I came across a few quotes from one of my favorite Presidents, Dwight Eisenhower. One, in particular, was compelling to me:
"One circumstance that helped our character development: we were needed. I often think today of what an impact could be made if children believed they were contributing to a family's essential survival and happiness. In the transformation from a rural to an urban society, children are—though they might not agree—robbed of the opportunity to do genuinely responsible work."
"Peace and Justice are two sides of the same coin."
"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. ... War settles nothing."
Hurrah for our last sane President!
Showing posts with label eisenhower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eisenhower. Show all posts
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Rudy!
Nobody expected Rudy Giuliani to be a serious contender for the GOP nomination this time last year. Hell, nobody thought he would even run. The GOP first string was all but declared: Virginia Senator George "Macaca" "Macaca" Allen, Senator Bill "Tears can give you AIDS" Frist of Tennessee, Senator Rick "I'd love a bottle of" Santorum of Pennsylvania, and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida (sorry, all out of snarky nicknames, although Jeb was the only one of these bozos who was halfway competent). At this point, you can add a former in front of all their names, because they're all out of office, Allen and Santorum involuntarily. Frist elected not to run for the Presidency, perhaps because he's about as exciting as the Metro section from an 1896 Los Angeles Times, and the elder Bush brother saw the writing on the wall and distanced himself from the presidential race as soon as possible. And probably spending many nights drinking and cursing his twit of a younger brother for ruining his career. Oh, well.
So, the top tier was vanquished, thankfully. True, Frist or Bush might be a potential VP candidate, but still--they're gone. That left a palpable hole for three people who otherwise would not have had a chance at the Presidency: ex-New York City Mayor (and social liberal) Giuliani, John McCain, and used to be Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney. Rudy is lucky, as this is the rare year where Republicans seem totally uninterested in the traditional social issues they have always paid lip service to: he's pro-choice, pro-civil union, and anti-gun, which is rare to find these days in a top-tier GOP candidate. It's true that parties sometimes run candidates who don't necessarily agree with them because of the national hero factor: one need look no futher than Dwight Eisenhower, who was firmly in the Democratic camp on foreign affairs and the New Deal, and actually cut military spending every year he was in office to balance the budget. Giuliani gained a lot of prestige from 9/11 after a very troubled second term as NYC Mayor, but is that (or the accomplishments of his first term) enough on its own to make up for his apostasy on the GOP's core issues?
As it turns out, no. But it isn't all Rudy is peddling. Rudy has been running a good game plan up until now, I have to admit. He's making his social positions an asset by saying they make him more electable, while appealing to conservatives on the issues that they care about at the moment. In particular, he has adopted an ultra-hawkish foreign policy stance that is arguably more belligerent than that of the Bush Administration. He says things along the line of, "It's good that, after 9/11, the President went on offense." First of all, I remember at the time that Bush showed admirable restraint in pursuing a military retribution to the 9/11 attacks that garnered respect from both the media and from Democrats. Second, this sound bite makes it sound as though Rudy felt that Bush could have attacked anywhere and it would have been proper. Rudy has been energetically been dissembling the same Cheney-esque BS that this administration has been selling us on the war. We hear from him chestnuts like, "[Going into Iraq] was absolutely the right thing to do...it is impossible to imagine fighting the War on Terror leaving Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq." Never mind that Saddam was detested by OBL and al-Qaeda, and provided no help to their cause. He's also selling the we need to fight them over there or else we'll fight them over here spiel, which fails the laugh test. For one thing, Iraqi insurgents are not all composed of one group, or even two groups. al-Qaeda accounts for very little of the insurgency. By and large we're dealing with Sunni and Shi'a nationalists who are struggling for power in Iraq, and they would have very little interest in coming back here to attack us. They just want us out.
All this is especially irritating when one considers that Giuliani is perhaps the least-qualified major candidate to talk about foreign affairs. His experience in foreign affairs is nonexistent, unless you count throwing Yassir Arafat out of Lincoln Center experience. What I find amazing is that his outlook and leadership style haven't evolved at all in almost fifteen years--he is still the same brash, aggressive, power-hungry man who promised to crack down on broken windows. And that is what spells trouble for me. If he hasn't changed since being Mayor, we're in for a world of hurt. While his first term was impressive, his second mayoral term was an unmitigated disaster, marked by cronyism, vendettas, posturing, and ultimately failure. Sound familiar? Any other world leaders that fit this particular bill? This time, the stakes are much higher--in NYC, the worst that could happen was that some squeegee men could get wrongfully arrested. Now, we're talking about a crisis moment in world affairs--the world hates us, which doesn't bother conservative Republicans, but it should, since we progressively rely upon other countries to manufacture the stuff we buy, as well as to consume the entertainment and other products we sell. We cannot afford to say we're the most powerful country in the world, as we are the world, at this point. Giuliani still has the worldview of a kid bully from New York, and I don't think that someone with so parochial a worldview should be sitting in the Oval Office in 2009.
Giuliani has managed to get social conservatives to support him by moving so far to the neocon right on foreign affairs (as well as on economic issues) that he hopefully would be unelectable to our nation at large. Polls show him beating the prospective Democratic rivals, but when you get down to it, Rudy has been presented to the public in a very positive light, as a competent, tough moderate. Once the public starts paying attention and realizes he's actually an extremist loon who just happens to be pro-choice, I can easily imagine any of the top three Dems taking him out. Everyone seems to say that he is a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode. Let's hope it happens before the election.
So, the top tier was vanquished, thankfully. True, Frist or Bush might be a potential VP candidate, but still--they're gone. That left a palpable hole for three people who otherwise would not have had a chance at the Presidency: ex-New York City Mayor (and social liberal) Giuliani, John McCain, and used to be Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney. Rudy is lucky, as this is the rare year where Republicans seem totally uninterested in the traditional social issues they have always paid lip service to: he's pro-choice, pro-civil union, and anti-gun, which is rare to find these days in a top-tier GOP candidate. It's true that parties sometimes run candidates who don't necessarily agree with them because of the national hero factor: one need look no futher than Dwight Eisenhower, who was firmly in the Democratic camp on foreign affairs and the New Deal, and actually cut military spending every year he was in office to balance the budget. Giuliani gained a lot of prestige from 9/11 after a very troubled second term as NYC Mayor, but is that (or the accomplishments of his first term) enough on its own to make up for his apostasy on the GOP's core issues?
As it turns out, no. But it isn't all Rudy is peddling. Rudy has been running a good game plan up until now, I have to admit. He's making his social positions an asset by saying they make him more electable, while appealing to conservatives on the issues that they care about at the moment. In particular, he has adopted an ultra-hawkish foreign policy stance that is arguably more belligerent than that of the Bush Administration. He says things along the line of, "It's good that, after 9/11, the President went on offense." First of all, I remember at the time that Bush showed admirable restraint in pursuing a military retribution to the 9/11 attacks that garnered respect from both the media and from Democrats. Second, this sound bite makes it sound as though Rudy felt that Bush could have attacked anywhere and it would have been proper. Rudy has been energetically been dissembling the same Cheney-esque BS that this administration has been selling us on the war. We hear from him chestnuts like, "[Going into Iraq] was absolutely the right thing to do...it is impossible to imagine fighting the War on Terror leaving Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq." Never mind that Saddam was detested by OBL and al-Qaeda, and provided no help to their cause. He's also selling the we need to fight them over there or else we'll fight them over here spiel, which fails the laugh test. For one thing, Iraqi insurgents are not all composed of one group, or even two groups. al-Qaeda accounts for very little of the insurgency. By and large we're dealing with Sunni and Shi'a nationalists who are struggling for power in Iraq, and they would have very little interest in coming back here to attack us. They just want us out.
All this is especially irritating when one considers that Giuliani is perhaps the least-qualified major candidate to talk about foreign affairs. His experience in foreign affairs is nonexistent, unless you count throwing Yassir Arafat out of Lincoln Center experience. What I find amazing is that his outlook and leadership style haven't evolved at all in almost fifteen years--he is still the same brash, aggressive, power-hungry man who promised to crack down on broken windows. And that is what spells trouble for me. If he hasn't changed since being Mayor, we're in for a world of hurt. While his first term was impressive, his second mayoral term was an unmitigated disaster, marked by cronyism, vendettas, posturing, and ultimately failure. Sound familiar? Any other world leaders that fit this particular bill? This time, the stakes are much higher--in NYC, the worst that could happen was that some squeegee men could get wrongfully arrested. Now, we're talking about a crisis moment in world affairs--the world hates us, which doesn't bother conservative Republicans, but it should, since we progressively rely upon other countries to manufacture the stuff we buy, as well as to consume the entertainment and other products we sell. We cannot afford to say we're the most powerful country in the world, as we are the world, at this point. Giuliani still has the worldview of a kid bully from New York, and I don't think that someone with so parochial a worldview should be sitting in the Oval Office in 2009.
Giuliani has managed to get social conservatives to support him by moving so far to the neocon right on foreign affairs (as well as on economic issues) that he hopefully would be unelectable to our nation at large. Polls show him beating the prospective Democratic rivals, but when you get down to it, Rudy has been presented to the public in a very positive light, as a competent, tough moderate. Once the public starts paying attention and realizes he's actually an extremist loon who just happens to be pro-choice, I can easily imagine any of the top three Dems taking him out. Everyone seems to say that he is a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode. Let's hope it happens before the election.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Waiting in the Wings
In 1952, the Republican Party managed to win its biggest electoral victory in 24 years, taking the Senate, the House, and most impressively, the White House. The latter had been under Democratic ownership for twenty straight years, and Dwight Eisenhower had been popularly elected in a landslide. Ike was a fabulously popular figure in the America of the time, and he was probably the last completely sane occupant of the Oval Office. He was a model President, though not a perfect one. He was regarded at the time, and still is to a certain extent, as a do-nothing President, a characterization which is unfair. Aside from keeping us out of about half a dozen wars across the globe and expertly traversing the dangerous political scene of the early Cold War, his legacy lives on here in the highways he built and the peaceful and prosperous America he left us.
Why is this relevant? Because Ike's two terms as President were the only time between 1933 and 1969 that the Republicans found themselves in the White House. Eisenhower interrupted over a quarter-century of Democratic hegemony in this country's leadership, but his popularity couldn't put his unloved successor into office (at least, not immediately) and his legislative majority folded after two years. Of course, those being more reasonable times, he was easily able to work with Democrats on many issues, but there is little doubt that the GOP's brief stretch in power then had nothing to do with what they stood for and everything to do with Ike's popularity.
Fast-forward to the present day. The situation has flipped, and the GOP has now held the Presidency for most of the past forty years. If you ask me, they are more likely than not to keep it in 2008. The Democrats won control of Congress last year on voter resentment on any number of issues, but the big mistake they made was that denouncing Bush made them seem like the answer to the country's ails, instead of the primary opposition to Bushian policies. From the latter standpoint, the Democratic Congress has been exemplary. The Bush agenda has been stopped in its tracks. However, since people evidently expect Congress to be proactive (for reasons surpassing political wisdom or even human comprehension), they have already been judged a failure. I myself did not expect a Democratic Congress to end the Iraq War when I voted to re-elect my Democratic Representative. However, this is beginning to seem less and less like a realignment and more like a hiccup, like 1952 (or 1946), where the opposition party only managed a few years on top before flopping once again.
One could draw worse parallels than the Democrats of today to the GOP of yesteryear. Both parties opposed popular movements, and both parties opposed said movements largely by offering watered-down or triangulated versions of the very same ideas. Both, despite brief slivers of power, frequently found themselves in the minority, defending discredited ideas and insisting that the other side just governs badly. I hate to have to be the one to say it, but effective government is not one of the priorities of the social conservatives behind the GOP these days. They're not going to vote Democrat because Bush exploded the deficit. Now, maybe if he were caught in bed with a Black man, and the GOP were to reverse their positions on abortion, gay marriage, stem cells, and evolution in classrooms...that might change.
The reality is that neither party is firmly grounded in a philosophy of governance at this point. The GOP has lost any credibility it once had as a party, and with its recent history of fiscal irresponsibility, foreign adventures/disasters, and religious sanctimony, it is no surprise that voters no longer trust them on the big issues. Republicans have followed the conservative movement long past its logical conclusion, and the real goal for the last few years has not been to follow conservative principles, but rather just to annoy liberals and rile up conservatives. They proved quite successful at this task, but now the base of the GOP is getting a taste of their own medicine on immigration. The irony, of course, is that the small government immigration solution is the one that these so-called conservatives can't stand.
Democrats have, right now, an historic opportunity--we can stand the political landscape on its head. Right now, the odds of Democrats taking back the White House are quite good, and as the American people seem tired of conservative incompetence, lies and broken promises, it would seem that liberals have an honest-to-God opening at gaining real power. Unfortunately, it does not look as if that transition is going to occur. The media, ever the opportunists, have all but annointed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, possibly because she will supply them, via her past, with an endless supply of breaking scandals. Plus, she has her "historic quest" for the presidency. I hate to bring it up, Madam Clinton, but you wouldn't be the first girl in the White House.
Unless we liberal Democrats wake up, we run the risk not only of losing a presidential election, but of losing a transitional moment, the likes of which might not again come for decades. Hillary Clinton, even if elected President, would lose the new Congressional majorities and likely would lose the Presidency in 2012. Not only isn't she a true liberal (she has the same center-right economic plan as her husband, despite a pandering "no" vote on CAFTA, she is a free-trader), she is the worst kind of liberal--the tell-people-how-to-live-their-lives kind. If anything, the Democratic party should be less susceptible to this sort of calculus and not more so, considering the more libertarian bent this party has taken in the past few years, while the GOP has gone in the other direction. Her success is based directly upon her marriage to Bill Clinton, and his popularity was based entirely upon his personality (and a lot of luck with the economy). Hillary has her supporters, largely women and ignoramuses who loved Mr. Clinton in office. And what wasn't there to love? Beween telecom deregulation, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, he had quite a few accomplishments for a Republican. I'll grant that welfare had to be reformed, but the others are inexcusable. Nominating Hillary Clinton will be a move back to our past, all right--the Clinton years of Congressional minorities, constant scandals, symbolic legislation, and gridlock. In other words, business as usual.
That, in a nutshell, is why I'm supporting Barack Obama for President. For one thing, the man doesn't pander. For another, he would actually win. Oh, and he's a liberal, but he's not just a social liberal. He's our best chance, and things might actually change if he gets elected. Not so for Hillary "Rupert Murdoch loves me and me alone" Clinton.
Why is this relevant? Because Ike's two terms as President were the only time between 1933 and 1969 that the Republicans found themselves in the White House. Eisenhower interrupted over a quarter-century of Democratic hegemony in this country's leadership, but his popularity couldn't put his unloved successor into office (at least, not immediately) and his legislative majority folded after two years. Of course, those being more reasonable times, he was easily able to work with Democrats on many issues, but there is little doubt that the GOP's brief stretch in power then had nothing to do with what they stood for and everything to do with Ike's popularity.
Fast-forward to the present day. The situation has flipped, and the GOP has now held the Presidency for most of the past forty years. If you ask me, they are more likely than not to keep it in 2008. The Democrats won control of Congress last year on voter resentment on any number of issues, but the big mistake they made was that denouncing Bush made them seem like the answer to the country's ails, instead of the primary opposition to Bushian policies. From the latter standpoint, the Democratic Congress has been exemplary. The Bush agenda has been stopped in its tracks. However, since people evidently expect Congress to be proactive (for reasons surpassing political wisdom or even human comprehension), they have already been judged a failure. I myself did not expect a Democratic Congress to end the Iraq War when I voted to re-elect my Democratic Representative. However, this is beginning to seem less and less like a realignment and more like a hiccup, like 1952 (or 1946), where the opposition party only managed a few years on top before flopping once again.
One could draw worse parallels than the Democrats of today to the GOP of yesteryear. Both parties opposed popular movements, and both parties opposed said movements largely by offering watered-down or triangulated versions of the very same ideas. Both, despite brief slivers of power, frequently found themselves in the minority, defending discredited ideas and insisting that the other side just governs badly. I hate to have to be the one to say it, but effective government is not one of the priorities of the social conservatives behind the GOP these days. They're not going to vote Democrat because Bush exploded the deficit. Now, maybe if he were caught in bed with a Black man, and the GOP were to reverse their positions on abortion, gay marriage, stem cells, and evolution in classrooms...that might change.
The reality is that neither party is firmly grounded in a philosophy of governance at this point. The GOP has lost any credibility it once had as a party, and with its recent history of fiscal irresponsibility, foreign adventures/disasters, and religious sanctimony, it is no surprise that voters no longer trust them on the big issues. Republicans have followed the conservative movement long past its logical conclusion, and the real goal for the last few years has not been to follow conservative principles, but rather just to annoy liberals and rile up conservatives. They proved quite successful at this task, but now the base of the GOP is getting a taste of their own medicine on immigration. The irony, of course, is that the small government immigration solution is the one that these so-called conservatives can't stand.
Democrats have, right now, an historic opportunity--we can stand the political landscape on its head. Right now, the odds of Democrats taking back the White House are quite good, and as the American people seem tired of conservative incompetence, lies and broken promises, it would seem that liberals have an honest-to-God opening at gaining real power. Unfortunately, it does not look as if that transition is going to occur. The media, ever the opportunists, have all but annointed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, possibly because she will supply them, via her past, with an endless supply of breaking scandals. Plus, she has her "historic quest" for the presidency. I hate to bring it up, Madam Clinton, but you wouldn't be the first girl in the White House.
Unless we liberal Democrats wake up, we run the risk not only of losing a presidential election, but of losing a transitional moment, the likes of which might not again come for decades. Hillary Clinton, even if elected President, would lose the new Congressional majorities and likely would lose the Presidency in 2012. Not only isn't she a true liberal (she has the same center-right economic plan as her husband, despite a pandering "no" vote on CAFTA, she is a free-trader), she is the worst kind of liberal--the tell-people-how-to-live-their-lives kind. If anything, the Democratic party should be less susceptible to this sort of calculus and not more so, considering the more libertarian bent this party has taken in the past few years, while the GOP has gone in the other direction. Her success is based directly upon her marriage to Bill Clinton, and his popularity was based entirely upon his personality (and a lot of luck with the economy). Hillary has her supporters, largely women and ignoramuses who loved Mr. Clinton in office. And what wasn't there to love? Beween telecom deregulation, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, he had quite a few accomplishments for a Republican. I'll grant that welfare had to be reformed, but the others are inexcusable. Nominating Hillary Clinton will be a move back to our past, all right--the Clinton years of Congressional minorities, constant scandals, symbolic legislation, and gridlock. In other words, business as usual.
That, in a nutshell, is why I'm supporting Barack Obama for President. For one thing, the man doesn't pander. For another, he would actually win. Oh, and he's a liberal, but he's not just a social liberal. He's our best chance, and things might actually change if he gets elected. Not so for Hillary "Rupert Murdoch loves me and me alone" Clinton.
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