Pensive Pence

On July 7th I tweeted this: My pick for GOP veep is Newt, since he’s the only one whose career won’t be ruined, since it’s already ruined. A lot of commentators were picking Newt, right up to a few days before The Donald picked Mike Pence, my governor. I have been living in Indiana for over three decades and have seen a number of governors come and go. A couple of times I have even been down in the Governor’s Mansion in Indianapolis, back when Evan Bayh was governor. Never met him, but I did speak with his wife. It was an arts in Indiana gathering.

Now Bayh is running for the open Senate seat, vacated soon by Dan Coats, who won it when Evan skedaddled for the greener pastures of lobbying. Now he wants back in. I’m all for him, given the Republican competition.

But, it was Mitch Daniels’ two terms as governor that most upset me. Mitch sold (“leased”) the Indiana Toll Road, I-80, America’s Main Street, thereby reaping monies for him to lavish on his cronies and favorite projects, however ill-advised. I wrote about all this in 2006. I drove the length of the Toll Road in early June this year and admired, a decade later, its ruins, the closed highway “Travel Plazas,” now looking like sets from Mad Max movies, the road itself so pockmarked that repairs can no longer be put off.

Daniels is a lot like Paul Ryan, elevated as a Republican intellectual regardless of all the evidence to the contrary. Currently, Daniels now heads Purdue University, hoping to privatize as much of public education as he is able, repeating there his experience as governor. Daniels led Indiana to be one of the first Right to Work states while championing school vouchers. The only luck for the population is that he won’t be returning to national politics anytime soon, given the controversies surrounding his marriage have left Mitch in a matrimonial ditch.

Now we have Mike Pence, who is Mitch Daniels with fewer brains. The litany of Pence’s many missteps as governor (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act anyone?) has been covered by the media, more or less, since he was selected as Trump’s veep. Since looks, appearances, are important to Trump, I presume he thought Pence passed muster - Trump evidently didn’t want to be paired with either Newt or Christie, two overweight court jesters. Pence has always seemed to me as if he was beamed down from the Mothership, someone who could easily be cast in Star Wars, a few strands of DNA away from android.

But Pence does fit the double-mask Janus candidacy that Trump wants to run, though, in fairness to Janus, this campaign is more a comedy/tragedy masquerade: Pick which one applies to Pence. Whichever, Pence is on the ticket to “shore up” the GOP base, all those rabid evangelicals and anti-abortion zealots. Pence is nothing but a Republican talking points machine, now augmented by lines about how great Donald Trump is and how he hears the heartbeat of the American public.

So, who is Hillary going to pick? Her choices aren’t much more appetizing than Trump’s. I had always favored Sherrod Brown, but no one wants to lose a Senate seat from Ohio, where the convention no-show GOP governor would name a replacement. Tim Kaine, though, is also a Senator, but Virginia has a Democratic governor. Kaine is a favorite of many, though, in the Trump mode, lookism being supreme, Kaine is too much of a feminized male, soft in aspect, not the sort of masculine image Hillary Clinton may need at her side. He’s definite second husband material. She’s doubtless tired of alpha-type males, but who she picks will matter. She needs younger, but experienced, though Pence has certainly lowered the veep-debate-ready bar.

And speaking of Indiana vice presidents, Dan Quayle has taken too much blame for his sorry service to George H. W. Bush. Quayle contributed to H.W.’s second term loss to Bill Clinton. Recall that Bush was having health problems toward the end of his first term, which brought on fears of Quayle being able to ascend during Bush’s second term, if he secured one.

But, I have always held that Quayle all along was a brainchild of 41. George senior wanted to prepare the way for his sons, one or the other, George or Jeb, neither of whom went off to Vietnam. He went with Quayle, knowing that someone of the Vietnam generation had to go through the crucible of public opinion about that issue, and Quayle’s time in the National Guard protecting the golf courses of Indiana would provide the precedent. And Quayle did survive the fire of that debate. But, of course, what Bush senior did not foresee was that the career he ironically protected was that of the draft-dodger Bill Clinton, though Bush had no idea he would be running against the guy when he ran in 1988.

But when George W. finally came along he did escape the Vietnam-service gauntlet, barely. He “beat” a man who actually served in Vietnam, Al Gore. I don’t think Hillary will play the veteran card for her veep pick, since the most likely veterans available would have served in a war she supported and her base abhors.

The July 19th version on the Huffington Post can be found here.

The Birther Business

A number of publications have been running President Obama assessment articles, given that he is nearing the end of his second term. And the campaign of Donald Trump is also fomenting retrospectives on the Obama administration, given The Donald’s role in the “birther” controversy during the president’s second term contest.

During Obama’s initial campaign in 2008 there was not that much mention of birth certificates, more of Hawaii, though — the media seemingly needing to acquaint the mainland with its existence back then. No birther blather rose all the way to the top, since John McCain had been born somewhere in Panama, so that fact made Obama’s place of birth rather moot.

It always struck me as funny that so many people wanted to believe that Obama had been born in a hut in Kenya. The contemporaneous birth notice in a Hawaiian newspaper would have been, by itself, far beyond the heroics of the most Manchurian Candidate-esque conspirators.

What the birther controversy was about, however, was Obama’s blackness, his alleged foreignness, his presumed shadow religion — linked to that unfortunate picture of him with the cloth head wrap — the not American-ness of our president, running for his second term. What might be hard to remember is that the country’s native latent racism had been fairly suppressed, muted, during Obama’s first run for the office.

One odd reason for that was the charges made, at first, by Hillary Clinton’s original African-American supporters claiming that Obama wasn’t black enough, that he hadn’t grown up with the usual African-American experience back on the mainland. There was too much Hawaii and Indonesia, only turning up in the contiguous states permanently when he went to college. Like his father, the Kenyan.

None of the Obama-isn’t-black-enough critics made that last charge back in 2008, to my knowledge. In fact, during that campaign year there was much more made of Obama’s mother and his white Kansan grandparents who played such a role in raising him when he was young. The not-black-enough campaign, however short lived, had unexpected positive results.

The birther business coming again before the second-term election was the tip of the spear of all the finally released accumulated racism that had built up during Obama’s first four years. And Donald Trump’s antic search for Obama’s birth certificate let all that simmering racism be focused.

But what has always struck me as strange, was the singular fact that of all the American presidents, Obama was, is, the only one whose father wasn’t born himself in America, or Ireland. Three Presidents (Jackson, Buchanan, Arthur) had fathers born there. Even George Washington’s father, Augustine, was born on American soil, in the Colony of Virginia, in 1694.

When Obama was/is referred to as African-American, it is truly literal. He is first generation. His father was an African. Obama is half Kenyan. I always thought that was remarkable in and of itself. Forget birth certificates. The only birth certificate I ever wanted to see back in 2008 was LeBron James’. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties when he played basketball in high school. I would have been interested in seeing proof of his date of birth.

Early in Obama’s presidency I was also struck by the fact that the last two Democratic presidents, both ending up with two terms, grew up without their birth father. What were the odds for that? In Bill Clinton’s case, his father died and was unknown to the future president; only his step father, whose name he eventually took, figured in his life. In Obama’s case, the father was there, largely invisible, in the world, until he wasn’t, certainly inspiring all those dreams from his father that resulted in Obama’s first book.

Both of these fatherless boys married women suitable for their nascent political careers. Bill Clinton seemed in his youth to favor bimbos, but he knew he would have to have a serious wife if he wanted to rise in politics. Obama’s calculations were a bit different, but no less obvious and political. Both men, it is clear, lucked out in their choices.

Yet, the Republicans have taken it upon themselves to stress Obama’s blackness, even in the current election of 2016. They may, or may not, given their liking of archaic terms, favor the word mulatto to speak of our half-white, half-black president, but they have made it clear that such a person only gets a seven year term as president, not an eight year term. Mulattoes, according to the GOP leadership, are only entitled to 7/8s of a presidency. Hence, no movement at all on President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, the last and most blatant example of Republican obstructionism.

And, of course, the presumptive Republican nominee, The Donald, keeps denouncing immigrants of whatever sort, along with claiming right of ownership of various races (“Oh, look at my African-American over here.”). But President Obama’s father wasn’t even an immigrant, illegal or otherwise. Yet, Trump’s current wife is an immigrant, filling, as she did, that important immigration fast-track category of supermodel.

I haven’t thoroughly checked, but if her husband gains the office, unlikely as that now seems, she might well be the first foreign-born First Lady. It’s not that I am a raging jingoist, but I am trying once again to make the obvious more clear: The world is getting smaller and smaller. That changes most everything, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t make the people who want to run it any larger.

The July 1st version on the Huffington Post can be found here.

Ted's Excellent Mansplaining

I was exercising at my university’s faculty gym when Ted Cruz was laboriously mansplaining why he was choosing Carly Fiorina as his virtual Veep for his holographic future presidency. It was a classic case: I, Ted Cruz, a man, will now tell you why I have the good judgment to select Carly, a woman, the glass-ceiling shatter-er. Fiorina may or may not have the potty-mouth of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character in Veep, which seems to be the chief qualification of our modern era, but, at this point, who cares? While exercising away, I kept wondering when Cruz was going to bring on Fiorina, since I had been on the elliptical machine beyond my usual allotment of time and Cruz, who had appeared around 4:15 was still blabbering on after 4:30.

Cruz obviously loves the sound of his voice. He grins inappropriately during his speeches and his unhappy slice of smile signifies the pleasure he takes hearing his own voice. I left the exercise room fifteen minutes later and Cruz was still there yapping. No Carly. I don’t tweet much, but had I a smart phone, as a number of other fellow exercisers did, staring transfixed at their small screens, I might have tweeted: #Where is she?

I saw later in the day from various news outlets that Fiorina finally made it to the podium, to little effect. God knows Carly understands losing, having done it so often both in the private and public sector. From the clips I saw, she evidently sang a song and seems to have pleasant voice while singing.

Indiana is now hot. Cruz and Carly came to South Bend yesterday and clogged up the downtown when I tried to get to the road show version of The Book of Mormon (I’m trying for contrast here) playing at the Morris Performing Arts Center. A lot of Cruz supporters in his crowd at the nearby Century Center were obese (less at the Mormon musical, which was wonderful theatrically, but reprehensible in every other way), though I don’t think, unlike the First Lady, Cruz considers obesity a national health issue. I am not body shaming, I’m just reporting. In any case, the Cruz rally was in one of the Century Center’s smaller venues, a room I last was in when a friend took me to a cat show held there. Lots of cats in cages.

Trump is coming to the Century Center on Monday night and Bernie Sanders is booked there Sunday, May Day. Hillary Clinton appeared at a more or less private setting, the AM General plant outside of the city that now makes Mercedes-Benz-es for the China market, a couple of days ago.

Some commentators out there in mediaworld are saying that Indiana may be someone’s Alamo, Cruz, Trump’s, it’s hard to tell. The connection is very thin. Maybe it’s because Cruz is a Senator from Texas. Is he Jim Bowie, Santa Anna, Davy Crockett, the Mexicans, the fort? It doesn’t make much sense. Who is running over whom? I guess it’s the last-stand business.

Truth might be the first casualty in war, but language seems to be the first in campaigns. Now, the self-presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, wants to slogan-ize once again America First! Not that many voters are going to think of Charles Lindbergh and his various enthusiasms pre-WWII that were attached to the slogan when first coined. Lindbergh loved the Luftwaffe. Poor Lindbergh. He flew planes. The Donald owns many. Perhaps Pat Buchanan is Trump’s unacknowledged campaign model.

Locally, there are contested races down ticket going on throughout Indiana, which may or may not affect the upcoming election. A Senate seat is open, thanks to the happy retirement of Dan Coats. He returned to Indiana in 2010 to assume the seat vacated by Evan Bayh. Coats is the only recidivist Senator, once retired, active lobbyist, then elected once again.

But the Democrats are still hoping for a win eventually against Mike Pence, the current governor, former right-wing radio talker (The Mike Pence Show), who even moderate Republicans have difficulty putting up with, especially after the costly fiasco of his Religious Freedom Restoration Act of late March, 2015. Pence was pictured with what looked like a high school production cast of Nunsense, after he signed the bill. Yes, let us restore all those lost religious freedoms! Pence has half-heatedly “endorsed” Ted Cruz, “I will be voting for Ted Cruz....” this coming Tuesday. Democrats have John Gregg running, who has run and lost before, but this time is changing his image, becoming a bit less rustic.

But it is the Republican primary for Senate that is interesting. Two contenders, Marlin Stutzman and Todd Young, both GOP Indiana district U.S. representatives, are lashing out at each other for the position, given Coats’ departure and longing for the hard work of lobbying. No love lost there, just like most of the Republican presidential primary cohort. Both candidates are really unappetizing, so there’s a slim chance for the potential Democratic candidate. Baron Hill, who lost to Coats a long time ago, in 1990, is serving as the warm-body sacrifice.

But, what really goes on here in Indiana won’t be covered much in our week in the sun. It’ll be more drive-by journalism, the 90 plus percent hoping for good visuals, the desired seen and heard reportage. On the bright side, if Trump gets the nomination Pence may well lose his reelection. I am not much into predictions - I was wrong about water beds way back when - but in the presidential primary race here I will predict wins for Bernie and The Donald. In any case, it will be close.


This ran in the Huffington Post on April 29, 2016. Click here.

The Haunting of Hillary

One thing that made the Clintons so mad about the 2008 presidential election is that Hillary would have won in a walk. That knowledge alone can account for Bill Clinton’s anger back in that campaign over the realization that Barack Obama would be getting the nomination. Bill had lashed out at Obama in January 2008 over his superior “anti-war” stand, in opposition to Hillary’s vote for the war in Iraq: “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen.”

The same sort of anger by the former president was displayed some ten days before the New York primary when Clinton again lashed out, this time at Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia who yelled that black youth weren’t “super-predators” and Bill shouted back, “You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter.” That both incidents eight years apart fell into a shadow caused by race may not be coincidental.

Back in 2008, John McCain was a weak candidate made even weaker by his selection of Sarah Palin as half the ticket. Who profited? Of course, Barack Obama, who may have not become the first African-American president without running against such a vulnerable pairing. It was six of one, half-dozen of the other. It would have been either the first woman president or the first black president. How easy an election did it turn out to be for Democrats? Americans elected a black man to the highest office in the land, that’s how easy. This is not hindsight. It was obvious at the time.

Previous to the recent New York primary, which Hillary Clinton won handily, the same 2008 dynamic was at play. And that is why she showed anger against the Sanders campaign, its mucking up of her march to history. Whatever the final act of the Republican implosion theater turns out to be, it will present the American people with an even more damaged alternative than McCain/Palin.

As Donald Trump tries to clean up his act, now cross-dressing as presidential, rational, and contemplative, both Clintons, thanks to their domination of the New York State political apparatus, may step back from and lessen their irrational fears of losing the nomination again. It remains to be seen if Senator Sanders plays along and stems his straight forward attacks against many of Hillary Clinton’s obvious shortcomings. He has saved Republican super PACs millions of dollars in advertising expense by doing their work for them. But, once she is the nominee they will unload their millions in the same sort, and worse, of vilification.

I happened to be in Israel when the news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal first broke in 1998, standing atop storied Masada looking out at the Dead Sea. Some Israelis were joking that it was a Mossad plot, inserting Lewinsky into the White House. When Trump’s campaign first gained steam, I heard from fellow Americans that he must be a Democratic agent, so successfully was he crashing the Republican house of cards.

Both surmises are doubtless equally true, being not true at all, except in effect. If Trump is the GOP nominee and Hillary Clinton the Democratic, she should walk into the office easier than Barack Hussein Obama did.

In 2008, sufficient Americans placed their hope in a young, relatively untested first-term Senator from Illinois, while the Republicans presented their dysfunctional odd couple, McCain/Palin, for the country’s approval. This time around who will they select? Trump/Kasich? Trump/Haley? It is conventional wisdom that vice presidents don’t matter, but this coming election may prove that wrong, for a lot of obvious reasons, balance, gravitas, etc. Nonetheless, the Democrats, barring the fatal unknown, should win, furthering the mixed legacy of the Obama presidency.

Obama, as it turned out, wasn’t too good to be true. That he was - at least he was true to himself. He just turned out to be too good to be as effective as his voters hoped.


The HuffPost version here:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-o/the-haunting-of-hillary_b_9742128.html?utm_hp_ref=bernie-sanders

Revenge of the Sixties

Ted Cruz, the Dump Trump movement’s great white hope, is the kind of guy who gave high school debate teams a bad name. A hectoring know-it-all who favors Chautauqua — not Hillary Clinton’s Chautauqua — stage gestures and oratory. Ineffably smug. But the oddity is that the Democratic number two, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, shares some of these same qualities, the hectoring know-it-all side at least, though he seems, unlike Cruz, lovable and grand fatherly.

I recently gave a talk at Lone Star College in Houston on the humanities and income inequality. Lone Star is part of the state’s junior college system and the students know first hand a lot about income inequality. I brought up the 19th century bohemian tradition, which meant to make poverty bearable and discussed beatniks, hippies, and the short period during the Sixties and beginning Seventies when anti-materialism was afoot. Back then there was enough surplus capital around, and higher education, at least in state schools, was not very pricey. Students actually had time on their hands to join movements and protest and organize.

Of course, that period ended with a bang and hardly a whimper. Reverence for the rich came in full bore with Ronald Reagan. Education policy changed, resulting in the for-profit college explosion over the last three decades, a form of privatizing, which was going on everywhere, even, and most stealthily, in the military itself. First end the draft, second begin to privatize around the edges. In modern history one result of that could be seen in Benghazi, an event more about contractors than enlisted soldiers.

During the same time line Wall Street average salaries in the NYC securities industry went from about 50 thousand dollars a year in 1981, double that of all other private sector jobs, to 400 thousand a year by 2008, whereas other jobs were only slightly above 55 thousand. The Wall Street bonus economy bloomed in the 1980s. Salaries skyrocketed from double to more than six times everyone else’s.

That rise didn’t just affect people working on Wall Street. CEOs across the land, top executives at most every corporation, including academia, felt deep in their souls that they were being underpaid. If those twenty-somethings at Goldman Sachs were making a half million, why weren’t they? Salary inflation at the top was contagious. During the 1970s the ratio of CEO pay to the company’s workers was around 20 to 1. By 2012 it went to 350 to 1. And that figure is the average.

These three developments, privatization, Wall Street profligacy, CEO salaries, were not disconnected. It was an imperfect storm, but well thought out. One example of this forward thinking is the so-called Powell Manifesto, his “Confidential Memorandum: Attack of American Free Enterprise System,” written by the future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell in 1971.

Various commentators claim it “influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s ‘hands-off business’ philosophy.” The memo is a remarkable document, prescient and alarming, though not in general circulation till the 1990s.

The right-wing think tanks were created and the changes to universities certainly came to fruition, though even Powell didn’t foresee the wholesale privatization, or the creation of the one percent, resulting in the current state of income inequality. The one percent/ninety-nine percent phrase was more or less coined in 2011, during the Occupy Wall Street eruption — though a movement largely feckless, the Occupy label has continued, stuck on all sorts of demonstrations.

Our culture values persistence and Bernie Sanders has been persistent. He has two or three things to say and he’s being saying them since he began to run for office in Vermont during the 1970s. What is amazing is that it has taken nearly five decades for his message to be heard. He is the revenge of the Sixties, a pied piper who has captured the young, with the distilled elixir of his (and my) youth. He has stepped out intact from a Sixties time capsule. He doesn’t look like a hippie, a beatnik, no serape or beads, no candles in Chianti bottles.

Bernie Sanders wears suits, but the excesses of the right over the same span have become so egregious, brazen, and successful, that no one, even the least sophisticated (i.e. Trump supporters), can miss or deny it, especially college students who are footing a lot of the bill — just to be educated. The older folk who are solidly in Bernie’s camp tend to be remnants of Ralph Nader-ites; Nader, in his youthful incarnation, was one of Powell’s chief villains in his mordant memo.

And though Bernie is running for the Democratic nomination, his campaign does have the atmospherics of a third party contest. As does Donald Trump’s. There is a divide being created that may turn into a chasm and it is still unknown if it can be healed, if Hillary Clinton ends up the nominee. As Bernie would remember, back in 1968 a lot of the titular Democratic young did not vote for Hubert Humphrey, allowing Nixon’s win, because, as was often said back then, progressives wanted to “heighten the contradictions.” Humphrey lost by less than one percent of the vote. Alas, over the decades, thanks to the Republican right, the contradictions have certainly been heightened.

The Huffington Post version can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-o/revenge-of-the-sixties_b_9634464.html