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5/16/2008
Personal Asides: McCain’s Columbus, Ohio Speech Historic, Brilliant, Incisive: “Question Time” ala Parliament Outstanding. What More Adjectives Can I Use?...Another “Great Book” that Screwed Us Up.  | Rene Descartes [1596-1650]
As the so-called :father of modern philosophy," what
a mess of uncertainty he bequeathed to us! |
McCain at Columbus, Ohio.
For this jaded politician-watcher who has been in the peanut galleries for more than 50 years-- as journalist, speech-writer, state official, federal official, foreign service officer, corporate executive, university lecturer, radio host and now journalist again--John McCain’s Columbus, Ohio speech yesterday goes down as easily the finest in recent times, equaling the greatest Republican campaign speech made in the 20th century, Ronald Reagan’s 1976 address to the Republican convention in Kansas City that nominated Gerald Ford.
At Kansas City Reagan, though defeated, set the parameters for his 1980 speech by articulating a matchless vision that Ford and no other Republican could have matched, sending delegates home with buyers’ remorse, feeling they had just nominated the wrong man. In his speech, Reagan told the story that became almost immortally tied to him. He was asked to write a note for a time capsule that would be opened in a hundred years. He pondered what to write. Then he realized that it didn’t matter, because in a hundred years Americans would know whether this country had faced up to the nuclear threat or had lost the battle of nerve. The crowd was powerfully silent when he spoke (I was there).
Paradoxically, two concession speeches, Reagan’s in 1976 and John Kennedy’s in 1956 at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre in losing the vice presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver (again, I was there) marked both men as sure fire players for future presidential runs. Unquestionably the far better speech was Reagan’s in that he set forth his vision of an America that he largely translated in his two terms.
But even Reagan’s speech was thin gruel next to McCain’s who as nominee did the stunningly unusual: he set forth a vision that comes near to ending the age issue that has dogged him and also announced a magnificent departure from presidencies of the past…a departure that has surprisingly been downplayed by the largely pro-Obama mainstream media. Moreover he presented himself as a kind of secular version of John XXIII who came to the papacy as an expected caretaker but who revolutionized the Church. (I don’t want to push that analogy too far as John died before Vatican II was concluded, to be followed by Paul VI who was a kind of ineffectual Hamlet with the great exception of “Humanae Vitae” which must have been engendered by the Holy Spirit. But take the analogy only so far-that McCain would be another Good Pope John whose wondrous frankness and humor brushed aside the cobwebs of the papacy that had shrouded it for 1,200 years).
First, McCain’s speech constituted a brilliant effort to downgrade the age issue, which is the most effective handling of that issue I have seen (far more so than Reagan did in his reelection where he was reduced to making a joke about 56-year-old Walter Mondale’s callow youth) which saved the day for RR’s reelection. As the world knows, McCain would be 72 on his inauguration, the oldest of presidents. His enumerating the goals to be undertaken in his first term shows that at this point of his life anyhow, he has the intellectual acumen and moral energy to re-start the creative engines of his party which have been stalled since 2005, when Denny Hastert and others lounged around as pork-chop incumbents and characterized the GOP as a big-spending, anti-thrift party.
Using the year 2013 when his first term will have been completed (and he will be 76), McCain said (a) American servicemen and women will be welcomed home after winning the war in Iraq, preventing civil war there, the militias disbanded, the Iraqi security force competent, the Taliban in Afghanistan reduced (but not eliminated), Osama bin Laden either dead or captured and no further terrorist attack against the U.S. The size of the military will have been “significantly increased,” the U. S. and NATO will have convinced Sudan to accept a multinational peacekeeping force. The U.S. will have returned to robust economic growth, the AMT phased out, the child exemption doubled, new free trade agreements ratified, health care costs reduced, the U.S. on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil.
Second, he played his trump card with masterly effectiveness-tying his vision to his ability to work across the aisle with Democrats since he is a master of legislative triangulation in achieving bipartisan progress, something Obama has talked about but has not thus far participated in.
“Question Time” Between President and Congress.
Third-and this strikes me, the amateur historian as powerfully significant-his pledge to further democratize and make more transparent the presidency with these words: “I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both Houses to take questions and address criticism, much the same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.”
By all odds, this is the most important innovation since Woodrow Wilson made the decision to revive the tradition, begun by George Washington, to personally appear before a joint session of Congress for the State of the Union. It is a brilliant innovation that will change the nature of the presidency enormously and for the better. It shows an amplification of the communication powers of the presidency. William Howard Taft was the first president to initiate questions from the press which were submitted in writing and to which he responded in writing. Franklin Roosevelt met with the press privately in conferences for off-the-record briefing purposes only where his words were not directly reported. Dwight Eisenhower enlarged this to meet with the media including television on a filmed delay basis which presented the president for the first time explaining his views to the media. John Kennedy enlarged this to hold live televised news conferences for the first time.
Now in the most significant enlargement of democracy since the presidency began, McCain would meet with a joint session of Congress and answer questions in parliamentary form-a magnificent and luminous sharing of his views with Americans. Frankly, it is something few previous presidents would have found the guts to try. Reagan was a master of communications but no one ever insinuated that he had an encyclopedic mind on the intricacies of government that Question Time would necessitate. Franklin Roosevelt was a Machiavellian master of timing and strategy but stayed as far away from immediate performances like debates as was possible.
As a former senator, Harry Truman might be expected to do well but he was never a warrior with the spoken word in debate, either in the Senate where he served or afterward. He would have been advised to avoid such appearances. Dwight Eisenhower would argue that Question Time would be dangerous in that the president might accidentally divulge some hitherto secret military knowledge in heated Question Time response (yet British prime ministers have all faced that same test). John Kennedy’s media advisers would certainly have advised him to avoid it since the Congress of his time had people far better equipped on military matters than he, e.g. Richard Russell of Georgia and on economics the wizard Eugene Milliken of Colorado. And on the details of government and its waste, John Williams of Delaware or Bill Proxmire of Wisconsin. And that’s before we get to Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia.
Let us acknowledge that Lyndon Johnson, the shrewd master of the Senate, would acquit himself well-but Richard Nixon with his sanctimoniousness and shriveled ego resulting in a strong streak of paranoia would have ruined himself long before his ultimate ruination with Watergate. Strangely, Gerald Ford, not the most articulate, would probably have done better than most since he was inured to House debate. Jimmy Carter would have been wise to turn down the opportunity for he would have been a disaster. George H. W. Bush might have made a pretty good stab at it. Bill Clinton, the master of persuasion, would have done very well. George W. Bush would not have been at his best before the Congress, let’s face it.
If McCain is elected so that he can inaugurate this new tradition, the nature of presidential candidates will irredeemably change. Presidential candidates will be chosen with an eye to how they would perform under these trying circumstances-which would elevate the quality of men and women seeking the post.
The odds are heavily against a Republican presidential victory this year but Democrats will be hard-pressed to employ the age issue since McCain has well used his time while Obama and Hillary Clinton have been squabbling over seemingly nothing (as they agree on all the salient issues).
In summary, McCain has given the country a strong jolt of creativity which should generate the hope that he be elected to translate his vision to reality. Although I backed Mitt Romney before McCain, the circumstances have thrust McCain forward with such drama that he is indeed the best man. His powerful presentation in Columbus proves it yet again.
II: Descartes Meant Well but--.
The second so-called great book (or great idea) that screwed up the world…and in reading Benjamin Wiker I recall now distinctly Fr. Ernest Kilzer OSB’s views on this…is by Rene Descartes [1596-1650] entitled “Discourse on Method” [1637]. Descartes is called the Father of Modern Philosophy…and right: he is, but that’s not all good. Modern philosophy today is a disgrace. Descartes is the father of it and he meant well but he granted skepticism far too much in trying to work his way out of it. Indeed, he worsened the skepticism.
Suppose you started to think that everything you are and everything you see doesn’t exist but is in a dream. Think of that long enough and you may go mad.
So in order to think himself out of that dilemma, Descartes started off by doubting everything, including the great works of the past, because there are different points of view in them, hence who is to say what’s right? In fact who is to say there is reason? So when other men who had better things to do went to work, building houses and doing things constructive, Descartes kept thinking: what if nothing exists and I am in a dream world? How can I prove that I am not? How can I prove I exist?
He came to the phrase: I think, therefore I am-meaning because I am thinking this, there is reality. Hurrah? Not so, said Father Ernie and now Ben Wiker. Why? Wiker: Does it sound convincing? “If it does, congratulations! You’ve just walked into a trap that has ensnared the Western mind for four centuries. It is a trap from which there is no escap;e because Descartes has presented it as itself an escape-but it is an escape from a trap that doesn’t exist.”
“Skepticism is a problem in our minds. It is a deadly trap only if we retreat into our minds to escape it. That is, if we let our doubt turn into doubt about reality. The place to run to escape skepticism is not our own minds…but straight into a tree to remind ourselves that, whatever our fancy to the contrary, the real world outside our minds has been factually solid all along. The proper and natural treatment for those inclined to think themselves into a corner is not to go into a corner and think but to run into the fields to grasp and be grasped by reality.” Wilker goes (and Ernie used to go) on and on to screw Descartes around. We could say, “Well, Rene, isn’t it really the other way around? In order to think, I first have to exist and I go right on existing even when I am not thinking. Anyhow, didn’t the world get along just fine before I was ever around to think about anything? So we should say, `I am, therefore I can think’ rather than `I think, therefore I am.’”
He went from there to try to proof the existence of God. Notice I say “try.” And he tried to do it this way: I can fathom a perfect Being. Thus because I can fathom this, He must exist. Thus there is a God. Well, I can imagine a world without God as well. Does that mean there is no God?
Com’on, as Ernie used to say (this I remember): “I can fathom a better world than this is on Mars. Does that mean that because I can fathom it, it exists? Of course not!”. And then he would storm around the classroom snarling, “the nerve of that Descartes!” This for a 17-year-old to watch and listen to was revelatory. (All the while, down the hall a near-relativist was screwing up some other of my classmates with his airy, poetic but totally subjective views of God and purpose. Even then in the traditionalist abbey were the seeds of relativism beginning to sprout though no one recognized them as such then, in 1946-from Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB but that is another story).
What goofed up ideas did Descartes leave us? Three things says Wiker. First, subjectivism. It all depends on me. “As we declare that there is no wisdom in the past and that whatever seems certain to us now must be true.” Second, “the confusion of true wisdom about God with whatever one happens to think about God…the ultimate egotism, since in defining God by our ownthoughts, we define everything else accordingly.”
Third, the apprehension that “since God was caused by our thinking Him, then He must only be a thought and not a reality.”
Our lecture on Descartes in 1946 ended with Ernie slamming the book “Discourses” shut with a bang and saying, “there! I have disposed of that miserable intruder on Western thought!”
If you want more about Descartes get the book, “10 Books that Screwed Up the World” by Benjamin Wiker. Just off the press (Regnery).
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5/15/2008
Personal Aside: “The Prince” Chortles at Rulers Who Let Underlings Take the Heat for Pursuing Evil. And How Radical Was Martin Luther King?  | The Martin Luther King we honor today is
drawn from an earlier, more moderate version, not
the pro-reparations oracle he later became, so writes
Dr. Thomas Woods in his latest history. |
The Prince.
“Hence it is necessary to a prince if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to do good…” With these words Niccolo Machiavelli became, in the estimation of scholar Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D, author of “10 Books that Screwed Up the World,” the protagonist of evil who became celebrated in less than a century of his death by Shakespeare (in “Richard III”) as the “murdrous Machiavel” the epitome of the evil statesman.
I told you yesterday that Wiker must have been influenced by someone who starkly resembled my old, late lamented philosophy professor because this book repeats case-by-case the views of the old Benedictine whose philosophy I thought I had lost by my 17-year-old carelessness in tossing away my notes from the academic year 1946-47.
Machiavelli insisted the Prince should not be the heavy, however, should not be hated-in fact, he should encourage his aides to do the dirty work that has to be done. There is an inherent contradiction in his writing i.e. the greatest moral good is a virtuous and stable state. But this is counterbalanced by the injunction that any actions to protect the country, no matter how cruel, are always justified. “Despite recent attempts to portray Machiavelli as merely a sincere and harmless teacher of prudent statesmanship,” writes Wiker, “I shall take the old-fashioned approach and treat him as one of the most profound teachers of evil the world has ever known.”
Example: Chapter 18 which asks if a prince should keep faith, honor his promises, work with what we today call transparency, be honest? Machiavelli concedes that everyone understands it is “laudable…for a prince to keep faith and live with honesty” but the rule that keeping one’s word might be discarded and, in fact, the entire idea of being good is rather naïve. The Prince must not concentrate on being good but seeming to be good. The Prince must be a “great pretender and dissembler.”
One example of what Machiavelli meant was cited in the case of Cesare Borgia, a consummately evil man. He had been named a cardinal but resigned to pursue his political ambitions. In Chapter 7 Machiavelli describes a typical Borgia action. Borgia had a bad reputation, deservedly with his conquered subjects which motivated them to rebellion. One principality Borgia had taken was Romagna which was “quite full of robberies, quarrels aqnd every other kind of insolence.” Borgia wanted to subdue its crime because it is hard work to rule the unruly. But remembering that a Prince must be well thought-of, he sent in a henchman, Remirro de Orco, “a cruel and ready man, to whom he gave the fullest power.” Remirro was the heavy, inflicted discipline but became unpopular in the process. So after Remirro had done his savagery for his boss, Borgia ingratiated himself to the people and became their hero by instituting a ceremony in the piazza where everybody came to watch.
He had Remirro cut “in two pieces” which deeply impressed the people as they watched him hewn in half in the town square. Aha, Machiavelli thought that tactic was just ducky. With one stroke of the knife that cut Remirro in twain, Borgia elevated himself as the steward of goodness in the people’s eyes. “I would not know how to reproach him,” Machiavelli writes of Borgia’s career. “On the contrary, it seems to me he should be put forward as I have done, to be imitated by all those who have risen to empire through fortune.”
Probably the most skilled practitioner of Machiavelli in our time was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here is a guy who pledged to keep us out of war while running for a third term…and won largely because the voters felt he was skilled to keep us out of war…all the while he was manipulating us to war. Here was a guy who talked about civil liberties while pushing his attorney general, Francis Biddle, to punish unconstitutionally those who talked against him, content to try to get rid of Biddle for practice of unconstitutional means when Biddle followed FDR’s advice. This analogy is mine, not Fr. Ernest’s nor Wiker’s.
Nor is this book merely a treatise on tactics. Christianity, Machiavelli instructs us, causes us to train our energies on an imaginary kingdom in the sky rather than seeking to make the real work more livable. “Machiavelli thereby initiates the great conflict between modern secularism and Christianity that largely defines the next 500 years of Western history and in this respect, ‘The Prince’ shows its mark in all the rest of the books we will examine,” summarizes Wiker.
King: How Radical?
Martin Luther King has been cited by many as supporting only equality of opportunity and not affirmative action. Not so as Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. writes in”33 Questions About American History:” [Crown Forum: 2007]. Woods is a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D in history from Columbia.
As a contemporary eyewitness to King, I recall that his initial foray was quite modest-support of equal opportunity in hiring and service at lunch counters and public transportation. But he grew more radical later on in life and endorsed such ideas as reimbursement for centuries of slavery and segregation. Witness his last book.
King wrote this in “Why We Can’t Wait”: “No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries., Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriatioin of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.”
The King we honor today is the earlier version not the vociferous leader he became.
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5/14/2008
Personal Aside: Ten Ideas that Screwed Up the World.  | Machiavelli [1469-1527].
A harmless teacher of prudent statesmanship
or the wilest teacher of evil the West has known? |
What’s the Big Idea? Ernie’s Notes Reconstituted.
I’ve related some time back that when I went to college (at St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota) in 1946 I was seventeen…one of a handful of kids my age, the remainder of the freshman class being ex-GIs recently mustered out of service, including quite a few who saw action in either the South Pacific or the European theatre. We 17-year-olds were unable to match them, of course, and were intimidated by them. Some were well along in years (by our reckoning), in their 20s, looking for babes and booze of which there was none at our all-male, severely restricted school, also a Benedictine monastery, 1-1/2 miles from the nearest highway, surrounded by 1,400 acres of dense woodland plus two crystal-clear lakes and after you walk to the highway a full sixteen miles to the nearest town of Saint Cloud (population then: 22,000). Stearns county, Minnesota was the most Germanic county in the country and probably the most solidly Catholic as well, part of an ecclesiastical see presided over by a conservative pre-Vatican II bishop who was so powerful that at Lent all the dancehalls shut down since no one went out dancing in deference to the penitential season.
The ex-GIs, some of whom had grey hair, groaned and said Dear God, what have we gotten into? For us aged 17 it was a lark to be away from home and a terrific Saturday night was spent by taking the Johnny bus into St. Cloud, going to a movie, having an ice cream soda and catching the Johnny bus back leaving St. Cloud at 10 p.m., walking the 1-1/2 miles in from, the road to our dormitory where lights out on Saturday night (only) was at midnight (other nights at 10:30 p.m.). Some ex-GIs made the trip, went to the bar at the Spaniol Hotel and got drunk, often missing the Johnny bus, trying to pick up girls (the farm variety were generally disinterested) and chipping in together to get a cab to drive them back to the school where, arriving in the dark, they had to grope their way to their dormitory beds.
The spectacle of some of them tottering around the campus on Saturday night in an inebriated state angered the venerable Abbot-President of Saint John’s, the Right Rev. Alcuin Deutsch, OSB. So he laid down an order. Everyone in the freshmen class…ex-GIs and us 17-year-olds (whom he feared would be corrupted) would have to take four straight years of philosophy and theology-no exceptions. Well, there was one exception. Most of the ex-GIs…and those of exceptional mental acuity… were sent to take philosophy under the Rev. Godfrey Diekmann OSB who was a very clever, late-blooming theological progressive.
The dumb ones like me were directed to take philosophy and theology from the Rev. Ernest Kilzer OSB, an old-guard expert in Thomism. That was my first lucky break and for me it made all the difference. I wrote about Father Godfrey earlier in “Flashbacks.” He anticipated Vatican II and beyond with all the relativism that brought such disaster to the formerly confident Church structure. Many…not all but many…of those who took his courses experienced almost insoluble difficulties with the rubrics of the Church.
For all the ex-GIs and all of us, Abbot Alcuin saved the day. He ordered a general 5-day retreat for all students in 1946, taught by a Fr. James Dismas Clark, S. J. who had just returned from the service as a chaplain where he survived Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. The retreat put on by this man who chose the name Dismas, that of the Good Thief, was experiential and invaluable. As result, Godfrey’s well-intentioned but fallacies notwithstanding, some of those ex-GIs decided to become Benedictines and are in the abbey yet, as white-haired monks walking in single file for early morning Matins, serving God through the day until Compline.
But many who took their courses from Godfrey had difficulties and if they didn’t stray from the Church became skeptics. But those of us who took our lessons from Fr. Ernest, largely, had no difficulties and a good many more became monks than those did with Godfrey…and if not monks the better men of which number I like to count myself. We got superb philosophical ballast which didn’t do a damned thing for our abilities to earn money in the cold, hard materialistic world, but gave us a reassurance that stayed with us all our lives. Here I am almost eighty and while far from an angel or saint…an earthen vessel…having fallen as humans are wont to do…know through Ernie’s dicta the nature of man and sin, forgiveness and redemption. For which I am deeply grateful to his memory as he lies there dead 40 years in the Abbey churchyard.
But despite all Ernie’s genius, I was still only seventeen, an only child, the first time away from home, with lamentable sense of boredom about my studies, a young man who sorely wanted to know the evil world Ernie condemned…at least let us say, to be tempted…in sinful, devil-may-care Saint Cloud (population: 22,000), drinking Glueck stite beer (12%) with a bourbon chaser which made me sicker the first time I tasted it than I ever can imagine it possible to be: causing me to fear first that I would die, then that I might not die.
So I am sorry to say I dawdled somewhat through my studies in philosophy and theology, while thanks to Ernie’s genius and my fear of his examinations, absorbing much more than I imagined (as it turned out) but not keeping my notes after examinations were taken. Hence when I graduated and went out to the world I often bitterly regretted not saving those notes.
Fr. Ernest, began our first year by saying that his course would take us through not just the great ideas and ideals of the Greeks and Thomas but the fallacies that have betrayed the wisdom of the West and have led the world into almost irrecoverable intellectual error.
For decades I yearned for those notes which I had tossed. I read book after book on philosophy and theology through all these years. Some were good, as Mortimer Adler’s (Lillian and I even took Adler’s course on the Great Books), brilliant, taught by the Master himself but none expressed in such cogent force what old Ernie (as we called him behind his back) enunciated.
Well, now, I can tell you that I have found the notes from Ernie’s four years of classes in philosophy and theology. Well-that’s an overstatement. Not exactly. But I have found the next best thing. A book expressed in far more vulgar style than Ernie would but which nevertheless makes Ernie’s points. It is called “10 Books that Screwed Up the World” by Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D. As I read the book and re-read it, I heard Ernie’s authoritarian voice once again. I checked out Wiker. His credentials are superb. He taught at Thomas Aquinas College in California, probably the most academically stringent of all the newer colleges formed to retrace the steps lost by the larger, nominal ones.
Benjamin Wiker…and I, over my lifetime…have read these dreadful 10 books so that you won’t have to. I’ll start reviewing his book tomorrow beginning with the first screwy idea. Never fear, it won’t be boring. I’ll add my own views so as to lighten the discussion (Ernie once told me: Your philosophical depth, Mr. Roeser, is that of a pie-tin!” Your comments eagerly received. And there will also be ample room to discuss politics and public affairs. Tomorrow then comes the first disquisition on “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli [1469-1527]. I know Machiavelli has been stupendously praised for his realism and cynicism. There are dangers to him. Hear Wiker out. And contribute your ideas. I know Dr. Paul Green who reads this blog is himself an expert on Machiavelli who will not agree with us and his erudite words are welcomed as well. Tomorrow then, bright and early, THE PRINCE.
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5/13/2008
Personal Aside: Blago’s Committee Owes Almost a Million to Big Jimbo’s Firm says “Crain’s” Hinz.  | Citizens for Blago's law bill to Big Jim is almost $1million.
Our thin-lipped ex-governor is now tight-lipped. :Writes
Greg Hinz "The partners at Winston & Strawn are tired of
serving as unpaid legal staff for needy chief executives and
aren't thrilled about the publicity from those cases either."
If worse comes to worse Big Jim may have to sell some of'
his antiques; he already disposed of his ideals. |
Big Jimbo the Magnificent.
The thin-lipped giant, 5-term governor and architect of the bipartisan one-hand-washing-the-other between the political parties which the “Tribune’s” John Kass aptly has called the “Combine,” James R. Thompson, seemingly has allowed his law firm Winston-Strawn, to hold the bag on a $965,352.04 bill for representing the unofficial defendant in the Rezko case, Citizens for Blagojevich, the governor’s campaign committee-so reports Greg Hinz of “Crain’s Chicago Business” in a brilliant piece of journalism.
The ex-governor who has become the state’s prime lobbyist, ostentatiously put his law firm on a pro-bono basis to carry the $10 million plus legal carriage encumbered by corrupt ex-governor George Ryan. According to Hinz, the pro-bono was to accommodate Ryan for rewarding Thompson’s firm with lots of legal business. Whether that is the case or whether Thompson felt a need to keep Ryan cozy and a friend for fear of what he might disclose in anger is unknown. After the Ryan case ended with a horrific loss for Ryan, Thompson decided to step down as chairman. Now larded with the taste for a lifestyle approximating Suileman the Magnificent, Thompson with a patch of prematurely orange hair atop his head, is busily trying to sell Sam Zell on a token of mercantilism similar to the state’s buying in to the White Sox for which he became famous-using state clout (he says no tax monies will be used but he frequently won reelection pledging no tax hikes and then reneged) to “save” Wrigley Field.
As Hinz writes, Ryan got a $10 million freebie in from Big Jimbo in part because the feds restricted his campaign fund from paying Thompson by charging it with racketeering. He points out that this could repeat itself with Blagojevich.
An excellent story from one of the city’s preeminent reporters and analysts.
| | | MR. OBAMA: A BLACK PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE HAS TO DEFINE WHERE HE STANDS ON RACE—WITH NO AMBIGUITY.
Since Civil War Black Empowerment Has Split 4 Ways and
Barack Obama Should Do More than Straddle. But He’s Unlikely.
This week’s column for The Wanderer, the nation’s oldest national Catholic newspaper. (NOTE: Published article is excerpted from this
longer version).
By Thomas F. Roeser
CHICAGO-We now digress from our weekly review of the presidential campaign for a little sociology. Why? Because Barack Obama and his ex-pastor’s quarrel about race will linger through Nov. 4. So let us divert from horserace politics and make it a teaching moment.
THE STORY THUS FAR: Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the black racist from Chicago’s Hyde Park lives in a $1 million mansion owned by his church which spares him from paying taxes, in a gated community keeping him apart from the riff-raff. He drives a Mercedes and stands to become a multi-millionaire.
WHY? Because he suddenly hit the jackpot when one of his flock became the all-but-anointed black Messiah of liberalism, giving Wright access to the national media where Wright gets Superbowl-style coverage for his views which he enjoys hugely. He is good for big lecture fees starting at $25,000 a pop, a book and national TV bookings.
THEN WHAT HAPPENED? At the National Press Club last week he seemingly covered all the bases, declaring (a) Louis Farrakhan “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century” and (b) declaring whites worship in church in the morning and put on white Klan sheets at night, (c) defending his accusation that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus to kill off the black population (“our government is capable of doing anything”). Topping it off, he (d) endorsed the anti-black stereotype that blacks and whites have differently wired brains. Why does he echo Mississippi’s old segregationist senator Theodore Bilbo of the `50s who used the same, unproven rationale to justify his contention that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and hence integration can’t work? A good psychiatrist might say it’s black nationalist race hatred born of deepest insecurity n reaction to generations of liberal white patronizing.
NOW THE PRESENT: Why did young Obama choose Wright’s church in his quest for Jesus Christ? Chicago Democratic realists know that the agree that young Obama came to Wright’s church not to find Jesus Christ (well, if he bumped into Him in addition to what Obama was really seeking, fine) but as a hip, politically astute community organizer looking for a political base to run for public office. Black churches are fecund sources for volunteers and Trinity was ripe pickin’s with 10,000-plus activist parishioners. As to why Obama stayed 20 years in a church where Wright extolled race hatred, the answer is easy and candidly supplied by Wright himself: Obama was seldom in the pews but used the church for “shake-and-howdy.” Did he know of Wright’s views? Of course: they’re not much different from those of other black ministers who seek to rev up their congregations by turning up the heat on whitey. Once Obama became big time, the views seemed incongruent to his so-called moderate image.
HOW DID ALL THIS BEGIN?
Silberman and White Guilt.
Does the name Charles Silberman mean anything today? No? Ah, how soon we forget! He was the most famous establishmentarian interpreter of white social justice in 1964 with his book Crisis in Black and White [Random House: 1964]. An associate editor of Fortune, he beseeched compassion for “the Negro” the favored word of the era; his book was required reading for corporate executives striving to stay abreast of the times.
Silberman wrote that (1) whites have “degraded the Negro.” Slaves, he said, were treated more shabbily in the U.S. than almost anywhere in history (what? Worse than the Spartans and Athenians who drove their captives to work in the mines to the point of death in 7th century B. C.? Or the hostages held by 2nd century B. C. Rome who were fed to the lions for the pleasure of the crowds before Christians came along? Not even remotely true.) But Silberman sold the thesis to business and the media. By dint of 400 years of slavery and segregation, he wrote, black pride was systematically knocked out of them. The job is to re-instill it.
He continued: (2) Negroes can only recover their self-respect if “whites go out of their way to give them a helping hand because merely allowing them equality of opportunity is not enough.” So (3) there must be special remedial training in all areas starting with schooling for “Negro children” at an earlier age-at three or four. If this doesn’t happen, by the time children are five or six “an overcrowded, oppressive [sic] home life has stifled their impulse to learn and made them much less alert than comparable white children.” Moreover (4) corporations “must set job quotas for Negroes”,” give them on-the-job training and even put up with impaired efficiency “until the Negroes are trained.” Thus were affirmative action and quotas born.
Then Silberman pointed as a model (guess what and where?) the Woodlawn area of Chicago’s South Side. Bounded by Lake Michigan to the east, 60th street to the north, Martin Luther King, Jr., drive to the west and 67th to the south, Woodlawn had been devastated by joblessness when black poor moved in to the former middle-class area in the 1940s--but never fear: Woodlawn, he pontificated, /would conquer black poverty, build jobs and opportunities through the heroism of one man-Chicago-born Saul Alinsky, 55. Alinsky, author of Reveille for Radicals which entranced liberals, had conceived a formula for community organization that instilled demonstrations, picketing and non-violent protest to gain remedial redress.
Alinsky had done it before successfully, Silberman wrote, when he organized a white ethnic Chicago neighborhood, “Back of the Yards,” to win respect for packing house workers struggling against the heartless owners of the stockyards. True to a degree: but now the old packinghouses were preparing to move away (which Silberman forgot to report). Now Silberman boasted, the man who organized Lithuanians, Poles, Irish and Italians into the “Back of the Yards Council,” was organizing black poor to win redress and make Woodlawn an island of social justice, through creation of a militant community organization, TWO (standing for The Woodlawn Organization). Apples and oranges, I reasoned: organizing whites with solid family structures and at least high school educations is different than galvanizing black poor without much education, products of splintered families who have moved here from the Mississippi delta.
How would Alinsky organize the black poor? By raising hell, staging picket lines, holding marches. I discovered (great coincidence) that Alinsky’s top assistant was one Ed Chambers with whom I had gone to school at St. John’s in Minnesota. I met with Alinsky and Chambers and was unimpressed. I didn’t see how organizing black ministers with the aid of one powerful Catholic monsignor downtown (Msgr. Jack Egan) to lead pressure tactics was going to get anything more than TV coverage.
I was right. The latest census shows Woodlawn today is much worse off than it was in the `60s: 27,000 people living in 10,000 households, over 90% black, half on public aid and median income under $13,000. Also 60s-style liberal programs have contributed to the breakup of the black families existing there, to be supplanted by gangs. Gangs supply the semblance of solidity families once did and also financial resources for black youth in drug pushing and sales. But life expectancy may be shorter than in Baghdad since rival gangs war on the citizens and society. Liberals’ only answer: nothing more than ministers and weeping mothers parading with placards and white radical Fr. Michael Pfleger shouting from his pulpit for an end to legal gunshops.
Ah, but if I had only junked Silberman when I rejected Alinsky. No, Silberman’s liberal poison of the white man as dispenser of beneficence had seeped into my consciousness. Whitey has a major responsibility to help heroically to enable “Negroes to recover their self respect,” that “merely allowing Negroes equality of opportunity is not enough” and that affirmative steps must be taken to ensure that Negroes are assisted more than any other group, including quotas, putting up with temporary inefficiency until-how long? Until “the Negroes are trained.”
Misled by that faulty `60s sociology, I left Quaker temporarily, took the job as assistant Commerce secretary, built the nation’s minority enterprise program under Richard Nixon and. created the model of preferential government contracts for minority businesses that is both used and abused by the feds, states and municipalities even today (I wanted it to last 10 years but its life is now immortal), spawned hundreds of small business investment companies (SBICs) directed only to minorities, not whites.
It didn’t pan out. The lowering of standards that Silberman advocated worsened the black feeling of inferiority which was eased by black anger and retaliation, black demands for “reparations” and foolish connotations of modern “slavery.” All the help from government and philanthropy unavailing, consider Michelle Obama’s well-publicized grievances against a white society that had made special arrangements so she could go to Princeton and Harvard. She couldn’t have gone either place on her own and she’ll never forgive white America for helping her.
Three Proposed Solutions to the Race Problem.
The rancorous national debate on race today is a meld of the contradictory views of black progress enunciated by four very different black men, three of whom clashed a few decades after the Civil War. The question: who was/is right? After years of working on civil rights issues hee and in Washington, I faltered, first believing W. E. B. DuBois was right but after returning to Chicago changed and have remained firm in my contention ever since.
. The two post-Civil War leaders holding radically different views were Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. They were followed later by Marcus Garvey whose thinking spawned Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan and from them a species of black liberation theologians including James H. Cone whose thinking influenced Jeremiah Wright. .
1. Booker T. Washington’s Gradualism Approach.
Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington [1856-1915] fostered the model for newly freed slaves to make the most of freedom (like Obama he came from mixed racial parentage; unlike Obama’s Washington’s father was white). That was by education, hard work and family stability. In an address known as “The Atlanta Compromise” delivered in 1895, Washington told blacks that the goal for them must be education-education-education. Moreover social and political power does not come by fiat or legislation-but only by solid individual accomplishment, one person at a time. He pointed to business participation and more importantly, business ownership, saying that with ownership would come economic independence and from this will come such political and social power as they would deserve. Washington downgraded integration, insisting that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; until whites catch up, blacks should advance themselves not by voting or running for office but by working and finally owning the land.
2. W.E.D. DuBois’ Pressure Tactic for Equality.
But a racially diverse group composed of more affluent blacks and liberal whites felt Booker T. was too soft on whitey and not hard enough on the South. They formed the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), ironically picking the name “colored people” just before the phrase lost acceptability. The guiding star of the NAACP was Washington’s great nemesis, W. E. B. DuBois.
Unlike Washington, DuBois [1868-1963] came from middle-class, almost upper, black stock, born in Massachusetts where his people had benefited as “free people of color.” He graduated from Harvard college and received his doctorate with honors from there. Insisting that blacks deserved white acceptability immediately, not when whitey got around to accepting blacks. He saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and his call for black self-reliance as a ploy to win favors from whitey (it was but it made brilliant negotiative sense at the time).
DuBois lived long enough to see great changes in race relations, the Supreme Court-ordered end to “separate but equal” education, the end of Jim Crow, abolition of “colored only” drinking fountains with more progress on the way. But progress was not enough and, in fact, disillusioned him about the United States (a characteristic duplicated by most black activists endebted to DuBois including Jeremiah Wright). DuBois actually aligned himself with the Communists, served as a front-man for Communist-inspired “peace groups” during the Cold War and finally left the U. S. with his wife to become a resident of Ghana where he died at 95 on the day of the Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech. The audience at the Lincoln Memorial was told of Dr. DuBois’ death and observed a moment of silence. Thus not for the first time did the civil rights movement of the `60s praise a pro-Communist who actively sided with the nation’s enemies.
DuBois’ intellectual legatees were Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist pastor and an agnostic Jew, Saul Alinsky. King preached and practiced non-violence; Alinsky eschewed violence but was prepared to go to the water’s edge. Alinsky was aided by the late Msgr. John Egan of Chicago who raised money for his efforts. Indeed, the two Democratic candidates for president, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, had early adopted Alinsky’s theories though both disclaim it now. Obama as community organizer says in his two autobiographies, he applied Alinsky’s strategies to try to organize the poor--but has soft-pedaled it greatly as candidate for president. As a Wellesley college graduating senior, Hillary Clinton wrote her honors thesis with the title There is Only the Fight: Analysis of the Alinsky Model. After she became First Lady, the White House press office put a kibosh on release of the thesis. Now she says Alinsky’s death changed everything about the strategy so her paper is moot. Alinsky’s methods calling for demonstrations, marches, blistering the white “power establishment” have been accepted and are de rigeur from Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and even minor league activists for “change” including Fr. Michael Pfleger. Media have taken up these agitators as “civil rights” leaders. Now those who espouse Booker T. Washington’s dictum are generally regarded by DuBois’ followers as tools of the white power trust and reactionary.
3. Garvey, Elijah, Malcolm X, Farrakhan and…
One offshoot from Booker T. Washington but ending up far different than he was headed by Marcus Garvey [1887-1947]. Jamaica-born he became a publisher and organizer of the United Negro Improvement Association. Garvey agreed with Booker T. that blacks should tend to their own knitting and avoid getting mixed up in integration activities and heralded Pan-Africanism, a movement that would constitute a black nation within the U.S. with linkage to blacks everywhere in the world. While Washington thought the day would come through gradualism when blacks would be accepted by white and integration would be natural, when DuBois wanted to hasten the day of total equality through legislation and demonstrations, Garvey wanted undiluted black identity, no incremental steps ala Booker T., no push to integration with whitey ala W. E. B. DuBois…but black nationalism. This led to the rise of Elijah Mohammad, Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), Louis Farrakhan and ultimately Obama’s one-time spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright. .
Farrakhan (and Wright) specialize in black separatism, brimming with hatred for whitey, the white power structure, the U.S. government and heavy anti-Semitism. Malcolm envisaged a Christianity vastly different from the concept of its Founder, writing “The white man has brainwashed us black people to fasten our gaze on a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus! We’re worshiping a Jesus that doesn’t even look like us!...The blond-haired, blue-eyed white man has taught you and me to worship a white Jesus and to shout and sing and pray to this God that’s his God, the white man’s God. The white man has taught us to shout and sing and pray until we die, top wait until death, for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter…while this white man has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars here on this earth!”
Both Malcolm and Louis Farrakhan had been top lieutenants-and rivals-for Elijah’s favor. Malcolm split from Elijah Mohammad purportedly because of Elijah’s committing adultery with a bevy of black female staffers and was assassinated while speaking at a rally in 1964, the rumor being that Farrakhan having ordered the killing. The 1995 documentary film “Brother Minister” shows an extraordinary clip of Farrakhan addressing a closed gathering of his followers in February, 1993. Shouting, his eyes bugging out in rage, Farrakhan describes Malcolm X as a “traitor” and says that if the Nation of Islam “dealt with him” as anyother nation would a traitor, “what the hell business is it of yours?” It suggests powerfully that Malcolm was gunned down by the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s trained security wing, acting on a directive from their leaders.
Was Farrakhan himself involved? No telling. Farrakhan came close to acknowledging it on “60 Minutes” but then denied it. The columnist-author Christopher Hitchens summarizes that Farrakhan “is the man praised by Jeremiah Wright and referred to with respect as ‘Minister Farrakhan’ by the senator who hopes to be the next president of the United States.” However, the Malcolm-Farrakhan message is seemingly identical and was translated into the black power movement by Stokley Carmichael, the Black Panthers and Ron Karenga.
…Cone and Wright.
The Malcolm message was converted to a variant of theology by James H. Cone [1938- ] , a one-time follower of Martin Luther King, Jr. who is Charles A.. Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theology seminary, New York. In his 1969 seminal book “Black Theology & Black Power,” Cone put the finishing touches on the religion that Jeremiah Wright encompassed and whose church Obama joined. While Wright differs from Cone in some respects, they are united on the broad basics.
What are they? Cone believes Jesus was black and true Christianity depends on His blackness, thus dwelling of black liberation. Cone summons legitimate anger, dismissing contemporary theologians for dispassion and coolness. He writes of “whitey the oppressor.” The goal of black intelligentsia is to “aid in the destruction of America” he writes. In a preface written to Cone’s book “A Black Theology of Liberation,” Wright says “There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being `How can we become black?’” Cone urges blacks to hate whites but denies this is black racism-for there is no black racism. Black racism “is a myth created by whites to erase their guilt feelings.”
While Booker T., DuBois and King welcomed white liberals to the fray, Malcolm, Farrakhan and Cone resent white liberals because they are as responsible for the black man’s plight as the George Wallaces. White liberals want to be loved by blacks but yet retain their power, he says. What can they do to be loved and still stay in the driver’s seat? Nothing. Christianity as practiced generally is a false Christianity, Cone says. He shrugs off so-called incremental progress. Instead black theology must confront whitey with a theology that teaches “white society as the racist Antichrist, communicating to the oppressor that nothing will be spared in the fight for freedom.”
Scholar Stanley Kurtz links Wright with this by pointing out that Wright made his Hyde Park church a dynamic center of black anger, particularly attractive to the middle class (poor blacks are too busy struggling to give much time to victimology). The general view is that Obama came to the church quite as a convert-but it is more likely, given some of the testimony I have heard from people who were at the church during Obama’s entry and left, is that the young street organizer joined it in admiration of its 10,000-member strength.
Small, Initial Stirrings of a Black Conservatism.
Recently there has come the beginnings of a new breed of black spokesmen, not indebted to the old DuBois ways nor to Garvey-Malcolm X-Farrakhan. . Talk radio has featured a good many of them including Armstrong Williams and Walter Williams (not related). In Chicago the most profound is Frank Penn, decorated veteran of Vietnam and a former Chicago police officer. One national figure is Juan Williams, NPR political analyst who wrote the captivating book “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black America-and What We Can Do About It” [Crown publishers: 2006].
There is one who by entertainment celebrity has made--and can continue to make--a huge difference. His name: Bill Cosby.
His life has been hard hit by racial violence. His son was randomly shot and killed while changing a tire on a Los Angeles freeway. His wife gained national headlines by blaming white racism. Not so Bill Cosby. He (and his wife) have an extensive record of supporting black causes-starting off with $22 million given to Spelman College, the largest individual contribution ever given to a black college.
Without contradicting his wife, he launched a campaign that argues absentee fathers, the rise of black-on-black crime, the spread of hip-hop are evidence that the black community is committing cultural suicide. Blacks are 13% of the population, yet black men account for 49% of this nation’s murder victims and 41% of the prison population. Teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000 more than double that for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group in the Census, making only 61% of the median income of white families. A recent study concluded by the Pew Charitable Trusts has found that the rate at which blacks born in the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty (45%), three times that of whites. A terrible statistic.
Thus he has gone on the road to speak about it. Ta-Nehisi Coates in May’s Atlantic Monthly describes it:
“He speaks on a stage using a hand-mike in standard uniform-dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat shirt with the seal of the University of Massachusetts where he received a doctorate in education 30 years ago. He has been traveling the nation addressing men only-black men. Media is kept out. “Men,” he says, “if you want to win we can win. But we are in a new time when people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal. When they used to come into our neighborhoods we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle and said, ‘By any means necessary.’”
His message: the civil rights movement is exiting the stage leaving in its wake men…he’s only speaking to and about men…who have shirked their responsibilities for as Cosby sees it the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, marches or pleas but strong families and from them strong communities. To see him perform is to evoke a kind of thrill-he’s Doctor Cliff Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved TV households in “The Bill Cosby Show.” Although he’s older and greyer now, just a quick athletic turn as he strides and he is once again the Oxford-educated Alexander Scott of the NBC adventure series “I Spy” in the `60s, the first network program to feature a black in a title role.
He has not been a perfect exemplar all his life. In 2006 he settled a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed sexual assault by him; other allegations have been made by women which have not gone to court. But a Pew survey shows 85% of black respondents feel he has been a “good influence” on the community, higher than Obama (76%) but lower than Oprah Winfrey (87%).
Says Cosby: “The lower economic and lower middle people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on [applause]. In the old days you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye [laugher]. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house and where you got on whatever you had and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.
“I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? [applause]. And where is his father and how come you don’t know where he is? [applause]. Where were you when he was eighteen and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? [louder applause]. And why doesn’t his father show up to talk to this boy?
“…Fifty percent drop-out rate. I’m telling you and people in jail and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse? I want somebody to love me and as soon as you have it you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother and great grandmother in the same room raising children and the child know nothing about love or respect of any one of the three. All the child knows is gimme, gimme, gimme.
“People getting shot in the head over a piece of pound cake. Somebody steals a pound cake out of a Seven-Eleven and runs down the street and is shot in the back of the head. Dead. Then we all run out and are outraged. ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him!’ I say `what the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? [fervent applause]. I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else and I looked at it and I had no money. Something called parenting said ‘if I get caught with it I’m going to embarrass my mother. I’m going to embarrass my family!’”
“Listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong…We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa-with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap-and all of them in jail!”
Good as he is, Cosby isn’t as definite on a major cause of black failure-illegitimacy and female-headed households--as I would like. Why do blacks lag behind whites in school? Are blacks genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than whites, as Wright’s cockeyed “brains-wired-differently” statement would indicate? Wrong. Granted, blacks score worse than whites on intelligence tests but from eight months to a year there is almost no racial gap-which indicates that the cause is fractured families. The proportion of black babies born out of wedlock has nearly doubled since 1970, to 69%. And 70% of these births are to mothers who are truly alone, not cohabiting. Ther is no doubt that stable, two-parent families accumulate wealth more easily than single-parent homes. Two-parent families find it easier to raise well-adjusted, studious children who go on to start stable families of their own. Broken families, if middle class, find it harder to stay that way, find it harder to break out. The man who has made the most eloquent case is white, not black: George Gilder whose books “Sexual Suicide” and “Men and Marriage” are renowned…powerful, courageous.
If Cosby comes to your town, make a point to try to catch his performance. You may not be able to if you’re not a black male-but try anyhow. You might buy his latest book, co-written by Dr. Alvin Poussaint (professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School) entitled “Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors” [Thomas Nelson: 2008]. Both he and Jeremiah Wright went to the same Philadelphia magnet high school a few years apart-but in approach are as different as night and day.
My conclusion, formed in 1971 when I returned to Chicago, is that the approach now articulated by Cosby, mingled with Booker T. Washington gradualism along with a strong insistence on Gilder’s program of strengthening two-parent families is the answer. You’ll find this approach …support of two-parent families plus acceptance of continuation of some government help within bounds…too slow for W.E.B. DuBois’ followers and markedly subservient to whitey for Cone and Wright, a path that not just Obama, Clinton won’t accept but which all of liberaldom rejects, because it eschews political demagoguery, racial invective, avoids trying to instill white guilt, doesn’t blame America, puts less reliance on government and a maximum on individual accomplishment.
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5/12/2008
Personal Aside: Vallas Disappoints but Maybe That’s Because He’s Biding his Time. But If He Is to Run, He’d Better Think if Over Long and Hard.
Vallas.
On my radio show last night, Paul Vallas…a friend whom I admire very much…did not exactly burn up the turf and was a grey shadow of the commanding, oracular speaker he was at the City Club April 28. Jeff Berkowitz, my co-panelist, came meticulously prepared as usual. I had a tough time getting Vallas to even concede that he would consider running for governor…something he volunteered almost off-the-bat at the City Club. Then, following up, I got him to acknowledge that vouchers would be high on his list if he were to run…but he circumnavigated a bit talking about charter schools which are not all that controversial. Jeff and I got him finally to endorse vouchers and once he got warmed up he stated as he had earlier before the City Club that the poor deserved educational choice as much-if not more-than the wealthy.
In all fairness, he has a job under contract as superintendent of the entire Louisiana Recovery school system (I had thought it was just New Orleans) and as such must not only honor the contract but avoid being dragged into political speculation. However at the City Club he did the beckoning and teasing about running for governor. Maybe he got some heat back home following his speech here. But he was not the decisive guy on issues on the radio that he had been at the City Club. In fact, he was rather needlessly verbose without getting to the point until we pushed him.
I thought Jeff made a good point when he cited the fact that when Vallas ran in 2002 he was not head-on for vouchers…although he denied it. Since he was on my show a number of times in that period, I have the same recollection as apparently Jeff does, that he was less firm in supporting them-although last night he insisted he has always been for them. I don’t have the transcript (maybe Jeff does since he interviewed him on his TV show) but I have the same feeling as Jeff that he was very light on the issue.
Both of us…and a very good interrogator from the audience…pointed out the obvious since he now is firmly for vouchers: that the Democratic party is unalterably opposed to them because of the teachers’ unions. I also pointed out to him that the Democratic party lists are pretty full up for governor; Lisa Madigan, Dan Hynes, Pat Quinn, Alexi Giannoulias and as he would have to fight a lot of heavyweights for the nomination, perhaps the Republican side would be advantageous for him: if. If, running as a Republican would free him to announce what he might truly think. He ducked that one so stringently that as of this writing I would make two observations:
1. While after the City Club speech it seemed almost a 50-50 bet that Vallas will be running for governor in 2010, I think this has diminished drastically to a 25% chance and 75% that he will not run at all.
2. His City Club speech seemed to invite the idea that he could welcome being considered to run as a Republican with the prospect possibly 30% that he would entertain the idea, I now lower this expectation to under 15%.
In essence, I think the hope that Paul Vallas would run for governor...as a Democrat or as a Republican…is very slight. But he is a good man and a good friend and I wish him well.
On the all-important issue of his conquering his reluctance to fly…which played a big role in causing him to lose in 2002 because he did not spend the needed time downstate…he assured me that this has abated to the extent that he can accept short trips: Chicago to Springfield and hops around the state. If that’s the case, this is a major breakthrough.
| | | Flashback: Mother Teresa Comes to Chicago and Has a Special Word for Me Involving the Gates of Heaven.  | To atheist Christopher Hitchens this lady is a fraud
because she ministered to the poor, dying and
diseased not to cure poverty on earth but to glorify
"Christ and His Church." Answer him in Reader's
Comments. |
[Fifty years of memories written for my kids and grandchildren].
Mother Teresa of Calcutta came several times to Chicago during the 1980s and as a good friend of mine, Bill Isaacson, an attorney, was close to her, I would join him when she came in to meet her at the airport. The most significant time was in 1987 when she came in to address a group of well-wishers at Felician College. It was mid-July with the temperature hovering at near 100 degrees, without a breath of air. You could hold a lighted match aloft and the flame would not quiver, it was so airless.
Then she was a relatively healthy 77, an Albanian Cathlic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950 and who for 40 years ministered personally to the poor, sick, orphaned and dying. She had attracted the attention of Malcolm Muggeridge who conducted a film documentary of her work, “Something Beautiful for God” which he later turned into a book. That publicity won international acclaim for her and she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. When she came to Chicago to meet with her sisters and speak at Felician she was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children’s and family counseling programs, orphanages and schools.
She arrived at O’Hare carrying a plain cloth bag, attired in her plain white cotton habit with blue borders. She had a few nuns with her but the rules seemed to be that they traveled without much of a purse, depending on the charity of others. She was about 4 feet 11 inches tall, with a brown, wrinkled face that looked like a roadmap of Skopje, republic of Macedonia, part of Albania where she was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 10, 1910.
Her English was remarkably good. She was the younger of two children born to the Albanian family whose father was involved somewhat in Albanian politics. He died when Agnes was eight years old. Her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic. From early childhood on she was fascinated by stories of missionaries and by the time she was 12 she was committed in her mind to become a nun. She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary and never again saw her mother or sister again. She went to Loreto Abbey in Ireland to learn English because it was the language the sisters used to teach school children in India. She arrived in India in 1929, entered the novitiate in Darjeeling near the Himalayan mountains and pronounced her first religious vows as a nun in 1931. She chose the name Teresa after Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower and took her solemn vows in 1937 at the Loreto convent in eastern Calcutta where she was teaching school.
While she enjoyed teaching, she was overwhelmed by the poverty of Calcutta, especially after a 1943 famine plunged the city in death; then there was Hindu-Muslim violence in August, 1946. In 1946 she experienced what she felt sure was a call to leave the convent and live with the poor. So she left the convent, beginning her missionary work with the poor and replaced in traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton chira decorated with a blue border. She took Indian citizenship and started serving the destitute and starving, picking them up off the street. She had no income and had to beg for food and supplies. Then she experienced a desperate emptiness which afflicted many saints including St. John of the Cross who described his inner malady as “the dark night of the soul” -a feeling that despite all the hard work you are doing, you go to bed at night with an vacuity, not a pleasant thing to experience. But confessors say that at the very time you cannot detect the presence of God, He is paradoxically very near. It was a time of great testing for her.
She received Vatican permission in 1950 to start a diocesan order that would become the Missionaries of Charity with the mission to care for, as she described it, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people who have become a burden to society and are shunned by everyone.” Because these people felt unloved, she herself received as a special “gift” the feeling of desolate loneliness as well as she toiled for the poor. She began with 13 members in Calcutta and by time she came to Chicago as a world figure she had 3,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide including refugees, blind, disabled, alcoholics, the poor, victims of floods, epidemics and famines.
In 1952 she opened her first Home for the Dying in housing made available by the city of Calcutta. She insisted that those who were brought in would receive spiritual care they were familiar with. Muslims were read the quramn, Hindus received water from the Ganges and Catholics the Last Rites. “A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels-loved and wanted.”
As she trotted by his side as I carried her cloth bag, she nudged me in the ribs. She was so tiny I had to bend down to hear her. As we got in a cab she said…her eyes twinkling...that I looked well fed. Well, she was right. I was then about 220 lbs. and 6 feet tall with a fleshy face and jowls. She beckoned me to bend down again with a long bony finger. When I put my ear to her lips she said with a mellifluous Indian accent, “Reduce, for the gates of heaven are narrow!” She smiled the most beautiful smile, her wrinkled face lighting up like 1300 candlepower. I belonged to her that very instant.
When she spoke at Felician (the school is now dormant and is a convent) I had arranged a camera crew from Quaker Oats audio visual to record her. In the audience which was filled to overflowing was a man I didn’t meet then but some years after, Msgr. Ignatius McDermott. The auditorium had no air conditioning. He told me later what I had fully realized, the day was “hotter than the hinges of hell.” She was utterly cool and calm and while people nearly fainted for lack of air, she spoke so persuasively that she stayed throughout it.
When we delivered her and her coterie to the convent where she would stay the night, she beckoned me again. I bent down. “Would you tell me where that camera crew came from?” she said. I told her my company. She took my name and while the cabbie’s meter was running, copied it laboriously. Two months later a scrap of envelope arrived at my house. It was hand addressed with pencil. We almost tossed it away but ripped it open. It contained a torn jagged edge of a paper bag such as what would carry groceries. . On it was written in careful, nun-like precision, eloquent words of deep appreciation for meeting her. We put it in our safe deposit box because to us it is very valuable-the only correspondence we have had from beatified person who may very well be canonized.
One would not imagine someone like this would be controversial. But in death, Agnes became such. The journalist Christopher Hitchens became one of her most virulent critics. He wrote that while alive she failed to defend herself against critical coverage in the press, citing charges of “gross neglect and physical and emotional abuse in her orphanages and unsanitary conditions in some of them.” The German magazine “Stern” made allegations concerning financial record sloppiness and the spending of donations. The medical press also criticized her in attention to some medical facts. Hitchens himself testified at the Vatican against her beatification and canonization process, writing that her own words on poverty showed “her intention was not to help people”…that “she wasn’t working to alleviate poverty but to expand the number of Catholics.” He quoted her as saying-and I am sure this is quite right-“I am not a social worker. I don’t do it for this reason. I do it for Christ and His Church.”
Hitchens who trumpets the fact that he is a militant atheist in his book “God is not Great” is her mortal enemy. Not to take the money to alleviate poverty but to do it for Christ and His Church by ministering to the poor and dying is, to him, a mistake.
I don’t quite know how to answer this charge since it’s almost midnight and I must go to bed. Maybe you can do it in Reader’s Comment.
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5/9/2008
Personal Asides: Paul Vallas on My WLS Program Sunday…Why I Choose to Moderate Rather than Bloviate…The Wedge…and Finally a Note.
Vallas.
Paul Vallas, superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans and former reform superintendent of the Chicago public schools, will be the guest this Sunday on my WLS-AM (890) program (8 to 9 p.m.). He ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois in 2002, losing narrowly to Rod Blagojevich. Since then, he was CEO of the School District of Philadelphia, presiding over the nation’s largest experiment in privatized management of schools, turning over the management of 40 schools to for-profits, nonprofits and universities, winning national acclaim. Regarded as one of the finest public administrators in the nation, he left Philadelphia when his contract was completed and went to work in New Orleans where today he reports directly to the governor, now Bobby Jindal. His contract will be up in 2008. He was also budget director for the city of Chicago and director of budgetary matters for State Senate President Phil Rock. He is renowned as one of the nation’s preeminent experts on public policy and administration. His family resides in Illinois and Vallas has always regarded himself as an Illinoisan.
Joining Paul to comment on the week’s news concerning Chicago and Illinois will be Jeff Berkowitz, the highly regarded ace interrogator of his own television show on CAN-Tv, “Public Affairs.”
Vallas appeared before the City Club of Chicago April 28 where the possibility of his running once again for governor in 2010 was mentioned. As his contract with New Orleans is still in effect, he declined to discuss the ins and outs of returning to political life but pointed out-significantly-that were he to run in Illinois (a) the only job that really would interest him would be governor and (b) he would make a key focal point of such a campaign reliance on vouchers. In the past as a Democratic candidate, he sidestepped the issue of vouchers. His announcement of his support of vouchers at the City Club was generally passed over by the news media but struck me as a very important step.
Why.
On my one-hour weekly program on WLS-AM, I choose to participate in a two-person discussion between a liberal and a conservative…which sometimes becomes a debate…rather than pontificate alone. Occasionally I am asked why. Three reasons: (1) I only have one hour which for pontification is far too short; (2) although many do not remember it, I held fort alone happily on WLS and two other stations for many years and have no objection to it-including stints lasting three hours daily on weekday evenings, on Saturday mornings. But on Saturday mornings on LS the last hour was devoted to what I called “Political Shootout” where I interrogated two guests with divergent viewpoints. When my time was shortened, I decided to go with “Shootout” entirely. Finally, (3) it is far easier to bloviate alone without fear of contradiction (the only divergent views being from callers whom you may silence by pushing a button, You may have heard on some national shows a divergent caller gets in, whereupon the host responds with alacrity and the caller is supposedly silenced with awesome respect. Not so: he is most certainly responding but he is talking to himself as he has been disconnected by the host). I find that instead of running my mouth, drawing conclusions from dual points of view serves as clarification of thought, for me and my listeners.
The Wedge.
Ok, ok, as Mr. Nofsinger is bored with economics talk, this will be the last of it. Here is what the wedge it.
When Henry Ford decided to raise his auto workers pay to $5 a day-then a very progressive step-he could be sure that 95% of this daily pay would be available to spend…and some of it on his cars. In other words, his labor costs were almost the same as the workers’ take-home pay. By contrast now the Ford Motor Company pays far-far more per hour for labor costs but the individual worker is lucky to take home a fraction of his own gross pay. The vast difference between the gross labor cost and the take home pay is known as “the wedge.” It consists primarily of federal income and payroll taxes plus the costs of special incentives, fringe benefits, pensions, health care etc., some paid by the worker and most by the employer -but all paid by the consumer. It is this wedge which supply-side economists contended pre-Reagan was the chief reason for our nation’s chronic bouts with inflation and recession-or stagflation.
They argue the combination of inflation and the bracket-creep of the “progressive” [sic] income tax automatically inflates this wedge even faster, forcing the economy to work harder and harder just to climb up the now famous “Laffer Curve” until real disposable income starts to sputter and the economy slides into recession again. Then, because the recession temporarily lowers the tax burden, there is temporary productivity and inflation relief-and recovery. But unless something is done to slow down the rising tax wedge, either through tax rate cuts or indexing, the whole deadly cycle begins again but at higher and higher levels each time. The long-term effect of this accelerating wedge incentives, lower basic productivity,, reduce real income growth and spur permanently higher inflation rates.
There. No more dismal science for a while. Incidentally, Frank, my father was a semi-pro baseball (and football) player and to the day of his death was saddened that his son never had either the athletic grace or the interest to be a sportsman.
Note.
If you’re occasionally unlucky, you will hit the Reader’s Comments of this website when, for a very short time, a scatological deviant writes in excreable bad taste, signing as his name the part of a woman’s anatomy which shows depravity bordering on the demonic. My webmaster quickly removes it. But if you find it in the brief interregnum before it is erased, know that this debased individual who lurks behind anonymity is a former supporter of Judy Baar Topinka, having gone to John Marshall law school where he returns to occasionally misuse a computer…one who has been offended since 2006 that I didn’t support her for governor. I didn’t because she is low rent (meaning of vulgar mien not economic status) which this heckler equals with his blennorrhea.
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5/8/2008
Personal Asides: The Pressure on Hillary to Quit…Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” Effect in Indiana….The Phillips Curse—er, Curve…Terry Sullivan’s Movie Review Draws Hot Controversy.  | What Darwinism really is (not evolution) as protrayed in
the film "Expelled" and its Chicago Daily Observer
review by Marie T. Sullivan has launched a fury of
attacks by our liberal, pro-freedom of inquiry friends
in academe. Read for yourself at www.cdobs.com |
The Pressure on Hillary.
My sole interest is to see John McCain elected president, obviously and absolutely. Still I am amused at the number of “objective” analysts who are pleading, almost begging, Hillary Clinton to toss in the sponge so that Barack Obama can have a smooth thoroughfare to the Denver convention and the coronation.
These are analysts who pretend to have no dog in this race. Well, then, why are they so concerned? For the good of the “system”? Com’on. Not just the analysts but the great prominence that editors on radio and television give a story that seemingly hasn’t changed for weeks. The big push has been in news prominence…front page stories, first-in-line stories on news broadcasts…show that their placement is due to liberal journalistic worry that the Democratic party may not have sufficient time to pull itself together and elect Obama.
In addition, there seems to be a slyly directed news placement of stories quoting nameless and sometimes obvious pro-Obama Democrats urging Hillary to run with him. Now, as a McCain supporter, I am undecided, frankly, over whether the tie-up of Obama and Clinton would be good or bad for Republicans. Something tells me lumping them together would be good for us. For one thing the divisiveness and hatred between the two of them would be advantageous…and the accumulated baggage would be better for us to exploit than Obama’s selection of someone like, say, Indiana’s Evan Bayh.
Were I to separate myself from partisanship and pretend to be an adviser to Hillary Clinton, would I urge her to accept the vice presidential nomination? Probably if she were any other candidate, I would say yes. The vice presidency seems to be changing, to become more activist as the years go by. Until Walter Mondale, the job was a seeming dead letter unless the president died. I visited Mondale in the vice presidency and talked with him at great length. There is little doubt in my mind that Jimmy Carter gave him a great deal of responsibility. Similarly, George H. W. Bush seemed to have more power than Mondale. Al Gore for all his pretenses was given great authority by Bill Clinton. There is no doubt that Dick Cheney has made of the office what it had been intended for by the framers, i.e. the second most important office in the land. So were Hillary not Hillary…and somewhat younger than she is (she’s 60)…I would urge her to accept it if it’s offered.
Yet there is no doubt that Hillary wants to be president. To assume that she would be fit and able to run at age 68 after two terms of Barack Obama is to assume a lot. I have always imagined her drive for power would be such that she would be discontented with the vice presidency, especially since she had had a great deal of responsibility in the White House as First Lady. On balance, I would urge her to pass it up but in the spirit of good sportsmanship, help Obama conspicuously in the campaign.
I have written earlier that while I grant the election is Obama’s to lose, there strikes me as something about Obama that is distinctively weaker as a competitor to McCain than many people think. Because I suspect Hillary is a plunger, a gambler, a risk-taker, I would conclude that she would be better off returning to the Senate (after all, senator from New York is no slouch job) and retain the freedom of action to pursue the presidency down the line…in 2012 if Obama blows the chance…or in 2016 at the conclusion of what could be his second term when she will be 68. To that extent, John McCain is a role model, running for the job at 71.
What Was the Effect?
Granted Rush Limbaugh ought to keep his helium balloon-sized ego out of election day manipulations…what was the likely effect of his “Operation Chaos” where Republicans were directed to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Indiana primary basis she would be easier for McCain to beat? A survey of statistics-minded bloggers found these conclusions.
Judging from the exit polls, when Clinton voters were asked whom they would support in a Clinton-McCain contest, 7% said McCain. That is truly phenomenal if one can credit Rush with that effect. IF, that is. But then Hillary won by 14% margin of 11% of the electorate which comes out to a 1.5% advantage in the overall tally. Since the pretext of the Limbaugh “Operation Chaos” was that Hillary would be a weaker candidate than Obama, the 63% means that at the very most 1% of her margin came from the Limbaugh effect. Thus if every one of those 63% Republicans thought Obama would be more formidable belonged to “Operation Chaos” Limbaugh boosted Hillary’s margin from 1% to 2%.
On the other hand, if he is so persuasive with Republicans, how did McCain get the nomination at all since Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham all blasted him during the deciding days of the Republican primaries?
I am first to say that Rush has a tremendous effect as a conservative ally-with 20 million listeners…but I just can’t listen to him for a long period, that’s all. Like one drunk with celebrity he gloried in Hillary’s jocular statement that he has a crush on her. It’s sort of pathetic to hear someone with that celebrity extending since 1987 nationally who cannot get enough…literally can not get enough…of himself. Two recent cases.
Some commentator mentioned, at the time of the death of William F. Buckley, that he was different from Rush is that he didn’t go into tirades but skillfully dissected his opponents with a rapier. When listeners tuned in expecting to hear some laudatory words in eulogy about Buckley, they heard instead a longwinded disquisition from him on how he is indeed like Buckley as a fawning little old lady from Dubuque called in with “mega-mega dittoes, Rush!” to which the Great Man replied “it’s nothing, really m’am.”
Second, when the Jeremiah Wright issue erupted, ABC played a statement from Lanny Davis, former lawyer for Bill Clinton, zinging Obama for his lateness in recognizing the pastor’s shortcomings. Rush said: why we said that very same thing from the get-go here and didn’t get a mention on ABC. Rush, the news thrust was that Lanny Davis, a liberal Democrat, was saying it. Calm down: you weren’t snubbed. With Limbaugh, it’s all about HIM…nothing else. You remember the mock banner headline in the liberal “New York Times” they would run at the end of the world? WORLD ENDS! WOMEN AND MINORITIES HIT HARDEST! Limbaugh’s radio broadcast on hearing the first crack of doom would be “SEE? YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST! I TOLD YOU SO!”
The Phllips Curve and Its Fallacies.
Since no one answered, it either means no one knows or no one cares. I’ll take the first option but appreciate that economics has always been known as the dismal science. It was an economic model designed by British economist A. W. Phillips in 1957 who theorized there is an entirely reasonable relationship between rising unemployment and declining wage demands as well as vice versa. As scholar Warren T, Brookes wrote, the theory held that capitalists dealt with excessive wage demands and inflation by inducing economic slowdowns. My father always held to that theory (though he was not an economist) and in fact Brookes did write that Phillips’ theory worked “rather well over the last hundred years in Britain and America, right up through the middle 1960s but fell apart in the 1974-75 recession.”
That’s when its original purpose was twisted by the Keynesians who thought they would help the workingman by putting it into reverse, inducing a little inflation to fight unemployment. Actually it was based on misleading workers into accepting a hidden cut in real income while money was being printed and devalued. Prices through inflation were expected to rise faster than wages-cutting real wages, boosting profit margins and making it profitable to hire stilo more workers. But by the early 1970s unions counteracted it by writing into their contracts COLAs, the same steps being taken with major government entitlement programs and Social Security as well, at which point Phillips became obsolete.
All right. I’ll try one more economics question before switching to something else (Frank Nofsinger will say “switch!”). Without looking anything up and depending on your general knowledge…
Define a Tax Wedge.
The term became current during the early supply side days and was tossed around in debates between Milton Friedman and the real supply-siders.
Review of “Expelled.”
For a fine review of Ben Stein’s documentary film “Expelled,” go to the Chicago Daily Observer and read a review by our arts and culture editor, Marie T. Sullivan that was posted yesterday. It has drawn many hot comments from those who resent the idea of universities devoting any time whatsoever to the issue of intelligent design. In fact as I’m writing this, the only pro-ID comment comes from Pat Hickey.
It’s important to state what the film…and Marie’s review…does not espouse. They don’t espouse creationism. They don’t blast evolution which can mean simply “change over time.” But they do suggest that Darwinism which claims that design in living things is an illusion ought to be contrasted in academe with a scientific theory based on evidence from nature and consistent with everyday logic. There: is that so radical? Well, you’d think…to read the critics including those answering Terry’s review…that the film was proposing a return of the 12th century concept of flat earth. Darwin’s term for biological evolution was “descent with modification” which when studied literally it non-controversial. But Darwin didn’t stop there. Darwin set out to explain the origin of not just one or a handful of species but ALL species after the first. Thus the correct word for this is not evolution which is accepted…but Darwinism.
As Dr. Jonathan Wells points out (with a Ph.D in microbiology from Berkeley but also a Ph.D in theology from Yale) Darwinism claims all living things are modified descendents of a common ancestor…the principal mechanism of modification has been natural selection acting on undirected variation that originate in DNA mutations…and unguided processes are sufficient to explain all features of living things-so that whatever may seem to be design, is just an illusion.
Thus, in essence, the issue is not between evolution and creationism. Nor is it strictly speaking between Darwinism and intelligent design. It is whether in secular academia there can be any reference at all to intelligent design. I guarantee you once you read some of the frenetic responses to Marie T. Sullivan’s thoughtful review, you will be mystified at the anger and heat that it and the film has generated from the opposition but relatively little light. The film and review pleads for acceptance of the possibility of intelligent design in universities (which is supposed to be hospitable to countervailing views) only to find that Darwinism is itself a religion.
Once again we have liberal scientists betrothed to ideology and liberal media (i. e. for local purposes, the redoubtable Richard Roeper) presenting anyone who questions Darwinism as redneck, hopelessly ignorant. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that Darwin and the entire later experience has offered no evidence whatsoever for one species evolving into another, that “design” better tells the story of the complexities of molecular biology than does random mutation…leading to the conclusion that Darwinism is matter of religion or rigid ideology rather than evidence.
It is clear from watching the film that Darwinists are terrified that intelligent design is a foot in the door leading to forcible acceptance of creationism. Not so. Read her view in www.cdobs.com and the hot-tempered comments and come back to me with your findings.
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5/7/2008
Personal Aside: There Was Never Any Suspense Anyhow—Obama Will be Nominated and Hillary Won’t Quit (for Which I Salute Her).  | Everyone has known but the media that
the nomiination goes to Obama because of
the demographic realities. But all the same,
you go, girl! Stick in there until the end and
don't let the pro-Obama media push you out. |
No Suspense.
At this writing…a little before midnight Tuesday…the hype about Hillary losing North Carolina and either carrying Indiana by an eyelash or losing by an eyelash is-eyewash.
It presumes the race for the nomination is suspenseful. It has not been for many weeks. Barack Obama has been slated to win the votes of a majority of the Super-delegates for many weeks now. Those mathematicians who are calculating the numbers don’t understand that at this point it is not a mathematical game but a strategic one. Literally a no-brainer since it involves the long range future of the Democratic party. Why?
Because the future of the Democratic party is tied up with its huge lock on the black vote. Super-delegates are all for the most part practical politicians. To snatch the nomination away from Obama when he is ahead in delegate count would irreparably destroy much black loyalty to the Democratic party. That loyalty is essential if the party is to continue to win slots up and down the ticket. Can you imagine what would happen to congressional races, state and county offices from top to bottom in every major state in this nation that has black votes? Not going for Obama would be a catastrophic mistake and its devastation could last for at least a generation. Not that disillusioned blacks would vote for McCain. There would be a tremendous fall-off in turnout.
This doesn’t mean Hillary will or should quit. She should definitely not because in the last weeks she has impressed many who are not in her corner with her resilience and toughness, two qualities vital for the presidency. In contrast, I have noted among my Democratic friends that Obama’s attractiveness has started to fade. Why-because of Jeremiah Wright? No, not necessarily although it was definitely a distraction.
Obama’s attractiveness as a candidate has been that he presents a different approach to politics, that the old see-saws, parsing, lies and doubletalk will end with him. In the campaign he has engaged in studious doubletalk that is not even slightly muted. Take his passing the ethics bill in the state Senate. He was allowed to put his name on it because Emil Jones, the ex-sewer worker turned senator, allowed him to. He overstates minimal accomplishments in the Senate; he outright lied just as Hillary has lied in trying to link himself to great events i.e. stating in Selma, Alabama that the bloody 1965 attack on the bridge impelled his parents to marry. How touching. But they had been married several years previously. How does that differ from Hillary’s claim to run through sniper-fire or that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary-two events that have been disproved factually?
His entire career in the Senate has been marked by caution and fear of substantive legislating. The Gang of 14…composed of Democrats and Republicans…who cut through the impasse in the Senate to achieve votes for court nominees (and I am not convinced of its overall value)…was accomplished without him. He is a straight Emil Jones-like party line hack. In the past few days I’ve been checking with people who knew the early Barack to see if they had perceived a searching for Jesus Christ which led him to Trinity United Church of Christ. The answer uniformly is no. His goal as has become clear now was to hang with a church that had at least 10,000 members who could supply the nucleus to his political career. If he found Christ somehow in that search, fine-but politics was the basis. The inflammatory rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright, not much different than any other storefront haranguer, didn’t faze him. Nor actually was he in the pews for any considerable time at all. He was doing “a shake and howdy” with people and his presence as a parishioner was, as Wright candidly admitted, very slight.
I am rather alone, I think, in imagining that a Barack Obama candidacy might well be easier for McCain to beat than a Hillary one. Hillary is not prone to make such huge mistakes as Obama. She is a better debater than Obama. Understand, I think the odds are very-very slight that Republicans can win this one…but I feel that quite by accident, we got the strongest candidate in John McCain-one whom I didn’t favor for first, second or third place. But given the nature of the contest, I think he is the best we could find. I think the contrast between McCain and Obama will be a better contrast than between McCain and Hillary.
I am sure Hillary will continue to run even if she has to live off the land and while she will give token support to Obama in the general, events…my dear boy, events…will occur that will make the Clintons valuable to the McCain forces by November. After all, Hillary would be foolish to accept the vice presidency given the age of this young man. Unlike the eccentric and erratic Fr. Andrew Greeley I won’t speculate on contingencies involving threats to life. Obama is a young, healthy man who if elected and if he does reasonably well could be reelected. A Hillary vice presidency would be an impediment to her. Her game plan should be to encourage a McCain victory with the understanding that if he’s around at age 76 and is able to comprehend, he should expect she will be running in 2012-or if he wants to pack it in, so much the better.
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