Pat Nixon’s Influence: An Historical Reflection

August 27, 2009 by Jimmy Byron | Filed Under Pat Nixon | 4 Comments 

PN – pictured at the Miami Beach Convention Center in August 1972 – was the first Republican First lady to have a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention. (Photo Credit: Life Magazine)

In 1984, First Lady Nancy Reagan addressed the Republican National Convention, arguing that her husband was still the right man to occupy the Oval Office. Barbara Bush did the same in 1992, Laura Bush in 2000 and 2004. Now regularly at the front of the public eye, the role of a candidate’s spouse has altered from that of quiet bystander to one of national prominence. It was Pat Nixon who popularized the now-common tradition in which presidential spouses speak on behalf of their husbands at their party’s national convention. Mrs. Nixon spoke at the Miami Beach Convention Center in August 1972, becoming the first Republican First Lady to address a national convention.

In addition to starting that tradition, her efforts on behalf of her husband in the 1972 campaign (depicted left on the cover of Time Magazine with Eleanor McGovern in October 1972) were replicated by her successors (and those who desired to be her successors, Republican and Democrat). Her lengthy, solo campaign trips are now common for a candidate’s spouse. Take — for example — this rare footage as a small sample of Mrs. Nixon’s 1972 campaigning.

There is no doubt that Mrs. Nixon exercised an influence upon those First Ladies who followed in her footsteps, and contributed to their ever-evolving role in the White House.

Needless to say, President Nixon’s campaign was triumphant, achieving a resounding victory in November over Senator George McGovern. At the inauguration in 1973, Mrs. Nixon broke with a 108 year tradition when she chose not to wear a hat during the swearing-in ceremony.

In his candid 1983 interviews with Frank Gannon, RN reflected upon a 1952 campaign trip in which Senator Harry Darby introduced Mrs. Nixon to large crowd gathered at a rally. In the words of RN, Darby said: “Our candidate for Vice President, Senator Nixon, he’s controversial – but everybody loves Pat.” As one of the most admired women in the world from 1958-1962 and 1968-1979, her achievements, influence, and remarkable ability to connect with the American people speak for themselves.

PN, pictured with Chief Justice Warren Burger, as RN accepted the Oath of office on his second inauguration in January 1973.

The Age Of Reagan

August 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Presidents | Leave a Comment 

Ed Driscoll has a new episode of Silicon Graffiti on his blog where he  interviews AEI scholar Stephen Hayward on the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Hayward is the author of the newly released second volume of The Age of Reagan.

Featured Articles — August 27, 2009

August 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

An Accomplished Sequel By George F. Will, The Washington Post
Kennedy went from a man of minor missions to the most consequential of the brothers.

For the Love of Teddy By Jack Shafer Slate
James Reston’s inexplicable Kennedy crush.

The War on Terror is Dead By Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal
Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” As we know, that didn’t happen. Four hundred years later, they’re killing us with the smothering pillow of hyper-proceduralism. Now the lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.

Obama and ‘Redistributive Change’ By Victor Davis Hanson, National Review
The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?

Obama Targets Medicare Advantage By Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal
Seniors would lose with health ‘reform,’ and seniors vote.

More On Ted Kennedy, Nixon, And Health Care

August 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Healthcare, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

The story of how President Nixon’s plan for comprehensive health care for all Americans fell by the wayside in 1974 because Sen. Ted Kennedy thought it possible to get a plan more to his liking enacted after a Democratic President entered the Oval Office has been the subject of several previous posts at TNN, and the Senator’s death late last night has served to remind J. Lester Feder of this. His post at Newsweek.com today, in part, reads:

[T]he Obama health reform package Kennedy supported in his last days is similar to one Kennedy helped defeat when proposed by President Richard Nixon. If anything, the Obama plan is more conservative. Nixon would have mandated that all employers offer coverage to their employees, while creating a subsidized government insurance program for all Americans that employer coverage did not reach. It would take a miracle to pass such a plan today—a public insurance plan and an employer mandate are two provisions of the proposals now in congress that are most in doubt.

But Kennedy helped kill Nixon’s proposal not only because he preferred a government insurance option for everyone, but because he believed it was politically achievable. Medicare, the government program for the elderly, was then only nine years old, enacted as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to expand the social safety net. Liberals hoped this would be a first step towards a national health insurance program that the next Democratic president could enact. That victory seemed around the corner—Nixon proposed his plan in 1974, while embattled in the Watergate scandal.

President Jimmy Carter did not make health reform a priority, however, and Kennedy later regretted rejecting Nixon’s proposal. “It was a rare moment in his senate career where he made a fundamental miscalculation about what was politically possible—a lot of liberals did,” says Yale University political scientist and progressive health reform advocate Jacob Hacker. “What was not recognized by anyone at the time was that this was the end of the New Deal Era. What would soon come crashing over them was the tax revolts” that ushered in Ronald Reagan and a conservative, anti-government philosophy.

For a generation born after the “Reagan Revolution” it’s hard to describe the degree to which Ronald Reagan’s rise to the Presidency came as a complete shock to the liberal elites and intelligentsia, especially in such places as Georgetown and Cambridge. In his autobiography The Prince Of Darkness, the late Robert Novak mentions a column he wrote in 1965 after seeing Reagan speak, when the latter was still a year away from running for governor of California; in it, he compared Reagan’s style at the podium to JFK’s. Novak writes that after the column appeared, his fellow journalist Mary McGrory called him, aghast, to ask how he could possibly compare the late President to a washed-up actor. And the truth is that, as an examination of newspapers from 1976 and even 1979 shows, many pundits took it as an article of faith that Reagan, even if nominated, would meet with the same fate as Barry Goldwater in 1964.

RN More Progressive Than Obama?

August 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

D.K. Jamaal from The Examiner lists the following reasons:

Richard Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, opened up relations with China, softened Soviet diplomacy, increased public aid spending, implemented po-consumer wage and price controls that limited gouging, expanded Social Security, raised incomes, oversaw widespread school integration, endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment for women, established the Environment Protection Agency, authorized the Clean Air Act and was the only modern President besides Eisenhower and Clinton to present a balanced budget.

“Nixon’s Life”

August 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon family, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Building on the more personal side of RN — featured in younger brother Ed Nixon’s talk at the Nixon Library yesterday and Frank Gannon’s 1984 interviews — the increasingly useful Hulu.com has a thirty-minute campaign commercial from 1968 which captures the 37th President’s early childhood in Yorba Linda and Whitter:

The Way It Is — And Almost The Way It Was

August 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

Robert Nedelkoff has noted —here and here— the remarkable revelation —first by Senator George McGovern in a 2008 New York Times op-ed, and, more recently elucidated, by Frank Mankiewicz in the Washington Post— that candidate McGovern had considered offering the 1972 vice-presidential slot to “the most trusted man in America,” CBS anchor Walter Cronkite; and, at least equally amazing, Cronkite’s later statement that he would have accepted it.

What might have been: Except for George McGovern’s (apparently erroneous) belief that he would have turned down the offer to join the ticket, America’s “most trusted man” could have had a shot at being America’s 39th Vice President.

Last Sunday on C-SPAN’s consistently superb Q&A, Brian Lamb interviewed Mr. Mankiewicz.   Still going nattily strong at 84, he served back in the day as Robert Kennedy’s press secretary during the 1968 campaign, and then managed George McGovern’s 1972 run against RN.

The interview is highly recommended as an insight into the life, times, and personality of a fascinating man.  More particularly, it revealed the genesis of Walter Cronkite’s opposition to the Vietnam war —which apparently began some time before he first expressed it on air, ostensibly as the result of the reporting he had just done from Vietnam— and its hitherto unknown (and, for a network anchor, its ethically dicey) extent.

LAMB: ….. Walter Cronkite had made his statement on Vietnam on his newscast. That would’ve been February the 27th, 1968. And this is only about 30 seconds. It was longer than that, but let’s just listen to a little bit of that.

MANKIEWICZ: Sure.

(VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER CRONKITE, AMERICAN BROADCAST JOURNALIST: It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation. And for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the north, the use of nuclear weapons or the mere commitment of 100 or 200 or 300,000 more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MANKIEWICZ: Hmm.

LAMB: It was longer. He went on to say, ”To say that we were closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” and it goes on.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: But my question is – he came back – when did he meet with Senator Kennedy? Was it between that moment and that moment that he announced?

MANKIEWICZ: No, I think it was before that, before …

LAMB: Before he had gone to Vietnam?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I think he had another trip to Vietnam. I think he’d been there before.

LAMB: And when you were sitting there listening to him suggest to Senator Kennedy he had to run for president to stop the war …

MANKIEWICZ: Right.

LAMB: … what was going through your mind?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I welcomed him as an ally. A lot of them on the Senator’s staff wanted him to run. Some did not. And here I thought was a pretty important fellow in America saying, ”Yes, you should run.” It may have helped him make up his mind.

LAMB: But in a bigger way or discussion, what about an anchorman for a major network getting involved in politics and the public didn’t know it?

MANKIEWICZ: Not very – it didn’t happen very often, if at all. That’s right. I was very – well, that’s one reason I favored Walter Cronkite to be the vice presidential nominee four years later with Senator McGovern. And as it turns out, as I wrote in the Washington Post, a year or two ago, Senator – Walter Cronkite told Senator McGovern that if he had only asked him he would’ve accepted. So if the ticket, in ’72, would’ve been McGovern and Cronkite, I think it would’ve been a different election.

You can read the transcript here, or follow the link to watch the program.

The deeply disturbing aspects of this situation seem only to have occurred to UVA Professor and political expert Larry Sabato.  In an important article —”Are the Top Journalists Insiders or Outsiders?” — he raises questions that are as pertinent today as they would have been in ‘68 and ‘72.’

Decades later, everyone knows that Cronkite was a Democrat. After his retirement, he gradually made no secret of his party affiliation and philosophy. But at the time, CBS went to great pains to present him as nonpartisan, and most Americans accepted that this was true. (The other networks played the same game with their anchors, whatever their underlying political philosophy–and not all were Democrats, by the way.) Now we learn that Cronkite was prepared to run for vice president on the 1972 Democratic ticket, had he been asked.

But it is the 1967 Cronkite meeting with Robert Kennedy that stuns. Cronkite willingly became an active player in national politics, choosing a personal favorite for president and directly attempting to induce a prominent politician to run for the White House. Are we to believe that Cronkite’s private importuning had no effect on his reporting? Can anyone defend this as even vaguely ethical for a man in his position? Cronkite was a citizen, of course, and if his views on Vietnam and his preferences for president were strong, he had the option to step down as anchorman and enter the political arena in some fashion. Or he could have transitioned into a newspaper columnist or TV commentator, openly pushing the agenda of his choice. Instead, Cronkite had his political cake and ate it journalistically, too.

All of this suggests what most people have always supposed: there is a partisan predisposition among some of those at the top of the journalism profession, despite their denials. Furthermore, some elite journalists do not step back from their bias but privately seek to re-make the world as they prefer it to be.

The remarkable case of Walter Cronkite leads to certain questions. Did he do similar things in additional cases? How about other prominent anchorman and reporters of that time? Were they behind-the-scenes players while pretending to be passive observers?

And what of today’s line-up? Everyone knows the ideological predispositions of many prominent personalities at liberal MSNBC and conservative FOX. Much of the programming at these networks is more in the category of commentary than nonpartisan news–though even at these networks there are plenty of correspondents who try to fulfill the old ideal of the disinterested reporter.

How about the anchors and hosts at ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN? What about the White House reporters who have frequent, one-on-one, off-the-record chats with the presidential press secretary and the chief of staff? Are they ever asked to offer strategic and tactical advice–or do they volunteer it?–when the cameras are not on, and there are no witnesses? Is this happening now in the Obama administration and did it happen in prior Democratic and Republican administrations?

Usually these could be seen as impertinent questions, but not after the Cronkite revelations.

The reporter or anchor has classically been portrayed as the outsider, battling the establishment to deliver the truth in the public interest. In the modern day, many of these reporters and anchors have become millionaire celebrities, part of the semi-permanent floating establishment they are supposed to check. How often do they succumb to the temptation to use their fame and position to influence elected and appointed officials, or gain access as the social equals of those elected officials for self-aggrandizement?

What we’ve just learned about “the most trusted man in America” gives us the right to ask.

One Of The Stories He Told

August 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, In Memoriam, Media, News media, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 5 Comments 

60 Minutes devoted its entire hour on Sunday to its progenitor and long-time executive producer Don Hewitt, who died a week ago today.  In typical 60 Minutes style, the program was informative, provocative, and entertaining.

Hewitt always said that his editorial criterion could be reduced to four simple words: Tell Me A Story.  And that’s what he named his 2002 memoir which was, not surprisingly, informative, provocative, and entertaining.

He devoted two pages of his book to CBS’ 1984 broadcast of ninety minutes of the thirty-eight hours of interviews I had conducted with RN the year before.  My interviews, unlike those conducted by David Frost in 1978 —which were adversarial in nature and which had been taped before RN finished writing his memoirs— captured a more analytical, reflective, and, generally, accessible Nixon.  Although he didn’t know what the questions would be, the project was intended to be part of a video encyclopedia of biography, and the template involved talking him through his memoirs.

Hewitt felt that the result represented a hitherto unseen Nixon —at least at such length and breadth— so he bought the broadcast rights for CBS.  Thirty minutes of the material, introduced by Morley Safer, was aired on each of two subsequent editions of 60 Minutes, and the remaining thirty minutes were shown of American Parade, a Tuesday night news magazine program hosted by Charles Kuralt.

Hewitt took the thousands of pages of typed transcript to his weekend home at Sag Harbor and did the editing personally.  Several times that weekend my phone would ring, and he would say, without any salutation, “This is great.  Listen to this…” and he would then read an entire exchange.  An hour later: “Now listen to these…we can put them together to explain that….,” and then he was gone again.

This was, of course, very flattering; but it was also very instructive.  On his first reading of that mass of material, and with broadcast deadlines looming, he unfailingly picked out the best excerpts (or, as I liked to think of it, the best of the best….) and instinctively saw the ways to organize and relate them.  And his enthusiasm was invigorating.  From even this very limited exposure I sensed how he could inspire, improve, and, at least occasionally drive crazy, the people with whom he worked.

In the end, the three 30-minute segments he produced, which seemed so seamless to the viewers, in fact each represented the hundreds of cuts he made.  I finally got to meet him, for the first time, after the shows were broadcast, when he invited me to his office to talk about Nixon — a subject he found fascinating and frustrating.

Unfortunately, what had been intended to be a coup was turned into a contretemps by the widespread liberal outrage that CBS was paying RN  to talk —that he was benefitting from checkbook journalism— and that, to add insult to injury, he was talking with me. The controversy even reached the level of an unfriendly editorial in The New York Times.

Hewitt was surprised and offended by the onslaught; he was certainly unused to being attacked from his left flank.  He considered many of the critics to be hypocrites; and in Tell Me a Story he addressed both charges in typically direct style:

The first issue is nonsense.  Print journalism pays for book excerpts and other writings by political figures all the time.  In a letter to The New York Times on March 14 that year, I mentioned its own purchase of the rights to something Winston Churchill wrote — and even the Times’s acquisition of serial rights to an earlier Nixon memoir.  More recently, Newsweek published an excerpt of a book by George Stephanopoulos, the former top aide to President Clinton.  The truth is that reputable newspapers and reputable news broadcasts pay for interviews all the time, not in cash but in something more valuable — newspaper space and airtime for an author to plug a book or a movie star to plug a movie or a politician to plug a pet cause.  Who in his right mind sits down to be interviewed without getting something in return?  And let’s face it, “getting something in return” is the equivalent of “getting paid.”  And we all willingly go along with it, because if we don’t, 20/20 will, and if The New York Times won’t, The Washington Post will.  Is there something wrong with it?  No!  Just stop all this “holier than thou” jazz that we don’t pay for interviews because everybody does, all the time.

The second issue: Gannon was not a newsman and didn’t pretend to be, so the tape we bought was not a journalistic interview.  It was an effort to get from Nixon some things he’d never said before publicly, or quite so frankly.  We made sure our viewers knew exactly what the tape was and what it was not, and that Gannon was not a reporter, but someone close to Nixon who got him to say more than anyone else had up to that point.  We also weren’t restricted to any portion of the thirty-eight hours.  It was our choice to select from that tape anything we wanted to.

One of RN’s conditions for doing the interviews with me was that all the material would be available for use in the Nixon Library — which then still lay several years in the future.  The interviews became the basis of what was, when the Library opened in 1991, a state of the art interactive exhibition —the Presidential Forum— in which visitors could choose from an extensive menu of questions and then watch RN’s answers (with the interviewer mercifully edited out) in the comfort of a theater setting.

On Politico last Wednesday, Roger Simon wrote “The birth of political television” — an excellent appreciation of Don Hewitt’s unique contribution to the development of broadcast journalism back in the day when events (like conventions) still contained some element of authenticity, before they became choreographed commercials.

Edward M. Kennedy    1932-2009

August 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

Featured Articles — August 26, 2009

August 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Kennedy dead at 77 By Martin Nolan, Boston Globe
Liberal lion of the Senate, symbol of family dynasty succumbs to brain cancer.

Health Care and the Democratic Soul By Thomas Frank, The Wall Street Journal
What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party.

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? By Steve Malanga, City Journal
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues.

Netanyahu Leaves Divided Israel for Europe Trip By Erich Follath, Der Spiegel
Some Israelis say that they have almost never had it this good, while others say that the prospects for peace could hardly be worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pays his first official visit to Berlin this week, has divided the Jewish state and is openly quarreling with the West.

A Sigh Of Relief At the CIA By David Ignatius, The Washington Post
“Let’s get on with it.” That was a signature line of the late CIA director Richard Helms, the savviest spymaster this country has produced. And it’s the right watchword for the agency as it tries to refocus on its core intelligence mission after a ruinous foray into the “enhanced interrogation” of al-Qaeda prisoners.

Ed Nixon Remembers Older Brother

August 25, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon family, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

RN’s youngest brother, Ed Nixon spoke to nearly 400 kids and their parents at the Nixon Library today as part of the summer series Meet The Presidents, a program on the lives of great Presidents.

The OC Register has footage:

Jessica Terrell from The Register has the story here.

Featured Articles — August 25, 2009

August 25, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The President Seems Lost By Richard Cohen, The Washington Post
Let’s go back to that “teachable moment.” It was proclaimed by Barack Obama after he said that police in Cambridge, Mass., had acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis Gates for essentially being black in his own house. It has been a month now, and the one sure thing we have learned in this extended teachable moment is about Obama himself. He can’t teach.

Saving the Obama Presidency By William McGurn, The Wall Street Journal
On this day in 1994, Bill Clinton’s presidency was saved. It didn’t look that way at the time. After threatening to keep Congress in session until a health-care bill was passed, then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell gave up and let members return home for their recess. The legislative push for universal health care never recovered, and scarcely 11 weeks later Republicans led by Newt Gingrich woke up to find that they had just won control of both houses of Congress.

Behind the Carnage in Baghdad By David Ignatius, The Washington Post
As security deteriorates in Baghdad, there’s a new cause for worry: The head of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) has quit in a long-running quarrel with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — depriving that country of a key leader in the fight against sectarian terrorism.

Why Obama Reappointed Bernanke to the Fed By Michael Greenwald, Time
Before Ben Bernanke was chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, he was an ivory-tower economist who trained at Harvard and MIT, taught at Stanford and Princeton and may have learned more about the Great Depression than anyone else on the planet. One thing he knew was that he never wanted to see another one.

The Iran Countdown By Michael Crowley, New York Magazine
Angry town-hall protestors are the least of Obama’s problems.

Nixon, Cancer, and Serious Medicine

August 24, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Domestic issues, Healthcare, Interviews, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

President Nixon launched the War on Cancer, which he considered a key initiative of his presidency.  When Frank Gannon asked him if he had enjoyed more victories than defeats, he said:  “That will depend on what happens. If, for example, there’s a breakthrough in cancer, that’s a victory.”

Jim Pinkerton argues that RN could indeed claim some measure of victory:

But wait a second, one might say.  Politics aside, did the “war on cancer” work?   The short answer is, “Yes, we have won many battles against cancer, but but not as quickly as we would like.  The full war has yet to be won.”  Is that an acceptable answer?  Have we gotten our money’s worth over the last four decades? People can differ in their answers to those questions, but it is true that treatment for many kinds of cancer has improved dramatically.   For example, colorectal cancer and  lung cancer are still big killers, but survival rates for those cancers have increased sharply.  And for some some other types of cancer, such as Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, some 98 percent of U.S. cases are cured.

…

Roosevelt vs. polio.  Nixon vs. cancer.  Whatever one thinks of those two presidents, it’s true that millions of people, in America and around the world, owe their lives to the great medical science that those two men unleashed. For both the 32nd and 37th presidents, that’s a powerful legacy.

Let’s Take A Look At Nixon Again

August 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

At New York Magazine, Carl Swanson has an interview with New York Times “Book Review” and “Week In Review” editor Sam Tannenhaus, author of the new book Death of Conservatism.

According to Tannenhaus, the GOP is in self-destruct mode and would be well served to revive 37’s brand of conservatism:

One never likes to predict reactions to one’s book, but I can very well imagine where some conservatives would say, “What he really wants is for conservatives to be liberal Democrats.” That’s not the argument of the book. That’s why it’s interesting to look at Nixon again, because he’s been so demonized and we forget he ran on five national tickets and won four of them. He appealed to the center. When either party strays too far, when it gets out of its orbit, then there’s an opening for the other one.

Her Life, Her Story

August 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon | 4 Comments 

Sarah Leicht — a TNN reader and high school student from Germany — produced the following video of Pat Nixon as part of a class project, rife with quotes and photos about the First Lady:

Ms. Leicht explained that she became fascinated with PN after watching video and reading the biographies of the first couple. “I noticed that Pat Nixon never got the appreciation she should have gotten for the things she did in her life,” Leicht said. “I think that she was a really great and wonderful woman and I wanted to show that with the video.”

“Her life and her story would really deserve that.”

Change We Can Believe In

August 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Obama administration | 1 Comment 

From a profile of uber lobbyist Heather Podesta (“the Insider’s Insider”) by Manuel Roig-Franzia in today’s WaPo:

In a glum economy, the lobbying business feels kind of bubbly. Every new Obama proposal comes with acres of fine print for corporate powers, interests groups and lobbyists to haggle over, profitably. Three gargantuan legislative challenges — health care, the environment, the economy — crisscrossing at once on Capitol Hill. Major health-care interests alone are spending $1.4 million this year lobbying Congress . . . per day, according to Common Cause, a government watchdog group. A lobbyist’s delight created, ironically, by the let’s-solve-all-our-problems-RIGHT-NOW approach of a president who pooh-poohed the excesses of lobbyists.

“This is a very good time to be a Democratic lobbyist . . . it’s incredibly exciting to be able to engage with Democrats and really see things happen,” Podesta says one afternoon at her office in one of those cool, restored red-brick buildings on E Street. “It’s always a good time to be Heather Podesta.”

There are more than 12,500 registered lobbyists — about 23 for every member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — and some are getting richer while others stagnate or even dip a bit because of all of this pesky recession talk. But those who operate at the confluence of this summer’s big three legislative streams are happiest of all.

WWNHD?

August 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Richard Nixon, Sports | 1 Comment 

I’m always hesitant to speculate on What Would Nixon Have Done? — partly because who really knows, and partly because such speculation too easily becomes an exercise in what the speculator wants done.

But I can, unreservedly and without any hesitation or shadow of a doubt, say that Nixon would have loved this — the unassisted triple play by Phillies second baseman Eric Bruntlett that clinched last night’s 9-7 victory over the Mets at Shea Stadium.  There have only been fifteen unassisted triple plays (and the only  one other one that ended a game was back in 1927).   Since there have been sixteen perfect games, this was a moment rarer even than perfection.  RN would certainly have savored the moment; and it isn’t entirely out of the ballpark that he would have been able to summon up from memory the relevant historical stats.

AP described the play:

With runners on first and second in the ninth inning and a run already in, Jeff Francoeur hit a line drive up the middle that appeared headed toward center field for a single. But both runners were stealing on the 2-2 pitch, so Bruntlett was in perfect position as he moved over to cover second base.

He caught the liner easily, stepped on second to double up Luis Castillo and then turned to tag Daniel Murphy for the third out. Murphy tried to backpedal away from Bruntlett, but had nowhere to go.

“Frenchy hit it on the screws,” Murphy said. “It happened so fast there was nothing I could do.”

Featured Articles — August 24, 2009

August 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Republicans Have Obama Playing Defense By Fred Barnes, The Wall Street Journal
Republicans are discovering just how effective an opposition party can be in Washington. Their strategy is simply to aggressively and relentlessly oppose the liberal agenda of the president and the Democratic Congress. As a result, Barack Obama’s agenda is in jeopardy, and the president is disconcerted, less popular and on the defensive.

All the President’s Zombies By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

High-Speed Boondoggle By Robert Samuelson, The Washington Post
The Obama administration’s enthusiasm for high-speed rail is a dispiriting example of government’s inability to learn from past mistakes. Since 1971, the federal government has poured almost $35 billion of subsidies into Amtrak with few public benefits. At most, we’ve gotten negligible reductions — invisible and statistically insignificant — in congestion, oil use or greenhouse gases.

Mr. Market Chokes on Obama-Style Health Care By Caroline Baum, Bloomberg
Health care is different. It’s ill- suited to market mechanisms because it deals with matters of life and death.

Russia’s Moves Raise Doubts About Obama’s ‘Reset’ By James Marson, Time
The much-trumpeted “reset” of relations between Russia and the U.S. was dealt a slap in the face last week as Moscow went on the offensive against Ukraine and Georgia. After Russian President Dmitri Medvedev waded into Ukrainian politics with barbed criticism of his Ukrainian counterpart’s “anti-Russian” policies, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin embarked on a provocative trip to reaffirm support for Abkhazia, the Moscow-backed territory that enjoys de facto independence from Georgia.

China’s Latin Economic Gambit By Hugo Restall, The Wall Street Journal
Americans tend to see China’s economic rise through the prism of the bilateral trade deficit and competition for manufacturing jobs. But the real story is that Chinese institutions are buying equity stakes and making loans to increase their influence in natural resources. And Latin America is the most important arena for China’s investments.

We Have Ways Of Making You Laugh

August 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Humor, Ideas | 2 Comments 

Leave it to a German academic —Helga Kotthoff of the Frieburg University of Education— to conduct research establishing that, as a headline in the Telegraph puts it, “Humor is an act of aggression.”  (Which, as headlines go, is in the category of “Dog Bites Man.”)

The decidedly humorless gender-oriented study, published in the Journal of Pragmatics, argues  that “the ability to make others laugh confers a degree of control which dominant people exploit to show they are in charge.”

“Those ‘on top’ are freer to make others laugh. They are also freer to be more aggressive and a lot of what is funny is making jokes at someone else’s expense,” she said.

“Displaying humour means taking control of the situation from those higher up the hierarchy and this is risky for people of lower status, which before the 1960s meant women rarely made other people laugh — they couldn’t afford to.

“Comedy and satire are based on aggressiveness and not being nice,” she said. “Until the 1960s it was seen as unladylike to be funny. But even now women tend to prefer telling jokes at their own expense and men tend to prefer telling jokes at other people’s expense.”

The differences between men’s and women’s ability to become comedians starts very young, she said. Boys as young as four or five tell more jokes, frolic and clown about while girls tend to be the ones doing the laughing.

But in later age women tend to become funnier because they feel freer to not be seen as ladylike.

She said humour, including teasing, was a mix of ‘bonding and biting’ and women often use humour to form social bonds with their friends while men often use humour to vent frustration. But both sexes use comedy as a means of controlling others.

She said: “For example, doctors sometimes use humour to comfort patients but also to silence them if, for example, the patient displays too much knowledge of a medical condition.

“Nurses and midwives tend to tell jokes about patients but not when the doctor is present. And when someone initiates a joke they tend to be ignored if they are in the presence of someone of a higher status.”

Until the sexual revolution of the 1960s women rarely became comediennes in public or private because most humour is an act of aggression, she said. “A study in the late 1980s showed that men use sexual jokes as a way of verbally undressing a woman who rebuts his advances; his humour was aggressive in essence.”

Me, I prefer not to think much about it and just adopt what might be called the French approach: I surrender to laughter.

Unworthy Of Trust, Confidence, Or Being Read

August 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 9 Comments 

On 2 August the New York Post ran a long excerpt from Ronald Kessler’s new book In the President’s Secret Service.  

Mr. Kessler has an impressive record as a responsible journalist, a serious author, and a go-to blogger, so I was surprised at the titillating and gossipy nature of the material.  But I thought that might reflect more of the Post’s editors’ tabloid sensibilities than the author’s sense of his subject.

The very brief section of Nixon excerpts was marred by including an ugly, blatant, and gratuitous lie followed by a couple of anodyne anecdotes which —given the nature of the man and the geography of La Casa Pacifica— are harmless but clearly apocryphal:

One evening, Nixon built a fire and forgot to open the flue damper. Two agents came running.

“Can you find him?” one of the agents asked the other.

“No, I can’t find the son of a bitch,” the other agent said.

From the bedroom, a voice piped up.

“Son of a bitch is here trying to find a matching pair of socks,” Nixon said.

At any rate I put the book on my Amazon Wish List to the top of which it would, in the fullness of time, eventually have worked its way.  Now, thanks to James Bamford’s devastating review in today’s Washington Post Book World, my Wish List is one book lighter.

Bamford considers Mr. Kessler’s claim —undoubtedly true— to have interviewed more than one hundred present and former Secret Service presidential protection division agents:

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