Nixon, Obama, and Ohio

February 7, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Democratic Party, Election 2012, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

According to Hotline, Democrats are seeking to build an electoral college fortress in Ohio.

An ODP [Ohio Democratic Party] document notes that the importance of the state to the Electoral College grows even more critical after this year’s census: “Projections suggest that Democratic stronghold states will lose as many as 8 electoral votes to growing Sunbelt-area states, giving the GOP nominee another Kentucky or a second South Carolina just from the reapportionment of the Electoral College.” It further predicts the party is unlikely to hold FL, IN, NC or VA in the next pres. cycle, and that Obama would have to carry nearly all of the remaining states he flipped in ‘08, if not Ohio, to win re-election, given these projections.

As in so many things, contemporary politicians are using RN’s playbook.  In Quest for the Presidency 1984, Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller recount Nixon’s September 1984 meeting with Ed Rollins and Lee Atwater.  The three discussed how to build Reagan’s own fortress.

Nixon warmed to the prospect and, as he often did in his consultations with Reagan’s men, took it one geopolitical giant step farther. Why not pick just one of Mondale’s big northern “must” states and carpet-bomb it — saturate it with mail, media, surrogates, and presidential visits as if Reagan were campaigning for governor instead of president? Mondale had to win everything in the industrial crescent along the Great Lakes. If they took a single high-yield state away from him, he was finished …. Ohio was twenty-three electoral votes, as Nixon knew without having to look it up. Ohio could be the ball game.

The Shift In Massachusetts

January 15, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2012, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The catastrophe in Haiti has put all the other news in the shade to some degree, but one political story is starting to set off shockwaves nationwide. Ever since Election Day 2009, when the GOP prevailed in the gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey, political observers have wondered what 2010 might hold.

Next Tuesday comes the year’s first major opportunity to find out what voters are making of whatever Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid have been doing on Capitol Hill. In Massachusetts, voters will select the replacement for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The candidates are Democratic state attorney general Martha Coakley; Republican state senator Scott Brown; and Libertarian candidate Joseph L. Kennedy, who has constantly been explaining that he is no relation to those Kennedys. (This brings to mind the time in the 1950s when a John Kennedy, no kin to the future President, ran for office in Massachusetts – I forget if it was as a Democrat or a Republican – and got a solid percentage of support from presumably confused voters, though he did not win.)

As recently as last month, it was expected that Coakley would easily win. This is, after all, Massachusetts, the only state that voted for McGovern over Nixon in 1972. Where Ronald Reagan barely prevailed over Walter Mondale in his own 49-state sweep in 1984. Where President Obama prevailed over Sen. John McCain by 26 points in 2008. Where no Republican has been elected to the Senate since Edward Brooke’s re-election in 1972. Where no one from the GOP has been sent to Capital Hill since 1994 – ominously enough (if you’re a Democrat), the year the Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in forty years.

And the situation is, indeed, ominous for Democrats. The most recent poll, taken earlier this week, shows Brown ahead with 50%; Coakley with 46%; and the “other” Kennedy getting 4%. Among independent voters, Brown has overwhelming support, 65%. President Obama and former President Clinton have announced that they were appear in Massachusetts for Coakley over the weekend, and that is hardly a surprise, for they know the stakes. For the GOP to take the seat would spell the end of the (technically) filibuster-proof Democratic majority in Congress. It would require Reid and Pelosi to try to knock together a health-care bill that Obama can sign during the next two weeks if Brown wins, before he can take office (since the Democratic secretary of state in Massachusetts thinks he can stall certification that long). It would give the GOP a boost that it has not had at any time in the next decade, and, even this early, might raise the question of whether a re-election bid by Obama is as doomed in 2012 as Jimmy Carter’s was in 1980.

In fact, some liberal Massachusetts pundits are already starting to wonder what went wrong. Bernie Quigley at The Hill thinks it has to do with that elitist viewpoint that Democrats in the Bay State have cultivated for many a year:

[W]e, many of us, the most common of common people in all of America and possibly in all the world, developed a new contempt for the working class, classically seeing them as a threat and, as the old Southern planters did, scorning the “link heads” and the “white trash” and developed deep and sentimental affections instead for the meanest and lowliest of proletariat. You can see this with the “Car Talk” guys. We, the common working class of Massachusetts and now everywhere, desired to have the guys who fixed our cars have degrees from MIT. That is not what you want in a car guy. You want a picture of your mechanic in a photo-op at the Wilkesboro track with his arm proudly around the celestial No. 3, Dale Earnhardt.

RN Known For Working With Democrats

December 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Democratic Party, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

David Hershenzohrn writes in The New York Times:

Nixon, the 37th president, was known for working with Democrats on health care policy, including legislation in 1971 that opened a major government effort to fight cancer.

Provocative Nonsense

December 5, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Afghanistan, Annals of the Obama Administration, Democratic Party, War on Terror | 13 Comments 

At the Huffington Post, Tom Shachtman writes:

Former Vice President Richard B. Cheney in a recent interview with Politico labeled President Barack Obama’s drawn-out process of deciding on a troop surge for Afghanistan as projecting “weakness,” and charged that this and other “signs of weakness” would embolden our adversaries in the world. In articulating this position, Cheney embraced the concept of “provocative weakness” promulgated many years ago by the mysterious Pentagon civilian adviser Fritz G. A. Kraemer.

Schachtman identifies Kraemer as the “shaper” of Henry Kissinger and a neoconservative guru.  Kraemer was one of Kissinger’s mentors, but so was William Y. Elliott of Harvard, an apostle of realism.  In suggesting that Kraemer was responsible for the idea of provocative weakness, Schactman is being ridiculous.  The notion that weakness invites aggression has been around for a very long time.  Consider:

• ” There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness.” — Andrew Jackson, special message to Congress, February 22, 1836
• “Weakness and unpreparedness invite aggression” — 1940 Democratic Platform
• “The disintegration of our military forces since the surrender of Germany and Japan is an encouragement to nations who regard weakness on the part of peace-loving nations as an invitation to aggression. And the countries whose people share our ideals, and who look to us for leadership, but who are weak in resources or manpower, lose faith in our ability to support the principles for which we stand.”  — Harry Truman, June 7, 1947
• “Weakness invites aggression. Strength stops it.” — Dwight Eisenhower, October 9, 1956

President Obama’s Vocal Minority Speech

December 2, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, History, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

1 December 2009 and 3 November 1969: the desire to contain a vocal minority and the determination to mobilize a silent majority.

I’ve looked at a lot of the coverage of the President’s speech at West Point last night, and, so far at least, no one seems to have noticed the precedent and example that is hiding in plain sight: Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” speech of 3 November 1969.

Nixon was eleven months into his presidency forty years ago —just as Mr. Obama is eleven months and a week into his— when he went to the people to explain his plans for the war the nation was fighting in Vietnam.

Both leaders used a highly-publicized and much-anticipated speech to explain the conduct of a war started by their predecessor(s); to separate themselves from that history; and to announce their new policies for ending the war and bringing peace.

Both speeches were about the same length —4500 words. And both, based on the knowledge that the nation was divided and confused, and that there was a widespread feeling that the leaders hadn’t been leveling with the people, began with straightforward narratives of the story to that point.

Nixon even listed the questions he would answer:

How and why did America get involved in Vietnam in the first place?

How has this administration changed the policy of the previous administration?

What has really happened in the negotiations in Paris and on the battlefront in Vietnam?

What choices do we have if we are to end the war?

What are the prospects for peace?

Obama recalled the brutal provocation of 9/11, the decisions that followed, the developments in Iraq, and the current situation in Afghanistan:

Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with al Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government.  Gradually, the Taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan, while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating attacks of terrorism against the Pakistani people.

Nixon mentioned his reservations about the way the war had been conducted:

Now, many believe that President Johnson’s decision to send American combat forces to South Vietnam was wrong. And many others —I among them— have been strongly critical of the way the war has been conducted.

Obama recalled his outright opposition:

I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions.

Nixon mentioned the possibility —and acknowledged the temptation— of simply ending the war by blaming the administration that began it.

From a political standpoint this would have been a popular and easy course to follow. After all, we became involved in the war while my predecessor was in office. I could blame the defeat which would be the result of my action on him and come out as the Peacemaker. Some put it to me quite bluntly: This was the only way to avoid allowing Johnson’s war to become Nixon’s war.

But I had a greater obligation than to think only of the years of my administration and of the next election.

Obama examined and refuted the arguments —within his own party— that he should wash his hands of the wars his predecessor started.  Indeed, he cited Vietnam in this regard:

I recognize there are a range of concerns about our approach.  So let me briefly address a few of the more prominent arguments that I’ve heard, and which I take very seriously.

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam.  They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we’re better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing.  I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.

Both Nixon and Obama quoted Eisenhower — Nixon albeit indirectly and Obama to make the opposite point.  Nixon said:

In 1963, President Kennedy, with his characteristic eloquence and clarity, said: “. . . we want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence.

“We believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Viet-Nam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.”

President Eisenhower and President Johnson expressed the same conclusion during their terms of office.

Obama said:

I’m mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who — in discussing our national security — said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration:  the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

The thirty-seventh President spoke of the great weight of his decisions as Commander in Chief:

There are powerful personal reasons I want to end this war. This week I will have to sign 83 letters to mothers, fathers, wives, and loved ones of men who have given their lives for America in Vietnam. It is very little satisfaction to me that this is only one-third as many letters as I signed the first week in office. There is nothing I want more than to see the day come when I do not have to write any of those letters.

I want to end the war to save the lives of those brave young men in Vietnam.

As did the forty-fourth:

As President, I have signed a letter of condolence to the family of each American who gives their life in these wars.  I have read the letters from the parents and spouses of those who deployed.  I visited our courageous wounded warriors at Walter Reed.  I’ve traveled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place.  I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.  If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.

So, no, I do not make this decision lightly.

Although the two speeches —separated by forty years— shared many similarities, there were major differences between them in terms of substance, technique, and intention.

At the core of both speeches, both Presidents presented essentially similar policies in radically different ways.  Nixon expounded on the Vietnamization that he had initiated earlier in the year:

We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.

And Obama set out what amounted to a policy of Afghanization:

The 30,000 additional troops that I’m announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 —the fastest possible pace— so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers.  They’ll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight.  And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.

But Nixon was adamant about staying until the job was done and about keeping his counsel in the meantime:

I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts.

While Obama was definitive about his timetable for disengagement.

And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.  After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

Nixon had written his speech entirely by himself at Camp David over the weekend before the Monday night on which he delivered it.  He did this partly because he considered the content so important, and partly because he was determined that none of it would leak in advance.  He took considerable satisfaction from the fact that what he said completely confounded the widespread speculations and predictions about what he would have to say.

Obama’s speech was parceled out in leaks over the preceding several days; and the text was accurately reported twenty-four hours before the speech was delivered.  In the event, the delivery confirmed the expectations.

Nixon read his speech in the Oval Office in the White House at 9.30 PM.  The glass-top desk was covered with a piece of brown baize and the only backdrop was the closed gold silk window curtains.  The Obama address, delivered using TelePrompter at 8.30 PM, was a highly staged and choreographed event in Eisenhower Hall at the United States Military Academy at West Point —the second largest auditorium east of the Mississippi (only Radio City Music Hall is bigger).  The event was opened with introductions and concluded with a crowd bath.

The Nixon speech was intended to speak directly to the American people by going above the large and growing anti-war movement while going around its sympathizers and supporters in the media.  Nixon was convinced that “the great silent majority” of Americans would support his plan to end the war the way he proposed if only he could reach them and explain himself to them.

His belief was justified by the phenomenal results of that single speech.  Overnight his poll ratings jumped from the high thirties to the high sixties, and the wind was at least temporarily sucked from the sails of the anti-war movement.

The Obama speech, on one very important level, was a finely calibrated exercise at mollifying, or at least containing, the vocal minority of leaders and activists inside the president’s own party who want nothing to do with this or any war.

Whether President Obama’s speech is as successful at containing the vocal minority as President Nixon’s was at mobilizing the silent majority will take at least a few more days to begin to figure out.

When Partisanship Stopped Ending At The Water’s Edge

November 2, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Democratic Party, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Conrad Black argues that the Democratic Party started the dangerous precedent of wartime politicking in the early Seventies:

The long nightmare in Indochina changed that. Having plunged the United States into Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the Democrats doomed South Vietnam and Cambodia by cutting off all aid to them after Richard Nixon had extracted the 545,000 draftees the Democrats had deployed there on a flimsy legal pretext, and had avoided a Communist takeover in Saigon. Democrats ended all aid to the pro-Western faction in the Angolan war, and made a halfhearted effort to impeach Ronald Reagan for assisting the anti-Communist Contras in Central America. This foreign-policy schism has not healed, though it had become academic for a time after the Cold War ended in complete Western success and the USSR peacefully disintegrated.

Sing For Your Supper

September 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Art, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2012, Ethics, Obama administration | 1 Comment 

The Washington Times ran a strong editorial yesterday —”Unanswered questions for the NEA“— on a story  that is sufficiently confusing to have resulted in its being relegated to B-sections and the blogosphere.

The Times‘ editors manage to make both its outline and its significance clear:

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman and the White House finally responded to a controversial effort by political appointees of both the White House and the NEA to “leverage” government funding of the arts into cultural support for the administration’s legislative agenda.

This is the short version of the Obama administration’s position: Nothing bad happened. The rogue employee who didn’t do anything bad has been relieved of his duties (and has now resigned). In an effort to make sure that the same “nothing bad” never happens again, the administration has distributed a memo and provided some new training on how not to do “nothing bad.”

The facts are simple and public. During the transition, President Obama’s top arts adviser made it clear that his ambition was for the arts to become an integral part of the West Wing. After the inauguration, meetings of artists and political activists at the White House explicitly discussed how to keep the arts community in campaign mode to back Mr. Obama’s legislative agenda. An NEA grants official, Mario Garcia Durham, was at one such meeting for which the attendee list is public.

As those meetings occurred, Yosi Sergant, a key cog in the Obama campaign’s outreach to artists, was transferred from a position at the White House to a position as the communications director of the NEA. When the grant spigots opened at the NEA, more than $2 million went directly into the coffers of arts organizations (and their members) attending these meetings and publicly backing elements of the administration agenda.

Does that prove laws have been broken? Of course not. The worst appearances can be completely innocent. However, the administration’s assertions that Mr. Sergant acted alone (“unilaterally and without … approval or authorization” in Mr. Landesman’s words) and that the administration’s efforts were “completely unrelated” to grant-making are at odds with the facts. The public deserves more than bland reassurances.

A full investigation by both Congress and the NEA inspector general is the only way to bring this story to a close. Answers to these questions would be only a start:

c What was an NEA grants official doing at a White House political meeting? What other grants officials have been meeting with White House political officials?

c So far we know about a handful of conference calls last month and White House meetings last spring. Is this the full extent of the coordination between the White House political staff and the NEA?

c Has the grant-making process been compromised by politics? How were the brand-new stimulus grants insulated from politics? Were any of the safeguards circumvented?

c On the same day that Americans for the Arts, a lobbying organization that also runs a partisan Democratic political action committee, endorsed the key elements of the Obama health care plan, the president of the group met with Mr. Landesman, the new NEA chief. What happened at that meeting?

c Why was activist Yosi Sergant transferred from the White House to the NEA? Who made the decision?

From Day One of this story, Mr. Sergant’s statements, the NEA’s official statements and Mr. Landesman’s statements have been riddled with falsehoods and bluster. There’s no reason to take anything the NEA has said so far at face value.

Millions For Defense. And Now Also For Tribute.

September 25, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, Senate | 2 Comments 

As reported by Bryan Bender in today’s Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON – A large military spending bill moving through Congress contains a little-noticed outlay for Boston that has nothing to do with national defense: $20 million for an educational institute honoring late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

The earmark, tucked into the defense bill at the request of Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, requires US taxpayers to help the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate realize its goal of building a repository for Kennedy’s papers and an accompanying civic learning center on the University of Massachusetts at Boston campus in Dorchester, next to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

Kerry strongly defended the insertion of the $20 million earmark yesterday. He requested that it be included in the $360 billion defense budget, he said, to recognize Kennedy’s long tenure on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The institute will serve as a focal point for the late Massachusetts senator’s legacy, much as presidential libraries do. It will house Kennedy’s official papers and oral histories from the nearly half-century he served in the Senate. With a museum and exhibit space, it also will be dedicated to educating the general public, students, teachers, new US senators, and Senate staff about the role and importance of the Senate in American political life. The institute plans to host an annual “Summer Senate’’ for high school students from across the nation.

The $20 million earmark would cover as much as 40 percent of the institute’s initial fund-raising goal.

Beyond raising questions about the practice of slipping earmarks into bills in Congress, the provision also presents a potential ethical question for Paul Kirk, the longtime Kennedy aide Governor Deval Patrick appointed to fill the late senator’s seat yesterday.

Kirk, who stepped down yesterday as chairman of the JFK Library Foundation, has also served as a member of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute board and has played a key role in helping plan and raise funds for the new center. If he casts a vote in favor of the defense bill, he also will be voting in favor of an institute to which he has had close personal and professional connections.

A spokeswoman for Kirk, Stephanie Cutter, said yesterday that he does not see his roles as conflicting.

“Mr. Kirk expects to vote on every issue important to the people of Massachusetts. He resigned from the Edward M. Kennedy Institute board at 8 a.m. this morning, so we don’t expect a conflict to exist, but of course he’ll comply fully with the ethics rules of the Senate,’’ Cutter said in an e-mailed statement. She did not respond to a question about what role, if any, he played in securing the $20 million earmark.

Kirk is not running in the January special election for a new senator to fill out the remainder of Kennedy’s term. He has not yet said whether he intends to return to the JFK Library Foundation once his interim Senate appointment expires.

At Kerry’s request, Senator Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, added the $20 million earmark to the defense bill, congressional aides said. The funding would come on top of $5 million secured with Kerry’s help earlier this year in a Labor Department spending bill, which provided money for the institute’s planning and design.

The center had raised an additional $20 million in private donations earlier this year, and more money has been contributed by members of the public since Kennedy’s death last month from brain cancer, said Joe Ganley, an institute spokesman. Ultimately, Ganley said, the majority of the center’s funding will come from private donors, not taxpayers. He said many of Boston’s most influential civic leaders, including businessman Jack Connors, are helping to raise funds.

The institute’s president, and it’s only staff member so far, is Peter Meade, a former Blue Cross-Blue Shield executive who also serves on the board of the JFK Library Foundation. Meade was unavailable for comment yesterday, Ganley said.

Using the national defense budget for such earmarks is considered a particular affront by those advocating for fiscal discipline in the midst of two wars that are straining Pentagon coffers. Overall, the Senate version of the bill includes 778 earmarks worth $2.65 billion, including a number that have little or nothing to do with military matters.

A major concern is what gets cut from the Pentagon budget to make room for things like the Kennedy institute, said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Strauss Military Reform Project at the left-leaning Center for Defense Information in Washington.

“The committee did not add money to the bill to pay for its billions of dollars in pork,’’ Wheeler said.

A spokesman for Inouye declined to explain why the Kennedy institute earmark was inserted into the Pentagon budget, rather than into an education bill or other piece of legislation. In a statement released by his office, Inouye said, “It is my sincere hope that many of these students will be inspired to seek a life of public service, with the same spirit of patriotism and love of country that I saw each and every day from Senator Kennedy.’’

While Kerry said using the defense budget to fund Kennedy’s institute was a tribute to his “leadership on military technology, weapons systems, and safety equipment for our troops,’’ Wheeler said he believes there is a more practical reason.

“It’s a natural for Kerry to go to Inouye on this,’’ Wheeler said. “If it’s in the defense bill it must be a good idea. And the defense bill is sure to pass. He wanted a fast vehicle to get it enacted.’’

Bob Greene, Richard Nixon, Civility, And Mystique

September 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Interviews, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

Yesterday, Bob Greene – the veteran journalist, not Oprah’s trainer – wrote a column for CNN.com about the nation’s winter of partisan discontent. (Well, yes, it is September, but the air did get perceptively colder this morning.)

For decades, Greene’s column at the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Chicago Tribune, was syndicated across the country, and many of his two dozen books were bestsellers. Seven years ago this week, a scandalous incident from 1988 involving a female high-school reporter surfaced and resulted in Greene’s dismissal from the Tribune. Since then he has maintained a much lower profile, but from time to time he still has unexpected and fairly perceptive things to say.

Sunday’s column opens with a reference to high-school “chicken” races. As longtime readers of Greene know, the days of his adolescence in the early 1960s, and his childhood memories of the 1950s, are never far away from his mind, so the allusion to Rebel Without A Cause is not unexpected. Then he draws a comparison between teenagers frantically racing toward a collision, and the intensity of the current debate over health care and “big government.” Greene expresses the view that when compared to the feelings generated in the last few months, even the arguments surrounding the 2008 election seem to evoke a vanishing atmosphere of civility.

To prove this point, he tells of traveling the country last fall, asking various ordinary Joes (plumbers or not) and Janes whether they planned to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain – and then asking them what they found to admire in the man they did not plan to vote for. He quotes an Obama voter who, not unexpectedly, admired McCain’s fortitude as a POW in Vietnam, and a McCain voter who observed that Obama was energetic, charismatic, intelligent. “People seemed to welcome this exercise,” says Greene, but then he glumly muses: “Somehow, it feels that a similar experiment would be doomed to failure now,” and that “it feels like we’re all in one of those old hot-rod movies[....], speeding straight toward each other’s headlights.” And then he wonders what can be done about it:

One answer may be found in an unlikely place — in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.

Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.”

Nixon’s presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:

“To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. … To lower our voices would be a simple thing.”

Some people’s feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Bob Greene has thought about RN’s life, and the lessons to be learned from it, for a long time. Indeed, in his mid-twenties he covered the 1972 campaign and wrote a book about it, Running. a decade later, he scored a one-on-one interview with the ex-President, which stretched over several of his columns and is included in his 1985 book Cheeseburgers, and extensively excerpted in his 2004 book Fraternity: A Journey In Search Of Five Presidents.

In that interview, Nixon reflected at some length about how a President should be perceived by the public. He told Greene: “A president must not be one of the crowd. He must maintain a certain figure. People want him to be that way. They don’t want him to be down there saying, `Look, I’m the same as you.’ . . .In all the years I was in the White House, I never recall running around in a sport shirt, let alone a T-shirt. Or sneakers and the rest.”

When RN said this, he had in mind leaders he greatly admired like Charles De Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – men whose rather austere and remote personal style nonetheless commanded enormous respect and admiration from their countrymen (or, as would be said now, countrypersons). While this sort of political style has generally been less admired by American voters, as the careers of John Quincy Adams – or Richard Nixon – demonstrate, there’s no doubt that most Americans do want their Presidents not to be too folksy or too accessible to the public. Dwight Eisenhower certainly struck the right balance. He was from middle-class, heartland America – but he was not “the same as” the ordinary voter. Ronald Reagan, as “down-home” as he could be, was always meticulous about keeping a certain mystique around his personality.

In the case of Barack Obama, the mystique has started to fall away, in a rapid and, for many of his followers, disillusioning manner. Twelve days ago he delivered a speech before Congress on health care which, in itself, was a good effort at rallying the nation to his cause, though far from a grand slam or a home run – more like a double. Then the Congressional leadership became preoccupied with punishing Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” during the address, and forced a vote on the matter which seemed to many Americans like an exercise in pointless overkill. Obama’s latter-day Brain Trust seemed aware of this, but no one in the Capitol Hill Democratic leadership was bothering to take heed of their concerns.

Today, Newsweek.com has a blogpost about the latest poll data. It turns out that most of the surveys do find an increase in Obama’s favorability ratings following the speech – but by one or two or, in CNN.com’s survey, five points, from 53 to 58. Compare this to the polls following Richard Nixon’s November 3, 1969 speech on Vietnam, when 77 percent of Americans expressed support for his policies – a spectacular rise from the President’s numbers before the speech. Even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech in 1979 temporarily lifted his approval rating from 25 to 37 percent, before the Iranian hostage crisis lowered it for good.

Last weekend President Obama, evidently wishing to build on what small momentum his speech generated, took the unprecedented step – for a President, anyway – of appearing on five Sunday-morning talk shows on the same day: NBC’s Meet The Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, CNN’s State Of The Union (formerly Late Edition) and Univision’s Al Punto.

This garnered the President the distinction of having achieved something approaching what media folk call a “full Ginsburg.” Back in 1998, in the first frenzied Sunday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, that ex-intern’s attorney, William Ginsburg, appeared on the first four of the aforementioned shows as well as Fox News Sunday. This achievement remained unique for about five years, then Vice President Cheney duplicated it, to be followed by then-Senator John Edwards (during his weeks as Sen. John Kerry’s running-mate) and then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The last to manage it was then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2007 when she was still the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent (and, in the minds of many in the media, virtually the President-elect).

But it’s one thing for even a Vice-President to undertake such a feat – and another for a President to think he has to make the rounds of the talking-heads programs. (Or, for that matter, the talk shows – if the Chief Executive feels he needs to make his case on The Late Show With David Letterman as I write this, can Carson Daly or Chelsea Handler be that far behind?) When that President pointedly declines to appear on Fox News Sunday, apparently because the network decided not to broadcast his speech to Congress, the semblance of a mystique certainly diminishes, and some, like Dwight Schwab of examiner.com, are even ready to compare Obama’s quarrel with Fox to Nixon’s difficult relationship with the networks. (For me, another analogy comes more readily to mind – former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s honeymoon with the media in 1998 that so rapidly turned sour. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So it makes sense for President Obama to try to follow in the path RN outlined in that first inaugural – a path RN himself found difficult to follow, because of the polarization that he inherited – and also to maintain an image befitting a President instead of a Sunday-morning regular. The right approach for him is not to start thinking about going on Olbermann, Matthews, King and Maddow – or Conan, Colin, and the two Jimmies – on the same night, but instead to focus on the effectiveness of getting his message across on the stage that only a President can command.

George McGovern Speaks At The Nixon Library

August 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Yorba Linda | 5 Comments 

On Wednesday night, a crowd of over 700 gathered in Yorba Linda to see former Senator George McGovern talk about his new book, a short biography of Abraham Lincoln. The event, co-sponsored by the Richard Nixon Library and Museum and the Richard Nixon Foundation (and held in the Library’s replica of the White House’s East Room) would have been remarkable enough for the appearance of President Nixon’s Democratic opponent in the 1972 election – but, in a surprise appearance, the Senator was introduced by none other than 83-year-old Gore Vidal, almost the last major American writer of the “Greatest Generation” still living, who has written about RN on many occasions (including the 1972 play An Evening With Richard Nixon). Both men received standing ovations.

Though Vidal has sometimes expressed a degree of admiration for the thirty-seventh President’s resilience and achievements in the field of foreign affairs, in recent years his remarks about Nixon have been much more negative, and he seems to blame RN for instigating the careers of former Vice President Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom worked in the Nixon Administration and have been the targets of Vidal’s angriest barbs in articles and interviews since 2000. The late Senator Edward Kennedy has also been the object of Vidal’s bile from time to time, unsurprisingly given the writer’s mercurial relationship with the Kennedy clan, and his preference for Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s brand of populist radicalism. But in his introduction in Yorba Linda, Vidal spoke instead of Lincoln, the subject of one of his best-known and most acclaimed novels.

Sen. McGovern then took the podium and discussed his biography. He stressed that Lincoln’s greatest achievement was preserving the Union, and spoke at length about the difficulties the sixteenth President had to overcome – his limited formal education, and his struggle with depression (which McGovern knows from experience, as he movingly describes in Terry, his book about his late daughter’s tragic battle with alcoholism and bipolar illness).

Though Ted Kennedy went unmentioned in the main part of McGovern’s talk, one of the questions asked after it referred to him, and the reply was:

“Ted was a great senator,” McGovern said. “He hardly missed a day [of work] . . . I admired him and, on a personal basis, if any senator suffered a loss like a child or a spouse, he was the first person who called. When our daughter Terry died, he came to see Eleanor and me. He was there at 9 a.m. the next morning with his wife. He was a person who respected tragedy because of his family. He was very thoughtful. I thought a lot of him.”

McGovern also spoke at Chapman University earlier in the day.

DSPQ

August 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient | Leave a Comment 

In the past I have cast a lenient —almost affectionate— eye on Chairman Charles Rangel.

The natty gravel-voiced Purple Heart winning long-time Congressman has represented his constituency diligently and mastered both the arcanae of tax codes and the even more arcane ways of surviving and thriving on Capitol Hill.

And Chairman Rangel, in addition to his almost unlimited charm and all but unlimited power, is a Democrat.  Which means that he has been able to run the Kennedy-Clinton-Dodd-Conrad-etc.-etc. play book that has worked before and will work again: If you ignore something long enough, no matter how devastating or demeaning or downright horrific it may be, it will either go away or people will forget about it, or both.

So, for going on a year now, Chairman Rangel has blithely sailed above such pesky pinpricks as the  media’s isolated and timidly expressed outrage, or his many colleagues’ calls for him to resign or at least step down as the head of his Committee, much less an Ethics Committee investigation.

But, holy Toledo, surely at some point enough has to become enough.

My bad: New information reveals that House tax czar Chairman Charles Rangel forgot to mention, among many other things,  this $1 million home on any of his disclosure forms.

Today’s New York Post reports what may be (or, see above, may not be) the coup de grace for a long and not totally undistinguished career:

Rep. Charles Rangel failed to report as much as $1.3 million in outside income — including up to $1 million for a Harlem building sale — on financial-disclosure forms he filed between 2002 and 2006, according to newly amended records.

The documents also show the embattled chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — who is being probed by the House Ethics Committee — failed to reveal a staggering $3 million in various business transactions over the same period.

This week, Rangel filed drastically revised financial-disclosure forms reflecting new, higher amounts of outside income and numerous additional business deals that had not been reported when the reports were originally filed.

In 2004, for instance, Rangel reported earning between $4,000 and $10,000 in outside earnings on top of his $158,100 congressional salary.

But the amended filings show that after the sale of a property on West 132nd Street, his outside income that year was somewhere between $118,000 and $1.04 million.

The forms filed by House members provide for a range of value on such transactions, so the precise number isn’t publicly known.

Rangel also lowballed his income by as much as $70,000 in 2002, $46,000 in 2003 and $117,000 in 2006, records show.

Only in 2005 did Rangel reveal his total outside income.

Members of Congress are required to disclose all their assets and outside income in an effort to expose possible undue influences.

Rangel’s office insists the Harlem Democrat did not conceal any outside income from the IRS and is paid up on his taxes.

The Post revealed yesterday that Rangel is in arrears on New Jersey property taxes — for property that for more than 15 years he failed to disclose to Congress and the public.

Another area of wide discrepancy in his financial-disclosure forms is where he’s required to list financial transactions.

Every year between 2002 and 2007, Rangel failed to include all his deals for the year, according to records.

On his 2002 and 2003 financial-disclosure statements, Rangel did not include any transactions whatsoever, according to papers on file with the House clerk.

But the amended records filed this month show as much as $310,000 in business deals in 2002 and up to $80,000 in transactions in 2003.

In 2004, Rangel left off his disclosure form as much as $430,000 in stock transactions, amended records show. One of those deals he did include as a transaction on his original disclosure was the sale of the brownstone on West 132nd Street.

But in the same report, Rangel failed to include proceeds from that sale as outside income. That has been revised in the amended report.

Despite the reported sale, city records still show Rangel is the owner of that property.

Ted Kennedy’s Plea

August 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2012, Healthcare, Presidents, Republican Party, Senate, U.S. History | 6 Comments 

The absence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy last week from the funeral of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, followed by the death on Tuesday morning of columnist Robert Novak, who was diagnosed with brain cancer not long after the lawmaker fell ill from the same cause, has served to remind Americans that the lawmaker’s days, sadly, are numbered. Still, discussion of what is to follow after his passing, politically speaking, has been muted.

That was the case until this morning, when news came that the Senator had sent a message to Massachusetts legislators asking them to reconsider a change in the law they enacted in 2004. At that time, Kennedy’s colleague in the Senate, John Kerry, appeared to have a good chance of attaining the Oval Office. This raised the question of what would happen were he to leave his seat. It was thought by many Democratic bigwigs in the state that Gov. Mitt Romney would appoint a fellow Republican as Kerry’s replacement, if it came to that, to serve until a special election could be called.

Even though no Republican has been elected from the state to the Senate since Edward Brooke was re-elected in 1972, the idea of a member of the GOP joining Ted in the Senate for even a few months was so horrific a prospect to legislators at the Boston statehouse that they enacted a law removing the power to appoint Senators from the governor and specifying that in the event of a Senator’s death or resignation, his or her seat was to remain vacant until it could be filled in a special election within 145 to 160 days – that is, about five months. As for the time in between – well, better, obviously, that Massachusetts be represented by only one person in the world’s greatest deliberative body than that a Republican should take the other seat for an instant.

At the time, neither Kennedy nor Kerry raised any objections to this line of reasoning. But now the senior gentleman from Massachusetts has had second thoughts. His statement informed the Boston lawmakers that, given the likelihood of a razor-thin vote in the Senate regarding health-care legislation, it was imperative that Massachusetts have two members at hand to help decide the issue.

There’s certainly more to this than just health care, however. For fully fifty-six years – over one-fourth of the Senate’s history – one of the two Massachusetts seats has been occupied, with a two-year interruption, by one of two brothers. First, there was John F. Kennedy, from 1953 until he won the Presidency in 1960. He resigned his Senate seat on December 22 of that year, and five days later Benjamin Smith, his Harvard roomate, was appointed to replace him. Smith remained a Senator until Ted Kennedy turned thirty and thus became Constitutionally eligible to be elected. The younger Kennedy won a special election for the seat in November 1962, and immediately after Election Day Smith resigned and Ted took his place.

The start and end of Smith’s tenure were situations where the Kennedy clan felt comfortable with having a Governor make appointments to the Senate, and now Ted seeks to have this power restored to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. So far, the Senator hasn’t specified whether he has anyone in mind to replace him; his wife, Victoria, has let it be known that she does not plan to do so.

But it has been reported that Ted wishes to see another Kennedy reach the Senate, though so far it’s been a difficult wish to fulfill. Regular TNN readers will recall that at the end of last year, when President Obama chose Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the Camelot clan attempted to stir up sentiment for Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg to take her place, resulting in a media frenzy of several weeks before Ms. Schlossberg took herself out of the running after a series of gaffes. A few months ago there was some talk of Robert Kennedy’s son Christopher, the president of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, seeking the Senate seat formerly occupied by Obama, since its present occupant, appointee Roland Burris, has said he will not seek election. But more recently it’s been reported that Christopher Kennedy is eyeing the Illinois governorship.

So speculation, after the Senator’s announcement, has started to focus on former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, his nephew, as his replacement. The younger Kennedy’s career in the House was not especially distinguished and in a contested election, were he not the incumbent, he’d probably find it an uphill battle, not least because of his ham-handed annulment of his first marriage in the early 1990s. But being appointed to the Senate would give him something of an edge when the special election came around.

But even if Joseph II makes it into the Senate, I wouldn’t bet on his seeking a second full term. By 2012, when Ted Kennedy’s term would have expired, he’ll be sixty, and, even in Massachusetts, the electorate probably prefers its Kennedys to be young and charismatic. And, by that time, four or five of the great-grandchildren of Old Joe and Rose Kennedy will be out of law school and ready for high office. (At the present time, only one member of this generation is over thirty – Robert Kennedy’s granddaughter Meaghan Townsend, a yoga instructor in Los Angeles. And just seven or eight are old enough to join their cousin Patrick Kennedy in the House.) In any event, during the next year or so we’ll find out if Camelot is vanishing into the mists of memory or is ready to begin another chapter – assuming the voters want it.

Setting The Record Straight On Social Security

August 13, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, George W. Bush, Healthcare, News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In this morning’s Washington Post, Paul Begala, one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and later a major White House advisor, contributes an op-ed. In it he argues that, although supporters of an expansive health-care policy (single-payer or otherwise) may be thoroughly dissatisfied with whatever legislation ultimately comes out of the Senate and to President Obama’s desk, they’d be well advised to bite their tongues and support it. As an example he cites the original Social Security legislation of the New Deal, which was quite limited in scope:

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner’s circle: farm workers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

The phrase “our progressive vision” may be taken by some to suggest that the expansion of Social Secuirty was strictly the doing of Democrats, in which case the Post’s Ezra Klein wishes to correct that misconception:

The original Social Security legislation wasn’t “perhaps” a “cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist” program. It simply was those things. But it was something else, too. A start. Over the next 50 years, it was built upon. But not only by Democrats. Some of the largest advances came when Republicans saw political opportunity in strengthening the entitlement. Begala implies that progressives eventually added cost-of-living increases to Social Security. In fact, it was Richard Nixon who signed that bill. Similarly, whether you like the structure of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit or not, it was a massive expansion of an entitlement program, and it was proposed and signed by George W. Bush.

More On The Ticket That Never Was

July 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 14 Comments 

Today’s Washington Post has an article by Frank Mankiewicz in which the political director of the 1972 McGovern campaign goes into more detail about the notion he toyed with in the hours after his candidate received the nomination one sweltering summer night in Miami Beach: to ask Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America" (according to a poll Mankiewicz had recently examined), to be the South Dakota senator’s running-mate.

Mankiewicz observes (as I recounted in my first post on this subject earlier this week) that it was Sen. Robert Kennedy who proposed, in the early weeks of 1968, that Cronkite run for the seat occupied by New York’s other senator, Jacob Javits. According to Mankiewicz, this was after Cronkite, who had turned against Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House on Vietnam, pleaded with RFK to run against LBJ; this was before the New Hampshire primary gave a shot in the arm to Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic antiwar candidacy. Kennedy replied (in Mankiewicz’s hearing), "I’ll do it, Walter, if you run for the Senate in New York." This proved unfeasible not only because Cronkite was a Connecticut resident (though RFK had not let his own status as a Virginia resident keep him from running in 1964) but because he was also a registered independent and as such did not meet the requirements to file as a Democrat.

But Mankiewicz kept the conversation in mind, and after McGovern was turned down by Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, and Ted Kennedy in turn, he brought up Cronkite’s name. The idea was dismissed by the rest of the candidate’s brain trust as unrealistic, and McGovern did not contact the anchorman.

But years later, as I mentioned earlier, Cronkite told McGovern that had he been asked to run on the 1972 Democratic ticket he would have accepted. Mankiewicz says that Cronkite also told a corporate board (on which both men served in the 1990s) that he would have agreed to the vice-presidential nod "in a minute."

Mankiewicz notes in his op-ed that at the time of the Democratic convention Nixon’s lead over McGovern had narrowed to four to seven points in some polls. He is sure that with Cronkite on the ticket, McGovern could either have won or lost by such a narrow margin that, after RN’s resignation – he evidently assumes the Watergate saga would have played itself out in the same manner – the McGovern-Cronkite ticket would have been renominated in 1976 and would have captured the White House.

This is how the op-ed concludes. But it’s worth noting that Mankiewicz does not go on to wonder if McGovern would have achieved re-election in 1980, with Cronkite succeeding him in the White House for eight years.

(This scenario is also called "Dan Rather’s Nightmare." Indeed, the most intriguing part of this alternate history is what would have happened at CBS if Cronkite had quit anchoring in 1972. Rather, at that time, did not have the prestige that he had by 1980 when he took over at CBS Evening News. My guess is that Roger Mudd, or possibly the now-forgotten George Herman, would have been the more likely person to replace Cronkite had he left earlier.)

It may be that Mankiewicz is aware that most likely, if McGovern had been "vindicated" by a near-win in 1972 and won in 1976, we would have seen a Presidency more or less the same as the Carter years, except worse – rampant inflation, friction with Congress, one misstep after another in foreign policy, with the Soviet Union gaining ground across the globe – with the same result: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Dr. House And Mr. Obama

July 24, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Obama administration, Religion | 3 Comments 

If healthcare reform, Obama style, gets traction and becomes the new reality in America, one completely overlooked consequence will be that the highly-popular television show, HOUSE, will have to say “yes, we can” and go off the air.   Or at-the-least, the program will have to be shortened to one act, focused completely on a waiting room and with the only dramatic tension being just which one test the team will choose to run.  

If you are not a regular viewer, what you need to know is that the fictional Dr. Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, is a medical genius.   He heads up a team of brilliant diagnosticians at a New Jersey teaching hospital and each episode necessarily involves a quest, via many tests and approaches, to figure out what usually-obscure illness threatens the life of the patient du jour.

It’s Sherlock Holmes in an emergency room stuff – sort of a “what done it?”

A few years ago, I had some pain in my chest and went to a local emergency room.   I was admitted to the hospital for some tests.  They put me on a treadmill, wired me for sound, and later did this thing called a “chemical stress test.”  That’s code for: “Injection of weapons grade uranium into patient to cause meltdown.”  There was one more test they could have done.  In fact, one doctor strongly recommended it.  It is called cardiac catheterization. A doctor inserts a thin plastic tube into an artery or vein in the arm or leg. From there it can be advanced into the chambers of the heart or into the coronary arteries.

The test is really the gold standard when it comes to diagnosing a heart problem.  It’s also apparently quite expensive.  Alas, the good doctor who wanted to see it done was overruled by my HMO – I won’t mention the name of the company, let’s just say it sounds a little bit like “Permanent Czar.” 

I passed all the tests – no heart problem – and headed home.  But my wife and I had a nagging question: Would that heart catheterization test have been a smart thing to have?

Over the next several days I received calls and emails from friends all over the country and I began to notice an anecdotal trend.   I heard testimony from people who had gone through what I had experienced, with all tests coming back fine, only to do the heart catheterization and find a serious arterial blockage requiring emergency surgery.

One such call was from my favorite liberal Democrat and good friend, Bob Beckel.  He told the same story – test after test came back negative, then the heart cath and a trip to multiple by-pass land.   He and others told me to pitch a fit with my czarist (Germanic form) health insurance company and keep doing so until they agreed to pay for the test.  So I did.

Already-too-long story short, I had the heart catheterization test done four months after my hospitalization, and thankfully it also indicated that there was nothing wrong; except for the stress of having to go through that period, fighting all the way, to get what could and should have been done during my prior hospital stay.  That would have saved time, maybe even a little money.  

Now, here is my question:  How is health care reform ala Obama going to do anything other than make it even harder to get such a test done? 

Does anyone without a power-grab agenda seriously believe that government-run health care will make it more likely that an expensive test will be run after several others have indicated no problem?  Calling Dr. House, Dr. Cuddy, Dr. House – I mean, really?

Many doctors already have to fight hospital administrators and health insurance companies en route to quality patient care.   Just ask them.   Will placing another level of authority over them, ceding more local turf to the feds, make things better? 

Frankly, when I take a look at what health care could become in America if we don’t collectively say “No, we can’t,” I find myself pretty cool with my HMO.  I know they get a bad rap, but if we don’t watch it, there will come a time when we look back and nostalgically refer to right now as “the good old days.” 

Sure, some stuff is broken and needs to be fixed.  Why not start with tort reform?  Why are we not hearing about this from the White House and the Democrats in Congress? 

Follow the money.  

I actually think the whole issue is being framed incorrectly and therefore it is easily subject to misunderstanding, even manipulation.   We don’t need health care reform.  Our standard of care is pretty good.   No, what people are really talking about is health coverage reform.   But no plan on the table right now is able to even suggest the broadening of coverage to include those millions who don’t now have insurance, without compromising the quality of care.

We are at a crossroads on this issue as a culture.  And many Americans – certainly many politicians – seem more than willing to trade our high standard of quality care for a model that dumbs it all down.  We are on the verge of selling our national soul for a mess of perilous pottage, and in the end we will all suffer.  Most of that suffering will be in long lines or crowded waiting rooms.

Has there ever been a situation in our history where increased government involvement in the actual running of something (not mere oversight, but managing the details day to day) has turned out to be a cost cutter?  Anyone? Anyone?

Creating a system whereby a significant number of people can get a service for free that others must pay for does not tend to keep overall costs down.  In fact, they skyrocket, placing an even greater burden on those who pay.  It’s misguided compassion and inherently based on class-envy. 

And don’t even get me started on the whole privacy-medical-records thing.  Recently, I had a conversation with a family – military people – and they have been looking forward to a particular promotion.   The problem was with a visit to the doctor a while back and the casual mentioning of “anxiety” to the physician. This led to the insertion of a comment on the computerized record that found its way to a decision maker on the promotion issue.  Bottom line, the advance was nixed.  Not because of any real issue, but because an annotation carelessly made, and subject to misinterpretation, became part of the record extant.  

Welcome to your future if the Dems have their way with one fifth of the U.S. economy. 

Finally, as I finish my health care rant, I can’t help but bring up the issue of evangelicals and Obama, at least in the context of so many younger ones lending him their support last fall.  My conversations with many young-Obama-evangelicals suggested that the number one reason they were willing to, in effect, abandon vital conservative evangelical positions such as the pro-life issue, had to do with temporal concerns and compassion, particularly the idea of providing universal health care. 

Now, six months into his administration, and as the details of his plan (or stealthy lack thereof) come into at least marginally better focus, I wonder if some of those hip “values” voters who bought into the mania have any remorse?   And when his plans sink under the weight of their sheer audacity, will it have been worth it? 

Maybe many will be dazed and confused and left to ponder life without utopian fixes and reflecting as Dr. House did in episode number 119: "It does tell us something. Though I have no idea what."

McGovern-Cronkite ‘72?

July 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Apollo XI XLth, Democratic Party, In Memoriam, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

A few minutes ago the fortieth anniversary arrived of the moment when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface. For most American TV viewers that awe-inspiring night, the voice commenting on the images that were seen over the next several hours belonged to Walter Cronkite of CBS, who died on Friday. His wholehearted enthusiasm for the space program and its accomplishments was deep and lasted throughout his life; in his 1996 autobiography A Reporter’s Life he cites the Apollo missions and the opening to China as among the accomplishments during the presidency of Richard Nixon that he admired the most.

However, Cronkite did not like what he described as the participation of RN and Vice President Spiro Agnew in “a conspiracy to destroy the press’s credibility.” On the air, as anchorman for the CBS Evening News, he did not offer an opinion directly on Agnew’s 1970 speeches criticizing television coverage of the Nixon White House or criticisms leveled by other figures in the Administration; this was left to Eric Severeid.

But in private, Cronkite, a thoroughgoing liberal, found much to dislike about the Nixon policies. And in some parts of New York City and within the Beltway, his attitudes were known.

Last year, as Barack Obama looked over his vice-presidential possibilities, former Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, published an op-ed in the New York Times reminiscing about the hours after he was chosen by his party’s convention in Miami Beach, as the delegates waited for the other half of the ticket to be selected.

McGovern says that he had already been turned down by former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Edmund Muskie, whom he had defeated in the sometimes bitterly contested primaries. After receiving the nomination, his next choice was Sen. Ted Kennedy, who declined, but suggested Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri instead.

McGovern then moved on to Sargent Shriver, but learned that the former Peace Corps director was in the Soviet Union and could not be reached before 4 pm, when the choice had to be announced. He then asked Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota (who would become Jimmy Carter’s running-mate four years later), but Mondale declined, also recommending Eagleton as the nominee.

McGovern’s next choice was Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who answered that although he would be honored to be the first Jewish nominee on a major-party ticket, he was about to get married and could not juggle a honeymoon with a national campaign. (This brings to mind the 2004 race, in which some of the supporters of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, still a bachelor in those days, were actively seeking a spouse for him in the event that he got out of the single digits in the polls.)

McGovern writes that he then telephoned Mayor Kevin White of Boston, who accepted at once, but was then vetoed by John Kenneth Galbraith (a member of the convention’s Massachusetts delegation), who claimed there would be a walkout if White was selected.

It was at this point that Frank Mankiewicz, the senior member of the McGovern inner circle, remarked: “Walter Cronkite was just named the most trusted man in America. What about him?”

The idea was tossed back and forth between those in the room, who, besides McGovern and Mankiewicz, included campaign manager Gary Hart and pollster Pat Caddell. Nowadays, when Tom Brokaw is routinely mentioned as possible Presidential timber should he ever care to emerge from retirement, and Rush Limbaugh, every four years, has to remind his legions of Dittoheads that he is disinclined to move from Florida to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “because I can’t afford the pay cut,” it’s hard to recall a time when newspaper publishers like Frank Knox and William Randolph Hearst were the only figures in the media who received serious consideration for the White House (or, as in the case of Warren G. Harding, were actually elected).

But in 1972, it was less usual to imagine TV personalities in electoral office at a high level. True, Ronald Reagan, after years on G.E. Theater and Death Valley Days, was the sitting Governor of California, but at the time McGovern was making his choice no liberal thought that Reagan could ever reach the Oval Office. So the nominee and his associates set aside the choice of Cronkite for the vice-presidency as unrealistic.

But, says McGovern: “I later learned from Walter that he would have accepted. I wish I had chosen him.” Instead, after being turned down by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, he chose Eagleton, who later was forced to quit the ticket, then Shriver.

The idea of Cronkite being on the 1972 Democratic ticket is still an intriguing one for connoisseurs of alternate history. All through McGovern’s progress to the nomination, it was clear that despite being a South Dakotan he was having trouble appealing to middle-American voters – as Nixon staffers Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman would say, he didn’t “play in Peoria.” Could Cronkite, who’d spent his childhood in Missouri (and his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, which would have been of no small consequence were he on the ticket), have been able to reach those voters?

There’s also the matter of Watergate. In September and October of 1972, McGovern often would discuss the articles appearing in the Washington Post about the break-in and its background, but the reaction from the electorate was tepid and indifferent. That October, Cronkite devoted over half of a CBS Evening News broadcast to Watergate, but that presentation had little impact. Had Uncle Walter been able to cast aside an impartial tone and appear in commercials speaking of Watergate in the way he spoke, in 1968, of what he saw as the failure of the Vietnam War, what would have been the impact of his words?

It seems unlikely that McGovern could have prevailed even with such a revered figure on the ticket – RN’s popularity was high in the summer and fall of ‘72 not just because of his trips to China and the Soviet Union, but because the economy was (temporarily) thriving. But undoubtedly the Democratic ticket would have carried more states than just Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Cronkite’s presence could have secured the Northeast, California and the Northwest, and the states that were part of what was just beginning to be called the Rust Belt.

Here, it should be mentioned that the McGovern camp’s contemplation of Cronkite was not the first time that he’d been mooted as a political prospect. In 1967, Sen. Robert Kennedy reportedly asked Cronkite if he’d be interested in challenging the other New York senator, Republican Jacob Javits. And in the spring of 1980, Rep. John Anderson, as he dropped out of the GOP presidential primaries and prepared to launch an independent bid, let it be known that he would like Cronkite as his running-mate, since it was already known that the newscaster, under the policy then in effect at CBS, would soon have to retire. But Cronkite, according to an article appearing in Time, dismissed the notion:

“Oh, yes, I’ve daydreamed about [running for office],” Cronkite says. “As I’ve daydreamed about sailing around the world—or rather, not as much, because I have thought of sailing around the world.”

His thinking goes like this: “Obviously anybody in any profession has a perfect right to get into politics. But one shouldn’t as a journalist serve two masters. There’s a basic conflict of interest—it’s a bad idea. I’ve been approached by both sides. Some are sincere, but others are flatly cynical, wanting to take advantage of a name that requires no buildup, no posters. Popularity on TV might have great appeal, but I don’t have any policy on how to run the country.”

So it’s clear that when Cronkite later told McGovern that he would have accepted a spot on the Democratic ticket in 1972, he was speaking with the benefit of hindsight, after the major part of his career in the media was finished, and that it isn’t that easy to assume that he would have made the jump, not long after the halfway point of his tenure telling us the way it was. Still, the two names on a tin button seem to linger in the mind’s eye.

Palin, Nixon, Power, And The GOP

July 15, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Nixon in the News, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin | 5 Comments 

In the Times of London, Daniel Finkelstein writes:

There is no more eloquent statement of modern Republicanism than resigning office with time still on the clock. Mrs Palin has chosen to talk about power, rather than exercise it. She would rather write a book and give lectures about being a governor than actually be a governor. And her party has made the same choice.

Yet the anger of Nixon’s coalition has never quite left it, even after years of huge political success. They see themselves as the eternally frustrated rebels knocking on the barred doors of Washington DC, when they have been on the inside themselves for years.

It has cast itself, deliberately, as the opposition, the angry outsider, and it is more comfortable in this role than it is as the party of power. As Rick Perlstein describes in his book Nixonland, being the party of the angry outsider began as an election strategy. Richard Nixon wanted to mop up votes that went to urban machine “law-and-order” Democratic mayors such as Richard Daley in the North and populist rabble rousers such as the segregationist Democrat George Wallace in the South.

Others attack the GOP from exactly the opposite direction. For years, we have heard that Republicans are elitist insiders who only want power.  ”It is power that attracts them,” wrote John Dean in Broken Government, “it is a tropism for authoritarian personalities, like moths to the flame.”  In 2006, Thomas B. Edsall wrote Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power.   He called the GOP “the party of the socially and economically dominant and of those who identify with the dominant.”

Both lines of attack are caricatures. Republican politicians do want power — like Democratic politicians — but they are often inept and disorganized in pursuing it.  As for economic dominance, one need only note that a majority of those among those making $200,000 a year or more supported Barack Obama.

There is a bit of truth to Finkelstein’s analysis: Republicans have indeed cast themselves as the opposition. Since Democrats control the White House and Congress, that’s what Republicans are. When the GOP was in power, Democrats were the opposition. Barack Obama deliberately cast himself as an outsider, hence his Secret Service code name — and the title of an admiring biography — “Renegade.”

Comeback Politics

July 12, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Democratic Party, History, Nixon in the News, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

In The New York Times, Adam Nagourney writes:

Political comebacks tend to come in two forms. The first is when a party stumbles back into power because of the mistakes by the other side. A classic instance came in 1976, when Watergate enabled Jimmy Carter to win the presidency. The second kind of march back to power, which takes longer but is more enduring, reflects a party’s success in coming to grips with changing conditions — demographic, ideological or both — and in finding a leader who has mastered the new political terrain. Mr. Nixon did this in 1968, and Bill Clinton did it in 1992.

This analysis is faulty.  On the one hand, it overlooks Carter’s initial success at moving to the center after the McGovern debacle.  Four years after the Democrats crashed on the left side of the road, Carter ran as a Bible-quoting, budget-cutting, formal naval officer.  On the other hand, it downplays the incumbent party’s woes in 1968 and 1992.  RN did indeed talk about new issues and policy ideas in 1968, but the  results also reflected the Vietnam War, a calamitous crime wave, and the failure of the Great Society.   And read my lips:  in 1992, the in-party’s problems — a tax increase and a recession – contributed mightily to Clinton’s 43% victory.   And although Clinton ran as a New Democrat, the party as a whole did not change at all.  Congressional Democrats failed to adapt to the times, which helps explain why they lost their majority in 1994.

Unclubbable Man Joins World’s Most Exclusive Club

June 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Senate | 1 Comment 

Robert Nedelkoff has examined the mathematics of Senator-Elect Franken’s “victory.”

The Wall Street Journal today examines the ethics of the Franken camp’s found-votes recount strategy:

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

In politics, as in life, you make your own luck.  Republicans tend to take a half-hearted —not to say half-assed— approach to the rough and tumble of electoral politics.  This is through excesses of timidity rather than of virtue, to be sure — but the result is the same.  And the word for the candidate who comes in second is still “loser.”

As far as the Senate Democrats who have so eagerly awaited the arrival of this new colleague — good luck to them.  I suspect that they may soon be experiencing a case of the “be careful what you wish for” syndrome.  As Robert Nedelkoff indicates, the world’s most exclusive club will now be welcoming an unclubbable man.  During my several years at Late Night with David Letterman and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, I only dealt with a handful of people who were truly  unpleasant and disagreeable.  The soon-to-be Junior Senator from Minnesota was a member in bad standing of that unappealing club.

Precedents For The Huntsman Appointment

May 19, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, China, Democratic Party, Election 2012, News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 2 Comments 

Yesterday Christopher Beam of Slate discussed some historical precedents for the action that President Obama took in recent days when he appointed Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah, a prospective candidate for the GOP’s presidential spot in 2012, as Ambassador to China.

Beam refers in particular to the appointment made by President Kennedy on August 1, 1963, when he chose Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, the 1960 Republican vice-presidential candidate, to replace Frederick Nolting as American Ambassador to South Vietnam. At the time, Richard Nixon was still in the political wilderness after his defeat in California in 1962 and his subsequent “you won’t have Nixon to kick around” remarks, and Lodge was the favored figure among moderates who hoped to find a candidate for 1964 less polarizing than Gov. Nelson Rockefeller on the left or Sen. Barry Goldwater on the right.

Kennedy’s appointment of Lodge had a twofold advantage: it reminded the world of the Cold War maxim that “politics stops at the water’s edge” and it more or less confirmed Lodge in his disinclination to actively seek the Presidency in 1964.

Beam goes on to say that “after Kennedy’s assassination, Lodge came back and launched an unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination.” It sounds like the young reporter, three years out of Columbia, needs to sit down with a copy of Rick Perlstein’s Before The Storm. Lodge was never a declared candidate in 1964. After issuing nearly Shermanesque statements that he would not run or seek the nomination (though he did not prevent supporters from putting his name on primary ballots where his stated consent was not needed for that purpose) the ambassador won the New Hampshire primary in February 1964 as a write-in candidate, following a well-financed blitz by his Boston-based supporters. (Goldwater came in second in this contest and Rockefeller third, with Nixon, as an undeclared write-in candidate, finishing a fairly strong fourth.)

But even after similar victories in Massachusetts and New Jersey, Lodge remained in Saigon and made no concrete move to secure the nomination. He finally resigned his post at the end of June 1964 and returned to the United States, but by that time Goldwater had almost completely sewn up the nomination and desperate attempts by GOP moderates to deny it to him focused on Gov. William Scranton.

Beam also declares that “Nixon completed the process [of bipartisan support of the Vietnam War] by doubling down.” This is quite a mystifying statement. It was Lyndon Johnson, with the support of both parties in Congress, who escalated American involvement in Vietnam in early 1965. By contrast, Nixon was the President who completed, in phases, the process of de-escalating and concluding the conflict, in the face of resistance from a Democratic-controlled Congress which had many members who sought unilateral and immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. You have to wonder what the history books said in his classes up in Morningside Heights.

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