Does America still need a president?

by Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 5/29/12

States’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights! – Texas Governor Rick Perry, April 16, 2009

California headed toward "nation state" status when it moved to link its carbon markets with Québec’s. But as Douglas A. Kysaw and Webb Lyons report in the Huffington Post, as much as California may envision itself a global player, “the fact remains that it is a state, and as such operates under a set of constitutional restraints that limit its involvement on the international stage.”

Has the American Presidency become an anachronism? Does centralized government today hinder the progress of mature states like California? Ours has become a government of political tribes and generations, not states – that idea was killed in 1913 by the 17^th Amendment. But centralized government may soon become a thing of the past. Tea Party is not just for us New Hampshire hillbillies any more. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Jersey’s governor Chris Christie have signing on.

California and Quebec ignore both American and Canadian governments and go ahead together as free states and regions. As governor, Schwarzenegger pioneered this approach.

Schwarzenegger declared California to be the modern equivalent of the ancient Athens and Sparta. “‘We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state,” he said in his inaugural address. “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

But federal governance presented problems.

Perry has made the same complaint.  The Founders were being forced to endure a king 3,000 miles away, he has written. “Is it not ironic that what we fought against 200-years ago is what we allow today, with the consolidation of power in Washington?”

Now Christie says he will move to allow casinos in his state to offer betting on the outcome of sporting events like football and basketball in violation of federal law.

"We intend to go forward," Christie said. "If someone wants to stop us, then let them try to stop us.”

Has he been talking to Judge Napolitano? It sounds like that thing Perry has on his cowboy boots: Come and take it.

“The president’s saga has a symbolism and sweep that his opponent hasn’t been able to match,” writes NYTs columnist Frank Bruni on Sunday. But match they will. They always do. The Clintons have turned the presidency of Bill into a globalist personality cult and Obama is more attractive. This is endemic to our structure of governance and became embedded in our DNA with the cult of George Washington, enshrined as an actual god on the dome of the Capital in the vast painting, “Apotheosis of George Washington.”

A function of the Senate was to bring detachment from the central authority to allow states to mature. A ploy, perhaps.  The marginalization of Jefferson off on the river banks in D.C. suggests it was.

Ambassador George Kennan proposed antidotes like a Council of Elders. An independent governors council - possibly a permanent one - of current and past governors (Schwarzenegger, Sarah Palin, Perry and Christie should begin to investigate the possibilities) would raise the status of governors and their states and regions and begin to address it.

These exist today, but politicians and we, the people, need to undergo a fundamental freeing from the creepy occultism of government symbolism (like the Vesica Piscis – divine portal – surrounding the Washington Monument which substitutes Washington for the Christ; separation of church and state? What if the state itself is the church?) and political indoctrination that has led us to accept with hard-wired religious fidelity the absolute authority of central government since Washington was portrayed as ascending to heaven body and soul on December 14, 1799.

Does America still need a president?


“States’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights!” – Texas Governor Rick Perry, April 16, 2009



Two weeks ago California moved one step closer to "nation state" status, as the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, announced that California would link its cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with a similar system belonging to a foreign neighbor, the Canadian province of Québec, Douglas A. Kysaw and Webb Lyons report in the Huffington Post. It makes sense to link across national borders, they say, but “ this lofty rationale masks a key point: as much as California may envision itself a global player, the fact remains that it is a state, and as such operates under a set of constitutional restraints that limit its involvement on the international stage.”

Has the American Presidency become an anachronism? It was a great idea when America was made up of three cities and a forest in 1776, but does centralized government today hinder the progress of mature states like California? We are a nation of political tribes and generations, not states – that idea was killed in 1913 by the 17th Amendment . But centralized government may become a thing of the past. Because Tea Party is not just for us New Hampshire hillbillies any more. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chris Christie, from the "initiative" states of CA and NJ, where things are said to awaken, have signing on.

Quebec, an hour from where I live, is a great and good place. California and Quebec now ignore both American and Canadian governments and go ahead together as free states and regions. As governor, Schwarzenegger attempted to do these kinds of things. He wanted to run a series of hydrogen stations from San Diego to British Columbia and had little interest in what America and Canada nationalists had to say about it.

He might have found sympathetic premiers across the plains to Quebec with that and when Howard Dean was governor of Vermont he might have been able to drop down to Burlington, then to White River Junction, then Concord and direct to Boston, barely an hour away. These are all sympathetic regions (fast trains could run those routes as well and go very fast in vast uninhabited regions which parallel the TransCanada). This should be the work of innovative governors and premiers. Presidents and prime ministers only interfere.

Governor Schwarzenegger declared California to be the modern equivalent of the ancient city states of Athens and Sparta. “‘We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state,” he said in his inaugural address. “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

But federal governance presents problems, he has said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has made the same complaint. The Founders were being forced to endure a king 3,000 miles away, he has written. “Is it not ironic that what we fought against 200-years ago is what we allow today, with the consolidation of power in Washington?”

And the states’ rights cry comes this week not from Rand Paul in the Appalachian hollers, but from Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey. As The Hill reported Friday, Christie says he will move to allow casinos in his state to offer betting on the outcome of sporting events like football and basketball in violation of federal law.

"We intend to go forward," Christie said. "If someone wants to stop us, then let them try to stop us.”

Which sounds like that thing Texas Governor Rick Perry has on his cowboy boots: Come and take it.

A federation of sovereign realms: Arnold Schwarzenegger starts the world again

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/22/12

“I’ll be back.” – The Terminator

California is the land of second chances. Too bad Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t get one. There was perhaps never a better match between man and place in the new world than Arnold Schwarzenegger and California. He might today be considered to have been well ahead of his day. He urged California to go its own way. The federal government hovering like a UFO overhead often seemed to him a useless nuisance. Arnold has recently started his own world called R20, an organization of regions united in climate action which completely ignores fixed national and international boundaries. Imagine a world born again of original, authentic sovereign regions instead of those inherited from generations past and drawn from ancient contention, some beyond even our human memory.

Schwarzenegger now brings his approach in Sacramento to the world at large. He said local governments are taking action now because "we can't afford to wait for national and international movement."

In 2007 Gar Alperovitz, a progressive historian and scholar at the University of Maryland looked to the new California governor as a singular innovator. He wrote then in The New York Times: “SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not evens the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure. . . . Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. ‘We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,’ he recently declared. ‘We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.’ In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, ‘We are a good and global commonwealth.’”

To Schwarzenegger we are all our own “city states” underneath, yearning to break free from ghostly ancestors who pull at us from the grave and like a snake, slip the old skin to be born again in a “good and global commonwealth.” Would that New England could actually think of itself like that.

Today, Alperovitz’s comments seem prescient and suggest some of the changes that have appeared here since 2009 with the rise of the Tea Party. Gerry Celente of Trends 2000 has called decentralization the central idea of the rising century. But these ideas did not start with the Tea Party. They were here all along and Schwarzenegger was the first to conceptualize them as a governor of California.

 “We all need to be aware that most of the solutions already exist – but it is our responsibility whether or not we can use them properly. If we manage to do so, we will create new business opportunities, jobs and, which is equally important, contribute to the preservation of the environment, which has been a major issue for a while now. We cannot wait on state or even world agreements, we can implement the solutions following the principle bottom-up,” Claude Béglé, Ambassador of R20 Regions of Climate Action conceived Schwarzenegger, recently said.

Nor can California afford any longer to wait for Washington and Schwarzenegger was the first to say so. Too bad he cannot be given a second chance.

Elizabeth Warren’s true American lineage

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/20/12

Elizabeth Warren might be excused for wanting to be Native American. She can claim an old American soul, going back generations in Oklahoma. In the heartland it is almost universal for those who have been here for a few generations to claim Indian blood; that is, to wish it were there even if it isn't. It is not so much a lie as it is the acculturation of personal and regional American myth; the fabric of old soul American consciousness. "Our spirit will walk among you," said Chief Joseph. Indeed it does.

Indians come to us as dream guides, spirit guides and like Sacagawea, real guides to our most important journeys at once physical and metaphysical. Those who have made these journeys tend to honor them. C.G. Jung, when watching Americans leave their factories, said we the paleface had come to walk "like Indians." One early commentator said we, like the Indians and unlike the Europeans, live without fences. We play Indian as children to call up the intuitive feminine. We name our cars after the noble and brave “Grand Cherokee.” We call to the spirit on Geronimo going into battle. When we want our heroine true, like Katniss, we put a bow and arrow in her hand. "We are all Americans here," said Ely Samuel Parker, the Seneca Indian, aide to Grant at Appomattox, suggesting that with the bloodshed at Bull Run, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville and Cemetery Ridge, we sanctioned our place and belonged here with the Indians.

The first poetic vision of Europeans in the new world was that of James Fenimore Cooper, who conjured Natty Bumpo. He had an "Indian name" – he had several, Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder  - indicating that he had been "reborn" in the new world in the Indian spirit. It is the oldest and most important myth in the American cannon of our folk lore from Lone Ranger, who died and became "born again" via agency of an Indian shaman, and Fox Mulder, who returned from the dead via Indian intercession in “The X Files,” born new with the past burned away in death, to enter a new age under the flag of the White Buffalo.

So Warren's claim to be "part Indian" is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.

Warren in that regard she brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston where we still have tendencies. The James brothers, both William and Henry, would appreciate it. Henry in particular in The Bostonians, could only find one worthy character up here, the country cousin Basil Ransom, a lawyer visiting from Mississippi. We are lucky to have Warren among us. She adds stock and substance.

I hope Mitt Romney remembers this and incorporates Indian blessings and ritual in his inaugural ceremonies as Canadians do and as they did in those terrific Winter Olympics in Salt Lake in 2002.  And I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn't back down on this, because wanting to be Indian, like Hawkeye, makes us in a deeper sense fully American.

Will Obama ditch Joe Biden? (Obama/McRaven 2012)

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/16/12

As Karen Finney has suggested here, (Did Obama set a marriage trap for Romney?, The Hill’s Pundit Blog 5/10/12) Joe Biden’s accidental announcement on gay marriage might have been staged. This incident and the Obama follow up announcement seemed almost dumb and dumber compared to standard format of press relations and revelations. It could have been a tactical ploy; staging a diversion, only to head off in a completely new direction. Possibly they hoped to nail the same sex marriage issue and leave it behind entirely by tacking in an entirely new direction a week or so later. Leaving gay marriage behind with Joe Biden. Such a move would be both tactically inspired and ethically insidious.

Joe Miller, who ran for senate from Alaska and is a rising star in the Tea Party movement, says in his blog that Obama is considering ditching Biden. I’d suggested here that Obama needs to accommodate the heartland. Our era today has entered into Jacksonianism already and that surging country confidence is right now fortified by 29 heartland states opposing Obamacare and 30 opposing gay marriage. In the original Jackson period the eastern colonials had to go country to catch up, coming eventually to dominance with Abraham Lincoln. If Obama doesn’t do the same he could destroy the Democratic Party.

The best choice in this regard might be Montana governor Brian Schweitzer. Obama could also trump the Tea Party by bringing in a military man or woman as VP. Two years back Texas Governor Rick Perry joked that the only purpose for the federal government is to run the military, control immigration and deliver the mail. A military man should be considered as VP to emphasize that constitutionally ordained role of the Commander in Chief. In this, General Wesley Clark, former commander of NATO who ran for President in 2004 would be a good choice. Virginia’s multifaceted Senator Jim Webb, warrior, diplomat, writer, historian and friend of Obama, would also be excellent choices. Clark, from Arkansas, and Webb would  also have appeal to heartland voters.

Further, the appointment of Jay Carney as White House press secretary has advanced the impression that Obama is a nerd. His paling with Hollywood types creates the impression that he is a lightweight. Joe Biden brings incompetence to the administration and Secretary Clinton brings partisanship to state where it doesn’t belong and an absurd first term foreign policy legacy. Webb, Clark or Schweitzer would add ballast to the ticket.

“Washington is abuzz with rumors the president will replace Mr. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” writes Miller. “He ought to. Slow Joe is a national embarrassment.”

But Secretary Clinton would hand it to Mitt Romney in a walk.

The Obama administration is in a state of crisis and it has brought America to a state of crisis. They need to leave behind the statisticians and bean counters and enter a complete change of paradigm. One individual would countervail the flake, lightweight, incompetent and absurd factors and instantly establish a new paradigm: Obama’s commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, four-star admiral William McRaven, who led the attack on Osama bin Laden. This was Obama’s best moment.  He should build on this.

A century of states' rights ahead: Who will take Montana?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/12/12

States rights’, states’ rights, states’ rights . . .! – Texas Governor Rick Perry, April 16, 2009, at The Alamo

A Zen history or anthropology of current times can be drawn on events that have occurred in the past three years which will undoubtedly change our American world, possibly for a century or two.

 Three historic events have occurred and one was iconic: Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October, 2009, shouting, her face contorted in disbelief, at a reporter when asked if there were any Constitutional problems with Obamacare.  "Are you serious,” she replied?  The idea had never, possibly in decades, dawned on her or her Congress. But just before, in February, 2009, NH state rep. Frank Itse proposed that New Hampshire need not participate in Obamacare, citing Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions. 29 states followed, held fast and brought their case to the Supreme Court. Nowhere in the past century did states block together so convincingly. The third came this week when President Obama used his “bully pulpit” to endorse same sex marriage. 30 states had already brought preemptive legislation in opposition. This time the states were ahead of history.

The states which approve of same sex marriage are either in the upper top right corner of the country (the very old Europeanish states) or the far left (their playground). The vast center (the newer states; some like those in Comanche territory, very new) is universally united in opposition to same sex marriage and it is these same states which oppose Obamacare. We can see formed by now what might be called the Three Americas, the artsy west edge, the grungy,  post-industrial, northeast which seems and feels now like all the people with money have moved to Singapore, then the middle. How closely this resembles an ancient pattern of Rome on one corner, artsy Athens in a far corner. And Gaul rising between the two in the center. As I recall from seminary school, the Gauls were the bravest of the three.

The American millennium arises within these parameters. America begins again in the middle and possibly what we have seen these past 236 years is only prelude to the real deal. We face a Jacksonian era just ahead and like the last one, it will not be for the timid. But whoever can take and hold Montana can take it.

I proposed here Friday that if Obama wants to be president for a second term and it is not at all clear that he does, he might look for a running mate from the heartland. He might look to Montana’s Governor Brian Schweitzer in particular. The most clever of Democratic advisors, Steve Jarding and Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, who call the Republicans who have risen in the heartland since Reagan “foxes in the henhouse” have written most presciently that if the Democrats  don' t look to the country they will lose everything.

By 2016 it may be too late.  It may already be too late. Having lived in the Appalachian hills around Wytheville and Popular Camp, it seems a tad hysterical, but this week Tim Kaine, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who is now running for Senate in Virginia, sent out two emails warning of “armed revolution” by the hill people of Virginia who live virtually in Thomas Jefferson’s back yard.

Fire Joe Biden

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/11/12

Possibly because of the Obama/Hollywood fete this week with Obama yucking it up with George Clooney and the Beautiful People I keep getting this annoying image of Joe Biden in Apocalypse Now! with Obama as the Brando baldy Mr. Kurtz, the god king gone mad from self idolatry and ethereal abstraction, and Biden as his coked-up scurrying sidekick played by Dennis Hopper: “He (Obama/Brando/Kurtz) is not like you and I,” says Hopper/Biden, wild eyed and arms flailing. “He reads poetry. Out loud!” T. S. Eliot no doubt. I cannot imagine how Obama, five points behind Mitt Romney in the current Rasmussen poll, thinks this is going to work for him. Does he really want to be President a second term or is President just resume filler and like Kurtz (and Clinton), he has greater plans ahead as a demigod?

I don’t think he can count on the adoring Millennials to carry him this time. They seem to have passed already, overshadowed by the rising Hunger Games crowd. But it is not only narcissism on a cosmic scale that afflicts this president. It is incompetence. And nothing represents this incompetence as characteristic of the Obama administration like the presence of Joe Biden on the ticket.

Obama is, as Bill Clinton is reported to have said in a new book (“The Amateur” by Edward Klein), such “an amateur” that Clinton pressed his wife to challenge him in the primaries. But Joe Biden is an incompetent. Bloomberg reports that he apologized to President Barack Obama for upsetting the White House’s timetable for revealing the president’s support for same-sex marriage, according to an administration official. But this behavior, starting early on in Israel, has been characteristic of Biden.

President Obama seems today a vacuous fiction of Hollywood and the geist. But he has here the rare opportunity to shift gears on the incompetence front. He could take this opportunity to fire Joe Biden and replace him with someone serious, someone honorable, someone mature and competent and someone who could gather a few votes outside of city limits of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.. Both senators from Virginia come to mind, Jim Webb or Mark Warner. He might even prepare a future for the Democrats and trump the Republicans by going country with Montana governor Brian Schweitzer or Montana Senator Joe Tester.

As it went with Kerry, so it will go with Obama

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/9/12

If I recall correctly, last year when New York Governor Mario Cuomo celebrated the legalization of gay marriage in New York, the same week, President Obama’s support in North Carolina dropped 14%.  Two things: As Rick Perry said about Mitt Romney, how can you change your mind as a grown up man about things so essential to life? It is not a change of mind; it is a change of feelings. Which may be worse. By what mechanism? Do we just change who we are, simple to conform to the floating standards? It is the curse of a very large country run purely on bright lights and sensory apparatus – TV, movies, movie stars and pounding music at every turn - constantly bombarding, and leaving in the end, so little to remain between the generations; so little to remain at all. Last year Obama opposed gay marriage. Last week he was “evolving.” (Wow.) Now he has evolved. There was, at the beginning, little to this man. Now there is less.

The second thing: People in the country live differently than those in the city and that is why North Carolina recedes when New York ascends. As historian Frank Owsley wrote of this it was Hamilton and the New Yorkers vs. Jefferson and the country people. The New York/North Carolina binary paradigm is still the perfect model. And the struggle is always about, to quote Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master . . . .” My last count, there are about 8 big city states (like New York) and 43 country states (like North Carolina). And the country states are motivated.

 John Kerry would have been president in 2004 but in the thick of war, Massachusetts brought forth a celebration: Gay marriage had been seen to be legal by the authorities in Massachusetts. But there seemed to be then (and I worked as a volunteer for Kerry) in my opinion a good degree of transference; Massachusetts was in a panic about the war on Iraq and instead of focusing on the positive program against that which both Kerry and General Wesley Clark who introduced Kerry at the Democratic Convention had come forth with, they promoted themselves to the outside (those 43 country states) instead as supporters of gay marriage. In the same period, above the border as liberal prime minister of Canada Jean Chrétien was leaving office, he announced with a flourish that the big issues ahead would be gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana. You could feel in his comments a “Take that, you Texans!” But Kerry lost and the party seems from then to now unable to discipline itself or repair itself. And liberal Canada has never recovered. In the last race the liberal party’s showing was the worst in its history.

Obama’s problem is that he is a kind of sense/feeling guy and assumes what is around him. Not like Carter in that regard and not at all like Kerry, but this will deliver him now exclusively to the city people; the people who live on the eight or so edges of America and it will drop his standing in the 43 states in the middle.

Obama today brings a direct challenge to the middle of America. And the middle of America will accept the challenge.

Imagine America and England without the Revolution

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/9/12

Thanks to Stephen Bone for his generous comment yesterday RE France and “the colonies.” He adds RE my picking on the French, “After all, without France we would not have a country.” But historic time presents us with a riddle, one which I have thought about more so since my family moved to the northern part of New Hampshire. What would America be like without the American Revolution? Possibly much like it is today.

Most of my neighbors got here migrating downward from Quebec in the industrial period, but a surprising number migrating north to what is today Canada during the American Revolution, then heading back to work a hundred years later. But consider what Hitler might have felt when he drove his troops into Paris on June 14, 1940. Americans held still for two years against their French allies in the Revolution. Why would they bother to defend their natural enemies, England? But aid we did and we culturally rebonded with England via the invasion of France with both our armies.

In the end, we were naturally closer to England than we were to France. So suppose they had just worked out the tax thing together in 1776? Both the Revolution and World Wars I and II on England’s behalf could have been avoided. A diminished post-Victorian British Empire must have seemed an easy target and the Germany navy smelled blood in the water as early as the Queen’s Jubilee in 1897 when Victoria was in her last years. But would the Kaiser and Hitler have dared to challenge a realm as vast as a unified Anglosphere?

Here in New England taxes went up after the Revolution although the farmers were promised they would go down. And are taxes worth fighting for anyway? And had all the English-speaking realms together banned slavery as England did by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 the American Civil War would have been avoided.

I couldn’t help notice yesterday that Australia’s economy is booming. It is the first major economy since the start of the financial crisis to record a surplus. One of my sons works there and another heads to England next year to study. They feel quite as home there as they do here. Increasingly, with a little help from The Beatles, Chef Gordon Ramsey, journalist like Stuart Varney, actors like the great Daniel Day-Lewis, it appears that things would have naturally occurred this way in time had not the Revolution broken us apart, and required two horrendous world wars to bring us back together. Back to where we appear to have been heading in the first place.

France’s American colonies

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/8/12

The New York Times has commentators in Paris but not in Texas. It would be inconceivable to imagine a NYTs op-ed voice in Louisville, on the slow-moving Ohio River or Indianapolis, dead center of East, West, South and The Great White North. Or Iowa, like Alaska, commandeered now by Ron Paul renegades. Or South Carolina where the women wear red dresses and refer to Sarah Palin by her first name. As much of the continent was at the beginning, New York City is still a French colony. “Lafayette, we are [still] here!”

Possibly we will always have Paris. Its’ magnetism is immense. We return to Paris again, to drink, like Hemingway, to fight like George S. Patton. And when they come to us as Sarcozy did as he geared up his fight for the Presidency of France it is not to pay homage to the American friend, it is to visit her colony. We live in the shadow of the City of Lights and France’s new president-elect, François Hollande, will soon visit France’s American colonies. 

"You are not going to determine only the destiny of France, but the direction of Europe too," he said in his closing campaign remarks.

But I doubt it. The French have little in common with Greece and little interest in it. As Bismarck said, there is really no Europe. And Greece is not exactly a child of the Enlightenment as France was and as Jefferson’s America was. France has more in common with America. As much today as when Jefferson was studying Rousseau to give form to the forest. A socialist France will have dramatic impact on the upcoming election in America.

As expected, Times columnist Paul Krugman was first to weigh in. And the front page news item in the NYTs calls the change in Paris a better fit for U.S. economic positions: “With the victory of the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, in the French presidential election, the White House has lost one of its closest allies on the Continent, but perhaps gained one with economic policy beliefs more closely aligned with its own.”

I’ll say. But this time it is different. Not all of us are still French colonies.

From Paris, or Berlin, Milan and even unfortunately London, America consists of only two counties, Los Angeles and New York City. The rest is bushes and  farms. But it is that, the in between which is heartland America, which will have the great effect in the upcoming election and the one after that. These states do not look to France for style or politics. And this America is rising to power and authenticity.

A rough sketch of the essential Euro-America states; that is, states influenced by what they do in Europe and states which will be influenced by the French turn to socialism: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida and California. Most of the other 43 don’t care. Theirs is a different America with a different destiny and it will come to clash now as the eastern states under President Obama’s leadership turns back again – defaults is a better word -  to Europeanism.

My grandmother landed here on the eastern shore and for the next 72 years lived within view of the port that dropped her off. That may be characteristic of the millions of others who came with her. But those who continued west found a different America. One that rises now and in 2016 and beyond will fully leave Europe and its American colonies behind.