Fourteen Unanswered Questions
May 20, 2008

The current scene is so complicated, that I don’t really understand much of it.  Here are some questions I couldn’t answer.  Here goes:

• Why did Mr. Whittington apologize to Cheney a few days after Cheney shot him in the face?
• Why has Barack Obama started wearing a flag pin in his lapel?
• Why doesn’t Mr. al-Fayed give up his conspiracy theory about Diana’s death?  And why can’t he pack up that tacky memorial in his department store?
• Why is Senator McCain talking so forcefully about reducing oil consumption when many of his major backers are oil companies?
• Why didn’t Pope Benedict kick out the rotten priests instead of just commiserating with their victims?
• How can those people who believe in intelligent design accept that Bush is president?
• Is Hillary Clinton really running only for the good of the country?
• Why doesn’t Senator Kennedy come clean about Chappaquiddick while he is still alive?
• Is ‘buying more things” (as Mr. Bush advised after September 11) really the best way to fight terrorism?
• Is gas worth more per gallon than milk?
• What do Muslims think of Osama bin Laden?
• Why shouldn’t the US tax the right to life people to cover the costs of those unwanted, twisted, and abandoned children who were given their right to life?
• Why are the Chinese doing such a good job with their cyclone victims while the advanced United States still hasn’t finished repairing the damage from Katrina?
• Does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

America Doesn’t Need a President of Principle, We Need a President Who Waffles
May 16, 2008

In the 2004 election, President Bush slammed Senator Kerry for waffling.  He offered himself as a person of principle who rarely strayed from principle.  Now look where we are. 

Principle is all right when it has something to do with reality. If principle keeps you from admitting to any error, you can get into real trouble.  If principle means rigidity, then the trouble can be catastrophic.

Rigid principle means forgetting things, too. Think about Katrina.  It was a disaster.  Now, with hundreds of thousands of people jobless, homeless, or refugees in other cities, the disaster hasn’t been solved.  If you forget about that, you can talk about the needs of some crippled girl in Minnesota and remain a thoughtful, principled, Christian man.

Rigid principle means getting into situations that are stupid, but only because your principles make you form your own reality.  Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida:  all were false.  Real enough to Bush to get us into a real war and rile up the whole Middle East.

Rigid principle means making one issue, terrorism, something that can be waved around to explain anything.  Hamas won in a free and fair election but forget that.  Call them terrorists and count them out of any peace talks.

Principle, Bush’s principle, is that “you don’t talk to terrorists.” So we don’t talk to Hesbolla, Iran, or Syria even as we look like idiots for not talking to them.  Talk doesn’t kill anyone and talk is not capitulation.

And at home, Bush can talk about being a president to all.  But his principles guide him to give tax rebates to well-off people, to regard those who are poor as suckers who voted for him anyway.  And his secrecy is a way to make sure that his principle isn’t found out.

Just Who Are These People? And What Are Their Songs?
May 9, 2008

Wouldn’t it be a relief to know what is really inside the heads of the three presidential hopefuls?  What is real, what is theater? What is their idea of truth, what is pandering?  Here are some guesses.

Start with the most difficult: Barack Obama.  He is a great speechifier with a touch of the preacher.  But he is so smooth and contained that getting inside his head is difficult.  Looking at what he has done in the past can reveal some of what he thinks.  Think about his difficult role in growing up in a white family.  He learned to be accepted and to smooth conflicts.  Even now, he must hate rancor and like diplomacy.  I also think he is shy behind the gloss.

He must also be a great wheeler-and-dealer, a little like William Jefferson Clinton (both of them grew up in broken homes) but Obama might have the lust factor controlled.  He needs friends and is loath to abandon them even if they are not true friends (think of the Reverend Wright).  But beyond those things, it is hard to say.  If Obama is elected, there will be some initial surprises; chances are they will delight many and enrage some.

Next hardest is John McCain.  His naval family and his struggle while a prisoner of war give clues.  He has a clear and unbreakable code of what is right or wrong.  That idea extends to duty.  But there are some cracks in that dutiful persona.  Remember, he was one of five legislators involved in some queasy financial business a few years ago.  Remember as well that he divorced his first wife when she was most in need of him.  And it didn’t hurt that his current wife is wealthy.

McCain does tell the truth as he sees it (up to a point, of course).  But be aware that that ‘how he sees it’ may not be others’ reality.  I would expect him to conduct himself as a president on a predictable path and be quite unshaken by others.  Does that sound familiar?  Think of him as a kind of George Bush but with a hardwired moral, quasi-military code (but not the restrictive religious one).   He will be quite inflexible.

The easiest and most human of the three is Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Yes, she has had experience and experiences.  She has been subjected to humiliation from her husband, vilification from both cookie-baking homemakers and feminists.  She has suffered from public defeat; think of her health insurance plan that went bust in the nineties.

But she came through it all, although with mounting frustration and probably rage.  That ‘rage’ is transmuted into a ‘fight to the end’ mentality.  It isn’t toughness; she is tired of being kicked.  She has had it with being a junior senator.  She is tired of not being on top, even as she is smarter than her husband.  So, what would happen should she win?  She will push through her programs, leaving a bunch of bodies on the way. She just might take some revenge on the cookie bakers and radical feminists, and religious conservatives, and a husband who has made her life a kind of hell.

So, we have three candidates:

• An enigma
• A not very flexible, but sort of honest roller coaster
• A bundle of rage, tightly controlled for now.

Two Very Different Wrights
May 5, 2008

Reverend Jeremiah Wright has hurt the campaign of Barack Obama.  He also hurt movement toward a just society in the United States.  If the Reverend is a Christian, he has read the scriptures.  Try to find such spite and rage there in his messiah.  You won’t.

There was, however, another African-American man, Richard Wright, who made a serious contribution to understanding the plight of Black people in this society.  His work caused a real jump, not only in understanding, but also doing something about that plight.

Richard Wright wrote the novel, Black Boy, published in 1940.  It was the fictional biography (including some of Wright’s own experiences), of an African-American young man, Biggar.  Biggar was smart and ambitious but every way he turned, he was humiliated and defeated and trapped.  Even today, it is horrifying reading.  Toward the end of the book, Biggar took the only path open to him, violent crime.  The book was an instant sensation.  It brought out torrents of white rage but also white understanding and willingness to change.

How can a book about an uneducated Black man, a criminal, have a positive effect?  Simple.  It showed that he was a human being, not one of those blubbery, stupid, childlike Black stereotypes.  It presented Biggar’s human pain and anger.  He was a (fictional) person of strong will who could not surmount the torment of being a Black in American society.

After another novel, Richard Wright eventually left (some would say, ‘fled’) to France.  Not only was he an African-American; he was also homosexual (that was before “gay” had been invented.)  His burden was too great to bear; he fled rather than turning to crime or self-mortification.

Let’s compare the two Wrights.  Richard forced white people to see African-Americans as human beings, humans bearing an enormous weight.  He just told the story.  He didn’t yell or threaten or scream.  His book had a great effect.

The Reverend Wright is different.  He rants at the whites to whom he talks.  He tells us that we are totally responsible for the situation of African-Americans.  He hurls thunderbolts at us.  But his stories are not to people about other people; they are not about the connection between whites and African-Americans.  He rages at faceless white stereotypes, not people.  He wants to right the wrongs done to African-Americans, not as people but cardboard cutouts.  Jeremiah reviles his white audiences while Richard merely told a story.

Reverend Wright would benefit if he could shake off the rant and cant.  Perhaps he could see that whites and African-Americans are people.  He could reveal the humiliation and pain and wasted lives that haunt all Americans but particularly African-American people.  It might be possible that his message could go to all people; perhaps a few on either side could help get on with better lives.  Rage and rant lead to conflict, to war, and war solves nothing—except to make the problems go underground and warlords rich.

The Missing Word: A Complaint
May 1, 2008

One thing really bothers me in this presidential campaign; it is in the absence of one word.  That word is morality.  I don’t mean the chintzy idea of morality peddled by religious conservatives; they would preclude same-sex marriage, abortion, sex before marriage, the ability to end life when pain becomes overwhelming, and drugs.  Funny, if these people are really conservative, why do they want the government to interfere in these very private matters?  They talk about less government.  Seems not.  Remember poor Terry Schiavo.  Her husband (the legal closest relative) decided her fate.  But no, our conservative and religious president returned from his vacation (not even September 11 could do that, I bet) and Congress pushed itself into her act?

True morality would stay out of other people’s pants and hearts.

Back to the core of this blog.  Our country, the United States, once seemed to hold moral issues in mind when making decisions.  Of course, national interest was there.  But somewhere was the idea of doing the right thing.  Our country is different now. Think of where we are. 

• We are in a war that has affected only the 35,000 or so families whose soldiers were killed or wounded.  [Won’t even touch the morality of that war.]  Do we all bear some of the pain?  No.  In fact, our president has pushed through tax cuts, ones that mostly help well-off people.

 
• Morally, we should all bear some of that burden.  But no one does.  Instead, we are borrowing (off the national budget) from rich foreigners, China and Saudi Arabia for instance.  These are not people yearning to be our buddies on the distant shore.  The people who will pay those loans will be our children and grandchildren who will be burdened by more and more debt payments-taxes.  Is that moral?

 
• We used to help poor nations.  But who has the largest foreign aid program now?  Japan, I think.  We are pikers.  Let those poor people starve and kill themselves.  We can still continue to enjoy our cars and complain about the price of fuel.

 
• We used to stand for letting people be free.  There’s still a lot of talk about it even as we support countries (stable ones?) that are tyrannies but have oil.

 
• We talk about accepting the results of free elections.  But we call Hamas a terrorist organization even as they won the Palestinian elections handily.

 
• We boast of American strength and pour a major part of our economy into the military.  But military strength is the strength of bullies; with it, we can (and have in Iraq) act without thinking.  Thinking tends to be moral.  We actually are getting poorer and more irrelevant as China and India and the European Union grow stronger in ways that count. Is it moral to have our working people be without jobs?

 
• Finally, what kind of morality is calling everything a secret for the sake of ‘national security?”  I thought that, in a democracy, the people could be trusted a little. Poor, deluded Jefferson thought so.  But, in 2001, our President refused to reveal the names of his new energy advisory panel.  Those names still haven’t been released.  Could it be that the panel was packed with oil cronies?

And there is a lot more.  But it is time to stop my whine and get on to this presidential campaign.  I would like to have the candidates talk some about restoring the good part of the US.  They could even use that m-word.  It is moral, for instance, to:

• Talk with nations that might be threats rather than threaten to attack them. [We are the real threats to them.]  It might even work with Iran.

 
• Accept nasty, although freely elected, governments rather than brand them terrorists.  People get what they ask for.  That is our idea; we got G. W. Bush.  Who knows, even Chavez might come around.

 
• Stop supporting evil and tyrannical governments because of fear or because of their oil.  Kim Jung Il plays his terrible game to perfection. 
• Escape from the pressure of oil and really spend resources on other forms of energy.  That might even mean raising taxes.  Americans hate taxes but we might be persuaded when we think of the common good.

 
• Help our people in need by investing in better technologies for knowledge and production.  Outsourcing is easy for owners but death to people who want to work efficiently.

 
• And let’s realize that our own people must be trusted and not necessarily any less than some bespangled general with his or her own agenda.

OK, I am done and I’ve barely begun.  But you see what I mean.  You can disagree all you want; that is free speech.  But please don’t descend into a rant.  That is dumb speech.  Americans should be better—and more moral-- than that.

Reverend Wright Almost Reveals Himself and Americans Aren’t Buying
April 29, 2008

Americans are not stupid.  [OK, forget electing George W. Bush.]  In the most recent MediaCurves, they proved it.  No one, not Democrats, not Independents, nor Republicans, fell for Mr. Wright’s talk at the National Press Club.  Their ‘agreement’ curves never rose above zero.

And that is because Mr. Wright wasn’t telling the truth.  For instance, the ‘black church’ does not preach politics; rather it preaches salvation, the joy of religion, and care for the poor.  Sometimes it preaches civil and social rights.  Mr. Wright was not speaking truth when he said that the September 11th catastrophe was payback for American wrongs to the world.  America may be damned but not by God but by ourselves when we take a path that leads to woe.

There is a difference between ‘truth’ and ‘reality.’ Truth may never be known; it is absolute.  ‘Reality’ is an interpretation. And Wright’s interpretation offers little in the way of finding the truth. No, it inspires self-contempt for Americans and no path out, even if his ‘reality’ is even very slightly true.  What kind of path to salvation is that?

Some people will make excuses for Mr. Wright.  By the way, before the National Press Club he never recanted one jot or tittle (what is a tittle anyway?) of what he preached.  There was no excuse, no real explanation.

Instead, he pursues his own agenda, climbing on the back of the Obama fuss to be heard.  His agenda and Obama’s are different.  Mr. Wright is a leech, sucking blood from the Obama campaign to further his own, angry voice.

Will this affect Obama?  Probably.  Will it turn votes away? Yes.  Don’t feel sorry for Obama; he is a grownup.   But let’s get back to issues and let’s get this tiresome primary process over so we can hear some real campaigning.  Whether it is Obama or Clinton vs. McCain, it is time to get down to real differences, less about personal style, certainly less about somebody’s wrong-headed preacher.

IT ISN’T CORRECT BUT IT’S THERE: Why the Polls Can’t Tell the Truth
April 28, 2008

Go beyond complaining that each poll isn’t correct.  Look at the polls over time to see how they lie consistently.  For instance, in New Hampshire, the distance in the polls between Obama and Clinton was small.  In Pennsylvania, the distance between Obama and Clinton in the polls was around 6 percentage points.  Yet, in both states, Clinton scored by a much wider score, in Pennsylvania by 10 points, not 6.  If you want to spend the time, you might find this is true for polls in other states.

Why did the polls lie?  In part it is because of something called “interviewer bias.”  That is, people answering questionnaires want to give ‘nice’ answers so they don’t offend the interviewer.  When interviews came along that can be filled out without an interviewer (think of MediaCurves which you are looking at right now) research companies thought that interviewer bias would decrease.  It hasn’t.

What is the ‘nice’ answer to give in an Obama/Clinton race?  Obama.  Clinton carries all that weight of public negative opinion.  She is sharp and shrill, not feminine but not masculine either.  So, give Obama—nice, straightforward, inspiring—your choice.

But underneath that ‘nice’ answer lies America’s ugly secret.  Race.  A number of people won’t vote for Obama, not because he is intelligent or young or inspiring or thoughtful; they won’t vote for Obama because he is an African American. 

Think of Pennsylvania.  Yes, there is the old saw that Pennsylvania is divided into three parts: Philadelphia Pittsburgh, and Arkansas.  It is almost true.  That ‘Arkansas’ part is really rural and really poor.  It was (and still might be) a stronghold of the Klan.   Like other parts of Appalachia, it is intensely conservative, conservative (in the old sense) to its core.  “Change” is something to be approached cautiously.  But, even there, political correctness has some weight.

So, when the nice interviewer or even that impersonal self-administered questionnaire comes along, there is a tug to be nice and pick Obama.  But, when the real vote comes, it is more likely to be Clinton or, in the national election, McCain.  In the voting booth, you don’t have to be nice to anyone.

Does this kill Obama?  No.  He will win more primary states. But, he must labor very hard to be one of the big ‘us’ before those Pennsylvanians and other core conservative people can vote for him in the payoff election.  He cannot afford to be the “Other.”  No more condescending ‘bitterness’ quotes, no more talking about America’s defects (even if both are true), no more not wearing the American flag pin on his lapel.   Rather display the old thoughtless warhorses of flag, patriotism, pledges of allegiance, prayer—all of them are necessary not to lose an election.  Afterwards, he (or whoever wins) can get on with the business of the day: restoring America’s tattered position in the world, figuring out what to do in Iraq, reducing the debt to people who don’t like us, letting us be more free, helping the country to be a tiny bit more self-sufficient.

In other words, if you want to win, don’t be who you are; be what people want you to be.

The Great Divide: Rodham Clinton’s Victory Speech in Pennsylvania
April 24, 2008

Looking at the Media Curves responses to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victory speech yesterday, one thing struck me. That was the difference in positive response between Clinton’s supporters and supporters of Obama. That difference was greater than those for speeches of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in 2004.

Are the antagonisms that strong? Is this series of primaries — increasingly nasty — dividing the Democratic Party? Some of the old pols think so. They might be right.

Can it be that Democrats can blow this election as they have done in the past? The answer is YES. All McCain needs to do is sit tight and whoever the Democratic candidate is, he or she has frittered away the party’s advantage.

People are thoroughly fed up with George W. Bush. People need someone to trust. Who would they rather see in office: a calm McCain or a frantic Rodham Clinton? Or, for that matter, an embattled and belittled Obama? McCain exudes that kind of public calm (despite stories of his explosive and debilitating temper). He doesn’t have to do anything.

At this point, unless the Dems pull together, McCain will win the election in November. He won’t even have to breathe hard. And for a seventy-something guy, that will be a blessing.