Tag Archives: President

Foreseeing a President Trump in 1998

05 Monday Dec 2016

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Richard Rorty

“[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the sadism which the academic Left tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

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Excerpted from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country.

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Andrew Jackson on the Rule of Law

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Andrew Jackson

“But in order to maintain the Union unimpaired, it is absolutely necessary that the laws passed by the constituted authorities should be faithfully executed in every part of the country, and that every good citizen should at all times stand ready to put down, with the combined force of the nation, every attempt at unlawful resistance, under whatever pretext it may be made or whatever shape it may assume…

You have no longer any cause to fear danger from abroad; your strength and power are well known throughout the civilized world, as well as the high and gallant bearing of your sons. It is from within, among yourselves, from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition, and inordinate thirst for power, that factions will be formed and liberty endangered… You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you, as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in his hands the destinies of nations make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts, and pure hands, and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time the great charge He has committed to your keeping.

My own race is nearly run; advanced age and failing health warn me that before long I must pass beyond the reach of human events and cease to feel the vicissitudes of human affairs. I thank God that my life has been spent in a land of liberty, and that he has given me a heart to love my country with the affection of a son. And filled with gratitude for your constant and unwavering kindness, I bid you a last and affectionate farewell.”

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Excerpted from Andrew Jackson’s 1837 Farewell Address.  This speech was given to mark Jackson’s retirement from both the presidency and public life. He would spend the remainder of his life at his home in Nashville, where he died in 1845.

The first section of these elevated words came bounding into my mind this morning as I watched coverage of Cliven Bundy’s Nevada saga debated by a panel of experts on CNN. That this stand-off is happening is strange enough; that it’s being discussed in earnest by talking heads on major networks is positively surreal. If there is anything worth saying about this self-parodying story it’s this: arming a militia is not a substitute for settling your grievances with fellow citizens, government, or law through established legal channels. For twenty years, Bundy grazed 900 cattle on 600,000 acres of public land, and he’s racked up a million-dollar tab. Obviously he doesn’t want to pay, but that money is owed — owed to the American taxpayer. If Bundy, his friends, or anyone else in Nevada had an issue with the Bureau of Land Management or the proportion of land aggregated to the Federal Government in their state, then they could have made their beef known on the streets and eventually on ballots and/or bills. Instead, as numerous sources have described, they only now decided to grab their rifles, form a barricade… and “put all the women up at the front.” Real honorable, guys.

While being interviewed by Sean Hannity last week, Bundy compared himself and his gang to the Minutemen of the American Revolution. Hannity apparently didn’t see anything objectionable in this claim, nodding in agreement as if it’s inherently legitimate to challenge taxation and the powers that be, so long as you do it with a cowboy hat, gun, and accent. But it’s not. The rule of law is not a slogan, nor is threatening federal agents with violence a game. John Adams wasn’t prattling like a pundit when he observed we are a nation of laws not a nation of men. Folks like Bundy are fond of railing against the takers in our society who depend on forms of government assistance like food stamps. But Bundy has literally and knowingly been mooching off of the federal government for two decades, only to now be feigning confusion and outrage when the bill, visible from miles away, comes due.

Read on:

  • Martin Luther King describes when and how you should break the law
  • Robert P. George and Charles Krauthammer discuss: What was the American founders’ view of human nature?
  • Thomas Paine delineates society from government

Cliven Bundy

‘Through the Haze of Pain’: Robert Kennedy Rises from the Depths

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in History, Philosophy

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Robert Francis Kennedy

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…

Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.

He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.

He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”

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A passage pulled from Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

I promise this is the last section from Schlesinger or Dallek that I’ll post — at least for awhile.

RFK / JFKRobert Kennedy FamilyRobert Kennedy and ChildrenRobert Kennedy and daughterJohn F. And Jacqueline Kennedy With Baby Caroline Kennedy

‘The Mystery of Suffering’: Robert Kennedy and the Meaning of Grief

24 Sunday Nov 2013

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Robert F. Kennedy Looking at John F. Kennedy Walk Away by Nat Fein

“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…

Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”

Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy

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Again from Arthur Schlesinger’s great (if hagiographic) biography Robert Kennedy and His Times.

About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.

I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.

Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.

Aeschylus

Last Words for MLK

Or, read some additional wisdom from the Greeks:

Roman Face

From Homer’s Odyssey

Romans Statue

From the Discourses of Epictetus

‘Tragedy without Reason?’: Robert Kennedy Endures His Brother’s Death

23 Saturday Nov 2013

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President Kennedy gallery

“Tragedy without reason? But was there anything in the universe without reason? The question echoed: ‘Why, God?’ For an agnostic the murder of John Kennedy seemed one more expression of the ultimate fortuity of things. But for those who believed in a universe infused by the Almighty with pattern and purpose—as the Kennedys did—Dallas brought on a philosophical as well as an emotional crisis. Robert Kennedy in particular had to come to terms with his brother’s death before he could truly resume his own existence.

In these dark weeks and months, on solitary walks across wintry fields, in long reverie at his desk in the Department of Justice, in the late afternoon before the fire in Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown drawing room, in his reading—now more intense than ever before, as if each next page might contain the essential clue—he was struggling with that fundamental perplexity: whether there was, after all, any sense to the universe. His faith had taught him there was. His experience now raised the searching and terrible doubt. If it were a universe of pattern, what divine purpose had the murder of a beloved brother served? An old Irish ballad haunted him.

Sheep without a shepherd;
When the snow shuts out the sky—
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?

He scrawled on a yellow sheet:

The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.

and

All things are to be examined & called into question—
There are no limits set to thought.”

Robert Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy at the Funeral for John F. Kennedy

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From chapter 26 (“Corridors of Grief”) of Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

How Robert Kennedy Responded to Tragedy

22 Friday Nov 2013

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Robert Kennedy and Brothers

“The question arose whether the coffin should be open or closed. The casket arrived at the White House early in the morning of the twenty-third. After a brief service in the East Room, ‘I (Robert) asked everybody to leave and I asked them to open it… When I saw it, I’d made my mind up. I didn’t want it open.’…

He spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom. Charles Spalding went with him and said, ‘There’s a sleeping pill around somewhere.’ Spalding found a pill. Robert Kennedy said, ‘God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well.’ He was still controlled. Spalding closed the door. ‘Then I just heard him break down…. I heard him sob and say, “Why, God?”’

He lay fitfully for an hour or two. Soon it was daylight. He walked down the hall and came in on Jacqueline, sitting on her bed in a dressing gown, talking to the children. Young John Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his father. His older sister, Caroline, said that Daddy was too big for his coffin…

Robert Kennedy sent a letter to each of his children and told his sisters to do likewise. He wrote his son Joe:

On the day of the burial
of your Godfather
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Nov. 24, 1963
Dear Joe,

You are the oldest of all the male grandchildren. You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill.
Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.

Love to you
Daddy

Robert F. and John F. Kennedy

He appeared, I noted the day after Dallas, ‘composed, withdrawn and resolute.’ Ben Bradlee the same day saw him ‘clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken.’ Discipline and duty summoned him to the occasion. Within he was demolished. ‘It was much harder for him than anybody,’ said LeMoyne Billings, his friend of so many years. He had put ‘his brother’s career absolutely first; and not anything about his own career whatsoever. And I think that the shock of losing what he’d built everything around … aside from losing the loved figure … was just absolutely [devastating]—he didn’t know where he was…. Everything was just pulled out from under him.’ They had been years of fulfillment, but of derivative fulfillment: fulfillment not of himself but of a brother and a family. Now in a crazed flash all was wiped out. ‘Why, God?’

Robert Kennedy was a desperately wounded man. ‘I just had the feeling,’ said John Seigenthaler, ‘that it was physically painful, almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack. I mean it was pain and it showed itself as being pain…. It was very obvious to me, almost when he got up to walk that it hurt to get up to walk.’ Everything he did was done through a ‘haze of pain.’ ‘He was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,’ said Pierre Salinger. ‘He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself.’ Douglas Dillon offered him his house in Hobe Sound, Florida, where Robert and Ethel went with a few friends at the end of the month. They played touch football —‘really vicious games,’ Salinger recalled. ‘… It seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down.’

Sardonic withdrawal seemed to distance the anguish. Seigenthaler went out to Hickory Hill after the funeral. ‘Obviously in pain, [Robert] opened the door and said something like this, “Come on in, somebody shot my brother, and we’re watching his funeral on television.” When Helen Keyes arrived from Boston to help with his mail, ‘I didn’t want to see him; I just figured I’d dissolve; and I walked in and he said, “Come in.” I said, “All right.” And he said to me, “Been to any good funerals lately?” Oh, I almost died, and yet once he said that it was out in the open, and, you know, we just picked up and went on from there.’ Senator Herbert Lehman of New York died early in December. Robert Kennedy, in New York for the services, said to his Milton friend Mary Bailey Gimbel, ‘I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.’

Robert and John F. Kennedy2

Friends did their best. John Bartlow Martin, retiring as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, went to say goodbye. ‘How his face had aged in the years I’d known him.’ Martin attempted a few words of comfort. ‘With that odd tentative half-smile, so well known to his friends, so little to others, he murmured…‘Well, three years is better than nothing.’ Peter Maas arrived from New York on the first day the Attorney General went out publicly—to a Christmas party arranged by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star for an orphanage.

The moment he walked in the room, all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence…. Bob stepped into the middle of the room and just then a little black boy—I don’t suppose he was more than six or seven years old—suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s deadl Your brother’s dead!’ … The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away…. The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”

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From Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

It’s the “remember all the things that Jack started” in Robert’s letter to young Joe that gets me. Started: like the title Robert Dallek’s great book, an unfinished life.

The KennedysRobert and John F. Kennedy 8Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy
Robert Kennedy and John F. KennedyRobert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Robert and John F. Kennedy3 John F. Kennedy Material released by the National Archives in Washington

Jack’s Easy Conquests

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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John F. Kennedy

“Jack’s greatest success in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be ‘a lady’s man’…

Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction… ‘I can’t help it,’ he declared with evident self-pleasure [in a letter to an adolescent friend] . ‘It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.’…

Jack’s easy conquests compounded the feeling that, like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class, he was entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly, even gratefully, from the object of his immediate affection. Furthermore, there did not have to be a conflict between private fun and public good. David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a 1939 biography of Queen Victoria’s prime minister, depicted young British aristocrats performing heroic feats in the service of queen and country while privately practicing unrestrained sexual indulgence with no regard for the conventional standards of monogamous marriages or premarital courting. Jack would later say that it was one of his two favorite books.

One woman reporter remembered that Jack ‘didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.’ After Harvard, when he spent a term in the fall of 1940 at Stanford (where, unlike at Harvard, men and women attended classes together), he wrote Lem Billings: ‘Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.’

But restraint was usually not the order of the day. He had so many women, he could not remember their names; ‘Hello, kid,’ was his absentminded way of greeting a current amour. Stories are legion — no doubt, some the invention of imagination, but others most probably true — of his self-indulgent sexual escapades. ‘We have only fifteen minutes,’ he told a beautiful co-ed invited to his hotel room during a campaign stop in 1960. ‘I wish we had time for some foreplay,’ he told another beauty he dated in the 1950s… At a society party in New York he asked the artist William Walton how many women in the gathering of socialites he had slept with. When Walton gave him ‘a true count,’ Jack said, ‘Wow, I envy you.’ Walton replied: ‘Look, I was here earlier than you were.’ And Jack responded, ‘I’m going to catch up.'”

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Again from Dallek’s great biography, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, this excerpt pulled from chapter 2 (“Privileged Youth”).

John in Joe’s Shadow

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

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Joe Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy

“For someone who prided himself on his independence — whose sense of self rested partly on questioning authority, on making up his own mind about public issues and private standards — taking on his elder brother’s identity was not Jack Kennedy’s idea of coming into his own. Indeed, if a political career were strictly a case of satisfying his father’s ambitions and honoring his brother’s memory by fulfilling his life plan, it is more than doubtful that he would have taken on the assignment. To be sure, he felt, as he wrote Lem Billings, ‘terribly exposed and vulnerable’ after his brother’s death. Joe’s passing burdened him with an ‘unnamed responsibility’ to his whole family — to its desire to expand upon the public distinction established by Joe Sr. and to fulfill Joe Jr.’s intention to reach for the highest office.

Nor was his father completely confident that Jack was well suited for the job. As Joe said later, his eldest son [Joe Jr.] ‘used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it. He was altogether different from Jack — more dynamic, more sociable and easy going. Jack in those days back there when he was getting out of college was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.’ Mark Dalton, a politician close to the Kennedys in 1945, remembered Jack as far from a natural. He did not seem ‘to be built for politics in the sense of being the easygoing affable person. He was extremely drawn and thin… He was always shy. He drove himself into this… It must have been a tremendous effort of will.’ Nor was he comfortable with public speaking, impressing one of his navy friends as unpolished: ‘He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on stage.’…

Despite his father’s help — or perhaps because of it — Jack continued to have great doubts about whether he was making the right decision. He could not shake the feeling that he was essentially a stand-in for Joe Jr. When he spoke with Look magazine, which published an article about his campaign, he said that he was only doing ‘the job Joe would have done.’ Privately he told friends, ‘I’m just filling Joe’s shoes. If he were alive, I’d never be in this.’ He later told a reporter, ‘If Joe had lived, I probably would have gone to law school in 1946.’ He disliked the inevitable comparisons between him and his brother, in which he seemed all too likely to come off second-best, but it seemed impossible to shake them.

Jack also felt temperamentally unsuited to an old-fashioned Boston-style campaign. False camaraderie was alien to his nature. He was a charmer but not an easygoing, affable character like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who loved mingling with people. Drinking in bars with strangers with whom he swapped stories and jokes was not a part of JFK’s disposition. ‘As far as backslapping with the politicians,’ he said, ‘I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.'”

Joe Kennedy Jr., Joseph Kennedy Sr., and John F. Kennedy

__________

From chapter 4 (“Choosing Politics”) of Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.

In the 2nd chapter of the book, there is an anecdote which relates Joe Jr.’s affable swagger during his days at Harvard:

His brother’s success in campus politics also reduced any hopes Jack may have had of making a mark in that area. Under an unstated family rule of primogeniture, the eldest son had first call on a political career. And Joe Jr. left no doubt that this was already his life’s ambition. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, one of Joe’s tutors, remembered him as keenly interested in politics and public affairs and quick to cite his father as the source of his beliefs. “When I become President, I will take you up to the White House with me,” he liked to tell people. Joe’s quick rise to prominence on campus gave resonance to his boasts.

John F. Kennedy, Joe Sr., Joe Jr.

Later, Dallek characterizes the cataclysmic effect that Joe Jr.’s death in World War Two had on his father and younger brother:

Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he explained that he needed to interest himself in something new, or he would go mad, “because all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Joe’s death also confirmed his father’s worst fear that U.S. involvement in the war would cost his family dearly, deepening his antagonism to American involvements abroad for the rest of his life.

His brother’s death also evoked a terrible sense of loss in Jack…

His heroic death left Jack with unresolved feelings toward his brother and father. His competition with Joe had “defined his own identity,” he told Lem Billings. Now there was no elder brother to compete against, and Joe Jr.’s death sealed his superiority “forever in his father’s heart.” “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack said.

Given the upcoming anniversary of his death, I’ll be posting more from and about Jack Kennedy in the next few days.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

Our Relationship to Our President

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

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Steinbeck

“The relationship of Americans to their President is a matter of amazement to foreigners. Of course we respect the office and admire the man who can fill it, but at the same time we inherently fear and suspect power. We are proud of the President, and we blame him for things he did not do. We are related to the President in a close and almost family sense; we inspect his every move and mood with suspicion. We insist that the President be cautious in speech, guarded in action, immaculate in his public and private life; and in spite of these imposed pressures we are avidly curious about the man hidden behind the formal public image we have created. We have made a tough but unwritten code of conduct for him, and the slightest deviation brings forth a torrent of accusation and abuse.

The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”

__________

From John Steinbeck’s essay “Government of the People,” published in his 1966 book America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction.

I had never heard about this lesser-known work of Steinbeck’s until yesterday, when I read William Vollman’s essay “Life as a Terrorist: Uncovering My FBI file” in the newest edition of Harper’s magazine. In this account, the FBI’s bumblings and hysterical misappraisals of Vollman and his friends are counterposed to the sagelike voice of Steinbeck, that most native of American authors, whose understanding of the American project — especially its sincerity and idealism, and how it may be cynically twisted by the powerful — still echoes into our own age.

I highly recommend Vollman’s essay as well as Jonathan Franzen’s “A Different Kind of Father”, a look at literature and paternalism, in the September edition of Harper’s.

Election 2012: A Prediction

05 Monday Nov 2012

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Electoral CollegeI generally think that the media’s obsession with pre-election polling — and the frenzied, horserace nature of it — is a particularly idle waste of our collective time and attention. The vote tally tomorrow is the only poll that matters.

However, with that said, I want to put on record what I think the votes will show. I do this not to promote a particular point of view (I am voting for Obama, to be clear), but instead am writing my predictions here in order to grade myself — and allow myself to be graded — once the votes have in fact been tallied.

The sources I am using to compile this state by state forecast are Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog for the New York Times, Public Policy Polling, YouGov’s data collection, and my professors of American Government and fellow classmates here at Georgetown. We have been tracking and debating these numbers for months now, and here’s what I think we will see on Wednesday morning:

Romney takes the dead Right give-aways. For the sake of this list, “dead Right” denotes states whose Republican advantage lies above 7% (the threshold for a “lock”) as well as the major national polls’ (Pew, Rasmussen, RAND and Politico) margins of error. So, here are the states that we’ll most assuredly see red come tomorrow (electoral college votes are in parenthesis): Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Arkansas (6), Arizona (11), Georgia (16), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (8), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), Montana (3), Nebraska (5), North Carolina (15), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (9), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (38), Utah (6), West Virginia (5), Wyoming (3).

The final tally of these numbers: 206

Obama will take the far Left leaners. In my calculation, again, a “far Left” state is one which major national polls show to be Democratic, beyond the 7% threshold and poll’s particular margin of error. Thus, these are the states that will turn blue Tuesday: California (55), Connecticut (7), District of Columbia (3), Delaware (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Michigan (16), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (14), New Mexico (5), New York (29), Nevada (6), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (20), Rhoda Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (12)

The final tally of these numbers: 243

Electoral College

This leaves seven states swinging in the balance.

Colorado (9) – Colorado may be the closest state to call this election, and from what I can tell, it’s almost a dead heat. The state was a surprise win for Obama in 2008, as Coloradans are known for their aversion to big government and embrace of more libertarian policies. However, I think Obama will carry Colorado, and I say this for two primary reasons. First, Democrats won Senate and Governorship races in Colorado in 2008, signaling a paradigm shift in the state’s partisan leaning. Secondly, Politico and YouGov both give Obama a slight (1-3 percentage point) lead in the state, while Reuters (via Ipsos) is the only poll showing a lead (by 2%) for Mr. Romney. Both Sabato and Silver give a slight advantage to Obama, too.

Florida (29) – In light of its particularly sluggish economy and slack housing market, I believe that Florida will most likely tilt away from the incumbent who carried it in 2008. Mitt Romney is showing as much as a 5 point lead in some polls, as the swaths of senior citizens, which populate key counties in the state, will surely show up in high numbers to pull the levers for Romney — a man they see as less threatening towards Medicare.

Iowa (6) – As of Friday, every major poll shows that Obama is winning in Iowa (by between 2-5%). Ann Selzer and Jennifer Jacobs, who are the most rigorous state-level pollsters in Iowa, also have Obama in the lead (by 5 percentage points as of November 3rd). Thus, despite Romney’s dynamic campaigning in the state, Iowa will be blue once again.

New Hampshire (4) – New Hampshire became a surprise concern for the Democrats this year, and in response, an unusually high amount of campaigning has been done (particularly by Vice President Biden) to try to close the usually Democratic state. In contrast to its neighbors, New Hampshire is traditionally known for its moderate voting patterns, and the fact that Mitt Romney maintains a second home in the state further pulls the electorate to vote for what they see as a native son. However, despite this, I am calling New Hampshire for Obama based on the polls done by Gravis, YouGov, Politico, and the University of New Hampshire, as well as the astute analysis of the state done by Nate Silver. Larry Sabato has also called New Hampshire for Obama. NH is going D.

Ohio (18) – The candidate who has won Ohio has won the last 12 presidential elections, and there are very few scenarios in which Romney can take the White House without first taking the Buckeye state. Thus, Ohio is key to a Romney victory. However, as polls show and analysts seem to agree, Obama is holding on to an excruciatingly close lead in the state, bolstered by a growing state economy and his support for the auto bailout (and related smear campaign of Romney’s opposition to it).

Virginia (13) – Obama won Virginia by seven percentage points in 2008; however, it looks like Romney will take the state this year. Due to its rapidly shifting demographics, Virginia is a new battleground state, one which has seen some of the most intensive campaigning of this election cycle. Ipsos, YouGov, Politico, and NBC are each currently showing Obama with a slight lead, yet the margins are slim and fluctuating and fail to account for the state’s shifty voter turnout. I think it’s in Romney’s hands, but this could very well be the closest call of the election.

Wisconsin (10) – Democrats have won in Wisconsin the last six elections (yes, even Dukakis carried it in 1988). However, the Republican ticket’s addition of Paul Ryan — a native of Janesville, WI and Representative from the state’s first district — has pulled the state towards the center. However, polls still show Obama with a slight lead in the state, and Sabato has officially predicted a Democratic victory. Nate Silver has even taken Wisconsin out of his “swing state” column, giving Obama a 94.5% chance of victory. I won’t argue with that.

As a result, my prediction can be summarized in three sentences. Mitt Romney wins 248 Electoral College votes. Barack Obama wins 290 Electoral College votes. Bo the dog will be first pup for another four years.

Electoral College