By William Fisher
During this seemingly endless presidential campaign, there’s been a ton of criticism of the so-called mainstream media and its alleged fawning love affair with Barrack Obama.
Yeah? Maybe on cable TV with Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. But they’re a pretty fragile counterpoint to that medium’s many wing-nuts like Sean Hannity.
Print reporters are ordinarily a very different story. If they err, it’s usually on the side of “objectivity.” If a candidate makes a statement, no matter how absurd or inaccurate or untrue, it gets reported. When I was a very young newspaper reporter, the office joke was that things didn’t get to be political news until they fell from the lips of public officials. We even had an official Associated Press handbook on “Objectivity.” That’s one of the ways Joe McCarthy got so famous.
But writers who really knew politics usually managed to thread their way around the AP’s rules. Despite print journalism’s well-worn and still-current mantra– “if it bleeds it leads” – most really savvy political writers figured out how to write you to a place where you would find yourself encouraged to raise questions.
For many years, Roger Simon of Politico.com has been one of those savvy political writers. Today, he’s become an entertainment critic. Today, he gets my nomination for the most mindlessly cynical piece yet written during this campaign.
I refer to his Oct. 2 paean to the moose-dresser, entitled, “You betcha Sarah Palin can debate.”
Sarah Palin, Simon wrote, “was supposed to fall off the stage at her vice presidential debate Thursday evening. Instead, she ended up dominating it.”
Really? That may have been the verdict of the GOP far right base, but all reliable polling concluded otherwise.
Undeterred by this inconvenient truth, Simon warmed to his task, citing the hockeymom’s myriad positive attributes. She “kept Joe Biden on the defensive.” She “repeatedly attacked Barack Obama”. She “looked like she was enjoying herself while doing it.” “She smiled. She faced the camera. She was warm. She was human. Gosh and golly, she even dropped a bunch of g’s…. if people thought she was going to look like a dumb bunny for 90 minutes, they were disappointed.”
Hey Roger, after eight years of mangled presidential locution, do we really want to be rewarding no-nothing grammar?
Palin, he wrote, “said what she wanted to say, and she was so relaxed she even winked at one point. Really! An actual wink during a national debate….”
Well, maybe what Palin really needs is a membership in Actor’s Equity! "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.”
But Simon gave her a free pass on the inarticulate test, writing, “She went out of her way to talk in everyday terms, saying things like ‘I betcha’ and ‘We have a heckuva opportunity to learn’ and ‘Darn right we need tax relief’.
He crowed that Palin again repeated Obama’s now-ridiculously-distorted statement that “he would meet with some foreign leaders who are hostile to the United States”, and then took her shot: “Some of these dictators hate America and what we stand for. They cannot be met with. That is beyond bad judgment. That is dangerous… An issue like that taken up by a presidential candidate goes beyond naiveté and goes beyond poor judgment.”
“Sarah Palin accusing Barack Obama of being naive?” asked Simon. “Yep. And she was unabashed about it.”
Maybe someone ought to tell George W. Bush, who is currently keeping himself busy talking with (and trying to buy off) lots of “dictators who hate America.”
“And so what if Joe Biden has been in the Senate approximately forever and knows a lot more about a lot more stuff than she does? She doesn’t care,” Simon wrote.
That’s it. She doesn’t care. And that’s one of the scariest things about McCain’s Russia-watcher.
In a moment of rare candor, Simon acknowledged, “a lot of her statements were of the fortune cookie variety. “At end of day,” she said, “if we are all working together for the greater good, it is going to be OK.”
“But a lot of people like fortune cookies,” he continued.
“Do people care about such stuff?” he asked. “Should all that down-home talk and body language really count?”
Simon wrote that Joe Biden doesn’t think so. (“Facts matter,” Biden said.)
Simon disagreed: “Yeah? In politics? Since when?” Well, maybe since Sarah Palin is asking us to ensconce her in Observatory Circle at a time when our country is facing its most existential challenges in a generation.
Is this really what we really want? A poorly informed opportunist who can’t tell us what she reads? Who plays fast and loose with the truth? Who can’t think of a single Supreme Court decision she disagrees with (save Roe v. Wade)? Whose international experience consists of trying to see Russia from her front lawn? Whose foreign policy savvy comes from a few minutes with Henry Kissinger or Hamid Karzai? Who labors under the misapprehension that the Constitution allows for vice presidential flexibility?
I don’t think so. And, judging from her plummeting poll numbers, neither do most of my fellow citizens.
It’s not that Sarah Palin is a Republican. We’ve had good Republican presidents before. It’s not that’s she’s folksy. As FDR and JFK and Harry Truman so ably demonstrated when they had to, folksiness can be necessary and positive.
No, Palin’s problem has already been underlined by some of the more thoughtful of her GOP brethren and sistren like George Will, David Brooks, and Kathleen Parker. Her problem is that she is clueless. It’s not that people may disagree with her ideas; it’s that she doesn’t have any ideas. It’s that she is quite content to live her life in a thought-free zone. It’s that she’s like Lou Dobbs in drag.
In short, Sarah Palin has zero knowledge of the things a Vice President really does need to know. Our Constitution. Our history. Our challenges. And a zillion other issues (including energy) likely to cross a Veep’s desk.
Can anyone think of a more absurd idea than a Palin portfolio that includes (a) energy (b) government reform and (c) improving the care of special needs children and their mothers?
And all that a beat away from a 71-year-old heart, et cetera.
For me, Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, best summed up our dilemma. He wrote: “Perhaps Sarah Palin will somehow emerge from the hurly-burly of history as a transformative figure who was underestimated in her time by journalists who could not see, or refused to acknowledge, her virtues. But do I think I am right in saying that Palin's populist view of high office -- hey, Vice President Six-Pack, what should we do about Pakistan? --is dangerous?
“You betcha.”
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Thursday, October 02, 2008
A Debate Question for Joe Biden
By William Fisher
Tonight, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden will engage in the first and only debate for vice presidential candidates in the 2008 election.
Who will “win” this debate should be a no-brainer. Joe Biden has lots of style, but he also has lots of substance. Sarah Palin will attempt to use style over substance, as there is no substance there.
Biden will make no attempt to destroy Palin. He will let her do that for herself in her responses to Gwen Ifill’s questions. And, as everyone except the moose-dresser’s dwindling cadre of loonytunes supporters have painfully come to know, she is quite capable of demonstrating her preference for Joe Six-Pack over actual facts and real information and anything remotely associated with thoughtfulness.
But the history of campaign debates is littered with proof that Joe Six-Pack often emerges victorious from these encounters. Just recall the Reagan-Carter debate of 1979. As NPR reported, the Carter campaign was eager to debate Reagan “because they thought it would give the president a chance to display his great command of complex issues, and that Reagan might stumble or look confused.”
The Reagan camp only agreed to that debate when they saw how tight the race was. “They were glad they did. Rather than sounding dangerous or overwhelmed, Reagan calmly brushed aside Carter's attacks, shaking his head” and delivering his instantly-famous one-liner: ‘There you go again’.”
Our best hope that this doesn’t happen again is that the American voter may finally be starting to understand that, in this election, the stakes are just too high to roll the dice in favor of someone they’d like to have a beer with.
That’s what gave us George W. Bush.
Joe Biden arguably knows more about world affairs and American foreign policy than anyone in the U.S. Senate. Like his running mate, he is also an expert on the Constitution and teaches Constitutional Law at American University. That should reassure us that an Obama-Biden win in November might return our country to such quaint niceties as checks and balances, limits on Presidential power, secret government and the rule of law.
Joe Biden is nobody’s fool on domestic policy either. His name appears on some of the most consequential legislation in recent history: To cite just one of many examples, the Violence Against Women Act.
But Biden is not without his vulnerabilities. Among the most glaring of these was his support for the so-called “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005". This bill, which President Bush signed into law in 2006, neither prevented bankruptcy abuse nor protected consumers.
So what did this law do? As reported in 2005 by Arianna Huffington, when she was writing for Slate, it made it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it made it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangered child-support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allowed millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of equity in homes and asset-protection trusts; it made it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allowed creditors to provide misleading information; and it did nothing to rein in lending abuses....
This law was a gift to the many of the nation’s biggest credit card companies, which spent years and millions lobbying the government for its adoption (and wouldn’t give up despite two earlier vetoes by Bill Clinton).
And guess what? Many of those credit card companies are incorporated in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware. Biden has been particularly cozy with MBNA, a Delaware-based financial services company that is now a subsidiary of Bank of America. Over the past 20 years, MBNA has been Biden's single largest contributor.
This is an issue Gwen Ifill needs to raise with Joe Biden. It should be instructive to hear his response – and he will certainly have one, as he will certainly have anticipated the question and rarely comes up short of several thousand words in response to almost any question.
Aside from Biden’s craven support of this home-state-supporting law, he’s got another problem Gwen Ifill ought to raise tonight: Barack Obama doesn’t agree with Biden’s positions on this issue. In numerous stump speeches, he has vowed to reexamine our bankruptcy regulations.
In the 2005 bankruptcy bill debate in the Senate, Biden was one of only five Democrats who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month.
Obama voted for it.
Likewise, amendments to the bill aimed at strengthening protections for people forced into bankruptcy by medical debts or who were members of the military.
Biden voted to defeat these amendments. Obama voted for them.
Likewise, an amendment that would have transferred responsibility in certain cases from debtors to the predatory lenders who helped push them into bankruptcy.
Biden voted against it. Obama voted for it.
Gwen Ifill should ask Joe Biden to explain these conflicts with the head of his own party’s ticket.
Over the past eight years – and particularly since the housing bubble starting bursting – bankruptcy filings have skyrocketed. While there have certainly been abuses by millionaires using clever legal provisions to game the system, most bankruptcies are filed by people earning less than $30,000 a year. They have been caused by mortgage defaults, by loss of jobs, by the rising costs of everything, and by runaway medical bills triggered by the absence of health insurance or by health insurance companies whose primary mission appears to denial of benefits.
I want Joe Biden to “win” this debate. He deserves to win it. He will be the anti-Cheney. He will be a credit to his office. He will be a comfort to those who envision the possibility that, someday, another vice-president may be called upon to move into the Oval Office.
More important still, Joe Biden can play a huge role in bringing sanity to American foreign policy and in helping to restore our country’s reputation in the eyes of the world.
But he is not without his warts. And these should be explored tonight. Not just because sunlight is the best disinfectant; it’s also because transparency can signal the beginning of the process that forces our elected officials to make long-overdue changes.
Real bankruptcy reform should be high on the list of such changes.
Tonight, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden will engage in the first and only debate for vice presidential candidates in the 2008 election.
Who will “win” this debate should be a no-brainer. Joe Biden has lots of style, but he also has lots of substance. Sarah Palin will attempt to use style over substance, as there is no substance there.
Biden will make no attempt to destroy Palin. He will let her do that for herself in her responses to Gwen Ifill’s questions. And, as everyone except the moose-dresser’s dwindling cadre of loonytunes supporters have painfully come to know, she is quite capable of demonstrating her preference for Joe Six-Pack over actual facts and real information and anything remotely associated with thoughtfulness.
But the history of campaign debates is littered with proof that Joe Six-Pack often emerges victorious from these encounters. Just recall the Reagan-Carter debate of 1979. As NPR reported, the Carter campaign was eager to debate Reagan “because they thought it would give the president a chance to display his great command of complex issues, and that Reagan might stumble or look confused.”
The Reagan camp only agreed to that debate when they saw how tight the race was. “They were glad they did. Rather than sounding dangerous or overwhelmed, Reagan calmly brushed aside Carter's attacks, shaking his head” and delivering his instantly-famous one-liner: ‘There you go again’.”
Our best hope that this doesn’t happen again is that the American voter may finally be starting to understand that, in this election, the stakes are just too high to roll the dice in favor of someone they’d like to have a beer with.
That’s what gave us George W. Bush.
Joe Biden arguably knows more about world affairs and American foreign policy than anyone in the U.S. Senate. Like his running mate, he is also an expert on the Constitution and teaches Constitutional Law at American University. That should reassure us that an Obama-Biden win in November might return our country to such quaint niceties as checks and balances, limits on Presidential power, secret government and the rule of law.
Joe Biden is nobody’s fool on domestic policy either. His name appears on some of the most consequential legislation in recent history: To cite just one of many examples, the Violence Against Women Act.
But Biden is not without his vulnerabilities. Among the most glaring of these was his support for the so-called “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005". This bill, which President Bush signed into law in 2006, neither prevented bankruptcy abuse nor protected consumers.
So what did this law do? As reported in 2005 by Arianna Huffington, when she was writing for Slate, it made it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it made it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangered child-support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allowed millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of equity in homes and asset-protection trusts; it made it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allowed creditors to provide misleading information; and it did nothing to rein in lending abuses....
This law was a gift to the many of the nation’s biggest credit card companies, which spent years and millions lobbying the government for its adoption (and wouldn’t give up despite two earlier vetoes by Bill Clinton).
And guess what? Many of those credit card companies are incorporated in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware. Biden has been particularly cozy with MBNA, a Delaware-based financial services company that is now a subsidiary of Bank of America. Over the past 20 years, MBNA has been Biden's single largest contributor.
This is an issue Gwen Ifill needs to raise with Joe Biden. It should be instructive to hear his response – and he will certainly have one, as he will certainly have anticipated the question and rarely comes up short of several thousand words in response to almost any question.
Aside from Biden’s craven support of this home-state-supporting law, he’s got another problem Gwen Ifill ought to raise tonight: Barack Obama doesn’t agree with Biden’s positions on this issue. In numerous stump speeches, he has vowed to reexamine our bankruptcy regulations.
In the 2005 bankruptcy bill debate in the Senate, Biden was one of only five Democrats who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month.
Obama voted for it.
Likewise, amendments to the bill aimed at strengthening protections for people forced into bankruptcy by medical debts or who were members of the military.
Biden voted to defeat these amendments. Obama voted for them.
Likewise, an amendment that would have transferred responsibility in certain cases from debtors to the predatory lenders who helped push them into bankruptcy.
Biden voted against it. Obama voted for it.
Gwen Ifill should ask Joe Biden to explain these conflicts with the head of his own party’s ticket.
Over the past eight years – and particularly since the housing bubble starting bursting – bankruptcy filings have skyrocketed. While there have certainly been abuses by millionaires using clever legal provisions to game the system, most bankruptcies are filed by people earning less than $30,000 a year. They have been caused by mortgage defaults, by loss of jobs, by the rising costs of everything, and by runaway medical bills triggered by the absence of health insurance or by health insurance companies whose primary mission appears to denial of benefits.
I want Joe Biden to “win” this debate. He deserves to win it. He will be the anti-Cheney. He will be a credit to his office. He will be a comfort to those who envision the possibility that, someday, another vice-president may be called upon to move into the Oval Office.
More important still, Joe Biden can play a huge role in bringing sanity to American foreign policy and in helping to restore our country’s reputation in the eyes of the world.
But he is not without his warts. And these should be explored tonight. Not just because sunlight is the best disinfectant; it’s also because transparency can signal the beginning of the process that forces our elected officials to make long-overdue changes.
Real bankruptcy reform should be high on the list of such changes.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
What Sarah Palin Needs to Know About Special Needs Families
The article below was written by Patricia Stacey, Author of “The Boy Who Loved Windows: Opening the Heart and Mind of a Child Threatened with Autism”.
Ten years ago, my husband and I discovered that our six-month-old son had serious neurological problems and was at risk for autism. He couldn't look at me, but he stared obsessively, incessantly out of windows, as if beguiled by light that flooded into the room each morning rather than by his own mother's face. The realization of his neurological problems was the beginning of a life-changing road for my family, a life of intensive research, and working as hard as we could every day of our lives to help our son overcome the disability that he was born with.
I resisted at first the identity of mom with a sick kid, yet I am still in awe of the ways that adversity has of dragging us back into life, into new ways of seeing. Researching, I learned that a baby's brain does not come into the world like a clock ready to start running; it comes in more like a computer ready to be programmed, ready to make itself fit into whatever world it enters.
In the first few months of life, the brain increases neural connections by as much as fifty trillion. These same connections will begin to be pruned away by the very brain that made them if the baby does not have the right kinds of "experiences" and stimuli. Understanding that time was critical, I knew I could not afford to think about my career. It was time to buckle down and get to work to make a future for my son.
I spent every free minute of the day on the floor with him working to stimulate his brain. Sometimes I had to do it in a darkened room, because my son's nervous system was fragile, shutting down in bright light.
Today at eleven years old, my son is highly social with friends calling for play dates. He is creative, intelligent, compassionate, and just finished his first season of baseball, but keeping him that way still takes hours a week, even hours some days. Sometimes I wonder what his life would be like if I hadn't spent those countless hours with him as a baby, if I hadn't brought him to nutritionists or driven him to occupational therapists and physical therapists and the parade of doctors who came not just to our lives, but through our lives.
Listening to a recent speech by Sarah Palin, I felt a strange sense of disquiet, a disquiet that continues to haunt me. As a feminist, I know I should be proud that a woman is in line for one of the greatest leadership positions a human can face in this world. Yet, Sarah Palin's presence in this campaign leaves more questions for me than answers. Most disquieting are her claims to being a "hockey mom," and to be a representative of special needs families.
I've been mulling this problem over for days. How can she do this? Pretend to know our struggles? How can any parent of a special needs child ramp up her professional life right at the moment she should be taking a leave of absence? (Or at least as her husband should, but neither is to my knowledge).
I can't figure out the mystery. Who is dragging their son to all those appointments? Who is talking to him and playing with him regularly to make sure all those neural connections develop properly? (If the brain doesn't receive the proper kind of stimulation, those neural pathways will be lost forever. Scientists now insist that the course of a child's life hangs on these important first months and years.). Who is meeting once or twice a week with early intervention staff to make sure that the family follows through with suggestions and therapeutic activities? And who is following through?
Palin can't know my struggles. If someone had asked me to so much as join the PTO when my special needs son was a baby I would have laughed, (or cried -- probably the latter).
Studies show that many fathers mysteriously become very busy when special needs children are born. The stress of the extra work at home, the dramas of discussion with doctors with its mixture of bad and good news, the new lists of twenty things parents are supposed to be doing, the endless visits to therapists, facing the stressed-out wife in tears by dinner, is too much for some to handle. Work is a safe haven from the chaos of the special needs family life.
But if there is a percentage of parents who retreat to work when they have special needs children, isn't Sarah Palin one of them? What makes the problem convoluted, like something Orwell described in his coining of the term "doublespeak" is the way that Sarah Palin pretends to be the kind of mother who is on the front lines. Instead, she stands on a podium with this child as if he is a trophy of her domesticity, without admitting that she often works 800 miles from her family home, and now will be on a campaign trail for weeks. By doing this, she mocks me and all the parents of special needs children who have given up years of our lives to protect the dignity and futures of our children.
"So are you saying that special needs children are solely the responsibility of mothers?" the feminist in me perseverates. "No! They are not," she insists. "But Palin parades her Down syndrome child at a convention, in an environment wholly hostile to a baby's delicate nervous system. She displays a teenager equally vulnerable, (and quite possibly a teenager who lacks proper guidance), while the baby lies in someone else's arms (ironically, that very teenager), a baby who lies limp-headed, ignored even while being starred at, surrounded by crowds of people who seem oblivious to the truth, that family values have skipped town in the arms of ambition.
Ten years ago, my husband and I discovered that our six-month-old son had serious neurological problems and was at risk for autism. He couldn't look at me, but he stared obsessively, incessantly out of windows, as if beguiled by light that flooded into the room each morning rather than by his own mother's face. The realization of his neurological problems was the beginning of a life-changing road for my family, a life of intensive research, and working as hard as we could every day of our lives to help our son overcome the disability that he was born with.
I resisted at first the identity of mom with a sick kid, yet I am still in awe of the ways that adversity has of dragging us back into life, into new ways of seeing. Researching, I learned that a baby's brain does not come into the world like a clock ready to start running; it comes in more like a computer ready to be programmed, ready to make itself fit into whatever world it enters.
In the first few months of life, the brain increases neural connections by as much as fifty trillion. These same connections will begin to be pruned away by the very brain that made them if the baby does not have the right kinds of "experiences" and stimuli. Understanding that time was critical, I knew I could not afford to think about my career. It was time to buckle down and get to work to make a future for my son.
I spent every free minute of the day on the floor with him working to stimulate his brain. Sometimes I had to do it in a darkened room, because my son's nervous system was fragile, shutting down in bright light.
Today at eleven years old, my son is highly social with friends calling for play dates. He is creative, intelligent, compassionate, and just finished his first season of baseball, but keeping him that way still takes hours a week, even hours some days. Sometimes I wonder what his life would be like if I hadn't spent those countless hours with him as a baby, if I hadn't brought him to nutritionists or driven him to occupational therapists and physical therapists and the parade of doctors who came not just to our lives, but through our lives.
Listening to a recent speech by Sarah Palin, I felt a strange sense of disquiet, a disquiet that continues to haunt me. As a feminist, I know I should be proud that a woman is in line for one of the greatest leadership positions a human can face in this world. Yet, Sarah Palin's presence in this campaign leaves more questions for me than answers. Most disquieting are her claims to being a "hockey mom," and to be a representative of special needs families.
I've been mulling this problem over for days. How can she do this? Pretend to know our struggles? How can any parent of a special needs child ramp up her professional life right at the moment she should be taking a leave of absence? (Or at least as her husband should, but neither is to my knowledge).
I can't figure out the mystery. Who is dragging their son to all those appointments? Who is talking to him and playing with him regularly to make sure all those neural connections develop properly? (If the brain doesn't receive the proper kind of stimulation, those neural pathways will be lost forever. Scientists now insist that the course of a child's life hangs on these important first months and years.). Who is meeting once or twice a week with early intervention staff to make sure that the family follows through with suggestions and therapeutic activities? And who is following through?
Palin can't know my struggles. If someone had asked me to so much as join the PTO when my special needs son was a baby I would have laughed, (or cried -- probably the latter).
Studies show that many fathers mysteriously become very busy when special needs children are born. The stress of the extra work at home, the dramas of discussion with doctors with its mixture of bad and good news, the new lists of twenty things parents are supposed to be doing, the endless visits to therapists, facing the stressed-out wife in tears by dinner, is too much for some to handle. Work is a safe haven from the chaos of the special needs family life.
But if there is a percentage of parents who retreat to work when they have special needs children, isn't Sarah Palin one of them? What makes the problem convoluted, like something Orwell described in his coining of the term "doublespeak" is the way that Sarah Palin pretends to be the kind of mother who is on the front lines. Instead, she stands on a podium with this child as if he is a trophy of her domesticity, without admitting that she often works 800 miles from her family home, and now will be on a campaign trail for weeks. By doing this, she mocks me and all the parents of special needs children who have given up years of our lives to protect the dignity and futures of our children.
"So are you saying that special needs children are solely the responsibility of mothers?" the feminist in me perseverates. "No! They are not," she insists. "But Palin parades her Down syndrome child at a convention, in an environment wholly hostile to a baby's delicate nervous system. She displays a teenager equally vulnerable, (and quite possibly a teenager who lacks proper guidance), while the baby lies in someone else's arms (ironically, that very teenager), a baby who lies limp-headed, ignored even while being starred at, surrounded by crowds of people who seem oblivious to the truth, that family values have skipped town in the arms of ambition.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Goodbye, Mr. Brooks.
By William Fisher
David Brooks of The New York Times has always been my favorite conservative commentator.
Our worldviews are often different and the same sets of facts often lead us to quite different conclusions. But his thinking has consistently challenged my own. He has forced me rethink some of my own orthodoxies. His arguments are literate, reasoned, and thoughtful. They display an awareness of history that has become rare in these days of soundbites and talking points. And his writing is devoid of the toxic hyperbole that has become the meat-and-potatoes of most of his demagogic conservative colleagues, like Anne Coulter.
That’s why I found his recent encomium for John McCain so outrageously disappointing. Here’s what he wrote in The Times:
“He is not a sophisticated conceptual thinker, but he is a good judge of character.”
OK, not a sophisticated conceptual thinker – I can accept that; it would be a refreshing change to have a thoughtful and – dare I say it? – curious man occupying the Oval Office. But it’s not an absolute prerequisite for the presidency.
But “a good judge of character”? That stretches credulity.
How would a good judge of character choose to hire a campaign manager who owns a company hired to lobby for the very perks John McCain now rails against? How would a good judge of character select as his principal spokesperson a recipient of one of the more golden parachutes of business failure while pledging to put an end to corporate greed? How would a good judge of character choose a principal economic advisor famously known as the father of deregulation while promising real reform and an end to the cowboy culture of Wall Street? And how would a good judge of character choose a running mate who, by even the most charitable measure, is arguably less qualified to be vice president than any other candidate for that office in the history of the country? Much less one who would be a single beat away from a 72-year-old heart?
I can only conclude that David Brooks must have been in some state of total denial when he commended John McCain as a good judge of character. But of all McCain’s character-judgment deficits, none is more revealing than his choice of Sarah Palin.
What does her selection say about the character judgment of a guy who would throw the country under the bus to energize the Republican base?
Even conservatives like Kathleen Parker and George Will are rightfully embarrassed by this wildly cynical judgment by Sen. McCain. And so is the rest of the world, which finds his choice not just laughable, but downright dangerous.
Sarah Palin announced that, after her election, she would be in charge of reform, energy policy and looking out for mothers with special needs children. Big portfolio, that.
But which of us would trust it to a person capable of participating in this exchange with Katie Couric of CBS?
COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? ... Instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?
PALIN: Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy -- Oh, it's got to be about job creation too. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions.
During the next four years, our country will face some of its most serious challenges since the Civil War. That John McCain would choose Sarah Palin to help confront these challenges speaks volumes about his judgment of character.
(And, oh, by the way, her acceptance tells us a lot about Governor Palin’s character. A person of real character would have declined the nomination on grounds of her own unpreparedness. Instead, what we got from Sarah was, “A good mother knows how to be good President! that's the bottom line!”)
Well, I find it hard to believe that David Brooks thinks it’s the bottom line. And I find it even harder to believe that David Brooks seriously considered any of this before painting John McCain as such a sterling judge of character. Had he done so, “country first” would have led us down a more responsible road – and have become something more an empty partisan mantra.
David Brooks of The New York Times has always been my favorite conservative commentator.
Our worldviews are often different and the same sets of facts often lead us to quite different conclusions. But his thinking has consistently challenged my own. He has forced me rethink some of my own orthodoxies. His arguments are literate, reasoned, and thoughtful. They display an awareness of history that has become rare in these days of soundbites and talking points. And his writing is devoid of the toxic hyperbole that has become the meat-and-potatoes of most of his demagogic conservative colleagues, like Anne Coulter.
That’s why I found his recent encomium for John McCain so outrageously disappointing. Here’s what he wrote in The Times:
“He is not a sophisticated conceptual thinker, but he is a good judge of character.”
OK, not a sophisticated conceptual thinker – I can accept that; it would be a refreshing change to have a thoughtful and – dare I say it? – curious man occupying the Oval Office. But it’s not an absolute prerequisite for the presidency.
But “a good judge of character”? That stretches credulity.
How would a good judge of character choose to hire a campaign manager who owns a company hired to lobby for the very perks John McCain now rails against? How would a good judge of character select as his principal spokesperson a recipient of one of the more golden parachutes of business failure while pledging to put an end to corporate greed? How would a good judge of character choose a principal economic advisor famously known as the father of deregulation while promising real reform and an end to the cowboy culture of Wall Street? And how would a good judge of character choose a running mate who, by even the most charitable measure, is arguably less qualified to be vice president than any other candidate for that office in the history of the country? Much less one who would be a single beat away from a 72-year-old heart?
I can only conclude that David Brooks must have been in some state of total denial when he commended John McCain as a good judge of character. But of all McCain’s character-judgment deficits, none is more revealing than his choice of Sarah Palin.
What does her selection say about the character judgment of a guy who would throw the country under the bus to energize the Republican base?
Even conservatives like Kathleen Parker and George Will are rightfully embarrassed by this wildly cynical judgment by Sen. McCain. And so is the rest of the world, which finds his choice not just laughable, but downright dangerous.
Sarah Palin announced that, after her election, she would be in charge of reform, energy policy and looking out for mothers with special needs children. Big portfolio, that.
But which of us would trust it to a person capable of participating in this exchange with Katie Couric of CBS?
COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? ... Instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?
PALIN: Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy -- Oh, it's got to be about job creation too. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions.
During the next four years, our country will face some of its most serious challenges since the Civil War. That John McCain would choose Sarah Palin to help confront these challenges speaks volumes about his judgment of character.
(And, oh, by the way, her acceptance tells us a lot about Governor Palin’s character. A person of real character would have declined the nomination on grounds of her own unpreparedness. Instead, what we got from Sarah was, “A good mother knows how to be good President! that's the bottom line!”)
Well, I find it hard to believe that David Brooks thinks it’s the bottom line. And I find it even harder to believe that David Brooks seriously considered any of this before painting John McCain as such a sterling judge of character. Had he done so, “country first” would have led us down a more responsible road – and have become something more an empty partisan mantra.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
FINALLY – A GOOD NEWS STORY
By William Fisher
A woman who was denied asylum in the U.S. despite her fears that she would suffer additional female genital mutilation if she was deported to her native Mali has been given a second chance.
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey -- whose intervention was sought in a national campaign by women’s and human rights groups -- has reversed a ruling by a federal immigration board that acknowledged that the woman’s genitals had been cut as a child but said that while “reprehensible,” the mutilation could not be repeated.
The Attorney General concluded this month that the ruling was flawed and sent the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) for reconsideration, along with guidance regarding legal errors the BIA had committed.
He said, “As several courts have recognized, female genital mutilation is indeed capable of repetition.”
The woman, Alima Traore, 28, was not identified in the Attorney General’s decision but had earlier been identified in an article in The New York Times. The immigration board had ordered her to be sent back to Mali. In addition to the threat of additional mutilation, the woman’s father said he would force her to marry a first cousin. Ms. Traore also said she feared that if she gave birth to a female child, the child would face similar genital cutting. Some 95 percent of women in Mali have undergone genital cutting, according to reports from the U.S. State Department.
Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender Refugee Studies at the Hastings law school at the University of California, was among those who spearheaded national efforts to persuade the Attorney General to reverse the decision. She told us, “The BIA's decision exemplified an appalling lack of sensitivity or knowledge on the issue of women's rights. Board members wrongly assumed that (female genital mutilation) could only be performed once, and failed to recognize that women who live in societies where (such cutting) is inflicted are subject to a constellation of other forms of gender-based violence.”
She added that the BIA’s “treatment of the issue of forced marriage was just as off-base -- characterizing it as an unfortunate inconvenience -- rather than as the denial of women's fundamental human rights. Under well-accepted international human rights norms, forced marriage is seen as a form of servitude, involving ongoing non-consensual sexual relations -- in other words -- rape.”
Ms. Traore has lived in the United States since 2000. She arrived on a tourist
visa and remained on a student visa, attending college and studying nursing. Her student visa expired in 2003.
The nation’s immigration judges, who are appointed by the Attorney General, have drawn sharp criticism for lack of experience in immigration law, and the Justice Department has been accused of appointing political cronies to these posts as part of the politicization of the Department.
This has resulted in what some critics have called “cowboy justice.” For example, studies have shown wide disparities in outcomes of similar immigration appeals between judges in different immigration courts and even among judges sitting on the same court.
One study found that a judge was 1820% more likely to grant an asylum than another judge in the same courthouse. It also found that one U.S. Court of Appeals was 1148% more likely to rule in favor of an asylum-seeker than another U.S. Court of Appeals, and that the fate of asylum-seekers was often decided not by the facts of the case but rather by a clerk’s random assignment of an applicant to one asylum officer rather than another, or one immigration judge rather than another.
Collectively, asylum officers, immigration judges, members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, and judges of U.S. Courts of Appeals render about 77,000 asylum decisions annually. Almost all of them involve claims that an applicant for asylum reasonably fears imprisonment, torture, or death if forced to return to his or her home country.
The nation’s 215 Immigration Judges handle over 300,000 cases a year. With only 215 Judges, a single judge has to dispose of 1,400 cases a year or nearly 27 cases a week, or more than five each business day, simply to stay abreast of his or her docket.
A study published in the Stanford University Law Review concluded that “in the world of asylum adjudication, there is remarkable variation in decision-making from one official to the next, from one office to the next, from one region to the next, from one judicial circuit to the next, and from one year to the next, even during periods when there has been no intervening change in the law.”
The study confirmed many of the findings of an analysis carried out by The Washington Post, which found that politicization of the asylum-seeking process was as rampant among DOJ-appointed immigration officials as it had been shown to be among U.S. Attorneys.
The Post found that “At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law….”
The newspaper added, “These appointments, all made by the attorney general, have begun to reshape a system of courts in which judges, ruling alone, exercise broad powers -- deporting each year nearly a quarter-million immigrants, who have limited rights to appeal and no right to an attorney.”
When Michael Mukasey took over from disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in late 2007, he cited improvement of the asylum-seeking process among his priorities. Since then, some retiring immigration judges have reportedly been replaced by more experience people, and immigration judges have received specialized training.
Gonzales’ 18-month tenure at the Justice Department was beset with controversy. A longtime Bush confidante and former White House Counsel, he announced his resignation after months of Congressional grilling over the firings of federal prosecutors and allegations that he had misled Congress about the Bush Administration’s “warrantless wiretapping” program.
A woman who was denied asylum in the U.S. despite her fears that she would suffer additional female genital mutilation if she was deported to her native Mali has been given a second chance.
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey -- whose intervention was sought in a national campaign by women’s and human rights groups -- has reversed a ruling by a federal immigration board that acknowledged that the woman’s genitals had been cut as a child but said that while “reprehensible,” the mutilation could not be repeated.
The Attorney General concluded this month that the ruling was flawed and sent the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) for reconsideration, along with guidance regarding legal errors the BIA had committed.
He said, “As several courts have recognized, female genital mutilation is indeed capable of repetition.”
The woman, Alima Traore, 28, was not identified in the Attorney General’s decision but had earlier been identified in an article in The New York Times. The immigration board had ordered her to be sent back to Mali. In addition to the threat of additional mutilation, the woman’s father said he would force her to marry a first cousin. Ms. Traore also said she feared that if she gave birth to a female child, the child would face similar genital cutting. Some 95 percent of women in Mali have undergone genital cutting, according to reports from the U.S. State Department.
Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender Refugee Studies at the Hastings law school at the University of California, was among those who spearheaded national efforts to persuade the Attorney General to reverse the decision. She told us, “The BIA's decision exemplified an appalling lack of sensitivity or knowledge on the issue of women's rights. Board members wrongly assumed that (female genital mutilation) could only be performed once, and failed to recognize that women who live in societies where (such cutting) is inflicted are subject to a constellation of other forms of gender-based violence.”
She added that the BIA’s “treatment of the issue of forced marriage was just as off-base -- characterizing it as an unfortunate inconvenience -- rather than as the denial of women's fundamental human rights. Under well-accepted international human rights norms, forced marriage is seen as a form of servitude, involving ongoing non-consensual sexual relations -- in other words -- rape.”
Ms. Traore has lived in the United States since 2000. She arrived on a tourist
visa and remained on a student visa, attending college and studying nursing. Her student visa expired in 2003.
The nation’s immigration judges, who are appointed by the Attorney General, have drawn sharp criticism for lack of experience in immigration law, and the Justice Department has been accused of appointing political cronies to these posts as part of the politicization of the Department.
This has resulted in what some critics have called “cowboy justice.” For example, studies have shown wide disparities in outcomes of similar immigration appeals between judges in different immigration courts and even among judges sitting on the same court.
One study found that a judge was 1820% more likely to grant an asylum than another judge in the same courthouse. It also found that one U.S. Court of Appeals was 1148% more likely to rule in favor of an asylum-seeker than another U.S. Court of Appeals, and that the fate of asylum-seekers was often decided not by the facts of the case but rather by a clerk’s random assignment of an applicant to one asylum officer rather than another, or one immigration judge rather than another.
Collectively, asylum officers, immigration judges, members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, and judges of U.S. Courts of Appeals render about 77,000 asylum decisions annually. Almost all of them involve claims that an applicant for asylum reasonably fears imprisonment, torture, or death if forced to return to his or her home country.
The nation’s 215 Immigration Judges handle over 300,000 cases a year. With only 215 Judges, a single judge has to dispose of 1,400 cases a year or nearly 27 cases a week, or more than five each business day, simply to stay abreast of his or her docket.
A study published in the Stanford University Law Review concluded that “in the world of asylum adjudication, there is remarkable variation in decision-making from one official to the next, from one office to the next, from one region to the next, from one judicial circuit to the next, and from one year to the next, even during periods when there has been no intervening change in the law.”
The study confirmed many of the findings of an analysis carried out by The Washington Post, which found that politicization of the asylum-seeking process was as rampant among DOJ-appointed immigration officials as it had been shown to be among U.S. Attorneys.
The Post found that “At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law….”
The newspaper added, “These appointments, all made by the attorney general, have begun to reshape a system of courts in which judges, ruling alone, exercise broad powers -- deporting each year nearly a quarter-million immigrants, who have limited rights to appeal and no right to an attorney.”
When Michael Mukasey took over from disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in late 2007, he cited improvement of the asylum-seeking process among his priorities. Since then, some retiring immigration judges have reportedly been replaced by more experience people, and immigration judges have received specialized training.
Gonzales’ 18-month tenure at the Justice Department was beset with controversy. A longtime Bush confidante and former White House Counsel, he announced his resignation after months of Congressional grilling over the firings of federal prosecutors and allegations that he had misled Congress about the Bush Administration’s “warrantless wiretapping” program.
Monday, September 22, 2008
How About a Different Kind of Rescue Plan?
By William Fisher
I know, I know. I’m supposed to be writing about Hank Paulson’s “rescue” plan, or the wisdom of sending more troops to Afghanistan, or the first presidential debate, or fact-checking the misstatements of the candidates.
But sometimes, less is more. The story that goes un-noticed and under-reported can often illuminate a much broader issue and provide insights at multiple levels.
Such a story appeared a couple of weeks ago in the online edition of the Los Angeles Times – and, to the best knowledge of me and Google – in less than a handful of other publications.
It caught my attention because it came on the heels of the “ServiceNation Summit” at Columbia University, where Senators McCain and Obama – appearing separately – presented their views on public service and civic engagement in post-9/11 America.
No surprises here. Predictably, both declared they were all in favor of more public service and more civic engagement.
Good. Now suppose you were motivated to actually do something to show your commitment to public service? Like joining the Peace Corps, for example.
Well, you would discover that the Peace Corps is planning to cut 400 volunteer positions. You would discover that Corps missions in many under-developed countries were being forced to assign one person to do the work of two. And you would further discover that, with fewer spots, an increasing number of Corps volunteers who were expecting to begin service this fall were seeing their deployments delayed at least until next year -- and in some cases indefinitely.
The reason is the agency’s $18 million budget shortfall. That shortfall, according to the LA times, is the declining value of the dollar and increased food and fuel costs worldwide. The Corps, which has a budget of $330.8 million, estimates its foreign-currency losses from 2008 alone to be $9.2 million.
Worse, the Corps’ budget for fiscal 2009 has not yet been passed. The House Appropriations subcommittee that sets Peace Corps funding has supported the Bush Administration’s request for $343.5 million, and its Senate counterpart has approved $337 million. But until Congress passes that budget -- which could be delayed until after the presidential inauguration in January -- the agency must operate at its existing funding levels.
Now, why do I think this is important? Surely, when we’re spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, we shouldn’t get apoplectic over an amount that our elected officials in Washington would regard as chump change!
This missing $18 million is important because yet again it reminds us that the fiscal policies of the Bush Administration have immediate and practical consequences. Like when the dollar – once considered the world’s preeminent currency – finds itself in continuous and sustained decline, as it has over these past seven-plus years. The reasons behind our shrinking dollar are numerous and complex, but most economists agree that a major contributor is the world’s expectations of weaker U.S. growth and stronger overseas economies. And since most of the world’s commodities – including oil – are denominated in U.S. dollars, the dollar’s declining value pushes up the prices of these essentials. For all of us, including the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps’ budget shortfall is also important because of what it tells us about the priorities of the White House and of Congress. There is no way I can be persuaded that our elected officials have to wait until the next Administration takes over to find $18 million. This is not a matter of budgetary procedures or of Congressional rules. And it’s not related to our current financial sector meltdown.
This is a simple matter of political will. If today’s Peace Corps had anything close to the powerful Beltway “rabbis” it once had, the missing $18 million could be found tomorrow – no, this afternoon. Maybe the solution would be to build just one less bridge to nowhere.
But there is a third, and arguably the most compelling, argument for fully funding the Peace Corps: It is one of our pitifully few foreign policy success stories. There could be no more powerful message about America than volunteers flying off to work in often hostile and dangerous places with no agenda other than helping the less fortunate.
When John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps in 1961, I was a very junior member of his administration. I was perhaps too inexperienced to fully appreciate the enormous potency of low-profile person-to-person public diplomacy. Back then, I had never heard of “soft power,” but nonetheless I had the sense that this was an initiative whose impact would far exceed its cost. And a program our country would come to be proud of.
The Peace Corps began in the heady Camelot days of JFK’s presidency. But, unlike Camelot, it was never about mythology. It was real. It was as practical and down-in-the-weeds as any government program can get. It fed on and brought out the best values of Americans and America.
Since then, the Corps hasn’t disappointed. Over its forty-seven years, some 190,000 volunteers have served in 139 countries. Today, there are 8,079 volunteers working in 74 countries. They still dig wells to bring fresh water to poor villages in the middle of nowhere. They still work with subsistence farmers to improve crop yields and stave off famines. They still advise expectant mothers about pre- and post-natal care. They still teach kids in one-room schools with dirt floors. And, more recently, they work to transfer entrepreneurial skills to microbusiness ideas the local banks don’t want to hear about.
In a world in which the United States finds itself with ever-fewer friends, the Peace Corps continues to forge bonds that last for decades and strengthen over time. It presents an alternative image of America to its recipients and to the countries they live in. It creates friends. And friends become allies.
So when Messrs. McCain and Obama extol the merits of public service and exhort us to become participants, they and we ought to be sure that $18 million doesn’t stand between our best instincts and the opportunity to serve.
I know, I know. I’m supposed to be writing about Hank Paulson’s “rescue” plan, or the wisdom of sending more troops to Afghanistan, or the first presidential debate, or fact-checking the misstatements of the candidates.
But sometimes, less is more. The story that goes un-noticed and under-reported can often illuminate a much broader issue and provide insights at multiple levels.
Such a story appeared a couple of weeks ago in the online edition of the Los Angeles Times – and, to the best knowledge of me and Google – in less than a handful of other publications.
It caught my attention because it came on the heels of the “ServiceNation Summit” at Columbia University, where Senators McCain and Obama – appearing separately – presented their views on public service and civic engagement in post-9/11 America.
No surprises here. Predictably, both declared they were all in favor of more public service and more civic engagement.
Good. Now suppose you were motivated to actually do something to show your commitment to public service? Like joining the Peace Corps, for example.
Well, you would discover that the Peace Corps is planning to cut 400 volunteer positions. You would discover that Corps missions in many under-developed countries were being forced to assign one person to do the work of two. And you would further discover that, with fewer spots, an increasing number of Corps volunteers who were expecting to begin service this fall were seeing their deployments delayed at least until next year -- and in some cases indefinitely.
The reason is the agency’s $18 million budget shortfall. That shortfall, according to the LA times, is the declining value of the dollar and increased food and fuel costs worldwide. The Corps, which has a budget of $330.8 million, estimates its foreign-currency losses from 2008 alone to be $9.2 million.
Worse, the Corps’ budget for fiscal 2009 has not yet been passed. The House Appropriations subcommittee that sets Peace Corps funding has supported the Bush Administration’s request for $343.5 million, and its Senate counterpart has approved $337 million. But until Congress passes that budget -- which could be delayed until after the presidential inauguration in January -- the agency must operate at its existing funding levels.
Now, why do I think this is important? Surely, when we’re spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, we shouldn’t get apoplectic over an amount that our elected officials in Washington would regard as chump change!
This missing $18 million is important because yet again it reminds us that the fiscal policies of the Bush Administration have immediate and practical consequences. Like when the dollar – once considered the world’s preeminent currency – finds itself in continuous and sustained decline, as it has over these past seven-plus years. The reasons behind our shrinking dollar are numerous and complex, but most economists agree that a major contributor is the world’s expectations of weaker U.S. growth and stronger overseas economies. And since most of the world’s commodities – including oil – are denominated in U.S. dollars, the dollar’s declining value pushes up the prices of these essentials. For all of us, including the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps’ budget shortfall is also important because of what it tells us about the priorities of the White House and of Congress. There is no way I can be persuaded that our elected officials have to wait until the next Administration takes over to find $18 million. This is not a matter of budgetary procedures or of Congressional rules. And it’s not related to our current financial sector meltdown.
This is a simple matter of political will. If today’s Peace Corps had anything close to the powerful Beltway “rabbis” it once had, the missing $18 million could be found tomorrow – no, this afternoon. Maybe the solution would be to build just one less bridge to nowhere.
But there is a third, and arguably the most compelling, argument for fully funding the Peace Corps: It is one of our pitifully few foreign policy success stories. There could be no more powerful message about America than volunteers flying off to work in often hostile and dangerous places with no agenda other than helping the less fortunate.
When John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps in 1961, I was a very junior member of his administration. I was perhaps too inexperienced to fully appreciate the enormous potency of low-profile person-to-person public diplomacy. Back then, I had never heard of “soft power,” but nonetheless I had the sense that this was an initiative whose impact would far exceed its cost. And a program our country would come to be proud of.
The Peace Corps began in the heady Camelot days of JFK’s presidency. But, unlike Camelot, it was never about mythology. It was real. It was as practical and down-in-the-weeds as any government program can get. It fed on and brought out the best values of Americans and America.
Since then, the Corps hasn’t disappointed. Over its forty-seven years, some 190,000 volunteers have served in 139 countries. Today, there are 8,079 volunteers working in 74 countries. They still dig wells to bring fresh water to poor villages in the middle of nowhere. They still work with subsistence farmers to improve crop yields and stave off famines. They still advise expectant mothers about pre- and post-natal care. They still teach kids in one-room schools with dirt floors. And, more recently, they work to transfer entrepreneurial skills to microbusiness ideas the local banks don’t want to hear about.
In a world in which the United States finds itself with ever-fewer friends, the Peace Corps continues to forge bonds that last for decades and strengthen over time. It presents an alternative image of America to its recipients and to the countries they live in. It creates friends. And friends become allies.
So when Messrs. McCain and Obama extol the merits of public service and exhort us to become participants, they and we ought to be sure that $18 million doesn’t stand between our best instincts and the opportunity to serve.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Palin: The Best We Can Hope For
By William Fisher
Political junkies follow poll numbers. So we know that there is more than a remote chance that John McCain might indeed become our next president. Which would make Sarah Palin our next vice president.
Just after her nomination, Governor Palin famously admitted that she had no idea what a vice president does all day. But later, she said the president would tap her for (1) energy issues (2) government reform, and (3) helping families with special needs children.
If these three tasks were specified by McCain, the nation could in for more trouble; she appears to be uniquely unqualified to take on any of them. If not, there may still be a shred of hope.
The hope is that McCain’s second most important executive decision will be to turn the clock back to a time when the first official in the line of presidential succession was, to quote FDR’s Veep, John Nance Garner, "not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
And, after eight years of Dick Cheney, this could be a brilliant idea, a real coup for the new president.
Even for John McCain, it could be a no-brainer. After all, the Constitution gives the vice president only two jobs: Taking the top job if the President becomes unable to serve due to death, resignation, or medical impairment, and acting as the presiding officer of the Senate. In that second role – which the Veep virtually never actually performs – his duties are to cast a vote in the event of a Senate deadlock and to preside over and certify the official vote count of the Electoral College.
Assuming McCain stays healthy, those tasks, plus maybe attending state funerals and otherwise becoming part of Washington’s ceremonial furniture, would be ideal for Sarah. She’d be ready!
And, for John McCain, this could be the beginning of The McCain Doctrine. It would be a wonderful example of preemptive damage control! And it would bolster his image of a guy deeply committed to “country first” by preserving our nation’s traditions.
For most of our history, that tradition has made the vice president largely invisible. John Adams, our first Veep, described it as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." When the Whig Party was looking for a vice president on Zachary Taylor's ticket in 1848, they approached Daniel Webster, who said of the offer, "I do not intend to be buried until I am dead." Vice President John C. Calhoun became the first vice president to resign the office, believing he would have more power as a senator.
For most of our history, vice presidents didn’t even attend meetings of the Cabinet. John Adams attended on in 1791, but after that no vice president did so until Thomas Marshall stood in for Woodrow Wilson while the president traveled to Europe in 1918 and 1919. Warren Harding’s vice president, Charles G. Dawes, was uninvited to the Cabinet Room after he opined that "the precedent might prove injurious to the country." Ditto Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s Veep.
Roosevelt maintained the tradition. He kept his last vice president, Harry Truman, totally in the dark about all war and postwar issues, including the atomic bomb, leading Truman to describe the job of the vice president as going to weddings and funerals.
It was not until Richard Nixon became Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president that the office began to remotely resemble today’s iteration. Eisenhower ordered Nixon to preside at Cabinet meetings in his absence. Nixon also became the first vice president to temporarily assume control of the executive branch during Ike’s three illnesses.
Not until 1949 did Congress make the vice president one of four statutory members of the National Security Council. Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s second-in-command, was the first Veep to have an office in the West Wing of the White House. And George H. W. Bush, while highly experienced in legislative, intelligence and diplomatic affairs, maintained a very low profile in Ronald Reagan’s administration.
But since the Reagan years, the Veep’s office has grown in importance through successive administrations. Al Gore, for example, was a key advisor to Bill Clinton on matters of foreign policy and the environment.
And then came Darth Vader, with his White House within the White House, his Scooter Libbys and David Addingtons, his acolytes at the Justice and Defense Departments, his skills as the ultimate Washington out-manouverer, and hence his outsize influence on the rookie Governor of Texas.
But John McCain is fond of projecting himself as his own man. Maverick, you know. So it would be a credible part of his narrative – and well within his powers -- to cede no authority whatever to Vice President Palin.
In which case, she could dutifully take up residence at Number One Observatory Circle, along with the First Dude and their kids, and perhaps even install a tanning bed.
Doubtless, Sarah would be Ready on Day One to start conspiring to use the Veep’s office as her way to build a bridge to somewhere. But that might take a year or so.
Meanwhile, the Republic would be safer.
And that’s the best we can hope for.
Political junkies follow poll numbers. So we know that there is more than a remote chance that John McCain might indeed become our next president. Which would make Sarah Palin our next vice president.
Just after her nomination, Governor Palin famously admitted that she had no idea what a vice president does all day. But later, she said the president would tap her for (1) energy issues (2) government reform, and (3) helping families with special needs children.
If these three tasks were specified by McCain, the nation could in for more trouble; she appears to be uniquely unqualified to take on any of them. If not, there may still be a shred of hope.
The hope is that McCain’s second most important executive decision will be to turn the clock back to a time when the first official in the line of presidential succession was, to quote FDR’s Veep, John Nance Garner, "not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
And, after eight years of Dick Cheney, this could be a brilliant idea, a real coup for the new president.
Even for John McCain, it could be a no-brainer. After all, the Constitution gives the vice president only two jobs: Taking the top job if the President becomes unable to serve due to death, resignation, or medical impairment, and acting as the presiding officer of the Senate. In that second role – which the Veep virtually never actually performs – his duties are to cast a vote in the event of a Senate deadlock and to preside over and certify the official vote count of the Electoral College.
Assuming McCain stays healthy, those tasks, plus maybe attending state funerals and otherwise becoming part of Washington’s ceremonial furniture, would be ideal for Sarah. She’d be ready!
And, for John McCain, this could be the beginning of The McCain Doctrine. It would be a wonderful example of preemptive damage control! And it would bolster his image of a guy deeply committed to “country first” by preserving our nation’s traditions.
For most of our history, that tradition has made the vice president largely invisible. John Adams, our first Veep, described it as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." When the Whig Party was looking for a vice president on Zachary Taylor's ticket in 1848, they approached Daniel Webster, who said of the offer, "I do not intend to be buried until I am dead." Vice President John C. Calhoun became the first vice president to resign the office, believing he would have more power as a senator.
For most of our history, vice presidents didn’t even attend meetings of the Cabinet. John Adams attended on in 1791, but after that no vice president did so until Thomas Marshall stood in for Woodrow Wilson while the president traveled to Europe in 1918 and 1919. Warren Harding’s vice president, Charles G. Dawes, was uninvited to the Cabinet Room after he opined that "the precedent might prove injurious to the country." Ditto Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s Veep.
Roosevelt maintained the tradition. He kept his last vice president, Harry Truman, totally in the dark about all war and postwar issues, including the atomic bomb, leading Truman to describe the job of the vice president as going to weddings and funerals.
It was not until Richard Nixon became Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president that the office began to remotely resemble today’s iteration. Eisenhower ordered Nixon to preside at Cabinet meetings in his absence. Nixon also became the first vice president to temporarily assume control of the executive branch during Ike’s three illnesses.
Not until 1949 did Congress make the vice president one of four statutory members of the National Security Council. Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s second-in-command, was the first Veep to have an office in the West Wing of the White House. And George H. W. Bush, while highly experienced in legislative, intelligence and diplomatic affairs, maintained a very low profile in Ronald Reagan’s administration.
But since the Reagan years, the Veep’s office has grown in importance through successive administrations. Al Gore, for example, was a key advisor to Bill Clinton on matters of foreign policy and the environment.
And then came Darth Vader, with his White House within the White House, his Scooter Libbys and David Addingtons, his acolytes at the Justice and Defense Departments, his skills as the ultimate Washington out-manouverer, and hence his outsize influence on the rookie Governor of Texas.
But John McCain is fond of projecting himself as his own man. Maverick, you know. So it would be a credible part of his narrative – and well within his powers -- to cede no authority whatever to Vice President Palin.
In which case, she could dutifully take up residence at Number One Observatory Circle, along with the First Dude and their kids, and perhaps even install a tanning bed.
Doubtless, Sarah would be Ready on Day One to start conspiring to use the Veep’s office as her way to build a bridge to somewhere. But that might take a year or so.
Meanwhile, the Republic would be safer.
And that’s the best we can hope for.
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