In early January of this year, I made several predictions for the new year. The time has come to tally the score.

1. Emmanuel vs Dean: This strategic conflict over whether the Democratic Party should wage a fifty-state campaign or just back only specific candidates in certain states continues. However, Howard Dean has become increasingly marginalized as we have witnessed his disappearing act over the last six months. If the Democrats are to win the White House they will need Dean. Unfortunately his current post does not permit him to endorse any of the current candidates.

2. The GOP Presidential battle: I said, “Look for someone like Sam Brownback, who has strong religious support to have the inside track.” It was the right prediction but the wrong candidate. Mike Huckabee was not even on the radar screen a year ago. A year from now he could be President.

3. The Democrats’ Presidential battle: The prediction posited a final showdown between Hillary Clinton and the anti-Hillary candidate. That one seems to be right on target. A year ago, the prediction posited that would be either Edwards or Obama. Iowa could well decide which.

4. Congress: The prediction said GOP moderates would allow the Democrats to be relati8vely successful. This one gets an “F” for fairytale, because exactly the opposite has happened. The Republicans have held together while the Democrats have not.

5. Iraq: I said the debate was over, again because I expected the Republicans to begin deserting George Bush. Unfortunately this one also missed the mark. The GOP has supported Bush’s war while the Democrats still argue with one another about what to do.

6. No Child Left Behind: This prediction has held. Last January I wished the Democrats would rebel and make NCLB a campaign issue, but as I said a year ago, “Look for the final outcome to be a renewal of a weakened NCLB.”

7. Tax Cuts: “ As all their other cards fail, the GOP will come back to this one,” I said last January. Bush has already successfully made spending an issue in the budget renewal. I also wrote, “Democrats would be wise to tie this to running the Iraq War, to No Child Left Behind, other unfunded mandates, and a balanced budget, but I predict they will not pull the trigger. If they cannot deal with this issue in new and imaginative ways, they will lose 2008.” I still stand by that one.

8. The Neglected: They still remain ignored. I predicted a possible third party effort in 2008. That the possibility remains open a year later, shows the inability of the Democrats to remember who helped them win a year ago.

9. The Economy: This prediction with its focus on housing gets an A+. Because of the housing crisis, the economy has now become the number one campaign issue. Remember, you heard it here first a year ago.

10. The Religious Right: While other blogs were reading the last rites for the Religious Right, last January I posited that this campaign would be a make or break moment for them and predicted the emergence of a new spokesperson. That this should be a Baptist minister Presidential candidate should make for an interesting year.

11. Blogs: The prediction hoped for a revival of the Dean campaign and predicted a major scandal. Neither happened. Blogs have increasingly become part of the media establishment, making a major scandal less likely. The biggest disappointment of 2007 has been the marginalization of truly progressive blogs. The only signs of life lie in the AfroSpear, which white progressives ignore.

12. The Raucous Right: As predicted Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have lost much of their power as has the rest of the Raucous Right, in part thanks to Don Imus. Humor (Colbert, Jon Stewart) is in, rant is out. For this we should all be thankful. Maybe we will finally see the end of the Era of Bad Feelings? Wait for the 2008 predictions.

Final Score: Nine Right, Three Wrong. Slugging percentage: .667 Now for next year…

Tagged with: campaign_issue • Democratic_Party • disappearing_act • emmanuel • fairytale • final_showdown • George_Bush • GOP • gop_moderates • Hillary_Clinton • Howard_Dean • mike_huckabee • Obama • posited • radar_screen • religious_support • Sam_Brownback • state_campaign • target • tax_cuts

Photo: John Moore, Getty Images
A picture of Benazir Bhutto taken moments before her assassination on stage at the campaign rally where she spoke.

The parallels and coincidences continue to multiply, the multiplication indicating the world-shattering implications of the crime. She died only yards away from where Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaqat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951. She was trying to unify a badly divided country. Some maintain she was shot in the head riding in a motorcade by a mysterious gunman. The number of shots and where they came from is still in dispute. Others say a suicide bomber caused her death. The government and various shadowy groups have been blamed for the crime. Flames, rioting and looting have erupted after the assassination. The name of a certain archduke who was assassinated almost a century ago keeps popping up. People will remember where they were when they first heard the news. She will forever remain a controversial figure as future generations argue over her legacy.

She once said that after her last visit with her father moments before he was hanged, nothing could be worse. Now she lies with him in the marble mausoleum where he was buried. They threw rose petals as she was buried beside him, their keening and weeping echoing off marble walls the color of the headscarf that was her trademark.

She leaves a husband and three children, the youngest fourteen years old, all whom become yet another generation heir to the violent death of a parent trying to lead their nation. She also leaves a nation and a world in chaos.

Her supporters shout, “Bhutto was alive yesterday, Bhutto is alive today.” Pray that somehow they are right.

Tagged with: archduke • benazir_bhutto • campaign_rally • coincidences • controversial_figure • death_of_a_parent • fourteen_years • future_generations • getty_images • headscarf • John_Moore • liaqat_ali_khan • marble_mausoleum • marble_walls • motorcade • parallels • rose_petals • shadowy_groups • violent_death

Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural is justly regarded as one of America’s greatest speeches. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Like many great speeches it is a tangle of paradoxes, some of which we are still puzzling over. Those paradoxes all begin with the voice.

When is a voice no longer a voice, but something else, something coached, well-trained and practiced so it becomes not so much a voice but a mirror, its vowels and consonants referring not so much to the speaker but the listener, so that each person who hears it hears something from deep in the recesses of their own mind.

In the electronic age, this has become the new ideal, perhaps because the artifice of microphones and sound boards demands it. Once we wanted our politician’s voices to reflect them, now we want them to reflect us, for artifice forces us to search the ether for authenticity and the only judge we have of that lies in the sound studios of our own minds.

Perhaps no one epitomizes this more than Ronald Wilson Reagan. To listen to his voice is to be drawn even against your will into the sonic equivalent of soft focus. Something in the tone that can move effortlessly from a whisper-like confessional to an earnestness that seems to come from somewhere deep in the chest like a war cry, wins audiences over in the way that a master guitarist can summon so many emotions from six simple strings.

Ronald Reagan would make full use of those skills in the 1964 Presidential campaign. The ostensible title given the address was “A Time for Choosing,” but to Republicans and others it has since been known simply as “The Speech.” Fittingly, it was not delivered on the floor of one of those wooden-raftered caverns with a name like The Wigwam or an immense amphitheater like Madison Square Garden, but from inside the little glowing box that had become a fixture in America’s living rooms. The wooden benches that had served as the galleries in political conventions of the past had been replaced by armchairs in people’s homes. It is also fitting that Reagan’s speech was part of a paid, prerecorded television commercial. It was a perfect setting for Reagan the actor.

In terms of its significance, “The Speech” deserves to be regarded with the “Cross of Gold” and a handful of other speeches that have not only electrified a campaign, but also defined the future of a political party. Columnist David Broder knew what he was witnessing, for he termed “The Speech:”

The most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the “Cross of Gold” speech.

Rarely are people swept away with waves of words. In the nineteenth century of “Cross of Gold” a significant percentage of Americans had heard enough stump speeches to qualify as experienced judges of their quality. In the twentieth century with radio and television lending politics all the stage-managed characteristics of a Hollywood movie, audiences have developed a more jaundiced attitude toward both speech and speaker.

But in 1964, the kind of speech Ronald Reagan recited was something relatively new. Most candidates had managed the transition to the new medium of television with the same trepidation Hollywood stars had managed the transition from silents to talkies. Speaking to a camera was a new skill for most of politicians, one that required many more significant changes than the transition from speaking to crowds to speaking over the radio. You had to learn how to modulate your voice, how to move your head so it did not appear wooden, how to look into the camera as if you were looking into the eyes of an unconvinced voter, and—as Richard Nixon learned in 1960—even such unpolitical skills as the art of makeup.

Ronald Reagan knew all these things. His best performances as an actor had been delivering heart-felt “values” speeches such as the one he gave as the dying Gipper in Knute Rockne, All-American. Yet for all this background, Ronald Reagan was a washed-up movie actor when he delivered “The Speech.” After his Hollywood career had turned sour he had been fortunate to find work with General Electric in 1954 serving as host for G.E. Theater, a now extinct programming genre which presented adaptations of popular plays, short stories, novels, magazine fiction and motion pictures. It was a role that certainly was a step down for the former sidekick of Errol Flynn, for all it required of the actor who once hungered for dramatic parts like that of the doomed George Gipp was that he read what are known as the “ins” and “outs,” introducing each week’s program and then signing off at the end.

He might have perished there were it not for the second part of the GE job which required him to barnstorm the country as the company’s goodwill ambassador. To Reagan’s credit, unlike other stars who might have sleepwalked through these functions, Ronald Reagan threw himself into his new role and in doing so found his true calling. Like actors who polish their skills in little theaters in small towns, Reagan honed his speaking skills at GE meetings, factory tours and appearances before local gatherings.

Reagan also found his voice, learning that Hollywood role playing could be placed in the service of delivering a political message. Instead of handing him a packaged script, GE, as people would later say, “let Reagan be Reagan.” So he gave full vent to the fanatical anti-communism that had characterized his reign as head of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Eventually Reagan became so good at what he was doing that his conservative opinions caused GE to let him go, fearing the corporation would be tainted as favoring right wing causes

When it came time for Reagan to deliver “The Speech” he had been well-rehearsed. He also had the aid of several people, foremost of whom was his wife, the former Nancy Davis, a mediocre actress and the daughter of Chicago neurosurgeon Dr. Loyal Davis. Reagan had married Nancy Davis after his marriage with Jane Wyman went sour, in part because of his obsession with the Screen Actor’s Guild. Unlike Wyman, Nancy Reagan not only supported her husband’s conservatism, she had far bigger and different dreams for him.

“The Speech” would help propel her husband on his way to making those dreams real. Delivered in support of Barry Goldwater it showed he made a better Goldwater than Goldwater himself. Although Goldwater would be resoundingly trounced, “The Speech” would rise like one of those movie heroes who picks up a fallen banner and leads the troops to victory. It captured all the pent-up grievances of those on the right who had come to resent the Great Society and what they felt were the appeasement of the left toward the Soviet Union.

Officially titled “A Time for Choosing,” “The Speech” contained many of the rhetorical elements that would become Reagan staples: the use of anecdotes and selective statistics to drive home a point, the rapier-like turns of phrase that skewered his opponents while bringing smiles to his supporters, the “common sense” logic that sounds good when you hear it and for which you can offer no counterargument without a great deal of research, and, of course, the almost messianic belief that there is only one way to interpret the Constitution and American history.

All these tactics were perfect for the immediacy of television where each viewer sits alone in the living room, their minds directly linked to the speaker’s words like some Vulcan mind meld. In “The Speech” Reagan opens by referring to his switch from the Democrats to the Republicans–a move he officially made two years before.

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course.

Then he goes after the GOP’s favorite target–taxes–in his third paragraph, saying:

No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.

After a brief recitation of the issues of war and peace comes the paragraph that some conservatives can still recite from memory:

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

The remainder of the speech has examples from the farm economy and a long discussion of welfare and urban renewal programs that was to become the center of what would become the Republican Counterrevolution against the New Deal. Amidst all the recitations of welfare’s shortcomings, Ronald Reagan raises the questions that America has struggled to answer over the last half century:

Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they’ve had almost 30 years of it, shouldn’t we expect government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?

This is a masterful paragraph. The rhetorical tactic of raising a question and leaving it unanswered has a long history, in part because it lets the readers fill in the blanks with their own answers. Reagan begins with a question that all but implies a “yes,” especially because of the folksy way he frames it. Behind it lies the entire Counterrevolutionary doctrine of “accountability” that spawned measures like No Child Left Behind.

The implication behind the next two questions lies in an assumption that at some point people will not need government aid. We know that isn’t true, there will always be people who, for whatever reason, illness, injury, disability, the economy, lack of skills, or just plain bad luck will need help. For Republicans who still believed in William Graham Sumner’s “survival of the fittest,” this question also had to have resonated with their own belief that the poor are responsible for their own bad luck.

If Reagan’s questions raise uncomfortable issues, sprinkled in his discussions of them are classic Reaganisms that his audiences would later come to expect, but at the time must have pulled more than a few people out of their seats and onto their feet:

Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me–the free man and woman of this country–as “the masses.” This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America.

A government can’t control the economy without controlling people.

In a program that takes for the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a “more compatible use of the land.”

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.

Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this Earth.

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory.

When you read them, these phrases have a certain in-your-face edge to them that even today is unusual for a political speech, yet delivered in Reagan’s practiced voice the edge seems smoother, almost folksy so you are caught off guard. The former actor and GE spokesperson had learned his craft well.

These skills would come together in the famous closing of “The Speech” in which he appropriates one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most memorable phrases for Goldwater, his audacity a rhetorical symbol of the Counterrevolution’s intent to undo the New Deal:

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

It would be almost two decades before “The Speech” would come to full fruition. Reagan would become Governor of California, challenge Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976 and finally win the Presidency in 1980. There is little question those who had first heard the speech and seen the speaker as a future president played a large role in that ascent.

When Reagan began planning for his inaugural address it seems appropriate that he would tell speech writer Ken Khachigian to use “The Speech” as a template. The use of Khachigian raises a long-standing question about Ronald Reagan. For some time, it was fashionable to wonder if Reagan really wrote his speeches or if he was just reading another script handed to him.

Recent books and studies have shown us that Reagan was extremely intelligent and that he did a great deal of his own writing. Reagan in His Own Hand details the radio addresses Reagan himself wrote between 1975 and 1979 to keep himself in the public eye. It shows a writer with a keen sense of language and a rare ability to make complex ideas understandable. Ronald Reagan was no Woodrow Wilson–he would probably be the first to concede that–but neither was he the empty-headed script reader portrayed by his enemies.

In what is probably the best biography of Reagan, Reagan’s America, Garry Wills brilliantly draws attention to how Reagan purposely made mistakes in his speeches:

Reagan has often goofed to look more natural–broken the grammar of sentences, feigned embarrassment, professionally avoided the appearance of being a professional. It is an important art in democratic politics. [p. 193]

With the First Inaugural–as with “The Speech”-it is clear the effort was Reagan’s. Much as Harry Truman took his advisor’s ideas and even some of their phrasing and then delivered his Kiel auditorium speech off the cuff, Reagan took Khachigian’s drafts and then rewrote the final speech himself. No source, pro- or anti-Reagan disputes this. Richard Reeves probably has the best portrait of the writing of the speech in President Reagan: A Triumph of the Imagination. He outlines how Reagan gave Khachigian a six-inch stack of 3×5 note cards that held the best lines of his previous speeches. In a discussion with Khachigian he also sketched out a broad outline of the speech:

The system: everything we need is here. It is the people. This ceremony itself is evidence that government belongs to the people….Under that system: our nation went from peace to war on a single morning, we had the depression etc….We showed that they, the people, have all the power to solve things….Want optimism and hope, but not “goody-goody.”…There’s no reason not to believe that we have the answer to things that are wrong. [p. 4]

But Reeves goes on to acknowledge:

The words were Reagan’s own. He wrote the final version of the speech out in longhand on a yellow legal pad. (p. 5)

Reagan made an unusual choice about the location for the speech. Where other presidents had addressed the nation from the front on the Capitol, Reagan chose to use rear, which as millions of tourists know provides one of the most famous views in America as it looks down the mall towards the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial and now the World War II Memorial. Across the river lies Arlington National Cemetery. There seems little question Reagan personally stage-managed this setting which he would invoke in his Inaugural Address.

Like a combination of political advance men and school teachers, Reagan’s staff spent the days before the speech lecturing to the media about the importance of this view, using language they might have cribbed from a Hollywood Western or one the nineteenth-century handbills that circulated across the Atlantic enticing new immigrants. The rear of the Capitol, they reminded the reporters, looked to the West which to Americans had always symbolized the boundless manifest destinies of opportunity.

Reagan’s Inaugural begins with a brief recitation of the importance of the “orderly transfer of authority,” but then does something quite extraordinary in singling out his predecessor for his help during the transition. Perhaps this was to help soften the blow of what would follow, which indicts Jimmy Carter’s leadership:

By your gracious cooperation in the transition process, you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other, and I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our republic.

The man who could brilliantly write two-sentence teasers for his radio addresses (Reagan would have made a great blogger), then gets right to the point–the economy, noting the nation was suffering from one of longest inflations in history. His detailing of the consequences of that inflation allows him to make one of the clever rhetorical transitions that characterized so many Reagan speeches, moving directly from inflation to his long-time causes of taxes and government spending:

Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending.

Then comes the paragraph that is probably the most quoted portion of this speech:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

What is often omitted, though, is the final sentence of this paragraph:

The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

This sentence along with several others remains one of the paradoxes of Reagan’s Inaugural. The next essay in this series–”The Paradox of Ronald Reagan”–deals with the that paradox.

Tagged with: American_democracy • American_Revolution • armchairs • artifice • Barry_Goldwater • california_challenge • communism • conservatism • conservatives • counterrevolution • cross_of_gold_speech • delivering_a_political_message • Democratic_politics • eagan_in_his_own_hand • earnestness • electronic_age • Errol_Flynn • farm_economy • final_speech • Garry_Wills • general_electric • George_Gipp • gerald_ford • goodwill_ambassador • GOP • governor_of_california • great_speeches • Harry_Truman • Hollywood • hollywood_role • intellectual_elite • issues_of_war_and_peace • jane_wyman • keen_sense • kiel_auditorium • loyal_davis • madison_square_garden • master_guitarist • nancy_davis • Nancy_Reagan • New_Deal • new_ideal • phrasing • political_conventions • public_housing • rare_ability • recesses • republican_nomination • Richard_Nixon • richard_reeves • role_playing • Ronald_Reagan • Ronald_Wilson_Reagan • screen_actor • script_reader • self_government • soft_focus • sonic_equivalent • sound_boards • speech_writer • tax_burden • urban_renewal_programs • vowels_and_consonants • war_and_peace • war_cry • William_Jennings_Bryan • wooden_benches • Woodrow_Wilson

Franz Gruber was a dark-haired Austrian with a dimpled chin who on Christmas Eve day, 1818, was asked to write an accompaniment to a Christmas poem that had been written two years before by the assistant pastor of the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria, near Salzburg. In his own words, Gruber told the tale of the creation of the world’s most popular Christmas carol:

On December 24th in the year 1818 the curate of the newly erected parish-church St. Nicola of Oberndorf, Mr. Joseph Mohr handed over a poem to the deputy organist, Franz Gruber (at that time also teacher at Arnsdorf) with the request to compose a suitable melody for two solo voices with choir and the accompaniment of one guitar.

Gruber’s description came thirty-six years later when the Royal Prussian Court Orchestra in Berlin decided to track down who had actually written this carol that had become one of the most popular in Europe. At the time most people believed the carol had to have been written by Michael Haydn, a well-known composer of the time. Then, as now, people felt great music had to be written by great men. That a man who at the time had taken a position as a temporary organist to help make ends meet could write such music still astounds music historians.

Curiously, the guitar accompaniment helped to establish Gruber’s authorship, for the organ at Oberndorf had broken down but there was still a need for music for the chorus to sing for the Christmas Eve service. Gruber was not only an organist but an accomplished guitar player (one wild story has him purposely destroying the organ so he would have to play the song on guitar.) The guitar is also important because if you have ever heard “Silent Night” sung with its proper accompaniment, rather that the bombastic huge orchestral versions you hear most of the time, you hear the true brilliance of the song.

In Gruber’s music and his friend Joseph Mohr’s words lies a sermon in itself of how two simple men born in a small Tyrolean villages somehow produced the extraordinary. The creation of “Silent Night” testifies to those unpredictable, rare moments when the human and spiritual come together to strike a bolt of transcendental lightning so bright it almost blinds us and rumbles through the air with that crack of inspiration that jerks us our minds awake.

Perhaps we resonate so deeply with Gruber and Mohr’s story and “Silent Night,” because even small children can grasp the obvious parallel with the Christmas story. In this paradoxical time where ecumenicals and fundamentalists clash in all the world’s religions, the Christmas story has become twisted, pedantic, and unfortunately political.

In another time and another place two simple Austrians sought to recover the meaning of that “silent night, holy night.” What they created went far beyond theology and religious exclusivity to stress the pure heart of the story, of a poor shepherd and his wife who were so insignificant that the innkeeper stuck them in a stable. If you read the words Mohr wrote (a translation site offers several possible English versions besides the one most of us know), their power lies in their simplicity (which in part is why translating the original is extremely difficult).

Their power also comes from the refrain in the first stanza, “Sleep in Heavenly Peace,” the few words that do translate easily. For “Silent Night” is above all a song about peace which is why it has inspired so many wartime reminiscences from soldiers and their families. Some of these are collected at the “Silent Night” web site. A soldier remembers a 1968 Christmas in Danang:

Then someone began to sing “Silent Night,” and soon everybody was singing from everywhere in the compound - from foxhole, from bunkers, from guard towers “Silent Night, Holy Night” resounded from the small country, in that small corner of the world, and I’m sure it was joined at some faraway rendezvous with millions of other voices singing “sleep in heavenly peace.”

In an America that seems to have lost its moral compass, where our president can say he sleeps fine while a war rages–as if he were both appropriating and perverting the words of the carol–never have the words of our most popular Christmas song held more meaning, offered more hope and direction.

A major reason Ameerica’s moral compass was lost is that we lost faith in those William Jennings Bryan termed “the common people–people like Franz Grubers and Joseph Mohrs. We also have lost touch with the true meaning of their words and music. The values the song invokes, that the Christmas Story itself invokes, that the teachings of all great religions invoke, lie not in conflict and dogmatism but in the infinite possibilities of the human character and imagination and in harnessing them for equity, for the common good, for all people whether they be poor, or infirm or even so insignificant that we make them sleep in a stable.

Much propaganda flows at this time of year about America as a Godly and Christian nation, so much so that some cannot even accept the idea of a Muslim taking the Congressional oath of office. But anyone who cares to wade into these muddied–even polluted–waters of what America truly stands for, finds not dogma but belief in a simple morality that asserts all human beings, even those born in the equivalent of stables or small isolated villages have the ability to become extraordinary. Franz Gruber and Joseph Mohr teach us every time we sing or hear their carol that we must do all we can to assure those lives have every chance to fulfill that destiny.

May the lives of all who read this enjoy their particular fulfillment and may you also remember in these contentious times that “love’s pure light” falls on all. When we block that light for whatever reason the night-like shadow we cast is neither silent nor holy.

Tagged with: 1948_Democratic_convention • Christmas_eve • Christmas_poem • Christmas_story • deputy_organist • equity • franz_gruber • guitar_accompaniment • joseph_mohr • Michael_Haydn • moral_center • music_historians • muslim_in_Congress • organ • the_common_good

Were the Spirit of Christmas Present to mysteriously appear in our bedrooms one night, what sights would he show us? If he truly wanted us see what the Republican Counterrevolution has done to our society he would take us to the one place where sooner or later the real victims of the budget cutting, slash and burn strategy end up - a large urban public hospital, perhaps in Washington, D.C.

Usually located in parts of town that the affluent do not regularly visit unless they have to, these places are often the last refuge of those who have already been through lives most of us cannot imagine. Some never leave except in a hearse.

If you come in like most patients, you enter through the ER, which is nothing like the television ERs with photogenic actors, fancy sets and soap opera scripts. The only similarity between reality and fantasy is that your first impression is of chaos. The real ER is truly a modern vision of Dante’s Hell, so that one half expects to see a large sign posted on the wall: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Except we might not see the sign through the tangle of people and medical equipment.

This is not to say that those who work in this place do not have hope, for often hope is all they have to offer, hope that is reflected in the eyes of all those patients which have that strange mixture of fear and uncertainty that comes only to those who know the string has played out and now they are about to come face to face with the great unknown.

A fair number of the patients also have a different look, one of anger and resignation after being kicked so many times that they are not sure what they will do the next time it happens and don’t really care. These patients hold sick babies who cry incessantly or sit there coughing with some malady that has gone on too long and now makes each painful hack sound like a death rattle. Others hold bandaged limbs or heads, many of them clotted dark red, some already showing the dreaded signs of infection. The cubicles around the ER often hold the hard cases who already have crossed over to that place where they have become a passive receptacle for enough tubes and wires to qualify them as cyborgs.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation did a study of these patients in New York City. They found:

There were large differences in patients’ health outcomes depending on which provider they typically used.

Patients who receive their care in hospital outpatient departments or hospital satellite clinics have much worse outcomes than patients obtaining care in private physicians’ offices or other settings.

Low-income patients frequently use emergency rooms for conditions that do not require immediate treatment or for conditions that could be treated in a primary care setting.

Amidst all these people sits a ticking time bomb far deadlier than the 9/11 attack, unnoticed by anyone for the threat she represents. On the outside she does not seem all that different from the others, perhaps even a little better dressed than most, outwardly appearing neither as ill or injured. But unknown to us, inside her body microbes so tiny they must be identified by an electron microscope are doing their mysterious, deadly work, multiplying at a furious pace, insinuating themselves into every organ as they cruise the veins and arteries without attracting the attention of any enforcement agent.

It may be the next AIDS, the next SARS, but whatever it is it will be something no current drug will stop. And our hopes and the hopes of all civilization that we will never have a repeat of the 1918 influenza epidemic ride on people who already have lost too much sleep and seen too much suffering and wonder if they can make it through the next hour. To catch those microbes, those treating this patient require the one thing besides money that is in short supply–time, time to assess that patient, time to ponder what they find, time to seek out other opinions, and time to do the right tests and get the right samples to the right technician in the right lab.

Here all the connections and questions of the last half century come to a head. Some might maintain the above scenario could not happen in the vaunted American health care system, but the system is not as vaunted as we believe, for economic injustice means some receive health care no better than they would in a third world backwater. States trying to pinch pennies have cut the benefits of the working poor, so they cut back on primary care that might catch illnesses early.

We all know also how hard it is even for the middle class to afford expensive prescription drugs that might knock out a deadly infection. They also wrestle with the bureaucracy of our wonderful private insurers, where executives fresh out of business school make medical decisions based on charts spewed out by a computer and knowing how much you will eventually pay for a procedure requires a degree in fine-print reading.

Meanwhile ER staff are overworked, underpaid and understaffed due to cuts that have driven many public inner city hospitals to the brink of bankruptcy. The rich do not come to these places except in extreme circumstances where a few minutes might mean the difference between life and death. As for the poor, they get shaken down with all the skill of a back-alley mugger.

The research that might have identified the threat of this still unknown disease also has been the subject of GOP cuts and blatantly political decisions made with a Bible not a medical textbook. None other than Newt Gingrich, of all people, wrote an op ed piece last summer about the impact of the Bush budget cuts in medical research:

NIH funding has been flat since 2004, undermining the gains earned through the doubling of the budget and slowing the pace of progress in biomedical research. The Bush administration’s proposed fiscal year 2008 budget would cut $329 million from last year’s allocation of $28.6 billion. Biomedical inflation significantly compounds the impact of this reduction. This is exactly the wrong course for the country. Investment in the NIH should be expanded, not cut.

As for the patients, the budget cuts have a systemic impact. Lack of adequate funding for education–especially in inner city schools–means the patients may have little of the knowledge they need to understand or communicate what ails them (translators are another group that has suffered cutbacks). Reductions in college loans mean fewer students can afford the long, costly road they must follow to become a physician or the even more expensive path to certification in a specialty. Public school cuts have affected areas such as wellness education while ideological rigidity over AIDS and sex education have weakened these programs.

The lack of media fairness probably means what little knowledge many patients have comes from commercials. A media susceptible to government payola plus partisan commentary and network cut backs on long, complex news stories mean the possibility of such an event has registered neither with the public nor policy makers. Some no longer trust what they hear after years of false scares and biased reports. And if the event really occurred, it would entangle in partisan rhetoric that causes people to deny the threat as they have with global warming. Just recall the coverage of smoking or obesity and you already have the templates.

Voting rights may not seem to impact an inner city ER, but they represent an often overlooked problem. Redistricting aided by cluster research already has diminished the clout of urban legislators who now fight for hospital funds with the suburban mediplexes that have become the direct counterparts of mega schools and strip malls.

In a section titled “Congress Favors the Organized,” the American Political Science Association report “Inequality and American Democracy” observes that Congressional pork now feeds relatively narrow factions:

Members of Congress have directed government funds coming into their districts to specific geographic areas that vote at higher rates and provide their greatest support.”

We know who those are. Moreover, since many in the underclass no longer vote, have become cynical about the results or are deliberately prevented from voting, their desperate voices crying for help with those most basic of needs–their health and nutrition–have little impact. At a national level we need only see what drug and insurance companies have done to health care and prescription drug reform.

The most frightening part of this scenario is that one partner in the GOP Alliance might actually welcome it. As any reader of the Left Behind series knows, plagues and pestilence appear as prominent features of the Last Days. They do not mark the failure of a system or a tilting of the playing field or even an inexplicable disaster, but instead signaling that time when true believers shall be saved while the rest of us will be consigned to eternal damnation.

The deaths that might result from the ER scenario are at this point imaginary, but the spiritual death that is already occurring as the playing field continues to tilt is not. The Raucous Right that has so deftly inflamed the Era of Bad Feelings, likes to think anger represents a vote of confidence in their agenda. But even they must know they are riding a tiger and everyone knows tigers do not like to be ridden. In America, something wild and uncontrollable has been let loose, and no one knows where the future will take us.

Tagged with: 1918_influenza_epidemic • 9/11 • aids • American_Political_Science_Association • Charles_Dickens • college_loans • dantes_hell • economic_justice • educational_equity • er • era_of_bad_feelings • fairness • George_Bush • GOP_budget_cuts • health_care • health_care_system • health_insurance • health_insurance_companies • inequality • last_days • level_playing_field • liberal_america • media_fairness • prescription_drugs • Rahm_Emanuel • raucous_right • religious_right • Republican_Counterrevolution • sars • spirit_of_christmas_present • the_poor • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • underinsured • uninsured • values • voting_rights

In his remarks concerning the recently-approved budget bill, George Bush directed special ire at the number and amount of earmarks. He should look in a mirror, for the biggest earmark in the budget is his–it’s something called the Iraq War.

Bush stated:

Another thing that’s not responsible is the number of earmarks that Congress included in a massive spending bill. Earmarks are special interest items that are slipped into big spending bills like this one — often at the last hour, without discussion or debate. Congressional leaders ran in the last election on a promise that they would curb earmarks. And they made some progress and there’s more transparency in the process, but they have not made enough progress. The bill they just passed includes about 9,800 earmarks. Together with the previously passed defense spending bill, that means Congress has approved about 11,900 earmarks this year. And so I’m instructing Budget Director Jim Nussle to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.

According to one estimate from the Heritage Foundation, Congressional earmarks totaled $20 billion. ABC News lowers that estimate to $14 billion.  BTW, $440 million of those earmarks is claimed by none other than Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Under the headline on his web site “McConnell Delivers for Kentucky,” he lsays the following:

The bill contains funding – secured by McConnell – for medical, agricultural and environmental research at Kentucky’s universities; environmental cleanup at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant; chemical weapons disposal at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond; marijuana eradication in the Daniel Boone National Forest; infrastructure improvements at our state’s locks and dams and recreational facilities; and various statewide crime prevention and transportations priorities.

“This was a tough year in the appropriations process, but after a long fight, Kentucky came out a winner,” McConnell said. “Whether it’s for education, defense or agriculture, I will continue to use my seniority in the United States Senate to help bring home funding on behalf of the hard working people of Kentucky.”

This is the same senator who voted against Children’s health insurance, but the country will be safe from marijuana grown in the Daniel Boone National Forest!

While the House refused to provide finding for the Iraq War, but it did provide $30 billion for Afghanistan. Then the Senate put money for Iraq back in the bill for a total of $70 billion for both of Bush’s wars. Bush wants $190 billion. So in other words, all the earmarks put together do not come to even one third the amount Bush received for his favorite earmark.

The Nation got it right with their famous cover of Dubya morphed into Alfred E. Newman. Those big ears fit George perfectly and one of them says Iraq and the other Afghanistan.

Tagged with: Afghanistan • Alfred_E_Newman • big_ears • bill_earmarks • budget_bill • budget_director • congressional_earmarks • congressional_leaders • defense_spending • George_Bush • heritage_foundation • Iraq_War • jim_nussle • last_election • morphed • omnibus_bill • special_interest • transparency

The budget bill passed by the House on Monday and expected to pass the Senate today or tomorrow could decide our next President.

One chief issue is funding for the Iraq War. George Bush says the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will require an astounding $190 billion. The House budget vote actually contained two parts; one which passed 253-154 approved an omnibus spending bill. The other which barely passed 206-201 provided $31 billion for the war in Afghanistan but nothing for Iraq. In essence, the pro-Iraq War forces in the House were not able to summon enough votes to keep the war going without some provisions for ending it.

This signals that at least some Republicans are rapidly bailing out of a sinking ship in this election year. Anyone with any sense in the GOP is doing everything possible to take Iraq off the table as an election year issue. But Bush has threatened to veto the bill if there are no funds for the Iraq War, so the Senate is promising to oblige by adding $70 billion, far short of what the President wants. Bush has signaled that he will sign the bill if these funds are included.

Then the measure goes to conference committee. The key question will be whether the Democratic Party has enough spine to stick to its guns on Iraq. If the committee agrees to an Iraq bill without any provisions for withdrawal or–to use a favorite Republican phrase–”accountability” you can hear the air go out of the balloons that the Democrats had hoped to be floating over a convention that promised a winner.

Above all, this vote represents a test of principles, not merely about Iraq but about whether this nation will support a level playing field for all Americans. A lot what I have termed Principles Voters await the results of this vote, eager to see if the Democratic Party has finally adopted enough spine to stand up to Bush and for the principles for which Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman fought. It will also be a test for Presidential candidates Clinton, Obama, Biden and Dodd, for the role they play in the Senate deliberations will signal which of them has the moral suasion and political skills to finally do what all of them have been saying they will do–end the Iraq War.

Their leadership will be demonstrated not merely by a vote or by a speech, no matter how eloquent, but by how hard they work to reach this goal. If one of the pack can do this, he or she could sway those still volatile voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and should walk off with the nomination. If, on the other hand, their opposition to funding the war is merely token, it will spur even more calls for someone like Al Gore to throw his hat into the ring. It also would strengthen the positions of Dennis Kucinich, who voted in favor of the House measure, and Bill Richardson and John Edwards, who are not voting.

If the Democrats can force the issue on Iraq, they will, as many people have predicted, place the Republican Party in a situation not unlike the Democrats in 1968, with a lame duck President presiding over an unpopular war. They will make the GOP’s question for this election year revolve around whether George Bush will take down his party in his efforts to continue his infamous “surge.” While common sense suggests Bush will have to compromise, this administration has shown an unwillingness to do so, for to the hardliners at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to compromise over Iraq is to admit the whole affair was wrong and these are people who do not admit they have made mistakes even if it means taking down their own party.

This week the Republicans must be wondering if their President is not a Grinch who has stolen their Christmas. But Iraq is not the only Grinch-like action taken by George Bush. He has caught himself in another trap of his own making. Unlike his father, who gave in on his “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” pledge, the son has stuck to his guns on spending like the cowboy he likes to imagine himself. Bush and his Republican Counterrevolutionary allies have drawn a line in the sand about total spending. That Iraq is the cause of these budget woes appears to have escaped those who voted against the House measure for “fiscal reasons.”

This is where George W. Bush wins the award for Grinch of the year green hands down. In order to continue to prosecute the Iraq War he would tilt an already tilted playing field further, cutting heating subsidies, local law enforcement, housing, and the infamous children’s health insurance bill. So George the Grinch would give Americans a Christmas without heat, without health care for their children, without law enforcement to stop the inner city murder epidemic, and without a roof over their heads. And to think the real Grinch only took the packages under the Whos’ Christmas trees. Green George would take the entire town!

Perhaps the most despicable act of all would eliminate the $654 million budget for grants to community action agencies that help the poor. If like mean you can’t do percentages in your head, my calculator tells me this cut to the poor amounts to 3% of the total Bush wants for Iraq.

Bush’s Iraq request comes to $520, 547, 925 per day! That means if we were to cut the war short by a single day, we could cover most of this aid to the poor. But the needy are not being neglected just for the Iraq War. We forget that the infamous Bush tax cuts still remain in the budget. So, Bush proposes to put lumps of coal in the stockings of the less fortunate and gold in the suit pockets of those with fortunes.

Back in the Vietnam War era, the big debate was over “guns or butter.” In the debate over that euphemism for spending priorities lay the beginnings of the Republican Counterrevolution, for the GOP believed they had Lyndon Johnson checkmated when they said this country could not afford to simultaneously fight a war and fund the Great Society.

This week the Democratic Party has a unique opportunity to turn the tables. All they need to do is to raise the “guns or butter” question again. Only in this case the “butter” is not going for the farsighted programs of the Great Society, but to line the pockets of rich tycoons who in the controlling GOP ideology are supposed to invest in the rest of us. That this idea is akin to walking down Wall Street and throwing money in the air is clear to everyone but the GOP.

The path seems so clear that any idiot could figure it out, but then Will Rogers used to comment about the intellect of those working under the Capitol Dome. The Democrats have so tied themselves in knots over triangulating every issue with focus groups and polls that most of the time they seem to be walking around in circles. All the conference committee needs to do is tell George Bush he cannot have both his wars (we forget Afghanistan when it is convenient) and his tax cuts.

There remains the false impression that Bush’s trying to have both his “guns and butter” has not hurt anyone domestically, but anyone who can read a budget or their own tax statement knows who has unfairly born the burdens of this war. In what can almost be termed the Great Society turned upside down, the GOP Counterrevolution has used Iraq as an excuse to cut funds for a long list of programs designed to keep the playing field level.

When you take a drive over the holiday break to visit friends and family tote up all that you see that has deteriorated because the GOP does not believe in a level playing field. Count up every pothole you hit, every public park that is closed because of lack of funds, every mound of snow that lies unmoved because we can no longer pay for clearing the roads, every school that has had to cut programs, every hospital whose ER is overfull, all the research and development cuts that have helped to fill that ER, and all the likely places for a terrorist attack that sit unprotected. Then when you get done, figure out the cost of gas to take that trip and compare it to a year or two ago.

With Iowa and New Hampshire looming in three weeks, why doesn’t some Democrat with presidential aspirations stand up and give The Speech That Needs to Be Given? If we want to continue the Iraq War (and the one in Afghanistan) then it is time EVERY AMERICAN sacrificed equally in the war effort. Period. That sacrifice means eliminating or suspending the Bush tax cuts until the war is over. This has nothing to do with “raising taxes” or “class warfare.” It IS all about basic fairness.

No other tactic would better frame the dilemmas posed by Iraq. No other tactic would finally ask if this war is worth it. If the rich aren’t unwilling to pay for Iraq–even though they seem to be doing quite well with their “contracts,” then why are we in Iraq? Most of all, no other tactic would expose how the GOP has systematically eroded the level playing field.

As readers of this page know, I like to make predictions, so here is another–the person who picks up this ball will be the Democratic presidential nominee or at least vice president. It is a no-brainer. The question is–does anyone have the brains?

Tagged with: accountability • aid-to-the-poor • Al_Gore • Barack_Obama • budget_cuts • Bush-Administration • Bush_tax_cuts • Chris_Dodd • Chris_Richardson • Democratic_Party • Democratic_presidential_campaign • Democratic_Presidential_candidates • democratic_principles • Democrats • Dennis_Kucinich • fairness • Franklin_Roosevelt • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • grinch • Harry_Truman • Hillary_Clinton • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • inner_city_murder_rate • Iowa_caucuses • Iowa_voters • Iraq • Iraq_policy • Iraq_War • Iraq_War_expenses • Iraq_war_funding_vote • John_Edwards • leadership • level_playing_field • New_Hampshire • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • principle • principles_voters • whos • Woodrow_Wilson