Mitt Romney essentially supports Barack Obama’s foreign policy in almost every particular. The question is: Whom do you trust more to carry out Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Mitt Romney or Barack Obama?
(And by the way, as the Mittster would say: Whose team would you rather have in charge of executing that policy day to day, people like Hillary Clinton or people like John Bolton?)
George McGovern, who died Saturday at the age of ninety, was a combat hero of the Second World War. As the twenty-two-year-old pilot of a B-24 Liberator, Lieutenant McGovern flew thirty-four missions over Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, guiding his plane—which he had named the Dakota Queen, in honor of his brand-new bride, Eleanor—through lethal bursts of flak. The B-24 was not just the American fleet’s biggest bomber, it was the hardest and most dangerous to fly. The young pilot’s courage and skill earned him two of military aviation’s highest decorations, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. (Also, he learned to fly at a Kansas training base called—true fact—Liberal Army Airfield.)
That vast numbers of McGovern’s fervent supporters in his 1972 Presidential campaign were unaware of most or all of this—and that ordinary voters, on the whole, knew nothing of any of it—says a lot about the naïveté and the nobility of the man and his campaign. War—the war in Vietnam—was the paramount issue, and McGovern was the candidate of peace and the peace movement. CREEP—the Committee to Re-elect the President, the President being Richard M. Nixon—did everything it could, legal and illegal, to paint him as a weakling, a coward, an enemy of America and Americanism.
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I’ll explain the baseball metaphor in a minute, but first: I think I speak for all Obama supporters, when I say, What a relief!
In Game One, it was clear from the beginning that the President was blowing it. “This is a catastrophe,” I moaned to a friend at around the ten-minute mark. “What a nightmare!” “Now, now,” she said soothingly. “It’s not as bad as all that.” But it was as bad as all that, and it got worse.
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One further addition to my list of the horrors and wonders (and there are wonders! plenty of them!) of the once and possibly future Republic of Texas.
Did you know that the Lone Star State has its own Pledge of Allegiance? I didn’t. But it does. Of course it does!
According to Title 11, Subchapter C of the Government Code of the statutes of the state of Texas, the Texas pledge may be recited at any “public or private meeting at which the pledge of allegiance to the United States flag is recited.” Also, “The pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States should be recited before the pledge of allegiance to the state flag.” Is this a matter of putting first things first or saving the best for last? I’m not sure. But Willie Nelson is nobody’s opening act.
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Last week, Mitt Romney won and Barack Obama lost. But the outcome was much more a matter of Obama losing than of Romney winning—because it was only Obama’s passive-unaggressive refusal to parry and thrust that permitted Romney to coast unmolested to victory on his perfectly prepared, professionally rehearsed, thoroughly focus-grouped, earnestly delivered speechlets.
This week was different. Joe Biden won, but not because Paul Ryan let him. Ryan came in second, you might say, but he didn’t lose.
Continue Reading >>Tomorrow evening, down at N.Y.U., you can catch a free screening of “Electoral Dysfunction,” a lighthearted look at a weighty subject. Mo Rocca is the film’s tour guide to some of the seedier attractions of the American political carnival, including such midway con games as targeted voter-I.D. laws, horrendous ballot designs, and, of course, the weird workings of the current electoral-college setup. You probably know Mo from his many appearances on CBS Sunday Morning, “The Daily Show,” and NPR’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”
Continue Reading >>Take my word for it: Saturday night’s concert in Central Park was outstanding.
One of the attractions of the Bob Bullock Museum of Texas State History, an imposing institution just across the street from the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is “The Star of Destiny,” a fifteen-minute “multimedia experience” purporting to tell “the stories of determination, perseverance, and triumph that have formed the Texas spirit.” It’s a World’s Fair-type presentation, narrated by an actor dressed up as Sam Houston and filmed to look like he’s standing onstage. What makes it “multimedia” is that, besides film, it uses slides projected on a three-screen setup and, in a segment about the gargantuan Galveston hurricane of 1900, employs strobe lights to mimic lightning and a hidden wind machine to blow great gusts of cold misty air into the startled faces of audience members.
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No phrase was heard more often or pronounced more reverently at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte than “middle class.” This represents a notable change from days of yore.
In the sixties and seventies, and to a lesser extent in the eighties, the middle class was not a special object of left-of-center worship—certainly not among self-romanticizing soi-disant “radicals” and scarcely more among relatively moderate liberals like me. “The bourgeoisie” was not something one yearned to join. “Middle class” didn’t mean work hard and play by the rules, as it does now. It meant work way too hard and don’t question the rules. It meant settle for an ecstasy-free life in a corporate cubicle and a ticky-tacky suburb, subscribe to Reader’s Digest, and get a haircut.
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“Um, that was O.K., I guess,” I said to my wife after President Obama’s acceptance speech. As someone noted on TV this morning, this was not one of B.H.O.’s greatest hits. What it was was solid. And sober. And sobering.
As such, it put a bit of a damper on the gusher of joy that had flooded the Convention’s opening night, crested on the second night with Bill Clinton’s bravura performance, and continued more or less unabated on night No. 3, right through Joe Biden’s delightfully Bidenesque lead-in.
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