Rant 1 February, 2008

Hello all.  I hope this finds you well.  It was US Presidents Day last week and it got me to thinking about American political leadership.  I thought I would pass along some thoughts and get your reactions, if any. 

I can remember when we used to have two holidays in February.  One was Federal honoring George Washington on his birthday Feb 22 and one observed by most Northern States, commemorating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on Feb 12.  Somewhere along the line the US Congress in its wisdom decided to cheapen the holiday and make it into a single day and move it to always fall on a Monday.  They also expanded it to include all US Presidents so we picked up such notables as Zachary Taylor, Richard Nixon and William Henry Harrison whom we can now celebrate on dates that are mostly not either Lincoln’s nor Washington’s actual birthday.  In 1841 Harrison died 31 days after taking office, making him the shortest serving President.  He is generally thought to have caught pneumonia from taking over 2 hours to read his 8,444 word Inaugural Address to a shivering Washington D.C. audience on a cold and wet March day.  This was the longest Inaugural Address ever delivered, which may show that while US Presidents are not necessarily smart, they may have the capacity to learn.

Back to leadership.  The results of my informal survey of the electorate, while admittedly biased toward white, upper middle-class males does yet cover a fairly broad spectrum of US political opinion.  Almost uniformly the reaction to today’s Presidential race is shock, horror and disbelief that a process that has already taken over a year and cost hundreds of millions of dollars has produced Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain as the individuals most qualified to lead this country.  This reaction is generally accompanied by an epithet of some sort, a shaking of the head and a statement bemoaning the fate of the country.  I would have to say that my personal opinion is squarely in the middle of this group.  Notwithstanding these views, the facts are that one of these people will be the next US President and the supposed leader of the free world.

The proposition that these candidates are the most qualified of our 300 odd million citizens, nearly 45% of whom are natural born citizens over 35 years of age and therefore constitutionally qualified to hold the office, is so contrary to the facts that I have yet to find anyone who will asset it.  I cannot help but think that this is somehow a failure of my generation.  We baby boomers have provided the candidates for President since Bush Sr. and the list has been uniformly poor.  Why is it that we simply do not seem to be able to get the “best and the brightest” to offer themselves for office? 

I was having a discussion about this recently and my interlocutor asked if this was a global phenomenon or something uniquely particular to the US.  I really do not know but opined that I suspected the dissatisfaction with candidates was pretty widespread but not as profound as here.  I would be interested in your views. 

It seems to me that one of the generational differences between Boomers and the WWII generation regards public service.  I cannot remember the last time I heard a politician talk about public service as a duty or calling.  You still hear disguised references to the joy of public service but it seems to me that most politicians today talk about what they individually are going to accomplish rather than the opportunity to serve the public interest.  Perhaps this is simply a reflection of our ME generation.  The attitudes of the Eighties decade may be more alive and well than I would like to admit.  If we have somehow lost the ability to honor and value self-sacrifice in the service of improving society generally, then it is hard to see how we can find our way back.  But it may be that we are no less principled than our parents generation but simply more cynical than they.  It occurs to me that what we are seeing may be the result of our instant and all-pervasive media cultures.  No politician in history has ever been exposed to the level of public scrutiny that meets today’s leaders.  Kennedy’s and Roosevelt’s indiscretions were well known but not widely publicized.  It may be that placing a candidate, and their families, in a fish bowl is just too much of a burden for most people to take up.  I just do not know and in any case it is leading to our most talented individuals avoiding politics.  The uniquely American attitude that the best political leaders somehow are not subject to normal human appetites also seems to me to be particularly stupid and another reason that “real” people are not entering political life.  I suppose it doe not matter what the causes but the results are so profoundly serious.

Right now the only hope I can see in the upcoming general election is that Clinton can overtake Obama in Ohio and Texas primaries and go on to win the Democratic nomination.  She would then have to win in November AND go on to become one of the best Presidents we have ever had.  I think it is unlikely she can overtake him.  Just too many democrats feel good about voting for a black man; it makes them feel like they are truly liberal and advanced in their views.  Obama has claimed the role of reformer and advocate for change which I think resonates with a lot of people.  I also think it unlikely that Clinton could win the general election.  Just too many individuals have negative views about her.  I do not much like her personally either but I do think she has the intellectual capacity to identify the right problems and try to do something about them.  The difficulty is that even if she gets the chance, I think she is such a divisive figure that she probably cannot get any significant changes enacted or unify the country in a new direction.  I also do not think Obama can win in November.  The US has made real progress in race relations in my lifetime.  I never encountered much prejudice when I was growing up but I also did not have much exposure to minorities of any kind.  I can remember making a trip to Virginia when I was a kid and seeing segregated facilities for blacks and whites for the first time.  These are all distant memories but racism is still very much alive and well in America.  I believe just too many white Americans; both Democrats and Republicans, will not be able to bring themselves to vote for a black when they are in the privacy of the voting booth; regardless of what they might tell friends or pollsters.  The key for Obama would be the Hispanic vote.  Both Blacks and Hispanics constitute a little less than 15% of the population.  If Obama got a strong majority in both groups, he might be able to win against McCain but historically Hispanics have not supported black candidates in any election contest anywhere in the country.  So far Clinton is getting 80%+ of the Hispanic vote in the primaries.  Will these voters go from Hillary to Barack in the general election or will they stay home or vote for McCain?  McCain has taken heat from the Republican far right, (read religious nuts), for his less than orthodox views on immigration but this could be his salvation with Hispanics in November.  I do not know much about McCain but if elected he will be the oldest person ever to be elected, he will be 71 at inauguration; Reagan was 69.  I know how set I have become in by ways and doubt if a 70 year old is the one to lead in a new direction.

If the Republicans do win the Presidency, it will be another example of them being able to win by running against a Democratic Party that really does not exist any more; i.e. tax and spend liberals.  As far as I can determine the last real tax and spend liberal to hold office was Franklin Roosevelt and he got us out of the Great Depression and is generally ranked as one of the greatest Presidents of all time.  The Republicans have been able to get much of the electorate to believe they are the party of economic prosperity and there is an old adage in the US that most people vote their pocketbooks.  This proposition was almost disproved by an Al Gore Presidency.  Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but lost the general election due to a handful of faulty ballots in Florida.  One heavily elderly South Florida precinct had such a confusing ballot that it was counted 80%+ for Bush even though the precinct had never voted less than 60%+ Democratic in any election in history.  This alone would have been enough votes to swing the election to Gore, hanging chad ballots notwithstanding.  Clinton had already presided over a period of unprecedented economic performance and if Gore had also done so as well the myth of Republican economic prowess probably would have been debunked.  If things continue to go badly, this flawed election in Florida may turn out to be one of the watershed events in world history.  I hope not. The fact of the matter seems to me to be that generally the Republicans believe that no government is good government unless it is for public policies that further line the pockets of the already prosperous.  I simply cannot accept that there is no role for government in the crisis we are facing.

I can remember as a very young child in school being taught at missile drills that getting under our desks and staying away from the windows would somehow protect us from a 50 Kiloton nuclear blast.  And I can remember the very real fear that I felt when I realized that what we were actually doing was kissing our Asses good-bye.  Teaching every school child in America that their life could end in a horrible nuclear incineration, suddenly and without warning may have something to do with the formation of our national psyche but I think that is a topic for another day.  I thought hopefully when the cold war ended that mankind would never again face such danger of chaos and annihilation.  I spent some time with my grandkids yesterday and the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, Islamic extremism and global climate change put them at much the same risk for uncertainty and disaster that we all faced at the height of East/West tensions.  The dangers are very real.  I was in Washington DC recently and spoke to an individual knowledgeable about our disaster preparedness, he said that it was generally accepted that there would be some sort of nuclear or biological attach within the continental US in the near future.  I hope he is wrong but my logic says otherwise.

How will we respond and what will it do to our way of life and the direction of societies generally?  I know when 9/11 happened that it would change our world profoundly but I did not foresee the possible extent of the consequences.  I knew that in our pursuit of security we would probably have to surrender some of the wide ranging personal liberties which Americans have enjoyed, almost alone among civilized nations.  My son said recently that he had read that the UK was becoming nearly a police state in terms of surveillance of both public and private individuals.  The fact that these methods have fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, been successful in thwarting terrorist’s plans, simply strengthens the notion that personal liberty and personal security are being viewed by governments generally as incompatible.  Americans have always had a fairly deep-seated distrust of government.  Benjamin Franklin; another leader with outsized appetites if accounts are believed, said something like, “no man’s life, property or liberty is safe while the legislature is in session”.  Regardless of the evident sense of that sentiment, we are obviously going to have to place more power in the hands of our government security agencies.  The passage of the Patriot Act and the widespread bugging of telephone and email of US citizens is just the beginning.  I also worry about what this will do to our view of human rights.  Press accounts already catalogue our increased willingness as a culture to condone, if not applaud, the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects.  I simply do not know if this is right or wrong, but I do know that the contention made by Noam Chomsky in one of his books about historical terrorism made the assertion that the only way a civilized society could lose a war of terror was by adopting the very tactics of the terrorists in responding to attacks, seems to me to be correct and that at least some in our society seem to be all too ready to do just that.  If we are willing to go this far after the World Trade Center, how far would we be willing to go once a nuclear attack was made?

And so we come full circle.  International crisis and potential environmental disaster demands wider government action at the very time when our security concerns are giving those governments unprecedented powers to restrict personal liberty.  We must act but we do so at our own peril.  Was there ever a time when we needed the best possible political leadership we could obtain?  I think not.  But we seem to be unable to devise a system to produce those leaders.  What needs to be done?  I feel the need to do something and believe I have the capacity to make a difference but I have absolutely no idea what to do.  If you have suggestions, I am a receptive audience.  My friend who recently died, Mike Holmstrom, used to say that what was important was to do the next right thing.  That if we simply made a little positive progress every day that eventually we would accomplish whatever it was that we set out to do.  I thought that was good advice then and I think it is good advice now.

But, I fear for the future.  This is the first time in my life when I have been at such a loss to know how to do the next right thing.