Sunday, November 4, 2012
Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues by Michael Brandman
As a change of pace I occasionally read a light crime fiction novel. Robert B. Parker, perhaps the most successful crime novelist of our time, died a couple of years ago and a man named Michael Brandman has picked up his Jesse Stone character. I see this at Wal Mart and read it. This is my first and probably last Jesse Stone book. Well, it certainly is light, too light to get me connected to the character to read Parker's Stone novels. Crime fiction can be entertaining, but when I get to the end of the story I always wonder why I read the book in the first place. Case in point here.
Lincoln This/Lincoln That
So now with the movie coming out we have to listen to all of Lincoln talk: Lincoln this, Lincoln that, what would Lincoln do, what would he say. It's all overdone. I admire Lincoln, our greatest President, but I waste no time or thought over what the 16th President would do if he were President today. What would Lincoln do? I do not care, for he was a creature of his time like we all are and it is fruitless to ponder what he would do today.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Getting Right with Mr. Lincoln
Lincoln Saturday, Nov 3, 2012 05:00 PM CDT
Lessons for Obama, from Abe Lincoln
In Spielberg's "Lincoln," a vilified president outfoxes his hateful opponents in a bitterly divided America
By Andrew O'Hehir
Abraham Lincoln remains until further notice the standard by which all presidents are judged, and by which all invariably fall short. The task that confronts presidents and turns them prematurely gray – look at pictures of Barack Obama in 2008 and today, or George W. Bush in 2001 and 2008 – has two levels that are often in conflict. He (one day soon we may get to add “she”) must fight the political battles of the day, with all the compromise, arm-twisting, prevarication and skulduggery that implies, while still holding in mind larger and more abstract questions about the role of the United States in the world, the moral imperatives of history, the will of God.
Neither Obama nor Mitt Romney is foolish enough to compare himself directly to Lincoln, but whichever man is elected on Tuesday faces a political landscape nearly as divided and poisonous as the one confronted by the 16th president. Moreover, this year’s election will vividly illustrate that the schisms of the Civil War – over differing visions of justice and equality, competing ideas about states’ rights and federal power, cultural divisions between North and South – have yet to heal, long after the passage of many generations and enormous waves of demographic change ought to have rendered them irrelevant. I have no doubt about which candidate Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner believe comes closer to the Lincolnian ideal, but their remarkable film “Lincoln” offers urgent lessons to both candidates, and the rest of us, about how to wield political power in times of crisis. Whether those lessons still pertain in the dysfunctional climate of the 21st century is another matter.
Each of those presidential components mentioned enough is loaded with swamps and pitfalls, and the combination has led presidents astray over and over again. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the father of the New Deal and the great hero of liberalism, overstepped his constitutional authority repeatedly, paving the way for the near-imperial presidency of today, and established himself as an elected tyrant, running for a third and fourth term (leading to the 22nd Amendment, which limited presidents to two elected terms or 10 total years in office). Richard Nixon was a coldhearted genius on both domestic politics and foreign-policy issues – and, in today’s terms, pretty much a centrist Democrat – who was seduced by executive power, and his own paranoia, into a series of petty and stupid blunders. The aforementioned junior Bush, by reputation a decent and kind man in private, was lured into ruinous overseas adventures by the grandiose historical claims of neoconservative intellectuals, simultaneously trashing our economy and our global reputation.
Lincoln stands apart from other presidents in the way he managed those competing demands and for other reasons too. It can be tempting, even irresistible, to view Lincoln as a trans-historical figure bigger than his context, an autodidact biblical prophet from the Western wilderness – beset by dreams and visions, and by what we would probably now call a lifelong depressive illness — who towered above the prejudices and factional infighting of the 19th century much as he literally towered over his countrymen. (At 6-foot-4, Lincoln was among the tallest Americans of his era.) Indeed, I think there’s still something to be said for that romantic conception. But Steven Spielberg’s remarkable film “Lincoln,” like the historical work on which it’s partly based (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bestseller “Team of Rivals”), depicts the 16th president as a leader of great complexity, first and foremost a shrewd political operator and a forceful wielder of executive power.
“Lincoln” is unquestionably the heavyweight film of the fall season and opens in theaters next week; I’ll have more to say about its cinematic and narrative qualities then. (OK, I’ll cheat a little: It’s a tremendous accomplishment on many levels, and Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones and Spielberg himself need to clear some space on the mantelpiece by February.) It’s neither a sweeping biopic nor a Civil War epic, although there are a handful of harrowing battlefield sequences. Indeed, the entire film is based on the final two chapters of Goodwin’s book, and its time period is limited to the winter and spring of 1865, between Lincoln’s reelection and his assassination. (In this context, that probably doesn’t count as a spoiler.) There’s no log cabin, no debate with Stephen A. Douglas, no Gettysburg and, mercifully, no John Wilkes Booth, whose name is never uttered.
Instead, “Lincoln” is tightly focused on the signature political accomplishment of Lincoln’s presidency: the passage of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery forever, in a Washington battered and embittered by four years of war. If the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 is more famous, Lincoln himself was well aware of its inadequacies. The proclamation was legally dubious at best and an unconstitutional exercise of war powers at worst, and rested on several contradictions, as Lincoln explains to his cabinet in the film. If the Confederacy was an illegal rebellion within the Union rather than a sovereign nation at war with the U.S. (as Lincoln always maintained), then he had no authority to overrule legitimate state law. Furthermore, seizing the slaveowners’ property as war contraband seemed to imply that Southern blacks were property, rather than citizens with equal rights before the law.
Only an amendment to the Constitution could bring a permanent and definite end to slavery in America, and Lincoln believed it was urgent to act immediately, both for moral reasons and tactical ones. It would send a clear signal to the world about the direction of America’s future, and it would cut away the economic foundation that held up the tottering Confederacy. But getting such an ambitious proposition through the Congress of 1865 was a daunting political task that required persuasion, negotiation, guile and underhanded strong-arm tactics more than high-flown rhetoric.
Lincoln faced fractious opposition even within his own party, both from the right and the left. Conservative Republicans led by Francis Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook in Spielberg’s film) favored a negotiated truce with the Confederates, and wanted to kick the slavery question down the road indefinitely, while the radical Republicans under legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) viewed Lincoln as a hair-splitting, legalistic compromiser who was eager to settle for half measures. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party had fought and lost the 1864 campaign on an openly pro-slavery (or at least anti-abolition) platform, but remained bitterly opposed to Lincoln and everything he represented. In the movie we see Fernando Wood (Lee Pace), a New York machine politician and an infamous “Copperhead” (Southern supporter within the Union), denounce the president on the House floor as a traitor and tyrant who yearns to subvert democracy and establish himself as an American Caesar. All of that’s found in the historical record; while Kushner’s screenplay compresses actual events, not much of it is fictional or even supposititious, beyond private conversations within the Lincoln household. Still, it’s impossible not to hear pre-echoes of the hateful and intemperate political discourse that’s so easy to find today, directed at the current occupant of the White House.
Indeed, the startling conclusion forced upon you by “Lincoln” is that the more things change in American politics the more they stay the same. It’s true that the two parties have switched identities to a large degree, and also that the central issues of the day and the nation’s demographic landscape would seem incomprehensible to anyone from Lincoln’s time. But 160 years on, we have an Illinois lawyer in the White House who is seen as an overly cautious reformer by many of his supporters and as the devil incarnate by his opponents. One party is dominated by Northern liberals devoted to a racially inclusive future, and the other by angry Southern whites clinging to an incoherent mythology of the past. No one outside departments of history uses the word “federalism” in 2012, but the underlying dispute about the role of central government that fueled the Civil War remains a fundamental dividing line between the parties.
Even the limits of presidential power, which Lincoln overstepped several times in the name of claimed moral righteousness, remain contested in similar fashion. Like many other people, I’m profoundly disturbed by the way the last two presidents have employed extra-constitutional authority to send purported terrorists to secret prisons, and to order the killing of both foreign civilians and American citizens who aren’t enemy combatants in any ordinary sense. But as “Lincoln” makes clear, in practice, we have entrusted our presidents with the power to violate the law on our behalf for most of our history. Congress has largely abdicated its constitutional oversight role or used it for narrow political purposes (as in both cases when a sitting president was impeached), and our only recourse against tyranny remains the highly imperfect remedy of the ballot box. Will historians of the future judge, say, the clandestine killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son (both U.S. citizens) to be illegal but justifiable, as most would now view the Emancipation Proclamation?
I’m not suggesting that anything on Barack Obama’s résumé comes close to the 13th Amendment, or is likely to. While the American public likes him pretty well (at least those who don’t utterly despise him), which may save his bacon on Tuesday, the Northern majority of the 1860s loved Abe Lincoln. On controversial questions like national healthcare and same-sex marriage, you can see Obama trying to negotiate the Lincoln dance between the long game of philosophy and principle and the constricted realm of political possibility. In fact, I think it’s clear that Obama thinks about the bigger historical picture, maybe too much so; it’s on the mucky ground of quotidian politics that he has been consistently outmaneuvered.
It’s true that Obama has been hemmed in by a united and hostile opposition, but so was Lincoln, for most of his time in office. Lincoln worked “across the aisle” with ideological opponents on occasion, but only opportunistically, seizing an advantage when he saw one. Spielberg’s film focuses in vivid detail on the grunt work of manipulating the 13th Amendment through that lame-duck Congress of 1865, which included more than 60 defeated Democrats, who were now free to vote their conscience on the question of slavery — or at least to be bought off, intimidated or browbeaten.
Can Obama or Romney or any future president emulate the combination of moral vision, philosophical depth and political prowess that Lincoln possessed? Well, let’s stop pretending that Romney is likely to win, or that if he does he’ll be anything except a handsome front man for big capital. Given the shadowy combination of corporate power, K Street lobbyists and super PAC money – all unimaginable in Lincoln’s time – contemporary presidents have lost most or all of their autonomy to pursue change on a historic scale. There are ample reasons to prefer Obama over his opponent, but most of them are negative: The Republican Party has become a nightmarish coalition of Wall Street suits and anti-government radicals from Podunk, united primarily by their extreme whiteness. As far as policy goes, neither 2012 candidate is likely to enact anything close to his proposed agenda.
As for Lincoln, he lived only a few weeks after his great legislative victory, and only a few days past the end of the war. He died at the hands of a deranged pro-slavery zealot who misunderstood rhetoric for reality, and believed all the outrageous things said about the president by his opponents. (If Fox News had existed in 1865, Fernando Wood would’ve been a regular, and Booth a fanatical viewer.) Booth was a roguish, handsome actor well known throughout the country — it was rather as if Johnny Depp had turned assassin — who genuinely believed he would be acclaimed as a hero and was dismayed to learn that even the Southern public was horrified.
The Lincoln assassination was a devastating coda to those years of bloodshed, and still feels like an unhealed trauma, all these years later. It was both tragic and ironic in the truest sense, since Lincoln had chosen a path of reconciliation with the defeated South, resisting calls from Thaddeus Stevens and others to dispossess the plantation owners, burn down their houses, and bring Confederate leaders and officers to Washington for trial and execution. Given Lincoln’s moral temperament and his enormous sense of responsibility for the war dead on both sides, it was the only choice he could have made. But if he’d somehow known that we’d still be fighting and re-fighting that damn war, eight generations later, with no end in sight – well, you have to wonder.
Lessons for Obama, from Abe Lincoln
In Spielberg's "Lincoln," a vilified president outfoxes his hateful opponents in a bitterly divided America
By Andrew O'Hehir
Abraham Lincoln remains until further notice the standard by which all presidents are judged, and by which all invariably fall short. The task that confronts presidents and turns them prematurely gray – look at pictures of Barack Obama in 2008 and today, or George W. Bush in 2001 and 2008 – has two levels that are often in conflict. He (one day soon we may get to add “she”) must fight the political battles of the day, with all the compromise, arm-twisting, prevarication and skulduggery that implies, while still holding in mind larger and more abstract questions about the role of the United States in the world, the moral imperatives of history, the will of God.
Neither Obama nor Mitt Romney is foolish enough to compare himself directly to Lincoln, but whichever man is elected on Tuesday faces a political landscape nearly as divided and poisonous as the one confronted by the 16th president. Moreover, this year’s election will vividly illustrate that the schisms of the Civil War – over differing visions of justice and equality, competing ideas about states’ rights and federal power, cultural divisions between North and South – have yet to heal, long after the passage of many generations and enormous waves of demographic change ought to have rendered them irrelevant. I have no doubt about which candidate Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner believe comes closer to the Lincolnian ideal, but their remarkable film “Lincoln” offers urgent lessons to both candidates, and the rest of us, about how to wield political power in times of crisis. Whether those lessons still pertain in the dysfunctional climate of the 21st century is another matter.
Each of those presidential components mentioned enough is loaded with swamps and pitfalls, and the combination has led presidents astray over and over again. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the father of the New Deal and the great hero of liberalism, overstepped his constitutional authority repeatedly, paving the way for the near-imperial presidency of today, and established himself as an elected tyrant, running for a third and fourth term (leading to the 22nd Amendment, which limited presidents to two elected terms or 10 total years in office). Richard Nixon was a coldhearted genius on both domestic politics and foreign-policy issues – and, in today’s terms, pretty much a centrist Democrat – who was seduced by executive power, and his own paranoia, into a series of petty and stupid blunders. The aforementioned junior Bush, by reputation a decent and kind man in private, was lured into ruinous overseas adventures by the grandiose historical claims of neoconservative intellectuals, simultaneously trashing our economy and our global reputation.
Lincoln stands apart from other presidents in the way he managed those competing demands and for other reasons too. It can be tempting, even irresistible, to view Lincoln as a trans-historical figure bigger than his context, an autodidact biblical prophet from the Western wilderness – beset by dreams and visions, and by what we would probably now call a lifelong depressive illness — who towered above the prejudices and factional infighting of the 19th century much as he literally towered over his countrymen. (At 6-foot-4, Lincoln was among the tallest Americans of his era.) Indeed, I think there’s still something to be said for that romantic conception. But Steven Spielberg’s remarkable film “Lincoln,” like the historical work on which it’s partly based (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bestseller “Team of Rivals”), depicts the 16th president as a leader of great complexity, first and foremost a shrewd political operator and a forceful wielder of executive power.
“Lincoln” is unquestionably the heavyweight film of the fall season and opens in theaters next week; I’ll have more to say about its cinematic and narrative qualities then. (OK, I’ll cheat a little: It’s a tremendous accomplishment on many levels, and Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones and Spielberg himself need to clear some space on the mantelpiece by February.) It’s neither a sweeping biopic nor a Civil War epic, although there are a handful of harrowing battlefield sequences. Indeed, the entire film is based on the final two chapters of Goodwin’s book, and its time period is limited to the winter and spring of 1865, between Lincoln’s reelection and his assassination. (In this context, that probably doesn’t count as a spoiler.) There’s no log cabin, no debate with Stephen A. Douglas, no Gettysburg and, mercifully, no John Wilkes Booth, whose name is never uttered.
Instead, “Lincoln” is tightly focused on the signature political accomplishment of Lincoln’s presidency: the passage of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery forever, in a Washington battered and embittered by four years of war. If the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 is more famous, Lincoln himself was well aware of its inadequacies. The proclamation was legally dubious at best and an unconstitutional exercise of war powers at worst, and rested on several contradictions, as Lincoln explains to his cabinet in the film. If the Confederacy was an illegal rebellion within the Union rather than a sovereign nation at war with the U.S. (as Lincoln always maintained), then he had no authority to overrule legitimate state law. Furthermore, seizing the slaveowners’ property as war contraband seemed to imply that Southern blacks were property, rather than citizens with equal rights before the law.
Only an amendment to the Constitution could bring a permanent and definite end to slavery in America, and Lincoln believed it was urgent to act immediately, both for moral reasons and tactical ones. It would send a clear signal to the world about the direction of America’s future, and it would cut away the economic foundation that held up the tottering Confederacy. But getting such an ambitious proposition through the Congress of 1865 was a daunting political task that required persuasion, negotiation, guile and underhanded strong-arm tactics more than high-flown rhetoric.
Lincoln faced fractious opposition even within his own party, both from the right and the left. Conservative Republicans led by Francis Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook in Spielberg’s film) favored a negotiated truce with the Confederates, and wanted to kick the slavery question down the road indefinitely, while the radical Republicans under legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) viewed Lincoln as a hair-splitting, legalistic compromiser who was eager to settle for half measures. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party had fought and lost the 1864 campaign on an openly pro-slavery (or at least anti-abolition) platform, but remained bitterly opposed to Lincoln and everything he represented. In the movie we see Fernando Wood (Lee Pace), a New York machine politician and an infamous “Copperhead” (Southern supporter within the Union), denounce the president on the House floor as a traitor and tyrant who yearns to subvert democracy and establish himself as an American Caesar. All of that’s found in the historical record; while Kushner’s screenplay compresses actual events, not much of it is fictional or even supposititious, beyond private conversations within the Lincoln household. Still, it’s impossible not to hear pre-echoes of the hateful and intemperate political discourse that’s so easy to find today, directed at the current occupant of the White House.
Indeed, the startling conclusion forced upon you by “Lincoln” is that the more things change in American politics the more they stay the same. It’s true that the two parties have switched identities to a large degree, and also that the central issues of the day and the nation’s demographic landscape would seem incomprehensible to anyone from Lincoln’s time. But 160 years on, we have an Illinois lawyer in the White House who is seen as an overly cautious reformer by many of his supporters and as the devil incarnate by his opponents. One party is dominated by Northern liberals devoted to a racially inclusive future, and the other by angry Southern whites clinging to an incoherent mythology of the past. No one outside departments of history uses the word “federalism” in 2012, but the underlying dispute about the role of central government that fueled the Civil War remains a fundamental dividing line between the parties.
Even the limits of presidential power, which Lincoln overstepped several times in the name of claimed moral righteousness, remain contested in similar fashion. Like many other people, I’m profoundly disturbed by the way the last two presidents have employed extra-constitutional authority to send purported terrorists to secret prisons, and to order the killing of both foreign civilians and American citizens who aren’t enemy combatants in any ordinary sense. But as “Lincoln” makes clear, in practice, we have entrusted our presidents with the power to violate the law on our behalf for most of our history. Congress has largely abdicated its constitutional oversight role or used it for narrow political purposes (as in both cases when a sitting president was impeached), and our only recourse against tyranny remains the highly imperfect remedy of the ballot box. Will historians of the future judge, say, the clandestine killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son (both U.S. citizens) to be illegal but justifiable, as most would now view the Emancipation Proclamation?
I’m not suggesting that anything on Barack Obama’s résumé comes close to the 13th Amendment, or is likely to. While the American public likes him pretty well (at least those who don’t utterly despise him), which may save his bacon on Tuesday, the Northern majority of the 1860s loved Abe Lincoln. On controversial questions like national healthcare and same-sex marriage, you can see Obama trying to negotiate the Lincoln dance between the long game of philosophy and principle and the constricted realm of political possibility. In fact, I think it’s clear that Obama thinks about the bigger historical picture, maybe too much so; it’s on the mucky ground of quotidian politics that he has been consistently outmaneuvered.
It’s true that Obama has been hemmed in by a united and hostile opposition, but so was Lincoln, for most of his time in office. Lincoln worked “across the aisle” with ideological opponents on occasion, but only opportunistically, seizing an advantage when he saw one. Spielberg’s film focuses in vivid detail on the grunt work of manipulating the 13th Amendment through that lame-duck Congress of 1865, which included more than 60 defeated Democrats, who were now free to vote their conscience on the question of slavery — or at least to be bought off, intimidated or browbeaten.
Can Obama or Romney or any future president emulate the combination of moral vision, philosophical depth and political prowess that Lincoln possessed? Well, let’s stop pretending that Romney is likely to win, or that if he does he’ll be anything except a handsome front man for big capital. Given the shadowy combination of corporate power, K Street lobbyists and super PAC money – all unimaginable in Lincoln’s time – contemporary presidents have lost most or all of their autonomy to pursue change on a historic scale. There are ample reasons to prefer Obama over his opponent, but most of them are negative: The Republican Party has become a nightmarish coalition of Wall Street suits and anti-government radicals from Podunk, united primarily by their extreme whiteness. As far as policy goes, neither 2012 candidate is likely to enact anything close to his proposed agenda.
As for Lincoln, he lived only a few weeks after his great legislative victory, and only a few days past the end of the war. He died at the hands of a deranged pro-slavery zealot who misunderstood rhetoric for reality, and believed all the outrageous things said about the president by his opponents. (If Fox News had existed in 1865, Fernando Wood would’ve been a regular, and Booth a fanatical viewer.) Booth was a roguish, handsome actor well known throughout the country — it was rather as if Johnny Depp had turned assassin — who genuinely believed he would be acclaimed as a hero and was dismayed to learn that even the Southern public was horrified.
The Lincoln assassination was a devastating coda to those years of bloodshed, and still feels like an unhealed trauma, all these years later. It was both tragic and ironic in the truest sense, since Lincoln had chosen a path of reconciliation with the defeated South, resisting calls from Thaddeus Stevens and others to dispossess the plantation owners, burn down their houses, and bring Confederate leaders and officers to Washington for trial and execution. Given Lincoln’s moral temperament and his enormous sense of responsibility for the war dead on both sides, it was the only choice he could have made. But if he’d somehow known that we’d still be fighting and re-fighting that damn war, eight generations later, with no end in sight – well, you have to wonder.
Joseph Epstein - Essays in Biography
I enjoy this collection of biographical essays by the noted critic Joseph Epstein. The author sometimes writes al a carte and sometimes in review of biogrphies. He has a way of finding an angle or angles on each person.
The book opens with a good piece on George Washington. Good old George. It's hard to say anything bad about our first President and the author can't of anything negative.
There is a strong essay on Adlai Stevenson. Despite my best effots at understanding why liberals in the 50's adored Adlai, to this day I don't understand it. He was smart. He was aticulate. He said the right things for progressive ears. But what did he actually accomplish? Not much.
Dwight McDonald was the consummate public intellectual. He did not have a personal specialized knowledge, but he seemed to be able to comment on everything. That is a trick to be admired.
Say what you will about T.S. Eliot: it's his poetic words that still ring in our years 50 + years after his death. We still measure out our lives in coffee cups.
The author takes it easy on Joe DiMaggio. My attitude is different. Joltin' Joe is the most overrated baseball player of all time. And have I ever said he was a King Sized Jerk?
The chapter on W.C. Fields is delightful. Fields was the funniest person of his time.
The book opens with a good piece on George Washington. Good old George. It's hard to say anything bad about our first President and the author can't of anything negative.
There is a strong essay on Adlai Stevenson. Despite my best effots at understanding why liberals in the 50's adored Adlai, to this day I don't understand it. He was smart. He was aticulate. He said the right things for progressive ears. But what did he actually accomplish? Not much.
Dwight McDonald was the consummate public intellectual. He did not have a personal specialized knowledge, but he seemed to be able to comment on everything. That is a trick to be admired.
Say what you will about T.S. Eliot: it's his poetic words that still ring in our years 50 + years after his death. We still measure out our lives in coffee cups.
The author takes it easy on Joe DiMaggio. My attitude is different. Joltin' Joe is the most overrated baseball player of all time. And have I ever said he was a King Sized Jerk?
The chapter on W.C. Fields is delightful. Fields was the funniest person of his time.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
The Case for the President & Romney Radicalism
The Case for Barack Obama
By E.J. Dionne Jr.Nov. 01, 201221
Waiting in line for two-and-a-half hours is rarely an exciting experience. But when my son and I voted early—he for the first time—at a community center in Rockville, Md., both of us were inspired by the hundreds of other people intent on exercising democracy’s most basic right.
In our deep blue county, this was largely an Obama crowd, crossing the boundaries of race, class and age. It was white, African American and Latino, young, middle-aged and old. These citizens eager to lift their voices reminded us that in this campaign, one coalition includes almost every kind of American. If Obama wins, he will owe his re-election to a little bit of all of us: blue-collar white voters in the Midwest, upscale voters in the Northeast and on the West Coast, an overwhelming percentage of Latino voters turned off by a new nativism on the right, and near unanimous solidarity on his behalf among African Americans. Obama is not the sort to think about dismissing 47% of us.
The sweep of the Obama coalition represented in that snaking line led my son and me to conclude something else: The President Obama of 2012 may no longer stir the jubilation called forth by the Barack Obama of 2008. But the hope and resolve he spoke of then have not vanished.
Yes, those feelings have been tempered by hard times and four years of bitter political struggle. Obama appears now less as a savior than as a human being with flaws and virtues, failures and successes. The hope of four years ago has transformed itself into something more mature and durable: a confidence in what an increasingly diverse, tolerant and open America can achieve. It is a view that flatly rejects the fears of those who see our country in decline and who always insist that the good old days should be our standard for the future. A nation that has produced Greatest Generations in the past can do so again. Indeed, I think we’re doing so right now.
In making electoral decisions, voters sensibly combine hard judgments about where candidates stand with instinctive calculations about how character might influence their choices in situations we cannot imagine today.
Ronald Reagan offered the most widely honored question about the practical matters: Are you better off than you were four years ago? And for most of the country, the answer is yes. Obama inherited an economy in shambles—the GDP was shrinking at an annual rate of nearly 9% when he took office—and turned it around. Unemployment is well down from its peak, 4.5 million private-sector jobs have been created since January 2010, the stock market has doubled since it hit bottom, and the housing market is stabilizing. Mitt Romney can promise 12 million more jobs in the coming four years because Obama’s policies have already put us on track to produce them, courtesy of a revival of manufacturing, a rise in exports and a new wave of research and innovation.
Most relevant to this year’s choice is the fact that the economy is in far better shape than it would have been if we had followed the counsel of Obama’s foes. They would have allowed the auto industry to collapse. They would have ignored history’s lesson that government must step in to stimulate economic activity when private demand plummets. We know from the experience of Europe that austerity leads to stagnation. Obama made the better choice.
Romney has at times condemned Obama’s stimulus plan while standing in front of enterprises returned to prosperity by the stimulus. Paul Ryan denounced the stimulus and then sought its succor for companies in his district. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Obama has revived a practical, sober and realistic foreign policy in the tradition of George H.W. Bush. Democrats crow about the killing of Osama bin Laden and thrill to Vice President Joe Biden’s handy bumper-sticker line “Osama bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive.” But behind the quip is a reality: Obama has transformed the war on terrorism from an all-purpose slogan designed to rationalize all manner of foreign policy adventures to a focused effort to keep the country safe. By ending the war in Iraq, winding down our commitment in Afghanistan and abandoning grandiose adventurism, he has redirected U.S. foreign policy toward the classic and sensible goals of preserving our power and influence and shaping an international environment congenial to our prosperity and our values.
Republicans bridle at the idea that Obama has restored respect for our country around the world. But it’s true. An Obama defeat would threaten many of his diplomatic achievements, including building what one pro-Western ambassador called “a successful coalition of the unlike-minded and unwilling” to confront Iran.
The strongest endorsement of Obama’s choices came from his opponent. In the third debate, Romney abandoned months of bellicose rhetoric and lined up behind one Obama decision after another. In this polarized political era, poll-tested imitation is about the only form of flattery we can expect. When Romney declared that “we don’t want another Iraq,” he was blessing the transition from George W. Bush’s era to Obama’s.
Obama’s decision to ignore cautious political advisers and see through the health care reform fight came at great political cost. Even some of his allies think the electoral price was too high. But this is a measure of Obama’s fortitude. By bringing the promise of health insurance to tens of millions of our citizens, Obama ended a national scandal. No other wealthy nation allows so many to live without basic coverage for illness or to rely on emergency rooms as a last resort. They either arrive there long after the opportunity to get well has passed, or they survive only to face years, sometimes a lifetime, of debt. The Affordable Care Act is an achievement worthy of our great reforming Presidents.
Once again Romney’s behavior proves the point. He speaks of repealing Obamacare only in general terms. When it comes to so many of the specifics—on prohibiting insurance discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions, for example, or on making it easier for parents to cover their adult children—Romney winds up backing what Obama did.
Beyond these large questions are concrete Obama achievements: his support for women’s rights, including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; the end of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and his endorsement of gay marriage; passage of Wall Street reform, including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; reform of the student-loan program; his appointments of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, checking the right-wing drift in the judiciary that gave us decisions like Citizens United; and many of the investments in the stimulus package, notably in clean energy. In quieter times, these would be playing a much larger role in the campaign.
All are part of the case for Obama. But the best reason for his re-election goes back to what motivated so many middle-of-the-road voters four years ago. Americans who want to replace polarization with balance, extremism with moderation, obstruction with problem solving and blind partisanship with compromise need Obama to win again. An Obama defeat would empower those whose go-for-broke approach to politics is largely responsible for the distemper of our public life and the dysfunction in Washington.
This election does not represent a choice between left and right. It represents a choice between balance and a new, extreme form of conservatism. This new conservatism cannot accept any tax increases as part of a deal to reduce the deficit. For all his attempts to sound moderate in the campaign’s closing days, Romney has not altered the response he gave during a Republican-primary debate rejecting a hypothetical deal involving a 10-to-1 ratio between spending cuts and tax increases. This refusal to acknowledge the need for more revenue is a recipe for eviscerating government—and the cuts, as Ryan’s budget shows, would fall disproportionately on programs for Americans with the lowest incomes.
The new right has broken with conservatism’s past—and our country’s most constructive traditions—by adopting a new and radical individualism that largely ignores our country’s gift for community.
The America of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and both the Republican and Democratic Roosevelts understood that government has a role to play in tempering the market and making investments the market depends on but will not make itself. The new conservatism measures freedom almost entirely in terms of the share of the nation’s GDP that flows to the state, as if spending on Medicare, Social Security, student loans, community colleges and infrastructure improvements somehow made us less “free.” And in the face of growing economic inequality, the new conservatism regularly discounts or condemns government’s role in leaning toward modestly greater equity, promoting upward mobility and checking concentrated economic power. It is this variety of conservatism that Romney bowed to in the primaries and would be forced to accommodate if he became President, whatever his constantly shifting views might actually be.
Obama, to a fault, devoted enormous energy during his first 21⁄2 years in office trying to move his opponents to compromise. Thus was almost a third of his stimulus plan devoted to tax cuts. Thus did he model his health care plan after Romney’s in Massachusetts. Thus did he seek a deal with House Speaker John Boehner during the debt-ceiling confrontation that, if enacted, would have disappointed many of the President’s progressive supporters. Only those who confuse compromise with capitulation can claim that Obama did not try mightily to keep his promise to end partisanship in Washington.
Obama should win a referendum on his stewardship. But this is also a choice—a “big choice,” just as Romney says—between moderation and a return to an approach to government more suited to the Gilded Age than to the 21st century. Obama is battling to defend the long consensus that has guided American government successfully since the Progressive Era. It is based on the view that ours is a country whose Constitution begins with the word we, not me, and that the private success we honor depends on a government that serves a common good and remembers the most vulnerable among us. The task of our moment is to revive that long consensus and renew it. Of the two major candidates, only Barack Obama accepts this mission as his own.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.Nov. 01, 201221
Waiting in line for two-and-a-half hours is rarely an exciting experience. But when my son and I voted early—he for the first time—at a community center in Rockville, Md., both of us were inspired by the hundreds of other people intent on exercising democracy’s most basic right.
In our deep blue county, this was largely an Obama crowd, crossing the boundaries of race, class and age. It was white, African American and Latino, young, middle-aged and old. These citizens eager to lift their voices reminded us that in this campaign, one coalition includes almost every kind of American. If Obama wins, he will owe his re-election to a little bit of all of us: blue-collar white voters in the Midwest, upscale voters in the Northeast and on the West Coast, an overwhelming percentage of Latino voters turned off by a new nativism on the right, and near unanimous solidarity on his behalf among African Americans. Obama is not the sort to think about dismissing 47% of us.
The sweep of the Obama coalition represented in that snaking line led my son and me to conclude something else: The President Obama of 2012 may no longer stir the jubilation called forth by the Barack Obama of 2008. But the hope and resolve he spoke of then have not vanished.
Yes, those feelings have been tempered by hard times and four years of bitter political struggle. Obama appears now less as a savior than as a human being with flaws and virtues, failures and successes. The hope of four years ago has transformed itself into something more mature and durable: a confidence in what an increasingly diverse, tolerant and open America can achieve. It is a view that flatly rejects the fears of those who see our country in decline and who always insist that the good old days should be our standard for the future. A nation that has produced Greatest Generations in the past can do so again. Indeed, I think we’re doing so right now.
In making electoral decisions, voters sensibly combine hard judgments about where candidates stand with instinctive calculations about how character might influence their choices in situations we cannot imagine today.
Ronald Reagan offered the most widely honored question about the practical matters: Are you better off than you were four years ago? And for most of the country, the answer is yes. Obama inherited an economy in shambles—the GDP was shrinking at an annual rate of nearly 9% when he took office—and turned it around. Unemployment is well down from its peak, 4.5 million private-sector jobs have been created since January 2010, the stock market has doubled since it hit bottom, and the housing market is stabilizing. Mitt Romney can promise 12 million more jobs in the coming four years because Obama’s policies have already put us on track to produce them, courtesy of a revival of manufacturing, a rise in exports and a new wave of research and innovation.
Most relevant to this year’s choice is the fact that the economy is in far better shape than it would have been if we had followed the counsel of Obama’s foes. They would have allowed the auto industry to collapse. They would have ignored history’s lesson that government must step in to stimulate economic activity when private demand plummets. We know from the experience of Europe that austerity leads to stagnation. Obama made the better choice.
Romney has at times condemned Obama’s stimulus plan while standing in front of enterprises returned to prosperity by the stimulus. Paul Ryan denounced the stimulus and then sought its succor for companies in his district. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Obama has revived a practical, sober and realistic foreign policy in the tradition of George H.W. Bush. Democrats crow about the killing of Osama bin Laden and thrill to Vice President Joe Biden’s handy bumper-sticker line “Osama bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive.” But behind the quip is a reality: Obama has transformed the war on terrorism from an all-purpose slogan designed to rationalize all manner of foreign policy adventures to a focused effort to keep the country safe. By ending the war in Iraq, winding down our commitment in Afghanistan and abandoning grandiose adventurism, he has redirected U.S. foreign policy toward the classic and sensible goals of preserving our power and influence and shaping an international environment congenial to our prosperity and our values.
Republicans bridle at the idea that Obama has restored respect for our country around the world. But it’s true. An Obama defeat would threaten many of his diplomatic achievements, including building what one pro-Western ambassador called “a successful coalition of the unlike-minded and unwilling” to confront Iran.
The strongest endorsement of Obama’s choices came from his opponent. In the third debate, Romney abandoned months of bellicose rhetoric and lined up behind one Obama decision after another. In this polarized political era, poll-tested imitation is about the only form of flattery we can expect. When Romney declared that “we don’t want another Iraq,” he was blessing the transition from George W. Bush’s era to Obama’s.
Obama’s decision to ignore cautious political advisers and see through the health care reform fight came at great political cost. Even some of his allies think the electoral price was too high. But this is a measure of Obama’s fortitude. By bringing the promise of health insurance to tens of millions of our citizens, Obama ended a national scandal. No other wealthy nation allows so many to live without basic coverage for illness or to rely on emergency rooms as a last resort. They either arrive there long after the opportunity to get well has passed, or they survive only to face years, sometimes a lifetime, of debt. The Affordable Care Act is an achievement worthy of our great reforming Presidents.
Once again Romney’s behavior proves the point. He speaks of repealing Obamacare only in general terms. When it comes to so many of the specifics—on prohibiting insurance discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions, for example, or on making it easier for parents to cover their adult children—Romney winds up backing what Obama did.
Beyond these large questions are concrete Obama achievements: his support for women’s rights, including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; the end of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and his endorsement of gay marriage; passage of Wall Street reform, including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; reform of the student-loan program; his appointments of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, checking the right-wing drift in the judiciary that gave us decisions like Citizens United; and many of the investments in the stimulus package, notably in clean energy. In quieter times, these would be playing a much larger role in the campaign.
All are part of the case for Obama. But the best reason for his re-election goes back to what motivated so many middle-of-the-road voters four years ago. Americans who want to replace polarization with balance, extremism with moderation, obstruction with problem solving and blind partisanship with compromise need Obama to win again. An Obama defeat would empower those whose go-for-broke approach to politics is largely responsible for the distemper of our public life and the dysfunction in Washington.
This election does not represent a choice between left and right. It represents a choice between balance and a new, extreme form of conservatism. This new conservatism cannot accept any tax increases as part of a deal to reduce the deficit. For all his attempts to sound moderate in the campaign’s closing days, Romney has not altered the response he gave during a Republican-primary debate rejecting a hypothetical deal involving a 10-to-1 ratio between spending cuts and tax increases. This refusal to acknowledge the need for more revenue is a recipe for eviscerating government—and the cuts, as Ryan’s budget shows, would fall disproportionately on programs for Americans with the lowest incomes.
The new right has broken with conservatism’s past—and our country’s most constructive traditions—by adopting a new and radical individualism that largely ignores our country’s gift for community.
The America of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and both the Republican and Democratic Roosevelts understood that government has a role to play in tempering the market and making investments the market depends on but will not make itself. The new conservatism measures freedom almost entirely in terms of the share of the nation’s GDP that flows to the state, as if spending on Medicare, Social Security, student loans, community colleges and infrastructure improvements somehow made us less “free.” And in the face of growing economic inequality, the new conservatism regularly discounts or condemns government’s role in leaning toward modestly greater equity, promoting upward mobility and checking concentrated economic power. It is this variety of conservatism that Romney bowed to in the primaries and would be forced to accommodate if he became President, whatever his constantly shifting views might actually be.
Obama, to a fault, devoted enormous energy during his first 21⁄2 years in office trying to move his opponents to compromise. Thus was almost a third of his stimulus plan devoted to tax cuts. Thus did he model his health care plan after Romney’s in Massachusetts. Thus did he seek a deal with House Speaker John Boehner during the debt-ceiling confrontation that, if enacted, would have disappointed many of the President’s progressive supporters. Only those who confuse compromise with capitulation can claim that Obama did not try mightily to keep his promise to end partisanship in Washington.
Obama should win a referendum on his stewardship. But this is also a choice—a “big choice,” just as Romney says—between moderation and a return to an approach to government more suited to the Gilded Age than to the 21st century. Obama is battling to defend the long consensus that has guided American government successfully since the Progressive Era. It is based on the view that ours is a country whose Constitution begins with the word we, not me, and that the private success we honor depends on a government that serves a common good and remembers the most vulnerable among us. The task of our moment is to revive that long consensus and renew it. Of the two major candidates, only Barack Obama accepts this mission as his own.
Romney's Radicalism
Carl Bernstein on Mitt Romney's Radicalism
by Carl Bernstein Nov 1, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
Pundits and voters persist in believing that Mitt Romney is a covert moderate. But as Carl Bernstein reports, it's far more likely he'll enact the Tea Party's far-right agenda.
With only a few days to go before the presidential election, it may be too easy for voters and the press to ignore the single most salient aspect of Mitt Romney's candidacy: his unwillingness to reject or confront in any significant way the truly radical nature of today's Republican Party in Washington, including its record, tactics, and philosophy.
Mitt Romney speaks during a rally in Celina, Ohio on October 28, 2012. (Emmanuel Dunand, AFP / Getty Images)
As a senior Romney advisor confided to me earlier this week, even some of the candidate's campaign aides seem unsure of his relationship to the ideological orthodoxy of the Tea Party forces that now dominate the GOP in Washington, especially in the House and among Republican lobbyists. No matter how moderate his underlying instincts or inclinations might be (a huge open question in itself), some in his campaign also wonder how, as president, he could restrain the radical forces driving his party.
"My own feeling about Romney is he's a very moderate guy forced to run to the crazy-right," said this advisor, a self-described moderate who served under two Republican presidents in significant jobs. "But even I'm not sure what will happen if he is elected."
Certainly those helping to drive the Tea Party agenda in Washington believe that in Romney--and his choice of Paul Ryan (philosophically one of their own) as his running mate--they have an ideal instrument to implement their agenda. "All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader," declared Grover Norquist at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February. Norquist, who has promulgated a no-tax-increase pledge that has been signed by 238 Republicans in the House and 41 in the Senate, went on: "We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go.... We just need a president to sign this stuff....Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen.... His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared."
Romney might appear to be just the man for the job, especially with his fealty during the primaries to the Tea Party's fiscal and social-policy agenda. However, his Houdini-like attempts in the last two presidential debates to transform himself into a centrist (in tone, at least) have once again raised the question of what his real beliefs might be. Given the ideological intensity of the party he seeks to lead, the stakes in answering that question could not be higher.
Plainly put, today's Republican Party (and its Tea Party wing) represent the first bona fide radical political party to rise to dominance in Washington in nearly 100 years. With good reason, "radical" is a term to be used with great caution; more often than not it has been employed in American history by demagogues and ill-informed ideologues as a way of labeling opponents as "un-American." It conjures memories of old McCarthyite tactics and outrages, and the labeling of decent and patriotic citizens and movements as traitorous. Even in comparatively benign usage, the term radical is often thrown around recklessly to impugn beliefs for being out of touch or foreign to mainstream thinking.
Even Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jeb Bush, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush are apostates from the ideological orthodoxy currently driving the GOP.
Yet the fact remains that the Republican ideas now ascendant in Washington would dismantle and transform social and economic policies that have been the basis of prevailing political consensus since the days of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, through his cousin Franklin's New Deal, through the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, and even from the Great Society through the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton decades. If that doesn't register as radicalism, I'm unsure what would.
Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society. This is especially the case in realms where private enterprise and the states cannot or will not do what needs to be done for the common good: from insuring food and drug safety (begun in 1906) to progressive taxation (1913) to the creation of the National Park Service (1916) to regulation of banking and securities (1933) to compulsory Social Security retirement accounts (1935) to protecting the civil rights of all citizens (the 1960s) to environmental protection (1970) to guaranteed medical care for the elderly (1965).
Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has applauded Republican/Tea Party efforts to privatize social security, eliminate environmental protection programs, restructure Medicare through voucher-like options, overturn Roe v. Wade, "self-deport" immigrants, and push for tax relief for the wealthiest citizens.
Like the Tea Party, Mitt Romney has railed in this election season against "government intrusion," particularly in regulating business and imposing higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, arguing (as was so often heard during the era of racial segregation) that states are better at providing for the needs of citizens, especially those who cannot adequately care for themselves and their families financially. His oft-repeated hands-off philosophy extends even to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is so busy this week providing crucial support to the states devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Back in June 2011, Romney notoriously answered a question about funding for FEMA by denouncing the federal debt as "immoral" and explaining that any "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."
If there has been a single message in Romney's campaign--which has been purposely vague and strident, according to the campaign advisor quoted above--it has been that reliance on the private sector and the states will solve problems in essential matters that the federal government now regulates and maintains.
That position, like the campaign's bedrock opposition to abortion and gay rights, its unrelenting anti-immigration stance, regressive philosophy of taxation, and promotion of religious ideas as government policy, reflect the substantive part of the GOP's reigning radicalism. And then there are its tactical aspects: insinuating that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus illegitimately holds the office of president, changing voting rules to make it more difficult for poorer Americans to vote, flattering and encouraging (rather than shaming) those Americans who proudly reject the findings and methods of science, driving from office and purging such traditional conservatives and moderates as Bob Bennett of Utah, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. In all of these ways, today's Republican Party declares its commitment to political radicalism.
There is no other word to describe the contemporary GOP's effort to break from our political culture's cumulative notion of normalcy and prevailing governmental philosophy. This extraordinary change in political direction is comparable in scale and intended effect to such transformational movements as the Radical Republicanism of the Reconstruction Era surrounding the Civil War and the Progressive movement of the early 20th century.
The previously quoted Romney campaign advisor (like a self-described "libertarian" former Republican governor with whom I discussed the same question recently) stresses the political necessity of courting and soothing the so-called "base" of today's Republican Party--actually, the ideological faction farthest right of the political spectrum on issues ranging from taxation to abortion--either to win the party's nomination for president or (as House Speaker John Boehner has discovered) to hold onto leadership positions in Congress.
"The Tea Party faction, or far right-faction, has been driving his candidacy, no question," said this life-long Republican, who insists on his belief that "Mitt Romney is not one of them." Rather, "the issue is how much can he move off that rhetoric [of Tea Party activists] and be moderate in governing, instead of responding to them. That's the basic question. And the answer to the question is unknown. My daughter said last night [two nights before the last debate], 'I can't vote for anybody who wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood. I can't trust someone who is willing to accept so much Tea Party bull.' That's the issue. How far right is he going to go if he is governing? And is he beholden to the Tea Party and extreme right? Or is he really a closet moderate who will govern from the center when elected? That's the issue about Mitt Romney."
As this adviser notes, the Boehner precedent serves as a powerful example of what happens when Republican leadership in today's Washington runs up against the Tea Party's agenda and policies promoted by its allies and enablers like the Koch Brothers (along with their political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, which generously funds Tea Party causes), and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on many issues. Time and again in the past four years, the House Speaker has capitulated to his Tea-Party-backed deputy, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who covets the Speakership, and the ideologically rabid freshmen elected in 2010.
"In private, John Bohener and Romney are both smart, good, reasonably moderate guys; but if the troops behind you aren't following you," says the Romney advisor, "that's tough. I don't think this guy [Romney] is radical but you can't govern as a moderate if your entire team is essentially extreme conservatives or radicals. Yes, it means he'll say any f**king thing in this campaign, just like George W. Bush did: a Republican today has to act very conservative to get the nomination...."
Would Romney promote a moderate agenda as president? The evidence from the campaign is inconclusive but also far from encouraging. As I was told by this campaign insider, the candidate and his inner circle of advisors decided months ago, during the primaries, that in order to blur the problematic ideological issue, the campaign needed to avoid releasing position papers on important issues, or laying out in any detail in any forum how he would address specific policy matters as president, or putting any distance between the candidate and the Tea Party radicals.
Beginning in the primaries, Romney's promise to "repeal Obamacare on the first day I am president," was seen as key to a winning hand, though there has been recognition among his advisors that such a promise is probably impossible to deliver, given the reality of Senate rules and the increasing likelihood of continued Democratic control of the upper chamber of Congress. The more realistic scenario discussed by his aides would be for a President Romney to push for extended delay--perhaps of five or six years--of mandated insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act as part of an overall budget deal.
Even at the end of a presidential election campaign, we have no way to know what Mitt Romney really believes. The contradictory character of his pronouncements over the course of his political career is perhaps the most consistent aspect of his public record, and it is hardly predictive of the kind of leadership that would seriously challenge and override the extreme desires and policies of the Tea Party. Indeed, Romney has been at his eloquent best when embracing its positions and arguments. His surreptitiously recorded "47 percent" remarks were the perfect expression of radical Tea Party ideology. "One of his problems, if Romney is elected, is going be fending off the right wing from pushing this nutty stuff, like Clinton had to fend off nutty stuff from his far-left," says the campaign advisor. "Clinton was fundamentally a moderate [president]. I think Romney would be too."
Radicalism as such is hardly dishonorable or misguided in itself. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage. The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.
Today's Republican Party, driven by the Tea Party movement, is equally radical. It represents as extreme a shift in political philosophy as any of the radical ideologies that have prevailed in our history. Even Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jeb Bush, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush are all apostates from its ideological orthodoxy. In their place, the movement substitutes Eric Cantor, the Koch Brothers, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, Grover Norquist, and Glenn Beck.
One thing seems certain in this final phase of the 2012 presidential campaign: whatever Mitt Romney might "really" believe, his election would bring this radical belief system much closer to--not farther from--the power it needs to achieve its ends. From there it would be well positioned to do nothing less than overturn the political order that has prevailed in America for the better part of the past century.
by Carl Bernstein Nov 1, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
Pundits and voters persist in believing that Mitt Romney is a covert moderate. But as Carl Bernstein reports, it's far more likely he'll enact the Tea Party's far-right agenda.
With only a few days to go before the presidential election, it may be too easy for voters and the press to ignore the single most salient aspect of Mitt Romney's candidacy: his unwillingness to reject or confront in any significant way the truly radical nature of today's Republican Party in Washington, including its record, tactics, and philosophy.
Mitt Romney speaks during a rally in Celina, Ohio on October 28, 2012. (Emmanuel Dunand, AFP / Getty Images)
As a senior Romney advisor confided to me earlier this week, even some of the candidate's campaign aides seem unsure of his relationship to the ideological orthodoxy of the Tea Party forces that now dominate the GOP in Washington, especially in the House and among Republican lobbyists. No matter how moderate his underlying instincts or inclinations might be (a huge open question in itself), some in his campaign also wonder how, as president, he could restrain the radical forces driving his party.
"My own feeling about Romney is he's a very moderate guy forced to run to the crazy-right," said this advisor, a self-described moderate who served under two Republican presidents in significant jobs. "But even I'm not sure what will happen if he is elected."
Certainly those helping to drive the Tea Party agenda in Washington believe that in Romney--and his choice of Paul Ryan (philosophically one of their own) as his running mate--they have an ideal instrument to implement their agenda. "All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader," declared Grover Norquist at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February. Norquist, who has promulgated a no-tax-increase pledge that has been signed by 238 Republicans in the House and 41 in the Senate, went on: "We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go.... We just need a president to sign this stuff....Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen.... His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared."
Romney might appear to be just the man for the job, especially with his fealty during the primaries to the Tea Party's fiscal and social-policy agenda. However, his Houdini-like attempts in the last two presidential debates to transform himself into a centrist (in tone, at least) have once again raised the question of what his real beliefs might be. Given the ideological intensity of the party he seeks to lead, the stakes in answering that question could not be higher.
Plainly put, today's Republican Party (and its Tea Party wing) represent the first bona fide radical political party to rise to dominance in Washington in nearly 100 years. With good reason, "radical" is a term to be used with great caution; more often than not it has been employed in American history by demagogues and ill-informed ideologues as a way of labeling opponents as "un-American." It conjures memories of old McCarthyite tactics and outrages, and the labeling of decent and patriotic citizens and movements as traitorous. Even in comparatively benign usage, the term radical is often thrown around recklessly to impugn beliefs for being out of touch or foreign to mainstream thinking.
Even Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jeb Bush, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush are apostates from the ideological orthodoxy currently driving the GOP.
Yet the fact remains that the Republican ideas now ascendant in Washington would dismantle and transform social and economic policies that have been the basis of prevailing political consensus since the days of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, through his cousin Franklin's New Deal, through the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, and even from the Great Society through the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton decades. If that doesn't register as radicalism, I'm unsure what would.
Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society. This is especially the case in realms where private enterprise and the states cannot or will not do what needs to be done for the common good: from insuring food and drug safety (begun in 1906) to progressive taxation (1913) to the creation of the National Park Service (1916) to regulation of banking and securities (1933) to compulsory Social Security retirement accounts (1935) to protecting the civil rights of all citizens (the 1960s) to environmental protection (1970) to guaranteed medical care for the elderly (1965).
Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has applauded Republican/Tea Party efforts to privatize social security, eliminate environmental protection programs, restructure Medicare through voucher-like options, overturn Roe v. Wade, "self-deport" immigrants, and push for tax relief for the wealthiest citizens.
Like the Tea Party, Mitt Romney has railed in this election season against "government intrusion," particularly in regulating business and imposing higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, arguing (as was so often heard during the era of racial segregation) that states are better at providing for the needs of citizens, especially those who cannot adequately care for themselves and their families financially. His oft-repeated hands-off philosophy extends even to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is so busy this week providing crucial support to the states devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Back in June 2011, Romney notoriously answered a question about funding for FEMA by denouncing the federal debt as "immoral" and explaining that any "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."
If there has been a single message in Romney's campaign--which has been purposely vague and strident, according to the campaign advisor quoted above--it has been that reliance on the private sector and the states will solve problems in essential matters that the federal government now regulates and maintains.
That position, like the campaign's bedrock opposition to abortion and gay rights, its unrelenting anti-immigration stance, regressive philosophy of taxation, and promotion of religious ideas as government policy, reflect the substantive part of the GOP's reigning radicalism. And then there are its tactical aspects: insinuating that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus illegitimately holds the office of president, changing voting rules to make it more difficult for poorer Americans to vote, flattering and encouraging (rather than shaming) those Americans who proudly reject the findings and methods of science, driving from office and purging such traditional conservatives and moderates as Bob Bennett of Utah, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. In all of these ways, today's Republican Party declares its commitment to political radicalism.
There is no other word to describe the contemporary GOP's effort to break from our political culture's cumulative notion of normalcy and prevailing governmental philosophy. This extraordinary change in political direction is comparable in scale and intended effect to such transformational movements as the Radical Republicanism of the Reconstruction Era surrounding the Civil War and the Progressive movement of the early 20th century.
The previously quoted Romney campaign advisor (like a self-described "libertarian" former Republican governor with whom I discussed the same question recently) stresses the political necessity of courting and soothing the so-called "base" of today's Republican Party--actually, the ideological faction farthest right of the political spectrum on issues ranging from taxation to abortion--either to win the party's nomination for president or (as House Speaker John Boehner has discovered) to hold onto leadership positions in Congress.
"The Tea Party faction, or far right-faction, has been driving his candidacy, no question," said this life-long Republican, who insists on his belief that "Mitt Romney is not one of them." Rather, "the issue is how much can he move off that rhetoric [of Tea Party activists] and be moderate in governing, instead of responding to them. That's the basic question. And the answer to the question is unknown. My daughter said last night [two nights before the last debate], 'I can't vote for anybody who wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood. I can't trust someone who is willing to accept so much Tea Party bull.' That's the issue. How far right is he going to go if he is governing? And is he beholden to the Tea Party and extreme right? Or is he really a closet moderate who will govern from the center when elected? That's the issue about Mitt Romney."
As this adviser notes, the Boehner precedent serves as a powerful example of what happens when Republican leadership in today's Washington runs up against the Tea Party's agenda and policies promoted by its allies and enablers like the Koch Brothers (along with their political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, which generously funds Tea Party causes), and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on many issues. Time and again in the past four years, the House Speaker has capitulated to his Tea-Party-backed deputy, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who covets the Speakership, and the ideologically rabid freshmen elected in 2010.
"In private, John Bohener and Romney are both smart, good, reasonably moderate guys; but if the troops behind you aren't following you," says the Romney advisor, "that's tough. I don't think this guy [Romney] is radical but you can't govern as a moderate if your entire team is essentially extreme conservatives or radicals. Yes, it means he'll say any f**king thing in this campaign, just like George W. Bush did: a Republican today has to act very conservative to get the nomination...."
Would Romney promote a moderate agenda as president? The evidence from the campaign is inconclusive but also far from encouraging. As I was told by this campaign insider, the candidate and his inner circle of advisors decided months ago, during the primaries, that in order to blur the problematic ideological issue, the campaign needed to avoid releasing position papers on important issues, or laying out in any detail in any forum how he would address specific policy matters as president, or putting any distance between the candidate and the Tea Party radicals.
Beginning in the primaries, Romney's promise to "repeal Obamacare on the first day I am president," was seen as key to a winning hand, though there has been recognition among his advisors that such a promise is probably impossible to deliver, given the reality of Senate rules and the increasing likelihood of continued Democratic control of the upper chamber of Congress. The more realistic scenario discussed by his aides would be for a President Romney to push for extended delay--perhaps of five or six years--of mandated insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act as part of an overall budget deal.
Even at the end of a presidential election campaign, we have no way to know what Mitt Romney really believes. The contradictory character of his pronouncements over the course of his political career is perhaps the most consistent aspect of his public record, and it is hardly predictive of the kind of leadership that would seriously challenge and override the extreme desires and policies of the Tea Party. Indeed, Romney has been at his eloquent best when embracing its positions and arguments. His surreptitiously recorded "47 percent" remarks were the perfect expression of radical Tea Party ideology. "One of his problems, if Romney is elected, is going be fending off the right wing from pushing this nutty stuff, like Clinton had to fend off nutty stuff from his far-left," says the campaign advisor. "Clinton was fundamentally a moderate [president]. I think Romney would be too."
Radicalism as such is hardly dishonorable or misguided in itself. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage. The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.
Today's Republican Party, driven by the Tea Party movement, is equally radical. It represents as extreme a shift in political philosophy as any of the radical ideologies that have prevailed in our history. Even Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jeb Bush, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush are all apostates from its ideological orthodoxy. In their place, the movement substitutes Eric Cantor, the Koch Brothers, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, Grover Norquist, and Glenn Beck.
One thing seems certain in this final phase of the 2012 presidential campaign: whatever Mitt Romney might "really" believe, his election would bring this radical belief system much closer to--not farther from--the power it needs to achieve its ends. From there it would be well positioned to do nothing less than overturn the political order that has prevailed in America for the better part of the past century.
The State of the Presidential Race (10)
I suppose it's down to those swing states. Most polls seem to show the President with a slim lead or a tie in those states. His advantage seems to be holding at plus 2. Let us hope those swing state polls are accurate and hold up.
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