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5/12/2008
Personal Aside: Vallas Disappoints but Maybe That’s Because He’s Biding his Time. But If He Is to Run, He’d Better Think if Over Long and Hard.
Vallas.
On my radio show last night, Paul Vallas…a friend whom I admire very much…did not exactly burn up the turf and was a grey shadow of the commanding, oracular speaker he was at the City Club April 28. Jeff Berkowitz, my co-panelist, came meticulously prepared as usual. I had a tough time getting Vallas to even concede that he would consider running for governor…something he volunteered almost off-the-bat at the City Club. Then, following up, I got him to acknowledge that vouchers would be high on his list if he were to run…but he circumnavigated a bit talking about charter schools which are not all that controversial. Jeff and I got him finally to endorse vouchers and once he got warmed up he stated as he had earlier before the City Club that the poor deserved educational choice as much-if not more-than the wealthy.
In all fairness, he has a job under contract as superintendent of the entire Louisiana Recovery school system (I had thought it was just New Orleans) and as such must not only honor the contract but avoid being dragged into political speculation. However at the City Club he did the beckoning and teasing about running for governor. Maybe he got some heat back home following his speech here. But he was not the decisive guy on issues on the radio that he had been at the City Club. In fact, he was rather needlessly verbose without getting to the point until we pushed him.
I thought Jeff made a good point when he cited the fact that when Vallas ran in 2002 he was not head-on for vouchers…although he denied it. Since he was on my show a number of times in that period, I have the same recollection as apparently Jeff does, that he was less firm in supporting them-although last night he insisted he has always been for them. I don’t have the transcript (maybe Jeff does since he interviewed him on his TV show) but I have the same feeling as Jeff that he was very light on the issue.
Both of us…and a very good interrogator from the audience…pointed out the obvious since he now is firmly for vouchers: that the Democratic party is unalterably opposed to them because of the teachers’ unions. I also pointed out to him that the Democratic party lists are pretty full up for governor; Lisa Madigan, Dan Hynes, Pat Quinn, Alexi Giannoulias and as he would have to fight a lot of heavyweights for the nomination, perhaps the Republican side would be advantageous for him: if. If, running as a Republican would free him to announce what he might truly think. He ducked that one so stringently that as of this writing I would make two observations:
1. While after the City Club speech it seemed almost a 50-50 bet that Vallas will be running for governor in 2010, I think this has diminished drastically to a 25% chance and 75% that he will not run at all.
2. His City Club speech seemed to invite the idea that he could welcome being considered to run as a Republican with the prospect possibly 30% that he would entertain the idea, I now lower this expectation to under 15%.
In essence, I think the hope that Paul Vallas would run for governor...as a Democrat or as a Republican…is very slight. But he is a good man and a good friend and I wish him well.
On the all-important issue of his conquering his reluctance to fly…which played a big role in causing him to lose in 2002 because he did not spend the needed time downstate…he assured me that this has abated to the extent that he can accept short trips: Chicago to Springfield and hops around the state. If that’s the case, this is a major breakthrough.
| | | Flashback: Mother Teresa Comes to Chicago and Has a Special Word for Me Involving the Gates of Heaven.  | To atheist Christopher Hitchens this lady is a fraud
because she ministered to the poor, dying and
diseased not to cure poverty on earth but to glorify
"Christ and His Church." Answer him in Reader's
Comments. |
[Fifty years of memories written for my kids and grandchildren].
Mother Teresa of Calcutta came several times to Chicago during the 1980s and as a good friend of mine, Bill Isaacson, an attorney, was close to her, I would join him when she came in to meet her at the airport. The most significant time was in 1987 when she came in to address a group of well-wishers at Felician College. It was mid-July with the temperature hovering at near 100 degrees, without a breath of air. You could hold a lighted match aloft and the flame would not quiver, it was so airless.
Then she was a relatively healthy 77, an Albanian Cathlic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950 and who for 40 years ministered personally to the poor, sick, orphaned and dying. She had attracted the attention of Malcolm Muggeridge who conducted a film documentary of her work, “Something Beautiful for God” which he later turned into a book. That publicity won international acclaim for her and she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. When she came to Chicago to meet with her sisters and speak at Felician she was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children’s and family counseling programs, orphanages and schools.
She arrived at O’Hare carrying a plain cloth bag, attired in her plain white cotton habit with blue borders. She had a few nuns with her but the rules seemed to be that they traveled without much of a purse, depending on the charity of others. She was about 4 feet 11 inches tall, with a brown, wrinkled face that looked like a roadmap of Skopje, republic of Macedonia, part of Albania where she was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 10, 1910.
Her English was remarkably good. She was the younger of two children born to the Albanian family whose father was involved somewhat in Albanian politics. He died when Agnes was eight years old. Her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic. From early childhood on she was fascinated by stories of missionaries and by the time she was 12 she was committed in her mind to become a nun. She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary and never again saw her mother or sister again. She went to Loreto Abbey in Ireland to learn English because it was the language the sisters used to teach school children in India. She arrived in India in 1929, entered the novitiate in Darjeeling near the Himalayan mountains and pronounced her first religious vows as a nun in 1931. She chose the name Teresa after Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower and took her solemn vows in 1937 at the Loreto convent in eastern Calcutta where she was teaching school.
While she enjoyed teaching, she was overwhelmed by the poverty of Calcutta, especially after a 1943 famine plunged the city in death; then there was Hindu-Muslim violence in August, 1946. In 1946 she experienced what she felt sure was a call to leave the convent and live with the poor. So she left the convent, beginning her missionary work with the poor and replaced in traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton chira decorated with a blue border. She took Indian citizenship and started serving the destitute and starving, picking them up off the street. She had no income and had to beg for food and supplies. Then she experienced a desperate emptiness which afflicted many saints including St. John of the Cross who described his inner malady as “the dark night of the soul” -a feeling that despite all the hard work you are doing, you go to bed at night with an vacuity, not a pleasant thing to experience. But confessors say that at the very time you cannot detect the presence of God, He is paradoxically very near. It was a time of great testing for her.
She received Vatican permission in 1950 to start a diocesan order that would become the Missionaries of Charity with the mission to care for, as she described it, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people who have become a burden to society and are shunned by everyone.” Because these people felt unloved, she herself received as a special “gift” the feeling of desolate loneliness as well as she toiled for the poor. She began with 13 members in Calcutta and by time she came to Chicago as a world figure she had 3,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide including refugees, blind, disabled, alcoholics, the poor, victims of floods, epidemics and famines.
In 1952 she opened her first Home for the Dying in housing made available by the city of Calcutta. She insisted that those who were brought in would receive spiritual care they were familiar with. Muslims were read the quramn, Hindus received water from the Ganges and Catholics the Last Rites. “A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels-loved and wanted.”
As she trotted by his side as I carried her cloth bag, she nudged me in the ribs. She was so tiny I had to bend down to hear her. As we got in a cab she said…her eyes twinkling...that I looked well fed. Well, she was right. I was then about 220 lbs. and 6 feet tall with a fleshy face and jowls. She beckoned me to bend down again with a long bony finger. When I put my ear to her lips she said with a mellifluous Indian accent, “Reduce, for the gates of heaven are narrow!” She smiled the most beautiful smile, her wrinkled face lighting up like 1300 candlepower. I belonged to her that very instant.
When she spoke at Felician (the school is now dormant and is a convent) I had arranged a camera crew from Quaker Oats audio visual to record her. In the audience which was filled to overflowing was a man I didn’t meet then but some years after, Msgr. Ignatius McDermott. The auditorium had no air conditioning. He told me later what I had fully realized, the day was “hotter than the hinges of hell.” She was utterly cool and calm and while people nearly fainted for lack of air, she spoke so persuasively that she stayed throughout it.
When we delivered her and her coterie to the convent where she would stay the night, she beckoned me again. I bent down. “Would you tell me where that camera crew came from?” she said. I told her my company. She took my name and while the cabbie’s meter was running, copied it laboriously. Two months later a scrap of envelope arrived at my house. It was hand addressed with pencil. We almost tossed it away but ripped it open. It contained a torn jagged edge of a paper bag such as what would carry groceries. . On it was written in careful, nun-like precision, eloquent words of deep appreciation for meeting her. We put it in our safe deposit box because to us it is very valuable-the only correspondence we have had from beatified person who may very well be canonized.
One would not imagine someone like this would be controversial. But in death, Agnes became such. The journalist Christopher Hitchens became one of her most virulent critics. He wrote that while alive she failed to defend herself against critical coverage in the press, citing charges of “gross neglect and physical and emotional abuse in her orphanages and unsanitary conditions in some of them.” The German magazine “Stern” made allegations concerning financial record sloppiness and the spending of donations. The medical press also criticized her in attention to some medical facts. Hitchens himself testified at the Vatican against her beatification and canonization process, writing that her own words on poverty showed “her intention was not to help people”…that “she wasn’t working to alleviate poverty but to expand the number of Catholics.” He quoted her as saying-and I am sure this is quite right-“I am not a social worker. I don’t do it for this reason. I do it for Christ and His Church.”
Hitchens who trumpets the fact that he is a militant atheist in his book “God is not Great” is her mortal enemy. Not to take the money to alleviate poverty but to do it for Christ and His Church by ministering to the poor and dying is, to him, a mistake.
I don’t quite know how to answer this charge since it’s almost midnight and I must go to bed. Maybe you can do it in Reader’s Comment.
| | |
5/9/2008
Personal Asides: Paul Vallas on My WLS Program Sunday…Why I Choose to Moderate Rather than Bloviate…The Wedge…and Finally a Note.
Vallas.
Paul Vallas, superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans and former reform superintendent of the Chicago public schools, will be the guest this Sunday on my WLS-AM (890) program (8 to 9 p.m.). He ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois in 2002, losing narrowly to Rod Blagojevich. Since then, he was CEO of the School District of Philadelphia, presiding over the nation’s largest experiment in privatized management of schools, turning over the management of 40 schools to for-profits, nonprofits and universities, winning national acclaim. Regarded as one of the finest public administrators in the nation, he left Philadelphia when his contract was completed and went to work in New Orleans where today he reports directly to the governor, now Bobby Jindal. His contract will be up in 2008. He was also budget director for the city of Chicago and director of budgetary matters for State Senate President Phil Rock. He is renowned as one of the nation’s preeminent experts on public policy and administration. His family resides in Illinois and Vallas has always regarded himself as an Illinoisan.
Joining Paul to comment on the week’s news concerning Chicago and Illinois will be Jeff Berkowitz, the highly regarded ace interrogator of his own television show on CAN-Tv, “Public Affairs.”
Vallas appeared before the City Club of Chicago April 28 where the possibility of his running once again for governor in 2010 was mentioned. As his contract with New Orleans is still in effect, he declined to discuss the ins and outs of returning to political life but pointed out-significantly-that were he to run in Illinois (a) the only job that really would interest him would be governor and (b) he would make a key focal point of such a campaign reliance on vouchers. In the past as a Democratic candidate, he sidestepped the issue of vouchers. His announcement of his support of vouchers at the City Club was generally passed over by the news media but struck me as a very important step.
Why.
On my one-hour weekly program on WLS-AM, I choose to participate in a two-person discussion between a liberal and a conservative…which sometimes becomes a debate…rather than pontificate alone. Occasionally I am asked why. Three reasons: (1) I only have one hour which for pontification is far too short; (2) although many do not remember it, I held fort alone happily on WLS and two other stations for many years and have no objection to it-including stints lasting three hours daily on weekday evenings, on Saturday mornings. But on Saturday mornings on LS the last hour was devoted to what I called “Political Shootout” where I interrogated two guests with divergent viewpoints. When my time was shortened, I decided to go with “Shootout” entirely. Finally, (3) it is far easier to bloviate alone without fear of contradiction (the only divergent views being from callers whom you may silence by pushing a button, You may have heard on some national shows a divergent caller gets in, whereupon the host responds with alacrity and the caller is supposedly silenced with awesome respect. Not so: he is most certainly responding but he is talking to himself as he has been disconnected by the host). I find that instead of running my mouth, drawing conclusions from dual points of view serves as clarification of thought, for me and my listeners.
The Wedge.
Ok, ok, as Mr. Nofsinger is bored with economics talk, this will be the last of it. Here is what the wedge it.
When Henry Ford decided to raise his auto workers pay to $5 a day-then a very progressive step-he could be sure that 95% of this daily pay would be available to spend…and some of it on his cars. In other words, his labor costs were almost the same as the workers’ take-home pay. By contrast now the Ford Motor Company pays far-far more per hour for labor costs but the individual worker is lucky to take home a fraction of his own gross pay. The vast difference between the gross labor cost and the take home pay is known as “the wedge.” It consists primarily of federal income and payroll taxes plus the costs of special incentives, fringe benefits, pensions, health care etc., some paid by the worker and most by the employer -but all paid by the consumer. It is this wedge which supply-side economists contended pre-Reagan was the chief reason for our nation’s chronic bouts with inflation and recession-or stagflation.
They argue the combination of inflation and the bracket-creep of the “progressive” [sic] income tax automatically inflates this wedge even faster, forcing the economy to work harder and harder just to climb up the now famous “Laffer Curve” until real disposable income starts to sputter and the economy slides into recession again. Then, because the recession temporarily lowers the tax burden, there is temporary productivity and inflation relief-and recovery. But unless something is done to slow down the rising tax wedge, either through tax rate cuts or indexing, the whole deadly cycle begins again but at higher and higher levels each time. The long-term effect of this accelerating wedge incentives, lower basic productivity,, reduce real income growth and spur permanently higher inflation rates.
There. No more dismal science for a while. Incidentally, Frank, my father was a semi-pro baseball (and football) player and to the day of his death was saddened that his son never had either the athletic grace or the interest to be a sportsman.
Note.
If you’re occasionally unlucky, you will hit the Reader’s Comments of this website when, for a very short time, a scatological deviant writes in excreable bad taste, signing as his name the part of a woman’s anatomy which shows depravity bordering on the demonic. My webmaster quickly removes it. But if you find it in the brief interregnum before it is erased, know that this debased individual who lurks behind anonymity is a former supporter of Judy Baar Topinka, having gone to John Marshall law school where he returns to occasionally misuse a computer…one who has been offended since 2006 that I didn’t support her for governor. I didn’t because she is low rent (meaning of vulgar mien not economic status) which this heckler equals with his blennorrhea.
| | |
5/8/2008
Personal Asides: The Pressure on Hillary to Quit…Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” Effect in Indiana….The Phillips Curse—er, Curve…Terry Sullivan’s Movie Review Draws Hot Controversy.  | What Darwinism really is (not evolution) as protrayed in
the film "Expelled" and its Chicago Daily Observer
review by Marie T. Sullivan has launched a fury of
attacks by our liberal, pro-freedom of inquiry friends
in academe. Read for yourself at www.cdobs.com |
The Pressure on Hillary.
My sole interest is to see John McCain elected president, obviously and absolutely. Still I am amused at the number of “objective” analysts who are pleading, almost begging, Hillary Clinton to toss in the sponge so that Barack Obama can have a smooth thoroughfare to the Denver convention and the coronation.
These are analysts who pretend to have no dog in this race. Well, then, why are they so concerned? For the good of the “system”? Com’on. Not just the analysts but the great prominence that editors on radio and television give a story that seemingly hasn’t changed for weeks. The big push has been in news prominence…front page stories, first-in-line stories on news broadcasts…show that their placement is due to liberal journalistic worry that the Democratic party may not have sufficient time to pull itself together and elect Obama.
In addition, there seems to be a slyly directed news placement of stories quoting nameless and sometimes obvious pro-Obama Democrats urging Hillary to run with him. Now, as a McCain supporter, I am undecided, frankly, over whether the tie-up of Obama and Clinton would be good or bad for Republicans. Something tells me lumping them together would be good for us. For one thing the divisiveness and hatred between the two of them would be advantageous…and the accumulated baggage would be better for us to exploit than Obama’s selection of someone like, say, Indiana’s Evan Bayh.
Were I to separate myself from partisanship and pretend to be an adviser to Hillary Clinton, would I urge her to accept the vice presidential nomination? Probably if she were any other candidate, I would say yes. The vice presidency seems to be changing, to become more activist as the years go by. Until Walter Mondale, the job was a seeming dead letter unless the president died. I visited Mondale in the vice presidency and talked with him at great length. There is little doubt in my mind that Jimmy Carter gave him a great deal of responsibility. Similarly, George H. W. Bush seemed to have more power than Mondale. Al Gore for all his pretenses was given great authority by Bill Clinton. There is no doubt that Dick Cheney has made of the office what it had been intended for by the framers, i.e. the second most important office in the land. So were Hillary not Hillary…and somewhat younger than she is (she’s 60)…I would urge her to accept it if it’s offered.
Yet there is no doubt that Hillary wants to be president. To assume that she would be fit and able to run at age 68 after two terms of Barack Obama is to assume a lot. I have always imagined her drive for power would be such that she would be discontented with the vice presidency, especially since she had had a great deal of responsibility in the White House as First Lady. On balance, I would urge her to pass it up but in the spirit of good sportsmanship, help Obama conspicuously in the campaign.
I have written earlier that while I grant the election is Obama’s to lose, there strikes me as something about Obama that is distinctively weaker as a competitor to McCain than many people think. Because I suspect Hillary is a plunger, a gambler, a risk-taker, I would conclude that she would be better off returning to the Senate (after all, senator from New York is no slouch job) and retain the freedom of action to pursue the presidency down the line…in 2012 if Obama blows the chance…or in 2016 at the conclusion of what could be his second term when she will be 68. To that extent, John McCain is a role model, running for the job at 71.
What Was the Effect?
Granted Rush Limbaugh ought to keep his helium balloon-sized ego out of election day manipulations…what was the likely effect of his “Operation Chaos” where Republicans were directed to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Indiana primary basis she would be easier for McCain to beat? A survey of statistics-minded bloggers found these conclusions.
Judging from the exit polls, when Clinton voters were asked whom they would support in a Clinton-McCain contest, 7% said McCain. That is truly phenomenal if one can credit Rush with that effect. IF, that is. But then Hillary won by 14% margin of 11% of the electorate which comes out to a 1.5% advantage in the overall tally. Since the pretext of the Limbaugh “Operation Chaos” was that Hillary would be a weaker candidate than Obama, the 63% means that at the very most 1% of her margin came from the Limbaugh effect. Thus if every one of those 63% Republicans thought Obama would be more formidable belonged to “Operation Chaos” Limbaugh boosted Hillary’s margin from 1% to 2%.
On the other hand, if he is so persuasive with Republicans, how did McCain get the nomination at all since Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham all blasted him during the deciding days of the Republican primaries?
I am first to say that Rush has a tremendous effect as a conservative ally-with 20 million listeners…but I just can’t listen to him for a long period, that’s all. Like one drunk with celebrity he gloried in Hillary’s jocular statement that he has a crush on her. It’s sort of pathetic to hear someone with that celebrity extending since 1987 nationally who cannot get enough…literally can not get enough…of himself. Two recent cases.
Some commentator mentioned, at the time of the death of William F. Buckley, that he was different from Rush is that he didn’t go into tirades but skillfully dissected his opponents with a rapier. When listeners tuned in expecting to hear some laudatory words in eulogy about Buckley, they heard instead a longwinded disquisition from him on how he is indeed like Buckley as a fawning little old lady from Dubuque called in with “mega-mega dittoes, Rush!” to which the Great Man replied “it’s nothing, really m’am.”
Second, when the Jeremiah Wright issue erupted, ABC played a statement from Lanny Davis, former lawyer for Bill Clinton, zinging Obama for his lateness in recognizing the pastor’s shortcomings. Rush said: why we said that very same thing from the get-go here and didn’t get a mention on ABC. Rush, the news thrust was that Lanny Davis, a liberal Democrat, was saying it. Calm down: you weren’t snubbed. With Limbaugh, it’s all about HIM…nothing else. You remember the mock banner headline in the liberal “New York Times” they would run at the end of the world? WORLD ENDS! WOMEN AND MINORITIES HIT HARDEST! Limbaugh’s radio broadcast on hearing the first crack of doom would be “SEE? YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST! I TOLD YOU SO!”
The Phllips Curve and Its Fallacies.
Since no one answered, it either means no one knows or no one cares. I’ll take the first option but appreciate that economics has always been known as the dismal science. It was an economic model designed by British economist A. W. Phillips in 1957 who theorized there is an entirely reasonable relationship between rising unemployment and declining wage demands as well as vice versa. As scholar Warren T, Brookes wrote, the theory held that capitalists dealt with excessive wage demands and inflation by inducing economic slowdowns. My father always held to that theory (though he was not an economist) and in fact Brookes did write that Phillips’ theory worked “rather well over the last hundred years in Britain and America, right up through the middle 1960s but fell apart in the 1974-75 recession.”
That’s when its original purpose was twisted by the Keynesians who thought they would help the workingman by putting it into reverse, inducing a little inflation to fight unemployment. Actually it was based on misleading workers into accepting a hidden cut in real income while money was being printed and devalued. Prices through inflation were expected to rise faster than wages-cutting real wages, boosting profit margins and making it profitable to hire stilo more workers. But by the early 1970s unions counteracted it by writing into their contracts COLAs, the same steps being taken with major government entitlement programs and Social Security as well, at which point Phillips became obsolete.
All right. I’ll try one more economics question before switching to something else (Frank Nofsinger will say “switch!”). Without looking anything up and depending on your general knowledge…
Define a Tax Wedge.
The term became current during the early supply side days and was tossed around in debates between Milton Friedman and the real supply-siders.
Review of “Expelled.”
For a fine review of Ben Stein’s documentary film “Expelled,” go to the Chicago Daily Observer and read a review by our arts and culture editor, Marie T. Sullivan that was posted yesterday. It has drawn many hot comments from those who resent the idea of universities devoting any time whatsoever to the issue of intelligent design. In fact as I’m writing this, the only pro-ID comment comes from Pat Hickey.
It’s important to state what the film…and Marie’s review…does not espouse. They don’t espouse creationism. They don’t blast evolution which can mean simply “change over time.” But they do suggest that Darwinism which claims that design in living things is an illusion ought to be contrasted in academe with a scientific theory based on evidence from nature and consistent with everyday logic. There: is that so radical? Well, you’d think…to read the critics including those answering Terry’s review…that the film was proposing a return of the 12th century concept of flat earth. Darwin’s term for biological evolution was “descent with modification” which when studied literally it non-controversial. But Darwin didn’t stop there. Darwin set out to explain the origin of not just one or a handful of species but ALL species after the first. Thus the correct word for this is not evolution which is accepted…but Darwinism.
As Dr. Jonathan Wells points out (with a Ph.D in microbiology from Berkeley but also a Ph.D in theology from Yale) Darwinism claims all living things are modified descendents of a common ancestor…the principal mechanism of modification has been natural selection acting on undirected variation that originate in DNA mutations…and unguided processes are sufficient to explain all features of living things-so that whatever may seem to be design, is just an illusion.
Thus, in essence, the issue is not between evolution and creationism. Nor is it strictly speaking between Darwinism and intelligent design. It is whether in secular academia there can be any reference at all to intelligent design. I guarantee you once you read some of the frenetic responses to Marie T. Sullivan’s thoughtful review, you will be mystified at the anger and heat that it and the film has generated from the opposition but relatively little light. The film and review pleads for acceptance of the possibility of intelligent design in universities (which is supposed to be hospitable to countervailing views) only to find that Darwinism is itself a religion.
Once again we have liberal scientists betrothed to ideology and liberal media (i. e. for local purposes, the redoubtable Richard Roeper) presenting anyone who questions Darwinism as redneck, hopelessly ignorant. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that Darwin and the entire later experience has offered no evidence whatsoever for one species evolving into another, that “design” better tells the story of the complexities of molecular biology than does random mutation…leading to the conclusion that Darwinism is matter of religion or rigid ideology rather than evidence.
It is clear from watching the film that Darwinists are terrified that intelligent design is a foot in the door leading to forcible acceptance of creationism. Not so. Read her view in www.cdobs.com and the hot-tempered comments and come back to me with your findings.
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5/7/2008
Personal Aside: There Was Never Any Suspense Anyhow—Obama Will be Nominated and Hillary Won’t Quit (for Which I Salute Her).  | Everyone has known but the media that
the nomiination goes to Obama because of
the demographic realities. But all the same,
you go, girl! Stick in there until the end and
don't let the pro-Obama media push you out. |
No Suspense.
At this writing…a little before midnight Tuesday…the hype about Hillary losing North Carolina and either carrying Indiana by an eyelash or losing by an eyelash is-eyewash.
It presumes the race for the nomination is suspenseful. It has not been for many weeks. Barack Obama has been slated to win the votes of a majority of the Super-delegates for many weeks now. Those mathematicians who are calculating the numbers don’t understand that at this point it is not a mathematical game but a strategic one. Literally a no-brainer since it involves the long range future of the Democratic party. Why?
Because the future of the Democratic party is tied up with its huge lock on the black vote. Super-delegates are all for the most part practical politicians. To snatch the nomination away from Obama when he is ahead in delegate count would irreparably destroy much black loyalty to the Democratic party. That loyalty is essential if the party is to continue to win slots up and down the ticket. Can you imagine what would happen to congressional races, state and county offices from top to bottom in every major state in this nation that has black votes? Not going for Obama would be a catastrophic mistake and its devastation could last for at least a generation. Not that disillusioned blacks would vote for McCain. There would be a tremendous fall-off in turnout.
This doesn’t mean Hillary will or should quit. She should definitely not because in the last weeks she has impressed many who are not in her corner with her resilience and toughness, two qualities vital for the presidency. In contrast, I have noted among my Democratic friends that Obama’s attractiveness has started to fade. Why-because of Jeremiah Wright? No, not necessarily although it was definitely a distraction.
Obama’s attractiveness as a candidate has been that he presents a different approach to politics, that the old see-saws, parsing, lies and doubletalk will end with him. In the campaign he has engaged in studious doubletalk that is not even slightly muted. Take his passing the ethics bill in the state Senate. He was allowed to put his name on it because Emil Jones, the ex-sewer worker turned senator, allowed him to. He overstates minimal accomplishments in the Senate; he outright lied just as Hillary has lied in trying to link himself to great events i.e. stating in Selma, Alabama that the bloody 1965 attack on the bridge impelled his parents to marry. How touching. But they had been married several years previously. How does that differ from Hillary’s claim to run through sniper-fire or that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary-two events that have been disproved factually?
His entire career in the Senate has been marked by caution and fear of substantive legislating. The Gang of 14…composed of Democrats and Republicans…who cut through the impasse in the Senate to achieve votes for court nominees (and I am not convinced of its overall value)…was accomplished without him. He is a straight Emil Jones-like party line hack. In the past few days I’ve been checking with people who knew the early Barack to see if they had perceived a searching for Jesus Christ which led him to Trinity United Church of Christ. The answer uniformly is no. His goal as has become clear now was to hang with a church that had at least 10,000 members who could supply the nucleus to his political career. If he found Christ somehow in that search, fine-but politics was the basis. The inflammatory rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright, not much different than any other storefront haranguer, didn’t faze him. Nor actually was he in the pews for any considerable time at all. He was doing “a shake and howdy” with people and his presence as a parishioner was, as Wright candidly admitted, very slight.
I am rather alone, I think, in imagining that a Barack Obama candidacy might well be easier for McCain to beat than a Hillary one. Hillary is not prone to make such huge mistakes as Obama. She is a better debater than Obama. Understand, I think the odds are very-very slight that Republicans can win this one…but I feel that quite by accident, we got the strongest candidate in John McCain-one whom I didn’t favor for first, second or third place. But given the nature of the contest, I think he is the best we could find. I think the contrast between McCain and Obama will be a better contrast than between McCain and Hillary.
I am sure Hillary will continue to run even if she has to live off the land and while she will give token support to Obama in the general, events…my dear boy, events…will occur that will make the Clintons valuable to the McCain forces by November. After all, Hillary would be foolish to accept the vice presidency given the age of this young man. Unlike the eccentric and erratic Fr. Andrew Greeley I won’t speculate on contingencies involving threats to life. Obama is a young, healthy man who if elected and if he does reasonably well could be reelected. A Hillary vice presidency would be an impediment to her. Her game plan should be to encourage a McCain victory with the understanding that if he’s around at age 76 and is able to comprehend, he should expect she will be running in 2012-or if he wants to pack it in, so much the better.
| | |
5/6/2008
DON’T ACCUSE ME OF BEING A POLLYANNA. OBAMA IS STILL GOING TO BE VERY-VERY TOUGH TO BEAT.
Still: There is One Hope-Events, My Dear Boy, Events.
A column from The Wanderer, the nation’s oldest national Catholic weekly.
By Thomas F. Roeser
CHICAGO-In these articles it has been my fate to bring depressing news to my fellow conservatives-much like the host who removes the punch bowl just as the party is getting to be fun. Just as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ripping themselves to shreds…and as John McCain is tied with both of them for the presidency…I come along and remind you how almost insuperably difficult it will be to elect a Republican president. Well so be it; however you will notice I leave a tiny glimmer of possibility.
There are six reasons why electing a Republican president in 2008 will be a near-impossibility.
First, given that a Gallup poll last week found George W. Bush’s disapproval rating the lowest-at 69%--of any president in its 70 year history, it is clear that the American electorate is sick of the Bushes and anything to do with them-which includes their airhead twins one of whom, Jenna, has said she will vote for Obama. Why is this so since almost alone I believe revisionist historians will incardinate George W. after we are all dead as a great president? Because living with the Bushes one way or another since 1980 is, for all of us, like eating too much chocolate: you never want a single morsel again.
It begins with the ageless preppie, George H. W. with a goofy smile like the comic Charles Nelson Reilly who makes silly mistakes, listening to a Harvard guru convince him to break his no-tax-hike pledge, acting like an errant toy soldier from a Nutcracker ballet chorus; his wife, Barbara, a patrician with a helmet of white hair who resembles all those wealthy matriarchs with eastern seaboard accents who run Spring social parties to benefit Planned Parenthood.
It includes their son Neil, the director of Silverado Savings & Loan which collapsed costing the taxpayers $1 billion for which he paid a fine of $50,000 and whose divorce from Sharon made national headlines because he admitted patronizing an escort service which led Sharon to surreptitiously snip a lock of his hair, not to impart a voodoo curse on him as he inaccurately charged but because she wanted the hair to be analyzed for drug use. Then we get to George W. whose game has always been to make a bet and let it ride: refusing to cast a veto on anything passed by Congress for five straight years, signing wasteful spending schemes and the horrendous McCain-Feingold law.
This is not to say there are not good parts-indeed, extraordinarily good including that first veto which was of embryonic stem cell experimentation…and more including successful moves to conservatize the Supreme Court. But take it as an article of faith that the nation has had an overdose, that’s OD, of Bushes that will last for decades to come.
Second, Iraq. After a successful invasion of Iraq ala Illinois’ Don Rumsfeld with a brilliantly bold, low-casualty drive to Baghdad and overthrow of the longstanding Baathist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the administration severely under-estimated the occupied Iraq insurgency and the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction which was announced in 2004 by chief UN weapons inspector David Kay who said to his great surprise no weapons of this kind were found. Claims of the surge working (which I truly believe) notwithstanding, a new record of 63% of the American people (same Gallup poll) believe the war is a mistake. Now Bush has found his Ulysses S. Grant in David Petraeus but it’s a question of whether it’s too late. Lincoln found Grant in 1864 and thanks to Grant’s victories was reelected that same year; whether Petraeus can subject or calm Iraq enough to allow Republicans to win even a marginal victory is uncertain.
Third, the economy. While not nearly so bad as the media say, the dollar is weak and equity markets are both volatile and bearish. But things are bound to get worse because of Democrats’ war on “the rich.” The top tax rate on estates now is zero but is scheduled to go up to 55% on January 1, 2011 and Democrats are against stopping the hike. The persona tax rate on dividends is now 15% but will rise spectacularly to 39.6% as part of the populist Democrats’ war on the rich; and that same war is likely to claim capital gains which will shoot up from 15% to 20%; the top rate on personal income will be hiked from 35% to 39.6%.
These are wrong moves in a “recession” climate but you can’t convince Democrats or much of the media of that. And Democrats aver, Americans have become increasingly convinced that globalization harms ordinary workers. This flies in the face of Bush’s-and McCain’s-support of free trade. The knock `em-dead recession long heralded as coming `round the bend by liberals, hasn’t hit us with full fury yet. True, as economist Brian Wesbury has said, when you add up all the components of GDP-consumption, business investment, home building, trade and government-you get a big goose-egg (0%) since weakness in housing and government offset gains in the others. But inventories rebounded strongly in the last quarter. Yet this helps no Republican as the mythology maintains we are in a recession.
Fourth, voting evidence. While 25% of the Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania told exit pollsters they would either vote for McCain or not vote at all if Obama were nominated, 27% of Republican primary voters in that state went to the polls to vote Democratic though there was a Republican primary extant, open only to registered Republicans. Rush Limbaugh claims they followed his urging to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to stir the Democratic pot but who knows? . Moreover while it didn’t count since McCain is the presumptive GOP nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvanians cast their votes anyhow for either Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul which is more voters than separated Clinton and Obama. Not a good sign especially since John Kerry beat Bush in Pennsylvania by 144,000 in 2004. In Pennsylvania, there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans which figures don’t include independents who couldn’t vote in either primary but who, polls have shown, have been moving to Democrats in the state steadily since 2006.
Fifth the rise in new Democratic contributor-fundraising across the country…an index into political health. Even before her victory in Pennsylvania when Hillary was crucially low on funds, she was topping McCain in new donations 2.4 to l. Obama beats McCain 3 to l.
Sixth, social conservatives meaning authenticist pro-life Catholics to evangelical Protestants have always been on board to support Republican presidential candidates since Ronald Reagan-but they are lagging due to coolness for McCain. Last month at a key, unpublicized meeting in New Orleans, several dozen leaders met and fought against each other like tigers. Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense fund attacked the group for not supporting Mike Huckabee. Paul Weyrich, a legendary leader, incapacitated since a freak accident left him with a spinal injury that led to both his legs being amputated, told the group in a low whisper amplified by a microphone that he had supported Mitt Romney, not Huckabee but “friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.”
Earlier Focus on the Family founder James Dobson had said on his radio program, “I cannot under any circumstances support John McCain.” Newt Gingrich had tried to rally support from them after he made a public confession of his concupiscence on Dobson’s radio program but there were too many doubts, especially about Gingrich’s administrative failings as Speaker. Mitt Romney whose key backer was Matt DeMoss spent the limit to woo the social conservative leaders-including sending each of them an expensive office chair to which was pinned a note: “You’ll always have a seat at my table.” He strove vainly for their support but they remembered that as governor of Massachusetts just a few short years earlier he fought against everything they sought. He was denied backing. Fred Thompson’s attitude was that of a leisurely senior citizen; Ron Paul, though pro-life, was too iconoclastic, too cranky, too libertarian. His reforms were too draconian; for example, most wondered how the health of the public would get safeguarded with Paul’s crusade to repeal the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906 which would upend the FDA. Then McCain appeared before the group and struck out-retelling a hoary tale on how his prison guard in North Vietnam drew the sign of the cross in dirt at McCain’s feet and then brushed it away. If it was supposed to electrify the group, it didn’t. And since then pro-life religious groups have been AWOL in McCain’s campaign.
Hark! Is That The Cavalry’s Hooves We Hear?
However I was the one who told you Harold Macmillan’s “events, my dear boy, events” story about how unpredictable occurrences can win or lose elections, was I not? There was no Republican candidate more in trouble, more bereft and more slated for the dustbin than McCain just a little over a year ago and he rose from the ashes to get the nomination. And no more shining forerunner of inevitable presidential victory than Barack Obama. McCain’s story first. Events-my-dear-boy affected them both: McCain for the good, Obama for the worse.
His liabilities seemed insurmountable. He is 71 years old going on 72 who would be the oldest president at time of election, one with past serious health concerns (a malignant melanoma diagnosed in 2000), who would be the first president not to be born in this country but in the Canal Zone where his father was stationed (and which a congressional resolution was passed to assure his legality). Despite his hero status as a prisoner of war, he had committed numerous political offenses against his party, for one seeking the presidency. He had allowed personal pique to color his relationship with the president of his own party stemming from his loss of the nomination to Bush in 2000. He challenged Bush and his conservative Republican Senate colleagues on numerous issues including authorship of the McCain-Feingold Act.
He was a major supporter of liberal immigration reform which angered conservatives and was defeated. He had even considered leaving the Republican party as a senator. His temper outbursts were seen as a souvenir of emotional instability endured through five years of largely solitary confinements and beatings. His running for president was seen by pundits as a quixotic venture. He started out as a favorite but when his enemies gathered to rain blows upon him his standing dwindled to seeming insignificance.
A low level of support in single-digits led McCain to drop out of the Iowa straw poll. The road back was tough. He became convinced he had to repair his bridges. He appeared at Jerry Falwell’s university as a commencement speaker notwithstanding that he had claimed Falwell was “an agent of intolerance”-a commencement at which some students carried placards protesting “McCain does not speak for me.” Conservatives booed him. The co-chair of his Florida campaign was picked up by cops on July 11, 2007 for soliciting a prostitute.
Worse, there was flagrant campaign over-spending. Campaign managers and consultants battled. With all the issue troubles…immigration, disconnects with conservatives…his earlier brushes with Bush…campaign contributions evaporated. In August. 2007 nine members of his campaign staff resigned because he couldn’t find funds to pay them. McCain said “we have to live off the land” with few paid staffers, relying on free news media exclusively. He was facing seven opponents, most of whom had better finances: Romney, Giuliani, Thompson notably.
Then, in December, came an event, Macmillan’s description of how an occurrence can change things. It was the Dec. 28 assassination of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto. Why in the world should that be a sizable event for McCain? Because it put the focus-bead on experience. .
Among all the Republican hopefuls, only McCain appeared to sound knowledgeable about strategy the U.S. should pursue in that crisis. The Sleepy Eye of the electorate (Eugene McCarthy’s phrase made to this writer) opened and took note of the fact that McCain appeared supremely knowledgeable, as the only lawmaker with extensive foreign experience. He had met often with Bhutto and also with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. Slowly McCain’s credibility started to return. Not at first. He came in fourth place in the Iowa caucuses of January, 2008 but unlike Romney had not staked a win there. Romney had spent three times more than Huckabee who finished first and seven times more than McCain. After the lousy fourth place finish, pundits almost unanimously told him to withdraw. McCain blew up. “The hell with this,” he told one pundit. “I’m going to New Hampshire where voters don’t let people like you tell them how to vote!” In New Hampshire he swung out hard at Bush for fouling up Iraq but backed him on the “surge” and vowed never to preside over a U.S. military defeat.
Few other Republican candidates came close to backing the surge, fearing that if it failed they would suffer. Not McCain. He extolled a new name in the military, General David Petraeus. Punching hard at the thought of winning in Iraq “with honor,” his national polling now showed him at 21% approval among the Republican candidates. He went to New Hampshire and won 37% to Romney’s 32% amid cries “Mac is back!” His national rank improved to 34% among the GOP candidates, a 21-point rise. Facing Romney in Michigan, the state of Romney’s birth, he did remarkably well, placing second to a native son 30% to 39% On to South Carolina where he met a barrage of mailers sent to all members of the media alleging that while a captive in Vietnam, McCain passed military secrets to the North Vietnamese to save his neck. The mailings backfired and McCain won with 33% to Huckabee’s second place 30%.
Now radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his 20 million listeners that the nomination of McCain “would destroy the Republican party” and Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, said “McCain has done more to hurt the Republican party than any elected official I know of.” Conservative newspaper columnist and TV talking head Ann Coulter (she of the knee-length long blonde tresses) said that if McCain were nominated, she would back Hillary Clinton. Now McCain faltered under the blows, finishing third in Nevada, with only 13% of the vote, finishing behind Romney and Ron Paul. The battle then moved to Florida where pundits said it would be a test for McCain among hard-core conservative Republican voters.
Rush Limbaugh was still firing his guns saying McCain was joined at the hip with Democratic liberals. The battle there was bloody. “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert reminded McCain he had said earlier “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues.”
Romney outspent McCain 3 to 1 on television and Limbaugh was joined in his attack on McCain by radio talk show host Laura Ingraham who said “I am concerned about the mental stability of the McCain campaign”-an obvious jibe at a rumor that years of incarceration had damaged McCain’s mind. Mark Levin, the talk show host known as “the Great One” started to call him “Senator McLame.” But McCain won the primary while being outspent 3 to 1, with 36% of the vote, Romney with 31% and Rudy Giuliani at 15%. That victory led to a flood of endorsements. McCain then won Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Oklahoma.
He was greeted tepidly when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and delicately amended his tune on immigration, saying he would make his first priority protection of the borders. He was told he had it unofficially wrapped up but not so. He lost the Kansas convention to Huckabee and lost Louisiana to Huckabee by one percentage point, won the Washington state caucuses. Without stopping to catch a breath he won Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia primary votes. On Feb. 14 Romney officially endorsed him. Huckabee stayed in but McCain beat him in Wisconsin. Now conservative talk show host Michael Medved who had supported Romney said Limbaugh, Ingraham and Levin, by engaging in candidate shilling (by which he meant using their roles as commentators to negate or hustle votes for favorites) and name-calling, had dishonored the talk show host profession. (First time I heard it called a “profession” but as extolling his talents as being “on loan from God” and declaring he has mastered certain issues with the same intimacy that he knows “every inch of my gloriously naked body” earns Limbaugh $20 million a year, never mind).
But the hammer blows weren’t over yet. The New York Times talked to two former associates of McCain who said that they had become convinced a romantic relationship had existed between their boss and a female lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, that McCain had acknowledged behaving inappropriately; as result they said they became disillusioned with the senator. Both were later identified as having been let go during the lapse in campaign fund-raising and one, John Weaver, who switched from Republican to Democrat, was seemingly working to destroy all he had built-up since he had been fired. None other than Lanny Davis, a former Bill Clinton staffer, stepped up to defend McCain’s role with the female lobbyist, although Davis will not vote for McCain. Immediately former talk show host critics Limbaugh and Ingraham rallied to his defense. He officially clinched the nomination on March 4 with sweeping victories in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont. President Bush then endorsed him at the White House. Now the man who was given up for dead a year earlier in presidential match-ups not only was the presumptive nominee but in an admittedly terrible year for Republicans has virtually tied Obama and Hillary Clinton in November match-ups. One event which occurred while the Sleepy Eye was awake and watching determined the difference.
Obama: Object of Hate by His Ex-Pastor.
McCain has had an invaluable breather as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama attempt to beat the tar out of each other for the Democratic nomination. In one of the most notable events Obama, the front-runner, attempted to defend his ex-pastor for using his pulpit to curse the United States and thunder any number of unacceptable things. Obama unwisely sought to deflect the imprecations but said he could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than he could the entire black community or his white grandma: an unfortunate statement that seemingly linked the entire African-American electorate with Wright…and may not have endeared him further to grandma, who knows?
Then last week Wright moved from being a supporter of Obama to an outright critic. Insiders in the black churches say that when Obama dis-invited Wright to give the invocation at his announcement, Wright was irredeemably angered. Last week he took to the road for TV interviews and two speeches (National Press Club and NAACP convention). In the speeches he mocked Obama, praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, repeated his view that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities.
Now Obama campaign HAS disowned Wright. The effects are not over yet. Suffice it to say the man who will negotiate with all our foreign enemies…the president of Iran, Castro, the head of North Korea…has struck out dealing effectively with his own pastor. Jeremiah Wright is behaving like McCain’s ex-aide John Weaver to destroy what he cannot participate in.
Thus does unanticipated events make enthralled students of us all.
| | | Personal Aside: What is Progressive About Taxation?  | Karl Marx was not so naive as to
think his progressive income tax idea
would destroy the hated rich--but would
rob the middle class of the incentive to
become rich. |
Answer: Nothing.
My thanks to those who sent in their erudite comments last week including John Powers who impressed us with his offhanded scholarly analysis of…I had to look him up…Vilfredo Pareto; Ralf Seiffe, Lovie’s Leather, Mark Harris, Leon Dixon.
The answer of course as all of you have agreed, is nothing. In 1980 during an overheated speech to the Democratic National convention, Sen. Edward Kennedy mocked Ronald Reagan for claiming “the progressive income tax was spawned by Karl Marx and declared by him to be the prime essential of a socialist state-the method prescribed for taxing the middle class out of existence.” Kennedy elicited laughter at the convention by saying “Mr. Reagan has confused Karl Marx with Theodore Roosevelt!” And the liberal columnist Richard Strout wrote, “Can America really elect a man as president who believed that the graduated income tax was invented by Karl Marx? Why does Reagan say such things?”
If Kennedy or Strout had read the Marx-Engels “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 they would find among the proposals 10 steps by which the proletariat would seize power from the despised middle class including the following:
“A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”
As the astute late commentator Warren Brookes noted, Marx was too sophisticated to believe such a tax would gut the rich or middle class. He knw that progressive marginal tax rates punish tot al productivity and output but would not hurt the already rich who could find ways to avoid it-either by moving or sheltering their wealth in the underground economy or through legislative loopholes. But Marx understood sagely that the greatest threat to socialism was not the rich who were and are relatively few in number but from the upward aspirations and mobility of the vast middle class whose legitimate desire is to join the upper class.
Now the Next Question.
No looking up your old econ books or going to search engines, remember. What is/was the Phillips Curve?
| | |
5/5/2008
Flashback: McCarthy’s Prestige Dwindles To Where He is Admired by a Precious Few. His Views Take Peculiar Twists and Turns. Deaths of Daughter, Wife and Companion Marya McLaughlin. Finally McCarthy Himself at Age 89.  | Gene McCarthy became the first national
figure to doubt the need of the U. S. to
win in time of war. He died as he had lived,
an enigma wrapped in a paradox. |
[More than 50 years of politics written for my kids and grandchildren].
Eugene McCarthy watched with satisfaction the reelection of Ronald Reagan over his erstwhile colleague Walter Mondale in 1984 although he said Reagan didn’t know anything about issues but didn’t need to know them to be president, and lived in a kind of self-imposed exile at his home in Woodville, Virginia with occasional forays in politics all of which brought defeat. He lived in a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in Woodville, in Rappahannock county, at the feet of the Blue Ridge mountains, a 90-minute drive from Washington. He lived on a $40,000 a year Senate pension, such lecture fees as I and others could arrange, an annual fee as a director of Harcourt-Brace and book sales.
His political wanderings had confused many. He ran as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 but fared poorly in New Hampshire and Wisconsin and dropped out. He ran as an independent candidate for president in 1976 when Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were opposing each other; he tried to encourage sufficient funds to dislodge certain Democratic states that were seen as very narrowly going for Carter-but the money to run TV ads was not sufficiently forthcoming (although I helped him in this). In 1980 he came out for Ronald Reagan and hoped to be named ambassador to the UN but was disappointed; whereupon he turned on Reagan. He sat out the 1984 campaign but in 1988 at age 72 his name appeared on various ballots as the presidential candidate of a handful of left-wing satate parties such as the Consumer Party in Pennsylvania and the Minnesota Progressive party. In this campaign he did a U turn on libertarianism and supported trade protectionism, Reagan’s Star Wars and abolition of the two-party system. In 1992 he attempted to return to the Democratic party and entered the New Hampshire primary at 76 but was excluded from the candidate debates. In 2000 at age 84 he supported Ralph Nader for president.
Every few years he would publish a new book of essays or political commentary. Whenever editors suggested revisions, his habit was to look for a new editor. “As his own friends admitted,” wrote biographer Dominic Sandbrook, he was “too lazy and self-assured to work hard at a book.” Because Sandbrook was critical, McCarthy stormed that he was seriously thinking of suing Sandbrook for libel-but didn’t.
His works started well. The first three were brimming with scholarship and acerbic writing-- “Frontiers in American Democracy” 1960, “Dictionary of American Politics,” (1962) and “A Liberal Answer to the Conservative Challenge,” (1964) as an answer to Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative.” These books showed the effect of solid research. But the remainder do not-since McCarthy had come to the conclusion that his experiences in politics were themselves all the research needed. This is true with “The Limits of Power: America’s Role in the World,” (1967), “The Year of the People” (1969), about his 1968 campaign, “The View from Rapahannock” (1984) “Up `til Now” (1987), “A Colony of the World” (1992). “No Fault Politics” (1998).
A very clever book is the one he wrote with the conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick, a drinking buddy and soul-mate, “A Political Bestiary” (1979), illustrated by Jeff McNally and is my favorite. Others which were, to my mind, well-written and highly worth the reading were “War and Democracy” (1968) and “Hard Years: Antidotes to Authoritarians”(2001). Not so the final one, “Parting Shots from My Brittle Brow: Reflections on American Politics and Life” (2004).
Deaths of Loved Ones.
The McCarthys had four children-a son, Michael Benet McCarthy, a daughter Ellen McCarthy, a daughter Margaret Alice McCarthy and a daughter Mary Abigail McCarthy. Of all the children, Mary Abigail was most politically involved. She graduated from Radcliffe College of Harvard University and New York University law school. She was a public defender in Washington, D. C. She struggled with cancer for many years and died July 28, 1990.
Gene’s close companion, Marya McLaughlin, 68, died in her home in Falls Church, Va. on September 14, 1998 of respiratory failure following an attack of meningitis. She was the first woman to appear in a regular journalistic position on network television news. Her paid death noticed listed McCarthy as her “close friend.”
Abigail McCarthy from whom he was never divorced, was 85 when she died on February 1, 2001 of breast cancer at her Connecticut avenue apartment in Washington, D. C. It was said that after a heated quarrel with her during the 1968 campaign he left after dinner and never returned. He took up with Marya McLaughlin the CBS-TV correspondent, dividing his time between his Woodville, Virginia farmhouse and her Washington, D. C. apartment. However toward the end of her life she renewed acquaintance with Gene; he turned his Senate pension over to her. She commented in 1987, “I’ve come to think of Gene as a relative.”
His Writings.
In most of the latter books he approached Ron Paul in his libertarianism with deviation for protectionism in manufacturing. But he did Paul one better. On abortion, while he was opposed to it, he felt the issue should be between a woman and her doctor and the government should not intrude. Paul is a little more definitely opposed than that. Throughout his life, McCarthy was making a journey. Starting as a very devout Catholic and rural lifer, he gradually watered down his faith until it was one of his own making. On all his obits the writers say he was a “devout Catholic.” Not in his final two decades or so. He was a free-thinking Catholic with enough cynicism and sardonic wit in him to doubt many of the immutable truths of the Church. This was either a legacy from Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB or an intellectual concoction McCarthy himself brewed. It is a mistake, I think, to blame Godfrey for McCarthy since both were equals i.e. not a priest shaping a layman.
Not long ago the author of “Almost to the Presidency,” the book I used as a kind of time-line for McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey to write my own observations and experiences with them, Al Eisele was in town for a speech to the St. John’s alumni. Al is a resident scholar with the Eugene J. McCarthy Institute at St. John’s. Al’s topic was the election of 2008 but I asked him who, in his estimation, was the greater man (neither was great in my estimation but that’s the term I used anyhow). Not to my surprise, Al picked McCarthy because he challenged the Vietnam war. My own choice would be Humphrey for without him taking a principled stand at the Chicago convention of 1948 the Democratic party would not have changed from the segregationist model it was.
True, all kinds of racial pandering and liberal excesses followed that change but the need for an initial change in 1948 was indisputable. Neither Humphrey nor McCarthy were great in an absolute sense. Hubert was a manipulative politician but his sense of conscience on civil rights came to the fore in 1948 and the Democratic party should thank him for his courage. Of McCarthy’s opposition to the Vietnam war, I think you know my position. It was a matter of convenience. His challenge of the war was at bottom unpatriotic. In announcing his candidacy in 1967 he said: “I am concerned that the Administration seems to have set no limit to the price it is willing to pay for military victory.”
Consider that statement for a moment. Suppose you heard it enunciated during the Korean War or World War II. It is the mother spawn of all anti-war defeatist statements that continues to the present day in Iraq. Before Gene McCarthy no so-called national figure ever dared to criticize the prospect of victory in war. This is, in the last analysis, probably what McCarthy’s true legacy was: spawning defeatist and skeptical attacks on the nation’s foreign policy and military ventures, adding even the wished-for prospect of military defeat.
In New Hampshire (which McCarthy didn’t win but came close) the psychology of his campaign was helped immeasurably by a spurious event-the supposed defeat of America with the Tet offensive. Faulty reporting on Tet misled the American people in many ways, including giving McCarthy support based on error that he should not have had. His near-victory there was spurious. It’s my contention that he saw the war which he once supported so warmly as to assure Johnson he would be loyal to it as vice president, as the opportunity to get even with a whole host of people…LBJ, Hubert, the rank and file of his party…for acquiescing in Johnson’s not choosing him for vice president. That is the view I have of his anti-war drive and one which I shall keep until I am persuaded by evidence to change.
McCarthy Dies: 2005.
Hobbled by complications of Parkinson’s disease, Eugene McCarthy died at age 89 on December 10, 2005 at Georgetown Retirement Residence in Washington, D. C. His eulogy was delivered by former President Bill Clinton despite the fact that McCarthy had called for his resignation when he was afflicted by scandal. Following McCarthy’s death, the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University dedicated their public policy center as the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy. Accordingly all kinds of great claims have been made for McCarthy’s views. But they are so discordant and contradictory one can scarcely ascertain what philosophy he had, if indeed he had any. He was a relativist and skeptic imbued with a bitter get-even sense that was waged against all his former allies.
The last time I saw him was in Minnesota at the 94th birthday of my former boss, former Governor Elmer L. Andersen. McCarthy, who was 89 and who was to die very shortly, was sitting in an anteroom of the hall where the banquet was held. He had then all the earmarks of Parkinson’s…the rigidity of a statue, the frozen expression of the face, with eyes that moved relentlessly in their sockets without movement of head, eyes moving to and fro. Our eyes made contact; I knew without doubt that this would be the last time we would see each other but out or respect for the energetic, witty and jesting man he had been, I decided to forego a conversation. I walked by; his head remained fixed as is the nature of the disease but his eyes followed me. So compelling were they that I turned and we stared for a long time at each other. His eyes were twinkling mischievously. I saluted him. He moved a few fingers to acknowledge but that was all. I moved on.
| | |
5/2/2008
Personal Asides: For Economics Wonks—What Is “Progressive” About Taxation?...A Daley for Ever-Changing Seasons…Where is the Black “Leadership” Condemning Wright?...”Expelled” Gets Thumbs Down from Roeper: “What a Piece of Garbage”…Mission Accomplished?  | Why is the good reverend so quiet
on the subject of Jeremiah Wright?
Cat got his tongue? Yes, he doesn't
want to antagonize those parisioners
who yell "right on!" when Wright goes
into his black racist tirades. So Obama
stands alone. |
“Progressive” Taxation?
We turn now from theological wonk-ism to economic wonk-ism. The same rules apply. No search engines. Rely on your own background of knowledge. The great central plank of western liberalism is the graduated income tax: the view that taxes can be regarded as progressive when they fall more heavily on higher incomes than on lower, that taxes can be regarded as progressive if they fall more heavily on higher incomes than on lower. Ralph Martire, a friend, has said that Adam Smith endorsed the concept of progressive taxes but I cannot find any pertinent reference-nor can Greg Blankenship. My question to you is-is such taxation “progressive”? Where did it find positive acceptance? Your assignment today without boning up but using your own native resources: write a paragraph either defending or assailing the concept of “progressive” taxation. Use either Reader’s Comments on my personal email.
One further point. Every so often on Reader’s Comments there appears a scatological comment which we remove promptly. On the Theological Wonk it so ridiculed apparitions of the Virgin Mary as to be demonic. It salaciously uses a ridicule of a female living human being’s body as an identification. Do me this favor: Please ignore it; do not respond to it--for it will not be there long. It’s hysteria, in fact, seems demonic. Rather than answer it, stay away from commenting. You can apprehend by its comments that it is twisted, perverted. Weekends are when it likely strikes, when the webmaster is not working. Were it in a room with us, a splash of Holy Water or holding aloft a crucifix would likely cause it to writhe and disappear. We cannot do that here but rest assured the webmaster will remove the comments. Thank you.
Our Own Sir Richard Rich…Richard M. Daley.
Rich Daley is today’s Sir Richard Rich. The man John Kass used to call “Little Big Man,” the Irish Catholic who has backtracked on abortion and opposition to gay rights, two principle teachings of his church in order to keep secure his 70% reelection margins, Daley places the utmost priority on keeping stride with the left, counting on his Irishness and clever invented ungrammatical put-ons rants (“what do I gotta do, take down my pants?”) to solidify him with working folks. Were he to remain fast to his faith, his reelection margin would probably be down to 68%. But he will do anything to survive politically.
He has supported the unrepentant Billy Ayres whose only regret is that he didn’t do more than participate in 25 bombings. But have you noticed, Sir Richard Rich…er… Daley has not yet spoken out against Jeremiah Wright, allowing Barack Obama to fight the battle against his raving racist ex-pastor himself: Wright is popular with blacks, you know so Daley doesn’t want to take a side. Gutless wonder. Thus Obama has had to fight the battle so far alone. Where is the bellowing Daley now?
Gutless and smartly duplicitous (he weeps when the news media inquire about his son Patrick who got involved as a secret partner in a sewer firm with a city contact: Patrick is in the service, you know prompting the tears that will dissuade further questions) he is little more than a shouting, red-faced rudderless carcass of opportunism and expedience. But he is not alone.
A “Sir Richard Rich Catholic” is the only suitable way to describe Daley and all other Catholic politicians who violate their conscience on abortion and gay rights in order to accommodate the liberal electorate (the list of legion: Durbin, Lisa Madigan, Dan Hynes, Emil Jones, Todd Stroger, Judy Baar Topinka: whom have I missed?). The flaccid, ever-parsing archdiocese here (and most other dioceses in the nation excluding a handful including St. Louis) allows them to get away with it and receive the sacrament anyhow, sharing in the gutlessness, differing only in degree from their eminences Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cranmer.
But, who was Sir Richard Rich [1496-1571]? He was the pillar of Jello and accommodation in the play and later film by Robert Bolt, “A Man for All Seasons” based on the life of Sir (later saint) Thomas More [1478-1535], More, the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, was the senior and most important lay functionary in the government. At a time when Catholicism dominated England, More was an exemplary one: ruled by his conscience. He refused to sign a letter asking the Pope to annul Henry VIII’s marriage and resigned rather than take an oath of supremacy declaring the king the supreme head of the English church. Bolt used the testimony of More’s son-in-law in a play which details More’s resignation as Chancellor rather than betray his conscience and his refusal to attend Henry’s “wedding” to Anne Boleyn. More refuses to attend, refuses to sign a new oath of support of the King and is convicted of treason by the serpentine Richard Rich. Informed that Rich was promoted as attorney general for Wales as a reward for prosecuting him with perjured testimony, More says: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world-but FOR WALES?”
Which leads to the questions locally: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world-but for MAYOR OF CHICAGO?” And to the archdiocese: “Why your eminences, excellencies, monsignori, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world-but to avoid embarrassment for the DEMOCRATIC PARTY?” Meaning the whole disgusting crew of Pelosi, Kennedy and others who received the sacrament when the Pope was in Washington. And liberals of the Republican party viz Rudy Giuliani and Topinka locally et al?
Where is the “Black Leadership” on Wright?
Now that I’ve asked where Mayor Richard M. Daley is let’s ask this: When does the so-called “black leadership” in this city or nation weigh in on Jeremiah Wright? Have you heard any big-time black “leaders” issue condemnatory words on this raving racist…who yesterday reiterated the sick theories of eugenics that blacks think with one side of their brains while whites are the obverse (Klan talk)? Where is the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson? Is not Barack Obama his candidate for president who is being taunted by Jeremiah Wright who shouted to an audience the other day “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”? Why doesn’t Jesse Jackson speak out? Why don’t other black leaders speak out? Todd Stroger. For that matter where is Fr. Michael Pfleger? Where is Emil Jones? Where is Donne Trotter? Where are the black aldermen? Black state legislators?
Under their respective beds, that’s where-because they fear to antagonize the number of their constituents whom they fear are attracted to Jeremiah Wright. The standing ovations of parishioners and audiences bouncing off the walls at the excitement give the so-called impregnable “black leadership” pause. Where is Mary Mitchell who so passionately wants Obama to win? Why is she taking such a soft tone against Wright…in fact criticizing Obama in a recent column for not picking up a telephone to softly work it out with Wright. Where is the other oracle of black reportorial analysis-Clarence Page? A little soft-spoken and evasive about Wright’s racist demagoguery, isn’t he? If a white said that black kids don’t think with the parts of their brains that whites do, meaning that black kids are suited more for hip-hop than mathematics, would we not have heard from them? Would not Pfleger have led a march somewhere with placards waving? Double standard, isn’t it? It really depends on whether bigoted words are used by whitey, isn’t it? When used by blacks, well…let’s calm down, folks. After all, he’s one of ours.
“Expelled” Gets Thumbs Down from Roeper.
Continuing the newspaper’s slavish subservience to “Sun-Times” editor-in-chief Michael Cooke who believes in nothing personally but who has ordered an almost unalloyed liberal newspaper (along with the a sex therapist and 99% lefty “opinion” columning bias), Richard Roeper dissed the film “Expelled” yesterday as “a piece of garbage”…not because it seeks to encourage universities to consider Intelligent Design in their overwhelmingly pro-Darwin classes (Roeper sees no reason why evolution and intelligent design cannot comprise a curriculum) but because its producer Ben Stein finds notable agreements between Darwin’s and Margaret Sanger’s eugenics and that of Nazi Germany.
The film debuted at No.9 and took in about $3 million in its opening weekend April 18-20. Despite its limited release, per screen ticket sales put “Expelled” at No. 5, topping “Nim’s Island” (21) and “Dr. Seuss’ Horon Hears a Who.” Liberal reviewers like Roeper had bet-and hoped-that it would be dead on arrival but they were far wrong.
No one but Roeper and his liberal fellow reviewers attempt to deny Darwin’s theory of natural selection was attuned to breeding cripples and defectives out of the human race any more than Sanger’s super race theories. The similarities are strikingly close-but Roeper who has an image to keep of an earnest young liberal dismisses them out-of-hand with no rebuttal. As a hurler of the imprecation “garbage,” Roeper has first-hand experience with the same. His paper is fast becoming the oddity of world journalism doing such tricks under Cooke’s direction as printing its main headline backwards to attract attention.
“Expelled” has some amateurish production values nevertheless is a masterpiece of scholarship as can be expected from an intellectual like Stein. Ben Stein is dismissed by Roeper as a comic and former Nixon speechwriter. Period. In the interest of accurate reporting of which the columning Roeper obviously knows little, Stein is an attorney, who was a poverty lawyer in New Haven, Connecticut, an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission, a professor of social policy of mass culture at American University, Washington, D. C., and the University of California, Santa Cruz, a professor of law at Pepperdine University law school, currently writes a regular column for “The New York Times” business section, has written for “The Wall Street Journal,” “New York Magazine,” “Barron’s” and has written a book on the Michael Milken Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond situation in addition to seven others including a 20 non-fiction works and a novel. That he was a speech-writer for Nixon and Gerald Ford means all the difference in the world to Roeper. Stein also has been an actor in a good many motion pictures and a TV series where he was recipient of an Emmy. Not enough for Roeper.
Why didn’t Roeper make at least a feeble effort to inform readers of Stein’s pedigree beyond being a comic and,,,ugh… Nixon speech-writer? Roeper is a sardonic little twerp who fills a hip kid niche in Cooke’s soon to be vanished paper, who got into the big time as a newsroom sycophant of Roger Ebert. Ebert is a film critic-now ailing-who made his huzzas among far-left oracles by pushing lefty ideas (he was the one who convinced Michael Moore to deliver a hotly anti-U.S. speech at the Academy Awards), a very popular venue. He is distinctly second-rate compared to the erudite Joe Morganstearn of the “Wall Street Journal” and the general outstanding criticism of Terry Teachout. But at least Ebert, born a Catholic, now agnostic, knows the film craft. Roeper knows precious little more than the average popcorn enthusiast lazing through afternoon matinees. When Ebert’s longtime partner in TV film reviewing, Gene Siskel, died, Roeper tried out and though, notably undistinguished, survived the cut. He varies his reviewing by writing columns in the “Sun-Times” that purveys predictable mishmash in styleless form producing unutterable tedium.
Why dikd Roeper diss Stein? Stein is a pro-lifer which has incurred the wrath of pro-abort Catholic Roeper and is distinctly at odds with the overwhelmingly (with the laudable exception of its fine cartoonist Jack Higgins) pro-abort “Sun-Times.” So to get even Roeper blacked out Stein’s background and made him appear as a pro-Nixon stumblebum. That’s class for you from what is quickly becoming classless porridge which if justice serves should get Cooke fired as he was earlier by the “New York Daily News,” but here not just for his own incompetence but because the Internet has been turning the daily newspaper into an atavism, slowly garroting the survivors.
Mission Accomplished? What Will it Take?
Yesterday as the mainstream media were quick to note was the anniversary of George W. Bush’s landing on an aircraft carrier and bounding out of the jet to be greeted by a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” installed by his staff. Bush admitted today that it is something he will live with forever-but it leads to the question: what will it take for the Iraq mission to be really accomplished?
Probably four things. First, since the Middle east is of incalculable importance to the U. S., “mission” will really be “accomplished” when Iraq becomes a stable state-a not impossible or ad infinitum project. Second, it is not important to me whether it is presided over by a Strongman or a representative republic, although polls show the latter is too optimistic. It cojld be partitioned into several homogeneous territories, each ruled as its popoulations wish. Third as a state it should be oriented to the West and Fourth it should be our ally against extremist Islamism.
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5/1/2008
Personal Asides: Mark Brown, the Consummate White, Guilt-Ridden Liberal Journalist…Mary Mitchell, the Black Female Journalist with a Grievance..  | God's angry black woman columnist. But is she
role-playing for Michael Cooke's marketing formula?
For that manner are all the others doing the same?
Maybe them but not Mary. She's really angry. |
Mark Brown.
Thanks to Jim Bowman, both Mark Brown and Mary Mitchell of the “Sun-Times” have been given a thorough scrutiny as result of their Jeremiah Wright comments. Bowman, himself a first-rate journalist and former religion editor of the old “Chicago Daily News” of happy memory, analyzes both of these half-formed emotional basket-cases on his blog “Blithe Spirit.” I’ll add my own psychoanalysis which is far more radical than his-and goes like this.
When he dies, Brown should be put into a glass container of formaldehyde and exhibited as the classic liberal who has substituted conventional relativist wisdom for absolutes. Show him a black liberal candidate and he wants…oh so passionately…to see him/her succeed because it will make him feel good, oh so comfy wrapped up in the cocoon of his own security. Liberaldom has become his central emotion since on all other major issues he is non-judgmental. Remember there are no such things as extremism in the black community. Blacks have suffered, oh how they have suffered, and are entitled to express any emotion in the marketplace of ideas. The only extremists are on the right. He reminds me of Lynn Sweet who is a far better reporter than he and who has a superbly sophisticated sense of politics unless Brown who labors to understand even ideas written with crayon.
People who read this frequently know how I value Lynn Sweet as a consummate political reporter. She is biased, yes, as the “Tribune’s” George Tagge was under the old Colonel-but her bias for liberalism has limits. You will remember that she has given the Democrats some very hard knocks. She is too good a news reporter, as Tagge was, not to live up to the standards of her profession.
All the same, Lynn is a liberal, albeit a much more thoughtful liberal than the visceral Brown. She and I were on a radio show a decade or so ago and she identified Jesse Helms rightly as an ultra-conservative (which he was in contrast to the run-of-the-mill conservatives of his time). I asked her: Lynn, you’re right. Now can you identify for me an ultra-liberal?
Long silence of dead air. She honestly couldn’t. Nor I am sure can Mark Brown. There are no such people. I said: Well, we’ll give you more time to think about it, Lynn. She said: no. Right now I can’t identify one.
When I saw her a few days later in Washington I went over to her and said: “Ramsey Clark.”
She said: “What?”
I said: “Ramsey Clark. Would you identify him as an ultra-liberal?”
She said she’d think about it. And she still is.
If she were here as I write this, I’d say: Billy Ayres. How does that strike you?
She’d probably have to think about that one as well. But that doesn’t bother me a bit because I love Lynn Sweet. She was a guest at a seminar in politics I taught at DePaul and if I ever teach again…which is doubtful…I am certainly going to ask her if she’d guest-lecture. I don’t know a contemporary journalist from this town who carries such an institutional memory of Illinois and now national politics as does she.
The difference between Lynn Sweet and Mark Brown is that Lynn couldn’t…probably still can’t…think of an ultra-liberal because she refuses to acquiesce to the premise, that her point of view would be ultra in any sense-but Mark probably denies any ultra liberal exists, not because he is duplicitous as Lynn would be, but because he’s really honest-to-god unaware that he or any who share his views deviate from the norm. Lynn is educable and brilliant. He is hopeless.
Mary Mitchell.
Mary Mitchell of the “Sun-Times” is God’s angry black woman. Mark Brown is not angry; he’s gelatinously malleable, guileless, innocent: liberalism is his church. It has assumed all the prerogatives of church and religiosity for him. . Mary doesn’t care much about liberalism, not even politics or ideology; she is race-centered. She is an angry black oracle. And she is not poor but middle-class with a great many advantages, far-far more than the average person. She has a newspaper column which puts her views front and center for hundreds of thousands of readers in a major metropolitan area. She has talent; far more than Brown who is a plodding slug.
Because for many years white liberals have spoiled her by insisting her views take predominance over many others since…you know…she’s black, she has assumed an attitude of benign (almost) belligerence. There she stands in the photo adjoining her column, hands on hips: no nonsense. Once I thought she and a few other columnists were being used by Michael Cooke for marketing purposes. That’s because the paper’s columnists represent commercial types: Richard Roeper is the hip, young single guy (well, not so young anymore) with views that are predictably liberal and not thought out…Neil Steinberg is the hip young Jewish professional, hair slicked down and a brash Brooklyn-style wise guy…Stella Foster is the average black menial type, giddy, blissfully ecstatic and unaware that she’s dumb, unaware that she is so-so-so what is the word, stereotypical of a celebrity-obsessed shop girl, somebody at a McDonald’s-whom I think Cooke intends her to represent. Then there is Mary: black, angry, smart, a queen bee, prima donna type, not taking guff from men, either.
Now that I rethink it, they are all being used by schlock Michael Cooke for marketing purposes. He’s the problem with the “Sun-Times.” I have the feeling everybody’s acting up for his benefit: Mary being God’s angry black woman, Steinberg the cynical sophisticate, Roeper the hip, Stella the klutz. All playing a role. I wonder what would have happened if the paper had stayed the way the old “Sun-Times” people ran it: Pete Akers, Emmett Dedmon, a format that was sober but lively. The slam-bang version of the National Enquirer-imitation is Cooke’s decadent gift…anything to keep the readership. But I wonder if they had to cheapen it to get the readers. Suppose they classed it up and returned it to the days of Akers and Dedmon.
Would the paper would have as many readers as it has today…if they hadn’t cheapened up it, put rouge on its cheeks and sent it out like a mini-skirted tart to stand by the lamplight? Sexist talk. Oh well, I bet it might have more readers. What do you think?
My kind of journalistic liberal is Mike Miner. He used to work there but is at “The Reader” now. I owe him lunch for some nice things he wrote a long time ago but he won’t let me pay. So we’ll go dutch and he wants to go to non-corporate place. So one of these days I’ll call him and suggest we go dutch to Manny’s. I wish he were running the “Sun-Times.”
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