It’s an interesting thing to go back and read American popular fiction from the 1970s—especially, in my experience, near-future science fiction of the period—and see the view presented there of America and its future. What you find, or at least what I’ve found, is (to use Jimmy Carter’s least favorite word) a deep malaise, a sense that the US had become (to quote one of Spider Robinson’s characters) a “tired old fraud” whose decline was inevitable. Across various genres, from liberals like SF’s Robinson to conservatives like the political novelist Allen Drury, the theme and tone is the same, varying only between “woe is us” and “good riddance”: America is fading, decaying, declining, its time at the peak of its success near its end.It’s interesting, as I say, because the actual 1980s ended up looking so vastly different from the 1980s envisioned by novelists in the 1970s, the era of Watergate, gasoline rationing, the hostage crisis in Iran, and, yes, the famous “malaise” speech; rather than ongoing economic collapse and a continuing loss of influence abroad, the decade saw the reassertion of American strength and power, both economically and diplomatically/militarily. By 1984, “It’s morning in America” would be a potent campaign theme, and the decade would end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and talk of America as the world’s only superpower.Why? A change in leadership. The election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980, bearing a message of optimism about America’s future and confidence in American strength, combined with economic policies which have set the terms for a quarter-century of economic growth and prosperity, was a major part of this. In Britain, which was having similar problems in the ’70s, it was Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979. And though his authority and influence were largely of a different kind, it’s surely no coincidence that around the same time Bishop Karol Wojtyla took the throne of St. Peter as Pope John Paul II; he made no economic policies and wielded no armies, though he had many wise things to say about both economics and the world scene, yet surely there have been few people in recent decades who have done more to inspire people and give them a sense that there is reason to hope than he did.It is a telling thing that the Democratic Party has now nominated a presidential candidate who gives us the vision of Jimmy Carter in the visionary language of Ronald Reagan. Whether it’s telling because it means that liberalism has changed, or because it means that we’ve forgotten that it hasn’t, remains to be seen.
Category Archives: Politics
Sooner or later?
There’s a bit of a debate going on (in the comments on this post, for instance, where it’s obviously among those pulling for Sarah Palin) as to whether John McCain should name his running mate before Barack Obama or wait until after Sen. Obama has made his pick. Personally, I don’t see the advantage to waiting. I stand by what I wrote earlier in my open letter to Sen. McCain, that I think he needs to act and force Sen. Obama to react; he needs to set the agenda, the standard and the tempo so that Sen. Obama needs to play catch-up, rather than dancing to Sen. Obama’s tune. Given the dynamics of this election, I do not believe Sen. McCain can afford to be seen as secondary, an “anything you can do I can do better” candidate with no ideas or initiative of his own; he can’t let Sen. Obama drive the bus, he needs to take the wheel and drive it himself.This is not an election for the conventional approach. That’s one of the reasons why I think Sen. McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate, and why I argued in my open letter that he should take an unusual approach to selecting his cabinet team: if Sen. McCain is going to win, he needs to shake up the conventional wisdom and cross up people’s expectations. Fortunately for him, he’s good at that.
Head falls off hatchet—news at 11!
CNN announced today that Anderson Cooper would be doing a story on Sarah Palin and the Monegan affair—news which of course raised the question of whether it would be a fair story or a hatchet job. It would appear that it was intended to be the latter, because after a number of people connected with Adam Brickley’s blog e-mailed CNN with some pertinent facts about the case, Cooper dropped the story. Taken all in all, I’m inclined to agree with Adam’s conclusion on this:
Maybe they’ll try to go back and rework the story using better facts, but I’m guessing that there won’t be any new attempt now that they know just how bad this story would have made them look. “Troopergate” is one of the most poorly executed hit jobs I’ve seen in my life, and this proves that it has no legs.
Barack Obama: Counting chickens before the eggs are even laid
During Sen. Obama’s recent trip abroad, John McCain charged him with hubris, saying the freshman senator from Chicago was acting like he’s already president. Sen. McCain wasn’t the only one who noticed, either; Paul Weyrich concluded that this was one reason the trip didn’t seem to benefit Sen. Obama.
The Obama campaign began referring to the candidate as if he already were president. . . .It might have worked but for the contempt the electorate has for the media. I saw at least half a dozen interviews on cables over the air networks. In every case voters said, “He is behaving as if he were already elected.” Most said, “That isn’t right.”
Now it turns out that there was even more reason for that feeling than we knew, because the media have been trying to sweep it under the rug: while in Afghanistan, Sen. Obama told a CBS correspondent that
the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years. [Emphasis mine.]And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.
Now, there are two problems with this. One, it shows once again (as did his “57 states” gaffe) that Sen. Obama has a tendency to get sloppy with numbers—which wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that the MSM forgive it in him when they would never forgive it in Sen. McCain. Still, it does raise the question (if only half-seriously), “does this ‘Constitutional scholar’ not realize that there is this little thing called the 22nd Amendment that holds a president to only two, four year terms? Um, that would be a grand total of only 8 years, Barack, not 8 to 10.”The more serious problem in my book is that it shows considerable presumption, and equal hubris, on Sen. Obama’s part. Who is he to expect to be elected President? And beyond that, who is he now to expect that after being elected, he’ll be re-elected four years from now? And as the invaluable Beldar put it,
If Barack Obama is this cocky and this sloppy now, when he’s not yet even the official nominee of his party, then just how much more insufferable and how much more reckless will he be if he actually does become president of the world’s only remaining superpower?
The arrogance underlying his statement is staggering; it makes my head hurt just to think about it. I wanted to like and respect this guy, I really did, even though I knew I’d never vote for him—but honestly, the more I see of him, the less I think of him.
The Pelosi Administration is gearing up
When I lived in Canada, I used to describe the Canadian government as an elected dictatorship. This is because Canada is a parliamentary democracy in which the standing rules of Parliament gave the Prime Minister an extraordinary amount of power to coerce and punish MPs (Members of Parliament) who don’t cooperate (I don’t believe that’s changed, but I can’t say for certain). As a consequence, the people of Canada elected the parliament every so often, thus determining who would be the PM, and the PM then pretty much ruled as dictator until the next election. To me, it seemed like rather a travesty of democracy (though to the Natural Governing Party, aka the Canadian Liberal Party, it seemed like a pretty good deal, at least during their long stretch in power).It appears, however, that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t share my opinion; judging by her behavior today, in which she attempted to use all the powers of her office to shut up a GOP challenge to her preferred policies, it seems she would like the same ability to dominate, manipulate, and otherwise control the House of Representatives that Jean Chrétien once wielded in the Parliament of Canada. Fortunately for us—and I do mean for all of us; if her tactics work, they might be good for the Democratic Party in the short run, but they’ll be bad for the nation in the medium and long run—some of the House GOP have been displaying unaccustomed backbone in the face of her political thuggery, refusing to go home like whipped curs with their tails between their legs. I particularly appreciated this line from Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.” Amen to that.The Anchoress is encouraging supporters to call their GOP representative, if they have one, to express their support, and also to call Speaker Pelosi’s office to express disagreement (politely and respectfully!). Personally, I’d go one step further: call your House member, whomever that might be and of whatever party they might be, and make it clear to them that you support democracy, not the attempt to use the rules and bylaws of our government to squash democracy; if issues can’t be debated fairly and squarely because someone like the Speaker of the House uses strongarm tactics to silence opposition, we’re in big trouble.HT: Bill
Sarah Palin hits the bullseye
John McCain leads Barack Obama among women over 40—normally a solidly Democratic voting bloc. To take advantage of this, Dick Morris concludes, McCain should take dead aim at this demographic, perhaps by selecting a female running mate who would appeal to them.
To do that, are there any better options than Alaska’s Sarah Palin? I don’t think so; and as Adam Brickley points out, people are noticing. Gov. Palin for VP.
Barack’s Iraq doubletalk
I’ve noted before that Barack Obama’s position on Iraq hasn’t been as consistent as he likes to make it out to be (he even went so far in 2004 as to tell the Chicago Tribune, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage”—which doesn’t square with his statement earlier this year that “I opposed this war in 2002, 2003, 4, 5, 6, and 7”); but this video (produced, of course, by the McCain campaign), which consists almost entirely of clips of Sen. Obama, makes his back-and-forth record on the situation in Iraq, and I think the fundamental cynicism with which he has approached the whole issue, excruciatingly clear:
I am increasingly suspicious that should Sen. Obama be elected President in November, those who voted for him will find what the liberal netroots are already finding: he is indeed “the black Bill Clinton,” and his promises are secondary to the political needs of the moment.
Yeah, I think I can stop worrying about Sarah Palin
For all that sites like Daily Ko[ok]s have been crowing over the Walt Monegan brouhaha in Alaska and proclaiming it the death knell for Gov. Palin (and for Lt. Gov. Parnell in his run for the House), it appears the people of Alaska aren’t buying it: an independent poll has her favorable rating still at 80%.As regards Daily Kos’ premature dancing on Gov. Palin’s grave, I’m irresistibly reminded of C. S. Lewis’ dry comment in the preface to The Screwtape Letters that “there is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.” That will probably get me into trouble, and I don’t mean it seriously—people with their kind of attitude just annoy me, whether liberal or conservative, which is why I couldn’t help recalling it. 🙂
Can a “citizen of the world” be the President of the US?
Barack Obama went abroad to burnish his foreign-policy credentials and trim John McCain’s advantage in that area, and at first it seemed to be working; now that he’s back, though, the trip pretty clearly looks like a political flop. For the first time since Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination, we have a poll (USA Today/Gallup) showing Sen. McCain in the lead, by four points; in the Rasmussen tracking poll, perhaps the most accurate one out there, Sen. Obama leads by three points, within the margin of error.What went wrong for the Chicago senator? One major thing seems to have been his Berlin speech, in which he greeted his German audience as “a fellow citizen of the world,” apologized for America, went out of his way to avoid crediting the US with saving West Berlin via the Berlin Airlift (for that matter, he also snubbed the Brits for their part in it), and referenced the fall of the Berlin Wall without ever mentioning that that came about because America led the West in standing up to Communism. As a result, his speech doesn’t seem to have impressed much of anyone. A letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune noted dryly, “While America may not be perfect, there is no reason to apologize to the Germans, architects of the Holocaust.” In a commentary in Germany’s Stern magazine sardonically titled “Barack Kant Saves the World,” Florian Güssgen called Sen. Obama “almost too slick” and said, “Obama’s speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon’s feel good song ‘Imagine’ than of a foreign policy agenda.” As for the UK, a columnist for the Guardian snidely dismissed the whole thing with a classically British crack: “Barack Obama has found his people. But, unfortunately for his election prospects, they’re German, not American.”It probably didn’t help, further, that he kept the American flag offstage, both for his Berlin speech and during his press conference in Paris with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy; that could only underscore the impression that Sen. Obama cared more about the opinions of his European audiences than he did of the opinions of American voters, whom the trip was ostensibly intended to impress. The thing that might end up hurting Sen. Obama the most, though, was the incident at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where he had been scheduled to meet with wounded soldiers. According to reports, the Pentagon informed him that he would not be allowed to bring the news media or his campaign staff, only his official Senate staff; in response, Sen. Obama canceled the visit. Sen. McCain’s response was predictable on every level, as political opportunity combined with a snub he no doubt felt keenly: he attacked.
If Sen. Obama wants to convince skeptics he can handle foreign policy, he’s going to have to do better than this.
The Empire shoots back
I was interested today to find a hit on my blog coming from the blog run by the editors of Canada’s National Review of Medicine; it was, of course, to my post on the Canadian healthcare system. I checked out the post in which I was referenced, and came away a little disappointed—it consists, in my view, of little more than a willful misunderstanding of the significance of the article by Dr. David Gratzer to which I linked in my post and a drive-by dismissal of several blog posts (mine included) which dealt with that article, followed by a few moments of patting themselves on the back that a lot of Americans would like to be like Canada. There was no effort to engage with any of the evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, which I and others referenced, or any attempt to make a real case for socialized medicine; honestly, I think I got a more thoughtful response in the comments on my post than these folks offered. I would suggest, of course, that you read the NRM editor’s post for yourself and see what you think, since your opinion might be more positive than mine; for my part, though, I think there’s more worth considering in the two comments on that post than in the post itself. I have no objection to the architects and managers of the Canadian system defending it and making the case for themselves—but if they’re going to do so, I think they have the obligation to actually make it, which means taking those who disagree with them seriously enough to actually engage their arguments.