Draft Sam Nunn

(draft: "The Canadian Century")

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 9/4/2007

By now the fire was rising above the heap of dry wood, the flames were enveloping his legs, and in another minute they spread all over the tree . . . But are there any fires or any tortures or indeed any force in the whole world that can prevail against Russian force?

- Tarus Bulba, 1835, Nikolai Gogol

Anatomy of war behind, war ahead: War often builds on the same pattern – it is an abstract contention of the head at odds with the heart looking for a purpose and agents. When economy shifts radically, as it did in the 1830s and 1840s when American head and heart prepared for war together and again in 1929 in a different war, opportunity for the one or the other to take the advantage manifests in the matrix. It is worth noting as mortgage defaults are higher today than at any time since the Great Depression and the world economy is going through seismic shifts, primarily because of the rapid rise of China in world economy, the decline of the dollar, the rise of the ruble and the sudden ascent of Russia as an oil-rich nation.

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

Churchill said England’s issues with Germany started with the Boer Wars in Africa, a war motivated by England to free the African slaves of the Voortrekkers in the 1830s. The rise of Evangelical Imperialism and a righteous purpose gripped the early Victorians. Having slaved from the beginning and having filled the world with slaves, freeing the slave world it helped create then became the motivating moral imperative throughout its world empire and in the United States as well. And again, economy was key: By the 1830s England’s economy was radically shifting to manufacturing and she no longer needed slaves.

When moral purpose is set the spirit flares and a dissident individual or a minority oppressed by the opposition must be found to team up with. Then organically, that interior minority or individual falls into the alliance with the side which opposes its master. But that individual may be an abstraction as well, like Eliza, the heroine of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who, possibly more than any real-life individual, brought the modern world into existence.

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

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

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

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

Eliza was a fictional American slave who escaped to freedom in Canada carrying her baby under her arm. Her liberation was a world liberation and we were her baby. Jefferson was barely cold in the ground when liberation of the slaves became the moral imperative of Victoria’s Evangelical Imperialists and the Industrial North in the United States. He expected invasion of the agrarian South as early as 1797 and it was possibly only his physical presence on the earth as the Great Man of the Enlightenment that prevented it from happening. Jefferson died in 1826. William Lloyd Garrison established the anti-slavery journal Liberation in 1831. High purpose bonded with the great new wealth of the industrialized states and sealed the deal.

But that which begins in abstraction ends in abstraction. Recently, Vermont’s state archivist, Gregory Sanford, in opposition to mischief makers (of which I am one) who seek Vermont secession has written that it is a myth that Vermont fought in the Civil War to end slavery: “Jeffrey Marshall, the head of Special Collections at UVM, has read thousands of Civil War letters from hundreds of Vermonters,” he writes. “He reports that only a ‘handful’ of the Vermont soldiers cited slavery as the reason they were fighting; they instead directed their ire at the secessionists, who they characterized as treasonous.” Yet from 1865 to the present, every Yankee child (including myself) has been taught that slavery was the cause and reason for northern aggression in the Civil War.

Bowdoin College’s Joshua Chamberlain is long forgotten and has been replaced up here as generational avatar by Bart Simpson. And the purpose and idea of federalism, for which Chamberlain and his small band from the North Country fought with stone and knife at Little Round Top in a battle that sealed the turning and direction of American and world history has vanished into the thin ether of Aquarius. In the papers this weekend both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama propose that gay marriage be an issue departed to “states sovereignty”: States Rights; the driving and motivating spirit of Nathan Bedford Forest; the fleeting rebel cry that Chamberlain and all but a handful of Vermont warriors fought against to create a northern vision of an American federation and to create the modern world.

Not to pick on that particular college, one of New England’s venerables. The general tendency up here since I went to college in the 1960s and 70s has been to equate soldiers of any side with fascism in the undergraduate mind and that idea still drifts through the hills here in the cold and the night and the fog. The student guide who disparaged Yankee soldiers and touted the opportunity to do an independent study on Bart Simpson was only reflecting the trends of the broader region. When Harvard opted to drop ROTC in a pique of anti-war piety some years back, most Northeast colleges followed on cue.

But the chemistry of this history is about as complicated as baking a cake: The net result 25 years later is an army officer corp bereft of Yanks and made up almost exclusively of Southern and Midwestern officers, a very good many of them taken up by the fanciful Southern political direction (now waning rapidly) of Jerry Falwell and its millennialist fever, complete with visions of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ focused on Iraq. It was virtually an act of secession by these northern schools from the definitive federalist vision of duty, responsibility and dharma incarnate as Lincoln demanded it and as Chamberlain got shot with five bullets for, but without the character, courage and conviction to actually secede.

Historian Tom Gossett, late of Wake Forest University, in his learned and excellent text on race relations in the South shows the importance of the Negro in the Mind of the North in the mid-1800s; in the mind of Victoria, in the mind of the world: When Eliza crossed the frozen river breaking up and jumping from floe to floe with babe in arms, we crossed the river with her, cradled in her arms, as was the Christ Child in the early pictures of the Divine Mother at Bethlehem. The image of Eliza and her Deathless Child appeared throughout the world, writes Gossett, on cigar wrappers in tsarist Russia and on signs and dramatizations everywhere which permeated the popular culture as the world first began to emerge as one world. And from that crossing there would be no turning back: The Russian tsars would free their serfs. China, Italy, all, would head to the federalized state in opposition to the independent nation-state. (Till now, when Vermont seeks sovereignty.)

The march to the federalized state envisioned by Hamilton – the marriage of corporation and central government (and Marx, Hamilton’s Dark Twin) could not be stopped. The abstraction had found its cause and its avatar; war, mayhem and the sacking of Atlanta, the carnage and the flow of blood – up to 40,000 killed in a day in conflict previously unimagined - and the wholesale slaughter of civilians in democratic warfare in which, in the “Sherman Doctrine,” all would share in blood and loss, were vast panoramic footnotes to that one essential crossing, in which Eliza freed the slaves and the world fled across the mythic river following the North Star; then as today and in every day since the day of Loki, Woden, Thor and the Green Man, the marker which marks The Center of the World.

The Russians have planted their flag there in recent days; there at the North Pole; that singular place where the earth seems to align itself with the North Star. I seem to live not far away; in any case, as near to the North Pole as one can possibly live and still be an American. In the Border Lands in Wisconsin thereabouts, agrarian visionaries say there is nothing north of them but “a bunch of fences.” I’ve been there. There are no fences.

It is starting to get crowded up here. New Elizas are coming here daily to the northern edge of New Hampshire even from as far away as North Carolina and beyond, and my own neighbors are looking even further north. And for this reason only: It is getting hot up here. For the first time in my history I have talked this summer to tobacco farmers in North Carolina who complained about the heat. As part of the unspoken lore and tradition – that which makes us who we are – Southern people generally do not complain about the heat. Same here. We never complain about the cold. But it is not that cold anymore and last winter we didn’t have November ice till late January. The Canadian Century is upon us and all roads lead to the thawing tundra: I’m beginning to wonder if I may yet buy real estate at the North Pole.

During the make-believe cold of the Cold War, the great Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung warned that as power grew in the post-war West and the “American tempo” rose in the world, we should be careful not to “project our shadow.” By which he meant that our enemy is us and as we build our own strength, it strengthens and builds our enemy as our Dark Twin, the Soviet Union, with the same strength as our own. Worth noting that when we suddenly and out of nowhere declared ourselves to be a “Christian nation” in the late ‘70s under the influence of the most po’ly guided and least-learned free-church political shamans up there from the hills near my old home in Tobaccoville, NC, (a political awakening quite similar to Victoria’s Evangelical Imperialism), likewise, Radical Islam – out of nowhere – suddenly became our enemy; an equal and opposite counterforce to our burgeoning religiosity.

Our Shadow had shifted. But that element seems to be drifting now and even my hunting buddies, it is reported, are putting down their rifles and the whole culture appears to be dwindling. Perhaps we are devolving to reason and good sense and returning from Outer Space. But it could be bad too: If we shift back our focus we will only return again to our old and greater economic enemy; Russia again perhaps, this time in league with China. We cannot beat it. As Pogo said, the enemy is us. And then we may long for this little, ancient (almost childish in incarnation), but time-honored war with Islam. But perhaps it is that we are just falling apart and that is part of nature.

The Russians will not go away. The Russians never go away: It is part of the Western heart as Particle is part of Wave. Contention between the East and West is the oldest in Christendom, pervading relations between Eastern and Catholic Christendom as early as 1100s and dividing the Roman Empire to its dual centers of Rome and Constantinople 700 years before. It is our nature to see ourselves in who we are not but somehow still are; as Constantine looked across the river at Rome, as Eisenhower looked across the river at Moscow.

This division amplified in the Cold War and it flares again: When the Russians planted their flag at the North Pole it was at the end of a series of war games uniting China and Russia. On the same day they sent their bombers, armed with nuclear weapons back to the sky after almost two decades of quiet brooding.

There was perhaps only one moment when this division could have been healed; when a mandala could have been placed between the heart and head to find union between the two rather than contention; to open passage to which the One could find its Long Lost Pure White Twin.

That moment was in the late 1990s when the Clinton Administration, intent on convincing the world and itself that in spite of the effeminate and narcissistic effects of the President and his agents, they were not anima polluted (for what there is a much better street expression), and could be as warriorish in the tradition as any who threatened Russia: In 1997 the Clinton administration led 90 Senators to expand NATO and bring a new line of nuclear weapons into parishes of the Eastern Orthodox Church on Russia’s border.

But these people, some of them Rhodes Scholars and educated in the most formidable of traditions – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Oxford – indeed the entire State Department, the Foreign Service and all the well-funded think tanks and all of those men with the high brows and resonant baritone voices who come to Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, turned in the end only to one of two quite common voices – Robert Kagan, the anti-hippie of his generation, who had a gratifying vision of a Shining City in which China and the Yellow Peril did not even exist, and Newt Gingrich, a small-time professor from a heartland college who had traveled South like Simon Legree with a vicious grudge against the Northeast Establishment.

Early on; long before, Clinton said he didn’t know what to do. Standing next to Elie Wiesel at a news conference during the Bosnian tragedy, he publicly announced, “ . . . I don’t know what to do” (nor did the Leader of the Free World know what to do in Rwanda, but in the fashion of the day he later apologized . . . a modest response and one which in less ethereal times would seem pathologically detached, given that over a million died; mostly women and children and by the knife). Shortly after he was seen carrying one of Kagan’s books around the White House. Then he knew what to do.

And when the Soviet Union fell, he followed the playbook of Kagan and Gingrich and expanded NATO, although Susan Eisenhower, George Kennan and some of the best minds of the time (but old minds) called it a mistake “of historical proportions.” Even my old and venerable Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, of late befriended by the Dalai Lama (but still no friend to the Russkie), had to ask: “Is a border dispute involving one or several of the new NATO members so vital a national security threat to the U.S. that we are willing to risk American lives?”

But it was the End of History, don’t cha know. The Russkie had fallen, and in one of the most pretentious pronouncements ever uttered by a think tank as the Age of Incompetence began to take on its head of steam, it was even called the END OF TIME itself!

But of course, it wasn’t. It was that our ideological Dark Twin was now weakened. Certainly it was morally weakened and condemned by its own, especially Gorbachev and our living Tolstoy incarnate, Solzhenitsyn.

In truth, the 90 Senators who voted for NATO expansion saw Russia as returning to peasant stock pulling on its forelock, while America soared to Jupiter, Sirius and beyond.

That was the singular possibility. We could then have found our Lost Twin and embraced him. But the Democrats, under the aegis of the Clintons She and He and Al Gore who vigorously supported this policy, had ceases to listen to Kennan, Eisenhower and the Old School in any matters. They refused to listen to Kennon – our most esteemed diplomat since Franklin - on foreign affairs and drove him to actually support Vermont secession at the very end of his life. And they refused to listen to John Kenneth Galbraith on economic matters, who came to consider them leisure class; a Culture of Contentment. Instead – and in hindsight this will be considered their great, narcissistic flaw – they listened to voices only of their own generation and their own age. Even if they were ascending radical Republican voices like Gingrich’s, or neo-conservative voices like Kagan’s.

Today Gorbachev no longer condemns Russia. He supports Putin’s efforts as necessities in keeping Russia together. Solzhenitsyn has returned to Russia and recently, he thanked Putin who visited his home to give him a national award.

Today, Russia is not broken and it is not a peasant pulling on its forelocks. It is one of the richest countries on earth. The ruble is booming, while the dollar is on the verge of collapse. Europe is entirely and exclusively dependent on oil-rich Russia for natural gas. Russia has reinvested its new oil wealth in its army while our army is spent on Medieval warfare of malevolent origin drawn from millennialist, eschatological visions of Armageddon and the Coming of the Son.

And two weeks ago Russia planted its flag at the North Pole

The planting of the flag was a Sputnik moment but underwater. Its purpose was to territorialize our northern regions and surely as if it was a war dog peeing the frozen tundra property line to warn off Canadian coyotes.

We moved NATO into Russia’s realm because we saw Russia as weak and we took advantage. No other reason. Now we are weak and the main reason is this: We have been without adult supervision in this country going on 16 years now.

Our first crisis in America today is a Crisis of Competence and it starts at the Oval Office. It is a management thing; both parties need to understand. And of all the way many people who have until recently announced that they want to be President, on a management-basis alone, only three are actually qualified to do the job if we are to advance as a mature and positive nation in the world. They are Mike Bloomberg, Mark Warner and Mitt Romney.

We have reached the turning point and the moment of high crisis – a crisis in competence in management but also in outlook. We can no longer go forward as a federation as Hamilton envisioned it and as Lincoln enforced that vision with another eight years of adolescent, undergraduate or incompetent management. Ron Paul brings a new spirit of endeavor and awakening paradigms to the contest. But if any of the others is actually elected at this point we face today the possibly the actual collapse of federalism in the United States as we and the world have come to understand it since Eliza crossed the river in 1852.

As a prominent Vermont politician said recently, Vermont’s attempt to secede is just a “silly Vermont thing.” Indeed, but for some unaccountable reason the myriad of Vermont silly things today manage to find their way into the broader conversation. Already, people who are not silly, like the Governor of California and his allies in major northeastern states, are taking notice and for the first time since 1865, have defied and ignored the federal government and resurrected the idea of states rights on environmental issues and other issues.

We have seen a complete failure of federalism in Iraq and in the Katrina region. This cannot be blamed on President Bush alone but on a systematic spiral of incompetence in management over the last 20 years. The first observation, as zen asks us to look at the thing itself without illusion, is that we have come to the end of things with the feds, and states on their own, like California and New York (and even Vermont) are able to do much better by themselves.

When historians look back at this fin de siecle to see what happened here, they will see a turning of events stemming primarily from a crisis of competence in governance. Both parties are cursed by it and it plagues especially the rank and file. It manifests in elected Democratic mayors of cities like Atlanta hiring Mitt Romney’s company, Bain & Co. to do the work for them. And in the appointment of Howard Dean as Democratic party chief; Dean, a Presidential candidate in ’04 who would ordinarily be considered a perfect failure and a marginal player as he lost ever primary and shifted the tone of the race to the Magic Mountain escapist politics of Vermont. He reanimated early visions of the Democrats as a silly party in a race which might otherwise have well gone to John Kerry had he remained in Vermont.

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

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

Unity 08, with prominent Libertarian, Democrat and Republican features, has proposed these past two years that it is time for a new approach and possibly a third-party candidate and just recently, Sam Nunn, the highly respected former Democratic Senator from Georgia, has announced that he has held talks with both Unity 08 and with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg about running for President as a third-party candidate.

Recently, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Nunn, who retired from the Senate more than ten years ago, “ . . . has watched what's happened to the country, and he's more than a bit ticked — at the "fiasco" in Iraq, a federal budget spinning out of control, the lack of an honest energy policy, and a presidential contest that, he says, seems designed to thwart serious discussion of the looming crises.”

"It's a possibility, not a probability," Nunn told the Atlanta paper. "My own thinking is, it may be a time for the country to say, 'Timeout. The two-party system has served us well, historically, but it's not serving us now.'"

But a lawyer friend of Nunn in Perry, Georgia, says it is in fact more a probability than a possibility.

Nunn said he's not likely to make up his mind until next year, probably after the early rush of presidential primaries have produced de facto nominees for both parties. He said the decision will depend largely on what he hears from the current candidates. The only certainty, he said, is that he won't be anybody's candidate for vice president.

In the Journal-Constitution interview, Nunn admitted he is also tempted by the fact that a presidential run would offer him a world stage to press for a revolutionary shift in U.S. defense and foreign policy.

Reading the blog on Unity 08, Nunn is liked by its participants. More than any living American politician, he has brought sense and sanity to a world hell-bent on mutually-insured-destruction. Just this week he traveled to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar to mark the 15th anniversary of the start of the Nunn-Lugar program, which is intended to help rid Russia of fissile materials left over from the Cold War.

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

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

"I do not see tough calls willing to be made by the body politic," he said.

Nunn is a conservative and a hawk on defense. He is also CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private charitable organization originally bankrolled by Ted Turner. Like colleagues Kissinger and George Schultz who he recently consulted with in private talks in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin on how to improve U.S.-Russian relations, he brings to the table a maturity that the Democrats have not shown in recent years and which is non-existent in the current line-up of Presidential candidates, several of whom were part of the Clinton’s Cajun Cartel.

Unity 08 calls for a new approach and in a recent NPR interview, CEO Robert Bingham called for candidates to name the teams they would bring to Washington with them.

I was delighted to read that Senator Nunn had talked to Mike Bloomberg about an independent run for the Presidency in ’08. I also think that he should take Unity 08’s cue and not only name the Cabinet or advisors he would bring to Washington, but as James A. Baker did, bring forth a group – a Founder’s Committee - for this auspicious new political direction, a group which might include Unity 08’s Angus King and Bill Weld, creative former Governors who brought Independent and Libertarian influences to their duty. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who uses the phrase “post partisan” might also be considered and Mark Warner, former Governor of Virginia, who pioneered ideas of post-partisanship by working most effectively across the isle in politically polarized Virginia.

And Mike Bloomberg is not the only billionaire who is considering third party politics. Warren Buffett shows strong interest in Arnold Schwarzenegger entering in a third party movement. Ted Turner might consider this as well; perhaps these and other philanthropists would join forces in a new third party direction. Consider that a Founder's Committee or Board of Trustees of some kind with responsible citizens from different walks of life might appeal to a larger group than just one person like Bloomberg or Buffett.

It is time for the Democrats to Kick it Old School and do as Baker did with the Republicans. Bring back the adults: Draft Sam Nunn.

Hillary’s Mao Theater

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 7/23/07

When Chairman Mao was in his hey-day . . . that would be during the Cultural Revolution when every second student on American campus was carrying a copy of the Red Book, there was a thing they used to do called Mao Theater. (Mao was kind of the Paris Hilton of the early ‘70s before yippie turned to yuppie.) Mao Theater was public drama of overt propaganda to condition the audience to adopt Marxist values. Little plays would go on; morality plays of Marxist morals and ideas and things they wanted you to become, and they would be accompanied by agitational propaganda – direct political indoctrination to accompany the theatrical production, thus to get the peasants on the whole program.

In hindsight, you would find it hard to believe that any group of people could be so stupid as to be influenced by this kind of thing. And only a slave race; the hordes; the masses would enter into such an absurd and simple-minded flow of indoctrination.

But here we are again with the announcement that the new 24 series (is that still on?) will star a “woman President” this next season. They changed her hair a little so it doesn’t look exactly like Hillary’s. The last Mao Theater presentation of President Hillary, Commander In Chief starring Geena Davis, to condition the audience to her upcoming Presidential campaign, the Chief was almost a ringer.

Who will decide this next President? David Geffen? Stephen Spielberg? Oprah? Jack Bauer?

How about None of the Above.

Are Americans as stupid as the Hollywood dictators of culture propose we are? At times, yes. But not today.

The three leading Democrats today are now fighting to be the new McGovern. The Democrats will become the “anti-Vietnam War” party applied now to the war on Iraq. It is their fatal flow to solve the issue of Iraq by looking to their personal and generational past and to the war in Vietnam.

The flaw in this is that in its inner-most sense Iraq is not at all like Vietnam. Vietnam was a random error of judgment by Jack Kennedy who did not know what the hell he was doing for a good long while when he first became President. America could leave Vietnam at any time without major consequence. And did. It was not a time of war. It was a time of peace and war was anomalous.

But several of the Democrats, most prominently Hillary and her Cajun Cartel, still have at least one foot in that decade. They want the war to go away now like the Vietnam War just seemed to go away. Hillary will advance now because she seems so good at being “against the war” – like we somehow remember her doing it all her life, kind of.

That’s not going to happen either. These Democrats, who fully supported Bush/Cheney/Rove on this absurd and tragic misadventure have proven themselves for a second time to be incapable of management and leadership abilities. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.

As misguided as it was, the invasion of Iraq was a “patriotic war.” That is, it was a war to which people gave their trust and their hearts en masse. Virtually 100% of Americans supported Bush when he first sent troops to Afghanistan. Still 75% supported the invasion of Iraq, and the leaders and journalists who knew full well what mischief was behind the war-making decisions threw in as well.

The people now will not disavow themselves of their original faith and intentions. They are tired of the war, but it is a misreading of America’s mood to think that therefore they will abandon the principle which first sent the 100% of American sensibility to support the Afghanistan invasion.

The ’08 race will be a referendum of this: Will Americans renounce their first intentions and vote for Hillary? Or in spite of misguided leadership by the worst President in our history enforce in concept the original premise of the war on terror. And in that case, vote for Mitt Romney.

There is something inherently crippling about the Democrat’s way to power and it started here in New England during the war in Vietnam. But Massachusetts, where I grew up, is not the same place as it was then. We no longer like to lose and take pride in losing as we did for a long time after the death of JFK. There is still that McGovern tendency and it still seems to pervade the Democratic Party.

In ’04 I worked here in New Hampshire as a volunteer for General Wesley Clark because he had the right view of the invasion of Iraq and unlike most ranking Democrats, he had the character to come public with it.

At a house party in Concord one night at which General Clark was to appear, I was talking to one of the most well known of political organizers in New England who was nationally prominent in the campaign of George McGovern.

I was a little startled when she said with great enthusiasm in reference to General Clark’s presence in the race: “It’s just like George McGovern!”

I myself saw no trace of resemblance to McGovern or the McGovern campaign. George McGovern lost 49 states and that total failure is still a matter of pride among Democrats.

Maybe this is a political party that just can’t grow up and we will see the end of it after Jack Bauer rushes around in earnest pursuit this next season stopping terrorists out to git us again (starring Kiefer Southerland don’t cha know. Isn’t he a Canadian? And what kind of name is Kiefer anyway?)

Howard Dean is another who suffered a catastrophic loss and was considered such a party hero that the Democrats made him the head of the party.

This is something I don’t understand: Here in Vermont and New Hampshire we pass through trends. Forty years ago there was a big hippie thing. It lasted about ten years and then the hippies all moved out west to Marin County and Seattle. Then fifteen years ago when Dean started being Governor of Vermont, there was a big gay scene. It was immortalized in the last season of The Sopranos where Vinni has to leave New Jersey because the mob discovers he’s gay. So he comes to New Hampshire and discovers that half the town is gay including most of the fire fighters. Truth is, it is kind of boring up here and the gay scene moved back to Boston and New York about eight or ten years ago.

So how come when a trend passes up here in northern New England it catches on in the national party?

New England is a much different place than it was in the Sixties when it was indeed a swirling vortex of hippies, anti-war activists and Maoist suburbanites lost in a haze of political make-believe.

Today we have a truly astonishing quarterback with the eye of a falcon and Boston has a cool, new bridge and a tunnel which sometimes works and other times not so good. Since McGovern won the state in 1972 Massachusetts has seen one of the most innovative and popular Governors, the Libertarian Bill Weld, who today waits in the wings with Unity 08 to open a third party if one of the others fail. And from then till now, this state in which my father managed to not talk to any but French and Irish Catholics in all of his 90 years has had a well-organized and effective Mormon as Governor.

New England it no longer the land of McGovern or even the land of Jack Kennedy anymore. It is the land of Mitt Romney.

Somebody tell the Democrats.

Federalism Has Run Its Course

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 7/5/07

The Libby pardon brought first to mind Bill Clinton’s one million dollar bribe received from Libby associate Marc Rich in the last days of his office, when Clinton pardoned treasonists and felons alike, giving relief “like lollipops” as Romney said, to anyone who had the cash to pay. Seeing him now in Iowa running his wife’s dog and pony show is enough to gag a horse. It is clear now and was clear from the start that this would be another Bill scam.

My second though was – politics aside – that we have been 16 years now without adults at the head of government. And the crew we face in ’08 is none as good: Romney will drive to the heart of Islam and perhaps to Russia; Hillary, who simply refuses to answer question from the press, will do whatever the market surveys and her husband tell her to do. As Emerson said at the awakening of our Republic, “we see ourselves ascending a stairs.” We appear now to be descending the same set of stairs.

As I was driving home last night I'd been thinking that if Senator Clinton and Governor Romney get the nominations, I would not vote for the first time in my 60 years. This would be a matter of conscience and moral responsibility, but not of passivity, because I would then send my meager efforts elsewhere. There are no vacuums in human nature, and there are always new paths when old ones fail. Here in northern New England many feel the same. Vermont actually faces a secession vote in March and 38,000 Vermonters are said to support Vermont nationalism. (When the issue was vetted on Daily Kos, two-thirds responded in a national poll saying Vermont had the right to secede.)

I feel no hostility to the two big parties, but I feel no attachment either. It would be a personal acknowledgement, feeling or belief that federalism as we have understood it in New England since 1865 has run its course.

I would hope then for a third party or even a regional party, as regionalism may be our destiny if federalism fails. And what we are seeing in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina; in the Middle East as the big ships head in to bomb Iran; in the Congress of Peeps which holds the coats, accommodates and appeases even as habeas corpus is discarded with a shrug; and in the Oval Office where one of the two most underdeveloped Presidents in our history; the one a serial draft dodger who compares himself to Churchill (and another who compared himself to Elvis) is a failure of federalism.

Thus the stakes in this election are higher than they have ever been since 1865. It could well be that Jefferson’s vision of a “decentralized” country would be the practical and obvious model after the Hamiltonian vision of an all-powerful Centralized Government and “one size fits all federalism” had filled the West and run its course and groups and types of regional character and community tier economies have developed across the continent.

The West is filled. The regions and communities have developed their own souls and characteristics. Federalism has run its course.

Hillaryland vs. Arnoldland

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network at 6/21/07

There are two kinds of people in this country: Those who look West and those who want to go Back East. Those who look West follow the Sun on its morning path across the Plains, the Pacific and the far waters. Those who look Back East move faster into its dwindling light.

California, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Arizona and the Southwest are the final destination of those who follow the Sun – they are the last places for new beginnings in America. New York, Boston, New England and Europe are the destinations of the Returners.

They are entirely different. The Sun Followers change – they greet change; they make change; they welcome change. The Returners get alienated by places they don’t know and haven’t been and they try to recall the early days. They remain the same throughout their lives, echoing the same cord in their 60s that they felt as young college students.

Here in New Hampshire last year one of the ritzy prep schools generously held a symposium for us proles in the state and our high school kids. In one of the exercises, the parents were asked to write a creative paragraph about themselves. I was surprised that almost all the men – they all had their hands up to read their comments out loud – most exclusively wrote about when they were in college or went to Woodstock and heard Jimmy Hendrix, or when they were teenagers in a band. They were all Returners. Maybe because they were all businessmen and couldn’t think of anything that would sound artsy. But they were all Returners anyway and at 50 years old they had no anxious life crossings to report, no salvations, no creative failures.

We have quite a few Returners up here. People “return” to New England although there is no more New England to return to because of all the Midwesterners and suburban types who have returned, and brought it with them.

A lot of the Returners are college oriented – they want to return to being in college. I talk to them about their dreams and they dream of being in college, although they are in their 60s. Which is kind of unfortunate. They come here to retire in the region of the college campus they went to because they have no place else to go; no town, no parish, no family. ‘Tis the curse of federalism and the corporate culture. (Do we still need federalism? New York and California seems to be very well today without it. Indeed, it seems increasingly to be a useless appendage.)

But there are issues with going back. One must cross life’s rivers. And when you cross the one river, it brings you to the second and then the third, and finally you reach some oasis in life’s journey. It is there from which life begins again. But if you don’t cross the first river you never get to the second or third.

Those who cross every river go back as well at life’s end. We return, in shadow, to whence they came. You have to go back; everyone is called back to her or his beginnings, it is the way of all things; God will call you back to the stone church and the green mornings and the smell of childhood friends when you are old – you will dream about the friends you were born with. But those who have made the journey, like Bilbo Baggins, are restless in old age and yearn to head West again; to camp under the stars in Sonora risking scorpion bite or paddle the Boundary Waters deep into the Yukon and grizzly territory. They feel maybe it is better to be eaten by a Grizzly than to pad around doing tai chi on the old college campus at 75 years old. Those who have made the journey are not afraid to die. The Returners all live to be 110.

Hinduism has it that life is always awakening and moving with the path of the Sun, and always returning with its Shadow at the same time. Newton found this core principle of the East as well; the path of Vishnu, the Creator, is balanced by that of Shiva, the Destroyer, and for every Force there is an Equal and Opposite Counterforce: again, the way of all things.

Two people represent this in high contrast here today in the Land of the Free; Arnold Swarzenegger, the Sun King who rose out of the beach scene and Southern California’s strong man culture – ( large as a Titan, no? Like the one which is claimed to Pour the Water in the icon of Aquarius) and Hillary Clinton, who, after victory of a sort, returns East; to New York and to the constancy of issues which have not changed in her life since she was a college student. In full truth, she is the representative figure of the Democratic Party today. Arnold is the representative of a diametrically opposed new movement in American culture.

Anyone who was in college in the late Sixties and early Seventies will recognize a familiar ring to the “Take Back America” conference the Democrats held recently. It echoes the “Take Back the Night” feminist concerts from college days, and it thus resonates the same cord of angst, alienation, approbation and victimization of that time and place, echoing into this.

This is the Hobbit tendency. As their Master Creator pointed out, the Hobbits like to read the same book over and over. These are the Bagginses, loath to leave the Shire and terrified by the river. Does Obama’s autobiography somewhat resonate with Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and somewhat with a touch of Malcolm X?

Echoing the Original Spirit creates the reinforcing orthodoxy around the shining moment and fortifies the waning spirit. But it leaves a hunger in the third or fourth generation’s repeat. Like that horrid music they constantly play in supermarkets and malls and everywhere; rock without roll, as Joni Mitchell called it – the spirit left eons ago. A Xerox copy of a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy on to white.

How many times have we heard now the “new JFK” or the “new Bobby.” Of course a new JFK would only be a shadow of the original. It is modish cultism; let’s restore that feeling which gave us such a buzz when we were 18. It is modish idolatry; let’s bring back the once and future king. The consequences on personality can be pitiful; it presents one from crossing the rivers ahead if one can only see into the past.

Thanks to YouTube, I can plug in and show my kids the power, courage, danger and fearlessness that Malcolm X found when he universally scared the pants off the white people. He still does. But Obama, who speaks of a “quiet riot” does not. There is no such thing as a quiet riot. Malcolm was a man who didn’t long to retire in his college campus. Or the anguish of Bob Dylan at Newport in 1965, like a magical animal come out of the North Woods; a heartbroken and drunken John Brown warning of pestilence, danger and the end of things ahead. The Poet of the Heart rarely expects to live past 30 and the best do not. Malcolm, like John Lennon, managed to get to 40 before he was gunned down.

We face the big transition now, and not because of this upcoming Presidential race. All healthy people are sick of this consultant’s scam already. Today America’s new generation faces the question every generation faces: Do we follow the Sun or retreat into Shadow?

I don’t care if Arnold runs for President. I don’t care what he intends to do. Nature will call him forth where he is needed. There is a new thing started up here in New Hampshire at high school graduations, much to the great dismay of the guidance counselors: When the boys get their diplomas, they collectively light up cigars. I believe it is an Arnold thing. From the kids I talk to, they seem to like Obama. But they idolize Arnold. He is perhaps the First Citizen of America’s finished journey in its last frontier; the place at the end of journeys where the world begins again.

We face now our first days: The North/South contention which has resonated heart and mind in this country for 400 years in cord and chorus and sometimes in blood and anger is over. That age was Prelude. That day has passed. We are now an East/West country and we will be for the next thousand years. And the representative avatars of this new condition are Hillary Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This is the question we ask today: Do we cross the river ahead and all the other rivers? Or do we return again to the Shire?

Bloomberg: The Mark Warner Paradigm

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network 6/20/07

Mike Bloomberg is old school from the time when politics formed around New England's ethnic and religious tribes as in the movie "Miller's Crossing." He and his family are highly respected here in the Boston area as authentic and original and trustworthy people; in a word, formidable. I've felt from the beginning that Bloomberg was acting as a concerned citizen, as it was said that he would only enter the Presidential race if both parties failed to put up worthy candidates. He's one of the smartest men on earth and he's not going to throw away a half billion bucks.

Interesting that he says today that he is no longer a Republican but did not yet declare himself to be an "Independent." His staff says he will not say what he’s going to do until February when the other two parties have declared their candidates.

If Bloomberg decides to make an independent run for the Presidency it could well awaken a permanent third party and one of the other parties will head to Palookaville. The conditions are perfect. The Republicans have at the moment the most to lose, as nominally this represents a division in the Republican Party, leaving the Religious Right and the Old South Republican wing to dangle. The loudest squawks have come from the torture buffs in the Republican nut-job wing.

But the Democrats have a lot to lose as well. They have made great strides gathering independents in ’06 and have brought a new face and a new beginning to Congress. But they have squandered the energy and already alienated the independents who brought them to the new Congress. Pundits say that new energy in the voting public could well go to Bloomberg. All those gains could now disappear.

Which is too bad. This dynamic new crowd of Democrats, which includes Iraq war veterans like Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania and Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire were just starting to get their stride. They were on a good track until the consultants took over the show and started this absurd early primary season and the American Idol Presidential lineup. Most in the mainstream are already sick of hearing about these people.

If Bloomberg does go ahead with his new party his tag team will certainly include his California bud, Arnold Schwarzenegger in some capacity – Secretary of State maybe. They are two of the country’s most savvy politicians according to Time where they made the cover this week. Warren Buffett has called for Arnold as VP candidate on a Bloomberg ticket. No question, the political season has changed and almost overnight.

In California today Bloomberg is saying: "Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles, and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology."

Likewise, Arnold's key phrase is "post partisanship." It is the new season and the new tune, and the Democrats are still playing the odd, whiny and inauthentic grocery-store music of Celine Dion.

But Bloomberg’s theme isn’t his own, and post-partisanship isn’t Arnold’s either. Five years ago you might have heard these same sentiments from the Governor who was considered one of the best in the country and one of the best in post-war politics; Mark Warner of Virginia.

Warner invented Mike Bloomberg. He invented Arnold Schwarzenegger. His decision not to run for President left a big hole in Democratic politics.

Warner might have transformed contemporary Democratic politics. Harvard educated and Yankee-reared, he campaigned vigorously and joyfully at Virginia’s NASCAR track and Appalachia’s Big Top churches, where Nantucket liberals fear to tread. But I can see Mike Bloomberg welcomed there as well.

In Warner's tenure as Governor, Virginia could be seen as a Petri dish for a new political sensibility. He proved beyond any doubt that the South and all of the red states could be brought back home to the Democratic Party by a genuine, enthusiastic and sincere politician with excellent management abilities, who respected his fellow Southern citizens as he found them.

As Governor of Virginia and as a Presidential candidate, Warner abandoned the politics of confrontation and established a new model, reaching across the isle to create working relationships with Republicans and ignoring ideology and issues-oriented strategies which often alienated mainstream voters and filled Republican ranks in the Old Dominion.

In an early foray into Iowa, Warner refused to enter into the politics of polarization when reporters pressed him into positioning on the most contentious issues. He once answered, “97% of what I do is management.”

It’s a management thing. The Democrats needed to understand. There is the essence of the new paradigm of what could have been the Democrats’ auspicious political future. When Warner dropped out of the Presidential race, the same management-based, bi-partisan political model was adopted here in New Hampshire by our Democratic Governor, John Lynch. He was reelected in this reddest of states with 80% voter support.

What Arnold brings to California today is new energy to face the new century. He defies the tradition-bound and calcified parties and pushes ahead with his own home-grown environmental treaties in utter disregard for the federales and the inch-worm bureaucrats at the EPA. And to his Republican friends who say that green power will slow business, he responds that green business is good business and forward-looking and alive states will include clean-energy entrepreneurs and be part of the ascending economic arc of the new century.

These are new ideas which are now awakening in the new century and leaving the hide-bound behind. It is good that Arnold has adopted them.

But they are not Schwarzenegger’s ideas. They are Mark Warner’s ideas. When Arnold was pushing his line items against the tide in his first term, Warner was up here in New Hampshire promoting green entrepreneurs and talking up these exact, same ideas. He had made them begin to work in Virginia and could well have made them work across America.

Now these ideas which were leading to a new Democratic awakening are entirely identified with Bloomberg and Arnold.

What happened? The Democrats’ dynamic new people and ideas were driven out by that destroyer of world; the middle-minded minions of the rank and file.

Bloomberg is a master. No one has ever changed the political landscape so dramatically by dropping so few crumbs. And the framing is brilliant: He is now making it crystal-clear that he will undoubtedly act, but he is giving the two parties time to shape up. He brings a decent and civil warning.

There is still time; the Democrats can still turn to their First Tier: Warner, Jim Webb, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Mike Easley of North Carolina, Wes Clark, Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, John Lynch of New Hampshire, Joe Sestak and others. But they have to look within themselves and ask what is it that compels them to send forth the middle and the middlin’ (Celine Dion?) when the best and the brightest are left on the sidelines.

The Democrats have to let go the current crowd and gather and spread in the South and Southwest and heartland as Warner and Wes Clark have done, as per the prognosis of Mudcat Saunders and Steve Jarding, in their book Foxes in the Henhouse. They need to move the headquarters of the Democratic Party away from Nantucket Island and Bill Clinton's NY penthouse to Richmond or Austin if they ever want to participate with the real people of our country again.

And this could be their very last chance.

Is Wes Clark the Last Hope for the Democrats?

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network 6/18/07

Senator Clinton's negatives are now to 52% according to Gallup, the highest of any candidate in the human history of the Democratic Party. Up from 46% about nine months ago. The more money she spends the more her negatives go up. And John Edwards, who recently cited Paris Hilton as poster-child for his “two Americas” pitch has drifted into Triple A. A few of the other Democrats who want to be President are so forgettable that most can’t even remember their names.

In contrast, Mitt Romney is beginning to boom and will continue to do. Headlines in my morning paper: "Romeny Grabs Lead in Early Voting States." Romney is smart as paint, is a masterful administrator and is very rich. I don't think the people who care about religion will actually much care that he is a Mormon when it comes time to vote. He goes to church and that is what they want; most of the others seem to go for the camera.

Any of the Democratic contenders against Romney will fail. But this time the Democrats approach a catastrophic failure. It will be the Democrats fourth total failure since Eisenhower.

It is quite possible that the Democratic Party itself cannot survive such a failure. I’m sensing entrenched retreat: Nihilism, born of desperation, has poisoned the blogs like DKos and some of the major bloggers are dropping out. This will further sink the Democrats' chances.

Ships come and go in such an uncertain political environment – last week Colin Powell and the week before, Al Gore. Then they pass again into the night and fog.

Wes Clark is still here. He says consistently that he has not ruled out a run in ’08. Wes Clark, as Dark Horse, can retrieve this for the Democrats and now he is quickly becoming the only hope the Democrats have.

We have been hearing from General Clark quite a bit, but you have to want to listen. He’s not on the Big Screen; he has no Hollywood poster child like Edwards and no mangled and misbegotten “quotes” from Lincoln of things never said (grabbed form the Internet) like Gore. He is right on the facts and accurate in his historical perspective. He is precise and perfect in presentation. And he’s been going on and on about Iran, like the Ancient Mariner, to anyone who will listen; in the Huffington Post, on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, and at the 92^nd St. YMCA in New York City, on Fox news and now as a commentator on MSNBC. He’s at StopIranWar.com, alone among the Democrats to warn of impending neocon-inspired invasion of Iran.

Like those who denounced Churchill as crying wolf, Rove & Company have called Clark’s claim about a pending Iran invasion absurd, and most of the Democratic contenders hope this will pass them by as well, as they hoped Iraq would. But this weekend in the NYTs, we are told that Vice President Cheney and the incompetent war cabinet has been pushing for strikes against Iran all along. Joe Lieberman, who used to be a Democrat and sometimes thinks he still is, is openly pushing for strikes on Iran. The Republican right is calling for the “nuclear option” as it has been since the beginning of the Iraq conflict.

Only General Clark speaks up.

Condi Rice, the Administration's Incredible Shrinking Woman, is said to prefer conversation rather than bombing Iran, but the NYTs reports that “ . . . Mr. Cheney believed that Ms. Rice’s diplomatic strategy was failing, and that by next spring Mr. Bush might have to decide whether to take military action.”

Cheney is incapable of seeing warfare as anything beyond revenge and dominance. He is the Anti-Eisenhower; he has a mind which rebels from strategic thinking and planning. They still haven’t avenged the Ayatollah Khomeini and the taking of American hostages in 1979. It will be the administration’s last bit of business as they finally close the door that Ronald Reagan opened.

Only General Clark and a few others – Eric Massa of New York, Andrew Horne of Tennessee and Jon Soltz; all military officers – are speaking up. But they are building a new Democratic Party and General Clark was elementary in organizing and husbanding its awakening.

I was pleased to hear on NPR this week and again on NBC over the weekend, a tribute to Jim Webb, the new Senator from Virginia, for Father’s Day. He talked about fathers and sons and the tradition of military service which has gone back in his Virginia family to before the American Revolution.

How times have changed in the last two years.The rise of Jim Webb, Joe Sestak, Tammy Duckworth, Andrew Horne; the kind of solid-stock heartland politicians like New Hampshire's Carol Shea-Porter and Arkansas's Woody Anderson that we haven't seen since the days of JFK. Clark tirelessly supported these candidates throughout '06 political season. They are forming a new Democratic sensibility.

They bring a new and different attitude to the Democratic Party - a positive attitude.

This new Democratic sensibility is a good fit for our country at the beginning of the new century. My feeling is that it is unfortunately the Democrats own internal energy - the pseudo-Republicans of the DLC in particular and what Democratic strategist Mudcat Saunders recently called the Metropolitan Opera branch of the Democratic Party - that is sinking these efforts, striving to return to pre-9/11 conditions.

The Democrats have to get serious now or it will soon be too late: As said; Romney is smart and he is a fantastic manager. But sending the country to such a detached manager as Romney, who was key to the progress of financial institutions like Bain & Company and Bain Capital, would be sending it into receivership.

And the crisis which begins our century could well be at hand right now as Hamas takes the Gaza Strip. This victory by the radical force in Palestine will empower a new generation of revolutionary, anti-Western young people. As General Clark said, Gaza could now be a breeding ground for Al Qaeda connected radicals. It is the beginning of a new framework of discussion and diplomacy and it is possible now for warfare to spread and alliances to harden.

I hope General Clark continues to speak up. Harry Reid is hitting a wrong note: This is not the time to go after General Petraeus with personal criticism. It encourages a negative mood for the Democrats. And it is wrong to criticize soldiers on the ground as “detached” and “incompetent” as Reid has recently done. It shows an intrinsic misunderstanding of the matrix of power in our country.

Perhaps only General Clark can forcefully and effectively shape the issues now for the Democrats and prevent the descent into this kind of "shadow" criticism that they are rapidly sinking into - it will drive the Democrats to nihilism and irrelevance, which at this point could lead our country to hidden disasters.

In The Wall Street Journal this week Reagan speech-writer Peggy Noonan all but called for a third party. David Broder of the Washington Post actually called for a third party last week.

Mainstream conservatives like Noonan and Broder are getting the idea: There are always other options.

One such attractive option is New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who said he would start his own third party if the standing parties can’t come up with something original and dynamic. Bloomberg himself is nothing if not dynamic and he does speak to the heart of New York City as great mayors like Ed Koch and Fiorello LaGuardia did. But he is enigmatic as well and is said to have all but sponsored Lieberman’s forey into third-party politics in Connecticut in ’06. Bloomberg could well bring the same Lieberman perspective to the national stage. Coincidentally, Mayor Mike is up here in New Hampshire this weekend. Just visiting, he says.

Bloomberg, nominally a Republican, has bi-partisan support, and political venerables like Ham Jordan, former chief for Jimmy Carter and Angus King, former Independent Governor of Maine, have been calling for a third party all year.

It should be noted as well that "post partisanship" being advanced in California in particular by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is an ascending political trend in political journals like The Nation. These new directions would well coalesce in a new framework provided by Bloomberg and the half billion of his own cash that he is willing to put up for this new venture. If so, one of the two standing parties could get a one-way ticket to Palookaville, as the Whigs did in the mid 1800s.

The Democrats need a candidate with the smarts and managerial abilities of Romney or they will be dead in the water come September. They need Wes Clark: If they don’t come forth now with their best First-Tier managers and strategists - Mark Warner of Virginia, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Mike Easley of North Carolina, Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania have been strangely overlooked for the naive and ideological American Idol lineup - they may find themselves descending into a spiral of irrelevance and caught in a twist of fate which they can no longer find their way out of.

Wes Clark is Dark Horse

by Bernie Quigley for Fighting Dems on 6/16/07

Senator Clinton's negatives are now to 52% according to Gallup, the highest of any candidate in the human history of the Democratic Party. Up from 46% about nine months ago. The more money she spends the more her negatives go up. And with all due respect, John Edwards, who recently cited Paris Hilton as poster-child for his “two Americas” pitch is drifting into Triple A. A few of the other Democrats who want to be President are so forgettable that most can’t even remember their names.

In contrast, Mitt Romney is beginning to boom and will continue to do. Romney is smart as paint, is a masterful administrator and is very rich. Any of these Democratic contenders against Romney will fail. But this time we approach a catastrophic failure. It will be the Democrats fourth total failure since Eisenhower.

It is quite possible that the Democratic Party itself cannot survive such a failure. I’m sensing entrenched retreat: Nihilism, born of desperation, is beginning to poison the blogs like DKos and some of the major bloggers are dropping out. This will further sink the Democrats' chances.

Ships come and go in such an uncertain political environment – last week Ron Paul, this week Colin Powell and the week before, Al Gore. Then they pass on into the night and fog.

Wes Clark is still here. He says consistently that he has not ruled out a run in ’08. Wes Clark, as Dark Horse, can retrieve this and now he is quickly becoming the only hope for the Democrats.

We have been hearing from General Clark quite a bit, but you have to want to listen. He’s not on the Big Screen; he has no Hollywood poster child like Edwards and no mangled and misbegotten “quotes” from Lincoln of things never said (grabbed form the Internet) like Gore. He is right on the facts and accurate in his historical perspective. He is precise and perfect in presentation. And he’s been going on and on about Iran, like the Ancient Mariner, to anyone who will listen; in the Huffington Post, on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, and at the 92^nd St. YMCA in New York City, on Fox news and now as a commentator on MSNBC. He’s at StopIranWar.com, alone among the Democrats to warn of impending neocon-inspired invasion of Iran.

Like those who denounced Churchill as crying wolf, Rove & Company have called Clark’s claim about a pending Iran invasion absurd, and most of the Democratic contenders hope this will pass them by as well, as they hoped Iraq would. But this weekend in the NYTs, we are told that Vice President Cheney and the incompetent war cabinet has been pushing for strikes against Iran all along. Joe Lieberman, who used to be a Democrat and sometimes thinks he still is, is openly pushing for strikes on Iran. The Republican right is calling for the “nuclear option” as it has been since the beginning of the Iraq conflict.

Only General Clark speaks up.

Condi Rice, the Administration's Incredible Shrinking Woman, is said to prefer conversation rather than bombing Iran, but the NYTs reports that “ . . . Mr. Cheney believed that Ms. Rice’s diplomatic strategy was failing, and that by next spring Mr. Bush might have to decide whether to take military action.”

Cheney is incapable of seeing warfare as anything beyond revenge and dominance. He is the Anti-Eisenhower; he has a mind which rebels from strategic thinking and planning. They still haven’t avenged the Ayatollah Khomeini and the taking of American hostages in 1979. It will be the administration’s last bit of business as they finally close the door that Ronald Reagan opened.

Only General Clark and a few others – Eric Massa, Andrew Horne of Tennessee and Jon Soltz; all Democrats and military officers – are speaking up. But they are building a new Democratic Party and General Clark was elementary in organizing and husbanding its awakening.

I was pleased to hear on NPR this week and again on NBC over the weekend, a tribute to Jim Webb, the new Senator from Virginia, for Father’s Day. He talked about fathers and sons and the tradition of military service which has gone back in his Virginia family to before the American Revolution.

How times have changed in the last two years.The rise of Jim Webb, Joe Sestak, Tammy Duckworth, Andrew Horne; the kind of solid-stock heartland politicians like New Hampshire's Carol Shea-Porter and Arkansas's Woody Anderson that we haven't seen since the day of JFK. Clark tirelessly supported these candidates throughout '06 political season. They are forming a new Democratic sensibility.

They bring a new and different attitude to the Democratic Party - a positive attitude.

This new Democratic sensibility is the best fit for our country at the beginning of the new century. My feeling is that it is unfortunately our own internal energy - the pseudo-Republicans of the DLC in particular and what Democratic strategist Mudcat Saunders recently called the Metropolitan Opera branch of the Democratic Party - that is sinking these efforts, striving to return to pre-9/11 conditions. Any of these new people: Tammy Duckworth, Jim Webb, Eric Massa, Joe Sestak, Wes Clark, would awaken American and beat the likes of Mitt Romney hands down. I'm hoping that Katrina Swett and/or Jay Buckey, who are both running against Senator John Sununu here in NH, can follow Shea-Porter’s lead and marshal this new Democratic sensibility in New England and bring it forward.

The Democrats have to get serious now or it will soon be too late: As said; Romney is smart as paint and he is a fantastic manager. But sending the country to such a detached manager as Romney, who was key to the progress of financial institutions like Bain & Company and Bain Capital, would be sending it into receivership.

The crisis which begins our century could well be at hand right now as Hamas takes the Gaza Strip. This victory by the radical force in Palestine will empower a new generation of revolutionary, anti-Western young people. As General Clark said, Gaza could now be a breeding ground for Al Queda connected radicals. It is the beginning of a new framework of discussion and diplomacy and it is possible now for warfare to spread and alliances to harden.

I hope General Clark continues to speak up. Although I appreciate the leadership in the House and the Senate, I'm afraid that Harry Reid is starting on the wrong note: This is not the time to go after General Petraeus with personal criticism. It encourages a negative mood for the Democrats. And it is wrong to criticize soldiers on the ground as “detached” and “incompetent” as Reid has recently done and shows an intrinsic misunderstanding of the matrix of power in our country.

I feel only General Clark can forcefully and effectively shape the issues now for the Democrats and prevent the temptation of this kind of "shadow" criticism - the thing which could drive the Democrats to nihilism and irrelevance, which at this point could lead our country to great disaster.

In the Wall Street Journal this week Reagan speech-writer Peggy Noonan all but called for a third party. David Broder of the Washington Post actually called for third party last week.

Mainstream conservatives like Noonan and Broder are getting the idea: There are always other options. One such attractive option is New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who said he would start his own third party if the standing parties can’t come up with something original and dynamic. Bloomberg is nothing if not dynamic and he does speak to the heart of New York City as great mayors like Ed Koch and Fiorello LaGuardia did. But he is enigmatic as well and is said to have all but sponsored Lieberman’s mischief in third-party politics in Connecticut in ’06. Bloomberg could well bring the same Lieberman mischief to the national stage. Coincidentally, Mayor Mike is up here in New Hampshire this weekend. Just visiting, he says.

Bloomberg has bi-partisan support, and political venerables like Ham Jordan, former chief for Jimmy Carter and Angus King, former Independent Governor of Maine, have been calling for a third party all year.

It should be noted as well that "post partisanship" being advanced in California in particular by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is an ascending political trend in political journals like The Nation. These new directions would well coalesce in a new framework provided by Bloomberg and the half billion of his own cash that he is willing to put up for this new venture. If so, one of the two standing parties could get a one-way ticket to Palookaville, as the Whigs did in the mid1800s.

We need Wes Clark now: If we don’t come forth now with our best managers and strategists, we may find ourselves descending into a spiral of irrelevance and caught in a twist of fate which we can no longer find our way out of.

Mother Duck

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network 6/04/07

We missed most of the debates last night – Democracy’s only show in town featuring eight ducklings and Mother Duck. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer being the Mother Duck.

We have a statue of Mother Duck here in the Boston region. The Boston Common, homage to Protestant Clarity and Yankee Character, features in statuary the whole crew from Robert McCloskey’s classic “Make Way for Ducklings.”

It is a great book and deserving of the statuary. And it does explain how the world works: Mother Duck is Kundalini, the primal force of the Universe. The little ones come along under her wing, try to do something by themselves, but fail and fall again and again until they finally fulfill Mother’s form. The world stops and patiently and kindly waits for them: The Irish Cop stops traffic all across the Universe till Mother Duck finds her way through the Boston traffic and finally arrives safe to brood on the little island among the Swan Boats to raise her babies. But it is all about Kundalini, the brooding Mother Duck: Everything which comes from the ducklings comes from Mother Duck and is a manifestation of Mother Duck. In the Chinese version of the story, the yin and the yang and the ten thousand things all come from Mother Duck.

Last night in the part of New Hampshire we call Massachusetts North, Wolf Blitzer actually asked the baby ducks to raise their hands on different hypothetical issues just like in school. But it makes no difference what the little ducks say or do, it is all about Wolf Blitzer. The ducklings are only the partial and secondary aspects of Wolf Blitzer.

TV debates are the worst way of deciding Presidents anyway. They would be good for deciding a tenured professor or a monk maybe. Or a President’s helper. (One of the best in recent years was the Cheney/Lieberman debates – both helper ducks, but now one has taken over the show.)

We only caught parts of the debate because I got distracted by Arianna Huffington in the last few days before. Her daily paper, The Huffington Post, has found the new voices this past year and increasingly they go there to gather. I go there to look for opinions as I used to go The Nation, The New Republic and NYTs 30 years ago.

But I like her voice as well. Last week she interviewed Al Gore about his new book and Gore talked about several failures of the people and its government. But Huffington sees at the core a failure of character – a failure of the American soul, she says - and she is right: Character and courage is central to all the other failures; it is a failure of leadership and competence, but beneath it is a failure of attitude, character and courage. And it is the one lacking ingredient in Big Nurse, Big Hair, Bad Hair, Happy Face Button, The Guy from Alaska and all the other little duckings in Wolf Blitzer’s passive and accommodating debating society. (If you can’t say anything nice about someone, call them names.)

I hope she was watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers last night as I was when I was supposed to be watching the debates. Their dance together was the essence of character: A free dance in the free world – the antithesis of brooding and dominating Mother Duck on the other station. At the top of the Great Depression, with fascism spreading across the one half of Europe and Stalinism the other, Fred and Ginger dressed to the nines and spun in circles like American mystic dervishes, as no one ever has before or ever will again. Their dance was a collective attitude study in the courage of the common people to face their dangers in 1936. Hitler was watching. The world was watching.

They did it all with such apparent ease and nonchalance. And at the end, Fred and Ginger casually walked off the stage; nothing to it - all in a day’s work. But the last number alone in Swing Time took 450 hours of rehearsal and 47 takes. By the end Ginger was bleeding through her shoes. On the final take, the studio crew broke into applause and so did the world. And the applause has never stopped. Ginger never complained. In the spirit of Roosevelt and the spirit of the day, they hid their wounds and bandages as Roosevelt hid his wheelchair.

The only purpose of these early primary debates is to advance the agenda of the brooding and dominating Mother Ducks who have territorialized the political process. Al Gore, in his recent comments on Charlie Rose recalls the idea that by asking the questions, you control the debate: This is how Mother Duck controls her ducklings.

Huffington’s new paper, blogs like the Daily Kos other new on-line journals like this one are the only venues asking other questions. These journals are entering the new century first. New voices are coming through like Jon Soltz’s of VoteVets.org, and some good old voices, some of which have long been silenced or exiled by Mother Duck; the voice of Gary Hart, the Democrat’s brilliant foreign policy commentator who accurately predicted the way things would go in Iraq; of novelist Erica Jong and activist Tom Hayden and the creative and versatile Nora Ephron, who represents us collectively at times as well as George Stevens did in 1936 when he directed Swing Time.

These new venues and voices should establish their own debates and ask their own questions. New organizations like the Fighting Dems might join in with them. It they still want to hear the voice of the enigmatic and gnarly codger – which brought creative spark to both parties in earlier New Hampshire debates, they will have to move it up here way north to the mountains. I’d propose holding alternative debates at Dixville Notch, NH, maybe, way at the top of the state, where Wesley Clark won with eight votes in 2004, John Kerry came in third with three and John Edwards third with two votes in 2004.

Al Gore Rising

For The Free Market News Network; diary on Daily Kos and Raising Kaine 5/27/07

They come in twos. But which is the Emperor? Which is the Sith? – Star Wars tradition

We are reaching the end of things now . . . best for Congress to hold quiet. The culture is about to flip. And when that happens everything gets different. The poles reverse their electrical pull. The Emperor becomes the Sith, the Sith the Emperor.

I’ve seen it flip before. Practically in my high school football field in Newport, RI. From Eisenhower Optimism & the Positive Face. Then a little known and undernourished Magical Animal came out of the borderland forest and lake lands of Minnesota. It is said in hindsight that the Sixties started in a minute, when Bob Dylan switched form a wooden guitar to an electric one in Newport, in the summer of ’65. Then everything was different.

And now it is flipping again. In September it will flip.

History has its gatekeepers. They open doors and they also close doors. Ronald Reagan was a gatekeeper to the third post-war generation of culture and politics, now in the last 15 minutes of its 11^th hour.

George Bush the Little is gatekeeper too. Since he first arrived in national politics it was clear that his fate would be to close the gate that Ronal Reagan opened.

‘Twas ever thus. Strauss & Howe’s remarkable perspective of post-war politics draws on Spengler and on Carl Jung: History runs in cycles and follows archetypal paths, the one compensating and balancing the other. History’s picture is generational, each generation with its own Monkey Gods and goddesses, heroes and siths. Replaced then every 20 years with countervailing gods and siths. Toynbee read Spengler and Jung half way through his history of the world: Yin becomes Yang, he wrote. The Sith becomes the Emperor, the Emperor, the Sith.

Boy George’s fate, since the day he was born, was to crash. It showed from the beginning. He was chosen by his father’s friends to oppose his own generation and he had the tendency from the beginning. He was always unstable; an alcoholic who transferred his obsession direct to religious fanaticism in the classic pattern. Other issues: He has no friends his own age; he is an introvert without the introvert’s path – poet, artist, preacher – and was driven instead to govern by his family, tempermentally ill-suited for the task. But this is characteristic of the cycle’s natural path to failure. And all must fail in history but the last standing: Washington, Grant, Eisenhower, the final figures in the previous three “saecula” of Strauss & Howe. Worth pointing out that all were Generals.

We are at the end, but only at the end of the middle: It is the deep gulf between historical big changings in the world - a gulf of mischief and incontinence, illusions and imitations of life, false premises and sociological vanities and follies – history’s forgotten realms.

This end is the beginning.

The Strauss & Howe books, particularly The Fourth Turning, are easier to understand than the Vedic wanderings of Spengler, Jung and Toynbee. And as far as I understand it, they follow the path with some accuracy: History comes from its own nature and the seeds of the third generation are sown in the first. The seeds of the fourth generation are sown in the second. In between, the avatar which will rise later lives in shadow. (Like the “Sleeping King” in the Tolkien stories.)

John McCain is exemplar of the third generation, taking his inspiration from the first and finding his “Fathers” in first generation - the WW II warriors. But it is a feeling thing, don’t you know. The third generation warrior wants to be like the first: He wants to live again the culture of valor because it is good and true. But first generation didn’t get to valor from book, movies, and memories of blood relatives. It came to them instead direct from necessity and the survival instinct.

The second generation sleeps as the third rises or sends forth it’s sith and its shadow side. It is time for it to rise now and it will rise with this picture: Earthrise. Earthrise is the picture taken from space of the earth rising in the distance with the moon as ground in the foreground. It is time for this to awaken.

The picture was taken in 1968 from the dark side of the moon. Mythologist Joseph Campbell said at the time that this image would change us. It would change the way we would see ourselves, much as the discovery that the world was round changed the way we were centuries ago. The Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” opens with this image and the fourth generation will also open with this image and this movie.

It was 90 degrees thereabouts yesterday here in the northern mountains of New Hampshire. Our third day of North Carolina weather so far this year. In 1968 we’d have a day, maybe two or three of these between late July and early August, but no earlier and no later.

The new generation will awaken now with the awareness that we and the planet are in danger. And Al Gore opened the gate.

Of all people my age who think of being President, Gore generates both general interest and generational cache with Millennials – fourth generation types. On DKos polls where 60-year-old Democratic Leadership Council probe droids rate only three to six percent, Al Gore jumps to 65% and higher. On Larry King last week when the audience was asked how many thought Gore should run, 82% said run.

They come in doubles – the Emperor and the Sith are one. But which is which? We see this everywhere: The Beatles/Rolling Stones, Woodward/Bernstein, Emerson/Thoreau, The Bronte Sisters Light and Dark, Bill Clinton/Al Gore. When the one rises to its fate, the other submerges. Then the culture flips.

It is flipping now. The Republicans seem to understand that it is all over for their ride by September. But it is the Democrats who lag. They were right from the start with Wesley Clark on Iraq/Iran but selected otherwise. To their detriment.

As well, the Democrats these recent years have largely supported Bush/Cheney on Iraq, from the beginning a kind of third generation fantasy play created in Dungeons & Dragons warriors who have never worn the uniform of their country or fired a shot in anger. It was to the Democrats an occasion to “act strong.” In that it was indeed the true test of leadership and the Democrats failed on this issue of authenticity. As the Lion King said to his cub: “I’m only brave when I need to be brace.” Indeed. Otherwise it is dress up and play theater, the fate of draft dodgers and cowards as they grow increasingly older.

The war in Iraq and the Bush/Cheney quagmire is now second cause in the world. Environmental disaster is imminent. And if no one else will lead, Arnold Schwarzenegger will.

This week, with Jodi Rell, Governor of Connecticut, the Governator has all but threatened secession if the feds don’t take action. Yet the feds refuse. Texas, threatened most by desertification, remains in denial. But California’s southern places will be turned to sand as well if action is not taken. Arnold appears to be building his own alliances of blue states, Canada and Europe in opposition to the tradition since 1865. And New England is joining.

Both Wesley Clark and Al Gore have been insinuating Mario Cuomo style “hovering” strategies this past year in the run up to ’08. They have both been critical of the early primaries and the consultants, cash and press hype which have turned our honored tradition into political novelty of trash TV like American Idol. They are not actually running, but haven’t said they won’t enter. For Al Gore it is working, but without greater secondary publicity, General Clark’s numbers are low.

There are two great problems for the U.S. in the world today that need to be solved. Environmental destruction is one. The Iraq/Iran disaster which has destroyed U.S. legitimacy in the world is the other. Al Gore brings Best Practices on the environment. Wesley Clark brings Best Practice solutions to Iran/Iraq.

This is an Al Gore/Wes Clark diary rather than a Wes Clark/Al Gore diary because it is hot today in New Hampshire and it is getting hotter. The climate crisis now supersedes the Iraq disaster.

Al Gore leads the charge.

France’s New Boss

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 5/15/07

It is part of life’s illusion that the world began the day we were born. Everything prior to our conception is pre-history. For people my age, Howdy Doody was the first Creation Myth (a Western tale), then Davy Crockett (another tale of heading West), Elvis and The Beatles. After that, nothing was left but work and death. Likewise today with my kids: The world begins with Pokemon, then onward and upward to the Brit wizard Harry Potter, Tolkien and “Lost.” Computers were already there at the Creation. TV too, but that is old pre-history stuff like railroad trains and the space program.

But time has its own paths and initiatives; it is not born in forgetfulness, or in the illusion that the world did not exist before we were born. It is always here on its continuum, ascending and descending in death and life like the ceilings in the mosque at Cordoba.

Those of us who were born again with Davy Crockett were also born at the end of things. And the end was a horror that the European world had neither endured nor encountered before.

That ending was marked at Yalta and at the Nuremberg trials, when the Euro world and all the world came to adapt to the American moment. America was driving the bus and as Ken Kesey said, you were either on the bus or not on the bus.

But America moved to its own tempo: We have been through three distinct periods since Yalta: Eisenhower yielded to Kennedy and Kennedy yielded to Reagan. And we today are three-quarters to the end of things in our own post-war arc.

Americans are fast moving beyond the Clinton and the Reagan generations. Those periods allowed us to move forward. And something for us is just ahead and it will hatch either in 2008 or 2012.

Here in 2007 Ron Paul offers new direction, and so do Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg, Jim Webb and Arnold Schwarzenegger. One or some of these will be the new pathfinders. The purpose and genuine function of this upcoming election will be to cast off that which has become anachronistic and post-seasonal and find the new direction and the new generation that will rise with it.

It is a problem for France because the recent election asked the French to chose between a Thatcher/Reagan candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a Hillary composite, Ségolène Royal. Their choice: come into the 1980s or come into the 1990s, both periods being left behind by Americans as the Free World enters the millennium.

The results bring France now to a dilemma.

France and Germany are linked in a binary relationship that rose when the Sun King consolidated France into one big state. What will the French do when they no longer look to America in imitation? And when America’s gaze turns East, and it inevitably will as economy shifts across the Pacific, how will France find its way with Germany?

The election of Sarkozy offers a suggestion. Sarkozy is two things: He is the Reagon/Thatcher Frenchman. He is also an aristocrat from Hungary which was part of the Austrian Empire at the time Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox. It is the realm of French and German contention since Napoleon.

Shortly before the election, Sarkozy was pictured riding a handsome white horse as Ronald Reagan was pictured on a white horse at the beginning of his Presidency. Sarkozy wants to be the Reagan guy in France and set closer ties with America. But there is an issue here: Ronald Reagan was a genuine, ordinary, American following the same path in the Land of the Free that most others of us followed. He was not an aristocrat. Sarkozy is an actual, Hungarian aristocrat and noble.

Today in the NYTs Serge Schmemann, writer and editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune writes that the new French President’s roots are worth remembering.

He recalls an Algerian woman asking the displaced Hungarian nobleman about his roots. Sarkozy said to her, “You are not Algerian, but French. And I am not Hungarian.”

One of America’s most poignant transitions was at Appomattox when Ulysses S. Grant’s Native American adjutant said to Lee, “We’re all Americans here.” That went for Lee, Jeff Davis, Ronald Reagan, myself, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But not necessarily Royal or Sarkozy. They are not Americans. They are Europeans. If they want to be like us that is good, but for them it is by choice – it is only an option. We are as we are by fate and American destiny.

It would seem that France has to decide now if it wants to be colleague, friend and cousin to America or to Germany and the EU. But two facts enter in: Frankly, most Americans don’t particularly care what France does so long as it doesn’t cause us problems. Second, France is already part of the EU and sits next to Germany, the EU’s most essential partner, as it always has. It is from this for the French as it always has been and from this that there can be no turning away.

We’re all Americans here, said Col. Parker, the Seneca Indian who accompanied Grant. That is true for Lee, Hillary and Obama because when we leave our other places we leave them behind and become a different people. In the end, we are not Europeans or Africans or anything else but Americans. We are the Texas Ranger, died and born again at the hands of the Indian.

But Europeans leave nothing behind. They may look away for awhile but it is always there. And Europe today sings together its own tune, Ode to Joy. It is a beautiful tune but it is not an American tune. Nor is it a French tune. And as France enters the millennium with a Bavarian Pope who looks to an earlier time, it sings a beautiful anthem, but one which has Austrian roots, as does France’s new boss.