road by Caleb Daniloff

Edmund Morris and Reagan

The Tragedy of Edmund Morris

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Self-Limiting Revolution

Abraham Lincoln’s $6 Million Hat

A Republic Too Fractured to Be Funny

There’s No Substitute for Print