The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Political Miscellany
Rick Perry To Skip Debates? Thumbs DOWN! Any regular reader of this blog knows I'm a proud native Texan; I graduated from a Texas high school and earned all 4 college degrees from Texas universities. We Texans don't back away from a fight; we don't start fights, but we finish them. That the Texas governor, with 11 years of gubernatorial experience, running the state with the strongest, most diversified economy, feels like he wants to avoid debates because he hasn't done well is absolutely inexcusable. How did he not know immigration would come up in the debate? Especially since he heads up one of the few states that share a southern border with Mexico? How did he not know that anti-immigrants would be suspicious of his policies--including an adversarial position on fence building (quoting Napolitano about being able to construct a ladder bigger than any wall), subsidized college tuition for certain foreign-born college-age students, etc.? Perry is not helping himself. I'm not sure he can salvage this run; trying to run a scorched-earth campaign against Romney is a political double-edged sword, and the damage could hurt his political future.
Some advice:
- Don't skip the debates. Viable candidates want to be in debates; voluntarily staying out of the debates is the equivalent of political suicide. A comeback story is pure Americana. The eventual nominee is going to have to take on Obama, whom argues in a sophistic, disingenuous manner, often trying to preempt and dismiss the opponent's arguments, making implicit, unsupported assumptions, etc. This is a guy whom pretended to be a centrist, trying to push his thin resume on a gullible American public with all the ethics of a used car salesman determined to dump his creampuff on some sucker.
- Attack Obama, not your fellow Republicans. Avoid petty bickering; people see it as mean-spirited, and they don't want to elect a mean-spirited President.
- Develop short talking points for all major issues. Depending on the specificity of a question it may be impossible to fit in a canned response. But like I've mentioned in past posts, Perry could have been talking about Obama cherry-picking which unauthorized aliens to deport, sanctuary cities, etc.
- Avoid straying from the script. For example, there was no way calling fellow conservatives "heartless" was going to end up well. Keep your message short, simple, positive, strong.
- Keep it simple, stupid! Voters don't have patience to wade through Romney's nuanced positions. In particular, after supporting Gov. Kasich's pension reforms earlier, Romney seemed to waffle on support a few days ago for arcane reasons. HINT: if you spend a long time trying to explain something, it's probably the wrong message. The world may be complex, but part of what's being tested is the ability to filter the critical points.
- Avoid petty disputes, particularly in debates. No more Perry-style incidents.
- Be pithy, consistent, constructive and positive.
Yesterday's poll question was: "Should the State Department use tax dollars to buy the president's books to give away around the world?"
Let's provide the background story:
The U.S. State Department is defending its purchase of $79,000 worth of President Obama's best-selling books, telling reporters on Wednesday that it's not an unusual practice to provide books to distribute in diplomats' host countries. "It's the embassies themselves that make the decisions what American books to buy [out of their budgets]."Here comes the predictable bureaucratic rationalization:
A senior State Department official told Fox News that books distributed by embassies have been used to engage audiences on U.S. foreign policy and its political system for decades. "Every embassy has a budget to buy books on US history, culture, politics for their own libraries and to give to host-country libraries and contacts," the official saidMore serious commentary is to follow. I decided to publish a characteristically tongue-in-cheek comment with plays on words, etc. (Fans of my ad libs to late night jokes in my Political Humor feature won't be surprised.) As of this morning, I hadn't drawn a response or even a single 'like'. I've never liked the heavy-handed, one-sided, insulting humor of a David Letterman; I think of the major late night comics Jay Leno is easily the best, although Jimmy Fallon and Dennis Miller have their moments. I'm more of a word sculptor/humorist. Most comedians can't do a decent Obama joke (e.g., Letterman): I mean, how hard is it to make fun of a President whom is a little too full of himself and unduly defensive?
"I understand the concept that the State Department has to give away anything this President has to say, because few foreigners or Americans would buy anything he has to say. Of course, half.com has copies of Obama's biographies on sale for 75 cents each: I know what you're thinking. It IS overpriced at that. I wouldn't give 2 cents to hear anything he has to say, not even the narcissism of two autobiographies by his mid-40's."More seriously, it isn't so much the magnitude of the expenditure--in the scheme of things, $79K is a drop in the bucket of $3.7T federal spending. But first of all, when 40 cents out of every federal spent dollar is borrowed, how in the world is it possible that expenditures for embassies or foreign gifts NOT one of those EASY DECISIONS on thing to have been put on hold indefinitely? NEVER MIND THE FACT THAT BOOKS BY OR OF BARACK OBAMA ARE THE DIPLOMATIC EQUIVALENT OF UNWANTED, PASSED-AROUND, DRIED-OUT CHRISTMAS FRUITCAKE!
Professional ethics requires that political leaders and government employees, bureaucrats/diplomats conduct their affairs based on intrinsic merit and not be influenced, in fact or appearance, by extraneous compensation in whatever form (money, gifts, meals, etc.) In the many government contracting gigs I've had, there were strict codes regarding what you could give a client; even a baby shower gift to a federal employee on the same project was unacceptable. So when you read sophistic arguments by State Department public relations arguing effectively that embassies acted independently of senior management, that there was no direct pressure brought to bear: it doesn't matter. I don't care if Clinton or Bush post-Presidential volumes have also added to various libraries or may have served as gifts. The fact of the matter is that most of President Obama's income since his time as a Presidential candidate has come from his books, not his Presidential salary. Whether or not Obama has, directly or indirectly, promoted sales of his books by the federal government, the appearance of personal gain by someone with managerial authority over the government is clear.
This administration is notoriously thin-skinned and defensive. I don't want to hear the Obama Administration's typical finger-pointing: did embassies buy gifts during the Bush and earlier administration? Do I really have to say "if your friends told you to jump off a bridge, would you?" This is just a matter of common sense; keep in mind even if previous Presidents did similar things, Obama himself claimed that he was going to set a higher standard: where's the higher standard?
To raise an alternate scenario, it may very well be the case that in the past we have spent money on things on little luxuries. Or maybe the husband of a spendthrift housewife didn't object to an occasional shopping spree. But things change; you may have been able to afford an occasional dinner at a 5-star restaurant and you were pulling a six-figure salary; when you are unemployed, you teach yourself to cook. There's a big difference between a $100 spree with $10K available on a credit card and now the husband is looking for work and there's only $500 left on the credit card. Obama did not inherit a $14.8T national deficit--he is fully responsible for it; he inherited about $10.6T, nearly half in social security reserves.You just cannot spend money like usual. You have to treat every federal dollar like, "If my grandchild could see me spending her money on stuff like this, would she think I was putting her taxes to good use?" No, pruning $79K in book purchases is not going to close a $1.3T deficit, but it's a start--and freeze any future library or gift purchases until we get this deficit under control. Let the well-paid bureaucrats, American or foreign, go to half.com and put up the 75 cents from their own pockets to read Obama talking about himself (again). What is sad is the chutzpah of State Department PR personnel (now, they would be the first personnel I would fire) in trying to defend the indefensible....
A couple of final comments about gifts, beyond the ethics issues I've just discussed. First, given the fact that Obama's books have been so widely published and available, since when do they make for a good gift? I mean, if you went to an Italian restaurant, would you really order just spaghetti and meatballs? When I go out to eat, I prefer not to eat something I can make in 15 minutes at home...
Second, the fact that Obama's administration gives out ordinary, cheap, best-selling books as gifts is hardly surprising. Remember when the former British prime minister on a visit to the White House early in the Obama Presidency gave Obama a pen holder fashioned from a prominent British anti-slave ship, companion to a vessel whose wood was used to build a desk in the Oval Office since 1880? And a first edition of a prominent Churchill multi-volume set? And what did the President give the prime minister? A multi-volume American movie DVD set. That plays on American DVD players, not European ones. And given the deep recession at the time, the DVD set included such uplifting titles like Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"...
And don't me started on the personalized (video highlights of a past visit) iPod given to Queen Elizabeth. I've seen ludicrous rationalizations of this one, too. I mean, are we seriously going to believe the Queen of England can't afford her own iPod? But middle-class American kids have them? And she would be impressed by something requiring all the sophistication of a fourth grade school project? As John Stossel would say, "GIVE ME A BREAK!"
Political Humor. This is a periodic reminder you can find digests of late night jokes at show websites or websites like newsmax.
"Here in New York City, Halloween a little bit different. You get that knock at the door, you open it up, and there are four guys with masks." - David Letterman
[They were wearing the masks of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, collecting for the DNC-EF. Of course, behind them was Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, dressed up as the zombie Wicked Witch of the East Coast. A $20 donation is suggested, but they will accept smaller bills as a down payment. Just a caution: small children complain that the scary monsters want to see their piggy banks.]
"In an interview last night, Rick Perry criticized Mitt Romney for flip-flopping on the issues. Romney said that Perry has no idea what he’s talking about. Then he added, “But he does know what he’s talking about.” - Jimmy Fallon
[Rick Perry responded, "If Romney says that he would not hire young gardeners who have come into his state for no other reason than they've been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think he has a heart. He needs to be hiring these children, because they will become a drag on our society."]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
CCR, "Have You Ever Seen Rain?" Oddly enough, the lowest ranking (#8) of CCR's top 10 hits, it's my favorite CCR track (although 'Proud Mary' comes a close second).
