Waiting for Spiderman: What Would Mike Bloomberg Do? (W.W.M.B.D?)

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/08/08

Steve Fraser, who writes about Wall Street, noticed the other day a banner in the crowd there that said, “Jump!”

It recalls an image of 1929 which has become a conditioned reflex: Wall Street bankers, the few and the brave in 1929, losing the fortunes overnight and jumping out of windows.

In the wake of the Wall Street crash of 2008, 1929 immediately comes to mind, and with it comes visions of Wall Street jumpers, soup kitchens and long lines of the unemployed stretching around corners. And it brings a panic call for Spiderman to come and save us again, incarnate as he was in that bygone era in the person of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We hear it everywhere. Rosa Brooks, the LA Times columnist says it is time for an FDR moment.

“Taking office during the depths of the Depression, FDR didn't just talk, and he didn't just tinker,” she writes. “He launched the New Deal, the ambitious package of relief, reform and recovery programs that most economists credit with helping steer the nation back to prosperity.”

Joe Biden started it, telling Katie Couric, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed," It was an instant Bidenism as Herbert Hoover was still president during the Crash of 1929 and Americans had no TVs. Tells you something right there. But we get the point.

Today there is a whole army out there of 60 and 70 somethings and older who have been waiting for the FDR moment for as long as I can remember and I can remember at least as far back as 1952, just like Joe Biden.

Two thoughts: First, Roosevelt was the great man of the day because he constitutionally refused to do what Biden and Brooks and probably a few tens of million of others want to do. When the crisis occurred, he ignored the conditioned reflex, which always looks to past scenarios and a world irrelevant to the changing and continuing circumstances. It would be to try to solve a problem using the wrong paradigm. Like trying to solve the military issues of WW II by asking what would Stonewall Jackson do? Or trying to solve issues in the tribal war in the deserts of Iraq by asking what would Eisenhower do? Roosevelt looked to current conditions in the new world order which evolved out of the end of a long labor-based industrial cycle with its own unique conditions and the rise to global prominence under Woodrow Wilson.

It is inconceivable that Roosevelt would look to solutions of 80 years past as we are asking leaders to do today – that would be 1853 in Roosevelt’s day. That’s exactly what Herbert Hoover would have done.

Second: Roosevelt’s programs did not bring the nation back to prosperity. World War II did. Military victory in Japan and in Europe did. Or better yet, victory in WW II brought the nation to a new prosperity as America had never been really prosperous in a uniform way before. These two elements – relief in the Great Depression and entry into World War II - cannot be separated. Roosevelt was smart and more than anyone in the professions in his era, he was a man of his time. He knew war was coming from his first day in office and everything else he did was secondary to that.

I can remember back to 1952 just as Biden can and like Biden, I grew up on the edge of one of the grimyest of mill towns in world history. My memory is different. In my town, there were 150 stone and glass cotton mills built in the mid-1800s. A million and a half Irish immigrants and French Canadians came to work in them including my father and all of my ancestors. They all went out of business or moved away starting in 1929. When I was born in 1946, just at war’s end, all the mills were empty. My father worked in the last cotton mill to close. He was the electrician. He shut the lights out.

It was a grim place to grow up. Many of us looked forward to getting out of town as soon as we could. Because the old economy never recovered. It ended. Then after the war a new kind of economy started again, but it was a very different economy and it started someplace else.

As a therapeutic exercise it might be worth while now to read Nicholas Baker’s book Human Smoke, which in spite of its biases and pacifist issues clearly and heavily documents the rise of Roosevelt and Churchill to prominence, on occasion illuminating their darkest corners. Because if we go into this financial crisis today with the same boyish wonder and idolatry we hold for leaders past we will fail. It is the same approach we took into Iraq.

Our situation today is entirely different from the crash of 1929. It is one thing to nationalize a nation of factory workers – they are already a kind of army – and something else entirely to nationalize a rich and varied economy of malls and yogurt shops, small manufacturers of high-tech items and niche markets; the primarily local business interests which have evolved since war’s end to fill the American wilderness. We will tend to think globally, as we must have been thinking in 1999 when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass Steagall Act and 90 Senators voted to do so, when the time may be coming to begin to think about acting locally and regionally, as Germany did this week when Angela Merkel declared that Germany would not support a EU-wide umbrella for Europe’s savings but a German one. EU is an abstraction and an avocation, its fate still to be determined. Germany is a real place.

Already, our usual rush to judgment and ill-conceived action based on conditioned patterns of thinking in crisis appear to have amplified our initial failure. The 700 billion bail out of Wall Street looks, as Mark Lander phrased it in the NYTs, like “ . . . a pebble tossed into a churning sea.” That is why it is called a crisis: because the conditioned patterns of thinking no longer work.

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been interesting to watch this week. Like Merkel, his first instinct was not to look to the vast external economic abstraction, but instead to look homeward. This week Bloomberg decided to seek a third term in New York, apparently abandoning any intentions of working on the federal level in a new administration. It is the right thing to do as it concretely addresses our first problem: New York needs to be cured because if New York fails we as a nation will fail.

Maybe only because we are from different local but interlinked tribes in the same place – Red Sox Nation - that I identify with Bloomberg’s style of leadership. On purely the tribal level as it plays up here, I’ve always had greater confidence in his ability to govern than other prominent local people like John Kerry, and even Jack Kennedy. Bloomberg has old soul as well as new soul as some in Boston’s currents do, so he isn’t blinded by novelty and when the shiny new toy fails it isn’t the end of the world. And I wouldn’t expect to see him with the What Would Roosevelt Do? (W.W.R.D?) bracelet or look to Jesus or Spiderman for solutions to current issues of economy and governance.

Bloomberg has a kind of classic managerial character which is the second or third called to solve the task after the first two have failed.

It may be our karma or punishment, which is probably the same thing, that we approach what might be one of our greatest challenges and conceivable a challenge to our very existence just five weeks before a presidential election and neither candidate appears to have a clue about economy.

But as Bloomberg said recently (but before the economic crisis), the next president will be an adult. A suggestion which I feel implies that we are better off in this than we would have been these past sixteen years.

He himself has considered running for president these last several years. I hope he hasn’t ruled it out in 2012 because few have followed the contours of our historical period as it arises to us with such grace and aplomb, abandoning political party identification as these antiquated and anachronistic orders become irrelevant to our evolving circumstances, and promptly leaving one career for the next as soon as the last has been accomplished.

In a speech in London this week, Bloomberg told the Telegraph that the global economy was ". . . facing the worst confidence crisis in our lifetime,” and that "the pain is going to be spread far and wide. . . . It is going to affect anyone who wants to borrow money to buy a car or a house or to expand their business or take out a student loan.”

But he rejected analogies to the Great Depression. "We have a short term crisis that we have to address. If we don't it could lead to something much longer."
How does the future look? "If it rains today I am disappointed that I cannot go out and play golf but I still think my golf game is good and that is what it is likely to be.”

Sage Taoist advice: We are and will be what we have always been. And to solve our problems we will have to find among us and bring forth leaders to act on our behalf, not in transformation, to make us something else we want to be or think we would be better off being, but to bring us back to ourselves and to do it successfully.

A Nobel Prize for Kurt Cobain

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/06/08

I was a little disappointed to read the other day that an American would likely not get the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.

"Europe is still the center of the literary world," not the United States, said Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. He suggested that American writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

He added: "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Too bad. I thought Neil Young was sure to get it this time. Dang. Not even on the list.

“Thinking your mind was my own in a dream/What would you wonder and how would it seem?” I like that part – like the Taoist tale of the man who dreamed of a guru and in a moment of Awakening saw that the guru was dreaming of him.

And the next line: “Living in castles a bit at a time/The King started laughing and talking in rhyme.” Could be a scene right out of the Upanishads in which a cosmic vision of the Self emerges as the Sword of Discrimination cuts away day-to-day illusion. Nice.

About 100 years ago someone asked Bob Dylan who he thought was the greatest poet of the age. He said Smokey Robinson of the Motown group, Smokey and the Miracles. I did a little research and looked through the past few winners of the Nobel laureates for literature. Smokey wasn’t on the list either.

I don’t know. The people who decide these things are Old Swedish Men (Old Swedish Men of every race, creed, color, sex and sexual orientation, of course) and live in tiny little rooms in a cold and gnarly land like I do 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 has).

Indeed, it is a well-known fact that these people only leave their rooms once a year to grant these awards. Maybe they should just try moving the awards to someplace more interesting like Afghanistan or Africa or India or Tobaccoville, North Carolina, and see what happens. And take away that thing that says you have to be an Old Swedish Man (but of any race, creed, color, sex and sexual orientation, of course) to be one of these judges.

I bet if you just took six random tribal elders (and you don’t have to be old to be an elder) – three men and three women – from Nigeria or Bali or Uzbekistan and asked them to make an objective study and draw up a list of the most dynamic and influential poets and writers in the American century since Victory in Japan they would come up with something entirely different. Smokey might even make the list. Maybe Neil too. And Eminem and Hank Williams and Laura Nyro and Johnny Cash and Kurt Cobain.

It is possible that the Nobel Committee for Literature, like the British crown under the pending doom of Camilla and Charles, is a little out of touch. For any writer or artist, winning an award is always a sign that you are getting out of touch; that you have been institutionalized. It is much more flattering to be censored or, as I once was, forbidden to talk to anyone in an entire university without permission from the Vice President.

A Nobel Prize and your time is up. And so is giving an award. Queen Elizabeth not long ago gave an award to Tommy Franks, making him a knight and putting him in the same crowd as that English life insurance salesman, Paul McCartney. And Mick Jagger, Friend of Bill. He got one too. You remember him. He does football games and Bar Mitzvahs now. That’s why the gods take the great ones young, before they can start getting awards and selling life insurance.

I mean there really hasn’t been anything around that you could actually call literature – Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Mann, William Butler Yeats, Emerson, Willa Cather, Tolstoy – at least since the Second World War. And except for the occasional Japanese courtesan, the art form of writing novels, for which Nobel Prizes in Literature are most frequently awarded, is an almost purely European form in case they haven’t noticed. The ones who win always appeal to the European or New York sensibility. Tolstoy said it was for the entertainment of a bored parlor culture of people with nothing better to do. He abandoned the craft in mid life. Novel writing is the opposite of zen, which tries to reduce the reliance on words until the words disappear altogether like a canoe passing into the night on a river.

What is inherent in the giving of these awards is the idea of a superior sensibility which should advise power. In the age of Johnny Bravo and the Powder Puff Girls – America’s Siegfried and the River Sirens – the Swedes look for a higher voice which would advise the throne. But mostly the throne doesn’t listen. Indeed, the work of the chosen poets and writers of the Nobel committee is generally known only to the pot-bound, jargon-speaking and jargon-thinking, autonomous world of the English Department because nobody else pays attention.

And that is not only my consideration. Here is Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English department at Yale, who writes on a variety of contemporary poets, speaking here on that dark twin who lingers under the stairs of the Academy, Lit-Crit: “When did you last read a book of literary criticism?” he asks. (Not since Moe’s Bar went Po-Mo.) “Not recently, most people who do not write criticism themselves will answer. Criticism today is impenetrable and irrelevant, since it is jargon-ridden and no longer interested in literature.”

In the days of Victoria, the toni crowd at the Marlborough House might have had a perverse interest in Wilde, Gide, Yeats and co. and the formidable group of artists and writers who stopped by William Morris’s kitchen. Even up until 1914 when a remarkable individual like T.E. Lawrence could enjoy celebrity both as a warrior and a literary lion.

But not today. Not since victory on the Western Front in 1917. Our world is a direct democracy – there is no enlightened eloi class of the Academy which speaks on our behalf. Nor does it speak to the more influential on our behalf. We speak for ourselves and if we want to name our kids Thursday or Track and start our own religion we in this very public age will do so, and we will probably also form an internet group for that purpose and for other families with Thursday children.

The Nobels might think of retooling. Maybe they should take a cue from the gaudy and unabashedly proletariat Academy Awards and give a variety of awards for specific tasks. Something like this: The Nobel Prize for Perfect Spelling and Grammar to Joan Didion; The Victoria, Empress of India, Award for Telling Foreign Devils How to Act to Salmon Rushdie; The Most Pissed off Young ‘Un Award to Suketu Mehta (his recent book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is actually well work reading, so he might not qualify). That way you could generate the gushy and dynamic tension like on Academy Awards night, instead of just that one short newspaper paragraph every year to someone you usually never heard of before and will almost certainly never hear of again.

Then again, it might even be time for these Nobel committee guys to think of going back to the old alma mater for some of that mid-life (or later) counseling on changing careers. They do that now.

British poet Harold Pinter won the award in 2005. Pinter says he was influenced by Jimmy Joyce and his shadow-kin Beckett. (Does not every lace-curtain South Boston Irish family like my own have their own Samuel Beckett, his angular bird’s face into the soup and grimly muttering something oblique and incomprehensible to himself throughout Thanksgiving Dinner? Is it that all the literary types who are not Irish secretly want to have an uncle or an auntie like that?).

But Pinter didn’t win the award because he was Joycian or Beckettesque. And it is not to say that Pinter is a bad playwright and I have nothing against him except that he wears a Greek fisherman’s hat. But clearly he got the award in 2005 for yelling about the American invasion of Iraq, which seems a little like getting too sensitive to the trends of the mass culture that these Nobel guys really hate.

The Nobel committee often attempts to affect the flow of human events in the world by giving awards that way. A poke in the eye to the Establishment, it is supposed to be.

Myself I would like to see an award go to Leonard Cohen, the primordial “ . . . little Jew who wrote the Bible . . .” he calls himself, who lives today in a Buddhist monastery in San Francisco. Was ever a journey so sublime? He wrote a touching Jesus poem (“Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water . . .”) when I was little and he is about the only talented writer from my generation who passed into the land of the dead for 20 years and came back into my life again a generation later via my kids. Back in the Sixties everybody like him, which in itself qualifies him for disqualification for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Anyway, I can’t see the Nobel committee liking his work. He also wrote the catchy theme song at the beginning of The Sopranos (“Woke up this morning . . . got myself a gun . . .”) but I doubt they watch that. David Chase, who wrote The Sopranos also deserves the Literature Prize, possibly more than anyone today, but his chances are about as likely as Neil’s.

I’d also like to see Nora Ephron get a life award as she is the fish that swims not at the front but near the front of the school and where she goes the generation goes and here at the very latter end of the American century to some extent the world still goes. And follows with uncanny precision. In the first and perhaps only century of and for the ordinary and common people of the world she writes of love between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. But I’d also like to see Ingmar Bergman and Bernardo Bertolucci get one too. Of course, they write movies and the Nobel Committee has that thing about only giving to plays staged in stark basement theaters and to poetry written with quills. And of course, one of them is dead but in literature, death shouldn’t matter that much.

Anyway, I don’t think any of those people would be interested in these awards. It would be like being put in a crate. They would perhaps prefer the distinguished company of those left out like Leo Tolstoy who The Nobel Prize in Literature passed over in its first year, 1901, for the poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme. Ever since, it has been a time-honored tradition.

How about this: a Nobel Prize for the Dead, to go back and retrieve Bergman and those others – Tolstoy, Proust, Hardy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Joyce, Conrad, Kafka, Breckt to name a few - who the committee overlooked. That way Neil and Smokey and Laura Nyro and Kurt might even get one eventually. And change the standards as well. Give the awards not just to writers but to writers/singers/musicians/dancers - to anyone who’s spirit soared and who lived for love and died for love and took his craft to be a sacred task in that river and followed that muse relentlessly to his destiny.

Where is that Deathless Child now? Where is his song?

McCain Should Send Sarah and Todd Back to Michigan

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill at 10/04/08

State lawmakers say they were blindsided by the McCain campaign’s decision to pull out of Michigan. I was a little surprised myself. So was Sarah Palin. She didn’t hear about it until Friday, after her debate with Joe Biden.

The decision was made on Thursday afternoon, just before the debate on Thursday night. It was an odd time to make a decision. The McCain campaign should recognize that in this volatile moment in which the Trickster appears to hold sway, the complete paradigm can change overnight and it changed again at the Palin/Biden debate. Palin was a hit. A big hit, so what might have been a good idea on Thursday afternoon might have become a bad idea by Friday. As Dick Morris said, Palin will awaken now as one who communicates to crowds with the abilities of Reagan and Bill Clinton and will be here as a political figure for years to come. And now in particular, people want to see her.

That is a good comparison and the handlers should consider working with Sarah and Todd as a cultural phenomenon rather than just an appealing but everyday political figure. She is much more and will become much more. Indeed, the entire future of the Republican Party may be hanging on her career. She will change politics but unlike Biden or the Bushes for example, she and Todd will bring a new dimension to a new and rising generation which will rise with her.

It might not have been a bad decision on Thursday afternoon. Team McCain as per Romney said they had low to minimal expectations of her performance. Romney is a great organizer. This assumes they were projecting on mainstream data and not expecting this great performance. Consider her a rising cultural figure bringing a new season to politics. The huge crowds she pulls clearly suggests that she is.

I was surprised to hear about the decision to pull out of Michigan because I can’t think of any place more attuned to the life style of the Palins in the lower 48 than Hemingway’s breathtakingly beautiful setting for his Nick Adams tales in the upcountry Lakes region. The Upper Peninsula in particular, where free and independent U-pers hunt for supper and raise their young ‘uns at the hockey rink. They are Sarah’s and Todd’s natural constituency.

Michigan is widely misunderstood by outsiders. Perhaps the bean counters were looking at the number of unemployed in Flint, and the number of abandoned houses in Detroit and not seeing the whole picture. Michigan has its own life force. It has a rugged heart and a good head. And it is unique in our history as it is the point-of-origin of American-based industrial imagination, something quite different from the English-based movement of the 1840s here in New England and the northeast. It shouldn’t be left behind.

McCain should send Todd and Sarah to the UP. Start there then head south and take a tour with Mitt Romney. (Is Romney running McCain’s campaign? Why not?) Then down to Ann Arbor, the only small town in American where you can find a great football game, a great hockey game and a few serene and quiet Buddhist temples as well. Call on Jeff Daniels, the actor, in Dexter. Maybe he can arrange a private showing of his local cult classic, Escanaba in da Moonlight, about coming of age in the family hunting grounds up in the UP. The Palins will understand.

Palin-McCain ’08: How McCain Can Win

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/03/08

Watching last night’s debate I kept drifting back to good days before the Castro revolution when Friday night meant watching the fights on black and white TV with Daddy-o. The Cuban competitors were generally evenly matched and competent fighters who usually kept going the full 12 rounds. But close to round eight, the superior athlete began to ascend slightly over the other and would continue then to dominate to the end. Likewise, at about 10 o’clock last night, two-thirds of the way through, momentum began to shift from the unanticipated high pitch of mutual competence both candidates brought to the show.

That wasn’t what was expected. The viewing audience fully expected Sarah Palin to be sent from the arena very early on, banished from the lower forty altogether, put on her snow machine with her forty children and sent packing back to Alaska. But by 10 o’clock it was clear that the debaters were drawing even. She realized it and rose to crescendo with that simple grace and common Frank Capra elegance which brings a direct personal magnetism to people who work with their hands and hearts. Drawing even was all she needed to do to restore her karma and quite possibly to win the election for McCain.

And Biden seemed to realize it at the same time. He smiles almost all the time but it is a different smile than hers. It put my kids on edge and they asked about it. Hers is the smile of the good mother or teacher who is not ruffled by random and erratic behavior, but is used to it and amused by it. His is a paint-on smile, at times patronizing and with odd, suggestive little hand motions to the face, like a football coach sending secret signals to his team. Then it sinks unannounced to gloom. Biden’s smile began to sink to gloom at about 10 o’clock. The consequences began to dawn on him: If he didn’t win this race hands down as he expected he would and as he was expected to, he could single-handedly lose the election for Obama. By 10:30 he was all gloom.

The whole debate was about Sarah, said Peggy Noonan.

“She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man,” she writes today in the Wall Street Journal.

One of the telling details came late in the debate when moderator Gwen Ifil asked both candidates what role they would play as vice president. Palin outlined the VP’s role as per the Constitution; the leader of the Senate. But she added that as this role was open to interpretation, perhaps as McCain’s vice president she would have an expanded role.

Biden’s response was vehement. The Constitution clearly outlines in narrow and specific terms the vice president’s task. Any other interpretation smacked of the Dark One, Bush’s VP, Dick Cheney.

I’ve been warning about free-floating management styles since William H. Whyte declared the death of the Protestant Ethic 50 years ago. But it is long gone in our country. Dropping talismans like habeas corpus is a symptom of its passing. It was gone before Bush or Reagan; probably since Kennedy, and it is not all bad. I accept this drift in structure and form as part of our populist development as we head into a new century with new parameters of labor, politics, culture and economy. Personally, I like the European system in which a president has a symbolic or cultural role and the prime minister does the work. That is basically what we have with Bush/Cheney; Bush in a symbolic role and Cheney doing the work. The problem with that is not inherent in the structure; it is inherent in competence or lack thereof in George Bush and Dick Cheney.

But such a structure might work well with McCain/Palin. John McCain is, after all, primarily a cultural figure; a war hero who holds the string of America’s tradition - possibly single-handedly - sustaining values and the heartland tradition; the faith of our fathers, back to Virginia where his ancestor was an adjutant to George Washington. He is a war hero. That is what he is good at and that is why people like him.

But from what I understand and what I have observed, he is not a particularly good manager and sustains one of those old-school offices where an elderly secretary in a hair bun runs the whole show from behind the curtain.

It is increasingly coming to the fore that Palin is a good manager and the more we see of her direct without malice or intervention from the press, the more it becomes apparent. Her general presentation last night suggested a natural manager.

On the campaign trail McCain should talk about culture and values. She should talk about issues. She should be presented as a manager on a team with McCain to orchestrate a new American vision over the next 16 years.

Possibly the most important single event to affect America’s fate since victory in the Pacific occurred this week with the Wall Street bailout. Yesterday afternoon the phones were blocked in Congress and it was impossible to send an email to a Congressman. This is a sea change of unparallel proportions in our time and shows a refusal of citizens to accept the old ways. They want new ideas, new structures.

And they will want new people; people they can start afresh with. There has to be a great confluence of the people of Main Street who are angry at Wall Street and Washington with the huge crowd appearing at McCain rallies. Reports are that the crowds are there to see “Sarah” and when her speech is up and McCain comes out, the crowds start to thin.

It is beginning to sound like a script written by Capra; runs on the banks, Wall Street corruption, a weasel Congress, even the jaded, harping reporters at the city desk mocking the country bumpkin. And the people looking for a natural leader of simple faith from the heartland; a Longfellow Deeds leaving the pixilated valley in the Green Mountains to restore nature to the republic.

If ever there was such a figure it is Sarah Palin. Send her up first and walk behind. Bring her to the vice presidency as an intern and train her to full form. Bring in the best and brightest to work with her in committee to restore the heartland; Bloomberg from New York, Ed Rendell from Pennsylvania and Arnold Schwarzenegger before he gets depressed and leaves entirely for Austria.

Consider a long-term plan. And when the time comes, turn the reins over to her. This is McCain’s ticket and his only chance.

Sarah and the Apocalypse: Tonight’s the Night

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/2/08

There comes a moment, said Edward Edinger, New York’s pioneering psychoanalyst, when something comes unfettered and free as if from nowhere and brings an end to all the systems and their agents and arts that we take for granted as part of who we are and what we always expect to be. The end of the generation’s saints and god kings; Mick Jagger and Hillary and Bill. The end of history; the end of Marx and Hamilton, the end of Congess, Wall Street, the Yankees and the New York Times. The end of that and that and all of that, as Robert Graves phrased Europe’s death in 1917, the end of everything. This, said Edinger, is the apocalypse and it could just as easily be bloodless as not.

It was the feeling they had when the Beatles tumbled altogether down the stairs of the airplane dressed in black as one, prompting visions in the elders of The Four Horsemen and leaving poet Allen Ginsberg to proclaim, “Liverpool is at the present moment the center of the consciousness of the human universe.” It would all be different now, they said, and briefly, between 1964 and 1968 it was.

Everything you planned for; everything you thought would naturally happen next and onward, just suddenly stops. That moment was most poignantly expressed recently by Wes Welker, a football player with the agility of a ferret, when his astonishing quarterback, Tom Brady, tore his ACL within minutes of the season’s opening. “We all had a little Come-to-Jesus moment,” he said, speaking for his teammates and about everyone else in New England.

We are at such a destabilizing moment today, brought to a change of season almost overnight and got there by two events which appeared only since the leaves started to change. The one is the sudden surge of identity and character shown by Congress in turning back a bailout of Wall Street being brought to us by the same team of managers who brought us Iraq and Katrina. The other is Sarah Palin.

The Palin terror strikes deepest in the heart. Just in my morning paper this morning a commentator called her “ . . . an insult and disgrace to womankind.” And even our usually excellent political affairs columnist in reporting that she is “ . . . hugely popular” here in the North Country, to which I can attest, sardonically suggests “ . . . New Hampshire voters, God Love Them, might want to ask Palin which C.S. Lewis novels she considers ‘very, very deep,’ and why.” (For answers to that, see Edinger, above, and his colleague, Marie Louise von Franz.)

The ever popular Ruth Marcus, Washington Post commentator and TV political analyst, offers a host of anecdotes of why Palin should be dismissed by our kind, the most damning: She got a Garfield desk calendar for Christmas which she liked. Hopefully her new Bush handlers will trick her out with the more courant Dancing Shiva as a desk prop and maybe a PBS penguin calendar and the always fashionable tote bag.

The clan which basks at Starbucks is really feeling it. How’d a barracuda get into these waters? Global warming?

It is not like we haven’t seen it coming. Our most honored scholars have long declared the end of things. Jacques Barzun, the very dean of ideas and culture, declared the Death of the Renaissance (meaning us) in 2000. Garry Wills, the venerable liberal journalist, announced early in the Bush administration that the Enlightenment was over.

But that is about half our history; the history of the blue states as they rose to power here since 1865. The Renaissance ended with Jefferson in rural parts, and the Enlightenment ended with Jackson. West of the New River in Virginia it never got a purchase. Those parts have grown in power and political influence through economy and population shifts since the 1950s. They demand now to be included.

And for once, my respectable representatives up here in my predominantly Buddhist and Unitarian corner of northern New England, Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes in New Hampshire and Peter Welsh in Vermont, were in full and righteous agreement with our Christian friends in the Deep South for whom Mike Huckabee spoke eloquently when he said the Wall Street bailout is like buying a Mercedes for a teenager who just wrecked the family’s old Chevy truck.

“The people who burned the Thanksgiving turkey are asking us to let them prepare the Christmas dinner,” says Huckabee. “No thanks!”

Having lived in both parts, this seems a marriage of the best of both. Perhaps we in the coldest north are finding our Jeffersonian roots again.

It is said that all cultural divides are about who will defend the old temple on the one side, and who will build a new temple on the other? Tonight’s debate, between the unlikely contestants, Joe Biden, speaking on behalf of the Eastern Establishment and its oldest orthodoxies and conventions, and Sarah Palin, Woman from the Forest, could well bring a critical turning point between old temple and new.

Tonight’s the night. The end of things is only the beginning.

Bloomberg to Stay in NY: Bad for Obama, McCain

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/01/08

Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, has decided over the weekend that he will stay in New York and run for a third term next year to help the city emerge from financial turmoil. He will have to try to reverse the term-limits law he had long supported to seek the third term.

Good for NY, bad for U.S.

Bloomberg has long positioned himself to have a role in either a Democratic or Republican administration and has been mentioned as a possibility for Vice President for either Obama or McCain.

Perhaps working in the next administration doesn’t seem like a very attractive prospect. The 2008 race has been touted as the “election of a lifetime” for the long election season. But as per Friday, it appears that the unfortunate winner in 2008 will now have the unhappy task of cleaning the stables and coping with whatever hybrid legislation Congress comes up with on the bailout, sure to be filled with anachronisms, irrelevancies, monumental headaches and little creativity. Politics from here to 2012 could well be a creative washout.

It was an auspicious possibility as Bloomberg would have likely brought with him his best bud Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California. They might have even brought along Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania to institutionalize their new bipartisan coalition, Building America's Future, to help rebuild America’s aging industrial cities and infrastructure. Obama has mentioned “rebuilding America” in both his debate with McCain and in his sensational acceptance speech.

Bloomberg, Rendell and Schwarzenegger would have brought a great offensive line to an Obama Presidency, with professionalism akin to the front office of the Reagan administration. Building America’s Future could have been the centerpiece of a formidable historic moment; a reawakening of the heartland and a new dynamic engine for the economy. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has been writing weekly about strategies for rebuilding America, wisely looking across the Pacific for inspiration. But over the weekend the possibility of those ideas materializing in the near future, which would require a significant influx of cash, appeared to be dwindling.

The failures on Wall Street have brought a tectonic shift, not only to the economy but to politics. The astonishing opposition to the bailout – 10 to 1 throughout the heartland – awakens a new and unpredictable political era for the country, very likely to change the dynamics by 2012. Citizens are suddenly demanding new accountability at a time when approval ratings in Congress are their historic lowest on record.

My Senator, Judd Gregg, got it right when he said, “If we can’t pass this bill we don’t belong in Congress.”

Sarah Palin in Pants: Wall Street vs. Main Street – Sarah 10, Barack McCain 1

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/29/08

There was potentially a change in venue and archetype with Sarah Palin. There was the possibility of the awakening of a holistic inner life as when Victoria was queen – to my grandmother and oldest aunties she was more the mother than their real mothers and every English person felt a part of her family. Another possibility was of a new Jacksonian populism awakening Alaska-style which would have been restorative. A republic should every several generations marry to the coyote or artic wolf to retain its original vitality. But McCain is prone to the work of the Trickster and his mercurial play. That alone might have been his motivation for choosing her. However, now that she is here and every manicured and coiffured squid on CNN and in the northeast press is taking shots at her, it could get interesting.

Palin’s mistake was in letting the poltroons who have been composing her recent public appearances – said to have been sent over from Bush’s office; they worship at the altar of Kali, the Death Mother – put her in pants. She wore a skirt and was free, natural, womanly and instinctive at her VP speech and it sent McCain toward the winners circle for the first time in months. And she came in with enough personal references – Dick Morris, William Kristol, David Brooks – to assume that she had at least entry-level ballast as Alaskan governor.

The interviews with Katie Couric were disastrous – but she also seemed paralyzed by the format, reading talking points from McCain/Bush and injecting them randomly into the discussion. Vastly different from the VP speech. Her debate with Biden will be the defining moment in the campaign and McCain’s last chance for the nomination.

She needs to find herself again and send the handlers back to the Crawford Ranch to coach Bush in cutting brush. My prediction is that if she comes out in pants on Thursday night McCain is finished. If she gets back to herself and ignores the squids they still have a very slight chance.

But win or lose, she will not go away now. And she would be better off without McCain anyway because she has commandeered the will of the people at a time when the people are beginning to feel their will. In a simple twist of fate, nature has conspired to bring her to an issue just minutes after she arrived in the public square. When Henry Paulson rushed into the room he expected the Congress of Peeps to respond as they always do to a tall man with a serious frown. He expected a bipartisan effort to save Wall Street by Thursday. But then they didn’t have it by the weekend. McCain rode in to bond the renegade Southerners with the others, round them up and bring them in. Obama, seeing no other option, reluctantly agreed, furiously waving agenda.

But they are having a problem now with Main Street. 1,100 calls came in to the Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s office over the weekend. Only about 100 of them thought the proposed federal bailout was a good idea. More than 10 to one oppose. It’s like that all over the heartland.

Palin will support the bailout because she is McCain’s running mate and she must. But she doesn’t seem to actually support it. She is just doing what they tell her to do.

When she was asked last week what she thought of the bailout she said, “What I’m hearing all over Main Street . . . everyone opposes it . . . the tax payer pays again.” This was fed to us in an attempt to show how off message she was. See, see . . . we told you . . . she’s out there where the buses don’t run. In fact, she was off the McCain message but was instinctively right there with the people.

It is amazing how bitterness still bleeds through the page regarding Sarah, as country folk have come to call her. Particularly here in the northeast. Barney Frank, for whom conspicuous buffoonery is a strategic part of the political persona, scorns McCain by implying that Palin is too stupid to be part of the Congressional discussion with real men like him. You’d think an experienced representative who is daily compared to a duck by Rush Limbaugh would walk more softly. Lincoln Chafee, former Senator from Rhode Island, whose father once landed in my yard in a helicopter for some unknown reason, calls her a “cocky wacko.” These lace curtain types from industrial New England might be excused for being too long in the valley. But Frank Rich’s long scorn in his Sunday column this week at the New York Times suggesting that “no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately . . .” so McCain could ride to the rescue in Congress is pure evil.

Something else is going on here. These people are terrified. They are the High Priests who accompany the Conquistadors and now their sponsors, the Masters of the Universe as author Tom Wolfe calls the investment warriors of Wall Street, are succumbing. And in all of New York and Boston today there is only one point of light, Brett Favre, and he is from Wisconsin or someplace and appears to cut his own hair.

The contempt pouring from the northeast is good for Palin. These people do not like the heartland and the heartland does not like them. But they do like her.

War changes people. Before the Mexican War the people of the heartland and the South in particular, would yield to whatever was decided for them by the white-glove Unitarians in Boston in consultation with the Virginia Episcopalians. After the war they would demand to be heard themselves. We might be there again.

A popular backlash is changing America’s political climate. Inflamed by the financial crisis and bailout, a form of class warfare could haunt business leaders for years to come, says Nina Easton, Washington Bureau Chief of Fortune Magazine.

“A month of historic government interventions shows signs of triggering a political version of climate change - unleashing a new era of class fury that could hurt U.S. companies, business leaders, and wealthy investors for years,” she writes.

If she is right, Obama and McCain will be the most unlucky politicians in the history of Presidential politics, both deemed obsolete within weeks of the election. Because the people are starting to act on their own initiative and they may be finding their own champion in Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin in Pants: comment to Ted at The Hill

Ted: There was potentially a change in venue and archetype with Sarah Palin; like the awakening of a holistic inner life when Victoria was queen – to my grandmother she was more the mother than her real mother and every Englishman felt part of her family. Another possibility was of a new Jacksonian populism awakening Alaska-style which would have been nice – but McCain is prone to the work of the Trickster and its mercurial play and that might have been his motivation. Palin’s mistake was in letting the squids who compose these public presentations put her in pants – they worship at the altar of Kali, the Death Mother. She wore a skirt and was free, natural, womanly and instinctive at her VP speech and came in with enough personal references – Dick Morris, William Kristol, David Brooks – to assume she had at least entry-level ballast as Alaskan governor. The interviews with Katie Couric are disastrous – but she also seemed paralyzed by the format, reading talking points and injecting them randomly into the discussion while she wasn’t in the VP speech. The debate with Biden is the defining moment and McCain’s last chance for the nomination. My prediction is that if she comes out in pants McCain is finished. If she gets back to herself and ignores the squids they still have a very slight chance.


- more ahead on this.

McCain, Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant: Imagine Warfare

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/27/08

Twice the name of Dwight Eisenhower hovered over the first Presidential debate, with John McCain emphasizing the middle name – David - of the man traditionally referred to as Ike, somberly using his full and formal name to bring gravitas to the proceedings and express the awe he feels for the man who brought victory in the Second World War. McCain would return accountability to Washington he said, citing Eisenhower on the eve of the Normandy Invasion, for example.

His presentation was of the warrior mythos; the soldier, the veteran and the victory which if eluded in war would turn the heart dark, blacken the flag and spoil the village. It comes from the heart of darkness McCain himself was visited to as a POW in Vietnam. It is still unfinished in his mind. And his presence on the stage last night gives evidence that that moment – 1967 to 1973 when McCain was held prisoner – is likewise still unresolved in the hearts and minds of America. That moment is still this moment.

McCain is the old soldier to whom the varied ways of the warrior are one passage over the centuries, from Yorktown to Bull Run and Cemetery Ridge, from Ardennes to Normandy and from Khe Sahn to Basra; petals lightly falling. It is auspicious that he admires Eisenhower, because Eisenhower’s management skills were prodigious. Hopefully, it is that which McCain admires about Eisenhower.

But I think not. McCain lit up last night when it came time to talk about war abroad. He likes war and still hopes to meet the 93-year old novelist Herman Wouk, who wrote the popular romance, The Winds of War, before he dies. But he had virtually nothing to contribute to the discussion about life here at home, except the 3 x 5 card he still keeps in his breast pocket from the small government period about “cutting waste.”

I’m not sure Eisenhower would approve. He was our greatest general not because he so much as honored honor (“ . . . honor for the sake of honor”; “war for the sake of honor”). He was our greatest general because he was our greatest manager in time of war. His mother was a Mennonite and a pacifist. He showed no desire to be a soldier as a young man. He said he attended West Point simply to play football and he received a football scholarship to go there.

There is a historic photo of Eisenhower on the morning of the invasion of France talking with a singular American marine in combat kit and darkened face. Eisenhower appears in the photo almost fatherly to a brave son about to face the crucible of life and death which would determine the fate of the world for the next 50 years in just the next few hours ahead. One could only imagine what Eisenhower was saying to him and the photo is composed to make you think about that. Maybe they were talking about the Constitution as George H. W. Bush liked to think about floating on a raft in the Pacific. Maybe something prayerful, like the simple faith of his Virginia tradition which sustained McCain as a POW.

In fact, Eisenhower and the marine were talking about fly fishing.

It is that detachment which won the war in Europe. Eisenhower had no desire to be warrior or President. He had not much interest in doing anything, it is reported in one of his biographies, except playing football. He was simply so good at tasks that became assigned to him that he rose to the top of his profession. Eisenhower put the world back together after others – diplomats, philosophers, strivers . . . warriors - broke it. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates today might bring a very, very minor comparison.

And if lineage is any indication, I don’t think McCain can take much sustenance from the fact that John Eisenhower, son of Dwight, a life-long Republican, a retired military officer and the author of several books of military history (including one on Ike), left the Republican party in 2004 to support John Kerry citing the “ . . . current administration's decision to invade Iraq unilaterally.” Republican Party leadership confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance, he told the Manchester Union.

“The fact is that today's ‘Republican’ Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar,” he said.

And it makes matters worse when Susan Eisenhower, daughter of John and grand daughter of Ike, another life-long Republican, has done the same this year to actively support Barack Obama.

“We are disliked overseas and feel insecure at home,” she wrote in the Washington Post. “We watch as our federal budget hemorrhages red ink and our civil liberties are eroded. Crises in energy, health care and education threaten our way of life and our ability to compete internationally. There are also the issues of a costly, unpopular war; a long-neglected infrastructure; and an aging and increasingly needy population.”

McCain wants to be the warrior’s President. But I can’t think of any time in our history that we have ever elected a warrior to be President just because he was a warrior. The election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 is the closest. Although the great and necessary soldier, he was not a great public manager and is considered one of the worst Presidents ever. His Presidency was one long victory march lasting almost ten years.

That’s what McCain wants. He wants his Presidency to be a victory march for Vietnam, for Basra and Baghdad and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Russia and all the places since Yalta where he and we have felt somehow unfinished. It is a personal McCain obsession and a national obsession and it borders on the edge of the pathological.

As one who watched the planes go up 120 mile south of where McCain was held prisoner, I’d be reassured to see a reference to Grant’s brilliant Autobiography, rather than to the make believe war of Herman Wouk. I guess Tolstoy’s Sevastopol or Hemingway’s A Farewell to Alms would be too much of a reach.

And I’d like to see him taking advice from someone other than his perennially strange and nervous side kick, Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina. If there was a dark corner in the veterans hall where Goth soldiers with black fingernail polish, fuchsia hair, body piercings and torn Marylyn Manson shirts gathered, that’s where you’d find Lindsay. He was among the first to bring the notion from the edge of the occult that a good war would help the economy and bring confidence to the country. It would get us over the “Vietnam syndrome.” He was there everywhere at the beginning comparing the invasion of Iraq to the invasion of Normandy and declaring every aspect of the misconceived adventure to be the equivalent to World War II.

It was like the flip side of the John Lennon anthem, Imagine: Imagine warfare, it’s easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky.

If you just went over there someplace and blew some stuff up, had a war, then came back and had a victory parade it would be the same as World War II. Only the criminally insane could actually believe that. But that was fully the conceptualization of the Iraq invasion at the beginning of the Bush administration.

World War II and the Civil War were wars of survival. Eisenhower and Grant were heroes because they saved our lives and livelihoods. They saved our culture. They created our culture. That is why they are celebrated, because when the war was over we were still alive and alive thanks to them.

It is the essential flaw in the McCain candidacy and it casts sadness on this very decent man and his very honorable public life. He has come to be seen as the savior of something that cannot be saved; the redeemer of something that cannot be redeemed; the fixer of a hurt in the soul which darkens the heart and blackens the flag and will never go away.

If the Bailout Fails, a New Political Movement Could Grow

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/26/08

We have seen here the call for consensus all week. If we don’t get the agreement by Friday the bear will come out of the woods. It is as if consensus itself is the answer, and I’ve heard a former head of Securities Exchange Commission say just that. Makes us all feel good about ourselves. This is not about Democrats and Republicans, this is about being Americans.

But it is just that fraternal nature which has reinforced bipartisan incompetence in Congress and even catastrophe in our times. Especially when both parties rushed in a similar manner to approve George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq without, as West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd said, so much as a brief discussion on the floor of Congress. Wasn’t time for discussion; needed to act fast before Al Qaeda snuck a dirty bomb into Cleveland or dropped WMDs into the porridge. They’re coming in the windows.

But there is a real division developing here now and if they don’t get an agreement by Friday it could well begin to subsidize a new political direction and a possibly even a new political party. And it would begin with Senator Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, who attended the meeting and yesterday said, "we will not have a deal."

I hope they pass the bailout, but seeing Nancy Pelosi, John McCain, Barack Obama and Harry Reid all huggy bear is no pretty picture in my mind. Nor it is at all reassuring watching the current worthies gather with history’s leftovers at the Clinton Global Initiative where they shamelessly self promote and preen in vanity’s yuppie equivalent of the court of Louis quatorze and in make believe pretend to solve the glut of the world problems which they themselves created, including this one. We seem to have come in our times from citizen to consumer and now to a binary horde, our political and spiritual origins forgotten and our families and traditions abandoned for the pink and light blue ties of the unified corporate culture of Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans.

In my neighborhood up here in northern New England people have suddenly started growing very large vegetable gardens. They bought out the country store’s stock of potatoes and onions on the first day of the season. They bought every wood stove available in northern New England. They even bought out stock of one-day-old baby chicks from national distributors, which is unprecedented in our time. They have lost faith. They are waiting for something.

There have been rumors of third party for several years now, a good one supported by William Weld and Angus King, possibly the most enlightened of recent governors in the northeast, and a new back-to-gold movement by conservative libertarian Ron Paul.

Say want you like, but up here the same fear they had of Ronald Reagan and the same scorn for Sarah Palin they display for Ron Paul, which if nothing more is a harbinger. Ron Paul had a clear plan in opposition to the two-headed Uniparty of Barack McCain. Nothing fancy, and in some ways as simple as hanging clothes out on the line to dry.

Paul was of course famously not allowed to appear at the Republican convention this year; too ornery and unpredictable. On Fox news shortly before he quoted Upton Sinclair writing if America ever became a fascist country it would do so waiving the cross and wrapped in the American flag. No telling what he’d say. But I couldn’t help notice that when Henry Paulson first rushed into the room, some of the first interview requests called in by the networks were for Ron Paul.

The other day Newt Gingrich said that what John McCain should do is oppose the plan. Obama embraces it and aligned himself with President Bush. Gingrich said it was a bad plan and the voters would know that by November. If McCain opposed, he would open a new direction in the Republican Party and take the day in November.

Too late for McCain. He’s all about not being on the Letterman show so’s to gird for economic war with the others. Are we not men? Too late for Obama, too.

And if they don’t have Paulson’s plan by Friday, Gingrich said, they will not have his plan thereafter.

Even Paul said that what has happened this week on Wall Street is the natural path for our economy as we have planned it in our times through the several decades, but you can’t just let it die overnight. You need a different economy, which he has proposed all along, but it will take time.

If we don’t have a plan by Friday we will begin to have a new direction; a new direction in politics, culture and economy because they are all related. It will begin to be drawn by Newt Gingrich, Richard Shelby, Richard Viguerie, who pioneered organizational advancement for the Christian Coalition, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.

“The word out of Washington this afternoon is that Congress and the Bush administration are very close to an agreement on The ‘Bailout,’” Huckabee said last night in an email message to supporters. “I can't tell you how disappointed and disgusted I am with this news. Like most Americans I have no idea what this ‘Sweetheart’ deal will consist of, but I do know that forcing the American people to accept the secretive work of Washington politicians is just plain wrong.”

Although it has been largely unseen by Washington eyes, Viguerie, who brought the Christian Coalition to be a formidable political establishment at the rise of the Reagan era, has made progress in this election cycle in converging the culture of his constituents with the economics of Ron Paul. They have always seemed a likely alliance in the Jefferson tradition.

“Stop the bailout,” Viguerie said in an email to supporters. “Congress and the administration are preparing to pass a bailout of Wall Street and of the corrupt and incompetent corporations that – along with Washington politicians and bureaucrats – are responsible for the current mess. It is going to cost each family in America $10,000, and perhaps much, much more. And that’s just the beginning.”

Viguerie and Paul together form an amorphous political culture waiting for a trigger event to make it happen. This could be it.

The Fourth Turning . . . the end of things and a beginning

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/22/08

Now might be a good time to review The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe. The authors’ theme is that all historical periods are "post-war periods" and every eighty years or so a human cycle of four generations concludes itself in catastrophe and rebirth.

“Just after the millennium,” the authors write, “America will enter a new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. The survival of the nation will almost certainly be at stake.”

The book explains why the great gods fall like the petty gods; each becomes "post-seasonal" and submits to the ravages of time. It is the catastrophic failure of systems that have run their course that causes the turnings.

Sometime around the year 2005, say Strauss and Howe, America will enter a period of unraveling; the end of the third post-war generation and the beginning of the fourth. "The nation will be more affluent, enjoy better health, possess more technology, encompass a larger and more diverse population, and command more powerful weapons - but the same could be said about every other Unraveling era society compared to its predecessor. They were not exempt from the saeculum [the historical period]; nor will we be."

They make five possible crisis projections: the first, beset by fiscal crisis, a state lays claim to its residents' federal tax monies. Declaring this an act of secession, the president obtains a federal injunction. The second is a terrorist attack; the third an impasse over a federal budget that reaches a stalemate; the fourth, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus; the fifth; growing anarchy throughout the former Soviet republics prompts Russia to conduct training exercises around its borders. They point out that it is highly unlikely that any one of these scenarios will actually happen. But what is likely, they say, is that the catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: "An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies."

First published in 1997, the authors show remarkable prescience. Did somebody say terrorist attack? Did somebody say Russia conducting training exercises? Did somebody say fiscal crisis?

Crazy about Sarah: The Return of the Earth Mother – America’s Center is Red

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill at 9/21/08

The worst harbinger for Obama, which awakened this week and will grow exponentially now, is the idea that if he loses this race it will be because latent racism is so widespread among white voters. This is the ascending nihilist narrative and it can only originate from the feeling that he is starting to slip. It is a way of saying it is not our fault, it is their fault. I’ve read this on blogs all week and heard it from rural rednecks who for reasons unfathomable have a conditioned affection for Hillary. And it has come just as quickly to the airy imagination of light-as-air artists in the ivory towers of the East. It is everywhere now.

Hillary’s industrial strength morlocks have used this race-baiting strategy all along to promote her and will again in 2012 and again and again until the Clintons finally bring the Democratic Party to ruins. But with the eloi of the ivory tower who support Obama it is a different matter. They appear to be giving up.

The new racist theme is an insidious and immoral conditioning of the horde on the part of MSM. It is Mao Theater - a concerted cooperation of bad sociology and trash TV news and opera - and Obama should counter it. He would have won this in a walk had McCain chosen Joe Lieberman, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee to share his ticket. Obama knows that. He only chose Joe Biden because he was so high in the polls.

It was also a mistake to compare Obama to Lincoln, as Al Gore and others have done recently, but perhaps this Clinton-era group is so lost to language by now that it can no longer distinguish hyperbole from reality. It was an injustice to Lincoln, to blacks and to the country to implicitly compare the situation of black people in America today to the conditions of slavery in Lincoln’s time.

Comparison to the mid-1800s does however begin to approximate the contention which has now grown to outright contempt between red states and blue states. The sudden, unlikely agent and catalyst for this transition is Sarah Palin.

Dick Morris’s tally on the election map at Newsmax shows McCain way ahead of Obama in electoral votes, 290 to 172. Perhaps Dick is smitten by Palin. But the University of Illinois model put together by the computer department and some political science students also shows McCain ahead 247 to 235 in safe electoral votes.

From here to November there are two critical events which will determine the outcome of this race. The October 2 debate between Palin and Joe Biden is the second. Much more important will be Palin’s September 29 and 30 interviews with CBS’s Katie Couric. This will be Palin’s rite of entry into our full American condition. Here she meets with the Gatekeeper. This is the first moment in which she officially becomes not just an archetypal Earth Mother from the Alaska wilderness, but one of us and potentially our Earth Mother.

This will be an important moment in our time. It is a moment we have been heading toward for almost 50 years because it is a moment which could mark the alienation of the regions. Forget the Russians and the collapsing economy – it was bound to happen; it was built that way. Forget the failing dollar – it’s been failing since they changed the composition to the bloated, off-centered, deconstructivist dollar in the ‘90s. Forget the Chinese and the Four Tigers. A chain saw, a Glock 9, a four-wheel drive and a country boy can survive. What we are beginning to see is the materialization of an organic division between red and blue America.

The honest call for bipartisanship and post partisanship we have been hearing from Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, is another symptom of the alienation of the regions. People only call for bipartisanship when consensus is breaking irretrievably or already broken.

The original plea came from George Washington in his famous farewell address, in which Washington warned against “the poison of partisanship.” The regions had already divided psychologically you could say, when Washington teamed up with Adams and the Northerners in opposition to Jefferson and the Virginians at Jay’s Treaty. But the contention was only conceptual; it was a cultural division between the industrial North and the pastoral South which lived largely in the minds of the Eastern aristocrats both North and South represented by Adams and Jefferson. The actual “irrepressible conflict” only began to materialize when Tennessee representative Andrew Jackson heard Washington’s farewell address.

Jackson was unimpressed. He disliked the whole idea of a State of the Union speech which aped, he felt, the English king’s speeches to Parliament. He also disliked Congress’s toadying and fawning response to the President. Congress’s response simply ratified the practice.

“In my mind, this address of Congress to the President was a servile imitation of that custom,” Jackson wrote. “My vote was not against the address as such, but against the custom, or the servile imitation of a kingly custom that it grew out of.”

Jackson’s dissent had an impact. As President, Jefferson declined to give such an address and the practice disappeared until Woodrow Wilson revived it.

Jackson was the first citizen of the west and had the South won or found parity in the Civil War, the conflict and its attending culture might have been conceived differently there. It might have been called the War between East and West or the War against the Gulf States as the region was referred to in post-war Southern literature. The Alamo would supplant the Boston Massacre as the Creation Myth of this region and Houston would be the capital. Virginia would be the distant frontier on the edge of the Jersey Turnpike which now seems to extend all the way to Richmond.

This came to mind over the weekend when I was looking at Dick’s electoral map of red states and blue states. Up top and around is New York and its extended colonies; Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Boston regions, most all on the edges; still hooked on Europe and untouched by the indigenous spirits of the heartland. Europe’s edge creeps in on the Atlantic side and soon to be perhaps, China’s edge will creep in on the Pacific side. The rest is red. There’s a lot of red on that map. It is almost all red. America has found its center and the center is red.

Easterners of the upper caste North and South, Adams and Jefferson alike, hated Jackson. And both were terrified of the republican vigor of the Tennesseans who had little interest in the fine points of Constitutional law and considered instead a woman or man’s character. These were Indian fighters and free and independent spirits; tough and capable frontier settlers with a stronger nature and constitution than the earlier colonial settlers who were pushed back to the seaboard by the Indians.

“I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President,” Jefferson said to Daniel Webster, an Adams man. “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has very little respect for law or constitutions . . . . He is a dangerous man.”

The same contempt, fear and even terror of the end of things is felt again today in the ivory towers of the East, its agents now on the ledges, watching Sarah and Todd – a whole big family of them with extended kin - coming right at them out of the frigid heartland permafrost on snow machines.

But this time there is one important difference. In the earlier day the great speeches and writing of the Bostonians, Emerson, Garrison and Theodore Parker, could eulogize purpose and perspective in bringing opposition to the South and the west as contention rose during the age of Jackson. The issue would be slavery if war came. And they could count of the common class in the North to fight on their own initiatives. Letters home from Vermont soldiers show that few common soldiers had any interest in slavery and virtually all fought to prevent the South from seceding. But they would fight.

This time the common class in the north country of New England where I live – the same mechanics and farm hands who brought Jackson to prominence – could not be counted on to do the same.

That is the fortuitous feature of the culture wars today. The scenario does not lead to such catastrophe because the common people – the people who do the work – are crazy about Sarah. The eloi would have to find someone else to do their fighting for them.

Palin faces in this debate ahead Joe Biden, the consummate Eastern striver from a northeastern Irish family much like my own who so wants to join the existing Eastern Establishment and prove himself to it, even decades after the Establishment’s founders and patrons; the Bordens, the Prescott Bushes, the Rockefellers and the other industrial and financial families of the north have abandoned the plantation to us ethnics and moved on to West Virginia, Texas and Arizona, fully disinterested in our efforts. What could present a more poignant picture of buildings falling?

This perhaps, coincidental in this season of departure: The closing of the gates to Yankee Stadium, the northern edifice, says baseball writer Ronal Blum, “ . . . built to symbolize American power, a place meant to hold the same place in New York’s imagination as the Coliseum does in Rome’s.”

It ain’t over till it’s over, the one true god king of New York at the peak of its arc of power, Yogi Berra, once said.

“I’m going to miss it all,” he said yesterday.

Is 2008 the Election of a Lifetime? 2012 Could Be Better.

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/17/08

Reagan administrator Ed Rollins writes that this is the election of a lifetime. We’ve been hearing that quite a lot. Maybe so. Maybe not.

There are too many amateurs in this race. Obama was pulled out of nowhere by Oprah and will.i.am. He brightened a dark corner in a chaotic time. But it is a management job and he has no experience in management (and is 99 in seniority in his current position). Nor does McCain. And is it good to have someone as President who can think of little else besides the war he was in over 40 years ago? Could cloud your mind. Most of us have moved on.

Biden has plenty of experience, but not the kind you need to be President. Supreme Court justice maybe or chaired professor at some Eastern university like Georgetown. Governor Palin actually has more relevant experience for the job than any of the others, which says not so much about her as it does about the others.

To some degree all four of these candidates are novelties when you consider that the job at hand is primarily a management task.

There ought to be an institution or think thank of some kind which grades aspiring Presidents in a kind of classification systems like we use for sheep or at dog shows. A First Tier candidate for President might be Governor of a big state – Texas, California, New York or Pennsylvania for example; someone like Ed Rendell, Mark Warner, Deval Patrick or Arnold Schwarzenegger if he were native born. Of course, Bush was Governor of Texas, so there are no guarantees.

Second Tier: Mayor of a really big city like New York or Chicago; Mike Bloomberg or Richard Daley. Or a major military operation like NATO: Wes Clark. Or held a major cabinet post in a previous administration. We don’t usually do that but I’d like to see it: Robert Gates or Condoleezza Rice or Reagan administrators George Schultz and James A. Baker or Jim Webb, who was Secretary of the Navy under Reagan.

Third Tier: Governor of a small or lightly-populated state like Vermont or New Mexico; Bill Richardson, Howard Dean, Sarah Palin or Linda Lingle of Hawaii. A governor could get a star here for being a really good manager of a small state, like John Lynch in New Hampshire or a great governor in a bigger state, like Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

Fourth Tier: Senators with no other experience – Biden.

Fifth Tier: Dennis Kucinich or a relative of a former President or a stand up comedian or professional wrestler or talk show host or just any celebrity or performer named Darryl or Krystal or someone who writes his name with punctuation marks in the middle of it or with the prefix Lil like Lil Wayne or Lil Kim.

The election of a lifetime is always the one that elects the great man or woman – Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt – to the position. I don’t think it is one of these four. I like them all. I think they are all nice. I just don’t think they are great.

And they are not great because history has not made them great. And history will not make them great in the next four years because the next four years will not be great. The next four years will be a dumping ground and the next President will have the pitiful task of cleaning the stables after Clinton and Bush and presiding over an unraveling. He and possibly shortly thereafter she will first have the task of getting us out of the war with Russia that Al Gore and Bill Clinton started by forcing a missile program on Congress in the mid ‘90s. He will have the task of facing an America without Wall Street and a New York without the Yankees as a winning team or The New York Times as a definitive voice. She will have the experience of watching the dollar flailing like a bird in a wind storm in an economy without walls where extended tribes in the desert have their own exchanges in buildings taller than ours. She will have the job of finding form and direction in a war that has taken on a life of its own as they tend to do when they are badly conceived and mismanaged for four years. He will watch all the hopes and aspirations of the last century and the one before that fall apart and he will hold the broken pieces.

When the pain is deep enough, the people will call up the great man or woman. It isn’t yet and the Bush people will try to hold it off best they can until after November. Then it will really start to unravel.

It will all unravel on the next President and it will unravel for a long time. Who were the Presidents during the last unravelings, in the times just before the Great Man came and we turned the corner? Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover preceded Roosevelt. Before that? Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan preceded Lincoln. What we will see in the 2008 cycle perhaps is the new Coolidge or Buchanan.

It was a sense of panic that brought us here. That and generations which have come to their ends. In 2008 and next year and the year after, we will still be at the end of things; things which began as early as the 1840s some of them and others which began in 1917. But by 2012 we might be starting to get to the new beginnings again.

The party which loses this race might be better off. I think some of the Republicans already intuit that. An Obama victory in November would likely set him up as fall guy for the mess ahead and turn it over in 2012 to Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. In a McCain/Palin Presidency the Democrats would be able to go back to the cave and pull themselves together. In 2012 they could come back with Warner, Sebelius and Rendell, their best, brightest and most capable, any one of whom is able to accept the original challenges of new awakenings in the new millennium.

Foxes in the Henhouse: Where Obama Missed the Turn

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/16/08

At the very beginning of this longest-in-history Presidential campaign there was a small but critical debate going on although few paid attention outside of the Old Dominion. The question was, could a Democratic candidate be elected to office in this country without carrying the South and the red states? The answer presented by Democratic strategists Steve Jarding and Dave “Mudcat” Saunders was no.

In a book titled, Foxes in the Henhouse; How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ‘em Out, the authors argued that demographics since post-war demand that the South be included in the national dialog. The Democrats have been in denial of the rising influence of the red states, they pointed out. Indeed, the northeast Democrats saw themselves in opposition to the red states. They saw the red states and the South in particular as a recalcitrant historical backwater which would soon yield to Wall St. influence and incursion by out-of-town young urban professionals.

Ignoring the culture and people of the South was inherently immoral and imperial, agued Jarding. It could well destroy the Democratic Party.

There was a second book by Tom Shaller titled, Whistling Past Dixie. It was exactly Sheller’s point that the South should be ignored.

Spending valuable resources in Southern states is a dangerously self-destructive strategy that could serve to relegate Democrats to minority-party status for a generation, it states on the book’s website.

The South could be simply deeded over to the Republicans, writes Shaller. There were enough Democrats outside the region to win in national elections.

As one might expect, of these authors Shaller was the darling of NPR, PBS, and his work appeared regularly throughout the liberal press. So it should come as no surprise that Shaller’s thesis was the one adopted by the northeast strategists of the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

In 2008 it was actually possible to win with this strategy but only if the Republicans put forth the most egregious candidates possible and yielded to their narrowest orthodoxy. And as of July this year, when Obama was dropping three-pointers with ease on the basketball court in Iraq, it appeared that the Republicans were going to do just that.

Obama seemed to have it all by summer. Even thoughtful and moderate Republicans like South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford seemed charmed.


I don’t think many Democratic strategists actually read the Jarding/Saunders book although the authors had successfully helped bring former Virginia Governor Mark Warner and Virginia Senator Jim Webb to the national scene. The party people I spoke to who did were all either Virginians or Texans.

And Obama’s ignorant and patronizing comment about 102 million rural people defaulting to “. . . God and guns. . . “ in weak economic times suggested that he had no clue about the South and little desire to learn.

But the McCain people did appear to be listening in on Jarding and Saunders.

A Joe Lieberman or Mitt Romney would have had both parties whistling past Dixie. The South would have had no options, and the playing field between the parties would have found a staid and tedious equilibrium. But if Obama had chosen Jim Webb, the Virginian with Scotch-Irish roots in rural Virginia, or Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas and one of the most accomplished governors in the country, he would have approached the needs of the heartland. But the choice of Joe Biden, the consummate striver of the Eastern Establishment, was the fatal mistake.

In one masterful hand, McCain responded by calling up Sarah Palin, the personification of heartland values. He awakened the South and the red states. He has been rising ever since.

The Obama campaign might not end in victory. But it is a well-run campaign run by a brilliant and gifted Senator even if it is based on a flawed paradigm which may damn its possibility of success. Even so, it could serve as a bridge to Jim Webb or Mark Warner and Kathleen Sebelius in the Presidential race of 2012 and begin a restructuring of the Democratic Party along more suitable lines.

This would in fact follow in the tradition of the mid-1800s when northeast liberals recognized that they must leave the ivory tower behind and look west and enter the real world of the new frontier if they wanted to participate in the future of America. As Benjamin Franklin advised early on, the future was in the west. Recognizing the needs of the heartland as Jarding and Saunders prescribe could again restore the Democratic party today.

There is a third book that needs to enter into this discussion, H.W. Brands’ masterful historical study, Andrew Jackson, His Life and Times. It is important for northern strategists to begin to understand the life force of the heartland and the South in particular. Jackson was, like Jim Webb, born fighting. From childhood on, Jackson fought Indians and English on his way from the North Carolina Piedmont to New Orleans, and he fought the Eastern Establishment with the same ferocity on his way to the White House.

The lesson then is appropriate again at the beginning of our new century: The South and the heartland will not be passed by, not now, not ever.

Can Joe Biden Change a Diaper?: Sarah Palin, Jim Webb, Andrew Jackson – Blame Mudcat

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill at 9/15/08

I can’t think of any time in our American history when the country repudiated a war it just fought. It is not in our soul’s nature to do so. Not in anyone’s.

75 percent of the country approved of the invasion of Iraq at the beginning and in spite of what Senators Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton said later, they knew full well and had it from the best and most reliable and detached experts that the evidence of WMDs – Saddam’s secret stash of Weapons of Mass Destruction which provided cause for the invasion – was faked. Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN was almost accompanied by the wink and the nod.

They knew the Bush administration planned to invade Iraq to kill Saddam within weeks after 9/11. And if they didn’t, they knew by the 2004 Presidential race because Clinton agent Wesley Clark told them. He wasn’t exactly that hard to get a hold of. Yet many of them still supported the invasion.

These Democrats were not brave when they were needed to be brave. They were not brave when the venerable Robert C. Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia, stood virtually alone on the Senate floor denouncing them as a Congress of Peeps for rushing through the President’s request without any thoughtful discussion. They were not brave when Jim Webb, the new senator from Virginia, then a Republican, called the invasion a surreptitious incursion of the Middle East, long planned in secret closets of the Pentagon and awaiting only this trigger moment.

They were not brave then and now, when 75% oppose the war, they are not brave again. It is the instruction of the Lion King to his cub: “I am only brave when I need to be brave.” Perhaps they missed that movie. To act otherwise is hubris and public theater.

Obama was brave. Webb was and is, and so were Byrd and Russ Feingold, the senator from Wisconsin, who gave a perfectly formed picture of a better path to any senator who would listen. Few did. Instead, they listened to the market surveys and when the herd shifted from 75% in favor of to 75% against, they followed the herd. Leadership in the Democratic party consisted of President Clinton, Senator Clinton and as he touts himself to be the enlightened and fully informed expert on foreign policy today, long-time on the Foreign Relations Committee and its current chairman, Joe Biden. The first two should have addressed the moment and Biden’s responsibility was to inform the Senate.

The Senate vote was the key moment of their political career and will again be key to their political futures or lack thereof. 77 Senators voted for the invasion and only 23 against, all but two of them Democrats. Had 50 or 40 or even 30 Democratic senators followed the Webb, Byrd, Clark and Feingold advice, it might have been a different story. It might have been a different war.

It might have been a war against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. A senate imbued with character like the Lion King, being brave when bravery was required, could have changed the course of this war but only at that moment just before the war started. It was their responsibility to do so. Now, in spite of what they say about going into Afghanistan, the military and the intelligence agencies understand that it is increasingly out of reach.

Obama has a key problem today and it is a problem that cannot be transcended. It is the baggage he carries; not the good work he did as a community organizer or his alleged lack of experience (Elizabeth I, Victoria and Lincoln had less) but the burden of the weakling rank and file he carries with him, particularly the Senators who were accommodating and appeasing when they needed to be resolute and vociferous.

Ulysses S. Grant writes in his autobiography that the Mexican War was simply a war of the strong against the weak, but “ . . . once initiated, there were but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it.”

Experience proves, he writes, that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, “ . . . no matter whether right or wrong,” occupies no enviable place in life or history.

“Better for him, individually, to advocate ‘war, pestilence, and famine,’ than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun.”

Time will tell if Grant is right, and that time will be November 8 when America votes for either John McCain or Barack Obama.

It has been repeated again and again that this is the most important election of our lifetime. My own feeling is that after November 8 the war will in our minds be over and we as a nation will move on to something else. In my mind what we will move on to is very promising and auspicious; the beginning of a new age, a new century and a new America. It will bring a future we can’t yet envision, but I believe it will bring a brand new future, one which we are not expecting and one which will not yield its path and substance to any of our traditions and expectations.

Such new periods most always start with a phenom and it has been noted repeatedly in these last two weeks that McCain’s Vice Presidential choice of Sarah Palin is a political phenomenon, a word best described as a “psychological event.” A phenom starts the world fresh again and leaves behind all that came before in the dust: Elizabeth I was a phenom, Lord Nelson and Victoria were as well and so were Miles Davis and The Beatles.

Does Palin fit a pattern of American politics? Most definitely so. Her candidacy and the new awakening it has brought about in the heartland suggests more than anything in our past hundred years comparison to the first great populist awakening in America, the Jacksonian period. Andrew Jackson was perhaps the most important of the Presidents as he brought democratic empowerment to the common people of the frontier in the South and Texas. And when they got it, they wouldn’t let go. The Eastern Establishments, right and left – Adams and Jefferson – expressed the same consternation at the rise of these country ruffians just as they do today on the op-ed pages and board of The New York Times and in the hallowed halls of Harvard. But in the end, the Eastern Establishment, to compete effectively against the riding Jacksonian culture, had to abandon its own stale and calcified orthodoxies and find their own country bumpkin: Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, when Emerson got himself thrown out of Harvard it gave him cachet.

It was a little surprising watching the Democrats freak out this week because McCain’s Alaskan woman-from-the-forest idea came from the Democrats themselves. Senator Jim Webb sent a shot of fear across the bow year before last when he responded to the President’s State of the Union speech by referring to “Wall St. Barons.” This was the first threat the Eastern Establishment felt and this was the origin of the Palin phenomenon.

Webb, a combat soldier in Vietnam, was well known as a war novelist and Reagan administrator. He switched to the Democratic party in 2006 and ran for senator in Virginia to oppose Bush’s policies in Iraq. He chews tobacco and carries a Glock under the seat of his truck. He wore his son’s combat boots in his campaign. He has writing a book about the history of the Scotch-Irish people in the far western hollows of Virginia from whom he - and the Jacksons Andrew and Stonewall - hail. His presentation on behalf of the Democrats was purely Jacksonian. He almost brought a sea change to the Democrats but it was crushed by the return of the Clintons. He was one of the first considered as a vice presidential running mate for any Democratic candidate this cycle.

Webb applied a formula which had already worked most successfully for Mark Warner when Warner, a lawyer who made his millions as founder of Nextel, ran for governor of Virginia. Warner, Harvard-educated and Hartford, Connecticut, reared, hired the brilliant political consultants Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders to get him heard and accepted in Virginia’s hinterland. They brought in the greatest of all bluegrass groups, the Stanley Brothers from Clinch Mountain, to sing at their events, and they got Warner to sponsor a NASCAR stock car with his name on it. They presented him as the avatar of Virginia’s Democratic populist roots and oldest rural traditions and it worked. Warner was one of the most popular and successful Virginia governors of all time; a Yankee and a Democrat in a meat-red state at that.

With the rise of McCain’s formidable Jacksonian Alaskan the Democrats might do well to turn again to Warner, Webb, Jarding and Mudcat. If they want to win in the near future they might consider “Editor of the Harvard Law Review” a youthful indiscretion and mask it on their resume. Voters might want to know this instead: Can you tend a wood stove without burning your house down? Can you find your way in the woods? Can you change a diaper?

Does Joe Biden know how to change a diaper? Does Charles Gibson? Does Peggy Noonan? Do you?