The Latest Scandals

Taxes: What does it matter that Gingrich released one year of his tax records? Any candidate can prep them a year in advance. Were I running for office a year or two down the road, and were I cynical, this year I would triple my charitable contributions, cut back on freelance writing to lower my income, and trim my deductions — on the assumption that one transparent year would be proof of thirty out of sight. So to be fair, Gingrich and all the candidates, if we go down this full-disclosure road, should release the last three years of returns. If so, I suggest that Gingrich will have as many tax/income problems as Romney.

Women: The Marianne Gingrich Nightline tell-all was a bust. In theory, we must sympathize with her: 60-ish, without much income, suffering from MS, forced to watch her ex — now soaring, both financially and politically, without her and without apparent acknowledgment of her long support for his career that must now be evident in his success — with insult added to injury as Newt parades around a younger, more attractive third wife as if he were a perpetual honeymooner. But to hear her is almost immediately to wonder, “Hmmm, let’s get this straight: you are mad that Mrs. Gingrich III and Newt did to Mrs. Gingrich II what you and Newt did to Mrs. Gingrich I? If you were sick and penniless when he left you, so was the poor first wife whom you once replaced.”

I wish I could believe (because I want to believe) that fidelity is essential in a leader, but unfortunately history tells me that Charles Lindbergh was a better pilot and inspiration than his more moral rivals, that the wayward George S. Patton saved thousands of lives by his brilliance in a way the more admirable but limited Omar Bradley did not, that the randy Bill Clinton was a better president than the devout Jimmy Carter, and that recklessly promiscuous JFK was no worse and probably more effective than loyal Richard Nixon. But marriage has so many variables (the devout husband can be mentally cruel and indifferent, the noble wife can be a shrew, the publicly supportive spouse can privately forgo sex, the faithful husband can be lazy and a leach), and leadership so many contours (natural brilliance, rhetorical flair, stamina, courage), that fidelity in marriage simply cannot quite trump them all. Was the wonderfully devoted Harry Truman a better president than Dwight D. Eisenhower (who once or twice probably strayed with his chaufferess), and if so, was it because he never looked at other women other than Bess? In short, the ABC interview was a dud. It only confirmed that dragging out a 12-year-old story on the eve of an election told us more about the morality of ABC than of present-day Newt Gingrich.

Romney’s money: Cannot Romney explain that, to be blunt, he does not have, and does not need, a regular day job any more? And therefore he does not pay taxes on income? In other words, cannot Mitt say that he once was so skilled or lucky that he made enough to allow him in retirement to either sell assets yearly, or buy and sell from his ample portfolio and therefore be taxed at the capital gains rate? The same unapologetic defiance should apply to Bain. If one devotes his career to winning the good life from taking over, trimming down, and selling companies, and one is not solely interested in cashing in and others be damned, cannot he in one minute, Newt-style, explain why he is a sort of personal trainer that both profits and does good from beating the out-of-shape into shape, and that when he cannot work with the flabby and unresponsive, he moves on?

The alternative is the sort of well-intentioned stumble in which the viewer sighs, “Come on, Mitt, you can do it. Don’t apologize or don’t gloss over, but explain, your success!”

Newt Gingrich

Why his death/resurrection/death/resurrection candidacy? His so-called checkered past and shoot-from-the-hip binges ensure that, on any given day, something arises from his past (women, book deals, consulting, etc.) or he says something provocative that leads nowhere (dressing down federal judges) which confirms the general take that he is too unstable for executive governance — a charge buttressed by the fact that Gingrich has never run a state or a business. But then, just when the op-ed writers and worried Republican elders write him off, he begins his comeback by questioning, rather than merely critiquing, the entire liberal experiment.

So he attacks the nature of the journalist’s question rather than answers it; he rails at overspending but in an existential way that suggests it is a symptom of a deeper malady; he assesses his rivals in the abstract as well as the personal. That takes gumption and talent.

The effect on primary voters? Gingrich becomes their everyman. He speaks for the beaten-down conservative, sick of reading about D.C. insider politics, race-baiting, crime, media bias, or apologizing abroad, as if to say, “I am your idea guy, your own PhD know-it-all, the good D.C. insider on your side who knows how the bad works, and I’ll out-talk, out-argue, out-think, and out-emote the entire Ivy-League elite Obama technocracy.” (Though I am not so sure he would win a debate with Obama given the exposure he offers through so many claims of multifaceted genius.)

So how long can the wild Gingrich needle graph go up and down, given his uncanny ability to die and be reborn a thousand times? I’d say about a month longer when one of two things will occur. One scenario: He is so thoroughly vetted that no more disclosures can emerge and he stops expounding ad hoc on Newtology in a way that confirms an undisciplined and wacky nature. In that case, he has a 50/50 chance of winning the nomination, regardless of the current status of his funding, organization, and endorsements. Or, we will hear yet a new Newtism (e.g., something like another neo-Marxist take on Bain Capital), or yet another brilliantly unworkable plan that serves as a proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, and the voters collectively sigh that they prefer Romney and pray he is not Dole, Bush Sr., or John McCain, more convinced that Gingrich is a Goldwater albatross rather than a Reagan savior.

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Is Reading Good Books Over?

There is great “truth and beauty” in Homer’s Iliad, but I would not try to make his sale on such platitudes. Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains a classic. But I confess it can be hard to get through. Conrad’s Victory or Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, if authored by writer X this year, would be trashed on Amazon.

So what are the reasons, in this age of the iPhone, Xbox, and PlayStation — or Fox News blondes and HBO — to sit down and read old stuff for an hour or two each week?

Here are a few reasons other than the usual defense of the “classics,” the “canon,” and the glories of “Western civilization.”

Mental Exercise

The mind is a muscle. Without exercise, it reverts to mush. Watching most TV or using the normal electronic gadgetry does not tax us much — indeed that is by design the very purpose: to eliminate effort, worry, unease, and afterthought. None of us thinks back a year ago to a great video game session. Few off-hand can recall the Super Bowl winner of 2001. I remember the scenes in a Shane or Casablanca, but not many others in the other thousand of movies that I have watched.

By nature, our ways of expression and even thinking always fossilize and are withering away with age and monotony — a process accelerated by the modern electronic age and the neglect of replenishment through reading. The actual vocabulary of our present youth seems to me reduced to about 1,000 words or so. “Like,” “whatever,” “you know,” “cool,” and other pop culture fillers now substitute for entire phrases, a sort of modern porcine grunting. The Greeks used particles to accentuate vocabulary and guide syntax; we used them instead of vocabulary. Our syntax, both written and oral, is reverting to “Spot is a dog”: noun, verb, predicate — period. How did incomprehensible slang, spiced with vulgarity, become an object of emulation? I used to listen to farmers without college degrees speak wonderful English; now to listen to a member of Congress almost requires a translator.

Reading alone enriches our vocabulary; it teaches us that good writing requires a sense of melody as well as a command of grammar. Soon those well-read become the well-spoken.

A Master of Words

Think for a minute: why did the Right often ignore the contradictions of Christopher Hitchens, and the Left mostly give up most of its anger at him? He was not necessarily a classically beautiful stylist, and could be needlessly cruel. He wrote no great history, no great novel, no great single essay that we can instantly recall in the manner of an Orwell or Chesterton. But Mr. Hitchens surely was a rare and gifted writer, polemicist, and savant. To read 800 words was to learn something new in passing. Even in his most ridiculous rant, a nugget of wisdom could be uncovered. A reference to an obscure Eastern European politician might appear side-by-side a line from Wordsworth — and would make a better illustration of his argument than just showcasing his erudition. He mastered the odd, even perverse turn of phrase, the ability to juxtapose the colloquialism next to Latinate pomposity, or to write a ridiculous 10-line long sentence, stuffed with semi-cola, dashes, cola, and commas, followed by a two-word noun-verb sentence that a five-year old could produce. In short, Hitchens was a voracious consumer of texts, and the result was that he achieved what the Roman student of rhetoric, Quintilian, once called variatio, the ability to mix up words and sentences and not bore. He could hold, even shock, the reader or listener from sentence to sentence, moment to moment.

But We Are So Much More to the Point

But you object that at least our current economy of expression cuts out wasted words and clauses, a sort of slimmed-down, electronic communication? Perhaps, but it also turns almost everything into instant bland hot cereal, as if we should gulp down oatmeal at every meal and survive well enough without the bother of salad, main course, and dessert. Each day our vocabulary shrinks, our thought patterns stagnate — if they are not renewed through fresh literature or intelligent conversation. Unfortunately these days, those who read are few and silent; those who don’t, numerous and heard. In this drought, Dante’s Inferno and William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico provide needed storms of new words, complex syntax, and fresh ideas.

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The 2012 campaign is heating up and we can see the outlines of an impending us/them class war. But in our strange 21st-century world, lots of crazy things blur the president’s 1%/99% divide. We watch the super-rich struggle for ever creative ways of blowing their money to distinguish themselves from the rest of us (cf. Johnny Depp’s [$50 million in income last year] hosting of a creepy, expensive costume Halloween party at the White House, in the style of the idle 18th-century French court).

Meanwhile we see the “poor” near rioting over buying the first few pairs of Michael Jordan $200 sneakers, or mobbing for big screen televisions on holiday shopping sale outings. Are we mad that too many are really poor, or that too many are simply unequal, in the sense of not having what “they” enjoy — a “they,” however, that cannot quite figure out how all their money leads to all that much better a life? I am sorry, Mr. Obama, but for all the Vegas-junketeering, no-time-for-profit rhetoric, I simply do not believe the one-seventh on food stamps, or the 48% who pay no income tax, are suffering like the starving 19th-century Norwegian immigrants on the windswept Dakota plains of Ole Rolvaag’s epic Giants in the Earth.

Capital for What?

I am not suggesting that poverty or life in the lower middle class is not tough, only that in comparison to past centuries, hardly as tough. Being “poor” is certainly closer and closer to those for whom life is pretty good — and yet this blending of the classes is entirely ignored by our class warriors in Washington. Life in “poor” nearby Selma is far different from Warren Buffett’s. Or maybe it isn’t really — again, in the sense that I’m not sure he bathes, eats, dresses, or goes to the doctor in ways we out here cannot.

In the year 2012, would a retiree be living better off the interest of $1 million — saved over a lifetime of work as a self-employed contractor — or would the beneficiary of an average public pension? Would you prefer to be working at 62 at the DMV making $50,000, or a near-retired real estate agent, in a down market, at 62 surviving on the “earnings” from the $450,000 in your 401(k)?

Suddenly, the income from stored wealth seems almost nonexistent. I speak to a few affluent groups and often afterwards hear that those who retired in their early sixties, and who are now in their mid- or late-eighties, have no income. You say, tough luck? But most are gradually consuming their capital and selling off assets — a great leveling effect of the ages. (Just wait until the second-term Obama administration decides that non-interest-earning $300,000 in the bank qualifies you as rich, and thus ineligible for need-based Social Security payments: it is not just that you will be punished for playing by the rules, but that the rules themselves do not matter much any more.)

The value of capital not spent is in decline. The interest on it earns seldom over 2-3%. It is lost easily in today’s wild Wall Street. It won’t show much immediate growth invested in a depressed housing market. Saved capital declines faster in value than the interest it earns — given the recent soaring prices of food and fuel. What is so good about saving up for retirement? To try to get a once despised 6% on your savings is to risk it all. If the president had his way, the capital that earned almost no interest would be taxed away at death anyway.

Debt—What Debt?

In the car today, I heard the usual con ads on the radio. Got problems with the IRS? No problem, we can renegotiate that away. Too much credit card borrowing? No problem, we can settle it at half what you owe. That mortgage of yours unfair? No problem; we can renegotiate it for you and forgive some of the debt. Often there is a vague reference to some federal program that some of us are eligible for. Lately I heard ads from the Department of Agriculture, reminding me that if I belong to some such minority group, I can sue if I felt I was discriminated against. (Who are the “they” with all the money to forgive all the debt?) Are we back to the Catiline conspiracy and calls to “forgive debt and redistribute property”?

When In Doubt—Sue!

Then there are the law firm ads: have you suffered whiplash injuries, been turned down for a job, worked with asbestos, had a bad drug reaction to brand X, been discriminated against, had a pass made at you, fallen on a banana peel? If so, the local John Edwards-like law firm will sue on your behalf. Fresno has just announced that its latest lawsuit settlement has pretty much exhausted the city’s self-insured fund for the year (but is it not month 1 of 2012, with 11 more to go?), with over a dozen other claims pending. What happens when we all become litigants and we run out of targets? Who is to play Germany to our Greece?

Like in Petronius’s Croton, where there were lots of con artists and far too few wealthy to con, things get ugly.

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Rip Van Obama

President Obama went into a deep slumber in December. When he woke up this January, he found himself back even in the polls, with neither a press conference nor another overhyped presidential televised address to be heard. Sleep, quiet, and solitude — all that appears wiser than campaigning, visibility, and speaking, both for Obama and Americans. In short, the president has really hit on something: an Obama going into a Rip Van Winkle somnolent state might just mean waking up again as president.

If conservatives once alleged that Obama got elected as Being There’s Chauncey Gardiner — the empty vessel that all put their hopes and dreams in — they might complain even louder that he now plans on getting reelected as him as well, as if 2009-2011 were now a dream and we are back to fall 2007 when a political unknown proclaimed himself a new Lincoln declaring his candidacy from Springfield.

Meanwhile, Fratricide

While the Republicans were tearing each other up in Iowa, to the delight of the liberal media, Barack Obama said not much at all from Hawaii. He did not have to, given that no Republican was offering a simple anti-Obama plan to drill for gas and oil as never before, repeal Obamacare, balance the budget, reform the tax code, and redo Social Security and Medicare. Instead his would-be opponents argued over who voted for what fifteen years ago.

We heard from the press and other Republicans in Iowa that Cain was a supposed womanizer, Romney a liar, Gingrich a blowhard and hypocrite, Perry clueless and tongue-tied, Paul a nut, Santorum a whiny complainer, Bachman a loser, and not much of anything about Huntsman. Who cares that the debt is hitting $16 trillion, the Iranians are enjoying our reset diplomacy, Iraq is heating up after our departure, and we are talking to the Taliban via the Muslim Brotherhood? Who mentions that our rendezvous with Obamacare is daily coming closer? Or that the Simpson-Bowles commission, the super-committee, and all talk of the debt is now but a distant, bad memory? Does it matter that Obama decided not to follow federal immigration law and will sue states that do? What are recess appointments when the Congress is not in recess? While Obama sleeps, all sorts of strange things do not.

As this circular firing squad went on in Iowa (strangest of all was the New Newt Gingrich’s 30-day new persona of senior statesman grandly proclaiming unity and civility — only to descend into the Old Newt proclaiming Romney a “liar”), each couple of days Barack Obama’s poll ratings inched back up. The more he kept out of the news and kept quiet, the more his negative and positive ratings went back in sync, until they are today about even, a radical shift in just about a month — and as a result of doing absolutely nothing. Do Americans sort of like Barack Obama the more that they do not see or hear much of him — at least while they hear too much of the Republicans ripping each other apart? After all, in 2008 with no record or much knowledge of his past, Obama The Idea was adored; in 2011 with a record and a fledgling history, Obama The Flesh and Blood was not. Why then not go into deep sleep, do nothing, let his surrogates loose, and let voters’ imaginations run wild with past fantasies and dreams — especially in comparison to the screeching of fratricidal Republicans that for now precludes any reexamination of a mostly disastrous presidential record since January 2009?

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The German Stereotype

There were lots of stories that left a lot unsaid. The Germany/EU debt imbroglio was one of them. The more Germany’s 80 million people were looked upon to bail out the 120 million of Mediterranean Europe—if not still more in France and Eastern Europe—the more in our politically-correct age we never quite were told how this could be possible.

German Octopuses?

Did Germans not sleep? Did they each have eight arms? Was Germany itself sitting on secret oil reserves? Did it have tons of stolen war gold horded in its vaults (as some Greeks alleged)? Had it harnessed a new type of energy? How strange to be told that Germany was the new heart of Europe but never to be to told how and why?

So how, in fact, did a humiliated Germany of 1919, a Germany after the ashes of 1945, and a Germany stung by a $2 trillion bite in absorbing a ruined East Germany in 1989, find itself—as Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand once feared in 1989—once more adjudicating the history of Europe? Were we terrified of stereotypes that were cruel to Germany (goose-stepping automatons were back again?) or that were cruel to southern Europeans (the Danes and Dutch were likewise solvent in comparison to the siesta-napping, and perennially shouting sunny Mediterraneans)?

Is there such a thing as national character or habit—both having nothing to do with race—in our postmodern age? In the 21st century, can we still say that Germans go to bed when Athenians go to dinner, or that they more likely consider tax cheating theft rather than ingenuity, or that they make things to work well rather than just make things to sell? Is it that when you go into a German bank you are served, and when you go into a Greek counterpart you witness an unending coffee break? Do tiny habits like your bus driver going down the aisle to collect trash versus throwing it out the window add up? When I see two Greek drivers scream and gesticulate at each other in Omonia Square over a tiny fender bender—as four lanes are shut down for their fifteen minutes of machismo — and, in contrast, watch two German drivers on Neuhauser straße in Munich exchange information, shake hands, and help push their dented cars off the road, does all that 1000 times a day also make a difference?

Is there a reason, aside from weather, why one would rather relax for a week in the Aegean than in Berlin, or retire on the Costa del Sol rather than in Bremen? For all the angry op-eds about the unraveling of the EU, no one quite walked us through exactly what Germans do each day that makes them different from other Europeans—although most who have visited Athens and Munich, or walked through Rome and Copenhagen, or sat in a café in Madrid and Frankfurt might be able to offer journalists some help. Of course, throughout 2011, I did read clever essays advising readers about how not to walk into this trap of believing in archaic and stereotyped notions like national character when some esoteric and almost unfathomable “real” cause (Thucydides’s aitia) far better explained the differences.

Iran: If Only …

Iran was another incomplete story this year. As the year ended, the Iranians were once again, in North Korean style, sounding off about their great navy closing the strait of Hormuz, attacking “foreigners” and all the other 1% probability nutcakery that responsible powers must nevertheless prepare for.

Oh, the efforts we go through to explain Iranian hatred of America, as we search endlessly for the “moderates” and remain puzzled over how in the world anyone could not like Barack Obama. Ad nauseam, we hear of 1953, Mossadeq, and the Shah—never that we originally found ourselves involved in Persia not for oil (cf. the British), but in World War II to supply communist Russia against the Germans, and then afterwards to ensure the Russians did not do to Iran what they had done to most of Eastern Europe. From 2007-2009, we heard from Obama about reset and dialogue with Iran, and “face-to-face” negotiations. And we got all that and much more.

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America Has the Slows

Sometime about mid-2009 America began changing psychologically. True, to the naked eye, America retained the old hustle and bustle, but in an insidious fashion it began to think a bit differently. And that change in mentality explains in part why a year-and-a-half recession that officially ended in summer 2009 seems never to have ended at all.

In short, a sizable fraction of the upper-incomes is hesitant, defensive, unsure — and to such a degree that for a while longer it is not hiring, buying, or investing in the old way. It believes not only that there is no certainty in the tax code, the cost of new entitlements, or our national finance, but that even if there were their own successes would be suspect and earn antipathy rather than praise.

In mirror-image fashion, those of the lower incomes are likewise hesitant to take risks — unsure that the rewards of work in the private sector are all that much better than what government can offer through subsidies. The former group fears government will grow; the latter that it will not. The one suspects that Obama will confiscate more earnings; the other hopes that it will. Either way, there are fewer enterprising employers and fewer self-motivated galvanized workers.

The result of this two-front war is that America has been slowing down.

Or in crudely reductionist terms: the one asks “why hire another worker, when it is not worth it to pay out more in new health care costs and taxes down the road?” while the other answers “why get off unemployment or food stamps when it is more likely that they will be extended than curtailed?”

We now accept the notion of the peasant mentality — that all wealth is finite and more for someone means less for another. In this new them/us atmosphere, Barack Obama took the natural tensions between the classes and exploited them as few other presidents dared. Suddenly, there really were two Americas: the suspect top who made over $200,000 and the more noble majority below who made less. Lost in that cheap division was any notion of the value to others from those who did well, or the reasons why some prospered, or the fragility of their brief good fortune.

If the upper 5% paid nearly 60% of the income taxes, then the problem was more fundamental: how had they been so well compensated in the first place to have the wherewithal to pay such taxes? It did no good to remind Obama that confiscating all the wealth of the 1% would not end the debt, or that steep new income tax on the 5% in and of itself will do little to balance the annual budget. His war was not about finding a remedy to his own profligate borrowing, but in retaining power through revving up anger at the better-off.

In the last three years, we have become so numb to Obama’s monotonous invective that it is now part of the national DNA: spread the wealth, fair share, fat cat, punish enemies, corporate jet owners, Super Bowl and Vegas junketeers, 1%, raise the bar, Grinch, millionaires and billionaires, at some point you’ve made enough money, no time for profit, and on and on. The subtext is always the same: the reason why, say, an orthodontist makes more than a Wal-Mart clerk is due to some sort of race, class, or gender discrimination, unfair advantage, or fatal flaw in the capitalist system, and only a technocratic elite in government retains the wisdom and morality to rectify that resulting inequality. One’s salary, then, is not quite his own, but more the collective’s — given that the professional’s good fortune results from an insidious system of exploitation from the moment he was born to the last bill he sent out for services rendered.

Republicans have no answer for all this, and the most recent polls reflect that fact. The more we watch Ron Paul talk about American culpability for 9/11, the more Newt Gingrich talks about hauling in federal judges for inquisitions, the more we hear that Romney is an opportunistic flip-flopper, the more a Cain, Perry, or Bachmann melts down, the more Obama plays cool — emerging from Hawaii or the golf links to sermonize on fairness while hoping that a Joe Biden, Eric Holder, or Steven Chu keeps his mouth shut for a little longer. In comparison to whom is to blame, it is as if near 9% unemployment, $16 billion in aggregate debt, pathetic GDP growth, a dead housing market, and a $1 trillion-plus steady annual deficit are no more than “whatever.”

Note here, however, that the president’s social sermonizing is predictably selective. On the top end, we hear about the horrors of the anonymous millionaire and billionaire, never of the real Jon Corzine who bankrupted MF Global, gave over $70,000 to the Obama campaign, and cannot remember what he did with over $1 billion of someone else’s money. In the world of Obama, human greed is not endemic, but of a particular conservative and grasping sort; in contrast, liberal conniving is always one of carelessness or can be recompensed by liberal activism.

So what I most resent in Obama’s pop socialism is not just its proven impracticality and moral pretensions, but its utter hypocrisy.

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I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind. — John Edwards

When does the legitimate “I oppose Obama” descend into the illegitimate “I hate Obama”?

It is popular now to suggest that conservatives in general and congressional Republicans in particular suffer from an obsession characterized by an uncontrolled antipathy for Barack Obama — personal and visceral — that warps their entire political outlook. No doubt some do experience the same obsessions that infected the Left in their furor at George W. Bush. One can find unhinged posters at anti-Obama rallies similar to those at anti-Bush demonstrations. Bloggers can show hatred for Obama in the manner one found them despising Bush. Perhaps for Howard Dean’s rants about Bush’s supposed foreknowledge of 9/11, we have Donald Trump insisting on a fraudulent Obama birth certificate. Truthers are analogous to Birthers. And for every conspiracy theory that Bush was continuing a long family tradition of profiting from Nazi trade, there was a suggestion that Obama was a Manchurian candidate planted here by Islamic interests to destroy from the inside the United States.

But again, I am not talking about conspiracy rants and raves, but a general psychiatric affliction that infects the influential political class — politicians, journalists, and those in popular culture and the arts.

So how does one distinguish natural political opposition from a psychotic state? In other words, when will we know that popular opposition to Obama’s worldview and a dislike at the way he seeks to divide the country degenerate into the paranoid venom that was unleashed against Bush?

Here are some things to watch on the national scene to warn us:

1) Assassination Talk

Watch it when opposition to Obama evokes thoughts of assassination and is not countenanced by the conservative community. In other words, be on guard for the conservative equivalents of a Gabriel Range’s Death of a President — a docudrama imagining a hit on Barack Obama. Especially important is to note any positive reaction to such hatred, like a first-place award from the Toronto Film Festival.

And do not forget novels. We are in trouble when a mainstream New York publisher (say, an Alfred A. Knopf) publishes a novel in which characters fantasize about shooting Barack Obama — in the manner of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint. Important here, then, is the reaction to such expression of murderous hate. Keep on guard for a conservative Michael Moore who might suggest that 9/11-like mass murder is appropriate for Obama supporters (“If someone did this [9/11] to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him!”) or who might resort to teen-age trash-talking, such as “What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar, and a functional illiterate. And he poops his pants.”

The point is not that there won’t be conservative deranged equivalents to Moore, but to watch whether such demonic figures are fully embedded within the conservative political establishment. If one were to substitute Obama for Bush in Michael Moore’s rants, would he then be invited as a guest of honor to the Republican National Convention? If so, we would have a good example of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Note too the spread of Obama tics into the entertainment industry: do Hollywood celebrities routinely in their award acceptance speeches, performances, and interviews interrupt to blast Obama in the obsessive manner of a Barbra Streisand, Matt Damon, Sean Penn, or Dixie Chicks?

2) Nazi Talk

Watch the Nazi analogies from public figures; they are good evidence of psychosis. Are there anti-Obama zealots like an Al Gore, John Glenn, or Garrison Keillor who without rebuke compare Barack Obama to a brownshirt or Nazi? If they do so, and go unchallenged, then opposition to Obama may be reaching afflictive levels.

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Obama Mythologos

Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact — a fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality.

“Brilliant”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on no evidence, once proclaimed Obama “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” When he thus summed up liberal consensus, was he perhaps referring to academic achievement? Soaring SAT scores? Seminal publications? IQ scores known only to a small Ivy League cloister? Political wizardry?

Who was this Churchillian president so much smarter than the Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, more astute than a John Adams or James Madison, with more insight than a Lincoln, brighter still than the polymath Teddy Roosevelt, more studious than the bookish Woodrow Wilson, better read than the autodidact Harry Truman?

Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even today’s inflated version of yesteryear’s gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?

I ask not because I particularly care about the GPAs or certificates of the president, but only because I am searching for a shred of evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and known erudition. For now, I don’t see any difference between Bush’s Yale/Harvard MBA record and Obama’s Columbia/Harvard Law record — except Bush, in self-deprecation, laughed at his quite public C+/B- accomplishments that he implied were in line with his occasional gaffes, while Obama has quarantined his transcripts and relied on the media to assert that his own versions of “nucular” moments were not moments of embarrassment at all.

At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?

That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany, the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57 states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the UK.

In short, the myth of Obama’s brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Plato’s Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom — and Socrates’ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the presidency respites from all the former.

“Healer”

Take away all the”‘no more red state/no more blue state,” “this is our moment” mish-mash and what is left to us? “Reaching across the aisle” sounded bipartisan, but it came from the most consistently partisan member of the U.S. Senate. Most of the 2008 campaign was a frantic effort on the part of the media to explain away Bill Ayers, ACORN, the SEIU, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, “get in their face,” and the revealing put downs of Hillary Clinton. But those were windows into a soul that soon opened even wider — with everything from limb-lopping doctors and polluting Republicans to stupidly acting police and “punish our enemies” nativists. The Special Olympics “joke,” the pig reference to Sarah Palin, the middle finger nose rub to Hillary — all that was a scratch of the thin shiny veneer into the hard plywood beneath.

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A Teen-age President in Search of an Adult Identity

Barack Obama keeps looking for a presidential identity not his own. In 2008, he wished to be JFK — whom he often referenced as a youthful and charismatic figure supposedly similar to himself. So we heard references to Obama’s father’s arrival to the U.S. during the golden Kennedy Camelot years. Caroline Kennedy herself came out of seclusion to assure us that Obama had the same Kennedy zest, and she flirted with a Senate run to help restore the lost age of grandeur. And at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama would have liked to electrify Europeans with another Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech. But even the left-leaning Germans sorta balked at that, and relegated the new Galahad to the Victory Column — a nice enough gesture that earned them a snub when a later President Obama chose not to go to Berlin for the commemoration of the twenty year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (But flying ad hoc to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics is a horse of a different color.)

The New Gipper

Next candidate Obama channeled his inner Ronald Reagan. He reminded us that that he too had a sense of a new “trajectory.” His supporters swore that he had the same sunny disposition and eloquence. Obama liked that new persona. Soon he was talking about being the same “transformative” president, as long as we understood that Obama was going to be Reaganesque solely in the way he campaigned and soared with “hope and change” rhetoric — a sort of ironic payback to the Reagan Revolution as Obama mimicked the Gipper’s personal talents to undue his legacy.

Young Mr. Lincoln

That did not last long. When he won the election, Obama now referenced the Civil War, slavery, and the civil rights struggle as he became the Great Emancipator to finally bind up the nation’s wounds. So he was for a bit Barack Lincoln. I mean this literally and to such a degree that he chartered a slow train from Springfield to DC in December 2008, to remind us that it had been 148 years since a similar messiah had trained from Illinois to Washington to save the Union. Aides got copies of Team of Rivals, since Obama had long seen himself as a saintly Lincoln in magnanimous fashion bringing in former political opponents who perhaps were more experienced but surely less talented than himself. A Biden or Hillary as Seward or Stanton?

Hyde Park Redux

But when he assumed office, there being no Civil War, Obama of Chicago Hyde Park now channeled FDR of New York Hyde Park to meet the same crisis of yet another Great Depression induced by Bush/Hoover. The “100 Days” of 1933 were upon us again. Those were the glory moments, as the White House let it be known, when a new FDR would bookend Social Security with Obamacare. That did not last too long —given the fury over the health care machinations, the Tea Party, 9% plus unemployment, the horrendous new debt, and the greatest mid-term setback since Roosevelt’s own in 1938.

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Candor

Aside from courage — the essential trait without which, as the ancients insisted, all other virtues are impossible — candor is now the most appreciated. Herman Cain came a long way, despite not knowing much of anything about foreign affairs and with a past that could not stay in the past. Why? He was blunt-speaking, and so often could cut to the quick. “9-9-9” was at once clear and concise, and that even trumped the fact that Cain himself did not know all the details of his own nostrum. And when he was not, or could not be, candid about his past, he faltered.

Crazy Ross Perot capitalized on that virtue as well — for a time, until he was not forthcoming about his contradictions. The more complex present society, the larger the bureaucracy, whether corporate or government, and the less likely we are to encounter clarity. And we miss it so these days, especially in matters of taboo race, gender, and class. Read a Reuters or AP story about a flash mob, copper wire theft, rape or murder and one infers Martians did it; read the posted Internet comments below and they are right out of the Roman Coliseum, so tired is the reader of mush. Candor was the great attraction of Achilles in the Iliad. John Wayne mastered the trait in his Westerns. Reagan for a while enjoyed candor. I greatly admired his “Evil Empire” references. Was it not both an empire and evil?

The secret to candor? The willingness to place honesty over comfort, or a sense of allegiance to truth of the ages rather than the lies of the present. Candor need not be rudeness, though it can be, especially if one is in a superior position. Churchill told generals critical of Montgomery that their anger derived from the fact that the obnoxious Montgomery was “better than you.” I remembered my father lamenting about someone he found wanting. “He’s weak and I told him so” is what he would say. My grandfather would say of a nephew or cousin gone bad, “He was no good, that’s all there was to it. Bad from the beginning, bad to the end.” What a way to cut out one hour of sociological and psychological mish-mash. The antidote to groupspeak is candor, a virtue never more missed.

Irony

Irony is not sarcasm, much less nihilism. Rather it is a way of tolerating absurdity and appreciating that the world seems to have a pulse of its own, a karma or nemesis that evens things out. Obama is an ironic candidate, though he has no sense of irony himself. Do you remember December 2008 when the Left openly worried that something might happen that would prevent our deliverance from the messianic president-elect? Instead, Obama has done more to harm Keynesian economics, the entire notion of “green,” big government, race relations — the list goes on — all those areas that he bragged he would embrace. That’s ironic — so is the editor of Harvard Law Review confusing Britain with England, Austria with Germany, or 50 with 57. So is the big critic of Guantanamo saving Guantanamo. So is Predator in Chief expanding targeted assassinations ten times. Yet editors often worry about irony, as if you are being mean to express it or the reader will not appreciate your intent.

I remember an academic colleague (well, more a rival or an enemy) with a nice sense of irony. I just had a root canal and was in pain, and explained it was probably from years of eating too many raisins off the shaker (they are far worse for the teeth than candy, and shaking 200 tons of raisins a year can give you a lot of cavities). He did not smile, but observed, “But, of course, raisins are deadly for raisin farmers” and walked off. I replied, “Well, raisin growers usually try to buy their raisins in the store.”

I admire Charles Krauthammer precisely because he usually offers an ironic remark each week or two that sums up the present absurdity in a rare fashion. David Brinkley had the same gift, but to a lesser extent. William F. Buckley was ironic. Great presidents like Lincoln and Jefferson were too. Is there some sense of fatalism in the ironist? That even he does not escape life’s contradictions, or rather especially he does not escape them?

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