The picaninny was the dominant racial caricature of Black children for most of this country's history. They were "child coons," miniature versions of Stepin Fetchit. Picaninnies had bulging eyes, unkempt hair, red lips, and wide mouths into which they stuffed huge slices of watermelon. They were themselves tasty morsels for alligators. They were routinely shown on postcards, posters, and other ephemera being chased or eaten. Picaninnies were portrayed as nameless, shiftless natural buffoons running from alligators and toward fried chicken.
My good friend was wandering through a Target store when he found a soda can with a picture of a picaninny on its side. The can was, not surprisingly, attempting to sell a watermelon flavored drink, making the already flagrant racism used to hawk this product that much more transparent. As a way of pre-empting charges of bigotry, however, the company which makes the soda decided to include a picture of a white child enjoying the same fruit on the other side of the can. As is evident from the scores of YouTube posts on this topic, racists and those who lack the most elementary critical thinking skills walked right into the trap:
myboner
What's the big deal when there's a white kid on the can also?
limoboy484
There's also a white girl on some of the cans of Watermelon soda. People like you would find a way to throw racism into the mix if there was "only" a white girl on these cans by claiming it's racist that they don't have any black girls on the cans. Either way you're just looking to start a one sided racial dispute. Do you refuse to buy Aunt Jemima products just because a black woman's face is on the box? Should we attack Paul Newman because a white man's face is on salad dressing bottles?
S0meCommonSense
seriously? welcome to our hypersensitive politically correct world.
glorythewhitehawk
there's a white kid on the other side of the can, so i don't know how it's racist. black people just like to cry about anything. WAHHHH there's a black face on a can of soda WAHHHH.
valkyrie091
lol n*****s are always crying over shit get a life f**s
To these specific geniuses and the thousands like them who put up posts like this (and since they seem to lack the capacity for basic discernment, let me make it clear - when I call you "geniuses", I am being facetious), I would like to posit a hypothetical scenario:
You walk into a convenience store and see a bottle of water. On one side of the label there is a picture of a swastika; at the other end of the label you see a number '8' on its side.
It is natural for the hypothetical "you" to assume that this soda can is promoting Naziism on its label, since in its Western context the swastika has only been prominently associated with the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich. Yet when you bring this can to the public's attention, the manufacturers point out that the squiggles are each symbols meant to represent eternity, with the swastika being taken from Buddhist theology and the '8' on its side being the 'infinity' symbol preferred by mathematicians.
Those with less advanced powers of deduction (to say nothing of those who glory in racism, understand that overt prejudice has been stigmatized, and thus revel in watching others pull a fast one on the minority groups they hate) immediately assume that the matter is resolved - it wasn't racist, it was innocent, and the proof lies in the fact that the harmless symbol which appears on the other side of the product seems to put the offensive one in a more innocuous context. Yet there are two major flaws with this line of thinking:
1) It assumes the absence of any socio-political background behind certain images. The image of the swastika isn't associated in Western cultures with Buddhism, but rather with Naziism; the picanniny isn't thought of in this country as being just an innocent picture of black children, but instead as being a direct appeal to a rather degrading racial stereotype. While those with less than savory motives may profess innocence to being aware of these facts, the reality is that in a capitalist economy, people are constantly selling products by appealing to a shared foundation of cultural, historical, and social knowledge which they then attempt to use in such a way as to hawk their product. They select the images they use very carefully (as anyone who has worked in a marketing department can attest), since three-fourths of successful business lies in effective advertisement and self-promotion (the other quarter being having a decent product). To argue that the company who made this soda wasn't aware of the way that image would be interpreted is like arguing that the hypothetical water bottle company didn't know what a swastika would mean to most Americans - it's ridiculous, and those who claim otherwise are being disingenuous.
2) If their intention had been to simply use a picture of a black child and white child, why not select an unoffensive image of each one? Surely there are other drawings of black children that do not conform to the specific visuals of the picanniny. Why select an image that so clearly plays to racist stereootypes when you could just draw an unoffensive one using the most basic computer software? The picanniny isn't just a random picture of a black child, it is one that has a very specific history, all of it incredibly degrading to the African American people. If their intent was truly to just put a black child on one side of the soda can and a white child on the other, then why did they choose to use the picanniny?
Of course, I am under no illusions that I will be able to convince the doctrinaine members of the opposing side about the error of their ways. As the 1896 Democratic presidential candidate once astutely observed, "The mind convinces itself of what the heart wants to believe is true." The people who believe that the use of a picanniny is acceptable on a soda can because a white child is on the other side are likely so mentally and spiritually corrupted by their own bigotry that I would have more success talking to a dining room table than I would one of them (and yes, I am cribbing from Barney Frank). Yet I feel the need to make a point out the full ludicrousness of their arguments, so at the very least those who deicde to watch the link I post below won't be inclined to fall prey to their way of thinking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SD6Wa2mydw&feature=channel_page
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Follow Up on "The Making of the President: 2012"
Three addenda to The Making of the President: 2012.
1) Jettboy makes an excellent point - Huckabee's disparaging comments toward Mormons have caused a much deeper animosity than I initially appreciated. As such, I have to revise my initial assessment and conclude that Huckabee is just as likely to pick a Mormon running mate as a Jewish one, since ultimately selecting a Mormon could achieve the same initial objective (i.e, addressing the perception that he is religiously intolerant and/or potentially theocratic) while helping to solidify Huckabee's support among a group that - while normally heavily supportive of the Republican candidate - could either swing to Obama, perform a write-in campaign for a third candidate, or just turn out in much lighter numbers for Huckabee should he fail to address that issue. As such, while I wouldn't rule out a Huckabee-Cantor ticket, I think there is an equally strong chance that a Mormon may wind up on the other end of that equation as well. That said, I do not believe he will choose Romney - as a former Massachusetts governor with a spotty record on the social issues that matter most to conservatives, he could easily alienate Huckabee's base, and what's more, his inexperience in dealing with the federal government would only accentuate one of Huckabee's chief political weaknessees. Personally, should Huckabee choose to select a Mormon running mate, I believe his pick would be Jeff Flake, the congressman from the Sixth District of Arizona. Although Flake is held in some suspicion by the most strident right-wing opponents of illegal immigration, as well as by the Christian Right, those same animosities could be used by Huckabee to claim that his ticket promotes ideological as well as religious diversity. What's more, Flake's dogmatic liberatarianism on economic issues could help peel off the growing contingent of Ron Paul supporters who, though opposing Huckabee on social and cultural matters, could fall in love with Flake and thus vote for Huckabee in order to put him a heartbeat away from the presidency. While I think the chances of a Huckabee-Cantor ticket are approximately equal with those of a Huckabee-Flake ticket, the prospect of not only winning back Mormon support but underscoring right-wing criticisms of "tax and spend" liberalism makes me personally suspect that Flake would be Huckabee's man. Finally, although the economic conservatives in the GOP do not hate Huckabee, they are a little wary of his populist rhetoric, and the selection of Flake would more than alleviate their concerns.
2) My predictions for a 2012 election that has Obama-Biden opposing Huckabee-Flake remain essentially the same as with Obama-Biden opposing Huckabee-Cantor, but with a few minor modifications. Flake's presence on the Huckabee ticket would probably do a great deal to help Huckabee win over the one ideological group that is most likely to defect to a third-party in elections such as this (namely, libertarians), as well as make some inroads into the independent vote. That said, Flake's ideology is still extreme enough that it will still probably fail to help Huckabee win any significant advantage among swing voters. At the end of the day, I see the Electoral College in a 2012 Obama-Biden v. Huckabee-Flake contest looking remarkably similar to its 2008 Obama-Biden v. McCain-Palin predecessor, with the only exceptions being a North Carolina swing to the Republican column and a Missouri swing to the Democrats. In the popular vote, Obama would still defeat Huckabee by a landslide margin (due to the absence of any viable third-party opposition, it would probaby be something like 57 to 42). Finally, among my own demographic, Jewish voters, I believe the aversion to the radical right-wing views held by both Huckabee and Flake would prompt a mass defection to the Democratic side, with even traditionally conservative Jews ultimately abandoning the GOP en masse and ultimately causing Obama to win the greatest majority of Jewish votes in American presidential history (i.e, more than ninety percent).
3) Those who want to understand an issue on which the 2012 election will likely pivot should look up Wayne DuMond. For more information, check out these two articles:
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/usa/news/article_1378573.php/Is_Wayne_DuMond_Huckabee_s_Willie_Horton
http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=154e1aad-fd18-4efd-8d80-b5dab8559419
1) Jettboy makes an excellent point - Huckabee's disparaging comments toward Mormons have caused a much deeper animosity than I initially appreciated. As such, I have to revise my initial assessment and conclude that Huckabee is just as likely to pick a Mormon running mate as a Jewish one, since ultimately selecting a Mormon could achieve the same initial objective (i.e, addressing the perception that he is religiously intolerant and/or potentially theocratic) while helping to solidify Huckabee's support among a group that - while normally heavily supportive of the Republican candidate - could either swing to Obama, perform a write-in campaign for a third candidate, or just turn out in much lighter numbers for Huckabee should he fail to address that issue. As such, while I wouldn't rule out a Huckabee-Cantor ticket, I think there is an equally strong chance that a Mormon may wind up on the other end of that equation as well. That said, I do not believe he will choose Romney - as a former Massachusetts governor with a spotty record on the social issues that matter most to conservatives, he could easily alienate Huckabee's base, and what's more, his inexperience in dealing with the federal government would only accentuate one of Huckabee's chief political weaknessees. Personally, should Huckabee choose to select a Mormon running mate, I believe his pick would be Jeff Flake, the congressman from the Sixth District of Arizona. Although Flake is held in some suspicion by the most strident right-wing opponents of illegal immigration, as well as by the Christian Right, those same animosities could be used by Huckabee to claim that his ticket promotes ideological as well as religious diversity. What's more, Flake's dogmatic liberatarianism on economic issues could help peel off the growing contingent of Ron Paul supporters who, though opposing Huckabee on social and cultural matters, could fall in love with Flake and thus vote for Huckabee in order to put him a heartbeat away from the presidency. While I think the chances of a Huckabee-Cantor ticket are approximately equal with those of a Huckabee-Flake ticket, the prospect of not only winning back Mormon support but underscoring right-wing criticisms of "tax and spend" liberalism makes me personally suspect that Flake would be Huckabee's man. Finally, although the economic conservatives in the GOP do not hate Huckabee, they are a little wary of his populist rhetoric, and the selection of Flake would more than alleviate their concerns.
2) My predictions for a 2012 election that has Obama-Biden opposing Huckabee-Flake remain essentially the same as with Obama-Biden opposing Huckabee-Cantor, but with a few minor modifications. Flake's presence on the Huckabee ticket would probably do a great deal to help Huckabee win over the one ideological group that is most likely to defect to a third-party in elections such as this (namely, libertarians), as well as make some inroads into the independent vote. That said, Flake's ideology is still extreme enough that it will still probably fail to help Huckabee win any significant advantage among swing voters. At the end of the day, I see the Electoral College in a 2012 Obama-Biden v. Huckabee-Flake contest looking remarkably similar to its 2008 Obama-Biden v. McCain-Palin predecessor, with the only exceptions being a North Carolina swing to the Republican column and a Missouri swing to the Democrats. In the popular vote, Obama would still defeat Huckabee by a landslide margin (due to the absence of any viable third-party opposition, it would probaby be something like 57 to 42). Finally, among my own demographic, Jewish voters, I believe the aversion to the radical right-wing views held by both Huckabee and Flake would prompt a mass defection to the Democratic side, with even traditionally conservative Jews ultimately abandoning the GOP en masse and ultimately causing Obama to win the greatest majority of Jewish votes in American presidential history (i.e, more than ninety percent).
3) Those who want to understand an issue on which the 2012 election will likely pivot should look up Wayne DuMond. For more information, check out these two articles:
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/usa/news/article_1378573.php/Is_Wayne_DuMond_Huckabee_s_Willie_Horton
http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=154e1aad-fd18-4efd-8d80-b5dab8559419
Anti-Semitic Assumptions from the Radical Left
While wandering through my local bookstore, I began browsing a book called The Speech. It was a fascinating compilation of editorials and analyses about Barack Obama's famous "A More Perfect Union" address, delivered during the crucible of his 2008 election campaign. When I came upon an essay by a man named Adam Monsbach, and saw from skimming that it addessed (at least in part) the issue of Jewish sentiments toward Barack Obama, I paused and began to read.
What I came across outraged me, and the reasons for that outrage deserve further attention. When I was a student at Bard College, I remember hearing one of my collegiate acquaintances - a proud left-wing radical named Noah - talk about how Jews were notoriously conservative in their politics and had an ingrained animosity toward the African-American community. When I pointed out that Jews are on average overwhelmingly Democratic in their voting patterns, that the disproportionately large number of Jews in Congress were likewise overwhelmingly Democratic in composition (and even more so today than they were back in 2004), and that non-partisan polls had found that Jews were more likely to be pro-choice, anti-Iraq war, pro-gay marriage, and left-wing in their economic philosophy than any other religious group, Noah dismissed me out-of-hand. Implicit in the defense of his position was that he was himself Jewish, and thus in no way capable of being an anti-Semite.
In his essay, Monsbach took a unique spin on the same theme I heard espoused by Noah - he argued that Jews over the past half-century have sacrificed their liberal idealism because of their assimilation into "white culture", and are therefore inclined toward racism against African-Americans, an assertion he repeats as if it were not a personal opinion but an established fact, and which he therefore sees no need to support with anything beyond fragmentary anecdotes (the veracity of which, given his own clear biases, are automatically questionable) and the somewhat odd notion that, because black anti-Semites like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan have apologized for their Jew-hating past, any Jews who remain suspicious of them must be harboring those feelings due to racism (he then tries to argue that Jews have made a point of forgiving Mel Gibson, something that was certainly news to me and my countless Gibson-hating Jewish friends). From this, he goes on to claim that Jews, because they have experienced relatively little anti-Semitism in the United States, have gone from persecuted minority to accepted members of the white elite, and thus revel in seeing blacks (and presumably other persecuted groups) instead of themselves as being part of "the other". While he doesn't go so far as Noah and outright claim that Jews are now conservative, the intended interpretation of these assertions (particularly for a left-wing radical picking up this text) is unmistakable. And of course, Monsbach insists throughout his essay that, as a Jew, he is obviously incapable of being anti-Semitic (although I will admit he possessed a subtlety that was lost on Noah).
Rather than begin this piece by addressing how it is indeed quite possible for Jews to be anti-Semitic, I shall instead focus on why the assumption that Jews are conservative, when made by a liberal and used as an implicit criticism of the community (as done by Monsbach as well as Noah), could only be anti-Semitic in origin.
1) Jewish-American history does not support this claim. First, let's look at the statistics. In every presidential election since 1924, a majority of Jews have supported the Democratic candidate because of his left-wing ideology; every Democrat since 1928, with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter in 1980, has received at least three-fifths (or 60%) of all the Jewish votes cast, and usually quite a bit more than that (the average Jewish vote for Democrats from 1928 to 2008 is 75%); and every third-party candidate who has received a disproportionately high number of Jewish votes has been left-wing (Socialist Eugene Debs in 1920, who received 38% of the Jewish vote compared to 3% of the general vote; Progressive Henry Wallace in 1948, who received 15% of the Jewish vote compared to 3% of the general vote; John Anderson in 1980, who received 14% of the Jewish vote compared to 7% of the general vote), while no right-wing third-party candidate has ever posted statistically significant results. Buttressing this data is a plethora of other juicy details from American Jewish political history, such as the fact that of the seven Jews appointed to the Supreme Court, all of them have been liberal and all but one was appointed by a Democratic president (Herbert Hoover being the lone Republican to appoint a Jew), or the fact that most of the prominent Jewish figures in American political history (and particularly after the wave of Eastern European immigration between 1881 and 1914) have been associated with left-wing rather than right-wing causes, from anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and labor leaders like Samuel Gompers and Sidney Hillman to civil rights workers like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and countercultural figures like Abbie Hoffman and Lee Weiner (this, of course, completely ignores the countless Jewish elected officials who have been prominent liberal Democrats, including the likes of Ernest Gruening, Abraham Ribicoff, Jacob Javits, Herbert Lehman, Simon Bamberger, and Milton Shapp, to name only a few).
2) Contemporary data about Jewish-American political beliefs do not support this claim. For starters, let's look at that old trope - promoted by the likes of Congressman Jim Moran and academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt - that massive support for the Iraq war by American Jews was a key factor in Bush's involvement. While it is clear that smaller Jewish lobbies (like neo-conservative think tanks and the Zionist AIPAC) did support the war, a survey taken in 2003 (at the very beginning of the invasion of Iraq) found that 54% of Americans Jews opposed the war, compared to only 43% who supported it, making Jews less supportive of the Iraq War than any other American religious group at the time. The most recent comprehensive survey conducted of the positions held by American Jews on major political subjects (the data of which comes from September 2008) found the following opinions:
- 44% identified themselves as liberal, compared to 30% deeming themselves moderate and only 24% considering themselves conservative.
- 56% considered themselves Democrats, 25% as independents, and only 17% as Republicans.
- 75% believed that the best way for America to handle its energy needs would be by developing alternative energy sources, with only 7% supporting greater energy production, 6% preferring greater energy conservative, and 10% supporting all three steps.
- 54% of Jews considered the economy to be the most important issue in the upcoming presidential election, with the next largest number (11%) believing health care reform to be key, followed by 6% placing the greatest emphasis on the war in Iraq, 5% on energy independence, 5% on terrorism, and a mere 3% on Israel.
- 73% liked Joe Biden while only 37% liked Sarah Palin.
A similar survey taken in 2007 (which addressed certain subjects that weren't included in last year's version) yielded other revealing information:
- 59% disapproved of the war on terrorism, while only 31% approved.
- 67% believed we never should entered Iraq, while only 27% still supported that decision.
- 67% support creating criteria that would permit illegal immigrants to stay in America, while 14% wanted them to stay for a limited period of time before being deported and only 15% wanted them deported immediately.
- That year 23% considered the economy and jobs to be the most important issue, followed by 19% considering health care reform to be paramount, 16% choosing the war in Iraq, 14% choosing terrorism and national security, 6% choosing immigration, 6% choosing the energy crisis, and 6% choosing Israel.
Here are some more tidbits:
- A survey conducted by Pew Polling in 2009 found that 84% of American Jews believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared 62% of mainstream Protestants, 62% of Eastern Orthodox Christians, 48% of Muslims, 48% of Catholics, 33% of Evangelical Protestants, and 27% of Mormons (more Jews supported abortion rights than any other religious group, with the only other one to come close being Buddhists, 81% of whom were pro-choice).
- Jews voted against Proposition 8 (the California initiative nullifying gay marriages within the state) by a staggering 78% to 8%, in stark contrast to the rest of the state (which supported it).
3) Perhaps most important of all, the predictions from the self-proclaimed experts on the Jewish vote that have insisted that they would either not vote Democratic or significantly drop off in their support for the Democrats have been consistently proven wrong. In 2004, articles and polls from progressive as well as Republican sources kept insisting that George W. Bush was poised to siphon as much as 15 to 25% of the Jewish vote away from Democratic John Kerry; indeed, a college buddy even went so far as to bet me dinner at a Tibetan restaurant that not more than 60% of all Jewish voters would actually cast their ballots for the Massachusetts Senator. Instead, Kerry received 74% of the Jewish vote, a drop of only 5% from the amount received by the Democratic presidential candidate (Al Gore) in the previous election, and well above the 60-65% that expert surveys kept predicting (the Tibetan meal was fantastic, by the way). Four years later, the alleged tension between Jews and Democratic candidate Barack Obama was even more hyped up - surveys were produced once again that insisted that only 60-65% of Jewish voters would support Obama over McCain, and so much concern was voiced that comedienne Sarah Silverman even implored young Jewish Obamaites to make a "great schlepp" to their grandparents in Florida to get them to vote for Obama, based on the notion that they were leaning toward McCain. This time, 78% of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama (an increase of 4% from the results in 2004), and since then Obama's support among American Jews has consistently remained at 79%. In spite of this, stories continue to crop up about "friction" between Obama and the Jewish community, with the media focusing on the few prominent Jewish conservatives who, either due to criticism of Obama's Israel policies or for some other reason, oppose the administration, and acting as if they are emblematic, while pundits like Monsbach and political reporters like Richard Wolffe still write about the so-called lingering suspicion that Jews harbor toward both the president and his liberal beliefs. Oh, and of the forty-three Jews who currently serve in the United States Congress, forty of them are Democrats (two of the remaining three are independents, with only Eric Cantor being the lone Jewish Republican).
In short, if one were to base conclusions about Jewish political affiliations on history and statistical evidence (as opposed to, say, personal anecdotes and searching deep within your gut until a feeling bubbles up from your intestines and reaches your brain to tell you what is true), then irrevocable opinion one would have to reach is that Jews are an overwhelmingly left-wing group. The next question that needs to be asked, then, is why do individuals like my old college acquaintance Noah and the supremely confident Monsbach believe that Jews are conservative?
There are two ways of drawing conclusions about any subject: One is to take an existing body of evidence and, using logical methodologies, extrapolate a truth based on that information; the other is to come to a conclusion first, and then either disregard all subsequently discovered information that contradicts that opinion, interpret and warp that information in order to get it to support your pre-existing belief, or (as Noah and Monsbach seem to have preferred) just avoid doing any research at all and instead base your assertions on anecdotes and intuition. Since it is impossible to believe that either of these individuals used any of the existing data to support their assertions, one can only come to the conclusion that they developed these opinions based on personal prejudices (which in turn they reinforced based on a selective interpretation of personal experiences). Of course, existing stereotypes about Jews - particularly that they are elitist, clannish, place a higher premium on Israel than on any other issue, and above all else, are rich - would support the idea that they would prefer Republicans and conservatives over Democrats and liberals. When you add to that the fact that both of these people belong to the left and have nothing but abject contempt for those on the right, it seems more and more likely that a belief in anti-Jewish stereotypes and a general inclination to dislike Jews in general is responsible for their opinion that Jews are conservative and/or oppose President Obama.
And what of the response that these individuals can't possibly be anti-Semitic, as they are themselves Jewish? Well, I could go into a long discussion about the ignoble history of self-hating Jews, from Nicholas Donin through Karl Marx, but I find myself too tired to engage in any more angry lectures. A brief overview of this blog shows that I have been foaming at the mouth (and hopefully at least partially enriching that foam with nutrients from my mind) for a very long time now. I need a break.
What I came across outraged me, and the reasons for that outrage deserve further attention. When I was a student at Bard College, I remember hearing one of my collegiate acquaintances - a proud left-wing radical named Noah - talk about how Jews were notoriously conservative in their politics and had an ingrained animosity toward the African-American community. When I pointed out that Jews are on average overwhelmingly Democratic in their voting patterns, that the disproportionately large number of Jews in Congress were likewise overwhelmingly Democratic in composition (and even more so today than they were back in 2004), and that non-partisan polls had found that Jews were more likely to be pro-choice, anti-Iraq war, pro-gay marriage, and left-wing in their economic philosophy than any other religious group, Noah dismissed me out-of-hand. Implicit in the defense of his position was that he was himself Jewish, and thus in no way capable of being an anti-Semite.
In his essay, Monsbach took a unique spin on the same theme I heard espoused by Noah - he argued that Jews over the past half-century have sacrificed their liberal idealism because of their assimilation into "white culture", and are therefore inclined toward racism against African-Americans, an assertion he repeats as if it were not a personal opinion but an established fact, and which he therefore sees no need to support with anything beyond fragmentary anecdotes (the veracity of which, given his own clear biases, are automatically questionable) and the somewhat odd notion that, because black anti-Semites like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan have apologized for their Jew-hating past, any Jews who remain suspicious of them must be harboring those feelings due to racism (he then tries to argue that Jews have made a point of forgiving Mel Gibson, something that was certainly news to me and my countless Gibson-hating Jewish friends). From this, he goes on to claim that Jews, because they have experienced relatively little anti-Semitism in the United States, have gone from persecuted minority to accepted members of the white elite, and thus revel in seeing blacks (and presumably other persecuted groups) instead of themselves as being part of "the other". While he doesn't go so far as Noah and outright claim that Jews are now conservative, the intended interpretation of these assertions (particularly for a left-wing radical picking up this text) is unmistakable. And of course, Monsbach insists throughout his essay that, as a Jew, he is obviously incapable of being anti-Semitic (although I will admit he possessed a subtlety that was lost on Noah).
Rather than begin this piece by addressing how it is indeed quite possible for Jews to be anti-Semitic, I shall instead focus on why the assumption that Jews are conservative, when made by a liberal and used as an implicit criticism of the community (as done by Monsbach as well as Noah), could only be anti-Semitic in origin.
1) Jewish-American history does not support this claim. First, let's look at the statistics. In every presidential election since 1924, a majority of Jews have supported the Democratic candidate because of his left-wing ideology; every Democrat since 1928, with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter in 1980, has received at least three-fifths (or 60%) of all the Jewish votes cast, and usually quite a bit more than that (the average Jewish vote for Democrats from 1928 to 2008 is 75%); and every third-party candidate who has received a disproportionately high number of Jewish votes has been left-wing (Socialist Eugene Debs in 1920, who received 38% of the Jewish vote compared to 3% of the general vote; Progressive Henry Wallace in 1948, who received 15% of the Jewish vote compared to 3% of the general vote; John Anderson in 1980, who received 14% of the Jewish vote compared to 7% of the general vote), while no right-wing third-party candidate has ever posted statistically significant results. Buttressing this data is a plethora of other juicy details from American Jewish political history, such as the fact that of the seven Jews appointed to the Supreme Court, all of them have been liberal and all but one was appointed by a Democratic president (Herbert Hoover being the lone Republican to appoint a Jew), or the fact that most of the prominent Jewish figures in American political history (and particularly after the wave of Eastern European immigration between 1881 and 1914) have been associated with left-wing rather than right-wing causes, from anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and labor leaders like Samuel Gompers and Sidney Hillman to civil rights workers like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and countercultural figures like Abbie Hoffman and Lee Weiner (this, of course, completely ignores the countless Jewish elected officials who have been prominent liberal Democrats, including the likes of Ernest Gruening, Abraham Ribicoff, Jacob Javits, Herbert Lehman, Simon Bamberger, and Milton Shapp, to name only a few).
2) Contemporary data about Jewish-American political beliefs do not support this claim. For starters, let's look at that old trope - promoted by the likes of Congressman Jim Moran and academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt - that massive support for the Iraq war by American Jews was a key factor in Bush's involvement. While it is clear that smaller Jewish lobbies (like neo-conservative think tanks and the Zionist AIPAC) did support the war, a survey taken in 2003 (at the very beginning of the invasion of Iraq) found that 54% of Americans Jews opposed the war, compared to only 43% who supported it, making Jews less supportive of the Iraq War than any other American religious group at the time. The most recent comprehensive survey conducted of the positions held by American Jews on major political subjects (the data of which comes from September 2008) found the following opinions:
- 44% identified themselves as liberal, compared to 30% deeming themselves moderate and only 24% considering themselves conservative.
- 56% considered themselves Democrats, 25% as independents, and only 17% as Republicans.
- 75% believed that the best way for America to handle its energy needs would be by developing alternative energy sources, with only 7% supporting greater energy production, 6% preferring greater energy conservative, and 10% supporting all three steps.
- 54% of Jews considered the economy to be the most important issue in the upcoming presidential election, with the next largest number (11%) believing health care reform to be key, followed by 6% placing the greatest emphasis on the war in Iraq, 5% on energy independence, 5% on terrorism, and a mere 3% on Israel.
- 73% liked Joe Biden while only 37% liked Sarah Palin.
A similar survey taken in 2007 (which addressed certain subjects that weren't included in last year's version) yielded other revealing information:
- 59% disapproved of the war on terrorism, while only 31% approved.
- 67% believed we never should entered Iraq, while only 27% still supported that decision.
- 67% support creating criteria that would permit illegal immigrants to stay in America, while 14% wanted them to stay for a limited period of time before being deported and only 15% wanted them deported immediately.
- That year 23% considered the economy and jobs to be the most important issue, followed by 19% considering health care reform to be paramount, 16% choosing the war in Iraq, 14% choosing terrorism and national security, 6% choosing immigration, 6% choosing the energy crisis, and 6% choosing Israel.
Here are some more tidbits:
- A survey conducted by Pew Polling in 2009 found that 84% of American Jews believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared 62% of mainstream Protestants, 62% of Eastern Orthodox Christians, 48% of Muslims, 48% of Catholics, 33% of Evangelical Protestants, and 27% of Mormons (more Jews supported abortion rights than any other religious group, with the only other one to come close being Buddhists, 81% of whom were pro-choice).
- Jews voted against Proposition 8 (the California initiative nullifying gay marriages within the state) by a staggering 78% to 8%, in stark contrast to the rest of the state (which supported it).
3) Perhaps most important of all, the predictions from the self-proclaimed experts on the Jewish vote that have insisted that they would either not vote Democratic or significantly drop off in their support for the Democrats have been consistently proven wrong. In 2004, articles and polls from progressive as well as Republican sources kept insisting that George W. Bush was poised to siphon as much as 15 to 25% of the Jewish vote away from Democratic John Kerry; indeed, a college buddy even went so far as to bet me dinner at a Tibetan restaurant that not more than 60% of all Jewish voters would actually cast their ballots for the Massachusetts Senator. Instead, Kerry received 74% of the Jewish vote, a drop of only 5% from the amount received by the Democratic presidential candidate (Al Gore) in the previous election, and well above the 60-65% that expert surveys kept predicting (the Tibetan meal was fantastic, by the way). Four years later, the alleged tension between Jews and Democratic candidate Barack Obama was even more hyped up - surveys were produced once again that insisted that only 60-65% of Jewish voters would support Obama over McCain, and so much concern was voiced that comedienne Sarah Silverman even implored young Jewish Obamaites to make a "great schlepp" to their grandparents in Florida to get them to vote for Obama, based on the notion that they were leaning toward McCain. This time, 78% of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama (an increase of 4% from the results in 2004), and since then Obama's support among American Jews has consistently remained at 79%. In spite of this, stories continue to crop up about "friction" between Obama and the Jewish community, with the media focusing on the few prominent Jewish conservatives who, either due to criticism of Obama's Israel policies or for some other reason, oppose the administration, and acting as if they are emblematic, while pundits like Monsbach and political reporters like Richard Wolffe still write about the so-called lingering suspicion that Jews harbor toward both the president and his liberal beliefs. Oh, and of the forty-three Jews who currently serve in the United States Congress, forty of them are Democrats (two of the remaining three are independents, with only Eric Cantor being the lone Jewish Republican).
In short, if one were to base conclusions about Jewish political affiliations on history and statistical evidence (as opposed to, say, personal anecdotes and searching deep within your gut until a feeling bubbles up from your intestines and reaches your brain to tell you what is true), then irrevocable opinion one would have to reach is that Jews are an overwhelmingly left-wing group. The next question that needs to be asked, then, is why do individuals like my old college acquaintance Noah and the supremely confident Monsbach believe that Jews are conservative?
There are two ways of drawing conclusions about any subject: One is to take an existing body of evidence and, using logical methodologies, extrapolate a truth based on that information; the other is to come to a conclusion first, and then either disregard all subsequently discovered information that contradicts that opinion, interpret and warp that information in order to get it to support your pre-existing belief, or (as Noah and Monsbach seem to have preferred) just avoid doing any research at all and instead base your assertions on anecdotes and intuition. Since it is impossible to believe that either of these individuals used any of the existing data to support their assertions, one can only come to the conclusion that they developed these opinions based on personal prejudices (which in turn they reinforced based on a selective interpretation of personal experiences). Of course, existing stereotypes about Jews - particularly that they are elitist, clannish, place a higher premium on Israel than on any other issue, and above all else, are rich - would support the idea that they would prefer Republicans and conservatives over Democrats and liberals. When you add to that the fact that both of these people belong to the left and have nothing but abject contempt for those on the right, it seems more and more likely that a belief in anti-Jewish stereotypes and a general inclination to dislike Jews in general is responsible for their opinion that Jews are conservative and/or oppose President Obama.
And what of the response that these individuals can't possibly be anti-Semitic, as they are themselves Jewish? Well, I could go into a long discussion about the ignoble history of self-hating Jews, from Nicholas Donin through Karl Marx, but I find myself too tired to engage in any more angry lectures. A brief overview of this blog shows that I have been foaming at the mouth (and hopefully at least partially enriching that foam with nutrients from my mind) for a very long time now. I need a break.
Friedman's Op-Ed on the Afghan War
If columnist Thomas Friedman's analysis of our involvement in Afghanistan is as insightful as I fear, it ought to give President Obama pause. One of the key lessons that the "best and brightest" among America's foreign policymakers failed to have picked up, despite repeated instances that have underscored its importance, is that a war can only be effectively sold to the American people if it carries with it a logically sound objective and can be said to have succeeded after having reached clear and definable pre-existing goals. When Presidents Roosevelt and Truman successfully led us through World War II, President Truman and Eisenhower through the Korean War, President Ford into Cambodia (to rescue American hostages from the USS Mayaguez), the first President Bush into Iraq (to prevent a hostile takeover of an innocent nation), and President Clinton into Kosovo (to stop the genocide of ethnic Albanians by the Milosevic regime), they had full public support because they set up realistic benchmarks by which to define "success" and made a convincing case to the American people as to why those military efforts were necessary. If Obama is to avoid suffering the fate of those contemporary presidents who are associated with failed wars (Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush being the most important examples), then he must recognize that the only reason we are engaged in military action within the Middle East is because, on September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden orchestrated a terrorist attack that took three thousand lives on American soil. Any military endeavor that does not serve the clear and unmistakable purpose of bringing the main perpetrator of that atrocity, Osama bin Laden, to justice, as well as protect us from future terrorist attacks, is a waste of something far worse than American treasure and international prestige - it is a morally indefensible squandering of American lives.
From Baby-Sitting to Adoption
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Aug. 29, this newspaper carried a front-page headline that should make your blood boil: “Karzai Using Rift With U.S. to Gain Favor.” The article said that Obama officials were growing disenchanted with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, whose supporters allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in the recent elections, while Mr. Karzai struck deals with accused drug dealers and warlords, one of whom is his brother, for political gain. The article added, though, that in a feat of political shrewdness, Mr. Karzai “has surprised some in the Obama administration” by turning their anger with him “to an advantage, portraying himself at home as the only political candidate willing to stand up to the dictates of the United States.”
If this is how our “allies” are treating us in Afghanistan, after eight years, then one really has to ask not whether we can afford to lose there but whether we can afford to win there.
It would be one thing if the people we were fighting with and for represented everything the Taliban did not: decency, respect for women’s rights and education, respect for the rule of law and democratic values and rejection of drug-dealing. But they do not. Too many in this Kabul government are just a different kind of bad. This has become a war between light black — Karzai & Co. — and dark black — Taliban Inc. And light black is simply not good enough to ask Americans to pay for with blood or treasure.
This is the most important and troubling fact about Afghanistan today: After eight years of work there, we still do not have a reliable Afghan partner to hand off to. And it is not all our fault. Lord knows, Iraq still has problems. The outcome there remains uncertain. But the reason Iraq still has a chance for a decent future is because a critical mass of Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites were ready to take on their own extremists and hold reasonably fair elections. The surge in Iraq started with key Iraqi communities wanting to liberate themselves from their own radicals. Our troops helped them do that.
The strategy that our new — and impressive — commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is pursuing calls for additional troops to create something that does not now exist there — a reasonably noncorrupt Afghan state that will serve its people and partner with America in keeping Afghanistan free of drug lords, warlords, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His plan calls for clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas and then building effective local, district and provincial governments — along with a bigger army, real courts, police and public services. Because only with all that can we hold the support of the Afghan people and avoid a Taliban victory and a return of Al Qaeda that could threaten us. That is the theory.
And it may, indeed, be the only way to go, but we should have no illusions: We’re talking State Building 101 in the most inhospitable terrain and in one of the poorest, most tribalized, countries in the world.
As the military expert Anthony Cordesman, who has advised the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, explained in The Washington Post recently, it requires “a significant number” of U.S. reinforcements and time to do what the Kabul government has failed to do, because it remains “a grossly overcentralized government that is corrupt, is often a tool of power brokers and narco-traffickers, and lacks basic capacity in virtually every ministry.”
To put it another way, we are not just adding more troops in Afghanistan. We are transforming our mission — from baby-sitting to adoption. We are going from a limited mission focused on baby-sitting Afghanistan — no matter how awful its government — in order to prevent an Al Qaeda return to adopting Afghanistan as our state-building project.
I recently looked back at Stephanie Sinclair’s stunning 2006 photograph in The Times of Ghulam Haider, an 11-year-old Afghan girl seated next to the bearded 40-year-old man she was about to be married off to. The article said Haider had hoped to be a teacher but was forced to quit her classes when she became engaged. The furtive sideways glance of her eyes at her future husband said she was terrified. The article said: “On the day she witnessed the engagement party. ... Sinclair discreetly took the girl aside. ‘What are you feeling today?’ the photographer asked. ‘Nothing,’ the bewildered girl answered. ‘I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?’ ”
That is the raw clay for our state-building. It may still be worth doing, but one thing I know for sure, it must be debated anew. This is a much bigger undertaking than we originally signed up for. Before we adopt a new baby — Afghanistan — we need to have a new national discussion about this project: what it will cost, how much time it could take, what U.S. interests make it compelling, and, most of all, who is going to oversee this policy?
I feel a vast and rising ambivalence about this in the American public today, and adopting a baby you are ambivalent about is a prescription for disaster.
From Baby-Sitting to Adoption
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Aug. 29, this newspaper carried a front-page headline that should make your blood boil: “Karzai Using Rift With U.S. to Gain Favor.” The article said that Obama officials were growing disenchanted with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, whose supporters allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in the recent elections, while Mr. Karzai struck deals with accused drug dealers and warlords, one of whom is his brother, for political gain. The article added, though, that in a feat of political shrewdness, Mr. Karzai “has surprised some in the Obama administration” by turning their anger with him “to an advantage, portraying himself at home as the only political candidate willing to stand up to the dictates of the United States.”
If this is how our “allies” are treating us in Afghanistan, after eight years, then one really has to ask not whether we can afford to lose there but whether we can afford to win there.
It would be one thing if the people we were fighting with and for represented everything the Taliban did not: decency, respect for women’s rights and education, respect for the rule of law and democratic values and rejection of drug-dealing. But they do not. Too many in this Kabul government are just a different kind of bad. This has become a war between light black — Karzai & Co. — and dark black — Taliban Inc. And light black is simply not good enough to ask Americans to pay for with blood or treasure.
This is the most important and troubling fact about Afghanistan today: After eight years of work there, we still do not have a reliable Afghan partner to hand off to. And it is not all our fault. Lord knows, Iraq still has problems. The outcome there remains uncertain. But the reason Iraq still has a chance for a decent future is because a critical mass of Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites were ready to take on their own extremists and hold reasonably fair elections. The surge in Iraq started with key Iraqi communities wanting to liberate themselves from their own radicals. Our troops helped them do that.
The strategy that our new — and impressive — commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is pursuing calls for additional troops to create something that does not now exist there — a reasonably noncorrupt Afghan state that will serve its people and partner with America in keeping Afghanistan free of drug lords, warlords, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His plan calls for clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas and then building effective local, district and provincial governments — along with a bigger army, real courts, police and public services. Because only with all that can we hold the support of the Afghan people and avoid a Taliban victory and a return of Al Qaeda that could threaten us. That is the theory.
And it may, indeed, be the only way to go, but we should have no illusions: We’re talking State Building 101 in the most inhospitable terrain and in one of the poorest, most tribalized, countries in the world.
As the military expert Anthony Cordesman, who has advised the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, explained in The Washington Post recently, it requires “a significant number” of U.S. reinforcements and time to do what the Kabul government has failed to do, because it remains “a grossly overcentralized government that is corrupt, is often a tool of power brokers and narco-traffickers, and lacks basic capacity in virtually every ministry.”
To put it another way, we are not just adding more troops in Afghanistan. We are transforming our mission — from baby-sitting to adoption. We are going from a limited mission focused on baby-sitting Afghanistan — no matter how awful its government — in order to prevent an Al Qaeda return to adopting Afghanistan as our state-building project.
I recently looked back at Stephanie Sinclair’s stunning 2006 photograph in The Times of Ghulam Haider, an 11-year-old Afghan girl seated next to the bearded 40-year-old man she was about to be married off to. The article said Haider had hoped to be a teacher but was forced to quit her classes when she became engaged. The furtive sideways glance of her eyes at her future husband said she was terrified. The article said: “On the day she witnessed the engagement party. ... Sinclair discreetly took the girl aside. ‘What are you feeling today?’ the photographer asked. ‘Nothing,’ the bewildered girl answered. ‘I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?’ ”
That is the raw clay for our state-building. It may still be worth doing, but one thing I know for sure, it must be debated anew. This is a much bigger undertaking than we originally signed up for. Before we adopt a new baby — Afghanistan — we need to have a new national discussion about this project: what it will cost, how much time it could take, what U.S. interests make it compelling, and, most of all, who is going to oversee this policy?
I feel a vast and rising ambivalence about this in the American public today, and adopting a baby you are ambivalent about is a prescription for disaster.
America Needs to See "Life Stinks"
A montage of images depicting urban blight (in this case culled from downtown Los Angeles) greets the audience. In the background one can hear news reports discussing matters of great consequence to and about individuals of great consequence. The indigent shuffle about their daily lives, indifferent to the voices that are responsible for reporting the human story, as both they and we know full well that those voices are already indifferent to them. As if to punctuate this point, a limousine carrying an important man - the kind of human being about whom those voices do care - whisks past a homeless man sleeping on a sidewalk curb, drenching him with water and mud.
Life Stinks! is my favorite Mel Brooks movie, and one of my all-time favorite films, because it insists on telling us what would happen if a man of consequence (the one in the limousine) had his story dovetail with the millions of human beings whose stories are often dismissed as being inconsequential. Goddard Bolt, a billionaire industrialist with a penthouse office in a Los Angeles skyscraper, wants to destroy a decaying neighborhood in his own city so that he what he builds on its site can become his legacy (the exact business plan he has in mind is far less important than his failure to recognize that the human lives he has destroyed, and not the heartless edifice he has erected in their place, would in fact be his legacy). Another corporate nabob, the deliciously unctuous Vance Crasswell (Brooks has a real knack for finding apropos names for his characters), also has his eyes on the real estate prize. Soon a wager is made - Bolt bets that he could survive for thirty days among society's most economically misfortunate while Crasswell places odds that he cannot. The winner gets to destroy the neighborhood.
The idea of forcing one of society's privileged to see what it's like on the other side is hardly original to Brooks' film; its literary origins can be traced as far back as Arthurian legend, and even its comic potential has been mined before, most famously in Mark Twain's 1881 classic The Prince and the Pauper. Yet Life Stinks! stands out as a particularly special entry within this genre for three reasons:
1) It has a compelling story and tells it well.
Movie critics, in their unending quest for the original and innovative, sometimes fail to appreciate that which is old-fashioned but, on the sheer strength of how it is told, manages to remain powerful, effective, and even fresh. Although Life Stinks! does tread on ideological and narrative terrain that has been visited before, it does so with vivid and fleshed out characters, a story that is impressively believable in its execution (especially considering its somewhat far-fetched premise), and the ability to seamlessly transition in tone between the comic and the dramatic, without at any time allowing one to cheapen the other. The fact that it is very funny, considering that Mel Brooks is its auteur, isn't particularly noteworthy (and although consistently amusing throughout its running time, Life Stinks fails to reach the greatness of Brooks' earlier work, such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein). On the other hand, the fact that the movie's story is so powerful, on the other hand, is quite surprising; while Brooks was never a slouch when it came to the art of telling a tale, none of his other movies have ever reached the level of Life Stinks! either in socio-political prescience or sheer dramatic poignance.
2) The comedy is an endearing blend of fundamentally innocent vaudevillian hijinks and biting satire.
The slapstick, stomach churning gags, and nyuk nyuk inducing misunderstandings that one would expect from a man who cut his comic teeth working as a writer for The Sid Caesar Show is all here, and perfectly unapologetic about the fact that it is a throwback to an era when comedy didn't rely on shock value and chic in order to receive approval. Yet the more important throwback is the way in which Brooks satirizes his subjects. At a time when filmmakers believe that the only way to make a movie socially relevant is to become as savvy and sophisticated as possible, it is refreshing to watch Life Stinks! express the confidence to make its point through the tried-and-true technique of creating comedy simply by showing that which is already absurd in life, rather than attempting to show off its own self-proclaimed sophistication by piling layers upon layers of irony or taking that which is already ridiculous and exaggerating it until it bears little resemblance to its original target. Take, for example, the scene when the now destitute and desperate Goddard Bolt pleads for food and shelter outside a church, only to be turned away by a nun (voiced to perfection by the late Bea Arthur) whose refusal to open the door denies him not only Christian charity, but even the most basic dignity of being able to talk to a human face:
BOLT knocks on the door. NUN's voice can be heard from inside.
Nun: Kindly. Who is it?
Bolt: Desperate but maintaining a semblance of composure. Please let me in. I need shelter.
Nun: Regretfully. I'm sorry. We're closed... my son.
Bolt: Slightly more agitated. But I haven't eaten all day. I need food!
Nun: Regretfully. We'll be open in the morning... my son.
Bolt: Hysterical. You don't understand! I don't have a place to sleep. I'm tired, very tired, very... Please! Please let me in! Please let me in!
Nun: Shouting. Now listen! You're wakin' everybody up! You get out of here or I'm callin' the police! Waits a beat. My son.
3) The movie has the courage to buck the prevailing socioeconomic, political, and cultural assumptions of its time.
Although Life Stinks! takes aim at many targets in its survey of poverty in America - the prevalance of drug use in slums, the degree to which facilities available to the indigent can be exploited at the whims of the powerful, the inhumane ineptitude and neglect that marks the health care received by those without money or insurance, the ways in which our society dismisses its suffering citizens as mere nuisances, and even small touches such as how the ashes of the cremated rich are placed in urns while the poor have to settle for shoeboxes - its greatest value lies in the comic eloquence with which it dispenses one of the central ideological convictions of its time. It is important to bear in mind, when Life Stinks! was released in 1991, the era of Ronald Reagan (at that time presided over by President George H. W. Bush) was in full swing. Despite the growing disparity in the quality of life between the rich and the poor, as well as the ever-shrinking middle-class, entertainment as well as news media insisted on reflecting the popular notion that times were good, opportunity for socioeconomic advancement was available to all, and most important of all, that those who were in distress only had themselves to blame. I wish I could say that these beliefs have since then received the widespread contempt they richly deserve (if not for moral reasons than because more and more Americans everyday are joining the ranks of the economically disadvantaged), but in the course of less than a week, I have personally encountered met five (count 'em, five) people who have told me (two of them by screaming and shouting me down, two of them with smug condescension, and the last matter-of-factly) that the growing number of Americans who are either unemployed or can't make ends meet with the jobs they already have are "lazy" and overall have only themselves to blame. To these monsters, Life Stinks! has a powerful rebuttal. As Roger Ebert noted at the time:
It's easy to sit inside an air-conditioned car and feel scorn for some poor wretch who is trying to earn a quarter for wiping a rag across the windshield. But if we were out there on the streets without a home or money, what bright ideas would we come up with? Donald Trump can make millions selling condos to other millionaires, but could he make 10 bucks in a day if he had to start from scratch? The conventional wisdom in these situations is that the poor and homeless should get a grip on themselves, should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But if they have no boots, what then? Wasn't it Anatole France who said that the Law, in its magnificent equality, prohibits the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges and begging in the streets?
Unfortunately, Life Stinks! marks an unfortunate nadir in Mel Brooks' career - this socially conscious satire became the first Brooks movie to ever bomb both among critics and at the box office. That said, it has in many ways aged better than any of his other films. At a time when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to "solve" his homeless problem by buying them one-way tickets out of town, when popular pundits like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh can denounce tax increases on those who make more than a quarter-million dollars as "punishing our most productive citizens", when the de-regulation and laissez-faire philosophy of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes can be directly traced to the economic crisis of 2007-2008, when the growing gap between rich and poor has made it so that the rich (much to their befuddlement) can't sell their goods and services to the poor (who lack the income to afford them), and when despite all of this, the ideological right (and the big businesses that control them) have convinced the intellectually deficient, paranoid, and hateful all across the land that they should shout down and bully liberal congressmen and labor unions (to say nothing of pudgy Jewish intellectuals) who want to increase taxes on the wealthy, use taxpayer dollars to create more jobs and raise wages, and provide high quality healthcare for all ... at a time like this, Life Stinks rings as true as ever.
PS: In a special feature "Making of the Movie" documentary on the Life Stinks! DVD, the question is posed to Rudy DeLuca, one of the writers, "Does life actually stink?" His response makes for a fitting close to this article:
"You have to weigh what stinks and what doesn't. You know, when you're out of work, life stinks. When your girlfriend or your wife gives you a hard time, life stinks. When you have a bad meal, life stinks. When you're out of money, life stinks. When you're in traffic, life stinks. When you're in heavier traffic, it REALLY stinks. And when you don't get along and have fights with your friends, it REALLY STINKS! And other times, there are times... when you just can't stand it."
Actually, as an incorrigible optimist, I much prefer the answer given by Mel Brooks:
"We should just enjoy whatever life we have, and pop around and jump around and eat spaghetti and dance as much as we can. If we're capable of dancing, we should dance."
Life Stinks! is my favorite Mel Brooks movie, and one of my all-time favorite films, because it insists on telling us what would happen if a man of consequence (the one in the limousine) had his story dovetail with the millions of human beings whose stories are often dismissed as being inconsequential. Goddard Bolt, a billionaire industrialist with a penthouse office in a Los Angeles skyscraper, wants to destroy a decaying neighborhood in his own city so that he what he builds on its site can become his legacy (the exact business plan he has in mind is far less important than his failure to recognize that the human lives he has destroyed, and not the heartless edifice he has erected in their place, would in fact be his legacy). Another corporate nabob, the deliciously unctuous Vance Crasswell (Brooks has a real knack for finding apropos names for his characters), also has his eyes on the real estate prize. Soon a wager is made - Bolt bets that he could survive for thirty days among society's most economically misfortunate while Crasswell places odds that he cannot. The winner gets to destroy the neighborhood.
The idea of forcing one of society's privileged to see what it's like on the other side is hardly original to Brooks' film; its literary origins can be traced as far back as Arthurian legend, and even its comic potential has been mined before, most famously in Mark Twain's 1881 classic The Prince and the Pauper. Yet Life Stinks! stands out as a particularly special entry within this genre for three reasons:
1) It has a compelling story and tells it well.
Movie critics, in their unending quest for the original and innovative, sometimes fail to appreciate that which is old-fashioned but, on the sheer strength of how it is told, manages to remain powerful, effective, and even fresh. Although Life Stinks! does tread on ideological and narrative terrain that has been visited before, it does so with vivid and fleshed out characters, a story that is impressively believable in its execution (especially considering its somewhat far-fetched premise), and the ability to seamlessly transition in tone between the comic and the dramatic, without at any time allowing one to cheapen the other. The fact that it is very funny, considering that Mel Brooks is its auteur, isn't particularly noteworthy (and although consistently amusing throughout its running time, Life Stinks fails to reach the greatness of Brooks' earlier work, such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein). On the other hand, the fact that the movie's story is so powerful, on the other hand, is quite surprising; while Brooks was never a slouch when it came to the art of telling a tale, none of his other movies have ever reached the level of Life Stinks! either in socio-political prescience or sheer dramatic poignance.
2) The comedy is an endearing blend of fundamentally innocent vaudevillian hijinks and biting satire.
The slapstick, stomach churning gags, and nyuk nyuk inducing misunderstandings that one would expect from a man who cut his comic teeth working as a writer for The Sid Caesar Show is all here, and perfectly unapologetic about the fact that it is a throwback to an era when comedy didn't rely on shock value and chic in order to receive approval. Yet the more important throwback is the way in which Brooks satirizes his subjects. At a time when filmmakers believe that the only way to make a movie socially relevant is to become as savvy and sophisticated as possible, it is refreshing to watch Life Stinks! express the confidence to make its point through the tried-and-true technique of creating comedy simply by showing that which is already absurd in life, rather than attempting to show off its own self-proclaimed sophistication by piling layers upon layers of irony or taking that which is already ridiculous and exaggerating it until it bears little resemblance to its original target. Take, for example, the scene when the now destitute and desperate Goddard Bolt pleads for food and shelter outside a church, only to be turned away by a nun (voiced to perfection by the late Bea Arthur) whose refusal to open the door denies him not only Christian charity, but even the most basic dignity of being able to talk to a human face:
BOLT knocks on the door. NUN's voice can be heard from inside.
Nun: Kindly. Who is it?
Bolt: Desperate but maintaining a semblance of composure. Please let me in. I need shelter.
Nun: Regretfully. I'm sorry. We're closed... my son.
Bolt: Slightly more agitated. But I haven't eaten all day. I need food!
Nun: Regretfully. We'll be open in the morning... my son.
Bolt: Hysterical. You don't understand! I don't have a place to sleep. I'm tired, very tired, very... Please! Please let me in! Please let me in!
Nun: Shouting. Now listen! You're wakin' everybody up! You get out of here or I'm callin' the police! Waits a beat. My son.
3) The movie has the courage to buck the prevailing socioeconomic, political, and cultural assumptions of its time.
Although Life Stinks! takes aim at many targets in its survey of poverty in America - the prevalance of drug use in slums, the degree to which facilities available to the indigent can be exploited at the whims of the powerful, the inhumane ineptitude and neglect that marks the health care received by those without money or insurance, the ways in which our society dismisses its suffering citizens as mere nuisances, and even small touches such as how the ashes of the cremated rich are placed in urns while the poor have to settle for shoeboxes - its greatest value lies in the comic eloquence with which it dispenses one of the central ideological convictions of its time. It is important to bear in mind, when Life Stinks! was released in 1991, the era of Ronald Reagan (at that time presided over by President George H. W. Bush) was in full swing. Despite the growing disparity in the quality of life between the rich and the poor, as well as the ever-shrinking middle-class, entertainment as well as news media insisted on reflecting the popular notion that times were good, opportunity for socioeconomic advancement was available to all, and most important of all, that those who were in distress only had themselves to blame. I wish I could say that these beliefs have since then received the widespread contempt they richly deserve (if not for moral reasons than because more and more Americans everyday are joining the ranks of the economically disadvantaged), but in the course of less than a week, I have personally encountered met five (count 'em, five) people who have told me (two of them by screaming and shouting me down, two of them with smug condescension, and the last matter-of-factly) that the growing number of Americans who are either unemployed or can't make ends meet with the jobs they already have are "lazy" and overall have only themselves to blame. To these monsters, Life Stinks! has a powerful rebuttal. As Roger Ebert noted at the time:
It's easy to sit inside an air-conditioned car and feel scorn for some poor wretch who is trying to earn a quarter for wiping a rag across the windshield. But if we were out there on the streets without a home or money, what bright ideas would we come up with? Donald Trump can make millions selling condos to other millionaires, but could he make 10 bucks in a day if he had to start from scratch? The conventional wisdom in these situations is that the poor and homeless should get a grip on themselves, should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But if they have no boots, what then? Wasn't it Anatole France who said that the Law, in its magnificent equality, prohibits the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges and begging in the streets?
Unfortunately, Life Stinks! marks an unfortunate nadir in Mel Brooks' career - this socially conscious satire became the first Brooks movie to ever bomb both among critics and at the box office. That said, it has in many ways aged better than any of his other films. At a time when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to "solve" his homeless problem by buying them one-way tickets out of town, when popular pundits like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh can denounce tax increases on those who make more than a quarter-million dollars as "punishing our most productive citizens", when the de-regulation and laissez-faire philosophy of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes can be directly traced to the economic crisis of 2007-2008, when the growing gap between rich and poor has made it so that the rich (much to their befuddlement) can't sell their goods and services to the poor (who lack the income to afford them), and when despite all of this, the ideological right (and the big businesses that control them) have convinced the intellectually deficient, paranoid, and hateful all across the land that they should shout down and bully liberal congressmen and labor unions (to say nothing of pudgy Jewish intellectuals) who want to increase taxes on the wealthy, use taxpayer dollars to create more jobs and raise wages, and provide high quality healthcare for all ... at a time like this, Life Stinks rings as true as ever.
PS: In a special feature "Making of the Movie" documentary on the Life Stinks! DVD, the question is posed to Rudy DeLuca, one of the writers, "Does life actually stink?" His response makes for a fitting close to this article:
"You have to weigh what stinks and what doesn't. You know, when you're out of work, life stinks. When your girlfriend or your wife gives you a hard time, life stinks. When you have a bad meal, life stinks. When you're out of money, life stinks. When you're in traffic, life stinks. When you're in heavier traffic, it REALLY stinks. And when you don't get along and have fights with your friends, it REALLY STINKS! And other times, there are times... when you just can't stand it."
Actually, as an incorrigible optimist, I much prefer the answer given by Mel Brooks:
"We should just enjoy whatever life we have, and pop around and jump around and eat spaghetti and dance as much as we can. If we're capable of dancing, we should dance."
Analysis of a Limbaugh Rant
The following monologue wsa taken directly from Rush Limbaugh's website, and I think it is as close to a prize-winning piece of right-wing demagoguery as anything that has been uttered over the past few months:
I'm thinking about our call from Rebecca. You know, there's a common theme, all of these people who are calling get upset about insurance agencies and insurance companies, and they keep talking about The Middleman. We've gotta get rid of The Middleman, and that's what Obama says -- and that's what is common theme among communists and socialists: "Take out The Middleman and let's have you deal directly with us in the government," and when I hear Rebecca jumping all over the insurance companies, I think, "Okay, that part of Obama's plan is working on some Americans." He's demonized the doctors, saying, "The doctors cut off your foot when they don't have to get 30 or 40 grand." Of course no doctor gets 30 or 40 grand for cutting off a foot. "They take out kids' tonsils unnecessarily just to line his pockets." He's demonizing everybody. The Democrat Party enemies list is the private sector. From Walmart, Big Retail, to Big Oil, to Big Pharmaceutical, to now Big Insurance. Look at the Democrat Party's enemy list. They're trying to demonize individuals, too, like me but they're demonizing all of these industries and now all these middlemen. "The private sector middlemen, they are the problem! We need to get rid of the private sector middlemen and just open the door so we can deal directly with our beloved benevolent government," which, of course, is only here to help us.
Let us do some dissection, shall we?
I'm thinking about our call from Rebecca. You know, there's a common theme, all of these people who are calling get upset about insurance agencies and insurance companies, and they keep talking about The Middleman. We've gotta get rid of The Middleman...
Granted, I did not find any transcript with Rebecca's call, but I think it is fair to assume that she was probably giving the relatively common argument that government-run health insurance would "cut out the middleman" between patients and doctors. As this line of thinking (rather logically) goes, insurance companies frequently fail to provide any meaningful services to the patients they claim to represent, and instead simply figure out ways of bilking both doctor and patient out of vast sums of cash in order for necessary medical procedures to be performed. Of course, more noteworthy than my supposition of what Rebecca said is the fact that I am forced to suppose anything in the first place; a man with more interest in intellectual integrity would have at the very least summarized Rebecca's argument to his audience (so that she could have the benefit of having presented her side on the issue) before simply disparaging it. Anyway...
That's what Obama says -- and that's what is common theme among communists and socialists...
When I was a young child, I used to say that I hated trivial things, such as getting a peanut butter sandwich for lunch (I hate peanut butter sandwiches) or having to wait on line before being seated at a ride. Eventually my juvenile hyperbole sufficiently aggravated my mother, who pulled me aside and politely explained that extreme words like "hate" had a very specific meaning, and that I should refrain from using them unless I understand not only what they mean, but how they specifically apply to a given situation. This particular insight is hardly unique to my mother, but apparently has been lost on the paragon of conservative thoughtfulness that is Rushbo; anything which he dislikes or wishes to instantly discredit he classifies as "communist" and "socialist". Does he even understand what those words mean? Can he draw a specific parallel between them and this situation? As someone who has made a point of studying various political philosophies throughout Western history, I can safely say that I never recall the theme of "needing to cut out the middleman" being used by them. Rush Limbaugh either doesn't actually understand socialism and communism, and thus fails to realize that his statement is as profoundly absurd as it is factually wanting, or he does understand them and intentionally plays fast and loose with his facts. Either way, it doesn't matter, because in the minds of his audience the mere pretense of authoritative knowledge on a subject like socialism and communism is enough to convince them that the expertise is actually present. None of them will ever bother looking it up to see whether Limbaugh was right or talking out of his rather prodigious hindquarters, and as such, he will have scored another dishonest win in his one-sided debate against Rachel.
... when I hear Rebecca jumping all over the insurance companies, I think, "Okay, that part of Obama's plan is working on some Americans."
Between 2001 and 2007, The Harris Poll conducted a comprehensive survey that asked Americans whether they felt the industries that provided major goods and services in America were doing a good job. Twenty-one different businesses were included in the survey, with Americans consistently giving the highest marks to supermarkets and Internet search engines and the lowest scores to oil and tobacco companies. Ranking nineteenth out of twenty-one in overall satisfaction, however, were managed care companies such as HMOs (29% approved in 2001, 30% in 2003, 41% in 2006, 37% in 2007), and just slightly above them (eighteenth out of twenty-one) were health insurance companies (38% approved in 2001, 40% in 2003, 46% in 2006, and 39% in 2007). Limbaugh isn't being fair to the insurance companies' unfailing ability to screw up their own public image without any assistance from President Obama.
He's demonized the doctors, saying, "The doctors cut off your foot when they don't have to get 30 or 40 grand." Of course no doctor gets 30 or 40 grand for cutting off a foot. "They take out kids' tonsils unnecessarily just to line his pockets." He's demonizing everybody.
The context of the speech in which Obama referred to these instances was, not surprisingly, ignored by Limbaugh. Here President Obama was discussing the very real problem of doctors receiving greater financial compensation for performing invasive medical procedures than for offering preventative care (to disagree with that notion would be to argue that surgeries are not notoriously more expensive than being given a pamphlet on how to improve your diet). As a true blue capitalist, Rush Limbaugh is no doubt familiar with the concept of incentivization - in an economic system based on the principle of free enterprise, goods and services will be proffered based on what their distributors believe will earn them the highest possible profit. If our medical care system made it so that doctors would receive money on the basis of how effectively they either prevented or treated illnesses (such as Obama was hypothetically proposing in his speech), it would encourage doctors to only take the patient's health into consideration when making decisions. Because our system instead offers doctors greater financial rewards for performing intensive procedures, physicians are faced with a dilemma that - regardless of how many choose the ethical path over the profitable one - quite clearly shouldn't exist in the first place. Of course, a stalwart defender of the unfettered marketplace like Rush Limbaugh was no doubt aware of all this already.
The Democrat Party enemies list is the private sector. From Walmart, Big Retail, to Big Oil, to Big Pharmaceutical, to now Big Insurance. Look at the Democrat Party's enemy list. They're trying to demonize individuals, too, like me but they're demonizing all of these industries and now all these middlemen. "The private sector middlemen, they are the problem! We need to get rid of the private sector middlemen and just open the door so we can deal directly with our beloved benevolent government," which, of course, is only here to help us.
This is as fine a piece of sophistry as I have ever encoutered. In one fell swoop, Rush Limbaugh has managed to turn billion-dollar corporations - the very same ones with hundreds of lobbyists on Capitol Hill constantly funneling thousands of dollars into the campaigns of congressmen (and women) from both major parties in order to have legislation passed in accordance with their interests - into powerless victims at the hands of sinister Democrats (and presumably ones with whom his poor, lower-middle class, and middle class listeners should sympathize). From this he then segues in interpreting the argument of his female caller (whose own words, once again, are never used to provide a balanced perspective on her position) as one of blind love of big government, even though of course the individuals who propose "cutting out the middle man" invariably do so because they want NO ONE standing between them and their doctor - the government, as such arguments go, would merely prevent insurance companies from standing in the way, rather than serve as a middle man or replacement to doctors in their own right. Finally, and most importantly, Limbaugh has managed, despite the waves of verbiage with which he has deluged his audience, to completely avoid actually addressing the claim poor Rebecca made in the first place. Instead he committed the classic "straw man" fallacy - instead of attempting to rebut whatever it was that Rebecca actually he said, he intentionally misrepresented it as being a completely different argument, so that by tearing down the much weaker assertion he has now falsely attributed to his hapless caller he can give the appearance of having refuted the (presumably stronger) claim she actually made.
I'm thinking about our call from Rebecca. You know, there's a common theme, all of these people who are calling get upset about insurance agencies and insurance companies, and they keep talking about The Middleman. We've gotta get rid of The Middleman, and that's what Obama says -- and that's what is common theme among communists and socialists: "Take out The Middleman and let's have you deal directly with us in the government," and when I hear Rebecca jumping all over the insurance companies, I think, "Okay, that part of Obama's plan is working on some Americans." He's demonized the doctors, saying, "The doctors cut off your foot when they don't have to get 30 or 40 grand." Of course no doctor gets 30 or 40 grand for cutting off a foot. "They take out kids' tonsils unnecessarily just to line his pockets." He's demonizing everybody. The Democrat Party enemies list is the private sector. From Walmart, Big Retail, to Big Oil, to Big Pharmaceutical, to now Big Insurance. Look at the Democrat Party's enemy list. They're trying to demonize individuals, too, like me but they're demonizing all of these industries and now all these middlemen. "The private sector middlemen, they are the problem! We need to get rid of the private sector middlemen and just open the door so we can deal directly with our beloved benevolent government," which, of course, is only here to help us.
Let us do some dissection, shall we?
I'm thinking about our call from Rebecca. You know, there's a common theme, all of these people who are calling get upset about insurance agencies and insurance companies, and they keep talking about The Middleman. We've gotta get rid of The Middleman...
Granted, I did not find any transcript with Rebecca's call, but I think it is fair to assume that she was probably giving the relatively common argument that government-run health insurance would "cut out the middleman" between patients and doctors. As this line of thinking (rather logically) goes, insurance companies frequently fail to provide any meaningful services to the patients they claim to represent, and instead simply figure out ways of bilking both doctor and patient out of vast sums of cash in order for necessary medical procedures to be performed. Of course, more noteworthy than my supposition of what Rebecca said is the fact that I am forced to suppose anything in the first place; a man with more interest in intellectual integrity would have at the very least summarized Rebecca's argument to his audience (so that she could have the benefit of having presented her side on the issue) before simply disparaging it. Anyway...
That's what Obama says -- and that's what is common theme among communists and socialists...
When I was a young child, I used to say that I hated trivial things, such as getting a peanut butter sandwich for lunch (I hate peanut butter sandwiches) or having to wait on line before being seated at a ride. Eventually my juvenile hyperbole sufficiently aggravated my mother, who pulled me aside and politely explained that extreme words like "hate" had a very specific meaning, and that I should refrain from using them unless I understand not only what they mean, but how they specifically apply to a given situation. This particular insight is hardly unique to my mother, but apparently has been lost on the paragon of conservative thoughtfulness that is Rushbo; anything which he dislikes or wishes to instantly discredit he classifies as "communist" and "socialist". Does he even understand what those words mean? Can he draw a specific parallel between them and this situation? As someone who has made a point of studying various political philosophies throughout Western history, I can safely say that I never recall the theme of "needing to cut out the middleman" being used by them. Rush Limbaugh either doesn't actually understand socialism and communism, and thus fails to realize that his statement is as profoundly absurd as it is factually wanting, or he does understand them and intentionally plays fast and loose with his facts. Either way, it doesn't matter, because in the minds of his audience the mere pretense of authoritative knowledge on a subject like socialism and communism is enough to convince them that the expertise is actually present. None of them will ever bother looking it up to see whether Limbaugh was right or talking out of his rather prodigious hindquarters, and as such, he will have scored another dishonest win in his one-sided debate against Rachel.
... when I hear Rebecca jumping all over the insurance companies, I think, "Okay, that part of Obama's plan is working on some Americans."
Between 2001 and 2007, The Harris Poll conducted a comprehensive survey that asked Americans whether they felt the industries that provided major goods and services in America were doing a good job. Twenty-one different businesses were included in the survey, with Americans consistently giving the highest marks to supermarkets and Internet search engines and the lowest scores to oil and tobacco companies. Ranking nineteenth out of twenty-one in overall satisfaction, however, were managed care companies such as HMOs (29% approved in 2001, 30% in 2003, 41% in 2006, 37% in 2007), and just slightly above them (eighteenth out of twenty-one) were health insurance companies (38% approved in 2001, 40% in 2003, 46% in 2006, and 39% in 2007). Limbaugh isn't being fair to the insurance companies' unfailing ability to screw up their own public image without any assistance from President Obama.
He's demonized the doctors, saying, "The doctors cut off your foot when they don't have to get 30 or 40 grand." Of course no doctor gets 30 or 40 grand for cutting off a foot. "They take out kids' tonsils unnecessarily just to line his pockets." He's demonizing everybody.
The context of the speech in which Obama referred to these instances was, not surprisingly, ignored by Limbaugh. Here President Obama was discussing the very real problem of doctors receiving greater financial compensation for performing invasive medical procedures than for offering preventative care (to disagree with that notion would be to argue that surgeries are not notoriously more expensive than being given a pamphlet on how to improve your diet). As a true blue capitalist, Rush Limbaugh is no doubt familiar with the concept of incentivization - in an economic system based on the principle of free enterprise, goods and services will be proffered based on what their distributors believe will earn them the highest possible profit. If our medical care system made it so that doctors would receive money on the basis of how effectively they either prevented or treated illnesses (such as Obama was hypothetically proposing in his speech), it would encourage doctors to only take the patient's health into consideration when making decisions. Because our system instead offers doctors greater financial rewards for performing intensive procedures, physicians are faced with a dilemma that - regardless of how many choose the ethical path over the profitable one - quite clearly shouldn't exist in the first place. Of course, a stalwart defender of the unfettered marketplace like Rush Limbaugh was no doubt aware of all this already.
The Democrat Party enemies list is the private sector. From Walmart, Big Retail, to Big Oil, to Big Pharmaceutical, to now Big Insurance. Look at the Democrat Party's enemy list. They're trying to demonize individuals, too, like me but they're demonizing all of these industries and now all these middlemen. "The private sector middlemen, they are the problem! We need to get rid of the private sector middlemen and just open the door so we can deal directly with our beloved benevolent government," which, of course, is only here to help us.
This is as fine a piece of sophistry as I have ever encoutered. In one fell swoop, Rush Limbaugh has managed to turn billion-dollar corporations - the very same ones with hundreds of lobbyists on Capitol Hill constantly funneling thousands of dollars into the campaigns of congressmen (and women) from both major parties in order to have legislation passed in accordance with their interests - into powerless victims at the hands of sinister Democrats (and presumably ones with whom his poor, lower-middle class, and middle class listeners should sympathize). From this he then segues in interpreting the argument of his female caller (whose own words, once again, are never used to provide a balanced perspective on her position) as one of blind love of big government, even though of course the individuals who propose "cutting out the middle man" invariably do so because they want NO ONE standing between them and their doctor - the government, as such arguments go, would merely prevent insurance companies from standing in the way, rather than serve as a middle man or replacement to doctors in their own right. Finally, and most importantly, Limbaugh has managed, despite the waves of verbiage with which he has deluged his audience, to completely avoid actually addressing the claim poor Rebecca made in the first place. Instead he committed the classic "straw man" fallacy - instead of attempting to rebut whatever it was that Rebecca actually he said, he intentionally misrepresented it as being a completely different argument, so that by tearing down the much weaker assertion he has now falsely attributed to his hapless caller he can give the appearance of having refuted the (presumably stronger) claim she actually made.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Barack Obama, Centrist Extraordinaire
When it comes to receiving public approval, President Barack Obama appears to be in a thankless situation. To his right, he finds an ever-growing faction of ideological zealots and general malcontents, who are quick to accuse him of every form of extremist and tyrannical behavior they can think of (words like "Hitler", "communist", "socialist", "fascist", and "indoctrination" keeping cropping up, as well as more kooky conspiracy theories than you can shake a stick at). To his left, among the people on whom Obama had assumed he could rely on for support, he finds the once-bountiful esteem in which he was held quickly diminishing among liberals who decry what they perceive (accurately or otherwise) as an excessive willingness to make concessions on the issues they hold most dear, often without any compelling reason being immediately apparent (particularly on the issue of health care reform). In short, conservatives insist that Obama is too liberal, liberals insist that Obama is too conservative, and no one seems to like him just the way he is. The question that no one seems to be asking, though, is why does Obama choose this path? What approach is Obama taking to the shaping of policy in his administration, and what does he hope to gain for either himself or his country by taking it?
The answer is as obvious as it is simple: Obama is being a centrist. In a time when the ideological poles are drifting farther and farther apart, Barack Obama is a man who insists on finding the halfway point between left and right and planting his flag as squarely as possible smack dab between the two of them. Like most centrists, he isn't doing this because his personal opinions actually are centrist in nature (very few people actually have a truly "centrist" outlook); throughout history, centrists have almost always been those politicians who, for whatever variety of reasons, realize that the best way to win elections and/or effectively govern the country is to compromise their more extreme beliefs in the hopes that a more moderate package will get wider political and public support. Yet what makes Obama so different from his centrist predecessors is that he seems to be staking out a centrist course when it works AGAINST, rather than toward, his ability to govern and his political career. At a time when the most effective way to govern and the best way to help his political career clearly rests in creating as much liberal change as possible using his vast reservoirs of political capital (derived from high approval ratings, large majorities in both houses of congress, a strong mandate to lead due to the unpopularity of his predecessor and his own highly charged presidential campaign), Obama seems adamant in throwing it all away in the name of the very centrism that most politicians only use as a last resort (such as the last two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). The reason for this is that, unlike most centrists (both now and throughout history), Obama is not motivated by pragmatism. Indeed, quite to the contrary, Barack Obama may very well be the first president in nearly two hundred years to be a centrist for almost purely idealistic reasons.
To better understand what I mean by this, one must first look at Obama's past (reading his memoir Dreams From My Father is very helpful in this regard). Here is a man who has spent his entire life, from childhood to the present, belonging to two different races - white and black - in a society that in countless ways forces its members to define themselves by the color of their skin. Throughout his life Obama struggled to find a way to reconcile these two warring aspects of his identity within his own soul, and create a meaningful personal identity as a result of it. This internal civil war was what ultimately drove him into law school, a career as a community organizer, the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, and finally politics. There is every reason to believe that that struggle still exists within his soul today, and from there one can easily see how it is, and always has been, the defining feature of his political character (especially since it is what led him into politics in the first place). The ancient Roman historian Tacitus, when writing about the emperors who united and then ruled the modern Western world, observed that every political leader - no matter how complex - is ultimatley driven by a "master passion", a single driving impulse that for better or worse underlies everything they say and do when they are put in positions of power (from there he speculated that Nero's master passion was cruelty). Barack Obama's master passion appears to be one very rarely seen in the modern world - a burning desire, an agonizing need, to bring people together, to get them to see past their petty squabbles and fears and to celebrate rather than deplore their respective differences, and in so doing to create a solidarity of purpose and unity of identity between all peoples and ideological factions, both in America and throughout the world (and in some small way, by doing this, within himself).
The signs of this were obvious from the very beginning. In all of Obama's campaign speeches, he spoke of the need for "change", but it is noteworthy that he never did so with the rhetorical trappings that suggest a progressive intepretation of the term: Talk of economic inequalities, social injustice, and a need to fight for the rights of the oppressed always existed as the ornamentation placed upon a message of bringing people together, rather than being the focus in their own right. Whenever he could he refrained from focusing on themes like "reform", and at no point did he attempt to articulate a new version of the liberal philosophy as applied to the specific circumstances in which he sought the presidency. Instead it was his wont to preach the need to build bridges across racial, ideological, socio-economic, and religious barriers in order to solve our country's problems as one America. There is hardly anything new about articulating such sentiments; indeed, preaching about transcending that which divides us is as old and well-worn a political cliche as pledging to lower taxes and sweep out corruption. It is hard to find any politician in one of the two major parties who doesn't give utterance to that idea on a regular basis. The difference between Obama and his predecessors is that, while they merely recited those lines as platitudinous formalities before dispensing with them just as quickly, Obama embraces them with the fervor of a true believer. After decades of hearing presidential aspirants proclaim themselves would-be uniters when it was very clear they harbored no such intention (most notably Richard Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000), Americans are understandably cynical toward those who claim that they care more about bringing people together than fulfilling their ideological agenda. Politicians are insincere all the time, and this claim has been viewed by many as the most insincere one of them all. Now left-wingers and right-wingers alike are stunned to discover that their new president, Barack Obama, might be the first politician in nearly two centuries who didn't just speak those words, but actually meant them.
It is precisely this fact that makes Obama's actions so mystifying to intelligent observers on both sides. We live in an era in which our political culture is defined passionate and irreconcilable ideological differences, spanning from the purely governmental (domestic, economic, and foreign policy) and trespassing into the cultural, religious, and social. So deeply entrenched is this prevailing mindset that Americans instinctively assume their politicians will make decisions on the basis of how they square with the ideology of the political team with which they have aligned themselves (or when a politician sells out, they will at least expect for him to make some bullshit excuse that reconciles the betrayal with a greater ideological goal). In this climate, Obama's point-of-view seems not only exotic, but frightening. Yet once you understand that the desire to bring people together lies at the very heart of Obama's political philosophy and personal character, every other action of his presidency quickly makes a great deal more sense. Of course he chose centrists that he believed Republicans as well as Democrats would support in his cabinet; of course he chose Jews to serve as two of his three top aides, a Latina as his first Supreme Court appointment, and his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as his Secretary of State; of course he has refrained from pursuing legal action against former Bush administration officials, despite mountains of evidence of ethically questionable behavior; of course he believes that trying to find common ground between Arabs and Israelis (by variously scolding and reaching out to both sides) will eventually create peace in that embattled region; of course he believed that he could heal the wounds of racial tension by bringing a persecuted black college professor and the white cop who arrested him into the White House to share a beer; and of course his first instinct, when confronted with the controversial arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates by a white cop, was to equally criticize both sides (which he did in his controversial "stupidly" press conference) and then invite them to the White House for a beer; and of course he has approached all of his major congressional initiatives with the almost obsessive desire to achieve bi-partisan support, even when doing so has entailed watering down his legislative goals with unnecessary concessions (such as he has done with the stimulus package and health care reform) as it remains abundantly career that Republicans are deadset to work against him no matter what he does. While it would be unfair to claim that Obama lacks strong ideological convictions, it is clear that his main goal as president is to unite a divided land - white, black, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, rich, middle-class, poor, liberal, conservative, and moderate - behind a set of objectives on which they can all agree. The ideologue's basic approach to solving a nation's problems is to connect a given issue to the core political philosophy entailed in his or her ideology, draw from that connection a policy proposal, and then through effective salesmanship have enough people unite behind that policy so that it will not only be implemented but solidify that ideology's status as the paramount political philosophy of its time. Obama's approach, however - the centrist's approach - is to focus first and foremost on unify as many people as possible in order to solve a given problem, with the principle being that regardless of what policies they unite behind, the very fact that there will be solidarity among so many different groups will in its own right be enough to lay the foundations for positive change. In short, most American political leaders start with ideas and then build a coalition; Obama wants to start with the coalition, and leave the creation of ideas until later.
For obvious reasons, his approach is unintentionally serving conservatives much better than liberals. For one thing, there is no risk of Obama's centrist concessions ever winning conservatives over to his theme of national unity. In order for Republicans and right-wingers to mount an effective opposition campaign against President Obama, all that is required is that they rally their base against him, which in their case is as easy as pulling out the same bugaboos about liberals and blacks that have long boiled the blood and stimulated the spleens of the American right-wing - because he's a liberal, Obama is suddenly anti-religion, anti-America (perhaps not even born here), anti-old fashioned values, and a radical socialist/communist who will destroy the American way of life. As a black man, he becomes a secret Muslim, a non-native citizen, a malcontent with a deep hatred of whites, and a man whose every accomplishment was bestowed upon him through affirmative action and white man's guilt (but never, ever due to his own merit). As right-wingers have found since the days of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater none of those charges actually need go through the inconvenient process of being true - their mere existence as charges is enough to persuade those who, in their mindless hatred of liberals and blacks (to say nothing of Hispanics, Jews, intellectuals, and other figures with whom Obama has surrounded himself) are eager to believe them. No matter what Obama did, he was destined to have the same caricatures with which conservatives have always branded liberals (or those they wish to characterize as liberals) affixed to him for the simple reason that he was a black Democratic president named Barack Obama. Who he was, what he believed, and how he behaved as president had been deemed meaningless before he was even sworn in.
Yet because President Obama, in his centrist idealism, remains utterly oblivious to this fact, he now inadvertantly helps the cause of the radical right: they can punch away at Obama as much as they want, since they the only response they will receive from his hand is a palm outstretched in friendship; they can continue chipping away as much as they can at his agenda, knowing full well that he will make concessions to them even when he is in a position to dictate his will, for the simple reason that it matters deeply to him that as many people as possible feel like full participants. Most importantly, even while taking advantage of him in this way, they can still derive the full benefits of vilifying him as if he really were a true dyed-in-the-wool left-wing radical. Heck, just for the fun of it, they'll even convince themselves that it's true.
Liberals, on the other hand, get much less from this arrangement, although they don't get as little as they are prone to proclaim (usually in fits of hyperbole). It must be admitted that in Obama we have an honest, intelligent, sincere, and fundamentally well-intentioned man as our president (four qualities that are the precise opposite of those held by his immediate predecessor). What's more, even with the excessive concessions that he has made to the right in the name of bringing people together (concessions that have at best won a handful of Republican votes, and at worst done nothing but embarass him), Obama has managed to rack up an impressive list of accomplishments, including not only a stimulus package that has prevented a second Great Depression and put us on the road to eventual full economic recovery, but also (as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel accurately observed) "winning approval for three hundred and fifty billion dollars in additional funding for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, expanding S-CHIP, signing an executive order to shutter the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and a memorandum to increase the fuel efficiency of cars", all of which were supported by at least some Republicans.
At the same time, Obama is not becoming the president liberals most ardently desired: one who would take the ideological paradigm from which American politics has been dictated for almost three decades - i.e, the conservatism of the Reagan Era - and through the bold and inspiring implementation of effective policies create a new ideo-political paradigm - i.e, that of a liberal Obama Era. When the left rallied behind Obama's campaign slogan of "Yes We Can", they assumed that he was placing the main emphasis on the word "Can" - and, it was further assumed that the "can" included ending the war in Iraq, guaranteeing affordable high-quality health care for all Americans, creating jobs and raising wages for America's poor and middle-class workers, fixing global warming, forthrightly addressing racial inequalities and injustices, and a plethora of other liberal goals. While liberals weren't wrong in believing that these were indeed the goals for which Obama strived when he said "can", they failed to realize that he placed a far higher premium on "we" - on getting people together in order to make change, with less emphasis on what exactly that change would be. Liberals and conservatives took it as a given that Obama's election would usher in the rise of a second Franklin Roosevelt - another bold, assertive liberal president who would bring the country into a new ideological era defined by left-wing political principles. Yet when Democrats prepared to rally behind his banner, and Republicans began stocking up behind the barricades, both were shocked to find that what they got was a president whose didn't want to participate in partisan politics, but instead hoped to bring the nation into an era of economic prosperity and international peace by getting everyone to work together toward the goals that were ultimately in all of their mutual interest. Both sides have reacted to this revelation predictably; liberals see this for what it is and are dismayed, while conservatives see it for what it is and, for their own selfish purposes, pretend that it's something else entirely.
There is only one president in American history who has successfully done what Obama is attempting (ignoring George Washington, who doesn't count since his presidency occurred in an era before political parties and who it was always taken for granted would serve two terms without opposition). That man was James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States, whose surprising ability to unify all ideological and demographic factions behind his leadership ultimately led to the dissolution of the primary opposition party of the time (the Federalist Party) and the dubbing of his administration's tenure as "The Era of Good Feelings" (1817-1825). Because of his larger-than-life persona, knack for inspiring trust among people from all political vantage points, and ability to create policies that both political parties could enthusiastically unite behind (which in those days included the right-wing Federalists and left-wing Democratic-Republicans), James Monroe not only became the only president to win an election with absolutely unanimous support (save only George Washington, of course), but his leadership put the final nail in the coffin of the already-dying Federalist Party, eventually prompting them to disintegrate entirely. Yet since "The Era of Good Feelings" ended with the controversial presidential election of 1824 (which gave rise to the bi-partisan system we still have today), most American presidents have assumed that ideological divisiveness was just a fact of life that could be disingenuously denied with pretty words but ultimately accepted by virtually everyone as inviolable. Though Obama himself may not realize it, he is the first president since James Monroe to disagree with that assumption. His dream, whether he realizes it in these terms or not, is to usher in a new "Era of Good Feelings".
Will he succeed? The short answer is no. The longer answer is no, because he misunderstands the nature of what causes his opponents to hate him (it isn't because of what he does or who he is, but rather the abstraction that he will forever represent to them). That said, he may very well succeed in a sense quite different from the one he desires. Should his economic policies bring about a boom by mid-to-late 2011, Obama will be in a position to isolate the right-wing extremists who oppose him from the rest of the nation, and in so doing create the closest thing to an "Era of Good Feelings" style coalition that is possible in today's world - i.e, a political climate in which the opposition, though still present, is isolated and marginalized from the rest of the country (for more information on how that may happen, please see my article, The Making of the President: 2012). Until then, though, Americans will have to live with an irony none of us had ever conceived was even possible: In a time when political leaders move to the center in order to bring everyone together and become popular, and gravitate toward extremes when they bravely accept unpopularity in the name of idealism, Obama is the first to refuse moving to an extreme even though it would make him popular, and instead determine to bring everyone together at the center even in the name of unpopularity.
The answer is as obvious as it is simple: Obama is being a centrist. In a time when the ideological poles are drifting farther and farther apart, Barack Obama is a man who insists on finding the halfway point between left and right and planting his flag as squarely as possible smack dab between the two of them. Like most centrists, he isn't doing this because his personal opinions actually are centrist in nature (very few people actually have a truly "centrist" outlook); throughout history, centrists have almost always been those politicians who, for whatever variety of reasons, realize that the best way to win elections and/or effectively govern the country is to compromise their more extreme beliefs in the hopes that a more moderate package will get wider political and public support. Yet what makes Obama so different from his centrist predecessors is that he seems to be staking out a centrist course when it works AGAINST, rather than toward, his ability to govern and his political career. At a time when the most effective way to govern and the best way to help his political career clearly rests in creating as much liberal change as possible using his vast reservoirs of political capital (derived from high approval ratings, large majorities in both houses of congress, a strong mandate to lead due to the unpopularity of his predecessor and his own highly charged presidential campaign), Obama seems adamant in throwing it all away in the name of the very centrism that most politicians only use as a last resort (such as the last two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). The reason for this is that, unlike most centrists (both now and throughout history), Obama is not motivated by pragmatism. Indeed, quite to the contrary, Barack Obama may very well be the first president in nearly two hundred years to be a centrist for almost purely idealistic reasons.
To better understand what I mean by this, one must first look at Obama's past (reading his memoir Dreams From My Father is very helpful in this regard). Here is a man who has spent his entire life, from childhood to the present, belonging to two different races - white and black - in a society that in countless ways forces its members to define themselves by the color of their skin. Throughout his life Obama struggled to find a way to reconcile these two warring aspects of his identity within his own soul, and create a meaningful personal identity as a result of it. This internal civil war was what ultimately drove him into law school, a career as a community organizer, the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, and finally politics. There is every reason to believe that that struggle still exists within his soul today, and from there one can easily see how it is, and always has been, the defining feature of his political character (especially since it is what led him into politics in the first place). The ancient Roman historian Tacitus, when writing about the emperors who united and then ruled the modern Western world, observed that every political leader - no matter how complex - is ultimatley driven by a "master passion", a single driving impulse that for better or worse underlies everything they say and do when they are put in positions of power (from there he speculated that Nero's master passion was cruelty). Barack Obama's master passion appears to be one very rarely seen in the modern world - a burning desire, an agonizing need, to bring people together, to get them to see past their petty squabbles and fears and to celebrate rather than deplore their respective differences, and in so doing to create a solidarity of purpose and unity of identity between all peoples and ideological factions, both in America and throughout the world (and in some small way, by doing this, within himself).
The signs of this were obvious from the very beginning. In all of Obama's campaign speeches, he spoke of the need for "change", but it is noteworthy that he never did so with the rhetorical trappings that suggest a progressive intepretation of the term: Talk of economic inequalities, social injustice, and a need to fight for the rights of the oppressed always existed as the ornamentation placed upon a message of bringing people together, rather than being the focus in their own right. Whenever he could he refrained from focusing on themes like "reform", and at no point did he attempt to articulate a new version of the liberal philosophy as applied to the specific circumstances in which he sought the presidency. Instead it was his wont to preach the need to build bridges across racial, ideological, socio-economic, and religious barriers in order to solve our country's problems as one America. There is hardly anything new about articulating such sentiments; indeed, preaching about transcending that which divides us is as old and well-worn a political cliche as pledging to lower taxes and sweep out corruption. It is hard to find any politician in one of the two major parties who doesn't give utterance to that idea on a regular basis. The difference between Obama and his predecessors is that, while they merely recited those lines as platitudinous formalities before dispensing with them just as quickly, Obama embraces them with the fervor of a true believer. After decades of hearing presidential aspirants proclaim themselves would-be uniters when it was very clear they harbored no such intention (most notably Richard Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000), Americans are understandably cynical toward those who claim that they care more about bringing people together than fulfilling their ideological agenda. Politicians are insincere all the time, and this claim has been viewed by many as the most insincere one of them all. Now left-wingers and right-wingers alike are stunned to discover that their new president, Barack Obama, might be the first politician in nearly two centuries who didn't just speak those words, but actually meant them.
It is precisely this fact that makes Obama's actions so mystifying to intelligent observers on both sides. We live in an era in which our political culture is defined passionate and irreconcilable ideological differences, spanning from the purely governmental (domestic, economic, and foreign policy) and trespassing into the cultural, religious, and social. So deeply entrenched is this prevailing mindset that Americans instinctively assume their politicians will make decisions on the basis of how they square with the ideology of the political team with which they have aligned themselves (or when a politician sells out, they will at least expect for him to make some bullshit excuse that reconciles the betrayal with a greater ideological goal). In this climate, Obama's point-of-view seems not only exotic, but frightening. Yet once you understand that the desire to bring people together lies at the very heart of Obama's political philosophy and personal character, every other action of his presidency quickly makes a great deal more sense. Of course he chose centrists that he believed Republicans as well as Democrats would support in his cabinet; of course he chose Jews to serve as two of his three top aides, a Latina as his first Supreme Court appointment, and his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as his Secretary of State; of course he has refrained from pursuing legal action against former Bush administration officials, despite mountains of evidence of ethically questionable behavior; of course he believes that trying to find common ground between Arabs and Israelis (by variously scolding and reaching out to both sides) will eventually create peace in that embattled region; of course he believed that he could heal the wounds of racial tension by bringing a persecuted black college professor and the white cop who arrested him into the White House to share a beer; and of course his first instinct, when confronted with the controversial arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates by a white cop, was to equally criticize both sides (which he did in his controversial "stupidly" press conference) and then invite them to the White House for a beer; and of course he has approached all of his major congressional initiatives with the almost obsessive desire to achieve bi-partisan support, even when doing so has entailed watering down his legislative goals with unnecessary concessions (such as he has done with the stimulus package and health care reform) as it remains abundantly career that Republicans are deadset to work against him no matter what he does. While it would be unfair to claim that Obama lacks strong ideological convictions, it is clear that his main goal as president is to unite a divided land - white, black, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, rich, middle-class, poor, liberal, conservative, and moderate - behind a set of objectives on which they can all agree. The ideologue's basic approach to solving a nation's problems is to connect a given issue to the core political philosophy entailed in his or her ideology, draw from that connection a policy proposal, and then through effective salesmanship have enough people unite behind that policy so that it will not only be implemented but solidify that ideology's status as the paramount political philosophy of its time. Obama's approach, however - the centrist's approach - is to focus first and foremost on unify as many people as possible in order to solve a given problem, with the principle being that regardless of what policies they unite behind, the very fact that there will be solidarity among so many different groups will in its own right be enough to lay the foundations for positive change. In short, most American political leaders start with ideas and then build a coalition; Obama wants to start with the coalition, and leave the creation of ideas until later.
For obvious reasons, his approach is unintentionally serving conservatives much better than liberals. For one thing, there is no risk of Obama's centrist concessions ever winning conservatives over to his theme of national unity. In order for Republicans and right-wingers to mount an effective opposition campaign against President Obama, all that is required is that they rally their base against him, which in their case is as easy as pulling out the same bugaboos about liberals and blacks that have long boiled the blood and stimulated the spleens of the American right-wing - because he's a liberal, Obama is suddenly anti-religion, anti-America (perhaps not even born here), anti-old fashioned values, and a radical socialist/communist who will destroy the American way of life. As a black man, he becomes a secret Muslim, a non-native citizen, a malcontent with a deep hatred of whites, and a man whose every accomplishment was bestowed upon him through affirmative action and white man's guilt (but never, ever due to his own merit). As right-wingers have found since the days of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater none of those charges actually need go through the inconvenient process of being true - their mere existence as charges is enough to persuade those who, in their mindless hatred of liberals and blacks (to say nothing of Hispanics, Jews, intellectuals, and other figures with whom Obama has surrounded himself) are eager to believe them. No matter what Obama did, he was destined to have the same caricatures with which conservatives have always branded liberals (or those they wish to characterize as liberals) affixed to him for the simple reason that he was a black Democratic president named Barack Obama. Who he was, what he believed, and how he behaved as president had been deemed meaningless before he was even sworn in.
Yet because President Obama, in his centrist idealism, remains utterly oblivious to this fact, he now inadvertantly helps the cause of the radical right: they can punch away at Obama as much as they want, since they the only response they will receive from his hand is a palm outstretched in friendship; they can continue chipping away as much as they can at his agenda, knowing full well that he will make concessions to them even when he is in a position to dictate his will, for the simple reason that it matters deeply to him that as many people as possible feel like full participants. Most importantly, even while taking advantage of him in this way, they can still derive the full benefits of vilifying him as if he really were a true dyed-in-the-wool left-wing radical. Heck, just for the fun of it, they'll even convince themselves that it's true.
Liberals, on the other hand, get much less from this arrangement, although they don't get as little as they are prone to proclaim (usually in fits of hyperbole). It must be admitted that in Obama we have an honest, intelligent, sincere, and fundamentally well-intentioned man as our president (four qualities that are the precise opposite of those held by his immediate predecessor). What's more, even with the excessive concessions that he has made to the right in the name of bringing people together (concessions that have at best won a handful of Republican votes, and at worst done nothing but embarass him), Obama has managed to rack up an impressive list of accomplishments, including not only a stimulus package that has prevented a second Great Depression and put us on the road to eventual full economic recovery, but also (as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel accurately observed) "winning approval for three hundred and fifty billion dollars in additional funding for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, expanding S-CHIP, signing an executive order to shutter the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and a memorandum to increase the fuel efficiency of cars", all of which were supported by at least some Republicans.
At the same time, Obama is not becoming the president liberals most ardently desired: one who would take the ideological paradigm from which American politics has been dictated for almost three decades - i.e, the conservatism of the Reagan Era - and through the bold and inspiring implementation of effective policies create a new ideo-political paradigm - i.e, that of a liberal Obama Era. When the left rallied behind Obama's campaign slogan of "Yes We Can", they assumed that he was placing the main emphasis on the word "Can" - and, it was further assumed that the "can" included ending the war in Iraq, guaranteeing affordable high-quality health care for all Americans, creating jobs and raising wages for America's poor and middle-class workers, fixing global warming, forthrightly addressing racial inequalities and injustices, and a plethora of other liberal goals. While liberals weren't wrong in believing that these were indeed the goals for which Obama strived when he said "can", they failed to realize that he placed a far higher premium on "we" - on getting people together in order to make change, with less emphasis on what exactly that change would be. Liberals and conservatives took it as a given that Obama's election would usher in the rise of a second Franklin Roosevelt - another bold, assertive liberal president who would bring the country into a new ideological era defined by left-wing political principles. Yet when Democrats prepared to rally behind his banner, and Republicans began stocking up behind the barricades, both were shocked to find that what they got was a president whose didn't want to participate in partisan politics, but instead hoped to bring the nation into an era of economic prosperity and international peace by getting everyone to work together toward the goals that were ultimately in all of their mutual interest. Both sides have reacted to this revelation predictably; liberals see this for what it is and are dismayed, while conservatives see it for what it is and, for their own selfish purposes, pretend that it's something else entirely.
There is only one president in American history who has successfully done what Obama is attempting (ignoring George Washington, who doesn't count since his presidency occurred in an era before political parties and who it was always taken for granted would serve two terms without opposition). That man was James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States, whose surprising ability to unify all ideological and demographic factions behind his leadership ultimately led to the dissolution of the primary opposition party of the time (the Federalist Party) and the dubbing of his administration's tenure as "The Era of Good Feelings" (1817-1825). Because of his larger-than-life persona, knack for inspiring trust among people from all political vantage points, and ability to create policies that both political parties could enthusiastically unite behind (which in those days included the right-wing Federalists and left-wing Democratic-Republicans), James Monroe not only became the only president to win an election with absolutely unanimous support (save only George Washington, of course), but his leadership put the final nail in the coffin of the already-dying Federalist Party, eventually prompting them to disintegrate entirely. Yet since "The Era of Good Feelings" ended with the controversial presidential election of 1824 (which gave rise to the bi-partisan system we still have today), most American presidents have assumed that ideological divisiveness was just a fact of life that could be disingenuously denied with pretty words but ultimately accepted by virtually everyone as inviolable. Though Obama himself may not realize it, he is the first president since James Monroe to disagree with that assumption. His dream, whether he realizes it in these terms or not, is to usher in a new "Era of Good Feelings".
Will he succeed? The short answer is no. The longer answer is no, because he misunderstands the nature of what causes his opponents to hate him (it isn't because of what he does or who he is, but rather the abstraction that he will forever represent to them). That said, he may very well succeed in a sense quite different from the one he desires. Should his economic policies bring about a boom by mid-to-late 2011, Obama will be in a position to isolate the right-wing extremists who oppose him from the rest of the nation, and in so doing create the closest thing to an "Era of Good Feelings" style coalition that is possible in today's world - i.e, a political climate in which the opposition, though still present, is isolated and marginalized from the rest of the country (for more information on how that may happen, please see my article, The Making of the President: 2012). Until then, though, Americans will have to live with an irony none of us had ever conceived was even possible: In a time when political leaders move to the center in order to bring everyone together and become popular, and gravitate toward extremes when they bravely accept unpopularity in the name of idealism, Obama is the first to refuse moving to an extreme even though it would make him popular, and instead determine to bring everyone together at the center even in the name of unpopularity.
My Favorite Quote
If I were asked to guess who the source of my favorite quote would be, I can assure you that my first instinct would not be to say Lee Atwater. As the founding father of the brutal "smashmouth" campaign techniques used by the Republican Party since the 1980s, Atwater epitomized everything that was wrong with the yuppie culture of the Reagan Era - he was proudly and aggressively materialistic, constantly craving to increase his personal power and fame (and always for their own right, rather than as a means to some greater end), sadistic in his competitiveness, self-serving in his worldview (hence his attraction to conservatism), and eager to exploit racial groups, ideological causes, and even human beings in order to advance his goals. One would hope that in a decent society, a man like Lee Atwater would be condemned for the savvy monster he was. Instead he rose to the higher corridors of power, culminating in his orchestration of George H. W. Bush's victory over Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.
One year after the crowning achievement of his life's work (accomplished at the mere age of 38), Atwater was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. The story of his struggle to stay alive can best be found elsewhere; suffice to say that, as it became abundantly clear that he had finally met an opponent who could not be outmaneuvered with spin doctoring, Lee Atwater began to take stock of his life. Not surprisingly, he found it wanting. Quite surprisingly, he was able to brilliantly diagnose just what it was that had caused not only his own moral failings, but the spiritual decay of American civilization as he saw it.
Posted below, in its entirety, is my all-time favorite quote, from the dying lips of the man who denied America a potentially great president (Michael Dukakis) and gave us instead the Bush Dynasty:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
One year after the crowning achievement of his life's work (accomplished at the mere age of 38), Atwater was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. The story of his struggle to stay alive can best be found elsewhere; suffice to say that, as it became abundantly clear that he had finally met an opponent who could not be outmaneuvered with spin doctoring, Lee Atwater began to take stock of his life. Not surprisingly, he found it wanting. Quite surprisingly, he was able to brilliantly diagnose just what it was that had caused not only his own moral failings, but the spiritual decay of American civilization as he saw it.
Posted below, in its entirety, is my all-time favorite quote, from the dying lips of the man who denied America a potentially great president (Michael Dukakis) and gave us instead the Bush Dynasty:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
How To Fix The Economy
I am always grateful for an economist who, instead of preaching doom and gloom prognostications about our country's future, actually attempts to offer some constructive ideas about how to solve these problems. Such was the case with James Cohan, a Boston professor who intelligently, articulately, and concisely enunciates an excellent plan for getting us out of this recession - combined with a comprehensive yet brief explanation of the economic principles underlying that plan - in language that even a layman can understand.
What will it take to put 14.9 million jobless back to work?
Peter Cohan
When you consider that 70 percent of U.S. economic growth stems from consumers, it becomes obvious that there is no hope of a true economic recovery until companies create more jobs than they destroy. That's because people without jobs can't borrow money to make up for their lack of income and they can't spend more of what they don't have. And until those worker are able to increase their spending, economic growth stagnates.
That's why news that 14.9 million jobless are seeking work is the most important piece of economic data. The biggest unanswered question is who to put those people back to work. Is government the answer? Or will free markets do the trick? With the right boost from government, natural economic forces will bring back the jobs.
That's because I think there are two economic forces that need to be unleashed. The first is Say's Law, the idea that supply creates its own demand. And in this case, what I am talking about is the supply of capital on a corporate balance sheet that demands to be spent -- preferably on strategies that enable the company to take market share from hobbled competitors.
And the second law, is what I call the Two Fears. The first, is the fear of losing your money and the second is fear of falling behind your peers. I think most individuals and businesses are currently possessed of the first fear so they are hoarding their resources. According to the Two Fears, economic growh ensues when the first fear flips into the second one.
To get the economy rolling, we need to connect Say's Law with the Two Fears. To do that, the economy needs cash-rich market leaders who find themselves gripped by Say's Law -- which spurs them to spend that cash so they can leave their competitors in the dust. This could catalyze the shift from the first fear to the second one. And that would make all the difference.
How so? If other businesses in the leaders' industries start losing market share to those more aggressive competitors, then -- if they have or can get the resources -- they'll feel an irrepressible urge to keep up. This will cause them to spend their cash on market expansion. And as more and more competitors jump on that expansion bandwagon, they'll hire people to provide the products and services needed to grab the market share they fear will slip from their grasp.
This just leaves one enormous problem: How to get enough cash on the balance sheets of market leaders to make Say's Law kick in. As I posted, the very high 6.6 percent growth in productivity in the second quarter of 2009 is likely to boost corporate profits. What would also help is for companies to take advantage of a rising stock market to sell more shares to the public to pay down their debt.
And government could also help stimulate growth -- as it did back in the 1970s when the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) built a ground-shifting technology, what we now know as the Internet. To encourage economic growth, such a technology must be one that is irresistible for business because it leads to quantum leaps in productivity.
All this may sound simple, but it will be difficult to pull off. And until then the economy will remain stuck in neutral which is bad for all those 14.9 million people looking for jobs.
There are copious examples from recent history to support Cohan's thesis. One need only look at the unparalleled expansion that began after the creation of the Intercontinental Railroad in the late-19th Century; the prosperity that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s due to the television/automobile boom in the 1950s and 1960s; and, most recently, the economic golden age of the 1990s, brought about by the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 that led to the creation of the Mosaic Web Browser (the springboard for the commercial internet) and was created and introduced by (as well as ultimately passed due to the efforts of) a United States Senator from Tennessee named Al Gore.
What will it take to put 14.9 million jobless back to work?
Peter Cohan
When you consider that 70 percent of U.S. economic growth stems from consumers, it becomes obvious that there is no hope of a true economic recovery until companies create more jobs than they destroy. That's because people without jobs can't borrow money to make up for their lack of income and they can't spend more of what they don't have. And until those worker are able to increase their spending, economic growth stagnates.
That's why news that 14.9 million jobless are seeking work is the most important piece of economic data. The biggest unanswered question is who to put those people back to work. Is government the answer? Or will free markets do the trick? With the right boost from government, natural economic forces will bring back the jobs.
That's because I think there are two economic forces that need to be unleashed. The first is Say's Law, the idea that supply creates its own demand. And in this case, what I am talking about is the supply of capital on a corporate balance sheet that demands to be spent -- preferably on strategies that enable the company to take market share from hobbled competitors.
And the second law, is what I call the Two Fears. The first, is the fear of losing your money and the second is fear of falling behind your peers. I think most individuals and businesses are currently possessed of the first fear so they are hoarding their resources. According to the Two Fears, economic growh ensues when the first fear flips into the second one.
To get the economy rolling, we need to connect Say's Law with the Two Fears. To do that, the economy needs cash-rich market leaders who find themselves gripped by Say's Law -- which spurs them to spend that cash so they can leave their competitors in the dust. This could catalyze the shift from the first fear to the second one. And that would make all the difference.
How so? If other businesses in the leaders' industries start losing market share to those more aggressive competitors, then -- if they have or can get the resources -- they'll feel an irrepressible urge to keep up. This will cause them to spend their cash on market expansion. And as more and more competitors jump on that expansion bandwagon, they'll hire people to provide the products and services needed to grab the market share they fear will slip from their grasp.
This just leaves one enormous problem: How to get enough cash on the balance sheets of market leaders to make Say's Law kick in. As I posted, the very high 6.6 percent growth in productivity in the second quarter of 2009 is likely to boost corporate profits. What would also help is for companies to take advantage of a rising stock market to sell more shares to the public to pay down their debt.
And government could also help stimulate growth -- as it did back in the 1970s when the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) built a ground-shifting technology, what we now know as the Internet. To encourage economic growth, such a technology must be one that is irresistible for business because it leads to quantum leaps in productivity.
All this may sound simple, but it will be difficult to pull off. And until then the economy will remain stuck in neutral which is bad for all those 14.9 million people looking for jobs.
There are copious examples from recent history to support Cohan's thesis. One need only look at the unparalleled expansion that began after the creation of the Intercontinental Railroad in the late-19th Century; the prosperity that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s due to the television/automobile boom in the 1950s and 1960s; and, most recently, the economic golden age of the 1990s, brought about by the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 that led to the creation of the Mosaic Web Browser (the springboard for the commercial internet) and was created and introduced by (as well as ultimately passed due to the efforts of) a United States Senator from Tennessee named Al Gore.
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