American Stasis

The historian Thucydides warned about the escalating violent language and behavior that we are witnessing. More on that later.

For now, tes, I thought Rep. Joe Wilson was a boor to scream out at the President during a Joint Session. If everyone were to do that, we’d descend into some sort of Third World Parliament in short order, or end up caning each other, as on the eve of the Civil War. He apologized to the President, and should have.

Tit-for-Tat?

But sadly, I put no credence in liberal outrage. Dozens of Democrats booed Bush during his State of the Union address in 2005; an unhinged Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) called him a liar from the House floor. The currently outraged, like Maureen Down and E.J. Dionne, said little about the 2005 interruption of the President of the United States with catcalls. Congressional efforts at censure failed. Stark, for all I know, remains not an albatross, but an icon of the Left.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

President Obama called for more civility on 60 Minutes the other night. A noble effort, all would agree. But he has himself been serially accusing his opponents of disinformation  and lying about his health care plan—even as his own accounts of how many are currently uninsured, the status of illegal aliens under his plan, or the nature of his end of life counseling programs seem to change weekly.

The President in his calls for moderation, of course, said nothing about Van Jones’s profanity and racism—or his czar’s charging Bush with planning the deaths of 3,000, charging whites with being mass killers in the schools, and polluters, and on and on.

Wasn’t There Someone Once Upon a Time Called Van Jones?

Any President devoted to the notion of restoring civility would have never nominated such a boor. Imagine instead a contrite Obama saying: “We have got to do better in the way we talk to each other. My own White House green jobs advisor should never have said the things he did, and that’s why he had to go.” Instead, Jones got out of town, screaming about smears at midnight. Obama voted present as the Left charged racism at Jones’s departure—although the President warned school children not to post things on the Internet, the implication being you too can be a poor Jones done in by Google.

The Wages of the Sixties

The truth is that a new generation of boors has come of age without sober wise people to teach them how to act. A Rep. Stark or Rep. Wilson, whether left or right, were Sixties people, a generation known for its hip crassness and uncouthness. The baby boomers themselves abdicated the role of elder statesmen, and instead need in their dotage to be taught before they can teach anyone. The proper censors are in the graveyards, a better mannered generation used to hardship and war, whose legacy of  standards we have squandered.

Boors Everywhere

The result? Turn to tennis and we see this week a pathetic Serena Williams in a profanity-ridden rant, because she is being beaten badly on the court and apparently cannot handle the self-induced humiliation, and so goes ballistic over an apparently bad call. I am sure she would have preferred, as in the past, the racist- to the profanity-card, had not the targeted umpire herself been a person of color. Of course, John McEnroe, Ilie Natase and Jimmy Connors set the present low standards in tennis. Ms. Williams is only following in their ends-justify-the-means footsteps. In about a week, her father will weigh in with his customary slurs on spec. Who knows, maybe even McEnroe will claim, “Even I would never do that!”

Steal the Show

Then a buffoonish rapper Kanye hijacks a music awards show, to scream out that he prefers the loser to the poor embarrassed winner, standing mute before him with the trophy. But how can the audience that honors the violence and degradation of hip-hop / rap, then be outraged that they get a live version of such crude behavior before them of what they buy on CDs? Had Kanye only put in a plug for green jobs, he might have escaped without the boos. So we need a Juvenal (‘Who will police the police”) to note the irony of a crass music industry being out-crassed on its formal night out.

Not So Long Ago

The Left is now furious that, as the new establishment, the rules of discourse are not more polite. But from 2002-8, they (Who are “they”? Try everyone from Al Gore to John Glen to Robert Byrd to Sen. Durbin), employed every Nazi/brown shirt slur they could conjure up. NPR’s folksy old Garrison Keiler was indistinguishable from mean-spirited Michael Moore in that regard.

The New York Times gave a discount for a disgusting “General Betray Us” ad. The Democratic Party head Howard Dean flatly said he “hated” Republicans. Hilary Clinton all but called Gen. Petraeus a liar in a congressional hearing. The New Republic ran an essay on hating George Bush (not opposing, not disliking, but “hating” the President). Alfred Knopf published a novel about killing Bush. A Guardian op-ed dreamed of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth coming back to kill Bush. And on and on.

Obama’s problem with warning Americans about bickering, partisan politics, lying, and misrepresentation last night is that his green advisor Van Jones just left after it was disclosed that he called Republicans “a–holes”, whites polluters / more prone to mass murder in schools, and charged the former President with involvement in 9/11. Obama said nothing about such “lying” and “misrepresentation” in his administration–other than to warn school kids to be careful what they put on facebook, twitter and the internet since it can be brought back up for the rest of their lives (i.e., poor Van Jones).

Like ‘hope and change’, ‘this is our moment’, and the now old ‘greatest time in history’ tropes, so too we  are getting used to a highly partisan president complaining about partisanship.

Yet, all the American people wanted last night was 1) the rough cost and where the money comes from (not more gimmicks that bad people will have to cut their profits or magic savings will come from waste and fraud [if the latter is really true, why not bank the savings right now?]); 2) how those who fall through the cracks will be covered (is it 30, 46, or how many million in Obama’s latest version?); and some appreciation that a great system can be improved, rather than the old anecdotes about victims of bad people that we’ve become used to on the campaign trail. (Trying to attach his agenda to the condolences of Ted Kennedy or raising the bloody shirt that more will “die” will not scare or charm a reluctant public that likes its present health and is uneasy about a state-run plan with caretakers of the likes of a Geithner or Jones. Most believe that more will in fact die if we have a Canadian or British style system that devolves into rationing care.)

The President really has to watch this constant return  to these soaring cadences that deliver banalities. One cannot sound like Lincoln if there really is no message. It is time to move on, ignore criticism, and offer something that most can work with; instead, after 9 months we are getting a ‘they are mean to me’ whine at about every speech and photo-op, in the manner of biblical prophets who lash out at doubters.

Obama never gives many concrete details, nor gets precise and concise, and now one wonders whether it is because he simply thinks he can go to the hope and change / soar like an eagle mode, and we will once more get mesmerized, or he has nothing to say at all, or both. But most caught on to all that, and now want a plan, not a prophet.

Bottom line? Obama should just borrow from the Republican plan, assure the Democrats he’s extending coverage to those uncovered, and then, and only then, go back to his eagle routine and soar with it in the stratosphere with “I alone hoped and changed health care.”

New Communique from the Ministry of Truth

At one point, the Obama administration was bragging about bagging one Van Jones; Valerie Jarrett, in fact, even gushed that they had been scouting the erstwhile mostly unknown Jones for quite a while. The word czar was employed of his new responsibilities, and we were subsequently lectured that “over $80 million” in stimulus money was going to be under Jones’s control—given his innovative “green jobs” approach that married civil rights with radical environmentalism.

And now? The ministry has downgraded that now inoperative statement, and insisted that Jones, after all, was not really an unexamined czar, but rather a mere informal “advisor”.

Himself—or in the Stars?

Jones himself, without any introspection, alleged that some vicious “smear campaign” did him in, but did not elaborate on what he meant. Is it not one thing to invoke the bogeyman Glenn Beck, but quite another to list in detail the ways in which Jones had been defamed and lied about?

Had Jones not signed a Truther petition, asking to investigate George Bush’s supposed role in 9/11 (Re: on the one hand, we are supposed to believe that Jones was a brilliant Yale law graduate,* on the other that he did not understand the simple English wording of the petition?), he might have survived the other inanities.

One Act Too Many?

We can attribute his “Republicans are a—holes” remark to lecture theatrics. I don’t care whether he fashionably claims he was some sort of radicalized communist, or even worry much about all the other silly, melodramatic self-characterizations of his own would-be importance. But the racist slurs about white polluters of the ghetto, the white mass murderers in the schools, and George Bush the petroleum crack-head were the sort of things that usually get one fired or demoted (cf. Trent Lott’s remark).

Bill Carter Redux

What we are now seeing with Obama’s coterie is a sort of Billy Carterism—after a while what seems at first outlandish gradually becomes repugnant. Half of the country is now furious at Obama because they are starting to see that Ayers, Khalidi, Meeks, Pfleger, and Wright were representational, rather than aberrational; that is, the associates that for 30 years were the natural friends and role models of Obama proved hard to shake and appear buffoonish 24/7. And stranger still, Obama himself seems surprised that they keep reappearing, as if one so easily can throw under the bus decades of choices, attitudes, and second natures.

Ward Churchillism

What do I mean by “representational”?

There is a strange pseudo-culture in America, of which Obama is a perfect example. Millionaire Michael Moore announces, “Capitalism is evil” as he hypes promotion of his moneymaking new movie. Oliver Stones praises Chavez, as the dictator shuts down voices of dissent—yet Stone himself could not make a movie in Venezuela as he does here. So too the murderer Che becomes a popular T-shirt emblem among the college elite. Van Jones calls Bush a “crackhead” but then in self-important style flashes on his website, “As a tireless advocate for disadvantaged people and the environment, Van helped to pass America’s first ‘green job training’ legislation: the Green Jobs Act, which George W. Bush signed into law as a part of the 2007 Energy Bill.” Bush is a crackhead in front of some audiences, compliant supporter to others?

Wise Moves

Otherwise quite content Americans, getting rich and famous in the free market under the aegis of U.S. freedom and security, have not only the luxury to play the court jester, but see it as a wise investment. Moore would never go to Cuba for brain surgery. Stone would never criticize the Bolivian government while he was living in Bolivia. No Harvard undergraduate would have liked to join occasionally murderous Che in the jungle.

So too it is with middle-class guys like Jones and Obama. Barack Obama, raised by white grandparents, sent to prep school, and educated at the Ivy League, realized that avenues are not so easily opened to the nerdy Barry Dunhams of the world.  Jones grasped that one Anthony Jones who was admitted to Yale Law School might actually have to study, compete for grades, and then go apprentice at a grinding law firm entry-level job.

“Hell-raising”

But as Jones relates, it was far easier to be a “hell raiser” at Yale. What that meant I think was that in lieu of studying (“Yale didn’t have any grades”), Jones knew that he could say and do almost anything he wished among rather wealthy (and to be honest, rather nerdy) white and Asian people, playing on both their guilt, and on their vicarious sense of adventure and cutting-age revolutionary romance—and do pretty well. And so he did.

Very quickly, as his subsequent career attests in a variety of “organizing” jobs, Jones discovered that he could tease and provoke white liberals by posing as some sort of wild (but actually quite safe) revolutionary figure who would call America an “apartheid” system, or dream of a “redistribution of wealth” or praise the advantages of social revolution through hip hop music (”I don’t believe the true power of the people can be confined to a ballot box…We need to be about the whup-ass. Somebody’s f***in up somewhere… They have names and job descriptions. You have to be creative about how you engage the enemy, because if you do it on his terms, the outcome is already known.”)—all the while living a rather mundane bourgeois existence jetting around for princely lecture fees, hyping a book, trying to button-hole celebrities, and finally getting close to his exemplar Barack Obama—who likewise had parlayed Barry Dunham of a Honolulu prep school into Barack Obama, exotic avatar of revolutionary hope and change.

And On It Goes

I support the President on Afghanistan and am relieved he did not pull out of Iraq as once promised (all combat brigades out by March 1, 2008—he said during his initial campaigning).

That said, almost a year ago, I wrote that the Democratic congressional chest-thumping for Afghanistan, as the good war, would cease as soon as Bush left office and that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was always going to be the harder, messier war in the long run.

Just as the John Kerrys of the world lined up on October 10, 2002, to authorize the Iraq war to bolster their security fides in what they then thought would be another walk-through, only to bail with “Bush made me vote that way”, so too they sought cover in anti-war protest over Iraq by praising Afghanistan as the good war, thinking it was won, Iraq was lost, and Bush was in power.

Now Bush is history; Iraq is quieter; Afghanistan is heating up. So? An Obama invasion into Pakistan in ‘hot pursuit’? I don’t think any of them ever realized that they would own Afghanistan and their own bellicose rhetoric would come back to haunt them. Have there been any New York Times exposes about  our post-Jan. 20, 2009 Predator assassinations in Pakistan, in which we obliterate houses, families and all, without Miranda rights or habeas corpus (what candidate Obama himself once deplored)? (And if the State Department was supposed to oversee private guards responsible for embassy security in Kabul, and the State Department in turn was  responsible to the White House, does the administration have culpability in the fashion that the rogue sex-perverts guards at Abu Ghraib, supposedly reflected the Bush-era military? If we blow up 90 in Afghanistan is it a war crime, or an honest mistake? When you turn the media into Pravda it becomes impossible to keep the party line straight sometimes.)

But other than continuing past policy on the two wars, almost everything Obama had done is consistent with his past associates (Pfleger, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), his past vocation (grievance organizing), and his past methodology (most partisan in the Senate, surrealistic Senate campaign in which foes mysteriously dropped out, the Axelrod/Emanuel Chicago way, etc.).

Health Care Grab

We all know what that a good health care system can be improved by increased competition, tort reform, tax credits for catastrophic insurance plans, deregulation, etc.

But Obamacare is not really about medicine. It is rather aimed at absorbing more of the private sector—once more, to create a vast new constituency of government workers and beneficiaries, to ensure an equality of result in treatment and access, and to replace private health insurers with public bureaucrats. (I got a taste of the future of the government octopus when I went yesterday to a California DMV office, and noticed that all the state employees at the windows had on purple union T-shirts with “organize” and “solidarity” emblazoned across them.)

In other words, in the Obama mind, would you want an autonomous family practitioner, entrepreneurial, keen to adopt to patient needs and tastes, juggling 10 employees and a 2-million-dollar family practice budget, grossing $400,000 a year in profits, highly opinionated and self-reliant, using his profits once in a while to ski or buy a BMW—or have him transmogrified into a GS-something, at $100,000 a year, with government benefits, unionized, docile, and waiting to go home when his shift at the dreary government clinic ends, wearing his doctor union T-shirt to work and eager to vote in politicians who ensure him lifetime tenure, generous retirement packages, and guaranteed pay raises?

The war against those who want to get rich

Then we have the “spread the wealth”, “redistributive” class warfare rhetoric, demonizing everything from Vegas to those earners who might make over $150,000 (I love the way the President keeps saying that people “like me” should pay more. Actually, few have had access to Tony Rezko’s spread-the-wealth tips, or have wives that get $100,000-plus raises when their husbands become Senators, or have had a lifetime government tenure of some sort). In just nine months, the President has created a near class war—with one provision: the technocracy like Dodd, Geithner, Murtha, Rangel, etc. are exempt from the high taxes and government monitoring that they feel is critical to inflict on others.

Debt

Gorge the Beast is the new philosophy. At a $2 trillion-a-year-deficit clip, and new borrowing for cash for clunkers, health care, cap-and-trade, etc., we will get taxes—federal, state, payroll, and surcharge—that will soon take 65% of the income of the “rich.” The IRS will grow and become more intrusive. The point?

Like it or not, by April 16 of each year we will all make about the same: those who make “too much” will return their stolen goods; those who were fleeced and “make too little” will receive it back through recycled entitlements, with the proper amount skimmed off at the top by the technocracy, immune from the very statutes they craft.

Means and Ends in the Age of Obama

One of the stranger things about this eerie first eight months of the Obama administration is how brazenly its supporters have been about the noble ends justifying the disreputable means.

Taxes for Thee

Take taxes. I thought the mantra was that the Bush tax cuts — equal percentages of cuts to all involved, an even greater number of households excused from the tax rolls altogether — were supposed to be cruel and proof of conservative selfishness.

Candidate Obama once in an interview seemed to agree that greater revenue ensued for the federal treasury, but he felt that such benefits were not worth the empowerment of so many to become so wealthy. In other words, higher taxes were good for those who make money — and avoiding or cutting them was unpatriotic and greedy.

We now witness Rep. Charles Rangel, who not only somehow on a congressman’s salary compiled hundreds of thousands in cash in various accounts, but also seems to have skipped out on almost every conceivable tax on such lucre. We know the tired story of Treasury Secretary Geithner, who not only skipped his FICA taxes, but pocketed the cash allowances allotted precisely for them. Whether a Chris Dodd or Tom Daschle, the story is the same — insider perks from low interest mortgages to free limousine service were never reported and never taxed.

There are two ways of making sense of this paradox. One, such liberals assume that their cosmic humanitarianism and brotherly egalitarianism exempt them from following mere mortal laws (e.g., as in “We are so divine on the important stuff that we deserve a pass on  small, insignificant matters”.) And two, in order to enact state planning, and superimpose an overarching government plan onto our own messy agendas, we must bow to a technocracy.

These gifted souls are like Plato’s Guardians —Übermenschen, trained at places like Harvard Law School, with government service at the Fed, years at this or that Cabinet post, or tenure in Congress under their belts, veterans of brief university postings. We are blessed with Geithners, Daschles, Obamas and others, and so can hardly demand they be bothered with minutiae like taxes, or following bureaucratic regulations governing gifts, whether Tony Rezko’s land deals or Friends of Angelo loan perks.

My Grass Roots, Your Astro-turfing

Examine also community organizing. The craft was caricatured by Rudy Giuliani at the Republican Convention as a sort of non-productive, busy-bodying, a dressed-up version of being paid to give out someone else’s money to someone arbitrarily deemed more deserving.

Be that as it may, the Obama mystique was wrapped up within such grassroots organizing and supposedly selfless public service. (Remember Michelle Obama’s referencing of how Barack could have been a cutthroat rich lawyer (I doubt that, since success in corporate law is not easy), but instead chose to go to Chicago to toil in the fields of the poor (alongside Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers)?)

But suddenly we are seeing a much more genuine form of community organizing. The team parties and town halls are not union-bussed in affairs. There are no federally-subsidized ACORN-like printed posters. Most are spontaneous protestors and dissidents, who don’t want to give up their private health care plans or endanger their Medicare privileges.

For this defiance they have been dubbed Neanderthals, mobs, unpatriotic, Nazis, and brown shirts. Community organizing and popular protest has gone from being seen as 1960s romance during the Bush years to sinister 1930s-like agitation in Italy and Germany. But the only thing that has changed is that now the community organizers are the establishment, and they don’t like being community organized. So once again, like raising taxes, we see that protest was always only a means to an ends, not an intrinsically necessary form of popular outrage.

Actions often have unforeseen consequences. Throughout the campaign and the first few months of the new administration, Barack Obama adopted a number of personas and positions that only now may be coming back to haunt him. Or in the words of the right Reverend Wright the proverbial “chickens are coming home to roost.”

1) The Wars

Obama and the Democrats once understandably figured that the war in Afghanistan was nearly won (between 2002-5 fewer of our soldiers were dying in an entire year there than in a single bloody month in Iraq), while (to quote Harry Reid) Iraq was already “lost.” Obama, like most, not only opposed the surge, but claimed it would be counterproductive.

In contrast, Obama promised that he’d be tough in Afghanistan, pursue enemies hotly into Pakistan, and not take “his eye off the ball” of the theater as did Bush. “Let me at ‘em” was the mood (sort of like the cartoon character who swings furiously and wildly at the air while his larger companion holds him up by the scruff of the neck.)

Remember that in early 2007 when Obama was beginning his campaign, Afghanistan was still thought of as the “good” war—UN approved, mostly quiet with few fatalities (e.g., 59 in all of 2005), and directly linked with the Taliban, 9/11, and Osama bin Laden.

Iraq, in contrast, was the thoroughly bad war—and became even messier as the controversial surge peaked fatalities.  Remember the “General Betray Us” ads?

Iraq was seen as George Bush’s albatross, as the once supportive Democrats (cf. the Democratic pluralities who voted to authorize the war in the October 10-11, 2002 votes) had long ago bailed. A wild-eyed public that polled 79% in favor of the war in May 2003 (despite the daily media blaring that there were no weapons of mass destruction), by 2006 was polling only 35% in favor.  By 2006 and 2008 the opposition to the Iraqi war was Democratic manna—especially as Obama and others in contrast sought national security cover in chest-thumping about Afghanistan. Remember the Obama promise to bring all combat brigades home from Iraq by “March 31, 2008”?

But there were a few problems.

1)   By inauguration, Iraq was already on the road to being saved. This year far more have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq; five Americans were lost so far this month in Iraq; 57 in Afghanistan—ten times the losses of the former!

2) the problem with “surging” is now not Bush’s Iraq version which worked, but Obama’s necessary Afghan reinforcement whose efficacy remains to be seen;

3) Obama and the Democrats may have not grasped that security and consensual government in Afghanistan were always the tougher propositions—a country landlocked, with harsh weather, difficult terrain, an illiterate populace, and poor, nuclear Pakistan next door; while Iraq was always the more viable—ports, oil, vital location, easy terrain and access, greater numbers of secular and literate citizenry;

4) Yes, Afghanistan was directly linked to 9/11. But if the ‘war on terror’ was really about radical Islam and its nexus with sponsoring Middle East tyrants and autocracies, then the removal of Saddam would cause in its own right positive ripples in a rather wider region. Iran, for example, was not perennially “empowered” by our removal of Saddam, as the conventional wisdom insisted the last six years. In fact, Ahmadinejad may be now threatened by the idea of a Shiite-majority democracy nearby, one that conducts itself in a fashion that is ipso facto destabilizing to its nearby theocratic cousin and its millions of the unhappy. Iranian popular angst increased after the fostering of Iraqi democracy.

Bottom line? Obama—rightfully so—committed himself to winning a good war in Afghanistan, and now he must accomplish what was a far more challenging proposition than he ever imagined.  His doom-and-gloom assertions about Iraq proved wrong, and now in turn he must oversee what may well turn out to be a George Bush-inspired successful constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate.

It is true that the liberal media will give Obama far more leeway (note how violence in Afghanistan and Iraq are not so much on the front pages as in the Bush years; and note how Hollywood will produce no more movies like Rendition or Valley of Elah about an unpopular war). In addition, the anti-war left—for now—will go easier on kindred Commander-in-Chief Obama. The Democrats in Congress, of course, will become suddenly be pro-war in Afghanistan as they were once anti-Bush on Iraq.  But all that said, again, Afghanistan won’t be easy. Security and a stable Afghan consensual government will mean Obama cannot vote present. As the casualties mount, so will the left-wing base agitate to galvanize public opinion against the war—and the media will make the necessary adjustments.

Conclusion? Obama should have never blustered about our supposedly hopeless situation in Iraq and his own eagerness to escalate in Afghanistan. Now we expect him to reify his campaign rhetoric. But he cannot easily wish to flee Iraq and turn victory into defeat there; nor easily surge in Afghanistan and have that once good war become Obama’s messy own.

2) Race

Obama could have downplayed identity politics, and stayed true to his message of racial irrelevance—despite the temptation of hyping the novelty and mystique of his heritage and of tapping the ever present font of white guilt. He could have run as a Colin Powell/Condoleezza Rice-like figure  who saw race as incidental, never essential to his persona.

The Obama Meltdown—Symptoms/Diagnosis/Prognosis

Strange things are happening to the Obama administration and quickly so. His polls are diving and may not stop at 50/50, the most precipitous drop in approval of a first-year President since Bill Clinton in 1993 (cf. Hillary care).

First, here are some of the problems the President faces:

Symptoms and Diagnosis

1)   Health Care. Health-care take overs and socialized medicine have terrified not just the right and conservatives, but the elderly of all persuasions who fear their shaky Medicare funds will be diverted to Obama’s new plans. In short, they believe their care will be rationed and given to all sorts of new recipients. And they fear age will be a basis for meriting treatment; as if the gang banger with a long felony record of mayhem at 22 would be more deserving before a federal health panel than would someone at 90 who scrimped and saved for insurance in case of some future need for a hip replacement (and was still active and productive; cf. great octogenarians from Sophocles to Barzun who did their best work in their late lives).

It was an insane political move to demonize these town-hallers, when streaming video showed the participants scared and angry, but not violent, trying to get answers from smug politicos who either cell phoned away, ridiculed questioners in the manner of Barney Frank, or mocked their interrogators. These were for the most part not Code Pink/Cindy Sheehan type protestors. (And by the way, what happened to Code Pink, given we are still in Iraq and Afghanistan?)

2)   The Spell is Broken. Cap-and-trade, the mega-deficits, the apology tours, and the sleaze of some appointments and congressional grandees (cf. Rangel, Dodd, Murtha, etc.) were stimulants, but not in themselves enough to awaken the somnolent American people from their collective trance. Yet health care was like a shot of adrenaline that jolted the patient out of his slumber. Suddenly hope and change no longer worked like the swinging watch and “you’re getting sleepy” lingo. Voters are feeling they’ve been “had” and were mesmerized into being used for an extremist agenda.

Who made the following decisions? 1) to propose a 1,000 page bill that no one had read, much less could explain?; 2) to ram down the greatest change in the US economy in fifty years by the August recess?; 3) to talk loosely of the “uninsured” without knowing why they were not insured, how much it would cost to insure them, or whether they currently in fact find some sort of care?; 4) to reference Rahm Emanuel’s doctor brother as a source of wisdom? 5) to demonize the health-care industry as greedy?

(NB: Does Obama really believe that illegal aliens do not possess 200-300 dollars a month to buy catastrophic health coverage, when they send on average at least that amount back to Mexico on the assumption the emergency room here is free, for everything from injuries to natal care? Does he believe that a 25-year old does not gamble that his robust health means he prefers his I-pod, DVDs, and nights out to squirreling away cash each month for health insurance? There are flaws in our system that must be corrected, but the notion of conspirators in black hats who plot to prevent health care for the “uninsured” is fallacious.

3)   The Counter-attack is not working. The Obama shotgun has blasted all sorts of magnum loads—town-hall and tea-party critics were un-American, Nazis, tools of the insurance industry, dupes, and Astro-turfers. Now the religious argument is thrown out at the 11^th hour: those who doubt neo-socialist care are somehow un-Christian and uncaring. But that tactic evokes Trinity-Church politics, where religious piety rings false and serves political advantage. Did not the Christian Right get demonized for just that avenue of political mobilization? And because Obama assumed messianic pretensions, such a prophet suffers the wage of hypocrisy, given the growing reality that he is, on the presidential scale, rather mean spirited, highly partisan, too sensitive to criticism, and surprisingly ill-informed given the emphasis on his Ivy-League education and the whiz-kids around him (who wrote the error-plagued Cairo speech).

The Therapy

1)   Cool the “this is our moment”, “hope and change” rhetoric. Obama reminds me of what Wellington supposedly said of Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Instead, he should quietly follow the 1995 triangulation model of Bill Clinton/Dick Morris.

Instead of the old sops of welfare reform, school uniforms, balanced budgets, and more police officers on the street (I’m not being entirely cynical here), Obama should concentrate on debt, debt, and more debt. He could freeze federal spending at 2% per annum, and get into the black in two-three years, given his income tax hikes. He could pacify the Left with, “I’d love to pursue our socialist agenda, but we are going broke and cannot right now.”

Instead of cap-and-trade, he could allot a few feminist, green and gay ambassadorships that would not impact the federal treasury. Given the sudden silence on Iraq, the Left has demonstrated that their furor was always about power lost and hatred for George Bush in the White House, never much about principles or convictions. That Obama is in the White House is more important to most former critics of Bush than anything he does or says.

2)   Return to the “no more blue/red state” bipartisan tropes. Consider Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank as the real challenges, since the animosity that they engender can do far more damage to Barack Obama than Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and all of the Fox News cast put together. Voters are more comfortable with Blue Dogs than Barbara Boxer. Soon the tea-party anger is going to spill over and result in Boxer, Reid, etc. having reelection nightmares.

Presidential Popularity

After just eight months, the President is at a 50/50 cross-roads in the polls. The once hope-and-change exuberance has dissipated. Such unpopularity is hardly new; what is novel is the rapidity in which a 70%+ approval rating has plummeted to 50%.

What’s Next?

The result is that Obama is increasingly at the mercy of events, rather than directing them himself. If the economy rebounds quickly, if his supporters vastly water down his cap-and-trade and health care initiatives and call such nuancing success, if energy prices stay depressed, if his administration stops the racial hectoring, if Michelle, Biden, and others are advised to smile rather than to speak, then Obama may, like Clinton in 1995, recover.

But if a recovery morphs into Carter-like stagflation with high unemployment, interest, and inflation, coupled with low growth, if Obama insists on a blood-on-the-floor flight for socialized medicine and radical energy taxes, if we get more “cowards” and “stupidly” editorializing, if Michelle gets angry and emerges with more “this is a downright mean country” sermonizing, if Biden starts talking his astrology, then we could witness a Carter or Bush meltdown in the polls—but in year one rather than four or five.

What Happened?

The public was mad at Bush for deficit spending, and yet Obama baited-and-switched and gave them much more of it. Americans perhaps were tired of “smoke ‘em out” and “bring it on” machismo, and then got off-the-teleprompter incoherence of the ‘inflate your tires’ type. Voters wanted Martin Luther King, Jr., and are hearing more an Al Sharpton. Wall Street greed continues, but the remedy for its excess instead falls on our family doctor, real estate broker, and accountant, and all the others who are demonized for making over $250,000 a year. Some believed Nancy Pelosi & Co. were genuine supporters of protest, and critics of government privilege—and only now learned that it was only liberal protest and Republican privilege she and her cohort praised and slurred. We wanted kinder, gentler servants, and instead got a Hillary snapping and gnashing in the Congo, Timothy Geithner swearing in profanity-laced diatribes at bank regulators, and Biden’s lunacy.

Quiet Before the Storm?

The more I talk to Americans, the more they seem to me increasingly apprehensive about the growing deficits. They are exasperated that the talk of all these new taxes won’t translate into balanced budgets, but into gargantuan new debts. More and more get the impression that the more we are to pay for taxes and the more entitlements are to expand, the more both are owed rather than appreciated. The more we say we are sorry abroad, the more a Chavez, Kim Jong Il, or Ahmadinejad may well confuse contrition for timidity and so try to readjust the regional order—as a warm-up for something really serious from Russia or China.

A Necessary Catharsis

If one reads the early plays of Aristophanes, Aristotle’s Politics, or later political observers like Tocqueville, then one appreciates that in a democracy there is always a certain tendency for ochlocracy. Popular demagoguery ensures that the better off are pilloried, and the public votes itself largess that it simply does not have. Indeed, in the ancient world, it is largely accepted that while democracy in name means power of the people in the sense of majority rule, it so often translates into the power of the poorer classes.

The corrective is for a conservative minority to win over a majority by appeals to reason and moderation, to stifle public appetites, to honor traditional values, to remind us all of the tragic limitations inherent in the human experience.

Thoughts of Our European Future to Come

After concluding another 16 days in Europe. I am again reminded how different their form of socialism  is, and yet how closely it resembles the model that Obama seeks for America. The vast majority of citizens lives in apartments, even in smaller towns and villages. Cars are tiny. Prices are higher than in the states; income is lower (The government taxes you to pay for things like “free” college, so you won’t have much to spend on antisocial things like your Wal-Mart plastic Christmas Tree or your second K-Mart plasma TV.)

Mass transit is frequent and cheap,  but often crowded and occasionally unpleasant. The stifled desire to acquire something—large house, car, deposit account—is of course not quite destroyed by socialism, but rather is channeled into a sort of cynicism and anger, often leading to a hedonism of few children, late and long meals, and disco hours until the early morning. The number of Gucci like stores selling overpriced label junk like 200 Euro eye-glass frames and 1000 Euro leather bags to socialists is quite amazing.

A Party for Everything

Multiple political parties flourish, all with passionate single agenda constituents. Graffiti is not gang related, but mostly political and nonsensical. Media is divided by politics, a leftwing paper, a rightwing magazine. Unions control almost all government services. And yet class is firmly entrenched and aristocratic snobbery more pronounced. (We already see that strange symbiosis between socialism for everyone else, capitalism for a few, whether in Michelle’s clothes, the Obama’s mansion, the Kerry fortune, the Edwards compound, the Gore appurtenances, the Clinton speaking cash cow, and too many others to list).

Among upper-class Greeks, one is constantly reminded that their grandfather, their cousin, or mother-in-law was this minister once, or that writer years ago, or today a famous diplomat—anything to focus one’s attention beyond the possession of the normal flat in the normal apartment building and the normal tiny Fiat and the normal public education.

Ministries to be Milked

When I talk to well-off Italians and Greeks who have substantial homes by the sea not available to most others, one of three realities leak out: one, they have family money made decades ago by their ancestors that includes ancestral estates permissible before the period of supposed mandated equality of result. In other words, theirs got theirs and then helped make laws so no one else could.

Or, two, people simply cheat on taxes all the time. If you buy something, the offer comes to pay in cash. A Greek explained to me his government job is his official tax-paying day job; the expertise necessary for it is what he farms out at night and on weekends for cash that goes for a second home, a larger car, a vacation abroad.

Egalitarian Vampires

Or, three, the technocrats who run  these vast welfare states are not only well paid, but more importantly are able to garner cars, travel, and plush apartments as tax-free job related perks (cf. the current scandal in London). If being a “venture capitalist” is what wannabe Harvard kids in their 20s sought in the 1990s, being a bigwig Minister, with neo-classical office, state Mercedes, and official residence is the perennial European equivalent. This is a continent of Tom Daschles, who win by being exempt from the burden of government that they subject on others, and win again by having the contacts to sort out government contracts to crony-businesses.

My point? The more Europe professes to be egalitarian, the more cynical and conniving the people have become—almost as if the human craving for one’s own property and to make one one’s destiny cannot be denied by the state, but by needs will be channeled into what the state mandates as anti-social for most, but quietly a perk for a few.

Rhodes

Millions of Euros have transformed Rhodes into a sort of Frankish and Venetian Disneyland. The medieval city has been completely rebuilt, or almost rebuilt—turrets, walls, streets, arches, courtyards—into a fascinating citadel as it might have appeared around 1500 or so. I visited in 1973, 1974, and 1988, and it has since invested more money in the last twenty years into infrastructure than during the prior 100. But then the story of Greece itself the last thirty years is the gargantuan influx of Euro money, both before and after the Olympics, that make it unrecognizable from my first visit at 20 in September 1973—an awful year of war in the Middle East, furor over American resupply of Israel,  of oil embargos, a preliminary coup that removed George Papadopoulos, brought in the more sinister Ioannides, and the shoot-out at the Polytechnion.

One does not see medieval homesteads in the interior anywhere in Greece as was common during the classical period. Indeed Rhodes of the Middle Ages—tons of stone ramparts guarding a stone central fortress with crowded brick and stone homes within—was not the Rhodes of 400 B.C. with plentiful small poleis and surrounding homestead farms.

Piracy and Ottomanism meant that enemy galleys could appear on the horizon without warning and land within hours to rape, murder, kidnap, and pillage. The pattern of settlement of  Rhodes is a testament to that fact. Houses are built fortress-like. Streets are labyrinths, and secondary lines of defense, as trapped invaders might be pelted from top stories of shuttered homes, citizens safe behind massive doors, or at least safe enough to jump above across narrow pathway-like streets or to escape through subterranean tunnels.

Throughout the Mediterranean antiquities of the 14th-18th centuries, the story is the same: fears of security, inadequate defense, and constant anxiety trump the ease and economy of living among the fields. Commuting peasants attached to lords who provide security for exploitation, not yeomen homestead farmers of the classical past, are more characteristic of the countryside

One way of learning history without texts is simply to wander the ancient countryside and observe: when there are scattered towns and homesteads, life is good; when not, life is tenuous and development retarded. Standing on the ramparts of Rhodes, I could not think of a scarier thing than hearing a shout from a watchman that seaborne raiders have appeared out of nowhere and the gates were closing to prevent catastrophe.  We in the United States have not seen such insecurity since the Civil War and especially the bloody killing in Kansas and Missouri, other than a few range wars in the late nineteenth-century West. But history is not always progressive, and without good government, national unity, and viable defense, the world returns to the status of the 15^th-century Aegean. Almost every island out here has an impressive Frankish fort, beefed up by the Venetians—and ultimately sacked by the Turks.

Bodrum

I first visited Halicarnassus—birthplace of Herodotus, home of the Mausoleum, and capital of Artemisia’s Carian kingdom—over 35 years ago. It has metamorphosized from a seedy, sleepy sort of Bohemian seaside port into a cruise ship  hot spot, with rebuilt Frankish castle, touristy harbor, scores of impressive wood yachts, and an inviting market not that much different from those on the Greek islands.

There is not much more than a stone or two left from the Mausoleum (the least visited of the 7 ancient wonders of the world, I think, are the Babylon hanging gardens and Mausolus’s tomb). The ancient theater is still used, but gaudy and without the dignity of the white simplicity of Epidauros. The harbor has great natural beauty. I spent the afternoon at a coffee bar and talked to a Turkish intellectual, furious that Greeks come easily ashore as EU cash-laden visitors, while Turks only with difficulty can stay more than a day on the Greek islands. I left the conversation when he got into the great Aegean narrative: that Greek islands, like Rhodes, Samos, Lesbos, and Chios, are intrinsically and properly Turkish—apparently he never heard of ancient Ionia. We had started out well enough, talking about olives and grapes, and the scarcity of water; politics ended all that.

Mykonos

I confess I have never liked Mykonos. Like most classics and archaeological snob students, I avoided it except as transit to uninhabited Delos. But aside from the Euro-sensualists who swarm the island, its interior has natural beauty and fine beaches, as well as good seaside restaurants. I first visited there 36 years ago, and that old divide between gawking traditional native residents and polymorphously perverse European party-goers is now gone. Indeed, the Greek cosmopolitans are almost indistinguishable from the other visitors. I usually preferred to visit Paros or Naxos, or even eerie tourist- and antiquities-free Syros. Swam alongside a snorkeler who speared four big octopuses, and he spoke English as poorly as I do modern Greek now.