Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Oklahoma.Credit Photograph by Dave Martin / AP.
Since
the midterm elections, President Barack Obama has been acting as if he
feels liberated from parochial political concerns. After taking action
on immigration, Cuba, and climate change, he should take on another
risky, if less well-known, challenge by commuting the prison sentence of
Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama.
Siegelman,
a Democrat, served a single term in office, from 1999 to 2003, in the
last days before Alabama turned into an overwhelmingly Republican state.
He’s spent the subsequent decade dealing with the fallout from the case
that landed him in prison—a case that, at its core, is about a single
campaign contribution. Siegelman ran for office on a promise to create a
state lottery to fund education in Alabama. The issue went to a ballot
question, and Richard Scrushy, a prominent health-care executive,
donated five hundred thousand dollars to support the pro-lottery
campaign. (Voters rejected the lottery.) After Scrushy had given the
first half of his contribution, Siegelman reappointed him to Alabama’s
Certificate of Need Review Board (the CON Board), which regulates health
care in the state. Scrushy had served on the CON Board through the
administrations of three different governors. The heart of the case
against Siegelman came down to a single conversation that he had with
Nick Bailey, a close aide of the Governor’s, about a
two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check from Scrushy for the lottery
campaign. As summarized by the appeals court:
Bailey
testified that after the meeting, Siegelman showed him the check, said
that it was from Scrushy and that Scrushy was “halfway there.” Bailey
asked “what in the world is he going to want for that?” Siegelman
replied, “the CON Board.” Bailey then asked, “I wouldn’t think that
would be a problem, would it?” Siegelman responded, “I wouldn’t think
so.”
In 2006, after a
district-court trial before Judge Mark Fuller, Siegelman was convicted
of seven counts, including bribery, conspiracy, and fraud. He was
acquitted of twenty-two charges and sentenced to seven years in prison.
(An appeals court overturned two of the seven convictions and allowed
Siegelman out on bail during some of the time his case was on appeal.)
Siegelman is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Oklahoma; his
projected release date is in 2017.
Throughout
Siegelman’s legal ordeal, the Supreme Court has been in the process of
deregulating American politics, most notably in the 2010 Citizens United
decision. In that case, the Justices found that money is speech—that
contributing to a political campaign amounts to a protected activity
under the First Amendment. As the appeals court in Siegelman’s case
noted, the charges in his case “impact the First Amendment’s core
values—protection of free political speech and the right to support
issues of great public importance. It would be a particularly dangerous
legal error from a civic point of view to instruct a jury that they may
convict a defendant for his exercise of either of these constitutionally
protected activities.”
It seems clear that
Siegelman was conducting the seedy, but routine, business of
contemporary American politics. Scrushy contributed because he wanted
something in return, which is why many, if not most, people contribute
to political campaigns. (George Will made this point
in a column in defense of Siegelman.) Why do “bundlers” become
Ambassadors in congenial countries? Why do local contractors support
mayoral candidates? Why do real-estate developers give to prospective
(and incumbent) governors? Because they want something. Siegelman was convicted because the quid pro quowas
too “explicit”—but, beyond the conversation about what Scrushy might
want, there was no clear evidence that it was. Thanks to the courts, the
line between illegal bribery by campaign contribution and the ordinary
business of politics has all but disappeared. Throwing a man in prison
for activity at the murky barrier between the two is simply unjust.
Siegelman should be freed, too, because there was a distasteful overlay of politics to his prosecution. According to an affidavit
filed by a Republican lawyer in Alabama, senior state Republicans, in
the aftermath of the 2002 election, said that Karl Rove, then a top
White House aide to President Bush, had promised them a Justice
Department investigation of Siegelman—an investigation that then took
place. The matter of White House interference in the case is unproved,
but Rove certainly proved, later in the Bush Administration, that he was
willing to manipulate United States Attorneys for the political advantage of the Republican Party. Given the ubiquity of quid-pro-quo politics in Alabama (and most other states), the case against Siegelman appears selective indeed. There
is another reason to question the harsh sentence dealt to the Governor.
The behavior of the judge who imposed it is more than questionable. On
August 10, 2014, Judge Fuller was arrested
for domestic violence in an Atlanta hotel after his wife called
911. Shortly after his arrest, Fuller accepted a plea deal that would
allow him to expunge his criminal record if he stayed out of further
trouble. But the standard of contact for federal judges should be a
great deal higher than “not exactly a felon.” At the moment, Fuller is
not hearing cases, but, inexplicably, the Eleventh Circuit Court of
Appeals has failed to remove him formally from his duties, and the House
of Representatives has yet not begun impeachment proceedings. The
state’s U.S. senators have called on Fuller to resign, but he has refused, and continues drawing a federal paycheck while doing no work. (Yesterday, Siegelman’s lawyers argued before an appellate court that the verdict should be overturned because of the alleged involvement of a lawyer who had been recused.)
Through six years in office, President Obama has been especially stingy
in granting pardons and commutations. But the power to grant clemency
is an important one; it should be wielded with care, but it should be
used. Our prisons are nearly full. Not everyone who is there belongs
there. Don Seigelman is one person who should not be incarcerated
anymore, and the President can and should make sure that he is freed.
And if it's not, it will be for a highly ironic reason.
Photograph courtesy of the White House
Ten and a half years ago, at the Democratic
convention in Boston, Barack Hussein Obama was introduced to America as a
youthful, magnetic man who had burst suddenly and somewhat mysteriously
onto the scene. This characterization—superficially appealing yet
weightless, more symbolic than substantive—followed him throughout his
presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton cast him as an inspirational
speechmaker like Martin Luther King Jr., as opposed to a viable
contender for president, and John McCain’s campaign scathingly labeled
him a “celebrity,” attractive but vacuous.
The lived reality of
Obama’s presidency has unfolded as almost the precise opposite of this
trope. He has amassed a record of policy accomplishment far deeper than
even many of his supporters give him credit for. He has also survived a
dismal, and frequently terrifying, 72 months when at every moment, to go
by the day-to-day media, a crisis has threatened to rock his presidency
to its core. The episodes have been all-consuming: the BP oil spill,
swine flu, the Christmas underwear bomber, the IRS scandal, the
healthcare.org launch, the border crisis, Benghazi. Depending on how you
count, upwards of 19 events have been described as “Obama’s Katrina.”
Obama’s response to these crises—or, you could say, his method of
leadership—has been surprisingly consistent. He has a legendarily,
almost fanatically placid temperament. He has now spent eight years,
counting from the start of his first presidential campaign, keeping his
head while others were losing theirs, and avoiding rhetorical overreach
at the risk of underreach. A few months ago, the crisis was the Ebola
outbreak, and Obama faced a familiar criticism: He had botched the
putatively crucial “performative” aspects of his job. “Six years in,” BusinessWeek
reported, “it’s clear that Obama’s presidency is largely about adhering
to intellectual rigor—regardless of the public’s emotional needs.”
By year’s end, the death count of those who contracted Ebola in the
United States was zero, and the panic appears as unlikely to define
Obama’s presidency as most of the other crises that have come and gone.
But there have been other times when Obama’s uninterest in engaging in
the more public aspects of his job—communicating his reasoning and
vision, soothing our anxieties with lofty rhetoric, infusing his
administration with the sense of purpose that electrified his supporters
during the 2008 campaign—has clearly harmed him. “If there’s one thing
that I regret this year,” he admitted in 2010, “it is that we were so
busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that
were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking
directly to the American people about what their core values are.”
The president’s infuriating serenity, his inclination to play Spock
even when the country wants a Captain Kirk, makes him an unusual kind of
leader. But it is obvious why Obama behaves this way: He is very
confident in his idea of how history works and how, once the dust
settles, he will be judged. For Obama, the long run has been a source of
comfort from the outset. He has quoted King’s dictum about the arc of
the moral universe eventually bending toward justice, and he has said
that “at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just
try to get our paragraph right.” To his critics, Obama is unable to
attend to the theatrical duties of his office because he lacks a bedrock
emotional connection with America. It seems more likely that he is
simply unwilling to: that he is conducting his presidency on the
assumption that his place in historical memory will be defined by a
tabulation of his successes minus his failures. And that tomorrow’s
historians will be more rational and forgiving than today’s political
commentators.
It is my view that history will be very generous with Barack Obama,
who has compiled a broad record of accomplishment through three-quarters
of his presidency. But if it isn’t, it will be for a highly ironic
reason: Our historical memory tends to romance, too. Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s fatherly reassurance, a youthful Kennedy tossing footballs
on the White House lawn, Reagan on horseback—the craving for emotional
sustenance and satisfying drama runs deep. Though the parade of Obama’s
Katrinas will all be (and mostly already have been) consigned to the
forgotten afterlife of cable-news ephemera, it is not yet certain
whether this president can bind his achievements into any heroic
narrative. It is already clear that, whatever the source
of the current disappointment with Obama, the explanation cannot be that
he failed to achieve his stated goals. In his first inaugural address,
Obama outlined a sweeping domestic agenda. The list of promises was
specific: not only to rescue the economy from catastrophe but also to
undertake sweeping long-term reforms in health care, education, energy,
and financial regulation.
At first, conservatives denounced this agenda as a virtual
revolution. “An ambitious president intends to enact the most radical
agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime,” cried the
columnist Charles Krauthammer. It “would permanently refashion the role
of the federal government in the lives of every American,” warned
Jennifer Rubin. Conservatives have since changed their line, and now
portray the president as a Carter-esque mediocrity—a “parenthesis in
American political history” (Krauthammer) “with no significant
accomplishment” (Rubin). But this is not because Obama failed to
accomplish the goals he set out. On the contrary, he has
incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of
them. The horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow
have all failed to materialize.
When Obama’s economic advisers set out to rescue the economy from the
abyss, they did not realize how deep it ran. Preliminary measurements
of the economic contraction, made at the end of 2008, turned out far too
optimistic; as a result, the scale of the remedy they proposed did not
meet the need. Still, the combination of rescue measures—an $800 billion
economic stimulus, a bank rescue, and an auto bailout—could be
historically matched in scale only by Franklin Roosevelt.
By any contemporary standard, the rescue succeeded. Of the 12
countries whose financial systems succumbed to the meltdown of 2008, the
U.S. has grown economically at a faster rate than ten. (And the
fastest, Germany, is currently teetering precariously.) Unemployment has
fallen below 6 percent, and the United States is the locomotive of the
world economy.
To be sure, the contemporary standard was fairly horrific. The
developed world has suffered six years of economic pain, a fact that has
dominated the political discourse. Obama’s Republican opponents have
assailed his economic response, which they claim (contrary to the
beliefs of more than 90% of professional economists) worsened the
crisis. Even Obama’s allies have devoted more attention to the
shortcomings of his rescue efforts than the virtues, in part because
they sought to focus Washington’s attention on the plight of the
unemployed. Paul Krugman devoted much of Obama’s first term to flaying
the inadequacy of the administration’s fiscal response, and its failure
to nationalize the large banks. Former New Republic economic reporter
Noam Scheiber’s deeply reported history of the rescue, “Escape Artists,”
emphasized its shortcomings rather than the huge amount of good it did.
Liberal economic thought during the Obama years has, for perfectly
rational reasons, been dominated by relentlessly campaigning against
complacency rather than celebration.
But it can be simultaneously argued that we have endured brutal deprivation and
that Americans experienced the world’s most impressive recovery from
the Great Recession. History is already being revised. In recent months,
as the American economy has surged, Krugman conceded that the bank
rescue plan designed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner worked after all
(“He was right; I was wrong,” Krugman wrote in a New York Review of
Books essay.) Scheiber recently allowed,
“my verdict on the administration was overly harsh.” Geithner’s stress
tests reduced the “spread” demanded by investors, which reflects the
market’s measure of the failure risk, which plummeted immediately and
permanently.
Obama was faulted, on the left and the right, for abandoning his
focus on restoring the economy in order to build a long-term legacy.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” his first chief of
staff Rahm Emanuel famously declared—a confession of the
administration’s scheme to exploit the downturn as cover for imposing
socialism, according to conservatives, and to many liberals evidence of
the administration’s callousness toward the victims of the crisis. And
it is certainly true that Obama rejected the suggestion by numerous
allies to make his response to the crisis the centerpiece of his legacy.
Instead he set out, even during the depths of the crisis, to institute
deep reforms whose effects would last well beyond the recovery.
With hindsight, this will look smart. The stimulus act itself spurred
45 states to undertake reforms to their education systems. It prompted
doctors and hospitals to shift to electronic medical records and
provided $90 billion in funding for green energy sources. The portion of
the stimulus that lent capital to unproven clean energy firms came
under withering assault from Republicans, who relentlessly touted the
failure of Solyndra, one firm that received loans. Surely this will
recede in the collective memory now that the program is projected to earn
taxpayers a net $5 billion. Thanks to public investment in the U.S. and
abroad, solar energy has undergone revolutionary growth. Capacity has
increased130-fold since Obama took office, while the price of installing
a system has fallen by more than half.
Environmental policy was initially seen as a major failure for the
administration—and, from the understandable perspective of
environmentalists, an unforgivable one. Obama tried in his first term to
pass a law capping greenhouse gas emissions, only for Democratic
Senators from coal and gas states to join with Republicans to defeat it.
Environmentalists spent much of Obama’s presidency lambasting this
failure.
But Obama discovered that existing regulations allowed him to
accomplish the same goals to which his failed legislation aspired. In
his second term, he unveiled strict new standards for automobile
efficiency and power plant emissions that, taken together, allow the
United States to meet its internal targets for carbon emissions. He
reached a major climate agreement with China, which presages the
first-ever international agreement by industrialized and developing
countries alike to curtail their emissions (an agreement made easier by
the revolutionary improvements in green energy, which could allow
developing economies to leapfrog straight past the dirty energy stage).
The success of this agreement will take decades to measure, but it could
well go down in history as Obama’s most significant legacy.
Overall, Obama’s federal government powerfully reordered the most
irrational and damaging aspects of the untrammeled marketplace without
impairing its entrepreneurial vigor. He is neither the socialist his
conservative enemies have called him nor the weakling his critics on the
left have painted him to be. The administration’s financial reforms did
not smash Wall Street, but they did reshape it and eliminate its worst
abuses. A little-noticed law, passed in 2009, banned a host of abusive
practices used by credit-card companies to bilk customers with late fees
and hidden rate hikes. A year after passage, total late fees had fallen nearly in half.
The Dodd-Frank reforms went much further, attacking the failures that
led to the meltdown from a variety of angles. Banks now must hold more
capital, derivatives must be traded openly on exchanges, large
institutions must separate their riskiest forms of trading, and any
too-big-to-fail institution must create an advance plan for systemic
failure. The law also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
devised by Elizabeth Warren, which protects customers from financial
industry abuses in much the same way as the Food and Drug Administration
ensures the safety of our food.
News of the law’s impact has not filtered out to the broader public,
but people who study the industry for a living have little doubt as to
its impact. It is “altering Wall Street in fundamental ways,” The Wall Street Journal reported
last summer. “There is no question that many of the highest-risk
activities, which happened to be the most profitable activities for Wall
Street, are now at least reduced and often totally gone,” Dennis
Kelleher, a sharp critic of the industry, said recently. After slightly
favoring Obama in 2008, Wall Street has now donated overwhelmingly to
the Republican Party, which has staunchly promised to scrap Dodd-Frank.
The Affordable Care Act enjoys—or suffers—a much greater public
profile. The law set out to reverse the two unique features of the
American health care system: it is the most expensive in the world by
far, and the only advanced health care system without a universal right
of access. By every important measure, it is succeeding at both goals.
The number of uninsured Americans fell by ten million in the laws first
year, and continues to drop as more people enroll. Republicans continue
to boycott participation at the state level, but Republican-led states
have slowly yielded to pragmatism, with Tennessee and Utah joining most
recently. Health care premium inflation has fallen to historic lows.
Obamacare’s various incentives to encourage hospitals, doctors and
insurers to eliminate waste, in place for four years now, have yielded
the lowest rate of medical inflation on record.
There have been plenty of additional policy victories: higher taxes
on the rich and lower taxes on the working poor; major reform of the
student-loan program; a substantial increase in Pell Grants; relief from
deportation for 4 million unauthorized immigrants; the end of the ban
on gays in the military. Historians will also note a series of laudable
negatives: Obama has, to date, wound down two wars while avoiding
others, not to mention a major domestic terror attack. With the sole
exception of David Petraeus, who resigned as CIA director over an
extramarital affair, not a single political appointee has had to resign,
let alone face indictment.
It is possible that Obama’s vigorous and creative exertions of
executive authority in his second term, especially in reshaping
immigration-law enforcement, might set a precedent for an excessively
powerful presidency that Americans eventually come to regret. It is also
surely true that many things were handled poorly, from his allowing
Republicans to blackmail him with a debt-ceiling threat in 2011 to the
botched launch of healthcare.gov. What cannot be questioned is the
administration’s effectiveness, to date, at carrying out the tasks Obama
identified at the outset. His administration has made the United States
dramatically more prosperous, more egalitarian, and more sustainable.
In a remarkable reversal from his predecessor, he has made the
government functional and placed it on the side of those who most need
its help. In private conversation, Obama expresses
frequent irritation with the news media’s hyperbole and lack of
historical perspective. This habit has itself subjected him to withering
criticism from Maureen Dowd,
who has scolded, “the American president should not perpetually use the
word ‘eventually.’ And he should not set a tone of resignation with
references to this being a relay race and say he’s willing to take ‘a
quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,’ and muse that things may not come ‘to
full fruition on your timetable.’” Obama had also likened his foreign
policy approach to hitting singles and doubles, further dissatisfying
Dowd who, writing last April, brought up the existential crisis of the
moment. “Especially now that we have this scary World War III vibe with
the Russians,” she wrote, “we expect the president, especially one who
ran as Babe Ruth, to hit home runs.” The World War III vibe has
disappeared. Indeed, Russia blundered itself into a catastrophe. But
attention has moved on. The widespread disappointment with Obama—“I’ve
been asked the same question in Beijing, Auckland and Rome: ‘What
happened to Barack Obama?,’” reported Howard Fineman last fall—reflects
the reality that most of Obama’s presidency has actually felt terrible.
Chuck Todd’s new account of this presidency, The Stranger, suggests
an alternate future historical record. It covers Obama’s presidency
episode by episode, giving each one the same degree of importance it had
at the time. His account of the stimulus, for instance, treats the
episode primarily as an attempt to win the favor of Republicans in
Congress. He concludes it failed, because, “far from drawing up a truly
bipartisan bill, Obama would claim the veneer of bipartisanship with
only Snowe, Collins and Specter for cover.” Todd’s own description
showed that bringing on more Republicans would have required making the
stimulus smaller (and less effective), but measuring the law as an
attempt to save the economy, rather than to bring the two parties
together, holds almost no interest for him.
Todd confines his description of Obama’s education reforms to a single sentence. (Not even the entire
sentence, either -- a clause within a sentence.) He omits any mention
of the administration’s climate action plan. Todd does devote several
pages to BP’s offshore oil-rig explosion, which captivated journalists
for weeks before the Obama administration found a way to plug the
leaking oil. He briefly notes that the administration did in fact pull
off a technically challenging task in sealing off the spill. “But
politically,” Todd writes, “while he certainly prevented the spill from
becoming a Katrina rerun for the Gulf Coast, the president somehow never
looked comfortable running this successful operation.” The structure of
this sentence reveals Todd’s entire analytic method: The
administration’s substantive success is the dependent clause. The Stranger
rates Obama somewhere between a disappointment and an outright failure,
concluding, “His legacy will be a generation of political division”—an
appropriate summation of how many Americans experienced Obama’s
presidency as a political drama.
In an April speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library
to praise the 36th president’s legacy, Obama turned to the theme of
vindication in an explicit way. His choice of Johnson was a telling one.
No American president left such a gap between the scale of his lasting
accomplishments and the indignities he suffered in his own time. The
Democrat who dismantled legal apartheid in the South and created
Medicare and Medicaid was so loathed he did not even bother trying to
run for reelection. At times in the speech, Obama linked Johnson’s
travails to his own. The triumphs of history that seem clear and simple
in retrospect, he noted, felt contemporaneously grueling and ugly. “From
a distance, sometimes these commemorations seem inevitable, they seem
easy,” Obama said. “All the pain and difficulty and struggle and
doubt—all that is rubbed away.” You can sense his desperate wish to
arrive at a vantage point where his accomplishments will be buffed of
disappointment and take on the same heroic gloss.
One can imagine future histories that focus less on Obama’s
dysfunctional relationship with Congress, and that measure
accomplishment in more discerning proportion. But the lesson Johnson
offers for Obama’s own eventual vindication is not quite so encouraging.
LBJ’s political career was defined by his singular failure in Vietnam.
The hatred this spawned blotted out his massive and more enduring
achievements. The current film Selma inaccurately depicts Johnson
as an opponent of the civil-rights struggle he had, in reality, thrown
all his energy behind. Five decades on, Johnson still has not escaped
the feelings he engendered—indeed, he still requires rehabilitation by
figures like Obama.
Johnson is hardly unique in this way. American historical memory is
heavily inflected with sentiment. John F. Kennedy remains an iconic
figure despite his negligible record. Ronald Reagan has won a legacy as
the restorer of American hope and the winner of the Cold War, as if
communism fell not as a result of its own dysfunction and four decades
of Western containment but because no U.S. politician ever previously
thought to tell the Soviets to tear down that wall. Partisan folklore
does not inevitably give way to calm appraisal. Andrew Jackson, still
introduced to schoolchildren as the hero of the common man, was a white
supremacist with a fanatical hatred for any government role in economic
development—a kind of 19th-century Ron Paul, but with a genocidal
militaristic foreign policy. Ulysses S. Grant, taught as a corrupt and
overbearing warlord, was also an effective champion of racial progress
as both general and president. Two centuries on, the fog of mythos
enveloping these figures has yet to dissipate.
Economists and political scientists will appreciate the scale of
Obama’s successes over the long run, as many of them do already. But
historians are storytellers, and the moody presentism that has rendered
Obama an enigmatic failure will not automatically give way to
quantifiable assessment. The president’s most irrational trait may be
his inordinate faith in the power of reason itself. *This article appears in the January 12, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
I need to think of a line fast.
Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis
The American political debate has transformed radically
over the last month. The underlying policy faultlines remain, but the
tenor is unrecognizable. When the Republican majority took control of
the House of Representatives in 2011, they had the crusading air of a
party fired with the conviction that it had to save America from
imminent destruction. It had the same millennial fanaticism in the fall
of 2013, when Republicans shut down the government to protest Obamacare.
The onset of the Republican Senate, by contrast, is accompanied not by
tones of revolutionary fervor but torpor and confusion. Before
the holidays, it was possible and even probable to think of the
American economy as disappointing. This is no longer plausible. Today’s
jobs report confirms that the recovery has shifted into a more rapid
phase of growth. 2014 saw the recovery finally escape its languid
post-crash phase. More Americans gained jobs in 2014 than any year since 1999.
Photo: Vox
The recovery is not complete — wages remain stubbornly
suppressed — but this fact itself suggests an upside: The absence of
higher pay is also the absence of any kind of inflationary pressure that
might cause the Federal Reserve to apply the brakes to the recovery.
This in turn suggests job growth is not finished. The 2016 elections
could well take place against a backdrop of full employment. The entire
predicate of the Republican argument since 2009 — that Obama’s massive
expansion of spending, taxes, and regulation has snuffed out job
creators’ incentive or ability to work their capitalistic magic — will
be moot. In 1996, the recovery was still embryonic enough that Bob Dole
could lamely assert that Americans were suffering from “the Clinton
crunch.” Four years later, George W. Bush had to acknowledge widespread
prosperity, while casting himself as the ideological heir to Clinton’s
moderate policies and running on “honor and dignity.” That is the sort
of reversal currently under way. Mitch McConnell underscored the metamorphosis when he acknowledged the economic recovery with inadvertent humor. “The
uptick,” insisted the incoming Senate Majority Leader, “appears to
coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s
long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican
Congress.” Neither half of McConnell's statement is true. First, the
biggest political change of Obama’s tenure, by far, was the Republican
capture of the House during his first midterm election, which destroyed
the Democrats’ ability to pass new legislation. Republican bills will be
blocked by Obama vetoes or by Senate Democratic minority filibusters
rather than by the Senate Democratic majority. The addition of the
Republican Senate does not change the state of gridlock between the two
parties; any agreement between the Republican House and Obama would be
amenable to a Republican or a Democratic Senate. Nor does the recovery
in any way coincide with the relatively insignificant change in Senate
majority. The Republican Senate victory was not expected until November.
The accelerating recovery was evident as early as June (as this
prescient Joe Wiesenthal column attests). One
can see the change, too, in the GOP’s early policy feints. As promised,
the party is holding a vote to build the Keystone pipeline. Keystone
was always a symbolic issue, but the symbolism was powerful because it
gave Republicans a way to situate their policies as the answer to the
electorate’s genuine concerns. Americans worried about a lack of jobs
and high gasoline prices. The pipeline offered no substantive relief to
either concern, but it could be sold as one. But with jobs growing
briskly, and gasoline prices falling through the floor, Keystone’s
symbolic value loses almost all its potency. If Republicans succeeded in
authorizing the pipeline, it is not even clear
that it would make enough economic sense to even build today. Keystone
has been reduced to a vestigial gesture of resentment against
environmentalists. They are doing it because they have already committed
to doing so, not because it makes any contemporary sense. Likewise, the party remains as committed as ever to repealing
Obamacare, but its apocalyptic terror continues to subside as the law
continues to function effectively. Republicans are holding a show vote
to alter the employer mandate, and their proposal would increase the deficit while reducing the number of Americans with insurance. The gambit has divided the party, with National Review registering its opposition. Signs of faint-heartedness in the anti-Obamacare jihad continue to pop up. Republicans in North Carolina and Texas have floated the possibility of ending their state’s boycott of Obamacare. Senator John Cornyn has suggested postponing the party’s annual vote to restore the pre-Obamacare status quo.
There is no evidence the Republican Party has changed its policy
doctrine. (Indeed, if you consider the last predicate, in 2001, George
W. Bush implemented the same tax cut agenda that Bob Dole advocated in
1996.) Yet if the lyrics remain the same, the music is radically
different. Six years of unrelenting hysteria have given way to a world
in which Republicans can no longer claim that Barack Obama has
transformed the country beyond recognition. Their goal is no longer to
assign blame but to seize a share of the credit.
Harold Bloomberg, “The Colgate Comedy Hour”
Well,
it was the day I was born, and I’m in the hospital with my mother when
Jerry Lewis and Eddie Cantor drop in. They consult some mysterious
scrolls, anoint my forehead with oil, look me square in my tiny little
baby eye, and say, “Kid, you’re destined to write for ‘The Colgate
Comedy Hour.’ We’ll come for you on your eighteenth birthday.” Now, this
was 1933, so broadcast television did not exist, and my parents told
Jerry and Eddie to take a hike. Fast-forward to 1951 and, like
clockwork, those two jokesters show up at my door, tell me I’m hired,
and whisk me off to New York City to be a writer. Never saw my mom and
dad again.
January 4th marks 50 years since the death of poet T. S.
Eliot. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of one of Eliot’s most
famous poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the work that
thrust Eliot onto the modernist stage. An embodiment of turn-of-the
century angst wrought by a world sucked dry by skepticism, cynicism, and
industrialism, Prufrock bears striking similarities to a subculture of
mostly white, urban, detached-yet-sensitive young adults at the cusp of
our own century. One might say Eliot invented the hipster.
In a keen essay on the hipster at the New York Times,
Christy Wampole describes the urban hipster as nostalgic “for times he
never lived himself.” Before he makes any choice,” Wampole explains, the
hipster “has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The
hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies
relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream.” A
pastiche of allusive, retro gadgets, hobbies, clothing, hairstyles, and
facial hair—ever increasingly referential—the hipster is “a walking
citation.”
In other words, he is J. Alfred Prufrock.
A true hipster would most likely chafe at this or any other neat
definition. The one clearly defining characteristic of a hipster is
denial that one is one. “Hipster” has been called “the most divisive characterization of our time.”
No one wants to identify as one, and everyone wants to mock them. But
there is more to hipsterdom than inexplicable mustaches and unblinking
irony.
Whatever hipsters are, they cannot be separated from the
cultural mood that birthed them or their natural habitat: the city.
Neither hipsters nor Prufrock would exist without the modern urban
setting that bred their sensibilities. It is in the city that the pulse
of a civilization is taken. The cityscape in Eliot’s poem, with its
skyline “like a patient etherized upon a table,” is, in fact, as famous
as Prufrock, whose emotionally and spiritually unconsummated desire
creates the central tension of the poem.
Such unmet desire is the same that contributes to the ambivalence and
detachment of hook-up culture, today’s effete substitute for the
drained dating rites of yesteryear. Pondering the impossibility of some
kind of genuine attachment, Prufrock muses, in lines one might hear
faintly echoed in Girls:
And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."
Prufrock cannot bring himself to ask
his companion the “overwhelming question” (which he never identifies)
that carries us through the poem. He is paralyzed by the same
overwhelming fear of missing out
(yes, “FOMO”) that plagues a generation facing endless options and
clear few choices: “In a minute there is time / For decisions and
revisions which a minute will reverse,” Prufrock laments. Instead, not
daring to “disturb the universe,” (“how should I presume?” he asks), he
engages in one long monologue rather than dialogue. Today, Prufrock
might be a blogger—and, in his fixation on trivial objects of beauty, a
social-media dilettante.
Indeed, the imagism that characterizes Eliot’s poetry—a poetic
approach that employs precise images to communicate visually, creating a
kind of sculpture with words—evokes the sort of pictures that fill up
Instagram and Pinterest feeds (where, unlike in Eliot, devastating and
meaning-ridden contexts are erased):
And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
...
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
...
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
Nearly a century before the age of social media, Prufrock also
exhibits a very current-seeming obsession over self-image and
presentation:
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— [They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"] My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— [They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
So he projects instead his chosen image of himself: “I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk along the beach.”
Prufrock of the cuffed white flannel trousers cultivates a detached
earnestness that isn’t unlike the modern-day adult who is as eager to
reject a hollow consumerism as he is to signify that rejection through
the material signs of thrift-store chic: the trucker cap, fuzzy sweater,
the thrift-store trousers, or horn-rimmed eyewear. Prufrock declares,
“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled….”
Then broods,
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
In these lines the central tension of hipster culture is hinted at:
the claim of authenticity, a claim that paradoxically, is undermined by
the very self-consciousness required to stake such a claim. This tension
leads to the charge against hipster culture that it “fetishizes the authentic.” One favorite fetish is the aesthetic experience, and we see this, too, in Prufrock’s pseudo-refrain:
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
These lines demonstrate the way authentic experience is replaced by
an objectified and fetishized experience, in this case of great art. An
actual experience is surpassed by talking of it. Or posting it on
Instagram or Facebook. Selfie or it didn’t happen.
Modernists are generally held responsible for having dug the deep
chasm between high culture and low, and Eliot is often regarded as
highbrow fare fit for college classrooms and academic journals. But the
erudite, Harvard-educated Eliot saw high culture not as opposed to
popular culture, but as its fulfillment, argues Eliot scholar David E.
Chinitz, whose research
shows that Eliot’s extensive engagement with a variety of popular
culture forms helped shape even Eliot’s most complex and difficult
works. Eliot greatly influenced pop culture in return—from “bullshit” (a
word the Oxford English Dictionary credits Eliot with being the first to record in an early, posthumously published poem) to Bob Dylan, from Genesis to Arcade Fire, from the Broadway musical Cats (based on Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats) to P. J. Harvey, from Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze's Her to hipster guys who—like J. Alfred—wear the bottoms of their trousers rolled.
Many observers have pointed out that hipsters’ rejection of
mainstream culture has simply been turned into a new marketing niche to
which they’ve unwittingly fallen prey. At Adbusters,
Douglas Haddlow reported several years ago that “marketers and
party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it
back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they
invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.” When I
took my niece to a local discount surplus store a few summers ago, she
was giddy to find a rack of T-shirts selling for one-tenth the price she
usually pays at that hipster mecca, Urban Outfitters. In the futile
attempt to reject mainstream consumerism, another niche channel was
simply created. As Prufrock says,
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
Some have declared that hipsters signify “the dead end of Western civilization.”
For Haddlow, hipsters are a movement that “has mutated into a
self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum, stripped of its subversion and
originality.” While reports of Western civilization’s death may or may
not have been greatly exaggerated, whatever it’s state, it is one that
the hipsters, nay Prufrock, inherited—not created. Thus Haddlow, whose
incisive and imagistic writing echoes the skill of Eliot, is not
unsympathetic, saying,
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels
real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated
generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang
songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last
generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the
vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western
civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has
stopped giving birth to anything new.
Eliot saw such 100 years ago, giving it voice first in Prufrock, then a few years later in his magnum opus, The Waste Land. In
a culture too detached and disconnected to give birth to anything new,
people turn to curation, pastiche, allusiveness, and
hyper-referentiality—the hallmarks of the hipster aesthetic.
But these were Eliot’s hallmarks, too. Eliot did not create the world
depicted in his poems; he merely gave it expression in the form of
fragments we might shore against our ruins. Hipsters—a movement many say
has passed—have perhaps done no less.
The small urban center of the region in which I live, for example,
would not have experienced the revitalization it has seen over the past
decade or so if not for the people who first dwelled in its rundown
apartments, sat in its lonely coffee shops, played their instruments
before its sparse crowds, and bought the first meager offerings of its
local farmers on Saturday markets. Now nearly everyone does these
things. But the hipsters were the first to return.
A good number of them have sat in my classroom. That is where I saw
my first pair of trousers rolled. These hipsters have taught me some
things. In return, I have introduced some of them to J. Alfred Prufrock.
With the Republicans taking control of the Senate and the 2016 Presidential race already looming I do not look forward to this year politically. It will get ugly.
Why Obama Should Pardon Don Siegelman
By Jeffrey Toobin
Siegelman, a Democrat, served a single term in office, from 1999 to 2003, in the last days before Alabama turned into an overwhelmingly Republican state. He’s spent the subsequent decade dealing with the fallout from the case that landed him in prison—a case that, at its core, is about a single campaign contribution. Siegelman ran for office on a promise to create a state lottery to fund education in Alabama. The issue went to a ballot question, and Richard Scrushy, a prominent health-care executive, donated five hundred thousand dollars to support the pro-lottery campaign. (Voters rejected the lottery.) After Scrushy had given the first half of his contribution, Siegelman reappointed him to Alabama’s Certificate of Need Review Board (the CON Board), which regulates health care in the state. Scrushy had served on the CON Board through the administrations of three different governors. The heart of the case against Siegelman came down to a single conversation that he had with Nick Bailey, a close aide of the Governor’s, about a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check from Scrushy for the lottery campaign. As summarized by the appeals court:
Throughout Siegelman’s legal ordeal, the Supreme Court has been in the process of deregulating American politics, most notably in the 2010 Citizens United decision. In that case, the Justices found that money is speech—that contributing to a political campaign amounts to a protected activity under the First Amendment. As the appeals court in Siegelman’s case noted, the charges in his case “impact the First Amendment’s core values—protection of free political speech and the right to support issues of great public importance. It would be a particularly dangerous legal error from a civic point of view to instruct a jury that they may convict a defendant for his exercise of either of these constitutionally protected activities.”
It seems clear that Siegelman was conducting the seedy, but routine, business of contemporary American politics. Scrushy contributed because he wanted something in return, which is why many, if not most, people contribute to political campaigns. (George Will made this point in a column in defense of Siegelman.) Why do “bundlers” become Ambassadors in congenial countries? Why do local contractors support mayoral candidates? Why do real-estate developers give to prospective (and incumbent) governors? Because they want something. Siegelman was convicted because the quid pro quo was too “explicit”—but, beyond the conversation about what Scrushy might want, there was no clear evidence that it was. Thanks to the courts, the line between illegal bribery by campaign contribution and the ordinary business of politics has all but disappeared. Throwing a man in prison for activity at the murky barrier between the two is simply unjust.
Siegelman should be freed, too, because there was a distasteful overlay of politics to his prosecution. According to an affidavit filed by a Republican lawyer in Alabama, senior state Republicans, in the aftermath of the 2002 election, said that Karl Rove, then a top White House aide to President Bush, had promised them a Justice Department investigation of Siegelman—an investigation that then took place. The matter of White House interference in the case is unproved, but Rove certainly proved, later in the Bush Administration, that he was willing to manipulate United States Attorneys for the political advantage of the Republican Party. Given the ubiquity of quid-pro-quo politics in Alabama (and most other states), the case against Siegelman appears selective indeed.
There is another reason to question the harsh sentence dealt to the Governor. The behavior of the judge who imposed it is more than questionable. On August 10, 2014, Judge Fuller was arrested for domestic violence in an Atlanta hotel after his wife called 911. Shortly after his arrest, Fuller accepted a plea deal that would allow him to expunge his criminal record if he stayed out of further trouble. But the standard of contact for federal judges should be a great deal higher than “not exactly a felon.” At the moment, Fuller is not hearing cases, but, inexplicably, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has failed to remove him formally from his duties, and the House of Representatives has yet not begun impeachment proceedings. The state’s U.S. senators have called on Fuller to resign, but he has refused, and continues drawing a federal paycheck while doing no work. (Yesterday, Siegelman’s lawyers argued before an appellate court that the verdict should be overturned because of the alleged involvement of a lawyer who had been recused.)
Through six years in office, President Obama has been especially stingy in granting pardons and commutations. But the power to grant clemency is an important one; it should be wielded with care, but it should be used. Our prisons are nearly full. Not everyone who is there belongs there. Don Seigelman is one person who should not be incarcerated anymore, and the President can and should make sure that he is freed.