Before wishing Obama “Good Luck” extricating yourself from the twin tar babies, Afghanistan and Iraq, I want to caution against some of the same kind of sloppy thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. Obama, Bush, and several other highly placed personages have been making a point of late that we all—Christians and Muslims—“worship the same God”.
No. The Muslims don’t think that and neither does anyone who knows an ounce of theology. It’s not necessary to think that to negotiate with them, cut a deal, fight with them or make peace. You certainly don’t earn any respect from them if you do.
They will think they are dealing with fools and negotiate—or fight—accordingly. The Crusaders, for all their faults, understood this completely. Hugely outnumbered by their Muslim foes, they hung on to forts and land in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine for two centuries.
We could learn something from how they did it. Very, very quickly, they grasped the differences between Shiites, Sunnis and the more radical sects of Islam. Crusaders were constantly shifting allegiances between these groups—understanding that often Shiites hated Sunnis even more than they hated Christians. Or vice versa.
General Petraeus has finally begun to figure this out. His Crusader predecessors even allied themselves, from time to time, with the Eleventh Century equivalent of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Yes, they allied with people who had done them horrible—and sometimes humiliating—damage, keeping the higher goal in mind: survival.
Islam is a vast sea. It will drown you if you do not differentiate one droplet from another and conduct your negotiations accordingly. (Unless you really enjoy facing car bombs and suicide bombers forever.}
Further, we must understand, that while one sect of assassins (Eleventh Century) or Al-Qaeda today may momentarily ally with Christians to fight another group of Muslims, that alliance will not ever last. Eventually they will come together. After two centuries the last Christian knights were finally driven out.
Because ultimately Islam is an offshoot of a sect of Christianity deemed heretical since two centuries before Mohammad was born. It was a huge sect, probably over half the Christian world in the fourth century—the half that is now and has been for 1400 years, Muslim.
North Africa, the Near and Middle East (all Christian back then) fell on one side of a theological divide; most of Europe fell on the other. They were splitting the Roman Empire in pieces at precisely the point when Constantine was hoping to use Christianity to unite the empire.
The issue that divided them—and eventually has caused such bloodshed—was the question of the divinity of Christ. Most of Europe held that he was God, that the Godhead was triune—a trinity made up of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (think of a Notre Dame place kicker crossing himself before he kicks.)
The other half of Christianity held that he was something just less than God—the neo-Platonic Nous, for example. He was the creative urge, the creator of the universe—but he was not co-eternal with God, and not God himself: the highest of creation but not God. These were called Arians.
The partisans of these opposing views got very exercised over this. It was shattering the peace. Constantine called a huge Church Council in what is today Turkey. The Council voted that Christ was God—and you’d better believe it. The “or else” could get very unpleasant.
So for a couple of centuries the half that secretly thought Christ wasn’t God kept quiet and seethed.
Several years ago I asked a Muslim professor from Cairo why North Africa had fallen so quickly to the Muslim faith. He looked surprised. “They were Arians”, he said. “They believed in one, single God. When the Muslims invaded they said, `You believe what we believe; join us.’ And they did.”
The Muslims are not at all confused about the issue of a triune God as opposed to their belief in a single deity, who has neither “son” nor “father”. We should not act like fools and try to tell them we think it’s all the same.
That’s like saying whether you vote Republican or Democratic, it’s all the same. McCain and Obama are really the same person supporting the same positions. Both candidates would regard you as nuts. But that’s what we’re trying to say to Islam.
Why should they negotiate with complete fools? Fuzzy thinking didn’t keep the Crusaders in their fortresses for two centuries. It won’t help us either.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
How a President Might Actually Govern
As I’ve said the last two days, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time the past 40 years thinking how a president could get a handle on the executive branch of the government. Technically, the Constitution says he’s in charge of that wing. Reality says he isn’t. So how can he gain control?
There are a couple of things that come to my mind. One—walk around. Have all of your cabinet officers, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries (all of the people who answer directly to the president get out of their secretary shielded offices and walk around.
Even the president himself—on a slow news day—get out and walk. I remember when I was at Health, Education and Welfare in the 1960s, people still remembered Nelson Rockefeller with a bit of awe. He was an assistant secretary under Eisenhower in 1953-4. He was also the only cabinet level officer any one could ever remember walking the halls.
The secretary at the door of every program knows an awful lot about what that program does and why. (Rarely does any executive, government or private industry, know as much as his secretary. They’re a lot like wives that way.) When a cabinet level officer shows up in front of her desk, with a big Rockefeller grin, and starts chatting and asking, she’s going start telling.
After all, her visitor represents real power—power that almost never shows up at the program level. She really has no choice but to answer the questions she’s asked. If she calls her boss, he has to answer too. And she knows he’d probably rather not be called. So she answers.
Mr. Secretary, Mr. President, you’ll learn a lot about your department that way. You’ll even remind its lowest level employees who the boss is—and that he’s alert, watching, aware. After you’ve chatted with several program chiefs and secretaries, your questions will be more knowledgeable and penetrating. You’ll sound like you actually know what’s going on. That will alarm them.
I have one more thought. Remember, I started this series by pointing out that unlike a CEO in private industry, a president cannot enforce his will be firing anybody. That badly cripples him. Realistically, you’re not going to overturn the Hatch Act. Better luck with Roe v Wade.
As it stands now, millions of federal employees are going to go on working to retirement, secure from being fired—at least for something as minor as allowing a President’s program to drop between the cracks. As long as he’s not guilty of overt defiance, he’s pretty much home free. (Besides there’s an excellent chance he’ll get all the way to retirement without ever meeting anyone who actually speaks for the administration.)
But there is something else Obama could try. He just might be able to make it happen because he has a large majority in both houses of Congress. Very early, preferably before January 20, he should sit down with the Democratic leadership in Congress.
He should make the point that he will take office with no real control over the executive branch—and yet he will be held responsible. American voters may even become unhappy if certain programs they were promised in the campaign do not come to pass. Congressmen understand this sort of reasoning.
Also, the normal fear that a Congress made up of one party might have at the thought of an effective president of the other party really running the executive offices will not be in play. They’re all in the same party now. So Obama might be able to talk them into it. Maybe.
I would ask for (no more than) one hundred chits. I would request legislation granting me the authority to discharge one hundred federal employees over the next four years. No pension, no appeal, no reinstatement. A prospect absolutely terrifying to a federal employee (with no social security).
Obviously—and Congress could see this—no president is going to use those chits promiscuously. He’s going to husband them. They will be like the atomic bomb—always there but rarely actually used. But any bureau chief or program director talking to the president or a cabinet officer will be very, very aware of them. It will make him far more tractable than he would otherwise be.
The president should use two or three of them early on—to show they really exist and he has the nerve actually to use them. Then just hold them in reserve until they really need to be used.
A president and cabinet who actually call in program chiefs and talk to them; officials who get up and walk the halls; and a president who has the power to fire—if only a few—that will result in an administration that has a reasonable handle on what’s going on and the ability to direct what is happening.
You will have the first president since, possibly, Andrew Jackson who makes a serious effort to take responsibility for what happens in the executive branch.
There are a couple of things that come to my mind. One—walk around. Have all of your cabinet officers, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries (all of the people who answer directly to the president get out of their secretary shielded offices and walk around.
Even the president himself—on a slow news day—get out and walk. I remember when I was at Health, Education and Welfare in the 1960s, people still remembered Nelson Rockefeller with a bit of awe. He was an assistant secretary under Eisenhower in 1953-4. He was also the only cabinet level officer any one could ever remember walking the halls.
The secretary at the door of every program knows an awful lot about what that program does and why. (Rarely does any executive, government or private industry, know as much as his secretary. They’re a lot like wives that way.) When a cabinet level officer shows up in front of her desk, with a big Rockefeller grin, and starts chatting and asking, she’s going start telling.
After all, her visitor represents real power—power that almost never shows up at the program level. She really has no choice but to answer the questions she’s asked. If she calls her boss, he has to answer too. And she knows he’d probably rather not be called. So she answers.
Mr. Secretary, Mr. President, you’ll learn a lot about your department that way. You’ll even remind its lowest level employees who the boss is—and that he’s alert, watching, aware. After you’ve chatted with several program chiefs and secretaries, your questions will be more knowledgeable and penetrating. You’ll sound like you actually know what’s going on. That will alarm them.
I have one more thought. Remember, I started this series by pointing out that unlike a CEO in private industry, a president cannot enforce his will be firing anybody. That badly cripples him. Realistically, you’re not going to overturn the Hatch Act. Better luck with Roe v Wade.
As it stands now, millions of federal employees are going to go on working to retirement, secure from being fired—at least for something as minor as allowing a President’s program to drop between the cracks. As long as he’s not guilty of overt defiance, he’s pretty much home free. (Besides there’s an excellent chance he’ll get all the way to retirement without ever meeting anyone who actually speaks for the administration.)
But there is something else Obama could try. He just might be able to make it happen because he has a large majority in both houses of Congress. Very early, preferably before January 20, he should sit down with the Democratic leadership in Congress.
He should make the point that he will take office with no real control over the executive branch—and yet he will be held responsible. American voters may even become unhappy if certain programs they were promised in the campaign do not come to pass. Congressmen understand this sort of reasoning.
Also, the normal fear that a Congress made up of one party might have at the thought of an effective president of the other party really running the executive offices will not be in play. They’re all in the same party now. So Obama might be able to talk them into it. Maybe.
I would ask for (no more than) one hundred chits. I would request legislation granting me the authority to discharge one hundred federal employees over the next four years. No pension, no appeal, no reinstatement. A prospect absolutely terrifying to a federal employee (with no social security).
Obviously—and Congress could see this—no president is going to use those chits promiscuously. He’s going to husband them. They will be like the atomic bomb—always there but rarely actually used. But any bureau chief or program director talking to the president or a cabinet officer will be very, very aware of them. It will make him far more tractable than he would otherwise be.
The president should use two or three of them early on—to show they really exist and he has the nerve actually to use them. Then just hold them in reserve until they really need to be used.
A president and cabinet who actually call in program chiefs and talk to them; officials who get up and walk the halls; and a president who has the power to fire—if only a few—that will result in an administration that has a reasonable handle on what’s going on and the ability to direct what is happening.
You will have the first president since, possibly, Andrew Jackson who makes a serious effort to take responsibility for what happens in the executive branch.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
How a President Can Find Out
Continued from last time – how does a president find out what’s going on in the executive branch of the United States Government? Before we figure out how he gains control, he has to know what is going on. This is not an easy trick.
One time, when I was working in the Surgeon General’s Office, I got curious as to how many grant making mechanisms, individual programs, existed in just the Public Health Service. I thought that should be easy to find out. How wrong I was.
There may be a census for the American people, but there is no census for the American government. No one could tell me how many programs that made grants there were in the Service. Certainly no one had a figure for the entire cabinet level department – Health, Education and Welfare as it was then called. I began to suspect no one wanted to know.
Just to be sure, I began calling other departments. Nobody at Agriculture or Labor or Commerce could give me a figure. There was certainly NO figure for the federal government as a whole. I realized that Congress didn’t know either. They were working out budgets for each department and agency, and they really, really didn’t know what these bodies did.
A couple of years later, when I was working in New York as a fund raiser, I made another attempt—this one from the outside—to find out. No luck whatsoever. The executive branch is a vast organization full of mid-level managers who know they will never get another promotion unless they create more programs and hire more people to run them and be managed. They constantly find ways. I did.
So what would I do if someone took me at gunpoint and stuck me in the Oval Office? First I would demand duplicate copies of the phone books for every single government department and agency in Washington.
Then I would call in all the cabinet members and agency heads under presidential control in the executive branch and hand them the phone book for their respective organization. Then I would tell them that what I was going to ask of them would be a top priority—and that they would report to me each week on their success carrying out this directive.
Once a week, I would be picking up a phone book at random and picking a program at random. I would then call the director of that program, his second and third in command, and demanding their presence in my office within one hour. Each cabinet officer and agency head would do the same thing with his or her own agency.
The program head would be directed to bring their budgets, their list of personnel, a list of all program activities and actual expenses to that meeting. Then I (or the agency head) and a good accountant would go through the figures, the charts and personnel records and ask a lot of questions. We might even send them home for more answers.
If things seemed too fuzzy, a White House audit team might be sent to visit program HQ and other offices throughout the country to get answers. In the end, we would know what that program did. The government grape vine would go into high gear and acts would be cleaned up all over Washington.
At the end of two or three years—having shared notes with the other agency heads—the administration would have a decent idea of what actually went on in the various departments and agencies. That’s time consuming, but if you want to get a handle on an organization as big and ungoverned as the federal executive branch, I cannot think of better way of doing it.
So many unauthorized programs would die unborn in the fear of a White House or cabinet level audit. You would find a line item for every activity that did occur. The bureaucracy would be compelled to realize that they really, really answered to the person with the title Chief Executive.
Because you see, Hatch Act or no, if these interviews actually turned up malfeasance (and misappropriation of funds qualifies), a bureaucrat can actually be fired. Or demoted. Or reassigned to a penguin counting mission in Antarctica for a couple of years.
I remember how much fear just the thought of a Congressional or White House inquiry could inspire among my fellow bureaucrats. Fear can have salutatory consequences when wisely wielded. It’s one tool a president can use. So I say to Senator Obama, Use it!
One time, when I was working in the Surgeon General’s Office, I got curious as to how many grant making mechanisms, individual programs, existed in just the Public Health Service. I thought that should be easy to find out. How wrong I was.
There may be a census for the American people, but there is no census for the American government. No one could tell me how many programs that made grants there were in the Service. Certainly no one had a figure for the entire cabinet level department – Health, Education and Welfare as it was then called. I began to suspect no one wanted to know.
Just to be sure, I began calling other departments. Nobody at Agriculture or Labor or Commerce could give me a figure. There was certainly NO figure for the federal government as a whole. I realized that Congress didn’t know either. They were working out budgets for each department and agency, and they really, really didn’t know what these bodies did.
A couple of years later, when I was working in New York as a fund raiser, I made another attempt—this one from the outside—to find out. No luck whatsoever. The executive branch is a vast organization full of mid-level managers who know they will never get another promotion unless they create more programs and hire more people to run them and be managed. They constantly find ways. I did.
So what would I do if someone took me at gunpoint and stuck me in the Oval Office? First I would demand duplicate copies of the phone books for every single government department and agency in Washington.
Then I would call in all the cabinet members and agency heads under presidential control in the executive branch and hand them the phone book for their respective organization. Then I would tell them that what I was going to ask of them would be a top priority—and that they would report to me each week on their success carrying out this directive.
Once a week, I would be picking up a phone book at random and picking a program at random. I would then call the director of that program, his second and third in command, and demanding their presence in my office within one hour. Each cabinet officer and agency head would do the same thing with his or her own agency.
The program head would be directed to bring their budgets, their list of personnel, a list of all program activities and actual expenses to that meeting. Then I (or the agency head) and a good accountant would go through the figures, the charts and personnel records and ask a lot of questions. We might even send them home for more answers.
If things seemed too fuzzy, a White House audit team might be sent to visit program HQ and other offices throughout the country to get answers. In the end, we would know what that program did. The government grape vine would go into high gear and acts would be cleaned up all over Washington.
At the end of two or three years—having shared notes with the other agency heads—the administration would have a decent idea of what actually went on in the various departments and agencies. That’s time consuming, but if you want to get a handle on an organization as big and ungoverned as the federal executive branch, I cannot think of better way of doing it.
So many unauthorized programs would die unborn in the fear of a White House or cabinet level audit. You would find a line item for every activity that did occur. The bureaucracy would be compelled to realize that they really, really answered to the person with the title Chief Executive.
Because you see, Hatch Act or no, if these interviews actually turned up malfeasance (and misappropriation of funds qualifies), a bureaucrat can actually be fired. Or demoted. Or reassigned to a penguin counting mission in Antarctica for a couple of years.
I remember how much fear just the thought of a Congressional or White House inquiry could inspire among my fellow bureaucrats. Fear can have salutatory consequences when wisely wielded. It’s one tool a president can use. So I say to Senator Obama, Use it!
Thursday, November 6, 2008
What Presidents Never Find Out
What if Jack Welch had begun his job as CEO at GE without the power to fire any employee at all? What if he had no idea—and no real way of finding out—what all the divisions of GE actually did? Would he be deemed a business Guru today? Would he have a column in Business Week?
That’s exactly the situation Barack Obama will walk into next January. It’s the situation Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Ike, Truman, FDR all walked into. A little known secret is that the president has no real control over the civilian side of government.
The one branch he does not run is the executive branch. A president can threaten, cajole and sometimes influence individual congressmen. He can appoint Supreme Court justices that agree with his policies. He can wage war. But he has had no effective way of influencing the executive wing—or even figuring out what it’s up to—since the Hatch Act was passed in 1939.
That’s the law that protects civil servants from politics. In other words, no Democratic president can make a civil servant follow his policies or program any more than George Bush could have made them follow his directives. They are insulated. They cannot be fired.
This gives them enormous power. When I worked in the bowels of the bureaucracy the saying was, “Presidents come and go, we stay.” Presidents—and cabinet officers—are never allowed to realize their impotence. Senior bureaucrats can be slavish in their expressions of deference and obedience.
The president hears them, becomes used to their obsequiousness, possibly even believes them and then goes back to his Oval Office. They go back to their offices and do exactly what they have planned all along to do, whichever president is in power.
I recall having a fairly high ranking bureaucrat open a drawer and show me plans for an expensive new project his program was planning to build. He freely admitted Congress had no idea, nor did the secretary of the department. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said—and put it back in its file.
This came as no shock to me. I was second in command of a small program that had no legal budget whatsoever. We had powerful backers. They bludgeoned and dragooned funds (that had been appropriated for something else) out of various bureaus and divisions until we had enough to fly around the country and run our program.
Go through the 1965-67 federal budget and you will find no trace of my program. We had no authorization whatsoever. Believe me, we were not alone. Had an auditor made any sort of fuss, the worst that would have happened to us is reassignment. The Hatch Act protected us.
I don’t think Clinton or Bush were aware of this reality—or that they are to this day. I am sure president-elect Obama hasn’t a clue. The civilian bureaucracy is huge; it is located in every city in the nation. It is essentially faceless.
(I do not in the least mean to put down the millions of civil servants who work long hours to protect our health, our safety and watch over the products we use. They keep our job sites safe, they fund vital medical research, they send me my social security cheque on precisely the same day of every month. They land our planes safely and they battle terrorists and crime. All I am saying, is that the president has very little to say about what they do. He doesn’t even fully realize the fact that he doesn’t. Bureaucrats are also very good at insulating presidents and cabinet officers.)
President-elect Obama has been a senator. I’ll bet he has never roamed the halls of an executive department asking what they do. Bush and Clinton have been governors. None of them ever had the eye view of the executive department I had—because I worked there. I was one of them.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last forty years figuring out what a president could do to get some handle on the departments he is constitutionally required to run. I’ll share some of my thoughts—for what they may be worth—over the next day or two.
It may sound arrogant to suggest I know something our government that presidents don’t. But I do.
That’s exactly the situation Barack Obama will walk into next January. It’s the situation Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Ike, Truman, FDR all walked into. A little known secret is that the president has no real control over the civilian side of government.
The one branch he does not run is the executive branch. A president can threaten, cajole and sometimes influence individual congressmen. He can appoint Supreme Court justices that agree with his policies. He can wage war. But he has had no effective way of influencing the executive wing—or even figuring out what it’s up to—since the Hatch Act was passed in 1939.
That’s the law that protects civil servants from politics. In other words, no Democratic president can make a civil servant follow his policies or program any more than George Bush could have made them follow his directives. They are insulated. They cannot be fired.
This gives them enormous power. When I worked in the bowels of the bureaucracy the saying was, “Presidents come and go, we stay.” Presidents—and cabinet officers—are never allowed to realize their impotence. Senior bureaucrats can be slavish in their expressions of deference and obedience.
The president hears them, becomes used to their obsequiousness, possibly even believes them and then goes back to his Oval Office. They go back to their offices and do exactly what they have planned all along to do, whichever president is in power.
I recall having a fairly high ranking bureaucrat open a drawer and show me plans for an expensive new project his program was planning to build. He freely admitted Congress had no idea, nor did the secretary of the department. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said—and put it back in its file.
This came as no shock to me. I was second in command of a small program that had no legal budget whatsoever. We had powerful backers. They bludgeoned and dragooned funds (that had been appropriated for something else) out of various bureaus and divisions until we had enough to fly around the country and run our program.
Go through the 1965-67 federal budget and you will find no trace of my program. We had no authorization whatsoever. Believe me, we were not alone. Had an auditor made any sort of fuss, the worst that would have happened to us is reassignment. The Hatch Act protected us.
I don’t think Clinton or Bush were aware of this reality—or that they are to this day. I am sure president-elect Obama hasn’t a clue. The civilian bureaucracy is huge; it is located in every city in the nation. It is essentially faceless.
(I do not in the least mean to put down the millions of civil servants who work long hours to protect our health, our safety and watch over the products we use. They keep our job sites safe, they fund vital medical research, they send me my social security cheque on precisely the same day of every month. They land our planes safely and they battle terrorists and crime. All I am saying, is that the president has very little to say about what they do. He doesn’t even fully realize the fact that he doesn’t. Bureaucrats are also very good at insulating presidents and cabinet officers.)
President-elect Obama has been a senator. I’ll bet he has never roamed the halls of an executive department asking what they do. Bush and Clinton have been governors. None of them ever had the eye view of the executive department I had—because I worked there. I was one of them.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last forty years figuring out what a president could do to get some handle on the departments he is constitutionally required to run. I’ll share some of my thoughts—for what they may be worth—over the next day or two.
It may sound arrogant to suggest I know something our government that presidents don’t. But I do.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
An Officer and a Gentleman
John McCain started adult life as an “officer and a gentleman”; he remains an officer and a gentleman. It was a most gracious concession speech, hopefully it will even be a healing speech. He remarked on the election of a black American to the Presidency, and he promised to do all he could to help the new President. He called upon his followers to do the same.
He said that losing was all his fault. Good officers do that. Eisenhower gave a victory speech when D Day succeeded—but he had another speech in his pocket in case the invasion failed. It said, “It is all my fault.”
To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became McCain’s campaign so much as his leaving it.
So it’s President Obama. He just never quit; he kept chugging along. There were times during the primary season when he reminded me of the Tortoise. Hilary, the speedy Hare, kept winning big states, but Obama slogged around picking up delegates in little bitty states. He proved Aesop right.
After the Republican convention his numbers dropped again. By mid-September it was a real horse race. There was no sure winner. And then came the collapse of the banks and the once great houses of finance. People were losing their retirement, their equities; even their savings seemed threatened.
When that happens you blame the party in the White House. That’s probably fair enough since the same President will take full credit while the markets go up and people make money. Poor John McCain –he had the Republican label printed all over him.
I won’t even try to speculate on whether Sarah Palin made a significant difference. But I honestly cannot see how Romney or “America’s Mayor” or anyone else on the ticket would have helped either –not with the entire American financial structure tottering toward bankruptcy.
After that the Democratic horse pulled into an insurmountable lead. It would have taken a “walk on water” or “raise the dead” miracle for any Republican to win the White House yesterday. They can try to blame Greenspan, or even Ayn Rand—they can point out that these policies were followed during Clinton’s administration (and that up to this summer, the Democrats were bragging on that fact), but the reality is that the roof fell in on a Republican watch.
The Republicans haven’t faced a massacre like this since LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964—or Roosevelt buried Landon in 1936. As football coaches, facing a dismal season, like to say, “It’s rebuilding time.”
This week’s Newsweek has a long article pointing out that Obama faces massive troubles—for which there may be no easy cure or any cure at all. You can immediately point out that Roosevelt faced a similarly daunting task—and didn’t see victory over the Depression for ten years.
But I will point out some significant differences. In Roosevelt’s time we didn’t have trillions in debt piled on us—that has to be serviced at huge cost before we can do any rebuilding. Even if an Adolph Hitler is waiting in the wings for us to wage war upon, where is the huge pot of gold that we picked up when the shooting stopped in 1945?
But that lies in the future. Right now we can say to the entire world, no matter how much hostility may exist between individual blacks and whites, a black American CAN climb the highest mountain.
What Abraham Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglas is now refuted. Even if I thought the races equal—which I do not—he wrote, the American public would not accept such an idea. Well, Obama just went equal big time: with the likes of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, both Roosevelts, Jackson, Washington, Jefferson—and Lincoln, himself.
Now he’s got to deal with it. Whether he will be a “good” president or a “bad” one waits to be seen. But nobody can argue that he’s a racially inferior one. He settled that for all time.
He said that losing was all his fault. Good officers do that. Eisenhower gave a victory speech when D Day succeeded—but he had another speech in his pocket in case the invasion failed. It said, “It is all my fault.”
To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became McCain’s campaign so much as his leaving it.
So it’s President Obama. He just never quit; he kept chugging along. There were times during the primary season when he reminded me of the Tortoise. Hilary, the speedy Hare, kept winning big states, but Obama slogged around picking up delegates in little bitty states. He proved Aesop right.
After the Republican convention his numbers dropped again. By mid-September it was a real horse race. There was no sure winner. And then came the collapse of the banks and the once great houses of finance. People were losing their retirement, their equities; even their savings seemed threatened.
When that happens you blame the party in the White House. That’s probably fair enough since the same President will take full credit while the markets go up and people make money. Poor John McCain –he had the Republican label printed all over him.
I won’t even try to speculate on whether Sarah Palin made a significant difference. But I honestly cannot see how Romney or “America’s Mayor” or anyone else on the ticket would have helped either –not with the entire American financial structure tottering toward bankruptcy.
After that the Democratic horse pulled into an insurmountable lead. It would have taken a “walk on water” or “raise the dead” miracle for any Republican to win the White House yesterday. They can try to blame Greenspan, or even Ayn Rand—they can point out that these policies were followed during Clinton’s administration (and that up to this summer, the Democrats were bragging on that fact), but the reality is that the roof fell in on a Republican watch.
The Republicans haven’t faced a massacre like this since LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964—or Roosevelt buried Landon in 1936. As football coaches, facing a dismal season, like to say, “It’s rebuilding time.”
This week’s Newsweek has a long article pointing out that Obama faces massive troubles—for which there may be no easy cure or any cure at all. You can immediately point out that Roosevelt faced a similarly daunting task—and didn’t see victory over the Depression for ten years.
But I will point out some significant differences. In Roosevelt’s time we didn’t have trillions in debt piled on us—that has to be serviced at huge cost before we can do any rebuilding. Even if an Adolph Hitler is waiting in the wings for us to wage war upon, where is the huge pot of gold that we picked up when the shooting stopped in 1945?
But that lies in the future. Right now we can say to the entire world, no matter how much hostility may exist between individual blacks and whites, a black American CAN climb the highest mountain.
What Abraham Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglas is now refuted. Even if I thought the races equal—which I do not—he wrote, the American public would not accept such an idea. Well, Obama just went equal big time: with the likes of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, both Roosevelts, Jackson, Washington, Jefferson—and Lincoln, himself.
Now he’s got to deal with it. Whether he will be a “good” president or a “bad” one waits to be seen. But nobody can argue that he’s a racially inferior one. He settled that for all time.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
How Christians Should Win
Yesterday I wrote on the demographic shift that has made many conservative Christian tenets—once adhered to nationally—minority positions today. Many Christians have not even admitted that this shift has occurred, let alone figured out how to deal with it.
I am going to address these comments primarily to conservative Christians—although others are certainly welcome to follow along. How should a Christian who finds his stands on abortion, homosexuality, etc., react when they no longer can command a majority of the votes?
One suggestion might be that we withdraw our unwinnable positions from the political arena. As a kid I heard a doggerel that went, “Old farmer Jones, sittin’ on a fence, tryin’ to make a dollar out of 65 cents … .” You can’t make one hundred votes out of sixty-five, either. That’s one of the nasty things about democracy.
And then, do what? Do what Christians have historically done to change societies around them. One, stop shouting political slogans and pray. Many Christians pay lip service to the power of prayer, but when it comes to political issues, they seem to believe only in the power of the ballot. So, pray.
Next, show love and compassion. For fagots and baby killers? Christ said he came to minister to precisely those kinds of people. “I come to judge no man.” (There will be a judgment, but that’s in a different time and place, and it’s none of our business.) We must stop judging and start caring.
Christ said that people would and should recognize Christians through the love they show. Angry demonstrations against abortion clinics and gay pride rallies, to name two, show very little love. The image left with non-Christians is of a hostile and potentially violent group.
Well, how would Christ handle abortion clinics and gay pride parades? Same way he handled gladiatorial combat, I suspect. There was a theatre for them just outside of Jerusalem. Did you ever hear a word about that holocaust from him—even though he must have walked past it many times?
No, he waited until love and prayer changed society. (It didn’t come with Constantine’s conversion, either. After that, Christians simply threw pagans to the lions for a few centuries.) The same way early Christians handled slavery. In silence. Praying and loving. Changing society as a whole first.
It wasn’t until the early 1700s that a sect of Christianity known as Quakers formed anti-slavery societies in America. For millennia before Christ and millennia after, slavery went right on—and Christians who could not make a dollar out 65 cents kept silence and prayed.
In Christ’s day, there were no abortions. There was infanticide. When faced with an unwelcome child, you put it out in the cold and let it freeze or let the dogs eat it. Just as much carnage as caused by abortion clinics. Do you hear a word about that from the early church? (They didn’t have the votes.) No. Just centuries of changing society through love and prayer.
In 1964 it was finally codified that women were the equal of men. That certainly wasn’t true in Christ’s day. Nor is it true in the non-Christian world today. So how did it come about? Quietly changing society with no angry demonstrations or condemnation. Until they finally had the votes.
If you believe in prayer, try it. Stop shouting and carrying on. Calm your E-mails and preachments down. If your prayers and kindness change society enough, you will someday have the votes. You just don’t have them now.
Does this mean don’t vote? Of course not. Pick candidates and nominees that are as close to your positions as you can find. Vote for them. Don’t ask them to be perfect or to adhere totally to your position on anything—they have to get elected, after all. Be realistic about the “sixty-five cents” you have got. Don’t try to make it something more.
Let’s be known for our love—not our spleen.
I am going to address these comments primarily to conservative Christians—although others are certainly welcome to follow along. How should a Christian who finds his stands on abortion, homosexuality, etc., react when they no longer can command a majority of the votes?
One suggestion might be that we withdraw our unwinnable positions from the political arena. As a kid I heard a doggerel that went, “Old farmer Jones, sittin’ on a fence, tryin’ to make a dollar out of 65 cents … .” You can’t make one hundred votes out of sixty-five, either. That’s one of the nasty things about democracy.
And then, do what? Do what Christians have historically done to change societies around them. One, stop shouting political slogans and pray. Many Christians pay lip service to the power of prayer, but when it comes to political issues, they seem to believe only in the power of the ballot. So, pray.
Next, show love and compassion. For fagots and baby killers? Christ said he came to minister to precisely those kinds of people. “I come to judge no man.” (There will be a judgment, but that’s in a different time and place, and it’s none of our business.) We must stop judging and start caring.
Christ said that people would and should recognize Christians through the love they show. Angry demonstrations against abortion clinics and gay pride rallies, to name two, show very little love. The image left with non-Christians is of a hostile and potentially violent group.
Well, how would Christ handle abortion clinics and gay pride parades? Same way he handled gladiatorial combat, I suspect. There was a theatre for them just outside of Jerusalem. Did you ever hear a word about that holocaust from him—even though he must have walked past it many times?
No, he waited until love and prayer changed society. (It didn’t come with Constantine’s conversion, either. After that, Christians simply threw pagans to the lions for a few centuries.) The same way early Christians handled slavery. In silence. Praying and loving. Changing society as a whole first.
It wasn’t until the early 1700s that a sect of Christianity known as Quakers formed anti-slavery societies in America. For millennia before Christ and millennia after, slavery went right on—and Christians who could not make a dollar out 65 cents kept silence and prayed.
In Christ’s day, there were no abortions. There was infanticide. When faced with an unwelcome child, you put it out in the cold and let it freeze or let the dogs eat it. Just as much carnage as caused by abortion clinics. Do you hear a word about that from the early church? (They didn’t have the votes.) No. Just centuries of changing society through love and prayer.
In 1964 it was finally codified that women were the equal of men. That certainly wasn’t true in Christ’s day. Nor is it true in the non-Christian world today. So how did it come about? Quietly changing society with no angry demonstrations or condemnation. Until they finally had the votes.
If you believe in prayer, try it. Stop shouting and carrying on. Calm your E-mails and preachments down. If your prayers and kindness change society enough, you will someday have the votes. You just don’t have them now.
Does this mean don’t vote? Of course not. Pick candidates and nominees that are as close to your positions as you can find. Vote for them. Don’t ask them to be perfect or to adhere totally to your position on anything—they have to get elected, after all. Be realistic about the “sixty-five cents” you have got. Don’t try to make it something more.
Let’s be known for our love—not our spleen.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
The Christian Right -- Betrayed by Democracy
American political demographics have changed dramatically within a human lifetime. The problem for conservative American Christians is that they haven’t figured it out yet—or what it means for them and for some of their most cherished positions. It happened too fast.
Like millions my age, I grew up listening to democracy glorified off the pulpit. Preacher after preacher would tell us how blessed we were to live in a democracy, what a wonderful thing it was to live in a democratically Christian nation.
They could view it as a blessing because, forty and fifty years ago, they had the votes. It was inconceivable to them that a day might come when democracy became a two edged sword, slashing at virtues, mores and morals no longer supported by a majority of the voters.
The term “moral majority” in the early 1980s was really a plaintive question – aren’t we? It hasn’t really changed, has it? The majority of Americans still support the same positions that we do – don’t they?
To prove that things had not changed, televangelist Pat Robertson declared himself a candidate for president in 1988. I remember the fervor with which many of my fellow Christians enlisted in his cause. Then came reality. Right here in Michigan. Robertson’s wing of the Republican Party was smashed beyond retrieval at the state party convention. George H.W.Bush hammered them into the ground.
Stunned, they fell back, licking their wounds—never to be the self-confident same again. But they still could not admit that the world had changed so drastically. After all, in the 1950s, a vast majority of the body politic – however hypocritically—claimed themselves adherents to and partisans of the conservative Christian point of view. Billy Graham was a national hero.
One small case in point—in 1952 and 1956, conservative Christians made a point of not voting for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, because he had been divorced. This contributed in no small part to the Eisenhower landslides in those years.
Today, it is the Republican candidate who once upon a time walked away from “the wife of his youth” and married an attractive and rich younger woman. Not even a whisper of criticism on the point. Too many of the rest of us have been divorced and remarried.
In the 1950s if I knew any homosexuals they were well closeted. I never heard anyone speak of it. I think I reached twenty-one, the age of legal maturity, without every hearing the word “abortion”. I certainly never knew of anyone who had one. We drank enough beer to keep the Monitor afloat, but no one I knew ever used narcotics.
We had the votes. In Grand Rapids there was only one drugstore open on Sundays—and it rotated throughout the city. When we went to the movies, even married couples slept in double beds and kissed chastely. (Some foreign types were sneaking in movies with subtitles and naked women in them—but you had to hunt to find them.) We had the votes.
No department stores, hardware stores, supermarkets or clothing stores were open on Sunday. Professional football was a fairly minor sport – possibly because it was played on Sunday when many of us were forbidden to watch it. We had the votes.
“Suddenly” it’s changed. We don’t have the votes. We seem to be back in some kind of pre-Christian era where there is no accepted standard of (Christian) morality. Now democracy bites. We simply do not have the votes any more—and Christians don’t know how to adapt to this.
They deny it. They talk of majorities that simply do not exist any more. They demand of (largely Republican) candidates adherence to standards that cannot command a winning margin in general elections. They become furious when those candidates make the least concession to reality.
The political American world has changed. Democracy is no longer automatically our friend. So how do we function as a minority in a world that no longer espouses our most cherished beliefs? That is the great question facing conservation American Christendom.
I’ll write more on that tomorrow.
Like millions my age, I grew up listening to democracy glorified off the pulpit. Preacher after preacher would tell us how blessed we were to live in a democracy, what a wonderful thing it was to live in a democratically Christian nation.
They could view it as a blessing because, forty and fifty years ago, they had the votes. It was inconceivable to them that a day might come when democracy became a two edged sword, slashing at virtues, mores and morals no longer supported by a majority of the voters.
The term “moral majority” in the early 1980s was really a plaintive question – aren’t we? It hasn’t really changed, has it? The majority of Americans still support the same positions that we do – don’t they?
To prove that things had not changed, televangelist Pat Robertson declared himself a candidate for president in 1988. I remember the fervor with which many of my fellow Christians enlisted in his cause. Then came reality. Right here in Michigan. Robertson’s wing of the Republican Party was smashed beyond retrieval at the state party convention. George H.W.Bush hammered them into the ground.
Stunned, they fell back, licking their wounds—never to be the self-confident same again. But they still could not admit that the world had changed so drastically. After all, in the 1950s, a vast majority of the body politic – however hypocritically—claimed themselves adherents to and partisans of the conservative Christian point of view. Billy Graham was a national hero.
One small case in point—in 1952 and 1956, conservative Christians made a point of not voting for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, because he had been divorced. This contributed in no small part to the Eisenhower landslides in those years.
Today, it is the Republican candidate who once upon a time walked away from “the wife of his youth” and married an attractive and rich younger woman. Not even a whisper of criticism on the point. Too many of the rest of us have been divorced and remarried.
In the 1950s if I knew any homosexuals they were well closeted. I never heard anyone speak of it. I think I reached twenty-one, the age of legal maturity, without every hearing the word “abortion”. I certainly never knew of anyone who had one. We drank enough beer to keep the Monitor afloat, but no one I knew ever used narcotics.
We had the votes. In Grand Rapids there was only one drugstore open on Sundays—and it rotated throughout the city. When we went to the movies, even married couples slept in double beds and kissed chastely. (Some foreign types were sneaking in movies with subtitles and naked women in them—but you had to hunt to find them.) We had the votes.
No department stores, hardware stores, supermarkets or clothing stores were open on Sunday. Professional football was a fairly minor sport – possibly because it was played on Sunday when many of us were forbidden to watch it. We had the votes.
“Suddenly” it’s changed. We don’t have the votes. We seem to be back in some kind of pre-Christian era where there is no accepted standard of (Christian) morality. Now democracy bites. We simply do not have the votes any more—and Christians don’t know how to adapt to this.
They deny it. They talk of majorities that simply do not exist any more. They demand of (largely Republican) candidates adherence to standards that cannot command a winning margin in general elections. They become furious when those candidates make the least concession to reality.
The political American world has changed. Democracy is no longer automatically our friend. So how do we function as a minority in a world that no longer espouses our most cherished beliefs? That is the great question facing conservation American Christendom.
I’ll write more on that tomorrow.
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