The Way of the Hockey Mom: Sarah Palin Doesn’t Blink

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/12/08


There is an old Zen Buddhist parable about a monk watching a young Samurai in a duel. A child is standing nearby with a large scary mask hanging over his shoulder. The Samurai notices the child just before he dispatches his opponent. He turns to the monk with pride after his battle but the monk says in disgust, “You’ll never be a Samurai. You saw the mask before you saw the child.”

It was the first thing to come to my mind when I saw Sarah Palin, McCain’s Vice Presidential pick, take the podium when he announced her candidacy. She sees the child before she sees the mask. She sees the awakening moment and steps forward to the duty at hand before she see experiences the fear that the new encounter will bring. She is fearless.

In her ABC interview yesterday she said she had no doubts in her ability to be Vice President and she answered McCain directly when he asked her.

“I answered him yes, because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink,” Ms. Palin told Charles Gibson, the ABC reporter. “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war.”

The zen child/mask barometer has always been close to my mind in measuring politicians. The only one in my lifetime who measured 100% Child, 0% Mask was Dwight Eisenhower. When he said something he generally meant what he said. We might have left the Child behind altogether in decades past and been living behind a series of Masks ever since. So many masks, so little time.

There was a shot of fear came across the bow when Palin talked last night of war with Russia. But what she did was clearly enunciate, without threat or intimidation, stated American policy with Russia. It is a policy initiated by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in 1997, but no one seemed to notice at the time that the object of this policy was war with Russia. The ascending concerns in the Democratic Party back then were gay marriage, dot.com stocks promising to rise stocks to 35,000 and the madcap antics of the Clintons.

That’s what’s freaking out the Democrats. Sarah Palin wears no mask.

That is the way of the Samurai but here in the north country of New Hampshire there is a secret cult which Sarah Palin and I both belong to that is the closest thing on this continent to the Tao path of the Samurai. Anyone who recalls with religious devotion seeing Cassie Campbell win the Olympic gold in 2002 or the almost 40-year-old Dougie Gilmore crawl off the ice on his hands and knees in his final game, or Bobby Orr’s scoring the Stanley Cup’s winning goal against the St. Louis Blues while airborne 40 seconds into overtime will understand.

It is the way of the Samurai but it is also the way of the Hockey Mom.

Penguin vs. Barracuda: Sarah Palin’s Egalitarian Revolution

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill at 9/11/08

Boston actor Matt Damon is appalled that a rural “hockey mom” even be considered for the Presidency. A very popular, nationally-syndicated political cartoonist presents her in the Oval Office astride a moose. What is sending terror through the hearts of Urban Northeast Liberals; a terror felt more deeply than that felt by Karl Rove, Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaida, is that the common people of the heartland; the people who listen to George Jones and go to Church of God and wear Hush Puppies, have found an attractive and capable candidate who fully represents them: Sarah Palin.

As the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher reports on McCain and Palin in Centreville, VA yesterday, eight working mothers went together to see her because she is “ . . . just like us.”

Fisher: “We don't live in an age of looking up to authority anymore. We don't cotton to the idea that there are people who are our betters. In this time of "American Idol” bedroom bloggers and the belief that experience, knowledge and education don't necessarily mean a whole lot, Palin is a symbol, a statement that anyone can make it if he or she really tries.”

"She's just as flawed as we are," one of the women said. "It's not the fact that she's a woman but the way she does it all. And let me tell you: There're more American parents with unwed pregnant teenaged children than American parents with Harvard grads. She's real."

Welcome to the world.

As Obama well pointed out in his book, The Audacity of Hope, Jefferson and Madison forced freedom of religion onto the Bill of Rights in opposition to Patrick Henry because Henry did not trust the common people. Patrick wanted rule by Virginia Episcopalians and he wanted legislation to keep the common people who identified with the Baptist religion from coming to power. These folk have become economically empowered since WW II and began to rise politically in the 1960s, in opposition to the rise of what was perceived to be northern decadence.

Their moment could well be at hand. This is a contention between countervailing American values and between regions and classes: Hamilton vs. Jefferson; corporation vs. family, North vs. South; Starbucks vs. Waffle House. Penguin vs. Barracuda. The old “Jeffersonian” values of family, small town, church and community with power devolved to the states and regions vs. Hamilton’s goal of corporate dominance of economy and culture globally based out of Wall St.

Jefferson is experiencing resurgence. It is coming to power now and will not go away.

Can Buffy Save the Democrats?

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/9/08

There is something here in the air of northern New England which was not here when I was a child. It seems to have come into the world like a spirit born of its own accord in the early Sixties when the great elms died all throughout the region’s countryside. It is the dissident spirit of trash social studies which pervades the university, politics, the press and the public culture up here and it has mushroomed in my lifetime. And it has moved now across the heartland.

It is a witch spirit.

Nathanial Hawthorne says it is a life force from the spirit world which has always been here. It comes, he says, from “those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life.”
When I attended the University of Massachusetts in late Sixties early Seventies, this spirit rose into the world and Awakened, much like the corpse plant that hatches every 50 years or so in the Smithsonian’s Botanical Garden.

It was a spirit pretentious and somewhat pitiful. It seeped throughout my generation and pervaded New England, like the ooze of industrial sludge which covered the ponds in towns like Fall River, where I grew up. It was a kind of half-knowledge and half-hostility which had no light within itself and saw itself exclusively in opposition to power.

In the lexicon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this spirit manifests as Revenge Demons. Regular viewers of Buffy know what Revenge Demons are. They are malevolent spirits which identify at every turn with the discontent, rather than with the civilization. They come out of the earth just when you are doing something joyful, healthy and family-like, such as trimming the Christmas tree and stuffing stockings, and they attempt to disrupt the situation.

Buffy is the avatar and front line of defense against Revenge Demons. In Buffy World, men are no longer men and they no longer have the political will to defend themselves, their traditions and their families. Indeed, family is a shattered shard of the past and men who once defended the hearth have been made cowering wimps by these Creatures from Beneath the Earth. So Buffy – for aficionados, she is technically the Earth Mother Incarnate and we call her The Slayer – has to take it back by herself with her few heroic mortal apprentices.

The Democratic Party in the last week may have experienced full possession by Revenge Demons. It could well be a permanent condition now. If so, the party will go the way of the Whigs.

The first few days after the announcement of Sarah Palin as Vice President, the Revenge Demons found possibly their finest hour and struck their most venomous chord. New York Times columnist William Kristol offered a few snippets from New Republic editor, Martin Peretz, blogging directly after the speech: “give [Palin] her due: she is pretty like a cosmetics saleswoman at Macy’s . . .good to see that the Palin family didn’t torture poor Bristol, at least in the open. . . . Yes, please God, do bless America and rescue us from these swilly people.”

Right now we are seeing the bitter reenactment of the anti-war movement toward the end of the war in Vietnam, a movement which deeply damaged the party when its candidate, George McGovern, lost to Richard Nixon, 49 – 1.

The Democrats suffered also an almost a complete defeat with Eisenhower and again in Ronald Reagan’s second term. The return of the nihilist Vietnam-era attitudes could this time be a mortal blow to the Democrats.

But I feel here in northern New England that there is something in the Democrats that likes to lose.

I worked for Wesley Clark’s candidacy in 2004 here in New Hampshire and at a house party in Concord Wes’s state director, a political consultant well-known nationally, expressed her excitement in having General Clark on board saying it was “ . . . just like George McGovern.” I knew then that we were screwed.

It is a sense of superiority we feel; like the poet’s circle or the esoteric realm of occult game players lost in their own aura in the darkened corners of the head shop. High-minded failure leaves us pure. But high-minded failure also relieves us from responsibility and grants unlimited power to the opposition. Perhaps history has passed us by up here – moving with the economy and population to the South and the Southwest and places where we never venture – and it has left us bitter and disaffected.

I supported Wes and still do because he brought a singular character to the Democratic party which we had not seen in a long time. He was the odd man out and was not at all characteristic of Democrats. I felt he could possibly restore a moribund party by giving it the heart of a bull dog. Likewise, Obama is a unique individual with great skill, intuition and abilities. But that was introduced on Oprah and rapidly rose in the mainstream thereafter is almost farcical. No reflection on him or Oprah. I greatly admire Obama and especially Oprah, the “free woman” who successfully takes on the world with her bare hands. But with Obama, like Clark, we were looking for a single-combat warrior to single-handedly find some direction – any direction- for the Democratic Party. We were not looking for a platform. We were looking for a savior.

And even at that, Obama had to fight his own party all the way.

Anyone who watched the speeches at the Republican Convention on the night of Sarah Palin’s speech couldn’t help but notice a conspicuous absence. There was not one mention – not one mention – of George Bush all through the night. Compared to the Democratic Convention the week before when they couldn’t get the Clintons off the stage, and Obama had to use a varied of shrewd maneuvers to trick and out stage them.

I have questioned whether or not the Democratic party can survive the Clintons. Truthfully, I don’t think they can. Whenever Bill appears with Obama as he does today, Obama’s numbers go down, and now he has few numbers left to keep him above water. Obama is the last hope for the Democrats. Without him they have nothing left, only the Clintons. And that is not a political party. That is a personality cult.

It has been theorized that the Whig party fell to defeat for two reasons: The Mexican War, although in Grant’s opinion it was merely a war of the strong against the weak, was not supported by the Transcendentalists and many in the Boston region took on a diffident air. The other reason is that they became effete, superior and disaffected. They took pride in esoteric and detached issues. They became irrelevant and they came to consider their irrelevance to be evidence of themselves as being of a higher order.

We hear it again. With McGovern and with others, frequently Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, who ran for president in 2004. Dr. Dean, after his time was up in Vermont, was looking for a job and got one. But on the build up to the 2008 race you would hear again and again on the blogs that one candidate or another was “ . . . the new Howard Dean.”

Note to Democrats: George McGovern lost. Howard Dean lost. Wesley Clark lost. And if the party doesn’t find a more civil tone and a more relevant and responsible direction, it will lose everything.

Foreign Policy Questions for Sarah Palin: A Better Idea from Thomas Friedman

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/9/08

There are reports now that Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new Vice President candidate, is being prepped by Joe Lieberman and other experts on foreign policy for her upcoming debate on October 2. There is a sense here of “ . . . the little woman” here up against a real pro. Foreign policy debates are important man tasks; not something a woman mayor does like keeping a budget or management a household of seven. This is man work. Better call the big dogs off the porch.

After all, she will be facing Joe Biden, long-time member and current chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a regular technical wizard of all the important minutia of foreign policy, although he was dead wrong on Iraq and as an influential Senator on foreign affairs, he holds heavy responsibility in leading the other Senators down the Bush/Rove yellow brick road. But he uses phrases like “. . . take him out” in reference to Saddam Hussein same as George Bush, Dick Cheney and the others who have never worn the uniform of their country nor fired a shot in anger. Biden is at least as good as Cheney, and like Cheney, he is a technician who studies the existing paradigm but can’t imagine it shifting. He can’t imagine the world of 2008 being organically different than 1957. And like Cheney, he is a five-time recidivist draft evader – something about these guys liking foreign policy and war as old men although they had asthma or something when they were called to service.

Frankly, I see Palin having the advantage here over Biden on issues of war and peace: At least she actually knows how to shoot a gun.

I have some advice for Palin: Watch out for those trick questions they’re likely to throw you. Like this one (note: A question in a compound sentence is almost always a trick question): In 1997, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore enthusiastically endorsed putting missiles and a nuclear umbrella in Russia’s neighborhood because they thought Russia was falling apart and we could take the advantage and besides, a Czech poet who chain-smoked cigarettes and really liked Frank Zappa told them it was a good idea. But now that the missiles are going in, the Russians are all strong again and are ready to drive them out. This has created issues in the EU which was already showing problems with the pesky Irish refusing to endorse the Lisbon agreements and its currency is only five years old. The problem is that France is now pitting against Germany since Sarko, the new French guy, wants to bring in a bunch of southern states in the Mediterranean regions to the EU, some of which have Islamic tendencies, and it brings now a classic and tradition challenge to the Germans power in the EU. And now some of the Germans – a people who never seem to sit still and are always up to something – are forming a new Communist party and teaming up with the Socialists. This because the American alliance with what Donald Rumsfeld calls “New Europe” – that would be the states the smoking poet wanted us to defend – has completely alienated the other Europe – the one where they had the Enlightenment and where people go to study art – and they are all against America now.

As Wall Street Journal editor Daniel Schwammenthal writes this week: “Considering the [German] Left's success in driving Germany's economic debate from the opposition bench, it's not hard to imagine the damage the party could inflict once in national government. Its reach would go beyond just economic policy and affect foreign affairs as well.”

That's a worrying prospect, he says, because Germany is already one of the weaker links in the Western alliance.

“Former Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder successfully tapped into anti-American feelings when he disagreed with Washington's Iraq policy and tried to sabotage it. Mr. Schröder also pushed for closer ties with Russia while insisting on toothless diplomacy to stop Iran's nuclear program.”

And if the burgeoning German Communist/Socialist alliance wins in new elections in and Schwammenthal says it is now possible, that would be primarily an anti-American move. It would in effect bring an end to the NATO Alliance. It would be quite conceivable then that the new commies in Germany hook up with Russia in opposition to the American intentions in Rumsfeld’s New Europe. So the question is this: What should America do if and when Germany becomes a democratically elected communist state? Should we leave NATO? What if they hook up with Russia? Suppose then they go after Sarko and his new Muslim friends? Should we go in there and defend France again like we always do?

You got to think about these things because Joe Lieberman and all the others they will send you initially advised that the invasion of Iraq would last a week and it would be a cake walk; a “slam dunk.” So far it has been about five years. So when they tell you that an invasion of Russia or one of those other places near Prague Castle will only take a few days and no more than a month, multiply it by about 250. Like your great pal, Linda Lingle, Governor of Hawaii, said about Delaware, Biden’s state, that it would take 250 of them to fill Alaska.

Try to get the conversation back to something the Senator from Delaware feels uncertain about. Like Clinton and Gore he is enamored of the Europeans and their poets and always does what they say and is always quoting Seamus Heaney who is a European poet. Try to bring it back to Michigan, Ohio and western Pennsylvania and places we live. And if they want to get artsy and talk poets, bring in Van Halen or maybe Neil Young or Patsy Cline or Black Elk. People Biden likely never heard of. Try to bring it back to something relevant to our lives on this continent and to the promising day ahead of us in the distant future when we finally begin to stop seeing enemies in the witch mirror and stop seeing ourselves reflected on other continents where we don’t live and in the sky and on other planets and come back to earth.

Another thing: Ask them if you can talk to Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, and when they say no, demand it. You’ll want to talk to him. He’s the adult. He’s the guy they brought in to fix it when all the initial advice of Biden and Lieberman led the country and half the world to unmitigated disaster. And you might talk to your Hawaiian fried Linda Lingle about this. Hawaiians, being Pacific people like Alaskans, don’t seem so obsessed with and enamored of Europe as we are here in the East. And she seems to have much better sense than those Harvard guys.

It is important that you take command of this whole scene quickly because just as Bill and Hillary are planning strategy lest Obama stumble, so Mitt Romney is quietly stalking you. It was interesting to hear your remarks and his back to back on speech night. There is an old Indian belief that says a person will be defined by the first thing she or he looks at. In your speech you first spoke of Michigan, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, places that are us at our center. Romney first looked to China, then Russia and other places that only Joe Biden could find on the map. Maybe he’s missing something at his center and that could be a problem for all of us and all the world in 2012.

Romney is hungry to continue the war brought by Biden and Lieberman on to Russia and Georgia. Tom Friedman, a strong supporter of the initial invasion of Iraq, has a better idea. In his Sunday column in The New York Times he notes that we are spending a billion dollars to agitate contention between Russia and Georgia. He says we would be better off giving the money to Georgia Tech to invest alternatives to oil.

“We’re going to spend $1 billion to fix the Georgia between Russia and Turkey, not the one between South Carolina and Florida,” he writes. “Sorry, but the thought of us spending $1 billion to repair a country whose president, though a democrat, recklessly provoked a war with a brutish Russia, which was itching to bash its neighbor, makes no sense . . . “

Americans are struggling to meet their mortgages, he writes, and we’re sending $1 billion to a country whose president behaved irresponsibly, just to poke Vladimir Putin in the eye.

“Couldn’t we poke Putin with $100 million? And shouldn’t we be fostering a dialogue with Georgia and with Putin? Otherwise, where is this going? A new cold war? Over what?”

Wrong for 12 Hours

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill at 9/05/08

Directly after Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention I wrote a column saying that Obama would be the “fourth man”; the significant figure in a historical sequence that opens the last post-war generation and the figure which the country consolidates around. It is that figure who makes history. It is that figure who is remembered when the culture turns. Everyone else who came before is forgotten.

12 hours later John McCain nominated Sarah Palin for Vice President. History could well show that I have never been so wrong in my prognosis. But I have been wrong about things before and held on to the wrong for years, even decades. This time I was wrong for only 12 hours.

I came to the conclusion about Obama because of a system I use; a theory of generational sequences unfolding in history in an eight-part, four-generation pattern observed by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe. The system combines business cycles and religious cycles together to create historical pictures in 80-year patterns. When I first studied the theory and corresponded with author Howe about it, I wrote to both John Kerry and John McCain and said that one or the other of them was likely to be the Gray Champion; the old soldier who restores grandfather’s old values and character and reawakens that character in the new generation. The question is, which one?

There had been two men in mid-century who had awakened new ideas and spirit in our post-war period, Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. John Kerry would come forth to materialize the spirit of Kennedy or John McCain would come forth to materialize the spirit of Reagan.

But when Obama appeared on the scene last year, the Kennedy karma was apparent although the trip to Germany (“I am a Berliner,”) was a little contrived; a little over the top. Nevertheless, McCain, looking to Lieberman or Romney for VP, was holding a bluff; he had nothing in his hand: Obama would open the gate to the new generation.

Then Sarah Palin happened.

“Happened” is a good way to express it because the Strauss/Howe ideas are actually based on the archetypal theories of C.J. Jung and work much like Jung’s theory of personality types, which alternate and complement one another. The cycle is predictable; the agent of change is not. As Jung wrote, the archetypes are based “ . . . in the Universe” – the endless Fibonacci swirl of the unconscious. They seem to come, “ . . . out of nowhere.”

What I get for being self assured. Looking more closely, Kennedy actually fulfilled an older path. His vision was an extension of Roosevelt and the New Deal. A system intended for a large European immigrant labor force which worked primarily in factories. Then Kennedy applied the old system to a variable labor force in a different age.

Reagan, on the other hand, was a new beginning to a new labor force with new business patterns and new populations, particularly in the West. It was a system beginning to suit itself to a continent that had finally become filled with people doing varied tasks, not laborers clustered together and doing related tasks in vast factories in Detroit, Fall River, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh and other Eastern cities.

Reagan began to bring new solutions to a new set of economic conditions and to a people less beholden to Europe as the pre-war generation of laborers. His was a “prequel” to something which would come ahead to find its fulfillment. Kennedy was a sequel to a labor period which had more or less already completed itself with Roosevelt.

The common misperception today is that McCain, if elected, will not run again in 2012 because he will be too old. McCain is a warrior – a Jedi – and it is not in the warrior’s nature to retire, but to die at the wheel. Retirement is not native to the soul condition of the Samurai or Templar; Samurai follows the path where duty leads. There is no good English word for this but the word to the Hindu is dharma; duty to the path; to nature; as the path opens before you. No rest, no retreat, no ordinary pleasures of the everyday. It is quite possible to see now with McCain/Palin a 16-year historical ride with the two working closely together; a ride to the end of the saeculum.

Strauss and Howe point out that the historical period ends with the singular man who fulfills the period and that is the person who history remembers. In the last three periods that will have been Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. If our historical period follows the pattern, the final figure could well be Sarah Palin.

Maybe not. I’ve been wrong about these things before, but only for 12 hours.

Peggy Noonan vs. Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/4/08

Peggy Noonan has long been one of my favorite writers, able to see around the corner when systemic transformations were about to occur; able to tell of danger ahead like a canary in the coal mine. What has given Noonan’s writing grace and perspective in the past is an ability to see what the pack was missing. This time she was fully riding with the pack.

Her comments yesterday caught on tape that John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President was “ . . . bullshit” and certain to damn McCain’s run were puzzling. What I found disappointing yesterday was the self assurance in her tone of voice. She was bemoaning McCain’s pick as a “ . . . narrative” choice by which I think she means a new face come in from the country with some stories that could be weaved for public consumption. She considered Palin a novelty.

Tom Shales, the TV critic for The Washington Post, was one of the few who got it right. Possibly because the kind of political turning that is happening today is much like what happens in movies, on TV and in stories. If McCain wins in November, he said, it would be because of Palin’s performance last night.

This has been a historic week. It is possible to see now two faces of the Democratic Party and two of the Republicans. Both parties are vastly improved; the Democrats by pushing Barach Obama to the center and sending the Clintons to the shadows. The Republicans did the same last night by bringing in Sarah Palin center stage and sending Romney and the others to the showers.

And Palin’s sudden success is precisely because of her “narrative.” Her story being told with images of her delightful family passing a newborn from arm to arm then over to Cindy McCain all during the night’s events presented a picture of Republicans – considered a party of clerks where I grew up – suddenly imbued with a vital new life force.

The baby and the Palins’ littlest daughter, wetting her hand to slick back the baby’s downy hair, stole the show. I’m sure Noonan is well educated. Perhaps it is time go back and reread Harriet Beecher Stowe’s historical novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Particularly the passage in this book that virtually changed the consciousness of the world which symbolized America’s journey from slavery to freedom with a narrative picture of a young woman crossing a frozen river with a newborn baby in her arms.

There was a good deal of talk of the “elites” and the “Eastern establishment” last night. Rightly so, because this election cycle more than any other outlines distinctions that have been evolving in both parties since the 1960s. Both parties have their traditional “establishments” but the Republicans are leaving theirs behind and morphing into a new political force. It is entirely relevant as it follows the contours of the American work force changing and adapting from the manufacturing base of the 1930s and before to a more mixed and varied economy featuring small businesses and entrepreneurial start ups. Romney stated it plainly: This is a race between East Coast Establishment and new Western developments unbeholding to the traditions of the Eastern elites.

And there is where Noonan missed the turn. She did so because she, a Wall Street Journal columnist with long ties to the Republican Party, has become part of that Eastern Establishment and subliminally reinforces and institutionalizes its vision.

I was surprised to see the startlingly innovative choice of Palin coming from John McCain. This is the old John McCain; the maverick, the America-before-party John McCain, who became as of last night a respected elder and Gray Champion to a brand new generation. And I was surprised to see the crowd thoroughly enchanted by Palin and family.

Palin brought a sea change to Republican politics last night and Noonan and the rest of the pack missed it.

But then there is this: Noonan probably doesn’t know anyone from the indigenous American culture. People who name their kids after Van Halen and drive snow machines; people who wear the “3” decal on their truck window to honor the memory of The Intimidator, Dale Earnhardt; people who own service stations as the family business; people who have more than one child and more than three cousins; people who eat at Waffle House and have family hunting camps and go to hockey games.

If she did she would feel fully alienated from them, for this is a different country of the mind in class and in origin of culture than hers and it is a brand new American country.

Thankfully, John McCain does know such people.

Noonan is still the touchstone for political events. Her warm encouragement of Barack Obama signified that he had found full acceptance by the Eastern Establishment.

But this race is no longer about Obama or the Clintons or George W. Bush and the entrenched traditions of both Democrats and Republicans.

It is now about Peggy Noonan vs. Sarah Palin. Which will territorialize the political process and take the day? Noonan and the aged Establishments of the East or Sarah Palin and the new generations, the new politics and culture and the new people of the West?

Like a Hurricane – Sarah Palin at the Republican Convention

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/3/08

I would like to outline a brief history of the so-called culture wars and what potential future they hold because I am getting the feeling that they could actualize out of abstraction very quickly around one extraordinary woman: John McCain’s selection for Vice President, Sarah Palin. She will not let go and the Republicans will not let her go. As David Brooks said last night, he has not met one delegate who opposes her. In fact, they’re crazy about her. All of the blue collar people I have talked to up here in northern New Hampshire, and this is a blue collar, bears-in-the-yard, libertarian Republican state, are likewise utterly crazy about her. They will not let go of her either, from what I can see, under any circumstances.

Power Points RE culture war:

1 - The culture wars or the division between red and blue states is a continuation of the Civil War. To paraphrase Carl Von Clausewitz, culture war is hot war by other means; by political and cultural means. Historian Dan Carter, in his biography of George Wallace, The Politics of Rage, makes the point that the Christian Coalition and the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson movement arose in direct opposition to the perceived decadence of the Sixties – the hippies, racial integration, sexual freedom, etc. Wallace correctly guessed that the regional values of the rural South would serve as a national theme in opposition. It did when amplified by Falwall and Robertson.

2 – Northern people are educated to believe that the Civil War was about slavery, which it was, but the inherent philosophical and underlying difference between North and South was a division between the view of the world of the New Yorker, Alexander Hamilton, and the view of the Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. Historian Frank Owsley identifies this here: “In the beginning of Washington’s administration two men defined the fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies, Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other Sates Rights, but in truth the first should have been called Unitarianism and the second Federalism.”

3 – This Christian Coalition’s perspective was empowered when big economy came to the South and the Southwest in the post-war period. Once the South came to power it could bring forth its own traditional values, called Jeffersonian values, and leave behind passive submission to the way of Hamilton and the North. In the later ‘80s and ’90, my old rural neighborhood in Tobaccoville, NC, which had voted Baptist and Democrat since the mid-1800s changed: More than 80% of my precinct suddenly registered Republican. Very many changed church as well to Assembly of God. It was a full-scale cultural transformation. What we are seeing today is western states adopting the traditional Jeffersonian values of the South, particularly Arizona and now Alaska. The North/South division is opening now to an East/West division.

4 – By choosing Sarah Palin for his Vice President, McCain has chosen an independent person from the most independent region of America who embodies the Jeffersonian ideal. As The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard says here this week, “she walks the walk . . . .” Managing her daughter’s pregnancy through family tradition (Jefferson) rather than ideological, institutional or technical strategies (Hamilton and the Northeast) brings folkloric cachet to Palin at a critical moment and brings broad sympathy to her through the Republican ranks. The Republican ranks have been awakened by her, particularly the common class. There is a distinct class difference now between political parties: Palin represents a common class; blue collar America, whereas Obama/Hillary appeal to an “elite” – but a Northeastern elite made up primarily of middle class people only one or two generations out of the working class.

5 – Goldwater, Reagan, McCain and Palin represent a complete breach with the Hamiltonian tradition in our time. When the northern urban Irish and the other common ethnic people of the Democratic Party came to power with Jack Kennedy, they hoped to join the same tradition of those of the elite schools and the traditional agents of the so-called Protestant Ethic (“This is a Protestant country,” FDR said to Joe Kennedy, “And you Jews and Catholics better get used to it.”). The urban ethnics of that age adopted the Hamiltonian direction with a difference of style and modified by European (Marxist) ideas. Carroll Quigley, an influential post-war historian, writes about this “Establishment” – ethnics now come to power wanting a place at the same table as the old Northeastern elites. But a greater division occurred in our period when Barry Goldwater ran for President against Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater didn’t want a place at the table. Goldwater rejected the table and the entire Eastern Establishment (Hamilton or the Hamilton/Marx hybrid) for a restored Jeffersonian position. The Republican from Arizona challenged the Eastern Establishment, both Democrat and Republican. Reagan did so likewise with far greater impact although with his vast federal spending turned out to be a federalist. Nevertheless, he was Jeffersonian in principle.

6 – McCain and Palin are both Jeffersonian in spirit; Palin is the perfect contemporary model of the Jeffersonian vision. Through McCain and Palin, the abstractions of the red state/blue state contention could materialize into a real-life social division in our time, possibly with territorial implications.

7 - Historians like William Strauss and Neil Howe who study generational patterns in politics point out that around the 60th year, the end of the third post-war generation, a breach occurs which will bring about the major change in the country’s destiny. We are at the 60th year more or less right now. I’ve felt that could well be an internal rather than an external division as party divisions today suggest the 1830s to 1850s when party lines broke and realigned. Ron Paul, Jeffersonian Trickster incarnate, could be a harbinger.

Sarah Palin’s speech tonight and how the Republican base responds to it should be telling and important in determining how this will proceed.

The Biden vs. Palin debate will be the key event of the fall season. In this Goldwater-Reagan tradition it will pit the old Eastern Establishment against the new Jeffersonian West. It will be a key moment. Joe Biden is the perfect exemplar of the liberal mask of the Eastern Establishment which Quigley (no relation) outlines ( – y’all watch The X Files ? The Elders – the secret coterie which “runs the world” from a paneled room in New York). Palin is the perfect avatar for the new American West.

How the Palins’ Pregnancy Issue Could Hurt Obama

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/2/08

The pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s daughter will in time be a plus to her campaign. People get pregnant. Welcome to the world. She and her husband Todd do what any family which has its dinner together would do; counsel, love and encourage. This is a family which takes life as it comes and deals with it. Obama and Michelle understand because like Todd and Sarah they are family first as well (and ideology second or in family matters, not at all).

In fact, this could hurt Obama and he knows it. Recently, on a PBS series called The Sixties, Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia, recalled the state of the nation in the mid-1970s when bitterness and anger replaced objectivity and purpose in the anti-war movement. He made the lucid point that a few individuals who went to extreme positions created a slingshot effect and consolidated the vast middle of America in opposition, engendering a conservative backlash.

This might be called the “Merle Haggard Effect”; regular folk for or against the war watching a pandemic of pointless violence against Pope John Paul, John Lennon and Presidents Ford and Reagan find a healthy response in wanting to return to the simple faith and solid heartland values of Muskogee. A return to folk like the Palins.

We have begun to see some of the same bitterness and anger reflected today in the blogs. It is entirely heartless and unconscionable when directed at a 17-year-old child who is rushed suddenly into adulthood. Anyone who has watched the Obama family can plainly see that they are not like that and they would have responded to the child’s plight with love and compassion just as the Palins have. Nevertheless, Obama could be touched by this unfortunate and immature behavior coming from his supporters. If he is marred by it - as George McGovern’s candidacy was marred by extremists – he could suffer the same fate as McGovern.

Regarding the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Obama had it exactly right. “This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president,” he said.

Nevertheless, the liberal blogs today; their anguish and venom amplified by the press, could be Obama's biggest handicap.

The Four Conservative Mavericks: Sarah Palin Comes Into the Country

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill at 9/01/08


Americans were always meant to be Alaskans, just as we were meant to be Texans and New Englanders. Emerson instructed us to “ . . . go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.” Our fate is to find ourselves again here in nature and don’t look back. That is why we go west and that is why we go to Alaska.

But it is one thing to go alone into the wilderness as Thoreau did when Concord was still in sight and with Emerson within a short afternoon walk for thoughtful conversation about the Vedas. Quite another is Jack London’s narrative of the Klondike almost a hundred years later: “He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air. Undoubtedly, it was colder than fifty below – how much colder he did not know.”

These are the original stories of the American tribes and they inform us and are useful to us as at one point in our lives’ journeys we each make a choice that makes us the kind of American we will be and we chose one of three things: Go west? Go back east? Or stay put? It is the Concord celestial bard’s view and it is endlessly embedded in American folk lore that the best among us will always go west. She who goes alone shall come to look at the world with new eyes, he writes in his Nature essays, and “ . . . shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, What is truth? And of the affections, What is good?”

And none have gone so far west as Sarah Palin.

Not since the last ten seconds of the Super Bowl when a Giants receiver caught the ball on his head have I seen so many people in the state of shock.

The Democrats understandably are almost numb. The liberal blogs have turned into a venomous horde. They are coming up with the most barbaric analyses of why Sarah Palin should not be Vice President. For example, and this is verbatim: 1) She is from Alaska. 2) She is from Alaska and they have Walmarts in Alaska. Walmarts are bad. 3) She hunts. 4) She eats moose burgers. 5) She is beautiful.

Where is it again in the Democrat’s boss handbook where it says that to be seriously considered as a candidate for President of the United States one must necessarily be as baleful and plain as a plateful of mortal sins?

For 12 hours they had it wrapped up. Obama gave the speech of a lifetime; a masterpiece, said historian David Gergen. He had finally pulled in the entrenched Hillarycrats who were going over to McCain. He had finally outmaneuvered Bill. And the bookies were sure that Mitt Romney would get McCain’s VP slot, giving the election to Obama with dead certainty. The talking points were all lined up.

Then out of nowhere, it was the little-known governor of Alaska with five kids; the wife of a fisherman, who hunts moose and bear and drives a snow machine a hundred miles an hour.

I’m still getting angry letters even from people I haven’t even seen in 40 years.

Not only the Democrats. The Republican columnists for The Washington Post who see America as a pliable sub-state of Europe – this would be in opposition to Emerson; he would consider these backsliders – are apoplectic. Charles Krauthammer is fully sketched out. He says the choice “ . . . seems near suicidal.”

How many cracks in the glass ceiling? 18 milllion? Something is definitely cracking here and it is more than a glass ceiling.

What caught my attention was in listening to McCain’s introduction to Palin. He said that she stopped the “bridge to nowhere . . .” and sent the cash back to Washington. And she used this phrase: “I said if we wanted a bridge we would build it ourselves.”

Build it ourselves? States aren’t supposed to do that. The federal government is supposed to do that for the states. It would defeat the whole worldview of Alexander Hamilton and ruin the way we have been doing things here since 1865 if states started doing things for themselves. That is the kind of crazy talk we heard from Ron Paul and Angus King and Jesse Ventura and those other independent governors and legislators of a few years past. That’s what Arnold and Mike Bloomberg and Jodi Rell, governor of Connecticut, are doing. Telling the feds; if they don’t take change of environmental innovation they will initiate new entrepreneurial legislation themselves, and the Governator is already doing so. It is seditious. It is Jeffersonian.

It was only that one comment, but I was struck by it because the Alaskans I know are actually all like that. They are inherently libertarian and don’t really care what people think in the Lower 48.

This independent streak has been popping up in the last few years all over the West. And it started with the first Republican maverick of modern times, Barry Goldwater; the spirit father, possibly, of Sarah Palin. The same panic set in when The Establishment, both Democrat and Republican (Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge; same foreign policies, different churches), first encountered Barry Goldwater. His petty bourgeoisie, small-time entrepreneurs (“ . . . a nation where all who can will be self reliant,” – Goldwater speaking at the 1964 Republican Convention) were considered a clear and present danger to the global post-war order.

When Palin walked on the stage with McCain she joined a string of Western mavericks; Goldwater, Reagan and McCain, all with incipient Jeffersonian ideas in varying degree.

These four conservative mavericks all share an inherently Western point of view which has risen in our time and it is the most important division in our American condition since World War II. Palin, with Hockey Mom support in the Great White North and NASCAR Moms below, fits into this tradition and could well be the appealing and effective avatar of this new set of ideas; ideas of “small government” and local creativity that first came into the mainstream with Ronald Reagan. The American West has awakened and it rises now in opposition to Obama and the Eastern establishment.

Overnight, this has become the race of the age and the most important one we are likely to face in our lifetimes. Obama and Co. are still very much plugged in to the Eastern Establishment. With Romney out and the others, the neocons and their coat carriers and fellow travelers in all the major newspapers now may suddenly find that they have more in common with Obama in terms of geopolitics than they do with Palin.

I don’t think Obama has it all wrapped up anymore. From what I have seen, she is formidable.

We know little or nothing about her and few details about her life. But we do know something about Alaska. When I was young many of my friends left the East to go work the pipeline on Alaska’s North Slope. Some stayed and became different, better.

There was a very popular book out back then by John McPhee called Coming into the Country and it raised in his readership the same sense of freedom and fresh air that Emerson celebrated in Concord and Jack London found alone in the woods in the coldest hinterland. It was a renewal; a restoration of what the Transcendentalists here in New England used to call Natural Religion.

McPhee writes of the life and times of Alaskans like Donna Kneeland, who spend much of her time in her cabin while her man was out on the trial trapping. This is before liberals entered a state that my Boston aunties used to call “Lace Curtain” and became squeamish just at the mention of trapping an animal and eating it and selling its skin. We don’t know much about Palin but we know she is through and through Alaskan. Maybe Donna Kneeland will tell us something about Palin.

She cooks and cans things, writes McPhee. She grinds wheat berries and bakes bread. She breaks damp skins with an old gun barrel and works them with a metal scraper . . . . Her copy of The Joy of Cooking previously belonged to a trapper’s wife who froze to death. Donna’s father, a state policeman, was sent in to collect the corpse.

This is the life proposed by Emerson and attempted with poor results by Thoreau at Walden Pond. McPhee’s book is full of stories like that; stories of Jack McQuesten who used to plow his garden with a moose, Wyman Fritsch, a miner, an Eagle mayor who died at a Council meeting, Nelson, who runs a health clinic in her kitchen and a gold panner named River Wind.

Many of these and perhaps all of these and Todd and Sarah Palin as well appear to have gone to Alaska for the same reason. Hamlin Garland who headed north in the Gold Rush in 1898 expressed it well: “I wished,” he said, “to return to the wilderness . . . to forget books and theories of arts and social problems, and come again face to face with the great free spaces of woods and skies and streams. I was not a goldseeker, but a nature hunter and I was eager to enter this, the wildest region yet remaining in Northern America. I willingly and with joy took the long way round, the hard way through.”

Now they have come back to us. I for one am glad they are here.

McCain’s VP Pick, Governor Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 8/29/08

In his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Barack Obama made the point that John McCain voted with George Bush 90% of the time. Therefore, he’s only been right 10% of the time, Obama quipped.

It was a good and catchy line, but it is that 10% that makes McCain a maverick. And that maverick quality is what has always made McCain interesting and trusted by a large bi-partisan swath of Americans. What makes mavericks necessary and important is that they invest the rest of their party with flashes of insight and original thinking that the others are constitutionally incapable of experiencing. Mavericks are not hidebound and blinded by institutionalization and orthodoxy. They open new gates and horizons. And McCain has done just that in his choice of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, for his Vice President.

The choice of Palin came from McCain’s 10% - his maverick corner. I can’t think of any one else in the Republican run up who would have chosen her. It is such a perfect choice for McCain. And it might prove to be the best decision McCain has ever made in his life.

On the surface, it appears to pull in the Hillary karma and the decision to pick Palin was certainly leveraged by the Clinton candidacy. Yet Hillary supporters are unlikely to like Palin, who used to get up at 3 am with her father to hunt moose and is the mother of five.

But people who like Alaska or the idea of Alaska will like Palin and Alaska still hovers in the American consciousness as an undiscovered country of the mind.

This is no longer a race between one candidate who brings to mind John F. Kennedy and another following in Bush’s Wall St.-with-cowboy-boots theme, or rows of candidates on either side who might have been classmates and colleagues at Choate or St. Paul’s or fellow undergrads at Harvard, Georgetown or Wellesley, for that matter.

It is a new paradigm and one closer to that gate opened by Ronald Reagan. It is a distinctly Eastern view of the world in opposition to a distinct Western view of the world with the Western view emerging in a new tradition. It opens an entirely new political dialog in the country pitting the Eastern establishment and all of the institutional thinking and baggage that entails against the new mores of the West and the rising spirit of adventure on a frontier still free and open, independent and self reliant.

Way to change the channel, Senator!

Obama’s Speech: Enter the Coyote

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 8/29/08

When I first heard tapes of Obama’s speeches I started checking the Chicago papers. There was a funny and distracting story one day about a coyote. A corner grocer in Chicago went to work one morning and found a coyote in his store. No one knew how he got there or what he was doing there. He was sitting peacefully near the cooler section. They called the city’s animal removal people to remove him. How could something like that possibly happen in a place like the Windy City, when everyone was asleep and no one was paying attention to the quiet things in the night?

I felt the first change in tone last October when I pulled my kids out of school to go see him at a high school in Littleton, NH. I usually dread going to these things because I can’t stand the music. Someone – a consultant of some kind – usually advises them to play the most fascistic music they can find to get the crowd “fired up.” It also makes them evil-minded. But Obama’s team was playing the sweet and gently rolling Motown classics of Sam and Dave.

After his speech, a girl from the audience asked Obama his position on gay marriage. I’d heard Edwards asked this same thing on two different occasions just before and he froze up each time like a Tennessee Fainting Goat that had just heard a car backfire. What was significant about this event and about this man was that Obama recognized first that in this high school crowd in this tough, working class, mountainous region of northern New Hampshire, the girl was uncomfortable and out of sync with the rest of her class. She was brave to ask the question. Before he answered the question he talked to her for several minutes and playfully incorporated her into the group until she felt that she was one of them and one of us; no one here would be left behind.

I knew this would be different because my kids listened to what he had to say and it was the first time in their lives that they had listened to a politician. It was about the time when they started comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy and I remembered feeling as they did when I was brought by my parents to hear Senator Kennedy speak when I was 12 years old.

I am struck by the stealth and the ability; the orchestration of these events that led up to last night. When the blunt instrument of the Clinton team felt they had territorialized the situation, Coyote Trickster always had something of his own up his sleeve.

It seemed almost like a dance with Coyote Trickster always one step ahead, doing new moves that the older people had not seen before. Like when the Clintons managed to get the two preceding nights to speak, Obama arranged to have his speech at Mile High stadium. It was a soft and subtle touch; a design of mind, eye and imagination to make the point of transcending the Clintons without words, like a great film maker such as Kurosawa might do to establish his point of view in a film. Again, when Bill Clinton felt he had dominated the night and the arena on the night before, Coyote Trickster suddenly made a “surprise appearance” to top the bill. Headlines the next day: Obama makes a surprise appearance. Front page picture on The New York Times in the morning; Obama and Biden waving to the crowd. Where’s Bill? It was a tale told in a subtle turning, like that moment when cash flow began to dry up on Hillary last summer and someone filmed her buying a Philly cheese steak then finding that she had no money to pay. “Where’s my money,” she casually asked her army of people all around her. Then with rising anxiety: “Where are the people who have my money?”

My kids wanted to stay up to watch last night. Another first.

I told them it was important because in what I write about history is designed in four quadrants and each quadrant is a generation. I am from the second generation and they are from the fourth and final generation of the post-war period. The world ends and begins again with their generation. The generation is the public psychological package in which they will lead their lives. Each generation has its own goddesses and archetypes and heroes and warriors and tricksters. Coyote Trickster is the first level of encounter with the world. Coyote Trickster always leads the way.

Coyote is different from the others. He doesn’t fit in with them. He seems to skinny to be in a high position as JFK was, but then he somehow seems a better fit than the other people were. Coyote is joyful as JFK was. Coyote is fearless and makes the others unafraid as well. Coyote is supremely confident although he seems to have no peers and no lineage and is way younger than the others. Coyote is a thin white duke who comes from nowhere in the night and when he is finished everything is different and things will never the same again. Others follow with greater organization skills and gifts which they find within themselves but they only find them because Coyote led them to them.

Coyote says things like, “ . . . I felt a single troubadour all alone on the stage could change the world if he knew what he was doing,” as Bob Dylan once said about himself in reminiscence.

Each generation has a very specific moment when it awakens and when it dies and it always awakens with Coyote Trickster. My generation began when Bob Dylan changed from a wooden guitar to an electric one at a folk music concert in Newport, R.I. 40-some years ago.

My kids’ generation began last night with Obama’s speech.

Tom Friedman: China Olympics Bring a Sea Change

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill at 8/28/08

Back during the Nixon presidency Norman Mailer caricatured the binary nature of American politics by referring to left and right as “Beatniks” and “Protestants.” In his book Of a Fire on the Moon he wrote that the Beatniks had let their guard down, and while they were out getting stoned, the Protestants had sent a rocket to the moon.

The country was due for a restoration and within a few years we would have one.

Today we have come full circle. And once again we have let our guard down. Today we have no big name novelists like Mailer. But perhaps the most influential public citizen’s voice in our time is Thomas Friedman’s of The New York Times. And yesterday, after returning from the stunning Olympics in China, he called for a sea change.

The Hill’s Kathy Kemper has been reporting on this all along while most of the other print press was either in denial or hoping to demonize China. Friedman writes: “ . . . as snapshots go, the one China presented through the Olympics was enormously powerful — and it’s one that Americans need to reflect upon this election season.”

Friedman’s voice is today as influential as that of the greatest journalist ever, Ida Tarbell, the Progressive Era muckraker, in her day. Her editor, S.S. McClure, once said that she was the best journalist because when she felt something, he knew that millions of other Americans were feeling the same thing. Where Ida Tarbell was to go, all of America would soon go and it would be very bad news for The Standard Oil Company.

He was a strong supporter of the invasion of Iraq. He even proposed that France be thrown off the UN Security Council and India be put on in its place, in hopes that India would support our invasion. But I knew the Bush/Cheney adventure was cooked early on when it started going badly and a California professor appeared on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer as a Bush apologist and brought to his point of view a swaggering endorsement of the failing mission by “his friend” Tom Friedman, hoping to add cache to his account. Next day Friedman came out against the war and that was the first and most important turning point. From there things would spiral downward.

Yesterday’s essay by Friedman is another such benchmark.

“As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony,” he writes, “I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.”

The difference is starting to show, he said. He compared arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

“. . . ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?”

Regarding the foreign adventures which both parties today support with varying degrees of subtlety and both with fully outmoded ideas (the Democrats from the late Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s favorite professor at Georgetown who doubled as an erstwhile consultant to the Department of Defense, the Republicans from Robert Kagan) he cites the first rule of digging holes: “ . . . when you’re in one, stop digging.”

The business in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East will continue. But what about Russia, Kosovo, Georgia, South Ossetia; all of the Middle East? All of the tiny Orthodox countries surrounding Russia? All of Islam? Isn’t China a potential enemy as well? Today we have basically alienated ourselves from almost all of the world’s people who watch soccer. I added them up one time and it came to over two billion potential enemy to our 300 slightly plus million. The two billion soccer watchers are the donut, the 300 million football watchers are the hole in the donut.

Time to change course.

Friedman calls for nation building and the nation which has to be built – some from scratch and some rebuilt – is America: “The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer. And, I repeat, they did not get all this by discovering oil. They got it by digging inside themselves.”
Rebuilding America’s inner state is what we have been hearing from Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia and Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas, as well. And even Friedman’s conservative colleague, David Brooks, has complemented Barack Obama on his vision of focusing long-term economy on education for children and young people; rebuilding American economy from childhood - an idea which was piloted by Mark Warner in Virginia. As Brooks says, John McCain has no such programs. Nor do the other Republicans.

Both parties are guilty of playing politics with tax gimmicks and capitalist riddles and mantras to get rich quick while our cities and bridges have crumbled around us. Both parties have seen imperial gain in these adventures abroad and looked in the witch mirror to see Russia and Islam as enemies. It is the ugly side of human nature to do so.

There will be consequences. Crimes have clearly been committed in the execution of war. Terrors have been brought by our allies and ourselves equal those at Guernica. And torture as a tool of state has been introduced by Americans. Not by some itinerant nihilist assassin living in the shadow of Prague Castle, but by the most esteemed professors at Harvard and Berkeley and the most prominent editorial writers at The Washington Post and the LA Times. These are situations which remain unresolved and must be come to terms with if we are to remain a republic.

But when Tom Friedman says it’s time to move on, its time to move on.

Life after the Clintons: Mark Warner

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 8/26/08

Joe Biden: He of the plagiarized speech; he of the bad hair weave; he of the long-winded and sonorous stemwinder and random aside. The one really good thing about Biden is that he is not Hillary and it is driving the Republicans crazy that she will not be VP. Rove and Co., with an obvious hand now behind McCain’s show, are as broody as Russians. Their whole game book is based on one Clinton or another poisoning the political water. It has granted them easy and unlimited access to unspeakable power. Such easy targets. Sort of how Bush & Co. thrill to invading little, tribal countries and then . . . uh-oh . . . suddenly finding themselves facing Russia.

This week Elvis leaves the building and so does the missus and nothing could be worse for Bush/Rove. Bush/Clinton is like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty locked in embrace, going over the waterfall together. Good for America. Good for Obama.

Of course, there are and always will be ongoing problems with Bill. It is that Elvis karma and we are seeing now Elvis in winter. He is supposed to speak on Wednesday night but he doesn’t like the assigned topic; Securing America. He wants to talk about himself.

Nevertheless, the Clinton industry is in remission. Tonight Hillary will sing her swan song although she doesn’t know it yet. Even Mark Penn is trying to pitch his way out, writing an obsequious op-ed for the NYTs yesterday for no other reason than to be in new company. This time Rasputin will not go down with the Romanovs. Perhaps he could put together a dog and pony show with Karl Rove as Timothy Leary and E. Gordon Liddy did when history passes by their brief and giddy moment and work the talk shows and county fairs.

This convention rises with the Kennedy family and that light will transcend all the shadows the Clintons intend to bring in from the dark side. From what I can see, the Clintons are today pariahs in their own party. The Clintons have not changed. The people have changed. The Clintons are today as they have always been. The Democrats have matured.

And Penn’s “I told you so” campaign, already in ascent as Hillary sends out op-eds to The Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post; complicated op-eds on economy which by her own admission she knows nothing about – she says she doesn’t even consult with those “elitists” - has no chance. Even if Obama fails, she will face Mark Warner in 2012 but this time he will raise the money.

Not since Madame Mao and the Gang of Four has a political operation held on with such veracity, and not since then has a group been so spent and irrelevant. This week at the Democratic Convention, the generation which began to rise with the internet in 2004 begins to take shape.

It is fully appropriate that Hillary speak tonight on the same night with Mark Warner, for in the space in between those two speeches the political season fully changes. The most important thing that will happen in politics between now and 2012 is that the generations will substantially begin to shift and the rising generation will begin to make its mark. Both the Democrats and the Republicans alike have to leave it all behind. But long before Monica and well after Marc Rich, the Clintons have made the Democrats apologists for the politically unimaginable and defenders for the indefensible. To get a fresh start, they need to be left behind.

Several years ago, Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia and candidate for Senate today, and Jim Webb, the new Senator from Virginia, started the new season for the Democrats. It was first identified when Markos Moulitsas, Hill commentator and founder of the original political blog, The Daily Kos, identified a generational division within the Democrats in an op-ed for The Washington Post. He mentioning Mark Warner and Howard Dean as "new Democrats" or representative of a new generation of Democrats.

These divisions need to happen. In that same period he had a post on Daily Kos asking, "Won't these Clinton-era Democrats ever go away?" Moulitsas is a representative voice of the new generation. It is a large and primarily young crowd that visits The Daily Kos and the statistics in this generational divide reveal destiny unfolding. Mark Warner and Jim Webb have always had sky high ratings with this group. Hillary’s ratings have usually hovered around zero and were never higher than 11%.

The Democratic Party is slipping its skin. It is casting off its shadow. A new party is growing. It began with people like Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Warner, Webb and Governor John Lynch here in New Hampshire. They are a new breed of Democrat and not particularly beholding to the Clintons. Barack and Michelle have since become the catalyst and are awakening this new talent into an actual new movement. And further, the new generation – the all-important fourth post-war generation – is clearly behind Obama.

Mark Warner will deliver the keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention tonight. As the Clintons close one door, Warner opens another.

Obama owes much to Hillary. If it was not for her, he would not be here as her incipient candidacy has been a creeping uncertainty for more than 20 years. As Jules Feiffer expressed it first in a New York Times picture op-ed; Obama, although we knew little about him at the time, was satisfying at first precisely because he was “not Hillary.”

Back in 2005 Hillary supporters and perhaps cultists (“The Clintons are the closest thing we will ever have to a king and a queen,” I was told by one of their major fundraisers years ago) were already drawing so much funding for her 2008 run that one Iraq war veteran running for representative in North Carolina had to pull out because he couldn’t raise money for his 2006 race.

Warner was making initial moves as well for his own run for the Presidency. Wisely, he very early on saw where this was going to go and pulled out.

His time is ahead and tonight he brings himself to the country at large and he brings with him a new generation.

What Joe Biden Does for Obama

By Bernie Quigley

for The Hill on 8/23/08

At first glance it appears like The Beatles after a rousing start, suddenly hired Perry Como to sing vocals. Media is stuck in conditioned response; Obama picked Senator Joe Biden for his Vice President for his experience; especially for his foreign policy experience.

Yes, Joe Biden has experience but it is in the wrong area. Two Senators on the ticket lessens the kind of experience an executive needs. Senators discuss, ruminate, advise or don’t. Senators talk, Presidents do, and the more experience they have, the more they seem to talk.

A First Tier candidate should have management experience – it is primarily a management position and problems will be solved by management abilities and strategies. Best choice in this regard might have been Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas and one of the best governors of the country or Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania. But Obama did the right thing in choosing Biden as his VP.

LA times and most everybody else suggests Biden was picked because Obama was “caught off guard” on the Georgia invasion and thus picked someone with “foreign policy experience.” But in these matters Biden, who voted for the invasion of Iraq and parallel’s the neocon playbook in Georgia, personifies experience with neither intuition nor judgment. But in my observation this past year Obama doesn’t stay off guard for long and he is not off guard here.

In short hindsight it is interesting that Obama said just days ago that he would take a Vice President who would “challenge him” and he trailed off saying that he wouldn’t take a vice president to tell him what to do in foreign policy. It is no way near the VP’s role except in the Cloud-cuckoo-land of Cheney and Co. Here, Obama is the adult in charge.

Anyway, Obama has friends in higher places on foreign policy; Sam Nunn from the old school and in a great and historic moment of American karma, Susan Eisenhower, who in the last 14 years has shown the wisdom, sensitivity and nuance of her esteemed ancestor. She has this week left the Republican Party to help Obama.

Had Obama wanted to continue the new generation theme he would best have picked Chet Edwards, the representative from Texas, recommended by Nancy Pelosi. Not much again in management experience but a bright new face and some good instincts. But Obama is not so narrow as to be an exclusively generational avatar for rising Millennials – as the Clintons and Al Gore proposed to be and pretty much were for Boomers. He is the favorite of the rising generation but he transcends generationality.

Obama brings more a change of theme rather than a collectivized shift of blood and gene pool; it is a show which can work for everyone - much as Ronald Reagan brought a change of theme; a distinctive change of political culture to something quite new: Something from the West; something from the air and mountains it seemed rather than from the entrenched earth temples of the upper Atlantic regions. And then Reagan brought in George Bush the First to show that clearly he intended to amend the tradition in a completely new way and advance it, not destroy it – the usual generational path of the naïve and inexperienced. Obama has done exactly the same. He brings in an entirely new show but in bringing in Biden as VP he holds the rope to his tradition and promises to amend it; to nurture it as one does in a marriage; something old and something new; an old house with new rooms.

Bush I in that relationship to Reagan would not take the spotlight from where it needed to be, on Ronald Reagan. He would be a funeral-goer vice president and I expect Biden will be too.

Obama is the Fourth Man in the four-generational sequence of post-war power: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Obama. He needs to stand alone and bring with him a strong line of the best and the brightest while VP stands aside with grace and in admiration.

And what a start: Caroline Kennedy, Oprah, Susan Eisenhower; the Three Celestial Sisters. Obama and his campaign has shown professionalism and deft not seen here since James A. Baker ran things for the Reagan administration. As a management project, I believe Obama will bring in a great front office as Reagan did. Starting off we are seeing Sam Nunn as senior foreign policy advisor and a sea-change of America’s presence and perception abroad. And at home an Obama Quaternity of Mike Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kathleen Sebelius and Ed Rendell to rebuild the cities and rebuild our country.

Next week Joe Lieberman will speak at the Republican Convention but Arnold Schwarzenegger, the star of the last Republican show who spent a million bucks to attend and entertained the burghers with quips about “economic gurly-mans” will not. Too busy fighting over the California budget, don’t cha know. It is a good trade; Lieberman for Arnold. He will cross over to Obama as Eisenhower has and maybe he will even bring with him his interesting and cool friends like George Schultz and Warren Buffett.

This is a big front line. Joe Biden, like Bush I to Reagan or Dan Quayle to Bush I, won’t steal the show.

A Nobel Prize for War

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/21/08

It is well forgotten today but the idea of putting missiles in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary was first insinuated into the hearts and minds by Newt Gingrich when he suggested it in the period of his Contract for America, which had such great influence on both parties at the turn of the millennium. It became fully integrated as national policy in 1997 when President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pressed the Senate to pass it. Susan Eisenhower led a group of senior foreign policy people from the World War II era calling it ‘ . . . a policy mistake of historic proportions.” But there was something distinctly generational about this group which inhibited them from taking advice from the old and the wise and 90 Senators voted to pass it.

At the time the Democrats were in a Clinton trance and they are only now beginning to come out of it. The liberals were enamored of the Czech poet Vaclav Havel, the poet turned president, thinking perhaps there would be peace if a poet was president. In the English Department and on NPR he was considered kind of a monkey god; the kind which engenders new abstractions. Many considered that the poet actually “brought down” the Soviet Union when in fact, the cat just died. They did not realize or did not care perhaps that promoting a binding war alliance with the Czech Republic and some of the Orthodox and Muslim countries swinging to the south meant advancing the nuclear option and committing America to war with Russia. Good thinking, like the suggestion of E. Pendleton Banks, a Soviet expert and scholar suggesting a “Danubian Federation” were not even aired. Havel talked about Frank Zappa and the Sixties and that did the trick. He was from the Sixties and they were from the Sixties. No number of wise elders can defend against Frank Zappa. Had we had such an agreement with Georgia, which it certainly wants, we would be at war with Russia today.

It was primary to the neocon world view; encircling Russia with weapons over there to the left (Part II), with American boots on the ground to the south, dropping them down from Germany where they were no longer needed, to permanent occupation bases in Iraq and thereabouts (Part I – complete, thanks to the neocon’s the great, good luck of 9/11). In the first days preceding the invasion of Iraq some advanced dharma was aired by fellow travelers and coat carriers, like the suggestion that India be brought in as an American ally – just imagine the extra foot soldiers we could get to occupy all those pesky places in the Middle East out of India’s horde of one billion - and replacing France on the UN Security Council with some American sycophant to minimize the pout factor.

I happened to be at the time a speech writer for a big supporter and fund raiser for Al Gore. I wrote Gore a letter to complain that his administration would lift this idea, like so many others, from Gingrich and Kagan. To my surprise he fiercely supported this program saying that the Clinton administration intended to push NATO into every nook and cranny of the recently freed Orthodox and Islamic neighborhoods of Russia.

I found the naivety of this position astonishing. Just a few years before Bill Clinton had appeared on TV with Eli Wiesel claiming he “ . . . didn’t know what to do” in Bosnia and it was well apparent that he did not. Then he hired a marketing strategist to tell him what to do, much as Hillary gets Mark Penn to tell her what to do now.

It was kind of unprecedented. Jimmy Carter hired a consultant to discuss hair and general appearance so as not to look too Southern in a country just getting used to it, but never about war. They already had people who knew about that. Not since Rasputin had a national leader just advised about things which he had no background in and simply with market share in mind. But to be fair, Rasputin’s advice to Nicholas was actually quite good. He was alone to warn Nicholas that war with the West would bring devastation. All the professionals advised Nicholas to go to war, just as most all the professionals today of both parties advise that these war initiatives are the best course and war with Russia would be inconsequential.

The Clinton people came up with the same playbook: the Kagan/Kristol playbook which primarily asks us to pretend there is no China and return instead to the 1950s and the Dulles Brothers – nuke Russia before Russia nukes us. There is a little twist to the Bill Clinton version – it appears to be the same old Dulles Brothers but edited and with a new introduction by Nathan Bedford Forest.

Something to think about when those pensive eloi of the Nobel Committee next consider their prizes. Bill Clinton is said to want a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Africa on AIDS. Or for something else. Makes it worse for Bill that they already gave one to Al Gore for his environmental movie even though as I recall he signed the contract for China to build a million Buicks there as VP. Do they still have Buicks? In China, apparently, millions of them.

I don’t know. The people who decide these things are Old Swedish Men who live in tiny little rooms in a cold and gnarly land like where I live and they never go anyplace fun. I know they have never paddled the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and Wisconsin and heard the night cry of the loon or been to the Dixie Classic or drove all night to Nashville and got tattoos. I’m quite certain that not one of these venerables has a tattoo of the Zig-Zag man on his forearm like my friend Burt.

They would never give the award to a guy who invented bicycles or something as sublimely elegant and simple as that environmental wonder, the clothes line. I never expect the poets I admire like Kurt Cobain to get an award like this. Or actual peace bringers like Nora Jones. But we have come today to the tipping point. Let us consider it from here back to the point of origin. And let’s, with grace and responsibility, give prizes where they are deserved and likewise, where it is deserved, let’s begin to assign blame.

Wes Clark for VP?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/16/08

The New York Times today has an article titled: "Obama’s Southern Strategy Omits Arkansas, So Far." It makes the point that Arkansas has a Democratic governor, an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, two Democratic United States senators and three Democratic Congressional representatives out of four. And the Democratic presidential primary there drew 80,000 more voters than the Republican one.

But what would be the point of throwing campaign cash into Arkansas in spring and summer if Wesley Clark is going to be sent up as VP in August. He will automatically carry the state.

Several months back Obama publicly listed his foreign policy advisors and Clark, a four-star general who commanded NATO, was conspicuously absent from the list. Clark was critical in bringing the Democrats to a turning point on foreign policy in regards to the Iraq war. It was widely suggested then that the only reason he would be absent from that list is because he was being considered for Obama’s Vice President.

Draft Sam Nunn. There’s Still Time.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/14/08

The Russians planting of the flag at the North Pole last autumn was a Sputnik moment but underwater. Its purpose was to territorialize our northern regions and turn our gaze north as surely as if it was a war dog peeing on the frozen tundra property line to warn off Canadian coyotes. Just as the U.S. intended to territorialize - by which we mean to dominate psychologically [see Sun Tzu] - Russia by planting missiles on its borders.

Yet it went unnoticed by a Democratic Party still laughing and dancing through the night with a flower in its mouth, as Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright did when the wisest voices in American foreign policy declared our intentions in Orthodox Europe to be, “ . . . policy error of historic proportions.”

The Republicans are worse as Georgia, preparing for its invasion of South Ossetia this past Sunday, facilitated the attack with bribes of hundreds of thousands of dollars to McCain’s highest-level staff.

Foreign policy of both teams and certainly in the still Clinton-dominated Democratic Party is virtually identical and seems unevolved since the 1950s when the Dulles brothers pressed to nuke the Russians before they got nuclear weapons themselves. In the secret histories told here in the hollows of the White Mountains, it is said that our Governor urged Eisenhower to run before we were either Red or Dead. We might be at such a moment again.

We have been 16 years without adults in the White House. Obama showed promise and maturity in selecting Sam Nunn as a foreign policy adviser. But the Dulles element still dominates the party and from public expression by his key supporters since Sunday, quite possibly still dominates Obama. His commentators are entrenched Clinton-era people and on the talk shows, Clinton-era voices bringing outright lies.

Planting the flag in the North Pole began the drive to new action and passion in the new century. It began a new era of growing things and creating things and killing things and thinking things up and making them on a vital and brand new, snow white and pristine Canadian canvas.

The fight, when it comes, is only the result of forces and efforts which have been working unnoticed or willfully overlooked in political delusion or hubris over long periods. Over decades perhaps and possibly interlinked to the beginning of human history itself. Countervailing and struggling possibly even to the Creation. It comes maybe - as Walt Whitman said in the greatest ever observation on American karma - from our “unsatisfied Soul” seeking passage to the sun and moon and all the stars and Sirius and Jupiter.

When moral purpose is set the spirit flares and a dissident individual or a minority oppressed by the opposition must be found to team up with. Then organically, that interior minority or individual falls into the alliance with the side which opposes its master. But that individual may only be an abstraction. That is Georgia President’s Mikheil Saakashvili’s problem. He thought they really meant it. He thought that simply bribing a few Senators would do the trick.

Bush in 2005 wanted to ally his cause with every dissident group he could find on the planet, in effect seeking a global struggle to “democracy” by direct military invasion and intervention not proposed since Christendom’s twilight. Party touchstones fled in utter confusion and from there he lost his thoughtful middle and had only the edges to hold on to: Those out there where the buses don’t run like Religious Right columnist Cal Thomas, who proposed within weeks after the tragic day of 9/11 that we use nuclear weapons in the war against terror.

War changes a country’s collective personality and psychology: The Mexican War prepared the South psychologically to fight in a greater war shortly after, and World War I awakened a barbaric sensibility in Germany – a primal spirit of the earth god Woden depth psychologists have called it – that would shock the world as it had never been shocked before 25 years later.

The Iraq war has changed America as well. Several of the Democratic candidates running for President last summer, desiring to show that they have the manlies of Khrushchev or Stalin, virtually swaggered and bragged about their willingness to use “First Strike” in the war against terror, adopting Thomas’s position and the Religious Right position of five years ago.

This (“never take any of your tools off the table”) became a standard Best Practices consideration adopted by Presidential candidates who Mitt Romney said correctly, “have never managed even a corner store.” One claimed experience in this end-of-the-world-nuclear-winter scenario simply because one of her relatives was President and she watched for eight years. Not unlike the way one of the family, possibly one sweetly but sadly Touched by the Lord, would learn to milk cows up here in New Hampshire. To his credit, Obama said he would not use nuclear weapons in the fight against terror under any circumstances.

This systemic incompetence started to become apparent when President Clinton, with Eli Wiesel two feet behind him shaking his head in dismay, uttered the phrase, “I don’t know what to do,” regarding Bosnia in 1993. It continued in stark outline last summer when Bush, asked why the Iraqi Army was disbanded two months after the invasion, predictably advancing chaos in the region to catastrophic levels and costing thousands of lives and endless broken spirits in families and neighborhoods, used this phrase: “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said ‘This is the policy, what happened? . . . Again, Hadley’s got notes on all this stuff.”

The chaos and incompetence afflicted both parties. But on the Republican side, the adults stepped in. The well-needed Baker-Hamilton report was simply an action by the well-regarded Bush family-fixer, James A. Baker, to stem a disaster wrought by a son randomly cast into the Presidency and fully unprepared for his responsibilities.

Then last summer Unity 08, with prominent Libertarian, Democrat and Republican features and clever supporters like New York’s William Weld, proposed that it was time for a new approach and possibly a third-party candidate. Sam Nunn, the highly respected former Democratic Senator from Georgia, also announced that he had held talks with both Unity 08 and with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg about running for President as a third-party candidate.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Nunn, who retired from the Senate more than ten years ago, “ . . . has watched what's happened to the country, and he's more than a bit ticked — at the "fiasco" in Iraq, a federal budget spinning out of control, the lack of an honest energy policy, and a presidential contest that, he says, seems designed to thwart serious discussion of the looming crises.”
In the Journal-Constitution interview, Nunn admitted he was also tempted by the fact that a presidential run would offer him a world stage to press for a revolutionary shift in U.S. defense and foreign policy.

Perhaps more than any living American politician, Nunn has brought sense and sanity to a world hell-bent on mutually-insured-destruction. Last summer he traveled to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar to mark the 15th anniversary of the start of the Nunn-Lugar program, which is intended to help rid Russia of fissile materials left over from the Cold War.

Ultimately, he told the Journal-Constitution, if there's to be any chance of persuading smaller countries to give up nuclear weapons technology — and keep it out of the hands of increasingly sophisticated terrorists — world powers will have to put themselves on a gradual, verifiable path toward total nuclear disarmament. That includes the United States.

Political debate has been captured by the extreme wings of both parties, he said, ignoring solutions that can only be found in the middle.

"I do not see tough calls willing to be made by the body politic," he said.
Nunn is a conservative and a hawk on defense. He is also CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private charitable organization originally bankrolled by Ted Turner. Like colleagues Kissinger and George Schultz who he consulted with last summer in private talks in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin on how to improve U.S.-Russian relations, he brings to the table a maturity that the neither party has not shown in recent years.

This week the Russians raised the stakes. In truth, neither candidate has reacted well to the Russia/Georgia conflict. But there is still time. In the few days left before the Democratic convention, the Democrats might think again about Sam Nunn.