Keep your tail up!

Malcolm freely admits his take on US politics is largely that of the East Coast (or what’s left of it, after Sandy came visiting). So David Horsey and the Los Angeles Times may be book-marked, but are not on his regular reading list often enough.

Which is a fault.

So Horsey’s political commentary last weekend only now comes over Malcolm’s horizon. And it is as good a quick-and-easy summary as one could wish:

If you live in Ohio, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are giving you a lot of love. But if you reside in California or Alabama, you may feel neglected and ignored by the candidates for president. Like parents in a big, noisy family, all their attention goes to the troublesome kids, not the compliant, quiet ones.

There has never been much doubt that states such as California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington would give their electoral votes to the president, and no doubt that Romney could depend on states such as Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and South Dakota to be solidly in his camp. All but about 10 states lined up months ago for one candidate or the other. Now it looks as if the number of states still up for grabs has dropped to seven.

As a result, there is really not a national campaign going on. All the effort and money for many weeks has been focused on voters in the swing states. Since, under the U.S. Constitution, the electoral vote, not the popular vote, determines who will sit in the Oval Office, and since the winner in each state takes all of that state’s electoral votes (with Nebraska and Maine being the two outliers where there is a possibility of splitting the vote), a presidential election really amounts to 50 distinct elections. 

He presents us with an unpalatable truth:

With as many as 43 of those 50 elections already decided, the real campaign is happening in just the remaining seven. That means any regional concerns folks in California or Alabama might have can be ignored by the contenders, who do all of their pandering in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Iowa and the few other places that have the potential to pick the winner.

He blames this limited focus on the workings of the electoral college, on polling and on marketing. End of story, except he presents it neatly:

If you are a single female, living in Pasadena, working at a university, driving a Prius, shopping atWhole Foods, watching “The Daily Show,” reading books by Anne Tyler, listening to music by k.d. lang and vacationing in Rome, the Romney campaign does not need to waste time trying to get your vote. If you are a male, living in Tuscaloosa, managing an auto parts store, attending a Foursquare Gospel church twice a week and listening to Toby Keith in your Dodge Ram pickup as you drive into the countryside for a day of deer hunting, the Obama campaign is not likely to spend a cent on you.

All palpably true. Then he dresses it all up in a cartoon pastiche that would fit the New Yorker to a tee:

And very nice too.

The most intelligent President … since when?

Here’s Malcolm reading a Timothy Egan essay for the New York Times.

If you’ve read it, you’re already ahead of our old boy.

Egan manages to skewer Mitt Romney (“a corporate tool”) and Newt Gingrich (“an influence peddler, a man who epitomizes what’s wrong with Washington”) on his way to considering President Obama’s speech on Tuesday at Osawatomie, Kansas. The essential significance of this speech was its location:

the small town where Theodore Roosevelt [in 1910] laid out an agenda for advancing American civilization through the 20^th century…

And though Obama gave a good speech, one that framed the coming campaign as a “make or break moment for the middle class,” he is no Teddy Roosevelt. Nor, for that matter, is the Republican party of today anything close to the one that T.R. led through nearly two terms.

In a century’s time, the two parties have switched roles. Roosevelt, with his plea for an income tax, child labor laws, health care and conservation, his call for worker protections, control of corporate abuse, and “a square deal for the poor man,” would be booed out of the room of any Republican gathering today.

Egan, apart from the “then and now” paradoxes, is positing that:

Obama showed only the timidity of modern political discourse. Roosevelt’s speech was a manifesto; most of his ideas eventually became part of American life. Obama’s Osawatomie oration was a rear-guard action, defensive of a governing philosophy under fresh fire.

All of which is valid.

Yet, let us think on.

Obama is something exotic: an intelligent — make that “highly intelligent”, even (shudder, shudder) “intellectual” — person to made it to the summit of US politics:

• The first Bush was “bright”;
• so, by a very different measure, was Jimmy Carter.
• Clinton had mental suppleness and subtlety, even if he lacked profundity.
• Eisenhower (born in Texas, grew up and identified with Abilene,Kansas), whom Obama rightly tagged, was no slouch. And had steel.
• Harry Truman, whose first political experience was as a page at the 1900 Democratic Convention in — yes — Kansas City, was denied by family circumstances the education he deserved — as a result he became one of the two greatest US Presidents of the 20th Century, rather than merely president of some country college: the world is better for it.
• Back beyond that Woodrow Wilson – Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, lecturer at Cornell, Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan, on his way to being professor and then president at Princeton – has to be the most intellectual President, possibly ever. And so the nearest measure to Obama.

One has to feel that, on a good evening, the intimate supper table at the Obama household ought to come close to an academic seminar: two scintillating and matched intellects striking sparks off each other. One hopes so. And that would be something unprecedented in US political history.

A second term?

Egan’s piece is entitled The Rough Rider and the Professor, with just that proper capitalisation; and it’s all about the modesties of Obama’s ambition, especially in comparison with Teddy Roosevelt’s:

Roosevelt, who was born to Manhattan wealth but could be at his most passionate on behalf of the 99 percenters of a century ago, also spoke for about an hour in Osawatomie, stemwinding his way through what became known as the New Nationalism speech. It’s worth remembering that he was no longer president at the time, but was mulling a challenge to his chosen successor, the malleable William Howard Taft. Ultimately, when he couldn’t wrest the nomination from Taft, Roosevelt ran on the Progressive Party ticket. The split of the 1912 vote ensured the election of a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.

And was decisive in generating the nature of the two-party system that persists (albeit inverted) to this day.

Once upon a time there were queries why Teddy had his place at Mount Rushmore. Gutzon Borglum stated:

The purpose of the memorial is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States with colossal statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.

That suggests Teddy Roosevelt, a singularly divisive figure in life, represents “unification”. If so, … hmmm.

Yet, especially in recent years, historians —  Edmund Morris, par excellence — have found Teddy Roosvelt increasingly of interest, and equally of merit. Morris encapsulated the essence of Teddy in four sentences, and three paragraphs  (though this is Time Magazine sub-editing):

They don’t hold White House lunches the way they used to at the beginning of the century. On Jan. 1, 1907, for example, the guest list was as follows: a Nobel prizewinner, a physical culturalist, a naval historian, a biographer, an essayist, a paleontologist, a taxidermist, an ornithologist, a field naturalist, a conservationist, a big-game hunter, an editor, a critic, a ranchman, an orator, a country squire, a civil service reformer, a socialite, a patron of the arts, a colonel of the cavalry, a former Governor of New York, the ranking expert on big-game mammals in North America and the President of the U.S.

All these men were named Theodore Roosevelt.

In his protean variety, his febrile energy (which could have come from his lifelong habit of popping nitroglycerin pills for a dicey heart), his incessant self-celebration and his absolute refusal to believe there was anything finer than to be born an American, unless to die as one in some glorious battle for the flag, the great “Teddy” was as representative of 20th century dynamism as Abraham Lincoln had been of 19th century union and George Washington of 18th century independence.

21st Century foxiness

Similarly, Obama is setting the context for presidencies of the present century.

And, the US electorate willing, by November of next year, Obama will be free — nay, obliged — to apply it. Anything else will put the rest of the world into infarctions. He has one great advantage, which Timothy Egan nicely puts:

Still, if the president can frame the election in the people-versus-the-powerful mode articulated by Roosevelt, he will win in 2012…

“That’s not politics,” Obama said. “That’s just math.” He was referring to why the country could not make investments in its future without the rich paying more in taxes. But his words also apply to the electoral calculation – a play for a majority that feels it is being left behind in an insider’s game.

So while there were no policy specifics in Obama’s address, what we saw in the Kansas high school gym was the clearest vision yet of the Democratic strategy for 2012. “This isn’t just another political debate,” Obama said, in introducing his theme of class fairness. “This is the defining issue of our time.”

Entering his second term, Obama will be in his “last job”. Even at the end of that stint he will be only in his mid-50s. Between November 2012 and January 2017 he has to define and deliver his “legacy”. If it genuinely is one of “class fairness” that would be truly remarkable, truly laudable — even, especially in US terms — revolutionary, truly Rooseveltian.

Then he can “retire” to be a college president, should he wish.

Show trials included

Two “givens” for what follows:

• Malcolm has some sense of history, especially political history;
• He has just spent a fortnight in the daily company of the Wall Street Journal (frequently bonkers far-Right and always Murdoch) and the New York Times (decently balanced, bourgeois, civilised and stimulating).

What amazes, on a daily basis, is a simple truism:

Apart from the odd Pakistani village madrassa, the mess halls of the Mutaween, and the complementary editorials of Socialist Worker and the Daily Mail, the last bastion of ideological purity is the present Republican Party.

It says too much that the only GOP presidential potential still standing is … Newt Gingrich.

As Rucker and Wallsten — what is it about the Washington Post that paired surnames inevitably suggest hybrid conflations such as “Rucksten” or “Wallker”? — are saying in today’s paper:

Once left for dead, the former House speaker has suddenly emerged as [Mitt] Romney’s most durable opponent yet — in part because he has performed well in the debates and, unlike the others, he is viewed by many in the Republican Party as a plausible president.

A bit further along there’s a telling observation:

“Is there enough time for Gingrich to self-destruct on his own before Jan. 3, or do you have to help it along? It’s a tough call,” said a GOP strategist who informally advises Romney’s campaign and, like other advisers interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking.

 When we look back on the last few months and note the political corpses littering the road to the primaries — Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Paul, Huntsman, Santorum, Cain  — that anonymous “strategist” clearly has a shrewd perspective.

There is, incidentally, another political story in today’s Wapo (Dan Balz in The Take) which notes, tellingly, how:

In 2012 GOP race, governors stay on sidelines

Which should remind us:

• that the most obvious launch-pad for a presidential candidature is the State governorship;
• that there are a number of governors looking statesmanlike, sitting on their hands, offending as few as possible, calculating the odds for 2016, and keeping their powder dry (and their finances ticketty-boo);
• so that in four years time we may be feeling the fetlocks of Christie of Noo Joisey, Daniels of Indiana and Scott of Florida, anyone of whom is more papabile than most of the current contenders.

And yet …

The Republican Party was once the party of Lincoln, of Teddy Roosevelt, of Dwight Eisenhower. More recently Jim Leach served Iowa’s 2nd District in the House of Representatives for twenty years, and was Obama’s worthy nominee to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sherry Boehlert, nearly “liberal” as Leach, was upstate New York 23rd’s Representative for a quarter of a century: when he stood down in 2006 he put it simply:

People say to me: ‘Why are you the kind of Republican you are?’ Because in my formative political years, when I was coming up in New York, my governor was Nelson A. Rockefeller and my senator was Jacob K. Javits.

What went wrong?

That was the question Malcolm put to a chance acquaintance, nearer the kernel than himself. It didn’t get a comprehensive reply, but provoked a mused, and even disjointed reflection, which went something like:

The “liberal Republicans” you talk about were Easterners, intellectuals. America and the Republican heartland moved West post-World War II. Even went down-market.

Barry Goldwater was misrepresented, misunderstood — as his later years and record testify. Both ’60 and ’64 were dirty elections, don’t believe otherwise. And the Dems were setting the pace in dirt. It takes two to tango.

Perhaps the real sickness set in with Dick Nixon and the Californification that came with him. The hurt of the resignation took a generation to pass.

Reagan was always happy to be represented as more conservative than he actually was.

When Bush was steamrollered by Clinton in ’92, it was a reminder of previous pain. His son was driven by that, by the “all hat and no cattle” insults, while he was played, manipulated by Cheney and Halliburton. Dubya had been tailor-made by Rove — well, remember Karl Rove came into politics as James Baker’s henchman. Then Rove brought the Christian Coalition lot to the table … and now they control the menu.

It was Malcolm’s turn to order the next round: Sam Adams Seasonal in Malcolm’s case.

Being ex-Presidential

Today brings yet another argument in favour of republicanism.

Bill Clinton’s day-trip to Pyongyang provides it.

A bonus of the presidential system (aided by term limits) is the availability of the odd ex-President or three.

This means the incumbent has personages of eminence (obviously, that definition excludes the most recent bod to achieve the ex-Presidency) ready, willing and able to provide a photo-op in far distant places, while being totally deniable.

Hence, Bill is close enough to power, via Hillary, to be convincing as an emissary, but arm’s length from Obama if things went awry.

And didn’t he manage to maintain a convincing stone-face while on his mission? Any doubts about that can be dispelled by reviewing the photographs put up on Huffington Post (from AP/Xinhua). Give the man an Oscar for best actor in a supporting rôle!

In the game of diplomatic Top Trumps, one Clinton outweighs any number of Blairs or Majors, or even any princeling. Malcolm can think of only one recent Brit who could have been similarly deployed and dispatched, and she was too dim and now too dead.

Things can only get better?

Somewhere around the house/in a box in the attic/garage Malcolm has the script of Gore Vidal’s 1960 play, The Best Man. Others may have come across the 1964 filmed version (also scripted by Vidal), which seems to be what’s behind the ever-so-slightly salacious cover (left). Malcolm fondly recalls seeing this movie, on its first run, in one of Dublin’s O’Connell Street cinemas.

The plot involves five men (this is 1960, after all) competing for the Party’s nomination at the Convention. The leading contenders are William Russell (Henry Fonda in the movie) and Joe Cantwell (played by Cliff Robertson).

Russell is the East Coast intellectual with principles, largely based on Adlai Stevenson. His extra-marital involvements have alienated his wife, whom he now needs back on the scene for a veneer of respectability. Cantwell is the machine politician, a Nixonian conniver, who gets one particularly-memorable scene: as he drives the LA boulevard he flicks a pack of index-cards, listing the Convention delegates: “Buy him… burn him.”.

In retrospect, Vidal seems to be depicting the two sides of John Kennedy. Apart from being a close Kennedy associate (until, typically, he fell out with brother Bobby), he had other means of insight.

Hugh D. Auchincloss (i.e. Standard Oil, so Malcolm draws a line to the Rockefellers and Bushes) had a second marriage to Nina Gore Vidal, and so became step-father to our lad. Auchinloss’s third marriage was to Janet Lee Bouvier, and so he serially became step-father to Jackie O. To shrink the East Coast political scene even smaller, Malcolm notes that:

• Gore Vidal, through his mother, is a distant cousin of Al Gore; and
• one of the Auchincloss-Lee Bouvier daughters dated a young John Kerry (whose mother was a Forbes, and his second marriage to a Heinz).

Back to The Best Man: both Russell and Cantwell need the endorsement of the aging, indeed dying President Art Hockstader (a hybrid of Eisenhower and Truman, and an Oscar-nominated rôle for Lee Tracey). Malcolm now sees that Ronald Reagan came close to playing Russell on Broadway. Melvin Douglas got the part when Vidal over-rode his producers’ proposal:

“I’m responsible for Ronald Reagan,’’ Mr. Vidal whispered… ‘’I turned him down for the part. They came to me and said, ‘What about Ronald Reagan?’ I said, ‘He is good, but I don’t think he’d be credible as a presidential candidate.’ I have always thought that if I had cast him, Melvyn Douglas would have become president. It’s been on my conscience ever since.”

This long, boring circumlocution is Malcolm’s build-up for the scene in which Russell approaches Hochstader. Hochstader presses Russell on his religious observance. Russell admits agnosticism. Hochstader has a devastating line which Malcolm recalls as: “Son, when I went into politics, you had to pour God over everything, like tomato ketchup.”

On which note, now let’s see: so far the Campaign for 2008 has thrown up:

• a Methodist married to a louche Southern Baptist (Hillary);
• an indefinable liberal “Christian” who was registered as a Muslim at one of his schools (Obama);
• a Mormon married to the daughter of an opponent of organised religion (Romney);
• the usual quota of tub-thumping Baptists in Paul and Huckabee;
• a clutch of Romanists in Richardson, Biden and the babe-magnet Giuliani (who has managed two divorces, one of which was a hot ticket for the scandal sheets, one annulment, two RC church marriages, spectacularly-public affaires, a gloriously dysfunctional family life …);

and, possibly, even hopefully, despite the New Year’s Eve denial:

• the statutory Jewish representation in the person of Mike Bloomberg, self-made ($11.5B+) but yet another Bostonian.

It surely cannot get weirder, but all is compatible and tickety-boo with the First Amendment (“no law respecting an establishment of religion”).

So not too much has changed, which is why the play seems regularly to be revived, on or off Broadway, in Election years. A review of the 2000 revival hailed the performance of Christine Ebersole:

Her bellwether take on the scheming wife of Senator Cantwell is an ingenious blend of Pat Nixon’s studied looks, Lady Bird Johnson’s disarming delivery, Nancy Reagan’s rapacious loyalty and Hillary Clinton’s chilling ambition.

When Malcolm looks for resonances in the script and the film, he finds an obvious one is the use of the Ambassador Hotel, on Wilshire Boulevard, as the film’s body-double for the play’s Philadelphia setting.

This must have qualified as the most cinematic hotel on the face of the planet: IMDB cites no fewer than 89 titles. It was here, in Room 568, that Mrs Robinson (the delectable Anne Bancroft) exchanged body fluids with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman). The Ambassador, of course, is no more: because of competition, modern fire and earthquake regulation, it closed in 1989; stood derelict until it was felled (excepting the Cocoanut Grove building) in 2005. Eventually, it may become the site for a school campus.

The Ambassador’s political involvement included stays by seven Presidents: Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It accommodated Khrushchev on his 1959 trip. In 1968, off the Embassy Room, where Bobby Kennedy had just acknowledged his success in the California and South Dakota Primaries, Sirhan Sirhan booked his place in the pantry-corridor of Infamy. Later, the Ambassador housed the Jury during the nine long months in 1971 of the Charles Manson trial.

As it gets down-and-dirty in Iowa and New Hampshire, Malcolm celebrates the shenanigans with another speech from the failing President Hockstader: ”Oh, I tell you Bill, I feel wonderful!” he says to Russell. ”Up all night — on the go all morning, seeing delegates — I tell you there is nothing like a low-down political fight to put the roses in your cheeks.”