Columnist.
Well, that sure was a short campaign. Two conventions, a few speeches and that's it? Obama-Biden beats Romney-Ryan like a drum and we get back to whatever it was we were doing before the election so rudely interrupted us? As of Monday, the Real Clear Politics average of presidential polls had President Obama five points ahead. Based on what he was hearing, Nate Silver, the New York Times' poll specialist, had granted Obama 316.9 electoral votes and Mitt Romney 221.1. Intrade, "the world's leading prediction market," had Obama's chances figured at 59.7 percent, versus a sobering, if not a gimme-a-double-scotch-depressing 40.3.
On with the campaign, then. And guess what. It's going to be a campaign after all, bearing no resemblance to the schizoid Republican effort of 2008, with John McCain (solid citizen, non-ripsnorter) selling good will and random platitudes, Sarah Palin selling mostly herself. Ugh. The memory belongs in a dark closet, with door closed and locked. A presidential campaign is not always a contest between ideas and philosophies. This one is. Just wait if you don't think so. Two different ideas about America are on display in speeches and ads: America as a land of freedom and opportunity vs. America as a placid sheepfold, run by the shepherds. The two notions have crossed paths before in campaigns but rarely so vividly, not to mention excitingly, as now. It's for two reasons.
As Lyndon Johnson told it -- or allowed it to be told in his name -- this Goldwater guy, if given half a chance, would blow up the world. In which case, why shouldn't the voters back in '64 not play it safe and keep LBJ in the White House? Memories of the infamous Johnson television spot, with its daisy-leaf-plucking-about-to-be-incinerated-by-bad-Barry, cuddly, little girl, cause some of us old-timers to reach for the Maalox. (Small wonder that Barry would later say, talking of Lyndon, "Don't get me started on that SOB.") The debasement of presidential discourse wasn't the only public offense Johnson committed, but he sure set a vital precedent -- one that came to mind as Mitt Romney was expatiating on Barack Obama's "campaign of personal vilification and demonization."
What goes around seems to come around, such as an accusation Democrats are perennially thrilled to hurl at Republicans -- those fogies and Neanderthals, those reactionaries, those cave dwellers. What must we do with these change-hating fossils? is the recurring Democratic 'plaint. Drag 'em into modern times, kicking and screaming? Oh, boy, does it ever come around! The shrieks and protests that fill American air space at the moment, the splutterings about change and whatever was good for Grandpa being good enough for me -- where do you hear it, on the right? Not for a minute. You hear it all on the left of the political spectrum -- the reactionary, status-quo-loving left.
Watch the Obama "progressives'" glee and mirth spreading across their countenances as they chunk mud balls at Mitt Romney's running mate-designate, Paul Ryan. That Ryan -- he's "a certifiable right-wing ideologue," says Obama strategist David Axelrod. ("Certifiable," don't cha know, means "legally insane.") From Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist: "(H)is mind is rooted in Ayn Rand's idolatry of selfishness." He's "Robin Hood in deep dark reverse," according to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the left-wing magazine, The Nation. That's besides being, in the mind of Congressman Steve Israel, the Democrat charged with retaking the House, "a nightmare for seniors who have earned their Medicare benefits."
Language, in politics, gets you only so far, but sometimes "so far" is far enough. Take 2008. I trust we all remember "hope and change"? We should. It helped propel a previously unknown community organizer into the White House, hence into our lives, as reorganizer-in-chief. Ted Cruz, "the Republican new man of the moment," according to Fox News' Chris Wallace, has his own gifts as a wordsmith: less sugary, more to be compared with a boxing glove. In the runoff for U. S. senator from the great state of Texas, the previously unknown Cruz whammed the well-known David Dewhurst, talking hard-edge language that seemed right, to many, for the necessities of the moment. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson, he "talked for victory." Victory, it turned out, was what Cruz voters yearned for after three years of imposition by the Obama administration, as well as Congress, on their liberties and prosperity.
Only in America. Meaning, naturally, 21st- century America, the country where you postulate your own view of reality and people with different views -- older views, especially -- *better agree with you or else keep their so-and-so-ing mouths shut, the so-and-so-ing rednecks!* That would bring us to the Chick-fil-A question. Chick fil-A. Hmmm. Being no patron of fast food, I wasn't sure until fairly recently how one was supposed to pronounce the name. Chick Fill-Uh? We certainly know better now. It's what comes of outraging advocates of same-sex unions by deferring to God when it concerns the purposes of marriage and getting yourself hauled before the Court of Fashionable Opinion.
*The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things -- bread and circuses.* -- Juvenal, *Satires* Except that instead of circuses we call them football games -- a term linked indissolubly with the mess at Penn State: NCAA fines and penalties, disappearing statues of head coaches and all the rest. "We've had enough," said Oregon State University President Ed Ray, affirming the virility of the NCAA penalty meted out to Penn State for ignoring ex-coach Jerry Sandusky's record of child abuse, a record too well known by now to warrant rehashing. The glory and majesty of Penn State's football program had come, seemingly, to outrank common human decencies, such as justice to the victims of Sandusky's perversions. So it came to what it came to -- catastrophe for Joe Paterno and Penn State football.
Every human trend (as those of us who've seen a few will affirm) looks fixed, untouchable, set in ready-mixed concrete. Until, to be sure, something else happens and the betting begins anew. The leadership of the Episcopal Church has the notion that objectors to the present leadership style better get used to an eternity of choose-your-own-truth theology. Don't bet the 401(k) on it: accounts of the church's recent General Convention notwithstanding. Things at the General Convention, from a certain perspective, certainly didn't look good. My fellow deputies -- I admit to serving as an elected member of this naughty assemblage -- endorsed pretty much the same menu that hooked Episcopal appetites during the wild and woolly '60s. We're a church whose worship and formularies presuppose the ancient Christian truths; except the way we have come lately to express these truths often makes it seem our principal interests are "social justice," cultural diversity and the liberalization of sexual norms.
It wasn't Tocqueville or Hamilton who said it. Actually, it was Ben Parker in "Spiderman." "With great power comes great responsibility;" it's common sense advice for adaptation in the ongoing war over Obamacare and why Chief Justice John Roberts conspired in upholding that political and economic blunder. Whatever one's view of Roberts' reasoning, one sentence in the majority opinion rightly affirms and sustains Ben Parker: to wit, "It is not our" -- that is, the Supreme Court's -- "job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." That's putting the matter a little curtly. What a lesson, all the same, in the uses and abuses of the greatest worldly power there is -- the power of people living in a democracy to spread the sails of the ship of state or, sometimes, drive the ship on a rock. One may wish the court had knocked down this potentially ruinous law, then stomped on it, lighting Cuban cigars with its pages and scattering the fragments around the chamber. The law is awful. Are we straight on that? Who passed and signed it, nonetheless? The duly elected legislature of the sovereign people and their duly elected chief magistrate.
Arizona's grasp of constitutional niceties may be imperfect according to U.S. Supreme Court standfasts, but the state's attempt to wrestle with the immigration conundrum deserves more respect than jurists and commentators are willing to assign it. Like, what's a state to do when the national government refuses to act on an urgent question intimately affecting its citizens? Arizona chose to enact a law. Some of the law passed muster with the high court this week. Other portions, less artfully conceived perhaps, lost out. Arizona peace officers can check the immigration status of people they stop for nonimmigration-related offenses. What they can't do, broadly speaking, is prevent illegals from seeking work. There we are, then -- meaning not fully enmeshed in the process of problem solving; rather, figuring out how the situation as a whole bears on prospects for re-election or defeat of the incumbent U. S. president. The immigration question, as laid out before us, really doesn't center on the rights or duties of government at one level or another; it centers on votes. Does it not seem that way with most public questions today?
When Congress, split seven ways from Sunday on the question, squelched legislation granting resident status for those formerly called "illegal aliens," President Obama said, in effect, so what? -- we'll do it anyway. And so he did it anyway, announcing last Friday the birth of a new immigration policy affecting an estimated 800,000 illegals. These illegals -- according to the president, who invokes the right to "prosecutorial discretion" -- get exempted from deportation for two years. The new policy renders them legally untouchable, in spite of their illegal status. The situation moves beyond factuality. Up becomes down, hot becomes cold -- by presidential directive, it is as if the country for whom the policy has been constructed was another nation entirely: less like the United States, more like the Wonderland in which Alice discovered the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and other self-definition experts.
What some of us -- well, anyway I do -- refer to as the Slobbification of America made a good showing the other day on the front page of The Wall Street Journal: the tale of a town talking up a ban on public profanity of the grosser sort. Which ban is up for consideration by the assembled citizenry of Middleborough, Mass. The local police chief, the Journal reported, wanted to fine anyone $20 who "accosts or addresses another person with profane or obscene language in a street." I write before the actual vote. I think I know the outcome all the same: futility, of the constitutional or the cultural sort, likely both. The Journal quotes a retired policy officer -- and supporter of the chief's move -- as saying, "Back when I was younger you wouldn't think of saying foul language on the street, but now it's (bleep) you or stick it up your whatever. It's not unique to this town..."
Government unions, what else? -- trying in Wisconsin to give their Republican governor, Scott Walker, the bum's rush from office. There's a fitness, a propriety, in the match-up of reformer (Walker) and encrusted power machine (the Wisconsin public employee unions). I've two reasons for saying so. By the way, I write shortly in advance of the vote on retaining Walker in office -- midway through his term -- or heaving him out the window -- obedient to the unions' summons to punish the guy for muddying their landscaped terrain. Reason 1: In spite of what surely must be the moral excellence of numerous public employee union members in Wisconsin, the state no longer can afford the unions at present pay scales. When Walker became governor after the 2010 elections, he found the state facing a short-term deficit of $137 billion, with a $3.6 billion gap to be closed by 2013. Which couldn't have been the unions' fault entirely. However, the taxpayers were funding 94.2 percent of state workers' pension costs and 88.4 percent of their health care premiums, and government wages were high in relation to private sector pay -- the consequence of collective bargaining.
All the Facebook tabulation of recent days -- whatever it may have meant to Mark Zuckerberg and his brokers -- brought to certain others in the great extended American community a certain sense of relief. It is not essential -- a matter of destiny -- some of us now know, to buy into the whole Facebook thing or for that matter even a sliver of it. We can safely ignore the whole thing. That is what we have learned by reading about Facebook. I have, anyway. A story over the weekend put the number of "seniors" who use Facebook at no more than a third. I cannot say what the reporter meant by "seniors." My uninformed guess would be that he meant people who remember the Kennedy assassination. This takes care, I think I can safely say, of the great majority of folk who might expect to communicate with me by means of Zuckerberg's miracle.
So how did "same-sex marriage" get to be a political issue in the first place -- the kind of issue that draws presidents and presidential contenders into the smoke enveloping this extraordinary battlefield?
What Barack Obama has going for him in 2012 is, well, put it this way: human nature. Witness the French. Witness the Greeks. Part of being human is wanting all you can get without paying any more for it than absolutely necessary. In the context of 21st century governance, this translates into a popular plaint heard throughout Europe and the United States: Namely, suffering is for the birds!
The thing about Lyndon Johnson -- and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators -- was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the '50s and '60s rustling the page of Robert Caro's super biography of Johnson -- the brand-new volume, titled "The Passage of Power," is fourth and penultimate in the series -- stirs memories of times when politicians sort of, a lot of the time, understood their job. They were not nearly as busy as their modern heirs. Their role in our affairs was smaller, less intrusive. That could be part of the reason that "legislative success" was not yet an oxymoron. The larger and more complex the thing you're trying to do in government, the fainter the chances of actually getting it done in a way that contributes to the general good and brings credit to the political artisans.
The power of redemption is the one concept a cynical, self-regarding epoch -- ours -- can't quite get its arms around, especially, perhaps, in the case of the late Chuck Colson. Can the guy have been right in the head? Wasn't he putting us on with all this Sweet Jesus business he performed in prisons all over the world? If Colson was dissembling about his hard-won faith in Christ, the result of imprisonment for his part in Watergate -- a possibility I don't accept for a millisecond -- his was an odd way of staging a comeback: witnessing Christ's love to the ickiest congregation imaginable, prison inmates.
