Connecting.the.Dots

The Politics of Attention Deficit Disorder

2009-07-20T10:22:00.004-04:00

Six months of scrambling on all fronts--bank bailouts, economic stimulus, climate change--have brought the President lower approval ratings from a public suffering from crisis overload and left him needing a Hail Mary pass to score on his key issue.

"With skepticism about the president's health-care reform effort mounting on Capitol Hill--even within his own party," the Washington Post reports, "the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to dramatically increase public pressure on Congress: all Obama, all the time.

"Senior White House aides promise 'an aggressive public and private schedule' for Obama as he presses his case for reform, including a prime-time news conference on Wednesday, a trip to Cleveland, and heavy use of Internet video to broadcast his message beyond the reach of the traditional media."

This test of presidential clout, coming up on a complex issue against the background of other trillion-dollar commitments that have still to bear fruit, leaves him exposed not only to Republicans with their simple-minded message of tax phobia and deficit fear but increasing anxiety among 2010-vulnerable Democrats who now sense a potential lack of visible progress on all fronts by next fall to keep them in office.

In this kind of ADD political climate, health care legislation lends itself to demagogues' cover on all sides, with providers "promising" non-binding new efforts to cut costs as Republicans line up with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus to "back" a future public option for health insurance with trigger mechanisms that will never be pulled off.

This leaves the President having to resist the temptation to settle for small gains that can be claimed as victory but will leave the failed health-care system fundamentally unchanged.

As he embarks on this week's campaign, to get him into "Win one for the Gipper" mode, he may want to take to heart Ted Kennedy's valedictory in Newsweek, "The Cause of My Life," which retells the medical consequences from generations of the "Kennedy curse" and makes a passionate plea for universal health care now.

Cronkite

2009-07-18T08:24:00.004-04:00

For the oldest of us, the Evening News died yesterday, the "most trusted man in America" who came into our living rooms every weekday night and told us about what was happening beyond our own senses, "And that's the way it is."

For two tumultuous decades, before 24/7 cable and the Internet, Walter Cronkite was the face of the news, mediating between millions of Americans and the raw chaos of events, ordering the flood of words and pictures into a hierarchy of importance and sending viewers off to live the other 23 and a half hours feeling well-informed.

It was an illusion, of course, but Cronkite was the ideal embodiment of reassurance that the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s was not upending the world as they knew it.

In the days before O'Reilly, Olbermann et al, he presented violent scenes at home and abroad with a McLuhanesque cool that drained most of the threat from them, giving only rare glimpses of human emotion in his welling eyes and shaking voice as he reported JFK's death, the disorder of the 1968 Democratic Convention and the sight of a man walking on the moon.

But beyond that calm façade were good journalistic instincts about the failed war in Vietnam ("If I've lost Cronkite," LBJ said. "I've lost middle America") and the meaning of Watergate (along with Woodward and Bernstein, CBS News was following the break-in while the rest of the media slept).

In the flood of tributes that inevitably follow the death of such a figure, the one that undoubtedly would have meant the most to Walter Cronkite was that he was always a good reporter. That he certainly was.

Wall St. Wins, We Lose, What Else is New?

2009-07-17T13:57:00.005-04:00

Juggling money is still America's biggest growth industry, according to the new earnings boom for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, who only months ago came to Washington to fill their begging bowls with taxpayer bailout funds.

Cranky Paul Krugman says such news "shows that Wall Street’s bad habits--above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis--have not gone away" and "that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely."

Back to business as usual, the big firms are generating huge profits from trading and underwriting securities to make up for the failure of those who are losing jobs to keep up with payments on mortgages and credit cards.

At the same time, the pain is being spread equally to prudent retirees who saved without gambling in the stock market but, thanks to the Fed's concern for Wall Street's ability to keep wheeling and dealing, are earning a fraction of one per cent on their hard-earned money, much of which will now go to keeping up the huge bonuses of those who shuffle it around.

Is this a great country or what?

Moon Landing and Chappaquiddick

2009-07-17T10:42:00.005-04:00

Forty years ago this weekend, two events marked the end of the Kennedy era--Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, as JFK had promised, and his brother Ted drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick to signify the end of Camelot.

"I believe," President John F. Kennedy had told Congress the year Barack Obama was born, "that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."

For those old enough to remember, that juxtaposition of Apollo 11 and Chappaquiddick will always mark the 1960s as a reminder of the essential truth about politics: high ideals being pursued by flawed human beings.

The jubilation over the moon landing ("one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind") was tempered back then by the trauma of a president's brother, and likely future candidate himself, involved in the death of a young woman and a scandal worsened by attempted coverups and a Nixonlike Checkers speech to save a political career.

Looking back 40 years later, does all this confirm Martin Luther King's contention that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," as often cited now by the first African-American president in history?

Chappaquiddick destroyed Ted Kennedy's hopes for the White House and led to 40 years of honorable service in the Senate, ending now with a terminally ill man devoting his remaining strength to the cause of health care reform.

Are the Kennedys' moral books balanced? A Higher Power will have to make that judgment.

Democracy of the Deaf

2009-07-16T11:25:00.004-04:00

In Washington's two debates this week, health care reform and the Sotomayor nomination, you could turn off the TV sound and miss little of substance--the D or R on the chest of the talking head will tell you that the subject is universal coverage or government control and deficits, judicial qualifications or activism.

The election of a president who prides himself on reaching across political divides has resulted in the irony of more partisanship than ever as remnants of the Republican party that rode roughshod over opposition in the Bush years are reduced to mouthing the slogans that brought them to power back then.

On health care, it's the Blue-Dog Democrats who are discussing the substance of proposals as the GOP repeats scare mantras about socialized medicine and keeps voting a straight party line in committees.

In the Sotomayor hearings, Republicans are obsessing over the Wise Latina remark and other speeches, while majority members are asking the judge about specific cases and legal principles in the course of her career on the bench.

As the Obama Administration closes in on its first six months in office, the reality of possible bipartisanship keeps receding, leaving it as only more slogan in a dialogue of the deaf.

Health Care as a Right

2009-07-15T10:45:00.003-04:00

The House proposal to raise taxes on the very rich to help cover health insurance for all brings into focus what has been a hidden issue in the debate until now: Should medical care be a right guaranteed to all by all, as education, safety in the streets and freedom from foreign invasion now are as part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

If government pays for the schooling of Americans and their safety in the streets, is it any less logical to consider protection from life-threatening disease as a basic right rather than an individual choice?

"Tax is a four-letter word" with voters, says conservative Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, pointing out that even families not in the top 1 percent "hope they're going to be there someday. So they don't necessarily think it's fair."

Even the Rightmost legislators and their constituents wouldn't propose privatizing the armed forces (pace Blackwater) and the nation's school systems but will argue that even partial public responsibility for saving lives in doctors' offices and hospital waiting rooms is unfair.

As the final showdown on health care reform comes closer, the President and his supporters are going to have to make that case against those who are still living with the Dickensian attitude that public responsibility for the poor ends with workhouses and prisons.

With Ted Kennedy's Senate committee now offering its own version of 21st century health care, that time is at hand.

Senate's Supreme Soap Opera

2009-07-14T10:12:00.003-04:00

As the Sotomayor Show drones on, Democrats and Republicans are pushing dueling plot lines--an American dream of minority upward mobility vs. the Conservative nightmare of activist judges tilting the scales in favor of it (see firemen, New Haven).

Behind these postures is the reality that Supreme Court confirmations are now TV soap operas in which politicians emote to their core constituencies on the way to what only Lindsey Graham openly acknowledges as Judge Sotomayor's predetermined final scene: "Unless you have a meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed.”

Without the high drama of Borking or Clarence Thomas High-Tech Lynching, this week's action will feature nitpicking over Wise Latina Woman and other off-the-bench remarks by the nominee, leaving the dutiful viewer to muse over the middle-aged woman at the center of it all.

Behind that figure of "a young minority woman from humble circumstances who overcomes obstacles, fights discrimination and achieves the American dream," David Brooks sees "a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way"--in short, a personal life.

Brooks' concern for Sotomayor is touching, but it invites comparison with attitudes toward the Justice she is succeeding, David Souter, a quirky, reclusive New England bachelor who preferred mountain-climbing to Washington socializing.

No one clucked over Souter's "sacrifices," and after this week's ordeal is over, Sotomayor will take her seat as the third woman ever on the Supreme Court and, by the time her tenure ends, such sexist distinctions will be long gone.

Cheney's Quiet Coup

2009-07-13T10:26:00.004-04:00

Last year's debate over whether the Vice President was part of the executive or legislative arm of government is being mooted by revelations that Dick Cheney was operating as a separate branch of his own.

Now we learn from Leon Panetta that he was running a secret counterterrorism program that the CIA withheld from Congress for eight years on his direct orders. Add this to Seymour Hersh's recent charge that Cheney had been running "an executive assassination ring...going into countries... and finding people on a list and executing them," and the picture emerges of a Vice President running his own post-9/11 war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

President Obama himself adds fuel to the fire in a CNN interview, telling Anderson Cooper that "the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001."

As much as the President and the rest of us want to put the Bush era to rest, the ghosts of Cheney's secret and illegal private war within the war on terror keep coming up and haunting us with questions of how much power one man can exercise unchecked in the administration of a president who calls himself the Decider but, where it counts, isn’t.

That past won't stay buried until we see it all fully and clearly.

Journalism 101: Whoring in Hard Times

2009-07-12T10:10:00.004-04:00

"The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record 'salons' was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions."

So says the paper's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, in a long mea culpa this weekend, underscoring how economic pressures can bedevil even those whose main business asset is a reputation for probity.

The lowliest staff member could have told the top people that it was not a good idea to ask $25,000 a head to attend "intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues" at the publisher's home with reporters serving as discussion leaders for "an evening of spirited but civil dialogue" with lawmakers and Administration members but, organizations being what they are, nobody did.

"They were all," Alexander writes, "aboard a fast-moving vehicle that, over a period of months, roared through ethics stop signs and plowed into a brick wall."

When a flier seeking underwriters for the first dinner this month was made public, an uproar ensued: "The damage was predictable and extensive, with charges of hypocrisy against a newspaper that owes much of its fame to exposing influence peddlers and Washington's pay-to-play culture. The Post's reputation now carries a lasting stain."

It's painful to imagine what Kay Graham, who took the heat for the Woodward/Bernstein exposure of Watergate that led to Richard's Nixon downfall, would have made of her granddaughter's decision to give lobbyists and their masters access to top government officials as well as her editors and reporters to help offset falling ad revenues.

Publisher Katharine Weymouth now says, "I have learned a lesson. Everyone has learned a lesson...If anyone should have stopped it, it should have been me."

She might have spared herself all this grief if she had known how the composer Gian Carlo Menotti answered the question of selling out commercially to support a noble endeavor.

"Your family is hungry," he said, "so send your sister out on the streets for a while. But when she came back, she would never be the same."

The Washington Post stopped just in time to keep its reputation for virtue, if not good judgment, intact.

Stimulus Stew

2009-07-10T11:27:00.004-04:00

The state of the economy, it's safe to say, is iffy at best but, less than six months after its passage, the market for badmouthing the stimulus bill is booming.

On the left, Paul Krugman insists that a "bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small" and "damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship."

From right field, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor tells us "the stimulus or so-called stimulus plan that spent almost $800 billion has not worked," while economist Karl Rove proclaims that "Obama can't be trusted with numbers" as he bashes the White House for being too slow in getting the money out the door.

In the center, Warren Buffet is musing about the need for a second round of pumping money into the economy, complaining that the first was "like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in...as if everybody was putting in enough for their own constituents."

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is on a tour touting positive results here and there, as the Recovery blog announces web seminars (Webinars) to spread the good news.

In this flurry of opinionating, the prize for empty news goes to USA Today for its headlined revelation, "Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in '08," which undermines itself by noting:

"Investigators who track the stimulus are skeptical that political considerations could be at work. The imbalance is so pronounced--and the aid so far from complete--that it would be almost inconceivable for it to be the result of political tinkering, says Adam Hughes, the director of federal fiscal policy for the non-profit OMB Watch. 'Even if they wanted to, I don't think the administration has enough people in place yet to actually do that,' he says."

Oh.

When Quitting Would Have Been Heroic

2009-07-09T23:33:00.004-04:00

David Broder muses today about exit strategies in public life:

"Two vastly different public officials--Robert McNamara and Sarah Palin--shared the spotlight this past week, triggering fresh thoughts about one of the classic dilemmas of governmental careers: When and how do you quit?"

Wrong question. What's important is why.

Coupling McNamara with Palin is less to the point than pairing him with Colin Powell, both honorable men serving presidents obsessed with fighting the wrong wars.

It took McNamara years to realize that his technocratic approach to Vietnam was foundering in Asian rice paddies and, when leaving as Secretary of Defense, he went to the World Bank without a public murmur about the American suffering over which he had presided.

Powell, on the other hand, knew from the start he was helping a president take the country to war with cooked intelligence but chose to leave quietly like a good soldier.

Either one could have spared his country the loss of lives, treasure and honor by quitting at the earliest possible moment and speaking out.

In comparing McNamara with Palin, Broder writes: "McNamara stayed too long and left too quietly. Palin is bailing out on her people far too soon. Neither can serve as an example for those in government wrestling with the decision of when to quit."

Sarah Palin does not belong in this equation. Whatever her reasons for leaving office, she was not involved in the death of young Americans in distant places. Leave her out of it and make a judgment about those who were.

Spitzer as AIG Culprit

2009-07-09T07:33:00.003-04:00

When a commission probes the economic meltdown, Michael Lewis' Vanity Fair piece "The Man Who Crashed the World" will serve as a rough draft of what went wrong at AIG and started the financial landslide.

In chronicling how the company built a tower of risk that tumbled around Wall Street's ears, Lewis in passing reveals the role of Eliot Spitzer, then New York Attorney General, in enabling it all.

Lewis' close questioning of "the silent, shell-shocked traders of the AIG Financial Products unit...finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the US economy, and the global financial system to their knees"--Joe Cassano, a hard-charging but relatively unsophisticated former back-room operator who drove credit default swaps to perilous heights.

When he got the job in 2001, Cassano was a pale imitation of the despotic CEO Hank Greenberg, who built AIG into an insurance powerhouse over 37 years, earning a AAA credit rating for prudence to go along with his aggressive tactics.

AIG FP’s employees, Lewis writes, "suspect that the only reason Greenberg promoted Cassano was that he saw in him a pale imitation of his own tyrannical self and felt he could control him. 'So long as Greenberg was there, it worked,' says one trader, 'because he watched everything Joe did.'"

But then in 2005 along came Spitzer, in his own relentless drive to build the reputation that led to his election as New York governor, to hound Greenberg out of AIG while treating Warren Buffet, whose General Re subsidiary was involved in the same questionable deals, with extreme deference.

After that, Lewis reports, "as one trader puts it, 'the new guys running AIG had no idea.' They thought the money machine ran on its own, and Cassano did nothing to discourage the view. By 2005, AIG FP was indeed, in effect, his company."

In building his own reputation as a white knight, Eliot Spitzer, later forced to resign for failings of his own, seems to have been instrumental in starting the avalanche that threatened to bury us all.

The Politics of Personality Disorder

2009-07-08T00:40:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford, who won't stop talking about the conjunction of their political and personal problems, are taking us into new territory where punditry has to give way to psychiatry to make sense of their bizarre behavior.

Consider the National Institute of Mental Health's definition of borderline personality disorder: "a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image, and behavior. This instability often disrupts family and work life, long-term planning, and the individual's sense of self-identity."

Of the two cases, Sanford's zigzags from ultraconservative pillar of the Republican Party to playboy of the Southern Hemisphere are easier to understand, a cultural cliché going back to "Rain," in which a devout missionary goes mad under the spell of Sadie Thompson.

Palin's odd week raises the psychiatric stakes--denying she is a quitter while quitting as she blames the media for her woes and then gives them nonstop interviews, a love-hate relationship with political fame that defies simple explanations.

In his analysis, Adam Nagourney of the New York Times observes that "there is plenty of evidence that argues against the idea that this was done with forethought and planning. The rollout was something of a car crash, as even her fans acknowledged."

Now Palin is all the over the place, talking to Time, CNN, ABC, Fox News and anyone else who will listen, wearing waders and spouting non-sequiturs next to a boatload of fish, embarrassing herself with references to a "Department of Law" in the White House and other unthinkable gaffes for someone John McCain and millions of voters deemed qualified to be a heartbeat away from a geriatric presidency.

Andrew Sullivan has compiled a dossier of her "lies," but that may not be the relevant category. What reality do politicians like Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford inhabit, and what would a psychiatrist from another planet make of their weird acting out?

Health Care Fallbacks

2009-07-07T08:35:00.004-04:00

The Obama White House is waffling on the public option and making piecemeal deals with providers, as hospitals now agree to sacrifice $155 billion over 10 years toward the cost of insuring 47 million Americans without coverage.

With the Administration conceding it "won't draw a line in the sand" and citing the Bush prescription-drug benefit in 2003 as a precedent, real health care reform is receding into a politics-as-usual charade to give the illusion of Change while making marginal improvements.

Now, the catch phrase is "trigger mechanism" that would let a public plan come into play when "competition was judged to be lacking," an evasion of breathtaking vagueness.

With Ted Kennedy on the sidelines, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is weakened in its efforts to push for an immediate public plan, but rhetoric is still strong.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is emoting: "If it's not there on day one, those of us who support a public option have a real problem with it."

Not exactly "We have just begun to fight," but with true reform approaching critical condition, the vital signs are growing weaker. Those who want to rage against the dying of the light had better make their voices heard soon.

Death of the Best and Brightest

2009-07-06T12:47:00.004-04:00

Robert S. McNamara, who died today at 93, was the exemplar of American know-how gone awry in a world too complicated for the practical mindset that built the most powerful nation on earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As one of JFK's "whiz kids" who went on to become LBJ's architect of the disastrous war in Vietnam, McNamara exemplified the limits of intellectual brilliance in a subtle and savage world.

"What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese,” he said, looking back in an oral history. “It led President Eisenhower in 1954 to say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall...

"I am certain we exaggerated the threat. Had we never intervened, I now doubt that the dominoes would have fallen; I doubt that all of Asia would have fallen under communist control...

“We didn’t know our opposition. We didn’t understand the Chinese, we didn’t understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents.”

A Harvard professor who left to become president of Ford after the financial devastation of his wife's illness, McNamara successfully brought his systems-analysis approach to running the Pentagon but became the main figure described in David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," Kennedy's crew of academic and industry brainiacs who pushed "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in Vietnam.

In later years, McNamara rued his role. "External military force cannot reconstruct a failed state, and Vietnam, during much of that period, was a failed state politically," he told CNN in a 1996 interview. "We didn't recognize it as such."

The lessons of his life are a critical reminder for the Obama Administration of the hubris that can blindside brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior. Robert S. McNamara learned them too late, but they can help guide American policy today.

Overstimulated Statehouses

2009-07-04T23:29:00.007-04:00

"People," Gail Collins asks in today's New York Times, "what is going on with governors in this country? Are we doomed to see them go bonkers one by one, state by state?"

As the President heads for Russia next week, he leaves behind troubled American statehouses, from Schwarzenegger's in California handing out IOUs like a busted riverboat gambler to those of Sanford and Palin, who resisted Washington's stimulus money and are now heading out of office, maundering about higher levels of arousal in Argentina and Alaska.

In New York, the legislature is being held hostage by Gov. David Paterson, who got the job after Eliot Spitzer resigned over professional stimulus, while former Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, awaiting federal trial for corruption, loses out to Palin for the Sitting Duck Award, granted annually to the most ridiculed newsmaker in the nation.

Affairs of the states have been roiled by collapsing economies and rising pressures on chief executives to manage their way through crises rather than primp for the TV cameras in search of higher office. For some, like Bobby Jindal after his disastrous rebuttal to Obama's address to Congress, that may be a blessing in thin disguise.

Meanwhile, the antics of Palin, Sanford et al are distracting millions of mourners who won't win the lottery for tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial next week. Compared to some governors, the Gloved One was a model of sanity and much more entertaining to boot.

Palin: Media Martyr's Revenge

2009-07-04T07:23:00.005-04:00

The self-styled victim of "the politics of personal destruction" has struck back at her tormenters by leaving Alaska's statehouse with trademark twinkly, crinkly aggression.

Sarah Palin dropped her bombshell on the eve of a holiday weekend, sending TV's talking heads scrambling back from vacation to studios or huffing over long-distance phone lines to parse her resignation.

Their puzzled but predictable responses ranged from William Kristol and Mary Matalin hailing the move as a masterstroke toward the 2012 presidential nomination to the consensus about it as bizarre and, in the words of Republican strategist Ed Rollins, "terribly inept."

In ten months on the national scene, Palin has tried to make ineptness an asset by equating competence with "politics as usual" and picturing herself as champion of the resentful and inarticulate from Joe the Plumber down

Palin's complaints about the media notwithstanding, her next logical move will be to follow the folk wisdom, "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em," and become a commentator for Fox News, where Rupert Murdoch will surely be happy to provide her with an income and national platform to ease the pain of her abuse by David Letterman and Vanity Fair.

In that role, and in lucrative lectures to right-wing Republican faithful, the former Governor will be free to exhibit her 21st century Animal Farm--from the pit bull with lipstick through yesterday's additions, the lame duck who milks a paycheck and dead fish who go with the flow.

In that ramble, Gov. Palin asserted that it would be "tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up. But that’s a worthless, easy path out. That’s a quitter’s way out."

Then she quit.

Her future colleague, Mike Huckabee, was rushed onto Fox News to hail her "spunk." Unlike Mary Tyler Moore's old TV boss Ed Asner, Huckabee was both collegially and politically restrained from a more understandable reaction, "I hate spunk."

Two Styles of Political Suicide

2009-07-01T15:50:00.006-04:00

While Mark Sanford continues to go for his own jugular with new confessions that will force him out of office, there is news about his neighbor to the north, John Edwards, that should bury him politically once and for all.

The two offer a fascinating contrast in self-destructive styles.

Now that his erotic secrets are out, the South Carolina governor just can't stop blabbing that he has "crossed lines" with other women, each revelation costing him the loss of more political allies, to say nothing of possible reconciliation with his wife.

Edwards, on the other hand, has been a true trial-lawyer weasel, practicing Nixon's "modified limited hangout," admitting only misdeeds revealed by others and hoping to keep all the rest buried.

This week those hopes were dashed by news of a book proposal by former aide Andrew Young, who once tried to take the rap for Rielle Hunter's pregnancy, but is now disillusioned (and no doubt greedy) enough to tell all about the affair, including their making of sexual videotapes and plans to marry after the death of Elizabeth Edwards from the cancer she has been fighting.

In his quest for the presidency, John Edwards kept talking about two Americas. When it comes to ambitious politicians, he and Mark Sanford have living in two different universes. but the result will be the same for their careers and help make voters wary of politicians posing as Mr. Clean.

Update: In the second part of his confessional AP interview, Sanford burbles, "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate." This declaration has haunting echoes of King Edward VIII renouncing his throne in 1936 for "the woman I love." The former king and his soul mate went on to a long life of exile in what used to be known as Café Society, but the GOP right wing has no such counterpart these days for dethroned Southern governors.

Bush's Ghosts

2009-07-01T11:26:00.003-04:00

Despite a consensus over his failed presidency, George W. Bush's enduring impact on American life is being marked this week by the slow-leak withdrawal from Baghdad and the end of a Supreme Court term in Washington dominated by his Chief Justice.

Behind headlines about the Obama White House's frenzy to resuscitate the economy from regulatory neglect, the Iraq war and Supreme Court makeover are reminders that eight years of Bush damage will take a long time to undo.

A New York Times analysis finds "a widening gap between the Democratic-led political branches and the Supreme Court" and that the court "appears poised to move to the right in the Obama era," noting that Bush's appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, voted the same way 92 percent of time, the highest rate for any pair of justices.

The coming gabble over the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter will obscure the hard fact that the Supreme Court will be little changed by her arrival.

Similarly, today's exit of American troops from Baghdad will be celebrated as a milestone but is more notable as evidence that President Obama's clear campaign promises have been muddied by the realities of ending a misbegotten war, leaving 130,000 American troops and who-knows-how-many security contractors in Iraq for who-knows-how-long.

Last November, Americans voted for Change, but the ghosts of Bush's presidency will be haunting them for years to come.

Sentimental Chicago Cops

2009-06-30T15:34:00.002-04:00

In 1968, what happened at the Democratic Convention was called "a police riot," but surviving officers held a reunion this weekend to celebrate what they remember as Custer's last stand for democracy.

The invitation assured attendees they were “the only thing that stood between Marxist street thugs and public order.”

As a witness to their efforts, arriving on a delegates' bus, I recall them surrounding the barbed-wire enclosed meeting site with battle gear, prompting a seatmate to advise, "If they ask you to take a shower, don't."

They were ubiquitous inside. One barred me from entering an area that my delegate badge entitled me to, nodding at Mayor Richard J. Daley seated front and center at the head of the Illinois contingent. "You guys pick presidents," he said, "but you know who's running this convention."

Outside, they were tear-gassing, clubbing and herding protesters, including a billy club across the backside of reclusive Hugh Hefner when he ventured from the Playboy Mansion to witness the action.

As they reminisced at their reunion, the retired cops could bask in the continuity of power in their domain, with Daley's son still running Chicago in a dynasty rivaling that of the Dear Leader's family in North Korea.

As the first Mayor Daley famously said on TV back then, "The police aren't there to create disorder, they're there to preserve disorder." They certainly did.

Non-Profit-News News

2009-06-29T11:36:00.005-04:00

A report in today's Washington Post raises questions about what's happening to the American economy, government and journalism.

Headlined "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue," it details how the world's largest company wormed its way into the Obama bailout and profited from issuing almost a quarter of the $340 billion in debt backed by the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, qualifying by owning two small Utah banks but at the same time escaping regulation of its huge financial operations.

The story exposes one element in a complex process but, beyond that, in its provenance, reflects wider problems in helping the public understand what's going on under the surface of government handouts and conventional reporting in these days of shrinking investigative journalism.

The Post notes: "This article was reported jointly with Jeff Gerth of ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. ProPublica is supported entirely by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations."

It's not only disturbing to find such charity behind the work of Washington's hometown news source but to consider the complications of how much attention it will generate in such GE-owned media outlets as NBC, MSNBC and CNBC.

Half a century of working in journalism and as a media critic have made me leery of conspiracy theories, but it will be interesting to see how much, if any, play this particular news gets tonight from Brian Williams, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer and other corporate employees.

It's same to assume that the President of GE won't be on the list of contenders for Worst Person in the World.

Disparity in Marital Smarts

2009-06-28T13:31:00.003-04:00

That new soap opera, "The Sanfords of South Carolina" revives interest in a subject that intrigued me over decades of editing women's magazines--the sexual politics of two-career marriages.

Working with ambitious women in their twenties and thirties, I was struck by how different their lives were from the Father-knows-best ethos of earlier generations. They weren't holding jobs, as most of their mothers did, only until they could start homemaking and procreating.

In those "dormitory marriages," there were fascinating variations of relationships between equals or, human nature being what it is, unequals on either side. In many cases, the wives were much smarter, sharper and more competent.

The Sanfords look like one of those couples. In a society that still gives power more easily to men (pace Todd Palin), however, a successful woman like Jenny Sanford has to morph from a New York investment banker to a helpmeet who "largely gave up her professional life and turned to helping her husband’s political career" even as she refused "to abandon her sense of identity, her direction, or her own opinions."

His wife successfully managed campaigns for Congress and the statehouse while rearing four sons, but for Mark Sanford, such a powerhouse performance may have been hard on the libido, leaving him vulnerable to "a dashing new version of himself," as Maureen Dowd puts it, in the eyes of an exotic stranger.

Sanford's downfall is a sad example of a society that is still struggling with the idea of powerful women (Hillary Clinton supporters had a lot to say about that last year and Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings may revive the subject next month).

Without making a Joan or Arc out of Jenny Sanford (her outward perfection may have been daunting to live with), however, it seems safe to assume that her husband's disappearance from the political scene won't deprive the nation of a strong, gifted leader. If and when she dumps him, Mrs. Sanford might think about running for something herself. When it comes to brains these days, Y chromosomes don't count.

Michael Jackson's Ultimate Career Move

2009-06-28T01:05:00.004-04:00

His passing is yet another reminder of how pop culture consumes its icons. At 50, Michael Jackson outlived Elvis by almost a decade, but neither was destined for the old age that Sinatra and Bing Crosby reached in an earlier era.

When Presley died in 1974, he was a grotesque caricature of himself, obese and drug-damaged, planning a comeback tour, but a cynic called his sudden death on a bathroom floor "a great career move" for an entertainer who was barely able to stand up while slurring his way through abbreviated concerts.

Now, amid all the outpouring of grief over a figure who meant so much to millions, there is the reality that Michael Jackson, emaciated and worn out, was dreading a comeback tour of his own and reportedly told fans after a recent rehearsal, "I don’t know how I’m going to do 50 shows...I need to put some weight on. I’m really angry with them booking me up to do 50 shows. I only wanted to do ten."

Now, celebrity vultures like Jesse Jackson and Deepak Chopra are stirring the publicity pot for new autopsies and investigations of doctors who were prescribing the multiple pills that Michael Jackson, like Elvis, was using to try to sustain a life that had spun out of control.

Those who remember the joy he brought into their lives will not be consoled by the search for someone to blame for losing him. The cynic may have been right after all. When the book closes on such lives, the careers remain, complete and intact.

Congress' Iffy Insider Trading

2009-06-27T12:09:00.002-04:00

Members of the House Financial Services Committee were wheeling and dealing in the stocks of banks they were about to bail out last fall, a revelation that may test Congress' rock-bottom approval ratings.

Both Democrats and Republicans were scurrying to profit from cashing in or out, according to enterprising reporters from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who mined disclosure forms for the fourth quarter of 2008:

"Anticipating bargains or profits or just trying to unload before the bottom fell out, these members of the House Financial Services Committee or brokers on their behalf were buying and selling stocks including Bank of America and Citigroup--some of the very corporations their committee would later rap for greed."

Compounding the news of such avarice is the suggestion that some were inept at it.

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, a Florida Republican, bought Citigroup stock the day before the House passed the rescue bill and President Bush signed it into law. She voted against it. The stock, which closed at $22.50 a share the day she acquired it, is now worth $3.

The Plain Dealer reports that "members of the Financial Services Committee were privy to closed-door discussions, staff briefings and political horse-trading decisions between political parties, Congress and the White House. Banks lobbied Congress and the administration heavily."

At least one of them missed the point.

Taking Obama's Measure

2009-06-26T12:37:00.003-04:00

With ten percent of his term in office gone, Barack Obama is being graded from the left and right and, not surprisingly, found to be doing (1) not enough and (2) too much.

(1) Paul Krugman faults him for "Not Enough Audacity," praising "Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues--and ability to explain those issues in plain English--is a joy to behold" but faulting "Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak."

(2) Peggy Noonan sees "a persistent sense of extraneous effort, of ambitions too big and yet too small, too off point, too base-pleading, too ideological, too unaware of the imperatives. And there is the depressing psychological effect of seeing government grow so much, so big, so fast. This encourages a sense that things are out of control and cannot be made better."

Somewhere between these polar views may be many who are less outspoken but trust Obama's instincts and judgment and, given the challenges he has to face, are willing to cut him some slack when he seems to be moving too fast or too slowly or trying to do too little or too much but won't hesitate to criticize him when we think he's going off course.

The opinion polls are getting iffy, but we still seem to be in a majority (pace Rush Limbaugh) who understand that, if Obama fails, we all do.