Quote of the Day
What ought one to say then as each hardship comes?
I was practicing for this,
I was training for this.
Epictetus
Pseudo Quote of the Day
What should a President say then as each problem surfaces?
I wasn't practicing for this,
(but I did cut a couple of strokes off my golf score during the oil spill crisis)
I wasn't trained for this.
(but has anyone ever more dapper talked the talk,
walked the walk to 'Hail to the Chief'?)
Barack Obama
President of the United States
Nobel Peace Price Winner
Savior of the Auto Industry
"Nothing faster than a high-speed train,
More powerful than my rhetoric;
Able to leap logic in a single sound bite"
Slayer of UBL, #1 With a Bullet
Rescuer-in-Chief (From Another Depression)
Best-Selling Author
Role Model For Your Kids
Political Potpourri
Super Tuesday Edition
One of the interesting side stories for me was a Democratic race where two Democratic-held districts were merged in the aftermath of the recent Census. Dennis Kucinich was badly beaten by Marcy Kaptur in this Battle of the Progressives. There have been rumors that Kucinich was thinking of a carpetbagging candidacy in Washington state, so we may not have seen the last of the Hyperpartisan One yet.
There is some personal interest here in that Kaptur's district closely flanked Bowling Green State's. BGSU made my first academic job offer; I turned down their offer in favor of UWM's offer, one of the worst decisions I've ever made (faithful readers will remember I wanted to teach graduate classes and be part of a doctoral program; at BGSU, I would have taught only undergraduate classes; if UWM had not made the offer, this blog would likely be written by a tenured faculty member, probably married with a family. Being on the business faculty at UWM was like being one of Spinoza's spiders...) BGSU thought the reason I turned them down was because of the boneheaded way they botched my return trip back home. It would be utterly inconceivable today given the TSA regime, but the college scheduled my last activity within an hour or so from flight time. The Toledo regional airport is a small one, several miles from campus (maybe a 15-20 minute drive away) and the college had me on the last flight going back (via connection, I believe) to Houston. But I wasn't given a rental car. So a faculty volunteer drove me to the airport, and the first thing he tells me is that his gas tank is nearly empty, so he has to stop for gas on the way. Now if you factor in the time at the service station, the driving time to the airport, my check-in at the airport (including luggage) and I'm still several minutes from the gate (and gates close before flight time), I was in a sprint once I got to the airport--and I arrived to find the gate closed. The gate attendant assured me that it really wasn't that bad being stranded in Toledo overnight (yes, I finally got on the flight...)
In any event, Kaptur is likely to face an icon of the 2008 campaign: Joe the Plumber (whom, at last mention, was leading by a few hundred votes in his fight for the GOP nomination). One could hardly script a better story than Joe the Plumber rides a wave of voter discontent to public office at the same time they throw Obama out of office...
I watched Fox News for the first time in a while, when Sarah Palin came on for analysis. The interviewer asked whom she voted for in today's Alaska caucus. (Hmmm. It turns my head to think of whom she might support. Let's see--Todd is an early supporter of Gingrich. Sarah Palin tells those in South Carolina if she lived there, she would be voting for Gingrich. She does the same thing in Florida. Who did she vote for?) Okay, you aren't going to believe this--she voted for Gingrich. I know--a big surprise. I've commented on this before, because I think Fox News is letting her get away with the pretense of being an independent analyst, especially when they refused to give Tim Pawlenty an analyst gig based on his then recent endorsement of Romney....
Okay, you know that my forecast in yesterday's post was almost spot on across the board. I had predicted Santorum would win Tennessee and Oklahoma, Romney would get Ohio, and Gingrich would win Georgia. I also predicted Romney would win one of the caucuses between Idaho and North Dakota. Word has just out that Romney beat Santorum in Alaska by a nearly 4-point margin: So Romney won 6 out of 10 races, placed second in 3 others, and his third-place finish in the North Dakota caucuses behind winner Santorum and runner-up Ron Paul was the one thing quite frankly I didn't see. I hadn't heard any discussion of Santorum in North Dakota. I also predicted that Romney would win a larger percentage of the 410 delegates up for grabs and would be a third of the way to the nomination: Huffington Post shows Romney with an estimated 411 after tonight (208 earned today): roughly 36% of the way needed to clinch the nomination. Santorum won 86 tonight and 176 overall. In essence, Romney has just lapped the field.
No doubt Santorum will, once again, gripe about the Romney campaign's money, but the fact of the matter is that moderates aren't supposed to win caucuses, and Romney has won Maine, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska. Gingrich is trying to make a Southern state strategy to the nomination, but he followed Romney in both Oklahoma and Tennessee. Romney also picked up the gold in Florida and Arizona and the silver in South Carolina.
There are a couple of things to note about Romney's HUGE Ohio victory. First, as late as a week ago, Romney was behind in double-digits and even a week or so earlier, Romney trailed Santorum by about 20 points. The story is even worse than Santorum suggests: one of the Fox interviewers said that Romney carried GOP voters by 8 points: the reason Santorum made it close was because of lopsided crossover Democrat support for Santorum. It is no secret that Romney is the one candidate Obama would prefer not to face; Santorum and Gingrich have little appeal to the independents and moderates needed to win the battleground states against Obama.
Fox News continues to annoy me with the consensus talking point that Romney is not winning in a very convincing style, it's all about money, etc. Let's keep in mind the entire race has been phrased as Romney vs. the non-Romney. Bachmann, Perry, Cain (twice), Gingrich (twice), and Santorum have all held (and then lost) the mantle of the non-Romney. It's pathetic when the only thing you've got to convince people to vote for you is that you aren't Romney. Sixth months ago Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had single-digit support when they were running on their own merits and Herman Cain was on top by virtue of a catchy "9-9-9!" slogan. That's right--Republicans preferred a pizza chain CEO whose only prior political campaign was a failed bid for the US Senate from Georgia over two experienced former GOP Congressional leaders. What have these two done in the interim do to win support? The only reason these two get any support is not based on merit: it's because other candidates dropped out of the race. For better or for worse, the GOP voters are demanding that Romney earns his nomination: it's not going to be handed to him.
There's a saying in basketball: you can't teach height. Regardless of Romney's ideology, he's one of the smartest guys to run for the Presidency in my lifetime; he's not a natural politician. There is a story I came across when I read up on how Romney handled RomneyCare policymaking. The consultant was explaining how in most cases he had served in a capacity where the politician basically was presented a policy and signed off on it as his own; in this case, the consultant said he went to a meeting with Romney where the situation was flipped on its head: Romney had his own ideas and was presenting them to the consultant. When I looked at the Bush Presidency--say, its handling of the Iraq occupation, you can't help but wonder why Bush waited until after the 2006 campaign to make a change in DoD management and strategy. (Of course, once the Congressional Democrats were in power, Bush wanted to make a change and it fell on deaf ears because the Dems wanted to cut and run.) This is a guy whom goes into detail, not just talking points; he's not going to be easily manipulated by advisers.
You can't teach competence; you can't teach leadership skills. I think it's time we have a national timeout and apply some elbow grease to this nation's problems--not like a clueless Obama whom clearly can't conceptually grasp the corrosive effects on the economy of the federal government's far less efficient utilization of the nation's GDP. I want to see a return to old-fashioned values and virtues, living within our means, not playing games with budgets; I think it's time to get away from the polarizing rhetoric on both sides of the partisan divide. We don't need a President habitually blaming the political opposition or predecessor for his own failures as we have seen the last 3 years.
We could use a little less excitement. The entire country thinks our political leadership has been going in the wrong direction. Professional politicians like Santorum and Gingrich are part of the problem, not the solution. Romney can walk the walk and talk the talk. Maybe Romney will bring all the excitement to the Presidency as Dwight Eisenhower. But I assure the rest of my fellow Americans, it actually makes me feel better having someone in office whom really knows what he's doing versus a placeholder guest-appearing on 'The View'.
Does that mean I'm a shill for Romney? Hardly. I don't like hearing all this dangerous talk about military options against Iran. I don't want him sounding like any other politician by telling us what he thinks that we want to hear versus what we need to hear.
The Obama Administration regulatory spill gumming up the economy reminds me of my early career as a programmer/analyst. Older DP professionals can probably remember these huge application printouts distributed daily and especially monthly. Most of those printouts weren't really being read by their target audience. And so I was like the little boy whom noticed the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes: why are we distributing things that managers or others aren't really using? Isn't that just a waste of money? Let's stop the madness...
Have you ever seen those TV shows of packrat spouses whom never throw out anything, and one can barely find a place to sit or lie down? The federal government is like the world's biggest packrat. What we need is something like a Romney whom knows all of this crap is stuff we don't need and is willing to work behind the scenes to do the world's biggest spring cleaning job one can think of. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations of Mitt Romney. Ideologically, I would prefer to see some of Ron Paul's ideas rub off on him....
So, yes, let's stop bitching about problems and start solving them. Let's stop spending the next generation's money. Let's speak civilly to each other in Congress and worry more about constructive solutions than the latest sound bite. Of all the people running for President, including the incumbent, I trust Romney to be the grown-up in the room. Maybe Romney is like my maternal grandfather: he wanted to listen to the evening newscast without interruption. People might have thought he was very boring (but he knew how to play ring around the rosie with his beloved grandkids...) If I want to hear a one-liner, I'll go to a comedy club; what I want from my elected officials is leadership and accountability.
Can't We All Just Get Along?
I know there's not much I can do about political correctness. And this is not an entertainment blog. But seeing the entertainment media discuss the Limbaugh-Fluke controversy and the once child star, now Christian actor Kirk Cameron (in trouble for a recent media interview where he discussed homosexuality in unfavorable terms) get attacked by wolf packs because they express opinions that others disagree with...
Listen, if you disagree with another person's point of view, that's fine--just do it in a respectful matter, without getting personal, judgmental, condescending, repetitive or abusive. I sometimes hear of instances where people get death threats over saying the "wrong" thing. The barely-constrained jubilation by certain leftists (including a well-known hacker group) at the recent passing of conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart is unconscionable.
I think what works with other people is more subtle: you live the change you want to see in others. Sometimes it's the little touches that matter. In one of my favorite Elton John songs, "The Last Song", the young gay man dying of AIDS discovers that a father's love runs deep, beneath the facade of judgmental rhetoric, and that he has underestimated his father's character. Whatever Strom Thurmond's political opinions, he once loved an African American woman and helped bring a beautiful little girl of color into this world, and I trust that at some level as a father, he wanted a better life for his daughter.
Limbaugh's use of a derogatory term is NOT misogyny (which is a far more serious issue than one's choice of words). Kirk Cameron's opinions about the gay lifestyle do not call for venomous tweets and threats, reprisals against his acting career or projects, etc. I think most of the people attacking Limbaugh and Cameron have undermined their moral authority by the very nature of their responses, which overshadowed the original infraction.
I think the way you should handle these things, when they occur, is to simply not reinforce the desired effect, e.g., you don't applaud a bad joke, you ignore what was said or politely disagree and move on. You don't overreact to the offense or escalate the situation.
This blog has been a frequent critic of the Westboro Baptists. As bad as their anti-gay rhetoric is, their anti-Catholic rhetoric is just as bad, if not worse. Remember, they wanted to protest the funeral of the little CATHOLIC girl whom was murdered during the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords. But if I met any of them in person, I would be civil to them--not because they deserve it, not because I agree with their views, but because I choose my reactions and will not let others define me.
I think when you respond to hate with your own hate (e.g., many entertainment figures responding to behavior not even directed at them, in very personal, hostile, judgmental terms), the targets of your misbehavior feed on your energy.
Back in 2008, I thought McCain did the right thing by distancing himself from the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle. But the Bill Ayers stuff I felt was a mistake from the start, and with Palin's red meat rallies (which I didn't like), it was inevitable a few crackpots in the crowd took it to a different level and started expressing themselves inappropriately. (What bothered me was that the mainstream media was falsely reporting the comments were directed against Obama, versus "terrorist" Bill Ayers.)
Yes, if I ever knowingly met a Westboro Baptist, I would probably smile, tell them that God had created this glorious day and wish His blessings on them. I would leave justice to God. It is enough for any one man just to reflect on his own sins.
Political Humor
"Japanese researchers have invented a speech-jamming gun that can silence people from 30 meters away. You fire this at them, and they can stop talking. It makes people speechless. We should try this on Rush Limbaugh." - Jay Leno
[President Obama has been testing out a prototype against his mainstream media critics...]
"In a speech on Wall Street the other day, President Obama compared himself to Gandhi. Well, that makes sense. He's created a lot of jobs in India." - Jay Leno
[Obama felt that Gandhi might have also won a Nobel Peace Prize if only the name of the last British Governor General had been George W. Bush... Perhaps Obama will honor Gandhi by naming one of the military drones flying over Pakistan after him...]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Goodnight Tonight"
