Conscience of a Conservative

The four columns that David Brooks wrote during the two conventions continue to fascinate me. The New York Times columnist is a conservative in the old sense of the word: a believer in small government and free markets, one who values the continuity of institutions and the traditions of a community. The Republican Party is Brooks’ natural political home. But he does not seem at home in this one. He praised the GOP convention for its celebration of “the striver, who started small, struggled hard, looked within and became wealthy.” But in the end, he wrote, today’s Republican party cannot govern because “its commercial soul is too narrow.”

He was disappointed with Obama’s speech because he believes that a country that has lost its way needs a leader with big ideas and the audacity to push for big change. Romney cannot do that. Obama has yet to show he will.

I agree. This election is about two men playing it safe, appealing to a narrow wedge of voters without offending their base. The way to do that apparently is to go negative . . . to show why the other guy is a worse choice than you.

If this election turns on who can be meaner, more partisan, more negative, we will all lose. And that is the direction in which the campaign is headed. Barack Obama is the only candidate who can rise above that and offer the communal vision this country needs. I hope he does.

Stumble of the Week

Note to self: How could Richard Nixon not make my list of least favorite presidents? Because . . .

#5 Andrew Jackson, the president of the people with an unfortunate whiff of Pol Pot. He opened the White House doors to the “common man” while he threw merit out the window by awarding government jobs solely on patronage – all of which pales beside the “trail of tears,” the forced and deadly relocation of all southeastern Indian nations to Oklahoma.

#4 Rutherford B. Hayes shouldn’t have been president at all. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote and led by 19 electoral votes, with three southern states in dispute. A commission, voting along partisan lines, gave their 20 votes to Hayes. The price? The removal of federal troops from the South, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the lethal ascendency of Jim Crow.

#3 Ronald Reagan’s folksy demeanor masked a divisive presidency. His image of the welfare queen in a Cadillac signaled that the poor – at least those who were urban and black – were not just getting what they deserved. They were getting more than they deserved. His pronouncement that trees cause pollution signaled that know-nothingism was a legitimate response to environmental destruction.

#2 James Buchanan. Pennsylvania’s only president spent four years doing nothing while the nation moved with increasing violence toward civil war.

# 1 George W. Bush. After going on vacation for the month of August, he returned just before September 11^th . . . to which his response was to tell us to go shopping while he launched two disastrous off-the-books wars, legitimized torture, and instituted tax-and-spending policies that led to the worst recession since the 1930s and left the country in shambles.

Just for Fun

As election season kicks off, I offer you my five favorite presidents (at least for now). #5 Dwight D. Eisenhower. Surprised myself with this one. Despite some huge mistakes (like overthrowing the government of Iran), Ike appointed Earl Warren Chief Justice of a court that ended school desegregation; dispatched federal troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas; and warned of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”

#4 John Quincy Adams. Defeated by Andrew Jackson after only one term, he immediately gained election to Congress where, for the next 17 years, he led the anti-slavery movement and became a tireless national spokesman for emancipation.

#3 Thomas Jefferson. Although a slaveholder, Jefferson gave America its dominant myth of the small farmer and independent craftsman, even as the Industrial Revolution was preparing to crush the reality. The most intellectual of presidents, he produced the Declaration of Independence, supported the separation of church and state, and advocated both liberty and equality.

#2 Franklin D. Roosevelt. The “traitor to his class” who protected American capitalism from its worst excesses, FDR led us through both the Great Depression and the Great War. The New Deal is looking particularly good – as the Tea Party seeks to dismantle it – because much of the national infrastructure we built then we still use now.

#1 Abraham Lincoln combined a poet’s sensibility with a horse trader’s cunning to hold the nation together through its bloodiest war and to end its most shameful institution. Ridiculed by his many foes, he had a transcendent dignity.

That’s my list: two Republicans, two Democrats and a Whig. Three served in the 19^th century, two in the 20^th.

Tomorrow we might stumble onto the five worst.

A Food Community

I think of Michelle Obama as the First Lady of Nutrition, the most environmentally aware person to yet occupy the White House. In March 2009 she planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn to give her family homegrown food, to provide at least a topic of discussion at state dinners, and to create a place where children and teachers could learn about healthy food.

And they need to learn. It seems incongruous that the richest country suffers from such poor nutrition: most American children eat far fewer fruits, vegetables and whole grains than they need, and far more salt. They drink more soda than milk. More than a third of Americans – and half of all African-Americans – are obese. They are overweight and underfed – a combination that seems unfathomable to those of us who equate skeletal images with starvation. But it is real.

Michelle’s efforts brought a blistering response from the food lobby. Organic gardens were elitist, while corporate agriculture could feed the world. The lobby poured millions into fighting taxes on sugary sodas and persuading Congress to declare pizza a vegetable . . . just like catsup.

Nutritional issues are most severe in our inner cities, where the absence of decent markets makes the residents captive to both high prices and unhealthy food. One response is the emergence of community gardens on vacant urban lots. Detroit has over 1500 such gardens. They are small, often isolated. But what a difference they could make if they joined together to grow – and to demand – healthy food for the city's poor.

Obama’s America

In an interview on NPR, noted conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza discussed his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which is playing in over 1,500 theaters around the country. D’Souza argues that Obama is intentionally implementing policies that will weaken America as he pursues the anti-colonialist dream of his Kenyan father. In the interview, D’Souza said that, in his autobiography Obama explicitly laid out his view that the key to a more equitable post-colonial world lies in diminishing the domination of the West and expanding the opportunities of the developing nations. D’Souza seems bent on recasting “birtherism” in intellectual dress – unlike the less subtle bumper sticker I recently saw: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for the American.” But inadvertently or not, he raises important questions: How will we integrate a planet of 7+ billion people who are in constant and deadly conflict over limited resources? How will we close the global gap between rich and poor?

The current model is based on continual economic growth and resource extraction in the belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” It is also based on fear, symbolized by our obsession with fences, walls and gates – with us on the inside trying desperately to keep them on the outside. Those two components contradict each other. Yet as the doctrine of unending growth appears to have run its course, those who have benefited most from it build higher fences, thicker walls and more heavily guarded gates.

We need to make more universal Ronald Reagan’s demand that we “tear down that wall.”

2,000

With our national debt at $16 trillion (and our combined public and private debt at $56 trillion); with the world’s population in excess of 7 billion; with the current presidential campaign estimated to cost $6 billion, 2,000 seems like a very small number. It is the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan in what has become America’s longest war. You wouldn’t have known that from the Republican convention last week, nor from the party’s platform, which mentions the conflict only once – in a paragraph almost at the end, criticizing the Obama administration for making military decisions based on political calculations but saying nothing about what a Romney administration would do. The platform also firmly opposes the reinstatement of any form of draft, including universal service, which means that a small minority of Americans will continue to fight in our conflicts . . . which is why we do not have the protests we had when everybody’s children were eligible.

I have little hope the Democratic convention will do better. Like much else that he has faced over the last four years, Obama inherited two off-the-books military quagmires from the Bush administration. But he early on made Afghanistan his war – the 2008 party platform promised to “win in Afghanistan,” by sending in “at least two additional combat brigades.”

That was then. Now the United States is again in a war whose objective has become to bring the troops home without losing too much face. For the families we have sacrificed to that end, 2,000 is not a small number at all.

Stumble of the Week

To no one’s surprise, organized labor stumbled in Tampa this week, as the Republican Party approved a platform aimed at dismantling the American labor movement, with a particular emphasis on public unions. I have no illusions about what the people who wrote the platform and the enormous money behind them want, which is to break, not just unions but the countervailing power of labor itself. That would enable “the malefactors of great wealth” (to use an old Republican’s term) to make even more money with even less regard for the conditions of the workforce. It’s almost like kicking a dead horse, thanks to the moribund nature of a labor movement in which under 12% of the workforce is unionized – and less than 7% of the private sector.

It may be cathartic to blame the bosses, but labor itself has much to answer for. In too many cases, it has stifled innovation, protected its power, and encouraged infiltration by the mob. It has been silent or recalcitrant on some of the most critical matters of the day. Its sole emphasis on jobs and wages has often made it antagonistic to environmental issues that may have more long-term impact on the workforce. It has reflexively opposed innovations that might improve public education. And it has offered little to the desperate plight of the inner cities, which once supplied the bulk of its membership. Labor needs to reform itself so that it can provide a broader vision to America's workers.

David Brooks

Several of you mentioned David Brooks’ column in Monday’s New York Times, and one even suggested I write about it. My initial response, of course, was that I will write about David Brooks’ column when he writes about mine. But on deeper reflection, it occurred to me that David has better things to do. I, on the other hand, do not. For those not familiar with him, Brooks is the Times’ conservative columnist and the right-of-center counterpoint to E.J. Dionne on NPR and Mark Shields on PBS. Hired by William F. Buckley at The National Review, he later wrote for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Brooks, like his intellectual hero Edmund Burke, is a sober, thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful spokesman for moderate conservativism – a movement so diminished in today’s GOP that the Times later hired Ross Douthat to speak for the hard right.

Brooks has written admiringly of Obama, and while he speaks out against his policies often and forcefully, his criticisms seem born more of disappointment than dislike.

In Monday’s column, Brooks, writing in an unusual satiric tone, sought to parody the media’s depiction of Romney as rich, aloof and shallow. The piece was so out of character for Brooks and so edgy about Romney, however, that in lampooning the pundits, he also roasted the candidate.

David Brooks’ ideal candidate is one who is pragmatic, thoughtful and represents a conservatism that builds on the best traditions of the past – one like the old Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts. But, whether in jest or not, that is not the Romney he presented on Monday.

Conventional Wisdom

The big question for many this week was whether the wrath of Mother Nature would pound down on the Convention of the Angry God. For now, at least, it appears that Hurricane Isaac is content to stay to the west and probe the levees built in the wake of Katrina – a reminder of the most expensive and one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history. Meanwhile, nature is sending another message from the north, as the volume of sea ice in the arctic has hit a record low. These reminders of the need to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, the desperate plight of the urban poor and the clear evidence of climate change have so far gone unnoted in Tampa. But after all, the reason people go to Florida is to get away from the ice and snow of winter. What disruptions there have been to the carefully orchestrated Republican convention have come from the mouths of Ron Paul’s delegates, who yelled loudly each time his votes were ignored in the official tally. With the big networks limiting coverage to both conventions, the wonderfully ribald process of political horse-trading, rousing speeches and brokered conventions is a thing of the past.

Maybe the process wasn’t any better back then, but it did have more surprises. The results were not so clearly pre-ordained nor were the candidates so programmed to stay on message. Politics perhaps has never been pretty, but it used to be more fun.

Radio Talk

I was driving back on Sunday afternoon from a wedding between one man and one woman, channel surfing on my car radio, when I landed on a talk show station that had just broadcast a long interview with Mitt Romney. The station had asked Laura Ingraham to do a post-interview analysis of the speech and preview this week’s Republican convention in Tampa. Ingraham, the host informs me, is the most ”listened to” woman on the radio. She got right to the point. The interview, she said, had shown a man of strong principles and deep faith who is comfortable with himself. This humanized Romney could now focus on the state of the economy, a subject his opponent desperately wanted to change. All the Democrats have to offer, she said, is “higher taxes, more aborted babies and gay marriage.” That, she concluded, was not a winning agenda.

Now, I don’t often find myself in agreement with a Fox commentator, but I think she’s onto something. If that’s all Obama’s got, he is in trouble.

As I thought about Ingraham’s trifecta, it occurred to me it was actually the mirror image of the GOP platform, which calls for constitutional amendments on taxes, abortion and marriage. That’s a lot of fundamental changes to a document we are told has been sacrosanct since 1789.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to create a fair tax system that recognizes our obligations to each other and to allow each of us to make personal decisions based on our needs rather than the dictates of the state?

“We Came in Peace for All Mankind”

Neil Armstrong died unexpectedly on Saturday, 51 years and one month after becoming the first person to walk on the moon. With over half the world’s population not yet 30, the moon landing is ancient history. And it does seem a different era. The Apollo Program, which fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, was the culmination of an intense space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, with the backdrop of the Cold War and fears of a science gap, which would lead to nuclear weapons inferiority, a destabilized world and a withering war.

So it is not surprising that Armstrong planted an American flag on the lunar soil. But unlike conquistadors of old, Armstrong did not claim the moon as American territory. In fact, not far from the flag, he and Buzz Aldren laid a plaque that read simply: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

With private companies gearing up for the commercial opportunities of space travel, with others thinking about exploiting the resources out there and colonizing new planets for when we have destroyed this one, with space itself increasingly littered with human debris and weapons of war, the words of that plaque are worth remembering.

With the exception of those doubters who insist he was actually in Arizona, Armstrong’s “small step” electrified the nation. Conceived by a president and built with public funds, it’s a reminder of what we can accomplish when we dream together.

Stumble of the Week

• As if it weren’t dead enough, bipartisanship stumbled this week when Judge Robert Simpson of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court refused to block the state’s voter identification law. Such laws may appear benign and reasonable in their wording, but at least in this case the intent was “to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That’s not me speaking; that’s Mike Turzai, the Republican Majority Leader who sponsored the legislation. A recent study found 27 instances of voter impersonation in 197 million votes cast across the country from 2002-5. To swat that gnat, lawmakers are eager to disenfranchise as many as 9 percent of the state’s eligible voters.

• Tolerance stumbled again in Tampa when the GOP platform committee added a draconian plank on immigration to go with its call to end abortion with no exceptions. Explained Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Secretary of State, “If you really want to create a job tomorrow, you can remove an illegal alien today,” oblivious to how many more of our jobs are going to Asia than to immigrants. I can’t wait to see the convention’s civil rights plank.

• Now that Larry Ellison has bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai, archrival Bill Gates has apparently set his sights on Rhode Island. Asked his opinion on buying a whole state, presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, “I am in favor of privatization . . . especially of states whose electoral votes my campaign wrote off months ago.”

Basic Goodness

Like many people, I have long struggled with the conflict between individualism and community – between the quest to be a distinct, whole and individuated person and the desire to be an integral part of a group. I admire the person who stands up to the crowd, who sets off alone on the open road, who thinks for himself and speaks what he thinks. And yet I also get the need for community, not for companionship only but to be part of something larger than yourself. We suffocate in communities; we starve without them. In his New Year’s address to the Shambhala community in Halifax, NS, sent to me by my brother Walker, Sakyong Mipham talked about “basic goodness,” saying that it “is not just a personal experience, it is also a social experience.”

“It is not just about me,” he continued; “it is about humanity . . . this notion of human nature is the most important global issue. What we do to our planet, what we do to ourselves, how we relate to our own minds, how we make decisions, and how we relate to the world is all coming from this notion of basic goodness. It is up to us.”

Basic goodness, as I understand it, does not require us to submerge our hard-won egos into the group, but it does ask us to see our interconnectedness with all living beings in a world filled with violence and anger – and to note that the path to building a peaceful world begins with being at peace with yourself.

Rape

Todd Akin is no quitter. In the face of calls for his resignation from Republican leaders across the country, Akin announced yesterday that he would stay in the race for Missouri’s Senate seat. Who can blame him? Polls show him winning, and he is in lock step with his party, which yesterday approved a constitutional amendment to ban abortions with no exceptions and to apply 14^th-Amendment protections to a fetus. Meanwhile, Akin told Mike Huckabee that he was being pummeled for “one word and one sentence on one day.”

The word that seems to stick in everybody’s craw is “legitimate.” The word that should is “rape.”

These guys talk about rape like it was like falling off a bicycle or getting a bloody nose. You know, stuff happens. And, occasionally a little miracle is the result. The great fear is that women will feign rape to get access to abortion services, but the gatekeepers are too vigilant for that.

Rape is an instrument of violence, of torture, of war. During the war in Bosnia, the UN Commission concluded, rape served “a political purpose – to intimidate, humiliate, and degrade [a woman] and others affected by her suffering.” It was also a tool for “ethnic cleansing,” and Bosnian Muslim women raped by Serbs were often forced to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth to “little Chetniks.”

Todd Akin is not some distraction from the real issues of this election. Wrapped in the false rhetoric of the sanctity of life, he represents a worldview that is as dangerous as it is repugnant.

Soul of America

While today’s hot question is whether Congressman Todd Akin will give up his bid to be Missouri’s next senator, the more significant questions are: (1) after his disquisition on “the female body,” why is he still leading Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill? And (2) how did he get the nomination anyway? Akin is no one-blunder wonder.

On Energy: “Energy regulations from the EPA and other agencies have stifled our industry.”

On Guns: “Certainly, some people commit crimes with weapons and I support the prosecution and conviction of these lawbreakers – this includes everyone from the street criminal to our Attorney General, Eric Holder.”

On Health Care (other than pregnancy, of course): “Health care decisions are intensely personal and touch every American.”

On Taxes (other than the very rich): “We need a system where more people would pay some taxes and, thus, have ‘skin in the game.’"

On National Defense: “Defending our country is a proud part of the Missouri tradition. . . . Missouri is ranked 5th in the nation in total defense contracts, with over $12 billion, . . . almost 160,000 jobs in Missouri are connected to defense, and over 16,000 active duty military personnel are garrisoned in our state.”

On Climate Change: “In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change, you know. Who in the world wants to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways?”

Despite Akin’s complete unfitness for office, McCaskill ran ads supporting him in the Republican primary – which he won with 36% of the vote – because she considered him the easiest challenger to beat. That is to say, she spent $2 million people had donated to her campaign to put this man in position to be a U. S. Senator. That is unconscionable.

Sticks and Stones

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) via Annie Blaine. This, I think, helps explain the poisoned atmosphere of our political discourse. It has become personal in the worst kind of way.

It has happened before. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U. S. Senate, Preston Brooks, Democratic Congressman from South Carolina, beat Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts so viciously with his cane that Sumner never recovered. The attack came in response to a speech two days earlier in which Sumner had heatedly attacked both the institution of slavery and the character of those who practiced it. Brooks intended to “punish” Sumner, not for his attack on slavery but to avenge the honor of his relative, Senator Andrew Butler (D, S.C.).

Many Southerners thought Sumner had it coming. As the leader of the radical Republicans in the Senate, he was an uncompromising abolitionist whose speeches were filled with invective and incendiary allusions. (His counterpart in the House was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, he of the club foot, who held the seat I ran for in 1996, a seat now occupied by one of the most reactionary men in the United States Congress. Such is the sad trajectory of the Grand Old Party.)

Four years later, the country was at war, in part because some had taken forceful speech against an unconscionable institution as attacks on their personal honor.

Stumble of the Week

Lucky 13. That’s the minimum percent of his income that Mitt Romney paid in taxes the last 10 years. “Every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent,” he said. “And if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity,” added Mitt, “why the number gets well above 20 percent.” Suggesting that his tax-deductible tithe to the Mormon Church virtually doubles his effective tax rate is certainly creative bookkeeping. The Romneys announced their findings after rereading a decade of their returns. But they aren’t sharing them with the rest of us. Maintaining that they are “very transparent to what’s legally required of us,” Ann Romney said releasing more returns would just provide “ammunition” for their foes. Well, of course. It gets even better, wrote a friend who sent a link to Jerome Corsi after last Friday’s “transcripter” post. Corsi, a tea party activist, Harvard PhD, author of The Obama Nation and “swift boater” in the 2004 elections, who has called Fox News too liberal and Paul Ryan the “best possible choice.” has now produced evidence that, before Michelle, Barack Obama was married to his Pakistani roommate at Occidental College. I think there must be a contest to see who can lay the most abominations on Obama, and Dr. Corsi will be hard to beat: homosexuality, same-sex marriage, miscegenation, interfaith dating, loving a Moslem, sitting in another man’s lap, hypocrisy, lying. I know this is the fringe – at least I hope it is – but how often do we need to be reminded that the fringe is dangerous?

The Jordan

I was in a seething black rage the other day, and so I went down to the water. Jordan Stream runs clear and cold much of the year. Its waters descend from the mountains of Mount Desert Island and gather in Jordan Pond before continuing to the ocean. They run through a woods of mostly conifer, poplar and birch, where the only sound, apart from an occasional birdcall, is the rippling of the stream as it meanders over red, brown and deep gray granite stones. If this won’t calm the mind, nothing will.

Streams and rivers do a lot for us. They provide water and food. They irrigate our farmlands and replenish their soil. They transport both goods and people. Harnessing their power was the first step in the Industrial Revolution and the modern world as we know it. But we need to stop thinking of streams simply as public utilities that provide essential goods for human consumption.

They are places of great beauty and spiritual rebirth. None more so than the Jordan River – the real place where Jesus was baptized and the mythical destination that slaves sang of crossing to freedom, one way or another.

Today, the Jordan River is the source of fierce contention in the Middle East, where it is listed as one of the world's 100 most endangered ecological sites – another reminder that a stream is an ecosystem that supports the entire web of life, and a refuge from the world and, sometimes, from my own rage.

Big Fracking Deal

Think of natural gas as the methadone of our fossil-fuel addiction. It’s cheaper than oil and therefore more addictive. It’s cleaner than coal so we can feel good about using it. And there is lots of it so we can take it until we drop dead. In Pennsylvania, dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas” because of its massive Marcellus shale deposits, 60,000 new wells are forecast by 2030. They will require clearing thousands of acres of woodlands, threaten the forest habitat of countless species, and have a multi-dimensional impact on fresh water: drilling a well requires hundreds of thousands of gallons; gas companies contend the chemicals they inject are a proprietary secret; and hundreds of wells will be drilled near the state’s cleanest streams. A chemical engineer friend told me that, while the technology exists or soon will for safe fracking, he doubts many oil and gas companies will use best practices. Meanwhile, stories of both human and environmental contamination pile up.

In the face of risks that are both huge and still largely unknown, the gas rush intensifies because the money is mind-boggling and the oil companies have enormous economic and political power. They spew the usual mantras: jobs, growth, dependence on foreign oil – although, as my son Jake pointed out, the U. S. is a net exporter of oil products.

As Bill McKibben wrote in a recent article that will wake you up, as long as the big energy companies control the public debate, little will change, and our addiction will end like all other addictions . . . badly.

Intercontinental Ops

One of the great pleasures of reading Dashiell Hammett is that his plots are so convoluted that I have to focus on the memorable characters (Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, the Continental Op) and the murky, smoke-filled backgrounds that become characters themselves. The novels bear almost endless rereadings as I try to unravel the intricacies of the story. The closest thing to Hammett’s fiction is Chinese reality, where two current law cases would do Dashiell proud. They have everything: lust for power, greed, bribery, corruption, magnificent names, murder – everything, oddly, but sex, which lurked ever below the surface in Hammett’s work.

The first case involves the fall from power of Bo Xilai (think French wine), amid revelations of extraordinary wealth and corruption among the ruling elites, and the imminent conviction of his wife Gu Kailai for the murder of a shady British character who made the fatal miscalculation of threatening Gu’s only child. The trial lasted a few hours. China’s conviction rate is 98 percent.

The latest case involves Sheldon Adelson, the ubiquitous billionaire who has poured over $35 million into Republican campaign coffers. He recently accompanied Mitt Romney to Israel to make sure he toed the hard line there, but it also turns out that two-thirds of Adelson’s fortune derives from his casinos in Macau, an island noted for mob activity and the only legal gambling in China. The case, which involves a socialite named Bao Bao and a frantic call to Tom Delay to bury a resolution condemning China, is but one more example of the global scale of corporate greed, political corruption and organized crime.