To-Do List: A Sentence, Not 10 Paragraphs
By trying to do too much, he risks not doing enough.
Something seems off with our young president. He appears jarred. Difficult history has come over the transom. He seemed defensive and peevish with the press in his Tuesday news conference, and later with Charlie Gibson on health care, when he got nailed by a neurologist who suggested the elites who support a national program seem not to mind rationing for other people but very much mind if for themselves. All this followed the president's first bad numbers. From Politico, on Tuesday: "Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama's handling of the economy and ability to control spending have caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest level since taking office, according to a spate of recent polls." Independents and some Republicans who once viewed him sympathetically are "becoming skeptical."
You can say this is due to a lot of things, and it probably is, most especially the economy, which all the polls mentioned. But I think at bottom his problems come down to this: The Sentence. And the rough sense people have that he's not seeing to it.
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Randy Jones The Sentence comes from a story Clare Boothe Luce told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that "a great man is one sentence." His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don't have to hear his name to know who's being talked about. "He preserved the union and freed the slaves," or, "He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War." You didn't have to be told "Lincoln" or "FDR."
She wondered what Kennedy's sentence would be. She was telling him to concentrate, to know the great themes and demands of his time and focus on them.
It was good advice. History has imperatives, and sometimes they are clear. Sometimes they are met, and sometimes not. When they're clear and met, you get quite a sentence.
Mr. Obama's White House is, at the moment, like most new White Houses. Every administration wants to do great things. Or, rather, it wants greatness. It wants to break through on some great issue or issues and claim to be, as they used to say, consequential. There's a busy hum of action. It can cause a blur. Everyone who works for a nation gets carried away. They're all swept up. It's understandable. They're working in the White House, they're mostly young—only the young can take the punishing hours, and only the young have lived through a limited enough history that they think everything counts and everything matters, which is how you want people in a White House to feel. In this they are like the young reporters and anchors on weekend TV. The storm comes and it's the biggest storm ever, or the most terrible brush fire. They're like this because it's their first hurricane. If the sin of the young is to blow things out of proportion, the sin of the old is no longer to notice true dimension and size. It's their 30th revolution after all, how big a deal could it be?
New White Houses are always ardent for change, for breakthroughs. They want the sentence even when they don't know the sentence exists, even when they think it's a paragraph. The Obama people want, "He was the president who gave all Americans health care," and, "He lessened income inequality," and, "He took over a failed company," and other things. They want a jumble of sentences and do a jumble of things. But an administration about everything is an administration about nothing.
Mr. Obama is not seeing his sentence. He's missing it. This is the sentence history has given him: "He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror." That's all anybody wants. It's all that's needed.
It is a great and worthy sentence, the kind that gives you a second term and the affectionate memory of history. If Mr. Obama earns it and makes it true of himself, he will be called good to great. But you have to meet it, you have to do it.
To get the first part of the sentence right would take a lot—restoring the confidence of the nation, getting spending down so people don't feel a sense of horror as they look at the future, getting or keeping the dollar sound, keeping the banks up and operating. A friend says that what's missing is an adult and responsible sense of limits, that we need to remember—we need to be reminded by our leaders—that it's not un-American to see limits. It's adult to see limits, it's right and realistic.
Are we beginning the journey back to anything like fiscal health? Who thinks the answer is yes? There's a pervasive sense that still, nine months into the crash, "we live in castles built on sand." We're not building on anything secure. Instead, and more and more, we have a series of presidential actions that seem less like proposals than non sequiturs. A new health-care program that Congress itself says will cost a trillion dollars over 10 years? A new energy program that will cost however many hundreds of billions in however many years? Running General Motors, and discussing where its plants should be, and what the interiors of the cars should look like, and shouldn't the little cup holder be bigger to account for Starbucks-sized coffee? Wait, what if it's a venti latte? One imagines the conversation in the car czar's office: "You know, I've always wanted to see a mauve car because mauve is my favorite color, I mean to the extent it's a color."
There is 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.
In terms of our security, we face challenges all over the world, from state and nonstate actors. Today a headline popped up on my screen: North Korea has threatened to attack us. A mordant response: Get in line, buddy. The administration, which has been appropriately modest in its face toward the world, should be more modest internally, and seek a new and serious bipartisan consensus on our defense system, our security, our civil defense, our safety. This of course is an impossible dream, but it was impossible back in the fractious '50s to reach a workable consensus on a strategy toward the Soviets. And yet we did it. Do we have anything like a bipartisan strategy for our age? Not nearly. We're split in two, in three. We'll wish someday we did. It is amazing we don't even talk about this.
Our economy and our security are intertwined. They are at the heart of everything, even to our ultimate continuance as a nation. Mr. Obama cannot replace his sentence with 10 paragraphs, and he can't escape it, either. Because history dictated it. History wrote it. "He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror." Sentences don't really get better than that. He should stop looking for a better one. There isn't a better one.
Silence Has Consequences for Iran
The less we protest, the more people will die.
JOSé MARIA AZNAR
If there hadn't been dissidents in the Soviet Union, the Communist regime never would have crumbled. And if the West hadn't been concerned about their fate, Soviet leaders would have ruthlessly done away with them. They didn't because the Kremlin feared the response of the Free World.
Just like the Soviet dissidents who resisted communism, those who dare to march through the streets of Tehran and stand up against the Islamic regime founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini 30 years ago represent the greatest hope for change in a country built on the repression of its people. At stake is nothing less than the legitimacy of a system incompatible with respect for individual rights. Also at stake is the survival of a theocratic regime that seeks to be the dominant power in the region, the indisputable spiritual leader of the Muslim world, and the enemy of the West.
The Islamic Republic that the ayatollahs have created is not just any power. To defend a strict interpretation of the Quran, Khomeini created the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard, which today is a true army. To expand its ideology and influence Iran has not hesitated to create, sustain and use proxy terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. And to impose its fundamentalist vision beyond its borders, Iran is working frantically to obtain nuclear weapons.
Those who protest against the blatant electoral fraud that handed victory to the fanatical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are in reality demanding a change of regime. Thus, the regime has resorted to beating and shooting its citizens in a desperate attempt to squash the pro-democracy movement.
This is no time for hesitation on the part of the West. If, as part of an attempt to reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, the leaders of democratic nations turn their backs on the dissidents they will be making a terrible mistake.
President Obama has said he refuses to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs, but this is a poor excuse for passivity. If the international community is not able to stop, or at least set limits on, the repressive violence of the Islamic regime, the protesters will end up as so many have in the past -- in exile, in prison, or in the cemetery. And with them, all hope for change will be gone.
To be clear: Nobody in the circles of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or Ahmadinejad is going to reward us for silence or inaction. On the contrary, failing to support the regime's critics will leave us with an emboldened Ahmadinejad, an atomic Iran, and dissidents that are disenchanted and critical of us. We cannot talk about freedom and democracy if we abandon our own principles.
Some do not want to recognize the spread of freedom in the Middle East. But it is clear that after decades of repression -- religious and secular -- the region is changing.
The recent elections in Lebanon are a clear example. The progressive normalization of Iraq is another. It would be a shame, particularly in the face of such regional progress, if our passivity gave carte blanche to a tyrannical regime to finish off the dissidents and persist with its revolutionary plans.
Delayed public displays of indignation may be good for internal political consumption. But the consequences of Western inaction have already materialized. Watching videos of innocent Iranians being brutalized, it's hard to defend silence.
Mr. Aznar is the former prime minister of Spain (1996-2004).
The Bard of Berkeley
A former poet laureate on haiku and the responsibilities of writers.
MICHAEL JUDGE
San Francisco
One benefit of being a poet -- as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host -- is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.
The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city's finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi's) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.
Last year alone the 68-year-old Berkeley professor won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection of poems "Time and Materials." From 1995-97 he was America's poet laureate, and he used the post in innovative ways to promote literacy. From 1997-2000 he wrote the popular "Poet's Choice" column for the Washington Post, introducing readers to his favorite poets each week. His translations of Japanese haiku and the works of Czeslaw Milosz -- the late, great Polish poet, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature -- are read the world over.
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Ismael Roldan Former poet laureate Robert Hass
Still, for the life of me, I can't remember what he looks like. So, after approaching a few slightly startled gentlemen in his age bracket, I'm relieved when a pleasant man with a warm countenance, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker, extends his hand and says simply, "I'm Bob."
After snuffing out my cigarette, I tell him my wife Masae awaits us inside and is holding what we hope will be a quiet booth where we can talk. Alas, there's a speaker above us blaring jazz, and adjacent diners are shouting above the din. Undaunted, we peruse the wine list. "Buttery and oaky is the classic California chardonnay that everyone's gotten sick of," says the poet, with a slight grin. "But I haven't!" And with that we order a bottle from California's Santa Rita Hills and begin.
He's just flown in from Toronto, he tells us, where he attended the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony, and asks that we please forgive him if he "fades early." The Griffin Prize, Mr. Hass explains, was founded by Canadian philanthropist Scott Griffin, who annually awards an impressive $50,000 to one Canadian poet (this year's winner is A.F. Moritz) and one non-Canadian poet (C.D. Wright). After the ceremony, there's a gala bash. "It's the kind of party where there's a flowing chocolate fountain and an open bar where poets don't do very well." He says I should write a story about it, and offers to put me in touch with the Griffin folks.
But before I can ask him for details, he's on to another topic: a Berkeley-based nonprofit called the International Rivers Network. "I'm the only poet on the board," he says. "It's an environmental organization that thinks about the ecological consequences of big dams" and provides "real life estimates of the damage done by these big boondoggle projects to the people who are trying to resist them." The group has worked in some 60 countries, he says, to help prevent the kind of cultural and environmental devastation caused by projects like the Three Gorges dam on China's Yangtze River.
Suddenly, like a guest who feels he's gone on too long, Mr. Hass apologizes and peppers us with questions. "How long are we here?" "Where are we from?" "How did we meet?" When he discovers my wife is from Japan and we met in Tokyo the conversation turns to his love for haiku, particularly the poems of the 17th century master Matsuo Basho.
In the early 1970s, he says, "I tried to teach myself something about how to make images from working on haiku . . . I had this real paradisiacal period in my life where I would teach, come home, get out the Japanese dictionary, work on haiku, then go swim laps for an hour, then have dinner and put my kids to bed. . . ."
Just then our waitress brings the "Fisherman Carpaccio," a flower-like assemblage of raw fish marinated in soy with a dash of karashi hot mustard and sesame oil. We order another bottle of chardonnay, and I attempt to ask another question. "That's a really pretty presentation, don't you think?" says Mr. Hass, admiring the dish that's just arrived. "Can we stop?" He then turns to my wife, who's a potter and chef, and asks, "What do you think about this presentation? And about saying this is carpaccio rather than sashimi?"
Right about now I begin to feel as if we're inside a Robert Hass poem. They are known for their playfulness with language, love of long, sprawling sentences, and, above all, a kind of unquenchable honesty, a wrestling with memory and the world as it is. Yet listening to him talk it strikes me that he isn't self-absorbed. He is, in fact, other-absorbed. His conversation, like his poetry, is full of wonder and horror, two wholly appropriate reactions to human history -- or a plate of sashimi-cum-carpaccio.
In "Time and Materials," published in 2007, Mr. Hass addresses everything from "Poor Nietzsche in Turin . . . Dying of syphilis . . . in love with the opera of Bizet" to an early memory of his father grinding up the antidrinking drug Antabuse ("It makes you sick if you drink alcohol," he writes) and forcing his long-suffering, alcoholic mother to swallow it. Later, he watched as she sat down with a bottle of booze and "gagged and drank, Drank and gagged." In another poem, he writes of his father's death and his feelings of "love and anger and dismay and relief at the sudden peacefulness / of his face. . . ."
In a poem for his friend and longtime collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz -- who died in Krakow in 2005 at the age of 93 after living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rise and fall of communism -- Mr. Hass writes how Milosz "never accepted the cruelty in the frame / Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster, / And the smell of summer grasses in the world / That can hardly be named or remembered / Past the moment of our wading through them, / And the world's poor salvation in the word."
This idea, this lament -- "the world's poor salvation in the word," that language often fails us, yet it's our only hope for redemption -- permeates Mr. Hass's latest book, which was completed in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war. In a poem titled "Bush's War," he conflates 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the brutal history of the 20th century, when the slaughter of civilians and the "firebombing" of entire cities was commonplace. "Forty-five million, all told, in World War II," he writes. "Why do we do it?" Certainly there's a rage / To injure what's injured us."
To Mr. Hass, who's married to the poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, terms like "collateral damage" and "soft targets" are not merely euphemisms but sacrilege. In another poem, written after visiting the demilitarized zone that separates South and North Korea, he writes: "The human imagination does not do well with large numbers. / More than two and a half million people died during the Korean / War. It seems it ought to have taken more time to wreck so many / bodies."
Raised in a Catholic household, Mr. Hass attended parochial school not far from here in the Marin County suburb of San Rafael and had, like his friend Milosz, a "relentlessly moral upbringing." His first book, "Field Guide," earned him the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973. In it, he writes lovingly of the lush California coast, but he also questions the relevance of romantic or elevated poetry in a violent age. Responding to Baudelaire he writes, "Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. / He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, / over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century / while Marx in the library gloom / studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit / and that gentle man Bakunin . . . applies his numb hands / to the making of bombs."
I mention how his first book and his most recent were both written when America was at war and, in a way, deal with similar subjects. "The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that," he says. And yet, "In this really violent, imperfect world where you're not just a writer but you're a writer writing in one of the languages of the rich and developed world . . . [you have] some responsibility for the world . . . [because] the way the world is seen gets framed in those languages."
He pauses, takes a drink of wine, then continues: "I have a Libyan poet friend who thinks that part of the big problem with the Arabic world is Arabic poetry, that . . . there's a certain level of elevation of the language that doesn't make a description of reality possible. Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?
"And part of the answer is, artists don't really have a choice. You don't get to pick how you see the world. A lot of my appetite is for a kind of pure poetry . . . and one of the things I identified with and felt like I understood about Czeslaw was that he was raised with an appetite for pure poetry in a world in which he thought it was not available to him as an option . . . after living through the underground in Warsaw seeing the entire Jewish community hauled off and killed, and seeing 250,000 Polish kids go out in the street and get mowed down by the Germans."
In his 1980 Nobel acceptance speech, Milosz said something similar: "Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends."
This is the work of the poet. And this, it seems to me, is the work that our dinner guest has undertaken.
Mr. Judge is a contributing editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review.
The Time to Tame Inflation Is Well Before It Strikes
Insurance is often most worth having when it seems least necessary.
Right now, you might feel you don't need any insurance against a rise in the cost of living. Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, is running at negative-1.3% over the past 12 months; with oil and real estate down drastically, there are few signs of rising prices in daily life.
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Heath Hinegardner But the cost of living mightn't fall for much longer. So it is a good time to look at inflation insurance, in the form of U.S. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS. The principal value of TIPS increases or decreases with the cost of living. Unlike normal bonds, TIPS don't get hammered when inflation rises.
There is a historic tug of war under way between inflation and deflation, with the federal government borrowing $1.9 trillion in the past 12 months even as prices of many goods and services continue to fall.
"Inflation uncertainty is probably wider today than at any time before the financial crisis," says John Hollyer, co-manager of the $22 billion Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities fund. "So having that protection in your portfolio is still valuable."
Even when prices are going up, many people fall prey to what is called "money illusion" -- the tendency to overlook the corrosive effects of a rising cost of living. You would probably rather have a 2% raise in a time of 4% inflation than a 2% pay cut in a time of zero inflation. The pay raise feels more positive and will make you happier than the pay cut -- even though both alternatives are economically identical, leaving you 2% poorer after inflation.
So if people are prone to this fallacy, why are TIPS funds hot? Through May, inflation-protected bond funds accounted for $10.4 billion, or 11%, of all the new money that flowed into stock and bond funds this year.
I worry that at least some buyers of these funds may be doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It seems implausible that, at the very moment when inflation seems to be least threatening, investors would get a sudden collective urge to protect against it. Instead of trying to protect against future inflation, many of these new investors may be chasing past performance. TIPS have gained 5.3% in 2009, versus a 4.4% loss on Treasurys overall, according to Vanguard. But, says Gang Hu, co-manager of Pimco Real Return fund, "a TIPS fund should be something you invest in for insurance, not for income."
Why? First of all, history suggests that deflation is highly unlikely to persist in the long run. Even in the onset of the Great Depression, when the government barely borrowed at all, deflation -- though severe -- lasted only from 1930 through 1932. With Uncle Sam now on a borrowing binge, we could easily end up with too much money chasing too few goods -- the very definition of inflation.
Second, the cost of living might rise faster than you expect; TIPS are priced as if inflation will run at an average rate over the next five years of no higher than 1%, and then will rise to 2.5% annually over the following five years. If those expectations are too low, TIPS will protect you.
TIPS offer baseline insurance against a rise in all the costs of living. However, TIPS aren't customizable. The official inflation basket consists of housing costs (43%), food (16%), transportation (15%), health care and recreation (6% each), apparel (4%) and education, communication and "other" (3% apiece). If the basket of goods and services that you pay for is significantly different from the CPI, then TIPS won't fully insure you.
So think about what makes up your personal inflation mix. If you are unlikely to qualify for financial aid, then the costs of educating your children could wildly exceed 3% of your expenses. So you might consider a prepaid college tuition program like the Independent "529 plan," assuming you are confident your child will be able to get into one of the participating schools. If you have aging parents, an assisted-living facility already costs an average of $3,000 a month; a semiprivate room in a nursing home runs more than $5,600 monthly. You can partially hedge against those rising costs with a stake in an exchange-traded fund like Vanguard Health Care or iShares Dow Jones U.S. Healthcare Providers Index.
Those hedges won't be perfect, either, but you need some riders to the general insurance policy that TIPS provide. You are the only one who can make sure you are fully insured.
Sex Americana
Infidelity is no longer a career-killer for politicians. But weirdness, mendacity and ineptitude just might be.
GERARD BAKER
Familiar as it was in its essential plot, the agony of Mark Sanford this week was curiously singular in its theatrical detail.
Sex has upended so many political careers in the last few years that we have become dully inured to the tableau of staged contrition by which the fault is confessed to the world. Whether the backdrop is Washington or Trenton, Boise or Albany, the script is always the same.
But in Columbia, S.C., last Wednesday, a week of surreal small-state misadventure was fittingly capped with a press conference that might have been scripted by David Lynch, with its mysterious, murmuring stream-of-consciousness observations about life and love.
There was, for once, no adoring wife, standing by her man, gazing dewy-eyed at the flawed hero. There was no attempt by the sinner to explain his sin in artfully phrased self-exonerations; no references to some inner demon, an abusive father, an addictive personality or the indescribable pressures of working so hard for the good of the American people.
There were instead some cringe-making, if honest, excursions through the cheap literary landscape of forbidden love (“the odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to heart”); a little homespun moral theology, (“God’s law indeed is there to protect you from yourself”), and, with its hemispheric wild-goose-chase subplot, from Appalachia to Argentina, an inescapable sense of borderline insanity about the entire event.
For all the talk of yet another politician dragged down by an uncontrollable libido, it may well be the sheer strangeness of Mr. Sanford’s behavior, rather than his original sin, that will do him the most political harm.
(clockwise from bottom left) Time Life Pictures/Getty Images; Associated Press (3); The Granger Collection; Associated Press; AFP/Getty Images Though adultery was, and still is perhaps for a minority of voters, an automatic disqualification for political office, the fact is that the moral rules by which American politicians are judged are complex and changing.
It has long been an axiom of clever, enlightened Europeans that public attitudes to sex, like capital markets, the social-welfare safety net, and advertising on television, are an essential point of cleavage, as it were, between the Anglo-Saxon model of government and society on the one hand, and that of the continental Europeans on the other.
The Americans and the Brits are, in this view, the psycho-sexually repressed victims of their puritan moral heritage and their Protestant work-ethic.
This supposedly makes them all prudes, ready at the drop of a pair of underpants, to cry foul and hound our political leaders out of office.
For the Europeans, especially those of a Latin provenance, the sexual antics of politicians are of no more consideration in the judgment of their suitability for office than is what they eat for breakfast.
In Europe this week a fair amount of fun was had at the coincidence that, on the same day that Mr. Sanford performed his mea culpa, Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, was cheerily waving off the latest set of allegations about his relationships with young girls.
Mr. Berlusconi’s skirt-chasing tendencies—though doubtless offensive to many Italian women—are considered an inevitable by-product of the machismo that has made him a lot of money and handed him the reins of Italian government for longer than almost any Italian politician since Caesar Augustus.
Also this week, in Paraguay, a country whose cultural influences are similarly Latin, the president, Fernando Lugo, was accused of sexual assault by a former housekeeper. He has already admitted to being the father of one illegitimate child and is alleged to have fathered others. Oh, and by the way, he is a former Catholic bishop.
Now while it is probably hard to imagine an American president or a British prime minister getting away with the Berlusconi-Lugo style of governing, does that really make the Anglo-Saxons prudish?
There’s a view popular in the U.S., too, that while once, many years ago, American leaders, from Thomas Jefferson to John F. Kennedy, may have been allowed, European-style, to get away with a sizable amount of sexual extra-curricular activity while in office, nowadays strait-laced America forbids such behavior.
But this view is neither right in its historical perspective—Jefferson’s antics were considered quite notorious and political fair game even by contemporaries—nor, more importantly, in its consideration of the current political climate.
The evidence of recent years in fact appears seems to be that straight (in every sense of the term) adultery is no longer a political disqualification for office, not even in Bible Belt states, and not even for Bible-wielding Republican politicians.
Instead the role that sex plays in politics is more nuanced.
The common view is that hypocrisy is a bigger career-killer than actual sexual misconduct; that if you’re a finger-wagging, family-preserving conservative, you’re going to have a harder time sustaining a career after revelations that you strayed than if you’re a permissive liberal.
There’s clearly something to this. Certainly part of the secret of Bill Clinton’s survival, one assumes, was that no one ever imagined that the former president was trying to tell people how to be a good married man. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California, highly plausible claims that he had made unwelcome advances towards a number of women scarcely dinted his election prospects. And Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor whose career was cut short by an expensive prostitute habit, seems to be on course for an improbable comeback.
EPA Newt Gingrich had an affair during President Clinton’s impeachment.
But even conservative Republicans caught in the act have not necessarily been terminally doomed by their sins: Larry Craig, the Idaho senator who mistook the alluring shoe of a law-enforcement officer in a public lavatory for that of a willing sexual collaborator—and broke the law, to boot—was not forced from office, despite an uproar. Sen. David Vitter, who became embroiled in another prostitute scandal, to this day continues to represent the people of Louisiana. And Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who was having an affair with a woman at roughly the same time that he was impeaching Bill Clinton, is now considered one of the front runners for the Republican nomination in 2012.
So even hypocrisy—the homage that vice pays to virtue, it is said— is not an immediate disqualification either. Perhaps mature voters have concluded that hypocrisy among politicians is not something that comes as a terrible shock.
In fact, so attenuated has the power of the sexual scandal become that there are some indications that it might even help some conservative politicians.
If Britain’s John Major had publicized his longtime affair, it might have helped him avert a Conservative rout.
When it was revealed a few years ago, to the utter astonishment of an unsuspecting British public, that John Major, the former prime minister, had been carrying on an affair for years with a cabinet member, it was widely commented that, if only the public had known at the time that the boring, plodding nonentity of a politician who led them was actually a red-hot lover, it might have helped him avert the worst defeat for the Conservative party in almost 80 years.
So the chances are not at all bad that if Mr. Sanford had done what some of his fellow penitent adulterers had done, simply fessed up a couple of weeks ago to his infidelity, and thrown himself on the mercy of his wife and the people of South Carolina, he might well have been able to salvage a political career. Instead, he was erratic, untruthful and seems to have spent state money on furthering the affair. If anything undoes him, it will be that.
And yet the whole sex question, and what it says about politicians, still clearly—though in slightly recondite ways—has an effect on public attitudes towards politicians. For most voters, even perhaps the most permissive or forgiving, moral character is never to be wholly divorced from assessments of a politician’s suitability for office.
Few people these days would agree with the assessment of William Bennett, the former cabinet member and conservative commentator, who said this week that Mr. Sanford’s behavior rendered him unfit for office:
“A cheat in private is going to be a cheat in public. Someone who lies in private is going to lie in public, and you can’t trust someone who does that.” But people surely still give some weight to the character issues in their assessment of a candidate.
Who doubts that part of the considerable popular appeal of President Barack Obama is that he is an evidently decent family man; a husband clearly in love with his wife and devoted to his daughters. Polls still show that overwhelming majorities of voters believe character is important to their assessment of a politician’s appeal.
This suggests that the issue of personal behavior may have lost its force as a negative factor in politics, but it still clearly has the power to be a positive one. Infidelity and sexual misdemeanors may not kill a political career, but an impression of faithfulness and decency can still help one. It should be remembered too, that while character matters, voters seem prepared to see sexual failures as only one part of the character issue. There’s no particular reason that other traits such as personal courage, hard work or humility should matter less in a political career than the sexual fidelity of a candidate.
But it ought to be clear that even among supposedly character-obsessed Anglo-Saxons there is an asymmetry to this relationship. Voters have shown a marked willingness to forgive a politically effective rogue. They can never be expected to extend the same forbearance to a morally perfect fool.
Friday, June 26, 2009
After a set-up piece by Mark Potter, Lauer interviewed McGreevey and asked him the ex-governor, "If it comes out that the governor used taxpayer money to go to Argentina on one or more occasions, does that complicate the issue? And, and would that make it more difficult for him to survive in office?" Interestingly Lauer failed to mention the fact that this was one of the reasons that forced McGreevey to step down.
The following are the relevant teasers and then full segment as they were aired on the June 25, Today show:
MEREDITH VIEIRA: Good morning, intimate exchange. Hours after his tearful confession emails surface detailing the affair between South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his mistress in Argentina. This morning an exclusive interview with someone who knows all about being caught in a sex scandal, former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey.
...MATT LAUER: And this morning the political future of South Carolina's governor Mark Sanford, a once-rising star in the Republican Party, is very much in doubt.
VIEIRA: As if his words at that news conference, where he admitted the affair, weren't enough, just hours later some steamy emails surfaced between Governor Sanford and his Argentinean mistress. But despite it all his spokesperson says the governor has no plans to step down. Much more on the absolutely bizarre chain of events of the past few days in just a moment.
...
VIEIRA: But first let's begin with that shocking sex scandal involving South Carolina's governor, and the unusual way that the affair came to light. NBC's Mark Potter is in Columbia, South Carolina, with the latest. Good morning, Mark.
[On screen headline: "Scandal In South Carolina, AWOL Governor Admits To Affair"]
MARK POTTER: And good morning to you, Meredith. Not everyone here believed that original story that the governor was hiking along the Appalachian Trail. But when they heard his version of why he was actually in Argentina, many here were stunned.
GOV. MARK SANFORD: What I have found in this job is that one desperately needs a break from the public.
POTTER: The mystery finally came to an end when Governor Mark Sanford went public and confessed that his story-
SANFORD: I love the Appalachian Trail.
POTTER: -and his life.
SANFORD: It's gonna hurt and we'll let the chips fall where they may.
POTTER: -had been a lie.
SANFORD: The bottom line is this, I've, I've been unfaithful to my wife. I developed a relationship with a what started out as a dear, dear friend from Argentina. It began very innocently, as I suspect many of these things do.
POTTER: Although his staff had said Sanford was away, hiking the Appalachian Trail, he actually was in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He said he had lied to his aides, and apologized to them, his four sons, his wife, and the woman in Argentina.
SANFORD: I hurt her. I hurt you all. I hurt my wife. I hurt my boys. I hurt friends like Tom Davis. I heard a lot of different folks. And all I can say is that I apologize.
POTTER: Sanford said he met the woman eight years ago. The relationship deepened a year ago. And was discovered by his wife Jenny five months ago. He said he was trying to work things out with his family.
SANFORD: I spent the last five days crying in Argentina.
POTTER: In the most emotional part of the news conference he thanked a friend of the family.
SANFORD: Hang, hang, hang on. An incredibly dear friend. And he is been helping us work through this over these last five months. And Cubby I want to say thank you for being there as a friend.
OFF-SCREEN VOICE: Are you separated from the First Lady?
SANFORD: I don't know how you want to define that. I mean I'm here and she's there. I guess in a formal sense we're not.
POTTER: After the news conference, his wife handed out a statement of her own, saying she'd asked the governor to leave the house two weeks ago, but would try to forgive him now. As for the trip itself, Sanford had left his car last week at the Columbia, South Carolina airport, filled with hiking and camping gear. But when confronted by a reporter Wednesday morning, after returning to the Atlanta airport, he still lied about the trip.
GINA SMITH, THE STATE: His response was, well he had originally intended to hike the Appalachian Trail, but had changed his mind last minute and decided to go someplace more exotic.
POTTER: But hours later, before the cameras, he came clean.
SANFORD: I would simply say I go back to that simple word of asking for forgiveness.
POTTER: Now, late yesterday some emails were published, reportedly between the governor and the woman in Argentina, one from the governor last year, said quote, "Please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head, my heart cries out for you. Your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your fingertips, and an even deeper connection to your soul. The newspaper, The State here in Columbia, which published them, said that the governor's office did not dispute the veracity of those emails. Matt?
LAUER: Alright, Mark Potter in Columbia, South Carolina for us this morning. Mark, thank you very much. Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey saw his political career come to an end after announcing he had an extramarital affair with a man. He's with us exclusively this morning. Governor, good to see you, good morning.
JIM MCGREEVEY: Good morning, Matt.
LAUER: It was hard too watch Governor Sanford yesterday during his news conference without thinking back five years to when you stood in front of the cameras. I know you didn't watch the news conference, but you've read the transcript. What are your thoughts on, on what he admitted to?
MCGREEVEY: Well, I think it's a very human. It's, you know, I'm filled with a sense of pain and anguish for him and for his family. But I think it was a very human moment. And it was very truthful. And sort of to come back the long process of healing and the long process of redemption, I think first you have to be truthful with one's self, with one's family, and with reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.
LAUER: When you stood in front of the cameras your wife at the time Dina was by your side. His wife Jenny was not by his side but she did release a statement. She said she still loves her husband, she's proud of his accomplishments as a public service, servant and then she said this Governor, she said, "I believe enduring love is primarily a commitment and an act of will, and for a marriage to be successful that commitment must be reciprocal. I believe mark has earned the chance to resurrect our marriage." Which is amazingly generous, given the circumstances. How much impact will the way Jenny Sanford acts over these next days and weeks have on his ability to survive this scandal?
MCGREEVEY: Well Matt, I'm at a point in my life where I don't want to engage in political prognostication. But I think what's most important now is for the person, for the man, and for the family. And I think what's essential for me, and I don't presume to give judgment, or advice to the governor, but is, is honesty. Second, a sense of humility, understanding where one is, in terms of one's relationship, and one's relationship with God. And third, also understanding the importance of getting beyond one's self. And that is rededicating, for me, a sense of service. And a sense of Godliness. I think too often, and for me in the political process, you begin to think of yourself as master of your own universe and your own set of ethical structures, your own sense of decision making. And when I had my crisis, I sort of, sort of confronted my own moment of truth. It was also ironically perhaps one of the greatest moments of blessing of grace in my life, where I sort of corrected course once again.
LAUER: Well but, but, but, but Jim I want, I want to go back. Because as a former governor you can also identify with another part of this story. And this is the highest ranking elected official in a state, state of South Carolina, who leaves his state, doesn't tell anyone where he's going. He's unreachable for five days. Politically and professionally, was that a fatal mistake?
MCGREEVEY: Oh, I don't know South Carolina as well as, as perhaps you do. You know, I think ultimately the governor has to decide in his conscience, in his, within the quiet of his heart whether, where he is at. And whether service and service to the citizens of South Carolina is his priority. And for me, I think it's, it's that self-examination, it's that critical reflection. It's not only the apology, it's not only the amendment, but also trying to move forward with humility and seeing, you know first, is an obligation to, to correct the relationship with one's family. And then move forward to service. And also, it's, it's, it's a very difficult process to undertake under the glare of cameras.
LAUER: Just one final question, Jim. If it is, if it comes out that, and this is hypothetical, but if it comes out that the governor used taxpayer money to go to Argentina on one or more occasions, does that complicate the issue? And, and would that make it more difficult for him to survive in office?
MCGREEVEY: Well, clearly that would, but Matt, you know I work with prisoners, ex-prisoners every day, and Exodus in Harlem and prisoners have the capacity, ex-offenders have the capacity to rewrite their stories and give new meaning to their lives. And I would just ask people for a sense of compassion at a very difficult time. And, and as a Christian, I believe in the power of forgiveness, and the ability to transcend one's circumstances as they are now. And so, if the governor has, for me, if you're able to move with a sense of truthfulness, if you're able to be humble about one's circumstances. To, to rewrite one's self with one's God, I think that gives a capacity to, to move beyond these circumstances. And I also believe we all sin. We all fail. It's how we grapple with that failure. How we grapple with that, you know, sinful nature to be able to move to the next point of our lives. And this isn't something to be ignored. This is something I believe with integrity, if the governor embraces it with honesty, he can be that much more of a better governor because it's admitting his nature, understanding the wrong, but being able to move past through it with integrity.
LAUER: Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey. Certainly an interesting perspective. Jim, nice to see you. Thank you very much.
MCGREEVEY: Be well. All the best.
LAUER: Thanks.
Animal House at 30
College students find new ways to channel their inner Bluto.
E.E. SMITH
When Animal House first came out just over 30 years ago, it dominated the cultural landscape. College students were nostalgic for the "raunchy, pre-1960s undergraduate ideal," says Peter Rollins, who has been studying pop-culture academically for over 30 years. Mr. Rollins, who attended Dartmouth in the 1960s, says that students back then tried to live "the fantasy" on their own campuses. Some still do, taking Bluto's counsel to heart: "My advice to you is to start drinking heavily."
Take Alpha Delta, the Dartmouth College fraternity that the infamous Delta house of the movie is based on. The movie, co-written by Dartmouth graduate and Alpha Delta brother Chris Miller, still inspires some of the fraternity's traditions today.
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Universal Pictures John Belushi as John Blutarsky
In spring 2008, a band covering Otis Day and the Knights played on Alpha Delta's front lawn to an audience of boozers, brawlers and, probably, future U.S. senators. This past spring, Alpha Delta organized an Animal House-themed party with the preppy brothers Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the inspiration for the sadomasochistic Omega house in the film. And on any given Friday night, it's not just beer making the basement floor of Alpha Delta sticky. Paying tribute to the movie that made their fraternity famous, the brothers of Alpha Delta relieve themselves in plain sight along their basement wall.
This behavior is frowned upon by some. James Watson, a senior at Dartmouth and the current president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, says that the Animal House culture is "very irresponsible." Speaking as the president of a fraternity whose motto is the "true gentleman," Mr. Watson unsurprisingly takes issue with such Bluto-inspired basement practices as "doming," where one chugs a six-pack as quickly as possible until projectile vomiting is induced.
Deborah Carney, director of Greek letter organizations and societies at Dartmouth, echoes Mr. Watson's concerns. "I saw Animal House twice and I thought it was funny," she says. "But when I show clips of Animal House to student leaders of Greek organizations today, they tell me that the clips are funny, but also . . . not funny."
So why do so many college men see Bluto as a model? "People think that behaving like Bluto will win them respect," Mr. Watson says. Bluto has nearly become the archetype of the college man. His poster is found in dorm rooms across the country. He is a binge drinker, physically aggressive and impervious to pain -- especially when he is chugging a fifth of whiskey.
Add one ingredient to Bluto's mischievous mix, sexual prowess, and you have what at Dartmouth is currently called "the hard guy."
An Alpha Delta insider, who agreed to be quoted on condition of anonymity, describes the hard guy. Referencing the excesses of typical Friday festivities, he says, "Your Friday night is my Monday morning." A Web site, created by Dartmouth alumni David Grey and Bobby Zangrilli, is devoted to selling T-shirts emblazoned with that and other hard-guy mottos. Another: "Hard Guy Dating: Having a girlfriend and not even liking her."
Interestingly though, the one variable that could check the hard guy is sex -- or more precisely, the opposite sex. Ms. Carney, looking back at her time at Dartmouth, says, "Over the last couple of decades, one of the biggest changes to the Greek scene has been the presence of women." Women were admitted to Dartmouth in 1976.
Mr. Watson agrees: "Having women around changes the way men act." The Alpha Delta insider has a different take: "My personal theory is that the college really didn't appreciate the attention from the movie and tried even harder to suppress the Animal House culture." As Dean Wormer once said, "The time has come for someone to put their foot down. And that foot is me."
The Alpha Delta insider is referring to the college's heavy oversight of Greek life. In 1999, Dartmouth's board of trustees passed the Student Life Initiative to sap the Greek system of its social dominance. Just one of the many highly unpopular provisions of the Student Life Initiative required Greek houses to register parties and kegs with the college. "Students tell me that, since the Student Life Initiative, parties have grown much tamer. There is more administrative oversight of the parties," Ms. Carney says.
Whatever the cause -- the presence of women or tougher supervision -- the Animal House culture is not the Sodom and Gomorrah it once was. Still, even after 30 years, neither the administration nor women can take the mischievous boy out of the college man. Back then, the frat brothers raged defiantly against the stuffiness of Omega house and the authority of the college administration. Today, they've been reduced to channeling their inner Bluto with hard guy T-shirts.
Ms. Smith, a recent Dartmouth graduate, is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.
Solidarity With Iran
Reagan's Polish lesson for Obama and the American left.
President Obama finally found his voice on Iran this week, saying the world was "appalled and outraged" by the regime's suppression of peaceful protests. Mr. Obama also hinted that he was prepared to reconsider direct negotiations with the regime. "We have provided a path whereby Iran can reach out to the international community," he said. "What we've been seeing over the last several days, the last couple of weeks, obviously is not encouraging in terms of the path."
So where do we go from here, particularly now that demonstrations are abating in the face of increased repression?
* * *
One place to begin is by studying the example of U.S. policy toward Solidarity, the Polish trade union that challenged the Communist regime in the early 1980s. As with the "Green Revolution" in Iran, Solidarity did not begin as a frontal assault on the regime itself, but rather as a peaceful shipyard strike. But it quickly grew into a broad social movement, encompassing shipyard and factory workers, intellectuals, priests and nearly everyone who didn't have a direct stake in the regime's survival.
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Associated Press Protesters supporting Iranian challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi
The U.S. initially adopted a cautious approach toward Solidarity. The Carter Administration rewarded the Polish government with foreign loans and credits for not cracking down on the movement. Then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan also took a restrained view, saying he "didn't believe it was our place to intervene in a purely domestic affair." But Solidarity gained greater traction with the American public and particularly with Lane Kirkland's AFL-CIO, which began collecting donations for Solidarity while refusing to off-load cargo from Polish ships.
Not surprisingly -- and as with Iran today -- these expressions of public sympathy gave the regimes in Warsaw and Moscow the opportunity to blame the West for "meddling," even as the U.S. gave Poland financial and food aid. But that ended in December 1981 after Warsaw imposed martial law, to which Reagan responded by suspending Poland's most-favored-nation trading status and imposing sanctions.
Reagan also offered Solidarity crucial political support, even when the movement seemed crushed. "There are those who will argue that the Polish Government's action marks the death of Solidarity," he said in an October 1982 radio address. "I don't believe this for a moment. Those who know Poland well understand that as long as the flame of freedom burns as brightly and intensely in the hearts of Polish men and women as it does today, the spirit of Solidarity will remain a vital force in Poland."
That support did not go unnoticed inside Poland, despite the arrest of Solidarity's leaders and thousands of others. The U.S. government also coordinated with the AFL-CIO, which smuggled money, printing presses and other equipment necessary to keep Solidarity an active, underground force.
Also crucial was Pope John Paul II, with whom Reagan coordinated a clandestine aid program. It was an angle Reagan understood intuitively: "I have a feeling," he wrote a friend in July 1981, "particularly in view of the Pope's visit to Poland, that religion might very well turn out to be the Soviets' Achilles' heel."
The Church's involvement made a martyr of Jerzy Popieluszko, the charismatic priest whose sermons were broadcast on Radio Free Europe until his murder, by the secret police, in 1984. The confrontation served to underscore that the regime was morally bankrupt and could only be sustained by force. Ultimately, it was brought down by the combination of internal rebellion, economic pressure, Western support for Solidarity and a Soviet patron no longer prepared to send in tanks. When parliamentary elections were finally held in 1989 -- before the fall of the Berlin Wall -- Solidarity took every seat but one.
* * *
Today's Iran is different in many respects from 1980s Poland. The Iranian economy is a shambles, but the regime can sustain itself through oil and gas exports. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can claim his own religious authority. And opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi appears to be a man more in the mold of an Alexander Dubcek than Lech Walesa.
Then again, the Iranian regime is now openly detested by a huge segment of the population, which has produced its own roster of martyrs. The repression has united the opposition and inspired global support, including some prominent former apologists for the mullahs. A large and restive trade union movement could become a locus of opposition, as could a growing number of prominent Shiite theologians who reject the idea of theocratic rule. The country is profoundly vulnerable to a gasoline embargo, for which there is pending legislation in Congress. Digital links to the outside world make it nearly impossible for the regime to arrest or murder dissidents without the world noticing.
All of which means that there are opportunities for the Obama Administration to exploit, provided it envisions a democratic and peaceful Iran as a strategic American aim. That doesn't mean military confrontation with the mullahs. But it does require taking every opportunity to apply consistent pressure on Iran while exploiting its internal tensions and contradictions.
"I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity," Mr. Walesa wrote in these pages after Reagan died in 2004. "Let's remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs. It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for."
The circumstances aren't so different. With similar vision and leadership, the endgame could be the same.
House Passes Global Warming Bill
Sweeping Legislation Calls For First-Ever Limits On Pollution Linked To Climate Change
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Photo
(CBS/AP)
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Interactive Global Warming
The greenhouse effect, a look at the Kyoto Protocol and a history of the Earth's climate.
House Democrats narrowly won a key test vote Friday on sweeping legislation to combat global warming and usher in a new era of cleaner energy. Republicans said the bill included "the largest tax increase in American history."
The vote was 217-205 to advance the White House-backed legislation to the floor, and 30 Democrats defected, a reflection of the controversy the bill sparked.
The legislation would impose limits for the first time on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, factories and refineries. It also would force a shift from coal and other fossil fuels to renewable and more efficient forms of energy. Supporters and opponents agreed the result would be higher energy costs, but disagreed widely on the impact on consumers.
President Barack Obama has made the measure a top priority of his first year in office. The president, along with White House aides and House Democratic leaders, scrambled for the votes to assure passage. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has pledged to get the legislation passed before lawmakers leave on their July 4 vacation.
The Senate has yet to act on the measure, and a major struggle is expected.
In the House, the bill's fate depended on the decisions of a few dozen fence-sitting Democrats, mainly conservatives and moderates from contested districts who feared the political ramifications of siding with the White House and their leadership on the measure.
Democrats left little or nothing to chance. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., confirmed by the Senate on Thursday to an administration post, put off her resignation from Congress until after the final vote on the climate change bill.
"The bill contains provisions to protect consumers, keep costs low, help sensitive industries transition to a clean energy economy and promote domestic emission reduction efforts," the White House in a statement of support for the legislation.
Republicans saw it differently.
This "amounts to the largest tax increase in American history under the guise of climate change," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.
While the bill would impose a "cap-and-trade" system that would force higher energy costs, Republicans for weeks have branded it an energy tax on every American.
But Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said there was a "moral imperative to be good stewards of the earth."
The legislation, totaling about 1,200 pages, would require the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and about 80 percent by the next century.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are rising at about 1 percent a year and are predicted to continue increasing without mandatory caps.
Under the bill, the government would limit heat-trapping pollution from factories, refineries and power plants. It would distribute pollution allowances that could be bought and sold, depending on whether a facility exceeds the cap or makes greater pollution cuts than are required.
CBS News correspondent Bob Fuss reports that the bill starts off slowly, but over the next few decades would have a dramatic impact, aiming to reduce greenhouses gasses by 80 percent by 2050. The caps on carbon emissions will start out generously, and with subsidies to prevent any big jumps in utility bills, but over time will increase energy costs and force utilities and factories to turn to cleaner sources of energy.
Obama on Thursday called it "a vote of historic proportions ... that will open the door to a clean energy economy" and green jobs. "It will create millions of new jobs," Pelosi insisted.
Both Obama and Pelosi preferred to focus on the economic issues rather than on what environmentalists view as the urgency of reducing carbon emissions blamed for global warming.
The Rust Belt coal-state Democrats who have been sitting on the fence worry about how to explain their vote for higher energy prices to people back home - and how the vote might play out in elections next year.
Republicans have been quick to exploit those concerns.
"Democratic leaders are poised to march many moderate Democrats over a cliff ... by forcing them to vote for a national energy tax that is unpopular throughout the heartland," Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said.
There was widespread agreement that under this cap-and-trade system, the cost of energy would almost certainly increase. But Democrats argued that much of the impact on taxpayers would be offset by other provisions in the bill. Low-income consumers would qualify for credits and rebates to cushion the impact on their energy bills.
Two reports issued this week - one from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the other from the Environmental Protection Agency - seemed to support that argument.
The CBO analysis estimated that the bill would cost an average household $175 a year; the EPA put it at between $80 and $110 a year.
Republicans questioned the validity of the CBO study and noted that even that analysis showed actual energy production costs increasing $770 per household. Industry groups have cited other studies showing much higher cost to the economy and to individuals.
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