Tag: president

Sadly Accurate Predictions – from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump

NOTE:  I wrote this in 2004, in the era of Sarah Palin.  Sadly, I was far more correct than I’d realized – just a little early.  So take a look.  We need to change the ending of our story.

Of course by now we’ve all seen this.

I wrote much of what appears below without knowing just how to begin it – and those wacky Republicans solved my problem.  The response to this boilerplate Obama statement was to issue a vicious attack accusing him of sexism because of Palin’s convention speech “lipstick/hockey mom/pitbull” quote.  This despite the fact that the metaphor has often been used by Republicans including Dick Cheney – to say nothing of John McCain – look here:

The McCain campaign, not only in its choice of Sarah Palin but in how they use her, is leaning on very scary  tactics that are similar to the successful exploitation of voters illustrated by some of the most memorable characters in American political films.  Watch this trailer for Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts; see if it isn’t more familiar than you wish:

Creepy, isn’t it?  A demagogue making his way to the top by lying about his opponent and manipulating the alienation of the American people for his own ends.  That could never happen in real life, right?

Much, much earlier in film history, the beloved Andy Griffith played one of the scariest public personalities ever in A Face in the Crowd — written by Budd Schulberg and directed by On the Waterfront‘s Elia Kazan.  He’s not a politician but watch the trailer and see if it doesn’t seem familiar.  You have to watch until the end to get the full impact.

It’s so depressing — and enraging — to watch this campaign peddling pseudo-folksiness to win over its public.  It’s time for that to stop working in our country.  Stakes are too high to permit us (or the press) to fall for the most approachable (and least honest) over the most excellent.

A couple more:
Barry Levinson‘s brilliant Wag the Dog

And, finally, remember Robert Penn Warren’s remarkable novel, clearly based on Louisiana’s Huey Long – All the King’s Men?  It portrays a politician on his path to becoming a dangerous demagogue.  Yeah, I know it’s melodramatic but does it feel at all familiar?

Clearly we should consider these archetypal characters as cautionary tales; instructive representations of our future if we allow this kind of campaigning to prevail.  Movies are our largest export (unless video games have taken over while I wasn’t looking)  and often reflect, if not our truths, at least our ghosts, shadows and neuroses.  It gave us The Body Snatchers in the 50’s, Easy Rider in the 60’s and Working Girl and Wall Street in the 80’s.  It’s easy to be seductive, to manipulate language and truth; easy to pretend to be one of the people in order to win them. The vicious, craven strategies of this campaign – and Sarah Palin herself – are  perfect examples; John McCain, whom I used to admire, has allowed, no encouraged, this shameful campaigning in his name and surrendered all the positions of principal that he once held.  If we don’t want (another) Bob Roberts (He does remind me of GWBush) or a cynical populist pretender or a MS Wilie Stark as our government, it’s up to use to exercise vigilance and fierce commitment to fight off these transparent manipulations and to ensure that it does not happen.

RePost – Don’t Gel’s Best of 2009 & Happy New Year: 2008, 1968, Our Country’s Journey, and Mine. Oh, and Thanks to Barack Obama for Turning on the Lights

New Hampshire Primary Election night
I came of age in 1968 (that's me on the right – New Hampshire election night.)  A civil rights idealist and anti-war activist, I was formed by the horrible events, remarkable activism and leadership of that critical year.  Forty years later, mostly because of Barack Obama, lost threads of memory emerged – all year long.  I'm very grateful for the opportunity to reconsider those times through the lens of this remarkable election.  Together they tell a story, or at least part of one, and I thought you might like to take this journey with me one more time as we move toward inaugurating the first black President of the United States, elected in the first real "Internet election"; abetted in great measure by a generation that seems, in many ways, a better, "new and improved" version of my own.

I'm going to start at the end though – the coming Inauguration, because I attended that of another "rock star" – John Kennedy, nearly fifty years ago – and all that came after was born that day.  The rest is in order and I think I'm going to ** my favorites. 

**The charismatic Robert Kennedy and first-comer Eugene McCarthy fought for the nomination in 1968.  When McCarthy shocked everyone with his March near-win in New Hampshire (that's the photo at the top), Lyndon Johnson pulled out,  guaranteeing that his Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, would win the nomination and lose the election.  In 2008 the battle was between two equally disparate Democrats: Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. Having lived through the first disaster, I was horrified by the possibility of a second.  It would be too much to suffer that kind of heartbreak again.

**The spring and summer brought the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy.  I was with Senator McCarthy, in San Francisco the night Dr. King died; in LA that night Robert Kennedy was killed.  I was young, traumatized and in the middle of history.

That same summer, Senator Obama accepted the Democratic nomination on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's great "I have a dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963.  Again, the person I was reached out to the woman I have become.  Again, two points in history merged.

Meanwhile, throughout the year, the McCain campaign tried, often through Sarah Palin, to re-ignite the smoldering culture wars.

For the first time since 1968, since I had been a journalist for much of the time in between and done no campaigning or petition signing or much else that would be partisan activity, I went canvassing in Virginia
with friends, including a four-year-old who added enormous to each trip
and enchanted quite a few fence-sitters.  Each trip was an adventure, always interesting, often moving.

**Of course, Election Night meant a great deal to all of us, but for me, Obama's speech in Grant Park, where my friends had been beaten and bloodied in 1968, was a perfect "exorcism" of those indelible memories.

Toward the end of the year, Judith Warner wrote about her efforts to explain the election to her kids – and so did I.

One more thing.  A year-ender trip to London and Vienna once again reminded me, as the Obama Berlin trip had done, how much Europe has longed for the America that stood for decency and hope.  Barack Obama was named the first-ever Times of London Man of the Year.

So here we are.  I'm not sure if I'll ever have the gift of so many
reasons to remember gigantic events of the past, but this year
certainly provided plenty.  It was a wonder and a privilege.  My hope
now is that, as we move forward, the hope we've all sensed over these
past months will morph into a real sense of mission and purpose.  That
is what will take all this promise and, as we Americans have done so
many times, use it to move us forward to the place we long to, and need
to be.

Ditching the N Word: Happy Weekend


Even if this is only half true, it's pretty amazing.  Next time we wonder about the impact of this election this is something to add to the equation.  Just ask an anthropologist or a semanticist or semioticist — or for that matter a historian: language forms perspective on ideas and this is, well, riveting.(H/T to Ben Smith's Politico blog for this clip.)

Barack Obama, Style, Change, and Basketball

Rice cover1
I really like Barack Obama – anyone who reads this blog knows that. And it's not just his ideas that are so attractive; his style is just stunning. I'm no starry eyed kid; I've been around the block with many candidates who looked better than they turned out to be.  But in this case, it feels like the more you look the better it gets.  It's scary, in fact, because it can't be true – there are sure to be grim and discouraging moments and long dry periods.  Even so, there is so much room for hope.  I wanted to share a couple of moments that add to that hope as we look forward in these very scary times.

First, last week's issue of the New York Time Magazine included a piece by Ron Suskind, author of A Hope in the Unseen, called Change.  You really should read it, but for now consider this story that Valerie Jarrett told Suskind as evidence that I'm not delusional to be so excited about the basic qualities of this man.

It was in Iowa, just a year ago. Obama was way behind Hillary Clinton. The heavyweights were called in, 200 members of Obama’s national finance committee. The money people. Many had given mightily. And now, it seemed, nothing was working. Obama said that before they
all gathered to pass judgment, he wanted them — all 200 — to meet his grass-roots field team in Iowa.They did, then gathered in a room at an Iowa arts center. The room was tense.
Obama explained that day that they were running a different kind of campaign, a real grass-roots campaign, one that grew from the bottom up, from the dirt, and that it takes time for those roots to take hold. And the heavy hitters nodded; yes, they understood that idea, but it wasn’t working. The polls were the proof. They showed Clinton with a double-digit lead.
And Jarrett can remember how Obama looked at them, hard-eyed, everything on the line. “ ‘Did you think I was kidding when I said this was the unlikely journey?’ ” Jarrett recalls him saying. “‘You thought this would be simple? No, change is never simple. Change is hard.

“
‘Listen, I know you’re nervous,’ he went on. ‘But if you’re nervous, I’ll hold your hand. We’re going to get through this together. And if we win Iowa, we’ll win this country.’ ”

Jarrett said: “He turned their emotion around. He made sense of it. He told them why we were there and what was within our grasp. And people became jubilant. You
never heard cheering like that. That was the turn, where it happened.”

To me that says it all. There's lots more in the piece though; I just read it last night and was just knocked out by it.

Then, thanks to RoadKill Refugee, who always seems to find things no one else has noticed, I came upon this remarkable interview between Obama and my old boss Bryant Gumbel. Again, everything that is revealed seems positive. Wise, funny, unpretentious – a man, as so many have observed, who is comfortable in his own skin; a man who doesn't have to prove anything to anybody.

Make of these what you will – but amid all the staffing speculation and bailout talk, school choice, puppy shopping and Inauguration gossip, this is a look at what appears to be some of the real stuff behind this person we've chosen to lead us for the next four years.

THE WEST WING AND THE MIDDLE EAST

West They carry West Wing re-runs in Israel. I’m sitting here on a break between a day of walking through this holy city and dinner watching and crying. Can’t believe it. It’s the one where Mrs. Lanningham dies – a sad one, yes – but as my husband just said to me – “It’s a television show.” He’s right of course – but not exactly.

Since the end of the Clinton administration, the West Wing hour was the only hour I felt like I had a president I could count on. Seeing it here so long after the show ended and Bravo stopped running it was a real ambush moment. Just reminded me how much I grieve for all I’ve thought should be… and how very much I feel we’ve failed. Talking with our Israeli friends about not so hard; their own sense of despair over the state of this country brought it all back. I’ll get over it…

Before my weeping incident it was a lovely day today. Early morning at the Kotel – me and the rabbi’s 7-year-old daughter on the women’s side and all the guys on the men’s. It was sunny and cool and the city glows in the morning. Of course it’s unsettling to pass through metal detectors to pray but once you’re there, it’s quite an experience.

Spices2_bags_market_3We had a great breakfast back at the hotel, then went walking with our friend Asher. We spent a couple of hours exploring the Mehane Yehuda market – crammed with vegetables and spices; meat, cheese, sneakers and clogs, sweaters, hats, nuts, loose tea, bottled water and almost anything else you’d want to buy. Asher took us from there to his old neighborhood Nachlaot, historic old houses off narrow streets.. strands of flowers hanging off some of the roofs and historic plaques decorating the walls.

So there it is – another day in Israel — the ridiculous, the sublime and the inevitable intrusion of the political longings that even a great adventure can’t stave off forever.